Halloween Time at Disneyland

 Last Friday the kids had the day off of school (for "staff development" in the district), so the husband took the day off from work and we spent it at Disneyland.

The park was all decked out for "Halloween Time," with lots of candy-corn colored bunting up and down Main Street, carved pumpkins on ledges and balconies, and a general "Harvest Festival" feel to the air.  The fact that the weather had cooled off from the 90s and it was overcast all day helped make it feel a little (teeny tiny bit) like Fall. (Or at least Fall in SoCal.)

 The next set of pictures were all taken at the "Woody's Round Up" ranch and barbeque area near Frontierland:

 Even the little goats in the petting zoo sported seasonal bandanas.

I love this picture on a whole lot of levels. It just makes me smile:

The lollipops, Donald Duck in costume, the harvest decor, the smiles on my kids...this is  just a lot o' cheesy Disney goodness all in one place.

And these shots were taken near or at the Haunted Mansion, which is all decked out again in a "Nightmare Before Christmas" theme until the entire holiday season ends in January.

It was a great day, capped off by our family's first viewing of the Fantasmic! water show. The only disappointment was that a large portion of the seasonal "harvest carnival" area at Woody's Ranch was closed that day. (I really wanted to check out the new "Conjure a Villain" tent.)

On the other hand, for the first time ever, we've bought tickets to attend a night of "Mickey's Halloween Party" in late October. This is special event (that requires an additional ticket), where everyone gets to dress up in costume, kids can trick or treat in different areas, lots of fun mini-events and character stuff, and a themed fireworks show. I'm pretty sure all the specific seasonal displays will be open and running that evening.

In the meantime, go get yourself a pumpkin latte. Or a handful of candy corn. Being at Disney, and looking at these photos again, makes me feel all harvest-y. It may be close to 90 degrees here again today, but it's time to burn that pumpkin candle! 

The Last Bookstore

 Way back in another lifetime, I taught a couple of English & writing classes to college students. I was freshly out of grad school myself, and though I was near 30, the fact that I was newly married, immersed in college life, and without any kids made me feel like I was still fairly close in age to the incoming generation of students.

That all abruptly changed when one of my students, a confident young guy, asked as I stood in front of the class what I liked to do in my free time. Or maybe he asked what my husband and I liked to do together. So I told him, and the class, about our favorite kind of date night. (But since we didn't have kids back then, it wasn't "date night." It was just "Friday night.")  I told him that we liked to first go out to dinner, and then while away several hours at our local Borders bookstore, often hanging out until closing time. (Remember Borders?)

The student, and the class in general, was horrified at our idea of "fun." (Although I recall a couple of females defending me, saying that it was "cute.")

Anyway. Maybe you'll think the same about our sole family outing over the 3-day Labor Day weekend. It was crazy-hot out, and humid, and I could not think of anything to do. The beach sounded good, but too adventurous. Our local pool was just too damn hot.  I had a craving to look at some books.  We don't have an independent bookstore here, which is unfortunate, and a true lack. We do have a Barnes & Noble, but I wasn't in the mood to browse in that sort of corporate, pre-selected atmosphere. I could already guess what they would and wouldn't have.

I remembered seeing some photos of The Last Bookstore, and got it in my head to check it out. The Last Bookstore is in downtown Los Angeles, located in an old bank.  It's also about 80 miles from my front door, which is a long way to drive to casually browse through the stacks.   On the other hand, downtown L.A. is only about 20 minutes east of my mom's house, so I was able to bundle in a "trip to grandma's" at the end of our bookstore jaunt.

It was worth the drive. There were books everywhere. Used and new books live happily together on the sorted shelves downstairs.

Books are art, and decoration, and functional: the front cash register is housed behind a counter area made of stacked books. 

As you head upstairs, you pass through a tunnel of books:

Upstairs are used books, and most are only $1.  They're sorted loosely by genre, and also by color:

The old bank vault houses true crime & horror:

The only negative is that it was still crazy-hot and humid in L.A., and the store didn't have air-conditioning. Yikes. Most any other day, that wouldn't be such an issue, but on one of the hottest weekends of the year, it was awfully stuffy and close, and I felt pretty uh, "glowing" by the time we were done. But it was still fun, and we still stayed for a couple of hours, checking everything out, including the artist studios and shops, also on the 2nd floor.

In the end, I bought an armful of books: four for me, three for the kids, and one for the husband, an oldie but goodie from his childhood:

My grand total was less than $25.00. 

I wish that we lived closer, so that The Last Bookstore could be a frequent stop for us, and not a special event.  In any case, I know I'll be back someday, hopefully on a cooler day when I can wear boots and a sweater and feel all cozy surrounded by books and other kindred souls like me, who think whiling away a few hours in a bookstore is a perfect way to spend their day (or date night). 

Curly Headed Woman

Be forewarned, this post contains a lot of pictures of me. And most are selfies, too, God help me. Not because I think I'm so gaw-geous or anything, but simply talking about my hair without the accompanying visuals just ain't gonna cut it.

Last September, I wrote about my short (and greying) hair and how I was trying to grow it out.  It took a long time, pretty much the whole year, but my hair is all grown out (and I do mean "out," as in width vs. length). 

This was me last year, at my aunt's pool party:

And this is me now (taking my selfie-taking so seriously!).

 My hair is,  and will still grow "longer" than this, but it's hard to tell, because of shrinkage.  That means my hair is one length when it's wet out of the shower, and about 3" shorter after it dries.  So in the photo above, my hair, when wet, is actually about as long as where my shirt puckers on both sides above my chest, but it's all dried and "shrunk."  My hair is extremely curly, not just a little, and it dries into tight little corkscrews, especially in the back.

 I knew I was going to write here about my hair, because I've had some breakthrough/revelatory feelings about it lately.  So I had the Husband take a few shots of me last week:

I've found that my hair can be just as non-photogenic as the rest of me. While my face gets all fake and tense and my body language stiffens up, my curls are just hard to actually see.  I had the husband take my photo because it was a good hair day, i.e, I had lot of good curl separation and definition. But in the photo above, it just looks like one big dark clump of hair, especially on the left.

Let's try it with a flash, I told him.

The flash does help show more of the tight little curls I have going on back there.  But still, it's hard to get a sense what exactly is going on back there (and under there, too).

So maybe you've read this far and are thinking I feel bad about the whole drama that is my hair. (And maybe or probably, you're feeling bad for me.) But in the last month, after years of cowering under my hair and it's...size, I feel proud of it. Happy that it's mine, and healthy, and even glad that it's so terribly, ridiculously thick.

Last month, I was getting a bit fed up and wanting to hack my hair off again and go back to short. I was trolling images of hair on Pinterest, looking for inspiration. (There's not a lot out there for curlies like me.)  While there, I stumbled upon some of  the graphic cartoons and the blog of "Tall n' Curly."  The woman who writes Tall n' Curly not only has ginormous big curly hair, but she's also 5' 11.5." So she might know a thing or two about never being able to be invisible or disappearing in a crowd. She might know something about wanting to hunker down and just be "normal" looking. 

I'm only 5' 6 1/2", but related to just about everything she had to say.  I spent over an hour clicking through her site, smiling and nodding at so many of the graphic cartoons describing all the stupid things straight-haired people say to curly-heads: "have you ever tried to straighten it?" "don't you ever moisturize?" "oh my god, you look so much BETTER with it straight, you should wear it like that EVERY DAY!"  and especially, "it's SOOOO humid/rainy today I can't do a thing with my hair!"

But I also got a little emotional reading her "About" page, where she talks in length about her evolution of accepting herself and her hair. This part in particular hit me:

Looking for the truth everywhere, I now believe everything happens for a reason. And in “everything”, there is my hair. I was born with this hair. There must be a reason for that too. So although I still – and will always – get angry a lot at it, I now respect my hair for what it is : a part of me.
Actually it’s not that different from who I am. I’m pretty stubborn and rebellious too. What was I expecting from it ?

Well, yeah. What she says.  And it seems so simple, but it really shifted my feelings about my hair. Not to imply that I've always hated my hair, because I don't, and I haven't. On the other hand, I've always felt the need to make apologies and excuses for my hair, like it's my bad monkey-child that I just have to drag along everywhere I go, like it or not.

Most of that guilt and embarrassment comes from my mother, who, in a nutshell, just doesn't like my hair.  And she REALLY doesn't like it when I choose to grow it out.  (Like now.)  That topic is a whole other post, but let me just say: I spent my childhood with her brushing my hair. Daily. (I know it's not her fault that she didn't know how to handle it, but all that fighting with my hair made her actively dislike it, except when it's cut very short.)

 Speaking of humidity, I must be all grown and wised-up these days, because I've (mostly) been able to control my hair in the crazy heat & humidity that's lingered here for the last two weeks. In the past, I'd have been forced to just throw it in a pony-tail every day to deal.  But my hair has been mostly behaving with the products I've been using. (And paying my crazy-expensive Deva stylist is also a big part of it.) Yesterday I did wear it up in a great big, top-of-my-head up-do. (My daughter said it looked like a hair-tsunami!)

After I took it out of the heavy-duty hair elastic, I had some REALLY big hair and volume going on. I tried to capture it at bedtime, but even these shots don't capture the true size of the event happening on top of my head:

My first and middle names have Celtic/Teutonic roots, and my names, respectively, mean "woman warrior" and "famous in battle."  With those kind of names, it's no wonder that so often I go through life fighting everything (especially myself) and making not-so-complicated choices into arduous, drawn out battles.

But I think it's time to stop fighting myself, my hair, and my true nature and declare: you know what, mom world? Life & DNA gave me some really crazy-thick and curly hair. And I actually like it. And my husband loooves it and thinks its sexy.

Deal with it. I'm a woman warrior, and I've got the hair to prove it. ;) 

The BIg Pink, Revisited

It's been a year and a half since I shared the re-do of my daughter Lily's bedroom.  In the original post, I wrote about how it all evolved, and also about the (many) things I don't love about the room.

Fast forward to this spring, and my irritation with the general look and feel of the room hadn't changed.  In fact it was worse, because now the room was thoroughly lived in and thoroughly messy and more, it was clear that Lily couldn't hang out in the room with her friends because there wasn't anyplace to sit. 

Around this time, in my despair to find a way to rearrange a room that just can't be very rearranged, I remembered the little orange futon that used to live in the playroom. After rearranging the playroom/guestroom, the futon was living out in the garage, waiting for me to put it up for sale on Craigslist.

One Saturday afternoon when I went in to dust and straighten the bedroom, I got completely fed up and started hurling piles of crap out into the hall and getting that "thousand mile decorator's stare" as I leaned in the doorframe and started cooking up a plan.

Within the hour, I had the husband hauling that heavy orange futon out of the garage and up the staircase. (I have such a nice husband. Have I mentioned that?)  Anyway.

Before:

And After:

I rearranged the room and later that weekend, hung up the shelves (that used to live in my entryway).  I'd been promising to do that forever, and Lily and I were both glad that I finally came through.  It allows her to display her Josef birthday doll collection (note that they stop at 9 -- because she didn't have any display space, they didn't get purchased these last 2 birthdays).  It also lets her display the "potion" crafts that were a big part of her summer.

So her room was completely rearranged, but still needed a good sorting and re-organization of so much clutter. But then summer hit and the kids were out of school, and so for the entire summer her room was merely different, but still not really done (or cleaned). 

Now they're back in school, and this week I've been cleaning and cleaning and throwing things out and helping to find better storage and organization options for her.

She's been a Japanese manga and chibi drawing fool lately, which is cute, but also means that her desk (and the surrounding floor) have been littered with papers in various stages of creation.  Since she's in middle school now, and since she's starting to do her homework alone in her room, we needed to clean up the chaos and make it a better space for studying along with the creativity.

The drawers are cleaned out, the crayons and markers are sorted and contained, and I bought her the pink paper organizer at Ikea this weekend. 

Her vanity area is now next to the door, and the surface was also a big cluttered mess of lip gloss, earrings, Harry Potter wands, marbles, papers, etc.  And she'd stopped wearing most of her earrings, because they were lost in her equally cluttered little jewelry box.

I bought the earring tree at Michael's, and she loves it, and loves that I found & sorted her earrings.  Let's see how well she can keep up with actually using it!

 Some cheap purple Command hooks serve to display her soccer medals and Disney pin lanyard. I want to buy some nicer, real hooks to install to the left of the mirror for necklaces and scarves. So far I haven't found anything I like, but  a trip to Anthropologie would probably solve that. 

The futon has just enough room under there to fold out into a full sized bed, once you move out the little table. We've used it for a sleepover, and it worked out great. (In the old version of the room, there was no space to sleep on the floor.)

While I'm still a long way from loving this room, I like it a lot more now that its more functional. Lily is able to invite friends into her room and have a place to actually sit and hang out.  This is a small room already, and it's packed full of furniture -- but every piece serves a function

The fact that she still prefers to crawl into my bed on lazy weekend mornings to sit and read gives me hope: it tells me that in a couple years, she'll likely get tired of exotic loft-sleeping, and want a regular bed again.  Already, she has to duck down to get into the bed, and she certainly can't sit up in it.  She's mentioned wanting a chandelier -- until I reminded her that she can't have any hanging fixtures while the loft is up. 

I'll be more than happy to oblige when that time comes. Until then, she's an eleven-year-old girl who still feels that she has a pretty awesome bedroom, no matter what mom thinks.

And mom just thinks she's a pretty awesome kid. 

You can see all the bedroom Before shots in my original post about her bedroom, here.

Linking up with Jules for the William Morris Project.

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

Last week I finished "The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls," a coming-of-age novel set at an exclusive riding/boarding camp for rich Southern girls in 1930.  I really enjoyed this book; the voice of the narrator, Thea Atwell, is strong and sure and terribly self-possessed for a sheltered fifteen-year-old. 

I was a couple of chapters into the book before it dawned on me why I was enjoying it so much: back when I was a teen/tween, I inhaled books about girls at boarding schools and summer camp.  Going away to school, and particularly summer camp, is something taken for granted if you're at least middle-class on the east coast (or so I learned), but that reality was terribly exotic and foreign to me, a barely middle-class girl from SoCal.

 I also have a huge weakness for books set in the South, especially the wealthy South prior to the 1960s, where manners and etiquette and good breeding were so much a part of the culture. Again, growing up I knew nothing of debutantes and cotillions and family names, but I soaked it all up like I was studying for some future test. (I read Gone With the Wind at least 3 times.)

So when wealthy young Thea is shipped from her isolated home comprised of acres of wild north Florida landscape, and shipped off to the mountains of North Carolina as punishment for some unnamed transgression, I was hooked. 

I liked the plot of the book, but what I liked even more is how DiSclafani chose to make Thea such a fiercely strong and feminist character in that insulated world of wealthy young horsewomen. Yes, she is sexual, and has strong sexual desires and fantasies, which maybe upsets people, but her desires are perfectly normal -- for 15 and 16 year old girls now, and those back in 1930.

Not to give too much away as to why Thea is abruptly sent hundreds of miles away from her beloved home and twin brother, but in our current culture of "slut-shaming" and blaming the victim, I loved how Thea understood and tapped into her own female power to navigate her new surroundings.

Very strong and engaging first novel, and I look forward to more from DiSclafani. 

********************
So, as I got a few chapters into the book and remembered how much I loved "boarding school books," I remembered my favorite one of all.  But I couldn't recall the name.  Thanks to the internet, a few minutes of searching provided the answer:

It was "They'll Never Make A Movie Starring Me," by Alice Bach.  Despite re-reading the book several times, all I can recall now is that the narrator is a well-to-do young woman from NYC, sent to boarding school in New England.  She's obsessed with the young Katherine Hepburn, and tries to live her life by mimicking Kate's wealthy blue blood/dryly witty persona of her early comedies.  What I most remember from the book is that protagonist wants to attend Bryn Mawr, the exclusive women's college that Hepburn actually went to.

Since I had no clue about New England blue bloods or what the heck "Bryn Mawr" was or implied, I lapped up all this fascinating cultural stuff. And since it feels like I also spent huge chunks of my adolescence trying on personas and mimicking famous people or characters, it's no wonder I responded to this book so much. 

And I'm happy that "The Yonahlossee..." novel brought it all back to me.  

Love and Eydie Gorme

Last Friday, a chill went through me when I learned that Eydie Gorme had passed away at 84.  Celebrities die all the time, and sometimes it gives us pause, and more often we say, "who? Oh....right. Her/Him."

But sometimes we get a little misty and take a longer pause, like the last time I was inspired to write about music.  If George Jones was the artist who most reminds me of my dad (for so many reasons), than it's probably the sound of Eydie Gorme who most makes me think of my mother. Well, her and Johnny Mathis.

Eydie Gorme reminds me of so, so many things. Of being a child in both my parent's and grandparent's homes, sitting and listening to their stacks of albums.  Of late Sunday brunches that my dad worked over all morning, eggs benedict with creamy cheese sauce and Bloody Mary's (for them) and Sunny Delite for me, both served in tall glasses that he'd chilled first in the freezer. And Eydie Gorme and her Amor album on the hi-fi. 

It's the Amor album that we all loved best, and by "we all" I mean most of the members on my mom's side of the family.  As I have (or haven't?) mentioned here before, I'm half-Mexican American, on my mom's side. If I mention this, people who aren't familiar with the cultural makeup of Southern California will ask, Ohhh. So where's your family from?" implying that my mother was born in Mexico or a Latin American country. But no, my mother's family are from here, from this native ground of Santa Ana winds and palm trees and balmy Christmas mornings.

(If you are from SoCal, or have at least lived here long enough, you know that half-breeds like me, who don't look or sound at all Mexican, are a dime a dozen. Turn over any Mission tortilla, and there we are.)

What this all has to do with Eydie Gorme is that I find it funny and ironic, how a white girl from New York City produced an album that’s so beloved in so many families like my own.  What this all has to do with me is that, in a way, Eydie Gorme is the reason I'm writing a memoir, rather than sticking to my first love, fiction. 

Also: a fiction (mostly) piece that I did get published is titled "Don't Go to Strangers." Which is the name of the title track from this album, another fixture in my household:

That album, and my story, which is also thinly-veiled memoir, are another story altogether. Which is why I'm finally writing that memoir. So many stories to tell.

For now, here's "Piel Canela", that first song on the Amor album that starts playing when the record needle drops into the grooves.  I know all the songs by heart and sing along --- phonetically.  I still have no idea of most of what she's singing about.  Except, you know, love. What else is there to sing about?

R.I.P., Eydie.