Ictutherapy.

ic·tus
Pronunciation: 'ik-t&s
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, literally, blow, from icere to strike: the recurring stress or beat in a rhythmic or metrical series of sounds.

Singing and playing my piano is how I best deal with pain day in and day out, simple as that. Music therapy is widely lauded. While my heart goes out to all who are suffering, I am practicing and playing, memorizing and vocalizing, getting ready for my October 15 play date at San Gregorio General Store. I have even been giving good mic down at the espresso garden cafe in an attempt to rid myself once and for all of performance jitters.

There is a lot going on in the world and to keep my mind in order and make it through life, I must play uniformly pleasant and interesting notes on a keyboard, sing songs I know and keep learning new ones. No problems exist during that time. I am swept away in my mind to places spoken of in ancient and modern lyrics. Bob Dylan is heroic, Joni Mitchell a prophet, and Joan Baez a beacon. These artists and far many more are here and alive, now, in my lifetime, and I am delighted to be alive simultaneously as them. Their words delight my mind while the world rages around me. My songs will be released soon, but they're just do-dads I diddled, definitely not my best effort. I can do better but I need a record label to back me up and maybe even a recording contract. Stay tuned. I am working on this, but I ain't quittin' my day job yet.
Pam.

Keeping Abreast of Tennis News.

I found this page quite amusing today.

Good Weekend To You.

It is a beautiful Saturday morning. We are heading out for a bike ride together. These rides are always such fun. Henry is a wonderful riding companion. He coaches me up the hardest hills. As in life! What a good friend he has been, and is. We are blessed with one another. Life is good. Tonight we are meeting up with Bill and Vivian for some vegetarian Indian cuisine, and who knows what after that. I pray for peace to all now and forever.
Yours, Pam

Subject Matters.

I rarely blog about work. I blog the good things because they are many and they outweigh the little things, which I never sweat. Moreover, I am an intelligent bloggerette. I knew proper protocol instinctively long before columnists began taking note. (See: "Keeping Tabs on Employee Blogs.") A blogger would have to be a special kind of stupid to have a blab-blog. Telling all is the best way to become unexpectedly disengaged from one's place of employment. Give me a break. So many times I read stories like the one above and say to myself, "I knew that. You know? I just knew that. Already."

My Nieces.

Madison and Emily play a hand clapping game.

Baked Camels.

My high school buddy, Jim, goes on missions in various locations throughout the universe, volunteering his time and many strengths, spreading the Good Word. Here is what he wrote:

"Marjorie and I just got back from three weeks in Israel, volunteering at IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) bases. Spent two weeks in the Negev Desert then a week at a base between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The whole place looked very much like California when we grew up. The roadways, the plants. The Negev was just like Livermore, just add 20 degrees of heat, take away the water and add baked dirt & rocks and camels. Tel Aviv was between 95 and 100 degrees with 80% humidity. Pasty white people from Maine should not go the Middle East in August. I'll go back again in Jan or Feb. "

My niece is currently in Guatemala on a similar mission. Jim goes to Guatemala on missions sometimes. Maybe they will accidentally meet up someday. Such good people, those two.

Mmm. Good cookies.

Thumbprint Cookies with Rose Petal Jam

1 Cup softened butter or margarine
1/2 Cup packed light brown sugar
2 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon rosewater or anise flavoring
1 cup sifted flour
finely chopped nuts or flax meal w/ground fennel seed
rosepetal jam
powdered sugar or sugared rose petals for decoration

Directions
Preheat the oven to 300° F. Grease cookie sheets.

Cream the butter, sugar and egg yolk. Add vanilla, rosewater and salt, mixing well. Slowly add the flour. Mix very well. Shape the dough into 2" balls.

Whisk the egg white to break it down. Roll the dough balls in the egg white, then in the nuts or flax meal. Place on cookie sheet about 2 inches apart. Bake 6 minutes.

Remove the cookie sheet from the oven and use your thumb to make a dent in the top of each cookie. Put a dollop of jam or jelly in each thumbprint. Return the sheet to the oven and bake for another 9-10 minutes.

Remove finished cookies from the oven. Remove gently from cookie sheet and allow to cool. Cookies may be dusted with powdered sugar or iced with shredded rose petals sprinkled on top, or left plain. Incredible for tea.

Yield: 2 dozen cookies

Reunion.

We will be celebrating Gloria's 50th birthday today. I do hope people can come. The chicken is marinating now. The cake's in the fridge. I made anise-rose petal jam thumbprint cookies last night (but only nineteen remain! What to do). My folks are here from Sonora. I got her two Life magazines from the two weeks before she was born in August 1955, and a Judy Littlechap doll. She is going to flip. Sadly Matt has to work but he'll be there with us all day in spirit. We will be thinking of all the family and praying for everyone's good health and happiness. I'll post photos later. Love, Pam.
PS: I didn't get the napkins that said, "I See Old People." That was a bit too harsh.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Tomato.

At home.

Cozy.

Can we blog?

Note: Comcast finally fixed the lid on the cable box, on 8-22 . So it only stayed exposed for one more weekend. Good!

Here is the box two days ago. It has been in this condition for months.

Our front yard shares half a patch of lawn area with the neighbors house next door to us. There are two underground cable boxes with cement lids on top, like an underground water meter. A big, heavy, concrete lid, a rectangular man-hole cover where the cable box resides. I do not have cable television. The lid to the cable box in my front yard is intact. The lid to the box next door has been broken for months -- ever since the previous tenant parked his three-ton truck on it and shattered it into three craggy sharp blocks. The underground box filled with four to six inches of water over time. No one did anything about it all summer, so at the beginning of August, I began making calls. Standing water, exposed wires, West Nile virus -- you do the math. This photograph was taken August 16 -- two weeks after my first phone call to the company. Today, they finally came, but what they did was, instead of clearing out the water and replacing the broken lid at my repeated requests, THEY HOOKED UP THE CABLE TO MY HOUSE, under some previous tenant's name. That is the crazy thing. Now I have a shiny new cable running to my house, sitting on top of the electrical meter, waiting for me to make some imaginery future telephone call per the tag they left. At least they were nice enough to leave a tag on my front door to let me know they showed up and did the wrong thing. I will probably get a bill in the mail.

Soon. Very Soon.

Stay tuned for info about my CD Release Party, presumably some time after Labor Day.

FYI.

My voice is better than Patti Scialfa's.

Amusement.

So many things have been cheapened by time. I miss the launchable drinking straw wrappers. You know what I mean. When we were kids, if you tore off one end of the wrapper, left the other intact and then blew through the straw, the paper wrapper would launch up into the air and fly like a paper airplane. We used to get them to go pretty far. Nowadays the paper is made of such thin tissue, the game no longer works. Stamping down one end of the straw to simply remove the paper also no longer works, because the fragile paper is just slightly stronger than the straw. The straw breaks, and it takes some maneuvering to get the tissue wrapper off just free the darn thing. I also miss soda-pop pop-tops. These too were launchable. You could pull the ring section off of the really sharp tab section, piece them together like a mini-catapult, hold it just so and pull back on the ring, and launch it like a Frisbee. These flew much farther than straw wrappers -- about thirty to forty feet. Seriously.
I don't mean to bellyache but I am a little bit saddened by the fact that my children will never know the joy of fashioning everyday, mundane objects like garbage into aeronautical wonders. Our fun was "bad for the environment," or so we were told. Right. We weren't littering. We always remembered to pick it up and put it in the trash can. I think it was the guys in the U.S. Government who were simultaneously launching nukes in the New Mexico desert who were feeding that us that line.

The Milk Pail Rules.

We adore The Milk Pail Market.

The Milk Pail Market

Location: 2585 California St., Mountain View.

Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., Mondays-Fridays; 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturdays; and 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sundays.

Prices: Fair (cherries 3.99 a pound)

Niche: Produce and dairy market. Independently owned.

Amenities: Indoor-outdoor produce department, cheese department (independent).

Fresh produce, an extensive cheese selection and low prices are a big draw for the Milk Pail, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Owner Steve Rasmussen imports much of the market's products in bulk from local farms and dairies and packages items on site. The store imports olive oil in a 55 gallon tub and bottles it in small, reusable containers. Milk comes in glass bottles from Rasmussen dairy in the East Bay, honey in a comb from "Wild Flowers" in Los Altos Hills and olive oil from "Olive Joe" in Sunnyvale.

The market features between 200-300 types of cheese from all over the world in cheese wheels that are rolled and packaged on site. The market sells the cheese in house as well as to three produce stands. For those who don't know a lot about cheese, there are "Tips" cards. Rasmussen also hosts regular cheese tastings.

The market's remaining items generally cost less than other surrounding grocery stores.

Of note is the market's homemade vanilla extract.

For more information, call 650-941-2505.

Happy Music.

We've been listening to Basque accordion music at our house lately. What happy music it is. Puts us in a good mood, and it's great to do chores to. Artist is Kepa Junkera, and a host of great musicians from around the world are featured, including Bela Fleck. It is wonderful stuff. This is a double album, called "Bilbao 00:00h." (I am guessing that translates to "Bilbao at midnight.") The liner notes are incredibly romantic. Each song has a beautifully woven description of the song and what it is about. For one he writes, "This is the story of Piti, an old accordion player from Zollo, a small tow near Bilbao, Spain. The accordion we hear plays tribute to the box he played until the very last moment of his life. People say that, short on strength as he was, he used to sit in the porch of his house and take up his accordion to play. Then he let it down, took it again and let it down one more time, as if it were a baby-child that should not grow accustomed to being in somebody's arms all the time. And in the arms of that old accordionist slept his parents and their parents. And the sun helped him play as it rose." I like that the songs are all unabashedly long, at least eight minutes apiece, and that there are 23 songs total. I could never tire of hearing it. These musicians have a lot to say and they take their time to play it right. Pam's Recommendation: 7 stars. (Out of five.)

I told Henry that Bilbao is where I prefer to vacation next year, rather than Paris. I will be saving my pennies, starting right now. Autumn, my niece, will be able to tell us where to go and what to do because she was an exchange student there for six months a couple of years ago.
I much prefer a warm Spanish sunset rather than a cold, cemented city.

Lookalikes.

Is it just me, or does Starbucks new Green Tea Frappuccino look exactly like a Shamrock Shake? Eh?