You're Doing It Wrong

(I misspelled the plural of tomatoes on my photo and it took me forever to figure out what the problem was. It pains me to leave it but too many steps to fix it. Oh well! See the manager for a refund. xo )

If everything goes as planned I have scheduled this to post while I am in Atlanta on my trip rescheduled after my last trip was postponed due to hurricane.

These are the last of my measly summer tomato crop. I need to clean this out since some of those are hopeless. The skins are thick and chewy and the tomatoes are tart. But it’s still a little special bite of summer.

Since we ripped out the bedroom carpet to expose the hardwood floors I am amazed at how much and how quickly fluff collects under the bed and in the corners. I suspect it has to do with the flannel sheets. I have hardwood in my office room and there aren’t nearly that many dust bunnies.

I am going to take the last few minutes of daylight to do some quick garden chores.

I made it. 30 days. I am completely out of juice, though.

This photo is from 1971 and is from a series my dad was doing for the annual Christmas card.

I love everything about this. My bangs in my face. My asymetrical ponytails. My giant ear.

The striped matching outfits!! My coat is buttoned but my sister’s is opened, revealing a dress that matches the coats. White tights and black patent leather shoes.

Adorable!

This is on Highway 96 in Orleans

Did I ever write about that time the alarm was going off at Little Tree?

There was a restaurant nearby that we really liked called Little Tree. We were really bummed when they closed. They seemed so conscientious and had a great menu. They probably went out of business because they didn’t cut corners.

One night we went in there and the alarm for the building was somehow going off. It was a terrible sound. You couldn’t have a conversation.

There were people having dinner in there. One guy had rolled up paper napkins and stuck one end in his ear and the rest just hung down like wilted ears.

It was strange — almost like a candid camera or something to see how we would react.

At first we were going to stick with it but we told them we’d come back another time.

If all goes as planned I am having a quiet dinner with Bob and Dad.

This is a selection of my cookie cutters. I offered to loan them to colleague in case he makes cookies this week while his family is in town.

I haven’t had good luck making sugar cookies the last couple of times. The dough was hard to work and the cookies came out lumpy and not pretty.

Who knows, maybe I will try again this year. I found a receipt somewhere that is supposed to be foolproof. HAHA. I know from experience there is no foolproof recipe that I can’t beat.

If you like such things I wrote a Bridgerton fan fic with Colin and Penelope (#polin).

It is very short and sweet and set in high school in 1986. Regency High Senior Spy. The goal was to enjoy writing again and it worked.

How do you even get 15k unread emails?

This friend hides their technology from me because I can’t process this many unopened email. When I have 50 emails I feel like everything is out of control and I’m losing my mind. Then I unsubscribe from everything and delete everything that is non-essential.

Most email is non-essential. The endless firehose wears on me sometimes.

Especially at the office at certain times. I start with the oldest email and work my way to the present and it starts coming in faster than I can answer. Eek. Anxious. Anxious.

It’s not like that all the time.

Remember when email was exciting? Kinda of like the days when you came home and were hoping there was a message for you on the answering machine. (Kids: back before cellphones people had a recording gadget on their counter that worked with the landline. Callers would leave messages and if you were dating that red blinking light was important.)

Then there came a day when phone messages were a burden, too.

I remember when I graduated from college and I had so little confidence about what I could do.

I wanted to get into publishing and had zero luck with that. And as I posted earlier this month, I wanted to work in the music business and that didn’t work out for me either.

I did work in the entertainment business indirectly and I hated it. People were snooty and angry and it was hard to believe some of them could remain standing under the weight of their own self-importance.

But then went I started working in federal Indian law I thought I would never figure that out and didn’t see what my place could be.

But anytime I looked at job ads over the years, maybe thinking I would try for a change, I never thought I could do anything.

Now that I’m old and near the end of my working years, I think I can do anything. Maybe I’d need a class or someone to help me figure it out, but I’m confident I can figure it out.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.