Tag: end of summer

My Sweet Friday

Cauliflower. Albino broccoli. When did it become amazing? It feels like it was just in the last few years that we have truly explored the wonders of cauliflower. When I was a kid, I loved white chocolate. (Who am I kidding? I still love white chocolate.) Anyway, every single Easter, the Easter Bunny would bring me a big, white chocolate bunny which I would gnaw on throughout the Easter season. Once, when I was out in my yard, and my white chocolate bunny had become just a little white nub full of teeth marks, my snoopy next door neighbor yelled out to me, “Dear, what is that, that you are gnawing on?” I explained that I was feverishly gnawing on what was left of my white chocolate Easter bunny. “Oh silly me!” she exclaimed. “I thought that it was hunk of cauliflower.” That’s then when we both doubled over in hysterical laughter. Feasting on cauliflower! Was she crazy?!? If this had happened nowadays, versus in the 1970s, I would have better understood her confusion. Cauliflower is good! My favorites for today, on this Favorite Things Friday are two cauliflower crusted pizzas, and a delicious bag of non-potato “tater tots”, made of, you guessed it, cauliflower. These items are delicious. They are not quite as good as white chocolate, but I would put them right up there, and they are not full of sugar.

Kirkland Signature Supreme Cauliflower Crust Pizza (a supreme pizza with meat) and Milton’s Craft Bakers Roasted Vegetable Cauliflower Crust Pizza (no meat) are both delicious brands of cauliflower crusted pizza that can be found at Costco. We get them every time we go to Costco (which is a lot, of course, because we’re a middle-aged married couple) and we haven’t tired of them yet! They come with two pizzas to a box. And you should be able to get Green Giant Veggie Tots Cauliflower, Cheese, & Bacon at any self-respecting grocery store. Try them, you’ll love them. And maybe, because of the pride that you’ll feel for yourself for eating healthier options, you might be able to add a little white chocolate in the mix, for dessert.

Have a delightful, holiday weekend, friends! So long, summer! It’s been real.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul Sunday

Hello friends and readers. I hope that you are experiencing a delicious, comforting, restful, yet interesting and rejuvenating holiday weekend. I’m a little “slow on the go” this Sunday morning. I find my mind wandering on to many things, but none of it rhymes, nor do my words seems to fit any kind of a poetic flow. My regular readers know that I devote Sundays to poetry on the blog. Poetry can be serious. Poetry can be fun. Poetry can be mysterious. Poetry can be poignant. Write a poem today. You won’t regret it. You’ll be tickled by your cleverness. Today I am borrowing from some other poets’ cleverness and wit. Here are two poets’ fun and short, little rhymes:

GREEN EGGS AND HAM – Dr. Seuss

I do not like them in a box
I do not like them with a fox
I do not like them in a house
I do not like them with a mouse
I do not like them here or there
I do not like them anywhere
I do not like green eggs and ham
I do not like them Sam I am

A WORD TO HUSBANDS – Ogden Nash

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

Here are a few other funnies from the humorous American poet, Ogden Nash:

I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.

If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.

Some tortures are physical And some are mental, But the one that is both Is dental.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, friends. I suppose this is the time of year that marks “unofficially” the end of summer. We made it. As I often asked my kids at dinner on various school days, “What were your highlights? What were your lowlights?” After you get them out of your system, pitch the lowlights, and keep the highlights in your “Beautiful Memories” file, to open up whenever you need their reassurance and joy.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

The Book in Your Heart

This has been a strange, limbo-like week for me. I’m still getting over my chest cold. My kids have been leaving our home, for their fall plans, in dribs and drabs. We will take my youngest son up to his apartment, on his college campus, this Friday, and my daughter starts her online classes for her junior year of high school on Monday. The other two boys are already away, doing their thing. My husband just ordered more home office equipment, as what has always felt like sort of a temporary situation – this working from home, is five months into being semi-permanent. I guess that our “official fall schedule” will start on Monday. So, this week, I feel like I am just treading water. This good-bye to summer is dragging out. I’m a little over this “long good-bye.” I’m ready for the next thing. As it is said, the best is yet to come, and I am ready to swim towards it.

Earlier this week we watched a show called, Street Food Latin America. This was a tricky challenge for me, to watch a show centering on delicious food, because I am trying to not eat after dinner every night, as an attempt to shed some of the pandemic pounds that I have put on. Still, the show was a good watch and the most intriguing cook on Street Food Latin America, was a woman named Pato Rodriguez. Her food stand, in the middle of the busy central Buenos Aires mercado, was obviously her life’s passion. In the show, she says that her customers ask her why she doesn’t have any children and she says, “You, my customers, are my children, and you are very spoiled!” And her customers were obviously spoiled. Her concoctions looked amazing. Even though she runs an unassuming food stand in the middle of a giant mercado, Pato Rodriguez has attracted famous Argentinian food critics to come to her stand, and to write about her amazing delicacies (the same writers who do the reviews for Michelin rated restaurants). When someone is absolutely “one with what they do”, so obviously living their passions and their dreams, their joy just oozes out of them. It can’t contain itself, and that joy is so contagious. I instantly liked Pato and I wished for her, nothing but a life filled with continued zeal for her cooking and sharing it with others. I could feel her deep enthusiasm for her life’s work through my TV screen. Here is a quote that she said, that was so right on the money, that I made my husband pause our viewing, so that I could write it down verbatim:

“I realized that people eat first with their eyes, then with their mouths, and then with their hearts.” _ Pato Rodriguez

That quote really made me ponder about how much it applies not only just to food, but to anything that we end up loving in life. At first we see something or someone who intrigues and captivates us, we devour our experience with that thing or that person or that place, and then, no matter what the outcome, whether the experience was a decidedly good one, or a mostly negative one, the moments of our focus on that particular happening in our lives, are imprinted on our hearts forever. The book of our lives, chapter by chapter, is kept in the cozy, safe, warm library of our heart. And we can open the book up and we can read it, and we can savor the experiences or at the very least, learn from the experiences, again and again and again. Our heart stores it all for us. As summer is closing, let a new chapter begin, and may it be one of the very best chapters, in each of our books!

First 90 Seconds

The words aren’t flowing for me today. I’m a little jittery from probably too much coffee. So, I’ll just pass on this interesting tidbit of knowledge which I read about recently, that makes a lot of sense to me. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, (trained at Harvard, no less), found that all of the chemical reactions in our body in response to an event that has happened in our lives, occur within the first 90 seconds of an event. Any reaction after that, is an emotional response to a thought that we are having. So if I wallow in the thoughts that summer is practically over (boo hoo), and some of my kids are out of our safe, little cocoon of a home, and are probably being swallowed up by germs at their college campus, or in their various daily outings, as I write this, my body and my emotions will be reacting to those thoughts, on constant loop. My body reacted appropriately during the first 90 seconds of waving good-bye to our grown young men sons, and the tears sprang from there. Now it is up to me, to change my thoughts, so that my body (and my mind and my spirit) and can rest up in positive, peaceful energy, and thus always be ready for appropriate, natural reactions, when necessary.

Change your thoughts and you change your world. - Quote by Norman ...

Summertime Blues

I have a little of that “end of summer” melancholy going on right now.  My high schoolers are headed back to school on Monday and my college student son heads back to the university in about a week and a half.  His girlfriend came over to the house to say good-bye to us last night as she is heading back to college early for her sorority rush season.  We released our eldest son into his own adult world earlier this summer. I wonder when we are complete “empty nesters” if the seasons will seem as acutely distinct as they do right now.

It’s not that I’m entirely sad that summer is over.  The heat has slowed everything to a molten glob of inertia.  I’m eager for a faster pace.  The summer jobs that the kids have had at the beach and eateries have lost their novelty and newness and the “wind down” is obvious.  I remember how shockingly disrupted I felt the first summer after all four of my kids had started going to school for full days.  I’m a person who likes my “alone time” and I am eager to feel the uninterrupted quiet of my thoughts and my own personal rhythms again.

Still, it’s the little things that make each summer special and a little unique to previous summers.  This year when I drove my daughter to tennis every morning, we enjoyed a routine of listening to the same crazy radio show and laughing along with the antics of the DJs who we have both grown to really like.  We saw on a country road, the same elderly man, dressed formally, always smiling, walking with his cane and this mop of a dog that my daughter and I have nicknamed “Smoothie.”  “Smoothie” gives us the most hilarious “stare down” every morning, annoyed that we have disturbed the peace of she and her beloved.  The few times that we haven’t seen them on their daily walk, we have been concerned.  We missed them.  I will miss them this fall.

Summer is the time of big, new adventures and the anticipation of big, new adventures.  It is the time of slowing down and baking, prepping for the feast of the banquet of new learning and growing in the fall.  It is a pause in the schedules of life.  I have to hit “play” again here soon and I think I’m ready, but I’ll keep the bright memories stored on my life drive forever.