Skinny.

Originally Posted:
by Mary Alice Holmes on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 10:55pm

Yes, I really am baking an apple crisp right now and I have high hopes of shoveling the entire fat laden thing into the mouth of Mr. Twenty Year Old who looks like a street urchin. He took off his jacket and I nearly passed out. His ribs are visible and, when he turns sideways, he all but disappears. Every woman I know wants this diet. The drawback is that it apparently involves Physics and Macroeconomics and concentration on a level I have yet to experience. Strange how some of us eat when stressed....my boss called me one day in the middle of a huge project and I couldn't answer the phone because my mouth was full of cereal. When I finished chewing I walked down to her office to find her mouth and fist completely full of chips....because we are women, and women stress-eat. But young men starve instead. They just eat enough, in the words of the college student, to keep the hunger pangs at bay. Wow. What a concept. Anyway, it's ten minutes to apple crisp. Did someone get the ice cream?

2012 Postscript:

Said 20 y.o. is now almost 24.  He lives across the country now, away from my watchful eyes and healthful meals.  A steady diet of fast food has caused him to gain so many pounds in a year that he now has a belly that is rounding over his belt.  Oh, Happy Medium, where are thou?

All I Want For Christmas

Originally Posted:
by Mary Alice Holmes on Monday, December 15, 2008 at 10:37pm
I am appalled. We as a nation are swimming in debt, banks failing, celebrity fund managers are bilking rich and famous clients of billions, major industries are crashing to the ground, and just like in 2001, we are being told that shopping will somehow cure all society's ills. No, it won't. Really. 

Please don't shop for me this holiday season. I don't need it, whatever it is. My house and the houses of my friends and my family are overwhelmed by stuff we don't need. Please help me cull my stash of unnecessary items by not giving me anything. I'm not kidding.

If you were considering buying anything for me, please donate to your favorite charity. Or mine. I have a few...my public radio stations (or yours), Rosie's Place in Boston, the Los Angeles Mission, the Women's Bean Project in Denver, my special favorite (the gift tht keeps on giving) The Heifer Project. Just the other day, the Boston Globe ran an article about how The Home for Little Wanderers, an organization that houses homeless and runaway children, has had the least amount of donations this year that they have had in many, many years.

A five or ten dollar donation to any of these charities will mean so much to a child who has nothing. (Well, except the public radio stations but you don't really need me to lecture on the joy that they bring to everyone who has a radio. I'll do that in March for the spring fundraiser.)

I have complex feelings about Christmas. I can really relate to Linus Van Pelt at Christmastime. I don't think the way we "celebrate" Christmas was what Jesus had in mind with his gift. It's not about scented candles or bath beads or socks or iPods. It's about a gift from your heart for someone who is truly in need. In this case, I am talking about cash and I am talking about kids. Please give to your local children's charity. Remember how great it was to be six and to believe in Santa Claus. Think about helping to provide a needy child with that special kind of magic. That's what I want for Christmas. 


2012 Postscript:  I'm still appalled. 

Thanksgiving Sunday

Originally Posted:

by Mary Alice Holmes on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 8:09pm

I don't eat turkey. Not for about 15 years. Even with me not eating, the 20-pounder is almost gone. One drumstick, a lb of sliced white meat and some gravy are the final offerings of a noble bird. I have two pot pies in the freezer, one for son, one for spouse. Five gallons of turkey soup are consumed and reduced to two small ziploc containers and all that remains of dinner besides the turkey is a bit of sauteed red cabbage with a dijon glaze. 

Even though I don't eat it I still insist on buying organic, free-range. I know free range means they can wander and I know they don't. I just like the idea that they aren't subjected to too-tiny cages. The first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts (mine, not the Pilgrims, in 1994) I searched for free range. In vain. The people behind the meat counter at the local supermarket looked at me as though I had three heads (but then maybe that's just the way New Englanders look at all outsiders.) Finally, one woman let me in on why they looked at me like that. Turns out they didn't know what free range meant. Nor organic, as ubiquitous as the word is now. Not only did that store not carry free range poultry, they didn't know who might. Here's some thankfulness for changing times!

I made one last pumpkin pie today to use up the last of the whole wheat crust. I used my godmother's recipe, "Never Fail Pie Crust," which she annotated in the back cover of a Romanian cookbook she once gave me. She's been gone a decade now and sometimes the way I conjure her again is with her pie crust! And if she showed up, she would complain about the way I waste water. Hopefully, she would give me hints about dealing with kitchen compost. She would be glad I chose this man instead of the previous one! And I hope she would think I turned out okay. She never came to a dinner that I prepared from scratch, although she was the one that taught my sister and me how to do it: how to make anything from scratch. My mother was keen on the latest labor saving devices including slice & bake cookies but my godmother would have none of that. She grew up in a time to which we are now returning. Layaway and home canning, compost piles and button jars, swap meets and auctions and cash. She was right thirty years ago and I wasn't listening. I give thanks that I had her in my life.

Jennie Botosan's Never Fail Pie Crust

4 cups of flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 3/4 cups shortening
1 egg
1 tablespoon vinegar
1/2 cup cold water

Sift dry ingredients. Cut in shortening with 2 knives or pastry cutter. Beat egg slightly, add vinegar & water. Mix well and add slowly to ingredients, blending well with fork. Chill in fridge.

Roll on pastry cloth or between wax paper. Makes two double crust pies. 

Facebook and me.

Originally Posted:
by Mary Alice Holmes on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 9:09pm


My therapist is amused that I now have a Facebook page. She thinks I seem like the least likely person to be disclosing my every whim. I told her it was all Teresa's fault and she believed me. And I am not really whimming about as anyone who checks my page can tell. But I am fascinated by the instaneousness of this work. Maybe what I really needed was a blog but this will have to suffice as long as a I have a big girl job to occupy my days. Should I be laid off, though, watch out, because I could start divulging all the intricacies of my mind right here in these notes. 
_________________________________________________________
And now a note from February 6, 2012


I've been freelancing for more than a year now and I have, obviously, not made a habit of blogging.  As I continue to post notes from Facebook from the last few years, I am reminded that I can actually think of coherent words to share.  Heartened by this revelation, I will continue to share what I know. 

Squandering

Originally posted:
by Mary Alice Holmes on Friday, November 28, 2008 at 10:30pm


I have squandered a perfectly good Friday but after perusing my friends' Facebook pages, it seems I am not alone in vacillating, wandering and napping. Ambitions lag. It's cold and I would rather stay in bed. Even staying in bed is not conducive to getting anything done because, instead of reading, I simply fall asleep. Quickly, within minutes. Sure, the dogs got a walk in mid-afternoon but that was it. No yoga, no intellectual reading. Then why do I feel like it was a really good day? Pie was consumed, gravy was made for leftovers. I am content. Mostly, I am warm. Anyone detecting this as a theme? This "warmth?" 


My brother in law came by for dessert yesterday with his wife. They are talking about Florida as a permanent move. Are we here already? Time to move to Florida? Yahoo has a list of the ten best places to move to in the U.S. and most of them are WARM. My vote goes to Santa Barbara, Santa Fe and Asheville NC, even though I have never been to Asheville, I think I'd like it there! It's warm. Or at least warmer than Boston. Now I am taking self upstairs to my warm bed with the down comforter and feather pillows. My pack, two dogs and a cat, follow me, intent on not letting me out of their sights. 

Saying you were there...

Inauguration Day 2009

by Mary Alice Holmes on Monday, January 5, 2009 at 10:54pm


I had decided some time ago that Washington was going to be too much of a mad house. When the predictions of crowds reached four million I thought that was three million too many. But today I received an email from an old b.f. (who had not an ounce of political savvy in his 140 lb body when we were dating) who is headed to Washington for the occasion and I am now beginning to wonder if I should be going, too. I've experienced one million people in Washington before. With my sister, in 1988, for the pro-choice March on Washington. It was a fantastic experience, mind-bending and hyper-stimulating. And I love Washington.  I will probably dehydrate myself beforehand because por-a-potties are my least favorite thing but there is nothing like worshipping at the cathedral of Thomas Jefferson in the dark of night. Sure, the view will be better from my family room on the 56" telly but what about the roar of the crowd? I am thinking about that moment after he says "so help me God" when the crowd, the country, the world will scream with joy. Do I really want to miss that? It's like I said to a friend earlier today, it's a bit like being able to say that you've been to Times Square on New Year's Eve. If you go to one inauguration in your lifetime, shouldn't this be the one? (At least until Hillary gets elected.)

So, who's game? Anyone want to road trip?

25 Random Notions About Me

Originally Posted:

by Mary Alice Holmes on Friday, January 30, 2009 at 5:49pm

1. If I must eat “commercial, candy-store chocolate”, please let it be a York Peppermint Patty.
2. I do not willingly relinquish an open microphone.
3. I dream of a greener future in which I live close enough to my work that I can walk or ride my bicycle.
4. I have reinvented myself almost a dozen times in the last 20 years and it’s getting to be that time again.
5. I don’t eat chicken not because of health or PETA reasons but because I simply do not like it.
6. The last time I ate a steak was in Manhattan, Montana with Steve Bowen and James Gierman. I stopped eating beef because the rain forest has been decimated by clear cutting in order to graze cattle.
7. I once lived in a garret in Paris.
8. And I once lived on a commune in Upstate New York.
9. My 30th birthday was spent in Moscow where the gendarmes at the Hotel Leningradskaya attempted to arrest me.
10. I aspire to spend a night in jail for civil disobedience although I may have missed my opportunity (hope-fully.)
11. I believe my dead father leaves me coins.
12. The Grand Canyon is “awesome.” (I know because I’ve been there a few times.) Therefore, the use of “awesome” in response to providing my order to a waitress or completing a doctor’s health survey or to describe my macaroni & cheese drives me completely crazy.
13. I’m in better condition physically and emotionally than I was ten years ago.
14. Dogs make me laugh.
15. I know all the words to La Marseillesaise in French and I can spell it and translate it.
16. I love to research.
17. My therapist told me that I am not a leader. Nor am I a follower. “You are a goer,” she said, “and if someone goes with you, that’s fine and if they don’t, that’s fine, too.” And this is why I pay her.
18. There is a dent in my skull from the time I hit my head on a radiator when I was two. It is narrow and about three inches long and the edge of a radiator coil fits neatly into it.
19. I would rather be in Italy than just about anywhere else on Earth.
20. I adore high heels. They do not, however, feel the same about me.
21. Yoga makes my world better.
22. George is my favorite Beatle.
23. I’m a wicked stepmother.
24. An upper class British accent makes me weak at the knees. A real one.
25. If it wouldn’t kill me, I would so be a pack a day smoker. After all these years of not smoking, I still need something to do with my hands.

BBC 100 List

Here's the list that was making the rounds on Facebook about two years ago. I never did confirm that this list was actually from the BBC. Perhaps I'll do that now. I did make a note at the bottom that this was a "half-baked list", at best, given that it includes Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven. Also, that Shakespeare appears a few times on the list, sometimes listing a particular style of play for which he is known and sometimes listing specifics, e.g. Hamlet., is distracting and haphazard. It's that kind of inaccuracy that makes me think it didn't come from the BBC. Why the New Testament and not the whole Bible? No Bagavhad Gita? No Talmud. A Euro-centric list with a random American thrown in, but few other ethnicities. Get my drift? Still, it's a list guaranteed to stir up conversation!

BBC - 100 Books.
Originally Posted by Mary Alice Holmes on Friday, March 13, 2009 at 2:05pm

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? 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. 4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen- x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - I started it.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – (shouldn't this count as 7 books :)?X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee- X +
6 The Bible (New Testament) - X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte – I tried
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 - X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - X
14 Shakespeare – X – um, how much? 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - X
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - (every two years or so) X+
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - X+
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald- X ++ (and so we beat on, boats against the current…)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X(and So long and Thanks for all the Fish and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul and Last Chance to See. Should this count as four?)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - 2012 note: Now that I have seen Downton Abbey on PBS I may have to read this one!
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky And yet The Brothers Karamazov which I have read is not on this list!
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X 3
8 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - X
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 - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - X
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 -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert – oh dear God. Seriously?
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Set
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley – X+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X ("It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.")
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X (in French and English)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X (Consumed whilst on the road in Paris)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy – X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (Although I much preferred "Captain Ahab's WIfe")
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker 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 Plath - 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 - X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (Are they kidding?)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X (In French and English)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X (Read whilst in England near Watership Down)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole – I tried but couldn’t finish
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – X (Didn’t we cover this above?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - X (again, in French and English)

This is a half-baked list at best. I'm at 61, not including the several that I started but never finished.And I think I should get extra credit for the ones I read in another language! But that's just me.

Comments from Friends: 
Kathleen Z: And don't forget all the Ernest Hemmingway you've read that is curiously missing from the list. Brits! March 13, 2009 at 2:45pm
ElizaBeth C: I think seeing the movies of some of these should count.... March 13, 2009 at 3:49pm
Laurel W: ‎47 and one half!...never got all the way through les mis! That is better than one per year given that I couldn't read until I was 5! March 13, 2009 at 4:59pm
Laurel W: It's too much work to copy and repaste! March 13, 2009 at 5:03pm
Rich B: I thought I read alot. Only read a quarter of these... March 13, 2009 at 5:33pm
Tricia M: Kind of an odd list...War and Peace AND Bridget Jones Diary? March 14, 2009 at 9:22am
Jane D: Do we get extra points for having read them multiple times and teaching them? Not surprising, MA, that you and I have read so many of the same titles. My total is 69, but like on your list, there are a few I started, then didn't finish. March 14, 2009 at 1:36pm
Alexa B: ‎43, with probably another dozen that I couldn't bear and didn't finish..sketchy list - my father would be appalled to hear that I got points for The Da Vinci Code but not for Ulysses.. March 14, 2009 at 3:33pm
Mary Alice: And my father would've been appalled that I got credit for Bridget Jones' Diary and not for War & Peace. But, seriously, do they really consider "Five People You Meet in Heaven" to be worthy of reading? Who are these people? March 14, 2009 at 6:56pm