brightness in the gloom

A friend sent us orchids for our anniversary and so far we have not
destroyed them. It's still raining, but since I don't have to worry
about work, I'm feeling cheerful and almost mellow. True mellow
usually starts on Day #3. (By the way, that is the flash reflection
above, not some amazing moon or sun apparition.)

Today we are having lunch with The Great Plotniks and tonight
we hit the theater. In between ~ library, banks, errands, etc. Oh,
maybe a nap. Just maybe...

a true rain storm

With loud thunder, bright lightening and lots of rain. Floods today,
that's for sure. This is my last work day of the week and then I'm
taking 4 (four, IV, 3 plus one) off for some catch-up me-time and to
celebrate the b.day of Husbando. I'm in that tired-of-work stage and
felt short-tempered and snappish with customers and fellow workers
yesterday. I'm paid to inspire others, not to snap at them. We had
technical cash register problems in the morning at the DY and that's
no way to work retail, trust me on this one. "No, I'm sorry you can't
use your credit card right now, do you have cash or can you write
a check?" Hmmmmm, I don't think so.

Take care with this weather if you are on the road. I'm planning on
an hour to go from Bernal Heights to the Legion of Honor this
morning. Easy does it.

well, that was fun...

Bless Ricky Gervais and his humor, especially when he threw such a low
flying insult at Mel Gibson. I couldn't have enjoyed it more. Of course
it means that we probably should go out and put on those 3-D glasses
to see Avatar and now I really need to rearrange the Flix® list in
order to guarantee that we see some of these Golden Globe winners
before 2020.

My day off was sooooooooo relaxing and I'm ready for work today.
And maybe even tomorrow, we'll see about that.

not your usual love story

Ever since 3rd Rock we've been fans of Joseph Gordon-Levitt
and he's been making us proud again. (500) Days of Summer
is all about young love, but not in that icky-sweet cloying way.
It's frothy, but pleasant for a cool winter's night.

Today is a Sunday off for me! Hoooooray. I'll start with yoga
and we'll take it from there.

ooooooh, another mystery!

Garnethill is a suburb of Glasgow and a young woman awakes
to find her lover in her living room. Alas, he has been tied up
and his throat has been slit. So messy. Did she do this in a
blackout? No, she is way too lovable (to me), so we are all
trying to find the killer. Garnethill is a loan from a friend at
the deYoung and a new and glorious author for me. Hoooooray.

kid catch-up

Santa brought RR a scooter (and a few other gifts, actually)

Ben and Sam (or vice versa) ~ Neti and Frank's grandchildren

Dancing Jen's 8 month old nephew, Kingston. Oh, those eyes.

getting my priorities straight

It's hard to feel sorry for myself because I can't seem to get a
ticket for Wicked for under $200 on my rare next Sunday off.
Oh, poor me.

Instead, we both sent checks for Haiti to:
American Red Cross
Bay Area Chapter
85 Second St.
SF 94105
www.redcrossbayarea.org.

Or Unicef, Save the Children, your choice...

who killed Miles?

We are certainly enjoying our BIG television and last night we
watched The Maltese Falcon. It's been a few decades since
last we chuckled along with Sidney Greenstreet and Peter
Loirre. I was hoping for more scenes of SF in the old days,
but most of it was filmed indoors, alas. Of course we know
that the Falcon is in a glass case up on the second floor of
John's Grill on Ellis Street. Fun stuff.

time for the important things of life

Baseball. Last night we watched Sugar and I do recommend it,
even for people who don't follow the only sport worth watching.
It's a story (probably true) about a pitcher recruited from the
Dominican Republic to play in the minor leagues. He ends
up in the midwest and that can be a culture shock for many
of us. Excellent film ~ 5 spoons (or cups). Rent it!

coffee, candle, flame

How's this for a delightful 6am start to my day off? My goal was to
do some writing, but I seem to be experiencing some sort of writer's
block currently. In any event, after 3 in a row non-burn days, I
desperately needed to stare at the fireplace while I read emails and
played around on MsBook. I will take a long solo walk this afternoon
and maybe have a latte before a lavish shopping experience at
Big Lot's.

OK, the coffee mug. It was a gift from Ginger when she lived in
Kansas and reads, "Nothing Runs Like a Deere" ~ I only use it for
days off. Of course.

no, this is the poem!

Mingus at the Showplace

By William Matthews

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,

casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.

So I made him look at the poem.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,

and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed
amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children. Of course later

that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.

“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
he explained, and the band played on.

is this the poem?

Last Thursday night our Tiapos friend Will said that a specific poem influenced him to become a poet when he was in college. I'm enjoying the search so much that I will publish this first for you (and me) and then write to ask him. The Day Lady Died
by Frank O'Hara
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

it's early, but that's OK

I had a great time with my writing friends at Tiapos last night.
Humor and pathos, the usual. There were 6 of us and everyone
brought something to share. Chef P. is off to France and The
Plotniks to South America, so it was lovely that most of us could
make it last night.

This morning I open the deYoung stores at 8:15-ish. I'm trying
to order tix for A Round Heeled Woman and the computer
is acting up and I'm getting (like) irritable. That won't do
at all. I might have to use (horrors) the phone.

it's 6:10 am!

Well, I certainly solved the title dilemma, didn't I? We both
enjoyed Julie & Julia last night. Wonderful scenes of Paris and
New York, great acting by Ms. Streep (who became Julia) and
I especially appreciated the blogging side story. Mr. Z in
Cleveland is now doing the technical thing so I can send this
blog to Kinko's for the printed hard copy. That means 3 years
of writing almost every day. Well, not deep, important writing,
but it's fingers-to-keyboard and to me that's quite an accom-
plishment. So add cooking intricate recipes to a daily blog and
my god, how did she do it?

it's 5:22 pm!

Once again, the age old question. How come days off fly by at break
neck speed and the work day often tick tocks along so very slowly?
(Until it's over and then I think ~ what happened to this day?)

The fireplace is burning already and I'm wide awake after a sweet
nap. Because I started the day with yoga, I'm feeling calm and
accepting of life and all the hurtles. Husbando is fixing some
shrimp dish for dinner, we have a great Flix® awaiting us and
now I'll light some candles and think about doing some writing
for Tiapos tomorrow night. I said I'd THINK about it and we
all know that counts.

where did this come from?

Neither of us would take credit for putting this on the Flix®
list, but The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard was amusing and
a nice break from the heavy the-world-is-ending stuff that
is on TV lately. Jeremy Piven and crew are hired to save an auto
dealership in some small town in California. Early to bed and
now I'm ready for Free Day at the Legion of Honor.

bleak big box news

-- Publishers Weekly, 1/4/2010 8:37:00 AM

In a financial analysis prepared in late December by the law firm of Lowenstein Sandler, the challenges facing Borders are laid out in a synopsis of the report. The “highlights” of the report are the retailer’s declining revenue and profit margins; a short-term liquidity crunch; a highly leveraged capital structure; and a challenging operating environment. The report draws no conclusions on what is likely to happen to the nation’s second largest bookstore chain.

The report notes that as of October 31, 2009, Borders had $32.8 million in cash and equivalents and an available current borrowing capacity of $215.0 million under its revolving credit facility, which expires in July 2011. With $674.2 million of short-term obligations, the report says, Borders is likely to face a short-term liquidity crunch if it is not able to refinance its debt or generate sufficient cash from operations.

As the report noted, Borders’ revenue have been on the decline since fiscal 2007 and went down 14.1% in the third quarter. Operating and net margins have also been on a downtrend since fiscal 2006 and declined again in the most recent period. In addition, Borders’ capital structure is highly leveraged with total assets of $1,741.9 million and a total debt of $407.8 million. It has a debt to equity ratio of 4.1x and a total debt to asset ratio of 0.2x as of the third quarter. Peers’s average debt to equity ratio and total debt to asset ratio for the quarter was 0.2x and 0.05x, respectively.

Borders’s operating environment, “has become increasingly competitive, technology-driven and price-sensitive,” the report noted. “Rising online book sales, e-books and a growing online user population is changing the dimension of a bleak environment for the U.S. book retailers.

Today I almost bought a trade paperback for $9 at Costco,
but I can't do that. I support all bookstores including the
big boxes. Costco is not a bookstore, however they do have
really fresh fruit at great prices. So when I got home here
was my daily email from Publisher's Weekly. It makes me
very sad ~ I spent 8 years complaining about Borders when
I worked there, but we need them.

so much for sleep

I usually fall right asleep after my 2:33am wake-up when I turn
on my itty bitty radio stuffed under the pillow, so I don't disturb
Husbando. Yes, I am a Very Good Wife. (The baseball replay is
best for insomina-killing, but I'll have to wait for that.)

But I digress. Last night Ray McGovern was on KGO. He is a
retired CIA guy and for the first time the assassination of JFK
made sense in a political context. So scary. I'm not a conspiracy
theory person, but this is too logical to ignore. I'll let you read
up on him and his beliefs, but the worst thing is that there are
still Allen Dulles followers in the CIA and our Pres. is very
aware of them. Of course they controlled the former admin-
istration and we know that Blackwater is like an arm of the
CIA and sheeeeeeeeeesh. Intrigue. It would make a great
movie, but it's too awful of a plot. Beware of Yemen. Argh...

giving up the ghost

I put down Her Fearful Symmetry because it was really a silly
ghost story. The plot would have been fine without this one
overwhelming ghost who became a major character. Life is
mysterious enough without inventing otherworldly folk. But
hey, that's just my opinion.

So today I'll start Spooner by Pete Dexter. Of course you will
remember his masterpiece Paris Trout and I also liked The
Paperboy. Let's hope for something rich and filling here.

indulge thyselves

A rare treat!

Standing rib roast & garlic mashed potatoes...

First, happy birthday to our blogmaid today! You add so much to
our lives. I will send you my morning email when I finish here...

Somewhere along the way, Husbando and I decided to treat ourselves
to wonderful (expensive) roast beef on New Year's Eve. Of course we
don't eat much red meat these days, so you can imagine how very
special this is. I didn't photograph the salad, but we did get some
greens, so don't be all tsk-tsk. We were in bed by 10pm and I was
awake at 5am and our neighbors are still up. I can hear the
thump-thump of their background music and that tell tale a little
too loud and precise conversational sound of too many drinks.
No problem, we have always been lucky with our city neighbors.
I turned on our back deck lights to help them celebrate.

And I wrote a couple of thank you notes. I like writing 01/01/10,
so I'll do a few more. Happy, happy New Year and thanks for
reading my blog.

Today I work at the deYoung ~ I haven't been there for a long
time, it seems, due to the Cartier gig at the Legion of Honor.