pomegranatesandpaper

A Monday to Remember

Because I am finally posting to the blog. 

 

 

Look! Look how lush the garden is this year! 

 

 

Look! Look how beautiful Chatham Harbor was two weeks ago!

 

 

Look! Look at my crabby journal page!

 

 

Look! Look at this beautiful lab who laid down in the street so we could pet her!

 

 

Look! The son got a tattoo! And he turns 27 tomorrow! I am old!

 

 

 

Look! The beach roses are in bloom and when the wind was off the water, it was finally understanding what rose perfumes are supposed to smell like.

 

 

Look! I walked every morning all over town just to smell the lilacs!

 

 

 

Look! There are seriously crazy-obsessed sailor/tattoo types on the Cape!

 

 

Look! The Bride and The Groom celebrated their one year anniversary and he ordered her a replica of the first tier of their wedding cake and it was delicious and henceforth their blog moniker at The Mr and The Mrs!

 

 

Look! Micalangela deigned to plein air paint with me because her cool cousin wanted to go!

 

Look! Look how cute this lighthouse Coast Guard old salt was in the lighthouse tour that i didn't do because I didn't want to climb the stairs with all those people!

 

 

Look! It was so cold that Mr. Pom had to buy another sweatshirt at the beach!

 

 

 

Look! We pretended we were staying at Chatham Bars Inn and spent the afternoon on the lawn eating free peanuts and chips!

 

 

Look! There was a break in the monsoon, so we took our friends on the Sandwich boardwalk and the monsoon decided it wasn't finished with us!

 

 

Look! We had to serve them lobster in the backyard to make up for almost drowning them and Mr. Pom finally figured out how to shuck an oyster and now I eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

 

 

Look! We started transforming the garage into The Art Garage and the dog ate all my collection of dried out crab shells before I could finish sketching them and he probably will have for dessert  the feathers the turkeys leave in the backyard! 

 

 

 

Look! I thought these upside down canoes looked like whales waiting for spring but when I try to paint them, they look like nothing at all!

 

 

 

Look! a bicycle tire/Christmas light chandelier and I feel so stupid for spending money at Pottery Barn on a new light fixture when I could have hipsterized something like this!

 

 

Look! The ultimate hipster store is holding these shoe lasts hostage until someone returns their tweed fedoras!

 

 

Look! We babysit the Granddog and I tried to get a selfy and he wouldn't sit still!

 

 

Look! If you don't sign up for my class with Kathy Nesi at Art Is in October, you won't get to play with markers and make cool hand-lettered pages like these!

 

 

Look! It's 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday and these guys have to pretend to be pirates for a little girl's birthday party! Aargh!

 

 

Look! We ate pancakes in Soho for Mother's Day and took pics of the new Freedom Tower spire!

 

 

Look! I'm moving to Fiji before next winter!

 

 

Look! Vampire Weekend is about to come on stage and my cousin is texting urgent messages!

 

 

 

Look! My healthy walk in Provincetown from  one end of Commercial Street to the other just got waylaid!

 

 

Look! Vampire Weekend finally came onstage and we were dancing fools and even my cousin stopped texting!

 

 

Look! We never got served in the restaurant so my cousin pulled out her private loaf of bread!

 

 

Look! They wouldn't let me into this secret garden in Annapolis and I had to be creative before the police were called!

 

 

Look! When we are stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on I95, Mr. Pom forces me  to write in my journal lists of why we are going to the Cape so I stop whining!

 

 

Look! This is where I wish I was today instead of getting ready to drive on the LIE to take a deposition and then learn a new software at work so I can write up the report! 

 

You are all caught up! Regular blogging can now resume without this load o' guilt I've been carrying round these parts!

 

Happy Monday!!

In Which I Tell You Everything, Yet Nothing

 

 

 

Sometimes an idea hits you in the head; sometimes ideas accrete, piling up little bits of this and that until it becomes a firm foundation for the next step.  I think I figured something important out. I hope to implement it in the near future. I do not like to be coy. I am not a fan of the 140-word oblique reference. You'll know soon enough. And if you don't, then you'll know I am still working on it. 

 

 

 

 

I do my best thinking in the car. I am, like The Empress, a ruminator. I think, ponder, fret, worry, and dwell. To combat this, I put on my earphones as loud as I can stand it and sing along as I drive. No, it's not the same if I put music through the speakers. My brain is so swirly-whirly that I need to have the music get right to the ear drum and into the brain cells directly. Kind of like shooting up into a vein (I suppose) but without the horror.

 

 

So I drove and drove yesterday to be here on the Cape. I escaped heavy the blindingly heavy downpours of the night before,  but there was  an intermittent drizzle that sometimes turned into regular, large plops. The northeast is wet, cold and soaked through. The mountain laurels are heavy with bud but too cold to blossom. The heat is still on; the hammock is dripping and about to moss over. 

 

 

When I got out of the car at The Cottage, my heart hammered a little because the garage door was covered in some kind of brown goo. When you are are not a full time occupant of a home, it can do strange things when you are gone. You find a tiny puddle of water in the middle of the laundry room; tor he dirt in the corner where you swept before leaving; or a near-record accumulation of twigs and small branches on the front lawn in the space of 4 days. 

 

 

 

I realized after a minute that the brown goo was not an outbreak of, let's say, carpenter ant excrement, but leaf casings, the tiny brown hull that protects the leaf before it buds out. The house and yard  was covered with a paste of this gummy, wet stuff  that looked like crepe paper  put through a mesh and sprayed everywhere.

 

 

 

My mind is kind of like that at times. The discarded emotions that others can quickly discard tend to linger and get all mixed up with the current emotions and suddenly I am clinging to  thoughts, words, and emotions that have nothing to do with current circumstance. It, too, creates quite a mess.

 

 

So today, with a house full of kids, dogs, mud, rain, battered leaf and leaf casings, and the noise of too many people disappointed in a wash out of a holiday weekend, I am not trying to escape, but sitting in their midst, drawing and cooking,  finding a deck of cards, some bones for 3 (!) dogs, and very grateful for those very tiny, very useful  earphones.

 

 

I am giving you some photos from another weekend. Let's all pretend it's this one!

Around the World in 7 Days or So It Feels

 

 

Don’t you hate when you get so behind on blogging that you don’t know where to start?

 

 

 

 

 I've been out on Long Island most days for a new work assignment. We've been coming up most weekends, so I go from one car to the other and one highway to another. 

 

 

My new are at work has me conducting deposition that last for hours each day.  When I get home, I try to write the report from that day so it is fresh in my mind and I don’t have to overly refer to my four hours of notes.  There's not much time for much else besides prepping for the next one, conducting it, and then writing it up. It's not unlike law school where you are in class all day and then rush home to do the reading and writing for the next day. And then doing it all over again until the weekend comes and then you try to catch up on all you didn't get done despite the long hours put it into.  How long I can keep this up is anybody’s guess.

 

 

 

This week, I went to Buffalo with a colleague to do some depositions up there. We didn’t see much of anything but downtown Buffalo, and there’s not much to see, but our Buffalo colleagues took us to a great  microbrewery and we ate Buffalo wings and drank Blueberry Blonde beer. 

I walked to the office each day with a Starbucks in hand and admired the very old buildings in between the empty storefronts and run down, empty mall areas. 

I really loved walking to and from work. I wish I worked in the city and could walk to work here. Of course, it is spring and even up there, it is warm and sunny. I suppose in winter it would be harsh, but just walking a lot made me feel more grounded and less harried than I do here where I am driving 70 miles roundtrip most days for this new assignment,

 

 

This is the atrium of the Ellicot Building where the court reporter is located. Isn’t it magnificent? The building was built about 125 years ago and is floor after floor of marble and oak, with operable  transoms, engraved door knobs, marble-lined restrooms, elegant elevators, and an amazing mosaic tiled first floor

 

 

 

 

The court reporter companies in the Bronx are in the basement of a building across from Yankee Stadium. The bathrooms are not marble and the stall doors don't stay shut unless you hold the bottom. The elevator does not have a free-standing marble podium surrounded by brass for the call buttons.  There’s a story that a rat fell out of a ceiling during a depo. I can’t confirm that story,  but I was there when water damage caused a ceiling to fall in on the table in a room  I was about to enter with a witness. 

 

 

We ain’t no sissies in my office. (Not that my Buffalo colleagues are, either. They have a huge workload!)  But seeing how things are done in less gritty urban setting was a pleasant change. The actual depo room was nothing more than a standard conference room, but the corridor doors were quarter sawn oak and had antique frosted glass on top.

 Downtown Buffalo has been hit hard by the recession.Very few business are open. The main industries appear to be lawyering (a fancy new federal court is there) and parking garages.  It is pretty sad to see all the shuttered storefronts and the dilipadiated tram that runs from one end of the business district to the other. We took it the first day but realized walking was much more pleasant. What probably was considered a stroke of genuis in urban planning 30 years ago has somehow now had the reverse effect of having pedestrians desert Main Street and stores are closed and rundown.

 

 

 

However, every few blocks there is a remnant of turn-of-the-century architecture. Some of the old buildings are breathtakingly beautiful and feature levels of craftsmanship that do not exist anymore.

 

 

This building is covered with terra cotta frieze and pillars.

 

.

My colleague took a later afternoon ride to Niagara Falls but I had to catch up on some things and didn’t go. 29 years ago, I was in Buffalo for a press conference with the Attorney General’s Office for a case we were working on when I first found out I was pregnant with The Bride.  My boss and I drove to the falls but it was the coldest day in Buffalo’s history and the mist from the falls was a frozen cloud that obscured both sides. All we could do is listen to the rushing water and imagine the spectacle. I’m sure we’ll get sent up there again, so I’ll have another opportunity to see it. This time I’ll bring my passport since I understand that the best view is from the Canadian side.

 

 

 

 

 

The ride up and back was long but went through some pretty scenery. One stretch of road was as picturesque as it gets for western New York. Valley and hill rolling with huge tracts of  planted acres and dairy farms. My colleague was a good sport about slowing down so I could take  pics.

 

 

 

 

We are all converging on The Cottage this weekend to celebrate The Bride and Groom’s first wedding anniversary. I know, can you imagine? Where did that year go? So much change, so much good, and so much heartbreak. We are going to  grill and hang out with our kids and their significant others. I am sure there will be a campfire and I will be sitting under a blanket and remembering how The Empress was annoyed that we kept lighting camp fires last year becaue she hated to smell of smoke. I would find her in the lving room reading on her Ipad. She would come out if promised coffee and cake, and the girls would wrap her in a big blanket, where she sat until she stood up and said to my older sister, "Time to go home!" And home they went. 

 

She is always with us.

 

I will post more this weekend. We’ve been up and back more times in 2013 than ever beforeand I have lots of adventures to share with you.  The week after next Mr Pom and I will be there for a whole  week and I cannot wait!

 

 

Everyone be safe on your travels, have fun and kick back!  Dance between the raindrops.