Friday Five Mid Lent Crisis

Sophia said "A pastor of my grad school parish once gave a fascinating reflection, at about this mid-point in the season, called "How to Survive the Mid-Lent Crisis"! As I recall, his main point was that by halfway through the season we have often found it very challenging to live up to our original plans....But, he suggested--on the analogy of the healing and reframing of our life plans that can happen during a mid-*life* crisis--that that can be even more fruitful.

So here's an invitation to check in on the state of your spirit midway through "this joyful season where we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart renewed" (Roman Missal). Hopefully there's a good deal of grace, and not too much crisis, in your mid-Lenten experience!"

1. Did you give up, or take on, anything special for Lent this year?
Well, since I just got back from a fabulous cruise I guess you know the answer to this. Actually, March is the end of our Fiscal Year at work, so work is particularly hectic as we prove to our overseers at the Federal Government that we are training, placing and keeping in employment for 90 days individuals with disabilities, by closing cases in large numbers. This is a bi-yearly event-March and September, State and Federal. The worker bees are tracking down lost clients and recording the information. It's bad this year as many people are having trouble finding and keeping work, and people with disabilities are usually at the bottom of the barrel.

2. Have you been able to stay with your original plans, or has life gotten in the way?
Life always gets in the way.

3. Has God had any surprising blessings for you during this Lent?
Not yet. Still waiting...

4. What is on your inner and/or outer agenda for the remainder of Lent and Holy Week?
Well, we just made our Passover plans, and I just made my Good Friday plans.

5. Where do you most long to see resurrection, in your life and/or in the world, this Easter?
Beloved and I are in couples therapy to deal with our "lack of space issue." I hope to see some resolution here that won't break the bank or put us too far outside of the city.

My Olivia Experience-Part !

IGuana be your friend!

When I was a young lesbian in the early 70's, I walked into Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore-just closed last week due to the economy-then owned by founder Craig Rodwell. In those days he didn't have many books to sell, so I knew most of his stock, but I visited often because I liked him and I was always hopeful that there would be something new. That day there was a record album. It was by Meg Christian. Who's this? I bought it and took it home and it was a lesbian singing songs about lesbians, mostly folk songs and one very funny song about being in love with her gym teacher. This was the first record that the Olivia Collective put out. They made a lot of records after that. Chris Williamson's "The Changer and the Change," was my personal favorite. I can't remember them all. Later on someone mentioned to Judy Dlugacz, a member of the collective that was dissolving by that time, that it would be nice to be able to take a vacation with just women. With that suggestion, Olivia Cruises was born.

We just returned from our second cruise. Judy charters Holland America ships, resorts, or river barges and markets to the lesbian community, though we had mothers and daughters and sisters and several straight couples on our trip. The entertainment, Arianna Huffington, Kate Clinton, Vicki Shaw, Renee Hicks etc is always fabulous, the parties are well done. What's different is that everyone is friendly. We traveled as a couple, but always had people to dine with, to talk to. We met people from all corners of America, Israel, Canada, Great Britain. We heard the most amazing stories, great and hair raising. One couple from Missouri told us about being in a Barnes and Noble-they were not 'obvious' in any way. They were confronted by a group of girls who told them to just stop being lesbians. It was not Gods way!  They were not wanted around here. Shocking stories!

Out of 1800 women I ran into one woman I knew in the early 70's in New York. She moved to Canada to be an architect and is now retired in Florida. I also ran into someone I used to work with at a volunteer counseling center in the early 90's. We'll stay in touch. We made some great new friends, too.

All in all it was a wonderful vacation. I'm sorry to be back. I want to go again!

Hasty Pudding Friday Five

Today I'm doing this Friday Five somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, so if you never hear from me again... Also, when I do spell check, everything is wrong, because the spellchecker is checking for Dutch words. Sign in is Anmelden, Password is Nutzernamei, and keep me signed in is MERKEN (look that one up!)
I also cannot do a cut and paste so as I can remember this is all about puddings:
1. I love, love, love puddings. I have been eating too much of the Holland America Bread Pudding with hard sauce which is not hard, but soft and creamy and served warm. That's what I had for lunch yesterday-all of lunch.
2.Instant or cooked. Cooked of course. On a cold day-when I am alone, as Beloved would not approve, I cook up some Royal Pudding and eat at least one bowl right from the pan, still quite warm. My mother would add an egg yolk and you have to be careful but that really makes it better.
3. Neither. Tried corn pudding and I love corn and pudding but together, yucky. and Figgy? Fuggetaboutit!
4.Fingerpainted with it? Maybe as a very young child. But now I know what to do with pudding.
5 Mary Jane was upset that there were no raisins in her rice pudding. Very upsetting!
Holland America, Olivia Recipe for Bread Pudding to come in the next week if I don't loose it.
The 1800 lesbians of this fabulous ship say hello!

1,800 of My Closest Friends

We've been on our Olivia Cruise since Sunday and today we docked in Turks and Caicos. Last night we saw Kate Clinton-so smart funny, the night before, Arianne Huffington, so insighful. We've met some lovely women.
Puerto Rico tomorrow.
I wish you all were here!
Pictures when we return.

Friday Five Fork in the Road

"I am at a life-changing juncture. I do not know which way I will go, but I have been thinking about the times, people and events that changed my life (for good or ill) in significant ways. For today's Friday Five, share with us five "fork-in-the-road" events, or persons, or choices. And how did life change after these forks in the road?"

What an interesting topic! I am on vacation and this will be a FF on Sunday. We are about to board a cruise to the Caribbean, momentarily and I'm blogging from the hotel!
So five live changing forks in the road:
1. I lived. My fathers first wife died having an abortion and he wanted my mother to have one too. She didn't. This was before they were legal.
2. I lived again. When I was about 6, I was hospitalized for bleeding from the kidneys which was undiagnosed. It resolved itself, without help from the doctors.
3. A friend offered to take me to an Al Anon meeting and there was an AA meeting down the hall. I said "I think I belong there." That was over 21 years ago. I lived again.
4. I was working in summer stock in Ohio and a scenic designer called from NY called to say, "Come to New York, darling, I have a job for you." I did.
4. I took a job at NOW. I met Beloved.
So hows that for forks in the road?
Must go repack for the cruise.

Book Meme

From Rev. Dr. Mom:

Rev. Dr. Mom said: "Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here."
Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
(my addition - by the ones I detested)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+++
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily BronteX+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkienx
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X +
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving x (I've real all of Irving!)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons x+
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens +
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plathn X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ?
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X (in French!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

(When I was a sick teen, a nazi nun sent a book list home of what I considered books 'too young for me' I was in about 11th grade. I read them, but I didn't like it and can't remember most of them. There may be a few on this list. She really was hateful. I was bored and sick and really liked to read, and these were pre-YA books. Bla!)

I came up with 35. (although it was really hard to count the little x's)  Who came up with this list? And they misspelled Sylvia Plath! Some of these books were required reading when I was in High School. And I can think of a lot of books that should be here.

In Case you haven't heard, The Racist New York Post Cartoon

Friday Five Taking a Break

Songbird posted this FF:
Where we live, it's February School Vacation Week!

Yes, that's an odd thing, a vacation extending President's Day. But it's part of our lives here. Some people go South or go skiing, but we always stay home and find more humble amusements.

In that spirit, I offer this Taking a Break Friday Five. Tell us how you would spend:

1. a 15 minute break

Under our union contract we get 2 15 minute breaks per day, however I've never in memory taken them. When I have a minute I play a game of solitare on the computer...then someone appears at the door and I quickly have to minimize it!
2. an afternoon off

This is rare, but maybe a meeting will end early and I'll be done an hour or two early. If I'm in the city and near the Manhattan office  I may stop at Macys or Jacks (the Bloomingdales of 99c  stores!) Or I may go home and take a nap.
3. an unexpected free day

Hooray! This never happens, btw. Although I have every other Monday off, I have to work longer hours to get this, it's planned. I will probably go to the Strand, the best huge used bookstore and browse, and buy. Then I'll take myself to lunch at a favorite place like Doma-where you pick up your delicious Florentine Tomato Soup at the counter, then share a table with all the slackers with computers. I usually have the Times or a magazine or one of those books I just bought. Then maybe swimming?
4. a week's vacation

Now that you asked, we're about to leave for a week with the ladies of Olivia Travel. This is a lesbian travel company that specializes in cruises and we're going to the Caribbean. We've been once before, but this time we're going for a week. It will be on one of the Holland American ships and onboard will be Kate Clinton, Arianna Huffington,  Vickie Shaw and others that I haven't heard of.
5. a sabbatical-Wow, someone tell the NYSED that counselors need these, too! I'd live in Europe for a while. Maybe Italy or somewhere nice. I'd blog and tell you all about it!

Not So Cozy Soup and Burger

On my day off yesterday, one of my tasks was to get a hair cut at my favorite, Dominic at Astor Haircutters. I was running late so that when I missed my bus connection, I took a cab down Broadway. At about 9th street, Broadway was completely  blocked off with yellow police tape. It was about a two block walk so I got out and walked. The police let me through the empty streets. I thought,"Oh my God, Astor Place has burned down and I'll never find another Dominic!" But, no, Dom was there and there was business as usual. When I got in the chair I asked what had happened. It seems that the Cozy Soup and Burger-really excellent burgers-had a shooting at 5:00 am. No one dead, just critical, so far. It was an argument. I didn't go there for lunch as planned...

A Valentine from the Empire State Pride Agenda-Lovely

I think I'll buy this from the I Tunes, but the visual is so much a part of it!