Purple is the Winner

I've decided I like the deep purple better than black....

Black Instead of Purple

I'm trying black today as my background color instead of the deep purple. Actually I thought I had picked black the first time! I'll keep it like this for a couple of days. Any thoughts??

A New Look

I've been thinking about a new look for my blog for the New Year. I don't really want to change my banner; I like the wisteria photo I took in Provence. I read a couple of blogs that are on black backgrounds...Soar-Dream-France is one. And I really like how the photos pop against the black. I'd be interested in your opinion before I set this template in stone. How do you like it?

Merry Christmas from Red Bell Farm!

For all of you out there who are dreaming of a white Christmas, here's one from Red Bell Farm!

"May your days be merry and bright,

And may all your Christmases be white!"

Merry Christmas from Red Bell Farm!

Atop the Tree

I read Tongue in Cheek every day. Corey is a wonderful storyteller and her blog is always a fun read. This week she asked people to comment on her blog entry telling her what sits atop their Christmas tree; she randomly picked 5 comments and the winners will receive a red French beret! Alas, I didn't win a beret, but I did have a load of fun reading about other people's Christmas trees! Many readers have stars, angels, and bows as tree toppers; a few have more 'unique' things, like a bird's nest, American flags, snowflakes, a coil of pearls that looks like white grapes, a crown, a snakeskin (really!), C3PO from Star Wars, and feathers. One woman doesn't put up a tree; she hangs a 12-string guitar on the wall and decorates it with garland, lights and ornaments! This lovely Provencal dove from my favorite ceramist, Edith Fidler, is atop my tree this year. It blends nicely with my postcards from all over the world and ornaments purchased when I travel. What sits atop your tree this year? I'd love to know!

Christmas Joy

"We don't remember days; we remember moments."


Cesare Pavese


Like the moment you open the back door and find the tall box left by the UPS man...











"The future is plump with promise."

Maya Angelou



Waiting, waiting for the future while plump buds drink and drink and drink....

" Before me, may it be delightful.
Behind me, may it be delightful.
Around me, may it be delightful.
Below me, may it be delightful.
Above me, may it be delightful.
All, may it be delightful." Navajo blessing






Thank you, Walt and Debbie, for my delightful Christmas tulips! My kitchen feels alive and blessed.

Christmas Angels

No surprise, I guess, that yesterday's CD was full of photos! I'm thrilled. This is the photo that Trav and Becky used for their Christmas card. I actually took it at La Jolla in October when we were all in San Diego.

This one of Marley and Parker is also on their card...

There isn't a better gift in the world for a grandmother than pictures of her 'angels!'

Favorite Things

One of my favorite things about Christmas (besides the carols, beautiful store windows, twinkly lights, sentimental tree ornaments, fudge, Christmas cookies...oh heck, there's not much about Christmas that I don't like!) is going to the mailbox and finding real mail...love those Christmas cards. But when I find a box from Montana, I feel especially blessed! In Becky's box to me, I found a new favorite Christmas tree ornament...








beautiful notecards with art by a local Yellowstone artist, Lynn Chan...











artwork by Parker (I think it's purple snow)....






a lovely and mysterious red satin bag to open later...

and this...a gift to make a grandmother's heart sing! Come back tomorrow to see what treasures it holds!





PS...Becky just called. I'm supposed to open the red bag now! She's got 'a theme going,' she says. You don't have to tell me twice to open a Christmas gift early!

The Blizzard of the Century

Just as predicted, the winds arrived at 4am this morning...how do I know? I was awakened by their moaning and howling! The gusts literally do howl over the top of my wood stove pipe...kind of like blowing over a bottle top. Yesterday was a 'work from home' day. As I checked voice messages and work emails, I watched it snow and snow and snow...to a total of almost 15 inches. Then early this morning, the snow moved out and the winds began to blow. Coupled with dropping temperatures into the single digits today and below zero overnight, this has been labeled a 'dangerous storm' and the 'blizzard of the century.' Hyperbole? maybe...maybe not! All I know is that I'm home again today. Who knows when the road will be plowed? Lucie, Sis the Cat, and I are fine...warm and snug inside with books to read and movies to watch. These big weather events do make me pause and think about how little control we really have over our lives.

I shot this video standing on my back walk looking east over the gravel road towards the ridge. This is what an Iowa blizzard looks and sounds like. Makes you appreciate the hard life the early pioneers had, huh?

The Final Obsession

What do strings of iridescent beads, tiny white lights, silk poinsettias, and Versailles have in common? They are all decorations on the small, artificial Christmas tree in my bedroom. Versailles is represented by postcards that I purchased there during my 2007 visit. See, I told you I was obsessed with cards this Christmas! Versailles took my breath away; it was over-the-top luxurious, opulent and beautiful. While I took many interior photos of the Palace, the postcards show it off the best.

Okay, I promise...no more Christmas decorations! But, I do want to share with you that I really was at Versailles. I took this photo of myself in one of the mirrors in the famous Hall of Mirrors. Last year I visited with a woman who is a huge traveller. She always takes a photo of her own feet at her travel destination to prove that yes, she really was there! Do you take photos of yourself when you travel?

Obsessed

I confess. I've become obsessed with cards this Christmas. No, not Christmas cards...postcards and business cards. It all started with my postcard Christmas tree. Suddenly, every card I've ever collected became fuel for my imagination. I remembered the business cards I collected from my trips to France. Mickey got me started with that; she asks for a business card at every restaurant she visits and tucks them into her travel notebook for future trips. I became a collector as well, but usually because cards from French businesses are so pretty and unusual. And now these pretty and unusual cards decorate another small Christmas tree in my entry hall. The one you see here with the different colored squares? that's from a tea shop in Paris and those are all labels from Kusmi tea which the shop features. The blue one with the mountain...that one is from l'Oustal, the B & B I stayed at in Montsegur. Restaurants represented in this photo are La Fregate, Le Christine, La Rotisserie d'en face, and L'Epi dupin..all in Paris. If I page thru my travel journal, I can tell you what I ate at each one!

The green and yellow card is from E. Dehillerin, a virtual paradise in Paris for serious cooks. Lined floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall with every kind of cooking gadget, pot, pan, dish, bowl, utensil you can imagine, this store is a treasure trove of goodies. The only problem is this: remember if you buy it, you have to either carry it home in your suitcase or have it shipped. You might think twice before you get carried away and purchase those lovely and colorful enamel-covered cast iron pots by Le Creuset! The card that is a picture of a pretty Lot village is from Lou Bolat, a delightful terraced restaurant perched on the hillside in St. Cirq Lapopie. I ate there twice; yummy both times.

Tiny red lights and gold bead chains complete the look of my memory-filled Christmas tree. But wait...I'm not done yet! Come back again for another card tree.

Red Belle Update

A quick update on Miz Red Belle....her headlight and fender are fixed, and she's back, better than ever! The entire repair process went smoothly and with hardly any hassle. I used Jack Anderson Body Shop in Indianola and I can wholeheartedly recommend them for your body shop needs...they were fantastic! We allowed 2 days for the repair, but the guys got it done before noon the first day. Because Enterprise didn't have the right car for me to rent, they dropped me off at work. When the repair was completed so quickly, they simply picked me up and took me back to the body shop...no charge! Gotta like that. I will also recommend Enterprise now to anyone who wants to rent a car. Their customer service couldn't have been better.

Kelley at the body shop said the guys were really excited to work on my Smart car since they'd never seen one before. They started on her before I even left the shop! They said the car was very easy to work on...everything just pretty much snapped into place...no worries! Kelley said she even had a woman come into the office who saw my car parked out front and wanted to know if she could look at it...she'd never seen a Smart car up close! All in all...a very pleasant ending to the deer vrs. car story.

The Postcard Tree

I adore postcards! I love to send them, I love to receive them, and I love to buy them just to keep. When I travel, I frequently buy postcards of interior spaces where photos are prohibited. The postcard is always a better picture than I could take anyway. I can't bear to throw away postcards that I get from friends and family which means I have quite a few tucked away in drawers. What to do with all these mementos? Decorate the Christmas tree with them, of course! My big tree in the living room is full of beautiful cards from national parks, trips to New Hampshire, Las Vegas, Hawaii, South Carolina, and Disneyworld. I've hung cards from Vienna, Mexico, British Columbia, Thailand, France, Spain, and Lithuania. If you've sent me a postcard in the last few years....it's hanging on my tree!

There's always room for one more, tho....so don't forget me when you travel in 2010. Your postcard could end up on next year's tree!

What do you do with your old postcards??

A Quiet Holiday

Thanksgiving was a quiet holiday this year. I actually went in to work for a little bit...don't feel sorry for me, tho, as it worked out better for me to make the trip to get an employee evaluation completed. Back home, I treated myself to some turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes. And I opened this special bottle of wine. It was given to me during my month in France by Christiane and Jean-Paul, my dinner hosts one evening. Laury and I were invited for aperos and dinner...a very special treat for me. They have a lovely old house just up the hill from Laury's. It has a grand fireplace in a cantou, which is a stone inglenook that has seating along each side. Aperos of red wine with cassis were accompanied by crackers, dry sliced sausage, olives and cornichons (tiny pickles) along with rock-n-roll oldies (American, of course!), lots of laughter and some spontaneous singing along to the songs that took us down memory lane. Who knew the French loved American rock? Dinner was a country delight. Christiane put together a yummy salad of greens sprinkled with walnuts, sliced duck gizzard and homemade fois gras. Our main course was a casserole layered with duck, mashed potatoes, wafer-thin slices of squash, and 3 kinds of mushrooms drenched in a wine gravy. My mouth waters just remembering how good it was! Then the cheese course...a cantal, a soft cow cheese, a pepper-coated goat cheese, and a sharp local roquefort. Wine, wine, wine, of course...then an apple tart with a tiny glass of prune eau d'vie...a fruit-based Everclear-like alcohol, very strong! More laughter, more stories in rapid-fire French that Laury had to translate. And then as we prepared to leave, Jean-Paul gave me this bottle of wine. It flew home with me carefully wrapped, nestled deep in my suitcase. Opening it for Thanksgiving brought all those delightful French memories flooding back. I am thankful for new friends!

Remembering Family and Friends

I travel alone, but I always carry family and friends in my heart as I journey. Frequently, I come across a sight, an image, a color that immeditately calls someone to my mind. Then even if it's a not a particularly memorable shot, I feel compelled to snap a photo of it. Take this zaftig sculpture that sits on a promenade along the harbor at Banyuls-sur-mer. Created by Aristide Maillol, she was given to the town in thanks for the sculptor's visits there. I almost backed into her as I photographed the colorful harbor and its bobbing boats. My surprise gave way to delight...I knew my friend, Mickey would love to see her sitting there by the sea since she's a huge Maillol fan. Snap!

I saw St. Jacques everywhere I walked in Conques. OMG...throw a sombrero and a cape on my brother, Jim and hand him a walking staff....he could be St. Jacques! Even the names match..St. James in English. Snap!













Every time I'd see one of these adorable deux cheveaux automobiles puttering along a country road or parked by an old stone building, I'd think of my brother, Walt...the car guy! Not that he'd ever in a million years drive one of these antiques, but he would certainly appreciate the loving care that their owners lavish on them to keep them shiny bright and running. Snap!





Some of my most vivid memories of my dad as I was growing up are trips to the beach where he would surf fish. Standing thigh deep in the salty water, he'd fling the heavy tackle out into the crashing surf hoping for a catch. His fishing rod and reel seemed huge to me, and I was always amazed that he could stand for hours in the cold, frothy ocean. When I spied the fishermen casting out into the brilliant blue Mediterranean waters at Collioure, I immediately thought of my dad doing the much the same thing along the coast of southern California back in the 1950's. Snap!



How do you remember family and friends when you travel?

Digging Deeper

It's easy to be charmed by the villages of rural France. If you visit, it's usually because you read about a wonderful market or an historic site there in an illustrated guidebook designed to attract tourists...and tourist dollars! Or perhaps you fell in love, sight unseen, after reading one of Peter Mayles' entertaining books about the characters and adventures of his beloved Provence. In either case, the village usually does not disappoint. All spiffed up for tourists, it provides you with an ATM, WC, and car park along with interesting shops full of local arts and crafts and lovely cafes where you can sample local cuisine while sitting on the outdoor terrace watching the world stroll by. Life is idyllic and sweet. You may begin to question, however, if life was always like this. What was your favorite village like before it was discovered by tourists? How did people make a living before and after WWII? Was this village occupied by German forces? Were its people always prosperous? Finding the answers to these questions requires digging deeper. If you lucky enough to be fluent in written French, there are sources for your research. If you're not (like me!), you have the search even harder. There are books out there, tho. This book, "Little Saint" written by Hannah Green weaves village life and history into Ms. Green's research of Sainte Foy, the venerated saint of the Abbey Church of Conques. I read it first at Laury's in September, and then bought my own copy to re-read once I got home. After spending so much time in Conques, the book took on a whole new meaning on my second read. It's beautifully written and full of the lives and loves of the Conquois. Here are a few more good reads if you're looking for the stories behind the guidebook hype....

"Village in the Vaucluse" by Laurence Wylie. Wylie spent a year doing sociologic research in a small, rural village that he called Peyrane. Twenty years later, he revealed that this village was actually Roussillon, a famous tourist village in Provence. His work covers life in the village by age groups: children (infancy, school and adolescence) adult work and recreation, and the aged.

"A Life of Her Own" is an autobiography by Emilie Carles, a French countrywoman born in 1900 in the Vallee de Claree high in the French alps. All her life she kept notebooks and diaries, finally putting them together in a book the year before her death in 1979. Translated into English in 1991, it's a fascinating story of a strong, outspoken, often radical French woman who almost single-handedly saved her beautiful valley from developers' bulldozers.

Michael Sanders went to the tiny village of Les Arques in the Lot to write a book about its restaurant. When he finished "From Here You Can't See Paris," he had actually written a book about the story of the village. Typical of so many tiny villages, Les Arques was on the verge of disappearing...its young people were leaving to find work elsewhere, its old people were dying off, its farmers were having a harder and harder time making a living. When its school closed, the village's fate seemed sealed until someone had the idea to re-open the school as a restaurant. Le Recreation breathed new life into the fading village and Michael Sanders was there to record the story.

Moon River Remembrance

My eyes filled with tears as I drove home from work tonight. I was listening to an NPR story about the centennial anniversary of the birth of the great lyricist, Johnny Mercer, who wrote the words to such songs as "That Old Black Magic" and "I Remember You." But it was the Henry Mancini song that Johnny wrote the lyrics for that brought me to that sentimental moment in the car. In 1961 as Mercer's career was being slowed by the rise of rock and roll, Mancini asked Mercer to write lyrics for what became the beautiful song, "Moon River." And "Moon River" took me back to the Lot, back to Laury's very own Moon River that I watched flow by my window every morning and every night of that wonderful month in Cadrieu. Light danced and sparkled on that river. The cliffs of the causse and the colorful trees and bushes of autumn were reflected in it. On my first night at the Chatette, I watched a full moon rise over the river. Laury pointed out the moon's aura...light in the shape of a cross that framed it. She said that was special to moonrise over the river Lot; that she'd never seen that cross anywhere else. When I got home a month later, I checked it out on my Iowa full moon, and she's right...no cross here, only a soft halo. Remembering the Moon River of the Lot, remembering Laury playing the Mancini/Mercer melody on her lovely baby grand piano late at night while I sat curled up in bed, reading and watching the light of the full moon streaming through my dormer window...no wonder my soft, silly, sentimental heart overflowed!

Bad News/Good News/Interesting News

First, the bad news. I hit a deer yesterday morning on my way into work. Yes, in my brand new, not even licensed yet car! I was on the off-ramp from Hwy.5 going about 40mph when a doe jumped onto the road from below the embankment. I couldn't avoid her. I'm now without a passenger side head light and turn light, and the fender panel will have to be replaced; not sure about the hood panel.

Now, the good news...the car is driveable. And I found out how it handles in an emergency. I slammed on the brakes trying to avoid hitting the deer and, it did just fine.

Here's the interesting news. The gal at the little body shop where I took it this morning for an estimate on repair costs told me that mine was the 37th vehicle this week that had come in for repairs from deer/car collisions. All but one had hit a deer; the remaining car hit something else trying to avoid hitting a deer! I can confirm that there are deer 'bits and pieces' at least every mile on both the Interstate and highway that I travel daily to and from work. This is crazy!

How Many Men Does It Take to Move a Helicopter?

Yes, that's the new Life Flight helicopter sitting in the middle of Watson Powell Blvd. in downtown Des Moines. And what is it doing there, you ask? Why would we ever block the street to land for anything less than a real emergency? The answer: to haul this beautiful aircraft into the Des Moines Convention Center for the two-day state EMS Convention slated to start tomorrow morning. In case you've ever been curious how such a feat is accomplished, read on...

First, you take lots of pictures because it just looks so darn pretty!

Then you find a mechanic to put the wheels on the skids. Once that's done, you get all the guys to pull it out of the street, so Des Moines PD can open up a lane of traffic.

Next you use lots of high tech equipment (pillows and duct tape) to pad and protect the blades.

After someone attaches the tow bar, you hook the aircraft to the hitch on the mechanic's truck.

Then you pull it slowly, carefully, gently up the ramp and into the exhibit hall of the Convention Center with men guiding the tail, holding onto the blades to keep them from bouncing and with two flight nurses sitting in the front seats to add a bit of ballast.

Unhook the truck and watch the guys move Life Flight into place!

Mission accomplished!