I love the iron work on the balcony, truly, I love it!

Clearly the folks above were overdosing on Phoquittal (copyright) when they landscaped their lawn. And who can blame them? The Oxygen Cycle be damned!! This guy came here to fish, not push a mower!!

There is simply no explaining the paradox that is the Jersey shore. It manifests in the most amazing displays of, well, I guess it's a kind of gratitude for one's environment you see rarely expressed in the burbs. Here is the true expression of the artist in each of us, the non plus ultra statement with which many homeowners feel the need to punctuate their property. Above are a few examples.

The local library is wonderful. Although they were taken aback when I asked if they had a cache of grownup jigsaw puzzles to loan. "We have some for children". Well, that doesn't do me much good, does it, lady? I explained that on the island I lived on in Maine, jigsaw puzzles were a hot item at the Libe. This is clearly not a puzzling community (how can they manage without such pleasurable meditation?); not even the dollar store, usually a reliable source of decent 500 piece puzzles in Maine, has them. I explained to the woman how puzzles were an excellent source of meditation; she just stared at me.

But what they DO have at the library here are DVDs of the entire first and second seasons of Dallas! And T and I are knee deep into season one, waiting for the cliffhanger ending. I remind my skeptical daughter (who is now so enthralled she put the Dallas theme ringtone on her phone yesterday) that when she was just a tot, and I had to do dinners Friday nights at my cafe, I would clean up as fast as possible, rush home, and beg my then husband to tell me what happened on Dallas tonight?! This was before the advent of VCRs, or at least I didn't have one. I believe T was skeptical that anything from the early 80s could capture her imagination, but she is hooked! We watch a few episodes a night, and revel in the shenanigans of JR Ewing, his astonishingly dumb, prone to self immolation female costars, his despicable dad, Jock (I call him "Jerk") and Miss Ellie, who is the poorest excuse for a mother anyone can imagine. She is the Enabler Supreme! Cliff Barnes with his tortoise mouth perpetually agape; cute as a bug and lame as a one legged toad Ray Krebs, an amazing character who has his way with that minxy Lucy one minute and is the model of paternity with her the next. These people are seriously twisted, providing the stellar model of behaviorial self destruction that we came to know as the eighties, Raygunomics, and the me generation. And yet, the show has it redeeming moments: these amazing pro choice arguments folks today would do well to heed, little insights about the have and have nots. It's like the writers and producers weren't really sure if these folks were good guys or bad guys (the essence of the American psyche). They definitely plugged into the zeitgeist, that's for sure.

For example, T insists that I once bought Principal Secret (a moment of Sunday morning infomercial tv madness) because it was Pamela Ewing who was selling it and so I believed what she said about her product! Well, whatever... but the proof is in the pudding, in this case my pudding riddled face.

So now I'll have to reactivate my Netflix to get seasons 3 and onward. Libe only has these two seasons. I guess I might as well watch the final season of MI5 as well on Netflix. Now there's a riveting show for you! If you're not into MI5, the BBC spy show, Netflix has 7, count em, seven seasons for your viewing pleasure, and the first few are instant viewing. It's an intelligent, riveting show, well done, as the Brits say. And the fellas are not hard to look at, ladies.

So Sarah Palin's running for Prez, eh? T's response: "NICE!" And I concur. Clearly Sarah's caught wind of the women's movement in the Rwandan Parliament, figuring it was time she capitalized on that, bein white and all, she'll have somethin they wanna hear, dontcha know. Maybe she can see their black faces from her house!

"The cardinal rule of politics -- never get caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman"

JR Ewing

Whoever said Elvis was the king was seriously misinformed.

Newsflash!! Just in time for Easter!!

First pictures ever made available of heaven!

just kidding...

it's Dubai

hey...

i just applied for a cooking job at this hotel on Martinique. Wish me luck, which might actually mean I won't get the job!

black like me.... no more
Please note painted nails, first time in years. To quote Joe Biden: "This is a big f***ing deal". His eloquence knows no bounds. Having painted nails is one of the perks of my new non-manual labor lifestyle. I found this turtle on beach while picking up plastic trash. He is my new pet. I make trails with him in the sand. I guess something good can come of anything.

So how about a Good News for Women page today? We don't get enough for sure. First off –Rwanda. Women comprise 56 percent of the Rwandan parliament. A majority, folks. Now that's what I call representative government at its best. Makes us look rather shabby, doesn't it? "Us" as in U.S. One of the male members there insisted women were better at making "peace". Probably because he knew that not too far away the police force of Liberia was arming fed up women to the teeth and training them to "combat" sexual violence in a real way. Like Carlotta sez: If more women knew how to use a gun, more men would be better behaved.

And this good news provides counterweight to what I read yesterday about Al Kayda's latest innovation (at least according to the Brits): the terrorist org seems to be perfecting the art of equipping women bombers with virtually undetectable explosive breast implants. Yes, you heard right. The secret word for tonight is.... Anyway, that's what I would call really bad news. Makes you wanna slap those girls upside their heads. What are they thinkin? Apparently not much. Maybe send those Rwandan women down there to straighten them out!

So, hmmm .. .. reading the ingredients on my Chanel face cream, big bucks, this stuff. Guarantees me those lines will just disappear for a mere hundred and twenty an ounce or something. They put this goo in heavy weighted jars so you feel like you're actually getting something for your money. It has never been satisfactorily explained to me just why all this reconfigured detritus of crude oil refining is so damned expensive.. quoi? I mean, it's stuff they just pitched into landfills before they figured out they could reconfigure it without any government oversight and and charge a fortune for it. Wish there was somewhere I could look this up online and see if any of these things are gonna kill me sooner than I want to depart this world.

And WAALAA! (I love Kaye Gibbons) No sooner did I think it than T sez: Guess what, ma and proceeds to inform me that her 8th grade pal from St. Ignatius, Becky Prusinowski, is a journalist for PAPER, a NY mag, and she says there is such a place where one can consult on the health benefits or hazards of various cosmetics, shampoos, pretty much anything that lathers or claims to make you better looking, smelling, whatever, baby (unforgivably hazardous ratings on most of the commercial ones, J and J baby bath always seemed too good to be true) and household products, etc. Your everyday stuff, well, just check it out. The site was set up by none other than the beloved Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org) , which is an amazing resource for info about nearly anything you can consume that may pose a threat to your health. The website within the EWG is called Skin Deep, and it's the EWG's cosmetics safety database.

Just head on over there with your mouse (click on links I've provided) and be prepared to blow your mind. Choose a category from the drop down menu and go to town. Be sure if the product you're searching doesn't come up with a result that you downpage a bit and choose the fine print option "Dont see what you were looking for? Include old formulations." Betcha you'll find it there. Now I'm not averse to multisyllabic ingredients. I'm something of a multisyllabic gal myself. But are all these ingredients really necessary to achieve the desired result? I think not! And most of these petro-derived ingredients are temporary fixes, they don't really help heal the skin or nourish it longterm. And I was surprised to find that in many products the most toxic, and I mean toxic, ingredient was fragrance! That's the thing that makes us feel good about using the product when we smell how clean and innocent it is!

You know, girls (and any guys lingering on the edges out there), the Europeans are way ahead of us on this one. Not something the newscasters are anxious to tell you.

Take a little time with this site and you will be amazed (and send them five bucks if you can). They are doing a valiant job of trying to keep up with monitoring ingredients spewed forth from a petrochemical industry that is growing faster than the USDEP or the FDA wants to talk about and is worth billions a year of your dollars. Some products are less harmful than you might think, and others that bill themselves in nouveau langue au naturelle are megatoxic. Here's an almost infallible giveaway: If it says "natural" it probably is anything but. And the new nano technologies, meaning they can make the particles of whatever is in that jar more easily absorbed by your skin, can be your worst enemy. Yup, just jet propel that poison right into my wrinkles, guys!

Still frustrated by the amount of time it takes to find out what this stuff is in your moisturizer or body wash? (And by the way, body washes are a big negative for the most part. Avoid them all is my advice. Get a good bar of moisturizing, I use the olive oil, or whatever variety, Kiss My Face soap for "personal hygiene" areas and use a good washcloth sans soap on the rest, unless you're full of mud or something. Use your head for Pete's sake.) So don't be ignorant. GO to this amazing site and scroll down about 2/3 of the way on the left side to Toxins info. Click on that and enjoy all the hard work done for you by Kathleen in Illinois who sells some pretty nice, safe, hand crafted (truly) face and body products on her site as well.

Take a minute to educate yourself, especially for the benefit of anyone you may know with bambinos. Do you even KNOW the difference between non-toxic and toxin- free?I bet not! Neither did I, and I'm one of those informed types. What the hell is hydrolyzed anyway? Do I want that in me? Am I bioaccumulating this crap? Well, duh. But it's never to late. And all this stuff comes to us from the hated petrochemical industry, and I am on a one-woman campaign to stop buying everything they try to foist on me and mine. No more plastic liquid detergent bottles, no more water bottles, git that microscopic cheapass plastic crap out of my face cream, off my beach, and outta my life! I'm tossing about 75 bucks worth of Chanel, not to mention other crap I've bought in my more in-vain moments, and hitching up with sites like Kathleen's at Healing-scents, Solay, Sundari (I can vouch for their products, having used them in New Mexico at a spa in 07 with gratifying results), Tara, Jason's, Avalon Organics and the jillions of other genuinely pure products you can find on the cosmetics database. Just search there under dropdowns for skin, then nourishing, then say, moisturizer , and you'll get a long list of good- for- you products. Take the time to get good at using the site. Don't give these creeps any more of your money just so they can poison us with cheap crap.

Here's another site I found today with lots of interesting stuff there about food safety, women's health, etc. Check it out.

And don't worry, I'll recycle all the crap I throw away. But recycling isn't the answer, it's just a temporary fix. Our Penance for Past Purchases.We need to stop buying plastic stuff altogether in all its forms. Put these guys outta business and insist on better from the cosmetics industry. For In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was –– Sustainability.

(I have this on good authority, truly.) Make mindful choices today and the future will take care of itself.

I liked this quote: We'll either cross that bridge when we come to it, or burn it. Either way, we'll deal with it later.

Shoutout to the Sukester. Nice to see you, girlfrin!

Have decided on a title for a collection of short stories of people who have been mean to me and mine over the years: "Vicious Little Pinpricks and Other Tales of Heartlessness and Cruel Betrayal."

I like it!

Tomorrow.. or soon anyway.. What's on your face? with links to cosmetic remedies..

napoleon.. a propos of nothing
Out west.. space is the place..

So it's raining, cats and dogs here. The entire tiny yard is a sea of, well, what else? water. Pervious surface is at a premium here at the Jersey shore, so flooding in the streets and parking areas is the norm. I waded in four inches in my suede boots today trying to get to the Beachcomber to FAX something. jeez!

The beach can lift your spirits and break your heart, all within a few moments. You cast your soul over the sand's ascetic purity, out over the waves, smiling like a fool when suddenly that scene in The Graduate looms before you, where the cuckolded husband collars Benjamin and insists he listen up: the future belongs to "plastics, ma boy". Little did Mike Nichols know back in 68 that our beaches would come to fester with plastic of every conceivable size, shape and useless permutation, degraded to the most microscopic, yet ultimately indestructible particle imaginable, infesting the guts of seabirds, fish and all living things. Generally creeping me out no end. And , generally speaking, it pisses me off.

The other day T and I were taking our afternoon stroll on the beach, resting against a sanddune after a several mile hike, when a man smoking a cigarette came ambling along the path to the beach, moving ever so cautiously to about midway twixt the waves and the dunes, where he paused indefinitely to smoke and get his bearings. His carriage conveyed a general suspicion of the out of doors, a mistrust of the uneven sand and wind. He was followed shortly by a couple with a leashed rather large dog, an exuberant pair, and the three of them were taking the air together, it appeared, friends, as it were. The couple let the dog off the leash in order to encourage it to relieve itself along the dune line. The woman was loud and fond of the word shit; the man wandered over nonchalantly to kick sand over the dog's poop. Then they releashed the dog and all retreated landward at the next street exit. They were there to toss a ciggie butt and a dog poop on the sand; that was it. I fumed, exclaiming to T that it was precisely this kind of lazy, careless, me first, who gives a crap, the world is my toilet attitude that I found so vile in Americans today.

And then I started bitching about all the plastic the bulldozers were bulldozing off the beach and into the grassy dunes in preparation for the summer tourists. T wanted to believe the dozer fellas picked up all the plastic and carted it to recycle. I insisted no, that the tire tread evidence pointed to the contrary, that they just buried it and hoped for the best. A nice fresh looking sand dune with bits of evidence poking out here and there.

As you can probably sense, I am furious mad on the subject of plastic of every make and model. The way we use it, toss it aside, buy more, toss that aside, as it all finds its way to the ocean dissolving into microscopic bits that lay about, quite invisible, poisoning us all. Screwing with our delicate hormones..

It's enough to make you bitter, cynical, pissed, really pissed...

And then I realize, hey! i don't want to feel this way, Yes these folks are unfeeling, ignorant slobs, but that doesn't mean I can't do something to remedy this on my own. So I started picking stuff up. Just a few things every day, dumping it in the city trash can near the road or in my recycle at home. And I started to feel just a little bit better. Every thing I picked up was one less thing to offend my eye when I walked the beach.

Like I said when we were traveling cross country: America! Pick up your trash!! So i did.

And then I get this email from Sherry; and Waalaa! she sends me the story of the starfish. And here is it.

A storm tide had washed huge numbers of starfish up on a beach and when it receded they were left stranded. A man saw that they would die, so he began throwing them, one by one, back in the sea. Another man came along and said, “What do you think you are doing? Don’t you know that you can’t save them all?” The first man picked up another starfish and threw it back to safety. “I helped that one,” he said.

And her email read:

Sometimes those of us with grand notions of our own possibilities can feel defeated by the immensity of the problems and the often noisy ignorance of so much that passes for civilization. I love the (non-Biblical) parable of the starfish on the beach. We may not be able to rescue all the suffering masses, but we can help this one, and that one, and that other one. Thinking and participating globally is necessary, too, but it’s in our dealings with the people right here around us that most of us can change the world.

We have snow today, maybe a half inch, but Mainers are tough and can handle setbacks. I have one daffodil blooming, and so it begins….

I just loved that, timely wasn't it? Sherry is a doll.

So get out there and pick up some trash, people!! And get someone else to help you!!

Like my Nanny used to say: Don't make me get my shoe out!

various pics....

map of where we've been (missing Alabama and MD)...

knife and fork inn, AC...

Atlantic City teardown with purple chair...

nutso place in North Carolina...

windy Jersey beach today...

and there will be a brief, very brief, interlude, encore, while i get my act together... lots of good stuff to come.. like "what's on your face?" (not unlike. "what's in your wallet?" gimmick)...so just hang in there, sportsfans...