This is Not a Food Blog

But this was my lunch today.

There's a lot of beauty in Oaxaca.

The sink  in my hotel room looks like a shrine.

While out and about in Oaxaca today, I think I found the stairway to heaven.

I think that's where these folks are headed.

We Are All on the Same Path

Parade through the streets of Oaxaca Day of the Dead 2017

Well, if you look closely you can see the glint of the tuba, but not much else. There were fabulously made-up marchers, but the crowd was huge so I could barely see them myself, much less photograph them. And I was woozy from lack of sleep and a big meal, so I have to confess I didn't try really hard to stand on a fire hydrant or jump three feet into the air or anything.

pulpo

This was dinner. Plus a fancy cocktail made with mescal, mint, and cucumber.

It's good to be alive. Despite all the treats brought to the cemeteries for the dead, I'm pretty sure the living eat better.

Good Lord

This evil giant finally crapped out this morning, and after three expensive repairs in as many years, I'm done with Mr. Fancy, and I'm getting a regular refrigerator. It took two tries to find a place that would deliver the new fridge as well as haul this behemoth away.

And my first premium payment for Medicare is lost in the mail.

And I had a nice little getaway this weekend and stayed in a place where the hot water ran out.

And it's another day of record breaking temperatures here---with Santa Ana winds and a red flag fire warning. It was 90 at 6:00 a.m. right here, one mile from the ocean. I never want ice in anything except the occasional gin and tonic. Except today when I want ice in everything. And the behemoth is just pee-ing it into a puddle on the kitchen floor.

And wow, every day I see a friend's post about Day 30-whatever now in Puerto Rico where most people still have no power. It's amazing to ponder it. If my house had no roof and no power today, someone would have to haul me away. And every day I see another friend's post about her daughter's medical bills, and the whittling away of their insurance. So many awful things are happening, and then they just slip away out of the news, but they're not gone. People with no houses and their places of employment, blown to bits or burned to a cinder. Health insurance being ripped away from people who can't survive without it. I can't imagine it. I have to imagine it. I want to imagine it. I want to keep imagining it so I will vote in every election large and small.

This Is My Ocean

And it's your ocean too. Whether or not you ever, in whole entire life, see it up close in person.

It's your ocean.

It's my ocean and when I'm away, I miss it. I miss it right now, sitting at my desk typing away under the picture of my ocean for a little time with it before I tear into Chapter 19 of my book.

I'd write by the ocean if it weren't so terribly impractical. Sand, wind, sunscreen, etc. Like those movie sex scenes on the beach. Sand. Wind. Sunscreen.

These days at home, I like to write facing the wall.

How to Party When You're Dead

My niece got married yesterday, and I loved how the wedding decor included those who are no longer on this earth. While I don't really believe that they were watching from above, literally, the way that we were all watching when the bride and groom danced their first dance, they were there through us. People say I look a lot like my mom these days, and my brother's resemblance to our father is almost uncanny.

parents of the bride watching the first dance

So there we all were. All of us. Present in our earthly bodies. Present in the stories told, present when we catch a glimpse of one another out of the corner of our eye, and think, whoa, for a second, I thought....

At one point in the evening my youngest grandniece came up to me out of the blue, and said, "I remember Great-Grandma Ethel." And I said, "Well, let's go look at her picture." And so we did.