Lunch with a friend

Today, my friend Jane drove over from a nearby town to have lunch with me in our Circle@Crown Café.  She's moving soon and won't live as far away.  Maybe it will be easier for her to visit with me.

Halfway through the week

I can't believe it's halfway through the week, and I'm just now realizing that ... I haven't been posting.  It's true.  Is it okay to blame my forgetfulness on things like watching the build-up and then the fireworks for the huge 4th of July celebrating 250 years since the beginning of the United States?

Yes, I watched the fireworks on television.  Crown Center's huge TV was tuned to what was happening in New York, but I missed seeing what was happening here in St. Louis.  I found this photo of downtown St. Louis online just now.

• On the last Monday in June, I mused about a runaway, HERE.
• My Wednesday word, two days later, was about a sloth, HERE.

And then ... nothing.  What was I doing?  Meeting in the lobby to talk with friends and neighbors; meeting a brand new resident and inviting her to the café with me.  Sunday came and went, and here it is already Wednesday before I am remembering to blog.  Okay, so I really AM getting old and forgetful.  Oh, wait, I did have my annual doctor's appointment on Thursday, so maybe that took up all the space in my brain, perhaps?

On the last Friday post that I remembered to do, I wrote about "mindfulness" HERE, but then my mind seems to have slipped out of gear or something.  Oh, well, time to pick up the pieces, and "click" back into my blogging mindset.  (Let's hope that did the trick.)

Two things on my agenda today

I had only TWO things on my TWOsday agenda:  a discussion group and an appreciation program with singers and snacks:

1.  Short Story discussion in the early afternoon that met in the small art studio was to study a short story.

Two discussion leaders (Esther and Christie) took turns reading Guy de Maupassant's short story entitled "The Necklace."  A couple of us knew about the story, me and another participant.  It had been part of my English studies (in high school, I think, though it may have been in college for my first degree).  If you are not familiar with the story, you can read it HERE.  I am a visual person, so I would have preferred to have a copy of the story so I could read along.  I don't retain as much by simply listening, and that's why I came home, looked it up (for myself and also for you blog readers), and thought about it on my own after our discussion.

2.  Volunteer Appreciation program in our large community room in the evening.

People who volunteer to greet visitors at the Welcome Desk were included, as were the residents and non-residents who prepare meals to be delivered to the community and Crown Center residents.  I was invited because I volunteer to work in the library, reshelving books and magazines, and preparing donations to be shelved.  I also cull books that have been there long enough and make room for newer books to go on our shelves.  I've been doing it since I moved here in 2014, along with other residents, like my friends Donna and Risé.  Donna, who had a Master's degree in library science, set up our library as in this photo when she first moved here.  The room was recently renovated, but I will share those changes another time.

International Women's Day

Since today is International Women's Day, it seems appropriate to share a book about women.

Women Make the Best Friends: A Celebration ~ by Lois Wyse, 1995, stories and poems, 189 pages, 8/10

In her heart of hearts every woman knows that men may come and go, but a true friend is forever.  At nine, nineteen, or ninety, the one constant that marks each stage in a woman's life is the importance of the friendships she has made.  In the best of times and in the worst of times, it is our friends who sustain us, cheer us, and see us through whatever surprises life throws our way.  (Edited, from the dust jacket.)  This book has short anecdotes, short poems, short 4-5 page pieces about conversations remembered.

Week in Review

• On Monday, I mused about a surrogate mother, HERE.
• On Tuesday, I wrote about people I meet in the Circle@Crown Café, HERE.
• My Book Beginning for Friday was from a book about Iran (which seems too topical, but is also why I picked up the book), HERE.

is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

Thinking about two things today

1.  Three surveys to fill out for the social workers in the office:

1. Program Survey (Yes, I'd possibly enjoy a discussion of literature.)
2. Daily Life Survey  (Yes, I prepare my own meals.)
3. Quality of Life Survey (No, I don't get bored.)

2.  Café meals:

• I pay for five meals a week delivered, so I don't have to cook all the time.
• I eat in the Café with friends as a way to socialize.

It's National Potato Day

National Potato Day is celebrated on August 19th every year to honor the favorite food of many people ― potatoes.  Whether they are roasted, fried, boiled, or mashed, potatoes are the perfect side for any dish and everyone's favorite comfort food.  This fan-favorite root vegetable is a significant part of cuisines across the world and is enough to make people feel full.

Today, let's be grateful and appreciate potatoes, a vegetable that has been a part of people's meals for centuries with the first potato crops planted dating back to 5000-8000 BC in Peru and Bolivia.  It spread all over the world from there and is now a staple in several cuisines across the globe.  The versatility of potatoes allows them to be cooked in different ways and paired with almost anything.  They can be used not only as a side, but also as a key ingredient in pancakes, bread, soup, and even drinks.

Potatoes have been the primary source of sustenance for many populations over the years.  It is also so full of nutrients that people can live off only potatoes for months.  In fact, between 1845 and 1849 a plague in the potato crops left some of the population of Ireland without potatoes for 4 years, and millions lost their lives due to starvation.

French fries are one of the most popular ways to prepare potatoes.  In one year the average American eats 30 pounds of French fries.  French fries arrived in the United States in 1784 when James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's slave, traveled to France with Jefferson so he could learn how to cook them the French way.  After returning to the United States, Hemings used to cook French fried potatoes for Jefferson's guests.  When the recipe was shared in a cookook in 1817, they quickly became a hit that spread through the country.

A majority of Americans also consider potatoes to be among their favorite comfort food, but fried isn't the only way Americans like their potatoes.  They also have them mashed or baked.  Most people like to slather their spuds with butter.

On National Potato Day you can really go all out and eat potatoes for every meal.  You can use regular potatoes or sweet potatoes for any of these:  (1) hash browns ~ maybe alongside eggs, bacon, or avocado; (2) potato pancakes are also a good option for your first meal of the day; (3) tater tots; (4) potato chips; (5) chips and dip; (6) French fries.

Our Circle@Crown Cafe will be serving a variety of potatoes today, so you may want to pick more than one kind.  See you there?

Added later:  Since today is also TWOsday, I've decided to have at least TWO kinds of potatoes.  Hmm, which variety am I in the mood for right now?

I'm dying to know more about this (LOL)

In our Café on Tuesday, a couple of us were talking about a class being offered in the latest Oasis course catalog about the "Death Positive Movement."  I had never heard of such a thing, so I got on my laptop and read more about it HERE.

Later that same day, I happened across a woman's theory (HERE) that we never really die.  Death again?  Anyway, the woman says that, instead of dying, our consciousness goes into an alternate reality.  "If the quantum immortality theory is correct, you’re just going to wake up in a parallel universe with no memory of the fact that you just survived an apocalyptic event."  I have heard about parallel universes, but this is interesting, isn't it?

Now for the kicker, one more detail.  The friend I was with in the Café read one more detail.  It seems the location for the Death Positive Movement class will be the Crown Center, the senior facility where I live.  Hmmm, now I have to decide whether I am curious enough to actually pay money to learn more about this stuff.  Whaddya think I should do?

If you can't read the small print on the headstone, it says:  "Because nobody gets out of life alive!"

Next week is Palentine's Day and/or Galentine's Day

Invite your PALS, male pals as well as female pals.

Meet me in the Circle@Crown Café at noon on Thursday, February 13th.  Let's celebrate together, eating or drinking whatever you get for yourself from the menu.  We will celebrate with our friends (and also with our PALS — see illustration above) by being together for an hour or two.  There won't be a program; just visiting each other.  See you there!

** P.S.  We will ALL be talking to whoever is at your table,

so obviously I cannot promise to sit with each person.

Dear Book Buddies

Dear Book Buddies who live near me,

Let's have a short meeting in the Circle@Crown Café, and choose a book to discuss some day soon.  This little mouse is reading Of Mice and Men, but we don't have to read classical stuff to have fun, do we?  I have a little stuffed mouse sitting on the box beside my door right now (when he isn't going for a walk on my Rollator), and the little guy has a book in hand that says (wait for it) BOOK BUDDIES.  Yes, really.  Ask my neighbors.

Anyway, if you have an idea for a good book we could discuss, that would be wonderful.  The Café is open Monday through Thursday from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.  Suggest a time that's good for you, and we'll start there to narrow down the best time for all of us.

TWO words for TWOsday

By the way, you are more than welcome to invite your friends who love to read.  The more, the merrier, as they say.  And the words for today are BOOK and BUDDIES.  Two very important words for people who like to discuss the books they read.

Another coincidence

Tisha B'Av, or "the ninth of Av" in Hebrew, is an annual fast day in Judaism.  It is a day of mourning that commemorates a series of tragedies in Jewish history and is considered the saddest day of the Jewish calendar.  It's a time for Jews to commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem by the Second Babylonian Empire and the Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years ago.

The date this year was Tuesday, August 13th.  The Crown Center had a notice on the monitors telling us the Café would be closed that day.  The coincidence is that I was reading Jewish Reflections on Death (HERE) just after I had seen the announcement and got to page 29, which says:  "On the Sabbath following Tisha-b'Ab, many Hasidim came to him..."

It was the first time I had ever heard of that particular Jewish holiday, and then I read about it in my book?  That's a weird coincidence!  The photo shows the Western Wall in Jerusalem, also known as the Wailing Wall.  Now I know why.

Books two friends read

The Shooting at Château Rock: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (Book 13 of 17) ~ by Martin Walker, 2020, mystery (France), 322 pages

It’s summer in the Dordogne and heirs of a modest Périgordian sheep farmer learn that they have been disinherited.  Their father’s estate has been sold to an insurance company in return for a policy that will place him in a five-star retirement home for the rest of his life.  But the farmer dies before he can move in.  Was it a natural death?  Or was there foul play?

Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges is soon on the case, embarking on an investigation that will lead him to several shadowy insurance companies owned by a Russian oligarch with a Cypriot passport.  The companies are based in Cyprus, Malta, and Luxembourg.  But Bruno finds a weak spot in France:  the Russian's France-based notaire and insurance agent.  As Bruno is pursuing this lead, the oligarch's daughter turns up in the Périgord, and complications ensue, eventually bringing the action to the château of an aging rock star.  But Bruno makes time for lunch amid it all.

My friend Joan in Montana is in the middle of reading this one and told me because I asked.  The second book was recommended by my friend Cindy when she joined me for lunch recently in the Circle@Crown Café:

Lucky ~ by Jane Smiley, 2024, psychological literary fiction (Missouri), 561 pages

Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky — and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side.  Jodie thrived in the warmth of her extended family, and then — through a combination of hard work and serendipity — she started a singing career, which catapulted her from St. Louis to New York City, from the English countryside to the tropical beaches of St. Thomas, from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and back again.  Jodie comes of age in recording studios, backstage, and on tour, and she tries to hold her own in the wake of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell.  Yet it feels like something is missing.  Could it be true love?  Or is that not actually what Jodie is looking for?  It's a colorful portrait of one woman's journey in search of herself.

Let's walk about it ~ I mean, let's talk about walking

Defensive driving is a way of driving that anticipates what another driver might do so you can react accordingly.  It goes beyond road rules and basic driving techniques to help reduce the risk of collisions and improve road safety,

You may wonder why I'm bringing that up, especially since I don't have a car and therefore no longer drive.  My neighbor Betty (the second Betty to move onto our floor) brought it up when we lunch in the Café, and I told her about Café Conversations.  When I mentioned Pamela's suggestion to idea to use a bowl or jar that people could put suggestions in, Betty said, "Walk defensively."

I guess I looked puzzled because she went on to say that we should not only drive defensively, but also WALK defensively.  Huh!  We had already been there awhile, and were ready to leave.  So I went home puzzling over what that would mean.  I think it would give a group a lot to discuss.

I went online and found the illustration above.  If you can't read the small print, I think clicking on the illustration will enlarge it for you.  The last example says a reason to walk defensively (like a penguin) is to avoid icy falls.  Umm, that's not likely with our St. Louis summer temperatures near 100-degrees!

It's a little small to read, but I think you can enlarge it by clicking on it.  The weather has been brutal here this summer.  Is it hot where you are?

 

After ordering lunch in the Cafe recently, I joined a group I knew and noticed one of them was wearing a pink tee with the words "fluent in fowl language."  You know I love word play and had to share those words here on my blog.  I found several versions of it online, and this looks most like what she had on.

I'll leave you with this to ponder.  I posted it two years ago, HERE, and it's still true.  We don't usually think of grocery carts as "vehicles," but when we think of the prices we pay for everything these days, we groan.  Especially our grocery prices, it seems.

Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

Café Conversations ~ ideas for discussion topics

I sat at a long table in our Café with a sign that said, "Café Conversations."  I had several pads of paper on the table, inviting ideas, though nobody used those.  What I did get, though, was people stopping to ask what this was all about.

• Sue couldn't stay to talk very long.
• Rosy did, though.
• Walter's friend was curious and came over to ask.
• Harry was on his way somewhere, but
• Melvin stayed and talked.
• Iva also sat down with us.

That was last week.  As I've talked to people and thought about it myself, I've come up with a few topics to consider for discussion:

1. When you walk, is it important to know how many steps are in a mile?  I've had time to look it up:  Based on an average step length of 2.5 feet, there are approximately 2,000 steps in one mile.  But does it matter?
2. Coincidences you have noticed in your life.
3. A humorous event you remember.
4. Health (yes, I know this is vague and could get into more than anyone wants to know).
5. Your favorite food (someone told me about watermelon and feta cheese as a salad, and I think that sounds good.
6. A chapter of a book of sayings, like maybe the Tao te Ching.  I like chapter 11.  Our Crown Center library has the James Legge translation.

Here's the translation of Chapter 11 from this version:

The thirty spokes unite in one wheel, but it is on the empty space for the axle that the use of the wheel depends.

Clay is fashioned into vessels, but it is on their hollow emptiness that their use depends.

The door and windows are cut from the walls to form a room, but it is on the empty space within that its use depends.

Therefore, what has positive existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not, for actual usefulness.

You can help by sharing any ideas you may have.  Can you think of something a group might enjoy talking about?

Hmmm, is Meet & Eat a better name than Café Conversations?  I couldn't find a logo online for Café Conversations.  Unless we use this one with comment bubbles over the heads of speakers.  What do you think?  Which name is better?

It takes a village.....

Wikipedia tells me that the full quote is "It takes a village to raise a child," but today it feels to me that "it takes a village" to get this post up on my blog.  Why? Because my laptop went down and I pulled out an old one that I haven't used in years. When I couldn't figure out how to get into it, I went to the Crown Center office and Andrew helped me connect to the wi-fi on the ground floor.  So here 'tis, as my friend Jane used to say.  Now if only I could figure out how to add the illustration I chose.  Hmm.

Oh, I got a photo to load.  Yay!  It's the pear salad that I wish they'd put back on the menu in my Circle@Crown Café!  Yes, it's as yummy as it looks.  Okay, I'll settle for this illustration because my "village" likes to eat.

Thoughts about tragedies ~ but also about fun

Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.  I was a one-and-a-half-year-old toddler.  My daddy was eventually drafted and shipped to the Pacific; I remember standing on the sofa to wave out the window as he left.

The JFK assassination occurred on November 22, 1963, when I was the mother of three small children.  My youngest was born earlier that year.

The Twin Towers came down on September 11, 2001 (that's 9-11), a few months before I retired.  Each of these was "a date which will live in infamy..." as FDR said in 1941.  And all of these happened in my lifetime.

Greg Freeman: A Gentleman, A Gentle Man ~ by Greg Freeman, 2003, newspaper columns, 191 pages

Why am I thinking about these dates?  I had just read Greg Freeman's column (p. 138) that was published on September 12th, when our whole country was still focused on the two planes hitting the world's tallest buildings:  "Tragedies like this stay with us the rest of our lives.  For one generation, that tragedy was Pearl Harbor.  For another generation, it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  For this generation, Sept. 11, 2001, is a date that will live in infamy."

Tuesday was Galentine's Day, a day that is now also called Palentine's Day.  Some of my friends met in the Circle@Crown Café.  People drifted in and out, so I don't have an exact number of attendees to report.  But we sat around tables, talking and laughing.  Several women from the office joined us.

Amy Poehler’s Parks and Recreation character, Leslie Knope, invented the holiday in 2010 to celebrate sisterhood one day before Valentine’s Day every February — and fans are still toasting their gal pals annually.  Read about it HERE, and there's also a video on that site so you can see the best Galentine’s Day moments in that show.

You are invited — let's talk on the 13th

Meet me in the Circle@Crown Café at noon on Tuesday, February 13th.  Let's celebrate together, eating or drinking whatever you get for yourself from the menu.  We'll celebrate with our friends (and also with our PALS — see illustration below) by being together for an hour or two.  There won't be a program; just visiting each other.  See you there!

Invite your PALS, male pals as well as female pals.

** P.S.  We will ALL be talking to each other,

so I cannot promise to sit with each person.

Palentine's Day is something new

Palentine's Day (information found HERE) sounds like Valentine's Day.  It was shown as a NEW WORD on February 13, 2023 (HERE).

For several years, I celebrated Galentine's Day on February 13th (click HERE for photos on this blog).  But Palentine's Day is even better because it's more inclusive.  It's on a Tuesday this year, so I'll plan to be in the Circle@Crown Café (more on that later).  In the meantime, maybe I can convince our program coordinator to make it an official program.

Is it hot enough for you?

The Washington Post reported that scientists say we are living through earth's hottest month on record.  I read that the heat wave has put over half of U.S. population under heat alerts  The heat seems to be all that's on people's minds right now.

My friend Nancy called from Pennsylvania, and we talked for at least an hour and a half, until I had to leave to hurry to a music program I'd signed up for.  I lived with Nancy and her husband and their children for part of the time we were studying for our Master's degrees at Emory University (on the right), so our friendship goes back to the 1980s, almost four decades now.

Earlier that day, I had lunch in the Café with my friend Sue, who is also Clawdia's friend.  I shared three DASH Diet books with her.