Book Club- Meeting 1

So, when I recently quit smoking....in which, by the way, I've failed at- Kathleen mentioned joining a "Book Club," in which I immediately replied that I would love to, as with losing my smoking, I seemed to have more time in a day.

However, tonight is our first meeting.....Looks like I didn't have as much time as I thought I would. I didn't finish Pride & Prejudice. But...I did take the time to watch the movie. That doesn't really count, does it?

I am, on the other hand looking forward to socializing with new lady Chester-ites. I think that's the correct expression for Females that live in Chester.....Of course, wine, cheese & crackers is also a good thing.

Sensory Memory

I'm at the office, rockin' out to some Tunes on my headphones. Right now, "Second Hand News," Fleetwood Mac is playing on my Pandora Station and I immediately smell a fireplace and the feel the warmth of it and get propelled of being at my parents house with the music playing loudly in the kitchen and dancing around in my younger days.

I wish I was anywhere in the world but here in this office today!!!!!!!!!

Valentines Day

What made my Sunday very special was not having to think! I spend so much time through the week exhausting my brain with work that by Sunday I am usually drained and it takes much effort to do things like planning.
I had worked Saturday night and gotten home late due to a strange customer at the bar....Long story short, not only did he walk out on his bill, he walked out on his date too...Snuck out the front door without her even noticing. JERK. Always an exciting story from Saturday nights at the Fishtale. Needless to say, I did not get home until much after 11:30 and was beat. Sunday morning I was awoken to breakfast in bed served on a pretty tin tray with a purple flower on my plate along with Orange Juice, sliced Canteloupe, Scrambled eggs, a Bagel and Kilbasa. Then Michael brought in the computer having started Les Miserables, the movie, via Netflix. He had a pretty bouquet of purple flowers in the kitchen and 1 single red rose & the sweetest card. I cried...I am such a sap for Romance!
I had to work for a few hours on a proposal so he cleaned the kitchen while I did that. Then, per his orders it was time for me to shower and we were heading up to Gilettes Castle with the dog for a nice hike. Boy, it was a beautiful day out! Very cold, but nice and quiet up there so Stella could run through the woods. We had a nice hike and then lunch was planned at La Vita, escarole & white bean soup, Ceasar Salad, Hand Cut Mozzarella and a refreshing Stella Artios. Afterwards, we met up with Kathleen, Ryan & Soup for Traditional Maragitas at Cabo and at home, filet mignon, roasted garlic mashed potatoes & corn. Ummmm, I was pampered and it was nice. But honestly, it was not in the spirit of Valentines day, because Mike is just this way, on any given day. I am lucky!

Monday, back at the office and being there early due to a meeting, it was a long day, didnt get out until 6:30 and once at home got a call I needed to continue working, which I did until after midnight, even while, unfortunately, we had friends over because Soup was leaving to go back to Maui this morning. I was a little dissapointed that work had to come up and interfere, but what can you do, I am dedicated to my job.

I hope tonight will be easier cause we are planning to veg out and have a movie night, plus enjoy homemade white clam spaghetti sauce!! I am looking forward and hope this snowy day comes to an end...& soon!

Snow day

I find I am much more productive at work & at my job....from home. Ahh..Wouldn't it be nice! Anyhow, outside of my productivity work-wise, I have also managed to somewhat pick up the house, take a nice hot & long shower, load the wood-stove several times and....finally make my decision that yes, I should have & will have the Black Carmen Harness Tall FRYE boots....and I found them on-sale so I will be making my purchase on Friday. Hopefully this expense will dissipate my craving for expensive boots.

Moving right along, I am still content here on the east, even with a possible foot of snow piling up. I am trying to rack my head today with Wedding Plans. The fact that my brother is getting married in just a couple of months has now peaked my interest in planning our day. As you know, we have "tossed" around several ideas and cannot seem to land on one that feels 100% right. The closest we have come is to the back yard 7:00pm wedding on July 31st with only immediate family and the closest of friends.

The way I picture it, is this: The sun starting to set, family and friends around little pub tables in the back yard, candlelight and fire torches, John Martorelli playing Pachabels Canon in D on his Electric Guitar as I enter from the front of the house with My dad and we make our way to the Arbor in the back yard(built by him), meet my husband to be, we recite our own simple vows and there you have it. Some light food and drinks as the night gets darker, minimal dancing.

Setting: 5-8 round tables below the deck around the patio which would serve as a small dance floor. Clear round short stem vases with White & Pink callalillies, maybe deep yellow table cloths and of course candles on each. A table with little apps. Scallops wrapped in bacon/Crab cakes/Stuffed Mushrooms/Sauteed Asparagus/Fresh Mozerella, Tomato & Basil Salad....I have to give the food more thought. Champage/Wine & Beer for drinks.

The next morning we would either head to LA for a few days then drive up the cost and head north to camp....or fly to Roatan and visit Mikes Uncle Joe & Betty, maybe visit Guatemala.


Concerns:
1- I want my backyard fenced in and patio complete by then
2- I would also like my master bath & 1/2 bath complete by then
3- & most importantly, trying to keep the guest list as small as possible is going to take ALOT of work and perhaps some hurt feelings in the end....

Okay thats enough about that. Back to work! Mike is closing the shop early due to the snow and we are having homemade Lobster Bisque from Lunch. His Dad makes the best Lobster Bisque!!

Yoga.....Or....Shoe shopping

"Broken Heart don't feel so bad, You Ain't got half of what you thought you had."
-Grateful Dead/ Row Jimmy

I am beat. I over did it! So I am having a Brandy to calm my sore muscles & overworked mind. Not only did I rush out of work to do DAY 7 of Jillian Micheals 30-day shred, then I proceeded down to Xo Yoga to try out a new class...Vinyassa. Right! Talk about getting my butt kicked by Patrick, who, unlike Wednesday (Beginners Yoga) nights where he tells you it doesn't matter how low you get to the ground, in this class he keeps you in an intense state of over-working yourself & more importantly, your abs, for an hour and 15 minutes...to the point where when your brain should be somewhere else....Mine was shopping for boots.

Does anyone see something wrong with this picture? Either I have an extreme addiction to shopping for shoes that needs medical attention.... or I simply suck at the art of meditation!
There, I said it!

The big question: Will I go again next Tuesday......I will think about it while I have another BRANDY!

White Noise (6-29-05)

fuzzy on a cloud / in a cloud
remembering memories i cannot be certain actually occurred... in this life / in this lifetime

where we held hands walking
like strangers fear to do
smiling for no reason except to be
within the moment of our moment
the moment of our lives we never seemed to understand the meaning of

why the noises in our heads are only for us?

why the path we walk we sometimes dread?

why the white noise is the cure for the dead?

Mexico (written 6-22-05)

we went there tonight
in a light that was just right
in our mind,through time we walked the line....

i cant stand this thought
i hate the pictures in time
i hate the pictures , watching you shine just how i wanted you to

and although, i didn't know where the road might have left us
i went ahead and took the plunge just like u and i liked to do

babe

i cant think
i cant blink
like i did that day

he died
& he took that away

i dont know if my smile will ever be that true
the way it was there with you
with him
with them
the bottle of goose
and a hand at cards that always loses

that was my hand...
and my hand in his

I would have taken it all back,
just to see him live.

day 367 (written June 15-05)

Well it feels like 2 weeks have gone by like a year
im on fire inside, im lost from one second & im found in the next

day 1 -manhattan
-.06cents in the bank
i knew it was going to be this way, and i left still the same.


im sitting now on the leather couch that belongs to those that make more money than i, smelling garlic, oils and asparagus slowly cooking in the kitchen

stress sits heavy on my shoulders

and yet the only thing i realize i can do is smile.
(the guy @ the store gave me free peanut butter ice cream...just cause he could.)

its nice here!

In Search of a Power Ballad

Power ballad is a name given to love songs that were predictably included on heavy metal albums in the 1980s. The power ballad was frequently slower in tempo and much less aggressive in lyrics than the remaining music on the album. The songs were often crafted in a hope of scoring a Top Forty hit, and were particularly associated with bands in the hair metal genre.

Power ballads have to be about yearning and need, commitment and loss. Listening to one should make your heart soar or sink. Its sentiment should linger long after the last chord. It should make you feel.

...The time of the power ballad is over; they vanished as suddenly and inexplicably as the dinosaurs. Yet their legacy lives on, and for every broken heart there remains an Every Rose Has It's Thorn. For every political prisoner Winds of Change stands like a beacon of hope.

(c) Leonard Nemoy

I can do anything...but how do I choose?

My mom found this article May 25, 2005 & at the time I was 25 and this article meant something to me back then.

SARAH: This is for you:

Newsweek Article

I Can Do Anything, So How Do I Choose?
by Jenny Norenberg

With countless options and all the freedom I'll ever need, comes the pressure to find the perfect life.

Dec. 6 issue - For the most part, my women friends and I were kids of upper-middle-class privilege, raised to believe that, with hard work and a little courage, the world was ours. We climbed mountains at summer camp, went to Europe on high-school class trips and took family vacations to New York City and the Grand Canyon. Our parents, like theirs before them, told their kids they could go anywhere and do anything. We took them at their word.



By the time we hit adulthood, technology and globalization had brought the world to our doorstep. Now in our mid-20s, we're unsteadily navigating a barrage of choices our mothers never had the chance to make. No one can complain about parents who started sentences with "When you're president ..." But we are now discovering the difficulty of deciding just what makes us happy in a world of innumerable options.



Three years ago my friends and I barreled out of the University of Wisconsin ready to make our mark on the world. Julia headed to France to teach English. I started law school in Minneapolis. Marie and Alexis searched for work in San Francisco. Bridget started an internship in D.C. Kristina landed a job in Ireland. The list goes on. Scattering to our respective destinations, we were young enough to follow our crazy dreams but old enough to fend for ourselves in the real world. At a time when our lives were undergoing dramatic changes, so was America. Three months after receiving our diplomas, the Twin Towers came crashing down. We realized that, in more ways than one, the world was scarier and more complex than we'd ever imagined.



Since graduation, we've struggled to make our own happiness. It seems that having so many choices has sometimes overwhelmed us. In the seven years since I left home for college, I've had 13 addresses and lived in six cities. How can I stay with one person, at one job, in one city, when I have the world at my fingertips?



Moving from one place to the next, bouncing from job to job, my friends and I have experienced the world, but also gotten lost in it. There have been moments of self-doubt, frantic calls cross-country. ("I don't know a soul here!" "Do I really want to be a ____?") Frustrated by studying law, I joined friends in San Francisco to waitress for a summer and contemplate whether to return to school in Minnesota. Unhappy and out of work in Portland, Molly moved to Chicago. Loni broke up with a boyfriend and packed her tiny Brooklyn apartment into a U-Haul, heading for Seattle. Others took jobs or entered grad school anywhere from Italy to L.A. Some romances and friendships succumbed to distance, career ambition or simply growing up. We all lost some sleep at one point or another, at times feeling utterly consumed by cities of thousands, even millions, knowing that even local friends were just as transient as we were.



Like so many women my age, I remain unmarried at an age when my mother already had children. She may have had the opportunity to go to college, but she was expected to marry soon after. While my friends and I still feel the pressure to marry and have children, we've gained a few postcollege years of socially accepted freedom that our mothers never had.



The years between college and marriage are in many ways far more self-defining than any others. They're filled with the simplest, yet most complex, decisions in life: choosing a city, picking a career, finding friends and a mate—in sum, building a happy and satisfying life. For me and for my group of friends, these years have been eye-opening, confusing and fabulous at the same time.



The more choices you have, the more decisions you must make—and the more you have yourself to blame if you wind up unhappy. There is a kind of perverted contentedness in certainty born of a lack of alternatives. At my age, my mother, whether she liked it or not, had fewer tough decisions to make. I don't envy the pressure she endured to follow a traditional career path and marry early. But sometimes I envy the stability she had.



Once again I've been unable to resist the lure of a new city. So, as I start my legal career in Chicago, I'm again building friendships from scratch, learning my way around a strange new place. Yes, my friends and I could have avoided the loneliness and uncertainty inherent in our journeys, and gone back to our hometowns or stayed in the college town where we had each other. But I doubt any one of us would trade our adventures for that life. I have a sense of identity and self-assurance now that I didn't have, couldn't have had, when I graduated from college. And I know someday I'll look back on this time—before I had a spouse, a home and children to care for—and be thankful for the years that just belonged to me.

I gotta go! (written May 8-05)

I gotta go, gotta pack my bags
i gotta go
theres so much ive gotta see and staying here, it wont work for me~
i need the city lights on another coast
i need the warmness of those i miss the most
ive stayed here long enough trying to find the reason i came
but I dont think Ill know until i let this go.

You know... (written May 4-05)

I never used to be that way.
I never used to think this day would leave me.
I never had the fear of another year that I do now.
You are fading fast & though I try to keep you alive I know I cannot.
I know I will never hold you ever like I ever did back then.
Did I hold you?
Did I smile @ you like I see myself do now in my mind... in this new time...
We keep traveling on, re-arranging furniture, purchasing new cars, trying to fill time with new loves and new desires.....when all we want is to find the truth....when all we want is to remember our youth.

Mariposa (written May 5-05)

you know you walk through life hearing the whispering words in your mind~ that feeling of love, the thought of the wings; an angels wings, angels on earth.
its not that you'll ever hear those words again- its that you don't know what the future holds for you.
but i do... i can see it and it is bright, and full of the butterflies lost so long ago in your mind. you question how someone can love you so deeply within themselves and then it just goes away as if loving you never existed~ memories fade im sorry to say time does heal all wounds, mariposa this is life. it didnt dissapear... it only changed. in dreams he will remember, and in dreams you will learn to live.

Risk would be a gift 5/1/05

I have a knack for and a lack for...always losing time for never staying in the same place long enough to taste the wine.
I stack memories like shoeboxes in a closet one on top of the other trying to fill my life when what I want is to fill my heart.
I'm more free than the ocean, yet sick of riding waves.
I find comfort in the voices outside the window and in the birds that start to sing too early, and the air;the smell, it reminds me of a place I long to go back to, yet moving forward is my only guarantee.

4-19-05

I cook seafood like a chef, not because I am hungry, but lonely.
And I drink to put out the fire inside of my gut.

3/12/05

"He pushed her back into the stucco surface of the wall as they kissed, she held onto him as if on the other side of his kiss there could be a new life"
(C) Unknown

March 12-2005

The skies are getting dark. That long winding circle to the next destination will begin to change my fate all over again. The fumes of this world are too much for me to breathe in. The ignition of my soul wont start.

I am torn apart.

White Oleander Part 2

" What I wanted...I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. Now matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California"

(C) Janet Fitch

McDonalds

There was a man sitting to my right eating McDonalds from a paper bag, dressed in the finest Egyptian Cotton shirt and pressed Linen pants. He had a Rolex for a watch and wore a band-aid on his chin. Hiding some mistake;an error in judgement.

I could feel his eyes staring inside of me; behind my back as I sat there to read. I should have turned around to say 'Hello'. To tell him I knew exactly what he was thinking..."what an innocent, intelligent girl with her legs folded and a book in her lap." What I should have said is "what you think you see is the illusion of the truth we all wish to believe"

White Oleander

"Why did she always have to tell the truth? I should have told her; certain people should always be lied to."

"Things weren't real to you. They were just raw material for you to re-shape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you'd have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you..."

"SENTIMENTALISM is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got"

(C) Janet Fitch

Quote of the Day: March 7, 2005

"Just because the rose died on the vine, doesn't mean it lied to you while it was in bloom."
(c) HUFF

At 25 (written Mar 7-05)

At 25
Playing in the sand & water watching the amusement of a 5 yr old as he pokes with an unfortunate surfers fin...and I watch more clearly, more closely than I ever have...as I listen to the beating of my own sin.

It's 3 in the Afternoon (written Aug 8-05)

Eager already for the light of the moon

ill watch this shower come down on me

wishing i could only be in your arms

in your afternoon.

ill sit

waiting

knowing how im just passing through

learning the word 'patience' by the hour

and im not sick of it yet

not sick of the longing

for you

your charms

your spit-fire arms with attitude & articulation

this evalutation of the word forever

i like the sound of this tune

the song thats never been sung

these lyrics that we can't steal and make our own

ill just listen to the wind blow

and smile.

its time to go to the show-

We could go to Block Island (written Aug 8-05)

And for just a day you can forget where you came from

and who you ever were

you can forget how time made you old

you can forget the dance at the prom

the high school reunion

the bike ride through the park.

I'm with you now

just for the moment.

So long as you can rest,

so long as you can remember

that... at one time we were the best

and that one time... you would surrender

so lets go to Block for the day

for the week

and all of next year.

you see i've nothing to walk away from

and nothing to run back to

and that makes it alright

but ...you got everything i got...so why waste the night?

Another Gas Station (written Aug 8-05)

I hurt.

Inside my gut i move in time with your travels.

how i long for another city-another moment

another gas station-

a deserted house in the woods.

In a pond near the cemetary

where those i don't know;lay

you and i took a moment to pray.

I cant keep wishing you away like I do

moving along so fast like i know how to.

Moving to time at a different beat-

a faster dance.

shaking the pants off of life-so eager

to feel the cut of a knife from the past.

This gift wont last...

this summer.

I could (written Aug 8 2005)

I could

write an entire country song about the workboots on his back step

but i wont.

i could tell you of the 'sorry's' the 'maybe's' the 'would be's' and
'the never could be's'

but why remember.

It was you in your boots,

you in the truck,

you & me that night... where the water hit the banks;

where time moved so slowly for us;

for our dance-

that wouldn't last the week,

and that by next year, would be gone.

You see, i've got someone i'm kinda holdin' onto

for no good reason,

but for reason enough.

And i guess that makes it worth it,

for he is the diamond in the rough.

Old Poems & Walks down memory lane

Ive decided, since I've got poems scattered in places I cannot remember, its time I collect them into something I can save & hold onto. Ive managed to find a few old ones while searching for an article...still missing. So I am going to share those with you today, in no particular order.

WARNING: If you are a poetry reader who tries to overanalyze every word... I suggest you stop here.

Motivation

Well, i finally got the motivation today to walk 5 feet from my office cube, grab one of those PURELL sanitizer rags and wipe the 2 coffee stains from my desk & the wine stain on my window sill! How's that!!!
They've only been here for about.....well since our Holiday party~ & Why, a wine stain, you ask. Well that's cause I just happen to have a cool or not so cool, haven't decided yet.....job.

I can see this being a "Motivational" Day....or borderline Nutsville!

They always say...

Time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

-Andy Warhol