Question; Which will better stand the test of time – Justice Kagan’s references to Spiderman in the majority patent case decision or Justice Scalia’s use of the word “jiggery-pokery” in the dissent from the health care subsidy case?
Please weigh in the comments!
(Bonus question: Can you tell how punchy I am right now?)
This evening, E introduced me to mochi ice cream. It was delicious! I had a guava, a white chocolate raspberry, and a pineapple coconut. The pineapple coconut was my favorite!
I may have to search for it when I get home…
A few days ago, B and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary – separately. He is back in New York State, while I am still in Hawai’i. Before he left, we had had a delicious celebration dinner with E at 12th Avenue Grill – on the second try, as the first reservation had to be cancelled when I became ill.
On the day, I opened cards from him that he had left here; I had left a card for him at home. Still, I didn’t feel moved to write about it until today.
E and I were at 8:30 Mass at St. Patrick Church, where E and L were married in Nov. 2012. E sings with the choir, so I have been sitting near the front on the right side of the church, where I can look over and see her. These last three weeks, I have sat behind the same couple, who are about the age of my parents and obviously filled with aloha spirit, always greeting many other congregants. This week, she was wearing a beautiful purple dress with coordinated lei and he was looking sharp in an earth-tone leaf-patterned aloha shirt and brown slacks.
Today, they renewed their wedding vows in celebration of their 64th wedding anniversary. When the priest called them forward after the homily, they first presented him with a plumeria lei. In a lovely coincidence, her name is also Joanne; his name is Guy. Guy and Joanne were married right there at St. Patrick and had also baptized their children there. No wonder everyone seemed to know them! Guy has a sly sense of humor. Joanne says the key to a long marriage is “Patience!” There were multiple rounds of applause for them from the congregation.
I hope that B and I will be blessed to celebrate a 64th anniversary someday. We are more than halfway there…
Yesterday was loooooong.
Our alarm rang at 4 AM so we could get to my parents’ place so they could help shuttle us to the airport for the first flight – a 6 AM to Philly. Yes, I know that at most airports we would have needed to arrive at the airport by 4 AM or sooner, but BGM is not like that.
We were delayed a bit by fog, but got to Philly in plenty of time to switch terminals and get breakfast before boarding a flight to Phoenix, which arrived early. So there was lunch and walking about the terminal and browsing the shops and finally boarding our flight to Honolulu, which also arrived early at about 5 PM Hawai’i Standard Time.
The rub is that HST is six hours earlier than Eastern Daylight Time, so our bodies felt like it was 11 PM – and we had gotten up at 4 AM. It took a long time to deplane, get baggage, wait for the shuttle bus to the rental car lot, finish paperwork, drive to the hotel, and deal with check-in and parking garage issues. We were fading fast…
Fortunately, our daughter E arrived with dinner, a delicious pasta salad with zucchini, Parmesan, and almonds that she had prepared and a loaf of fresh Italian bread. We are staying in a condominium hotel, so we had a fully equipped kitchen and a table for supper. Seeing E for the first time since they visited for Thanksgiving last November – and the food – helped revive us despite the length of the day, although I collapsed into bed a bit before 9:00.
Adjusting to time change is not one of my better skills, but B and I managed to sleep until 3 AM and then to snooze off and on until 6:00. It’s now 4:15 PM and I admit to being a bit tired. But E will be done with her work day soon and we plan to go out to dinner and visit for the evening, which I hope will keep me going until a reasonable bedtime.
I’m hoping to get settled into Hawai’i Time sooner rather than later.
I grew up in the sticks.
It’s an expression I don’t hear much anymore. OK – I don’t hear it at all anymore. I’m not sure how widespread its usage was but it means to grow up in an out-of-the-way place. I grew up in a town of 200 people, give or take, in western Massachusetts along the Vermont border. We had a little general store which had the post office in it. We had a paper mill where most of the people in town worked. We had a school that went up through eighth grade. We even had a little bar/restaurant called “The Club.”
Everything else – big grocery stores, clothing stores, the high school, doctors, banks, etc. – was twenty miles away.
So, to me, where I lived was the definition of “the sticks.”
I was surprised after I moved to Broome County NY – aka Greater Binghamton – that the definition of “the sticks” was different. In New York State, it seems that everything gets compared to New York City. There is The City, its suburbs and Long Island – and everything else becomes “upstate,” mashing together large cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, with smaller cities, towns, villages, and very rural areas, such as the Adirondacks.
So even though I live on the southern border of the state, just a few miles from the state line with Pennsylvania, I am “upstate.” I live in a town that is a hundred times larger in population than my hometown, about the size of the twenty-mile-away city that we used to go to for shopping and services when I was growing up. My current town is a suburb of Binghamton, which is a city with its own opera company, symphony, minor league baseball and hockey teams, and all kinds of other amenities that were much further afield when I was growing up.
Yet, because we are small compared to NYC, we are considered to be “the sticks.”
Go figure.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “stick.” Come join in the fun! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/15/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-1615/
badge by Doobster @MindfulDigressions
Three has been an important number for me.
I was one of three sisters.
Trinity has been one of the themes in my life, from church to a high school friend to the name of my younger daughter.
There are lots of sayings about events – good or bad – happening in threes.
“The third time’s the charm.”
This afternoon, on the third day since the events of the stream of consciousness post I wrote this morning, I read this call for submissions from Silver Birch Press, making it the third instance of dealing with the meaning of names in as many days.
I have to write a poem for this. It was meant to be.
I’ve already been through several drafts in my head and two written ones. I think I will be bringing it to my poetry group this week rather than what I had planned to bring so that I can have it in shape to submit.
Here’s hoping that this poem will be a good-thing-that-comes-in-threes…
It seems that it should be the easiest thing in the word to graciously accept compliments. Someone says something nice about you or something you have done and you smile and say thank you.
Somehow though, if you tend to be the self-deprecating, or perfectionistic, or even the humble sort, it can be difficult not to go on with a “but” … it was really a team effort, or I made a mistake in the third movement, or it was just a little something – or it was nothing at all.
Sometimes, we don’t feel worthy of the compliment. It may help to look from the point of view of the complimenter instead of reflexively rejecting the substance of the compliment.
Next time, maybe, it will be just “Thank you.” With maybe an extension of the gratitude, like, “I’m so glad you liked it.” “It means so much to me to hear you say that.”
A gracious acceptance of the compliment with no “but”s.
*****
The prompt for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “compliment/complement.” Anyone can join in! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/01/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-215/
Why is it that I never seem to be able to type the word “because” accurately? I know how to spell it, but somehow my fingers always seem to rush the U in before the A. Is it just me? If you have a word you can’t seem to type right, please share in comments.
“Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.”
– Albert Einstein
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday. Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/15/one-liner-wednesday-end-of-story/
I just saw a piece on the Today Show about the only remaining theater organ in Seattle, which in the 1920s had fifty in silent film and stage theaters. The organ in the piece was a Wurlitzer, which was one of the most common manufacturers of the day.
It reminded me of the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, New York, which housed a Link theater organ, built by the firm of a local family. Edwin Link went on to found Link Flight Simulation, which used the technology of the organ business to craft the first mass-produced flight simulators, the Blue Boxes that trained many pilots in World War II.
When we moved here in the 1980s, I studied organ with M. Searle Wright, who was an enormously talented classical organist, teacher, and composer, and, at an age when most people are retired, then the Link Organ Professor at the State University of New York-Binghamton. He also was one of the few remaining masters of theater organ, able to sit at the console and accompany silent films, bringing to life the sounds of the world and the moods of the characters. It was an amazing experience to hear him accompany a film! Talented younger organists would travel up from New York CIty to study theater organ techniques from him.
We more often heard Searle’s theater organ talents when he played a 45 minute prelude of classic American songbook and Broadway tunes before each Binghamton Pops concert on the Morton theater organ at the Forum. On the music stand, he would have only a list of the pieces (perhaps with the key structure, he planned to include that day and would weave those songs together, showing off the fun aspects of theater organs, the literal bells and whistles.
A magical art, which is, thankfully, still being kept alive by those to whom an older generation of organist like Searle Wright passed on to them.
