The summer movie season began officially for me last weekend when we took in The Great Gatsby at The Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. Built in 1926, just a year after Gatsby was first published, the Grand Lake boasts marvelous Art Deco interiors and some awfully sweet concessionaires. The story fell flat for me but the [...]
I thought I’d be rhapsodizing about cherry blossoms this morning. Instead, I’m waiting for the Opossum Angel of Death to remove a dying critter from my crawl space. Mother Nature is full of complexities. A few nights ago as I lay reading in bed, I heard something scratching underneath our bedroom floorboards and woke my [...]
Out with the dragon, in with the snake! This past Year of the Dragon was HUGE for me and mine. We sold our family home, moved to a new place, married off both daughters in style and welcomed our son home after two years living abroad. On those charts that measure stress-inducing events, well—we’d be [...]
Watching the political duel that was the second presidential debate, I couldn’t believe the amount of testosterone on display. The president, usually so suave and unflappable, came off as a vindictive bully. Gov. Romney, abandoning his gosh-golly-darn colloquialisms, prowled the stage like a veteran combatant ready to wrestle the POTUS to the mat. Really, [...]
Ever since I was a little girl pouring over the Sears catalog* to order school clothes I’ve loved the idea of creating a wardrobe from scratch. Unlike a friend who lost her home and all her belongings in the Oakland Hills fire (or a cousin who once had most of her wardrobe stolen from a [...]
