Tuesday, February 28, 2017

February Recommendations - add it to your list


As promised, I'm back on the last Tuesday of the shortest month of the year to share some of my recommendations with you. And of course I'm linking up with Lauren & Bre for their Add it to my list linkup, which they're doing the last Tuesday of every month.

Some things I think you should add to your list, if applicable:

Oh My Yog! Yogurt - I'm not here to debate the healthiness of yogurt with you or discuss the added sugars or why fruit on the bottom is bad or any other bullshit. I like yogurt but I'm picky as hell about it. I absolutely love this. The blueberry is fine but the strawberry is the tits. Creamy and delicious. And this has no bearing on how it tastes, but I love the inside of the containers too.
Golden Girls on Hulu - It's streaming start to finish. Two weekends ago I started from season one by accident (it came on after Modern Family without prompting) and it's been awesome. It's so much funnier as an adult. They also tackled a lot of issues on the show, which was awesome for its time. Bea Arthur's delivery is fucking amazing.

Logitech wireless mouse - I was buying the Amazon wireless mice when the batteries had to be replaced, the whole fucking mouse up and died, three different times. Logitech has fun designs and they work so MFD isn't constantly holding his up in the air like he's going to throw it.

Feminist Apparel - In general, sure, but if that type of apparel is your bag, specifically check out the Feminist Apparel website. They are a local Philly company and I love their designs. Since January, I might have spent my feelings of rage on a new wardrobe of lounge apparel. Hell, Mae even has some.
What have you been using or doing lately that I might want to add to my list? My birthday month starts tomorrow so that's like a license to do whatever I want.



Linking up with Lauren & Bre

Monday, February 27, 2017

TWTW - the last one in February

Two months of 2017 gone in a snap. I spent the last Friday night in February basking in the May-like air, starting a new book, and making a batch of power breakfast muffins to freeze and a vat of iced coffee in which I fucked up the ratio and had to process it further Saturday.
Saturday morning was spent at the Bucks County Women's Democratic Forum followed by quick stops at Target where I got a kickass sale on chicken and Produce Junction for this week's flowers. 
Weekly food prep: fried eggs and cheese on English muffins for breakfast; a cleaning out the pantry lunch made of ground beef with onions, rice, rotel tomatoes, corn, and taco seasoning; snacks are green grapes, strawberries, and cucumbers; and one dinner of chicken thighs over artichoke hearts with mushrooms, grape tomatoes, and onions. Lots going on this week so I'm not sure if we'll need another dinner or if we'll eat on the fly.
Saturday night we drove through a freak torrential downpour in a winter thunderstorm to have a delicious dinner at Ryan Christopher's with Chris and Diana, then we walked over and hung out at their house a little. It's been a while since we've seen them so it was great to hang out. Because we're old we were home in bed by 11. 
Sunday morning was spent lounging and reading and dreaming of not getting up off the couch.
By noon I was gabbing with the girls while shopping LuLaRoe at Amanda's (I couldn't get my other ladies in a shot but caught up with Michelle, Lisa, Sister Secrets, Melissa, and Amanda's mom and cousins too) then hit Lou's Farmer's Market for fruit for the week. I passed it the first time, which was in line with me having to go back inside Amanda's for my sunglasses, taking the seriously long way home from there, and having to have Debbie figure out how to pop the hood on my trunk so we could add wiper fluid to wash off the angry bird diarrhea. Getting older, am I right?
I finished The Life We Bury and introduced Mae to her new sling. Yes, I bought it. 
Sunday night we celebrated my mother-in-law's birthday at A-1 Japanese Hibachi. Happy birthday Lynn!!
I rounded out the weekend starting a new book (The Widower's Wife) and watching Criminal Minds.


That about does it. Gearing up for a busy week, I have something every night so I'm trying to move at least one thing. Peace be with me. 




Linking up with Biana at B Loved Boston for Weekending


Friday, February 24, 2017

So this is the tale of our castaways, they're here for a long, long time...


When I was younger, I watched a lot of Gilligan's Island. When I was older, I was enthralled with LOST. I can safely say that while I like watching it on the screen, I would absolutely never want to find myself in that predicament. I'm not a survivor in those terms - MFD is the survivor in our relationship.

Even so, I've spent a lot of minutes in this life idly thinking about things I'd have with me on a desert island. I've also thought a lot about that term - shouldn't it be deserted island? You'd think, but desert is just an archaic form of deserted that means the island is uninhabited, not dry like a desert. Whatever, I know. p.s. - the photo above is from 2010 and was taken on Disney's private island in the Bahamas, and this post itself has been in draft form since 2014. 

Food - steak

Snack - strawberries

Drink - iced coffee (there is free flowing non poisonous water on this island, damnit)

Clothes - maxi dress

Accessory - big ass scarf

Beauty product - Soap

Luxury item - sunglasses

Books - Honestly, I can't think of a more terrible category. I consume books quickly. I would like an endless library. That being said, I will go with Beach Music by Pat Conroy.

Music -  Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

TV Series - Beverly Hills 90210

Movie - Dirty Dancing...did you expect something else? I can spend an eternity driving myself crazy dissecting this movie.

What are your picks? Or do you need the weekend to mull it over?

Have a good one!


Thursday, February 23, 2017

Thursday Thoughts - I need a long winter's nap

1. Amanda and I were talking about the Golden Girls, which I'm watching from the beginning on Hulu. GG is one of  her favorites. Literally every night this week I come home and read and have tea and watch the Golden Girls like any normal 70 year old woman. Anyway when we were talking I mentioned how I missed Dorothy, and Amanda said the same about Sophia, and I said I love her and Dorothy but Dorothy the best. She was like that's because you are Dorothy. Which is true. Amanda went on to say that I am Monica Geller and Dorothy. Also true. So, my exact composition in TV sitcom characters:
Monica is blurry because she's a gif but I hate gifs. Love label makers, hate gifs. 
2. Does anyone want to read Behind Her Eyes or Pretty Little World ? I have copies of them and am happy to mail/give them to you under the condition that you mail them to someone else or share them in person with someone else, with the same instructions given to the person you pass them on to. I don't want them mailed back to me, but I do want them shared with as many people as possible. Let me know. I already tried to pawn them off on my co-workers. No takers. EDITED TO ADD these have been claimed! Stay tuned for more in the future. 

3. Look how lame my book photos are. Are you following That's What She Read on Instagram? Jenn's book pics absolutely always draw my eye. The only time I am tempted to pose my life on that social media platform is around books, and usually after I see one of Jenn's photos. 

4. As long as they're not sleeping, my dogs are very easy to whip into a frenzy of excitement over nothing and I love that about them. 

5. Tuesday's post about meeting a Muslim neighbor cost my heart a lot to write and I don't have it in me to go anywhere else on the burned down house front this week. Maybe because there are too many places to go? Protections stripped from transgender CHILDREN and indigenous people abused and shamefully pushed off treaty lands for the zillionth time in this country because greed and oil are more important than water. Anyhoo if you read Tuesday's post, thank you. If it made you think, I'm glad. If you skipped it or hated it, how about this weather we're having?

6. For Black History Month, one of my favorite poems by Maya Angelou. 

7. I forgot I took photos of the peacocks running amok at Grounds for Sculpture with my camera instead of my phone so I never included them in my initial post. They are such gorgeous creatures. Peters was having a field day with her spirit animal.
8. Nineteen days until I turn 40. Yesterday seemed like an opportune time to re-order my anti-aging night regimen. And a new backpack as if I was in elementary school. Yin and yang. Speaking of buying things, I am thisclose to buying a pet sling for when Mae won't walk on the beach when it's cold. I thought for a minute about people judging me, but then I thought of the lady who bikes around town at the shore with her cat in a covered house attached to the back of the bike. I said to myself self...get the sling.

9. Reminder:

10. E-card of the week: me, crawling towards my birthday month


Later hosen, 

Linking up with Kristin & Joey and 


Stuff, Things, etc.



Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Shit MFD Said Vol 38



Me: I need to get the tattoo on my back redone before my birthday.
MFD: I can do it for you.
Me: That's not true.
MFD: Give me a needle and some ink.

With life insurance people
MFD: I was just telling them you're a robot.
Me: Lovely.
MFD: No! I told them a story about how I made a little space to sleep this weekend near a tv and watched Small Wonder, you know, with the robot girl, and then I said...
Me: Just stop.

Looking at the humidifier
MFD: Does that even work? Should it be closer to us?
Me: It's not supposed to be a fucking rain forest in here, Mike. It is working.
MFD: If you say so.

MFD: I'm really struggling with the subset of comments on my post that are about LuLaRue. Oh, it's a picture of you.
Me: Yeah.
MFD: But what is LLR?
Me: What do you think it is?
MFD: Oh, is it LuLaRue?
Me: It's LuLaRoe not LuLaRue.
MFD: Is it the same as lulumon? 
Me: You're thinking of Lululemon. It's not the same and there is no LuLaRue or lulumon. This conversation made me tired. 



All read and approved by MFD before they go live...
Shit MFD Said Vol 1Shit MFD Said Vol 2Shit MFD Said Vol 3Shit MFD Said Vol 4
Shit MFD Said Vol 5Shit MFD Said Vol 6Shit MFD Said Vol 7Shit MFD Said Vol 8
Shit MFD Said Vol 9Shit MFD Said Vol 10Shit MFD Said Vol 11, Shit MFD Said Vol 12, Shit MFD Said Vol 13, Shit MFD Said Vol 14, Shit MFD Said Vol 15, Shit MFD Said Vol 16, Shit MFD Said Vol 17, Shit MFD Said Vol 18, Shit MFD Said Vol 19, Shit MFD Said Vol 20, Shit MFD Said Vol 21, Vol 22, Vol 23, Vol 24, Vol 25, Vol 26, Vol 27, Vol 28, Vol 29, Vol 30, Vol 31, Vol 32, Vol 33, Vol 34, Vol 35, Vol 36, Vol 37



Tuesday, February 21, 2017

It's not about being political. It's about being human.


"I am angry," I said on Saturday as we were driving through Somers Point. MFD was shoving Goldfish crackers in his mouth in the passenger seat. I glanced over, not sure if he heard me. Just as I was about to freak out and accuse him of not listening to me, he turned the radio down and said cautiously, "Well, it's good that you recognize that. What are you angry about?"

Let us begin. 

Words have been hard for me. I'm grasping. Distracted. Skimming the surface and lacking in personality in this space. I sit down to type things out and my brain just won't articulate. My friend Heather wrote a post about blogging in post-election America Friday. It wasn't until I read it from a writer I respect that I realized that was it. Heather's subjects are more serious and her writing more eloquent than mine, but it felt good to see something I've internalized. YES, my spirit said. I see my reflection there.

What the hell does my weekend recipe matter when I find myself sitting in a room with a small group of people on a beautiful Saturday morning listening to two Muslim women field questions about their faith and culture?

I went to a Meet a Muslim event Saturday to be a friendly face. Sitting in that chair, I felt anything but friendly. I wanted to stand up and scream STOP. STOP DEFENDING YOUR WAY OF LIFE AND YOUR RELIGION BECAUSE YOU'VE DONE NOTHING WRONG.

I didn't want to scream AT these women speaking, of course. These women were intelligent, coming from a place of yes, and a little out of their comfort zones. They don't do this for a living. They were just there as people, talking to other people. I kept thinking how brave as they fielded questions. Imagine you, a Christian for argument's sake, standing up and attempting to answer questions on behalf of ALL Christians. Impossible. There are so many different types of Christians, and levels of belief within those different sects, and some individual and larger groups of Christians who have done really awful things, so you certainly don't want to speak on their behalf. I mean, the Nazis were pretty staunchly Christian, and the KKK is still loudly and proudly Christian. The quite Christian pro-birth movement has set fires to women's health centers, murdered doctors, and gunned down clinic workers. All acts of terror for sure, committed in the name of religion. Do we want to define other Christians by those people? Hell no! Swap out Christianity and Islam and the answer is hell yes.

The very fact that this type of meeting, an attempt to reassure us and educate us, is even happening is what boils my blood. This is where we are as a society? We treat crimes by white Christians as one off, out of the ordinary, the exception to every rule, something a mentally unstable person did. We don't assign violence as an aspect of their culture, religion, or race as indicative of a larger problem that the rest of us should be afraid of. And we won't even admit that we frame them differently.

So no. I don't want these women to have to spend Saturdays answering questions about being a Muslim and I don't want to write about this because it is common sense. I want ALL of us to spend our time living as human beings, not worrying about other asshole human beings. This enrages and exhausts me and hurts my heart. If I am feeling like that as I sit in a place of privilege, I truly cannot imagine what my fellow Americans who are Muslim are feeling.

This is beyond politics. We can talk all day about politicians and how they behave and what they do. But when they point to a group of people and tell us to fear them and we do that? That's on us. That is on every single one of us. That is being complicit or not being complicit in the persecution of others. And we've seen what has happened at the other end of that many times throughout history, haven't we? When people were largely accepting of things that might have been legal at the time but were absolutely morally wrong? Do we want to be people who were blindly led to fear others and acquiesced?

I don't. I won't. Put me on the fucking watchlist. You can drag me kicking and screaming away along with them.

Please don't think this is not happening. There is a Muslim Watchlist. Bank accounts are being frozen. People at airports and borders are being questions about their religious and political beliefs and asked to hand over their social media handles and cell phone pass codes. For no other reason aside from being Muslim.

We have a chance to change the outcome. We do not have to watch people be subject to crazy bullshit or be taken away in the night. We must be good neighbors who stand up for one another even if that person looks different or worships differently.

I would venture to guess most people grouping the over 1.6 billion Muslims in this world together as a group of people worthy of suspicion have probably not met or spoken to many Muslims...that they know of. If they have, they somehow convince themselves that the Muslims they know personally are okay, but the others out there...questionable.

I listened to these women Saturday speak about feminism in Islam, how LGBTQ people are treated, the work Mosques are doing in communities, what it means to wear hijab or not wear hijab, what this much talked about sharia law is, struggles within the community, etc., and thought if I substituted some words I could be listening to women talking about their experiences in Christianity or Judaism.

I wish there was some way we could have rotating weekly dinner parties with people who are different from us. When you put faces to these people, it is a lot harder to be okay with being hateful and fearful of something you don't know much about. They probably hate when people drive slow in the left and when people let their kids run around nice restaurants like assholes too. And I bet a lot of them cry at This is Us.

We are so much more alike than we are different. Peel the top layer off and there we are, all bleeding.


Monday, February 20, 2017

TWTW - the one that felt like spring in February

Walking past a man singing Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta is a perfect way to leave the workweek behind on Friday. I did virtually nothing that night except finish this fucked up book and get a massage at 9 pm. I also got the sketch for the tattoo I'm getting to cover up the one currently on my back, and I loved it.
Saturday morning MFD and I went to a Meet a Muslim Neighbor gathering. More on that tomorrow. Sorry because if you're on IG you might have already seen this photo there and I rarely double up.  
Then we threw the dogs in the car and drove to the shore to take in the salt cure. 
We also checked in on the house to make sure all was well and to remind ourselves of all the work that is coming our way in a few weeks. 
We were back home by 5 and lounged the night away. The dogs were absolutely exhausted after their beach run. I started a new book and watched a Golden Girls marathon. The best thing about doing that is singing the theme song every half hour. Thank you for being a friendddd
Sunday morning started with unfortunately weak coffee that had to be tossed. I did the changing of the sheets and the other hausfrauing bullshit required not to be a dirtbag. Then I met up with a small progressive group in my area at Panera before sitting outside with the dogs to enjoy the 70 degree weather on February 19. It's nice and all but climate change, man.
Weekly food prep was light this week: scrambled eggs with spinach and cheese for breakfast; snacks are power breakfast muffins, granny smith apples, and cucumbers; lunches are baked pesto chicken over brown rice; and dinners will be spaghetti with simple sauce and salmon with steamed veggies. 
Sunday afternoon we went to Catie & Joe's engagement party to celebrate their upcoming nuptials where I ate a shit ton of sugar, shared many laughs with friends, and took zero photos. 


And in the spirit of President's Day...
That about does it for me. How was yours? What is your favorite thing you did? 




Linking up with Biana at B Loved Boston for Weekending


Friday, February 17, 2017

Grounds for Sculpture


I've lived in this area my whole life, and I've taken NJ Transit to NYC from the Hamilton Station many times, seeing the giant sculptures on the way in and vowing to visit their home, Grounds for Sculpture. And I never did in all of these years, until Debbie and I went this past Saturday.

It was awesome. I am not one to wander museums and mull over paintings and I truly loved our time here. Given that I loved The Clay Studio in Philly too, I think I'm a little more for the 3D.

On Saturday we got there around 10:15 in the morning, lingered over lunch on the grounds, and were still on our way home by 2:15. We both said we'd go back and just hang out on the grounds on a nicer day. There are two cafes and a restaurant for sustenance.

We started inside in the gallery attached to the Welcome Center. There were three buildings open, but most of our time was spent outside.
Inside was nice and all, but my favorite was outside. The grounds themselves are like something out of a storybook.
My favorite were the huge sculptures.
But I liked the smaller ones too.
I think what I liked best was tromping around outside just happening upon things. It felt a lot like being in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Lunch at Rat's Restaurant on the grounds was very good and relaxing, as was the walk up to it. It's accessible whether you're visiting the Grounds or not. If you go, make a reservation.
Admission was $10 per adult - I bought tickets online before. They're timed entry. They're open Tuesday through Sunday (special opening this Monday for President's Day) from 10-6.

If you're close, go! It was great to be outside walking around, we got our workout in for the day. Debbie even more so as she had to run back to retrieve her purse from the cafe, which we laughed about for an eternity. Perfect place to visit with a friend, a spouse, hell, the whole family.

Have a great weekend! Hey, it's going to be 60 in the Philly area...perfect weather to visit Grounds for Sculpture.


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