Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 12:30AM 
Who's doing the carving? Click here for pumpkin below where you'll also find a leaf motif stencil.
Friday, November 11, 2011 at 8:06AM Check out these online games for holiday guests such as: Thanksgiving Dinner Bounce!
Don't miss these and many other FamilyFun games!!! Follow this link for instructions.
Thanksgiving, games Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 1:40PM http://freshperspectives.squarespace.com/blog/tag/thanksgiving
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 12:36PM Found on a recent trip to NYC.
Over the course of the next few days I'll expand each source with pictures.
Meanwhile, click on links to get a sense of various possibilities for holiday gift giving found in Bryant Park.
Animated Closet had terrific kids clothes not shown on blog/inquire via website link
White Llama/no website yet. I'll share pictures later in the week. Meanwhile, here's the contact info: whitellama@hotmail.com
And locally, one of my favorite finds:
Plush Pumpkin See store locator on website for a shop near you. In the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area, visit Emily Joubert in Woodside. Also, thanks Linda, you'll find them at Alyse Grace and Pink Tangerine.
Finally, an online link I love for creating your own gift labels. Fairly priced, intuitive design process. VistaPrint
Thanksgiving, holidays Monday, November 7, 2011 at 1:42PM 
Last week I saw a YouTube video that made me feel really good, and I emailed it to my fabulous aunt in California because she likes to post that kind of thing on her blog. I got her response this morning.
“WOW. How great is life?”
It’s been on my mind for the last couple of hours, because really, when you take a second to think about it, how great IS life? Everybody has their problems and concerns and things they lie awake worrying about, and sure, there are days when you just want to crawl back into bed and hide under the covers for a while, preferably while consuming an entire package of Double Stuf Oreos. But while I can’t speak for anyone else, personally, when I stop and take a good objective look, my life is pretty great. There are things I want that I don’t have, but I think almost everybody can say that; in the end, I have very little to complain about. Why is it so easy to forget that? It’s so easy to take things for granted and be dragged down into negativity and wind up in a bad mood before you’ve even finished your morning coffee. It’s so easy to be hard and cynical and roll your eyes about things instead of daring to be softly optimistic. When was the last time you stopped and took a breath and allowed something to amaze you? I don’t know about you, but I’m amazed in that negative, wounded, “Wow, people are really freaking awful sometimes” kind of way on a regular basis. But what about the other kind of amazement? The goosebumpy “Whoa, I need to stop and marvel at this for a minute” kind? The kind that makes you say, “Wow. How great is life?” It’s the kind of thing that happens so often when we’re kids, but as we grow up, we forget. I’ve been working on laying down my cynicism and sarcasm and eye-rolling and re-learning how to let things amaze me again, and it feels like fresh air after years of staleness. It’s not every day that something completely blows your mind, but that’s not necessarily what I’m talking about. I’m talking about things that could easily fly past you if you’re not open to noticing them – small things like discovering a new song that speaks to you, or a wonderful meal, or a really great kiss that, if you’re paying attention, are just enough to make you stop and smile and fall a little more in love with the world. Allowing myself to have that (every day, if I’m lucky) makes it so much easier to put problems and annoyances into proper perspective. There’s a place for those things in a person’s life, but it’s not front and center, at least not all the time. There are quietly amazing people and things all around, and I’m learning let those be front-and-center as often as I can. It makes me smile more, and be kinder, and feel more grateful. It makes me love my life.
“I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much — my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…”
– American Beauty
My darling niece, Meghan, can be reached at:
http://theupstairswindow.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/front-and-center/
Monday, November 7, 2011 at 6:58AM Thank you, Meghan! You're absolutely right/this is a feel good all day sort of film!!! Read Meghan's response. So well written.
Monday, November 7, 2011 at 6:42AM Whales nearly collide with woman as a pod of humpbacks look for food in Monterey Bay near Santa Cruz, CA.
Other recent whale encounter. And another.
Who's ready to go whale watching with me?
Monday, November 7, 2011 at 6:40AM What to do with a bumper crop of Romas?
The following recipe is from Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics: Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients.
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F.
Arrange the tomatoes on a sheet pan, cut sides up, in a single layer. Drizzle with 1/4 cup of olive oil and the balsamic vinegar. Sprinkle with the garlic, sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Roast for 2 hours until the tomatoes are concentrated and begin to caramelize. Allow the tomatoes to cool to room temperature.
Cut the mozzarella into slices slightly less than 1/2-inch thick. If the slices of mozzarella are larger than the tomatoes, cut the mozzarella slices in half. Layer the tomatoes alternately with the mozzarella on a platter and scatter the basil on top. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper and drizzle lightly with olive oil. Serve at room temperature.
Monday, October 31, 2011 at 10:34PM I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.
Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.
When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.
We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.
I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.
Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.
I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.
That’s incredibly simple, but true.
He was the opposite of absent-minded.
He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.
When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.
He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.
He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
He was willing to be misunderstood.
Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.
Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.
Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”
I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”
When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.
None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.
His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.
Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.
Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.
When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”
When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.
They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.
This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.
And he did.
Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.
Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.
Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?
He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.
With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.
He treasured happiness.
Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.
Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.
Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.
I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.
Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.
“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.
He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.
I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.
Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.
One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.
I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.
He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”
Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.
By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.
None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.
What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.
Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.
He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”
“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”
When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.
Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.
Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.
His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
Monday, October 31, 2011 at 10:30PM 
Irreverent, outspoken, pretty outrageous. Tina Fey's Bossypants
I've traded tedious for a raucous ride around town running errands while listening to this Saturday Night Live/30 Rock star's take on life.
From Amazon: Tina Fey’s new book Bossypants is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation. Some of the funniest chapters feature the differences between male and female comedy writers ("men urinate in cups"), her cruise ship honeymoon ("it’s very Poseidon Adventure"), and advice about breastfeeding ("I had an obligation to my child to pretend to try"). But the chaos of Fey’s life is best detailed when she’s dividing her efforts equally between rehearsing her Sarah Palin impression, trying to get Oprah to appear on 30 Rock, and planning her daughter’s Peter Pan-themed birthday. Bossypants gets to the heart of why Tina Fey remains universally adored: she embodies the hectic, too-many-things-to-juggle lifestyle we all have, but instead of complaining about it, she can just laugh it off. --Kevin Nguyen
Loving it! Can't wait to get back in my car tomorrow.
Monday, October 31, 2011 at 12:37PM 
Recipe and photo from Allrecipes.com.
INGREDIENTS:
1 (8 ounce) can Pillsbury refrigerated crescent dinner rolls
2 ½ slices American cheese slices, quartered
10 large hot dogs
Cooking spray
Mustard, ketchup
DIRECTIONS:
Are these darling or what?
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 3:47PM Stephanie! THANK YOU!
Photo and recipe are from Food & Wine. Check link for many more ideas!
Grace Parisi's cake pops are easy to make: Crumble store-bought pound cake; mix with lemon, sugar and butter; then shape into mounds. When they're covered with white chocolate, the cakes look like ghosts. Make their faces with an edible decorating pen or dots of black frosting. See link for detailed recipe.
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 7:46AM 
Look who Barb B captured on film in her Pennsylvania paddock!
Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 5:28PM 
From today's NBC Evening News:
Santa Cruz is a tourist destination for sure. Just try getting over Highway 17 on a warm weekend day in the summer.
But the good people at the Santa Cruz County Conference and Visitors Council are always trying to get more people to come to the area. The above photo just might do the trick.
The photo was taken during a marketing shoot on the Monterey Bay on Tuesday, said Christina Glynn with the CVCl.
The intent was to show businesses that Santa Cruz is a good place to hold a conference or retreat. They hired models to pose as conventioneers on a Pacific Yachting and Sailing boat learning how to sail (the outing is supposed to build teamwork among execs).
While they were busy making that magic, the group noticed some whales off the side of their boat, so photographer Paul Schraub grabbed his camera and started taking pictures.
All of a sudden, two huge humpback whales breached the surface simultaneously within a few feet of kayaker Alan Brady, who said the whales were so close that he had to duck out of fear of being hit by the tails. He was not injured.
Glynn called it a once-in-a-lifetime photo.
For locals, the shoreline behind the whales is Seabright State Beach in Santa Cruz. Whales have reportedly been very active in the past week, feeding on an abundance of anchovies off the coast.
The image might not have been the intent of the outing, but it is considered a win for the marketing department.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 3:59PM 
Thanks, Joan!
The photo was taken at the entrance to Katlian Bay at the end of the road in Sitka, Alaska. The whale was surfacing to scoop up a mouthful of herring (the small fish seen at the surface around the kayak). The kayaker is a local Sitka Dentist. He apparently didn't sustain any injuries from the terrifying experience. The whale was just around the corner from the ferry terminal, and all the kayaker could think at that moment in time was, "Paddle man. Really fast!"
So incredible, one might wonder if Photshop played a role in this picture. What do you think? Pretty remarkable either way!
On further investigation...
Folks, this is for real!!!! This happened in the last two weeks. The spawning herring are in the Sitka Sound and when they are in, all the predators arrive to feast. Dr.Kraft happened to be in the wrong place at the right time!!! The Whale was coming up under the herring which the whale had schooled with a circling motion driving the herring into a ball through which the whale comes up. This is a once in a life time photo and I wanted to share with all of you. Life is good in Alaska!! AMJ
OK, AMJ, I'm going with your account! Wow.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 9:47AM 
Nicely done, Better Homes and Gardens! Click below for more easy/fun Halloween ideas!
Kid-Friendly Halloween Decorations & Crafts
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 9:28AM 
"Just in time for Halloween -- fun pumpkin stencils! Our free pumpkin carving stencils feature designs you'll love, from pumpkin faces to dog breed designs to printable templates of favorite Halloween icons. Plus, learn pumpkin carving basics. Use our pumpkin patterns to create cute -- or creepy -- pumpkin displays. To carve them, simply log in at BHG.com (or register -- it's free), then open the printable pattern and print. Size the pumpkin pattern on a copier if needed. Tape it to your pumpkin and poke the outline of the pattern with a pin before carving your masterpiece." BHG
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 9:04AM While these photos were taken last year, Roger Reynolds Carriage House (Encinal Avenue, Menlo Park, CA) is currently stocking a selection of sensational squashes.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 6:26AM 
For the most thorough analysis, including pictures of deteriorating jack-o-lanterns, check out this site
"There are 5 most common methods of pumpkin preservation. If you want your pumpkin to last longer then use the following things after you simply carve it and clean it out.
1. Bleach. The pumpkin should be soaked in bleach solution (1 tsp. bleach/gallon water) for 8 hours. Thereafter it should be sprayed daily with a mild bleach solution. The soaking and spraying is intended to hydrate the pumpkin flesh, while the bleach is an antimicrobial.
2. “Pumpkin Fresh.” We sprayed the pumpkin daily with commercial pumpkin preservative Pumpkin Fresh, as directed on bottle. The solution contains water, sodium tetraborate decahydrate (borax), and sodium benzoate (a preservative and fungicide). The label describes it as a “fungicidal solution.”
3. White glue. You can also coat the inside and cut surfaces with white glue. The dried glue is intended to seal the pumpkin, preventing dehydration.
4. Vaseline. Vaseline is also a good way to make your pumpkin live longer. The pumpkin should be coated on the inside and cut surfaces with petroleum jelly. This is intended to keep the pumpkin flesh from dehydrating.
5. Acrylic spray. Carved pumpkin can also be sprayed with acrylic finish spray. The spray is intended to seal the pumpkin flesh, preventing dehydration and acting as a barrier to mold growth."
Halloween 