No we're not going to LA affair/But we will dress like this as we do everywhere

Blogger’s Cramp
by Ann Leary

I’ve heard it from more than one or two,
This blog’s becoming a bore for you.

“The blog’s too doggy!” “Not another poem!”
“We’ve seen enough trees! PLEASE, enough loam!”
(Okay, nobody’s complained about loam)

Well, next week for a change of pace,
I’ll take some photos of a tropical place.

Yes, we’re taking a trip, there’s a break in the show,
So prepare yourselves for a blog without snow.

A beach, a hammock, a thatch-roofed hut
Should get us out of our winter blog rut

Perhaps you’re worried that I shouldn’t declare
Our travel plans to everyone, everywhere.

Don’t worry, our caretaker’s a pretty tough nut
(and he carries a registered you-know-what)

And Lulu bites, I haven’t shared that before
Well, now you know, she bites like a whore.

No I didn’t steal that from Whitman or Shelley
“She bites like a whore,” came right outta me belly!

And onto the blog where it will enchant or enrage you.
I give, and I give and I give, just to engage you!

Somebody very kindly posted my (Leo) horoscope yesterday or the day before and I’ve been scanning all the comments because I’m wondering if it warned that I would break a tooth and then a computer in one weekend.  I still can’t find the comment with the horoscope, but did get a new laptop today. Mine has been on it’s way out for a long time. It didn’t close and I had to tape it shut when I traveled with it. I guess you’re not supposed to keep dropping the laptops on the ground.  And it wasn’t really my tooth that broke, on Friday, just a veneer. On one of my front teeth. Oh, you thought those were my real teeth?  No, no, my real teeth have been filed down to scary little nubbins in order to make way for the veneers. You see, I had a less than perfect smile.  I had a big gap between my front teeth that somehow looked cool until I was 35, and then, overnight, made me look like a witch.  I’m not sure how that happened but the exact same thing happened to a friend of mine when she turned 35.

But yesterday nothing broke.  Denis and I went to see our daughter play her last high school hockey game.  Holly came along. She is sometimes timid in unfamiliar places so I’m trying to expose her to stuff.  The last time I took her to a hockey game she shivered under my coat, so this time I found a little hoodie for her.

Yes, it’s a hockey sweatshirt! I found it on a stuffed bear.

Lord almighty, ain’t she a cute ‘un, though? (Still missing part of tooth).

She rode on Denis’s lap on the way to the game.

And she rooted for Dev’s team.

Sorry, the hockey photos all came out a little blurry, but that’s our Dev with her stick on the ice (I think).

GO BIG RED!

Somebody was a little bit excited to be at Fenway, on Friday, watching the Bruins play the Flyers outdoors.  Well, 38,000 people were a little bit excited.  I’m not a huge sports fan, but I am from Boston and love New Englanders and must admit I found it thrilling to be swept into Fenway with the very enthusiastic black and gold crowd.  We had great seats where we could see all the action, including these lucky little tykes who wore the uniforms of the Bruins and the Flyers and had a scrimmage in front of the entire stadium:

Then came the marching bands followed by Boston’s bravest:

And then the game was on:

That brown circle to the left of the rink is actually the pitcher’s mound.  If you’re like the male members of my family, you would have felt compelled to repeatedly point that out to all those around you, shaking your head in awed disbelief.  If you’re like me, after the first ten minutes of the game, you’d have begun to feel a swelling panic as your toes and fingers grew numb. I had been promised a heated box, but I was sitting in the stands, the wind whipping against my cheeks, icicles hanging from my nostrils.

Well, there was a heated box. With food, coffee, cocoa and old friends.

Please don’t make fun of my hat. Lots of people wear squirrels on their heads at hockey games.  It’s sort of a tradition.

Well it was great. We had Denis’s sister, Ann-Marie and brother-in-law Neil Coleman with us, which made it extra fun, as they are two of my favorite people on earth.

Today, movies, indoors.

Because so many of you have emailed me and commented here about how much you have loved reading Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, I decided to ask Mr. Chaon if he would be interested in doing some sort of Q & A with us.  He said that he would be happy to, and then I asked Steve Bennett, who owns AuthorBytes, my web design firm,  if he could find some way that we can do some sort of live chat right here on the blog and he said that he would be happy to.

So, now I’m happy. Very happy!

The chat with Dan Chaon is scheduled for Tuesday, January 12, at 8:00 p.m. (EST).

It will be a “live chat” meaning that you will be able to ask Dan Chaon your questions and he will answer them live, but it will all be in text format.  You won’t be able to see anyone.   But once I have the live chat element up and running, I plan to do chats with all of the authors whose books we read.  And I’ll do occasional chats with performers, dog rescuers, maybe even members of casts of television shows.  In fact, in order to make sure there aren’t any glitches for our author chat, I’m planning to ask Denis if he’ll do a chat with you all next week some time.

Well, that’s the news.  Very excited about our future chattiness!

This year I have decided that I will try to do all of my Christmas shopping in our area, at privately owned shops, rather than at giant chain stores.  This has been easy enough while shopping for the daughter, mother, sister, nieces, and anything with two x chromosomes and a complete disaster while shopping for the husband, brother, son, etc. Men are just impossible to shop for.  They hate to shop and hate when women shop for them.  How my husband and son manage to always be clothed is a mystery to me.  So, I have turned to the internet in my quest for something, anything for the guys.

Some of you may remember a very unfortunate incident I had internet shopping over the summer. Well, today wasn’t much better.  Don’t ever google men’s fashion.  You could end up here:

That model is just not getting paid enough.  Nor is this one:

I am thinking of getting my son that helmet.  I’m sure that’s what all the college boys are wearing.  Also am considering this very cute top for Denis:

Shhhhhh! Don’t tell!

Denis arrived home last night after the memorial service for the Worcester firefighters and was mobbed up by some fans.  The girls really cheered him up:

Have been writing today. No time to blog. Tomorrow all sorts of news!

Somebody asked in a recent comment whether Uncle Sull is into dogs and indeed he is.  I realize that I haven’t properly introduced my Uncle Sull to you all, though you’ve all come to know him here, through his comments, so please allow me to do so now.  I think some of you are under the misconception that my Uncle Sull is some tweedy old pipe-smoking Republican, and he’s nothing like that at all (except for the Republican part).

Uncle Sull is my uncle, Thomas Sullivan.  Tom is my mother’s half-brother from my grandfather’s second marriage and he is much closer to my age than to my mother’s age.  When we were kids, Tommy used to come stay with us during our summers in Michigan and Wisconsin.  Tommy was a city kid, born and raised  in Staten Island, and we lived in leafy suburban areas and so he would come and spend some time with us each summer.  He was a kid, and so were we, so it was funny to call him “Uncle Tom,” but I believe we did.  Uncle Tom?  Did we?  He was cool and citified and always about two years ahead of the fashion wherever we lived.  For example, he visited us in bell-bottoms when we were little, and all wearing regular jeans, then a few years later, we were wearing these giant bell-bottom jeans and he was wearing skinny jeans and hightop Keds.  We must have seemed like such hillbillies to him.

Now I hope Uncle Sull won’t mind if I reveal that he wasn’t always an ultra-conservative. No, Tommy was a bit of a hippy in the 60s,  I so wish I had photos of him.  He had long hair and was into all sorts of counter-culture stuff of the times that drove my very conservative grandfather crazy.  Not sure when he pulled the old switcheroo on us liberals, but we have many people in my family with all sorts of diverse political viewpoints and because of this, I try to never discount a person based on their political views.  I have to say that I believe liberals are a little more close-minded in many ways than some conservatives I know, when it comes to judging others’ political viewpoints. I have friends that insist that they cannot be friends with Republicans or conservatives and that makes me feel sorry for them and their very constricted perspectives, as some of my smartest and nicest friends are Republicans.  Really!  We just don’t talk about politics very much.

But back to Uncle Sull.  I asked him to send me a photo of him and his beloved Newfoundland dog, Buckley and he sent me these.  The first is Buckley eyeing a smokin’ hot actor on a bus stop sign:

And here is Buckley with Uncle Sull, himself.  They don’t always walk around waving the American flag. It was Memorial Day:

Happy Thanksgiving to you all, dear blog readers.  Today we walked all up and down the streets of Montmartre and through the Latin Quarter.  We had a lovely guide who is American but has lived in Paris for much of her life and is very knowledgeable about French history and by the end of the day I was clutching my throat with both hands and making sure that my head was still securely attached to my neck.  Those French sure knew how to throw a revolution.  Our American revolution was still quite recent when the French gave greedy old King Louis and Marie Antoinette the heave-ho, and it’s clear they meant to upstage us with all their casting about of freshly liberated heads of state (and I mean just the heads)and martyring of nuns and whatnot.

Well, I hate when people show you the photos of their holidays and say, “Oh, this is the so-and-so, where we ate such-and-such.”  So I’ll just post a few photos and you can enjoy the scenery and I’ll be happy to answer and questions.  The internet is VERY slow here and I’ve not been able to catch up on all your comments.  But I will!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Okay, I’ll answer your questions about the above shots now. Yes, the Christmas tree is being decorated in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.  And, yes, the guy in the crane is giving the finger to the people below, who were all hooting and jeering. In front of the sacred Cathedral. I absolutely LOVE the French.  Oh, our guide gave us her opinion on why the French are such huge fans of American comedians like Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey.  It is because they always try to be very dignified and correct (except when decorating trees in front of churches) and the American comedians who are the most outlandish with their facial expressions and general physical movements are the most hilarious, in their opinions.   This made sense to me.  I know many Americans have been puzzled by the French love of Jerry Lewis, because many Americans, especially those of my generation just never thought he was that funny.  According to our American guide that’s because we know a lot of people who act like goofballs.  The French do not know so many.

Remember what I was saying about my posing problem?  Just point a camera my way.

The photo below is of me posing with a certain man of the blog. Does anybody know who this mysterious Francophile is?

Today we visited the Chateau De Versailles.   I have been to Paris on several occasions but have never visited Versailles, so was very enthusiastic about our little excursion.  We had a wonderfully amiable driver and guide named Didier who picked us up at our hotel.  When we arrived, Didier parked the car and hustled about getting us all admitted and the next thing I knew we were walking up some beautiful marble steps and then we entered a vast hall covered with murals.

I must interrupt my story here to explain something.  When my kids were little I read a lot about child development and one thing I learned is that a child goes through certain stages after which the child is able to capably regulate his or her emotions.  I completely skipped these stages.  They’re supposed to happen around 5 or 6, but I think I spent the whole time playing with kittens and watching the Land of the Giants or something and the stages passed me right by.  As a result, I have a hard time, on occasion, with the whole emotional regulation thing.  I tell this now, only because when we entered this first vast, muraled hall at the Palace of Versailles, I began to cry.  I don’t mean that my eyes misted up, or that I had to wipe away a tear.  No, I burst into tears.  I tried to wipe the tears away but they were streaming down my face and my daughter noticed them and grabbed my son, saying, “Don’t look at Mom, it’s too embarrassing, DO NOT look at Mom.”

Denis caught a glimpse of me and then started studying the ceiling mural very seriously.

Because my family were all suddenly facing away from us, Didier had only me to begin his tour with, but after saying a few words and having me answer with heaving sobs, he had to ask if I was okay and I sputtered, tears springing from my eyes, “It’s …just ..so …beautiful.”

By the time we reached the second or third hall, I was used to all the gilded beauty and the musculature of the painted horses and warriors, and all the Gods of mythology, the cherubs,  the vastness of the space, the tapestries, the sparkling chandeliers, the multitude of arches and the leaded windows leading out to the  manicured gardens, and I was able to listen to Didier and focus on the lifestyles of the Kings Louis, XIV, XV and XVI.

My favorite thing (and really what little I have every known) about the French court life was all the fooling around that was going on.  All the lovers and mistresses.  All the illegitimate heirs.  So, when Didier pointed out Louis XIV’s bedchamber and mentioned that a small door led to a back chamber, I chirped, “That’s where he’d meet his mistress, right?”

“Well, perhaps.  But there were many chambers back there….”

“Would his mistresses sometimes sneak into his room?” I asked, breathlessly.

“No, not even his wife would visit him in his room.  He would go to her.”

“Interesting!” I’d say, my head spinning with all the romantic possibilities, the kids walking, fast, into the next chamber.

I did the same thing when I was shown the brothels in Pompeii and the Roman baths. Teenagers were able to listen to their guides explain about the sex menus on the walls of the Pompeii brothels, while I was snickering into my hand, my cheeks flaming.  It’s another stage that passed me by.  Maturity in general.

So it was a glorious tour, not too crowded and Dev took all the pictures, except this one, that I took of two delightful young Americans:

Some of you know my camera travails of recent months. Well, at the airport on Sunday, as I reached into my giant carry-on satchel for passports, etc. my new-ish camera leapt from the bottom of the bag in an apparent last bid for freedom before we boarded, and it landed on the hard floor, spinning crazily beneath the feet of our annoyed fellow travelers.  The flash was destroyed.  So now, all the indoor and nighttime photos you see will either, a)suck or, b) have been taken by my daughter Dev.

Yesterday, we walked and shopped.  It was raining but just a little and very mild.

Then last night, we went out to dinner.  Devin and I got a little dressed up.  The guys, not so much

We ate here:

Sorry, no flash.  It was called Le Bistroit St. Honore, and oh my dear Lord, it was delicious!  The family wouldn’t allow me to take photos of the escargots, salads, steak frites and lamb stew that we devoured.

On the way home we saw these interesting wigs displayed in a window:

This, of course, was my favorite:

Yes, the pony bouffant was made completely our of human hair!  Tres chic!