“Equal Means Equal”

That’s how Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick put it when he signed the measure repealing the 1913 law which was the final impediment to same-sex couples from other states marrying in Massachusetts! The repeal of the 1913 law (which most likely was originally enacted to prevent interracial marriage) took effect immediately.

The tourism slogan may be “Virginia Is For Lovers”. But imagine all the lovely places in Massachusetts folks could get married and then honeymoon!

Power of Language

Senator Barack Obama is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. He has been ever since the final primaries on June 3, 2008 and Senator Hillary Clinton’s concession speech on June 7th. Recently, Senator Obama has increasingly been described as being presumptuous; as suffering from hubris.

In my opinion, there is a current of racism inherent in this criticism. To me it smacks of the old idea of the “uppity black” “exceeding his station” in life. Nor do I think it is an accident that “presumptuous” has become the word of the day. Not long ago Senator Obama’s critics were describing him as elitist. That didn’t do the trick for them. So the crowd who brought us “death tax” as a replacement for “estate tax”, settled on “presumptuous”. In that word they found a way to strike the old chord of racism, while maintaining plausible deniability.

Summer Harvest

Before I headed off to Carrie’s shower on Saturday morning, Chuck went to The Country Hen in Hubbardston to buy eggs during their farm store hours. He also stopped by the Farmer’s Market in Barre and brought home some zucchini and summer squash. Tonight I cooked up the squashes along with some olive oil, onion, garlic and artichoke hearts. I added some rosemary and a little bit of crumbled bacon. A few more veggies, such as tomatoes and eggplant and I would have been in the neighborhood of a ratatouille. But it was just fine as is.

I once described some recipe I had concocted to my nephew J.R. and his wife Lorrie. As I listed off sherry, olive oil, garlic, onions, a splash of cream, etc. J.R. got a grin on his face and said: “You could cook shoe leather in those ingredients and it would taste good!” Yup. Cooking is not rocket science!

Sunday Night

- More wild thunderstorms and rain, but all is well.
- I’m bleary eyed from processing Carrie’s Bridal Shower photos in iPhoto and Photoshop Elements 4.0. But I sure did learn a whole lot!
- I also had to figure out how to use Apple’s iWeb for the family photos, because I couldn’t get create and upload access to Apple’s HomePage! Ever since Apple made the big switch from .Mac to MobileMe, there have been hiccups and glitches. I can’t complain too much because from early 2005 until a couple of weeks ago it had been incredibly smooth sailing.
- Hope your weekends were everything you wanted them to be...

So Good!

The upcoming nuptials between my niece Carrie and her fiance Al are now just weeks, not months away. We love Carrie like a daughter and we are very happy that she found such a great guy. There’s just one very, very serious problem. Al is a die hard New York Yankees fan. Egad! So, here in Boston Red Sox Nation, it’s a mixed marriage. That fact, however, was difficult to discern today at Carrie’s Boston Red Sox themed bridal shower!

Lots of behind the scenes planning and plotting by Carrie’s sister Kate, their Mom (my sister) Gail and Carrie and Kate’s Auntie Linda made for a great afternoon hosted at Auntie Linda’s home in Rhode Island. Gail flew up from Georgia to surprise the bride-to-be, laying low at our Mom’s home until the shower. It was a fun wing ding and a good time was had by all!

Good News

Not sure if it was my icky illness or the wild weather earlier this week or something else, but I’ve been at sixes and sevens for several days. I’ve still been ticking things off my to do list, but I haven’t felt very zippy.

I did find some good news though:

Jeff not only survived, but blogged his way through his recent medical adventure!
PoetMama is expecting her second child, another daughter!
Barbie2Be has launched her new business!
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has figured out which jalapeno peppers we should avoid. So that means if we can figure out where our jalapenos come from, we can make this yummy appetizer - maybe with a bit of pineapple.

Also, something nice is happening to someone nice, tomorrow, but I can’t post about it yet. You never know who might be reading Pink Granite twixt now and then!

Say When:

WHEN!!!
I’m sure some other parts of this planet would be happy to have some of this torrential rain.
Because we’re all set for now - really.
Please?


Screen shot from WBZ4 Weather Radar

Probably Not What George W. Had In Mind...

Thanks to Papamoka, we have this video created by his circle of extended family and friends on the northern shores of the Quabbin Reservoir. Percussionist Doug Plavin clearly knows how to get people movin’ and groovin’!
Do pay close attention to the funding source credit at the end of the video...
;o)

Silver Plus Paper

Happy 26th Wedding Anniversary J & K!

Under The Weather

Actually, sick-as-a-dog. Hopefully, I will be 100% in no time.
The good news is that the last 24 hours guarantees Chuck will be the first person to be canonized while still alive!

This & That

:: Thank you to everyone who has been clicking off to sign the petition urging the U.S. Census Bureau not to edit the 2010 Census. (See July 18 - “Call For Action & Accuracy” below.)

:: I am very much enjoying the television series “In Plain Sight” on the USA network.

:: The New England region has the highest consumption of ice cream per capita in the United States. It makes me proud to be a New Englander! We eat ice cream year round. My favorite since childhood is coffee ice cream (regular churn, not soft serve) in a sugar (not a waffle) cone. These days, the best I can find is at Friendly’s. It used to be Newport Creamery, but nowadays, they’re almost exclusively in Rhode Island.

:: I have the opportunity to purchase Photoshop CS3 for better than half off the exorbitant list price. But I could also upgrade from Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Mac to the recent Photoshop Elements 6.0 for Mac, for about a quarter of the CS3 sale price. Chuck is a patient man. He’ll probably be fast tracked for sainthood after he dies just on the basis of living with me. And the me he is living with right now is incessantly wrestling with this CS3 vs. PSE 6.0 decision.

:: Summer being in full swing means I am in my seasonal country music phase. I’ve never lived south of 41 degrees latitude (or west of 93 degrees longitude), but how can I not enjoy music with lines like Brooks & Dunn’s “I shaved my legs. I paid my money. Play something country.” Or Sugarland’s “Friday, payday, Lordy gotta get away, had it with the wife thing; livin’ on a shoestring.” Or Toby Keith’s: “I ain't as good as I once was, but I’m as good once, as I ever was”!
Toe tappin’ bliss..

The Ultimate Happy Dance

It was through DancingMorganMouse that I found the ultimate happy dance video. It’s definitely worth a look. I smiled all the way through.
Click here to see the video.
You can learn more here.
By the way, feel free to join in as you watch. That could only be a good thing for you and the planet in general!

Call For Action & Accuracy

Back in 2000, I had a temporary job with the U.S. Census Bureau as an enumerator. I went through a training course and learned how to accurately and thoroughly gather and report data. Making sure that maps were correct, new homes noted and finding out how many folks were living in communities was all very important. My work with the Census Bureau was sometimes challenging, (especially after a negative editorial was printed in a regional newspaper) but always interesting. Some folks were kind; some were rude and mean spirited. Some people, often elderly, were obviously lonely and happy to find another human being standing on their front porch. Even if all I was there to do was gather some basic information and deliver their Census form.

Working for the Census Bureau also strengthened my respect for how important home ownership is to folks. Some people had exquisitely tidy and well tended yards, others, well, looked like the before photos for a house and garden makeover show. But people were proud of what they had, protective of it and seemed to love making it more their own. Sometimes that seemed to mean making it look more like the before photo, or planting a whole flock of plastic pink flamingos or operating earth moving equipment of all sizes to reshape the very land itself. But the important thing was it was theirs and it provided them and their family, with safety, shelter and a deep sense of place.

Unfortunately, I learned today that the United States Census Bureau will EDIT the data which will be carefully gathered by enumerators and submitted by individual citizens during the 2010 Census.

The U.S. Census Bureau will NOT count legally married gay couples as married. Instead, the U.S. Census Bureau will EDIT the data submitted by married gay couples and change their status to "unmarried partners"!

An excellent organization, People For The American Way, has organized an on-line petition to the U.S. Census Bureau. You can sign the petition here. I urge you to take action on this. As Dan Kennedy of Media Nation reported the other day in this post, “one in five Americans lives in a state where same-sex marriage is recognized”.

We can’t allow the Census Bureau to edit out the fact that a same-sex couple is legally married. You can tell them it’s wrong by signing the PFAW petition.

Meet Poly & Dani

Yesterday, both of these beautiful butterflies dined on our Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) in the dooryard. The top one is a Black Swallowtail - Papilio polyxenes. I’m pretty sure she is in fact a female so let’s call her Poly. The one on the lower right is a Monarch - Danaus plexippus. Because I can only see the underside of the wings, I can’t guess at gender. So let’s call it Dani. If you look closely, Dani wasn’t dining alone. Unfortunately Dani’s companion rushed off before I could catch his or her name.

Note to self: Grow more Milkweed!

Layout by LMR/Pink Granite. Software: Apple iPhoto ‘08 & Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 for Mac. Font: Helvetica

Fifteen Innings!

I didn’t want to care about tonight’s last night and this morning’s All Star Game at the soon to be “old” Yankee Stadium, but I couldn’t help it! It was a great game! Tied at 3 - 3 in the eighth inning, it stayed that way through the second seventh inning stretch in the fourteenth inning! Finally, the American League, packed with Boston Red Sox players, scored the winning run in the bottom of the fifteenth!

The best part was seeing all those great players, who are fierce competitors and rivals across 162 games every season, all hanging out together in their American League and National League dugouts. It was a bit surreal watching Derek Jeter, captain of the New York Yankees hanging on the railing, shoulder to shoulder with Jason Varitek, captain of the Boston Red Sox. Oh, and then J.D. Drew of the Boston Red Sox was named Most Valuable Player of the 2008 All Star Game. So good, so good, so good!

No need to wish me sweet dreams tonight!
Home field advantage, here we come!

The Same Stars

“We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universe encompasses us.
What does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.”
- Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (circa 340 - 402)

The first sentence in the quote from Symmachus makes me think of this community within the blogosphere. As Roo asked of
Ronnie the other day: “Does she [Sarah Faith] realise the number of virtual aunts and uncles she has?” I don’t suppose she does - not yet! But in addition to a wide circle of family and loved ones in South Africa, Sarah has lots of folks around this shrinking planet thinking, worrying and caring about her, celebrating her safe arrival and her beaming parents’ joy. That can only be a good thing.

The second sentence sends me off to more complex issues of belief, faith, religion and sadly, folks taking sides. Years ago I clumsily groped toward what Symmachus wrote so eloquently. I said that we all started out with the exact same set of Tinker Toys, we just built different versions of God with them; different explanations of the universe; different understandings of life. In the present day, to extend the image farther than I should, I would say a group of people got together and decided one particular Tinker Toy assemblage was the best; the right one; the only one. Then another group did the same thing with their favorite assemblage and before long we had monotheistic religions.

After half a century, I believe it’s only the common, human, moral truths that really matter. The most fundamental of these is the Ethic of Reciprocity or, as many of us know it, The Golden Rule. To loosely quote Hillel: “All else is commentary.”

Bound - To Be Determined

Chuck and I recently watched a television report on high end bookbinding on “CBS Sunday Morning”. The exquisite bindings by Herb Weitz and Jamie Kamph were dazzlingly beautiful and tremendously expensive.

That prompted Chuck to pose the following question:
If you could choose one book to have bound in a fabulously deluxe, once-in-a-lifetime way, what book would you choose?

Would it be a childhood favorite - perhaps the book one of your parents read to you at bedtime?
Would it be the first book that turned you on to a new genre or a new way of thinking about life?
Would it be something you wrote yourself?
Would it be a religious text?
Would it be your favorite cookbook?

I confess, I can’t decide. Neither can Chuck!
I thought about my favorite dictionary; The RH2 - The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged.
I thought about the book of poetry that my poem “Two Days In August” was published in.
Or perhaps “A Lantern In Her Hand “ by Bess Streeter Aldrich, which was the first stunningly powerful book I ever read as a child.
Then again, maybe “Gone With The Wind” which I read every summer all through junior high and high school.
Oh my! There are so many wonderful possibilities!

What book would you choose?

Once Again Corporate America Doesn’t Get It

The uniquely southern, delicate and light baking flour “White Lily” is no longer being produced in Knoxville, Tennessee. The J.M. Smucker Company (Oh Lord, I am biting my tongue and holding my fingers in check as I type the name “Smuckers”) bought White Lily and decided to stop milling the flour where it had been milled for 125 years. I referenced the famous and decidedly regional White Lily flour last year when I urged any reader in the southern United States, to make these “Touch of Grace Biscuits”. I knew better than to attempt to replicate them using a non-southern style of flour. But Smucker’s didn’t. They claim no one will be able to tell the difference. However, in a blind test for the New York Times, no one was fooled. You’d think that the company founded by Jerome Monroe Smucker in 1897, would be respectful of the more senior White Lily Company.

This time it wasn’t our fault. We weren’t the kiss of death. But we feel for the generations of southern bakers who have had part of their flavor heritage and taste tradition irreparably changed.


Thanks to Natalie “Alabama” Chanin of Alabama Studio Style and the Alabama Stitch Book for the heads up about White Lily.

A Little Tweaking

Jessica Sprague posted a Photoshop Tutorial yesterday that she called “ShaZAM!” She suggested that we try the technique on a photograph and post the before and after imagess. As always, her tutorial is very clear and involves two duplicate layers of the original photo. You treat each layer a little differently, (one as Screen, the other as Overlay) and adjust the opacities until you achieve the desired result.

As I went through Jessica’s Shazam techniques, I couldn’t help but compare it to something I learned over on Ree’s website Pioneer Woman. Ree sometimes takes her SOOC (Straight Out Of the Camera) photo, duplicates it as a layer, then applies Hard Light and adjusts the opacity. That can give a very electric, almost overblown effect. For a gentler effect she recommends applying Soft Light to the duplicate layer. I’ve found that works very well, usually at a 50% opacity.

So what you see below is Chuck, a truly handsome and photogenic subject, standing on the side of the Cadillac Mountain Road in Acadia National Park in Maine. He is proudly holding his National Parks Golden Age Passport card, which he got when he turned 62. Our friend Gale up in Bar Harbor calls it his “Old Man's Card”!

The top photo is straight out of the camera - our old non-digital Canon SLR, of blessed memory. The middle version shows Ree’s Soft Light change. The bottom one shows Jessica’s Shazam technique. Oh and in the bottom two, I applied a narrow burnt edge, using a technique I learned from Ro Paxman over at Scrap Girls. I don’t have a link to the technique, but you use an Adjustment Layer for Levels, move the sliders to blacken out the photo. Then use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to set your edge and feather it (I used 5 pixels). Hit Delete and Deselect. You can then apply a Gaussian Blur to tweak it even further.

So which one do you like best? Yes, I agree. Chuck is adorable in all three. But look at his face, his hand and the waterfall behind him as you assess which version is your favorite. Thanks!


Just click on the layout to get a better look.

Layout by LMR/Pink Granite. Software: Apple iPhoto ‘08 & Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 for Mac. Font: Helvetica

: : Update: Check out graphics wiz and author Claudia Snell’s comment on this post. She provides a nifty way to build on Jessica’s technique!

Beah Heah

Translation: Beer Here - as spoken with a somewhat exaggerated New England accent.

In an ideal world, Chuck and I would go up to Bar Harbor twice a year; once in the spring, once in the autumn. But the last two springs we haven’t been able to go. So yesterday we decided to make a day trip to southern Maine. We figured we would bring a couple of pairs of Birkenstocks to be repaired and we would bring our empty Bar Harbor Brewing Company beer bottles to be returned. We had no plans to purchase any new pairs of Birkenstocks, but we did definitely want to replace the beer!

Note #1: Remember a couple of weeks ago I mentioned we had a Special Problem? The lead sentence was: “Chuck and I aren’t big drinkers.” That’s important to keep in mind as we go along.

So off we went. The day was sunny, in the mid to upper 80s (30 C), and much drier than it had been recently. We stopped for lunch at Flo’s in Cape Neddick. Totally decadent, totally yummy. Then continued on up to Portland. Once the Birkenstocks were dropped off for repair, we drove farther down Forest Avenue to RSVP Discount Beverage. We’d never been there before, but a call to the Bar Harbor Brewing Company the night before, meant we had a list of several places that sold “our” beer.

We think of it as “our” beer, because we don’t drink beer. Well, we never used to drink beer until we ordered a bottle of “Bar Harbor Peach Ale” at Poor Boy’s Gourmet Restaurant in Bar Harbor. Out came an ice cold, 22 oz bottle of incredibly tasty, complex beer, made by the very local, very small Bar Harbor Brewing Company. (Note #2: The purists are correct: beer is beer, ale is ale. But to me, it’s all “beah”!) That was several years ago and every visit to Maine, we would buy a mixed case including all of their varieties and make it last until the next trip up to Mount Desert Island.

RSVP had three varieties of “our” beer on the shelf. We asked a very helpful and knowledgeable gentleman if they had any of the other varieties. He said no and then asked if we knew the brewery had been sold. Sold? I swear you could have seen the color drain from our faces! We know we are the kiss of death, but because we had been to the website and called them the night before, we were really caught off guard. Bar Harbor Brewery was literally a Mom and Pop operation. All the beer was brewed, bottled and labeled on site by the husband and wife brewmaster team. While we had been reeling, the RSVP man was still talking and brought us over to the new version of Bar Harbor Brewing Company products, in average size bottles, in a traditional cardboard six pack. Sure enough, there on the side of the label were the words: bottled in Portland, Maine.

We asked the bearer of bad news how many of the original 22 oz bottles of BHBC beer he had on hand. The number involved cases. We told him we’d buy it all. Seriously. We also managed to pick up a bottle of the previously elusive Kahlua Especial. (Please see Note #1). Because I wanted to be certain we could make our mortgage payment this month, I asked Chuck to charge the beer and Kahlua to our credit card, rather than the debit card!

Once the nice folks at RSVP had loaded up our Subaru we drove back down Forest Avenue. Along the way we decided to check out the other liquor stores on our list in the hopes of finding some of the other Bar Harbor Brewing Company varieties in their original form. The first place was a bust, but at the second, finding no parking, I dropped Chuck off and circled the block while he went in and investigated. As I rounded the corner, Chuck emerged, gave me the thumbs up sign and waved me into a no parking area. My car flashers on, Chuck and the staff ferried out more cases of beer to the waiting vehicle. We made a clean getaway, credit card slip in hand and went to our last stop, Whole Foods.

The Whole Foods in Portland, Maine is one of their huge, fabulous, flagship stores. We looked neither left nor right and made a beeline for the beer. Sure enough, they had some of the Bar Harbor Brewing Company varieties in the refrigerated section. We emptied the shelf. Then we found Rob. We explained our plight and our quest. Yes, he had more in the back. "We’ll take it." A dolly was procured. The bottles were counted. We stopped by customer service to let them know Rob had gone above and beyond the call of duty and we checked out, our third credit card slip in hand.

Back at the Subaru, we were running out of room, but we managed to stow the final cases. Laughing, we looked at one another. What the heck had we just done? We pondered the question and continued to chuckle as we drove to a restaurant we had heard good things about on WCVB’s “Chronicle”: “Susan’s Fish & Chips”, back over on Forest Avenue. Chronicle usually makes very good recommendations. In this case, Chronicle was wrong. The food was really sub par. Which in our experience is par for the course in Portland. We’ve dined at half a dozen restaurants, mostly down on the waterfront, and we wouldn’t recommend any of them.

Fed (technically), we drove our precious cargo home. Three hours later, we arrived to find a message on our answering machine. It was our credit card company. They wanted to talk to us about a possible fraud with our card. At first our hearts sank. Both our debit cards had been compromised a few months ago in the Hannaford Grocery store security breach. But as Chuck dialed them back, the penny dropped. Yup. Our credit card company thought that some frat boys in Maine were throwing a kegger! Nope. It was just the two of us. And as we stood in our kitchen surrounded by cases of Bar Harbor Brewing Company beer, Chuck told the credit card company about our adventure and couldn’t resist adding: “But we really aren’t big drinkers.”!