Bruce Li (aka Yuan Li) visits AWeber.com - We visit A-Z Thrift Shop in Hatboro, PA

What a perfect opportunity for my Chinese foreign exchange student - Bruce, 17 - to see an IT company firsthand.

My son Dan works at AWeber.com.

 We checked in at the Reception Area where Heather had us each sign in on the IPod, which took photos of us - we were too comely to resist - and we pressed a button, which Bruce found in a flash - he's very tech-savvy - and it printed out our nametages.

This IT company makes the most of technology.

Dan, our tour guide, introduced us to Tom Kulzer, the owner and founder. It was 'wear-your-PJs-day.'

These IT companies - IT stands for information technology - often have a very relaxed, playful attitude toward work.

Look, I work from home. Here I am sitting in my PJs, listening to WXPN radio, noshing on peanuts, entertaining company, knowing I'll get all my work done today.

Same is true at AWeber. They have work spaces - no private offices - which make it quite democratic. Conference rooms, large and small, are everywhere.

Dan stands by a desk whose height can be raised or lowered by a lever. We know sitting for hours on end is terrible for your back and legs and blood flow.

Dan said he often works standing up.

Everyone has Apple computers with huge monitors.

Informative TVs post up-to-the-minute information.

"Light rain" read one of the monitors. The rain was quite heavy as we drove down County Line Road. Bruce asked me what we call this type of rain. "Heavy rain," I said.

Bruce was particularly interested in tornados. I told him we had one a couple of years ago and that I blogged about it.

Bruce requested I take his pic in the cafeteria to send to his friends in China.

He has never seen anything like this place! Few people have.

Rec areas include all sorts of video games, which Dan and Bruce love, a billiard table, and

Bruce puts a spin on his gnip-gnop serve. He won two trophies in China.

One of Dan's colleagues is married to a Chinese woman who comes from the very same province as Bruce.

Bruce ordered his fave food - a bacon cheeseburger.

"It's GOOD!" he said.

It's always nice being with Dan. His magnetized nametag gains him entry to various locked doors. It senses the magnet and the door unlocks just as he arrives.

I had seconds of everything: New England clam chowder and salad.

While some of the 120 employees eat - everyone eats in shift - the TV played a recent interview of AWeber talking about their unusual working conditions on an ABC morning show.

Restrooms at AWeber.com are like that of a four-star hotel.

When I chatted with Tom, the owner, for a second, I told him how beautiful the entire place was - a mural of painted Lego people greets us as we ascend the staircase to the second floor and splashes of color on walls throughout the building.

The English phone booths are in the Marketing Dept.

 This erasor board has been painted a special white that allows writing and drawings to be erased. Bruce wrote something on the left that says "I love being here at AWeber" - Bruce Li

Hmmm, maybe I should give him my I LOVE AWEBER T-SHIRT.

On the way home, I stopped at the Hatboro PO.

As we walked toward the PO, Elena - above - saw me through the window of her thrift shop and ran after me.

I did some Xmas shopping there yesterday and she accidentally overcharged me. She was having trouble with her credit card machine when I was there, so that's why it happened.

I bought a crock pot there, the only woman in the country who has never had a crock pot. 

Elena and her husband Dmitri, a Greek name, he told me, own the shop. They're from Ukraine, as is their son Alex

Chatchkes for the ages.

In China, said Bruce, they have thrift shops but people prefer buying new things.

Board Meeting of New Directions - Coffeeshop Writers' Group - Poem: How Did I Get Here?

I am so fortunate. I can command myself to get a lot done in a short time. I was up in the middle of the nite getting Sarah's old bedroom ready for the foreign exchange student who will arrive at noon tomro.

The couch turns into a bed. When I have the leisure to read during the daytime, which, like a rare comet, occurs every one thousand years, I read in this wonderful room with its soothing white carpet and white walls. I call this The Quiet Room.

Louis Auchincloss, lawyer, historian, and author died in 2010 at the age of 92. I'm reading a collection of his short stories, which are always about the wealthy. Maybe I'll get some tips. I would love to be wealthy and have my name, like Rosalind P Walter, as a donor to worthwhile causes.

Was at Dan's today and enjoyed seeing



and his sister Grace. What a thrill when she calls me "Bubby."

Sharon Katz, owner of Collaborative Care in Abington, a superb holistic MH facility, and Ron Abrams, a personal injury attorney, attended the board meeting.

I prepared a veritable feast!

with Monterrey Jack cheese by Cabot. When you leave the cheese on the cracker, the cracker loses its crunch.

Never knew dat, did you?

Unsalted, of course!

The incomparable!

AND....

8 cups of decaf coffee. While I was traipsing thru the Internet finding this lovely pic for you, my three beloved readers, I came across the Q: Why is the color orange associated with decaf coffee, you know, on the restaurant coffee pots.

Ah, the world makes sense now.  Astrophysicists you can erase your blackboards and go home to your wives and children. Work on the God question. Ask Rosalind P Walter for funding.

I had about 5 cups of Decaf, hot and steaming and absolutely delicious.

After the bored meeting, I zoomed over to our Coffeeshop meeting. The snow was melting and the day was balmy and made you feel happy.

Thanks for the bookmark, Marf. And also for the delicious soup, a b'day present for moi, 68 on Xmas day.

Wow, this was scrumptious and I've got loads left. She also gave me a second jug of soup.

Marf got the recipe from an old lady about 25 yrs ago. Sauerkraut gives the soup a special ZING.

Marf read a wonderful poem about a relative-by-marriage who took his own life. As did the 32-yo writer Ned Vizzini (thanks to Saul for the heads-up). Jumped to his death from the roof.

Speaking of dying, our Allan Heller regularly reads the blog of his friend Ed Galing, the Poet Laureate of Hatboro. He was shocked to learn the 96-yo poet died this morning.

Allan spoke to him last nite. He frequently called Ed to cheer him up from his many ailments that keep him in the doldrums.


Ed was a very generous man, said Allan, who helped Allan get his poems published.

Allan read three wonderful poems!

Balls - Year's End - and Pearls Before Swine, a biblical phrase - all came in a stream. Balls was quite funny. Hey, I want that for the Compass, which we're working on right now.

Linda, with her poinsettia earrings, wrote Tower of Strength for her brother Richard's b'day.

Does he appreciate your poetry? I asked her.

No, she said.

This woman can toss off a great poem as easily as the clouds roll across the sky.

Donna is quite the chic dresser. Really beautiful sexy lacy top. Can't really make out her nails, which are always beautiful.

Her offering - A Fine Christmas Day - contained the fine first lines:

Bells are ringing
This fine Christmas day



Beatrice! pronounced bee-a- treechie!

Where art thou?

She left early, leaving us The Web of Life, starring these two lines:

Every living thing is connected to others in multiple ways. If you start observing one, you soon begin to see the intertwining, You could pull an invisible string and it will drag numerous others, which in turn would be tangled with many more.

The above photo is from last week's meeting. I was wearing my good clothes from our Board meeting. I was trying to impress a psychiatrist who never showed up b/c he thought the meeting was tomro.

Wore the shirt I bought in Paris with the Father-Knows-Best elbow patches.

Made a start on a short story. The idea came to me last nite. It's about a shopkeeper in New Hope, where my dad owned a head shop. The woman who owns the shop is an Orthodox Jew named Mira. I once knew an Orthodox Jew by that name. She was a beauty!

Why not have her own a carpet shop in New Hope?

Mira sold this very same carpet at her New Hope shop.

This, of course, is the one I bought in Paris.

Here's Brianna, Martha's granddaughter, a truly beautiful 14-yo, who, like most teenage girls, doesn't think she's pretty at all.

Now, a word about my below poem. As I wrote the words about finding a young lover on Match.com, I thought, Ruth, you're 68 years old and always thinking about sex.

Keep it out of your poem.

Then I thought, Well, this is me! Gotta be honest.

Look, the male artists are always thinking about women.

Here's a painting by Balthus. My cousin Mark, an artist, named his dog Balthus.



HOW DID I GET HERE

Well before dawn I awake
and check my clock
the ritual begins
hold up my hands
the hands that have been with me
nearly sixty-eight years
nail polish chipping
no liver spots
I could post my hands on
match dot com
and see if I can find a
young lover

The unwashed burgundy
drapes that mother made
when I moved in
are never opened
if so
they would see me
looking around the room
the painted swirls
on my bedroom doors
still mourning the Little Golden Book
Life on the Farm
I left back at the apartments
on the high closet shelf
tossed, I’m sure, in the trash
by the new renters

I pick up a book
lying in the husband’s space
aiming to read it
I lay it back down
contemplation again
at how good it feels
lying in my own bed
well past midnight
content as a passing cloud.
Always thinking,
as I did as a kid in the pink bathroom,
How did I get here?

Shelly Quigley stars at our New Directions meeting - Foreign exhange student - My story is accepted

Wielding a mean guitar and helped by her husband Bill Quigley, a psych nurse at Brooke Glen, Shelly led us in Christmas carols and a few Chanukah songs.

What a great way to start our meeting. We barely had any people but we talked until 9:45 and then walked out into the moon-filled night.

I'm going to host a 17-yo young man from China in my home for 9 days. The stork is delivering him this Sunday at noon.

I answered an ad in Patch.com, which is going out of business. 

Green Planet Homestay sponsors these home visits, not to be confused, we hope, with home invasions. 

This morning I heard from an excellent online lit journal, whose name I can't remember, and was positive they rejected my story THE PSYCHIC, loosely based, very loosely, on a former BF. Altho the BF has been dead a long time - he dumped me about five yrs before he died - his website is still up.

I printed out a copy of one of his creations .... the below is NOT one of his sculptures

and used it to motivate me and to describe the details of his artistry. I had to make up quotes from the cover story the NY Times did about him. 

Worked really hard on the story - took about four days - and then, heart in hand, mailed it in.

Thank you, Buddha, for my success.

Today I was gonna go off FB. Reason was cuz no one read my latest Intelligencer article. 

Then I got cold feet and told my son Dan not to close the account.

"I wasn't going to, Mom," he said. He knows his muddah.

And, now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going straight to

Ellen Rosenberg and I drive to the Michener to see Grace Kelly

Easton Road, Easton Road, I said to myself as we drove to the James Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA.

I became a member the last time I was there - $30 - and was determined to visit it again. Plus they gave me a free ticket for a friend.

I was so happy Ellen wanted to go with me!

As we approached the museum, I felt a wave of exhilaration. It surprised me.

The Grace Kelly exhibit was wonderful with all her gowns. Edith Head was the costume designer at Paramount.


The woman is a real beauty, orig. from the wealthy Philadelphia family of Jack Kelly.

Her wedding gown, above, is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.


One of my fave parts were the Home Movies that the Kelly Family took. Grace was the daughter of the wealthy Jack Kelly, whose family hailed from Ireland. He was an internationally famous athlete who became wealthy with his bricklaying firm. Read about how he was snubbed in the Olympics b/c he worked with his hands.

Grace would continue the tradition of taking home movies when she was aboard Prince Rainier's boat.

She and Rainier had three kids.

Rainier died at age 81 in 2005. He was from the famous Grimaldi family.

Son Albert, below, has three illegitimate children, which, apparently is nothing new for the Grimaldis. 

Would you sleep with this man?

Albert II
Albert II at the World Economic Forum in 2013.
Their son Albert is now the monarch.

He wanted to marry the woman below, but she refused to convert to Catholicism.

Albert II[1][2] (Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi; born 14 March 1958) is the reigning monarch of the Principality of Monaco, and head of the Princely House of Grimaldi. He is the son of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, and the American actress Grace Kelly. His sisters are Caroline, Princess of Hanover – his heiress presumptive, and Princess Stéphanie. In July 2011, Prince Albert married Charlene Wittstock.[3]
The gowns on display were from her movies plus her personal collection.  Here's Ellen using my 10-percent discount to buy a scarf, which snaps on.  She bought me a cup of decaf. She didn't like her coffee so she traded it in for tea. The red-headed terror. When we got home I checked my blood sugar. It was great.... 87. 80 to 120 is normal. Ellen asked me to check hers. Remember when we played nurse as kids? At last, 62 years later, I did it. Changing the needle on my lancet, I held out her third finger - the plumpest to prick - she didn't even flinch and her sugar was a perfect - 111. Look, we've all got a few crosses to bear. However, I just read in the Times that for folks older than 60 our blood pressure can be a little higher than orig'ly thought. From the Times: But the guidelines committee, which spent five years reviewing evidence, concluded that the goal for people over 60 should be a systolic pressure of less than 150. And the diastolic goal should remain less than 90.  That's good b/c this morning I accidentally took a mag ox instead of my blood pressure med. See ya later! If I'm still alive, that is.