pomegranatesandpaper

Just a quick how-de-do

What did I last, four days? No, I'm really still on hiatus, but I just finished all my art and writing projects for this month and I am so happy! I get these ideas for columns, do a few drafts, and then work on them like crazy for about 48 hours. This one took a long time to gel. They have a very short word count,  need to relate to the content of the magazine, and have to be, in short, "pithy", i.e. completely different from blogging and from literary narrative work. That's why I usually can't blog and write the columns because my writing style can't shift that easily from how y'all doin' to finely crafted, not one word extra prose. I think everyone who writes should assign themselves essays of under 1000 words to do on a regular basis. They are fine exercises in writing with clarity and brevity with a clearly defined point of view on a limited topic.

But now my brain feels like it's been trampled on, and I need to eat some ice cream and watch a silly movie of some kind. My darling husband, seeing me in the throes of writing on the porch from 9 a.m. to noon, when to the deli and bought proscuitto, fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers, sauteed eggplant, chicken cutlets, and an antipasto salad. We had it with big slices of cantaloupe and white wine. We will have the same for dinner and then follow it up with a drive to the water to see the sun set.

Happy summer. Keep on being a kid. Only 5 days to Cape Cod!!

Gone Fishin'

It's hot, work is miserable, home life is stressful, I can't talk about any of it, and my scanner's busted. Readership is down, comments are down, and everybody's going out of town.

Pomegranatesandpaper has gone fishin'. There may be occasional posts, maybe even some artwork or reruns from the archives of favorite posts. But for the next four weeks, consider me on hiatus.

Enjoy the rest of the summer and do something wonderfully childlike =
catch fireflies
blow soap bubbles
play jacks
swim underwater and time how long you can hold your breath
have a cocktail at sunset on the beach
fly a kite
go for a picnic with ripe peaches and cassis
eat breakfast at the picnic table
camp overnight
make coffee over a campfire
bury a friend in the sand
canoe kayak row sail surf boogie skim
hike a trail
go to a rooftop restaurant
be a regular at the farmer's market
sow seeds for fall lettuce
dry bouquets of hydrangeas
weave crowns of Queen Anne's Lace
keep all the lights off and only use candles after dark
make lanyards and pot holders
make cement castings of your kids' hands and feet
buy a bike
put on some Rollerblades
run out screaming for the ice cream man to stop
change the color of your hair
or cut it off
wear flip flops to work
drink champagne with raspberries
make ice cream in an old fashioned ice cream maker
or an electric one
put a chair on the front porch - or lawn - after dinner
and get to know your neighbors
have a weenie roast
and don't forget to make s'mores
watch fireworks on a blanket - on a boat in the harbor
leave work and go a 1:00 ball game
make sure you eat at least one hot dog and have a beer
run through the sprinklers
kiss under a full moon
make love in the middle of the day
eat peanut butter and jelly for dinner
followed by a sundae with marshmallow fluff
have a sleep over
and watch scary movies in the dark
TURN OFF THE INTERNET
and live love laugh

See y'all in a few weeks

The Famous Strawberry Dress Photo Shoot

Wow! Two posts in one night!!

My sister, Mar, faithful blog reader, has sent me the infamous strawberry dresses on cousins photos. Now I have no choice but to embarrass them at ages 13 and 14 and publish said photo. Really, what can of mother/aunt would I be unless I did so? I promise I won't pinch their cheeks when I'm 80, though.

My oldest niece, Stephanie, is the one on the left. The one about to cry in the middle is Laura, the one who just turned 13 yesterday, and the one grimacing like she's eating a sour pickle (tho I suspect she's trying to say cheese) is the Little One. Is she cute or what? And now she's all adolescent and just back from Tony Hawk's Boom Boom Huck Jam and has announced that she wants to motocross. Yeah, right. Italians don't motocross.

And the coquettish older woman who has been super imposed on the photo is my mom. The photo is for a secret project and if I told you, I'd have to kill you. And that's not very friendly so don't go there.
I wonder where that strawberry dress is? I have to find it and use it to torture my future grandchildren.

Fantasy Shopping Meme

102
thunderstorms coming through
what else is there to do:
fantasy shop on line
then show us your favorite things!

Here's a few of my favorite midsummer tchotchkes (excuse the spelling)
brought to you by the summer sale at
Anthropologie:

I love these over-sized mugs. I love the glaze, which is just washed over the mugs. I love the colors, but they made you buy them in sets of four of the same. Bad marketing. I guess that's why they are on sale. Why don't they ever run these things by me??

This is my second favorite color, if I was ordering them. But I'm not. Only ten days till vacation.

These are Continental Cups. I rarely drink espresso at home. Actually I never drink espresso at home because the espresso maker died a few years ago and I never think it tastes as good as home. But I'd get these anyway. They're so summer, so nautical, so whimsical. I'd put drawn butter in them for lobsters or really intense hot chocolate. Hmm. Do we have lobsters or hot chocolate in the house. That would be no.

I can never have enough cups and plates and I'm running out of cupboard space. So here's the perfect solution:

Those are forks, spoons, and knives, folks. How cute is that! My sisters and I once went to this chichi Mediterranean restaurant where the food was average but the napkin rings were made of crossed forks and spoons. We decided to go back and take one each until we all had a set of 12. Of course we didn't do it - we're law abiding citizens. But very shallow. All we remember is the napkin rings.

And, of course, what would fantasy shopping be - albeit on sale fantasy shopping - without some textiles. I absolutely have to have these, even if they do not go with any linens I have . I will just have to go get the linens to go with them.

They're so Mary Tyler Moore, Larchmont, Lili Pulitzer. They scream Southampton summer. And the closest I'll get to it.
I will close with one very tasteful item that I would buy in bulk, if I had anything but ugly melamine cabinets to put them on. But someday, someday....maybe I will buy them and use them as the inspiration for the entire kitchen. If only I could use them as the collateral for the entire kitchen.

I challenge you all to a fantasy shopping blog entry. The world is your oyster. The only limitation is that you need to have a photo of it. So it can be your desert island or the perfect fountain pen, but you have to show it. So this is a volunteer meme - pass it on.

Mid-summer has become more stressful and pressurized than mid-December. Work is relentless. The lull of summer means fewer court appearances, but we pack in the depositions during this time, which actually results in more work for us since we have much longer reports to do for depositions than for appearances. I worked ten hours today and never came up for air except to stuff a sandwich in my mouth at my desk. I still didn't catch up with what was due today and I have so much due before the end of the month (that is, the end of the week). It's fairly unusual for me to have somewhere to go each night also, but a combination of things has made me busy and having to forgo a long overdue dinner with friends.

Tonight we were at my niece's 13th birthday party. Now all three girl cousins are in their teens! One of these days I'll find the the photo of the three girls at ages 4 and 3 in identical strawberry dresses I bought them and patent leather shoes and scan it in for you all. Just for the embarrassment factor, of course. The Little One has become such a teen. Our very close mother/daughter relationship is being stretched to the limit, but I am being patient as I've been through this twice before (ok, I did really yell at her at the party when she sounded off to her aunts about lowering the music but y'know that's all part of keeping up appearances in front of the sisters and mom).

Tomorrow I am going to get an estimate on the damage to my car from last week's accident. I haven't had a chance to do it since then. My boss told me to go after court after she listened to me furiously typing on the keyboard for ten hours. It's always the littlest cases that cause the most work and today was filled with emergencies and most of my staff was out of the office.  I'll take the time to mail off my art projects. I'm really happy how they came out. I can't talk about them because one is for the magazine and the other is for the collaborative journal and it wouldn't be fair to publish them here. I can see a real improvement in my drawing skills and now I know what projects I"m bringing to the Cape. I'm bringing a ton of old family photos to draw and watercolor and the Japanese quilt book and some fabrics. I may bring my little Singer Featherweight that I haven't used in years. It's tiny and great for piecing and reminds me of my little kids and living up in the country in the 90's.

That's all I have left to say tonight. I'm too tired to turn this into elegant poetry. But we've known each other long enough for me to blather on for one post, right?

Memory

Monday morning and I'm moving slowly
my body is holding on
to the memory of the weekend
each step reflects the twists and turns and hiking
over hot sand
my arms wake me several times this night
though asleep they sing loudly
of holding pens and brushes and
I shake them into submission and
dive back to somnolence to forget.
The older I get, the less the mind
remembers
the more the body memorizes
and the two are at odds
when it's time to put feet on the floor.

At the beach I watch my younger self
like a porpoise in the clear green water
shimmering with sunlight
wild with the waves
I ride, surf, and body slam
my suit fills with sand
my head fills with water
my board skims
my body floats
my legs drag me out of the surf
all through my eyes alone
as I watch her
thirteen and fearless
conquer the beach.

The first step is the hardest
and perhaps the third and
fourth and the fifth
the day unfolds in a series
of winces, jerks, and stumbles
and I try to forget the number
of steps from here to there
surely there's relief in some
bottle somewhere in the sandy
recesses of my purse
by nighttime I'll be ready for
another trek
the mind's a void and
pain I can forget.

Tap - tap - tap...hallo....is this thing on? Righty-o then.

Hello and welcome to Days of Our Blogging Lives. This week's adventures brings our heroine face to face with imminent peril whilst motorcrossing followed by a hospital vigil that happily ends well as the work week fades into oblivion. Will our heroine survive another week? Of course! And she shall do it splendidly and without knocking back more than her share of ginandtonics and Hershey's nuggets with toffee and nuts.

You know it's only two more weeks until I leave for vacation, so it must be time for a few crises to raise their heads in order that we start biting our nails over whether we will make it on the trip or not. Just as the work week was blossoming into its usual hectic, hot, humid, self, the joint got jumping. While driving to court on Tuesday morning, a fellow who failed driving between two straight lines managed to sideswipe my car while we were moving - in two different lanes. Not sure what he was doing, but when I took a look at his insurance card and saw the dreaded "999" code - assigned risk - I gave up trying for a logical explanation as how he managed to hit my car while driving on a straight road, in dry weather, at under 40 mph, between lane markings. But never fear! I made it to court on time and covered all my cases, and got back in plenty of time to call my sisters to find out where my daughter was going to end up that day. Only it seemed that my mother had taken ill, and they were all headed for the emergency room. We then spent the next three days waiting for doctors and tests and spending late nights driving back and forth. And I'm relieved and happy to report that she is fine and recuperating well and is taking a nap on my porch while I write this.

Today I realized that I had two major art and writing projects due at the end of July and didn't have a clue what I was doing with either. However, I made major headway on one and have a good idea about the other. I spent the morning peaceably drawing and painting, falling into a zone where I concentrated on form and line and then color. That is, until the dishwasher flooded the kitchen with I Love Lucy suds. Stan, The Princess,  and The Little One mopped it all up magnificently and I wrote the first draft of my column on the porch. Now we are going to grill salmon and tilapia, and I making couscous with pinenuts, olives, artichoke hearts, corn, and tomatoes. I am trying to shake up my cooking a little - or at least trying to do a little cooking. Tomorrow is a beach day and I think I can safely take one of my art projects with me to do under the umbrella.

It's gin and tonic time - gotta go!

Family is on my mind
always
but today with intensity
I'd rather soon forgo
mid-week dramas
and even my car
suffers from brutality
so to soak myself
in blue pool water
on a day finally
clear and crisp
is a beautious gift
surely there is
someone who needs
a middle aged poet
and artist
for full time work
I will write you sonnets
and paint your nails
and create a past
present and future
you can inscribe in
watercolors and stone

Cranky, crabby
heat stroke
lethargy like
arms draped
in wet woolens
left to steam
in the sun
I crave ices
slushies frosties smoothies
cold, wet, sweet, sour
work settles me
with air conditioning
and I unearth data
almost lost
the day spent
entering and reporting
with one last push
I finish a summary
and press the button
to send it off
at home I miss
her and regret
my voice rising
instead of saying
come home
shrimp and potato salad
served diner style
soothe me for awhile
but the ennui returns
at home
until I realize what
is missing:
a crayon in my hand.

I dream of earthquakes
great cracks opening
outside my window
and I try to decide
what is the dearest
to wrap and take
a baby is thrust
into my arms
whose?
sleep is filled
with dreams of
trying to get
from here
to there
I am awake
but walking under water

Today kicks off National Ice Cream week. Indulge without guilt knowing you are supporting a national celebration.

July 17 National Peach Ice Cream Day

July 23 National Vanilla Ice Cream Day

Aug 2 National Ice Cream Sandwich Day

Aug 14 National Creamsicle Day
Aug 21 National Spumoni Day

Nov 25 National Parfait Day

Dec 13 Ice Cream and Violins Day

Read more about ce cream holidays here and courtesy of

Wave Fitzgerald's Living in Season newsletter.

I for one will do my best to be patriotic all this week.  I may even go buy an ice cream maker.

And don't forget the hot fudge.

"Time is short and the path to authentically giving expression to what lies within us is usually vague enough and intangible enough that if we don't overcome our dance of avoidance we may find we've simply run out of time"

Creative Authenticity by Ian Roberts (Atelier Saint-Luc Press 2004) (p.93)

Dinner
on the side porch
three on one
red ramekins  of
inky soy
plump green pods
of beans pop
between teeth
and tongue
lazy orange and
white shrimp loll
on tiny beds of  rice
spicy tuna rolls feverishly
in black seaweed
quivering mounds of roe
science fiction
in the mouth
salty food for a
summer night
washed down
on a river of
Mexican beer
Food for the stomach
Creativity by Matthew Fox
Creative Authenticity
by Ian Roberts
writing by candlelight
on the porch
Food for the soul

Sitting on the porch eating M&Ms
dragonfly lights lit
bouquet of madonna blue and lilac hydrangeas
punctuated with Stella d'Oro lilies
air as soft as clouds
Yankees vs. Red Sox buzzing in the living room
shouts of glee from same
surprise dinner of chicken cutlets
made by happy husband
The Princess keeps me company
with tales of campers peeing in pools
and we sniff our wrists
and swoon over Lovely
tigers roam with mewling cries
outside nasturtiums bloom
with basil and bronze fennel
and dusk falls lightly
a silk scrim across the day

We joined Netflix a few months ago and for once I'm getting to rent the movies I want to see. Stan was the person who drove to Blockbuster, so the movies picks were usually geared to Action movies. I signed up for Netflix, so it's my queue, with a little input from him. I do order all the new releases, but I also get to order films like The Weeping Camel that he would never have picked up.  I just can't seem to get the timing right on returning these discs, though. I tend to have them sitting around until Thursday when I suddenly realize that means no movie for the weekend, so now I've started watching them midweek, which falls into my summer of sloth quite nicely.

Really, I want to come home and sit on the porch, light the candles, read, drink wine, invite the neighbors over. I intend to just lie on my bed for a few minutes when I walk in the door.  But then my eyes start to close and I drift off for a while and then jolt awake when some child insists on eating a meal.

[As an aside - I wish I was savvy enough to do an applet of sound on this blog so you could hear the noise going on outside my door right now and also smell the gas fumes wafting into the windows from the goddamn gardeners next door. At exactly 8:00 (there's a noise code) they ALL turn on their super turbo-charged incredibly loud and obnoxious mowers, trimmers, weeders, and blowers all at once. My  neighbor's yard is smaller than mine and The Little One mows ours with a push  mower in about ten minutes. It sounds like they are drilling for oil.]

Back to regularly scheduled programming: So after lying on the bed for a half hour, I succumbed to a  combo dinner: two slices of pizza with a movie. I had rented 13 going on 30 for The Little One and I to watch but she was spending the night at my sister's, so I watched it myself. I know the reviews were awful, but some of it was charming and poignant, some of it was awkward and dreadful (watch the scene at the party and "Thriller"), but it passed the evening pleasantly.

That's what my job has made me into: someone who wants to pass the evening "pleasantly".

You all know that I can't write about my job because we need to eat - even if it's pizza, and I'm quite sure my company would be the type to fire me if I wrote about it. Suffice to say, I'm no fool, though Dooce did it and built a career out of it, so maybe I'm on the wrong track altogether. However, I will say that my company is doing a major reorganization for the third time in the three years I've worked there.

It's all about downsizing folks, all about the bottom line. This one is the worst ever. Major relationships have been disrupted; protocols are all in question; no one knows the fuck is going on. It hadn't impacted me yet, but now  my main support staff is going, going, gone. A para that I've worked with since I got there, someone I considered a personal friend, is no longer talking to me, based upon another para getting a promotion, a promotion that I found out about when the rest of the office did, and left me reeling, since the two of them are my main reasons for surviving in our crazy environment.  The stress at work from the actual work is bad enough; I can't take these interpersonal conflicts.

Then there is the drama of CAMP at home - and my daughter's reluctantly going because her cousin was going, her cousin deciding she doesn't like it, my sister, the one who told us about the camp, deciding that her daughter doesn't have to go anymore, my daughter's freaking out that I am still making her go. Ah, the crying, the tears, the gnashing of teeth - and that' s just from me, not counting The Little One's histrionics and the siblings weighing in on it and the husband's take, and the sisterly conflict.

So you can understand the two slices of pizza, Oreos, and 13 going on 30. I promise to be more creative tonight.  I intend to not come home.

Everyone at work is on the edge.  We are downsizing and about a third of the support staff has been "impacted" and are waiting to find out if they will be rehired in a new unit that is forming. Everyone is still working hard, but some things are getting screwed up and there's not much you can do about it considering the situation. I was pissed off at papers getting screwed up in court yesterday and again today. 

As soon as I could cut out last night, I picked up The Little One and went to the pool. I was supposed to work a half day because she needed to go to the doctor, but then the doctor had an emergency and it got rescheduled to another day, so she was at loose ends. We joined this pool just for her to have something to do, but it's so crowded that I dread going on the weekends. Evening swims are just the thing and I was surprised how many people were in the pool at six o'clock at night. We swam around and i timed the girls as they had hold your breath contests. I exercised my knee, splashed a little, and just stared at the blue sky.

Water renewal. A little water, a little chlorine, a hideous blue bathing suit, and I'm a kid again.  Back tonight unless there's a late day thunderstorm. I have to remember my rubber duckie.

We decide to go out today, a clear, sunny day, a day with a minimum of pain for Stan. He agrees to go up the Hudson, if I drive, and I eagerly say yes, anxious to be out of the house, away from the four walls that threaten to enclose our lives all too often. The Little One and The Princess are at the beach and Mystery Man is hanging around with plans to do nothing more than watch movies.

Soon I am on a familiar parkway, the one I traveled daily to our first house, a thread of pavement that connected me to new home and old. It's the kind of driving I like best: light traffic, sunny day, and a road I know so well that my hands respond to the curves before my mind recognizes them. Soon I am zoning out, my mind traveling roads far ahead and far behind, detours that only my brain takes, and I am lost in the backroads of our lives together. I brake and accelerate and turn and stop, all with only half my conscious mind. The other half is relaxed and meditative and I could keep up this driving pace until we reach Canada if we wanted to.

In less than an hour, we are driving the twisting, rolling hills of the  money belt along the river, passing the high stone walls and lazy  fields and horse barns of Garrison. We pass Boscobel and make plans to return to see The Tempest, knowing we never will. We past the Butterfield Hospital and decide to call a realtor about the little brick house for sale on the corner of Main Street, knowing we never will. Later we end up under the trees, reading the newspapers and painting the mountains. Around us people read and study and knit. An older woman in a chic straw hat and oversized Jackie O sunglasses sits on her jacket and stares pensively at the flat river.  Speed boats and jet skis buzz by a red tugboat chugging determinedly behind the red barge that it's pushing upriver. A strong breeze kicks up and we scramble to gether the papers and journals as they fly across the grass.

Naps follow at home and the plans to grill lamb chops devolve into a rare treat of the entire family in the car and headed towards a burger joint. We sit at a sidewalk  table that our arms stick to and eat raw clams with cocktail  sauce and hamburgers  on greasy buns. Before we go home, we detour to the Italian end of town for lemon ices.  Our hands sticky with ices and in various stages of brain freeze, we are a  kernel of a family sealed inside the air conditioned car, a family  expanding beyond our reach faster than we would like, but for tonight we are shoulder to shoulder, squabbling over the radio station, burping in each other's faces, comparing ices from various purveyors round the country, and singing b-a-n-a-n-a-s, while watching the road ahead and seeing in our mind's eye, the road behind.

These are not deer at the zoo - they are fawns that were grazing in a field right across from Dunkin' Donuts where I stop for my after-court coffee. The mother was just a few feet away in the shadows, but I was still surprised to see them in the middle of the day in a little patch of grass amidst strips malls and very busy route 9. It's the third sighting of deer I've had in the middle of the day and it's getting scary when you are driving on the parkway. Hit one of these and you've totalled your car and can be seriously injured. They are very cute to see, but a big problem in the suburbs as more and more building is going on in the rural areas and the poor animals have nowhere to go.

I'm freshening up the blog look for summer. Today is breezy, sunny, and cool and I was inspired to bring fresh colors here. I have a few errands to do that I may just put off to Monday at lunch. My sister and I made tentative plans to go to the pool, but I don't think I'll get there until later in the day. I have a two writing deadlines to get to and two pieces of artwork (neither of which I have a clue about), but instead, I suddenly find myself pulling fabric out of the closet and being inspired to make a Japanese-influenced quilt. I can blame the cover of a book I saw on Small Hands for this sudden obsession and now I am rooting through my indigos and richly colored cottons to create an abstract patchwork that I intend to tie and not quilt - I can't remember what the Japanese term is for the tied quilts.

Is it wrong to hope it gets cloudy and rains so I can stay inside and play with fabric rather than sit at the crowded pool? You know The Little One will make me feel guilty and I'll end up going. Of course, if I could figure out what pattern to use before I go, I could bring some fabric with me and cut it out there.....or just spent the afternoon designing the quilt in my journal and painting in the colors.  That would be a good compromise. I might even wear a swimsuit and actually go in the pool - but let's not get carried away!

My deepest sympathies and sorrow to the people of London as they suffer at the hands of the brutality that has become our world.

But I want to cross out the last part as soon as I write it - it's not our world and yet it is  our world. I want to scream "This is not my world".

In the end, if you are lying under the subway car, or your mother, sister, father, lover, friend, colleague or neighbor is lying there, or if they are all total strangers to you, it is your world.

And what can we do but go on, acting as if it is not part of our world. We must continue to write, draw, paint, and color outside the lines. We must write poems to the night sky and offer alms to the weeds. We must make dinner out of peas and rice and drive on dusky evenings for ice cream cones and take our kids to the dentist and get a coffee at the corner deli on the way to work.

We may never defeat terrorism. I don't have the slightest idea of how to go about it. I just know that wherever they live on earth, people are inherently good, that they love their children, worry about their parents, want to help their neighbors even if they don't have a clue how. I know that the everyday people of this world wish that the enormous jingoism that floats over both sides of the terrorism equation could be deflated like a beach ball left in the sand over the winter, to be found a year later dried up and  laid flat, and its shiny, colorful appeal dull and deadened.   

I'd planned to show you photos of  Beacon:Dia , but photography inside the museum in strictly prohibited as several dozen signs and a strident intern told us when we came in. And photos of the outside of the museum are for personal use only. Is a blog personal use? Not sure - so I've given you the link lest I be hunted down by the contemporary art copyright bounty hunters.  The space for the museum is amazing. It's a renovated  factory that goes on forever, has incredible light and the type of space that museums in New York City would give their best benefactor's right arm for. The highlight of the trip was the Warhol retrospective, with many of his silk screen portraits, about two dozen of his Brillo Boxes and a room as big as a football field whose walls were lined with a study of light of shadows. However, my personal favorite was the work of  John Chamberlain, which are sculptures made from crushed industrial and automotive metal. The most interesting was a "screen" of about 25 feet made of ribbons of wildly painted metal strips that rises from a hedge of metal and stand unsupported.

Afterward, we drove south along the Hudson and ended up in Cold Spring, a charming little town across from Storm King and West Point. We ate lunch at one of our favorite spots, a place Stan and I discovered 20 years ago, Hudson House. Although it was hot, there was enough of a breeze to allow us to sit on the porch and have a leisurely lunch while we watched the boats on the Hudson and people picnicking in the little park under the trees.

It was late by the time we got there, and we took advantage of the lull in between sittings to take out our watercolors and journals and paint the petunias.  The staff thought it was great and came round several times with refills of water and iced tea. We declined dessert, though it sounded fabulous, but we'd had biscotti and carrot cake earlier in the day at Dia. I also bought a cool, chunky journal at Dia that is pamphlet stitched and covered with rubber-backed felt. The paper is some type of Bristol and it's smooth surface is a delight to draw on and takes watercolor well. 

It was an odd holiday weekend, with Stan in bed most of the time, taking painkillers, the older kids at the beach or ball games, and The Little One  at my sister's beach club all weekend. Although I missed the kids and didn't go to the fireworks, Monday was relaxing and a grown up take on what life can be like for empty nesters. My older sister and I have several more trips lined up, one to Kykuit and another to Storm King Art Center, and lunch at Blue Hill at Stone Barn. 

And that's why we moved back to New York!

Happy 4th of July

Wherever you are, I hope you have time today to fly a kite, either in your hand or in your mind.

Off to Beacon Dia - a new contemporary art museum on the Hudson. Back tonight with stories to tell.

This is our boat leaving the dock. We have satellite wireless so I'm able to blog near the harbor. We are going to spend three days fishing, swimming, and avoiding sharks while we consume mass quantities of shredded pork flesh and as many margaritas as we can until the blender burns out.

NOT.

No, we are celebrating our time We Would Have Been In Italy by doing nothing. My kids want to know when we are having The Barbecue but I reminded them that The Barbecuer is zonked out on pain pills and all he is grilling is a lot of zzzz's. You know in the cartoons when they show a guy lying on his back snoring and the little feather is going up and down on his breath - that's pretty much the high life around here.

My extended family is waiting for me to cave in and have The Big Barbecue, moi who has the smallest house, smallest yard, and is down to one semi-functioning spouse. There is just cause for this desire, since we were once The Party House, starting with our bungalow in the woods in the upstate portion of the county, replete with pool and lake and an acre of land. Certain in Fresno, we were the ones having luaus and margaritas-in-the-hot-tub. The Little One is wistful about our Memphis years, when the neighborhood parade ended on our front lawn and we had a giant potluck that only ended when the first drunken neighbor started to pass out in the 99 degrees heat and humidity. We once spent two full days with one set of neighbors when we found out that we were the only people in our area that did not leave for a lake house on the 4th. But with a 40 foot pool with slide an diving board, we didn't have to go anywhere to be on vacation.

But 'tis not to be this year. For one thing, it's a 1200 mile drive to get to our pool.  And unless they all want Chinese, there will be no grand meals served here by moi.  Today The Little One got invited to Jones Beach, so I am free to sit in a dither as I decide whether to do some fun crafty type sewing, some obligatory finish the drapes type sewing, some fun artwork, some obligatory artwork, some fun writing, some obligatory writing...or I just start watching The Food Channel with Paula Dean and end after Michael Chiarello about four hours later.

In the meantime, don't get burned at the beach, don't drink and drive, don't eat undercooked pork, and do not, do not, play with fireworks.

Oh, and have a good time.  I'll be back - what else do I have to do?