See how I am?

My house was one busy house today.

Take a look.

Bethany and Samantha, shooting the breeze.

Charlie and kids, playing Skipbo in the living room. 

And again. 

Miss Natalie, going solo. 

Working on applesauce.  

Bethany's going to complain about her double chin in this one.

What can I say?

It's hereditary.

There's no way I could crop it out.

It's a chin, for Pete's sake!

The finished product.

And then I was mean and made Bethany clean up her mess.

Charlie signing up for Rosetta Stone.

He's learning Spanish.

Did you know active military  can get it for free?

And Josh eating his lunch.

Pistachios. One raspberry. A carrot. A cucumber. And Quaker rice cakes.

Gluten-free makes for an interesting diet.

My third loaf of apple bread in two days. 

Daniel playing "Somewhere My Love" on the piano, follow-the-lights style. 

Three kids playing chess.

Papa came in later and coached them. 

Bethany's tired feet getting a Shiatzu massage.

Natalie's feet waiting hopefully in the wings. 

Samantha's bible.

She and Charlie spend a lot of time with their noses buried in it. 

Daniel doing his music theory and getting a Shiatzu massage.

Some people have the life, don't they? 

And getting ready to sleep in the rec room with Charlie.

Eagerly anticipating the early-morning fishing trip with Papa, Charlie and Sam. 

Add a couple of grandchildren piano lessons, homemade pizza for dinner, and me watching Lark Rise to Candleford, and you've just about got it.

Happy weekend.

A reality check

You might have noticed how my blogging goes in spurts.
Sometimes, ideas and opinions just ooze out of me.
Other times, I can't come up with a single phrase that deems itself worthy of gracing The Blog.

It's been a bit of a dry spell lately, even though my brain is running in overdrive. I just wanted to let you know that I have evaluated the next couple of months and realized that I may have over-committed myself. Because I love you, every last one of you, the lovely commenters as well as the lurkers, and even the anonymous who once left that snarky comment about how my favourite music festival sounded boring (well, maybe not the anonymous) (can we say sensitive with a long memory?)  I wanted to warn you that my updates will probably be sporadic.

So please don't abandon me!

Here's a sneak peek at the major events coming up:

A Continuing Education day-long class for the Oregon Music Therapy Assn. on the 30th of this month, of which I am in charge. The paperwork alone makes me want to take a nap.

Two Christmas activities at Church in December, a dinner for the adults and a breakfast for the kids. Of which, again, I have the final responsibility.

Weekly choir practice and performing in church for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yup. Me in charge.

Christmas. Need I say more?

Charlie and Sam's wedding in Southern California right after Christmas and all that goes along with that. I'll be happily making the cake and the rehearsal dinner.

A friend and I are going to volunteer at a birth clinic in Haiti in the middle of January. We'll be gone for almost two weeks. It's a trip that is very dear to my heart, but the logistics are mind-boggling.

Another big music therapy event at the end of January which is only in the early planning stage.

Jeff and I are taking a trip to the U.K. in May. As yet unscheduled, so lots of work to do yet on the planning end.

Add all that to my work and Nana and wife and other duties and I have this mild sense of panic in the back of my mind. That being said, I'm not even finished with this preemptive apology and my mind is already brimming with ideas for blog posts.
Sigh.
I defeat my own best intentions most of the time.

Enigmatic sunset

I took these photos within a couple of minutes at Bethany's house last week. The sky didn't change its appearance during that narrow time frame as much as the photos would suggest. Some of the difference is due to the direction in which I was pointing the camera, but that certainly doesn't account for all of it. I suspect it also depends on whether I was focusing on the sky or the ground. I love to take photos, but I wish I was more motivated to sit down and really understand the mechanics of the process.

These are completely unedited, except for cropping.

Just wondering

Some things I have been puzzling over lately:

Since when was a 16 ounce bag of Hershey's chocolate considered to be "jumbo size"? Unless it describes me after I've finished consuming the whole bag.

What is with the use of the adjective "warm" in a business setting? Several colleagues have started signing off on their emails with "warmly, so-and-so". And today, Skype warmly welcomed me to their service in an email. Is it supposed to make me automatically trust them? What kind of person describes herself as "warm" anyway? The word "menopausal" springs to mind, but most of my readership probably won't appreciate that connotation!

Does anyone actually watch Survivor any more?

Why would the administrator of a retirement home insist that my first music therapy session be a freebie "demo" and then not bother to observe even a minute of it? Yes, this actually happened to me last week.

How did Jeff and I create such manly sons?

And how could they even think of eating that cute little squirrel on their rugged camping trip last night?

Sam'n'Charlie

Charlie proposed to his sweetheart this morning up at Magness Tree Farm.
We assume it was suitably romantic, because she said "Yes."
Actually, Samantha already has most of the wedding plans down, so it was a moot point.

They will be married here on December 29th.

Yes, this December 29th.

When you're a Marine, you don't mess around. Charlie told me that one of his friends had to reschedule his wedding four times. After the invitations had been sent out.

So, I know you're all wondering how I feel about this, right?

After all, my blog, my life, it's all about me.

Well, my observation is that Charlie is as happy as I have ever seen him. He seems to be more comfortable in his own skin, not so restless as in times past. He is taking responsibility and making plans and dealing with some of the hard facts of life with determination and optimism. 

So I am happy too.

Guess who?

A pirate story

Today's story came to me in a round-about way.

Twenty five years ago today, Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by Palestinian pirates.
For those of you who are fuzzy on the details, as am I, let me re-cap.

Klinghoffer, a retired Jewish businessman, was confined to a wheelchair because of the effects of two strokes. He had no interest in a Mediterranean cruise, but went because he loved his wife, Marilyn. It was their 36th wedding anniversary. A few days into the cruise, four members of the PLO boarded the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, and made outrageous demands of Israel while the world watched helplessly. The pirates singled Klinghoffer out for execution, shot him in the head and chest and forced the ship's barber and a waiter to throw his body overboard. Marilyn didn't find out that he was dead until the pirates left the ship in Port Said, having being told that he was in the infirmary. She died of colon cancer a few months later and the couple's two daughters now work against terrorism in their names.

The fate of the pirates was rather a mixed bag and involved a little spat between our beloved Ronald Reagan and the Italians. The PLO did end up having to pay a sizable amount of money to the Klinghoffer daughters, which is now used to fund their foundation against terrorism. Delicious irony, don't you think?

Lisa and Ilsa Klinghoffer in 2003, holding a photo of Leon and Marilyn.
Photo from NYDailyNews.



Segue with me back to 1967.
This is the year that I sailed with my family on a 5-week voyage from England to New Zealand.
On the Angelina Lauro.
Sister ship to the Achille.
Which got me to thinking about that ship, wondering what happened to it, so I did a little Google.
It's amazing what you can find on the internet.

The Angelina started life as the MS Oranje, built in 1938 for a Netherlands shipping company. She spent most of World War II as a hospital ship for the Australian Navy. The Dutch government bore the full cost of the conversion to a hospital ship and the crew remained Dutch, even though the Captain was Australian. The Oranje served in multiple theatres during the war, made 41 voyages, and was a welcome sight in Australian and New Zealand ports.

After the War, the Oranje spent the next couple of decades as a cruise ship, sailing around the world. With passenger numbers dropping, she and her sister ship were sold to the Flotta Lauro Lines, an Italian company. She was extensively rebuilt, with one of the outstanding features being her tall, louvered funnel which was topped by a large smoke deflector wing. The newly outfitted Angelina Lauro took her maiden voyage in March 1966.

This photo is from Reuben Goossen's comprehensive maritime website. Isn't she a beauty?

One year later, my family boarded the boat in Southampton.

My Dad had bought himself a new-fangled Super-8 movie camera, with which he proceeded to make a menace of himself. In later years, we all laughed whenever we watched those family movies, because Dad would inevitably pan up to that awesome funnel whenever he filmed anything on board the ship. I guess I was under-impressed, being only eleven at the time and not understanding anything about engineering or design!

For more of my Dad's story, go here, in case you missed it the first time.

Well, we had an interesting voyage, because it was right after the Suez Canal closed and so they took the stabilizers off the ship in order to make up time. We had to go into the Mediterranean to Italy, then back out again to travel all the way around Africa. I have fond memories of the five weeks we spent mostly playing Monopoly with our little gang of like-minded kids. Mum would tell you several horror stories, but again, I guess I was oblivious.

What happened to the Angelina, you ask?

Well, she got another retrofit in 1972. In 1979, she burned and sank while in the U.S.Virgin Islands. 

I hope I haven't bored you with my little trip down memory lane. I found it fascinating to fill in the gaps for my own satisfaction. We experience so many things in life and we view them from our narrow field of vision, never seeing the bigger picture.

It's fun, sometimes, to enlarge that perspective, don't you think?