The Special People Club

Back to Tom and my fabulous West Coast years for this memory. Tommy and I often spend holidays together. In 1996, we decided to meet in San Francisco at Tom's cousin's place for Christmas, followed by a holiday extravaganza trip to LA to celebrate Tom's birthday before I flew home. I flew down on the 23rd and Tom picked me up at the airport. We had a lovely few days in Beautiful San Francisco...we toured the city, we had dim sum in Chinatown, coffee at a dinky little cafe in North Beach, wandered around making fun for ourselves, went to the Contemporary Museum of Art...all sorts of exciting San Francisco things. Tom's cousin Michael is a charming host, and we had lively meals on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with many delightful (if eccentric) fellow guests. Tom and our friend Greggie and I rented Crumb and watched it on Christmas night, full of shock, horror, and fascination at this odd little man and his even odder siblings. On the 26 th , we headed back to LA...

I watched 30-minute Meals with Rachel Ray today. Tom and I used to think Rachel would be our friend. I used to like watching her. But now I find her a bit annoying. I think she's over extended and needs to slow down a bit. Her heart's not in it anymore. I won't be watching her again. I'm sad, but many friends eventually grow apart.

I have rolled nicely into a lazy pattern of midwestern holiday. My jetlag has been hard to kick, so I am seeing a bit too much of the Today Show each morning. Today I laughed heartily at Rosie O'Donnell's lambasting of that idiot Donald Trump, and decided that Meredith Viera has proven herself a classless hack in her reaction to it. David Gregory asked her if she had a comment and she got this holier than though face and said no, not really, but she just hated to see people being mean to each other. She's obviously not pleased that Rosie is on The View. You've moved on to the Today Show, Meredith. Let it go and wish them well. My dad's not really been eating since his radiation, so my mother and I have been coaxing him with anything that sounds good...we figure that if his appetite comes back and he eats something, his strength will come back, too, and he will be better prepared for the chemo. This has resulted in meals we wouldn't normally have, like froz...

I am back on US soil, sitting in my old favorite Christian coffeehouse in my little hometown in Iowa. Left the UK on Saturday, flying BA into Chicago and landing about 2PM. It was a great flight, actually. I expected that, one week before Christmas, the airport would be a zoo and my plane would be packed. I arrived about three hours before my flight, and was summarily herded into a tent in the departures drop off area. NO one was allowed to even enter the airport until about an hour and a half before their flight. I took a seat and drank my free coffee and tried to pick out the Americans in the crowd. (Hint...look for ruddy cheeked fat men wearing trainers, and women in turtlenecks and you're guaranteed to be right.) Chatted for a bit with a fellow expat on the way home to see her family in Philadelphia and another on his way to Washington DC to see his girlfriend. We were all dreading the flight, and annoyed to be sitting in a tent when we'd tried so hard to be diligent ...

Although I've never been a girly girl, I've always liked dressing up in pretty clothes. I know I've mentioned here before that I've had some serious opinions about what I wanted to wear since I was about two. And my mother, bless her, may have disagreed with my preferences, but she has always done what she can to help me realise my fashion dreams. I think it comes from being a chubby child, something my mom and I have in common but my grandmother did not understand. Grandma didn't encourage my mom to express herself...just encouraged her to lose weight. So my mom made sure that, regardless of how misguided my fashion sense was, I was able to feel pretty and stylish on my own terms. My mom scoped out all the best stores to find places that carried cute things in my size. This was before the rest of America caught up with me, and so there wasn't a vast array of choice for a chubby/stocky kid. (Please don't tell the AMA that the obesity epidemic is my faul...

Good lord. As if their campaign against cartoon characters weren't enough, now it's tofu that's making men gay . Surely, they must be joking.

The Christmas party lived up to the legend. We arrived around 730, and within about 2 minutes had been handed Caipirhinas . My black lace cocktail dress makes me look hour-glassy and shows a good bit of cleavage, and since I tend to be a bit of a tomboy by English standards it was really funny watching my male colleagues respond to the girly , made-up me. Got a lot of compliments, always good for the ego. Dinner sucked, as usual, but you figure they're cooking for 1000 people in a tent so there's a limit on what they can do for the price. The wine was flowing freely and I was sitting next to our MD, who has a tendency to fill your glass when you're not looking. Every time I'm by him at a function I end up much drunker than I should be, and I definitely believe it is his fault. My Christmas cracker contained a little fortune fish that, when placed on my palm, revealed that I am in love. Would be nice if it had a name for me, too, but I'm willing to go on faith. I...

My friends Susan and KB are two of my closest girlfriends. I met them when I transferred to Luther my junior year in college. I got to know KB over the summer before classes began. My childhood friend Blane knew her from many college theatre productions and so our social circles overlapped quite a bit. This is bound to happen in a small college town, and since we both spent many a night at Zahasky's drinking Blatz and singing along to Hank Williams on the jukebox, it was only a matter of time until we bonded. My friendship with KB led me to Susan, who came on campus a few days early to help with orientation for incoming freshmen. As fate would have it, her first night back in town was the night we were out with the Biseks celebrating the new microwave in the RV...it was a wild, crazy evening full of pickled eggs and Wisconsin beer, sure to cement any friendship for life. Though we were very tight in college, when we graduated we went our separate ways and were only in cas...

So first there is the commenting issue. I've found that in MS Explorer I can't even comment on my own blog, let alone any other beta blog. Annoying. And now, I'm at and I tried to go to my own site to use some links and I am getting an error message. I am really annoyed.

I'm frantically finishing my cleaning for the cleaner, rehearsing a presentation that I'm doing tomorrow with a client and keeping an eye on the telly as one of my favourite movies, Amelie, is on. I have three more nights here, Friday I stay with my friend Patricia near London, and then I'm off for the holidays. It seems crazy that this is my third Christmas flight home for the holidays. It's becoming a part of my routine. Weird how an international flight used to be exciting. I'd make a packing list, I'd plan ahead, I'd not be able to sleep the night before. Now I don't even think about my trip until a night or two before I leave. I can pack for two weeks abroad in about 45 minutes. I only have to plan ahead and do laundry. And at Christmas time I have to run a few errands. It's not a holiday without some meat flavoured potato chips any more. Friends in Minnesota...many have been asking me about my holiday schedule, so I thought I'd update y...

Bubs found a cool little internet toy, and so I immediately went to find out what tarot card I am. You are The Star Hope, expectation, Bright promises. The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one. What Tarot Card are You? Take the Test to Find Out.

I've given in. I am not a person who enjoys cleaning. I never have. So I don't really do any more of it than I have to. I am content to live in clutter and dust, as long as bugs and rodents don't pitch a tent. And while I'm not a hoarder, I do tend to collect things. I tell myself that someday I'll want these things for something, but I never do. They will find their place of prominence and then sit there unnoticed and untouched until I accidentally bump them a year later and see the dust that has collected, which horrifies me. I then quickly move them someplace else so they can sit for another year until the cycle repeats. The problem was compounded here in my house in England. Very little in this house is mine. My things are all in storage, or rather transitioning from one storage to another right now, but still...they're in Minnesota where I cannot access them. All the furniture and furnishings to speak of in this house are either my landlords, or they ha...

My mother had great holiday decorations. She's a decorator anyway. There are two bright orange porcelain sinks in my childhood home, chosen because they were really cool in 1976 and went with the hand-painted poppy plates in the kitchen and the earth-toned "first bathroom". But at holiday time things went crazy. Things heated up in October with the onset of Halloween. We had pumpkins and witches and black cats printed on cardboard that could be put up around the house. There was a felt bat that could hang from the ceiling (and never screeched or got caught in my hair), and Hallmark made these cool wax candles in shapes for sitting on tables. (We never ever lit them, so there are still wax jack-o-lanterns in a box in our basement, I'm sure.) Thanksgiving saw more of the same, including wax candle pilgrims and turkeys, as well as these FABULOUS paper honeycomb 3d turkeys. (We had pumpkins for Halloween, too, but the turkeys were the best.) But these were just warm...

I couldn't sleep this morning...woke up at like 630AM completely wide awake. So I spent some time online reading some news stories, catching up on blogs and watching BBC Breakfast. There is some really useless news out there. The story about the plane that had to land because the passenger lit a match to cover the smell of their flatulence just hit the news here. Then there's this little gem . Poor Indian men. In Health , they're stating the obvious...people can be thin and unhealthy! They're FAT ON THE INSIDE! In other news, too much marijuana smoking can hurt kids brains . I've talked about the propensity for drunken stupidity and violence from YOBs and the male population of the UK. Now they're finding the girls are boozing it up and itching for a smackdown , too . (This is on the tale of the news that the lasses are also getting freakishly pissed a bit more than they should.) Ah, the realities of England. They'll make even the biggest anglophile g...

Bubs has been highlighting this recently, and let me tell you it is hysterical. I don't know why, but seeing children in complete, total terror on Santa's knee is the funniest thing I've seen in some time.

1. Green Eyes - Erykah Badu 2. Choice in the Matter - Aimee Mann 3. Almost Blue - Chet Baker 4. Skinwalker - Robbie Robertson 5. Coat of Many Colors - Shania Twain and Alison Krauss 6. Doin' What Comes Easy to a Fool - Junior Brown 7. Star 69 - Fatboy Slim 8. Last Living Souls - Gorillaz 9. I'll Look Around - Madeleine Peyroux 10. 52 Girls - The B-52's

When I moved to MSP after college, I lived with my friend KC. We started off in a two-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis, but in the spring we got a chance at a great three bedroom in an old Victorian house in St. Paul. I convinced my friend Chris to join us and the three of us set up house. Our place was fabulous. It was the entire downstairs of this giant house. The rooms were huge, the ceiling was high, and there were three formal fireplaces...Chris and I even had them in our bedrooms. It was in a "transitional" neighborhood so the rent was cheap. There was a crack house across the street, a woman from the building across the alley used to knock on the door regularly and ask for money, and the day after we moved in they found a guy "expired" in a vehicle in front of our house. (Or so the nice policeman told me when he knocked on the door at 6AM. I still imagine him with a date stamped on his forehead.) But these seemed like minor irritations to 22 year olds who...

I got home late from work tonight, and had nothing thawed to make for dinner except a package of pork mince. It went out of date on the 5th, and so I looked at my watch and it said it was the 6th so I made some delicious hot and sour soup and ate it. Then I looked at Bubs' entry on Pearl Harbor and thought, "Silly Bubs. It's only the 6th. And then I remembered that tomorrow is the 8th because it is our Christmas party, so it really was the 7th. So the pork was TWO days out of date. Now I am waiting for every little gurgle to turn into gut-wrenching cramps of pukedom.

This is a horrible story. I'm never buying a real tree again.

My favourite cultural oddity is just two days away...the company Christmas party. We're going to a Christmas Party venue here in MK that is themed as "Red Hot and Rio." Salsa dancing, mojitos and caipirhinas, dinner, dancing, drinking, and bumper cars. What more could a gal want? And people really do get as drunk in real life as they do in the movies here. Seriously. It boggles the mind. I am so looking forward to it I can hardly stand it. I even have a new black lace cocktail dress for the occassion. Need to find shoes, and I'll be set. I can't wait.

1992 was my last year in retail. Over the course of four years, I'd worked my way up from plebian sales associate through various levels of management, and finally was a store manager with a fabulous new store. They had high expectations of us, and we were having a killer sales season. We worked crazy hours and I was exhausted by the time Christmas Eve rolled around. But I knew there was much kolache baking and merriment happening in my absence, and I was itching to get to my brother's so my holiday could start. By the time I arrived, things were buzzing. My nephew Sam had just turned one, and this was the first Christmas in years with an excited little kid in the mix. Everyone was poised with cameras and anticipation of the fun they would have as he opened package after package of unnecessary toys. Appetizers and wine were set and ready, dinner was on the stove, and everyone was excited. I blustered in all chatty from my busy day and entertained them with my stories of stupid ...

Ointment, meme, jerkoff, salve, cooties, grunt, kipper, peter, skank, gurgle, dink, mildew, wiener, panties (and undies, for that matter), uffda, meat, deese (short for decent), ooze, moist, pimple, titties (or teats), fanny, hairy, bird, snickerdoodle, gaucho, giggle, funnier, mature (if pronounced ma-tour...ma-chure is fine), goober, keeper, grody, spank, vino (unless said by an Italian or Spaniard), Spaniard, party (if used as a verb), spittle, hyper (okay as a prefix), creamy, pad and any word that comes from combining a person's name with a real word (such as dale-icious, not to say you're not delicious, dale...it's just a word that came to mind). Oh. And words misspelled for "cleverness." Spelling is not something to play with.

I think tonight we'll move to the Seattle Years for the Christmas memory. My friend Pam got me thinking about this when she commented on my tree decorations and my reference to the forest of trees. In fact, it's this memory that started this whole series, because it got me thinking about the many good Christmas memories I have. Certainly I, like most people, have some unhappy ones, too, but I'm electing to focus on the ones that make me smile. I lead a pretty blessed life, actually, and I think I lose sight of that sometimes. For those of you who don't actually know me, a brief history...I moved to Seattle basically on a whim. I needed a change, my friend Ben was going and it just seemed like the right thing to do. It was. It was difficult to get settled and, as with all new places, it took me some time to get my bearings. I'd moved there with my friend Sonja, but she moved back to Minneapolis for love. I found a true soulmate in my friend Bethany, and El Ben has al...

Falafel with hot sauce, baba ganouj and a seltzer.

My last name is Czech. As with many Americans, the ethnicity gets diluted pretty quickly as immigrants marry other nationalities and kids try to blend in at school, and pretty soon all that's left are a few rituals and traditions that incorporate the family background. For my family, most of these are food related. My dad's Czech grandmother lived with his family when they were growing up. She did a lot of the cooking, and my dad learned to love the breads and meats and soups she made. Therefore, Christmas is a time for baking the treats of my dad's childhood and trying to evoke a bit of the heritage of our hard-to-pronounce name. Our primary baked goods are kolaches , rye bread and houska. ( Houska is a braided sweet raisin bread glazed with powdered sugar icing, candied cherries and almonds, which, like fruitcake, looks better than it tastes for most people.) Houska and rye bread are the more complicated ones so they have fallen by the wayside in recent years. I think...

There's no way I'm doing that long questionaire of boring things . (I do snore sometimes and often snort when I laugh, though.) But I love the randomness of music profiling so I am doing this . (But I will never use the term "meme," FYI. I like the internet, I'm obviously a self-obsessed, compulsive blogger, but I don't care for "terms" and prefer to treat everything I do as traditional self-publishing. Sort of an eco-friendly Thomas Paine, but without all the relevance and with more song lyrics and recipes.) How many songs : 2835 (haven't loaded half of my collection in yet) Sort by song title : First song : '69 El Camino by SCOTS Last song : Zombie Love by the Jazz Butcher Sort by time : Shortest : Outro by Rilo Kiley 0:04 Longest : Group Dance by Charles Mingus 18:39 Sort by album : First song : Hello by Oasis - (What's The Story) Morning Glory (Punctuation must come before numbers in the sort) Last Song : The Rockafeller Skank b...

I love holiday lights. I love to see neighbors vying for the tackiest house in the 'hood. I love blow up Santas (for the yard) and reindeer on the roof and lights that stream along every beam and eave. I love twinkle lights. I love the way lights look in the snow. I love Christmas Vacation because of the lights. One of my favourite things in 2000 was the house on Hamlin and something north of Summit that created a palm tree with lights on their maple. Beth and I drove by it about 30 times. I think they thought we were stalking them. I love holiday lights. Our first Christmas in MSP after college, Tom and I had the sorts of jobs English majors and History/Russian majors got in 1989...we worked in bars, restaurants, and retail. We had weird schedules and lived our lives off the clock. Breakfast happened at 3 AM. You got up at noon. You worked eight hours at some point in the day, sometimes 12 or 14 hours even, but you just didn't know when you'd be doing it. Tom's hous...

1. Reason to Cry - Lucinda Williams 2. Scholarship is the Enemy of Romance - Billy Bragg 3. Shut Up - Black Eyed Peas 4. All My Tears - Emmylou Harris 5. Girlfriend is Better - Talking Heads 6. Frontlines - Teddy Thompson 7. Dagger Through The Heart - Sinead O'Connor 8. Weird Divide - The Shins 9. If You Only Knew - The Mavericks 10. Can't Seem To Make You Mine - Alex Chilton

My Grandma B came of age right before the Depression. She was one of eight children, raised by their mother after my great grandfather left the work camp and disappeared to Indiana to start a new family. These were not friendly times for a single mother. My great grandmother had to take in a lot of laundry and put in a lot of time to earn enough to feed her family. As the second oldest child, my grandmother was required to shoulder a lot of responsibility for her younger siblings while her mother worked. She helped stretch the food to feed them all, helped with darning and mending and other household chores to extend the life of their belongings, and learned frugality as a way of life before she turned 18. Throughout her life, she retained this frugality. She fell in love and married my grandfather, who was a kind, generous man with a good sense of humor who valued happiness and life much more than wealth. Instead of trying to use his engineering background to make money, he ran the ...

Catherine Tate - Gingers for Justice I'm watching Catherine Tate right now, and decided I'd check out youtube to see what I could find. Here it is...Gingers for Justice.

Catherine Tate - Helen Translates Another one of my favourites...Helen can "do" lots of things.

I love rhubarb yogurt. It is a standard yogurt flavor in the UK. You can even buy generic rhubarb yogurt. My new favorite breakfast is rhubarb yogurt with grapenuts, two cups of PG Tips white, no sugar, and a glass of ruby red grapefruit juice. I'm LUCKY.

I am quite the fan of Christmas. I like the way it smells. I like the way it sounds. I like the cold air (the one month of the year where I DO,) and I like the way snow looks with Christmas lights. Or ice on Christmas lights. That's REALLY cool. So in honour of the holiday season, I am going to share my favourite Christmas memories and other Christmas trivia over the next few weeks. Many among you will find this sappy. You're right. Got a problem with that? Today we will start with my stocking. Back when we were babies, older female relatives knit. Booties, scarves, blankets, you name it. There's a baby coming???!!! It's knitting time!!! (Crocheting was for multi-colored afghans.) When my brother (who is two years older) was born, my dad's Aunt Til knitted him a fabulous stocking with a jaunty Santa climbing out of a chimney and BOB (his name, luckily) on it in big letters that look like they're straight from a laser. (Even though his given name is Robert, they...

If you don't read Coaster Punchman's World, here's a little story of our wacky life on the left coast. I was really annoyed at first because, while I find the story quite funny, his retelling made me feel like I didn't handle it well. But I thought about it a bit more and I thought about the Five Crushes tag, and I realised that, in fact, I've had to handle more than my fair share of whackjobs with a lovejones. I'm entitled to be sick of this, and therefore handling it at ALL is handling it well. The story of Bodhi explains, tangentally, why I am not married. I am not a dater, nor do I engage in casual pickups. It is not wise for me to trust men. This is not man-hating...on the contrary, I love men. And men love me. But it's like I'm magnetic north in the world of crazies. I have to be very careful. My logic has always been that sane men just don't find me that attractive, but actually, that's not true. They do, but I'm intimidating and...

My tree is up. It is a 3-foot tall tree (ok, maybe 4) that I got for £2 at a carboot sale. It has colored twinkle lights and a lovely angel on top that was a gift from my friend Bethany. Bethany also left me a cute little caroler/angel last year when she was here, and it's right up there where I can see it. There are childhood ornaments that my mom made. She was crafty...I know other people that have these same ornaments, but my mom's are much nicer, I must say. My favorites are the sequined mittens (the red ones), the Santa slipper with sequins, and the fake skates with paperclips for blades. There are dreidls from my friend Larry in Seattle, who added a bit of Hannukah to our forest of trees to make them more inclusive. When I lived with Knox and Ellen, the Christmas trees from Chubby and Tubby were only $3. So we got three. They were Charlie Brown trees, but they were AWESOME. There is a set of vegetables from Tim and Mark...a bulb of garlic, a potato, a tomato, and an eg...

Dale has tagged us with a little movie quiz. I have elected not to discuss my f ive grossest moments because that wouldn't be polite, and don't care to reveal my life's crushes because, well, I've traditionally had some freakishly bad taste in men, and that stems from freakishly bad taste in boys. But this one I'll do. 1. Popcorn or candy? I generally don't eat anything at a movie theatre, but if I do I buy the popcorn with a bit of delicious butter-flavoured topping, put salt on it and then dump Milkduds, Sugarbabies, Goobers or M&Ms in it. Just like the boyfriend/secret service agent in First Daughter. 2. Name a movie you've been meaning to see forever. The Women . I know I will love it, just haven't had time to see it. Note, I have not put Mommie Dearest down here because, as my mother always says, there are just some things that shouldn't be given your attention. Psycho actresses who look like transvestites and abuse their children fall ...

So sorry I've been absent. Have been off doing various things, allowing me to reconnect with the life I ignore when I'm in school. It's been lovely. I've also had a bit of a dodgy tummy with the antibiotics I've been taking. But I have finally lost most of my cough and I am well rested and have started going to the gym again. All good. It's good to feel like myself again.

This first song is dedicated to Dale. See, everyone's iPod has hidden depths. 1. Bandstand Boogie - Barry Manilow 2. Gimme Some - Nina Simone 3. Long Hot Summer - The Style Council 4. Don't Worry Baby - Los Lobos 5. Ain't Got a Thing - Josie Kreuzer 6. Blister in the Sun - Violent Femmes 7. Workin' In Corners - Nanci Griffith 8. Sick Day - Fountains of Wayne 9. On Green Dolphin Street - Gene Harris 10. Evidence - Joseph Arthur

On tonight's (or more specifically last week's) episode of The Catherine Tate Show, a pack of gingers decide they're tired of hiding out in Russet Lodge, living in shame. So they break out and form Gingers for Justice, and begin protests at the Houses of Parliament dressed as carrots, gingernut biscuits and Duracell batteries (the Copper Top). Of course, the protest is cut short because it's a sunny day and they forgot their sunscreen.

So I had been approved for the study tour to India, and then I started thinking. There is a tour to Cuba. As a US citizen, I can't go to Cuba without a damn good reason. Education, now THERE'S a reason. So I decided to check into it. And I've been allowed to switch. In June, I will be traveling to Cuba, assuming the Treasury Department approves my request for a license. This is really, really cool. We'll get to see first-hand their exceptional school system and health care. We'll get to do a community service project. And if he's still alive, rumour is that we may even get to attend a reception with El Presidente. Now THAT is an educational experience. I have always wanted to go to Cuba. I used to have past life dreams about how I AM Cuban. (Or, more specifically, WAS.) In the dreams, I am from a wealthy Havana family. I fall in love and marry a farmer/landowner that I meet while I'm strolling with my sisters on a lovely spring day. I move to his estate ...

On night one of my brief reprieve from student hell, I have come home, made dinner (some tesco healthy living crunchy fish and sweet potato fries with fresh green beans and tomatoes on the side,) and decided to watch telly. I turned to Trinny and Susannah Undress , their replacement show for What Not to Wear now that they've moved to ITV1. Instead of dressing one person (or two, as they settled on in their last WNTW format,) they dress couples who have started taking their looks for granted now that they're all paired off. Tonight's couple are a bit odd and quite frumpy. She is short and four months pregnant. He is tall and FREAKISHLY long wasted. Trinny picked up on this immediately. She said, "My LORD you have short legs for a tall man." Susannah didn't see it right away, but when she took Andy shopping she realised that Trinny and I were right. In fact, she told him to take one of his outfits on because he looked "positively deformed." Somehow...

One year ago right now, I was getting ready for my trip to New York for Thanksgiving, where I would spend a few blissful days with my friends Tom and George seeing plays and eating delicious food. I was mulling over the idea of applying to grad school, but was frankly a bit frightened that they'd laugh at me when they saw the application. But I took my laptop with me anyway and I sat on Tom's couch working on the essays. I knew I'd never actually get in, but figured I had to try. Little did I know. As of 4PM yesterday, I am officially half way through my MBA. And I'm good at this. My right thumbtip is still numb from the pressure on my pen for three days and I'm not able to actually focus for long on the screen because I'm freakishly tired, but all in all things went relatively well. I was as prepared as I could realistically be, and I figure I had an alright answer for most things. I may not have lit the sky on fire with my eloquence and ability, but I thi...