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TRAVEL MEMORIES AND WRITER’S RETREAT

I took time out to visit my son and his family in Seattle. My granddaughter’s favorite thing is riding horses, so I took a picture of her taking a lesson on an appaloosa horse. She told me she had to learn how to brush a horse and muck out a stall as well.

I also watched her play soccer on a field that looked as big as a football field. That makes for a lot of running as she followed the coach’s instructions to stay with her player from the opposing team. She also got in a few good kicks. Promised a treat at a local frozen yogurt place if they won, the team persevered and trounced the opposition 3 to 1. I joined them in adding nuts and other tidbits from a buffet of things to sprinkle on top. After setting my cup on a scale to have the price figured, I joined the happy team members.

As my son and my grandson played catch, my grandson explained how he signals the pitcher to throw different types of pitches.

My son took me up to top of the Seattle Space Needle. We stood on the revolving glass floor and got a panoramic view of Seattle and Puget Sound with mountains on the opposite shore. Looking down on a building roof, sporting huge spiders, complete with shadows, we argued about whether they were painted or three-dimensional figures, but the shadows were not consistent with the time of day, so they had to be painted.

Down on the ground again, we ate Scottish meat pies. After taking a bottle of strawberry soda to the table, I was appalled to discover it had 74 grams of sugar. I knew I should have chosen water instead, but it was a refreshing accompaniment to my beef pie on a warm day.

Two weeks later, I took a different kind of trip, to a house in the Texas countryside for a writer’s retreat with a dozen other writers. I took part in several writing sprints of twenty minutes and my best total was 555 words, over two pages. During the rainy weekend I managed to crank out thirty pages on my next book, a sequel to Searching for Love. Now comes the hard part, the editing. I’ll let it cool while I finish editing Romancing the Vet.

Below, Sandy, Virginia, and Gina are hard at work writing.

From the mouth and hands of an artist – beauty and wonder

I visited Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum in Seattle and viewed wonders made by Dale Chihuly, born in nearby Tacoma, Washington. I loved the foot-wide flowers hanging from the glass “greenhouse” that glowed in the sunlight with shades of orange and yellow.

   I marveled at the eight-foot tall sculptures with so many blown pieces in differing shapes. I thought about the artist, standing on a ladder carefully assembling them and marveled at his patience. 

One exhibit, featuring items assembled in boats was inspired by Chihuly’s experiments with glass balls in Nuutajarvi, Finland, where he worked at the famous Hackman Glass Works. He tossed glass balls into a river to see what would happen. After seeing teenagers in rowboats gathering the balls, he made an exhibit with balls of different sizes and colors in a boat. Inspired by fishing boat floats, he called this Niijama Floats.

The other “boat” held glass forms of different sizes, shapes, and colors resembling stems, reflected in the black mirrored surface below. He called that Ikebana after Japanese flower arrangement traditions.

An exhibit of various forms and colors, some resembling swans, longer than my thirty-foot living room filled one whole room. Another room held flowers three feet across in different colors placed six feet high.

Outside, I walked past tall, slim cylinders in blue or red, resembling candles, and a tall yellow green glass bush. Set among natural foliage, it looked like a real plant. I guessed it was from ten to fifteen feet tall.

Not long after my arrival back at DFW Airport, I had an appointment with my oncologist and again saw Chuhuly’s orange and yellow creation at UT Southwestern’s Seay Biomedical Building in Dallas. The sculpture consists of 1,100 hand-blown glass elements, flown from Seattle and assembled in the lobby of the building. And best of all, I have pictures on my camera and my phone and will add three to this article.

Lunch Disaster

Tired of soup and sandwiches for lunch, I decided to try a new recipe for baked eggs. Since it’s still summer in Texas, I decided I’d use the microwave oven.

The recipe called for chives, parsley, and tarragon. Well, I had parsley, and I thought I had tarragon. I know I’d made a type of Hollandaise sauce with tarragon once, but I couldn’t find any tarragon. Maybe cilantro would do. For chives I substituted paprika to add color. Carefully, I measured out ½ tsp. of each and mixed that in a small bowl.

I put one pat of butter in each little ramekin, but didn’t want to add all the herbs and spice, so I divided half the amount among the four dishes and put them in the microwave for ten seconds to melt the butter.

I managed to crack each egg without breaking the yolk. I sprinkled each dish with pepper, added a tablespoon of milk and sprinkled a tablespoon of grated parmesan cheese over each one. Somewhere I’d read you should break the yolk before microwaving, but with all that stuff on top, I didn’t think it necessary.

The recipe said to bake twelve minutes. I have a 1250-watt microwave, so I set them to cook for half the time and started setting the table. I kept hearing little pops. When I opened the microwave door, I saw bits of herb crusted egg all over the oven and groaned.

To make things worse, the herbs tended to concentrate in spots, making some bites too spicy. I’m glad I hadn’t used all the herbs. My husband, bless his heart, ate his and said, “Please don’t try that again.”

After lunch, I gave that microwave a good cleaning and resolved to try a different egg recipe next time.

Great Place to Travel

While doing research for Royal Wedding Scoop, I found the Santa Maria Montserrat Abbey, nestled high in a multi-peaked mountain in Catalonia. The nearby caves would be a good place for the kidnappers to hide Princess Patricia’s two sisters.  The abbey is about thirty miles from Barcelona.

I have pictures and memories of visiting the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s marvelous temple in Barcelona, Catalonia.

 

 

 

According to Wikipedia, “Catalonia declared independence on Friday 27th of October 2017.

In pictures I found (Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey)  the view is fantastic when riding cable cars up to the top. There is a trail you can walk. Or you can take the Rack Railway train. The abbey is an active Benedictine monastery, with many rooms to tour, but to visit the museum you need to buy a ticket.

However, you can see the black virgin for free. The statue is carved of wood, and over the years its varnish has turned black from lantern light and candle light. Many people visit it, believing it has miraculous healing power.

 

Appreciation Is the Key

The slip of paper in my fortune cookie said, “Appreciate the caring people who surround you.” Little did I know that advice would be brought to my attention four days later.

Waiting my turn at the doctor’s office, I perused the magazines. The headline on Time magazine said, “Hate in America,” and the one on Family Circle said, “Feel the Love.” The choice was easy.

The article, Five Ways to Improve Your Marriage, by Andrea Syrtash caught my eye. The ideas presented could enrich any close relationship, so I took note of them.

The first was to take a positive inventory of what I appreciated about my partner. The second was to mention one of those to him. I thought of the compliments he’d made to me. Had I said enough to show how I appreciated him?

Then the article encouraged me to visualize what a good relationship looked like by writing down adjectives like caring, appreciative, helpful, laughing with me, and humoring my idiosyncrasies.

The fourth recommendation said to touch each other more. Apparently, that releases oxytocin, which is often called the “cuddle hormone.”

The fifth and last suggestion was also important. Get over the idea of perfection. Well, I’m not perfect. Why should I expect my partner to be? Hoping for him to change into someone I would consider perfect is not going to happen, so why even think about it? That frees me to be happy and content with who he is and appreciate his good points.

Here we are celebrating the publication of 

Searching for Love with a glass of wine.

Scolded for Doing a Good Deed

While taking my daily walk, I noticed several stones in the street. The median was decorated with but grass, feather grass, huge rocks, and crape myrtle trees surrounded by rounded river rocks. It looked like some driver had lost control, drove up on the median and scattered them. I’ve always worried that the huge rocks, two to three feet in diameter, now covered up with feather grass might stop a car or truck with disastrous results. These dozen or more river rocks would cause problems for the 700 or more cars per day moving down the street, many at speeds over the legal thirty miles an hour.

Wanting to be a good citizen, I watched for traffic and hurried over to pick them up and put them back around the crape myrtle. Luckily, rush hour was over, and I quickly put the rocks back, not taking time to figure out exactly where each one came from and finished the task before any more cars came.

Thinking to write about this on my website, I went back for my camera. Again, I watched for traffic. When the road was clear, I set one rock in the road where I’d seen the rocks before and snapped a picture.

I looked up the hill to check for traffic again. Down the hill came a cop on a motor cycle with red and blue lights flashing. I stepped up on the median curb waited until he stopped to explain what I was doing. Finally, he said, “Okay, but you need to get out of the street right away. It’s dangerous.”

I said, “Yes, I will,” and looked to see if any cars were coming. Since the road was clear, I clutched my camera, crossed the street and headed home.

Today, when I took my walk, I checked to see if I’d place the rocks well. They looked okay, so I crossed back over the street and resumed my walk. Curious about the spelling of the tree’s name, I looked it up on Google. “The scientific name is lagerstroemia crape myrtle. The traditional Southern spelling is “Crepe Myrtle” (because the delicate flowers resemble crepe paper).”

Serving in the Rain

Today I volunteered handing out food at Tarrant Area Food Bank’s mobile pantry. We were glad it was cloudy, so no one had to assemble and put up the canopy to shade people from the Texas sun. People came by with shopping bags and large boxes in shopping carts, which we filled with vegetables and other food.

After a while, a few drops started falling. Okay, I can handle that, so I kept on handing out six ears of corn and three huge zuchini. People held out shopping bags to fill.

Some zucchini were ten inches long and three inches in diameter. I explained you could slice it and boil it or fry it with onions or bacon. The zucchini that were spoiled will go to a garden for compost. I brought one of them home. I can slice off the bad part and fry it. I think I’ll try bacon with it.

Then the drops came faster. I’d left my hat inside because the wind kept blowing it off. Well, I’m not made of sugar, so I won’t melt. The people kept coming. If they needed food and were willing to brave the rain, I was going to keep working. Here is a picture of the canopy we use on sunny days.

Finally, at ten minutes to eleven, the rain stopped, and even though eleven was closing time, there was a whole lot of people in line, so I handed out more food. By this time we were giving out twelve ears of corn.

At a few minutes after eleven, after the last person came through the line, I sank into a chair to catch my breath. I’d worked hard, but it was worth it to see all those smiles and hear all the thank yous.