I enjoy unbuttered popcorn as an evening snack – generously sprinkled with Spike seasoning. I just googled “spike” and had to go to page 5 of the search results to find my family’s favourite all purpose seasoning. We’ve been studying the variability in popcorn efficiency – defined as the percentage of kernels that fully pop into edible…
Here’s a photo of Mom’s Grade 3 class at McKinley School in Gardena (Compton) California. Mom is seated, third from the left. Her classmates were mostly children of Japanese and Mexican farm workers. Update: Due to popular demand (100% of commenters so far have requested it) I am including the Grade 4 class picture below. It…
Lying in bed this morning, I lazily checked my email on my ever-handy iPhone. Suddenly I bolted up in excitement. (The truth is that I continued to lie lazily, but my brain did perk up.) I had received by email, a blog comment from a hitherto unknown half-second-cousin-once-removed, who found my post about Charles Douglass Waddell, who happened to her great-grandfather.…
Not long ago I learned a new word: “mondegreen,” from Throw Grammar from the Train . A “mondegreen” is a misinterpretation, most often of song lyrics, by a listener. The word comes from author Sylvia Wright who heard the words “Lady Mondegreen” in a Scottish ballad. She thought they sang: Ye highlands and ye lowlands Oh…
As I left off in the last post, toddler Anne was living with a foster family while her mother was in a mental hospital in British Columbia and her father was finding his way in California. (Society didn’t have the same expectations of fathers in those days.) Anne soon went to live with her mother’s older sister Vera on…
. . . . . . . . . . . . Often on weekend days we walk to the beach and around the peninsula. It is a 1.5 to 2.5 hour trip, depending on the diversions. There are frequently bald eagles around. They are the official national bird of the United States, where they’ve…
My mother’s story began in 1922. In fact it began a bit before – let’s say September 1921. That is when her parents were married. Adam, age 35, was a World War 1 veteran who, like many other vets after the war, was having trouble finding suitable employment. He was from a family of Scottish…
Here is the plan for the new year: Diet for the month of January (a minor “correction”). Finish doing whatever I decide to do with my mother’s photo collection. Label the rocks from my Australia trip. (Yes, I’ll explain that in a blog some day.) It is #2 that presents the most difficulty. Since I was…
Seeing Clarely 