AWOL - TheBrains, Transactional Analysis and Germs

Oh la! November 30th and not a single peep out of me. And not in the mood to be either witty or sharp or even interesting. Yikes! What's happened? Where is the familiar loquacity, the need to blab, the desire to display my Virgo skill with language? Where is the ego that is sure everyone wants to know ... or at least have a record of ... what is going on at TheCastle? Is this just a temporary hiatus? A reaction to a sinus infection that laid me low for weeks? A calm before the storm? A dark hour just before the dawn?  Or has TheQueen sort of had her day? Is it time she retires into semi-seclusion and lets a new regime take over?  Am I ready to let TheQueen and her Blog just fade away into nothingness?

I don't know. What I do know is that the thought of a post-less month in the sidebar feels very much like  Rat Prison so here is a post to fill that up. If my LeftBrain wants to keep a perfect, if gratuitous score, that's okay by me.  And it's not as if I have done "Nussing, nussing" since I last posted.  There was werk - which had it's own set of demands, including fun ones. And two visits from the kids, counting this past Thanksgiving weeken: A thanksgiving weekend that included Cousins! And a thoroughly delightful weekend visit with adorable Other cousins - and even knitting! I taught said adorable cousin how to knit baby booties. I mean - how cool is that?

That weekend was super fun - but as I recall, I was sick as a dog then too. Or maybe just sick as a puppy - but ugh. sick.

And also there is grief. Global grief about the massacre in Paris. And personal grief about the holidays coming up and, hey, no Mama. And grief that resulted from a clash with ThePrince. (Can you imagine? Insurrection in the ThePalace? I mean, who would ever quarrel with that paragon of peaceful cooperation, me?) And grief coupled with fear because sister had to have open heart surgery and, hello - scary. Not really up to losing More Precious Family. And a fundamental grief too about the loss of Things As They Once Were.

And no I'm not stupid enough to cling to an ignorant belief that Things Were Better In the Good Old Days. I mean - we could be having an epidemic of typhoid or Tamerlane could be galloping across the landscape making mountains of skulls (though maybe his spirit is in Paris). Which is just to say that, yeah, I know. Times are always bad and always good and it's really up to us to pluck the good out of the gross. Which I can usually do. Just struggling a bit here, now.

No. I am blaming all of this on germs. I am sure they are still coursing through my blood veins. Maybe just the sloughs of them - not the live active ones - but there has to be some sort of Other Reason for this tough time besides a selfish indulgence in melancholy.
Yeah - right. blame it on germs - so you don't have to listen to me and figure out what we need to make me feel better.

Ooops. RightBrain is right about that. She is hurting and something needs to be done. Well, my beloved NaturalChild, we'll take this week to figure out what you need and then find some way to give it to you. I promise.



But what about that MediGap thing we have to do? And the 5-Year Plan work? And don't forget we need to go to the gym. And I thought we were going to start strength training again. There are ThingsToDo!

Yes, my dear LeftBrain Parent - we'll get to it all. You'll see. It'll even be fun. After we go have a good cry - you'll see. It'll all be fun.

And TheQueen will be back, too - and it'll be fun. I promise. It'll all be fun.

An Anniversary I Never Forget

  is the sum of   +      Yes my friends - it is that time again. The anniversary of the day, the very moment, when TheQueen knew her future and it was good. I missed posting this last year and it was a different sort of celebration anyway. This year I'm more on top of my game. This year so many new happinesses have piled on top of each other I am sure Mama must be up there in heaven, picking the best stuff off the shelve and showering it down on top of me. Thank you, Mama. I feel your presence all the time.  So - for the 43rd time I'm gong to remember that special day by posting the story of how TheQueen found ThePrince: 

Long long ago there was a cheeky teenager, just past her 19th birthday, who was studying music at

big city university. One Friday, as she walked into the orchestra room, the flute player spun around in his chair, looked straight at her and asked her if she wanted to drive to North Carolina with him the next day.

“Sure” she said, desperate for anything to do on the weekend, when most of her friends split for home, leaving her to rattle all alone in a monolithical cement dormitory. Besides, he was one of the really good looking guys she and Robyn had decided were “cute enough to take us out”. And he had such a voice - deep sonorous basso profundo with the most delicious country southern drawl - not hick, in fact, very cultured, but oh so Southern. And startlingly blue eyes. Blue like autumn skies. And he was big - not fat or anything - just big with a big aura, a big presence. Nothing hesitant or shy or self-effacing. This was a man, not a boy, and he was inviting her to spend all day with him.

“Right.” he said. "Meet me at my house tomorrow at 10 a.m." and he gave directions to a row house in the Fan district, a few blocks from school.

Poor thing. Little did he know that he’d just arranged a date with his exact opposite in the GreatClockUniverse. She was no ditherer. No lingerer. No procrastinating late comer. She was an EarlyBird - always 15 minutes before hand, sometimes more. For this important assignation she was a full 30 minutes early, knocking on the dark and silent door of his first floor apartment.

“Stood up!” she thought. “Impossible” Nobody stood up this girl, no siree. And she stomped the four blocks back to school, snatched her fiddle out of her locker, slammed the practice room door shut and began to saw away, muttering imprecations, curses, indignant affronted descriptions of what is expected in this world, and other dark and damning words. But ...

She was also innately fair and as she scraped away at Kreutzer, she had to admit that the man had said come at 10. Perhaps he was out filling up the gas tank. Or perhaps he was renting a trailer. After all, the purpose of the trip was to retrieve his piano, waiting for him in his old place in Chapel Hill, NC. And so, at 10 o’clock for sure, she rounded the corner of Lombardy and Floyd and there he was, waving an arm, smiling happily and calling out “Hey Baby!”

She crossed the street and he invited her into his apartment. He offered her a beer, and though she hated the stuff - still does, in fact - she was also aware of what is cool and for a still-teenage girl at college, drinking beer at 10 a.m. was truly cool, so she said yes. He was back in a flash with a mason jar full of the most delicate, most mellow drink she’d ever tasted. His own home brew. There were gallons of it in his little bachelor kitchen. Now, be it gallons or pints, this stuff was potent and it was only moments before she was definitely in the mood to be entertained. And entertained she was, with music, books, ideas, and talk talk talk, tumbling out of this delightful man with his shelves full of books, boxes full of sheet music, head full of poetry in three different languages and kitchen full of nectar. Best of all, he was happy. Neither cynical, sarcastic nor jealous of another’s musical ability or progress, he was ready to share, to learn, to listen and to admire. In the highly competitive world of performing arts, here was someone with a blend of such innocence and courage there was nothing to do but laugh with pure pleasure and maybe fall in love a bit.

After a while the two of them tooled off in search of a U-haul place. Across the Lee Bridge at an Esso Station on Cowardan Ave., where Caravatti’s Junk Yard used to be, he stopped and went in to arrange a rental. Minutes passed and when he returned he stood right in front of the car and grinned at her through the windshield; one of those beaming, sunshiny “Ain’t this Grand?” grins. And as she stared up at him, suddenly he turned into an old man, still standing there, still grinning. She blinked; gawped; stared again. She looked down at her own hands and they had turned into an old lady's hands, the skin papery and spotted with large brown freckles, sunk down between the tendons. They were her grandmother’s hands. And she thought “My god. I’m going to be riding around in a car with this man when I’m an old lady.”

For some reason he had decided to rent the trailer in NC. Probably the Richmond outfit didn’t have what he was looking for. They motored on down I95, past the tobacco plant and warehouse district of south Richmond, past Petersburg, through Emporia. They talked the whole time, chattering, discovering, opening, sharing. At one point he said “well, there’s a lot you don’t know about me” and she thought “oh boy, there’s a lot you don’t know either”. And at that, there were some surprising points of contact. He had graduated from the same high school her dad had gone to. She had played a concert in Chapel Hill that he had gone to hear. He had taken lessons in Winston Salem while she had been a student at the School of the Arts. At Herndon, NC they stopped for lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken place. She had never been to one. In fact, fast food then consisted almost entirely of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, milkshakes and fries. Fried chicken was a real treat and, of course, to a 19-year old, it didn’t foretell the diet doom it was to present later on.

The October skies had been gray all day but they grew heavier and more threatening as evening approached. Rain began to fall. At a Carolina gas station he picked up a small box trailer and two ice cream sandwiches. “How did you know ice cream is my all time favorite treat?” she cried and to his question of “Then don’t I deserve a reward” she answered with a resounding kiss. Of course, this was in the days when, first off, girls worried about being thought forward or even worse; fast! It was also at a time when she was very wary of anything that would cause boys to sidle away from a touchy feely woman. Of course, this was no boy. 28, he’d told her. But when it’s the right guy, with the right gift, only a kiss will do.

It was harder to be chatty on the long dark wet drive home. Especially when the passenger was one of those Superior Morning Persons. For an SMP, darkness means it’s time to close one’s eyes. She still didn’t realize she was dealing with one of those Stubborn Night Owls. SNO’s think SMP’s are silly, especially the types who creep out of cozy warm beds before the sun is actually above the roof tops of the houses across the street. All those delightful discoveries were waiting up ahead for them. On that day, in the hypnotic glare of headlights on raindrops, she grew pretty drowsy. “I like to drive. Go to sleep” he told her and eventually she did.

It was too late to get back into the dorm when they reached Richmond. She’d known it would be and had signed out for the weekend. He gallantly put her up for the night. She was there the next day when other friends came around to help shove the piano down the narrow hallway and into the apartment. It was well into the afternoon before she made her way back to her place, to pace the dormitory halls till her girlfriend should show up and she could tell her the exciting news about the upcoming nuptials.

There have been many more rambles, in half a dozen different cars, since that October 16, thirty nine forty two forty four years ago. In 1991 the two of them took the trip to North Carolina all over again, even to starting at 1617 Floyd and to looking for some sort of U-haul place on the south side. They found the KFC in Herndon had moved a block but it was still serving up the original 11 herbs and spices recipe. They'll probably go off on a ramble today, the two of them, getting older, but not yet quite as old as the geezers in her vision.

But that is the story of my anniversary. We also celebrate a lovely wedding anniversary in April. It’s important, but not more important than October 16, when my favorite cute couple started out on life’s journey. Sometimes it’s hard to believe I even had a life before that day, although I can tell stories from that Mesozoic Era. It’s as if 10/16 were my real birthday; the day I began living my grown up life. BD, who had a head start on me, says he feels the same way.

There are a lot of stories in my bag of tales, but this one is my favorite.

Ooops. Time Got Away From Me

I didn't mean to stop posting about my trip - and I promise - before the weekend is over You, Yes, You, You Lucky Readers, will get to hear about TheWeddingInRomania! But for today TheQueen is going to talk about HerRoyalSelf.

TheQueen returned from her travels with the dread Vacation Poundage clinging to her regal form and some of the vacation photos are (ahem) Not as Attractive as She Would Have Liked. So she buckled down on her menu planning and joined an exercise challenge from SparkPeople dot com.  Every morning she - er, sorry, I'll get off my throne now - I get an email with New Exercises To Do.  They're fun. They're challenging. They're shaking things up and I am loving it. It is just the mind-stir I needed.

Yesterday's challenge was to snack smartly and get in 30 minutes of cardio. I know that cardio really means get your heart rate up and I am sure I felt it beating now and then as I climbed the hills of Maymont Park yesterday. Was it sustained for 30 minutes? probably not but I got in about 3 hours of walking altogether and that is good enough for me.



I'm not really a bad snacker, most of the time. so long as I can stay away from the Cheetos - and I never went near a Cheetos store. (I don't count the grocery store since I think of it as  a place to get food - not junk. Junk comes from 7-11 or a gas station store). So yesterday was not much of a challenge. It was some challenge since Sister and I were at CanCan, a very tony restaurant that can serve you up some calorie laden goodies .... think lobster mac 'n' cheese. Drool. but they also make such delectable goodies as roasted beet salad with walnuts and water cress. Do you know how rare watercress is in a salad? Lawsie I love that green! succulent. peppery. delicate. yum. On my plate. Lucky me!

It was warm enough for us to eat outside and there was a wonderful blues singer on the sidewalk serenading us at just the right decibel. We caught up on TheWedding and TheTrip and swapped horror stories about pilots going on strike and 1 year old triplets squirming in the seats directly in front of us, screaming for 5 hours.  Then she said "Let's go to Maymont"



As a true Richmond VA girl - I know Maymont. It's a Gilded Age mansion that was given to the city upon the death of its owner, Sally Dooley in 1926. It lies on the rolling bluffs of the river bank just across the river from where I lived as a teen. You could walk there, though we usually drove and I have a lifetime of memories tied up with the place. My sister has even more because they've always operated an animal rescue operation on the premise and my 2 younger sisters volunteered there for years. The house, alas, was never open when I was a girl. It was left to the city. with almost all its gilded and glorious furnishings,  but no money for upkeep. By 1929, gilded money had dried up and the house was closed to outside visitors till after I moved away from Richmond. In the 1970's a non-profit was formed to restore it but I just haven't ever had the opportunity (or taken the opportunity) to go inside.

sister and I rectified that yesterday and boy oh boy - did we have fun. Himself asked me later if the Dooley's had good taste and all I could say was that they had exquisite taste for the taste they had. What an explosion of ornamentation. I loved it  loved looking at it - and was oh so grateful I neither had to live with it or clean it. But boy oh boy - it was like looking at all the glitter and glitz you could dream of in a single building.

So - what a rewarding, happy, joy filled way to spend Day #8 of my 30-day challenge. Still loving it - still feeling the obligation AND desire to watch what I eat - still wanting to reach my October goal.

For day #9 I will go to the gym and do the exercises - which look interesting and fun and yeah, probably hard. But I'll be thinking about day #8 and smiling.

And in my next life I get to sleep in this.

TheQueen in Romania: Day 2 - September 5

Awake at 8 a.m. we dress and have a peek around the hotel area.  Our room is very plain and clean with a window that looks out onto the courtyard. Courtyards are everywhere in this land of tightly packed houses right up next to the street. Peek through any gate and even downtown you are likely to see chickens or flowers, grapes, or automobiles, laundry or cobbles, or trash, of course. Romanians are people just like everyone. But inside most courtyards are gardens. Inside ours is smooth clean parking with a big clothesline strung from the building to the shed along the back. Sometimes there was laundry hanging on it but it was always spare and tidy and just clean clean clean.

LD picked us all up around 10 and took us to have breakfast with his friends M and P Rogers and her parents from Columbia – South America, not South Carolina. They were all touring Europe together and had scheduled things so that they could meet up in Turda for the wedding. M and P both work at the Robinson plant and her parents are retired. She is an engineer and she’s just as cute as can be, with beloved kitties she’s left behind.  Love me an animal lover!

They were staying at the Hotel Dracula ... it’s not really quite called that ... it’s real name is Hunter Prince Castle& Dracula Hotel .  That had been an option for us, too, but it was pricier and honestly, the rooms looked weird in the photos. Not that it was all that expensive, though – $60 for a room and breakfast. The hotel was much prettier than it appeared in photographs, though. The restaurant is open to the outdoors and there are flowers packed in tightly around every inch of bare ground. In the end, though, I really felt at home at Vila Adriano and I don’t think I’d ever have felt at home at the rock hotel. I did enjoy the breakfast there, though. Yum. Salty cheese and bread and little cups of coffee.  I’m sort of a big mug-0-coffee girl but I grew to love these tiny espresso drinks and am seriously considering buying an espresso machine. What I began to miss, though, was fruit. Eventually I learned to buy fruit at markets but those first few days I really yearned for that particular kind of sweet.

LD was our only tour guide today because P and her family were busy with last minute wedding prep.  I had asked the night before if I could help in any way but she said no no – go be a tourist.  In the end, I wish I had helped, but then again – everything about that ceremony was so perfect I can’t believe I’d have added much.  LD recommended visiting the historical museum first and then the salt mines so the troupe of us started down the narrow streets to the museum – in a fortified palace built sometime in the late medieval or early modern era. 

We were the first museum visitors of the day and we had the most enthusiastic guide, who was thrilled to practice his English and show off his collection. He claimed expertise in the Roman era but he knew about every exhibit.  I was most impressed with the prehistoric pottery but there was an enormous painting of King Zapolia granting religious freedom to 4 of the Christian sects in Transylvania ... notably leaving out the Orthodox religion which, I believe, was the religion of most of the peasants. this event was known as the Edict of Torda – 1568.  

Our guide took us on an extended tour till we realized, suddenly, that if we were going to go to the salt mines we had to leave right away. I skipped the salt mines that day because I wanted time for a bath and to get dressed for the evening’s party at grandmother's house.

 It turned out I had plenty of time to get ready though, because about 2:30 P called and said they were running late. When the guys arrived people wanted to do different things. B was sleepy, BD wanted to walk and I wanted to be out and in the town. So W, J, and I met up with the Rogers for a drink at one of the outdoor cafe’s on the square on Str. Republicii.

We were all a little excited about what might happen - what was coming next - in this adventure into another culture.  what was so interesting and heartwarming was how ready everyone was to be pleased, to have fun, to experience something new.

At 4 we all piled into cars and drove to grandmother's house. It was on a street that served two different groups, since her part of the street was well paved and across an intersection it was all pot holes. I know, because W turned the wrong way at that intersection and we got to see both ends! 

Her house is in the left corner of a long lot. The front door is on the side, a la Charleston houses.  the right side is a small yard with fruit trees planted the whole length.  Behind the house is a cement walk between a pen for her little wire haired dachshund and a fairly large hen house. Behind this was a large garden, full of tomatoes and peppers,  and more orchard – pears and plums and apples were in bloom and later in the evening, when Sister and I wandered back to have a look, she gave us samples of each. This was the first fruit I'd had other than grapes - which are a bit fiddly to eat -  and enormously welcome. The neighbor behind grandmother’s house had a dovecot and his birds swooped in big circles overhead as the evening came on – glittering white with the angle of the setting sun.

But wait! I’m leaving out the party part. Here was a gathering of the two immediate families plus the American guests, including Sister and BiL, who had arrived at the Vila Adriano.  They were both tired from their week of trail riding on horseback in Southern Romania, BiL especially, who told me he should have taken this trip 20 years earlier. Sister was full of stories and I listened some but soon we were swept up in the festivity of this gathering.

Here were, gramdmother, uncles and aunts and cousins. One uncle and aunt would be the bridal couple’s Nas si Nasa, pronounced Nashi Nashi. They are the only other people besides the bridal couple and the priest who will have a role in the wedding ceremonies.  The idea is that an experienced married couple, who are not the parents of either bride or groom, offer to be advisers to the couple. Not being the parent of either, the nas and nasa can give unbiased advice when the new couple have troubles in the future. There was one cute little cousin that I wanted to steal away.  Such sparkling eyes, long and twinkling, shy, but with some of P’s intrepidity.  

Last of all was the wedding coordinator. This is more of a role than the wedding coordinator in American weddings because there are more speeches and customs involved. Although he is a family friend, he also does this professionally. He spoke no more English than I did Romanian so P had to do a lot of  translating. Explanations were frequent but hard to remember. But he was very vivacious, with twinkling eyes that made frequent contact with mine and he had a beautiful voice.

The food was stuffed cabbage roles – perfectly seasoned, deliciously addictive – I ate so many I nearly popped – and cheeses and grapes. There was also M’s fabulous cranberry and tuica brandy in which I indulged – rather a lot.  Oh and yes. sparkling water. And cake! The cake continued from this party on throughout the entire trip. Little rectangles no bigger than my thumb, with 3 layers of sponge cake soaked in flavors, topped with flavored gnash frosting. There was a very light chocolate but my favorite was the lemon. 

As we sat and ate and chatted, P came up and told me she had bad news about the hair appointments. They were scheduled for 6 a.m.! Instead of a big salon with all the girls gathering there was one hairdresser who would be doing all of the women in the wedding and M, Sister and I were to be first. P promised to call us at 5:30 to wake us up. Oh My.

At the end of the party the wedding coordinator led us in a song: Multi Ani ... which means Many Years. It’s sort of the Happy Birthday song, also appropriate  for weddings. The tune and syllables were slow enough that I could sing along and later R came up and told me I was complimented on my excellent singing (by whom?) 

We were all so flushed with happiness and good food and delicious tuica brandy and kindness and excitement and new love that I, at least, was rather floating on clouds as we began to walk back to the hotel. A few blocks from grandmother’s house I was summoned back to help with fiddly wedding tasks, so I drove to the apartment with P. The whole place was fragrant with tuberoses she had bought at the market along with roses, gladiolas and other blossoms with which she planned to make all the bouquets for the whole bridal party. She asked me if I would like to help but I was not confident enough to say yes. Instead I helped cut out place cards for the reception tables – and chatted a little with M, who arrived later. LD was present too but it was pretty obvious that the bride was too tired to delegate tasks and the groom was being quite tenderly, but nerve-wrackingly helpful, so P gently suggested that perhaps it was time I took LD back to the hotel.

We gathered up the bouquets, as LD had an important role to play with them on the morrow, and tuica, cake and glasses for serving at our hotel on the first step of the ceremonies. LD would stay with B at our hotel this night and by 10:30 I was back in my room with BD, who had discovered FavOrit – the Romanian music and dance channel on TV.  It truly became our FavOrit channel throughout the whole trip, with the pretty girls in white embroidered blouses and white skirts with black aprons and the men in their black boots and white costumes. The songs all sounded alike to me but they were always charming.

And so ended Day 2 of our Romanian odyssey.