I found a writing class. I’m going to try and sign up on Tuesday… I have to find a new blogspot for the writing.

Here? Well, I’ve been eating all too well lately, savoring my food with appreciation. I live a good life, I enjoy wonderful food. Recent events have me in a spin, fighting really, that temptation to fall into the abyss, (I’m NOT going there anymore, NOT), and trying to notice the good parts of my life. Noticing them, I am. I am asking my senses to wake up, and of course, taste is such a big sense. I love how we eat at home, how we cook and appreciate every bit of what we do, how we live in an area with so many different cultures, and so many wonderful places to experience the food of these cultures. I am loving my bowls and my pots and my pans. I do have excellent things! Now, how to be this way, love these things without becoming the third Fat Lady!

So. Wore the size 12 capris from my week-end in July with our daughter in Virginia. They’re snug. My face is as round as ever. I still have quite a nice bum, though! But my boobs are just too big, and the whole top half of me is that of a hearty well fed Dutch farm girl. Bloody ‘ell. Despite my philosophical leanings to understand what life is about, what it means, I still have a strong sense of vanity. Can you have both? Does the universe allow this?

My mum and I drove up to Cold Spring(s?), a cute little town on the Hudson river in Putnam County, New York. Oy Vey, lovely town with gorgeous old buildings and antique stores. About 8 miles before Cold Springs, on the 9D North, I saw a hand lettered cardboard sign “Tag Sale”. I screeched to a stop. Just checking Mum! Stay here. I bought a brown stoneware (about 3qts) Pfaltzgraf bowl (breaking up a set, how sad) for $5. I bought 3 broaches for $1 each, a fake pearl circle, a big blue stone set in fake marquesite, and a sterling silver cat. I also bought a $3 Claddaugh ring, sterling silver, made in Ireland (so the claim on the inside), for my daughter R, of the Roseannie perfume. When I climbed back into the car, I immediately pinned the pearl circle on my mum’s scarf. She was so chuffed, you would have thought it was real pearls. There was also a ceramic paella bowl thing there for $6 that I coveted but did not buy. I chatted with the sellers. The woman who was in charge told me she was having to sell her home. I said I hoped it was for a happy reason, but she did not reply.

My mother and I went on to Cold Spring, and walked around, had lunch and chatted to people. My mom had a lovely time, so she tells me. I didn’t buy a single thing there, the prices were too far out of my range. On the way back home, we passed the tag sale, and I almost caused a traffic accident (sorry, I am a shit driver) as I tried to stop and turn in. I bought the paella bowl, asked after a second Claddaugh ring I had seen and traded macaroni and cheese recipes with a man from Maine who said he also used the paella bowl as a wonderful mac & cheese bowl. I spent a grand total of $16 at the tag sale and came home as happy as can be.

Tonight’s salad was prepared in the Pfalzgraf dish, and I roasted potatoes and onions in the paella dish. I polished the Claddaugh ring and gave it to Roseannie.

You won’t know this, but Roseannie has her own special smell, I call it Roseannie perfume. It is a “just there”, not very strong, slightly sweet and gentle smell that I’ve always noticed about her. Well guess what? Maya the puppy has it too. It’s just by her soft ears and across the top of her head. I figured it out. This is the smell of a sweet soul.

I’ve been thinking for awhile that the time has come from some changes. I want to write, but maybe this is not the right venue. I still love peeking in here throughout the day to see what everyone is up to and I always come away with new ideas for all sorts of things from how to make exercise more enjoyable, or recipes or great books, or just to connect with another human being in, considering how many people I live with, what sometimes seems to be a lonely day. BTW I’m reading Amy Tan’s “Saving Fish from Drowning”. So far, I am liking it.

It took me an awfully long time to figure out how to pull all of these words out of this blogspace and into some readable/printable format for posterity. Who knew that it would be so hard to convert an xml document to word or text? Blech.

The next bit is only semi Geek-ese. My IT colleagues should/would roll their eyes if they see my solution….hey, I’m a data base gal, they don’t let me write for the front end anymore. Too old, I think. I had quite a job figuring out how to save my words from this blog, and I thought I’d share. I tried to be clear. Feel free to send me a note or a question if I haven’t.

For any of you that have this problem too….here’s what finally worked for me - some of my steps may be unecessary from a tech point of view, and I can’t tell you which ones, but in the end it worked for me:

First - at home I’m running the XP operating system. I used to have XP professional, but I think this one may be a later version. This seems to make a difference to how things came out. My work PC is different and the same things I tried on the work PC came out very differently.

Here, in 3fc, I went to Manage, and clicked on the Settings option, which is now waaaaaaay over to the far right.

From there, under “writing”, I changed the maximum number of posts to display on a page to 500 (I had 277 posts in all, so far, so make that number of posts to display at least as big as the number of posts you have). What this does… is pull everything you’ve written onto the screen after you’ve clicked on print - not just the few pages you’re usually looking at on the screen. I also changed the number of lines to display for a post to 500. This may have been unnecessary, but the idea was I wanted everything, not just half of the post with the little “more” at the end of a paragraph or two. Once you’ve changed these settings, just go and view your blog and click on print. You should get ALL your posts and all the lines in each post. You don’t have to use up all your ink and actually print, you can also just save your print-out to a file (using Microsoft’s Document Imaging if you have it, or, if you’re lucky and have it, Acrobat (usually some part of Acrobat can be downloaded free from the internet) - so you can save it to a PDF), gives you a really nice printable format. You can always really print it all out later. That was my option 1.

Option 2, which worked better for me at home was to use the RSS Feed under the title of “Meta” directly on my blog page to “feed” to myself first the blog, then the comments. Before using that option, I went back to Manage, then settings (waaaay right) and changed the Reading settings as follows (again, to be sure I was able to “pull” everything): Blog Pages show at most 300 posts, and Syndication (that’s the RSS) feeds show the most recent 300 posts. When you click on the RSS feed, smart software pulls your posts and places them into an XML file. If you do this from IE on my home computer, you get a very nicely formatted document that even has any pictures in it that you’ve published. Now this was the bugger - how to get that document saved as a WORD doc? Well I couldn’t. Dammit. I am not clever enough. So I printed it, just as I described above, saving the print-out to a file instead of actually printing. The advantage here, to me, was the prettier (I was going to go all IT on you and say “superior”) formatting.

LOVE,

RubyJean