California winter days

Me in Santa Monica at Will Rogers State Park. Copyright Paige LaCombe Photography
Paige and I spent yesterday together, and we went to visit our friend Dana who lives in Topanga Canyon. First though we stopped by Intelligentsia, a coffee shop on Sunset Blvd. A random person took this one with my cell phone.
Next to Intelligentsia there is this graffiti mural wall that says I never hated anyone. We loved it. Next we stopped at a great foodie restaurant - True Food Restaurant - in Santa Monica where we met up with Dana! It was a beautiful day and we sat outside on the patio and took photos and Dana and I exchanged our respective turquoise necklaces because it was Monday, the "day of giving and receiving" according to the 7 Laws of Success by Deepak Choptra!This is a self-portrait of me and Paige at the beach in Santa Monica using Paige's awesome new Canon Mark 2! She is starting a photography business and is really excited about it! (Copyright (c) 2011 Paige LaCombe)This is a phone photo I took of the beach. We just sat and listened to the waves for a while. I meditated both with my eyes closed, and open watching the sparkles of the afternoon sun dance on the indigo waves. I had the most peaceful feeling that things were exactly right in the universe at this moment in time.
Next we went to Dana and Ron's house in Topanga Canyon for dinner. I love the meditation room Dana designed there - isn't it cool?
Dana's 13-year old daughter Rachel Riley played guitar and sang for us - wow! She is an incredibly talented young lady! Check out her Youtube channel - it even has original songs. I would say I thought it was even more powerful in person though! Dana made us an amazingly delish dinner, and we played "20 questions" and it was a lot of fun. Then we headed back home (to Eagle Rock)
Renata, Paige, Kim and me hanging out at Paige & Renata's place!

Occupy friendships... and Houston

For Daline's 40th birthday, she came up with idea to light a candle and eat something sweet to celebrate in our mind something sweet we have in our lives "right now" - not something we hope for, not something in our past. The thing I had at that time isn't in my life anymore though. Just when I think I am so strong and confident and happy, my emotions fail me. But just like winter is a rebirth, may this time be so for me.

God, winter is so beautiful and the wintry portions of my life are those which often give birth to a deeper understanding of who you created me to be, O God. Give me time to explore, to reach out, to find that ripple of hope within my soul. Amen.
- Penny Tressler

Today is turning out to be a very crappy day! I woke up so excited to spend the afternoon and evening with my daughter. We had scheduled to do two massages at the same time at this place downtown (I used a Groupon type deal) - it was for her birthday present. Then we were going to return to Ruggles since we had that restaurant fail last time we went, and they gave us our food free, and so I still had the voucher for there too. But so I called to confirm the appointments, and thank God I did because not only did they have the time wrong, they only had one not two scheduled. And the other masseuse was on vacation. Nice. Also, all this other stupid crap is happening. I have this one story I'm trying to get published and I got all these questions from an editor but no real idea what I'm really supposed to be doing with it and none of my sources can be reached because of the holidays. My cell phone isn't charging properly and it's annoying (Fortunately they're mailing me a new one tomorrow). And me and my daughter decided we're just going to do our outing another day. Sometimes I just hate being a single mom... I love being a mom, I love it more than anything. But I hate being broke, I hate struggling and I hate being alone. I never used to, but I do now. It sucks. Sorry if that's a little too real. But that's the way it goes. I have known Daline since about 1990 when we were in college - at Texas A&M - Whoop! We met when we drove together to a beach cleanup on Matagorda Island, and have been friends since. She knew me before I had met my now exhusband (and father of my 2 children), and she held my baby girl Savannah when she was little before I had moved away from College Station. After our respective divorces, we went to the Bahamas together near Christmas (2004 or 05) to "skip" it altogether and later traveled to the Peruvian Amazon together (memories of Peru and photo gallery). I visited her when she was anointed a lay Buddhist monk (boddhisattva) at Green Gulch Zen Center, and we have gotten together many other times. Over the years, near or far, we have shared so many conversations, and I love so much about her. She has introduced me to so very many concepts that have stimulated my personal development and spiritual and emotional growth such as codependency and the Work of Byron Katie - and I have such deep admiration with the bravery with which Daline approaches life, the loyalty she has to friends and family, and her beautiful soulful singing voice and her desire to follow her dreams, wherever they may lead. I spent her 40th with her, and here are some shots from the day.
She had some friends come to the park near the Menil, and we munched and some played drums and we just hung out for a while. Artist Sharon Engelstein and her daughter, Daline, and me.
Next we went to Occupy Houston to give FREE HUGS and do "random acts of dance" (I have to admit I didn't really do the dance thing, except for one song...). This is Capital Tatts wearing his Guy Fawkes face mask. This is Jamin - he showed me around. I was surprised at how few people there were there (a lot of people come and go, and it was a Sunday), but also surprised at how organized they were. They had a permanent camp set up, they were serving food to protestors and they had beds (no tents, because that would be "illegal"), and they had signs with upcoming protests. Every night at 7pm they have a meeting to discuss things - participatory democracy. Everyone was super nice and I thought it was great. Perhaps I will come up with a story idea about it - not totally in my domain, but you never know. They even publish a newspaper! This is where they sleep. A lot of homeless people come here to sleep also, and they feed them too.Declaration of Occupation: Exercise your right to peaceably assemble, occupy public space, create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone. Signs with upcoming events, information, etc. Bill of Rights: We are not camping. We are assembling peaceably to petition our Government for a redress of grievances. This is our permit.
Afterwards we headed to Bohemeo's cafe where they had an open mic night and Daline got up and sang a couple songs. It was the first time I have seen her perform! I have heard her play for me, and love her music. It was so cool to see her play, especially knowing that when I started this blog, she went out and did an open mic night for the first time ever, and she was so scared she almost threw up she says!Oh my GOD they stole my idea!!!! This was painted in the bathroom. Where else would they have gotten this idea from - really? I asked when they opened and they said 2006 I think, which was after I started my blog but maybe before I changed the layout. Anyway, who knows when they put this up... but I seriously think they stole the idea from me after searching bohemian on the internet... I know my blog comes up high in search rankings... It's slightly different of course but has a LOT of the same definitions, which I found randomly all over the internets (It is right under my header on my blog...go look and compare!)Ivan, Daline, Mary, I can't remember the other dude's name but he came with Mary, and me in the back. And after hearing her play, I went home because I didn't want to be out late. Lame right! But hey I'm not a party animal anymore! Rawr!

Chillin in L.A.

Open door on Thorne Hall, Occidental College in Los Angeles. President Obama went here for a couple years.A shot of Thorne Hall from the outside. A lot of concerts and presentations are held here.
Another building at Occidental or "Oxy" as they call it. A terrible photo taken by a phone but I just wanted to present a couple snapshots from the day yesterday. We hung out by Paige's gorgeous pool! Savannah and Dana's daughter discovered some blackberries in the yard.The original Charlie's Angels - ha ha! Me, Dana and Paige.

Pepperdine, Point Dume and great friends!

We arrived in Los Angeles around noon Thursday and went straight to Pepperdine University, a private Christian college in Malibu overlooking the ocean - wow! Gorgeous campus. This is the chapel. The blue in the background in this photo is the ocean!
This is a view of the stained glass inside the chapel. I didn't get many other photos of campus but it was really beautiful. Paige is a teacher and when she taught high school she took some of her kids to look at this and other colleges so she gave us a tour and told us about the campus since we didn't have a formal tour set up. We visited the library, the chapel, the student center and ate lunch in the cafeteria. Savannah loved the college.

Next we drove a couple miles to Point Dume, which is where they filmed part of Ironman (his house was CGId onto Point Dume). This is Lu, Sam, Savannah and Raleigh.
My friend Paige!At the edge of the sandy beach there were some rocks and though the tide was up and we couldn't see any tide pools, we climbed over the rocks to another beach around the corner.
The lava rocks were sharp! We went back and got our flipflops...
The water was a beautiful emerald/blue color. We even saw a couple of harbor seals on the rock that is teeny tiny in this picture. Paige saw some dolphins playing in the waves.
And this is the beach around the rocks.
Savannah taking photos as usual! :)
They were even filming a commercial. The one guy kept yelling out "Rolling - quiet!" which I found very annoying when my son started climbing off on the rocks and it was windy and he couldn't hear me tell him to not go off too far... I was like, forget you dude, my kid is more important than your dumb commercial!
At the end of the day, we headed back and had a few friends over for dinner. This is Dana and Paige!
And this is Bruce and Paige. Love all those gorgeous orchids in the window! Their house is amazing - love it. It was an overall great first day in Cali! I am so grateful to my friends who I love so much.

Tomorrow my kids and I are heading to Universal Studios and meeting up with my second cousin Daria and her two kids. I haven't been there since I was a kid so I'm excited to get back and see what it is like now.

Birthday celebrations!

This picture absolutely melts my heart. Ever since I moved to Houston in 1997 (holy moly that's a long time ago) I have taken the kids to Moorhead's Blueberry Farm every summer and we have picked them and eaten as many as we could from the bush and taken the rest home. This is actually the 2nd year of picking - 1999 - or gosh maybe it was even 2000. Look at my beautiful babies! They are teenagers now! We went there a couple weeks ago and I now have a freezer full of blueberries (as well as fresh blueberry crisp, blueberries & cream cupcakes and fruit salads already baked/made and consumed). I didn't get pics of the kids because they were inside the bushes (see below) and it was hard to get a photo with the lighting. But I have blueberry pickin' pics and stories from 2009 - Yer Face, 2007 - blueberries and Gawad Kalinga, and 2005 - blueberries, kids and the hippie generation.
My friend Elise is inside the blueberry bush! Elise is the President of Astrodome Studios - aiming to turn the architectural wonder that is the Astrodome into a film studio.
This is this year's crop we picked! Well this is my bucket and Elise's I think - my kids had two smaller buckets also. Notice she picked the unripe red ones because she's a newbie... ha ha. I gave her a hard time.
And here's a photo of the blueberries & cream gluten-free cupcakes I baked. I found this recipe at Elena's Pantry blog. It seemed like a lot of oil to flour... I didn't use coconut flour but instead used rice flour and coconut oil instead of grapeseed oil. I made a couple of batches and the first batch I used all coconut oil (1/2 cup as it says) but coconut oil is sort of solid-like at room temp so I think it ended up being more volume of oil than the recipe should have had and they were pretty greasy albeit delicious and coconutty! The second time I used less oil overall and a bit of butter and a bit of coconut oil. Those were not as tasty but still good, especially once topped with (organic) whipping cream and blueberries. Anyway it was a fun experiment. I saw some coconut oil at the store the other day but it was expensive and seemed high in fat content for flour. Anyway the cupcakes were for...drum roll please...
... a birthday celebration! Mine! And my good friend Elise! We are Moonchildren, Cancerians, water babies... children of July! I hosted an I Dont Want to Grow Up party at my house for us! A great excuse to get my favorite girl-power people together! This is Eileen, Lynn, me, Trish and Georgia!
Forgive the photo quality - some of these, this one included, were taken from my phone. This is me, Jessica (who owns Joyfolie - adorable baby shoes and soon-to-be-adult shoes) and Georgia.
Another pic of us girls, with Jessica at the right end this time!
Talking, laughing and eating! Do you like my pink knit cap? I got it at a thrift store in Oregon!
Some of the things I made for the party -counterclockwise from left - roasted veggies (onions, peppers, blue potatoes, carrots with olive oil), coconut-mango salsa with chips, blueberry crisp, white bean pesto salad (I sort of made up the recipe), and toasted quinoa, corn & avocado salad (OMG I am now obsessed with toasted quinoa - it is soooooo freaking delicious!) I will post the recipe soon along with another good one - fennel-white bean soup.
My sister from another mother is making the face I have made since I was a wee one!
Oh and I should add that part of the "I don't want to grow up" party theme was to pop bubble wrap!
Hanging around the kitchen table! My lovely friend Stef is in this pic too - sitting on the left by Eileen - and Mary is next to Elise.
Elise, me and Georgia. I was standing up tall to make myself taller than Elise who had super high heels on! Later in the evening we played the game "things" which is super fun (my friend Nikki introduced me when I was visiting her in Dallas) and it's similar to Balderdash, if you've ever played that.
Beebopping in the kitchen! Eileen, Lynn and I.
Create a mug! I bought one of these for each of the birthday girls for the past couple months - me, Elise, Lynn and Eileen & had everyone sign and then you bake them in the oven to make it permanent. They're at Starbuck's if you want your own! :)
Lynn at Tammy's 4th of July/Eileen's surprise party Monday. I love this photo of her! It's a bit fuzzy and dark because it's a phone pic but still...that is Lake Houston in the background and you can tell how dry it has been here because there is normally not a "beach" at all!! That is due to the extremely low water.
Elise & I at Tammy's on the 4th of July. And with that, I bid adieu! I love my friends soooo much!