Melanie's Blog

Community
Thu, June 16, 2011

Webster’s Dictionary (online version) variously defines the word community as:

- a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons

- a body of persons or nations having a common...

view
 

True Grit
Wed, May 4, 2011

The spring edition of our electronic newsletter, “Brava,” was emailed earlier this week.  If you haven’t yet read it, it provides an update on some noteworthy events taking place at SFGC this spring and summer, including our annual fundraising gala, the Chorus America...

view
 

The Home Stretch
Fri, April 15, 2011

Spring break is over at SFGC, and the girls returned to Chorus last week. Having completed our annual gala at the end of March, the administrative staff is now in the home stretch of the season, working away at projects and programs coming up in the next 3 months, before the end of this...

view
 

Bramasole*
Wed, March 23, 2011

What a teaser this so-called spring weather has been! What with Saturday night’s gale force winds, (which took some sheets of tin off our barn roof) and the return of the rain on Tuesday, March seems to be roaring out like a mad, wet lion.

view
 

The Red Balloon
Thu, March 10, 2011

I found a red balloon nestled in the sage bush in my front yard last week. It definitely seemed like some kind of omen, since the 1956 French film about a boy and his balloon companion have been an important icon for most of my life. (And then I read in SF Gate the next day that 10,000 red...

view
 

Forever February
Fri, February 25, 2011

It’s the shortest month of the year, but somehow it feels like the longest.  This seems to be a widely shared feeling, and maybe it’s not just about the weather, which, until the forecast for SNOW(?!) this week, has been rather mild.  The jazz violinist Regina Carter wrote...

view
 

Time in a Bottle
Wed, February 2, 2011

Last week I read about a time capsule from 1910, opened by the Cleveland Elementary School in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco.  It was an interesting glimpse of life in post-earthquake San Francisco, as the geographic boundaries and the population of the city were rapidly...

view
 

Burns Night
Tue, January 25, 2011

Today is the poet Robert Burns’s birthday, also known as the holiday Burns Night in Scotland. I’m not especially attuned to Scottish holidays, but it showed up on my European calendar this morning, and then there was a tiny paragraph about it in the New York Times...

view
 

Frauen liebe und leben
Fri, January 14, 2011

I just read former NY Times food critic and Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl’s memoir about her mother, For You Mom, Finally. In Reichl’s previous books, her mother stands out as one memorable lady, but perhaps for the wrong reason. While the...

view
 

A Quiet Christmas
Fri, December 17, 2010

I’m not trimming a tree this Christmas. It seems shocking even to put that in writing. We’ll be visiting my parents in Oregon for Christmas, and then pruning vines and planting trees in Lake County over the New Year’s weekend. Since we aren’t going to try...

view
 

News