Come Saturday Morning

My title is a reference to an old Sandpipers song that was the theme for the 1969 film The Sterile Cuckoo, starring Liza Minnelli. I remember when it was overplayed on the radio, but I rarely hear it anymore.

Weekend Part 1:

I’d intended for Friday to be a low-key day. I took Debby to an appointment in the morning, where I read in the car while I waited. Then we picked up lunch and came home. I did some housework, napped, read some more, and chilled. I’d already decided to take the weekend off social media, ignore email, etc., and that’s why I’m now backdating several posts.

Things took an exasperating turn when I accidentally let a pot of potatoes and eggs burn–I was cooking them for expected guests to Saturday’s dinner that would include potato salad. I was furious with myself for the waste of food and time. I really can’t multitask when I’m cooking. I get too distracted…and that’s how I burn stuff. I threw out the mess, cleaned up the kitchen and eliminated the smell with Tom’s help, and boiled another large batch of potatoes and eggs. I was able to complete the potato salad and refrigerate it before I shut everything down for the night.

As I was getting ready for bed, I got a text from Tim letting me know news had just hit that Taylor Hawkins, age 50, drummer of the Foo Fighters from 1997 to present, had died. I’ll grab a bit of info from his Wikipedia page rather than try to sum up his career myself:

…he was [also] the touring drummer for Sass Jordan and for Alanis Morissette, as well as the drummer in the progressive experimental band Sylvia.

In 2004, Hawkins formed his own side project, Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders, in which he played drums and sang, releasing three studio albums between 2006 and 2019. He formed the supergroup NHC with Jane’s Addiction members Dave Navarro and Chris Chaney in 2020, where he also took on lead vocal and drumming duties…The band’s sole album is due for release in 2022.

Alongside his work with Foo Fighters and fronting his own projects, Hawkins was an occasional studio session drummer, recording with Elton John, [Miley] Cyrus, [Glen] Campbell, Perry Farrell, Stevie Nicks, Coheed and Cambria, P!nk, Slash, Bob Mould, and Eric Avery, amongst others.

Hawkins was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021 as a member of Foo Fighters. He was voted “Best Rock Drummer” in 2005 by the British drumming magazine Rhythm. He died on March 25, 2022, in Bogotá, Colombia, after emergency services were called to his hotel room, where Hawkins had been suffering from chest pain.

This news gutted me–I have my own musical reasons for loving Taylor Hawkins, and he was known for being a genuinely good guy. He overcame a lot of the afflictions that beset artists in the music industry (early reports imply some of those might be the cause of death), and the joy that emanated from him in public and when he performed was a brilliant light.

At Christmas, one of my gifts from Timothy was this book:

I haven’t read it, because as I’ve said over the last couple of months, I was trying to finish other books, tackle my TBR pile, and by the end of this month, you’ll see that I devoted March to fiction only. Reading Grohl’s book, which I’ve been excited about, will be bittersweet and likely sad, because he and Hawkins were not just bandmates, they were best friends, brothers by choice, and soul mates.

This all put me in a subdued mood on Friday night. I finally checked social media to read reports about his death and to express my sadness on Instagram, where I follow and am followed by musicians and music fans, as his death is one that is getting a strong reaction from those groups.

Just before I turned in, Lynne and I exchanged a few texts, and I went to sleep determined that Saturday would be a better day.

Weekend Part 2:

Tom does several hours of volunteer work on Saturday mornings, so it was just the dogs and me when I woke up. I decided to begin my day by reading in bed for a while, which meant when I heard the doorbell, I had to make a quick stop to the bathroom before I could find out who was getting a delivery.

Turns out it was ME getting the delivery, but it wasn’t flowers or packages. It was Lynne with her little girl Minute arriving as a complete surprise! Since she hasn’t visited since May of last year due to other commitments as well as Covid surges and variants, this was a FANTASTIC beginning of the day. We got to spend five hours talking and catching up, and once Tom got home, sharing my first birthday cake of the day.


OMG, it was so good, and that groovy puzzle is also from her.

We’re planning more get-togethers in the near future. She took home the sketchbook she keeps here for her coloring pages, so she could fill it with all the pages she’s done while we’ve been separated during the pandemic. Also, Mark, she does intend to help me come up with some ideas to make our yard prettier. I got to see lots of photos of what she’s doing with her own yard, which is huge, varied, and already looking like spring.

After she left, Tom and I did a little more housekeeping to prepare for:

Weekend Part 3:

My birthday. I’m so grateful for receiving an abundance of messages, cards, texts, and gifts (many of which will show up in future posts). Getting to see friends ON my birthday for the first time since 2019 was amazing.


Debby baked me a chocolate cake, and that’s a giant cinnamon roll with a candle in it because The Brides wanted to also have a belated celebration of Tom’s birthday; that was his dessert from them. He grilled burgers, ‘dogs, and a couple of steaks Lindsey brought, and my contribution was UNBURNED potato salad.

Jack’s contribution was staying at Debby’s with Stewie so he couldn’t bug Tim, and the other dogs were happy to see Pepper and Tim’s pack after getting to visit with Minute earlier in the day. All of them are the reason, after all, we are called Houndstooth Hall.


Rhonda let me know this is the ONE day of the year I’m allowed to wear this baseball shirt in her presence. Later, I suggested if I wore it any other day, we could get a photo of her holding up a different finger.


Celebrating with Timothy, Lindsey, Rhonda, and that little camera-fiend Eva, who spent the entire party trying to make everyone see that she got a mani-pedi in honor of the day. Not pictured are Tom and Debby. I lamented that even with four photographers present, we hardly take pictures anymore.

Though the weekend got off to a somber start, it turned out to be a wonderful day to celebrate being born and still being on the planet. Thank you to everyone who made it special.

Come Saturday morning, I’m goin’ away with my friend
We’ll Saturday-laugh more than half of the day, just I and my friend
Dressed up in our rings and our Saturday things and then we’ll move on
But we will remember long after Saturday’s gone

Songwriters: Dory Previn / Fred Karlin

Wednesday Experiment

Someone recently told me that I could just get a jarred spaghetti sauce. I think that’s a viable option for people who don’t like to cook or who don’t have time and are satisfied with a jarred sauce. But that’s not how I make my sauce. Today, I didn’t want to pair it with pasta because I was trying something new.


For this sauce: I started with chopped onions and minced garlic sautéed in a bit of olive oil. (Usually, I also sauté chopped celery and chopped bell pepper for my sauce, but I didn’t want it for this dish.) Once the onions were translucent, I browned the meat while stirring in the onions and garlic, then added a 6 oz can of tomato paste, a 15 oz can of tomato sauce, and water as needed. I stirred in desired amounts of oregano and parsley, then added a dash each of salt, pepper, sugar, and garlic powder. I let this low simmer for two to three hours.


In the afternoon, on a break from writing, dog duty, and a bit of housework, I thick sliced a peeled eggplant, dipped it in egg, then into Italian seasoned bread crumbs, and browned it on both sides.


Put the eggplant one layer deep in a casserole dish. Topped each eggplant slice with a 1/4 slice of white cheddar, then spooned meat sauce over it all.


Topped that with shredded parmesan and panko bread crumbs. Put that in the refrigerator until it was time to bake it.


Baked at 350 until eggplant was done.


Ideal with garlic bread and a salad.

Mysteries, etc.

In my effort to read more fiction this year, one of my goals has been to catch up on the series of my favorite mystery writers. My mystery bookshelves can be deceiving.

On those shelves, I might have one or two books by a writer, but I have just under 300 ebooks, and the largest percentage of those are books from mystery series by prolific writers like Louise Penny, Donna Leon, Carolyn Haines, Alan Bradley, and Martin Walker. Also, there are some mystery series on my LGBT shelves (and some of those authors also have works included in my ebooks), and the full collection of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books are in a different room, plus she has other series I have in ebooks.

All of this means I don’t know what’s missing from the pandemic years, and I’m currently compiling a list by author of all their works, and whether I have them in hardcover, trade paperback, paperback, or ebooks, and if they’re in ebooks, whether they’re on my Kindle app, Kobo app, or Nook.

Just so you know what I’m doing with my non-writing time. This is why I don’t watch much TV and see so few movies these days. Though on the TV topic, Tom and I have watched almost the entire first season of “Ghosts” as our dinner entertainment, and while I thought it would just be a fun diversion, it’s actually a show we both really like, humorous and often touching. Glad to hear it’ll have a second season.

The Drama and Desire of February Reading

There is still today, plus two more days, in February, but I’d rather do a lot of writing, so I’m calling it for this month’s reading activity. Here’s what I’ve read, and this post ends with something I promised to tell you.

First up, on the Kindle app, I read Bow Wow, the third (maybe last?) in Spencer Quinn’s Bowser and Birdie middle school mystery series with a dog as a narrator. I’m a fan of Quinn’s Chet and Bernie mysteries (written for adults), also narrated by a dog.


I bought Pattie Boyd’s memoir in late 2020 on my Kindle app. I don’t know if I started it then, or in 2021, but it fell victim to my pandemic inability to read. I finished it this month!


I downloaded these two short story collections by Helene Tursten to my Kindle app as soon as Princess Patti recommended them early this month. She said she smiled all the way through them, and she clearly knows me, because while I might not have picked them on my own, I found the “elderly lady,” Maud, wickedly amusing. The entire time I was reading, I knew these books were meant for Marika. When I suggested them to her, I found out she’d already read and loved them.

If you recall, I shared that I read the first two parts of Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days in 2010 and made no promises about when I’d finish. This month, I reread those first two parts and completed the third part! They are strange tales, the first set during the Industrial Revolution in New York, the second also in New York just after 9/11/2001, and the third set 150 years in the future, starting in, then venturing away from, New York. I think I figured out why I stopped reading this book. Walt Whitman is a huge presence in the three stories (the person and his writing), and I remember a period when I decided to reread Whitman. I think Cunningham’s book is what motivated me. Then a whole lot of life events got in between me and going back to the Cunningham book. I’m so glad I finished it!

I have several unread Joan Didion books, and I started with this one. It’s a quick read, and its real-life vignettes take place in a part of the South with which I’m very familiar.

I blogged at length on Tuesday about this Stevie Ray Vaughan bio, and I have this to add. The reason I’m acutely aware of the dates of SRV’s death, meeting our late friend Steve, and getting our dachshund Stevie is because I have the “manager’s log” from my time at that bookstore. I was the last of several managers/assistant managers left from among its contributors, and I felt it was prudent for me to take the log when I resigned. It wasn’t an official store record, just personal conversations between managers about things that needed to be done or had been done, along with accounts of crazy things that happened at our store. I especially treasure the notes and conversations between Steve and me, and I’m glad I kept the “log.”


I’ve saved Eamon Dunphy’s biograpy Unforgettable Fire: Past, Present, and Future–The Definitive Biography of U2 for last because it’s related to the bookstore and also to the art work I shared last week with the promise of an explanation to come.

In 2019, when I undertook to write what I’ve come to call the Neverending Saga, I thought I was writing one novel. Instead, I’m now somewhere around the middle of the fifth novel–written in less than three years. For a year of that time, I worked a 60-hour-a-week job. Once I was laid off and quarantined at home, I was able to devote full time to researching and writing. I’ve done more research than I ever imagined I would, because the stories so far have included relevant events from the 1940s to (at this point) the mid-1970s. It has been a laborious act of love, and it was bringing me a lot of peace of mind and happiness during the pandemic. In 2021, those feelings came to a screaming halt. I won’t belabor the reasons, but they were a shock to my system.

The good thing is I learned valuable lessons for moving forward. The bad thing is, I doubted myself and my work for a lot of months. Part of the hard-and-fast goals I set when I decided to undertake this project meant I’d be swimming against a current of conventional wisdom. I don’t have a publisher to answer to, but to meet my personal standards, I want what I’m writing to be plausible. Part of my research is the effort to find that my perspective is, in fact, plausible.

Very often, I search my blog for information or photos from the past 18 years. On one such search, I saw a post with a picture of the book above and text that said Tim had loaned me the book. When I decided to read it this month, I tried to find that post again and couldn’t, no matter what text I used. No problem. There was a photo of the book, so I searched my Flickr photos, my LiveJournal photos, and my Word Press Photos. My searches found nothing, which was impossible. The photo had to be stored somewhere for me to have used it. Without the post, I couldn’t find the code for where it was stored.

This is where my actions begin to show signs of my Aries compulsive need to FIND THE ANSWER. The answer doesn’t matter to anyone but me. I didn’t need the answer to read the U2 book. But how could I not find a post on my blog that I remembered seeing? When I couldn’t find it through photos, I began to review every year of my blog. Since I migrated my LJ to it, I’m talking about scrolling through more than 7000 public and 150 private posts.

Ultimately, there was no such post. I talked to Tim. He thinks he may have read the book, but he has no memory of loaning it to me. I can determine by the publication date and the sticker that the book was published before I began working at the bookstore, and became a bargain book while I was at the bookstore, or again, depending on the store (one store surviving when it was bought by Barnes & Noble), several years later. So perhaps I purchased it myself and just never read it.

When I started reading it this month, I was sure that I hadn’t read it before. A wonderful result of reading it now was that something that’s a fundamental part of how I’m writing one of my storylines, a part that I think readers might take issue with because it’s not the way this story is almost always told or written, validated that I need to stop worrying about it, trust myself, my instincts, and my characters, and keep writing. Neither my story, my characters, nor my plot has any connection at all to the band U2, its members, or their story (as of circa 1987/88). It’s just that what I see as possible is, in fact, possible.

The single explanation I have for the blog post is that it never existed, that I dreamed it. It isn’t impossible. I often have dreams that feel like pretty nondescript real-life events. But I’m skeptical. For what reason would I dream about a book I’ve owned for as many as 32 years and never read, and what are the chances it would turn out to be exactly what I needed to read?

Except…  Someone recently told me that when I wonder if something is true (“I dreamed what my imagination needed to feel authentic”), I should see if the Universe sends two confirmations. The first thing that happened was that the Photo Friday theme the week of my obsession was “Desire.” I was all, Aw crap, what kind of photograph am I going to have… And then it came into my head: U2’s song “Desire.” How was that in any way helpful? What did it have to do with my writing? Why was U2 hounding me?!?

With a sigh, I looked up the lyrics to “Desire.” And then… I laughed. Fine, okay. The doll who represents my musician, pictured here in November 2020…

And the U2 lyric: Gonna go where the bright lights
And the big city meet
With a red guitar, on fire
Desire

That red guitar is vitally important to the life and destiny of this character. I wrote it red for one reason, a funny reason that has nothing to do with any guitar anyone I’ve ever known owned. That would be a spoiler, so I’ll leave it there.

To create something tangible to try to express all this, I did the painting that I used on that Photo Friday post.

Still, I wanted some rational proof that Tim loaned me the book and I subsequently wove it into a dream “post.” I had one other way to test that. I began looking through my old photo albums (from when I shot on film, not digital). I take lots of pictures when family and friends visit our homes; I never know what one of them might catch. For example, the bookshelves in The Compound dining room in the background of a photo of some friends.

There’s the U2 book. That photo is timestamped 1/29/2000. More than a full year before Tim moved to Houston and could have found a Bookstop bargain book on sale anywhere. That settled the matter for me. Call it magical. Mystical. It definitely shows why I always turn back to music for inspiration and guidance. I don’t need to understand it. I just need to say thank you.

THANK YOU!

Now I have writing to do in the library next to the fire with a little company on the table next to me.

Hope you all find the magic, the mystery, the means, and the music to keep yourself going and loving life during turbulent, confusing times. Peace.

More Reorg

Last night, Tom and I did some major moving and shifting of books to make these bookcases in the living room work better for us. Most of his stuff stays put once he’s read it, but a lot of my books that I frequently consult were behind the TV, which I was always having to move to find them. Now, his rarely consulted or reread books are behind the TV.


From left to right, these are divided by LGBTQ non-fiction and fiction by author; music, whether memoir, biographies, or other nonfiction by artist then subject, and the many oversized programs and promotional materials that are shelved together away from the related artist just because of their tallness; mystery by author; political/history/sociology; metaphysical by topic; health; religion, spirituality, and philosophy; and finally, science fiction.

Another reason we did this is because we were running out of shelf space. The bookshelves in the library (almost all fiction, drama, poetry, and art, but also children’s and humor) are full, too, but for this living room set, there was one way we could make more space: by removing most of the boxes that were on them. Only two or three remain, and the others, along with boxes that were on shelves in our bedroom, have been moved to the office on top of the two larger dog crates, which serve well as tabletops.

By the way, in the top photo, second bookcase from the left, in front of the bottom shelf, Anime’s tail is visible. Today, we had a CRAZY morning of dog chaos because we had both the cable guy and the exterminator on the property. The dogs and I had to take a nap afterward.

Below is the whole dog Anime, generally the sweetest of the BatPack, who was just as vocal as the rest of them this morning. Despite their lunacy (it was a full moon, after all), we love them all, and they had a great romp of squirrel chasing later.

Tiny Tuesday!

The other day I went through the pantry because there are so many things in there that haven’t been touched in a long time. Almost all of these involved some kinds of beverages brought by visitors who like to drink them. There were many varieties of tea, instant coffees and cocoas of the “just add water” type, plus some dried fruits, candies, specialty crackers, pudding, etc. I looked at the “best by” dates on everything. Some of that stuff must have come with us from The Compound, because “best by” predated our move to Houndstooth Hall at the beginning of January 2015. All of it ended up being tossed except for one batch of instant cocoa that had been put in a Swiss Miss tin. The tin’s original contents had expired, but the replacement cocoa was still fine.

Among the teas was a collection in this tiny tin:

After I emptied and tossed the contents, I was pleased to add the tin to my Beatles/London shelf in the writing sanctuary.