Catchy Name Needed

From nonelvis :

1. Stop talking about politics for a moment or two.
2. Post a reasonably-sized picture in your LJ, NOT under a cut tag, of something pleasant, such as an adorable kitten, or a fluffy white cloud, or a bottle of booze. Something that has NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICS.
3. Include these instructions, and share the love.




I think I posted this one last year sometime, but I don't care, because I like it. And, kittens! And also because I posted about my grandma yesterday and that made me all nostalgic again.

My grandma's name was Maedelle. I am not completely sure if it was originally Mae Dell, and it just got squished together over the years, or if they named her that from the beginning. That name definitely belongs to that East Texas school of double names, in any case, which has mostly vanished nowadays. (I always remember that for years she had a hairdresser, a woman, whose name was Cecil Rae.)

Maedelle was a bit of a character. When she died, in 2000 - age 89 - my cousin Pat wrote a piece for the local paper detailing some of her eccentricities. One was their house, which rambled all over - you had to go down a few stairs, for example, to get to what Grandma called the "sleeping porch" - which may have originally been a regular porch, but by the time I became old enough to remember had been enclosed. Come to think of it, I'm sure it was originally outside, because I remember that for a long time there were still windows on the inside. My grandfather was (a) very low-key and (b) adored her, and so he pretty much let her do whatever she wanted. Later the porch my sister and I are standing on here also got enclosed, as an add-on to the kitchen.

She loved to cook. She was a great cook, in a very country, fried-food-heavy sort of way. At my grandparents' house, the big meal of the day was what they called dinner and which was at what most people nowadays would call lunchtime. I remember "the men" coming home at noon for dinner - I guess it must have been the men who worked for Papa selling tractors. Then Grandma put the leftovers in the oven where they stayed all afternoon (yeah, I know, botulism and all that, but I don't remember anybody ever getting sick) until they were warmed up again for supper.

I suppose the meals when we were there were probably bigger than usual, but what I remember was that there was always a helluva lot of food. More than one meat, several vegetables, rolls, dessert. Usually there was this thing called "congealed salad" which I always hated, but which was jello mixed with whipped cream or sour cream and fruit or nuts and then refrigerated until it, well, congealed. And, oh yeah, cakes and pies and cookies, always. She always left batter in the bottom of the bowl for us when she made cakes. And I still can't see a chocolate meringue pie without thinking of her, to this day.

On with the continuing story...

( (or even not-so-clever music quotes) )

holidailies

When I was in 5th grade, I joined the choir at school. I didn't want to - I wanted to be in the band. My mother made me do it. She said I'd like it. And at my school, for some reason band didn't start until 6th grade, but choir started in 5th. I had already started taking piano lessons a year or so before, so it wasn't much of a stretch to think I'd like it. And I suppose I had sung in the kids' choir at church, too, although I barely remember it. Just do it for a year, my mother said.

I never did join the band.




Holidailies

Inspired by that scary-looking track for Dean that came out this afternoon, we went and spent a godawful amount on groceries - we were going anyway, but we bought extra canned stuff and so forth - and we came up with a tentative plan for what we'll do if we have to evacuate. There's no question of staying here if it really comes right at us - it wouldn't take much of a hurricane to flood this place - but we do have Mom's place, which is also in a flood zone, if it came to anything major, but which is 25 miles or so inland, at least. So that would be the first stage, going there. Yeah, it's half empty, but it does have a bed and some furniture, and electricity and water. No cable, no phone, so it's not exactly a long-term plan, but it'd do for somewhere to sleep. And we might repair further inland, to my aunt's, if it becomes anything big. (Also, as I said to Rob, if we end up getting several days off, we might want to go there just for something to do. It will get boring fast with no internet and no cable.)

Yeah, I know this is early. Dean is still a long way off, but it never hurts to have a plan.

Come to think of it, not everybody knows where I live, so let me explain exactly why it's so much of a concern. After the 1900 hurricane (aka Isaac's Storm, if you've read that), they built a seawall in Galveston, right? It's 12 feet high, and they basically jacked up the whole town to match - and I mean that literally. They put everything up on stilts, and filled in underneath it. All of the east half of Galveston starts out 12 feet above sea level on the Gulf side and then slopes back towards the bay. However, where we live wasn't in town at that time, it was out in the country, and the Seawall didn't come down this far, originally. And later, when they did extend it down here, they didn't do the filling-in part, it just slopes right back down on the back side. And that's where we live, right behind the Seawall, a couple of hundred feet from the Gulf. And I don't know how far we are above sea-level, exactly, but it's not far. Five feet, maybe, at a guess. (Maybe. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out it was two or three.) And we live in a first-floor apartment. Galveston doesn't normally flood in any major way, because of that sloping-back-to-the bay business, but there's still storm surge. So this is not somewhere you want to be in anything but the tiniest hurricane.

(We were discussing something today that I'd practically forgotten, though. We came to a hurricane party at these very apartments, long before we lived here. Well, it was more of a tropical-storm party, really. We sat in somebody's third-floor apartment till about 4am and got drunk and played Jeopardy! as I recall. And I remember looking down at the pool, and they had taken all the poolside furniture and sunk it in the pool. Wonder if they still do that. Seems like getting it out would be a bitch.)

Rob and I got married on Saturday, May 2nd, 1987. It was Derby Day, and windy - but it didn't rain, which was good, because we got married in my parents' back yard, and we didn't have a tent. (We did have a back-up plan, which was to use the Methodist church if it rained.) I had just turned 27, and Rob was only 24 - in retrospect we both seem to have been incredibly young. We didn't have any money, so we really did the wedding on the cheap, which turned out to be a lot of fun. We had to be creative. We begged and borrowed - one of my mother's friends had a movable gazebo and latticework arch, and we got the chairs and tables from the church I grew up in. I made my wedding dress (I don't think I have a picture online, darnit) and we made mix tapes for the wedding and the reception - and this took a lot of work back in the days of vinyl records, let me tell you! We bought food and plates and things at Sam's Club. We did spring for a cake - we found a local "cake lady" whose prices were reasonable - and we had bouquets and boutonnieres from a florist, because I didn't know if I was talented enough with flowers to do that myself. We didn't have a photographer, which means our wedding pictures are all obviously amateur, but I've never cared much. We enjoyed our own wedding, and most of the guests seemed to too.

We didn't have much time off of work, so we went to New Orleans for a few days. (We actually spent our wedding night in Beaumont, Texas - which is on the Texas-Louisiana border - because we knew we wouldn't be leaving until fairly late and we didn't want to have to make the whole five-hour drive to New Orleans.) Neither one of us had ever spent any time in New Orleans before. We stayed in a Best Western right on Bourbon Street, and we wandered around the Quarter and looked at the touristy stuff and generally had a good time.

And we still have a good time. Happy anniversary, baby.

Somebody on Holidailies has a blog called "Julie Do Ya Love Me?" - which unfortunately is a song I know very well (or did once anyway), and so it keeps getting stuck in my head every time I see that. Bobby Sherman, is that who sang that song? I bet a lot of the younger ones around here (meaning, well, everybody under 40 or so) have never even heard of him. Well, you didn't miss much there. Same era as the Partridge Family and the Osmond Brothers, that's probably enough to tell you a lot.

Shelly Sikes disappeared twenty years ago today, after finishing up a shift at Gaido's Restaurant in Galveston. The next week, I started working at Gaido's. I met my husband there. Oh my god, I can't believe it's been twenty years.


Added: the link above doesn't work, but here's some that do: Houston Chronicle, The Charley Project

I had the day off today. Rob has been off for the last three days (for no particular reason, his boss just likes his employees to take some vacation periodically) so I took today off so we could go and do something. I didn't know what, just something. When we worked at Gaido's - a long time ago, now! - we used to go up to Houston every week or two and just mess around. We would go to the big Bookstop on Alabama or go to a mall or go to a movie, and we almost always went out to eat. So we wanted to have a day like that. We ended up going to the Galleria and eating at Cheesecake Factory and going to the big Half-Price Books on Kirby. (The Bookstop we used to go to is now a Barnes & Noble, and it's still a great bookstore because it's so huge - not to mention being in an old movie theater - but we were in more of a Half-Price mood today.)

You know, Cheesecake Factory gets maligned a lot - and I've maligned it myself from time to time, I admit - but really their food is generally good. Especially given the options in the mall, even a mall as big as Galleria. I had the lunch-size pizza, which came with a salad, and it was just the right amount of food. (Well, the salad was really too big, because I never finished it, but I can live with that.) They also had the best iced tea I've had in ages, which is no small thing in my book. (Rob had what he always has, which is some kind of chicken - Chicken Romano, I think it is. I tasted it, it was pretty good.)

We didn't really spend a lot of money, except on the meal, and even that wasn't too bad. The only thing I bought at Galleria was another mascara, at Sephora. This time I bought a Stila waterproof one. (For some reason, Stila's mascara is very reasonably priced. It was $9.50, which isn't much more than L'Oreal's. That certainly doesn't seem to match their pricing strategy for the rest of their line. Not that I'm complaining about the mascara being too cheap, you understand.) Other than that, we mostly walked around the area where the expensive stores were and window-shopped. These shoes were in the window at Kate Spade - complete with dinosaur - and if I were the kind of person who wore things like that, not to mention the kind of person who bought $325 shoes, I would totally buy those. (They're cheaper than I thought, actually. I told Rob they were probably $500.) (And it's funny, because I am not really a person who's into shoes, normally, but I have found myself admiring shoes a lot lately. I don't know what's up with that, exactly. Maybe I'm shoe-deprived.)

Then we drove over to Rice Village and prowled around Half-Price Books for a long time. Rob bought a couple of books, I couldn't tell you what, and I bought Foucault's Pendulum and The English Patient, which I have been meaning to read ever since I finished Anil's Ghost a year or more ago. We spent a good while combing the History section but didn't end up buying anything. (I still have to buy my dad a birthday present, though, so I might be back there. But I'm not going to see him for a week or two so I decided to wait on that.) I also looked for Connie Willis books but didn't find anything, darnit.

(Which reminds me that I have been meaning to write about the Connie Willis kick I have been on. But it's getting late so that will have to wait.)

By that time it was getting to be rush hour and we decided we'd better head home. We took sort of a long way round to go around the traffic, and we ended up going through Alvin, my home town, which I hardly ever go to now that none of my family lives there. So I spent a lot of time going, "Oh look! they're building a high school in Manvel!" and so forth. (Manvel is where my dad grew up. It's about 10 miles outside of Alvin, and all these years everybody in Manvel has had to go into Alvin to go to high school. It's a measure of how much Manvel has grown that they've finally caved in on that point.) They also have apparently either torn my grandmother's house down, or built something in front of it so that you can't see it any more. I suspect the former, but I'm not sure because the landmarks have all changed, and I wasn't about to try to do a left turn on that busy highway to find out for sure.

The meme of the moment - because everybody's doing it (here and here, for example) and I can't resist - although, typically, I am skipping the parts I don't like. (Like yesterday. I already wrote something about yesterday, that's no fun.)


Five years ago: I was in the midst of a massive depression. I don't like to talk about that period too much.

Ten years ago: Ugh. Now that I think about it, this period wasn't too great, either. I had just started my current job, and was enjoying it even though I had the boss from hell. But Rob was still working nights, and so I didn't see him much, and I let work become my life for a while because I had nothing better to do.

Fifteen years ago: Married, working at a bad job in a restaurant which I stayed at far too long because I mostly enjoyed it. I don't really remember a lot about 1990, to tell you the truth.

Twenty years ago: My last year in Austin. I was single and I had a full-time library job in the Serials department, which I hated, and which is why I ended up leaving town a few months later. I was going out a lot, though, and having a great time. Lots of concerts and bars and general carousing.

And because I am old, I can keep going:

Twenty-five years ago: I was a senior (!) in college. I was not carousing a great deal because I was studying too much. Actually in the fall of 1980 I did my student teaching, which was a nightmare. I was teaching half-days and taking a couple of classes besides. That semester nearly killed me.

Thirty years ago: Junior in high school. I was a year ahead in school, which meant since I was only 15, I couldn't drive even though just about everybody else in my class could. Although my mother let me drive illegally around town a lot because she was tired of chauffeuring me and my sister around. (She claims not to remember this.)

Thirty-five years ago: Elementary school - sixth grade, I suppose, since I skipped that grade somewhere in there. We were back in the Houston area by this point, and in the house we stayed in until I finished school. It might give you an idea what era we're talking about if I say I owned a maxi skirt.

Forty years ago: Kindergarten, in Lamesa, Texas. (Which is wayyyy out in West Texas, somewhere south of Lubbock.)

Jesus. I can remember things that were forty years ago. That's scary.

(This user pic, incidentally, is approximately forty-one years old. I was four.)