Category: local fun

Coffee or tea?

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, friends, local fun

I love coffee.

I became a regular coffee drinker in college. My friend Diane and I would go to HoJo’s for late night breakfasts and bottomless cups of coffee. Because I drank it faster than the waitress could replenish the cream, I soon became a black coffee drinker. This worked well for us because then Di could have all of the creamers and I could have more of the straight coffee.

Life was good.

After I graduated from college (and from HoJo’s), I managed a restaurant for years so I had access to unlimited bottomless pots of black coffee, of which I took full advantage. I could make a fresh pot any time I wanted it and then just drink the first cup or two before the remainder was sold to customers, and then I could start another fresh pot. Repeat process.

Fast forward thirty (gasp!) years. I am still a black coffee drinker. I spent many of those years as a slave to Dunkin Donuts Medium Black French Vanilla. Too many. Currently my loyalties have shifted. I can enjoy a cup of whatever the local coffee shop is serving up, but I recently realized that I am now a slave to the Keurig. I can go through a half a dozen K-cups in a single day.

Today I tried an experiment: I started the day with a cup of Tulsi Tea instead of the coffee that I am usually sipping no later than 6am, often as early as 5:30am. To my surprise, the caffeine headache didn’t surface until 11:00am, so I had my first cup (Spicy Eggnog!) of coffee of the day then. I held out until 6pm before I had a second cup.

The great thing about Tulsi Tea is that it comes in many flavors, just like my beloved coffee. Maybe I’m on to something?

To be continued…

National Cupcake Day

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, family, friends, Holidays, local fun, quest for the best

I just got this in under the wire…I can’t believe that I didn’t know it was National Cupcake Day today! I must be pretty darned distracted to miss this. I’m not even in any position right now to bake or obtain a cupcake to consume, so I must celebrate vicariously through Thoughts of Cupcakes Past.

Look what Jen is serving up at her bakery, Somethin’ Sweet in Sanford~sweet snowman cupcakes! They are just the cutest things ever! Of course, all of the cupcakes and treats here are amazing, so I hope you were able to get over there to buy some cupcakes to celebrate today.

If  you missed the boat (or had to work) like me, consider tomorrow a “Do-Over”!  At your earliest possible convenience, buy or bake yourself (and your family, and your friends….) some cupcakes to celebrate the day. After all, cupcakes make any day just that much nicer.

Consider placing an order for lovely baked goods for Christmas while you are there. Jen will be open on Christmas Eve (morning only, 9AM-12N) for pick-ups and last minute impulse (the best k ind of) buys.

Enjoy!

Making Gingerbread Houses

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, family, friends, Holidays, local fun, tweens

I admit it: prior to yesterday I was a Gingerbread House Virgin. Through twenty-plus years of motherhood, I’d managed to avoid ever baking, never mind decorating, a gingerbread house. The desire just was not there. I couldn’t have been less interested.

Then something incredible happened: I wanted to make one.  Something shifted inside me and I really wanted to do it…and then…

I got lucky.

🙂

Tip: do it for the first time with someone who knows what they are doing!

Okay, enough double entendre. My friend Kristen (see her blog here) is a fabulous baker and she invited my daughter and me to be part of her (tenth, I think) annual ritual of baking and decorating a Gingerbread House with her son, something I’d never done with my own son in his childhood (but hey, we did make dozens—dozens!–of Christmas cookies over the years! Just sayin’.).

Our jobs were to bring something flat to put the house on the day prior, and to buy some candy to contribute to the stash of building supplies.
Oh, and to show up. 🙂

The end result? Amazing. The ideas the kids came up with were so creative–it was just wonderful to watch their minds working. Plus, my friend and I got to chat virtually uninterrupted for at least an hour.

This is definitely an activity I would like to do again next year.

The irony? My son was making his first Gingerbread House at the same time at his girlfriend’s house with her family. Go figure.

Watch the slideshow that follows to see what we used for materials. 🙂

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Angels at Clay Hill Farm, part 2

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, friends, local fun, no fear

I attended the Angel Dinner the other night with a friend and I loved it. I wasn’t sure what to expect, so if you are wondering how it works, let me clue you in.

You come in and are seated by the waitress.

Ruth Kramer is the Intuitive featured at Clay Hill Farm’s Angel Readings. She is a lovely woman with a British accent who is full of energy and enthusiasm for her work. First, she comes right over to introduce herself to you and explain how the evening will go.

You will be seated at a table with other patrons (there were six people total seated at my table). Usually the small room is sold out for Ruth’s Angel Reading dinners, but on this night we were at about 1/2 capacity. This was lucky for us because she had a little more time to spend with each of us for our readings.

Little notepads are provided on the table along with pencils for you to write down any questions that occur to you to ask Ruth as you are waiting for your reading. Dinner will be served in a parade of amazing courses which you will choose upon arrival from a small menu. Warm rolls, then soup or salad. There will be several entrees, including a vegetarian one. Several incredible dessert choices will follow that will most likely be your most difficult decision all evening…which one? Can I have two? 🙂

If you think of it, you can bring a device to tape your reading, if “the angels will allow it”…Ruth says sometimes the angels will not allow her words to you from them to be taped.  So as a back up plan (if you go with a friend like I did) you can take notes for each other as Ruth is speaking (my friend’s idea) so that you can fully concentrate on what she is telling you versus trying to write it down and listen simultaneously.

I took pictures of the food, but the lighting was so low that none of them are really good enough to include here…maybe the angels didn’t wish the food to be seen? 🙂

Ruth will be at the Clay Hill Farm one more Monday night, as of this writing, on November 14. Call 207-361-2272 for reservations.

Staying in touch

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, friends, Life in the cube, local fun, relationships

Have you ever left a job and said, “Hey, let’s keep in touch!” with a fellow coworker? Or perhaps the reverse happened: a friend from work moved on to greener pastures and you were sad when you heard her say, “Hey, we’ll keep in touch!”

Why? Because let’s face it: how many of us actually do that? Especially when you don’t live that close to each other. Live, like an hour or so away from each other. Since I am a person who is ‘directionally challenged’, I don’t drive to places that I don’t know how to get to if there’s any way to avoid doing so (yes, I’ve heard of GPS. Don’t care.).

Well, I have a friend who moved on, and we have done that “keep in touch” thing. It’s been more than a year now, I think. How are we doing it? I think the credit really has to go to my friend Shawna, because her idea was for us to meet for lunch once a month.

And we have. It helps that her new job is only about 20 minutes from where I live (and is mostly a straight line to get to :)) and that there are a lot of restaurants within a five-mile radius of her office. Even if there were none, though, it would certainly still be doable. Hey, maybe I can’t find my way to unfamiliar places, but I can pack a bag lunch!

We also meet periodically for other things too: we saw a show (Legally Blonde) at the Ogunquit Playhouse (we love the plays that Sally Struthers graces!) and we go to Merry Madness in Portland’s Old Port every year (this will be our 6th year going, weather permitting). (I think).

Keep in touch with your friends. Good ones are hard to find.

Susan Conley at Kennebooks

by Karen, posted in books, friends, good grief, health, local fun, no fear, relationships, writing

Susan Conley recently came to Kennebooks to read from her book, The Foremost Good Fortune. Susan is a Mainer, raised in Woolwich. In addition to being a great writer, she is also a great reader. Maybe this is because (as we learned in her talk) Susan is a poetry teacher, and when she reads passages from her book aloud, in her slow, sing-song-y sort of way of drawing out the syllables, the consonant sounds…it makes her book sound like poetry. Could this manner of speech perhaps be connected to her learning to speak Mandarin?

 I also learned that hula hooping and badminton are “huge” in China.  That she was involved in the founding of The Children’s Room.

“Memoir is all about honesty,” Susan says, and further states that “you feel it when it’s not (honest).”  This is why, after her writers group read her earlier drafts of this book they basically asked her, “Where are you in this?” and she ultimately rewrote so that she was now “showing up” on the page. “You’ve got to take us to those places,” her writing friend said, of “emotional complexity” that were lacking in the earlier work. Oh and of course, I learned the significance of the title of the book.

🙂

Susan started writing her book, was diagnosed with cancer, then started writing it all over again. A different book. This book. She says she told her story in the present tense in the book and thinks of it as a love letter to her sons, who she hopes will read it one day.

Finally, The best thing that I learned is that Susan has been cancer-free for three years.

Susan may be back at Kennebooks in March as part of the Maine Women Write Book Club. Consider joining! The first meeting is slated for mid-October at the time of this writing. Call (207-967-6136) or email Ann (ann@kennebooks.com) at Kennebooks for more information. Hope to see you there!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

How to grow a watermelon

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, gardening, local fun
intact watermelon

How do you grow a watermelon? Darned if I know. Here in Southern Maine in spring and summertime,  the growing (of anything, really) doesn’t (usually) come easy.

Someone must know how, because I see them all the time at my local farm store, Spillers. I see them at the Farmers Markets. I see them at the supermarket. My favorite gardening book, The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch, devotes pages 457-465 to the topic, therefore one must conclude that she must also believe that it’s possible to grow them here.

When my husband decided he wanted to grow watermelons, we picked up some seed packets. We hedged our bets by also planting some seedlings that we found already started at Agway. We tried for three years to grow watermelon to no avail…until this year.

This summer, I even saw them (briefly) in my back yard, on the vine that grew from the seeds that we lovingly sowed in very early spring.  .  . we had such high hopes! This would be the year! And a miracle happened…this was the year!  We had a few fruits on some of the vines. We even glimpsed one good-sized watermelon growing on one of said vines. We were so happy!

We were so naive!

We were happy for about three minutes, which must have been about how long it took before whichever critter from the wild also noticed it and took matters into its own hands–er, mouth. Our next trip out to the garden to lovingly gaze on our produce prodigy ended in tragedy as we noticed the large bite that was taken out of the side of it.

😦

One of the smaller ones remained, so despite its size, we brought it into the house. We weren’t willing to risk losing the last intact melon. With bated breath, I cut it open.

There was enough for my husband and I each to have a teaspoon of watermelon.

The fruits of three years labor. Reminds me of the $64 Tomato.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

P.S. Buy the books at your local bookstore, such as Longfellows or Kennebooks (in Maine), or Literary Bookpost (in North Carolina).

Time is on my side

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, friends, local fun, Midlife Crisis, yoga

I went to see my friend Stacey for a massage at Mainely You Massage a few days ago. I had picked the time so that I would not have to rush around to get there. I had the entire day off from work and had planned things to do (lunch and book-browsing with my friend Kristen, visiting another friend Teresa at her ice cream shop to try some new flavors that she created, dinner out with both of my children at the same time!) to which I was really looking forward and about which I was very excited. I arrived 15 minutes early for my appointment, after seeing my daughter of to school, my husband off to his job.

Stacey said, “How are you feeling this morning?” and I paused (completely uncharacteristic of me) and considered this question for a second before I responded. “Rushed!”  I was feeling like there wasn’t enough time. I felt pressured. “And there’s not one reason for my to be feeling this way!” I admitted. I pretty much always feel like I don’t have enough time to do the things I want to do, yet here I was, at the beginning of a day filled with exactly that, and I was still carrying this feeling around!

“That is a mantra that you created,” Stacey offered, inviting me to be focused on the thought, “I have plenty of time,” which is true, instead of  “I don’t have enough time,” which is (usually) not.

Wow.

As I went about my day, I started to really notice my thoughts, and was shocked at the number of times just that morning that I thought, “I don’t have enough time”!

Louise Hay, in many of her books, writes about the idea that, basically, “What you think is what you get.” I’ve believed this but for the first time I considered it in a different plane, almost, because even when I really did have all the time I wanted, it was right there in front of me, I didn’t see it.  Wasn’t appreciating it.

Has this ever happened to you?

Angels at the beach

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, family, good grief, local fun, Midlife Crisis, relationships

I was walking at the beach with my daughter and my husband the other day. I was thinking about how big she’d gotten, which led to thoughts of her at different ages throughout the years, and how I received that sign from my dad that I was pregnant with her.
Of course, thinking about one dead relative inevitably (for me) leads to thoughts about other dead relatives.  Wells Beach reminds me of Nantasket Beach in the 1970’s, and Nantasket beach reminds me of my grandmother. She always took me to the beach (ocean) when I was growing up, and I always think of her when I am near it, so granted, thoughts of Nana had been hovering there in the back of my mind for the past hour or so.

After we finished our beach walk we went to Forbes to get some lunch. I was telling my husband how I had been trying to get to Forbes all summer but something kept coming up and I never made it. I decided to take it as a sign that it was because I was supposed to be there this day in particular. He smiled at me, indulgently. He is used to me ascribing meaning to things that he does not.

As we were finishing up our lunch, I suddenly became aware of the conversation at the table behind me: “Nana, are you happy here at the beach? You’re an angel!”

I swear to God.

I felt a huge surge of emotion as the tears welled up and spilled forth (zero to 180 in a millisecond!).

I just finished a pretty good book that has an angel subplot: Pictures of You  by Caroline Leavitt. Check it out!

Summer vacation (day 4)

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, family, italian, local fun, yoga
    1. Broke with routine and went to a second yoga class at Windsong Yoga.
    2. Housework (like taxes, no one gets a vacation from that!).
    3. Finished the book I was reading, Oxygen by Carol Wiley Cassella; didn’t like the ending much.
    4. Spent an hour at the library leafing through magazines. Fun for free! 🙂
    5. Sea Dogs game at Hadlock Field. Ate Italian Sausage with peppers and onions, french fries, 1/3 of a pretzel, ice cream sundae. Bleah.
    6. Found the copy of  The 17 Day Diet by Mike Moreno that I bought at the library book sale a few weeks ago. Sigh. Will peruse.

I’m finding that my lists that I made pre-vacation are a very useful if I use them as a guide, and very stressful if I use them as a directive.