Author Archives: kathy

Indian Temple Festival

The invitation came from Sharona, Chief Officer of Vibe, at Soul and Surf Resort in Varkala, India, during breakfast:
“In case you’re interested… there’ll be a temple festival going on this afternoon. There’ll be drums… and elephants… and, um, drums….”

Who doesn’t love a festival, and elephants, and DRUMS?! And Noah was pretty sure there would be cotton candy and balloons as well, maybe.

You could hear them before you saw them.

Noah was right about the balloons, complete with Angry Birds and 100 Or So Dalmations.

There were drums, as promised, and festive overhead banners lining the streets, and men with immense colorful pompom tower objects, decorated with swastika-like symbols (sort of) attached to chairs (sort of) that they had hoisted on to their shoulders and were twirling about as they walked.

Clearly, I could have done some cultural research before attending so I could make sense of what I was seeing.

Turns out, Hitler was a great appropriator of ancient iconic symbols, and I could have saved myself a few moments of “WTHeck?!” if I’d noticed the symbols on the twirly-gigs were “backwards” from those with which I was uncomfortably familiar.

On the other hand, simply taking it all in as presented to my Western sensibilities made for a lovely, mind-expanding afternoon of “tourist” with a captial “T.”

Disney-inspired dalmatians overseeing offerings to the gods.

Gotcha… Think: the Santa Claus parade at Christmas.

Some parade (and life) moments can take your breath away when you least expect it, for reasons you didn’t see coming.

#peoplearepeoplewhereeveryougo…

… with hopes, and realities, and frustrations, and disappointments, and dreams, and purses, all tucked up right where you know where to find them without looking.

Everyone’s just trying to make a little margin…

… and everywhere, little kids ADORE having the chance to play (literally) with the big kids.

Universally, those on the sidelines have a place in the play…

… and people always enjoy a hot oily treat with their festivities, especially if accompanied by a bell announcing the possibility, preferably half a block in advance to give you a chance to negotiate with the powers that be for why it’s a great opportunity and to scrounge around for loose change.

I could be biased, I suppose, since the young man (front left) was an Indian doppelganger for our own perfect Mathias, but I’m thinkin’ Bollywood’s a-calling for this kid..

I found myself wishing I was a talent scout right then.

The floats were truly impressive with myth-enacting animatronics that would have put the best of 5th Avenue windows at Christmas to shame.

But what was most interesting was that the advertising opportunity was not lost. According to literally everyone we talked to on the subject (granted, a limited set given the ~1.4 billion people who could conceivably hold an opinion), every parent in India wants–and believes–their child to have a future as an engineer.

Thank goodness, there are moments where, expectations for their glorious futures notwithstanding, kids are allowed to just be kids.

Aside from the realistic mane on ol’ Leo, there was nothing fluffy about these floats.

Again, I found myself wishing I had done some reading around who, from a Hindu perspective, might have been slaying whom, and for what reason.

However, what I did learn, real time, is that no matter what you might have missed from an academic point of view…

… you can always read the faces of the crowd to tell you more than half of what you need to know.

For example, as measured by the whites of their eyes, this float hit its mark as a religious morality tale: the little guy behind Grandma was clearly inspired to pay closer attention next time in Sunday School.

The drums kept coming, with sometimes modest…

… and sometimes more extravagant varieties of presentation.

These guys were beating their cadence with paddles on the sides of their swan.

It was a hot, humid, beautiful, exotic, and altogether human experience.

I came face-to-face with India’s very own Rufio. (I think I actually heard him crow.)

… and Peter Pan himself.

And yes, there were elephants.

For me, it was like spotting multiple Santas, each one completely singular in their own right, yet each one perfectly legitimate as representative of the uber concept, at the end of the parade: exciting, and a little weird.

In many ways, they will serve as a fitting reminder for me of my experience in India:

They were glorious, and humbling…

… and a challenge to my sensibilities as to how things “should” (or “should not”) be.

Come to think of it, India’s not that much different than Canada or the US in that way. No matter where you go, there you are, along with your particular perspective on “how things should go.” Just like American Express, you can’t leave home without it. International travel just gives you a shortcut to encountering it.

For some, however, those “preferences” are refreshingly simple to manage without stress:

Do you want the green elephant tooter or the blue one?

India Jet Lag Cure

Note: this post has almost nothing to do with India and everything to do with how to survive the first 48-hours with two little kids once you get there.

India will come later.

Say what you will about the insane spread and strange austerity of the Frankfurt airport…

... any airport that provides multiple football field-lengths of full-sized cots clearly understands its mission as an international jet lag way station.

Note to prospective traveling grannies: 30 hours of travel, plus a 13.5 hour time difference, plus the chaotic pace of Bangalore, multiplied by highly active two- and five-year old sleep needs = a serious need for a Jet Lag Plan.

Thankfully, Kate was all over it in the packing department.

Pool time!

For some, good hydration and a little yoga is key to a quick recovery.

For others, exercise and some hand-eye coordination flexing is the ticket.

Personally, I found a little adoring lens therapy went a long way to getting my head, heart and travel-hormones back in synch.

A little volunteer gardening also helped to get things grounded. While I’m not sure the chlorinated water was exactly what the poolside vegetation craved, it worked for J for at least 20 minutes.

Kate found that working on her recreational improv skills pulled things together…

… and J discovered you might as well work on your technique while you’re at it.

Football is tougher than it looks, you know.

Fortunately, things drifted back to where they belonged fairly quickly, or at least it has seemed that way to me.

I don’t know, though. Adults get jet lag too, and it fogs the brain.

Finally, for pushing the “please stay awake for just one more hour” envelope, an iPad, headphone splitter, and Shaun the Sheep cannot be recommended highly enough.

It’s now seven days later, and we’re all finally almost in the groove, just in time to have left Bangalore and land in the coastal resort area of Varkala. It’s so ~~stinkin’~~ blissfully hot and humid here that Bangalore was balmy in comparison, and I feel like I’ve entered a Bikram vacation zone.

But who knows? Maybe the languid, slo-mo mojo will improve my writing skills as I actually write about India next.

Time and things work differently here.

Rick and Kathy Play Games

Rick and I like to make up games.

It happens spontaneously when one of us does or says something, and then the other one makes a play on it, and… let the games begin!

We were sitting on our little cliff deck when the cormorants decided it was time to air out their collective pits. There was only space for one pair of outstretched wings on the buoy, so there was some vigorous feather wrestling over how many minutes constitutes a “proper turn,” and who was up next.

“Quick! Get the camera!”

We passed our beloved Nikon D1500 back and forth, trying different angles, focal lengths, and compositions. Once the birds took off in search of a more spacious perch, our attention wandered to what else might be interesting through the lens without getting our butts out of our really comfy Adirondacks.

Quite a bit, apparently.

“Hey! Wanna try shooting the same thing, and see what happens?”

We often see the same thing through quite different creative perspectives.

It’s a huge positive in our relationship: we double our fun when we get to enjoy the other guy’s experience of beauty and life, in addition to our own.

It’s like the “find the animal in the clouds” game. The first fun is finding the seahorse all on your own. The second fun is the challenge of finding the right words to guide the other guy into seeing it, too.

All I could see was the question mark, asking where the seahorse was.

The game taught us anew that clouds don’t have a monopoly on having worlds hidden in their textures.

Frankly, this was a bit freaky once Rick pointed out the gnarly old man staring at us from the bark.

In the warm afternoon sun, we found ourselves composing around the pools of golden light that dappled our lightly wooded shoreline.

Is “dappled” a verb? Yes.

It was camera therapy, with a buddy.

Life tip: when stressed, go zen behind the lens with a friend.

Shadow play was fun…

… as was playing upside-down.

And no, we did not experience any nasty surprises via large perching birds with an excellent sense of timing.

Taking time to let your focus drift to things just beneath the surface is a wonderful tonic.

Just ask Winston.

P.S. There’s another fun rickandkathy.com made up game coming your way shortly! Stay tuned for WWF_WTF (Words With Friends_Written by Two Friends).

“Brooklyn” Movie Review

If it’s been years since you’ve gone to the movies, Brooklyn is a great reason to go back.

I get why you don’t go any more. My own experience is that most of the marquee-grabbing movies today accost me with some, if not all, of the following affronts: extreme characters, breakneck plot shifts, violent visual upheavals, and eardrum-splitting surround sound, all of which seriously mess with my ability to suspend my disbelief.

Brooklyn, on the other hand, is an oasis of beautiful visual craft and storytelling I had forgotten was even possible in a movie.

Based on the novel Brooklyn by Irish novelist, Colm Tóibín, it’s a quiet movie of immense moments, of the ordinary human experience of leaving home, the loss of “normal,” and finding your way forward through discovering that you can’t go back.

In hindsight, I wish I had understood the moments were meant to be savored, each in its turn like a fine gourmet chocolate. It made me aware that I’ve held a different orientation to movies recently, one that is anchored in a plot-screaming headspace of “what will happen next?” rather than “what’s happening now?”

Brooklyn, on the other hand, holds you in the spell of the first blush of new love or a brilliant Irish acapella tenor giving voice to a homesickness so palpable you’ll have tears streaming down your face even if you aren’t weeping.

Despite being advertised as “a rich period drama [early ’50s] that tugs at the heartstrings,” (Wikipedia), Brooklyn is deftly punctuated with snippets of ordinary human hilarity.

Anyone who has ever shamed themselves with inappropriate–yet entirely uncontrollable–explosive giggles in somber surroundings will resonate warmly with the scene at the dining table of the rooming house as the exasperated matron tries, by sheer force of will, to stifle the giddiness of two flighty roomers. Similarly, eight-year old punk Frankie’s outrageous declaration that “We don’t like Irish people!” is sure to tickle self-aware social instigators who have ever been lead from the dining table by their ear.

Part of the fun is found in the dialogue itself. It’s replete with the quick Irish accent and wit that is a delight to both the ear and the mind, and Irish actress Saoirse Ronan as “Eilis” and her fellow actors deliver it all superbly.

In fact, the acting is so universally compelling, it felt to me that there were no “extras” in Brooklyn. It is as though every human on screen is a fine actor in their own right, each with their own fully fledged story to tell. Even if it was merely a wave goodbye from the deck of a ship, or the way an old gnarled hand held a soup spoon at the charity Christmas dinner in the basement of the church, I believed.

I won’t comment on set, costume, music, direction, etc., because once I was five minutes in, they were all invisible to me. The potent amalgam caught up with me 107 minutes later as I left the theater with a beautiful new story lodged in my heart and the fervent intention to watch it again, this time moment by moment.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn, the book, is all queued up on my Kindle for some cozy holiday reading. I have a feeling this may be one of those rare circumstances where the book will be better for having lived the movie. I’ll let you know in an update here when I’m done.

At Christmas, Give is Good

Silver bells, silver bells… As the shoppers rush home with their treasures…

Listening to that Christmas song yesterday as we decorated our tree, I found myself reflecting on the lyrics: What made those parcels—tucked under our arms, then wrapped in sparkling paper and placed under the tree to twinkle in the reflection of the lights—so special?

Anticipation.

It’s the delicious anticipation of delighting someone you love.

As Rick and I talked about earliest memories, we unearthed a few sweet insights around Christmas gifts.As kids, neither of us remember spending much time developing our consumer muscles. We didn’t regularly hang out in the toy section of department stores, and children back then simply weren’t marketed to nearly as aggressively as they are these days.

So when the Sears Wish Book appeared a month or so before Christmas, it was the one time of the year we had exposure to the wondrous possibilities of toys and games that could be ours.

We spent hours on our bellies in the living room, considering our options, eliminating the non-contenders, then zeroing in on and communicating our favorites with inked circles of desire.

Come Christmas morning, we were sometimes surprised with choices we hadn’t even known were available, but once they were unwrapped and ours, filled our hearts and hours with amazed delight.

For Rick, the Elgo Skyline Construction Kit was a standout.

He remembers being about six or seven years old, well before he knew that plastic interlocking building blocks even existed, or that it would appeal to the designer/builder/puzzle doer in him.

But Santa knew.

For me, my earliest receiver memories are split between a Christmas morning pair of red leather ski boots—WITH BUCKLES!—and a gift I received after seeing them in the catalogue, but not getting until my birthday in mid-January: a pair of bona fide go-go boots.

The ski-boots were a hit because a) I hadn’t realized the buckle types were available but immediately recognized the totally cool factor inherent in them, and b) they were a huge vote of bright red leather confidence from my parents in my sporting abilities.

And I did go forth and rock the slopes.

The go-go boots, on the other hand… I would have given my Nancy Sinatra fan club membership card for those boots. And on the morning of my eighth (ninth?) birthday, there they were, all mine.

AND my sensible, pragmatic, and always responsible mother permitted me to wear them—unlined, with a slippery sole, in the middle of January, in the snow belt known as Ottawa, Ontario, Canada—to school the next day.

For reasons I’ll be happy to go into over a couple of martinis with you some day, my inner artist really needed those boots at that point in my life.

For now, I hope you’ll lean on the truth of this: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” (Prov. 13:12)

The gears shifted for both of us at an early age when we realized we could get as much and more pleasure from giving gifts—both wrapped and not—to our dear ones.

Telling those we love by way of gifts that they are both seen and loved is one of the greatest presents that Christmas gives to us all.

We don’t get the Sears catalog anymore. I’m sure they’re out there, but I haven’t bought anything from Sears for years, and certainly not by their catalog, so we’re off the list.

But that’s okay.

Times change, and now the Sears catalog of our youth is called Amazon Holiday Central. For my inner holiday kid looking to replicate the first Saturday morning after the catalog arrives, belly down on the carpet, it’s one of the best gift stores online.

Best Anti-Wrinkle Creams

Google the words “face cream” and you’ll net a mind-boggling 150 million search results.

Add to your research “moisturizer” (20.5 million results), “lotion” (69.9 million), “ointment” (24 million), and “face serum” (50.7 million), and you now have well over THREE HUNDRED MILLION opinions to consider.

At that startling moment in a woman’s life where deciding on the best anti-aging cream for her particular face has suddenly become an earnest goal, that is definitely TMI.

Online shopping doesn’t reduce the complexity any either. An amazon.com search for “face cream” in all departments returns ~119,000 actual product listings, and that’s not even counting all the viscosity options mentioned above. Even a physical saunter through the stultifying number of face creams in my local London Drugs can cause me to break out in facial hives, which is precisely not the point.

In addition to the overwhelming number of options, I’m accosted by relentless marketing propaganda suggesting I search my mirror for signs of red blotches, visible pores, dark bags, fine lines, and reflections hinting at anything crepey, sagging, shriveled, or likely to turn into a pothole by next spring.

Factor in quasi-medical articles warning me of chemical ingredients likely to mutate my lymph nodes, and I confess to rapidly losing sight of my inner beauty.

Credible recommendations and reviews of the best anti-aging face cream and anti-wrinkle lotions are as illusive as the Fountain of Youth itself. Can’t someone trustworthy just point me to the magic cream, please?

Turns out there are, at least in my world, a number of sources I do trust, starting with Lulu of Lulu’s Chinese Health Center in Parksville on Vancouver Island.

The Magic Cream (above), which Rick went to pick up for me, was intended as a break from my regular OTC cortisone for a chronic patch of dermatitis on my leg. After getting squared away on the cream, Lulu made Rick stick out his tongue.

He complied and came away with some intriguing goodies to restore the yin to his yang, but that’s a story for a different day. My point here is that when he told me of her somewhat startling request, I was aware that my confidence in the leg cream immediately went way up. Apparently, for my money, if you’re in the business of recommending curatives for one of the biggest organs of the body—a person’s skin—it’s a huge credibility builder if you also know a thing or two about reading tongues.

This isn’t as silly as it sounds.

The FDA regards face goop as a “cosmetic,” and as such, devoid of medicinal value or worthy of the more rigorous testing applied to drugs. Any statement they make approving a cream is focused exclusively on safety, not effectiveness. Cosmetic companies, however, are experienced and crafty in the art of blurring the perception lines between “medically proven to FDA drug-level standards” and “tested in a lab with a dermatologist somewhere in the building.”

So when someone—anyone, apparently—with a whiff of actual healing insight comments on a face cream, I pay attention.

Thus, the other actual person that I trust to recommend the best anti-wrinkle cream for me is my dermatologist, a woman of respectable age with skin that glows with a radiance that starts at least a half an inch below the surface of her face.

Her advice came prefaced by saying the best anti-wrinkle cream is a sunscreen with an SPF factor of at least 30 that I should have been using since birth. Once the wrinkles, blotches and spots actually arrive, the best you can hope for with potions and lotions is to prevent further damage and maybe to modestly plump up the saggy bits with a nicely scented unguent that makes your skin feel good.

CeraVe Moisturizing Facial Lotion SPF 30

“Best face cream? CeraVe. Use the one with sunscreen on your face, neck and back of your hands. For the rest of you that you can reach, slather on either the lotion if it’s hot and humid, or the creme if it’s winter and dry. It absorbs well, and smells good.”

Apparently there are a lot of dermatologists (or best friends) giving the same advice: the modestly priced 12-oz. CeraVe lotion ranks on Amazon as the #1 Best Seller in Facial Moisturizing Lotions with a 4.7 star rating by over 1200 reviewers.

CeraVe Eye Repair Cream

The CeraVe eye wrinkle cream was my idea.

While my busy dermatologist didn’t have time to unpack the rationale for her medically-informed opinion on CeraVe, the Mayo Clinic weighs in on the topic by suggesting that while there is no known “face lift in a bottle” available for the weary and wrinkled consumers, products containing retinol (vitamin A), vitamin C, hydroxy acid, coenzyme Q10, tea extracts, grape seed extracts and niacinimide “may” result in “slight to modest improvement, mostly due to their ability to exfoliate, prevent water loss, or counteract inflammation.

“May.”

Image source: http://pre05.deviantart.net/b6ad/th/pre/i/2014/074/4/e/galadriel_by_lotsoflowe-d7ac7tu.png

They go on to say that when sifting through the merits of, say, 120,000 or so available options on Amazon, you should consider the following variables:

Cost: there’s no discernible correlation between more money and fewer wrinkles
Concentration of effective ingredients: all non-prescription options contain lower doses than their prescribed counterparts, resulting in more limited and short-lived miracles
Individual differences: Everyone’s skin is different. Just because wearing a 1/2- inch thick coat of mayonnaise to bed every night works for Cate Blanchett doesn’t mean it will work for you. (I just made up this example, but mayonnaise and olive oil do feature highly in the list of homemade wrinkle cream ingredients.)
Layering on of ingredients: there’s no proof that using two or more of the above use ingredients works any better than one by itself.
Frequency of use: there’s no overnight drama in the face cream world, unless you count a nasty reaction that leaves your face bright red and flaky. You need to use products for many weeks before even the “modest” effects kick in, and they’ll disappear if/when you quit
Side effects: see “nasty” above

So what DO they recommend to retain whatever youthful dewy glow remains?

Quit smoking: It wrecks your facial collagen and elastin, causing skin to sag and wrinkle prematurely. The up side of this is if you’re 45 but your face and neck look 75, people might conclude you have great legs for your age!
Use moisturizers, and choose one with a built-in sunscreen of at least 15. Though moisturizers can’t prevent wrinkles, they can plump up dry skin and temporarily mask tiny lines and creases. The best wrinkle cream yet may be a wide-brimmed hat and limited sun exposure.
Consult a dermatologist if you’re interested in a personalized skin care assessment and recommendation for what OTC products might work best for you, and when to call in the big guns of prescription creams, Botox, or sand-blasting.

One final go-to source that we often find helps cut through the mental fogging of choice-overload is Consumer Reports. In this 2011 wrinkle cream review, (latest review available), they report having rigorously tested a swath of anti-aging face creams across 69 women and 12 men for a period of 12 weeks.

They report that while the Garnier Ultra Lift Anti-Wrinkle Firming Moisturizer, L’Oréal Paris Revitalift Face and Neck Day Cream, and Lancôme Paris Renergie Double Performance Treatment Anti-Wrinkle Firming Cream each produced a very modest improvement after an hour, after six weeks all the products tested had smoothed fine lines a teensy bit, and on only a third or fewer of the people who used them. This result included the control cream they used which had no anti-wrinkle magic ingredients at all.

And while I’m tempted to hoot that you can’t make up product names like the Lancome winner above, apparently, you can.

Twelve weeks in, the sensory panelists judged that in a field of burst bubbles, the Garnier product came out slightly ahead of the contenders, judging by blind-controlled photos that it reduced wrinkles “somewhat” on a little more than half of the test subjects who had tried the product. And even at that, fewer than half said they’d buy it, citing an aroma containing a hint of floral and “sweet plastic,” the need for some serious elbow grease to rub it in, and a slight residue. The rest of the products barely moved the needle at all on fewer than 20% of the testers who used them.

Ironically, without even knowing the brand or specific product, the highest number of votes by test subjects said they’d buy the control product with NO anti-wrinkle ingredients, the Neutrogena moisturizer. (Note: the report didn’t specify which exact Neutrogena moisturizer was used. I just picked one with an SPF rating of 30. This one also has an SPF rating of 30 and a slightly higher reviewer rating, but I put it in second place for using a word I don’t understand–“Helioplex”–in the product name.)

Bottom Line

In the search for the best face cream for you, pick one that’s easy on your wallet, has a decent sunscreen, and smells and feels nice.

For now, I’m trying a little dab of the Magic Cream on my face with my CeraVe (I can’t help myself), but just in the morning. While it feels great, it smells vaguely like Pad Thai with sesame oil. And even though Rick tells me frequently I’m quite a dish, I don’t want to go to bed smelling like one.

Easy Basil Pesto Recipe

Hi. My name is Kathy, and I’m a pesto-holic.

Remember all that incredible fresh basil we celebrated as a reason why God invented homemade pasta? Turns out we just couldn’t eat that much pasta or pizza before the basil began whispering, “Winter is coming. Pesto me, baby… pesto me.”

Pesto is the magical synthesis of the Flavor of Green, the Curative Clean of Garlic, the Warmth of Nut, the Peace of Parmesan, and the Umami of Olive Oil.

Heaven.

A classic basil pesto recipe (per Cook’s Illustrated) involves pulsing until smooth the following ingredients in a food processor, and then stirring in 1/4 cup parmesan cheese:

1/4 cup pine nuts, walnuts, or almonds, previously toasted in a heavy skillet until golden and fragrant, 4-5 min
3 blanched medium garlic cloves (45 seconds in boiling water, rinse in cold, peel and mince)
2 cups packed fresh basil leaves (“bruised” before use by pounding in a sealable plastic bag with a rolling pin)
2 tablespoons packed flat-leaf parsley leaves (optional for color)
7 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp. salt

According to Cook’s Illustrated, blanching “tamed” the garlic while bludgeoning the basil boosted its herbaliciousness. Our version is way less precious, easier, and absolutely delicious, but then again, we like our garlic on the feisty side.
Rick and Kathy’s Easy Basil Pesto Recipe

Fill almost to the top of the handle of your Cuisinart food processor (here’s why Cook’s Illustrated chose it and so did we) with fresh washed and dried basil, or use half basil and half baby spinach. We’ve tried both, and they are equally fabulous.
Add 1/2 c. high quality olive oil and 1/3 c. raw walnuts, 1/2 tsp. salt and fresh ground pepper. Pulse until mostly smooth.
Add 1/2 c. parmesan cheese and pulse until blended. Adjust salt if necessary.

Oh, my.

Store in the fridge (up to 5 days, but it won’t last that long) with some plastic wrap pressed down so it makes contact with the surface to prevent excessive darkening.

As my basil was waning, I harvested it all this week and made several batches.

I took what I wanted to freeze and divided it into ice cube trays and covered tightly with plastic wrap before freezing for a couple of hours. I then took the frozen pesto cubes and used a vacuum sealer (our review here) to preserve as much color and flavor as possible, and popped them back into the freezer.

Vacuum-sealed fresh basil in February, baby. Oh yeah.

Try it in its classic incarnation as a pasta sauce, adding 1/4 c. of reserved hot pasta water to the pesto to loosen it up a bit and soften and blend the flavors before coating the drained pasta.

But it’s safe get out on the ledge a bit here, too.

Try it on everything from crackers to omelets—sublime when tucked in with spinach, parm cheese, and avocado—to salmon as a delicious crusty coating, layered on like icing before baking/broiling.

Apparently, it also goes well with fingers.