CORONA DEL MAR TODAY

Last week, I wrote about teachers wearing blue, passing out flyers and protesting because the state budget crisis has resulted in dozens of teachers in Newport Mesa losing their jobs.
I sent this message (via Facebook) to Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine, who represents Corona del Mar:
“Chuck,
Newport Mesa teachers are passing out flyers today to protest [...]

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I was looking through a Williams Sonoma catalog this weekend, in the back section where they have thousand-dollar ironing boards and steamers and step ladders and vacuums. The women look so efficient in the photographs, sitting ramrod straight as the run their cotton tablecloths through a mangle. What a joke I must be, running to [...]

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I’m not even a bicyclist. But I have a dream that I think would make cyclists and motorists happy — and change Corona del Mar forever.
Are you ready? It’s kind of crazy.
No parking on East Coast Highway.
That’s right — between MacArthur and Poppy, just no street parking. The parking lanes could become nice bike lanes [...]

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Waiting for a mammogram is not fun. Even if you are sure you are fine, you are surrounded by women getting tested after their own cancer battles, and women returning because the last test showed something funny. It’s stressful.
So I try to give the benefit of the doubt to other women who maybe act a [...]

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It’s mid-week, early March — so I know it’s not the tourists honking at me.
It’s regular Corona del Mar folks who don’t understand that a stop sign waits on a yield sign, and that no matter what, I will not pull my little Hybrid Honda out in front of a bus.
Honk away, but I still [...]

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Today at a local upscale grocery, the checkout clerk and bag boy were so involved in their personal conversation that they didn’t take the time to say “Hello” to me or my husband, or to the woman in front of us.
They were deeply involved in a slangy back-and-forth that was very inside-jokey. Foshizzle type jokey.
The [...]

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Sometimes our collective fascination with the English accent is just ridiculous.
When I call for a hair appointment, a recorded message features an English woman telling me that my salon is located in “the beautiful Newport Beach.”
Today, when parking at a doctor’s office lot, the recorded message was an English woman telling me to go straight [...]

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The streets in Corona del Mar are too narrow. And I don’t really get this, because it seems to me that modern cars are generally no bigger than the boats that people used to drive back in the day.
As a result, some people take the tactic of driving down the middle of the streets, [...]

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It’s not quite yet Valentine’s Day, but in Corona del Mar, we’re just skipping over it, I suppose.
Why else would Albertsons have the displays with Easter grass, eggs and pastel-colored wind-up toys?
It’s not even as if Easter is especially early this year. (It’s April 4.) No, we’re just jumping from one candy-selling excuse of [...]

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A new shopping area in Costa Mesa that will be like the San Francisco Ferry Building? That’s what the local media are saying.
Here’s an article about it in OC Weekly, and here’s where I read it first, in GreersOC.
Now excuse me while I roll my eyes.
My family and I moved to Corona del Mar ten [...]

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