Category: Daft Musings

On Thursday, Shiaw-Ling and Candace did us the great favor of babysitting Neil and Kelly so that Peter and I could check out the new Morton’s in San Jose. As we were discussing the menu, I told the waitress that I was skipping dessert at Morton’s in favor of a slice of the Charlie’s Cheesecake…

Regular readers of this blog are aware of Kelly’s book obsession. When I complained to Peter about having to read her the equivalent of the collected works of Dr. Seuss each and every day, he suggested I find a storytime to take her to, where I can have someone else read to her for a…

Michael Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is a weird story in which the devil, in the form of a mysterious foreign visitor, Woland, and his small cadre of capricious associates, including a gigantic black were-cat, and a demon named Azazello, wreak havoc on 1930s Moscow. The title characters are Master, a writer whose unpublished novel has…

Yesterday, I finally bought a cheesecake (as well as a package of bite-sized cheesecakes, called “Poppers”) from Charlie’s Cheesecake Works in Almaden. The store (and bakery) is located next to my favorite thrift store, the Unicorn Thrift Store, and Charlie’s Cheesecake Works will give you a free sample of their cheesecake–as a popper in the…

Yesterday, Peter hypothesized that the widely vocalized dislike of our current president has less to do with factual knowledge than with our need to focus our fears about terrorism onto someone, anyone we can blame and hate in its place. When I think about it, his theory makes complete sense. After all, if someone you…

The fact is, we all know exactly why we have Cesar Chavez day, and it has everything to do with his ethnicity and politics, and very little with his actual accomplishments. We started down this slippery slope when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday became a holiday.

My husband and I used to believe in Costco. We bought Costco cards and went into the big-box retailers’s store regularly; and when we came out, having spent hundreds more than we would have in a trip to a regular store, I mentally justified it by telling myself we’d saved money by buying items in…

A few weeks ago, Peter was out with one of his British friends, named Andrew, who wanted to buy a skirt for his wife. Peter called to ask me for the American equivalents to British clothing sizes. After some confusion, I came up with a phrase to clear it all up: American girls want to…

Mike Manley, one Neil’s cub scout troop leaders, is fascinated with once-vibrant communities and houses, like English Camp and the Henry Miller mansion, that fell into decline and now can only be found by hiking in on a dusty path in a lush forest. How does it happen that a place like this, not all that far from a current urban area, should have been abandoned and effectively disappeared, he wonders.Actually, we have to look no further than current-day Detroit.

Last night, I went to Camera Theatres to see the movie Zodiac. I love reading true crime, particularly about serial killers. But movies based on serial killers are usually gore-filled horror flicks, focusing on the killer; or gritty action films, with a sole trigger-happy cop looking for the killer and gunning down everyone in his…