Category: All (-ish)

Requiem: Free gift from first checking account.

IMG_3167I went to school at a small women’s college in the small town of Nevada (pronounced Nuh-VAY-duh) Missouri. Back in my day, when you went to college, you had to open a checking account in your college town because it was before debit cards and if you weren’t going to carry cash around all the time, a checking account was what you needed.  I put off going to open my account on the special day they had for college students, and then had to force myself to go on another day. It was my first checking account, and seemed like a very big step and I wasn’t quite ready to make that step.

There were (I think) four banks to choose from in Nevada, and I chose Citizens State Bank because they offered a free gift if you opened an account with them.  It was a crushing blow to realize I’d sold my choice for a pocket mirror. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this token. However, it was for years my eyebrow plucking mirror as I could prop it on the windowsill and use the natural light to find the stray hairs.

I’ve just realized that this was not the last Citizens I banked with.  There was one in Massachusetts, too.

Is Citizens still there?  Apparently, it changed even before I left in 1995.  It merged in 1994 with the Mercantile Bank of Western Missouri which merged in 1998 with the Mercantile Bank of St. Louis National Association which became in 1999 part of Firstar Bank of Missouri, which merged in 2000 with US Bank.  And that bank still exists.

Someday someone is going to write about the many bank mergers of the 90s.  They were super annoying and I’m guessing they didn’t help ME any.  In Boston I had to keep switching banks because I would find a nice small bank and it would be gobbled up by some conglomerate that wanted to charge me tons of fees because I didn’t have a combined balance of $5000.00.

Requiem: Delia shoes.

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Oh Delia*s.  How I enjoyed your catalouges when I was in my 20s.  This is my last item of clothing from that company remaining in my closet; the company has folded.  These shoes were always fun to wear because let me tell you, many men really enjoy big, stacked shoes like this.  “Those shoes are amazing!” many men (always men!) in my age demographic would say.  Perhaps they are not as aware of the fluctuation in fashion and the shoes make them think back to their college years, when all the hot girls wore big shoes like this.

The delia*s logo:

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What’s up with me and cooking lately?

Glad you asked.

For the past year I’ve been a subscriber to SoupStones, so a nice lady from Australia sends me five recipes to make each week.  It’s $20.00 per month, which is outrageous, but the food is good, it makes the right amount of portions, I don’t have to think, and most of the meals come together quickly.  So every Friday (that’s aspirational, mostly I do this on Saturday morning) I make my grocery list for the week and then on Saturday go shopping.

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However, since the beginning of April, I’ve been taking a class on Thursday nights, which means my weekly schedule looks like this:

Monday: long work day, can’t do much when I get home.
Tuesday: tap class
Wednesday: restorative yoga
Thursday: Pattern Manipulation Class
Friday: pretty much toast

This schedule doesn’t really leave me much time to cook during the week, so I’ve been doing a week’s worth of cooking on Sunday.  It’s not my favorite thing, but  like it better than spending too much money eating out.  Plus, I know that I have food for the week.

I usually run out of steam before I complete my list, though.  As you can see, the Hot, Cheesy Chickpeas didn’t happen.  I told myself I would do them later in the week. I won’t.

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Requiem: Motion Industries Mug

IMG_3163My first job out of college was for Motion Industries.  I was the receptionist, and the company I worked for had recently been acquired by MI.  Redundednt people were being let go, everyone in the company was older than forty, and there wasn’t  really anything much to do.  I was bored and depressed and it was the kind of company that only had two holidays per year and accrued any vacation time for a full year before awarding it. I lasted eight months before fleeing.  Best part? My boss Roberta Cronin.  “You are terribly overqualified for this job, but it’s yours if you want it,” she told me about a week into my temp gig.  We made it official and I learned–not for the last time–about  the danger of settling for whatever job comes my way.

End of this creepy house?

IMG_3148It doesn’t look very malevolent from this angle, but this house has always creeped me out.  I deliver the quarterly neighborhood newsletter and I always take a deep breath before setting foot on this property.  You know how some houses are like that?  There was some indication today, that this might be a tear-down.  But perhaps I’m just hopeful.

An ambling type of day.

I had a few hours between appointments on a lovely Saturday, so I did something I rarely do.  I wandered about with no real goals in mind.  It was a beautiful day to do so.

This lilac impresses me with the amount of blooms it has managed to produce.

In Massachusetts I lived in what was called a Philadelphia-style house.  I just googled the term and results seem to indicate that this term is only used in the Boston area to descibe a two-family house.  At any rate, they were everywhere in the Boston area and I don’t often see them here.  So I took a picture of this one, which is not only a Philidelphia-style house, but said house seems to have managed to escape the sprucing up most houses have undergone in this neighborhood.

It was record store day.  This is a line to get into one of Portland’s record stores.

I ate my lunch here.  I did not try their delicious flan.  That term is an oxymoron in my book.  But every time I run across flan, I think of the Birthday Flan in one of the episodes of Friends and I smile.  That Birthday Flan got what it had coming to it.