You gotta have friends…

I spent last weekend in Massachusetts with friends…Friday night was a get-together of some of my theater group friends…the rest of the weekend, ending finally mid-morning Monday, was spent with a group of my girlfriends…we talked, we drank, we laughed, we played Bananagrams and Blokus, we shopped and cooked, we went to a Zumba class, we watched all 12 episodes of the first season of Homeland and both football games…whew! What a nourishing, reinvigorating, nurturing few days…wish it could happen more often, but life is life.

This all got me thinking about friends. I grew up in a pretty rural area in Southern California, surrounded by apricot orchards and farms. There were only two elementary schools in town and I went to half of kindergarten, first, second and third grade in one of them, and half of kindergarten, fourth, fifth and sixth grade at the other…this meant that I knew almost everyone in my little junior and senior high schools. I was never in one group or clique…I had friends in most groups, especially those active in drama and musical theater. After high school, I moved away and never came back…I’ve spent most of my life since on the opposite coast. Of course, when I say the opposite coast, I mean up and down the East Coast. Friends here, friends there…some close by, some very far away. Then, along comes Facebook and blogging, which open up my world to old friends and memories…I will never see most of these people again, but that doesn’t diminish their places in my life.

So, I give thanks to all the friends in my life…each of you has made memories that I hold dear…don’t know what I’d do without you.

In my refrigerator…

I am going to spend the weekend “off the grid”…spending time with friends and I want to enjoy every moment fully.

Our refrigerator has been brimming with leftovers, which we are managing to eat our way through…leaving some behind for hus, the leftover-eating prince (the two kings of leftover-eating are my other dad, Michael, and my bro-in-law, Terry…they are worth paying to see as they eat their way through a refrigerator!)…I know hus will take advantage and cook for himself things my plain palate can’t tolerate…our leftovers are:  An amazing pot roast with sweet potatoes, potatoes, onions and carrots; lentil stew with onions, carrots, spices and, late, a boneless, skinless chicken breast which simmered in the crockpot with the lentils; spaghetti and home-ground hamburger and sweet Italian sausage meatballs; and pea soup with ham…yum! I love cooking in the winter.

I realized this morning that I haven’t showed off my favorite puppy lately…oops! He went to the groomer a couple of weeks ago and they blew out his curls! He looked like a show dog with soft hair sticking straight up…it has taken all this time to get him back to looking almost normal.

I should be back online next week and will catch up with all my favorite bloggers and friends…stay safe and warm!

Another amazing winter sunrise…

What a morning! 7 degrees F again, the deck sparkles with frost, sea smoke rises from the Atlantic…

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Oh, what a beautiful and very cold morning…

So much for complaining about the lack of winter weather…I was talking more along the lines of snow…lots and lots of snow, on occasion…I really hadn’t wanted (or asked for) single digit temperatures (1 degree F from 6:30am…now, at 8:30am, it is a whopping 5 degrees). It is so cold, I am wearing socks…that says something! I am going to be pinning (on Pinterest) ideas for window treatments which help insulate and filter light, but are also unobtrusive. Any blogs other than Young House Love that I should check out for inspiration?

That said, you should see what I see out my back door…there is no way to successfully convey the magic…it reminds me of looking down from an airplane window at the wisps of clouds between you and the earth below…only this time, I am looking out at wisps of mist wafting off the ocean…just plain awesome…

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2011 in blog posts…

Don’t know if this type of thing interests you or not, but here are the 2011 statistics that WordPress very kindly put together for me, with respect to my blog, StarStruk by Life. I plan to keep on writing and sharing and hope that I meet new folks along the way…here’s to 2012!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Glorious shades of gray…

When the sun finally started to rise this morning, I made my familiar trek out to the deck to photograph the day.  This morning, 26 degrees F! I was, as usual, barefoot, but I did put on a jacket.

But then, I just couldn’t stop watching…the sky just started glowing and changing…here’s a bit of what I saw in the space of just a few minutes…

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So many shades of gray…and not one of them alike!

Here comes a storm…

They were calling for snow flurries for later today…now I hear it may be just rain.  Whatever is coming, it is on its way…

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Glad I don’t have far to go today…

Oh, what a night…

OK, here goes another December weather rant.  Puppy and I went to bed last night to the sighing sounds of the surf.  We slept pretty soundly until somewhere just after midnight, when the howl of the wind, crash of the waves on the rocks below our house and bang! of small objects hurled against the house.  Boo barked and ran circles around the room, begging to be let out to fight the noisy monster. I let him out and he conducted a thorough examination of the yard…all the snow was gone and twigs and branches were strewn about, but he could not, for the life of him, find the monster. So, we came back in and attempted to settle back down…no luck…first the power went out (causing lots of tweets and peeps from electrical devices around the house), then it came back on to more tweets and peeps. This precipitated another trip outside, still to no avail. All in all, he went out four times between midnight and 4am…then, finally, he was able to fall asleep curled into my legs…wouldn’t want that howling monster to break in and blow me away!

This morning, the wind has subsided a bit, but the waves are still crashing and it is 51 DEGREES FARHENHEIT outside! AT THE VERY END OF DECEMBER!!! Here’s a glimpse…

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The good news is that the snow is gone, so I can take the lights off our outdoor tree without falling down the cliff!  I will miss my rainbow tree and can’t wait to make it even more magnificent next year…

Blog, blog, blog…

As I was doing laundry yesterday, I turned on a movie to watch as I folded…Motherhood, I think it was called, with Uma Thurman…she played a writer whose career was put on hold by mother- and wifehood…she blogged as an outlet, joining the wide world of Mommy Bloggers. I actually enjoyed parts of the movie that I could TOTALLY relate to (without giving too much away, the fact that she let a stranger help her carry things up the many stairs to her apartment and the fact that he then helped her decorate for her daughter’s birthday party while dancing wildly; then there was the scene with her husband where she broke down about how much her life had changed since kids and how her dreams and aspirations were ebbing away)…

But the movie got me thinking. There are so many bloggers out there.  I started my blog of 4 plus years after reading my daughter’s blog and those of her friends…the Healthy Living bloggers, I called them…foodies and marathoners and dancers.  I then branched out and picked up various blogs to follow which tickled my soul and enriched my life.

What kind of blogger do I consider myself to be?  Hmmm…I love my grown and gone children and their families and my greatly enhanced and extended family, I am (or was) a community theater actor, singer and director, I love to cook, garden and take photos of pretty things…I love my dog, my cats, my in-laws and, most of the time, my life.  So, I’m a daily life blogger?  A family life blogger?  A “my life” blogger? And then I started taking pictures which I couldn’t stop myself from sharing, making some days’ blog posts extremely photo heavy. I just can’t seem to label myself…

What kind of blogger are you?

We’re not alone here…

On our walk yesterday, we were greeted with day old snow…I immediately noticed the pattern of Boo’s footsteps as he raced ahead.  But then I started noticing footprints that belonged to no one we know…for elimination purposes, the top photos are ours, the rest seem to belong to birds, squirrels and other woodsy creatures we rarely see…

Hus and me

Boo!

Bird and ?

A veritable potpourri of prints

Raccoon?

Name that print!

Squirrel? Rabbit?