I also wanted to share what a BLAST I had at the Menilfest last Saturday! There must have been close to a thousand people come through during the day. Sometimes the crush of people was so thick I could see through them. The Dry had great sales but I have to give credit where credit is due and that is to THE WASP! I had my wasp costume with me and I had it on a dress dummy. I’ve tweeted the pictures but I’ll post them here tomorrow.
Also on Sunday a long section of lower Westheimer near our house was blocked off to traffic so that people could walk on the road! It was called “Walk Houston”. The organization will host another road block next month in the Heights.
We walked but not on the road. We walked over to see the tearing down of the old building on the corner of Montrose and Hawthorn. It was the multistory building where the famous Cody’s Rooftop Bar was a huge attraction for years. It was the only place in Houston where a live jazz band played all the time.
The weather was delightful here in Houston. If you were here I hope you got outside. If you live anywhere else. I’m Sorry.
Kidding! I hope you also had lovely weather and walks where you live, too.
Houston weather today warm. Downton seems to be heating up, but still not on the same level of intensity as last season. At every turn I think they are almost there but nope, falls short. Thomas is back though, so maybe the trickster will make something happen.
And what a time to find out that Bates is a forger. I’m so upset!
The weather in Houston can and usually does change drastically from day-to-day. Today, it was a balmy 65 degrees F. Tomorrow it is supposed to be freezing. This is nothing new for H-town.
We I was a child one thing stands out about the Christmas it was 80 degrees F. It stands out because I remember wanting to stay outside because it was so hot inside. My father insisted on lighting a fire in the fireplace, and keeping it blazing. It was Christmas, he said. He wanted the fire roaring.
Although I was a very small child I remember being so frightened about Hurricane Carla. My mother had just had my baby brother and my father was at work. She made my brother Jon and I come in from playing although the weather outside was great. We didn’t want to come in. But the tone of her voice was enough to bring us running. It wasn’t long before the wind began. What a wind! Over 145 MPH it pushed out trees nearly to the ground. We snuck peeks through the window though my mother had us laying on the flood in the bedroom.
I’ve always wondered about that but now when I think about it, I recall that my mother was from Iowa. They have tornadoes up there! She must have been terrified. There was no place to hide from the hurricane. We don’t have storm cellars in Houston. We had a central bathroom, I suppose we could have clung to the toilet but there were three of us and a tiny baby.
The next day when the storm had passed, we exited the house and it was sunny again. While the grown-ups saw to picking up the pieces (my grandparents home was knocked off its foundation) we went back to our games.
The weather in Houston is interesting. Never boring. Perhaps we should mirror the British and begin with weather conversation as a general rule. After all, who wants to be boring?
I was challenged to share what it was in my early life that made the hours fly by and shaped what my future passion would be.
This is my offering:
I was seven years old when my father built the tree-house. It was more of an eight-foot square platform held up by two Chinese Tallow trees. Chinese Tallow trees do not live long. Their branches bend and twist rather than break when they are young trees. The older ones are brittle to a fault.
Originally imported to Texas as an experiment to see if the tallow could be extracted and help the candle industry, the tallow trees were a failure. The electric light bulb gained popularity over candles, and the tallow in those Tallow trees was impossible to extract commercially. The tallow project was abandoned but the trees multiplied and spread. Now the trees are so prolific in the wild that native trees struggle to prosper. Despite gorgeous fall foliage, the Chinese Tallow is considered a pest tree.
My first remembrance of a wasp encounter happened in that tree-house, or, I should say, under it. The main entrance and exit was by way of a ladder that went straight up from the ground and through a square hole cut in the bottom. There was a board door that could be dropped over the hole to protect from invading pirates, gorillas, or just brothers in general. Sometimes brother Jon would beat me to it and lock me out. The only other way to enter was to climb through the trees and scramble over the “side” to the platform.
Wasps are quiet at their nest. They set sentries as lookouts who will warn the hive of danger. They are the first line of defense. They have levels of “buzz”. The louder the buzz, the more danger you are in of getting stung. I learned this because when I grabbed the branch next to the hive to haul myself over the side of the tree-house, the wasps exploded with buzz and began stinging me. I slip-fell out of the tree losing most of the wasps that were after me on the way down. I don’t even think that the stings registered until later because of the rush of adrenalin from the fall.
Thus I learned to watch out for wasps in trees.
Years of days went by – or perhaps it was days of years, who knows how childhood passes – Jon and I wore that tree-house to splinters. That palace in the trees kept all our secrets and stories.
Perhaps we loved the tree-house life for its order, because our home life was not so orderly, or because there, we could escape whatever plans were laid for us by parents who thought we needed plans.
I will tell you this, even when Jon was allowed friends in a neighborhood full to brimming with boys, I was never lonely. I found my friends in books. I took books up in the tree-house. Every day after school, I took a book into the tree-house and spent hours up in the air, reading.
Nancy Drew cleverly unmasked the bad guy in my tree-house. Mowgli learned the language of the snake tribe in my tree-house. A tiny naked baby (Tarzan) was discovered in a tree-house by none other than GORILLAS! The scent of cinnamon and curry wafted all the way from India (Kim), I visited China in the 1600’s (The Black Rose), I heard horses stampeding across the vast prairies (Fury, The Black Stallion), and came face to face with a murderous black mamba snake (Bring ’em Back Alive) in my tree-house.
I relished the danger and intrigue inside my books, but … but I could not escape my chores. I had to descend to ground level to eat, you see. There was a pull, like a great suctioning from that “inside” world of whatever I was reading, to enter the shrill world of the now. To this day when I read a good book I feel that pull of good story. Don’t you?
All those years of reading in trees taught me about story. Despite my “labels” as day-dreamer in school or scatter-brained at home, this head-in-the-clouds-girl spent many much-too-short hours in the trees learning the pattern of good story. As a result, I’m an author.
Now I can share good stories with you, my gentle reader.
Today I went on a search for a programmable crock pot. I have several slow-cooker recipe books. What I wanted to find was a crock pot that I could load with oatmeal the night before and “program” for a hot breakfast.
Really, he could care less about Crock-pots.
I’ve seen a lot of different “programmable” crock-pot/slow-cookers”. They have the word “programmable” on the box. These range in price between $175.00(Ninja) to $39.00(CrockPot). So, armed with my Kohl’s gift certificate I set out at about 10 AM this morning.
Houston’s weather is a weird thing to factor into any planning in January. Some days it might be 40 degrees, other days it might be 75 degrees (and people will still light a fire in the fireplace for the ambiance). Yesterday it was 18 degrees and today it was about 50 degrees with light rain. The weather is like a roller coaster here. You only have to board the ride to get by.
So I wrapped up in a jacket and went to Kohl’s. I exited the Beechnut ramp and turned into the Meyerland shopping center. Wasn’t that where Kohl’s was? I circled, and circled, past the Target, past the Palais Royale, past the Cafe Express. No Kohl’s. I was about to message my daughter to see if she could tell me where it was and remembered Kohl’s was one exit up. So I rode the feeder to the appropriate turn-off and went in. After searching the store, the item I had seen last year was no longer offered. Instead they had no programmable slow-cookers under $60 (CrockPot and Hamilton Beach and Ninja).
I spent my $25 gift certificate on two blue rugs.
I went back to the Meyerland Shopping Center and parked at the Target. Dashing through the rain I made it in. And…they had the perfect programmable Crock Pot for $49, which is a very nice price. I levered the big box into the cart and checked out. The check-out price was $60.
Nope, that’s not what the ticket on the shelf said.
I pushed my basket of crock pot back to the aisle and engaged a busy-looking clerk to help me identify the problem. She said that while the crock pot above the aforementioned sales price was the one I bought, the one below it on the shelf was the actual item for sale. Okay. I took both items to the customer service desk and asked for an exchange. They gladly exchanged the item and gave me the money back with no problem.
I went to the grocery store and bought the items I was cooking for supper in the new slow-cooker. I went home and unpacked the new slow-cooker. I began reading the directions. The box said “programmable” but the inside directions said, there were three preset temperature settings only – Low, Medium, and High.
I repacked the thing with all the weird packing bits that fit together like a puzzle and require genius level reasoning to reassemble. I went to all this trouble for a “programmable” slow-cooker, so Mama don’t settle for no pre-sets YO!
Besides, it was only 3 PM and so I still had time for a slow-cooked meal. Tonight’s meal was to be comfort food. Okay, something hot will do.
Besides, I have an excellent book on tape in my car that explains all this running around Houston looking for a crock pot business. Peter Straub, Lost Girl, Lost Boy…scary good book.
Went back to a Target closer to home and explained that I had just bought this slow cooker at another Target thinking it was programmable because it said it was programmable. They gave me my money back. I thought, well, I might as well look here. Different Targets stock different things. So I went looking and sure enough I found a slow cooker. A Crock Pot brand 6 Quart, that said “programmable” on the box. I looked it over. It looked good. I bought it. It was $39.00. I saved $10 or $20 over the last few choices I had picked.
I took it home, unpacked it and set it up.
It was exactly like the last one, without the “warm food temp” gage on the dial, which I suppose is what cost the $10 extra.
I guess “Programmable” means I can turn it to one of the three “preset” settings of “Low, Medium, or High” and then when that setting is completed, it automatically switches to “Warm”.
Comforting to know that with all that trouble taken I ended up with the same type of Crock Pot that I had back in the 80’s. It cooked well enough back then, so I will settle down and do with it what I will. I figure if I want oatmeal in the morning I’ll have to set it at a low temp for eight hours (who sleeps longer than that?) and that should be that, or, dare-I-say-it, I’ll be forced to cook my oatmeal the old-fashioned way
Tonight’s Chicken Marsala came out excellent. Hope your supper tonight was just as warm and lovely.
It isn’t easy to lose a parent. It isn’t easy to lose anyone. I lost my niece when she was 23. I was torn asunder. I can only imagine what her parents went through. What a horrible, horrible thing. I still break apart thinking of her. That’s why I dedicated the book, I was working on when she died, to her.
Today, I realized I am no longer a daughter. I am still a sister, a mother, a wife, but “daughter” was knocked off the list when my mother died last Sunday. I still find it hard to believe. Not because I thought she was invincible, but because every time she slipped into a more fragile state she would somehow spring back. In the back of my mind, I thought she would spring back this time, too. She didn’t.
She really is dead.
She had stopped eating a month ago. I tried to get her to eat. I poured soup into her mouth. It dribbled out. She gave me “the look” as if to say, “Are you nuts?”. The hospice nurse assured me this was the body’s way of shutting down. When mom stopped drinking I wanted to put an IV in her to hydrate her but the nurse said that if the body shuts down, the kidneys stop working. If the kidneys stop working, the water has no place to go, except the most delicate organs, i.e. the lungs. Then, the patient drowns. That is a horrible way to go. So, no IV.
There is nothing more difficult than watching your loved one fade away, while you are helpless to stop it, to make things better. In other parts of my life I’ve been able to control the outcome. No one can control the outcome of another life.
I wanted the nursing home to call me when she was getting near. We had spent some time with her that day and she was breathing heavily. I should have known. I. should. have. known. But I went out to eat with my husband and before the food arrived, the nursing home called to tell me she had died. There couldn’t be a harder thing to hear. I had wanted to BE there.
Listen. My mother didn’t care. If she were alive and we were discussing this she would tell me she would not have cared if I was sitting there when she passed away because she was happy to leave. She wanted to leave. She was looking forward to being with Jesus. And Dad.
You may think this is happy “platitude” time, but it isn’t. I was watching her on the monitor. She was virtually paralyzed from a stroke that week, but she moved and opened her eyes. She was looking at the ceiling and moving her lips. Her hand moved, reached out. I don’t know if she saw my father, or her parents, or Jesus, but whoever it was, it was a powerful enough vision to give her the strength to move immovable limbs.
You can rest assured in your hatred of all things Christian or “godly” but give me faith in Christ any day, my friend. There is nothing to lean on except Jesus when you get to the point where you are facing eternity and have time to think about it. My only concern for you is if you must face eternity with no time to decide what to do, as in the event of a car accident. I mean – Boom! Hello!
Pixy Stix in bucket light (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I grew up in the Pasadena/South Houston, TX area with its muddy bayous, caustic smell from the paper plant, and great Tex-Mex restaurants (Does anyone even remember Monterrey House?). We moved to Almeda, TX when I was thirteen. Back then it was true country, or as I thought of it, the edge of nowhere.
Growing into a teen out there had its merits. My neighbors had horses. I loved horses. What could be more fantastic?
My brothers and I relished Halloween. We would spend a lot of time thinking up great ways to scare the little kids of the neighborhood on that night. I was the witch with a caldron made from the horse’s water barrel while one of my brothers would throw the straw zombie from the roof. Scared the living daylights out of those little ones. Heh. Heh.
Our church, which was very conservative, encouraged a Halloween get-together for the youth (that would be us-uns). My Uncle and Aunt had a barn that they would turn into a fantastic haunted house complete with a maze, glow-in-the-dark spooks, and wet noodle-filled troughs we youth had to crawl through. It was the seventies. There wasn’t more fun to be had short of drugs and we didn’t do drugs.
The night of October 31, 1974 a little boy named Tim O’Brian swallowed some powdered sugar from a giant pixie-stix and went into convulsions. He was dead before the ambulance got him to the hospital.
It wasn’t long before investigators put the truth together. Tim’s father had laced the pixie-stix with cyanide and handed them out to his two children and two of their little friends after having taken out a $30,000 out on his two children.
Ronald O’Brian was the “Candy Man”. The man who killed Halloween.
It was horrible. And especially shocking because it took place in Deer Park very near where we were little kids and went trick-or-treating.
Pandemonium. In the eighties there were some deaths related to taking cyanide-laced Tylenol. More pandemonium. Halloween was definitely filled with danger. Don’t trick-or you’ll get treated to the offerings of sickos. Hospitals offered to x-ray candy for needles and razor blades because rumor had it that these had been found in apples and snickers bars.
Then Satan stepped in.
Halloween was invented by Satanists. It is evil. Don’t you put on that mask, child! It is evil.
Why else would the night before be celebrated in Mexico as the night of the dead? And Halloween was in reality All Saint’s Eve with pagan leanings and rife with witches.
Not so in other parts of the world as All Hallow’s Eve, if you lived in Scotland or England would be celebrated with prayer and doughnuts.
In America, churches no longer had spook houses. They had harvest celebrations.
It’s been a long time since The Candy Man murdered his son. Things have calmed down a little.
The decades-old idea that depraved strangers are targeting children with tainted Halloween candy, however, is more fiction than fact, says a sociologist who has studied the phenomenon for 20 years. University of Delaware Professor Joel Best said he has yet to find a case in which a stranger deliberately poisoned trick-or-treaters.
“This is a contemporary legend that speaks to our anxiety about kids,” Best said. “Most of us don’t believe in ghosts and goblins anymore, but we believe in criminals.”
Thirty years ago, after Timothy’s death, the idea of a madman poisoning children with Halloween candy was all too real.
“We were all shocked that someone would kill their own son, their own flesh and blood, for a lousy … $30,000 life insurance policy,” said former Harris County Assistant District Attorney Mike Hinton, who prosecuted the case.
O’Bryan apparently was willing to go further, passing the poisoned Pixy Stix to at least four other children, including his 5-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Miraculously, officers were able to retrieve the remaining tampered candy before any other children ingested it.
An 11-year-old boy who was given one of the tainted Pixy Stix was found asleep in bed later than night, cradling the tube of poisoned candy in his arms. He had been unable to pry out the staples O’Bryan had used to reseal the plastic container.
“He didn’t have enough strength to get it open,” Hinton said. “It just sends shivers down your spine.”
We know the world is filled with crazy people who would kill complete strangers for very little or no reason. We don’t live in a nice space. We are surrounded by danger. We don’t let our children eat food off the floor (I hope) or eat something they’ve dropped in line at the supermarket. We examine candy wrappers to make sure they are sealed. Every package we buy – be it aspirin or gas-aides – is strangled with nearly impossible-to-open wrapping. But then the neighbor gets mad at his wife and in the process of running her off the road with his vehicle, bumps another car and kills the mother and her two-year old inside. (True story from two weeks ago in the Pasadena area.)
So this is what I know. We don’t know our end.
Meanwhile, Halloween is back in style again. Go trick-or-treating. Eat candy. Laugh a little. It’s high time.
Today was one of those fine days when everything worked well together and I had the opportunity to go out with friends from Sugar Land. We had a lovely meal at Paulie’s on Westheimer. Paulie’s is well-known for their hand-made pasta and other authentic-tasting Italian delights.
Afterward we went on a close circuit of sights. First, the Guild Shop on Dunlavy is rated the best second-hand shop in Houston. I like it but I have another favorite. The thing about the two thrift shops we went to today is this: They have seriously discounted, real antiques. Take my word for it. You will see the same things at the antique shops five blocks away on lower Westheimer for five-times the price. I bought some designer sleeveless shirts for a dollar. I witnessed a lady buy a Louie Vuitton vintage purse. It was $230. I’m pretty sure you would have had to pay about $1,200 for the same bag about five years ago. I have a friend who has one that is over thirty years old. I hear they hold up well. The Guild Shop has everything. I mean it.
Next we went to the Bluebird Circle shop on Alabama. This one is my favorite thrift shop. I think it feels more organized and neatly laid out than the Guild shop. You can really see things here. I’ve gotten some fabulous chandeliers here in the past. I’ll include the pics of the two of them.
Shopping at these two thrift shops was a huge bonus during our renovation of our two historic homes.
I saw some antique scales today. I’m going back for them. They are too cool to leave for long. The price goes down over time but the chance is that someone else will get them. It happened with a table I saw that would have been perfect for my son’s house. He wanted to wait for the price to go down. Needless to say. It got sold.
After the thrift shops we went to BlackSmith, a coffee/pastry/sandwich shop on lower Westheimer. We had the homemade biscuit with creme fraiche. Oh. My. Goodness. Don’t tell a soul! I don’t want word to get out and then there really would be nowhere to sit. I loved this place. Can’t wait to try other things on the menu.
Then we all ended up back at my house. My pals came in and I realized with something akin to horror that the house – though I had picked up and straightened before I left – was something close to a disaster zone of untidiness. In my absence the family had cooked lunch and eaten and left me the dishes to prove it. But I have the greatest friends in the world. They didn’t seem to mind. What more can anyone ask?
Okay, you know who you are!! Thank you for a wonderful day out. LOVE YOU!!!
English: Category:Images of Dallas, Texas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I didn’t go to preschool or kindergarten. Perhaps that’s why it wasn’t long into my first year of school that I was sent to the principal’s office. Here’s what happened: The teacher had left the room. In a firm moment of lost reason I decided it would be super cool to stand on my desk and pretend to be the teacher. We had desks that were little tables with separate chairs. I stood on my desk, not next to it or at the front of the class (well I didn’t need to, my desk was at the front of the class). I danced. I sang. I adapted my best Mrs. Nelson voice – yes, that really was her name – and reminded the class to sit down and be quiet. The class went from hilarious laughter to dead silent. For a moment I felt real POWER! Then I saw the fear in their eyes. Nope, they were not afraid of me. Me, still standing on my desk. I didn’t have to turn around to know who had just re-entered the classroom.
This same teacher soon discovered that my lack of attention and discipline might be related to the fact that I couldn’t see a thing she was writing on the board. Board? I didn’t get why we were even watching her scribble on it. All that watching seemed a waste of time. Mrs. Nelson sent me home with a note that I couldn’t read. Probably because I hadn’t learned how yet. It seemed so ominous.
Soon we were headed to Dallas to see our optometrist. I know. Seems extreme to go from Houston to Dallas to get an eyeglasses prescription but that’s what how my family rolled. Besides, the optometrist and his family were friends with my family. The only other reason I can think that we did that was because the visit was free. We also ate and slept at their house. This was in the early 60’s. It seems such a weird and wacky thing to do coming from the perspective of nowadays. I mean, Dallas was a long way away in those days. Not that Dallas has moved closer. It just seems like it has because the speed limit is higher and cars are faster – or we drive faster, I don’t know which. Maybe it was a weird and wacky thing in those days, too. Or maybe the White family was that amazing to let us do it. Mrs. White was probably the hospitable person on the planet. She had five kids. We had four kids. That’s a lot of people to feed and house.
Thank you White family of Dallas. I know there are many of you all over the world by now but just a line to say those moments we spent telling stories late into the night from the living room floor were wonderful for all of us kids.
And thank you Mrs. Nelson from E.F. Smith Elementary for being the only teacher to write a positive note on my report card in five years of grade school. “Becky is a wonderful artist!”
So my first pair of glasses were light blue. Cat glasses. The first time I put them on when we got home from the store I went out in the back yard. It was the first time I saw detail. Detail!! You mean everyone can see the individual blades of grass on the ground? It isn’t just a flat mass of green? Clouds? There are clouds in the sky? Suddenly my colorful world was full of wonderful detail. There are not only places to go but things to see! How exciting!
The other day I was driving West on I-10, my thoughts ranged from the mundane (how was I going to find the time to stain the floors of the Oldcastle house) to the odd (I love renovation. Why didn’t I do this full-time?).
I’ve discovered laying glass tile is a breeze. If they weren’t so expensive I would plaster rooms with them. Rooms! At the Oldcastle house I put glass tile around the bath vanity, including at the floor around the vanity because the hole that we filled in with cement was filled too high to put conventional tile on. So here you see the dark tile around the new vanity.
Sure, I could begin a small renovation business. I had just installed glass tiles and grouted them in the master bath of the house.
They looked perfect. I had designed several of the new elements of the house from the cabinets (wish they were all white, though) and the bathroom vanities. I had added a light where there was none to create a dining room area. It was fun. Just wish I wasn’t using our money to do it. How much more fun would this be if it were someone else’s money? I could do wonders for people looking to change their old and drab bathrooms and kitchens.
We had already been approached by two neighbors who were interested in purchasing the property. So I knew things were going to be okay with it.
Kitchen almost done.
We had established that this week we would be putting up a “for sale” sign. Finishing touches, completing the punch list, that’s all we have left.
Then my mother-in-law called. She had blood in her stool A lot of blood. She wanted a ride to the doctors. My husband took her, after a consultation with the doctor, they had her at the hospital in fifteen minutes. Her blood-thinner levels in her blood were at the stage where it was surprising that she had survived. She was bleeding internally. There was fluid around her heart. It didn’t look good.
First night in the ICU she called my husband at 2 AM and told him if he didn’t get down there and get her out he would find a dead mother in the morning. We spent time with her the next few days. Every day and every night it was a new conspiracy theory. For instance the hospital staff was conspiring against her to keep her in bed so they could take more of her money. And the electronics in the room were making the clocks and her watch jump ahead every few hours so that it always looked like 2 AM so she would remain confused. The scary one was that no one was visiting her. And who was I to tell her different? We wouldn’t take the time to come visit. We weren’t caring enough to make sure she was fine. Okay.
My sweet, dear, beloved mother-in-law had gone “around the bend” in a big way.
In order to show her that we cared I resorted to bringing her a pile of get well cards from her loved ones – i.e. all of us – with notes and pictures, vases of flowers (fake because “real ones make me sicker”), photos of us visiting when she was too asleep to know we were there and making her drink water (“I don’t need water. Everyone makes me drink water. It’s just a trick.”)
The renovations and the rest of the world had to come to some sort of agreement with timing.
Last night, after several nearly sleepless nights we figured she was calmer. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that we took the phone away from her. So we planned to sleep. Then the phone rang at 1AM. This time a neighbor across from the Oldcastle house was calling to the report the garage door and front door were open. We asked him to please lock the house up. We rose early to drive over to see what damage had been done. Nothing. Everything was as it had been. Strange.
Then it hit me. I forgot the fundamental rule of property recently abandoned by its occupant.
Change the locks.
This wish for renovation work full-time must have been the thinking of a brain high on paint fumes.
people was so thick I could see through them. The Dry had great sales but I have to give credit where credit is due and that is to THE WASP! I had my wasp costume with me and I had it on a dress dummy. I’ve tweeted the pictures but I’ll post them here tomorrow.
Walk Houston”. The organization will host another road block next month in the Heights.
Rebecca Nolen 