Tag: friends

Wells Harborfest: Straight Lace

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, local fun, tweens
Rotary Chicken Barbecue

This past Saturday was the annual Wells Harborfest at (you guessed it!) the Wells Harbor. There was a chicken barbeque by the Wells Rotary. This year it was extremely well attended. More than once during the time that my daughter and I were in line they thought they were sold out. We were lucky enough to get there in time. The dinner was $10 and consisted of a half chicken, scoop of cole slaw, soft white biscuit with butter, a bag of chips (which my daughter immediately appropriated, along with the roll), and a drink. The sodas were all gone, so we split a bottled water.

For dessert, Sundaes at the Beach was ready with a cooler and 2 scoopers of 4 flavors of their delicious ice cream: the holy trinity: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, but with a nice bonus flavor: kahlua chip, which is one of our favorites. One scoop was only a buck.

We finished just in time to grab a seat on a bench for the Straight Lace concert at the Hope Hobbs Gazebo. This has become an annual event for us also. Last year, Helen (one of the singers) even invited some of the younger fans (my daughter included) up on stage to sing with the band, and gave them a percussion instrument to play! This year that didn’t happen, but it was still fun to watch everyone dancing.

Have you been down to the harbor for any of the free concerts? They are every Saturday night at 6:30pm this summer. Pick a band and go! It’s free fun for the fam. 🙂

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Children’s theater

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, restaurants, tweens

Consider taking a break from the movies this weekend. There are shows this summer at the Ogunquit Playhouse for kids of all ages. If you have some free time this weekend, head over to the Playhouse to see this week’s show: Jack and the Beanstalk. The show times are Saturday August 7th at 10AM and another show at 12:00 noon. On Sunday, August 8th there is one show at 10:00AM. The price is reasonable, and almost any seat will give you a good view of the stage.

You can order your tickets online at the Ogunquit Playhouse website (full disclosure: my daughter is in this play!).

Have plans already this weekend? There is one more event for children’s theater this season: My Son Pinocchio. There are 3 shows; the dates are August 28th and 29th (also a weekend).

After the theater, cruise (or crawl…it is a summer weekend in Maine, after all; traffic will most likely be heavy) on down route 1 toward Wells for lunch or a snack. There are so many great restaurants and ice cream shops that your only problem will be deciding which one to pick. 🙂

Reunions

by Karen, posted in education, family

My 30th high school reunion is coming up this November. I have been to only one thus far, the 10th, mostly because I never received any notice of any of the reunions (found out about the 10th from a friend I happened to run into one day while food shopping). Enter Facebook; suddenly I am findable..and was found.

Coincidently, I recently read the book The Last Time I Saw You by Elizabeth Berg, finishing it just prior to learning about the upcoming reunion, which I believe has put me in a receptive frame of mind for reunion-going.

If I remember correctly, we had in excess of 600 people in my graduating class. One inventive alumnus set up a reunion page on Facebook, and to date, there are about 178 of us accounted for. I say “about”, because the number is growing every day. I think it makes going to the reunion less threatening, more accessible, sort of, when you have the opportunity to “meet” up again with people prior to the actual event.

It’s amazing to chat online with people that you know but haven’t seen or talked to (for the most part) for thirty years. I am thinking it will be more fun if I get motivated to pull out my high school yearbook (hmmm, it’s around here somewhere…) and look back at us then, and next check out the pictures of us on Facebook now. Some of us have kids that now are about the same age that we were when we graduated.

I also learned from a quick google search that there is a website for my graduating class (full disclosure: the first one I found was not for my state. Duh. Note to self: always include the state when googling a city!). Good thing I checked the list of names (of which I recognized none! My first clue that I was in the wrong place!) before I bought the tickets through Paypal.

So, how do you all feel about high school reunions? To go, or not to go…that is the question.

Saying goodbye to a friend

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, fitness, good grief, health, tweens

My daughter’s friend delivered some unexpected news last week. Without preamble, she sent a one line email declaring that she was moving. To California. Like, soon. 

Chocolate chip cookies

 

Well. It’s not the first time that one of her close friends have moved away; it’s the third time, actually. It seems to be hitting her in a different way this time, however, which I imagine is due to her developmental stage. She is feeling it more, so of course, I am feeling it more as well. She was visibly sad, and was telling anyone in the family who would listen about how her friend was moving and how much she was going to miss her. 

Then a funny thing happened: as I was busily trying to think of a way to help her to feel better, she was busily figuring it put for herself. This is what she did: 

  1. She took construction paper and crayons and made a book for her friend. The book’s title? “Things I like about (name of friend)”.
  2. She asked me if we could bake some chocolate chip cookies for her friend, having ascertained beforehand that these were her favorite kind of cookies (note: date stamp on photo is incorrect; it’s a new camera and I’ve yet to set the date!).
  3. She obtained her friend’s new phone number in California, and in addition to placing it in a safe place, she made sure I had saved it in my cell phone as a safety measure.
  4. She hunted down a gift bag (purple! purple is her friend’s favorite color!) that was big enough to hold the construction paper book without folding it, the container of cookies, and an “I’m going to miss you!” greeting card, then assembled the gift.

So, she did all of these things just by instinct. She thought she was putting together a nice present for her friend and making sure they could stay in touch. I realized that she was processing her grief, and doing it by instinct, and in a healthy way. 

Then, she put it all aside and went out in the yard to hula hoop for an hour. 

 

Isn’t it amazing how much our children teach us about life (see note about picture date stamp, #2 above)?

Book clubs

by Karen, posted in books
First meeting of our book club!

Our book club’s first meeting was  at Mike’s Clam Shack in Wells.

What we have in common:

1. We are a group of six local women. We ranged in age from 34 (but looks like 28 was the consensus!) to mid fifties. 

2. All of us knew somebody but none of us knew everybody (except one!) before we met that night. 

3. We are all married. 

What we do not have in common is this: our taste in books. I picked the book for the first sesson: Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg, a book that I loved by an author that I love. The book chosen for the next meeting is Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane…’nuf said. 

What is good about having divergent taste in books is that we will all, at one time or another, be forced (gently!) out of our collective comfort zones for the reading and discussion of the book that we would not ourselves have chosen, the book we would not have read otherwise.  So, we will also have this in common too. 🙂 

Only one of us had the foresight to actually bring the book to the meeting, which was much appreciated (especially when it came time to take a picture). She also marked some passages off to discuss, which added a lot to the discussion and made me wish that I had done the same! (note to self: bring book and mark off passages of next book for next meeting). 

I generally find it easier to deal with a book toward which I don’t automatically gravitate by listening to it on audio. Your local library is a good resource for finding your book club books on CD’s (or, of course, in print), if money is tight, or if you just don’t want to spend a lot of money on a book that you will only read once. Annie’s Book Stop is another great local resource for used books. Interested in starting your own book club? Find some ideas here. 

Next, we are thinking about naming the book club… 

Are any of you in a book club? What are you reading now? Have you named your book club?

Homemade egg rolls

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, gardening, recipes, shopping, tweens
Rolling up the egg rolls

 

Our friends, the Douangsovaths, came over to our house to teach us how to make egg rolls. 

After they arrived, we took a quick shopping trip for necessary ingredients. Lettuce I had growing in  my garden, a tomato was on the counter that i picked up at the farmers market earlier that week…but bean threads? Not one of my pantry staples. 

Here’s the shopping list: 

  1. Green Cabbage (not Napa)
  2. The largest bag of carrots that I’ve ever seen
  3. Bean threads (in the asian food aisle)
  4. Egg Roll Wrappers (they brought these; I’m actually not sure where they came from)
  5. Whatever meat you want to use; we used ground chicken and ground pork (for convenience sake!). We also bought some small shrimp (and cut them up even smaller).
  6. Magic spice mix: mixed salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder. I guessed for the proportions. You mix them all together until it “tastes right”. Ahem.
  7. Canola oil for frying. Get a big one.
  8. One beaten egg; this becomes the glue that keeps your egg roll closed.
  9. A LARGE jar of duck sauce.

For equipment, you need a food processor, a fry daddy (which they brought with them). Kitchen tongs. 

Then, you just mix all the ingredients together in roughly equal parts. Then you use about a tablespoon of the mixture and roll it up in the wrapper as tightly (and as thinly) as you can. 

Then fry for 6-7 minutes until golden brown, drain on a rack. We made about a hundred and fifty rolls. Here’s the thing: you will not remember how many you’ve eaten if you just start cutting them up and eating them as you are making them, as we did.  I’m warning you about the egg roll fugue state that will ensue if you do this! Decide how many you will eat, put them on a plate, and then stop! (okay, you have been warned). 

The lettuce was used (and full disclosure: they bought some not knowing we had it growing in the garden already!) to wrap up the egg roll after it was fried; that’s how one of our friends eats them (he also put  a pile of a shredded carrot recipe he had made on it too). I tried it this way and it was excellent. Sort of helps you forget you are eating deep fried food when you disguise it by placing vegetables all around it. 

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parting is such…(insert oxymoronic phrase)

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, books, good grief, recipes

my best work friend is moving on to greener pastures in the workforce…happy for her, sad for me.  of course,we plan to stay in touch and have even gone so far as to devise ways to accomplish this (we don’t live near each other), but it is still happy/sad. In The Happiness Project (http://www.happiness-project.com/), author Gretchen Rubin talks about this feeling (she calls it ‘happy/unhappy’ in her book), when the thing that makes you happy also makes you unhappy…one of her examples is eating more than one cupcake…i can relate to that.

how to officially say goodbye? usually at my company we offer up a cake of some sort (although more often than not, my departing friend is the cake baker/procurer) and a gift certificate to a local business.

her favorite cake is chocolate cake with chocolate frosting; guess i’d better get a-bakin’~http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Deep-Dark-Chocolate-Cake/Detail.aspx seems like as good a place to start as any.

how do you say goodbye to (favorite) work colleagues?

what are some favorite goodbye gifts that you have given (or received) under similar circumstances?

here is a link to some goodbye poems (may also be useful  in case any of you are cardmakers or scrapbookers ): http://www.poem-poetry.com/goodbye-poems.html

catholic death by chocolate

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

i found out today that my friend gave up chocolate for lent.  being a lapsed catholic, my guilt began gnawing at the edges of my psyche. it’s lent already?  in a burst of solidarity i say, “i’ll give it up too!”. having acted in haste, i then began repenting in haste. WHAT was i THINKING? I certainly was NOT thinking about my lower left desk drawer, which is currently happily housing a large bag of peanut m+m’s, hershey’s kisses, dove caramel promises, raisinets(which are all dark chocolate! virtuous!) …and a box of godiva chocolates i’d had big plans for not sharing since i’d received them for christmas. what should i do? what would YOU do?