• Family Matters

    Escape

    Escape

    I drink cranberry juice in a wine glass. It makes me feel like I’m drinking a real glass of wine. The color is similar and they both taste good in small luxurious sips. I’ve always loved the way my favorite wine glass feels in my hand. The wide bowl, the narrow delicate stem, the weight in my hand. There’s something very grown up about sipping something from it, even if it is super sugar concentrated fruit juice.

    I had one of those days. A day where you light a candle and take a long hot shower in the dark. I can’t drink wine so I’m having cranberry juice in my favorite wine glass and I’m playing soothing music from my itunes. It makes me feel better or at least like I’m taking care of myself. I get so overwhelmed with the every day troubles and I see myself disintegrating and making things worse by just getting mad at people who can’t change anything. It’s pointless. Sometimes I just wish I could flip a switch and transport myself somewhere else. Mostly so I stop causing more damage to a an already bad situation.

    I’m sure some of my frustration today has to do with hormones but a lot of it is situational. I’m just overwhelmed by the class difference in my own life. I go from one extreme to the other. You read that right. I’m talking about the difference between being wealthy and poor. Today I baby sat the Things and I attended a birthday party in a garden so extravagant that they had a pool made from rocks. There was a water slide and a cave to swim into. Even the sink in the bathroom was a work of art. I catch myself in awe over the simple things like the soap in the soap dish and the floor that is made of cross-slatted pieces of exotic wood. I am in awe of the birthday cake that is fancier than a wedding cake in Martha Stewart’s Wedding magazine. The topper was so elegant, it looked like an exquisite package made from icing with a giant pink bow and striped wrapping paper. It was for a four year old.

    Right after the party I talk to my mom on the phone and she tells me how she’s going to have to pay late fees this month because she can’t come up with the last hundred dollars of her $400 mortgage payment. The people who’s party I attended today spent more on their party favors than my mom pays for her house! How can this be? How can one day I be on a luxury yacht admiring the shiny polished wood and the next telling my mom I can’t loan her a hundred bucks! And it’s not just like my mom is the only one having money trouble. She’s just the only one who won’t care if I write about it on the internet. Life has always been hard financially for my family but we’ve always been proud that we are happy and full of love. Happiness is greater than buying things any day.

    It’s just sometimes I just can’t get my head around things. The anthropologists talk about class difference between races and different cities and countries but nobody ever talks about the class difference inside families. How is it that one sibling can go to college and get a good job and make it to the other side of the tracks while the other drops out and loses job after job and has three kids and and ends up on welfare or homeless? Should the successful sibling help out the down and out sibling? Blood is thicker than water, right? When is helping not helping? When is it the poor sibling’s own fault for making bad decisions? Could helping that sibling out time after time only perpetuates their bad decision making? Should the successful sibling feel guilty for having better luck? Should we just spread the money around and all end up sort of better off than the poorest member of the family?

    I can’t answer these questions and they make my head hurt.

    Something else really bad happened today but I can’t blog about it. I just want to mention it because it’s not really the issue of class differences in my family that is driving me to drink cranberry juice. But it does factor in.

  • Beach Bits,  movies,  travel

    Crashing the Boy’s Weekend

    Crashing the Boy’s Weekend

    Sometimes I think I lead a charmed life. I can’t believe some of the amazing adventures I’ve been on and many of them totally not planned. When I stop and think about how when I met Toby, he was practically living out of his car and delivering pizza and now he’s one of the most sought after photographer’s in Orange County, my head spins. It’s like my fairy tale has come true. I never married Toby for his money because he had none back then! But today I’m a lucky lucky girl who gets to enjoy the perks of being a photographer’s wife. I always believed in Toby and thought he would be great someday. But I never dreamed up this kind of life.

    Like tagging along on a fishing trip to Catalina Island on a luxury yacht that even Beyonce and Jay-Z would be proud of!!! It was something else! I’ve never been on such a nice boat before. The six and five year old boy’s were not too thrilled that I was allowed on. They were under the impression that it was a boy’s weekend only. But Toby was shooting the boys for a brochure he’s working on and the Dad’s thought they could wrap the whole thing up in one business/pleasure event. I came along because Toby has that nasty cough and he needed an excuse to get a hotel on land while they all slept on the boat. I thought that was a grand idea. A hotel night on Catalina Island! Bring it on!

    One little itty bitty thing I didn’t take into consideration before I signed up: Riding a yacht to Catalina is a little rockier than taking a heliocopter. In fact it was downright just like having morning sickness. I puked three times. Good thing I’m an old pro at this puking thing. It was just like being in my first trimester all over again. Thankfully once we got to solid land, the nausea went away. Phew!

    We moored at a place called “Moonstone Cove”. It’s got to be the prettiest little cove if you’re not counting Toby’s Dad’s cove up in Northern California. There is a little dock and a small rock beach perfect for learning to skip stones on. The land is private but since we had connections, we said we were guests of the local country club and had a nice time lounging in the shade of the trees.

    After washing down the boat and a little rest on the dock, we took a small dingy over to Avalon. (You can’t moor the big boat at Avalon because all the moorings are spoken for and you have to rent one from somebody who already owns one.) I wish I had better pictures of the crazy ride over but I’m using my 10D and my lensbaby that has the narrowest angle of view ever because it’s “fairly telephoto” (tobyspeak). It was pretty fun though, scooting over the water at 30 miles an hour with the wind in your hair and the water spray flying by you. When we pulled into Avalon there were boats every where. July is peak season for them. We could barely even squeeze into the dingy dock and had to jump from dingy to dingy just to get to shore.

    When we got on land we had a terrific lunch and then the boys got ice cream for the big photo shoot. Toby really had a time of it getting the boys to act like models and not crazy hellions. He was trying to get a nice picture of them enjoying ice cream with the landscape behind but he almost got ice cream on his lens instead because they kept lunging at him. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

    After the quick photo shoot, we went on a glass bottom boat ride. The water was pretty murky so we didn’t see much besides the very well trained fish that follow the boat around to get fed. The visibility wasn’t as great as it was the last time we went several years ago. You might remember this movie from that trip.

    Then the boys left with their dad’s for a barbecue back at Moonstone Cove and lots of fishing and we stayed in Avalon to take night shots of the harbor. It was the most pleasant summer night you could imagine. I don’t have any shots because Toby made me leave my camera at the hotel so I could help him carry his gear. His hand started swelling up again and this time it was his right hand so working with a camera and a lot of gear was a little stressful for him. Maybe later I’ll post one of his. Of course his shots look like postcards but then what do you expect?

    Sitting up at the top of the hill looking down at the harbor full of boats and the Casino all lit up was the most pleasant thing I could think of to do on a perfect night like that. The temperature was just right and there wasn’t even a breeze. Above it all we could hear the squeals and laughter of all the people below enjoying the summer like only vacationer’s can. Avalon almost reminded me of how festive Mexico can be on warm nights like this. It was really amazing. We missed a comped dinner at the Catalina Country Club but weren’t too disappointed because when we got there, five minutes after they’d closed, there was a wedding still going on and the canned dj music was really cramping our style anyway. Instead we ate at a second story steak restaurant and dined by the open window so we could watch people go by down below. It was a perfect perfect weekend. Especially when you’re getting paid to be there!

    We stayed at the Hotel Atwater and it was nice. The walls were a little thin and the trash trucks dumping trash outside our window in the morning made us feel like we were back at home. But Toby really liked our view because outside there were two palm trees absolutely riddled with holes made by woodpeckers. He must have sat by our window taking pictures of woodpeckers for two hours or more. Hey, whatever floats your boat. I, on the other hand, took a nap! (For the baby of course!)

    I didn’t take many pictures on the ride back because I was so worried about getting sea sick again. I didn’t take my eyes off the horizon once. I did see a few dolphins and the tail of a whale though.