kindstar

Haven't been on LJ for a very long time. I don't know why, just got busy with other things. However, I was just reminded by a notice of a birthday by someone on here whom I always found a delight, and I thought I'd better wish her a Happy Birthday! I was rudely awakened awhile ago by a neighbor who came home, apparently after an evening with alcohol, and blew up at her teen aged son, screaming at the top of her lungs and doors slamming, and then he was yelling back, and it went outside, and other lights came on. Finally the settled down, but now I'm wide awake.

Our 1924 apartment is in the process of being remodeled. It's been going on for over a year; two if you count that the previous year we were told we would be 'relocated' and would receive the 90-day notice at any time. After playing that silly game for a year, the relocation fellow came by at 7 pm one evening to say the relocation had been cancelled. This was the day before there was a big article that the City of L.A. was looking into finances in the Housing Department. Did I mention our building is owned by the city? It's a long, sad story. The woman who owned it had a major stroke, and her bipolar son was the manager of the ten unit building. I was looking for a new place, since a room mate situation in a house was breaking up, and went to the jr. college I had gone previously to look at the housing board. I encountered this fellow, the campus 'eccentric', who always went around barefoot, and he said, "Oh, I have a building you can move into." A good bachelor apartment was available, and I moved in. Sixteen years ago. Since then, the county took the building for back taxes, and as it was about to be auctioned, the city purchased it (they had first option), and then it sat for seven very long years. It's a long sad, crazy, story, but the gist of it is finally someone noticed something needed to be done, and a little over a year ago, they began the remodel. There are ten units; four one-bedrooms and six singles. A great location (although quite noisy around here). Now the place is surrounded with scaffolding, six units have been gutted and remodeled, mine one of them. I visited my daughter and family in Ohio for two months over the holidays, and when I returned had to stay in one of the finished and furnished one-bedrooms for a bit, and am now in the process of moving back in -- to an apartment entirely different than the one I lived in previously. Everything has to be reconfigured and rethought. Meanwhile, they work on three of the four units remaining to be redone. Outside the back half of the building is wrapped in black paper and wire and waiting to be re-stuccoed. It seems a never ending project.

The family having the fight is temporarily staying in two singles downstairs while their front upstairs apartment is being remodeled. I will be so glad when they are back in that one. Only half the building is occupied, all people who have been here for years (actually, the noisy girls are the most recent -- one 'inherited' it from her mother when she died.)

So major transitions going on here lately.

Good to be scribbling on LJ again after several years away!

Wow! It's been ages since I've written here, or visited friends here. I got hooked on FB, and am generally living there now.

Not too much new has happened since I was last here. They are remodeling our 1924 building; doing a lot of repairs which have needed to be done for ages. We were supposed to be relocated, but then they changed their minds and decided to do the work with us in the building. It's such a great location and a great view, although a tiny apartment, I don't mind too much...so far, although it does get nerve wracking.

Haven't done any work on the dollhouse in ages. Writing, mostly.

I wish people were kinder to one another, more considerate of one another, and much more aware of the future and what we need to do to improve it for the coming generations. I was a child of the 60s, and at that time we worked hard ot make the world a better place. It saddens me greatly that so many turned and became the enemy, and how our planet is being destroyed from such an excess of greed by a few. My apologies to those much younger, who will have to deal with the problems brought about by the weak, sad people who seem to be running the show today.

However, where there is life, there is hope, and I hope for things to turn around and improve and get better and better. Peace and joy to all!

Yesterday, looking for the music for The Water is Wide, I found a stack of sheet music (mostly copied) about three feet high that I'd forgotten about, from when I was studying in school. Even though it was a very warm, muggy day and having all the windows open and fan on didn't particularly make much of a difference, I took upon myself the task of sorting through some of it. I discovered I had quite a bit of Gershwin, Porter, Sondheim, and others. I created 'like' categories. Music is amazing and songs are so magical; little stories launched on the rocket ship of tune.

Recently, someone introduced me to Jason Mraz through the wonderful song Bella Luna. Immediately I got a copy of Mr. A - Z, one of his CDs, and I so thoroughly enjoy it! In the song Bella Luna, he has a line, "...all I can give you is the language of a lover...."

And the light bulb went off, and I thought this is what writers give to people, and particularly songwriters. The language of a lover. For during the time you are listening to a song, or singing along, or reading, your consciousness is bound with that of another person(s). The person who created was engaged in an act of love, an intimacy with his or her own spirit and consciousness, perhaps working with others to create, and when you partake of that creation, there is some manner of communion involved.

I've had amazing coincidences occur. There have been times in my life when I've been searching for an answer about something, and a song has appeared, or I've encountered a book that touches on whatever it is about which I'm concerned at the time.

Sometimes it seems as if I am in sinc with my MP3 player, the songs being randomly played from the vast library there match my state of being perfectly.

And then, occasionally, they don't match at all and I feel completely out of sinc.

Incidentally, if you recall that old Apple ad with the person strolling down the street listening to music in the Ipod and on the wall the shadow is doing all this amazing dancing -- that's me! (And probably you, too!)

Once again, I've taken quite a vacation from LJ. It just seems I spend too much time on the computer, none-the-less, it seems like the things I do are important, at least to me. If occasionally I do something that adds something for someone else, that's icing on the cake. It seems to me it's like that, you have to please yourself first. Recently I gave similar advice to my grandaughter, who likes Harry someone or other in a group called, I think, 1 Direction. He said he didn't like lip gloss on girls. I told her not to worry about what men liked or didn't like. To do what she liked, and that way when she connected with people it would be people who liked her for who she was and not who they wanted her to be. (Of course, in a real relationship, should the fellow mention he didn't care for lip gloss, I might refrain from wearing it around him, at least when I was hoping for some smootching.) A little give and take is a good thing, but if pop stars are going to offer advice, I wish it would be more like Bob Dylan, who said "You can't please everybody, so you've got to please yourself." Or something like that. He probably wasn't the first person to say something like that, or the last.

It's been a wonderful summer in SoCal, and still is. We were at the beach yesterday. What is more splendid than a wonderful Pacific Ocean beach in August? (Other than perhaps the nice glass of wine in the cool back yard that evening). Life is so very, very good. The moon last night was spectacular. This week is the Blue Moon (the second moon in a month). Retirement is a wonderful thing, although it seems life has simply gotten much busier, but much of that being much more wonderful stuff. And able to stop and smell the roses and stare at the moon ("...till I lose my senses...") and wonder at the magnitude of the ocean and the sky at night and watch the stars twinkling and the constellations change... Time for deep, rich conversations with friends, to savor the taste of delicious food (rather than gulping down a quick dinner and begin to prepare for the next day's work....) Just from eating more healthily (a salad nearly every day) and walking a lot (to and from the library a lot), I've lost weight and am in better physical shape than I've been for years. Of course, not so much money as there was, and my splurges have become mainly books and art supplies, but there was never enough money anyhow. Keep wondering when they will reconfigure pay scales of jobs with the fact that many women are now heads of households and wage scales for jobs predominately held by women have never been adjusted accordingly.
However, if it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not -- merely pointing out something that needs to be pointed out.
So, I'm rambling on here. However, a lot remains to be done today, and I want to be able to go out and moon gaze tonight. So I'll stop here for now, and hope to return more often, at least once a week. I really do love LJ -- there are a lot of fabulous people to be found here!

The song is one I love, and today here in lovely Southern California, it really might as well be summer! Blue ocean, blue skies. Knowing we had a few really warm days coming, when I was shopping Friday, I bought three bunches of daffodils for five dollars -- 30 stems. Hyacinths for the soul, except daffodils. They were just slim green stems with long 'bumps' on the top. I put them in water, and they've opened slowly over the weekend and it's been enchanting. Last evening I read Daffodils by William Wordsworth, looking up at them, imagining great quantitiy in a lovely open space beneath the skies. Then I remembered, when I was 18, we lived in a house in Ohio, sort of rural, and in the spring a huge field of daffodils appeared in a corner of the backyard. When I shared that with someone, she told me about a friend of hers who had a baby, and while the mother and baby were in the hospital, the husband ordered a thousand daffodil bulbs and had them planted in the yard so they would bloom in the spring. One of the most romantic things I ever heard!

The downside of living in beautiful sunny California is we don't get the spring flowers of the east, because we don't have cold winters. Things I miss: forsythia, snowdrops, crocus, daffodils, narcissis, tulips and all spring flowers. And lilacs! We used to have a dozen or so lilac trees along the drive by our house when I was in my teens (before we moved to the house with the daffodils, and I left home soon thereafter). When the lilacs bloomed and it was going to rain, my mother would send me out with a stepladder to cut down as many of the lilacs as I could. They were purple, mauve, pink, white, and smelled amazingly wonderful. We would fill the house with the cut lilacs, because once they've bloomed and it rains, they are done for the year. So we'd have them a bit longer. And then, there would be more on the trees for the next year.

What I don't miss from Ohio is the terrible windstorms. Weather changes drastically in northern Ohio, along Lake Erie, because Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes. So weather conditions can change very quickly. Now they are having terrible tornadoes in the midwest, and my heart goes out to all the people losing so much from these terrible weather conditions.

Mother Nature, when she is good and loving, is the sweetest provider: but when she is not attending to business and the warrier aspects of nature come into play...

There is a little song, frivolously titled Minuette, the last lines of which are "...what nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man."

Let's hope not. As another poet once said, "...the world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." Of course, I don't know how happy kings are, in general. But daffodils certainly seem like great happiness magic!

Very happy with the name I have, and I've never wished for another name. However, had I been named differently, I would have loved Chloe. When I think of Chloe, I think of a woman feminine, funny, fashionable. Someone who deals well with life and knows how to accessorize. A woman with a wonderful laugh, who has lots of friends and is adored. Very kind, very bright.

It's been a very long time since I've written here, and I don't particularly know why. There was a long visit with my daughter and her family, when I went back to Ohio and we had Christmas together for the first time in 20 years. That was last year; in fact, I returned to Southern California about this time last year. Of course, I retired, too. When I retired, I looked around the house and noticed all the projects I hadn't tackled in the years I'd been working. And, I got very into reading. Although now I'm not sure if it's more reading or more book collecting. For awhile now, I've been working on a biography of Robert Penn Warren, an amazing American poet who is most well known for having written, and won the Pulitzer Prise, for All the King's Men. I'm also reading several other books. And last night I picked up my guitar, also for the first time in years, wanting to learn All the Things You Are from The Ultimate Jazz Fakebook, a recent acquisition. Clearly, this is an exercise in insanity, because fakebooks are for musicians who really know what they are doing, and jazz musicians are of the genius category. I spent hours looking on chord charts and making a cheat sheet for myself with the chord configurations. A lot of the chords are in the middle of the guitar neck, and some go even farther down the neck. I don't know why I got it into my head to do this. I haven't fallen in love recently, or even encountered anyone who even mildly piqued my interest for years. However, I think it's a lovely song. Perhaps I need something to make myself a little crazy for awhile (other than politics...although that's really asking for maddness -- in this election year, I wish I had an island to which I could retreat!) It's lovely to see the posts of the folks on Live Journal again. I've thought of people. Of course, my computer crashed, too. The one I have now is an older one on loan. Hopefully, I'll be visiting here more often.

While most of the rest of the country has been broiling all summer, southern California has just seemed to have a continuous spring. Too chilly in the evenings to sit out with a glass of wine, or even want to grill. Of course, I've gotten very spoiled in the twenty some years I've been out here. If the temperature gets below 68, I think it's winter. But it's been good for taking long walks through the botanic garden, which I've been doing every week with a friend who retired shortly after I did. One day when it did get hot for a few days, we went to the beach instead. I haven't been to the beach for ages, so that was a real treat.

Just finished reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I have quite a few le Carre novels, most of which I need to read or reread. I was reading them years ago, when he first started publishing. Every summer I make a list of books I want to read. If I'm lucky I read a book or two that is on the list, and then several that weren't.

I was reading the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey Maturin series and got as far as The Ionian Mission, and then got sidetracked, so I need to get back to that, too.

This summer I've been paying attention to news and wanting to be more politically aware. However, that gets very depressing very quickly. Politics seems to me to suck the life out of people. It seems like all politicians do is grandstand and worry about who is getting elected. I don't see a concerted effort to work for the people of the land and make the country a better place. A lot of bickering and nitpicking about foolishness, and meanwhile the economy rattles, so many people are without jobs, losing homes, struggling to make ends meet. The gap between the wealthy and the majority of people is ludicrous.

And yet, it seems like instead of people coming together, there is more and more fragmentation, people getting into their own little clusters. Instead of finding common ground to make things better, the groups make a lot of noise and oppose one another.

When I was young, I really wanted to make the world a better place for my children. It seemed back in the late 60s and 70s, that was the goal of many. Perhaps every generation feels that way. You come into it wanting to make the world a better place, but doesn't seem like it improves much.

However, I'm usually sunnier than this. But I'm not paying so much attention to politics anymore. There was a good lesson about that in 'definitely, maybe', a film I really enjoyed.

And I've been watching a lot of Colin Firth films this summer. Last summer I went crazy for Mamma Mia and watched it about ten times, and then started watching films by people that were in it. It's Complicated with Meryl Streep, and Ghost Writer with Pierce Brosnan. Recently I saw a very unusual film about the America Cup and people living lives most people can't even begin to imagine, 'Wind' with Stellen Skarsgard in it. That was a beautiful film to watch, even if the plot was a bit waterlogged. Then I watched A Single Man, Colin Firth's most recent film, which caused me to appreciate what a truly fine actor he is. At the Academy Awards, I was torn between wanting him to win and George Clooney to win, because I did see Up in the Air and thought he was marvellous in that. Although I'm the only one I know who actually liked the film. I recommended it to my daughter, and she and my step-daughter went to see it. My daughter told the step-daughter she would call and let me know what they thought about it. I got this call, "WHY IN THE WORLD DID YOU SEND US TO SEE THAT AWFUL MOVIE!" I think the problem with it was it wasn't really a romantic comedy. I don't want to say too much, in case someone happens to read this and decides they want to see it.

Then I rewatched Pride and Prejudice, and OH MY. Firth truly worked some serious magic in that film. Then I started watching other films he's done, and noticed what a truly fine actor he is. Also, I tend to like the casts of films he is in.

So, a good summer for curling up nights and watching movies. I also watched So You Think You Can Dance, which had stunning dancers this season, although unfortunately two of them were injured and had to drop out of the competition. These young, excellent dancers are so amazing. Watching them dance is like watching flowers bloom.

And I'm playing Bill Evans, the Riverside recordings. What an amazing pianist he was! A true artist. Also, had a lovely opportunity to go to a concert at the Disney Concert Hall, hearing the California Philharmonic play from Beethoven to Disney (a long way), with a little Music Man in the midst. That was a treat!

Not been on here for awhile. It was good to stop in and see old journal friends. I've noticed many people seem more sporadic than usual, and expect everyone is out summering. Let us play in the sun for awhile longer!

Any place I get poor service, I don't return to. If I learn a company treats its employees badly, I don't buy it's products. More and more, I'm trying to be environmentally and socially responsible in my purchasing decisions. Currently, companies are cutting back, letting go employees, cutting benefits. However, the people who reap in the profits aren't trimming from their own pockets. More and more I try to look to the places that are making good decisions and doing right by their employees, and do my spending in those places.