A Lightbulb Moment

Gentle Readers, although you may not have noticed it I have taken a month or so off from blogging. I needed time to think, to regroup, to decide where to focus my energy.

A fortuitous opportunity to spend some time in airport bookstores and watching a little reality TV with my sister finally made me realize something: pastimes in our culture are aspirational. The things most people watch and read are about who they think they are or who they wish they were. We may laugh at the Real Housewives of Wherever, but they are setting trends and selling products and people can't get enough of them.

And let's face it, my friends, nobody aspires to the life of an old maid with a cat. In fact, most younger people probably laugh at my exploits, but laugh in that uncomfortable "Dear God, don't let that be me someday" kind of way. People my own age tend to pity me, and to make suggestions about how I could be more successful or date more if only I changed everything about myself.

People have been asking me since I was a teenager (usually with a degree of irritation) why I'm so hell-bent on being myself and I have no answer for that. In fact, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to be anything but him- or herself, why they would spend a lifetime searching for that mythological something outside themselves that is supposed to make them feel like they are okay. Whenever I've tried that, the results were very bad indeed.

All of which is the long way of explaining why I'm not updating here very often. There isn't much of a readership for an old maid with a cat, even if the old maid has a wicked sense of humor and still gets hit on by men young enough to be her sons.

I'll continue updating regularly over at My Life In Food: A Culinary "Art" Journal, but focusing it more on the silly pictures I enjoy drawing (one of which was recently published in the online food magazine Pork and Gin) and less on trying to make it into a Food Blog.  Maybe I'll draw some cartoons for this blog, too.  We shall see.

I'm just an ordinary person whose ambition is to be as kind, as creative, and as happy as I can be on any given day. It's not aspirational, but it works for me.

Happy Halloween!

I totally stole this from someone on Facebook.

Tonight I'm going to my friend's house as I do every Halloween.  She lives on a busy street and gets a bazillion trick-or-treaters.  What's more fun on Halloween night than sitting on the porch drinking tea and handing out candy to a bunch of cute kids in costume?

Dressing up to hand out candy, that's what.  I usually think of this approximately five minutes before leaving the house.  Last year, my friend loaned me a plush moose hat and all evening people kept saying it was too early for reindeer.  That was annoying.

This year, I've got a costume all ready to go.  I'm going to get someone to take my picture and I'll post it here because obviously I have no shame about posting pictures in which I look silly.  I'll give you a hint: I'm dressing as an Aunt of Literature.

And no, it's not Auntie Em.

Safety First

If you go for a walk with the Army Dude in the western part of Rhode Island at this time of year, he requires you to wear one of these attractive numbers.  It's to avoid getting shot because of deer hunting season, but honestly, how much danger could I be in?  It's not like I ever shut up.

Note how it gives that pumpkin shape to which every girl aspires -- and the color... well, the photo doesn't do it justice. 

Even though the day was a bit overcast, I decided to accessorize with a pair of sparkly sunglasses.  (Translation: I hid behind them.)  Not that I think it helped.  I haven't felt this conspicuous since my sister Rachel visited and did my makeup before we went out to dinner.

Cozy

A rainy day.  Tailor-made for making jewelry, reading, and taking a nap.  Who am I to argue with Mother Nature?

Do Not Disturb

My BFF was in town for a week, and in addition to the usual merrymaking and carrying on, there was her 90th birthday party and a family cookout that I helped to cater and clean up after.

If anyone is looking for me over the next couple of days, I can be found napping with my cat in the sunroom. Being nice to people in large groups really takes it out of a cantankerous old maid.

A Day In The Life

Awesome spider web in Rovensky Park

The Team Maria President thinks I need an AuntieCam because he says I am always up to random and hilarious things that would be fun to watch. Exhibit A, he believes, is the fact that I got up at 4 a.m. and put on a fancy necklace and a tiara to watch the royal wedding. Exhibit B is the fact that I think it's a perfectly normal thing to do.

Trust me, gentle readers, you do not want me to set up a webcam. Right now I'm still in yoga clothes and I haven't brushed my hair. However, yesterday -- since I'd already decided that I was going to play hooky from all the things I should be doing -- I thought I'd bring a camera along and document my day.

I took a mid-morning walk to Rovensky Park, where I checked on the tree where I'd hung a bracelet I found in the path one day. Yup, it's still there. Then I sat on the grass under a weeping willow for a while, just thinking my thoughts.

Arriving back at Old Maid HQ, I decided to make some sun tea. This batch has pomegranate and blueberry green teabags, plus one bag of True Blueberry. I'm a rebel like that.

This is what I wore. See? Perfectly normal -- nary a tiara in sight. The dress is from Old Navy. I bought three of them for next to nothing at the beginning of the summer and I've been living in them. Other items:

Flats: Target, last summer
Bracelets: Ed Levin
Rings: Road trip mood ring and silver ring from Pepi
Watch: Raymond Weil, at least 20 years old
Earrings: a gift from a friend.

I know Michael Kors would have something stinging to say about the fact that my earrings match my dress ("Oh my God, she's a middle-aged Barbie!" comes to mind) but too bad. I love turquoise and am fully capable of putting together a head-to-toe turquoise look including shoes and an ankle bracelet. I think I showed remarkable restraint.

By lunchtime I was hungry and dreadfully hot, so I made a smoothie. (Note that I put the top securely in place before starting the blender, Rachel.) This one is banana and strawberry with vanilla yogurt.

I headed out to Barnes & Noble where I browsed through a stack of glossy fashion magazines because I simply had to know what's in for fall. I got the scoop, but more on that in a future post.

I took a quick browse through Michael's and laughed at the moss balls. I'd have taken a second picture of them and sent it to my brother and sister to brighten their workdays because I'm a giver, but my phone was on low battery.

Arriving home in the late afternoon, I caught up on Tom & Lorenzo's take on the first episode of Project Runway Season 9 and added my opinions to the commentary. As one does.

After dinner out at the Blue Plate Diner with a couple of friends (I had the Cobb Salad), it was time to curl up in my Tinkerbell pajamas with a P.G. Wodehouse anthology and call it a day.

Cool Chicks

One of the things I love about my mom is that when I instant message her on a random Tuesday afternoon asking if she feels like going on a mini road trip to look at gravestones, she replies "Sure. What time?"

We went to my mom's hometown of Little Compton, Rhode Island, and had a look around a couple of graveyards. In the picture above, my mom is standing next to the memorial for Elisabeth Alden Pabodie, daughter of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of the Mayflower. John and Priscilla were later immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Courtship of Miles Standish, in which John Alden and Miles Standish vie for the hand of Priscilla Mullins. Nobody knows how much of the poem is fact or fiction; however, if she was deciding between the two, in my opinion Priscilla made a wise choice. According to what I've read, Miles Standish was a bellicose creep with a Napoleon complex.

I love the way the carver continued the letters above if he ran out of room -- note the word at the end of the first line. It's actually "Body," but the Y is very small and placed above the D.

The creative spelling is interesting, too (I looked at my mother and said "Dyed what? A shirt? A bolt of cloth?"). Coincidentally, I've become obsessed with a genealogical mystery from the year of Elisabeth's death, so I've spent a bit of time recently looking over documents from the 18th century. The spelling is enough to make me dizzy after a while.

This is my grandma's headstone. She was a hot ticket. When I was a kid, she drove a convertible and took us on foliage rides. Her favorite color was red and she wore it with abandon -- clothing, lipstick, accessories. In the summertime she favored large straw hats with flowers on them. (My mother claims that the flashy dressing gene skipped her generation, but I have seen my mother in a large straw hat with a flower on it. Just sayin'.)

Gram was the kind of person who shouldn't have been asked a question unless you wanted her unvarnished opinion. Actually, she'd often give her opinion even if you didn't ask. Looking back, I like that about her -- she always spoke her mind honestly and without apology.

Despite her shocking lack of cats, I have a particular fondness for Auntie Grace, my mother's maiden aunt. She was my grandfather's sister and a force to be reckoned with. Auntie Grace was a sharp businesswoman who worked for the Fall River Electric Light Company in the early part of the 20th century, and then ran the Simmons family grocery store after her brother's death. Auntie Grace's last words, uttered in the hospital emergency room in ringing tones, were "Young man, you're hurting me. If you can't do your goddamn job, go find someone who can." Now that, gentle readers, was an eighty-six-year-old with moxie.

Those are just some of the women in my family. Now you know a little bit about how I ended up to be so awesome.

Auntie Appreciates Art

On Sunday, the Army Dude and I took a quick jaunt over a couple of bridges to the village of Wickford for their annual art festival. For those of you who ain't from around here, Wickford is not really on the map as it's a village within the town of North Kingstown and does not have its own zip code -- unlike the village of Greene, which is a village within the town of Coventry and does have its own zip code. It's this kind of dedication to inconsistency that has the tourists shrieking in despair by the time they get to Newport and are confronted with its maze of one-way streets without street signs.

The art festival is huge, with dozens of exhibitors from around the world. We walked down the pretty, tree-lined streets and looked at booth after booth containing art of all different kinds.

Image: peytonart.com

It's a tough call, but I think my favorite was the Wild Women and Dogs series by Peyton Higginson. I just love everything about the paintings: the colors, the details, the movement, the joy, the textures, the crazy hair.

The village itself is very interesting and pretty, with lots of historic homes and picturesque New England style churches. This steeple belongs to St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Main Street.

The big draw, however, was the Baptist church across the street. What they lacked in charming architecture they more than made up for in food. They had chowder, stuffies, hotdogs, hamburgers, and more. This strawberry shortcake was To. Die. For. The Army Dude took leave of his senses for a moment when we got to the food booth and suggested we share a strawberry shortcake. I didn't want to hurt him. But I would have.

Auntie Has a Whale of a Time

In honor of my turning 29 AGAIN last week, the Army Dude and I decided to go on a whale watch on Sunday. Here I am aboard the Whale Watcher, owned by Hyannis Whale Watcher Cruises in Barnstable. I'm wearing my uber-cool Friendship Trap sweatshirt and carrying the also-uber-cool tote bag a good friend brought me from Belgium. You can't see it, but the tote bag says "le joie de vivre avec stuff."

It was at about this point in Barnstable Harbor that I realized the downside of this adventure. To wit: my fellow man. I'm not a huge fan of humanity to begin with, and the boat was packed with a lot of particularly noisy specimens. Entire families, many with small children who were distressed by the wind, the motion, and the fact that they weren't allowed to get up and run around during the hour it took to get to Stellwagen Bank.

Incredibly, the Army Dude actually dozed off in the midst of all this. I couldn't believe it, but then it occurred to me that it was probably quieter than working with an airborne battalion in Iraq. I decided to quit being a delicate flower and enjoy myself.

As we approaced the feeding grounds of Stellwagen Bank, we started seeing whales. The naturalist on board warned us that there was no telling what or how much we'd see.



And then the next thing we knew, it was whalepalooza. There were whales everywhere! This group is bubble feeding, which is when a group of whales gets together and surrounds a school of fish. They release air from their blowholes which creates a net of bubbles that contains the fish. Then the whales swim right through and scoop them up.

This whale is kick feeding, which is when an individual churns up the water with his fins and tail. The bubbles confuse the fish and then he scoops them into his big, gaping mouth.

Note the baleen on the top jaw. That's for the purposes of straining out the water and leaving only the tasty, tasty fish behind. Not that I think whales spend much time savoring their meals. This feeding thing looks like a tremendous amount of work, and it takes an awful lot of fish to keep that blubber layer pleasingly plump.

This is another example of bubble feeding. If you look closely, you can see another whale in the background near the boat. Even as we watched whales feeding right up near the side of our boat, we also saw others feeding and spouting in the distance. By the end of an hour we'd seen over 30 whales in the area, with sightings close enough to identify 19 individuals including two mama whales with their calves. It was amazing.

We learned that the technical term for that water vapor in the air is "whale snot." This was the third or fourth exhale that came right at us, before the naturalist helpfully suggested that we should keep our mouths closed and turn away because we didn't want to be breathing it in. Well, that ship had already sailed.

The Army Dude is convinced that we are going to come down with some kind of exotic whale disease. "Like whooping cough or swine flu," he said, "except a whale thing." So far, I feel fine. I am craving sushi, though.

Sunday at the Park and Beach with Auntie

I was inspired today by Laura over at Rhinestone Armadillo, who posted about playing in the water. It's part of her "Summer of Awesomeness" series, for which I will be guest blogging during the week of July 17.

It occurred to me, when I was reading Laura's suggestions about going to the city pool or driving to the beach, how lucky I am to be able to walk to the beach.

I didn't actually go play in the water. You'll notice nobody was playing in the water and it was noon on a Sunday. That's because this is Rhode Island, where the water temperature is 68 degrees. (Really. I looked it up on NOAA.gov.)

The part of the beach I stood on to take the picture is known as Reject Beach -- it's the public-access part of the fancy-schmancy Bailey's Beach Club. You can't see it in the photo, but there is a rope just past where the guy is sitting all by himself that goes right down into the water and separates the fancy section (with the buildings) from the section used by lesser mortals.

The rich folks can't block public access, but they can put up up a sign limiting our activities. I guess it's okay to sunbathe topless, though. Good to know.

Reject Beach is at the very end of Newport's Cliff Walk. As you can see, there was some fog along the shore today -- just a normal day in coastal RI. Actually, I enjoy watching the fog roll in off the ocean.

Cliff Walk takes you past some pretty fancy real estate. This is just somebody's house; the path also meanders past The Breakers, Rough Point, and other celebrated Newport mansions.

Look! It's the SS Minnow! Wow, they really got lost in the fog. The good news, though, is that there aren't any headhunters on this island. Nor, as far as I know, are there any bats who will bite you and turn you into Dracula.

On my way home, I decided to show you my favorite park: Rovensky Park on the corner of Bellevue and Rovensky Avenues.

The park is very well kept and has the prettiest trees -- many of which are marked with informative plaques about the trees' species and origins.

For example, these Japanese Cedars are natives of Asia. From a distance they appear to be one tree, but when you get closer you can see that they are four trees planted very close together. I'm sure the planting was done for solid horticultural reasons.

But standing within the trees is like being in the middle of a group of sisters dancing with their arms entwined. I've always sought out spots like this to think about things or to read a book. I was a dreamy child, full of fanciful notions like trees being able to dance. Everyone thought I'd outgrow it. Thankfully, I never did.

The Vapours

Gentle readers, I know I haven't been blogging much in the last week or so. You see, I recently learned that my beloved and otherwise-very-awesome sister has begun to wear legwarmers. On purpose. As I'm sure you can understand, this is a shock to my system. It's been all human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria up in here.

But fear not, my friends. Maiden sisters are made of strong stuff. After a few days on my fainting couch with cold compresses, hot tea, and the early novels of P.G. Wodehouse, I feel ready to face the modern world anew. Even a world in which legwarmers might be sprung upon me at any moment.

Auntie Finds Baffling Message at ATM

What can it mean???

Roadtrip: Day 8

Forgive me, gentle readers, for taking some time to finish up my road trip saga. I've spent the past three days sleeping. I'm finally shaking the malaria or typhiod or whatever it was we had, and starting to feel like myself again. Also, I had a boatload of laundry to do.


We got a really early start on our last day. It was a race to get me to a train headed to Rhode Island. It was also a race against a possible snowstorm. We did see a little snow in New Jersey, but I made it stop using my psychic powers. It's just another service I provide.

We were only in West Virginia for a short time before we got to Pennsylvania -- as you can see, the sun was just coming up.

The state of New Jersey has their welcome sign in the middle of the highway, which is just wrong. But it was a beautiful day in North Plainfield, which is the birthplace and childhood home of Monica of 5 Cats Shy. There wasn't a statue or even a plaque commemorating her birth at the hospital there, which is also just wrong.

Soon it was time to say goodbye to Monica and the kitties, and head home via Amtrak. It was a long eight days; at the same time, it went by in a blur. I guess time is always sort of elastic when you are away from home and your usual routines.

I've been telling a few people about the trip and everyone says "I'm sorry it was so awful." But it wasn't. Yes, we were sick, and yes, we got hemmed in by Snowmageddon. But we also had a lot of laughs and a lot of fun.

I guess when you're with a true friend, even difficult circumstances can turn into good times.

Roadtrip: Day 7

Sunrise at the South Carolina state line.

We got on the road before dawn, excited to be heading north after so many days of an eastern trajectory. The cats were happy to be singing along with their favorite tunes.



We crossed into Virginia (cue the happy dance) and entertained the patrons at a Waffle House off I-81 by walking the cats in the parking lot after we had lunch.


The drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenendoah Valley was so pretty. The roads had signs stating that speeders would be caught by aircraft enforcement. I viewed this as a challenge and I kept telling Monica I wanted to see a Bear In the Air in action. She thought I was kidding, and then wondered how we made such good time.

When we arrived in Woodstock, VA, Monica got in touch with the Collegiate Membership Coordinator at the Sigma Sigma Sigma Sorority National Headquarters, who very kindly offered to give us a tour. The house was built in the late 1800s. It's beautiful, and full of the rich history associated with the sorority, which was founded in 1898. Monica loved it because she is a Sigma and she was at the mothership; I loved it because I enjoyed the old house filled with antique furniture, china, jewelry, and history.

Roadtrip Day 6

We got another early start and headed toward Mississippi. By midmorning, the cats were getting restless (did I mention we were traveling with two cats?) and needed a potty stop. We also took them out on their leashes for a little stroll in a gas station parking lot. Ringo (left) betrayed his paternal alleycat origins by insisting he check out the dumpster. Seamus was more cautious, preferring a very short stroll near the car.

We got back on the road with the cats in their carriers, singing along to Monica's mix CDs. Seamus likes to sing along with Meatloaf's "Bat Out of Hell;" Ringo enjoys singing along to Buddy Holly's "Every Day" and The Beastie Boys' "Girls" (Ringo is a xylophone man).

The next thing we knew, we were crossing the mighty Mississippi River.

I did my Crossing Into A New State Dance (patent pending). We recited "M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter-I-Humpback-Humpback-I." And we drove on.

When we reached Alabama, it was a beautiful day -- more like spring than midwinter.

Finally, we made it into Georgia and headed for Atlanta. It felt like a really long day. I'm not sure why this one in particular felt long -- since they have all been long -- but it did. We staggered into the house Monica shares with her friend Karen, went out for a quick bite to eat, then went to bed.