A Trip of a Lifetime

We just returned from a 10 day trip to Europe---3 days in Barcelona and then a 7 day cruise to Spain, Italy and France.  And here's the best part....both of our mothers went with us!  It was a perfect trip.  Perfect weather, perfect travel, amazing scenery, wonderful people who tolerated our pitiful attempt at their language and the company we kept couldn't have been better.

We are blessed.

At the Pablo Picasso Museum, Barcelona

There's a slideshow below [WARNING:  It's a bit long.  And yes, I recognize that this is like subjecting your dinner guests to slideshows in the living room.  BUT you don't HAVE to click on it.  There.  You've been warned.  Oh!  Oh, oh, oh!  Here's your second warning....IF you choose to click on it, I'll know.  AND you'll be obligated to watch EVERY slide show in the our living room post dinner after EVERY vacation.  MUWAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!  ok, just kidding.  I won't know.  

Really.  I won't. ]

Locations included Barcelona, Spain; Monte Carlo, Monaco; Nice and Eze, France; Santa Margherita, Camiglio and Portofino, Italy; Alghero, Italy; Mallorca, Spain; and Valencia, Spain.

A few reflections from the journey.....

-4 countries in 10 days, pretty impressive.  And amazing.  Perfect weather and beautiful, stunning scenery

-We walked.  A Lot.  I loved it.  I always think to myself, I would love to live somewhere where I could walk or ride my bike to work, have public transit, great small markets and restaurants.  But then.....then I realize I'm really a country girl at heart.  The city is great, but I really like to only visit.


-We were prepared and conquered jet lag on the front end of the trip.  But dear Lord, why didn't someone warn me upon the return!!!  A four day recovery is brutal.

-Lord, forgive me for all of the times I wasn't patient with a non-native english speaker.  I'd like to think there haven't been that many, but probably more than I care to admit. For every person who tells a visitor to the States to "learn english", shame, shame, shame on you.  How quickly we forget that our great grandparents and their parents were once visitors to the States too.  And Lord, thank you for putting patient, kind and willing to not laugh at my broken non-agreeing noun-verb Spanish in my path over the last ten days.

-Europeans do food better.  Period.  They take their time.  They enjoy it.  They don't preserve or use artificial ingredients to make it convenient.  Food and eating is part of the art and culture.  We can learn a lot from them.

-Europeans do churches better.  We saw a lot of cathedrals and we were in a lot of holy places. [not one of which included a coffee bar in the narthex----yes, that's a glimpse into my snarkiness]

-Very few adults get to travel parts of the world with their parents.  We did it with two and have memories to last a lifetime.  Indeed we are blessed.

Thanks for a great trip Mama C and J!

Summer Mud

After a three year hiatus, I'm finally back in the studio.  Ok, ok.  I couldn't resist that last sentence.  Doesn't it make me sound like a semi-professional, once-had-a-really-good-thing-going-but-life-got-in-the-way-and-prevented-me-from-producing-amazing-ceramic-wares-that-are-sold-in-the-thousand-dollar-range?  

Now, here's what that sentence really implied......after three years, I found a local summer course where I could ruin a lot of clay, get really messy, attempt to center a lump-o-clay for at least 30 minutes of each class and hope that at the end of the three weeks I have something to bring home so Sweet Sarah really believes I was doing something.

Top left corner.  That's my bowl.

I also happened to rope Mama C in to it.  Her first pottery wheel class.  I think she's hooked.  But she's also tired from making the drive twice a week.  Don't you know how exhausting it is to golf three times a week, be a regular concert goer [Darius Rucker in the rain for her last night], have perfectly preened containers around her garden and maintain an active social life on the weekend?!  Retirement is EXHAUSTING, PEOPLE!!!!!!!

That look?  Yeah, that's the look I got when I was six
and I did something I was told not to do.  Same look.

It's been fun to spend time with Mama C [don't let The Look scare you.  She's all bark, people!]  And it's been delightfully frustrating and re-training [some of it came back to me, but I learned a LOT] and a nice reprieve for my brain to think about something other than work.  

Classmates!

Ready for the kiln

Ready to glaze! [why did I just use an exclamation mark!?
The picture above shows ceramic wares that are ready to be glazed.
There, much more aligned with the first sentence. ]

Tonight we glaze.  More pictures to come!

Meringue Fingers

When I was in college the NCAA required the student athletes to go through a series of courses called LifeSkills. One in particular, Table Manners and Business Dining, seemed a waste of my time, given that Mama C didn't tolerate much of a stray elbow, lip smack or open mouth chewing at the table. I'm pretty sure by the time I was seven I knew where to place the salad fork and which side the water glass belonged in a place setting. Yep, I was a graduate of Mama C's homeschoolin'.

Apparently, there are some people---professional people. Suit wearing, heal clomping, Coach briefcase slinging women in the world that weren't provided the same Mama C home rules, nor the illustrious NCAA Ms. Manners course.

Ok, so where am I going with this? Well, sit down people. Buckle up because I can't make this stuff up!

Last week at the conference I was attending, we were about half way through lunch when a hot mess of a woman, also attending the conference, plopped herself down at our table, took three large bites of potato salad and then, with her mouth still quite full, decided it was the right time to introduce herself.

AVERT YOUR EYES!!!! Look away!!!!! Convince your gag reflex that you're really not seeing mashed potatoes mixed with green beans in her mouth.

(Now if Sweet Sarah were to interject here, she would probably enter a lengthy sub-text about how table manners is probably my number one pet peeve. A smack? A crunch? The loud chewers???!!! Ugh!!!! Makes me lose my appetite.)

And oh. OH. OH. OH!!!!! It gets better....
Are you ready?

Well, after snarfing her way through two plates of buffet food in the time it took me to finish half of a salad, she jumped up to get dessert.

And what did she return with on her plate???

Oh yes, a cream pie. Yep.

In nearly three bites and a few more mouthfuls of conversation she was done. ALMOST.

But it couldn't be that painless. Nope.

You see, there was a little bit left on her plate. A little bit of cream and meringue, which seemed to be escaping her fork. So what did she do? Did she use her knife to gently guide that last little bite onto her fork, ala European style? Did she turn her fork on the side and give it the old scooping slide twist?

Nope.

Of course she didn't.

She used the two year old "use the fingers from your other hand to get it in your fork" method.

Oh yes she did. I can't make this stuff up people!

Oi vey!

Perhaps I should start offering consulting classes, "Professional Table Manners".  ....on second thought, maybe I'll leave that up to Mama C.