There's a Beach on This Side the Pacific too

“You’ll miss 100% of the shots that you never take.”

--Wayne Gretsky

You guys don’t know how much I appreciate you.

In looking back over my blogs, I notice I have to watch not only the date but the year—I’ve blogged that long. Wow, and many of you readers have stayed with me. I am in awe.

I’m created another blog! This one is island repeats. If interested you can find it at http://thefrogsong.blogspot.com/ entitled Notes From The Treehouse, a retrospective on the Big Island of Hawaii. Don’t concern yourself with reading again all those convoluted thoughts, anxieties, worries, and issues I had with the island, I’m just telling you what I am up to.

I wanted www.notesfromthetreehouse.com, even paid ten bucks for a domain name, but alas, it doesn’t work. The http://thefrogsong.blogspot.com/ does.

I figure the island information is worthy of some pay-per-click ads. Ads pop up on the page and the reader—for free—can click on an ad. The advertiser pays per click. Sound good? Let’s see how it works. The site places ads according to the content, so I am anxious to see what pops up. They will probably change with each post.

On the home front, I got broadband on my PC. Yea! It works great. I can type here, go online here. Before I had to use the laptop and my fingers stuttered all over the place. Of course now on this computer when I make mistakes I will have no one to blame but the nut behind the wheel. Guess I will still have to use the laptop in the tree house though unless I drag this computer up there…whoops have to drag a phone line up there too.

The sneezing, coughing, wheezing, sniffling isn’t over, but we took ourselves to the beach last week anyway—ended up in San Diego at our favorite pizza place, Fillipis, the original one with cheeses, dried fish, pastrami, salamis, olives, cookies, some hanging overhead, some in cases. You squeeze past this array of tantalizing foods, and then you sit at a red checkered table clothed table, and prepare yourself for an epicurean delight. The beach trip was for another business plan, and another website.

Don’t laugh.

This site is called, Advice From Far Far Away, http://www.advicefromfarfaraway.blogspot.com/
and it is an advice column.

Before arriving at the beach I bought a bottle of rum, removed the label—hey, if you are marooned on a tropical beach you had to be marooned with a case of rum, right? Or that bottle found in the sand would, most likely, be a rum bottle. Remember the lady at the Ponds Restaurant in Hawaii? She found an ancient brown Purex bottle on Tsunami beach. A note in a Purex bottle? Naugh.

I poured the rum into another bottle, removed the label, put a note in the bottle and threw it out to sea. When it rolled in we photographed it. You see we are--in fiction--still stranded on a remote island somewhere in the Pacific. You can write to us, ask us your heart wrenching questions on life, love, and whatever, put it in a bottle—called cyberspace—and we will throw it back to you.

We are not professional counselors. This site will be peer to peer answers only. Daughter Darling, however, does have a degree in Psychology, and one of her contributions at the Battered Woman’s shelter was peer counseling. I haven’t lived past the mid-century mark for nothing, besides think of all those seminars I took. The site will feature a three generation perspective, which includes Baby Darling, who, being new and closer to the source, still knows that life is supposed to be fun. His advice will often be “Have an iced Tea and a cookie, and get over it.”

We thought of naming our advice column, Ask Two Dorks and a Man Cub. (What do you expect for free, two PhD’s and a Nuclear Scientist?) We decided, though, to call ourselves Grandma Jo, Momma Lani, and Baby Elias.

Okay, guys, we need some questions to get started. Got any?

P.S. We photographed the bottle rolling in the waves on video. However, the camera is sick and will not download into the computer, so we are going with a still photo for now. When the camera is repaired we will attempt to load a video.





Baby D finding a bottle


P.S. Please give your attention to: BreastCancerWarrior.net  It's from a dear reader and all around wonderful person.



Noses, Memory and Temecula

I swear my nose grew during those 7 months in Hawaii, but I was telling the truth, honest.

It’s strange though about memory isn’t it? That experience is there vivid, yet far away already. Makes me wonder about fact verses fiction, and how memory is fluid sometimes.

About my nose, it seems bigger to me, everybody else would probably say, “But you have always had a big nose.” Maybe I didn’t notice its size before, or I lost some weight initially, and thus it seemed bigger. I think, though, I am noticing my age.

“I’ve learned that old age is not a defeat but a victory, not a punishment but a privilege.”

—age 79 (From a book, dear Barry the caretaker of the Hawaiian farm left behind)

That touched me for I feel I aged 20 years during our Hawaiian stint. DD says no, but she is my Darling Daughter and wants to make her mother feel good. (My body feels good though, and if I don’t look in the mirror I’m fine. I’m grateful.)

Meanwhile in the grand state of California, It is storming over Big Rock Candy Mountain.

The mountain lies beyond the swath of green that is the grapefruit orchard. The mountain looks like a humungous Baby Ruth bar. We named it.

It was 104 degrees this morning, and then the clouds rolled in and thunder and lightning struck, really struck, and made a small brush fire behind the mountain, then sprinkles came—lasted long enough for DD to bring in the furniture she was painting--and then it was over, the fire was out, all returned to normal. We wondered if it ever rained here, although I don’t believe those little spits of water could, in all conscience, be called rain.

About Temecula, at first I thought this town was Eat, Shop, Eat Shop, Eat Shop, then it dawned on me. This is a planned community, and they placed a shopping center every mile or so. I guess so every little residential area has close access to food and shopping. It has no central old downtown area as do so many older cities. It has an old town, though, that looks like an old western town—I believe that was planned as well, or at least updated. I did feel at home when we went into a Laundromat and a sign read, “Do not wash horse blankets in the machines.”

No more Laundromats for us now though, we can wash our clothing at home. Hallelujah. And between DD and me we save about $50.00 a week.

We are recovering from colds—A strange one, “I feel like I am coming down with something. No, I feel fine. It went away. I’m out of sorts. The world’s in the pits. Rats, my head aches. Now my nose is running. I have a cold, I’m getting over it, ‘Cough, cough,’ Well, not yet.” A week coming, a week here, let’s hope not another week to leave.

I have decided since success is our goal, and wise people have said wise things, that I am going to include something motivational in each blog post. Here is my first:

“You are not your brain. Your brains are like your arms or your fingers, your heart or your lungs. They do their best work when you stay out of their way. Just try listening to your heartbeat for a couple of minutes, or pay close attention to your breathing. Chances are, you’ll get so worried about the whole process, you’ll wind up hyperventilating.”


“Or try this when you’re typing—figure out which finger presses the next key to spell out a word. You’ll bring the whole typing process to an immediate standstill.


“So there you are: you try to help out, and you wind up hyperventilated and totally unproductive. The thing about creativity is this: don’t think about it. And that’s perfect, because that leaves the productive parts of your brain free to work.”

—Brush Gordon, Project Director, Creative Development, Disney Imagineer.