Pie
MorePie
Fourth of July
Banjo Man
Glen the Banjo Man
blizzard, tacos and ikea part 3
Blizzard: Banjo Man and Mom continued to wait for a plow and electricity. Both arrived by Sunday night. Mom would stay with Banjo Man for a few more days, until her walk was shoveled later on in the week.
Tacos: I ate 3 fried avocado tacos from Torchy’s, chicken enchiladas from Guerro’s and a burger from the Magnolia Café.
Ikea: Son #2 and I spent Monday and Tuesday putting more bookcases together (him) and cleaning and cooking and nagging (me). We actually had a pretty good time. We even sold this thing:
It was taking up too much precious closet space, so I put an ad in Craigslist. We sold it the next day to a woman with seven children. Keep in mind this is the smallest washing machine anyone has ever invented. It’s almost useless, even for one person. Why anyone would want it—especially someone with seven children—is one of life’s little mysteries.
Note: I wish I could figure out how to make this blog post interesting.
How about a before and after photo?
BEFORE
AFTER
and long after…
My feet get very tired in Texas.
blizzard, tacos and ikea, part 2
I apologize for having kept you waiting. I have some great storm pics taken by daughter Nancy, but I’ve had no luck transferring them to the blog. Darn. I kept hoping that if I tried enough times, something would work. It didn’t.
So…where were we?
Oh, yes. Saturday. Banjo Man and My Mother were stranded without electricity or water with 2 feet of snow on the ground and the temperature starting to drop to 9 degrees. No one had showed up to shovel or plow. Branches covered the long, wooded driveway. It was time for Banjo Man to once again put on his boots and cold weather gear and hike to Mom’s house. This time he would bring her home, where the propane stove was keeping things warm and toasty in the lower level of the house.
Mom fell outside her back door. She fell again at the bottom of her hill, by the garage. She had hip spasms and couldn’t move. So Banjo Man left her sitting in the snow and hiked back into the woods to find an old toboggan in an old shed. Then he hauled her by toboggan back to the house.
This was no easy feat. It still gives me nightmares.
They celebrated their survival by eating dinner by candlelight near the stove and drinking one or two bottles of wine. At least that’s the rumor.
Meanwhile daughter Nancy and Mike were stranded in the middle of town, six miles away.
Snow up to the roof of the Toyota Highlander
Banjo Man spent the weekend melting snow to flush the toilets. And he built a “hibachi” (as he put it) in the birdbath to heat up meals. My portable radio—complete with batteries—gave them news from the outside world. Their cell phones were kept for quick updates to me and for possible emergencies.
Electricity was restored Sunday night, in time for two hours of Downton Abbey and a non-birdbath dinner. But they were still stranded.
That’s when Jeff showed up with his chainsaw and helped Banjo Man clear the driveway.
We love Jeff. I owe him many chicken enchilada casseroles and all the artichoke dip he can eat.
Meanwhile, Son #2 and I were assembling Ikea bookcases (him) and expounding on the benefits of getting rid of clutter and unnecessary collections of weird things (me). Believe it or not, I can dispense opinions and wisdom while also cooking chicken, pork roast, macaroni and cheese and brownies (Son #1, Sweet D-i-l and Most Handsome Grandson were coming for dinner).
On Sunday we returned to Ikea to fine tune the reorganization plan and ate the Saturday night leftovers with Son #1, etc. My daughter-in-law provided special wine and chocolate-dipped strawberries (the biggest strawberries I’ve ever seen) for our women-only Downton Abbey Watch Party.
Note: it was good to see Mr. Bates get out of prison before he killed someone. How strange to see Thomas cry. Poor Edith can’t catch a break when it comes to men, but it’s good to see her smiling. The clothes aren’t as beautiful as the seasons before. Good for Matthew for manning up and taking control. Lord Wrentham looks dumber every day. Where’s his dog? Who the heck is Rose?
Could any of these people cook hamburgers in a bird bath???????
Posted in austin, family, rhode island
3 Comments
blizzard, austin and ikea, part 1
I have so much to say. Too much, actually. I haven’t blogged because I don’t know where to start. Storm? Grandson? Tacos? What do you want to hear about?
I am in Austin. I left Rhode Island early Thursday morning, landed in Chicago in the midst of light snow and arrived in Texas before noon. The planes were half empty, so having a row of three seats to myself felt absolutely luxurious.
Blizzard Nemo hit home on Friday morning.
While all of this was going on, Son #2 and I were in Ikea.
An Ikea store is approximately the size of London. At the entrance they give you a map and a pencil. There are arrows painted on the floor, and secret passageways to take shortcuts, but the shortcuts are not really short.
We returned a wobbly bookcase and got a store credit. Then we ate in the cafeteria. And then we walked for eight or nine miles looking for solutions to storage problems.
After what seemed like an eternity, we loaded up a couple of hundred pounds of cardboard-encased storage solutions and headed to Son #1’s house to accompany the family to my grandson’s first swimming lesson.
My sweet grandson wasn’t happy. Like his father at that age, he is very suspicious of new things, even with his daddy joining him in the pool.
They both survived and ate plenty of bbq at the restaurant next to Aqua Tots.
Back in Rhode Island, our county was one of the hardest hit. Two feet of heavy snow, a snow that broke plows, would paralyze the Northeast for several days. Banjo Man and my mother (who lives over the hill and through the woods) lost power at 10 PM. The storm was a ferocious combination of blizzard and nor’easter, with a moon tide and high tide complicating things at the height of the winds (up to 80 mph along the coastline of Nantucket).
Banjo Man hiked to my mother’s Saturday morning to check on her, because it was still snowing and she had no heat. He told me this while he was trudging through the snow and explaining how he’d been careful to stop every few minutes to catch his breath. There were branches (or trees?) blocking the long driveway; the plow would not be able to enter. No one was allowed on the roads anyway. 80% of the state was out of power. The temperature was dropping and predicted to be 9 degrees before midnight.
I promptly began having a nervous breakdown, one that would last for the next two days.
To be continued…
Posted in austin, family, grandmother stuff, rhode island
3 Comments
need a hug
I couldn’t wait another month to get a “Grandma hug”, so yesterday Banjo Man suggested I get on a plane and head to Texas asap. Because this little guy is waiting for me.
Thank you, Southwest, for some great travel deals. Thank you, Banjo Man, for a great idea.
We’re partying in Austin in March. Family and friends are flying in from North Carolina, Nebraska and California. Glen’s nephew is exhibiting at the film festival and will be demonstrating his film inventions. We can’t wait!
So between lots of hugs and babysitting (fun, fun, fun!!!) and shopping (hurray for a daughter-in-law who likes Ikea!!) I’ll be making and freezing meatballs and chicken enchiladas and all sorts of goodies for the following month, because listening to music makes you very hungry.
It really does.
South Congress Cafe
Torchy’s or Magnolia Cafe leftovers?
Posted in austin, family, grandmother stuff, travel
3 Comments
slave to fashion
I’ve been watching a lot of shows on the History and Science channels lately. “Ancient Aliens”, “America Unearthed”, “River Monsters”, stuff like that.
In 2004 Will (son #2) and I met in northern England, where he was finishing up a summer as a volunteer on a dig at Bamburgh Castle. I’m going to blog about that trip this week, because things are quiet here in New England and I’ve done enough whining about writing. The baby quilt is coming along nicely (after an invigorating trip to the local fabric store for more thread and just a little bit more blue fabric), the new “Blues For the Fiddle” dvd lessons are inspiring me to practice for hours and my office is clean.
So I thought I’d revisit Scotland.
This picture was taken in the Orkneys. Will and I had just ascended from a mysterious hole in the ground called “Mine Howe”. We’d paid our 2 pounds, been given helmets and sent up the hill to make our way down the slippery stone steps dug into the earth.
Anyway, while I was looking at old pictures and found this gorgeous one of More Pie The Archaeologist, I realized I still have that coat, those boots, the sweater (which I bought in Orkney and love) and those pants. Nine years later and I wore that coat to the movies last week. Hmm.
I’ve been known to wear some really horrendous outfits around my house. Truly, you cannot imagine. After the last months of writing and rarely having to get dressed to leave the house, I’ve sunk to new lows of “letting oneself go”.
Poor Banjo Man. I have spent way too many days looking like someone who lives under a bridge. Or in a deep hole in the ground.
So I have changed my ways. My goal is to get dressed in something decent every day, something decent enough so that if anyone dropped in to say hello I wouldn’t have to hide in the bathroom because otherwise they would think I was (a) psychotic or (b) had the flu.
Glamour is now my middle name.
Posted in personal female whining, road trip
Leave a comment
due may 22
You may remember this couple?
They’re having a baby. A boy. In May!
Isn’t that exciting???!!!!
So I get to make a quilt.
I love to pick out fabric from my shelves. Quilters call it a “fabric pull”, which means we pull out whatever we think might work in a quilt and audition it with other fabric. Decisions are made. Fabric is ironed. Then cut.
I love to cut fabric. That’s my favorite part of putting a quilt together.
I cut 448 little white squares, 448 triangles and 56 little print squares.
Then I sewed. I listened to Gillian Welch cd’s. I hummed. My sewing machine hummed.
Life was good.
We had a wind and rain storm last night and many Rhode Islanders are out of power. So far we’re fine, which means I’ll be sewing another pile of these triangles this morning!
We’re lucky we didn’t lose any more trees.
I’m lucky to have plenty of fabric, thread and a brand new iron, the kind that doesn’t shut itself off every 8 minutes. I opened every box of every style iron in Walmart to read the instructions until I found an iron that shut itself off in one whole hour.
I wish they wouldn’t shut themselves off at all. Is it a law or something?
Posted in friends, rhode island
2 Comments
well, this was fun!
photo from best-beaches
Banjo Man’s movie weekend continued on Sunday, when he took my mother and I to Newport to see a movie he’d read about in a newspaper he’d perused while waiting to meet a client.
I didn’t think to bring my camera–it’s 8 degrees, on an island, not far from the water so I wasn’t thinking about spending time outside–but I wished I’d taken a picture so I could show it to you. The 1834 Jane Pickens theatre is one of many gems in Newport. It shows the “little” movies that don’t get played in the big movie complexes.
Such as QUARTET.
Imagine a luxurious retirement home in a British countryside estate. A retirement home for musicians.
Imagine a retirement home full of aging musicians who have made the decision to keep singing, keep performing, keep playing music, no matter the insults of aging.
Posted in movies
3 Comments
a weekend of movies
Banjo Man has been feeling neglected.
Actually, he’s a very patient man. No one else would have put up with a depressed, unhappy, miserable, exhausted, stressed and self-pitying writer for all of these past months.
Banjo Man deserves a medal.
I finished rewriting 2/3 of my book at 10 AM Friday. Then I went back to bed and slept until 4 PM. It is cold here and my electric blanket is my best friend. After I woke up and changed into non-writer-bag-lady-living-on-the-streets clothes, I followed Banjo Man around the house. I’d missed him. I needed to keep telling him I’d finished the revisions and was no longer crazy.
He was happy to hear that. So happy he wanted to go to the movies. He’d been waiting and waiting and waiting for me to finish writing so we could actually GO OUT SOMEWHERE. So on Saturday we went to the noon show of ZERO DARK THIRTY” and to the 4:00 show of LINCOLN. Between shows we walked to Applebees for a late lunch. We both fell asleep during the previews before Lincoln, but woke up to watch the movie.
We really, really enjoyed both movies.
Random thoughts:
I wish I worked for the CIA.
I’m glad I don’t have to jump out of helicopters in the dark.
I can’t wait for the next Vince Flynn novel to come out.
It takes a certain kind of genius to write a book and/or make a movie about the passage of a constitutional amendment.
Movie popcorn doesn’t smell as good as it used to.
Posted in movies
3 Comments
