Friday!!!!!

It's been a rough week for many of my Peeps.....you all know who you are. But alas, it's Friday. Time to head home as early as possible and recharge our batteries for next week. Does anyone have anything good planned? It's going to be a rainy and somewhat blustery weekend here in the Pacific NW, which is a bummer because Annie (from "Cozy Shack") is on vacation in Seattle. It's a shame she won't get to see Mt. Rainier in all its snowy glory.

We have nothing planned except for watching football and I'd like to make some jewelry with the beads I recently bought.

Anyways, to cheer you up and end your week with a smile, I've dipped into one of my fave sites, I Can Has Cheezburger, and posted these really amusing pics.

Not with the price of gas these days!

This one is definitely photoshopped, but it really, really cracked me up. For those of you not familiar with Philly, it's not the world's safest city....I call it "The City of Brotherly Shove".

Aw! This one's sooooooo cuuuuuute!!!

Kitteh? What kitteh?

Take that you obnoxious cockney GEICO gecko! Bring back the Cavemen commercials!!

This one I like to call "If Brian was a kitteh". (love ya, hunny xoxoxoxo)

No Longer a Key Demographic

The other day I was filling out some form, and I got to the section where they list what age group you are in. Much to my chagrin, I now fall in the 41-55 category. When the hell did that happen? Wasn't I just buying Boomtown Rats and Clash albums just the other day? Or was it really 25 years ago? I used to get so excited when I'd come home with a new album. You never know what lay inside.....lyrics, a poster maybe? Now I find myself getting excited when we get stuff for the house. Like the new sinks and faucets we got for upstairs in October. For a week I kept saying, "I LOVE my new kitchen sink!" What the hell happened to me?


It was just in the news last week that the first of the baby boomers are collecting Social Security!! How did time fly by so quickly? Why don't boomer opinions matter any more? How come no one cares about what we have to say? Why do I find myself sounding like my mom, "What is wrong with these stupid kids today and that gawd awful music they listen to? It's nothing but noise!" You know why? Because boomers are no longer a key demographic. No one cares about us anymore. We're a bunch of aging hippies whose kids....and grandkids....just pat us on the head patronizingly when we talk about the good ol' days of protests and free concerts in the park. Sort of like we did with our parents who would wax nostalgic about jitterbugging to the big bands or how they managed to survive the Great Depression.


Anyways, Brian and I approach our television-watching from a totally different perspective than most people. It's sort of a science with us. We like to see what kinds of commercials run during some shows, just to see the demographics that the advertisers are trying to reach. Like if you are home sick and watching TV, all the ads will be for vocational schools & personal injury attorneys, because the people that are most likely at home watching TV are people out of work for one reason or another.


So we were watching TV the other night, and this commercial comes on for some whole grain cereal. Total maybe. Can't remember the product. The graphics are all psychedelic and Peter Max'ian and the music being used is Canned Heat's "On The Road Again", a staple 1960's tune. Brian's like, "Oh wow maaaan, check out the trippy commercial!" Unfortunately the first thing that came to my mind is OMG! They are peddling whole grain cereal to aging hippies to keep them regular in their old age, by using groovy music and graphics!!! Was the summer of love really 40 years ago? Cadillac has also been trying to tempt us aging baby boomers by using Led Zeppelin music for the past 2 years. Let's face it, the only people who buy Caddies and Lincolns are old. In fact, many of the commercials targeted at us doddering old fogies use "our music", because people our age are currently making the commercials.

But I swear, I will have to smash my TV if I ever see a laxative commercial using "Shake Your Booty".

Hot off the press

I finished this beaded cross stitch project up last weekend, just in time to put up for Thanksgiving! Click on the picture to see the detail.

TGIF

One of Brian's buds called and asked him if he wanted to go have a couple beers at the local watering hole, so I thought I'd take advantage of the quiet time and do a blog post.

This week seemed as though it last forever. I can barely remember Monday. We had zero trick or treaters on Halloween. Someone did come to our front door at about 9:00 p.m., but it was too late and we didn't answer the door. We just let Sagan and Pepper keep barking till they went away. I didn't carve a pumpkin this year....I didn't even buy pumpkins so that I could roast the seeds. I hate it when Halloween falls in the middle of the week like it did this year. Next year it'll be on a Friday b/c of Leap Year. A year from now, every single commercial you see on American TV will be a political ad. We're coming up on a very, very important election year. If you don't like where this country is headed, then you have got to vote for change.

I had my physical on Thursday and I passed except for my doctor riding me like Seattle Slew about my weight. If you're gonna ride my ass, at least pull my hair, you know? Hmm. What part of I HAVE A HEEL SPUR ON MY LEFT FOOT AND I CAN BARELY WALK MUCH LESS GO TO THE FUCKING GYM does she not understand? Did she forget that she gave me the referral to the podiatrist? He gave me a cortisone shot in my heel that relieved the pain for a total of 2 days. My orthotics should be in shortly & he's probably going to have to give me another shot.

Don't Forget!!

Clocks FINALLY go back this weekend. I really don't see the point of the extended daylight saving time this year. Truly. It's just as cold and dark today as it would have been last Sunday if the clocks had gone back like normal. I love being on Standard Time, or "real time" as we call it. Back in the mid-70's, I want to say like 1973 or 1974, they tried leaving the clocks on daylight saving time for the entire year. The experiment bombed. I remember my elementary school had to move our start time to 9:00 a.m. because the kids were out in the pitch dark waiting for the buses. Sandwich is a large town, size-wise, and there were a lot of kids that lived far away from the school so they'd have to get on earlier buses than kids that lived closer to Sandwich Village. But then school also got out an hour later, at 4:00 p.m., so now kids were getting off the buses in pitch dark and walking home from their stops.

Washington does not need to observe daylight saving time. We are far enough north that the sun goes down pretty late in the evening and comes up just a few hours later.

It's finally November

I love November. It's the month of my birth. I'm truly a winter child. I love the dark, cold days and crisp nights. I'm not crazy about driving in snow, but I like snow. I loved to ice skate & sled. Never been on skis though. I love the wet and wild Pacific Northwest winters, although I am not eager to see another storm like we had last December any time soon. I share my birthday with Jimi Hendrix and Carolyn Kennedy. I'm a Sagitarrian through and through. My poor parents didn't have a chance as I was also born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon. It's killer to have a birthday that usually falls over Thanksgiving holiday weekend, although this year it's the following week which kind of sucks. Every now and then, it falls on Thanksgiving Day itself. Thanksgiving weekend is my favourite holiday, more than Christmas. My birthday is just far enough away from Christmas that no one could get away with giving you the dreaded "combo birthday and Christmas present" that some of my friends with mid-December birthdays often got when we were kids.

Foil Hats-R-Us

Some of you guys know what's been going on at my work. My job has been extremely stressful for over a year now, ever since Robyn took the Court Commissioner job. Steve absorbed all of her pending cases which meant twice the workload. Any thoughts that Debby or I would be laid off have gone out the window because there is plenty of work to keep 2 paralegals busy. And we could stand to hire a person to just answer the phones too. However, Debby's father, who is in his mid-90's, has suffered an enormous amount of illness, injuries and surgeries this year. Stuff that would have killed me like 10x over, but he's one of those tough, ornery Washington coal miners. Anyway, the end is near, and she's taken a leave of absence to care for him. Now, I know that's a really nice thing to do, but it's not something that I could EVER do. I would have to have a nurse come 24/7. From a selfish point of view, our office is now short staffed and guess who is carrying the entire load. Yes, that's right, yours truly. And my anger and resentment grows exponentially with each passing day. I know it's selfish, I'm well aware of that and well aware of that flaw in my personality, but I'm only human and that is how I feel.

In fact, I overheard Steve tell a client, "Just throw all the stuff in a box and bring it in here and I'll have my paralegal organize it next week". When he hung up, I called out from my office, "Are you on drugs? Just when am I supposed to find the time to do that little project?" We have 3 trials this month. 3. One of them is next Friday. I have to write a Trial Memorandum, Chronology, PreTrial Information Form and all the other time consuming documents that are generated for trial and he is volunteering me to organize some putz's financial papers? Is he out of his fucking mind? So he backpedaled and said he'll actually have to do the sorting. But he doesn't have time for that either. It's a friggin nightmare.

If we had a practice that specialized in just personal injury, probate or estate planning, it wouldn't be so bad. But 95% of our practice is family law and lemme tell ya, there are some crazy ass people out there. I know that our clients think of me as brusque....even rude. I have to maintain an arm's length relationship with them. I try to be friendly, for the most part, but when it's the same person calling day after day after day asking the same questions over and over and over, well....as the saying goes, "I have one nerve left and you're getting on it." They drop in without appointments and say, "Steve here?" Then stick around when you tell them that he's with a client or on the phone. Meanwhile I have a deadline I'm trying to meet and they just don't get the fucking hint that our office is not somewhere for them to hang out and chit chat. But see Debby mollycoddles our clients and spends time on the phone with them discussing the minutiae of their lives. I just don't have that kind of time.

I deal with a lot of heartache and sadness every day. From the woman who is shattered over her husband's affair and request for divorce, to the father who has watched his wife and mother of his children descend into alcoholism, drug use and risky sexual behavior. You don't often think of the women being the "bad guy" in a divorce. Usually it's the philandering husband having a midlife crisis who is banging some slut. I'm here to tell you that the women are as bad as the men. We represent plenty of fathers who have primary custody of their kids. And the only people who end up suffering are the kids. Another really sad thing, is that Steve now represents some the children of our clients, ones who were in their teens when their parents divorced and are now in their early 20's and repeating the same patterns and mistakes that their parents did.

Because I do the kind of work that I do, I tend to use humour as a defensive mechanism. We laugh a lot at work which is good because we need to laugh to keep from going crazy. Of course the Xanax doesn't hurt either. wink.

Never A Dull Moment

I had Pepper with me at work today. Sometimes I'll bring her in if I know that Steve is leaving really early or isn't in. Today was such a day. Steve was leaving at 11:00 to drive over to Spokane, which is 5-6 hours east of us, near the Idaho border. Brian and I don't want to leave Sagan all alone when I have Pepper with me at work, so we will take him to the Doggie Daycare...er, I mean "Canine Activity Program"...at Sumner Vet. I really don't have room in my car for both of the doggies, so Brian was elected to drop off and pick up Sagan from Sumner Vet.

Pepper and I left work at about 1:45 and enjoyed a nice, quiet afternoon here at home; a break I desperately needed. Brian leaves work at 4:30. Now, usually, I'll send him an email or call him and say, "Don't forget to pick up on a Sagie!" Today, I mentioned it in the morning to him via email.

At 5:00 I heard Brian pull into the driveway. I hear the sound of only one car door. The sound of the garage door going down. I walked to the foot of the stairs and as he opened the door to come in I said, "Um, where's BooBoo?" Brian's eyes bugged out and he yells, "OH SHIT!", shuts the door and leaves. Meanwhile, I have started to laugh hysterically. I am in the family room now, literally doubled over and howling.....then I hear, just barely audible from outside, "Laugh it up, Laughing girl..." and that sent me into more gales of hysterical laughter.

You have to understand, this is Classic Brian. Back when we lived in Fairfax, he would often call in a food order to M&G Burger in town, go pick up his order and bring it home. There were several times when he'd get up to leave and I'd say, "Don't ferget to get yer burger" and he'd be like, "Ha ha. Funny." 10 minutes later he'd come home w/ a 6-pack from 7-11 and I'd say, "Where's your burger?" To which he'd usually reply, "Fuuuuuuck", turn around and leave again.

Have a great weekend everyone and I'll catch up with ya later!

Creative Samhain

It's Halloween, aka Samhain, tomorrow!! I wish daylight savings time had ended last Sunday like it used to. But don't get me started on the "I Hate Daylight Savings Time" rant....Anyways, over the years we've started to amass a pretty large amount of Halloween decorations. We've scaled back the last couple of years because Sagan's just a bit too, um, "enthusiastic" yet for us to trust him around the Halloween tree w/ decorations & lights or the little Halloween village that has houses and characters that are reminiscent of a Tim Burton movie.

Once I learned how to cross stitch about 7 years ago, I realized a whole new world had opened to me in the decorations-department. My fave kits are from the Mill Hill Company, because they offer beaded cross stitch kits, like the one below. The 2 pumpkins and the witch are actually pretty ceramic buttons. The ghosts are done in white beads and the house is a mix of stitched beads and floss. I just finished a wicked cool Thanksgiving-themed beaded cross stitch and I'll post that next month. Click on the picture and you can really see the beads! I had to have this pattern when I saw it in the catalog. Fortunately, I did not have to stitch all that black; Aida cross stitch cloth comes in black, white & ecru. All I had to do was stitch the design. Even the black part of the witch is just the black cloth. I kind of fucked up the count on the moon so it's not quite round....by the time I realized my mistake, it was too late to rip out what I'd done, so I fudged it.

This is also a cross stitch that is one of my faves and I had a lot of fun with all the pretty colours. The most tedious part of this pattern was stitching the 8 skulls on the bottom.

Moving on to the Food Arts section of our program, isn't this a hoot? I saw the recipe in a magazine for "Ghosts in the Graveyard", sponsored by Cool Whip. I used to make this for Brian to bring in to his job on Halloween every year, both in California and Washington. Brian was the genius who solved my ghost problem. I don't have a pastry or icing bag, and Brian told me to cut the corner out of a baggie and use that. Brilliant. Snaps for Brian! Email me if you want the recipe; it's really easy and quick. And it tastes gooooooood too.

Before anyone raves over my pumpkin-carving skills, let me just say that if you own one of those carving pattern kits, you absolutely cannot screw up a pumpkin. This pattern, "Scream" was in the kit. The kids really seem to like this one as it always got the most comments.I've done a design from the kit for years, but apparently none of the photos I shot came out good because while I remember shooting them, hardly any made it into my photo albums. This one I did in 1997, when "The X-Files" was super popular. I found the logo and kept blowing it up on the copy machine till it was large enough to trace onto the pumpkin with the tools from the kit.

OOooooo....trippy and scaaaarrryyyyyy...... The large glowing triangular thing is our purple lava lamp in all it's gooey purple glory. Then the X-Files pumpkin, and then the purpley thing is a Van de Graff electricity ball. I'm sure you've all seen them, they shoot coloured lightning out of a ball in the center, but when you touch the outside of the glass globe, the lightning jumps to the tips of your fingers.

Have a Happy and Safe Halloween Everyone!!

Radio Days

Brian and I were chatting earlier about his radio show and so forth, and how difficult it is your very first time facing that microphone, having to talk off the top of your head, coherently, to no one in particular. It took me back to my first time in front of a radio mic, in 1978 when I was in the 8th grade, and how that experience threw me into the amazing world of radio.

I was a radio nut, having received my first transistor at age 8, dialing in WRKO in Boston and becoming hooked on the music of the early & mid 70's. I idolized 'RKO jocks Harry Nelson and Mike Adams. On clear nights I could dial in WABC in New York City, and sometimes CKLW in Detroit.

When I was in the 8th grade, I had an amazing English teacher, Mrs. Webster. She was one of those creative, outside-the-box, quirky teachers that encouraged students to explore music, reading, arts, poetry, etc. In fact, she would make monthly trips up to The Harvard Coop, a huge record store in Cambridge on the Harvard campus, to buy records; their prices were way better than at Musicsmith in the Cape Cod Mall. If you gave her your list and your money, she would buy records for you. Mrs. Webster was also in charge of our high school's radio station, WSDH. This was an FM station, on the educational band at 91.7. She bought albums for the station to use, with her own money. This wasn't a dinky little station either. It had a 30 mile radius, and the station was run as professionally as any other radio station. WSDH had program logs, a teletype machine for news stories, and a set format. Students did shows during study halls and lunch, and after school. The station signed on at 9:00 a.m. and signed off at 7:00 p.m.

Mrs. Webster asked me if I would like to write and record a special, to be played on the radio, about one of my favourite bands. Any band I wanted. I was a little overwhelmed; I had just turned 13. She really encouraged me to do it and she wouldn't take "no" for an answer. So I wrote up something about ELO's history & music, and one early Sunday morning, toted my ELO records and script to the high school to record it. Mrs. Webster ran the board and we did a few run throughs, but man alive was I ever nervous. I couldn't stop my voice from shaking or my hands from shaking the papers; my breathing was all off and I sounded breathless. Thinking back on that memory is even giving me butterflies in my stomach as I write this. The special aired one afternoon, but I could not bring myself to listen to it. My parents recorded it and were SO proud of me, but to this day, I have never heard it.

At the end of my 8th grade year, Mrs. Webster invited me to take a new class in Radio, for the first half of my 9th grade year. The school had hired a real station manager, Herb Andrews, to run the station, and teach the class. There were only 5 of us who were invited to take this special class, which would also give us credit towards graduation. Mr. Andrews' job was to teach us the FCC materials that would help us to pass the FCC Licensing Test, given in Boston, that upcoming February, 1979. We had to learn Elements 1, 2 and 9. 1 was mostly radio's history and that was really easy. 2 was more theory and technical information - like "AM" means Amplitude Modulation and "FM" means Frequency Modulation. 9, well, I never understood 9 from the minute we started. It was extremely complicated and I think it had to do with complex formulas about hertz and watts and circuits. I will never forget when Mr. Andrews was prepping us for the test that December, which was coming up fast, he asked, "OK, do you guys need me to go over anything again?" and Kris Olson said, "Yeah, Element 9!" He goes, "Which part?" and Kris goes, "All of it!"

In January, 1979, we were studying like crazy. Every spare minute I had, I was studying for the FCC test. Imagine our shock and chagrin when out of nowhere, the FCC decided that licenses would not be required for on air talent, a permit card would suffice, and they were discontinuing the test. We laughed about the cruel irony of spending months studying, but I have to tell you I was pretty damn relieved because I there ain't no way I was ever gonna pass Element 9.

At first I started just reading the news and sports for Kris when we got our own show in the spring of 1979. That was fun. She and I had the same taste in music and I didn't mind if she ran the board...I just didn't have enough confidence to do it myself as on-air talent. We did our show through the summer, and in the fall I switched to working with Holly instead. Meanwhile, behind my back, Holly and Mr. Andrews schemed to force me into having my own show. I don't remember how it happened, but I do remember that it took me off guard.....they sort of told me I was doing it and I don't recall having a choice. It was a very amusing conversation too, that I recall as well. Holly was one of my best buds and I was quite fond of Mr. Andrews, so I figured if they really thought I could do it, then I owed it to them to try. This is a picture of the board at WSDH, that I took in 1980.

I took to radio like a duck to water. I knew a lot about music. I read all the trades - Billboard, Rolling Stone, New Musical Express & Flexipop when I could get my hands on them, Creem, and many others that I can't remember off the top of my head. I was already amassing a collection of albums and 45's of my own, and I started bringing them in and playing the stuff I liked. We suffered a terrible blow in the spring of 1980 when Mr. Andrews died suddenly. We didn't even know he was sick, and found out that the administration knew but they kept it from us. We were absolutely devastated. All of us "AV Geeks" that worked at WSDH were pretty closeknit and we all took it very, very hard.

The school talked about shutting us down. We panicked. Some of the guys wanted to have us take over the station...you know, all of us just barricade the doors and take over, like in the movie "FM", which was based on something that WBCN jock Charles Laquidara actually did at 'BCN. But instead we decided that if we all pulled together and really organized the station, cleaned the place top to bottom, we could prove to the administration that our station was worth saving. One day during April vacation in 1980, we all met up at the school with the permission of the principal of course, and parceled out tasks to everyone. We were off the air, but we spun tunes anyway and just cleaned and cleaned, organized the records, put all the logs in chronological order, washed the windows and dusted. One of the guys who had his license went out and got us tons of pizza. It was a really fun day.

When I look back on that now, I cannot believe what a major feat that was. We were in 9th, 10th and 11th grades and we thought of this on our own, and did it on our own. It wasn't even a question. So the school let us go back on the air, with some supervision from another teacher who had assisted Mr. Andrews from time to time, Mr. James, till they could hire a new station manager. Mr. Malcolm came on board in the summer of 1980. He was a gross man. He was into country music and was extremely conservative and a Ronald Reagan backer. My very first shift that summer when he was there, I was in the teletype room getting the news. He came in and we were talking. He put his arm around me. I looked up at him in surprise and the dirty old man kissed me on the lips.

This was 1980 and no one talked about stuff like that. I told Liz and Holly, but none of us knew what to do. It never occurred to me to tell my parents and even if I did, they wouldn't have done anything about it anyway. I didn't want to quit radio. So I just decided I'd have to keep my distance and make sure I was never, ever alone with him. He and I did not have a good relationship from that day forward. His relationship with Holly deteriorated completely one day when they got into a huge fight over the music she was playing....I was sitting there at the table rapidly turning the pages of Billboard with my heart pounding, wondering if Holly was going to get expelled for talking to a teacher like that. Fortunately she didn't. Holly moved to Oregon in 1981 and I did her last show with her and boy did we have fun. One time during February vacation in 1980, she and I did a marathon 12 - 8 show, alternating running the board. We ended up playing really long songs like "Alice's Restaurant" if we needed a break. Long songs were good for bathroom breaks as well.

Meanwhile, Liz and I were playing more and more of our own music by this point. We were into new wave and punk, and we were actually getting a following of regular listeners from all over the Cape and as far as Plymouth. They'd call up with requests and dedications. My time slot at WSDH was Mondays from 2:15 to about 4:00 or 4:30. Then Liz had her own show after school during the week, and then she and I did a show together Fridays from 2:15-7:00. Mr. Malcolm was a stickler for playing the popular top 40 songs and wanted to see our playlists. Additionally, at 5:00, the station switched to a "soft rock" format. But I got around it. What I'd do is play all the top 40 songs from 2:15-3:00 because that's when the kids were all still on the school buses getting home. So when they got home after 3 and called in to hear Loverboy or some other lame crap, I'd say, "I'm sorry but I played that at 2:25". If Mr. Malcolm bitched, I'd show him the playlist and say, "I played them all already." So he had no choice but to back off. I'd start playing punk at 3. Then when the station would go to soft rock at 5 pm, Liz & I would play all the slow new wave songs like "That's Entertainment" by the Jam.

One time Liz and I were hanging out in our fave record store in Hyannis, Wave Records which sold punk and new wave imports, and we were laughing about something. One of the people browsing in the store, who we didn't know, looked up and said, "Hey! I know those laughs! Are you Liz and Joanne from WSDH?" That was so freaking weird.

Mr. Malcolm, Liz & I had our final falling out during the summer of '82, after she and I graduated but were still doing a punk show on Monday afternoons. He started in on us and we told him to fuck off. We packed up our records and walked out. Left dead air. Left him in the lurch for Monday afternoons too. Incidentally, while I was at St. Joe's my mom told me about the huge scandal at Sandwich High, how Mr. Malcolm touched a girl inappropriately and she told on him and he was fired. I said, "I'm not surprised. He kissed me." My parents were, of course, horrified.

My radio days were numbered though. I went to St. Joseph's College in Maine because they had one of the only Mass Communications programs in New England at the time, other than Boston University and Emerson College neither of which I could get into because of my SAT scores (but I did transfer to Emerson for my junior and senior years). I was on the air at WSJB at St. Joe's with Michelle and we had a great time. Unfortunately, I learned that I suck at audio production, which is an extremely huge part of being in radio. It's not just being a DJ and spinning your fave rave tunes. I have always had a hearing problem in my right ear from a childhood ear infection. I just could not do audio production at all. I worked at WOCB in West Yarmouth on Saturday nights in 1983, but not as on air talent. This is the WOCB/WSOX building.I just had to keep the station on the air, power down the transmitter at 8:00 pm, change the music tapes on the FM-side of the building, and do sign off at 2:00 a.m. By my sophomore year at St. Joe's, I don't think I even had a show, at least I don't remember having a show that year.

I switched my major to TV Production and transferred to Emerson College, but I still dabbled in radio. I had a show on WECB, Emerson's little AM station, in my junior year, sharing air time with my bud Charlene. We had a good time doing the show, but no one listened. Emerson has an FM station, WERS, that is critically acclaimed & well known around Boston, and the kids that worked at WECB were really looked down on by the WERS kids.

My last foray into radio was my senior year at Emerson. My bud Ellen scored a job at WZOU, "Boston's Zoo". A lot of our WECB friends were working at the Zoo, so she got me a job answering the request line there during my free afternoon from classes. As luck would have it, my idol Harry Nelson was working at the Zoo, and my #1 idol, Mike Adams, was working at their sister station down the hall. I remember when Ellen took me over to introduce me to Mike, I was so speechless and shy, but I asked him for his autograph and he was so sweet and seemed flattered that I remembered him. Here's fellow Emerson student, friend, WECB member & WZOU employee Fil Kovisars in the Zoo van, in front of my dorm. The position was called "Phone Research". Here's a trade secret: When you call up to make requests, they never make it on the air. The person answering the phone had a list of all the songs that were played. When someone called up to request one, all we did was make a little mark next to the song. Based upon that research, the playlists would change to put most requested songs into heavy rotation, and drop songs that got few requests. Every now and then the DJ would call out to me that he'd take the next call and then he'd throw that person on the air. That was the only time requests were ever actually played.

I'm glad I had a chance to be involved in real radio when I was young. It was a great time in my life and I'm happy to see that Brian's picked up the torch and is having so much success with his own show, Shakedown Street.

TA-DA!!!!!

Look whose film is on the list, second from the bottom! Good job Axe! I knew you could do it. We all did! And a mighty good film it is, too.

Windy weather

Last week, we had our first wind storm of the fall/winter season. Bonney Lake was one of the communities that took the brunt of the storm, with wind gusts of 55 mph, but fortunately everything was fine at my house and now that we have a generator, power outtages are no longer an issue.


You all know how much I love being out on the water on boats of all kinds. However, after seeing these pictures of the Ferry Cathlamet, taken last week during the storm, I have to say that I would not want to be on a ferry in these conditions. I wonder how many cars in front got soaked? I hope everyone had their windows up!

This ferry runs every half hour or so between the communities of Mukilteo and Clinton, in Washington. It's just a short 20 minute ride across Puget Sound but it must've seemed pretty long for the people on the Cathlamet last Wednesday!

The Fall of '87

20 years ago this fall, my life was really going good for the first time in a long, long time. I'd had a really rough 1986. After graduating from Emerson College, I was pretty terrified at the thought of entering the work force full time; I only knew going to school and working in the summers for my entire life to that point. But I'd gotten a job at a TV station on Cape Cod, even though the pay sucked, and I was beginning to enjoy myself. Except I still lived at home and my parents expected me to follow the same strict rules and regulations that were placed on me in high school, and believe me, I was NOT on board with that. Not at age 22. In the fall of '86, I suffered a blow when my fiance decided that the sun had set on our day in the sun, sending me into a terrible funk for months and months.


However, in February of 1987, I finally moved out of my parents' house and had started dating again. I was living in what I call "The Scumhole House", renting a room and sharing the common areas with 4 other people. It was OK, I didn't spend much time there anyway. But in May of 1987, I was laid off from my job at Channel 58. However, by the summer, I had been hired at Channel 56 in Boston and things were going really well. I moved out of the Scumhole House into a fantastic studio apartment above a garage in a house that was located down a dirt road called "Cranberry Trail." I knew the landlords' son from high school and in fact I blurted out, "I had such a crush on your son Bobby!" then felt my face flush. They offered me the apartment.


So by October, 1987, I was living alone at last, I had a great job with great pay and union benefits. Life was good. In October, I took a solo trip to Maine to visit my BFF/Sister/College Roomie, Michelle. Instead of driving up the highway, I took the scenic coastal route, from Kittery to Portland. I first stopped at Cape Neddick to take pictures of the coast.Then I stopped in Perkins Cove, which is where my parents used to vacation each year with their friends. Perkins Cove is in Ogunquit and is very close to Kennebunkport too.

The day after I got up to Maine, Michelle and I took a drive over to New Hampshire. It was peak foliage week and we were not disappointed! The White Mountains are really more like hills, compared to the actual mountains we have on the west coast. But the White Mountains are also millions of years older than the mountains in the west, and have worn down over time. It's hard to believe that they were once as tall as the Himalayas!

We stopped so I could take a picture of this pretty church in Bretton Woods. When we walked around the corner, we saw......

SNOW!!!! We could see that the higher hills had a dusting, but this was the only snow that was down below, at road level.

So Michelle built a snowman.

This is the magnificent Mt. Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods. The tallest peak is Mt. Washington, which is the highest point in all of New England, at 6,200 feet, give or take. It's not a tall mountain, but it has the nastiest weather on the entire planet and the highest wind speed ever recorded was on top of Mt. Washington. You can drive to the top, take the cog railway, or hike up along the Appalachian Trail.

This hotel is absolutely gorgeous inside too. I would love to have stayed here before I moved away.

Bretton Woods & Mt. Washington.

More foliage in the White Mountains.

No trip to NH is complete without a stop at Clark's Trading Post. It's a pretty large souvenir shop, and they used to have trained, performing black bears in the 1970's but I don't know if they do that anymore. Clark's is Kitschy Souvenir Central.

I love the covered bridges in New England! They are so picturesque!

Happy Belated Earthquake Day

October 17, 2007 marked the 18th year since the Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area. The date is as symbolic to those of us who lived through it as 9/11 is to everyone else. We'll never forget the day, never forget the weather (sunny, still & hot - "earthquake weather"), never forget where we were at 5:04 pm (home watching the World Series between the SF Giants and Oakland A's, Brian was cooking spaghetti & I was painting a design on a denim jacket) and never forget how it changed us. And made us stronger.

We could so easily have run back to the east coast. I am certain that my parents actually thought I would move back. But no way. I was not leaving. I was a San Franciscan now and earthquakes were a part of the package. So we'd only lived there for 2.5 months and Ma Nature decided to show everyone who was boss.

That was a long, long night, lemme tell ya. Pitch black all over the region....you could see the Milky Way. Sirens wailing all night long. The Marina District is on fire, part of the Bay Bridge has collapsed. Aftershocks that rocked us all night and you never knew if it was going to be minor and stop or keep going & get more violent.

Occasionally when we picked up the phone there'd be a dial tone and we'd try to make a call to a friend or family member to let them know we were OK. Remember, the power went out almost immediately, so we never saw what everyone else saw that night, until the next day. We knew it was bad, but we didn't know how bad. On October 18, everyone was told to stay put. They said that we could get powerful aftershocks, up in the 6.0 range, therefore weakened and falling masonry and broken glass was still a hazard, so try to stay inside. We lived a couple of blocks from Golden Gate Park and we couldn't stand being inside anymore, especially if we were going to get another quake, so we walked up to the Park and just sat in a little grassy area for a few hours. We decided that we'd rather ride out a quake outside than in the apartment again.

It's an icky feeling to know that the ground under your feet isn't as rock solid as you think it is. Storms can be predicted for the most part. Quakes can't. You don't know how bad they will be or how long they will last. And when the shaking stops, you realize how grossly unprepared you are for something like that.

To say we suffered major PTSD would be an understatement. I don't want anyone to get the idea that because of our resolve to stay that we weren't completely and totally terrified by what had happened. We were, believe me. One day we had an aftershock while I was standing in the den. I was sick with panic. For many, many weeks, I avoided going in the den and if I had to, I made it a quick trip. As if my going in the den was going to trigger another aftershock. But that's the kind of weird connection your mind makes: Den = terrifying earthquake. Even on the year anniversary, 10/17/90, I was expecting the ground to start shaking again and was relieved when it didn't. Then I realized how silly a thought that was. The odds of it ever happening again on the exact day and time are extremely slim.

One of the lawyers in my office had a client who owned the Calistoga Old Faithful Geyser; her name is Olga Kolbek. The geyser in Calistoga is one of only a few "Old Faithful's" in the country because it goes off at regular intervals. Whenever the geyser would alter it's eruptions, we usually had some kind of seismic activity, even if it was a flurry of microquakes that no one can feel. So Olga would often call our office to warn us that the geyser was now going off every 3 hours, so take necessary precautions. While I appreciated her heads up, that kind of news was enough to set off a wave of panic in our office. EVERYONE would be calling friends, spouses & family to tell them what Olga had said. Next thing you know, it was on the 6:00 news that night. Seriously. Olga would call the news stations to let them know. Then we'd all be on tenterhooks for days. Waiting. I even would go so far as to take all the breakables off the entertainment center and the fireplace and put them on the floor till enough time had passed that it might be safe to put them back up. Or was it? Would I put them back up and then there'd be a quake?

I'm glad we went through it though. It made us stronger, it made us feel like we belonged in San Francisco. That was during Daddy Bush's reign and he didn't come out to see us, just like his son didn't show up in New Orleans a couple of years ago. We got the ultimate booby prize though: Bush sent Dan Quayle to survey the damage about a week after the earthquake. We were like, "Yeah, thanks but no thanks, we can take care of ourselves." And we did. I was proud of my adopted city for rising to the occasion. Everyone reached out to everyone. I heard that homeless people were out in the streets downtown directing traffic.....and doing a bang up job of it too.

I found this postcard and bought a ton of them to send out. This was "back in the day", before email, so there were a lot of people we still hadn't contacted. I sent one to my parents and my mom said, "That's not funny." I, myself, thought it was a riot. The back reads:
"The house fell down, The road broke up, Life goes on in the Bay Area, But Hey....I'm OK!"
"7.1 10/17/89 5:04 pm" (since then our quake was downgraded from 7.1 to 6.9).

Losing my mind but not my marbles

I've always loved coloured glass of all kinds. I grew up surrounded by coloured glass as my mom has a really pretty collection of small glass pieces that she keeps in a sunny window on the inside porch off the kitchen. Many a morning I'd be munching on my cereal, transfixed by the sun shining through the beautiful cobalt, ruby, amber, emerald and amethyst pieces. My hometown, Sandwich, used to have a functioning glass factory for a few brief years in the mid-1800's. It shut down after only a short time, and Sandwich glass is now one of the most expensive kinds of collectible glass you can find. I even saw a pair of Deming Jarves dolphin candlesticks in the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, which surprised me.

So it's no surprise that I fell in love with marbles. I would never, ever play "keepsies" with the other kids because I didn't want to lose my precious marbles to anyone. I had a very small bag of marbles until my First Communion in 1972. My Aunt Glady & Uncle Yimmy couldn't make the trip up from Yonkers for the big event, but they sent a gift that I will never forget. Marbles. Loads and loads of them. I'm not sure what the story was, but I think someone they knew was getting rid of the collection so they asked if they could have it to give to me. Here are the regular cats eye-type:

These are glass but they call them "aggies", since old marbles were made from agate.

It seems that marble terminology varies from region to region. I've heard these called "shooters" but where I grew up, we called them "boulders". The really super large marbles we called "jumbos".

These are my very favourite kind of marble. Again, in my area we called them "crystals" but they are also called "clearies" because you can see through them.Here are some that were given to me by friends.



I bought these in an antique store in Sebastopol, CA. Nothing too valuable, just your basic pretty marbles from the 1950's, including an old metal jack and jingle bell.

This is a collection I got off eBay really cheap.

I bought this jar of them at an antique show in Tacoma a few years ago.

Now we are getting into the "cream of the crop" when it comes to serious collecting. I paid A LOT of money for this large, 2" sulphide of a dog, but I wanted to have at least one near-mint sulphide. They are extremely expensive because they are very old. I've seen them sell for up to $1,500 and higher. Some marble makers have gone back to making sulphides, but the antiques are the ones I really love. They may not look like much, but every serious collector needs at least one sulphide in their collection! I have 3 sulphides, which is about all I can afford. This is another dog. The third smaller one has a chicken.

These are called "onionskins" and they too are very old, usually made in Germany. When I say "old", I am talking early late 19th to early 20th century.

These are called "swirls" and they are most often German as well, and produced in the same time period as onionskins. They usually have a latticino core surrounded by the swirls of colour.

But when I see a modern-era art marble, I often can't resist buying one.

Or two.

Or three.....These are super old "Bennington Clays". This particular set was found somewhere near a Civil War battlefield in Virginia. Most Benningtons were produced in the mid-1800's, but unlike the German glass marbles, they are not terribly expensive or valuable.

Finally, this set of 6 oddly shaped marbles are ones that I made a couple of years ago. I took a marblemaking class at The Bead Factory in Tacoma and lemme tell ya, it's really hard to make a perfectly round marble. Mine don't roll, so much as wobble. But hey, at least I can say that I made marbles!