this week...

Old Farmer's Almanac For Kids

Papasan

Not my photo...but...a rather good likeness...

A papasan

with a blue cushion
is a very good chair
for relaxing on
an ordinary day.
Its also good place
for a sick cat
or
a short spell
of weeping
or
a dry-eyed spell
of watching the news.

CAT

caught
a
bird
yesterday
much
to
my
surprise

Christine de Wikipedia

Random link...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_de_Pizan

VA poet laureate

And my former highschool creative writing teacher...

http://www.carolynforonda.com/

Canciones

There was once this girl who used to sing songs and snippets of songs in art class. How many? More than a hundred? More than two hundred? She sang Scarborough Fair /Canticle and maybe I Am a Rock and Faking It (in which she accidentally sang "just mean old me" instead of "just lean on me.") And probably The Sounds of Silence, The Boxer, An American Tune, America, Slip Sliding Away, Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, Kodachrome, Cecilia, the Simon and Garfunkel lyrics to El Condor Pasa, and others, mostly from their Best of...and Concert in Central Park albums.

Also...probably snippets and songs from the whole Paul Simon Graceland album.

Graceland
I Know What I Know
Gumboots
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
You Can Call Me Al
That Was Your Mother
The Myth of Fingerprints

the funny thing about the previous post was when I wrote it the president was flying into Chicago for his birthday.

Birthdays

This is where my sister recently hit her quarter-of-century mark!

A Giant Moravian Coffee Pot and some others....

Russian Tea

The samovar is an object quite prominently displayed at The Russian Tea Time restaurant in Chicago, a cultural experience that my father could very much enjoy, as he liked all the food on the menu and also got a chance to practice his Russian on many a hapless waitstaffperson.

The samovar actually reminds me of a crock pot, which is what some American Southerners (such as my mother) use around the holidays when they serve a concoction made up of tea, orange and pineapple juices, cloves and sugar, which they call "Russian Tea."

some other songs....

Its All The Same
I, Don Quixote
I'm Only Thinking of Him
I Really Like Him
Aldonza

There was the older

brother that she met in gym class, and the following year, the younger one was in her typing class. And her neighbor friend was in her art class. She kind of got fascinated with the older brother in the gym class. She'd had a few conversations with him. She knew a few things about him. Then she'd go to into art class, sit across the table from her neighbor friend, and sing some of the songs from the the latest musical she had been listening to, which was, in this case, The Man of La Mancha.

Little Bird Little Bird

Dulcinea

Once in the spare bedroom of an old house I found an old wedding photo of two hippies (or hippie-ish) looking people on a beach, except I think the man's hair might have been longer than the woman's (?) She wore a mini-dress and a shell around her neck. They both had bare feet. It looked so nice, so happy, so optimistic. I asked my mother about it, and she told me that this photo had been taken in the early 70s and that they were distant relatives. These two people were married and had a daughter. But the marriage didn't last. It broke up and the woman moved to Las Vegas, and unfortunately, she was murdered. But somewhere, I have a distant relative, presuming that the girl grew up all right, named Dulcinea.

To Each His Dulcinea

Dulcinea

Best way to pill a cat

If you've got 3 pills and one is too big for his little throat to gag down and you're administering these 2x a day...
(that's 6 pills total)

Don't cover them in butter (he'll just hide 'em in the corner of his mouth and spit them out somewhere in the corner)

Don't grind them up and put them into his catfood. (He's too wise for that).

The best way to administer the medicine is to pulverize these pills into a very fine white powder, and add just enough liquid vitamin C (flavored for kids) to cover the very bottom bowl of a spoon, mix with a few water droplets, stir until the powder is mostly dissolved, then suck it all up into a syringe/eyedropper thing. Squirt this as quickly as possible down the back of his throat.

The liquid Vitamin C has a fairly palatable aftertaste, so he'll only be mad at you for about five minutes. Even less if the medicine is administered before mealtime and in front of friends. (He loves the sympathetic comments!)

Interesting Women

Of medieval France...

CHRISTINE DE PIZAN

Of the Italian Renaissance...

VERONICA FRANCO

something else funny...

Once there were these 2 friends/neighbors in art class. Who were not at all stingy (in their affections). They could like each other and also like other people, too. (Exes, cute Jewish girls, these 2 fabulous Latino brothers...) She (the girl) liked to draw pictures of peoples' faces. Him...not so much.

There was this one day when she was on the bus talking to him. "So," she said, "theres this one girl at school and she's really tall and pretty and she has long black hair and she's really beautiful..." "Oh, really." "Yes. I'd really like to draw her...You know, I noticed that I like to draw pictures of girls a lot, for some reason, I don't know...maybe, I'm not that into male beauty..." she stopped because she sounded quite awkward. It was not such a nice highschool, it was easy to say something weird-sounding and get made fun of, and she had a feeling she'd just said something kind of weird, so would he make fun of her? But he did not. "Oh, yeah, I know what you mean, me too, I'm not into male beauty either, I'm into female beauty, all the way." And then they both laughed and she felt better.

But later, when she was in art class, she thought she might like to challenge herself. Why do I always just draw pictures of girls? She thought. Maybe I've just swallowed some kind of a societal standard. I think I will draw one of a guy. So she did. Maybe she at first was trying to make the guy look like one of the Latino brothers (who both cute, in different ways, the older one, she met first in P.E. class, she liked him. The younger one, in her typewriting class the next year, also seemed interesting, but it wasn't quite the sort of intense kind of like that she'd felt for the older one). Anyways, maybe at first she thought of him, but then the person she was drawing actually just became a figment of her imagination. She used her pencil and did all of this smudging, so the skin became darker and the eyes and the nose were a bit different, and she made it kind of look like it was nighttime in the sky behind the person and made this sort of vague, stormy landscape. She was quite please with the result. He was of uncertain ancestry, like maybe he was part Latin, part Arabic, part Indian or something.

Other people came over to look at it. Who knows, t first they might have said things like, "Well, thats very nice, but you know, smudging is so unprofessional for an artist, I don't recommend you do that." "Thats a very interesting drawing, you know, so and so's drawing is more technically accurate, but yours, well it really seems like it tells a kind of a story." And then, some people said, "Hey, do you know who we think that drawing looks like?"

And she looked at it and thought...Uh-oh...

Actually, thats not true. I did see one...Dr. Zhiavago.

something funny.

My mother once told me, when she was in college, she had a date, and the girls all told her "Omar Sharif is sitting in the lounge!" But actually, he was not Omar Sharif, he was just a guy from West Point.

So. I never found a picture of him before. I've never seen any of his movies. But I just googled him. Here's a picture of good ol' Omar Sharif!

quote

Here is one I got from this website

Water says to the dirty one, "Come here."
The dirty one says, "But I am so ashamed."
Water says, "How will you be made clean without me."

Rumi, Mathnawi II, 1366-7