This has been the first week that I have had time to start "catching up" in almost four months. The last few days of finals were hectic beyond belief, and then I went right to Berkeley for the weekend so that Sandy would be free to attend the family meeting in Louisiana.
Dale Jr. was the other representative of the Hodges family at the meeting. Grace Gee told me how much she appreciated his being there.
Sandy told a funny story about Kenneth Paul inviting them to a buffett on a riverboat casino. S. said that Dale Jr. was interested in exploring the riverboat, but that the only entrance to the boat led to the casino, and the casino had no doors or windows leading to any other part of the boat!They really did not want their gamblers distracted, I guess.
I started going through my mountain of unread papers first day I got back home. I had only been dealing with what I call the "turn-off-ables", for several monthys. And I've started slowly making some inroads into shaggy looking garden, compost piles, and messy house. I got so behind after the hectic spring of school.
Friday I was at the library having my computer tutoring session with Daniel Nicolai starting on the very complicated India visa application. A lot of the questions had to do with whether I had ever had anyone in my family who was either Bangladeshi or Pakistani, or had anyone in my family ever been married to anyone who was either Bangladeshi or Pakistani. Although Daniel's help was speeding things up, we still didn't finish.
Daniel had to bring his newborn baby to the lesson, and I thought we wouldn't get anything done. But she slept the entire time.
That day I had lunch with my friend Merrill and also with Jeannie Love, whose classroom I worked in for years when I was with the schools. It was really nice to catch up. The restaurant was a chain called Bucca de Beppo's ("Immigrant Italian meals" it says on their outside wall, which is a hip-sounding way of saying they make absolutely no effort to be authentically Italian.")
I practiced guitar and singing twice this week, the first time in so long that my fingers hurt. I am determined to persevere and get back the ability to sing and strum without pain.
We've continued visiting the gym for a half-hour three times a week, and Dale Sr. still does the stationary bike while I do the treadmill. Now that school is over, I want to add a weekly Zumba class, yoga class, and long walk. The unaccustomed types of exercise have left me sore.
I will digress here with a couple of photos from Berkeley. They are out of place because my computer tutor has my laptops while he changes info from the old one to the new one, and I'm afraid that if I try to move the photos I'll lose them.
1) This display of items below, aimed at the gay customer, was in the Berkeley Target store on Shattuck. I've certainly never seen anything like that at the Target stores in Arizona.
2) Below that, two photos of the same woman and only a couple of days apart. In the first, she is in her care-giver scrubs at Campus Dr. The second was taken the Saturday before, when her husband took her out for lunch for Mother's Day. Oh, and she also has produced movies in Nigeria.
Sunday evening we finally used that a certificate to VinciTorio's, an Italian restaurant in Tempe. It was quite good, especially the appetizer of mussels and clams simmered in a tomato garlic sauce. The wine was good also. Our small table was facing the accordion player, who was very good, old standards such as "Volare" and "Up a Lazy River" embellishing lots of beautiful little trills while keeping up the toe-tapping rhythm.
The story of how I was given the gift certificate: Two years ago I was in Starbuck's. If you take a cup in with you that you have purchased from Starbuck's, you get ten cents off of your drink. I was sitting there drinking out of one of their cups that I had brought in with me, a heavy thick cup with a silhouette of a bear on it, and a guy who is always in there comes up to me. He is a widower, only around 45 I would say, with a long thin blonde-gray pony tail, always reading Zane Grey as he sits with his coffee.
"Oh", he said, "You're drinking out of my favorite cup!" He went on to say that he always used to bring that cup in, to drink his coffee out of, but that they dropped it while filling it behind the counter, and broke it.
I didn't think much of it then, but after going home I decided to start keeping that cup in the car, and if I saw him at Starbucks again, I would give it to him. And I did.
He was very touched, and offered to pay for the cup, which I waved off. The next time he saw me, he said, "I'm going to get you a gift certificate from my sister's Italian restaurant in Tempe." For about a year afterwards, whenever he would see me he would look very guilty and apologize several times for not getting the gift certificate yet, and I would protest again and again that it didn't matter.
He never brought the cup to Starbuck's anymore, because he said he didn't trust them not to break it again.
Then finally one day he said proudly, "I have it!" and went to his car and got the gift certificate and gave to me. It sat in my bill drawer for a year, but we finally used it last night. Very nice, although my pesto pasta was a little disappointing because it wasn't a patch on Sandy's.
My friend Ann and I just decided on flights to India, after several mis-starts during a crazy afternoon last Tuesday.
We met first at the Tempe library, because she wanted to see more of the website than her phone would let her see. Different
sites had given varying info about when one could get
the visa, and the one recommended by our tour company (Intrepid, they
are Australian) said you couldn't get a visa yet for a September trip.
Ann was really upset, because she wanted
to get the visa before she bought the flights, and she wanted to buy the
flights before she goes to Canada (soon) and before the prices get
higher. ).
I happened to
mention a place in town which does quicker passports and visas for a
fee, so she said, "Let's go there!"
It turned out that that didn't work
either because they needed to take the passports for a few days and she needs
hers PDQ for Mexico and Canada. (And an e-visa is indeed not available yet for our September trip.) But at least
the people in the little passport place were able to put her at ease that there was
no doubt that India would in need let her in, so we went ahead and
decided on the flights. She has since bought the tickets using her card, and I will reimburse. We change plans somewhere in China, wow.
Whew! A crazy afternoon, but the tickets are bought.
Whew! A crazy afternoon, but the tickets are bought.
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