I really appreciate the point highlighted in the book The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy., Jr.: The founding fathers were well aware of the ravaging effect epidemics of disease can cause, familiar with smallpox and malaria slaying their troops. Yet…they refused to include in our Constitution an exception allowing for the suspension of constitutional protections in situations of pandemic.
Ode to The Beach 🏖️
The beach is the great equalizer. It is the end of the school year here in Florida and all the kids are gathering there. I think they…we all…are so happy to be back to it after the recent hurricane.
For the kids, for everyone, it is somewhere beautiful and luxurious to go that is basically completely free. This makes it accessible and diverse. It is wonderful because you can go for the day or just a little break. I prefer the latter because it prevents boredom and sun damage. For me as soon as my feet touch the sand and I see the beautiful waves, no matter how stressed I’ve been, I feel relaxation wash over me. Fortunately I live close enough that it is easy to drop in early in the morning when the birds are having their breakfast and the sea is still calm. Or sunset which is always different and always lovely. This is what I plan to do now that summer is starting. I hope you will get to enjoy too!
GRADUATION!🎉🎓
One Down…4 to Go!
Graduation is always a festive time, but for me, this day when my first of five kiddos will graduate from high school, it feels like Christmas morning!
The moment is all that much sweeter because there were many times over the past year that I wasn’t sure if it would happen.
My son and I had been estranged for the better part of several years. After he chose to live with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend I saw very little of him despite my efforts and invitations. It was heartbreaking.
He even ran away twice. He was like the prodigal, running for no good reason.
Through the help of prayer, the intervention of a very skilled therapist and perseverance, we were reunited a few months ago when he asked to come back. I thought of him as my prodigal son. And that thought materialized more so as he moved back in with me. That was when I observed that he was using drugs. This led to at times missed school and anger expressed at me and other family members. For much of the past few months it was really touch and go.
When caps and gowns went up for sale months ago I purchased one though he said he did not plan to walk, just in case. I talked regularly about the graduation ceremony, telling him how proud of him I was.
The month leading up to graduation included many emails from teachers and the guidance counselor about missing assignments and prerequisites needed to graduate. My son was rather hostile toward me much of the time and I was sure I could not make him do any of these things but he completed them and when we received final approval that he had graduated (with an A on his government final!) the relief was palpable.
It’s hard when you hear and see other families presenting their graduate and family as problem free. Social media is of course not a complete lens into anyone’s world! And it wouldn’t be appropriate to air all our dirty laundry. There are appropriate forums.
He had been accepted with a partial scholarship into university some time ago but refused to add me to the contact list or share anything going on with me so I had little way to partner with him towards this next big step. Yesterday my heart sang when he reached out to ask me with part of the registration.
This week has been full of graduation excitement with rehearsals and our daughter’s elementary moving up ceremony. My son has been delightful, smiling and participating more in family life. I even overheard him respond to a friend who was critical about the graduation ceremony that after all this it would be ridiculous not to walk (interspersed with lots of Dude! of course)!
So this morning I got up early, affixed his tassel to his cap and decorated the yard & dining room with graduate decorations. My heart thrills.
I know there will be ups and downs to come but for now I’m going to enjoy this hard earned moment of elation, relief and pride.
On Botox
This year I will turn 50.
I have been bothered by my wrinkly forehead in almost every sort of close up photo.
So I decided to try Botox. I have two groups of friends, the natural ones who have never and probably never will, and the younger than me ones who are obsessed with it. So…I decided to give it a whirl.
I chose a shop that is doctor owned and that my hairstylists really favor, being also personal friends with the owner who I know through them.
I made my appointment and reported at the scheduled time.
It was not the doctor who saw me but a PA. We met in an office and she gave me some choices and I chose the simplest, wanting to start small.
We moved to a treatment room and she left to mix up the magic potion. When she returned she iced my forehead. No pain killers.
Then she took a needle, explained where she would be making the injections and pinching my skin injected several times across my forehead and in between my eyebrows, the agreed upon places. I have to admit. I was x nervous and it hurt.
The injection spots were slightly red but nothing noticeable. Almost immediately I felt I did not have to choose between lifting my brows to avoid my scowl and not doing to avoid forehead lines.
I did meet a friend on my daughter’s field trip who is an injection rep and trainer and she did not favor the place I went, suggesting at the price I paid it was not real Botox, and telling me that technically I should not be able to frown at all, so maybe I will go elsewhere to see if that can be corrected.
Also it does change the landscape of your face… .now when I lift my brows they go up in an arch.
But overall I feel SO much better, less distracted by my lines, so much freer to show expression.
Recipe for Runners
The 4 “B’s” for runner sustenance are well known: bananas, bagels, beans & broccoli.
Tonight I coupled the past two with pasta to create a delicious dish that is perfect for runners in training.
Ingredients:
Pasta cannelloni beans broccoli red pepper flakes cream vegetable broth salt pepper Parmesan cheese olive oil garlic
Cook the pasta in salted water. Drain. In the saucepan add olive oil and sauté garlic and red pepper flakes. Add broccoli florets. Add a bit of broth. Sauté until crisp tender. Add beans and stir gently. Stir in a tiny bit of cream. Toss with Parmesan cheese and pepper.
Enjoy & Happy Running! 🏃♀️🥦🧄
Wisdom 💬💎
The South wanted slaves to count as full persons for voting purposes. The North wanted them to count as 3/5. Is this because the North thought less of blacks than the South? No. It is because the North was so against slavery they wanted the practice to end. Counting slaves as full persons would have empowered the South, further entrenching the establishment of slavery. Look it up.
Lesson: things are not always as they seem on their face. I urge you to think deeply and always consider the money trail. Don’t accept or tout simplistic answers.
Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding, for the gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Proverbs 3:13-15 (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version).
Ode to the Timeshare 💦🏡⛱
Ok so I was talked …bullied…into purchasing a timeshare shortly after becoming single, while still in that euphoric tipsy turvy stage of just being excited to do things for the shear thrill of being able to do it yourself. And I know there is a stigma but I want to share how positive it has been in my family’s life. First, the background…
You know how it goes. You show up for the too good to be true 3 nights, 4 days resort vacation, commit to the one hour (projected, not actual!) talk, tour, brainwashing, hypnotism, heavy handed sales really…determined to resist…and boom….the sales guy (only person who still wears a suit these days and on a Saturday!) somehow gets out his numbers & calculations & guilt complex driving techniques, preying upon your not so stellar budgeting skills & before you know it you are the proud owner of a time share!
Now granted mine is not the traditional fixed deal where you have to spend the same week at the same location forever or plan your vacations on a five year basis…thank God!
It is a point based system with many in network resorts to choose from. So far my family has only visited the same one, about three hours away, in the heart of Disney.
Since then I have observed there are many organizations specializing in helping owners divest their time shares. At first I thought this was the secondary time share market. But, no, these companies actually want you to just surrender your time share, including any money you paid up front. Many, many scammers preying on the unwary.
Every time you go to your resort you will get pressured to buy more. I succumbed once. But no more. Now it is a game to me. I show up, set my timer for one hour, get what I want out of the salesperson (usually planning my next big vacation) and persist in politely declining all their can’t pass this up offers. But maybe many are not so stalwart and eventually end up over their heads. I cannot imagine someone who has paid thousands of dollars not being able to keep up with a few hundred in resort fees per year but maybe those people are out there.
The fact is, despite all the bad rap about time shares, I am so grateful I did this for my family.
It has carved out vacation time in our busy lives, time to be together away from our typical busy lives running here and there. Yes, the teens are still on their phones as much there as at home 😅but it is still good to get away from our usual and have a change of scenery.
I can’t say we do much. Some of our best memories I think have been just hanging out at the pool, or binging on Harry Potter movies or eating “gator bites,” probably just fish or chicken in disguise, but I’m rather cynical.
Sure on occasion we’ve visited one of the nearby parks but mostly we just chill inside the gated complex which has all we need.
As I said we’ve only ever been to our “local” resort but this coming summer we’ll be branching out, meeting my dad “halfway” between our southern location and his northern, exploring a new resort.
Our time share, bought not as part of a plan but on impulse, has enabled me as a single mom to give my family what many of my friends has growing up, a “cottage” where I come from, where families would go every weekend in summer and sometimes out of session. We can’t go every weekend but we go a few times a year. And as the kids get older it’s harder to find times we are all available to get away from work, school and other activities that hold us closer to home.
I’m revisiting this article I wrote a year ago while on spring break with 4 of my 5 kids because I am just so happy. I look back at some of the photos and realize how much they’ve grown over the last 3 1/2 years since I purchased my interest. They are almost all teenagers and the youngest at 11 believes she is. They don’t like to do much other than he on their phones but they still drop everything to come to Orange Lake with me. And I treasure it. 🤗💗
I grew up in northern Michigan and while my family did not own a cottage I spent summer weekends with my friends at theirs. It was my way of life. Owning this time share has allowed me to provide my kids with a similar experience, the familiarity and tradition of revisiting the same place year after year, growing up making new memories in the same place.
My teenage son has found a group of friends on the basketball court where he spends the evenings. (Over the summer he met his first “girlfriend” 😊.) My girls make friends too in the pools. I work some because according to them I’m a workaholic. 😅They play. I love my work and being able to do it while they play. We are together.
To me it is easy, to bring them on a 3 hour drive, to tell them to order what they want on the room charge. It is nothing finance wise. It is Everything to them, the memories they will have. This constancy in their life that maybe can make up a tiny bit for the chaos of divorce and shuffling between two very different households..🙏
I cherish the memories we’ve made and will continue to make at our special place.
Hurricanes Part 2 🌀💦
Hurricanes are a bitch. Always on the horizon during hurricane season when you live in the Southwest, mostly false alarms, they are disruptive to the spirit and schedule, but when they hit like Ian did they are a catastrophic nightmare, rending untold loss.
The strange part is…before and after the bright sun and clear blue sky are mocking, Mother Nature meanly strutting her stuff.
The other craziness is how disparate the effects are, discriminating for no apparent reason between one community and another, wrecking complete destruction through water or wind on another and leaving another wholly untouched.
The complete unpredictability from one hurricane to the next is also astounding. Your house is safe. You believe you can weather another storm there and boom your property is wiped out and you nearly die or maybe do.
The lessons of hurricanes are threefold in my observation.
They are a reminder of the vast power of nature, unharnessable and uncontrollable even in our modern age of technology.
They are a gift, centering you, bringing everything to a halt and helping you focus on priorities, including detox from modern amenities and connectivity, taking us back to a former savage, rustic era when it was not so easy to be mobile in the physical of remote sense, when families engaged in reading, Board game night and bedtime at sunset, conserving energy during the hottest daylight hours, food and physical provision a central concern of daily life.
And they are a harbinger, blowing away the veil that thinly covers things that really don’t matter so much in life or relationships that have gone cockeyed through the busyness of the rat race.
Hurricane 🌀
I am reflecting on Hurricane Irma, the only other hurricane I have lived through since moving to Florida, as Hurricane Ian approaches. At that time I was still married. This time around I have been single for 4 years. We evacuated to the panhandle then. Today my girls and I are riding it out in place at the townhouse I bought after my divorce, with all 5 of our pets, one puppy, two kitties, a Beta fish & a fluffy little white hamster.
I noticed after Hurricane Irma how the winds of a Hurricane can blow away that which no longer serves. For me it clarified that my 20 year marriage had come to its end. Within 8 months I was divorced and on my own for my first time in my adult life.
After Irma I developed a hurricane plan that involved leaving town and only returning when power returns. I did this once in 2019, leaving with my kids to shelter with a friend in Minnesota. That hurricane (Dorian) petered out. But the tricky thing about an evacuation plan is that you really don’t know until the last minute. The last place I want to be is out on the road in the line of storm fire with the potential of running out of gas.
So…here we are, my two girls (10 and 12) and I hunkered down with our pets. I had considered evacuating by flight, exploring various options, band had made arrangements for my ex to take the puppy and for him to bring kids to check on the other pets. But I was returning from Mexico late at night two days before the storm and everyone I was talking to and traveling with was planning to stay. Once you decide you are kind of bound to that. In this case, the strength of the storm and the path changed so that now we are expecting landfall of a category 4 hurricane pretty directly within the next hour.
I spent much of the day yesterday charging devices, cooking food, filling basins with water and bringing in my lanai (patio) furniture. We are as ready as we can be. At the time I write we still have power.
Last time, our first hurricane since moving to Florida from Denver, I remember the back and forth leading up. We had no pets at the time which makes it a bit easier to evacuate. Just like everything else in my married life I delegated all decision making to my husband. He studied the weather and came up with recommendations. These varied from moment by moment from evacuating first thing in the morning, then suddenly pulling the trigger to leave at night, driving through the night on back roads and arriving in Panama City for breakfast. The whole time we were there at a nice Holiday Inn resort I was so worried because at the time our livelihood was comprised of 6 rental houses which happened to be situated in the direct projected path of the hurricane. These houses were not only our family’s source of income but our entire college fund and retirement. I would go down to the gym in morning and watch the coverage and feel so nervous and helpless. Not one of those houses was covered by insurance. Our everything could have been decimated. Fortunately that did not happen. But the fact that it was a distinct reality woke me up. The winds of change began to blow in my life, pushing me to question my happiness and potential of life.
This time around I feel empowered taking shelter in my own house, tucked away with two of my kiddos and the pets I’ve acquired for them. I know I have done everything within my power to secure our safety, except possibly installing our shutters which was simply beyond my physical ability and my handyman who lives in the same neighborhood said it would not be safe to install in the rain and his family does not have theirs up either. It makes me happy to watch my girls peacefully playing with their cats and snacking while we wait. My older girl and I had a conversation about how God is in charge of the storm and He made us so what do we have to fear.
In short, this hurricane underscores the greatness of peace and strength I feel since being a woman on my own.
On Birthday Cake 🍰
My son’s birthday is in a few days. We haven’t been on great terms so I want to make it special, show him I love him so much even though he’s mad at me. I wish I was the kind of mom who has a go to birthday cake recipe but I’m too interested in variety and honestly maybe a bit ADDish. So I was thumbing through a stack of magazines and torn out recipes. Most were junk so I threw them away which was great. Then I decided to climb my stool and reach into the top cabinet above the fridge where I keep my Mom’s recipe box.
I took the little wooden, well loved recipe box down and set it on the counter. I was already missing my Mom, who passed five years ago now. I am always keenly aware of her absence at holidays and birthdays because she was such an amazing baker. I never had to bake birthday cakes or any desserts or breads for holidays. She would plan for months what to make and loved it. She was always thumbing through recipe books and magazines and ordering them for me. She loved to watch cooking shows. It was truly her passion.
My Mom used food as currency in exchange for favors. Once when I was in elementary school I got called down to the Principal’s office because my overly loyal and exuberant mother had promised one of my classmates cookies if he would vote for me for student council.
The box was a bit disorganized because that is how my Mom was. There were little alphabet dividers but mostly the recipes were just stuck in wherever. There were even a few business cards and receipts stuck in here and there. Some I suppose were from my childhood but mostly my Mom cooked the same simple good meals regularly without a recipe, pot roast, baked chicken, Orange roughy in butter, goulash (she was third generation Polish and German)….and of course we made the same Christmas cut-outs every year and gingerbread men. She and my kids loved to decorate these together just like I did as a girl.
So I don’t know if she made many of the recipes. But she collected them. Some were in her handwriting, faded now. Lists of ingredients with very minimal notes about what to do with them. Some were from magazines. Some weee from her more organized friends, nearly typed or laminated. Recipes she must have enjoyed at a cocktail party or ladies’ luncheon once upon a time.
My Mom was born at the cusp of the 40’s when the War was ending, so many of the recipes were from that era when canned foods and novelties like marshmallow crème and jello were all the rage. These didn’t appeal to me much. Others were to be made in the newly invented microwave.
Some of the recipes were in my child’s handwriting because I grew to love cooking too and wanted to be like my Mom.
One was written in my Dad’s humorous way, for Pemican.
Some were from the time I became a vegan (at 16), a habit that freaked my family out as we lived in a small town in mid Michigan where the only vegetarian meal in a restaurant was salad and baked potato and we had one health food store. No Whole Foods yet back in the early 90’s.
And I began to miss my Mom so much. And the tears began to course down my face, staining the recipes further. I missed her baking and I missed her love and her presence.
I pulled out a few cake recipes. I don’t know if my son would like them. I still don’t know if I will make one of them. I’m not the baker my Mom was. My attention span is too short. And I am still too scarred by my former husband always berating me for showing off if I created something beautiful in the kitchen. But I liked touching the recipes she once held in her hand, so many written in her hand. I felt her presence.
Miss you Mom. Love you forever. Thank you for watching over us. 💗
Notes From Real Life 