Almostgotit.com

Blogging may have to take a back seat again this week.

A friend of ours (I’ll call her “Joy”) died very suddenly yesterday morning. The married mother of 9-year-old “Phillip,” she was the parent with the steady income and the health insurance plan.

The family had many plans for the future, but this scenario wasn’t one of them. There was no will, few financial reserves, and though Joy’s husband “Andy” is a shrewd businessman in his own right, this hit him as an absolute broadside.

All he can do right now is weep or look stunned. And whatever he has left, his son needs it all.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are stunned too, and trying to put together the beginnings of what to do next for someone whose spouse suddenly dies.

Yesterday, amidst the busiest weekend of the church year, finding an available priest for the family was my first emergency. Today, between holiday celebrations, we’ve been arranging a funeral.

Everybody dies. And there are basic “death checklists” that virtually everyone will deal with at some point, given our universal mortality.

Most of these checklists assume a person is older, however, and without quite so many entanglements.

Where are all the other answers? (oh, help!)

And where’s the universal genius who’s supposed to be in charge of all of this, anyway?

Someone needs to reassure and manage Andy’s clients until he can do so again himself. Since Andy taught me much of what I know about webpage management, some of this may fall on me.

Andy and Phillip also need financial advice, legal advice, and health insurance. They need money and childcare and household management plans and community support. They need everything.

Nor are these homeless people, or hermits. They have friends, relatives and co-workers. They are “plugged in.” And we, the family’s network, are doing what we can.

What strikes me is how stupid, and helpless, we all still are.

Most of all, though, I vacillate between wanting to weep and wanting to yell, because God Damn it, Easter or no, this is all wrong, and Phillip needs his mother!

Ten honeymoons in ten days, hoo boy! I’ve just written and posted the last of them for The Rocky Road of Love blog.  While the honeymoons are pretend, every one of these places really exist and really would accept visitors (that was the “rule” I made for myself when researching them.)  Anyway, here are links to the final five. (You can revisit summaries of the first five honeymoons by clicking here.)

 Tree House: Turkish Wedding Soup with Spiced Sauce

A treehouse, a freehouse,
A secret you and me house,
A high up in the leafy branches
Cozy as can be house.

A street house, a neat house,
Be sure and wipe your feet house,
Is not my kind of house at all –
Let’s go live in a tree house.

I was inspired by Shel Silverstein’s poem, then I found a real funky-looking treehouse hotel in Turkey and a romantic recipe to go with it.

Tropical Honeymoon in Aruba: Baked Bananas with Rum Sauce

Guilt drove me to give the couple a brief respite at a more typical honeymoon locale.

The “Baked Bananas with Rum Sauce” recipe seems to have been particularly popular, too.

Gee, bananas. Who knew?

To the (Australian) Lighthouse: Lighthouse Cocktails

In researching this one, I fell in love with the Straviken lighthouse in Sweden, but still felt guilty. (My life.  Guilt.)  This time I worried about sending the lovers to someplace so cold in February.  So I found a lighthouse hotel for them in Australia, instead.

There followed a lively exchange (see post’s comments!) with the Straviken’s owner about whether or not there are polar bears in Scandanavia. 

N.B.: There aren’t.

Honey, let’s play (Spanish) Caveman: Quick Vegetarian Paella

I used my own experience staying in a Spanish cave hotel near the Alhambra in Grenada for this one.

And have been yearning for Flamenco music and sangria ever since.

I also finally figured out a way to cook paella that doesn’t call for a million weird ingredients and doesn’t take all day to cook, either.

(Unlike this post, which is giving me absolute fits, probably because of all the pictures.  Wordpress codemakers have some ’splaining to do!!)

Romance on (Ice Hotels) Ice: How to Make an Ice Bowl

Sam and Harry are due home later today, but I have one last honeymoon fantasy to spin for them. This time, it’s a hotel entirely made of ice.  I wanted to make a hotel entirely out of ice too, but decided to settle for making an ice bowl instead.  It took me a while to work out the directions, finally settling for a sort of “Ice Bowls for Dummies” approach (the kind I’d prefer myself) and was quite pleased with it. 

Here’s a link to summaries of my previous five “Honeymoons”, which I’ve just updated.  Don’t expect pictures, though, because I’m done messing with them!

——

Treehouse Image: Kadir’s Treehouses in Olympos, Turkey
Divi Tree Image: Manchebo Beach Resort & Spa, Aruba 
Lighthouse Image: Cape Otway Lightstation (original photo source unknown)
View of Alhambra from the Sacromonte: Photograph © John Willer and used with permission.
Ice Bowl: Creative Commons photo by EuphoriaLand

Over at the Rocky Road of Love blog, I’ve published five honeymoon-vacations-with-recipes in five days and will publish another five over the next week. I’ve found some amazing photos and the food is really good too. The problem is that the writing makes me so hungry!

The “Honeymoon Chronicles” thus far:

• Boat and Breakfast: Salmon Quiche A giant, floating resort in British Columbia’s Prince William Sound, accessible only by sea plane or boat.  A wonderful salmon quiche with a whole wheat crust.  What else could anyone want?
• A Castle in Scotland: Nova Scotia Oatcakes An overnight ride on the famous “Flying Scotsman” train. A castle near Edinburgh where Mary Queen of Scots once hung out.  One of Almostgotit’s favorite family recipes.  Heaven!
• Honeymoon in a Monastery: Cabbage Soup for a Crowd Just because monks are celibate doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t welcome honeymooners.  They’ll even serve them soup.
• South African Safari: Babotie Casserole There are no recipes for “Lion Steak:” I looked.  Babotie is a South African tradition: I won’t give it away, but it’s seasoned with almonds, spices and lemon.  Come see!
• Love in a Yurt: Chocolate Raspberry Napoleons with Raspberry Mascarpone Cream  Five star dining at 8,000 feet, where the food (and the chef) arrive by snowmobile.  Bonus: skiing burns lots of calories, so dig right in!

I’m guest blogging this week over at the Rocky Road of Love, where foodies Sam and Harry have finally married each other and are off on their honeymoon. I’ve been trying to guess where they are and what they might be eating. Today I’ve got them staying at a floating resort in Canada, accessible only by sea plane, feeding them a wonderful salmon quiche (recipe provided!) Come by for a visit!

Creative Commons Photo by estherase

Well, that was a strange little interlude.

It seems my predecessor wasn’t quite so eager to resign after all, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem except that the Board of Directors wasn’t quite sure they could do (ANYTHING) without her, either. So I decided they’d have to do without me instead, and here I am.

The “no succession plan” scenario is, unfortunately, far too common in the nonprofit world (most churches require retiring ministers to leave the congregation entirely, for this very reason). Perhaps this Board will do a better job next time; for my part, I suppose I’ll chalk it up to learning how to fail faster; I was just glad I saw the no-win situation for what it was as soon as I did, and got out before there were any actual murders.

My friend Emily has asked me to guest-host her “Rocky Road of Love” blog for the next week or so (starting Monday) while she is in PARIS doing some research (she’s a writer, and does that sort of thing.) I think she mainly wants to see me get off my dark-night-of-the-soul butt, but it’s very kind of her and I think it will be a lot of fun. Stay tuned!

——-
Related Posts:5 strange things I did to get my job
Working for a nonprofit organization
Career or blog in a rut? Find a Traveler

1. Nonprofit Communications
Written by a nonprofit consultant, this active site is a particularly rich one with tip sheets, a wonderful archive, and a terrific blogroll. Not to be missed.

2. Nonprofit online news
Every new executive needs to invest time in keeping up with her new industry. This site provides the latest news from and about the online nonprofit community.

3. Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector
Keep up with the times or get left behind! With nonprofit giving remaining fairly steady while the number of NP organizations continues to grow, it’s getting pretty competitive out there. Smart NPs know they need to pursue new audiences and new approaches (social networking, e-philanthropy, push technology.)

——-
Related Posts:
Quick lesson: build a feed reader

“What qualifies you for this job?”

It is a fair question. The reporter sounded like he’s all of twenty years old, and he knows my husband, which tells you two things at once: I must be getting old, and no matter how big a city, this is still a Small Town.

I thought of the paper this guy writes for… one of those thin weeklies (mostly advertisements) that inevitably appears at the end of your driveway on a day when it rains, so that you have to scrape up a sodden mass of multi-colored pulp when you go get the mail, vowing to boycott every single one of the advertisers (though their names are no longer legible) and wishing there were some sort of Law.

There were so many ways to answer his question, too. Possibilities ranged from simply repeating the info on the press release he’d already read to an astonished “Who says I’m qualified?”

I also could have held forth on the benefits of having had a liberal arts education, or else quoted the title of a book by Ann Crittenden: “If you’ve raised kids, you can manage anything.”

In the end, though, I had pity on the fellow, who just needed something short and straightforward, to fit a couple of column inches between the ads for rain gutters and exterminators. And decided it was time to get back to blogging!

The current banner on this site was produced with the help of a fun little site called Spell with Flickr All you do is enter your text in the handy little box, hit enter, and up pops your phrase written out entirely in photographs. This site even provides the code for your photo sequence which can be pasted right into your website or blog. I didn’t want to add that much photo load-time to my blog, however, so I downloaded each letter instead, assembled them into a single document using MS Paint, then used Photoshop’s “save for web” option to reduce the file size by changing both the compression AND resolution! before uploading the whole thing back to my site.

Congratulations to my blogging friend Ann Bares, whose Compensation Force blog was just rated #1 in the recent HR Blog Power Rankings posted on The HR Capitalist!

Of course, another reason to keep blogging is all the great spam you start getting after a while.

I don’t just mean the sex ones, though there is that. Here are some of my more printable favorites:

How do you do…
The Regard! The Excellent forum! Thank you!
There was merrily!
This simple prodigy!
All the best!

They came and found music, and dancing! There was exceeding brilliance, and also (most likely) Haiku! How much more complimentary could they be?

Hi all!
Excellent forum, added to favorites!
I simply mad about this forum!
The Good lad an author! I much like site!

And I simply mad about such enthusiasm, and hardly even feel it necessary to correct a little gender confusion. Good lad it is.

One time, I got several in a row like this one, and I would give up half the dictionaries in my house just to receive another:

orange-winged parcel-gilt midden mavis nitrogen cycle meter fixer openside planer palm fern oat grinder pea green opera cloak mining claim mole catcher muck rolls paper-baling Oceanic mongol Pan-saxon one-act mullein pink opium-drowsed mild-savored nitro-hydro-carbon oil beetle mint camphor opening bit passage hawk Pagano-christian officer plant Pan-turanism night-overtaken noble-natured Olive oil castile soap one-pounder narrow-shouldered moss-brown non-recoiling Non-syrian Mid-asian parish school muskus grass oyster plover ninth-known pack twine nimble-mouthed oyster tree party-zealous Monroe doctrine now-being opium drinker palm beetle open-caisson moon-struck Non-sanskritic orange peel oil-yielding naked-eyed mighty-brained mid-aged murexide reaction palate bone pack road paper-selling mid-refrain much-devouring Old bactrian oat bread mutton cane ostensible partner oil cup mud-color never-say-die olive-shadowed out-of-town mouth footed olive gnat nail bone mezzamine floor

Ah, just read it and weep.