I'll take the high road and you take the low road

Today:
Shopping in Oban, in mist and overcast skies. This is what we thought the whole week might be like. But it wasn't!

Then more driving through more beautiful countryside on more winding roads past more shimmering lochs stopping at more scenic overlooks and having more tasty food cooked and served by more friendly people speaking in more delightful accents.

That about sums things up.

This is Loch Lomond.

Tonight we are in Glasgow, which is very much more "modern" than anywhere else we've been. We got the lay of the land with an early evening walk and dinner. Tomorrow we'll see what we can see in 8 hours, then it's on to the airport hotel in Edinburgh.

I'm on a boat

Not now, but earlier today we took the ferry from Skye back to the mainland. Then we drove to Ben Nevis, the tallest moumtain in Scotland. We took the cable car up, and on the way I realized I'd left the iPod in the car. So, sorry, no picture from there.
Tonight we are in Oban, and tomorrow we'll head to Glasgow.
There have been too many sights snd experiences to include here. I'm not even reporting on the highlights, just on the one thing a day for which I have a photo and a snappy title.
In answer to the question of how clooty the dumpling was: I've now had it twice! It's a moist fruitcake, made with molasses (treacle is what they call it here) and served with either custard or cream.
Equally yummy is sticky toffee pudding, which is a butterscotch cake, also served with cream.
Wait, is toffee butterscotch? Hey! Butter-SCOTCH!

E pluribus unum

Another perfect day

Eureka!

And I found it and ate it in a tea house
in the town of Uig on the Isle of Skye.

Wifi has been too hard to come by and typing on this keyboard too tedious to do justice to the experience.

I'll just post a couple of photos with no commentary.

Arthur's Sea

That's an intentional typo. It's really Arthur's Seat, an 820-ft (meters be damned) hill adjacent to Holyrood Park. And I climbed it! Up steep inclines and over craggy rocks!
Almost!
I got to within spitting distance of the "summit" --without ever bursting into tears, let it be noted--and then decided that I didn't like it any more and decided the view from where I sat was just peachy. I was given many good-sport points from the point-giver, my Tenzing Norgay, who made it to the top in my name.
It provided a spectacular view from wherever you stood (or sat) and it was a good farewell event for our stay in Edinburgh. Tomorrow we start chanting "Drive on the left, drive on the left . . ."

Last night revelers of unknown origins reveled in a bar right below our hotel room window until nearly 4:00 am. I'm wary of a repeat tonight . . .

What movie had a scene set here?

This is the remains of the abbey at Holyroodhouse Palace. Which is where the queen stays when she is in Scotland, they said, though I thought she and the Corgis stay at Balmoral. Maybe that was Helen Mirren.
The ruins of the abbey was the best part. The palace itself is shabby chic, I guess. They seriously could use an extreme home makeover or Nate Berkus. No offense.
Taking a dinner break before posting the last installment.

Paparazzi shot

You'd have thought J. K. herself was there, seeing what a crowd there was just to take a photo of the window. So of course I did too.

I didn't take pictures of the main activities of the morning and mid-day: the National Museum of Scotland, then a walk around the neighborhood of the University of Edinburgh, and a jacket potato for lunch. Then we regrouped for our afternoon itinerary.

Paparazzi shot

You'd have thought J. K. herself was there, seeing what a crowd there was just to take a photo of the window. So of course I did too.

I didn't take pictures of the main activities of the morning and mid-day: the National Museum of Scotland, then a walk around the neighborhood of the University of Edinburgh, and a jacket potato for lunch. Then we regrouped for our afternoon itinerary.

They don't know it's lox

They call it smoked salmon. Fine. It was really delicious, served with scrambled eggs and buttered toast. And a pot of tea, of course.

Today in 5 snapshots

It was a picture perfect October first kind of day. Cool, crisp, sunny. This is St. Giles' Cathedral on the Royal Mile. We've walked along this section of the street many times . . . It's just a block from our hotel.
This morning we had breakfast nearby, sitting outdoors.
Coming up next, the requisite food photo.

When in Rome

I had a beer with dinner! (a fruity one)
Meh.
But everything else has been lovely.
I can't figure out how to enter more than one photo per post, so I'll have to do one comment per, like a real postcard.
About to to go back out for more walking around because it's 9:00pm, but it's still bright daylight!

Edinburgh Castle

Good thing I didn't see them on the wing of the plane! (Bridesmaids joke)

The first day felt like two days

First dinner: vegetarian haggis with neeps and tatties. I have a feeling that it being vegetarian took all the haggisness out of the equation.
Posting on this tiny keyboard is difficult and adding photos is hard to do too, so I'll keep the posts short.
The Scotsman (hotel) is lovely.
With about 12 hours of sleep to bouy us, we're off to sightsee.

Land of Tape and Broth

My heart will soon be in the Highlands. Along with the rest of my major organs, if all goes well.

I'm a tad nervous, I'll admit. I'll take this as evidence that I am stretching the stretching muscles, I guess, so it's all for a good cause.

So, I'm signing off until the next chapter from the land of kilts and bagpipes. Haggis and oatmeal.  Castles and whisky.

Oh, wait. One of the guidebooks has a list of Scottish Words and Phrases, and they claim these are in common, everyday usage, but advise visitors not to use them themselves, lest they be thought to be "showing off." Beyond the expected bonnie and wee, I like these two, which are food items:

champit tatties
clootie dumpling


I don't feel like telling you what they are. If I see either one on a menu, I'll report back.

If nobody hears from me for 100 years, you can assume I'm dancing with Gene Kelly.

Love, love,
Clootie Dumpling

The night before the day before

I'm not asleep.

I haven't had this kind of sleepless night in a while. I'm running through packing lists and don't-forget-to-do-before-I-leave lists in my head.

I can plan and pack for a weekend-in-New-York trip without a lot of thought. Same with a week-at-the-beach trip. It's a matter of repetition, obviously––the way you get good at most things. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? On the train, with a small suitcase packed with capris, black pants, a couple of tops, comfortable sandals, and a sweater for cool evenings. Oh, and practice.

Our recent weekend in New York was fun. Hot weather. A lot of walking.  We experienced the High Line, which is pretty much just walking, but a little bit closer to the sun, so just a tad hotter than walking on the streets.

I seem to have established a policy of not having any photos of myself  or any friend or relative on this blog. So here is a very boring photo from the High Line. I may have to consider amending my policy.

Other unpopulated sights from the weekend:

Wanna buy a bridge?

How about an island? $24.

Washington Square

There was a farmer's market in Union Square.

You know how in movies sometimes the female protagonist is some kind of soulful creative type who has a terribly quirky artistic niche, like constructing miniature furniture or photographing vegetables?  I could so do that! Look how photogenic they are! 

I guess I can let the haggis out of the bag and announce that we are going to Scotland. As if you didn't know. I will blog if I can, since there will likely be something interesting or, at the very least, scenic to report on. I can't guarantee that all the capabilities will be in place, but let's hope for the best.

Here's my tribute to Scottish literature: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I read the book and saw the movie back in my impressionable years, and yet the impression that remains is dim at best. Still, it strikes me that it could be perfect material to be made into a musical, don't you think?

Annie meets The History Boys!

Maybe I'll try to locate a copy tomorrow to take with me. Easier read than anything by Sir Walter Scott, methinks.

OH! P to the S:
Celebrities! In NYC I saw––gathered under one theatrical roof:
Tommy Tune
Susan Sarandon (yawn; already saw her once, a couple of years ago)
Al Pacino
Nicole Kidman

That is a good crop, if I do say so myself.
But New York is easy.
If I see a celebrity on the Isle of Skye, I'll plotz.

On the road

I'm heading out in a few hours––a trip to NYC for A&E, R&R––and therefore I'll be off duty until Sunday, at least.

How will you all manage?

I do admit that this blogging habit over the past three months has made me feel that it is my responsibility to share my daily personal revelations––however fleeting and infinitesimal in scope––with you, my little readership. I know my responsibility is only to myself, but that's the "mission" this project has begun to acquire.

I'm ready to apologize for my presumptuousness, but why should I? Henry Winkler wrote a book of reflections on life, family, and blah blah:

Kanye West wrote a book of "creative, humorous, and insightful philosophies and anecdotes used in creating his path to success."

Gwyneth Paltrow is happy enough to tell you how to live.


And so on . . . too many to count in this category. I'll let this one speak for them all.

A book I came back to this week that falls into the same category but is actually worth reading is Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea. I read it a few months ago for book group after having avoided it for years, thinking it was a Hallmark Card novelty book of affirmations or Christian aphorisms. It is not. I'm going to have to save my more detailed praise for it until another time, because the road awaits. 


To fully confess my own inflated feeling of self-importance when it comes to dispensing wisdom, I will end with this moment from Broadcast News, which is chock-full of quotable lines of dialogue. Seriously––go back and watch it, if you haven't seen it lately. 


So:
Paul Moore: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room. 
Jane Craig: No. It's awful. 

Have a good weekend, everyone! Try to muddle through! 

Jumping while lying down

I tried a new (to me) kind of Pilates class yesterday. It's called Cardio Jump Board, and it involves continuous jumping, with the feet and legs in various positions. But all while lying on the Reformer.

This is exactly the equipment I used.

Here's a taste of it. But I promise you we did it for 40 minutes of the 50 minute class.

You'd think it wouldn't really be that tiring, 'cause, after all, you're lying down the whole time. How bad could it be?

I'm here to testify: It was rough going.

Now, I want to glide into a nice bloggerific analogy based on this experience.  A Carrie Bradshaw-esque segue into a broader and more profound issue that I can then elaborate on for the rest of this episode. Er, column. Whatever.

"I couldn't help but wonder: Was my jumping getting me anywhere if I was doing it lying down?"

Unfortunately, I can't think of a pun to take us from "jump board" to the the topic I'm interested in right now. So inhale, scoop your abs, and now exhale as we jump to another topic altogether.

Two days ago, I went to a memorial tribute for someone I knew not at all. She was an artist––an animator, primarily––who was married to someone who went to my high school, who himself is really no more than an acquaintance to me. So for all practical purposes, I went to a memorial tribute for a stranger.

I found it to be a meaningful and moving experience. She was, by all accounts, and as made evident by the presence of more than 300 people at the event, a vibrant and well-loved woman. And what does one expect to hear in eulogies, if not that the deceased was wonderful, kind, smart, loving, full of life, talented, brave, funny?  But because I had no personal attachment to the woman who died, I was free to hear all that was said in more general terms.

I was going to tell the whole long story of how she and her husband met and how touching it was to hear about. But you can just imagine a touching story of how two people met as college students, and then were together for 36 years, and then the woman died at 56.

The point I thought I wanted to make was something about the life of an artist and something about life in general, and also about death. But now, two days later, it seems less urgent that I let you in on my little nugget of insight. You can go ahead and imagine that for yourself, too––can't you?––without me having to tell you. Something along these lines: Life is sweet, made sweeter by the fact that it ends.

I had some other thoughts, but they've turned spongy and slippery under my fingertips as I type, and I can't get a hold of them.  No big loss, I'm sure. If they were worth anything, they'll probably bob back up to the surface again, and I'll try to let them bake in the sun a bit next time, so that they can be held and turned over and examined.

So all in all, this was a particularly half-baked episode, but I'm not going to scrap it altogether, because look: I made a kind of a hat . . . sort of . . . where there never was a . . . you know . . . hat.*

*I was specifically asked by one very nice reader to explain things that might be obscure to people who aren't necessarily familiar with every single peculiar thing I might ever make reference to. So, to the others of you, those who don't like explanations, look away. And for anyone who would like an explanation, this is it: This is a paraphrase of a song lyric, from the Stephen Sondheim musical "Sunday in the Park with George," which describes the creative process. 

Inspire, aspire, perspire*

In my Facebook News Feed today. . .
(Is using the official Facebook terminology a sign of corporate brainwashing, like saying grande at Starbucks instead of medium?)

I used to make a point of refusing to say tall, etc., but now I think, "What exactly am I proving and to whom?" The baristas––I mean the cashiers––never blink or wince or correct me; it's all the same to them, and it ends up making ME feel like the dope, all high and mighty about ordering my iced decaf.

. . . was a link to a 5-minute video of highlights from the "She Roars" event of late April--my first "small adventure," as recorded in these pages.

How quickly the feeling came back to me! Just watching the slideshow of photos and hearing snippets of the addresses by President Tilghman, Justice Sotomayor, and Andrea Jung (CEO of Avon)––I got a fresh jolt of the feeling of inspiration that characterized those three days at Princeton. We women came to Princeton "born to lead, taught to soar"––I feel both aspects are debatable in my case, but I also realize that it's common to think of oneself as the exception to what seems to be the norm in this kind of high-achieving peer group––and being among them again for that weekend, the pervasive feeling of purpose and power rubbed off.

But then, as most things do, it faded. Seeing the video today reminded me of it.


Coincidentally, my commemorative "She Roars" scarf arrived in the mail this afternoon.

Very pleasing design and lovely silk.

I think I will keep the scarf in sight here, where it can serve as a physical reminder of the She Roars inspiration and my still-nebulous aspirations. (In Weight Watchers––and probably in behavior modification therapy, too, which is what WW is mostly based on––they call that an anchor: a physical object or other cue that you can associate with your goal and use to help remind you of it.)

Today's moral, then, is that it's good––necessary even, I'll venture––to keep being exposed to sources of inspiration, because one exposure––no matter how awesome and monumental and a-ha to the maxxx it feels––is not going to be enough. You get all pumped up and motivated from hearing the coach's pep talk, and that gets you through the first period/quarter/inning/heat/set, but then something goes not-quite-right and you lose your mojo, and everything goes to hell, and you're back on the bench/in the dugout/penalty box and you can't remember what was so inspiring, and is there any more buttercream frosting?

So: Inspiration needs to be applied repeatedly, like sunscreen.

Unless, I imagine, if God talks to you through a burning bush. That probably sticks with you.

Not a burning bush. But isn't it nice? Sparklers on the 4th!

*I thought I made this up. I mean, I DID make it up; it just so happens I'm not the ONLY person to have made it up. Inspire, aspire, perspire are what one blogger calls the "Three Spire's of Great Leadership" (sic on that apostrophe, by the way), another's idea of 3/5 of the "5 Spires of Leadership" (the others being conspire and transpire--what about expire?), the ad campaign for Summit Natural Drinking Water ("the official water of Philippine Olympic athletes"), and the brilliant idea of about 693,000 other geniuses like me.

Is it Tynwald Day again already?

Since I'm such a fan of marking off chunks of time that have a starting gate and a defined finish line, July 1––first day of the second half of the year––would have been a good starting-of-anything day.

Or, yesterday––first day of my new age––would have been, too.  (Not  my "new age,"  just my new "age.")

Or even today, first business day after the start of my new age.

But instead of re-starting any of my self-exploration/improvement/evolution projects full-speed-ahead, in earnest, this-time-I'm-REALLY-doing-it-ly, I watched the Casey Anthony verdict while eating leftover buttercream frosting by the spoonful, out of a Tupperware container into which I had also scooped some Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia FroYo.  (Room-temperature frosting mixed with cold ice cream is epic, by the way.  It's the Gilgamesh of flavor/texture combos.)

Why would a person do that?

This is a good thing to contemplate while feeling a little nauseated and logy, and that is where you find me. I'm going to see if Emerson has anything to say about it.

Here is the cake that yielded too much leftover frosting.

Delicious, but meh design-wise. An oft-repeated fall-back option.

Scenes from the parade:

Prize-winner. Very impressive.

This is more on par with the typical parade float. The steeple-hats were funny. They probably realized they looked like they were serving in the Kaiser's Army, right? Probably.

There was more than one ersatz Stanley Cup. This was the biggest.

See, every year this guy dresses up as . . .oh,  never mind. 

Everyone agreed, it was an excellent parade.


And now, today being Tynwald Day,  it's an excellent time to rededicate myself to my reading/writing/box-sorting goals.
So let it be written, so let it be done. 

Also, no more sentimental posts. I'll put any such thoughts in my private Hello Kitty diary instead. With the key that locks.

Keep out!!! This means YOU!!!

But I actually had/have this one.

Happy Tynwald Day!!!!!

Reflections on making my own birthday cake

The first thing I want to state right off the bat is that my husband offered––REPEATEDLY––to be the provider of my birthday cake (theoretically, even by baking it himself) so that I wouldn't have to be the one to make it.  

This could have been mine. Perhaps I chose poorly. . . 

But I wanted to make it, for a number of reasons. One of them being that I could have a jumping-off point for these reflections. 

(Everything is copy, as Nora Ephron's mother supposedly told her.)

The second thing I have to get out on the table is that while the writing on this blog started out snappy and light-hearted, it has devolved into murkier regions that could be considered navel-gazing (maybe core-gazing, in this case), though hopefully not all the way into self-pity or maudlin sentimentality.

Well, put on your mukluks: It may get a little mushy underfoot tonight.

A while back I proposed that the Weight Watchers maxim that nothing tastes as good as thin feels isn't correct. 

Another premise of a healthy eating philosophy is that food isn't love.

Again, I have to disagree.

My mother did a lot of baking. She cooked too, of course, but it was the baking that was her forte––or maybe it was just that eating the baked goods was my forte. Sweet rolls, cookies, brownies, raisin breads, challahs, cakes of all kinds––but birthday cakes were the pieces de resistance. The reason I make themed birthday cakes for my family is because she did. Hers were better––more creative, more elaborate, better executed. It's not a competition––I don't mean it that way. I'm just letting you know the facts, because you didn't see all of her cakes. 

I do have some photos, so here's one to prove my point. 

She PAINTED with the frosting.

But the enjoyment of and pleasure in birthday cake–baking got passed down, along with some of the talent. 

She wasn't up to baking my cake the last several years. At least twice, my sweet daughter did the baking, at her grandmother's bidding and with some phone consultation between them, I think; and I believe I've made my own cake a couple of other times in my adulthood, when geography was an issue. So, it's not an "Oh, poor me" thing at all. It's really fine.

The other thing I want to say about baking and my mother is this. And to be honest, I wrote some of this a while ago, at the time that it happened:

My mother never threw away anything sweet. It was one of her superstitions. There were several more that had to do with not throwing things away. When I cleaned out her apartment, I found a stack of old calendars in the closet––used and unused––because she would not discard them, and dozens of empty compacts (Revlon Love Pat, if you want to know) because they contained mirrors and she couldn't risk them breaking, I guess. And anything sweet had to be either consumed or stored indefinitely. 

Because she had stopped baking a few years ago, there was a large glass container holding nearly a full five pounds of sugar in her kitchen cabinet. As I cleaned out the kitchen, I left the container of sugar until near the end. It wasn't among the objects that had to be wrapped up in newspaper to remain buried in a carton in my garage for who knows how long.  So, in one of my last trips, I tucked the glass container in the crook of my arm and brought it home, to my kitchen.

And then, as I made Passover desserts a month later, I used her sugar. As I did today, in my birthday cake. And what it felt like was that I was sprinkling some of her sweet, magical, don't-ever-throw-it-away essence––yes, like ashes––into me and my family. 

Some mourners spread ashes into the ocean, or in a garden, or on a mountaintop, because that was what had special meaning for their loved one. But this is what is fitting for my mother––baker of comfort and celebration and love.

Food isn't love? You can't expect me to believe that, can you?