sunny blizzard

~E~ I recently said goodbye to another friend/coworker, and this one was even harder than the last. I've worked with A for two years and we had a good rhythm going, I think. She, I and the attorney we work with came together amazingly as a team during this crazy Green Card Summer. And I didn't realize how much I thought of her as a friend until she told us she was leaving. It was really hard the first few days when yet again I'd pass her office and -- it was empty. She's off to school halfway across the country and I wish her the absolute best. A few months ago, I lost another friend/coworker L. I met her when she needed to carpool to work for a couple of months. I have to admit I was looking forward to meeting her because I'd heard her name here and there (one of my team members had a little crush on her), and she seemed like a very cool person. She is. She's funky and smart, and I miss the emails she'd send out a few times a month wondering what our thoug...

~E~ Number One Son and his girlfriend met us for lunch at the waterpark yesterday, dripping wet. After filling us in on how she had passed out after waiting in line for the rollercoaster in the hot sun for 40 minutes, and Son had not been able to catch her as she fell (she's fine) Son couldn't wait to tell us about the "big" wave pool. I had suspected there was a bigger wave pool than the one we'd been splashing around in, but I hadn't been able to drag the Little Kids very far from that area of the park. Son led us straight to it after burgers and pizza. OK, the thing is freaking HUGE. There is a channel through which the wave comes, then the area opens out into a fan-shaped pool. As we got to it, a gigantic wave came flowing towards us-- I mean gigantic. Ginormous. Freaking BIG. It looked about fifty feet high from where I was standing (but I'm sure it wasn't!). After it gets past the channel, it crests and comes crashing down, much to the delight o...

~E~ When I was a kid my mom and dad would sit around on a Sunday reading the paper and listening to the radio or to records. They would often play the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, so I grew up with Irish folk music. One song I always liked was "Oro Se Do Bheatha Abhaile", which was sung in Gaelic so I never understood the words. Picture a 6-year-old singing along in gibberish! Here, listen to Sinead O'Connor's version. Somewhere along the line as an adult I learned about Grainne Ni Mhaille , an Irish pirate queen who lived and pirated on the west coast of Ireland. She caught my imagination, although I could never find out much about her. Over time she must have caught other people's imaginations as well, since now a Google search will actually have more than 4 or 5 hits and there's a current Broadway play about her. When I gave birth to a daughter, Grainne (grawn-ya) was my first choice of names, but for personal reasons I chose the English version, Grace....

~E~ This question always throws me. I'll mention I had a super time at a play I saw last night, or that I really enjoyed being pregnant, and then someone drops that question. It's a very innocent and obvious question. It should be easy to answer if I'm raving about something, right? I think that for most of my (married) life no one really cared what I thought about the things I enjoyed, so I developed a habit of just enjoying things 'inside myself'. I didn't bother to learn the narrative for my experiences. I simply enjoyed them. In the last few years my life has changed a lot and there are those who would like to hear why they should go to the Ren Faire I've been babbling on about. I must be more conscious of my experiences. Are you good at explaining why you love the things you love? How do you do it?

Clearly, God has decided that Chief Justice Roberts is unfit for the Supreme Court and has made his desires known . U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has left a Maine hospital after having a seizure yesterday afternoon at his Maine vacation home.