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A Perfect Day in L.A. 1024 768 Mari Bickmore

A Perfect Day in L.A.

Well, actually another perfect 10 days in LA.  It’s like deja vu there!  Sunny in the 70s everyday.  I was in the South Bay Area visiting my son and his family…mostly to see my AMAZING granddaughters.  No really…they are amazing.  So sweet and cute.  My older one told me one day that I was always in her heart and in her brain everyday.  That just rips your  heart out when you only get to see them every 3 or 4 months.  I got to take them and pick them up from school almost everyday too.  What a change from when you have your own children and sometimes you aren’t savvy enough to know that you GET to take them and pick them up from school as opposed to having to do that.   That older child would wave to me for quite some time when I left her in the morning, until she turned the corner and could no longer see me.  I would have stood there all day long to see that wave and that smile!  Just getting to go to their swim lessons, ballet lessons and violin lessons was a treat.  I even lucked out and was there for my youngest granddaughter’s field day at school!   I did an art project with them everyday and didn’t care about the mess.  Grandchildren are the best and being relaxed as a grandparent is such a release.

We always eat out far to much when I visit, but getting to try new restaurants is a great thing too.  Just a couple of good places in the area that I haven’t tried before:  Brio Coastal Grill at Del Amo Mall (tied for the best Shrimp and Grits I have ever had) and Mama Terano in Rolling Hills Estates (OMG – I had the special:  Veal Sweetbreads Linguine.  I’m telling you, you should call them and have them put you on a contact list for when they have this special again.  Not kidding.).  Those two are my standout restaurants.   Oh wait!  Shrimp By You in Torrance was a winner too!  We shared a Big pot with a whole lobster, shrimp, snow crab, crawfish, and clams (we substituted the mussels for crawfish).  Choice of sauces.  Really, really good; we ate the whole pot.   Hermosa Beach Fish Shop is always good:  Great fish tacos, but their Fish Shop Shrimp is outstanding.

HOWEVER, we went to Smorgasbord LA, which is like a food festival but there every weekend, and had a great time.  There are around 50 booths/trucks, a mix of both, with so many selections.  The first one was Smogasbord New York and that guy opened on here.  A venue for up and coming chefs.  I think I walked around it twice before even attempting to make a choice.  I’m sure so much of it was really good, but the absolute best thing there has to be the Ugly Drum Pastrami Sandwich!!!  I know, if you had said that to me I wouldn’t have believed you either…but it’s undeniably true.  I was standing in the line for a pork belly taco from Goa Taco (truly yummy), and this man started talking to me.  Said this taco we were about to partake of was really good, but that I had to try the pastrami sandwich.  His son, right on cue, walked up with said pastrami sandwich and the dad made him give me a bite of it.  Heaven.  I didn’t even have the taco yet and my plan  was to immediately go stand in another line for that heaven on a slice of homemade rye with a little mustard.   There were seven of us, so I had little bites of a few things, but none any better than these.

We did go home and try to fly a really, really big kite..but after all the wind we had that week the wind gods left and it didn’t get off the ground.  That was the day before I left.  I am pining for another bite of the pastrami!  But truly, I miss the girls more than the sandwich.  They are living it up in London this week for Spring Break and aren’t giving me a second thought…as it should be.

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It’s A New Year! 768 1024 Mari Bickmore

It’s A New Year!

…as if you didn’t know–but who’s still writing 2016?

I was thinking about resolutions again, so I looked back at a post from New Years two years ago and still have a lot of work to do on those resolutions, namely:

1. Try not to waste so much time; i.e. watching too much TV, spending too much time looking at random things on the internet.
2. Focus on learning, expanding my base of knowledge, self-improvement; i.e. really learning a second language, scripture study and spirituality, take new design classes, or find an entirely new business to try.
3. Make a bucket list and start marking them off; even things that seem unrealistic. Go big or go home, know what I mean?!?! Someone told me that dividing it into categories, such as weekend-type items, week-long items, month-long items, etc. might make the list easier to use.
4. Try to have a healthier lifestyle; i.e. eating, exercise, work hard with physical therapy to get my gimpy foot healed enough to jump back into tennis.
5. Work at relationships; expand my circle of friends, let my family know how much I love them all the time. As an aside to this, I want to perform some type of service for random people as often as possible…I am not great at thinking about this, so it will be a definite process for me. I know “pay it forward” is an old cliche now, but that probably sums it up.

I told my daughter yesterday that I was just going to try to do something constructive every single day.  There are so many options that I should at least be able to do that.  I’m thinking that just getting my to-do list done for the day is something constructive!   I started painting a few months ago for the first time in my life, after years of wanting to try it, and it is my obsession right now, so working on a painting would be constructive.  Here’s what I’ve done so far over the past few months…so you see I’m just a beginner; therefore, taking some art classes would be constructive.

Helping someone, working out, making a new recipe…anything from the above list.  See how easy that is going to be?  I’m fooling myself, right?  Maybe I should revisit this philosopy at the beginning of each month and see how I’m doing.  Onward and Upward!  I wish I had had this mindset years ago.

Right now I’m doing something constructive everyday just by helping to take care of my new grandson and my daughter.  He just gets cuter everyday!

But that will end before I know it and I’ll be back in the real world.

My oldest granddaughter just turned SEVEN this week.  I can’t believe she is that old! I soooo wish I could have been with her on her birthday!  Right now I believe she loves me and likes to spend time with me…but how many more years do I have with her like that?  or with her younger sister?  They are are the apples of my eye are more beautiful and amazing everyday. And they all live so far away.  THANK GOODNESS for FaceTime!

 

Obviously I need to make sure to contact all of my family often.  I also need to try doing things that are out of my comfort zone.  I will work on figuring that out.

Just get out there and live and do good!

Winter Wonderland 1024 768 Mari Bickmore

Winter Wonderland

Have I written more about renovations? Did I finish my Gram Camp saga?  Did I write about the outcome of the presidential election?  About those great new cookies.  About my last trip? About all the atrocities Islam continues to commit Every Single Day. Anything?  No, no, no, no, no and no.  (I did do a little victory dance on election night that the barely-human Clinton woman didn’t win and I think I’ll wear my Adorable Deplorable T-shirt for months to come.)  I would love to say that it’s a new year and I’m turning over a new leaf for blogging, but I just can’t commit because I don’t want to mark that in the failure column.  I will say that I have every intention of writing more.  Not just intention–I want to write more! and that is probably something I can succeed at since I’ve written so rarely; more could be not very much at all!  Truly, it doesn’t matter because hardly anyone reads this so it is really just like journaling and that’s just fine.

Well, Christmas is over for another year and now we can start counting down for next Christmas – 354 shopping days!

Backing up though, we spent Christmas in Salt Lake City in a really nice, newly and tastefully renovated townhouse we rented just about three blocks from Temple Square and another block to City Creek shopping mall.  (Great location and if you’re looking for a spot in downtown SLC it is VRBO #4053608.)   The owner had even put up Christmas lights outside…it’s the little things!

I LOVE spending Christmas with my grown children and their families, who doesn’t?  But I’d rather do it at home where all my cooking utensils and food are right where they should be and I have everything I need to prepare a huge holiday dinner and all the dinners in between.  If I could just let that go and eat out when I’m out of town I’d probably be better off.  Anyway, this year was different…my youngest child and my only daughter was expecting my third grandchild, so everyone had to be there to welcome our new grandson to the world!

Utah was so kind in delivering us a white Christmas wonderland.  It snowed most of Christmas Day, which made me feel like I was right in the middle of a Norman Rockwell painting.

My fabulous granddaughters got to play in the snow and make snowmen, which they don’t get to do often in SoCal…well ever.  My oldest son got to go up to Brighton to snowboard a couple of days and the girls got to take their first ski lessons.  We all got to walk Temple Square at night, which is even more amazing at Christmas than any other time of the year. Christmas lights virtually covering everything, twinkling in everyone’s eyes as they walked the grounds that were more than magical.  Just being at Temple Square gives you that warm feeling that makes you remember what Christmas is all about. Makes me want to sing Christmas songs right now (trust me, you wouldn’t want to hear that!!! hahahaha).

Hot chocolate at Godiva afterwards just topped it off!   We had hot chocolate two or three times after that at other places…just a disappointment.  Godiva hot cocoa is maybe the best ever, but when I think back to the hot chocolate at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans I’m not sure.  We also saw a couple of movies, one for the girls (Sing) and Stars Wars: Rogue One for me.  That was my favorite Star Wars since the original ones.

When the fam all comes together, it is sometimes hard to entertain everyone over a several-day visit.  Don’t you hate it when everyone just sits around the house and you know they are bored, but you don’t know what to do?!?!   Or you plan to get up and out early but with that many people it just doesn’t happen?   I tried to find things to do.  The day after Christmas, the day my daughter went into the hospital to be induced, we went to Park City.  I mean we couldn’t just sit in the room and stare at her, right?  I love to walk around Park City and have lunch at one of the cute little cafes.  Well, we missed the cute cafe (hint: don’t eat at the Blue Iguana).  But we did get enjoy Park City and peruse the cute shops and galleries for a couple of hours afterwards, so it eased the pain of driving all the way out to Park City and having a barely mediocre lunch.

Time to go to the hospital and drop everyone else back at the house and let them figure out how to entertain themselves.

Without the gory details…We have a new, beautiful, fabulous grandson!  Mother and baby are doing fine and the baby LOVES his Mimi!  I get to stay on for a few weeks to take care of mother and child while everyone else returns home.  I know it’s going to rip my heart out when I have to leave…but that’s another day so let’s not dwell on it.

I already miss having all of my family all together at the same time.  I will miss them for a long time…forever until I see them again.  I hate it that everyone lives so far away from each other.  We did miss having one child with us at Christmas this year as he decided it would be more exciting to go to Thailand for Christmas then be with us, especially when he is working on Kwajalein and I never get to see him normally.  I mean who would choose Thailand…Bangkok, Chiang Mai, beaches…over Utah and me?

That is not going to play out well for him though!  I talk big, but when he comes home again I’ll be so happy to see him that my ire will probably go right out of the window.

It’s time to get ready for the day.  Lots of errands to do and a baby to spoil.  Cheers and Happy New Year!