Live in it then! Five cents, please.

The toaster that gets you dates!

2012-01-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I look at the bloggers who commit to blogging every day for some prescribed period of time and think, "No way."

I know that ordinary little things can lead to interesting and important musings. But take days like today. Bought a toaster. No emotional or philosophical implications. No drama at Costco. No fires or thefts led to replacing the old one. It wore out. That's all.

Nothing to write about. At least, that's what I thought. Then I read the Instruction Manual.

I won't razz the people who need instructions on how to toast. There are too many people who hand over their bank account numbers on email-request, or who eat the silica gel pak in the aspirin bottle. They probably need a course in toasting.

I will quietly acknowledge the genuine need for those instructions, and move on to Item Two in the list of warnings:

The danger of Toasting Alone!

I was unprepared for this restriction on my toasting freedom. Sure, I don't live alone, but what if Larry goes out of town? Or even just up to the Home Deepot? And maybe I want toast, and maybe I don't want to wait till he gets back. Do I await my Attendant, or eat something safer, or heck! just throw caution to the wind and toast with abandon?

It's grossly unfair that there's no notice on the box warning you that this toaster cannot be used by single persons. They get your money, you go home and unpack it and not only are your hopes of making a crunchy, buttery piece of toast dashed, but your mental competence has been insulted, AND the toaster is pouring salt into the wound of your unattached status.

But then it hit me. They've done you a favor! Finding a new and amusing pick-up line is never easy but this toaster gives you one for free.

You spot an attractive prospect. You sidle up to the bar and do all the "Hi, what government program would you cut?" or whatever they're icebreaking with now. Then, with shy charm, you say: "Look, I need your help. I'm not allowed to make toast tomorrow morning unless I have...you know....somebody else there. I sure hate to be all alone and toastless..."

The instructions fold for easy pocket transport to the local bar, so when you encounter skepticism, you can even produce the interdiction against toasting alone.

And I wlll say that it makes lovely toast.

BTDT

2011-12-31T15:13:00.001-05:00

My feeling about New Year's Eve has long been "Been there done that." Never liked it. I'd attend parties more as an obligation, or as a way to not feel isolated and pathetic. Many New Year's Eves I spent watching TV and washing my hair.

One notable exception was a year in which I'd undergone a break-up in the fall. That year (1991? Not even sure!), I forced myself to go to a dance, and, what's more, I decided I could not leave the dance until I had danced with 7 guys. Any adult male counted, but I had to stay until 7 different men had filled spots in my mental dance card. I did it. It took until 2AM, but that also was a good thing. Getting home too early seemed only marginally better than staying home altogether.

I really am just as susceptible as anyone, to the symbolic "fresh new year" thing, though I'd be more inclined to say that the year turns at the solstice. I've weakly made resolutions, then quit making real ones and made spoof ones, and now I skip it. Every day is a chance to do my best and some days I do and some days I don't. That's not likely to change.

I'm blessed with a spouse who's not into New Year's Eve either and we spend a quiet evening. We have to stay awake because the Traditional New Year Phone Calls come in from the kids and sometimes other kin, so going to bed only to be jarred awake by the phone is worse than the tiredness.

I also took some last-day-of-the-year photos today, so here are a few photos of the environs this afternoon:

Camellias starting to bloom

It's camellia season -- they will be loaded with blooms in a couple weeks.

Tiny garden spider babies recently hatched

We fear for these baby garden spiders. They hatched too soon, but their mom laid the egg sac awfully early and the extended warm weather brought them out. Even at 16x zoom with camera braced against the porch wall, the photo isn't too clear, but there they are.

And they're fascinating. In the picture below, you see this same bunch -- top-center -- with the egg sac that they left, back there in the corner above the door. They move in a group and are actually not on the ceiling but suspended just underneath it in a group web.

Baby spiders in cluster - top center

Wild grape vines, finished for the year

Annual autumn sea oat wash-in

Every fall, the sea oats die back and lots of them float in on the tide and get stranded. I was delighted that this picture really shows the way they get suspended on top of the vegetation. I'd tried many times to capture that with other cameras!

Scooter accompanied me on my photo shoot. He makes a nice closing shot. Happy flip of the calendar, everybody!

Christmas morning

2011-12-25T10:57:00.005-05:00

About 8:30 AM, 12-25-2011

Christmas Eve - from Beyond Sing the Woods

2011-12-24T13:29:00.002-05:00

Beyond Sing the Woods (and its sequel, The Wind from the Mountains) are the saga of the Björndal family from about 1760 to 1826. The books were published in the US in 1936 and 1937 -- and it's odd that they haven't come back into print, while so much else from the bad to the good-but-obscure has, in this digital age.

From these novels, I am posting TWO Christmas descriptions tonight --- but the other excerpt is on the book blog, so go here to read another one.

Here is Christmas in about 1809(?) from the first novel, Beyond Sing the Woods:

---

There was an old custom at Björndal by which all the gaard ate together on Christmas Eve. In earlier days the old living room had been big enough, but so many more people now lived at the manor that it had grown too small, and for twenty years now the Christmas meal had been spread in the sal. This had been built for feasts in the days when the rococo style still lived and laughed in the northern countries.

There were chairs enough for all, and handsome they were for the most part. Some were from Holland, some from England, and some had been made at Björndal by Jörn Mangfoldig. They were not alike for they dated from widely different times. The finest had high backs and were upholstered in yellow leather and of these there were eighteen.

There must have been parties in that room before, with dancing and music; but long since, thought Adelaide, for tonight it looked very solemn. The candles hanging from the ceiling were unlit. All the light there was came from the table--from the holy Christmas candles. There they stood in straight lines in sticks of silver, brass, and iron. In the middle of the table stood the candle of the Three Kings in a stick of heavy silver, and before it lay the Bible flanked with two tall wax candles as in church.

Adelaide did not take in much of all this, but the solemnity of the hour stole into her. It was very quiet in the hall among all those many people.

Glasses were filled with spirit and ale, and the food was brought and set upon the table.

Then Old Dag read the Christmas text as in all years. Hands were folded and heads bent in silence. Major Barre, the tough old soldier, laid first his left hand upon his right, and then his right hand upon his left--then he, too, folded them together. Adelaide's eyes stole round to Young Dag sitting at her side. His hands were clenched together, iron within iron; he was leaning a little forward over the table, and his head was bent as though listening to something far away.

Old Dag's voice carried the words of the Scripture firmly and gravely out into the room, and the sputter of the candles as the flames flickered was the only other sound. The air was heavy with food, candles, ceremony and newly-washed people. Adelaide was conscious of all this, as she sat beside him she wished to be beside, and the happy spirit of Christmas and festival penetrated her as never before. The Bible images of shepherds, star, stable and manger and Kings from the Orient passed living through her mind as in her happy childhood.

Those at the table who had lived at Björndal for some years--and there were many--looked in surprise at Old Dag this evening. His voice was strange and fuller of meaning than ever before. He shut the Bible with slow dignity and said Amen; there followed creaks from chairs and breathings from people as all began to eat.

When all had had their first taste of meat, Old Dag took his glass in his hand and surveyed them all.

"There is much to be remembered on this evening," he began, "much good from the long year which is past." Every man should therefore thank Him who governs all, he said, and he himself gave thanks especially because he still had health to see them gathered about him once more. Then he wished God's peace on the house and upon all, and with this was given the signal for them to take up their glasses.

Adelaide peeped stealthily out from beneath her lashes, and fixed these pictures in her memory. She had never thought to sit down at meat with so many sorts of people.

Nearest the door sat mostly vagrants, some very white-haired, shaky old fellows among them. Some had furtive eyes and bent heads, others sent sly or greedy glances at the food, and ate as if never to eat again. Life has been hard for them, thought Adelaide; they have had but little food in their time. And she thought kindly of all she saw.

There were many and varied people at Björndal and all had their places at this table. There was Stygg-Hans and Espen Fillehaug and Ruske-Per and Lang-Ola and Stum Jens and Anette Paasa--these and many others who could work no longer. Then there were some among them who could still use their hands, such as Jörn Mangfoldig who was once so skilled at carpentry. Now his eyes were dim and his hand shaky, but he still had work to do mending things, he imagined, and he had his safe home at Björndal until the end of his days. He was one of those who had Dag's cast-off clothes, so he was finely dressed for the party.

Here and there all around the table were those who were young and strong, like Syver and the other grooms, and there were wild young people among them, but at this table they behaved themselves. People from the woods were here too, and Martin Hogger himself, the most powerful tree-feller in the forest.

Chairs scraped and shoes shuffled when every one left the table. Each in his turn, according to his station, walked past Old Dag and shook hands to thank him for the meal and wish him a happy Christmas. The old man took each one's hand with special warmth this year. Then chairs were shifted back against the wall, the table was cleared, and all went back to their own quarters about the gaard.

Christmas rudeness

2011-12-08T17:47:00.000-05:00

I've been waffling about posting this for 5 years. Seriously. It has sat in draft mode since December 2006, while I worried about whether it was too mean and snarky, too ill-timed, always too-something-or-other. Apologies. I want the yearly "Should I post it?" dilemma to go away, so here it is.

I wrote it to vent my frustration, back when very dear relatives were sending me the most godawful glurge emails ever. Though I was tempted, I never actually emailed this spoof back out to them in response. It's been so long that long-form glurge is really a thing of the past. It lives on in short form as Facebook posts ("If you don't copy and post this as your status, then you do not love - [your spouse, your kid, Jesus, America]!! C'mon folks, who's with me?!").

But meanwhile, 5 years is a long time to leave an unposted draft in the queue, and I'm tired of looking at it every December and wondering, "Should I ....? Nah, let me think it over a little longer." Lemme just "publish" and get it over with...

•*¨`*•. ☆ .•*¨`*•

Once there was an elderly shopkeeper. One snowy Christmas Eve he was closing up for the night when a little boy and a woman came to the door.

"Please!" begged the little boy. "Have you seen a puppy?"

"Why no, son," answered the old man. "I haven't seen any puppies. Have you lost one?"

The boy looked very sad. "He was my Christmas present. I told mom I wanted a puppy more than anything in the whole world, and she got me one, but he's missing! Somebody mighta stole him!"

The boy's mother finally spoke up. "Timmy, why don't you go check the alley in the back. Mister, is it OK for him to go to your back door and check the alley there?"

"Certainly, young man. Right through there." The man pointed.

"Say, that's a swell idea!" said Timmy and headed for the back door.

When he was out of hearing the woman said to the old man, "Please, mister! There was never any puppy. We can't afford one, but Timmy wanted one so much, I told him that the puppy was stolen, so he'd think I could give him his heart's desire. Please go along with it so he will think I got him a puppy!"

"Of course," said the old man.

Just then, Timmy came back in the front, looking glum. "I didn't see him in the alley."

The old man looked down and said, "Timmy, there's something I have to tell you. I cooked your puppy and ate him for dinner. I'm very poor and I thought he was a stray that had no one to care about him. I'm so sorry."

Timmy screamed and burst into tears. His mother looked at the man in horror and then she knelt down and held her son. "Timmy that's not true! Nobody cooked your puppy! There never was any puppy! I couldn't afford one, so I told you he was stolen! I didn't mean to hurt you."

Timmy wiped his eyes and said, "That was mean!" and went out to the car.

His mother said to the man, "How could you say that to him?!"

The old man answered, "I bet you never lie to your kid again." Then he went home and brewed up a nice cup of spicy Christmas tea.

Daer Episcopal church - yur doin it rong

2011-12-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

You can't be more tired of my rants about the division in the Episcopal Church than I am, but this may be the last one, because they've, pretty much, cut the baby in half, and it's not really my issue anymore except in being there for my dad. He gets around fine by day but doesn't drive at night, so I accompanied him and endured a meeting about this a few nights ago. It wasn't fun.

Most of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina is on the conservative Anglican side of the debate. Not just the churches, but the Bishop of SC his very own self, who's distancing the diocese from the national policies.

(For clarity here's the deal:

Technically, all sides, Episcopalians and Anglicans are ... Anglicans. It's all part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, but the views of its various offshoots differ so radically that the sides need IDs.

So when I say "TEC," that's The Episcopal Church with its affirmation of gay unions and its liberal theology. "Anglicans" will have to refer to the conservative sub-groups who oppose TEC's direction.)

Dad is ardently in favor of the conservative view. My mother, though, despised the controversy, thought the church should proclaim the basics, embrace all people, and help the poor, and was furious that this parish she'd given so much time and heart to was withdrawing much support from TEC. She marched into the rector's office 7 years ago and said that she expected her pledge to be shared with TEC as always.

My parents were a life lesson for couples in embracing your commonalities, while uncompromisingly standing for important beliefs when you differ. I learned a lot from these people.

I rarely miss her more than I do when confronting the fundamentalist mentality here in RedStatistan. Yet I don't speak "for" her. I am appalled at the whole controversy, right here on my own, but differ in my willingness to say "Buh-bye!" and let them go.

The meeting was not even about the various points of view, but assumed that all of those present were on one solid side, certainly trying to coexist, but united and unquestioningly against "them" and their liberal policies.

I will hand it to them, that they, the Anglican conservatives, hope to keep the denomination intact and not split away, but they are as uncompromising as TEC is and it's hard to blame just one side for slicing the baby in two. One woman stood and said she hated the idea that her lifelong identity as an Episcopalian might, if things go badly, be something she has to leave behind, but that, and I quote, she'd "rather be a Christian than an Episcopalian."

Gee, that's funny, so would I.

I get the disgust with TEC. I'm with the Anglicans on some of it. TEC has been unable to affirm even the most basic Christian doctrine as its foundation, and that could make them a big teetering organization about nothing.

Some of my best friends (you know who you are) repudiate all supernatural elements and the whole Bible narrative of miraculous events and incarnate God. I have no quarrel with what anyone believes, because I honestly -- it's a whole 'nother topic -- think belief is not at all a choice.

But why the %$*@! be a Christian church then?? Rename yourself Secular Liberals United for world Betterment (SLUB), employ all those people on the enormous TEC campus in the Cause, and quit claiming you're a "church." It's OK, you can keep your non-profit status and everything.

I've said before that it probably should just split if it can't find common ground, but both sides are pointing out stats on declining membership, and many of us are emotionally long-gone. I don't think they have a clue how thoroughly any split would fail to neatly give each side a comfort zone. If they tear the sheet in half, a lot more disconnected tatters will fall loose to the ground than they realize.

In my family, my generation pretty much symbolizes the slice-the-kid-in-half aspect of this battle. Already, my brother is an ardent fundamentalist, and he has no interest in the Anglican permutation of that. He's an active member of his Baptist church. And when the time comes, I'll be on my way.

It's OK. I sat through this meeting, and I'll probably sit through more services and meetings I despise, to be there for Dad who may need help getting there in the future and deserves to participate as his conscience directs him. And then I will have no more to do with either branch. Because, like the conservative lady who spoke, I'd rather be Christian than either a nothing's-true EC or a submissive-women, anti-gay-marriage Anglican.

I'm cool. I took my Serenity pills. I'm still in the process of watching an important part of my childhood implode, but I am processing it, though a 2009 trip to the church we attended from the time I was 3 til I was 14 did kind of give me pause.

It was my uncle's funeral in Dec 2009, in this church in which I was a toddler in the nursery school, Confirmed at age 12, a truant from Sunday School at 13, and even came sort-of full-circle as a teen assistant in that same nursery, when I was 13-14.

Photo by Larry, while I drove.

It was an astonishing experience to see it in 2009, for the first time since I was 14 years old --41 years!-- and not see the typical unrecognizable updating that I've come to expect when I visit old haunting grounds.

Neither the neighborhood nor the building had changed. No idiots had "modernized" its design or feel. The peace of the place, which clearly spent its money on good solid maintenance but not on "Hipness Appeal! Relevancy! Make it Pop!" amazed me. The feeling that it was serenely outside the current crisis was undoubtedly deceptive, but it felt really good.

I keep hearing that a split is "inevitable" since both sides seem to be so rigid. Such a split will affect my old church too. I'm not sure which way they'd go, but I'll never live there again and neither denomination will have a place for me anyway. But it's the feel of that place that I'm looking for. A place that actually pays attention to the Red Letters, and helps the poor, and shuts its mouth about politics.

An anecdotal weather ... thingamajig

2011-11-23T12:34:00.001-05:00

I often have insomnia which cuts the center out of my night, and last night was one of those. I was up at 3AM, net surfing, drinking a protein shake, reading, wandering, tripping over cats who always think "The hooman finally gets it! This is prime activity time!"

So there was my weather widget up in the corner of my google page. It told me that the current temperature was 70 degrees (f).

That widget has been wacko before. It can pull the wrong data for a location.

I've also blogged about how hot it can get year round here in coastal SC.

But....but....!! [sputter sputter] ....I never.....

Not at 3 AM. Not in the middle of the night the day before Thanksgiving. I went to weather dot com and got the US map and was so amazed that I took a screenshot. Zoom it and you can see the time of night, "3:15 EST" at the bottom of the map.

This is just creepy. When the temp does not fall below 70 degrees at night, that's in, like, July/Aug, when we're having 90s during the day.

We've got a holiday and guests coming in tonight and I can't give any kind of time to research right now, but I did a cursory search for record night temperatures in SC. I can't say that this doesn't happen regularly. I coulda' missed it.

Unfortunately, nobody cares about records on the warmest nights, only the coldest. They love to tell you how hot it got on a particular day and how low it dropped at night, but the dilemma of how to research "how low it did NOT drop" is something I can't devote time to today!

Just know that even for hot and muggy SC, where we get odd shorts-weather days in every month of the year .... 70 degrees f, deep in the night, on 11-23, crossed the line into being kinda disturbing.

OK, the zoom is mindblowing

2011-11-17T09:35:00.001-05:00

My new camera offers - it says on the case - a "4x optical zoom." That's one reason I picked it over another similar PowerShot that had only the same 3.5 zoom that my old one had.

So I'm standing around taking outdoor pictures a couple days ago.....

.... and I noticed people out in the marsh oystering, which they do at low tide. I thought I'd see if the 4x got enough detail to show what's going on out there. I hit the zoom lever and it crept up to 4x, then hesitated. Before I could think to let go of the lever, it started up again and kept zooming until the display told me it was giving me 16x.

I. am. in. awe.
Here's another one. From this:

To:

My happiness level with the new PowerShot is increasing. A lot.

My little love and I

2011-11-12T08:57:00.001-05:00

I love it. I'm keeping it.

My beloved camera is what I'm talking about. My dear 2004 Canon PowerShot. Heavy as a hand grenade, took great pictures in its prime. It's having trouble now. Every shoot has more unusable shots.

In each shoot, more turn out like this.

So I had to get another camera, and I went with another PowerShot since I liked the last one so much. Below are a few from the first batch of photos.

Good, because I could get a photo when I tried to get a photo. Not good, in that I'm not happy with them. I was hoping the old Canon would last until I could get a true upgrade, but it wasn't meant to be.

Still, taking pictures is fun again.

The first photo, of course, had to be of The Boss.

Oysters in the creek at low tide. This one's OK.

Gone to seed

Fun book!

If you have to go away...I'll leave your shoes beside the bed.

Several of these were taken at Dad's house.

About 4:30 PM, sun sinking, golden fall marsh and flag on 11-11. This is the only one that turned out as nice as I'd hoped.

The grocery store didn't charge me for either of these 2 little potted mums, since they were nearly dead. One has succumbed but the other is reviving.

And maybe I'll gain mastery over the settings on this camera and get sharper images. If all else fails, I can read the manual!

There are things I will never understand

2011-11-09T13:58:00.003-05:00


A 2008 photo from the start of the development. These are 200-year-old live oak trees, destroyed. Then the real estate crash halted the project until this year (2011)

The development across our town highway is back in gear.

In 2008, a different developer had Big Plans, and cleared and paved it. Then 2008 happened and he tanked. Another developer bought it from him recently and the voice of the buzz saw now echoes through the land.

As I've mentioned before, there's a strip of woodland between us and that highway.

The new developer is building houses along that strip of land, above where I put the Wi-Fi sign, and wants to do clearing about where I've placed the "Woods" label

So the doorbell rings.

"I'm here to offer the services of the developer. He'd like his residents to have a view of the marsh, and he's offering to clean out that tangle of vines and growth and brush on your lot, at his expense."

Understandable from his point of view, but no, no, a thousand times NO.

To be polite, I went out there and let him show me what the developer was talking about, and it would really be carefully done, and would not hurt any trees.

Just one problem though. That wood, with its impenetrable wild tangle, is ALL THAT STANDS BETWEEN US AND STATE PARK CAMPER INCURSION. It is also all that stands between us and the endless endless road noise.

He could not get it. He could not comprehend what I was saying. Clearing the marsh end of that wood, so it's still a wood, but more manicured and park-like, would put traffic and its noise right in our eyes and ears. It barely dulls the noise now.

A lovely clear view for the buyers of those houses, through our wood to the marsh, would mean a hideous clear view in the other direction, for us, of their houses, and the cars whooshing by. Tree trunks, no matter how many, won't help.

"But it's a trashy mess" was his, and I'm sure, many peoples' feelings about wild undergrowth. He really thought the appearance was not only bad, but that the buffering ability was irrelevant to living here.

People often say "I can't understand his point of view," when what they really mean is "I disagree with it," but this is a case in which I really mean it;

I can't understand people who think that woods are ugly; that nature is too messy. That wildness is visually unappealing and needs to be neatened up.

Are we really the same species? Do others really not see the beauty in those brambles and wildflowers? Or at least see the value they have as a border to an estuary?

I want to leave this house, this precarious location, so badly, it's not funny. 9 years ago, it was such a gift to be able to stay here and reduce our debts, and have the woods around us. Not anymore. I want out.

Third grade - peace, love, commas

2011-11-01T19:57:00.000-04:00

My elementary school, photo taken 1999.

Writer Natalie Goldberg has advice for writers and blogger Xtreme English posted a passage from it, which included some writing exercises. And THANK YOU, XE, it's wonderful advice, plus it got me started on one of Goldberg's exercises; to write everything you remember about third grade.

Third grade for me was the 1962-3 school year, and my first thought about the Goldberg exercise was that third grade was a big nothing. Any interesting events, any particularly good or bad teachers, came in other years, so Third was notable for not being notable.

About 18 years ago, when I was in a writers' group, I wrote a nostalgic essay about 1964. I posted it to this blog (wow. 4 years ago!). It's here if you want to read it (or read it again) but I never felt happy with it, and later, realized it was not only kind of substandard, but actually inaccurate.

I certainly wrote it honestly -- i.e., that was how i remembered things -- but that memory of 1964 being the last serene summer before awful life events changed our world was false. In fact, Sally and Patsy's father died in the same fall of 1963 that Kennedy was shot, and that next summer was about trying to regain "back to normal" feelings like we'd had before, not a time of still having them for real.

The calm year, the real last-year-of-innocence, was third grade, fall 1962 through spring 63.

Nostalgic visit to the primary-grades building, 1999. The 3rd grade wing is behind me, up the hill. That hill was much higher in 1962.

Third Grade was a big rite of passage at my elementary school, because we moved up the hill. The school sat along a hilltop that looked enormous to me then. Grades 3-6 were all in one L-shaped building, with the primary grade building beneath and behind it, down a hillside flight of stairs. Of course we hiked up and down the concrete steps to library and cafeteria sessions, but our home base as 1st and 2nd graders was the bright little-kid-oriented rooms.

When I walked into my assigned Third Grade room, I got a clear message that sunny Primary life was over and we were getting down to serious business. Intimidating maps and historic portraits on the wall portended demanding studies. No more bright paint. No long wall was devoted to a window looking out at the leafy world. Upper class schoolroom windows started at the shoulder height of taller kids. Rows of worn readers that we were expected to use for self-improvement when we finished an assignment with time left, and sets of occasional-use books ("Now, would Ricky and Karen please pass out the music books?") filled shelves underneath it. My class met in a blue-gray room that sun rarely touched.

And this year, we'd get grades. Not just checkmarks in Fair, Good, Swell categories, accompanied by narrative about our effort and attitude, but A, B, C ... and other, unthinkable letters. The year started, as they all did to some degree, with stomach-knot anxiety about what would be demanded of me.

And, as they all did, it turned out to be just more school. We had a nice enough teacher and a year without drama. I got good reports at the first two quarters. I felt more relieved than proud, or even interested. An achievement ethic wasn't in me yet.

Which is why, at the third quarter report, I was stunned to see straight A's down the column.

I hadn't tried for those, or any, grades. I worked because it was assigned, though I put more into it when the task interested me. I thought of report cards much the way I thought of bubble gum fortunes. You opened the paper, you saw what had been declared for you.

I wasn't much into thinking ahead. This was the year I put a leftover half of a peanut butter sandwich in the back of my desk and forgot about it until clean-out day before Christmas break. It was barely recognizable, stuck to its wax paper with green mold.

But third grade was the year of punctuation. I mean, serious punctuation; quotation marks, complex sentences with commas.

I hung onto every word. This was something I wanted. These were the writer's tools for expression and clarity. I might not have mastered clarity yet, but I got pretty good at commas.

In fourth grade, big things happened, in the neighborhood and in the world, but in third, September to June ambled through their mundane lessons and vacations and seasons. It was the last year of my unshaken life. After my friend's father committed suicide that fall, and the President was shot and killed, the world never again seemed trustworthy, but in Third I had the tranquility to let me take an interest in a subject for its own sake. Which was pretty cool.

I get it! It's pumpkin-colored for Halloween, right?

2011-10-30T11:51:00.000-04:00

Dear Local Newspaper Social Pages:

Yall'll have to forgive me for my reaction to this wedding announcement, since its peculiarities may have been around in other places for years, and only just got here.

I want the paper to survive, and if this brings in money, then way cool! Design the yazzoo out of wedding announcements if you want to. I mean it. I sound sarcastic but it really is a pretty clever way to boost the ol' income on non-essential but cool things that people will pay extra for.

I'm actually old enough to find nothing new about the fashion details and the Cast of Thousands in this celebration of the Extreme Specialness of this couple. Newspapers used to do that all the time, and it was always a premium for the folks in the nice part of town. Uppercrusters had big, top of the page announcements so relatives could clip it and get the date and paper's name in the clipping, while the tract house families had to remember to snip enough margin for room to write in the date with a Flair pen. The high-falutin' brides - or really, the parental outlay for their dresses - were displayed in 2-column photos, and accompanied by a family history and all the stuff about how the embroidery on the dress wasn't just done by any old sweatshop seamstress, but by the one who got Employee of the Year, and everything. They probably paid extra for the detailed report, and I bet these folks did too.

I like that.

Here's the thing. The orange background's gotta go. It looks like one of those ads-that-look-like-news-stories for Performance Improvement Pills, if you know what I mean.

As for the headline, I don't know who wrote it, but it's a little confusing. The Impressive Specialness of their vows kind of makes me laugh, like I am at the rest of this announcement, but kind of doesn't, and that's partly because I, this is the truth, read it to see what was unusual about their vows, but didn't find out. Do some people take rully rully serious, special vows? Like, bravely hitting the "Play" button at Expert instead of Basic level? I don't mean the write-their-own thing with unique quotes and poems (been there, done that), but a church's required vows?

They seem like nice kids and I wish them luck, so don't tell them that last week in their same church, Tammy Retread and Doug Plywood made the exact same vows that they made. Even if Tammy and Doug's clothes came from BridalMart and they all celebrated at Waffle House afterwards.

Even I have some standards.

2011-10-25T20:35:00.001-04:00

I'm am so crafts-challenged (poor digital dexterity and no patience) that my standards for my own work are pretty low. But I do have standards. Really.

I am never going to crochet like the experts. Never never never, and that's because I have NO desire to. Such intricate work makes me stark raving insane.


Hand made by my mom-in-law. This kind of skill floors me.

Larry's mom crocheted this gorgeous tablecloth for us. It's enormous, covers a nice big farmhouse-sized table for a big gathering. I've just folded out a corner to show the pattern. How anyone can do something this big and this beautiful, stitch by tiny stitch, much less do it in a few months, boggles my mind. I have enough trouble with simple mufflers.

And then, there's my lumpy work...

The all-blue one on the right is designed and being made (it's maybe half-done) for a friend for Christmas. The blue and green one on the left (also incomplete, but about 2/3 done) wasn't made for anybody. It's a test piece, to try out stitch ideas and see what makes the kind of final product I want to make.

My conundrum is that I don't want to do time-consuming stitches, but I get sick of the basic crochet stitch that makes all those little bow-tie-looking rows. Bored with them. Tired of that granny look.

So! The question was, how could I make a piece that looked like I worked really hard, without actually working really hard? I approach life this way whenever possible: easier paths, shortcuts, magic formulas, etc etc.

On the blue/green one, I started doing rows of various stitches to see if I could make something that has a more interesting appearance, but was not too thick to wrap comfortably. That job has taught me a lot. It's too thick and stiff, some of the rows too uncomfortably ridge-like, and the variety of stitches looks as amateurish and randomized as it is, but as an experiment, it helped me figure out an easy stitch for a muffler that's decent-looking and feels good. I'll finish it anyway, but only because I've started, and hated, and unraveled about 6 previous attempts and just don't want to throw out another one.

Maybe I'll give it to Goodwill, or use it myself, but it doesn't meet my standards for gift-giving.

This is where people say stuff like "The recipient won't care about the endearing goofiness! You made it with your Very Own Loving Hands!"

Bullcrap. Maybe she would find it all endearing, but it bugs me when women get told that, when it comes to the work of their hands, the lu-u-u-v is what matters. Insipid, sexist swill. Ever notice how, if a guy's woodwork or metalwork or whatever is lopsided, out of proportion, painted sloppily, or otherwise stupid-looking, nobody says, "Oh who cares, it's so cute, you made it with lu-u-uv!"?

At a glance, the blue one doesn't look that much nicer, but it does look a little nicer when you see it in person, and feels better, and meets my standards, which are mediocre. This isn't about Being Too Hard On Myself. It's competent, not Excellent. My yarn tension is uneven, so there are some stitches you could drive a Humvee through, others so tight I can barely find the place to insert the hook for the next row. It will look homemade, and I'm fine with that, but it has to be a certain level of well-made.

As for making anything with Love, it's sort of not in me to work serenely. Even my simple project fouls up at moments, and the language I use ... let's just say that New Age people who think that your feelings and mental state infuse your products with good or bad vibes would be horrified by my attitude.

Maybe I should order some of those "made by" personalized labels for my goods:

Handmade For You - with Creative Profanity!

They like us. They really like us.

2011-10-23T10:25:00.002-04:00

Not enough, of course, to acknowledge our high buyer rating with any kind of reward, but ...

Maybe for our 15 year anniversary, they'll send us a refrigerator magnet! It's good to have something to look forward to.

Life in general

2011-10-16T16:39:00.000-04:00

There's this little problem. I feel like all I do is rant and complain, but when I find myself thinking, OK, haven't posted in awhile, need to give my blog some attention, I feel the urge to rant start building.

Politics - I can't see any willingness to listen, on the part of anybody on any side of anything. It seems to me that politics has become nothing but quips. Every issue begins and ends with a sound-byte-trade and then moves on. 9-9-9 becomes "Well that's 666 upside down." Any math teacher -- hell, for that matter, any 6 year old could tell you that nine isn't six. The barbs are worse than superficial, they're meaningless.

Then you come to the Episcopal Church, in which each side claims it is "the true church" and the other is one that has no right to represent it in policy or pulpit. It's come up again because the Bishop of South Carolina has been distancing the SC church from the main group because he disagrees with its direction, and the US church is calling him on the carpet for it.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church. To many people, the church they're gone to all their lives means nearly as much as family does, and I also find it painful to watch it wreck itself, but I can't find a side to like. The US Episcopal Church that's adopted all kinds of liberal policies might seem like it's more to my taste than the backlash is, but (long ago) when I went to its site and -- after much clicking -- found the annual reports, all I could think was that this denomination is a massive, useless, self-serving bureaucratic behemoth.

The cash comes in, the cash goes out, to buildings, and utilities, and landscaping, and boardrooms, and desks, and tables, and chairs, and filing cabinets, and computers, and coffee-makers, and printers, and copiers, and executives, and secretaries, and building maintenance, and shipping supplies, and managers, and managers of managers, and committees, and paper-generation, and megatons of absolutely nothing, while the fund for relief gets a small sliver of the pie.

Obviously, it's a big employer. But so is WalMart, and, I fear, for similar reasons.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, I can't sleep thinking of our kids struggling to get the pile of outrageous rents and tuition fees off their backs so they can get a little ahead, a whole lot harder than we ever had it, prices for life as a student way beyond what an ordinary hardworking kid, even with two jobs, can pay. And how we can help, while feeling like we're trying to help Sisyphus get that goddam rock over the top of that hill.

On some of those occasions, my stomach starts growling and I hit the refrigerator at 3AM, pour a little grape/blueberry/pomegranate juice and eat a little of that good homemade bread that Larry's been making (What a blessing), and think, this is all the church is really supposed to be. People, dare I say like me, living my screwy inefficient life as best I can, finding in a piece of bread a reminder of the only human being who has ever lived into whose hands i can completely entrust myself or my loved ones. None of the bureaucracy makes any spiritual sense.

We can do things to help the kids, and we are doing them, and the fact that getting a degree and putting together a life that has some fulfillment and meaning beyond crappy hourly jobs is a slower process now than it was for our generation, doesn't mean it's not doable and progressing.

I now have office space, for crafts and for storing more of my too-many books and toys.

Life isn't bad at all, except at 3AM. And a little bread to shut my stomach up, and a good book, get me out of seething over things I can't change, and, eventually, back to sleep, knowing that there are things I can.

In honor of Banned Books Week....

2011-09-29T20:50:00.000-04:00

I usually do a banned book post every year. This year I have a blog devoted to books, so it's over there:

How to Avoid Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Can capital punishment be justice?

2011-09-23T13:04:00.001-04:00

You might not expect me to be undecided, but I am.

I've jumped from side to side on this issue. My first stand was pro-death penalty. I was a teenager, and encountered -- in a brochure about fighting child abuse, not about criminal justice -- a story of a little boy's death after abuse so horrible that it seemed that such criminals have forfeited their right to live, in the sight of the community, God, in every way.

Later, I changed my mind, then still later, changed it back. Altogether, I've re-thought it probably half a dozen times and ever since the execution of the OK City bomber, I've been stuck in a muddy, uncertain middle. I thought that one was the right thing. I still do.

Here's my thing.

When I read that laws have been written to say that the burden of proof no longer falls on the prosecution at a late stage in appeals, even when the evidence and testimony that is now available would have brought acquittal if it had appeared at the original trial;

when I see that some states fight to execute people who are asking for DNA testing of their evidence, which didn't exist years ago at conviction, and the state takes the unconscionable stand that procedure has been fully carried out and that this makes execution "right";

when I encounter these things, I know that, if capital punishment can be just, it is not now.

And my own endless heart-changes indicate that, like the people who crafted the system, my stand had been based on primitive emotion. Not reason, or justice, but pre-verbal, primitive gut reaction.

I think we're hardwired to react with fear, rage and revulsion against the deeds of some, and that we write up loads of procedural legal convolution and spin reasonable arguments, to feel OK about claiming the right to kill.

I think this because, if we really wanted simple justice, deterrence, and safety for the community, we would write laws that never, ever tolerated anything less than going to the utmost length to make sure that only the undoubtedly guilty are executed.

Whenever we can do that, then I will revisit the issue of whether the death penalty can possibly be right or just. Maybe it can. I can't even imagine it now because all I see is barbarism cloaked in robes and business suits.

I am ashamed of my country

2011-09-21T23:29:00.001-04:00

The execution of a man of whom there is more than reasonable, there is huge, doubt of guilt is the most shameful thing I have encountered in my life.

Am I overstating? I remember My Lai. I remember Kent State. I remember Waco. Why is this worse?

This is the darkest of them all, even if the number of unjustly killed can't compare, because it's so cruelly and unthinkingly Correct. Procedure has been followed. The paperwork is in order.

Procedure failed in all of the other cases, but procedure will always have limits within which it can affect justice or right. There's a point, like the edge of The Matrix, beyond which the structure can't go and we're in the realm of individual blind judgment. That judgment is subject to crippling fear, psychosis, greed and rage.

This unconscionable execution is more horrible because procedure has been sanctified and itself is corrupt.

I live in a country where the truth does not matter. None of the mountain of evidence matters. It can't stand up against the soul-dead ash-storm of Procedure. The legalities allow this vicious murder to take place. The legalities, which exist to support justice, are in the hands of the ugliest human souls imaginable. They have no reason to fight for the right to kill him, except a craving to kill.

The claim that Procedure is that important is a lie. Such people care no more about legality than they care about murder of an innocent man. Procedure becomes God, Truth, and Justice, it doesn't serve them. The truth is not a goal and the knowledge that he's probably innocent isn't disbelieved, it's irrelevant. They want to kill. That Procedure, like a game, places rules above reality. Those who play it want a clean, neat way, a way paved with degrees and licenses and performance evaluations, to have what they crave, the power to kill.

I live in a country that calls this justice. I live in a country where legally sanctioned criminals maintain states' rights, even when that state is the epitome of corruption and its purveyers of justice crawl under the rock of Procedure to deliberately -- not ignorantly, but with full knowledge of the travesty that they're committing -- serve lies.

I live in a country that is capable of allowing the State Of Georgia that right. A nation that sanctions the "right" of a state to destroy a human being and if that person may be innocent, what a God Damned shame, but it's Within Proper Procedure.

I live in a country I am ashamed of, because the whole country allows its citizens to be destroyed, to be subject to such state autonomy, to fall to the ice-cold subhuman Proceduralists who jockey into positions of power on a scale small enough to give them the power to craft a system of inculpable killing because they want to kill.

The worst thing I can wish for these bastards is that they live out long lives with an internal system failure of the deadening that has shielded their souls, and answer to some Higher Power when they leave this life.

Troy Davis died at 11:08 PM

Try not to heave while I do a rare Gratitude post

2011-09-20T13:47:00.000-04:00

I'm not much on doing nice humble gratitude posts. I'd rather gripe. But this week has brought too many things to love and to be grateful for, so bear with me.

1. 3 healthy cats. Both sick guys are back to their usual selves, and Little Gray has not shown symptoms.

Downy rests up from the heavy demands of his life

2. Fall! The first nice cool overcast days of the season. I actually wore a sweater over the weekend. I'm also a fan of gentle gray days and cool weather, so the cool, cloudy weekend was like a gift. And today, we're getting rain! Huzzah!

3. Time with my dad, and the fact that he's still getting around and finding good in life.

4. A husband who decides to spend the afternoon baking bread. On his birthday. That was Friday.

5. And who walked all over the grocery store to find the chips I craved, on a special display, after I'd glumly given up on them when they weren't on the regular chip aisle. I didn't make him do it, honest - I'm not that much of a High Maintenance Woman. Probably too much of one, but not that much of one. He disappeared and next thing I knew, he was guiding me to a chip rack.

6. Books. At every stage of my life, books have moved me, expanded my world, and kept me sane. This is only a few of the ones that have been the right book at the right time over the decades.

7. The invention of the slow cooker. It's more than just an easy method of cooking for ADDs. As luck would have it, the slow-cooker also makes the kind of food I like best, thick soups and stews, one-dish meals. Slow cooking has existed for eons, but this little wonder of the world lets you do it without keeping watch over it, and without leaving your stove or oven on all day if you're out.

Back to my usual crabbiness without delay....

Whatever it is, it's contagious

2011-09-13T18:00:00.001-04:00

Now that Scooter, the Previously Sick Cat, is back to normal, Downyflake, who never gets sick, not in 8-9 years or so, has come down with what looks like the same bug.

Slightly different symptoms, in that Downy was panting. Panting can mean various things and some of those things are pretty bad.

But Downy is The Nice One, and was considerate enough to get sick during regular weekday work hours. So our regular vet worked him in and found he has a fever and some upper respiratory crud.

Home now, after THREE shots. One of the shots was benedryl so he's rather mellow.

That's one nasty bug if we passed it by hand from Scooter to Downy -- who never meet in person. That probably means Graymatter will get it too. Unless her Personal pH balance is so acidic that it kills the germs.

Too soon.

2011-09-11T13:35:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I posted on facebook that I intended to miss as much of the 9/11 commemorative activity as possible. I got a fair number of "Yeah, me too" responses. Here I am, writing about it anyway.

I've never liked tragedy-anniversaries, but I honestly do understand their importance. Something terrible happens. It rips us apart. Some events require recovery, others need both recovery and assimilation of a new reality, and either way, take a lot of time. As I heal, I mark that healing : how a year later it's still painful but life is renewing; how 5 years later it's a scar that will always be part of me and in some ways makes me better, more compassionate, more grateful for what's good. Ten years later, I've survived, grown, hopefully built something good out of what it taught me.

Regarding 9/11, that's crap. The wound is still raw, the issues still unresolved, and whatever progress in getting-past-it usually comes in a year, or 5 or 10, feels like it hasn't even bloody started yet.

On the contrary, its siren has kept wailing through every day of these ten years.

So - the dialog kind of goes like this:

"Never forget!"
"Will you LET me forget?!"
"See? You want to! America-hater!"

No, I don't want to forget. I want us to move beyond, and I feel like we aren't. Anniversary rituals seem like something that should come after that.

I'm using "I feel" a lot and that's because that's all it is, my feelings. It's unquantifiable, and impossible to pass along to anyone else who doesn't feel the same way.

The film footage never stops running. Not a day goes by that someone does not evoke 9/11 because it's a direct cause of an action, a policy, a debate of the day.

There are those on the one side who say that this is what makes the particular enemy that attacked us so vile - its relentlessness, its determination to exterminate free, democratic western society, so that the conflagration it starts never ends.

And on the other side, there's the feeling that the vilest SOBs of all have exploited the event for perpetual-war mongering and the profits derived therefrom, silencing questions with sneers about "peace at any price" and hating America and cowardice.

I realize that almost no one takes one or the other of those views exclusively. Most of us see some degree of each going on, even if we disagree about which predominates.

But in either case, 9/11 has barely gotten anywhere near as far, in its process, as a commemoration usually marks. Anniversaries revisit events precisely because the event is slowly transforming from open bleeding to scar tissue.

Mulling it over, I realize that something in me rebels at letting profiteers and opponents of all non-Christian faiths whip us all up again in a rush of anger/grief/fear which they're just waiting to exploit again. "9/11 fatigue" might be legitimate on any other day of the decade but this one, and to ignore the day is to pretty much hand it over to the exploiters. It's vital to take it back and give its sole ownership to those who died and who performed stunningly heroic deeds that day.

We need to honor them, but it seems so much like we've all done it every day of this endlessly fresh conflict.

You revisit an event because you've moved away from it. This one, we pull forward with us, day by day, and I'm having a whole bunch of trouble finding a 10-year marker in the rubble of discord that's not only never been cleared away, but that we keep adding to.

Hurricanes, Twitter, and Sylvia Plath's typewriter

2011-09-09T15:20:00.002-04:00

No, it's not a Royal.

I recently read a blog post from a young woman who tells us what she's interested in from Twitter tweeters.

There's not a thing wrong with her preferences, but they prove beyond any doubt *I* had that Twitter is a young person's game.

She's uninterested in following people who mostly tweet retweets and links, instead of their own thoughts. Items 3, 6, and 7 on her list eliminate me from her world right now, not to mention book promotion, which I'll be doing eventually.

OK, social networking is all about finding people who share your interests, so she can be into "Be original! Say something!" while others might enjoy mostly pass-alongs.

Being original or interesting in 140 characters seems to me to be something only occasionally possible. Does that show my age, or does it show the mundanity of my life, or does her generation really care about trivia like the fact that today I hauled out my small crockpot for the first time in 10 years so I could make a smaller batch of vegetable soup? OK, Larry had to haul it out of a high cabinet. And he cleaned the top of the refrigerator while he was up there.

I can share that fairly succinctly, but what's interesting about it isn't really a 140-letter thing. Would tweeting, maybe, be a good exercise in curbing my longwindedness?

Here's what's going on : another hurricane is out there, and I realized while scrubbing the tray for the toaster oven that my whole life from spring to fall is about (a.) prepping for losing everything and (b.) hoping not to. For that, and the heat and the bugs, summer has become a stretch of grumpy lethargy. Yard and garden work, I give up, and that probably won't change soon, since the heat and bugs are too much for a few more weeks. But I dismiss indoor projects too.

We're currently watching the immensely fun Warehouse 13. It's, for the uninitiated, a steampunky series in which the US goverment finds and stores various highly dangerous "artifacts" under lock, key, and "neutralizer" which is a purple goo that disables artifact misbehavior and is always on hand.

The writers have great fun with this.

In the one we watched last night, agent Pete stepped into the evil force-field emitted by Sylvia Plath's typewriter.

The typewriter causes despair. The team has only minutes to solve a dangerous problem but Pete, roped in by Plath's Royal Manual, stares at it and can't move. "What's the difference?" he says dully. Who cares? Nothing matters. There's no point, etc etc.

I might, possibly, have a sick sense of humor but, despite finding Plath talented and her death tragic, I found this hilarious. A soul-sucking typewriter. Another agent pushes him out of its field and the agents move on to their task.

Today, I made soup and washed up, and found myself thinking, Might as well clean this toaster oven tray. It's all discolored and cruddy, and I've looked at it many times and thought I should give it a scrub.

As I worked it over with Barkeeper's Friend [TM], I thought, "Why bother? What's the point? I'm cleaning this so Hurricane Marie can hit us at Cat 4-5 and take it and everything out to sea....."

I realized that I have my very own Inner Plath Typewriter. I have no idea whether this is learned behavior from a family of rather anxious and sensitive people, or whether it's brain chemistry. I think its brain chemistry. At least, I can't think of any family members I might have learned it from. The sort of gloomy pessimism I see on both sides of my family has rarely made them lethargic. Every one of them has always lived actively, always done the chores, done projects, lived to the fullest, even while being pessimistic about it, and I am the one exception. I retreat into a sort of functional-catatonic state in which I do what has to be done, but not much more. If a task can sit, it sits.

I kept scrubbing (it's still splotchy-looking but usable), and thought, This is good. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Live anyway.

It's not really a breakthrough. I periodically kick the pessimism/sapped energy habit but fall back in. The Inner Typewriter will activate its gloom-field but I need to neutralize it when it does. Purple goo. Maybe a brain-food blueberry shake.

Home. Eating. Grumpy.

2011-09-05T16:26:00.000-04:00

That could describe me on any day of the year, but in this particular case, it refers to Scooter.

They couldn't find anything wrong with him. Joyful joyful!!

He still wouldn't eat much when we got him back here, but he also was sneezing. Cats insist on testing food aroma before they will eat it and whatever the systemic illness was, it put his smeller off. He'd eat the smellier treats in our repertoire, but that was all, last night, apart from a syringe-feeding that did not go well. It seems to be slowly improving, and he's now eating odoriferous wet food.

Still not allowed outdoors until we get him back to normal. Not happy, but no lethargy. Grateful tonight.

And just WHEN are you going to open this &$^% door??!

Scooter isn't well

2011-09-04T00:44:00.001-04:00

We spent yesterday evening at the emergency vet with Scooter, the downstairs, indoor-outdoor cat. He had no symptoms except lethargy and refusal to eat. At the vet (those wonderful wonderful people! They open when all others close, nights, weekends, holidays. Bless them forever) they found he had a fever, so we left him overnight for bloodwork, etc.

Called this morning. His fever is gone! and bloodwork is normal. ?? That's good but he still won't eat.

This cat has usually lost a lot of weight when away from us. Maybe he had some run-of-the-mill infection and got over it but can't cope with (perceived) abandonment and confinement.

He's also not young, age unknown, but not young, and the dreaded day will come, however much I say PLEASE, not today. He get an x-ray later, and then I pray and pray we can bring him home.

I can't describe the uniqueness of this cat. I can tell you how he comes when he's called, how he takes walks with us, how he converses and signals and all that, but you'd have to live with him on a daily basis to really get the experience. I've lived with a lot of cats, and Larry with many more, and neither of us has ever met anyone like Scooter. All our cats have been producers of good endorphins during the stress of recent years, but Scooter gets way and gone the most credit.

So here we sit. I decided I'd illustrate this post with the most recent photo I'd taken of him, no matter what it looked like, and this is it, above. Hanging around the upstairs front door begging for attention.

I hate that we can't have him up here with us. I hate that Graymatter can't tolerate another cat, and I hate that the one who most "deserves" full time with humans he's clearly uber-attached to can't live in the house where he'd be safer and live longer just by avoiding the scrapes and bites and little venoms of nature.

He wants to come in the upstairs where we are, but he wants to enter and leave freely, and to roam. He lived outside too long to tolerate confinement. We tell ourselves that. Maybe if Little Gray Lucretia Borgia wasn't here, he'd be fine with it, but that's not to be.

We know people, and know others through media, who provide safe havens for a lot of animals and we've thought, because we love the idea so much, that one of our callings in life might be to do that. Then Graymatter intervenes and I'm starting to realize that, if there is some Great Plan, we've, maybe, been assigned a different version of the job. We can take in fewer cats, but we get "sent" the ones with few other options.

Scooter ... well, anyone would adore him, but he chose here, and seems to like this Best Of Both Worlds situation.

It's Graymatter who'd be relocated from a lot of homes. She's who she is, she can't help her high anxiety and her .... um .... need to assure herself that her space is hers by peeing on anything whose ownership isn't clearly marked. That picture of Scooter shows him outside our front door. He approaches it and yowls regularly, and we sometimes seen raccoon pawprints out there. To Graymatter, that's where Enemies try to breach the fortress, and she has peed on the door so often that the paint is dissolving.

Who else would both give her a home and love her? She might get shelter, but not the kind of enmeshed bond she gets with us, and that she needs, little psycho that she is. We're certainly not the only difficult-cat tolerators, but we're the ones who got the job. And I do love her, with all my heart.

Meanwhile, I'll call the emergency vet hospital again in a couple hours, and see if we can get our little Crock of Gold back here. He's our luck, best we ever had.

The chick in the mirror

2011-09-02T11:51:00.004-04:00

A few days ago I wrote up a major frustration-venting over selling to self-professed "Christian" customers on ebay.

Then I decided, "OK, this was ONE obnoxious person, I shouldn't make a big generalized deal over it and rant away about all Christians everywhere." I got it out of my system, fine, no need to post it.

Today I get another one.

Is two prissy Christians my tipping point? I dunno, but however much it sounds like I'm painting a big population with a wide brush, I have experienced this enough to truly believe it:

A great many people who identify themselves, in largely unrelated matters and venues, as "Christians" seem to feel a massive sense of entitlement to correct and criticize every aspect of others' lives.

First there was a book I labored over creating the listing for, with multiple photos and description, to eliminate the possibility that anyone looking at it could find it deceptive in any way.

Specifically, I listed the condition of a 1960 design textbook as Very Good, which it was - maybe never used, clean, crisp and bright - even though it didn't have its original dustjacket. Jackets survive rarely on those old textbooks, since they got much much harder wear than other one-use reading books did.

A potential buyer sent a snotty sarcastic "question" couched in sweetness, in which she (or he?) talked to me as though I were a small and errant child who needed to be Guided about book condition. Unfortunately, before we had a chance to place a "block this bidder" on her (or him?), she also bid on the book, despite making it clear in her email that she didn't want it as it really was. Now, why would she buy it if...?

Oh crap. She wants the title, midcentury design is very desireable right now, but the cheapest with a decent jacket is $64 and she's given up on affording that, so she'll buy this superior unjacketed copy and then...

This was negative feedback just begging to happen.

We blocked her anyway, but too late, so there was nothing to do but close the listing.

Why exactly I was targeted for this Lesson From The Righteous, I don't really know. While most sellers are using stock photos and pre-filled information, I take multiple photos of important features and flaws, and write up this detailed description that Larry says nobody reads. 8~)

I'm under no illusions about that, but it does cover me. I can point to it and say, "But I said there are spine creases. Clearly. Right there. Line two. See?"

The potential buyer did read it. Her sarcasm was employed in informing me that she was Terribly excited!! to find this book with its dustjacket, because you called it VG so it must have its jacket, yay!!! The sarcasm with which she pretended shock that it didn't have one was pretty obvious. She wasn't misunderstanding.

I do know how to deal with creeps, and I know that it's dangerous to assume that they are not really misunderstanding.

I expressed my Deep Sorrow that my listing had been "unclear" and explained, in equally kind and gentle terms, how book sellers will give separate ratings for book and jacket, so books can be rated apart from their jackets, and how you can get actual information from an ebay listing, by merely reading it and looking at the pictures! It's fun and easy too! No no, I was more subtle than that. Really. But when she wrote again, instructing me again, it was time to bail.

What does this have to do with tightywhitey Christians? Why do I think she set out to Improve Our Walk In Truth by leaving us negative feedback so as to obey Biblical Edicts to Admonish miscreants? In Christian Love? Her user name is (I'll deliberately paraphrase and misspell this) a variation of ChrisstianLuv.

Keep spreadin' the Luv, honey.

Honest, I know that obnoxious people come in all creeds and associations, probably in about equal numbers. Sample any group, whether it's Christians or Pepsodent users or vegetarians, and you'll get x-number of trolls who have some kind of need to claim victimhood, or feel big by correcting others, or otherwise cause battles just because they feel like it.

Then today, the sale of one of my brand-new Bibles, which I packed carefully and securely in protective packaging, got slammed for using the recycled materials. Why the customer cares what the mailing box looks like -- holy bleep, I boxed it and padded it, instead of using an envelope -- is beyond me unless it was intended as a gift and even then, don't most of us order a book, take it out of the mailing box and gift wrap/bag it??

In my librarian days, I was in charge of inter-library loans. We'd get loaners of requested books from the state library or from other libraries all over the country and returns were particularly important. Each customer was cautioned that this wasn't just any loan, it was a trust from a distant library which had no authority in our state/county to get the material back with, and that our library could be blacklisted from the inter-library loan system if too many out-of-state loans to our patrons disappeared.

Exactly two non-returns happened on my 10+ year watch. BOTH procured for church matters or activities. In both cases, the borrower took the dismissive attitude that God's Work made return unimportant, and we could go jump.

Christians are assuredly not any more obnoxious than are others, but there's one difference. Other groups don't seem to think that the group itself issues the blanket license to assume authority over others.

A specific license? Sometimes, sure. Vegetarians can cop an attitude about animal welfare and food matters, sewing enthusiasts will critique garment workmanship.

But blanket license? The belief that their Fight For Truth applies to every single aspect of other peoples' work and lives, and that they are called by Jesus to correct posture, parenting and purveyance of ebay goods? I'm seein' it.

While internet selling is a good choice for someone with a thin skin, I still let them get to me on occasion. This has to be about my inner peace. I joke about Opportunities for Growth and how annoying they are, but the advice I want to give these complainers, which is "Start with the person in the frikkin mirror!" applies to me.

Whatever motivates these people -- and this is one stressed-out society right now. We've had more complaints in the last 3-4 years, in relation to vastly fewer sales, than in the whole 1998-2007 stetch on ebay before that -- but whatever motivates them, I have to do my best and then quit caring. I did well by the customer, with secure packaging, timely service and a good deal, and I have to turn him over to whatever version of Higher Power he's into.

Does this sound like something I should have learned many decades ago? I did and I didn't, because it's one of those lessons that come back and come back and come back and come back.....

The lesson being that avoiding criticism by working overtime to please people (in this case, customers) doesn't solve my inner problem of a thin skin. It reduces the number of occasions on which I have to confront it. It's my job to thicken my skin.

Larry pointed out a unique feature of life in our times that I hadn't really thought about. In selling, or any interaction done online, we're not just dealing with the bad (or good) personalities in a limited geographical area. We're dealing with them all over the planet, and maybe in higher percentages. Just as I like to protect my too-thin skin by putting online access to me between me and the buyers, unhealthy personalities can also find the internet protective. They can lob their stinkbombs over the fence and run away unseen.

Which is why the problem always -- always -- comes from a customer whose displeasure I wasn't expecting. Always. The ones I worry about? Never. The ones I think would have absolutely nothing to find wanting?? It's them, every time.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-27T20:20:00.003-04:00

Hurricane Irene a video by nickelshrink on Flickr.

Apologies for the oversized screen - I cannot seem to change it manually.

One minute of the storm, August 26th at about 4:30 PM.

The marsh (yes, this is the marsh, not the ocean!) is submerged by the storm surge! Seabirds are screeching there in the sound portion - there were lots of them swooping and diving as though they were having a great time.

And to think - we got off easy.

Craving Christmas

2011-08-20T14:32:00.001-04:00

Our tree 2002

It's August and the Christmas catalogs are starting to pour in. Most years, they irritate the bejesus outta me. Tacky, ridiculous stuff and besides, it's still summer, etc. etc.

This year, for the first time probably ever, I keep feasting my eyes on them, not so much on the giftable goods as the Christmas cards, with their images and their messages.

This craving has a bunch of reasons, one being the relentless heat and mosquitoes. I crave fall and winter. I'm even sick of thunderstorms, which I usually love. Our recent lightning strike shook my storm enjoyment. By the way, it fried every smoke detector in the house, necessitating a full set of replacements.

My grandmother's childhood ornament string, circa 1910

Another is that it's been so long since I really experienced Christmas that I miss it. Last year was something to get through, and actually, the year before wasn't much better. Dad's only brother died and we took a difficult trip in an ice storm to the funeral on December 17th 2009, with my very frail mom, so the next week was recovery and grieving. Christmas 2010 happened and happened well but it didn't happen in my heart, just in cars, shops and rooms. I'm feeling more ready to love Christmas as a way of sharing something with people in my past as well as my present. I need renewal. I feel like I'm running on empty, just over halfway through the year.

The cards in the National Wildlife catalog are a mental vacation. Quiet idealized woods and cottages in snow, little birds puffed against the cold, sparkling lights spattering out of windows at dusk, peace on earth, wishing you peace, let there be peace....

The pre-written lines on the cards ... Well, let's just say that they're exercising my brain. I have the leisure at this time of year to think about what they say and how I feel about it.

"Season's Greetings" is the one I hate. The only one. It's a venerable meaningless sentiment, having been around for business-networking-decades before the culture wars bled over into Christmas.

I'm OK with "Happy Holidays." To deny that there are other holidays is silly. The statistics as to how many more people celebrate "this" one over "that" one mean zilch. It's not a majority-win-all issue, and I fail to see how anyone could embrace the loving spirit of Christmas without liking the idea of wishing happiness for others who aren't interested in Christmas happiness.

"Happy Holidays" is a good thing to offer. "Season's Greetings" is emotionless, soulless, so robotic you can smell the machine oil of the "Don't really care if you're happy" thought that lubricates its dead gears.

But I do Christmas because I believe in it, and that means that the reason I send cards is Christmas. And the reason I'm glad others find something joyful in the turn of the year is that it, I certainly hope, gives them not just happy holidays, but renewal for the year. Strength for a full-year's journey.

So, I guess the next category of card-sentiments that I don't like are the ones that say only "I wish you a wonderful season." Just the season?

Honestly, just me, but I'd get a better holiday that provides a little soul-sustenance year-round.

I need to like both the art and the message. This one (below) has a good sentiment (which you need to click it, to read).

If only the art didn't look like somebody found a distant planet on which all life had been scorched off by a gamma-ray burst, and inexplicably planted a church there.

Last but maybe best is rediscovering a gift I got long ago.

Beyond Sing the Woods was given to me by my writer-grandmother, when I was about 16. I couldn't get into it then. I picked it up again a couple weeks ago and have been Wowed. Some gifts wait till the right time and this was the right time, most certainly.

Beyond Sing the Woods has rich, glorious Christmas scenes. The novel takes place in a vague era that's probably the late 1700's or early 1800's, and the goods and food are varied and opulent, but the power in the festival comes from something more nebulous than that opulence, and gift-giving is practically an afterthought. The feast renews an awareness of something higher, especially in the poorer residents too careworn most of the year to think long about the beliefs that they do hold.

The book is filled with visions of the new added to, or built onto, the old; the new 18th century house, attached to the older hall with its heavy leaded glass windows and its multiple generations of weapons and ironware piled back in the shadows, and, opening off of another room and still older, the house from antiquity with its hearth in the middle of the floor and smokehole in the roof. The past isn't gone, it's encompassed in the new. The rituals have tied past to present since memory began.

I'm craving cool weather and time outside, and the short days that ease into night. And gifts are good, I like gifts when they're in proportion to the purpose of the festival. There has to be a way to give, without gift-giving becoming the disproportionate thing it can become, like a bowling ball balancing on a straight pin. I want Christmas for the connection with people in my past, and connection with people who will remember our Christmases when we're gone.

Our power company is teh awesome!

2011-08-15T19:59:00.006-04:00

At about 7:30 PM yesterday, a lightning bolt cooked our end of the neighborhood. It sounded like it hit our chimney -- the roof sounded like it was splitting, things sparked -- but there's no sign of a hit, and the bolt seems to have struck only outside, a few yards away.

It took out the transformer on our corner, and the absolutely awesome crew from Santee Cooper was out there replacing it by 10 PM. A slightly more cynical friend reminded me that they were probably loving the overtime, and I'm sure that's true, but it was a l-o-o-ong hard day for those guys, storms and similar strikes all over the place. It took 3 huge trucks, two with cherry-pickers. I took the picture at close to 11PM, from the front porch, where we stood and watched, having read with booklights for 3 hours and not wanting to run down any more batteries.

By the way, it made me decide to get more booklights that take ordinary AA batteries from now on. I have a charger for rechargeable batteries. Most booklights that they sell now use those expensive, non-rechargeable, little specialty disc batteries. I've got one light that's out of commission because I carefully opened it, got the battery number, bought one, got it home, and found that the little %@$-d needs TWO of the bleeping things.

We still had a fried modem and no cable, which took another day to fix. I spent the day reading and -- I amaze myself! -- sewing. I loathe needles and thread but it was an undeniable shoutout from God/The Universe/Opportunity, to do several annoying clothes-mending jobs that have sitting for years.

It could have been a lot worse.

I could dust something off...

2011-08-11T14:44:00.009-04:00

I have a bunch of drafted posts waiting to be rewritten into publishable states. But I'm not going to work that hard. Instead, I'll ramble.

My novel is also stalled. All it "needs" is proofreading that I've realized I'm incapable of doing because I'm too familiar with it and my brain just slides past goofs. I put "needs" in quotes because my opinion of the basic story, characters and execution is merely that of the author and not sufficiently objective, so my belief that it needs only proofreading could be total brain-goo. I'll be hiring a real editor when I can afford it, but not before.

My review of The Dry Grass of August (which I wrote about on this blog awhile back) is now up, on the book blog.

So is an overlong (but I cut a fourth of it!) treatise on women in the 1920's, as depicted in a few popular fiction books I know of.

I haven't been announcing book blog posts. A new one appears on occasion.

I'm finding Real Life hard to write about lately. Mostly because its uneventful, and that's very very good. Enough with Events. It's not a terribly happy time, but actually, a good part of life in some ways. This year+ since Mom got sick has been, and keeps being, an Opportunity For Growth.

I'm fed up with Facebook. I post only selectively, and post links to articles or fun things only if I really think they're interesting to a wide swath of my "friends" but get practically no indication that they were seen. And I've realized what most people -- really, I do think it's most -- use Facebook for. Their egos. They amass 200+ friends and immediately click each one and choose "Hide all posts by soandso." Then they themselves post, and bask in the "likes" and attention and discussions they spark, but care not a bloodyblue screw what you have to say if they are not the center of attention. A website that used to tell you who had your posts blocked has been taken down. Man, them facebook moguls sure have got some kind of far reach. So FB has become the ideal way to

A. promote yourself, I guess. Unless everybody's blocked you.
And...
B. claim your friend list is terribly diverse, while you make sure you never hear anything you disagree with.

Facebook is a major player in the complete divide that's happening in the U.S. No information sources for the general public, just a batch of resources each dedicated to their own viewpoint, and to making sure their members preach only to the choir and act as good choir-members to others they already agree with. Facebook has brilliantly managed to become a way to be a source for all sides while letting each member silence all diversity and stew only in his/her own pot. You can hear only liberals, or only conservatives, or new-agers, or atheists, or fundamentalists, only whatever you're into. No wonder it's taking over the planet.

Plenty of other topics coming, when I get them ready.

Peanut-free Sesame Noodles

2011-07-26T15:18:00.002-04:00

Cook, drain, and cold-water rinse:
8 oz. of your favorite pasta.
I used whole wheat.
GLUTEN-FREE rice pasta works OK, has a more brittle texture.

Mix - in a medium bowl that will hold the entire recipe:
3 tablespoons of Sun Butter (sunflower seed butter)
2-3 tablespoons of sesame tahini

Microwave the seed-butter mixture about 30 seconds, till quite warm.

Whisk in:
2 tablespoons Tamari sauce
2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 teaspoons powdered ginger

Add the noodles, mix thoroughly to coat, and chill.

Yummy, if you like this sort of thing!
Better than they look in that photo.

Eden

2011-07-24T13:12:00.001-04:00

I had a craving for sesame seeds for some weird reason. Cravings can sometimes be a nutritional need asserting itself. Sesame seeds are full of great nutrients, especially a broad spectrum of B vitamins.

So this is a What I Had For Lunch entry -- kind of. I could satisfy both my acute craving for the seeds and my ongoing love for fruit-and-protein shakes.

As I looked at the luscious delights piling up in the mixing bowl, I had this strange, kind of awful and kind of wonderful realization : I live in Eden.

Or rather, I live in a privileged position in a privileged society in which Eden is brought to me in trucks. This morning's paper headlined the latest food crisis in Somalia and, for that matter, right here at home people are living in the woods of the state park and -- we hope -- seeking assistance from food pantries. There's one at a church right down the street.
I, on the other hand, can decide I'm in the mood for sesame sticks and blueberries and bananas and this delicious sweet vanilla protein powder, which makes a sugar-free fruit shake that's killer-wonderful. And things I wouldn't even know existed if I lived here 50 years ago, like acai juice. All I need to do is load a grocery store shopping cart. And pay for them. Which too many people can't do.

How men solve clothing problems

2011-07-22T18:01:00.003-04:00

So since we're moving furniture and boxing up stuff, finding one's belongings isn't an instant process right now.

Yesterday we worked up until 10 minutes before we had to leave for a lunch appointment. I had to find a shirt in a color that would not look poisonous with the capris I had on. NOTHING worked, minutes ticking away. "I can't find a shirt that will go with these!" I yelled.

Larry answered instantly: "Black! White!"

"Don't have either!" (Findable at that moment)

"Gray!"

"Yes! Got it!"

Men are great outfit-simplifiers. For every problem, one of three answers will work. Black. White. Gray.

Another day, another mammal

2011-07-17T11:47:00.005-04:00

If I posted an entry about every raccoon we capture and transport, they'd all look pretty much the same.

Bright eyes reveal a look of suspicion and contempt. This one had an air of resignation:

Raccoons are also smart enough to eat the food rather than letting the fear of their predicament kill their appetite. "OK. Gonna be in here for unknown amount of time. Might as well enjoy the meal."

The release spot we've been using for a couple years now:

And usually an exit so fast I can't even get a photo:

Yet another spew about juries and verdicts

2011-07-09T19:46:00.004-04:00

Since justice isn't a topic I've written much about, I don't mean that this is another spew about it from me, but another in the massive stream of reaction to a recent case that dominated the news.

I did not keep up with the case and haven't clue one about it. This is about being a juror. Already, in this morning's paper, a microcephalic rant appeared from someone with the phrase that we hear, over and over and over and over and over......

"Everybody knows....." A phrase for and by the unthinking and ineducable, a phrase that has shored up a million wrongful accusations, reputation-destructions and wrongful deaths.

That particular proto-hominid insists that "everybody knows" the child was smothered. He obviously has no concept of evidence, proof, legality. And as for understanding that belief and knowledge are not the same thing - I doubt he's capable.

I was on a jury once and it's one of my most miserable memories, and not because it was any life or death matter, but because I was incapable of doing the job, and because the other jurors were too. My faith in the jury system went completely to hell after it.

It was a drunk driving case. We were a jury of six.

I was newly sober and as stupid as the arrogant, crusading, newly sober can possibly be. The other 5 jurors -- all 5 -- were ready to acquit.

I was a shy, follower type. But I was full of self-righteous condemnation of all who weren't as Marvelous, Special and So-oh-oh-ber as Superior Me, and was practically drunk on my rarely-felt power to persuade. I convinced all 5 of them to convict.

No need to tell me how many people drunk drivers kill and how the conviction might have been the wake-up call the accused needed.

No need to tell me that however bad my judgment was, I was judging to the best of my pathetic ability and that was what they chose me to do.

No need to tell me that, to reiterate, I did not volunteer for duty or for the case, but was chosen, coerced by law to do it at every step.

No need to tell me that if the others disagreed, their failure to stand up and say No, I will not convict is on them, not on me.

I get all of that.

The guy could have been guilty, but it was a borderline case with no proof and no real evidence except a timetable of what he ate and drank in the previous few hours. I had no business Saving the World with a conviction that was inadequately supported. Maybe I stumbled into an accurate verdict and maybe the Anthony jury did too, but in both cases it had to be about what was adequately proven, not what was likely or what "felt" right.

I was a crusading jerk, and the other 5 were spineless and uncaring jerks who just wanted a consensus so they could go home. It was a Perfect Storm of Category 5 Jerk, and something desperately needs to change about the jury system.

As I said, I didn't follow the Anthony case and don't feel entitled to any statements like "I think" she did or didn't do it.

But I did learn something in the past, about the huge honking difference between

"maybe,"
"probably,"
"most likely,"
"she's a horrible human being"

and

hard factual evidence
that answers the questions
beyond reasonable doubt.

I have no solution to stupid juries, and I'm not convinced that this was one. The little that has come out sounds like they were conscientious and serious about their legal responsibility. If the system fails, the jury gets blamed and I'd want to stay anonymous too if I'd been on this one. The system failed when I was juror, and I still feel the weight of the responsibility. But I do know juries of carefully chosen morons are too frequent, and that something oughta be done.

I wouldn't call it my "solution," more like my vague thoughts, but I'd like to see much bigger juries, selected more randomly, but from trained -- trained -- people, and verdicts that do not have to be unanimous. Which does not mean convicting on 51% votes. Two-thirds or even 90% to convict could be required.

Or not. Could it be worse than this system? Yeah, my smart readers will probably think of scenarios in which it could, scenarios I haven't even thought of, but my experience instilled in me a horror of the system as it "works" now.

In which we discover that rearranging the house is as much work as moving out altogether

2011-07-06T16:31:00.001-04:00

I'm time-challenged right now because we're shifting things in our house.

O yeah? Big deal!

It is for us. I'm sure it's obvious that we live in a nice house, but what's not obvious is that we live in only half of it, and what we're doing right now is switching halves. It's creating a major weed-out of unused stuff, and rediscovery of forgotten things.

Aw, man. Tower Records was so awesome. Tower dot com isn't the same.

Our Fourth

2011-07-04T13:29:00.003-04:00

American favorites from everywhere.

Great Granddaddy's flag in its usual place - wind is very high today!

Hot dogs from Rochester maker - woman-owned for 5 generations!
Purchased at our favorite Italian deli. (Link goes to their "about us" page. If you click the main page, you get automatic concertina music. You can hit the stop button on that before you proceed. Just a fair warning.)

Watermelon from Georgia USA:

Happy Fourth to everybody.

Burglars and smoke

2011-06-23T13:17:00.003-04:00

Ever come home from the grocery store mid-morning, say, 11AM or so, and surprise a burglar? We did, Tuesday.

Three guesses as to his mode of transportation.

I'd play hard to get with the answer but those who read my blog regularly have probably already guessed.

He came on a bike, with a basket to hold one pack while he carried another slung over his shoulder. Apparently planning to quik-pik his way up the neighborhood.

He parked his bike in the driveway, in a position that made a good compromise between hiding it from immediate view, behind shrubbery, and keeping it enough in the open for handy retreat access.

An amateur would have wheeled it around back where he entered, but he'd have had to ride it back out through mushy grass or garden, on a narrow path that could get him trapped and necessitate taking off on foot and abandoning it. Parking it in front looks so "I'm just a thirsty cyclist on a hot day, I have nothing to hide," if it gets seen by neighbors or even caught by the homeowner. He knew what he was doing. We certainly took him by surprise because he was around back of the house, and had quickly exited the garage when he heard the car pull in. He left the garage door pushed open, and we later found drawers pulled open, way off in the foyer.

We have not been locking the garage's patio door because the garage does not allow access to the house, and because the masses of paperbacks and grubby Cabbage Patch dolls, and other unsold goods in there are about all it contains. If the guy had taken the moldy Alf lunchbox, I'd thank him.

And we keep the door cracked because Scooter the cat needs to get his stubborn butt in to cool off, eat and drink. Yes, before you say it, it's time for a locked door with a cat door cut in it. Since the door is steel, and since it's not our house, that's not been a top priority project.

When I spread the word in the neighborhood, I got confirmation of a homeless camp in those State Park woods right across the creek. Always thought it was the ideal spot so that was no surprise.

The woods across the creek, and this neighborhood have obviously always been this near one another, but when park visitors had to walk down a dangerous highway shoulder -- Highway 17 splits right there and cars are whippin' along at the Bypass 17 speed as they enter Business 17, which I neglected to label in the map -- not much crossing back and forth went on. Now the bike bridge makes it safe, easy, and fast.

Larry confronted him in the back yard. The guy seemed to be high but not too high to plan and execute the attempted theft, and to play it nicely to avoid personal harm. He wandered away from the back door with a dumb grin. He said he was just looking for water. Larry pointed out the hose at his feet, one of two he'd walked past. He drank a few sips, asked to shake Larry's hand, walked back to the front with Larry following. Larry said, "Is there any reason we should look in your bag?" The guy grinned dopily, said "eh eh....Nah....Have a good day." He rode slowly off. We checked and can't see any particular thing missing, though it's a chaotic heap in there. I expect he was caught too fast, or found little worth picking, probably both. We did not call authorities. Several people have told us we should have. We'd already decided to lower the hammer in any future incidents.

And then the smoke started. Late yesterday it was so thick that I thought surely the dreaded wildfires are coming our way. This photo lacks the drama it should have, but you should know I took it directly facing the western sun, and the smoke was dimming everything like a blanket.

The pack-and-run anxiety began to build. Then, amazingly, it turns out to be coming from Florida and Georgia.

In the map below, you see Garden City at the top, and that's where we live. At this projection, the map doesn't label Murrells Inlet which is right next to GC, just a little set back, down the inlet. Source of the smoke is a bunch of fires at the bottom of the map. Not good.

The wind conditions have improved the air today. You can still smell the smoke, but it doesn't make me wheeze. This is shaping up to be an interesting summer. I've had interesting summers and I'm really not wanting one.

It's a heartache

2011-06-18T13:56:00.005-04:00

Still photographing and scanning, enough to force me to pay for "pro" status on flickr!

Meet Georgia, and doesn't she look like a pistol!

This is my Great Great Grandmother (1846-1925), date of this photo unknown. I titled it "1890s" but she could be anywhere from her 50's to her 70's here. I'm thinking 60+, making the photo from 1910 or so. There's no telling.

She's my ancestress straight down the female line, my mother's mother's mother's mother.
You can see her three daughters here.
My grandmother (the short story writer) used to tell an anecdote about her own birth. Apparently, Georgia took one look at her newborn granddaughter and said, "Well. She's all Burroughs." Gran did look very like her father, not so much like her mother, who was Georgia's middle daughter, Iola.

It seems that there was more to it. In my journey through old photos, I found a photo of a younger Georgia,

marked on the back with Gran's handwriting:

"She did not like me."

How anybody, much less her own grandmother, could dislike my grandmother at all, much less on newborn sight, is disturbing.

Gran had loving parents and doting aunts and uncles, and an essentially happy life, so it didn't wreck her or anything. She rarely talked about this lady, and the inscription on the picture was my first encounter with the fact that this wasn't just a snitty first reaction, but persisted.

The inscription was written fairly late in Gran's life - that's her handwriting from when she was at least 40+ and looks more like the age 50's and 60's writing I always knew. The fact that she identified her grandmother this way makes me pretty sure that it still stung. She had plenty of love and support, but it's hard not to want people who should love you to love you, or at least for their opinion of you to make sense.

I'll never know what that was about, other than resemblance to the "wrong" side of the family, and maybe Georgia disliked her son-in-law for, again, unknown reasons. My first reaction to the top photo was that this was one tough but witty lady, and maybe that's still true. I'm not sure whether I'd have liked her or not, but I'm pretty sure crossing her wasn't a very good idea!

Candy-coated goodness!

2011-06-15T16:16:00.002-04:00

Over on facebook people are posting pictures of their dads for Father's Day weekend, and it was a good reason to fire up the PC (urgh!), which is the only computer my scanner will negotiate with, and scan this one in.

I love this photo. Dad is the little one, here with his big brother in their back yard. The photographer (my grandfather?) appears to have his camera on a tripod and to be standing to one side, probably snapping the photo with an extender cord hooked to the shutter, whatever those cord things are called.

I rarely boot up the PC. I wrote in 2009 about what a mess it was, and how I'd be doing a "system restore" on it when I no longer need the 9-year-old (now 11-year-old) word processor to work. That time ought to have long-since arrived but the typos and little errors in my novel ... that's a whole other story. Short version - it's only typos now, and I keep thinking I'm just hours away from publishing, but more errors show up.

Anyway, I resist using the PC, so when I do decide to scan something, I make a project of it and do a bunch of stuff that's been accumulating.

All of these should come up large if you click them individually.

I spotted this ad for the genuine original Downyflake baked goods, so I wanted to show yall where our sweet free-floating-anxiety-ridden golden cat gets his name.

That led me to all kinds of great ads in the rest of the magazine, which is the June 1954 issue of Woman's Day and a super time capsule!

This one, I thought of for my occasional posting of comic strip ads. Oddly, just a couple days ago we were in the pet store and I overheard the owner talking with another customer who makes his own dog food. She was saying that too many people who make homemade dog food use only muscle meats, but dogs need organ meats too. So this really is a poor little rich dog :
And oh, the good ole days of guilt-free sugary cereal! Hey, it may be candy-coated, but it's wholesome :

I copied the ad below, thinking, "Wow, lookit those toxic chemicals we used to use..."

Guess what. That stuff is relatively non-toxic (I always think, "relatively") and still used in foggers. It is worth posting just because I had no idea insecticide home-foggers were around that long ago. I sort of recall them from the '70's and used them in the 1980's, in my all-out war on roaches in an apartment complex, but they were available the year I was born.

Not all ads of the era were mockery material. Modess sanitary napkins had beautiful and classy ads, and are famous for not showing the product or using text that explained what it was. If you didn't know, you didn't need them anyway!

Last but far from least -- Mrs. Filbert was an actual person! I never knew that.

Oh all right. The guys wanna see some cheesecake. Fine. Here:

Tinderbox

2011-06-13T13:50:00.035-04:00

Heat, lots of heat, and no rain. Scooter could be in his air-conditioned foyer, but insists on being out in this miserable weather and I wish he wouldn't. He's not young. But he refuses to leave his territory unsupervised, so he moves from shade spot to shade spot. The shade isn't that much better than the sun, especially when you're encased in (rapidly shedding) fur. Stubborn little cuss.

Here's what's going on around here : fire prevention. Maybe "fire defense" is a better term.

Our house sits between two wooded lots. The lot on our west side is right up against the road, and the bike path.

As a treehugger type, I never thought I could dislike a bicycle path, and to do so is selfish of me, but being next to it sux.

What used to be a quiet village road's end, past any village destination points, has become just the most sought-after parking spot ever. People haul their bicycles to our neighborhood by car, park the car, get on the bikes and cycle across the creek bridge to the state park.

That is not a diagram of a tooth. It's meant to represent our house, yard, and driveway. It's not a reliable map. Scale and relative placement are very very ...very... approximate.

There's often a whole row of cars on the shoulder next to the wooded lot -- where I've marked it as a ...um... parking area -- as though we were havin' a big ole party at our house.

They are in fact crashers into our personal space.

For one thing, problems with our service have made us pretty sure some are/were wi-fi thieves. Across the 2-lane paved street is an abandoned development project where cyclists and others also park, and it's closer to our house than my map makes it look. They could catch the signal with a booster, and maybe even without one. Sometimes there's a car or SUV sitting right ON the bike path, as though it were a pull-over spot, and that's so near our house they could get an even stronger signal. Yes, we have tightened security and are now thwarting them.

Many of the real cyclists treat this dirt road like it must be Nowheresville, and leave their cars halfway out into the road blocking a lane. They dump trash out of their car doors. They pee.

I do not love nature lovers. They don't seem to love nature much themselves.

The food wrappers and empty cans are bad enough, but a cigarette butt is something to fear. The drought is becoming a real problem, and those woods are full of dead branches and underbrush. All it would take is one jerk to flick his butt on the roadside. That could start a fire that would take the house we live in.

There's not a lot we can do except to trim trees and brush back and make it a little harder for a fire in those woods to jump our driveway, over to the house. So that's what we're doing, and it's hot, tiring work. Such projects are for cooler weather but now's when we need to do it.

It takes this lovely new lethal weapon, an extension limb saw with a nice pruning shear attached. Larry used the saw on a couple limbs, but the pruning shears are so sharp that they take fair-sized limbs down, so we mostly used those. A professional with a truck is going to haul all this material off for us.

Along with the heat and the exertion, we're also doing this job during (augh!) mosquito season, but let me recommend these nice plants:

As patio plants they do a pretty good job of discouraging the little bastards, and even make a nice natural repellent to rub on yourself -- though if we each took a leaf every day, the plants would be denuded fast, so I'm still using the nasty chemical repellent, and showering it off right away.

Literary Wow on a personal level

2011-06-05T14:42:00.004-04:00

I'll be writing about this novel over on the book blog, and may even cannibalize a few paragraphs from this entry, but the personal side of my reaction to it goes here.

If you've ever felt that the segregationist South of the 1950's was a place beyond your comprehension, you might find yourself feeling a little less so after reading this novel. It takes you there. Then again, you have every reason not to want to go there. It is not a nice place.

The title, as much as the cover, attracted me in the bookstore and I discovered right away that it took place within walking distance of the house in which I grew up, and only a handful of years earlier. The family in the book lives a few streets away from the street I lived on. The daughter bikes to Freedom Park, which I did too. It's like, the stage sets of my life: the towering shade trees of the avenues, Ivey's and Montaldo's stores, the Manor Theater. Having a house next to Sugar Creek, and knowing that the springtime creek rising will soak the back of your lot. My (later) high school's marching band plays at local events.

The author is a decade+ older than I am and knew a more rigid version of the segregated world, but not by a huge degree. And only in its laws, not in its social divisions, which had changed very little by my childhood of the 1960s.

Jim Crow laws were banished by the time I had a semi-thoughtful awareness, but, predictably, attitudes changed a LOT more slowly, which kept racial divisions alive and well for years and years. The same old system dies hard and isn't gone yet. Separate neighborhoods, little shared experience that wasn't engineered by school desegregation laws, a distinct us-and-them feeling.

By my era, school integration was beginning, and it was perfectly legal for all races to sit down in any restaurant, or go to any movie theater. We knew the old laws, but we were so young that anything a few years back was "the olden days." Often, a few African Americans were at another table at the restaurant, or at the drug or department store, and we found it normal. They were such a small minority of our daily experience that it reinforced our feeling that they had their own world.

In fact, the author has her teenage character go to a movie at the Manor Theater and walk home, and doesn't mention the unspoken rule there, even in my time - blacks sit in the balcony, whites sit downstairs. That gradually deteriorated and by my teen years, I could sit there, which I'd always craved doing. The theater still operates -- along with the neighborhood, it kind of morphed into an indie film place, now a Regal cinema but still given to "films" more than to movies. The balcony doors are locked, or were every time I visited in the 1990s or early 2000s.

At about age 10 -- and I have no idea what the occasion was -- I was dumbfounded to see a pleasant middle class black neighborhood in Charlotte. It might have been on a multi-den Girl Scout activity of some sort (?), held in various Scout meeting places around town. I have no memory of the occasion other than the discovery that there were African American neighborhoods that looked basically like our white neighborhoods. Someone's pretty, classily dressed mother, obviously on car-pool duty, was ushering her little girl charges into her station wagon, and it was all I could do not to stare.

I knew some desperately poor whites, especially in the farm country my grandparents lived in. I honestly thought that "we," the whites, lived a spectrum of poor-to-rich, based not on race but on various unrelated factors. And that "they," the blacks, were uniformly poor and did low-pay domestic work or manual labor.

That's the society I grew up in, one in which black professionals and middle-class families had an entire other universe that ours rarely saw. It was no leap at all to the realization that this part of town not only existed, but that it must have been existing all along. Well, duh. But it shows you how completely dis-integrated, in every way, southern society was then.

The Dry Grass of August takes a white girl of 13 who lives in a nice house in the Myers Park section of Charlotte, through the racially violent and ugly South of late summer 1954. The racism is a spectrum of its own, semi-literate, violent and deadly in the deep south towns the family drives through on a road trip, but neat and cordial and evil in a different way, in the "decent folks" society of the 50's suburbs.

(Publisher's promo video):

When I write a book-blog entry about it, I think (!) I can be objective about its literary merits, but it's entirely possible that what would have seemed like just a really good book to me otherwise, will take on superpowers of literary importance to me because of the sheer "me me me!" thing that's going on. Not the plot, in which 13-year-old Jubie encountered horrors I never knew existed till I was much older, and not the family dynamics, which have no resemblance to mine, but the outside world that Jubie is reaching into and absorbing. This is where I'm from.

Drought? What drought?

2011-06-02T15:35:00.003-04:00

Story after story comes through the news of storms and floods, not that we want tornadoes or flooding, but they aren't happening here. We're bone dry. It goes on for weeks, then we get a brief spell of rain but it changes nothing. More dry weeks come. The water table is down, the plants dry up, the animals suffer.

On the rail you see a Lean Cuisine [TM] container with water in it, which I put out for a poor black and lethargic chameleon who hangs around the front porch. He drank deep and greened up in a few hours, and I've left it there as a chameleon-spa. With the container plants we've put out, it's a popular reptile resort now. A light color container would be better, and I may rummage around for something, but I grabbed what I had, since the poor little guy looked like he was hurting.

The cactus photo is kind of a cheat though. Yeah, that cactus is thriving here, next door in my dad's vegetable garden, but not really because of the drought. Coastal SC actually is cactus country, sort of. 4 years ago, that one appeared after a high tide, washed out of somebody's garden, or...something! He planted it right there, for fun, and 4 years of winters and rains and an occasional snow haven't bothered it.

Then last summer, during THAT drought (!) we saw this cactus, which appeared at the end of our driveway by the utility pole, source unknown. It's still there, but we want to transplant it. We just don't yet know where.

I know many of my readers are sick of wet weather, not to mention violent storms. We'll take the rain off your hands. If necessary, we'll take a nasty storm, though that's possibly a "Be careful what you wish for" declaration. Our one tornado scare a few weeks ago had me filling bottles with water and putting family photos in a zip-lock, then stashing it all to take to the basement and hunker down. And it's staying handy.

But I've stayed here through a Category One hurricane and that was no big deal, so a couple tropical storms sound really really good to me right now.

Raging against the machine

2011-05-31T20:50:00.005-04:00

I repeatedly say that I'm not a nice person, but, nasty as I am about feedback whiners, I have to say that I am a LOT nicer than the sellers who withhold customer feedback in order to do their own feedback-hostage-taking. Some do, and won't leave it for a buyer unless the buyer's praise is safely posted.

And while it's not right, I understand it because sellers have almost no power anymore. We can't give the nastiest buyer a low rating. If sellers use that weak leverage to get their rating a smidgen higher, it's little enough.

The fact that we get to deposit the buyer's money before we send him anything is not as great a power as you might think. Buyers can still ream us.

A favorite thing is to pay for the paperback, receive it, claim that it never arrived, and demand a refund.

It's a tactic for small items only. The seller --- OK, we make very little money on a 1.98 paperback, so giving 75 cents for delivery confirmation isn't worthwhile, and increasing the shipping cost to cover tracking bumps our item way down the list for a potential buyer. Buyers appreciate us for our real-cost shipping, and pass over some flat-rate-$3.50 shippers to buy from us instead.

We can clearly state that we take no responsibility for packages lost by the PO and that the buyer should arrange for tracking or insurance.

That's pointless. eBay eliminated our ability to put confirmation or insurance on the invoice, even as options. Some sellers were abusing it, taking the money and running, and maybe there was no other way to stop that, I don't know. But the level at which buyers can rip off sellers is centered on small sales for these reasons.

Here's the thing that I'm having trouble doing the Serenity Prayer about:

Our gold medallion as a "Top-Rated Seller" is gone again. Last year I wrote about how we lost it for awhile, over an anonymous buyer complaint, and regained it fairly quickly, but now it's gone, probably forever.

Only this time, it isn't because our ratings have fallen. They've gone higher. They're the highest we've ever had.

Turns out that "Top-Rated" isn't just about ratings. You have to make enough money to attain Power Seller status. That unrelated factor -- income level -- makes you ineligible to be ...um .... to be top rated. Even if your buyers adore you and your ratings are through the roof.

It's wrong. It deceives the buyer. You search for, say, copies of Jane Eyre or something. The list appears. Gold medal sellers' copies come up first.

You notice that some gold medal sellers have scores of 98 or 99. But a seller with no award, and low on the list, has a score of 100%. To a buyer, the fact that the 100% seller has no medal means something. Logic indicates that there must be some factor on which that seller, despite the 100% score, is displeasing buyers.

You think. But you're wrong. That's a small seller, who's making lower profit for eBay. eBay can deny the seller the reward associated with the medallion, and take a higher percentage of that seller's profit. The small seller is pleasing customers but eBay really doesn't care. It cares about the money that comes in, and only that.

They could at least rename their medallion something honest, like simply "Top Seller." To claim it's awarded for ratings is a lie.

This is why feedback means a lot to us.

In a way, it seems like it should mean less. The greatest ratings in the world won't get us "top rated," and it's, of course, self-perpetuating. We sell less because we're lower on the search results, or because we appear to, in some mysterious way, give at best unexceptional customer service.

I expect it's gone forever, and I also expect that we should hang it up. We've been there 13 years, we've outperformed most sellers, and yet we're considered, in some way, a drag on their enterprise.

But we own a lot of inventory, so winding down the business would still involve selling off stuff. Going back to working for others..... well, getting hired at over age 55 is near impossible, and we have an established business and an established, long-term, and fabulous, reputation.

Quitting is always an option but until we commit to going or staying at eBay, I want that high rating because it now is the only thing that makes us stand out. And I skirt the edge of debasing myself to get it, and I blow off steam here where I can.

I won't feel too terrible about throwing my fits here. This is only part, but still, an important part of my life, a frustrating experience of watching a business that for awhile earned us a nice living go downhill and not only affect our income but threaten to deprive me of doing the one thing I'm best at, which is matching books with readers. The blog might as well show it, warts and all, but other topics are on their way. Really.

Dear feedback whiners. SHUT it.

2011-05-31T10:01:00.005-04:00

Honest, eBay customers who gasp their outrage that we have not left adoring feedback for them, within some timetable they have in their little heads, get a nice, friendly response. Really they do.

Some seem not so much outraged as truly worried if they gave us a good rating and we didn't reciprocate IMMEDIATELY, and I alleviate their worry with kindness and a casual mention that many big sellers have automated feedback service that spits out a return compliment the instant the received feedback posts. Those automatons make life a lot harder for the manual operators like us.

But, while I am not a nice person, I am not self-destructive, so I'm also pleasant and courteous to the obnoxious ones. I can't actually answer feedback whiner emails with anything like what I really want to say, so I get it off my chest here.

Man, we really need a vacation.

--

Dear moron.

We are in receipt of your demand that we leave feedback about what a swell buyer you are, and that we do it right now.

The answer is that we DO leave feedback for buyers, ALWAYS.

And we do it whether you leave feedback for us or not. It is not contingent...

...wait. That may be too big a word for you. Let me dumb that down some: It is not dependent on your leaving it for us.

Well, we leave it for every buyer, except under the following circumstances:

We do not leave it when buyers insult us. And;
We do not leave it when they threaten us.

Here is...

FEEDBACK 101. You're welcome:

1. Feedback is voluntary. You don't have to give it and we don't have to give it.

2. It exists only to help other buyers.
It does make us feel good. We actually care whether our customers are happy.
But the feedback system exists not to warm anybody's hearts, but to guide your fellow buyers as to which sellers are good.

3. It's only a guide to identifying good sellers, not to rate buyers.
You seem to have missed the highly publicized free pass that eBay gave you buyers a couple years ago, so let me enlighten you - there is no such thing as bad feedback for buyers anymore. No matter how you cheat or abuse us, we can't leave you anything but good feedback.

This makes our leaving you feedback at all mostly meaningless.

The one time it matters is when the buyer is very new to eBay and has practically no feedback points. New buyers do need to accumulate a few, so that sellers know you understand the buying process.

But, Holy Guano, people! Years later, when a buyer has, like a hundred or more, it makes no sense for him/her to give a crap about getting his/her little petting session for every transaction.

Here's the End of Chapter Summary:

You are rating the seller as to whether you got good dollar value and reasonably-priced prompt delivery.

You are not rating the seller as to whether he/she stroked your fur and said Good Fluffy.

You are rating the seller to help other buyers.

We leave buyer feedback as a thank-you to customers, and in that sense it does matter, because we really do appreciate them, and if you had not whined "Where's my feedback?!" it would have appeared from us anyway in a few days, with the appreciative tone that we sincerely feel.

So your shrill email telling us that you left it for US three whole MINUTES ago, WHY haven't we reciprocated??!? is a waste of your time, as well as obnoxious.

We will leave it. We do it in batches, so try not to freak out for the next few days and yours will be in the next lot we do. That your self-esteem is jonesing for us to drop everything and do it is bizarre. Maybe you should talk to somebody.

But we will not do it at all, if you hold yours hostage. Emails saying "I will not leave it for you until you leave it for me!" will get us to shrug and say, Be our guest.

Because, see, we care about doing a good job, but we really don't give a hang that we'll have 4801 feedbacks instead of 4802! Our world will shatter. Not. You can keep waiting and the transaction will time out and we're peachy with that. Capiche?

Your withholding feedback only hurts other buyers, if it hurts anybody.

So hold it hostage. We'd care but we're a little busy over here being vigilant about the condition of our merchandise, about accurate description, about getting you the best shipping deal (which sometimes takes research), and packaging your stuff securely, and addressing it legibly, and hoping you effing enjoy it.

--

There. I feel better now.

My post-apocalyptic cheese sandwich

2011-05-21T19:34:00.004-04:00

Because, really, when the appointed moment for the Rapture has passed, and you look around and find that you're still here, and must face the fact that you are not among The Elect, what else can you do but make a cheese sandwich?

Your halo is in the mail.

2011-05-20T12:36:00.000-04:00

I can tell we're among the ones who will be Raptured tomorrow, because our halos have been delivered. If yours has not, then .... well, I'm sure it's .... it's in the mail.

Detective work on a family mystery

2011-05-14T13:11:00.007-04:00

My grandmother wrote a unpublished novel, and a bunch of short stories that did get published. Holland's: The Magazine of the South, Farm & Fireside, and probably others paid her nicely for her work.

I say "probably" others because she had an almost pathologically self-deprecating tendency to throw away her courtesy copies.

Bless him forever and ever, my grandfather often rescued the magazines from the garbage and hid them away. In 1984, when Gran had passed, my mom and I found them secreted among stuff on high shelves in odd rooms of their house. That's what's left of her body of story work, in the top photo.

The confession stories were the ones my grandmother was the most ashamed of. She said they were trash, and while she wrote them strictly for money, it appeared that she even felt bad about taking the money.

I well knew she was always hard on herself, but this seemed oddly extreme to me.

I tried to figure it out. Even confession stories presented positive enough values and uncompromising consequences for wrongdoing. Hers would be classy, I was certain. Maybe she felt bad about encouraging readers to even buy these magazines and be exposed to the lurid parts. Maybe the whole idea of fiction being sold as fact bothered her. I could kinda see that, and I understood the low status of trashy fiction for the time, but 30, 40 years later she still wanted to erase that part of her history, and seemed unhappy that my mother had even told me about it. What the...?

Anyway, I thought they were lost forever. But my grandfather must have stashed away one of those, too. There are multiple copies of the 2 mainstream magazines that mom uncovered in the old farmhouse, but I had never seen that True Story issue -- the one on top of the stack -- until a frikkin WEEK ago, when I found it in a drawer with the others.

Unlike the others, it's a wreck, tattered and flaking, and it's almost impossible to turn the pages.

But within an hour of finding the one in Mom's drawer, I was back here at my computer, and had bought and paid for a relatively nice copy from an eBay seller! God, the internet is so full of crap and misinformation and identity-thieving and data-mining and utter obnoxiousness..... ARGH, but sometimes it's the best thing that ever was :

True Story - November, 1930!

Now the hard part.

Confession stories, at least back then (maybe now?), carried no author names at all, even pen names. They were usually written in the first person which created an illusion of personal info-sharing. Because they were complete fiction.

While my dear grandfather had enough thought for her legacy to preserve the tattered copy above, he apparently did not go so far as to realize that family 80+ years later would need to know which was hers. Or maybe he marked it on the Contents page, but that page is now missing.

ARGH to the 2nd frikkin power!

Looking through the stories, it's a process of elimination. The $2000 and the $1000 prize stories?

Highly unlikely. If she'd won such a gargantuan fortune, that would have become family legend no matter what she wanted. So I eliminated those two.

Eliminate settings involving cattle ranching or olive growing in Spain. She could certainly research anything but I'm 99 % sure she didn't bother when she could write what she knew, and that was country people and country problems.

Eliminate anything about lust or mobsters, because she would never be un-classy, plus mobsters, and urban settings, weren't what she knew. Everything of hers that we do have was rural. Southern rural, but for confession stories, I won't completely discount a midwest farm story, when the plot concerns the people and not the particulars of plains farming.

The tragic honeymoon story is kind of amateurishly written, plus it's sort of pointlessly dead-honeymooner depressing and that's not her style. Anyway, it's about Rocky Mountains camping.

So I winnowed it down to these two. The Prodigal Son story ....

And the... other one.

And I'm pretty sure it's the other one. The prodigal son story is the midwest farmer one. It's countrified enough and carries her values, AND involves tuberculosis. She'd had one TB scare in real life by then and was always watched for signs of it, so it would be much on her mind. But it's drearily repetitive, and has a long story-within-the-story that's too detailed and mawkish. It isn't well-constructed enough for a novelist whose novel was very seriously considered by a major publisher and was nixed only for being too sad in 1931. She, as should be obvious by now, would never brag on herself, and she's the one who told me that the publisher's letter praised the novel.

Still, maybe lousy writing was the reason she loathed her short story so....

But! this one said "Bingo!" to me as I read it.

Despite its melodrama, it's well-written enough to be kind of touching. The girl who erred is relentlessly Noble, but it's a pretty realistic story about what happens to a woman in the early 1900's who has a baby out of wedlock, and the lifetime of self-abasement she, not so much undergoes (passively), but puts herself through if she's a good woman. And it's about her being a good woman.

Spoilers (because it's a lo-o-ong story in tiny print and hard to scan): Our heroine, 17-year-old Margaret, tells the story of Anna, who comes to keep house for Margaret's family after Anna's baby dies at birth. Margaret is in love with Christopher and comes to realize that Christopher fathered Anna's child.

It takes a few years for Margaret and Christopher to marry, and first they have a very open conversation about it, more honest about life's messiness than stories you'd get in Redbook at the time. The writing is good until the silly ending in which Margaret and Christopher find out that the child did not die, but inherited her long-suffering mother's beautiful voice and became a light opera star. Confession magazines required such Stella Dallas-y stuff and I expect Gran hated writing the big tearful Reveal to give the story commercial edge in a highly competitive market.

Clues that this is her story:

The heroine is the oldest of a brood of kids in a happy family. My grandmother was too. And Gran's youngest sister, about (?) 14- 15 at the time this was written, was surely known by the family to be just such a talented singer as the girl in the story. My great aunt did have minor success regionally before quitting to do the marriage thing.

A minor character has a name that's connected with our family, an unimportant clue except as part of the whole pile of clues. The heroine has to say goodbye to the man she loves for awhile, as he goes off to make a career for himself. My grandmother did this every week while my grandfather was on the road as a traveling salesman. The couple in the story love each other deeply and reconcile themselves to reality. Yep.

Adding up: the realistic yet very compassionately handled subject; the probability that Gran mined some sad local out-of-wedlock situation for her plot; and the melodramatic exposure-of-secrets tie-up at the end, required by the confession genre .....

I think this is her story, and that these are the reasons she wanted to disown it, even though the check it brought in probably meant they could now buy a mule for the farm. In her mind, she'd not only added bad melodrama to sell it, but, much more importantly, she'd used someone's tragedy to make money. I knew her and that would explain it.

And it's still a guess! A good guess, but a guess.

I feel like I spent the day having a long heart-to-heart talk with my grandmother. If this is her writing, both the story and her feelings about it tell me a lot about her. She wasn't proud of herself for this, and I understand, and yet I'm proud of her. And proud of my grandfather too, for being one of those people who preserve history when others think it's trash!

What matters

2011-05-06T20:43:00.002-04:00

You'd think Mother's Day would be hard for me this year, but actually, these manufactured holidays never meant much in our family, and that's a real blessing now. Either you appreciate your loved ones on an everyday basis, or you don't, and all the flowery "get sentimental when the Holiday Industry rings the bell" celebrations were, not ignored, but always pretty secondary in our house.

I posted this photo awhile ago, but here it is again because it's so incredibly rich with what mattered in the home my parents made.

As a family we kind of fit in with the local suburban culture, and kind of didn't. My dad was an orthopedic surgeon, and we lived in the part of town and went to the schools that other upper-middle-class professional families lived in and went to. But somehow, we were a little outside it all and I, at the time, never really noticed how. I felt like my family just had a different style. We got a lot of our casual clothes at Kmart, our cars were old models that looked odd to me. I asked once why our cars were shaped funny and that became a source of hilarity for Mom all her life. But they ran. Usually. One time, the steering wheel came off in her hands when she was doing carpool, causing her to lay her head on the empty steering column in despair for a moment before she knocked on a door and borrowed another mom's car.

We had no stereo. Behind the lounge chair, on the floor, you see our record player. It was a big cowhide-suitcase style portable that they had back in med school days when they lived in one room. We. Ran. That. Machine. To. Death. Mom raised me on American musical comedy with it. She often had light opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, or Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy going on it. When my baby brother was big enough to occasionally be fun -- by about 1963 or so -- we'd play something lively and dance around to it in the den. Christmas music whispered on it for hours as Mom wrote her gazillion Christmas cards every year, and we'd crank up the volume for family evenings during the season and on Christmas day.

A lot of what this photo evokes for me is actually outside its borders, because my memory fills in the rest of the scene. Out of the photo, but probably right next to me as I was taking this shot, was our little black and white TV.

Our kitchen was big, sunny, that "heart of the home" they talk about, but had those old metal-rimmed countertops, not high tech formica but covered with figured contact paper laid down by Mom, which would wrinkle and crud up and eventually get pulled off and replaced.

But we did have this awesome refrigerator * with the carousel shelves.
I loved this thing:

I vaguely knew, but never really appreciated all my father and uncle and grandfather did with their lives. Dad and his brother were in orthopedic practice with their father, who started a service in which they took turns serving two clinics up in the mountains treating poor patients. They made money, but not the kind that a lot of other surgeons made.

So my parents put money into what mattered. In the photo, a random stack of books is there within reach, and that's our home in a nutshell. Books about everything. Loads of history, lots of art books, Peanuts, Charles Addams and Helen Hokinson cartoons, science from astronomy to zoology, and a literary smorgasbord that could be mined not just for entertainment but to grow a mind.

At about age 14 or so, triggered by something I can't remember, I got worried about humanity and technology. About how we'd gained abilities that we maybe shouldn't have. I have no idea what it was about, except that I developed a fear that truth could be overcome by falsehood, Wrong could win out over Right because humankind could fake things so diabolically well. To help me work through that, Mom gave me this murder mystery (this very copy, now quite tattered) :

You'll have to read it to find out why!

Also outside the photo's frame, on the upper shelves next to Mom, are the umpteen sets of encyclopedias they bought, all at once, probably making some lucky guy Salesman of the Year in the process. In one swell foop they got us The Book of Popular Science, Lands and Peoples, World Book, and a short-entry general set called Grolier Encyclopedia. Dad had a globe and an unabridged dictionary on a stand in his den. I could write a report on pretty much anything without leaving home.

The holidays with real family-bonding meaning are going to be hard for awhile, but Mom always found such things as Mother's Day sort of nice but silly, and it mostly evokes a feeling in me that I've got things that can never be taken away, that make me the slightly off-center person that I am. All I can do is be so incredulously grateful, and wish everybody could have it.

---

* The refrigerator illustration comes from Atomic Kitchen -- lots of fun, especially for people my age!

To serve turtles

2011-04-26T13:00:00.009-04:00

Something we've done regularly over the years is to rescue turtles who are misguidedly attempting to cross roads. We're up to about (?) 7 or 8 of them now. Usually, the errant turtle is leaving one piece of habitat for another, and if there's a decent lagoon or patch of marshy wood nearby, we simply relocate him/her to it.

Sometimes the turtle isn't misguided at all, merely desperate. Today's was leaving his now-destroyed home, a former wood on our route to the post office. It's now been flattened for development. I guess the economy is picking up. The turtle did not seem very excited by that. S/he was crossing in hope of finding a new home, but the other side was also no place to be. It used to be a delightful goat farm and orchard. It's now Orchard Acres, or some such development name.

So we placed the turtle carefully in the passenger-side foot-well, where he had little choice but to wait with skeptical patience while we mailed packages, and grocery shopped. At home, the milk did wait in the car while Larry walked the turtle to the edge of the woods, fairly far from the road.

Scooter can be counted on to supervise all activities in his territory.

What the bleep are these people doing now?!

An hour later, no sign of Turtle of the Day, so we will hope he likes it in our local wood.

The thing that is hid bringeth He forth to light -Job 28:11

2011-04-24T15:37:00.000-04:00

I do hope my readers are having a happier Easter than the Big Ass Sandwich Company is having.

This eatery is ... was right down the road in my little town. This morning we got detoured around a roadblock with lots of emergency vehicles flashing lights ahead of us, and wondered what was up.

Turns out the building burned in the early morning.

And revealed some .... undocumented .... poker machines. In the attic. Their charred remains lift their faces to the morning sun.

Oops.

But, really, I mean, it's an old building and I'm sure that some previous owner just left them there in the attic when they became illegal a few years back.

Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

Yard. Work.

2011-04-21T13:40:00.003-04:00

A mass migration of Easter guests is coming, and for some reason, I actually looked at our front yard, as though seeing it through the eyes of a visitor.

AAUUUUUUGH!!

It's hard -- OK, it's impossible -- to stay ahead of weeds in this climate, and I'm really OK with kind of a casual natural look. But it did look like the house of people who've ..... had a rather difficult year. And there were things that I had not only ignored this year, but ignored ever since we moved in 8.5 years ago.

Like the dead fronds on these palm thingies. We actually did not want to trim them the way some people do, which is to denude the bottom each year and raise the new growth by yearly increments until it looks like a tree. But taking out dead fronds keeps the live ones healthier, and so this long not-done job thinned the plants out an awful lot. But that was an awful lot of dead material. FIVE packed wheelbarrow loads. It's not a big wheelbarrow, but, still.

Did some edging with the electric edger. Some other edging work required a hatchet.

Larry had to interrupt our edging program to do a fire ant treatment. The white powder is there on a fire ant nest, to kill them. I really really hate fire ants. Anyone who's ever endured the stinging, itching misery of fire ant bites hates fire ants.

I've cleaned up the paving around it, but this hard-to-use patch of quasi-garden under the stairs will stay as is until we get something that can survive in almost no sunlight. Weeds obviously are OK with it, but the plan is a nice flowering shrub surrounded by rocks.

In the background you see our exciting new doormats! Sprucing up is all work and no play if you can't buy something.

This tree planted itself in the bottom of an unused planter. I don't know what it is, but I like trees, so I pulled it out, filled the planter with dirt, and replanted the tree. A few prunings of its scraggly shoots and twigs make it look more like an intentional planting than like a weed that grew in an abandoned container. I might find something similar to put in the other empty planter. Tomorrow. If I have time. Guests start arriving tomorrow evening and there's lots more to do than that, so we're taking the casual approach.

My muscles are sore, which means I've done a good job. Having sore muscles is like carrying around a clipboard. It means you're really accomplishing something, whether the results bear that out or not!

Joyous Easter to all!

Four

2011-04-09T19:19:00.007-04:00

A quick visit from my North Carolina brother this weekend. There have been many over the past year but this was the first time he came by himself, since the early weeks after Mom died. He had some errands to run and then he and I went to Goodwill to look around. I bought bodice-ripper romance novels to resell and a nice sweater.

Larry thought that Dad, bro. and I should have an old-fashioned family supper, so he stayed home and my bro and I wandered next door. Dad made dinner for us. I asked if he wanted help. He said no. He almost always says no. My bro and I sat in the living room while dinner prep sounds came from the kitchen, along with that early evening golden light that you get when homes come to life again at the end of the day, and the background noise of whatever was on the kitchen TV while Dad worked. I sat with my book. My brother dozed off. He'd been awake since he left NC at 4:30 AM. I couldn't concentrate on my book. I kept thinking, It's like it used to be, years ago. We have parents taking care of things while we wait to be called for supper. When Dad came to door and said "Feed!" we gathered at the table and held hands for the grace ritual and were a family of three, but really, as we held hands across Mom's empty place, and even afterward, we were that family of four.

But I have the soul of a cat and I do not like change.

Not a summer person

2011-04-05T19:37:00.003-04:00

There are people who love summer. Possibly, even, most people love summer.

I admit it's kind of a luxury to have so much of it, and have it so long, that I can legitimately dislike what other people crave through their longer, colder winters. But normal people seem to resemble the following :

(You can zoom this by clicking it, if you like.)

All pretty self-explanatory. Each thing there, you like or you don't like. I don't.

The one item that inspires a rant, though, is flip-flops.

What is this Universal Worship of flip-flops?? Who decreed that we're all supposed to just adore them??

In my version of the feminist era, we took Women's Studies classes in which we studied ancient foot-binding and compared it to crippling pointy high heels, as being ways to hobble and thereby disempower women.

Yeah, 6-inch spiked heels are back but my concern is the so-called "comfy" shoe.

The %&*$ing shoe that has no back. Everything from bedroom slippers (Yeah, those are just REAL warm and cozy) to sneakers is abundantly piled on the shoe department shelf in backless styles.

Play tennis in this tennis shoe. Go on, dare ya.

Flip-flops are the same. An insecure shoe that's under, not on, your foot. Scuff along! Clench your foot with each step, to keep the shoe on. I mean, you're only a chick. You don't want to run or jump, or defend yourself, or chase that purse-snatcher at the mall, or pretty much do anything except be fashionable. In my opinion it's yet another conspiracy by The Patriarchy!

Really, the flip-flop cult has gotta end.

Get really thrilled. I've started a book blog.

2011-03-31T12:45:00.000-04:00

I'll wait here while you go find a container for your joy.

......

I said for years that I had no desire to do a separate blog for each topic I write about. About which I write. Stupid prissy syntax rules.

But lately I've thought ... well, maybe just one.

My whole life has revolved around books, bookstores, libraries, buying books, selling them, reviewing them, and I find I want to praise or rant about them fairly often. Thus, a book blog.

I've put it up, after only 3 days of tinkering, and there will be more tinkering, but there it is. AND it has only one new entry. I copied several old entries from this blog to that one, but my regular readers have already read them. The most recent entry is the only new one you'll find, for a few days anyway.

I actually had second thoughts. I mean, how often will I write in a single-topic blog? At this point - heck if I know! And do I really have much interesting to say about books and reading? But it took a lot of cutting and pasting to set it up, and I hate to have wasted the effort.

Problem is, I'm a classic example of someone whose résumé makes her look like she knows a lot about something, when she really doesn't.

For one thing, I was no English major. Or even English minor. I took exactly 2 classes beyond the required Freshman Comp.

One was on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I actually took that course at the local college in the summer, in hope of using it to meet my freshman comp requirement, but that didn't work. I liked the class though.

The other was a "half-course," brief and for half-credit, on Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Margaret Atwood. Also liked the class, and liked 5 out of 6 of the books, but I could NOT slog through Emma. Emma is actually terrific. I read it last year and adored it, but my barely-formed brain couldn't handle that ThomasHardy-esque sentence structure in 1977.

And that's it for my actual literary education. I've read a gazillion mysteries and an odd assortment of other stuff. Sometimes I don't get around to an everybody's-read-that till late. I read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was 52. Oh, and it was really good. You should read it.

I don't toe party lines. I hate Wuthering Heights. Why it's such a BeeLOVEed CLAssic is beyond me. For once the movie made more sense.

Anyway, I'm a vast sea of ignorance. But I visit other book blogs and sometimes They. Drive. Me. Stark. Raving. Insane. As little as I know, I've realized that there are bloggers out there who read with most of their brain cells asleep. If they book blog, I might as well book blog.

It will include observations on how humanity values and treat books.

Since posting may be sporadic (or may not), to save time for readers who still check for updates instead of getting notifications, I have changed my link-list ...

----> over there on the sidebar ----->

...into that "most recently updated" mode. Blogs will creep down until they're updated, so that you can glance at it as it crawls toward the murky bottom of the list, and skip it till Fresh Deathless Prose shoots it to the top again!

ALL right, TO your corners!

2011-03-23T12:56:00.012-04:00

Let me back in! I'm the Good one,
she's the Bad one, remember??

I don't know what's gotten into our Beloved Cat Family lately, but maybe the change of seasons affects animals in ways that make them feistier, more restless....or something. Our long-ago vet explained the howling-at-dawn behavior: Outside, they perceive animals waking up and moving around, and the daytime species get active. Spring might be doing the same thing. Gearing up the territorial instinct or something.

Graymatter and Downyflake have never had much sibling love. They grew up together from adoptable-age kittenhood, and it was kind of a disappointment to us how little they wanted to do with each other. We mostly blame Graymatter, who is completely intolerant of any other cat she did not grow up with. But Downy gets fed up too, and plots little revenges. Lurks behind chairs to pop out and smack her. Trapped her in a corner of the bathroom the other day, and just lay down. "You can't get past me. I can just lounge casually right here...."

There's been an escalation lately. This morning they got into a yowling, fur-flying thing and we exiled Downy to the porch. Was it his fault? Who knows? He was the one we could catch.

As Downy takes a rest from his protest, Graymatter gets behind the curtain to check him out.

It seems to have helped. As much as The Bitchlet dislikes him, cats dislike change even more, so we let him back in, and she seemed to find having him around a little more tolerable.

For the time being.

Talent optional

2011-03-22T13:15:00.000-04:00

Since my needlecrafting skills are limited to basic stitches and simple squares or rectangles, it was kind of nice to realize we had a real need which called for exactly that skill set.

We have 3 stations in the kitchen at which we deal with making protein shakes, handmixing various things, or making tea. That in turn causes an annoying series of clacking/clanging sounds as measuring cups and big mugs move from step A (ingredients) to step B in the case of shakes and pancake mix (blender). I could get cheap potholders at the Dollar Store, but something wider and thinner than a potholder was called for, to cushion sound but lie flat and accommodate multiple mugs or bigger bowls.

Crocheting this took about 2 hours. Nice, since we'll need 6 in order to have a set to use and a set in the laundry. The yarn is variegated, so no skill was needed to create the color palette. One down, five to go.

Snark that Springeth Green [PG-13]

2011-03-16T14:39:00.008-04:00

On Saturday, July 17th, 2010, we got a morning phone call from NY, that my 85-year-old mom-in-law had been taken to the hospital with congestive heart failure. All day we waited for the next phone call.

But when the phone rang it was my father next door, saying that my mom was going into the hospital with congestive heart failure.

I didn't know what CHF was, really. I would never have believed that my dear mom-in-law would see her 86th birthday (2 months later) much less be back to driving and active life, which she now is. At the time we thought we might lose them both that very day, and Larry and I were basket cases.

We sat in our (South Carolina) ER waiting room with my parents, and we tried to talk normal things like the garden. The Brussels sprouts were doing well.

Mom summoned a smile and said, "Well, your mom will be very happy to help you eat them."

Days later her doctor discovered the MAC infection that was too much for her, and she died on the 28th.

We ignored the Brussels sprouts and most everything else. Every time I looked at those pretty plants, I'd think, "We should think about how she'd enjoy them, she'd want us to enjoy them." It didn't work. Everything went to seed and the gardens dried up into rectangles of dry brown stalks. As I felt a little better it seemed a shame, but at the time, the very thought just reopened the loss. We debated whether we'd even do gardens this year.

So flash forward to mid-February in South Carolina and a couple warm days. And the dry brown stalks have re-greened and are producing little sprouts. Photo taken Feb. 17th.

This seems like some kind of Spiritual Symbolism. You can't say no to The Giver of Life, for Lo! the .... something something [INSERT BIBLE QUOTE HERE].

I'm coming back to life too. And we will hope it's only a phase of my fuller emotional engagement, but i am grouchy as holy hell.

I'm sure no one has noticed. Shut up.

But it does not resemble Biblical doves with olive leaves, and rainbows of promise and renewal. I yell at everything.

Stupid kitchen knives that won't slice an onion evenly.

Stupid [bleeping] gigantic water tank in our bedroom closet taking up a desperately-needed quarter of its space so I have to stand on something to reach teetering piles on high shelves, which fall off when I try to pull something out. Really hate that water tank.

Stupid Facebook's "New Photo Viewer, created because we Luv our members so-o-o much! Or maybe because if it ain't broke, we fix it!" that CROPS THE BOTTOM OFF MY PHOTOS. And claims it doesn't, when I go to the charmingly spelt "help centre."

[Bleeping] giftwrap industry. The giftwrap industry is phasing out flat sheets and the choices are gift bags, which don't pack well when you have to immobilize a breakable, or big rolls, which are holiday-specific, to force you to buy more instead of using the leftovers. And then store them. It's a whole Temperamental post in itself.

Getting angry about spam email is the most pointless of the pointless, but spammers have destroyed what started out as a great way to message, and the more copies I receive of Hookup2nite! and money scams and TARA! wanting to read my palm, the angrier I get. I find myself wanting something very ugly to happen to "Tara." Then I convince myself that since this is a spambot and not a human being, it doesn't harm my soul to wish it. But my Higher Power probably wants me to remember that it's the thought that counts.

Oh, and there's a whole rant I wrote but haven't posted, about a video that subtly mocks and humiliates older women. I want to take the little bastard CameraPerson and ... never mind.

My Craving To Criticize threatens to take me over. I read other blogs (no, none of this refers to you guys who are on my blogroll) and want to write whole long responses full of phrases like "What planet is she on?!" and "mentally deficient puling," and "Praise Jesus! feeling good about ourselves is the cruise-ship to Hell, you tell 'em, honey!"

I know my readers kinda like my snark posts and I'm happy to do them at times, but a constant stream of it doesn't wear well. I'm indulging myself with this post, but believe me, the 10 separate posts it could have been would be overkill. Yet it's all I seem able to write or think lately. I'm really not in the mood for The Examined Life, I have no desire to examine my life right now, I just want to eat chocolate and say swear words, but I kind of need to look beneath it all at the cause.

The real me is a grouch, but I'm also well aware that none of these relatively trivial things is what I'm really angry about.

What am I really angry about? The last half of 2009 I went to 5 funerals in 6 months, including my uncle, Dad's only brother. And I begged off of attending a 6th funeral. The summer of 2010, you know about. The illnesses and deaths of people dear to us have kept slamming us since. Larry's uncle, who meant a whole lot to him, died a few weeks ago. We are wrung out and feeling brittle and I really want to slash God's tires, but I get sent to Celestial Voicemail instead. Your fury is important to us, please hold.

So I blow up about matters either trivial or outside my sphere of influence. That Serenity Prayer again. What can I change and what can't I?

According to grieving literature anger is part of the grieving process, and there's no exact formula as to when you hit that patch. I've hit it. So, at the moment the voice of the turtle is heard in our land and it's saying, "%$*#!"

Introducing Seattle Smallhold

2011-03-07T15:37:00.001-05:00

Please allow me to introduce yall to my college roommate, Rebecca, who has just started
a blog about her urban homesteading experience in her Seattle neighborhood!

I have few pictures that we're both in but here's one pair in which we passed the camera back and forth and took each other's picture, there on the Stephens College campus. Warm spring day 1974.

Rebecca:

...and me:

She's extroverted, positive, and generally kickass, while I'm introverted and a pessimist. Just imagine us rooming together.... 8~) She's one of my favorite people and I think you'll find her blog an interesting read.

Me, Gandhi, and hell

2011-03-03T13:35:00.008-05:00

I've got a bunch of half-written posts, but instead of wrapping up any of them, I run into an attention-getter online and veer off on the Vitally Important Subject of ...

Is Gandhi in heaven or hell?

It's strange to be a nomad who ambles between the secular world and the fundamentalist Christian world. I often feel like an illegal alien in both places, but I read writers and bloggers in both. Those who don't keep up with the fundamentalist blogosphere just don't know what you're missing! .... Yeah, you probably do know, and that's why you choose to miss it, and here I come, ruining everything.

I bet that the, and i'm not being sarcastic, the absolute storm that blew up over the weekend about an upcoming book, was something many of my readers didn't hear a whisper about.

It starts with this video :

...and major writers in the Christian blogosphere, who have books out and big followings, are having this massive discussion about the theology of heaven and hell. Commenters are writing hundreds of comments, some as long as a blog entry themselves, most fairly respectful if adamant, a few quite vicious. A friend's blog sent me here.

I ended up in a wonderland of links. I learned that there is such a thing as evangelical universalism, that arguments as to whether hell exists and whether God would send anyone there aren't all -- there's the question of whether consignment to hell must be eternal, or whether it can be a place that still carries hope.

I learned who Brian McLaren is, and that traditional evangelicals think he's theologically loose and dangerous. One blogger worries that Rob Bell's theology

"not only dishonors God, his Word and his Christ, but could also be directly responsible for some passive church-going people ending up in hell."

You gotta understand, I'm not here to tell anybody which side they should be on in these issues, or even to say that there shouldn't be conflicts over them. Historically, people have been tortured or killed by the thousands over doctrinal points, so to live in an era in which people blog 20 paragraphs, and opponents blog 25 paragraphs, is a great blessing - and a huge leap forward.

It's the claim that these are salvation making-or-breaking issues that gets to me. It's the way they contradict their own belief system.

You either believe you need salvation through Christ's redemptive act, or you don't believe it. If not, then the whole issue is like one of bridge players discussing a rule. You don't play bridge, so you don't care.

The problem is that even those who do believe it seem to think that these other doctrinal points can negate that salvation. In doing that they deny their own theology. They holler "The Bible is THE Word of God!" but over pulpits or keyboards they reveal a bait-and-switch. Well, sure, Jesus said that "Whoever believes in Me" thing, but he was just giving the executive summary. You can't expect it to be that simple.

In other words, they -- not pagans and atheists, but the Bible-believers themselves -- are saying that the Born Again experience isn't the answer after all. They're giving the doctrinal point about the nature of hell unwarranted importance. Does anybody who believes Christ is The One Way also think that someone who accepts Jesus as his personal savior will get burned anyway for claiming those in hell have hope? Such a doctrine is THAT evil, and causes a full-cache dump?

John 3:16 - For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
[TERMS AND CONDITIONS: This offer is null and void in case of doctrinal incorrectness on matters of transubstantiation, free will, predestination, wifely submission, pre-tribulation versus post-tribulation rapture, the eternity of damnation, whether praying to a saint equals worship, the male gender of God, or other clauses which may be added without notice.
[ ]yes [ ]no -I have read and agree to these terms and conditions]

Opinions on theological matters are fine. It’s the claim that this stuff is a critical salvation dealbreaker that gives me a migraine.

Either hell really exists or it doesn’t. If it does, then it’s either a changeable hopeful state, or it’s eternal. My conduct of my life has...what, exactly, to do with the answer? It falls into that “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t move it?” category. Does it matter if i take a stand and it turns out to be the wrong one? Does it say anywhere that failing a quiz on points of doctrine would actually open the trap door and dump me in the incinerator? Why does anyone think it rises to that level of importance?

My daily battle is to live the Serenity Prayer. To try to figure out what I can’t change and what I can and should, and then to find the courage for it. Not only the courage to take risks, but to not get dis-couraged when it seems like my effort is too small to matter.

Which is why I loved this Gandhi quotation (No, I have no idea what quotation the art show incident was about) when I spied this sticker at a booth at the Burlington County NJ Farm Fair in 1999, and have kept it in sight ever since.

So I have to come out of the closet and say, I like this video. I'm interested in the book. Once I read it, I may or may not agree with it, but I've never thought humanity understood what love really was.

Our concept comes from desire and couples frolicking in the daisies and mothers refusing to believe their kid committed mass murder. We don't comprehend the fierce uncompromising cleansing love, that's fully compatible with an equally uncompromising justice. Our concept of wrath, as in God's wrath, has got to be just as corrupted by our experience of human rage and violence.

To require anybody to comprehend God - to comprehend God's love, God's wrath, or eternity itself -- is an absurd thing to ask. To say that incomplete understanding of the incomprehensible is hell-worthy would qualify as downright abusive, if such a pronouncement actually had the power to decide who burns and who doesn't.

But it doesn't, so debate away. I'm going to take some Excedrin and go look at the garden.

Dear Borders - Here's why you're bankrupt.

2011-02-20T15:22:00.007-05:00

Dear Borders Marketers Who Made D's in Biz School:

I love Borders bookstores but there isn't one anywhere NEAR me.

However, when I was visiting North Carolina a few years ago, I shopped in a Waldenbooks, and the clerk suggested I get the Borders Rewards card and I figured, Hey, why not? Once in awhile I'm in a town that has one. You get other deals too! he, smiling, said.

So via email, I have been getting "offers" for years. Great stuff. Jewelry (don't care), discounts on cruises! (do not care), wine (who the bleep cares?!), ski equipment (oh please), clothes, but never what I needed when I needed it.

Till today!

My dear light jacket bit the dust this week. I love it. In fact, I still fancy paying to replace the zipper and keeping it, but it's a little worn after about 7-8 years of 3-season wear, so I thought, OK, need a jacket.

All of my mother's clothes are still next door and Dad said recently that it's getting to be time to find them good homes. I would love to just adopt one of her jackets. Only, I went through everything, and she never wore light jackets. Sweatshirt jackets in the yard, and blazers when she went out, but nothing similar to my late lamented jacket.

Next : the shopping dread. I've been wearing a parka and putting off the shopping. Funny how I used to love clothes shopping and now it's a chore. And I have a LOT of things I both need to do and prefer to do these days.

Today, my Borders Rewards email popped up with -- at last! -- 25% off at L. L. Bean!

You complete and utter jerks.

When I went to the offer, I got a message that the offer was "locked" and that a complex set of interlocking rules and requirements sets the rules for actually using these great offers.

People: There is nothing more deeply stupid than complex sets of interlocking rules and requirements. Give a coupon, don't give a coupon, give a smaller coupon, I give not a damn, but when you play manipulative little games with me, I guarantee you I don't play.

In this case, you wanted me to earn 50,000 (yes, I typed that correctly) points in order to have this offer "unlocked" and I needed to spend the last several years accumulating those points by clicking "offers" similar to this one, hundreds of times. Spiked-heel boots, cruises, wine, nose rings, whatever crap has no relevance to my life, just to get (50? or so?) points each time, as I waited like Rapunzel for the point-accumulation to grow like hair, long enough for your stupid Reward to crawl up and reach me.

"Rewards" is an odd term for this.

Motivating buyers by helping them feel like they're working for an actual reward isn't a bad business strategy in itself. I just got two cool Cuisinart cookware thingies by saving stamps at my local Piggly Wiggly, and I did feel like I was doing something smart and thrifty and getting a payoff for the effort.

But the amount of "kiss our ass one more time for a few more crumbs of points" you require....

Let's just say that I kinda know why you just filed Chapter 11.

Meanwhile, a couple years after I got that Borders card, my friend Catherine (Hi, Cath!) forwarded me a better sale-stuff source.

Shop-It-To-Me is quick, it's easy, you tailor to your own detailed preferences the email offers you'll receive, and the frequency with which you receive them.

Via today's email, they had a nice little Eddie Bauer jacket, not only a third off, but with a free shipping offer.

And they didn't make me do anything more than put it in my basket, type the free shipping coupon code in and pay 'em.

So Borders Folks, I hope you keep going, but I really hope you do better, and fire that section of your marketing department.

Thanks awfully (because it was awful),
RGS

It's good to hear modern rockers sing a traditional song the traditional way.

2011-02-11T17:13:00.008-05:00

I do understand the frustration some people feel when singers put some kind of new interpretation on a standard. This is one of my personal favorites, and I was so glad to run into this version by 2 rock singers who do right by it.

I mean, it has a melody. It has lyrics.

Especially lyrics.

Original lyrics. They were probably never completely impossible to find, but the vast majority of popular singers did a version with the lyrics altered. One commenter on this video actually thinks the nice versions she's always heard were the real thing.

Here it is, original lyrics (mostly) restored by those Great Traditionalists, Rod Stewart and Cher!

And Happy Valentines Day.

I expected worse

2011-02-08T20:14:00.003-05:00

I'm going to go against the tide here. Admittedly, I'm not a football person, and I'm not an any-sport person when the game becomes like an Oscar ceremony that has to be dragged out for a gazillion hours of sponsor time.

But I kept hearing about this performance and so I finally pulled up the video. And thought, "Um, OK, bungled the words." That's both a not-uncommon problem, and, yes, you bet, something to strongly criticize. She's a professional singer and it's not too much to ask for her to learn the words.

Stage brain-failure can happen to anyone. I'll never forget Alan Sherman forgetting the words to his own song ("Return to Camp Granada") on live TV (Yes, that's how old I am.) Anyway, i'm skeptical as to whether Aguilera's flub was stage fright rather than laziness, so, yes, flubbing the words is criticism-worthy.

But the performance? I liked it. If she had not bungled that line, I can't help but wonder if anyone would care.

She did literally perform it, with some vocal calisthenics and emotion.

But I was expecting outright disrespectful histrionics, and all I saw was typical singer-acting to convey the strong emotion of spotting the flag after a hellacious battle. It seemed in keeping with the song.

The idea that the National Anthem has to be sung like a hymn and never "performed" bothers me. It is not a hymn.

I love my country, I live with a combat veteran who knows and feels what the flag means, but in my opinion, patriotism is not on the level with worship of God. And an anthem that grew out of a dramatic event can be, not just sung reverentially, but performed with drama.

That's just me. Her styling and her voice quality came within my parameters for dignity. Close to the edge but not over it.

I'll add that it would suit me fine if the whole celebrity National Anthem thing ended. What a fabulous opportunity it would be for some talented unknown to get this job every year. Half-time has plenty of celebrities. Enough with the celebrities.

Expectations have a lot to do with perception. Something can seem "better" when you were expecting "worse," Everything I've read had me ready for "Let's Do the Time-Warp Again," so that could affect my feeling.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel that viewer perception that the anthem was being treated disrespectfully was also affected by cutaways to players, some of whom were mugging, looking like it was wasting their time, and generally being disrespectful during it.

Anyway, for those who missed it, here it is :

Faces to go with the names

2011-02-03T15:15:00.004-05:00

Back in December I posted "One Hundred Christmases," about books given as Christmas gifts among my family members, starting way back. So now that i've found some photos of the earliest gift givers, I thought I'd blog them. Here are the three sisters; Bell, Iola, and Jessamine.

I never knew Bell, and I don't think I've ever seen this picture before. My mother, bless her! sorted and labeled gazillions of old photos and I'm slowly going through them. Nice to meet you, Bell! Probably a photo from, maybe, 20 years after the one of her little sisters, which follows. She was older but not this much older!

I did know both of these ladies; Jessamine was my great great aunt, and lived to age 92, when I was 18! And next to her, the middle sister, my great grandmother, Iola. She did live to a ripe old age, but died when I was 5 :

Iola a bit later; my great grandparents as newlyweds. Pretty happy, despite her rather glum expression.

Book therapy

2011-02-01T19:57:00.003-05:00

No, this book is not therapeutic. Interesting, yes, but uplifting ... no.

This absolutely charmed me in the bookstore. Then I read it.

It's categorized as a graphic novel, though it has pages of straight-out text. Makes it look like a kids' book which it absolutely, emphatically IS NOT. Graphic novels is the best category for it.

It has a totally cool concept. A discontented young woman roams the streets at night and, one night, encounters a mysterious bookmobile that runs only at night.

It's her own personal magic bookmobile, run by her own personal otherworldly librarian. It contains every book she's ever read. Actually, it has everything she's ever read, including letters, cereal boxes, etc. Only what she's already read, nothing she should, or wants to, or would want to read. Just her past.

Is this an awesome idea? What a great way to get in touch with her lost self.

So I think it's going to be a charming story about...what? the healing power of books? revisiting your past and reconnecting with your old dreams and fantasies, and how that can help you get your life unstuck?

No. It's about how avoiding Real Life relationships and achievements by book obsession, like any retreat from reality, can be sick and destructive.

And though charming, it's not, it is food for thought, which is what a book should be. But, while getting the message, one of my thoughts was, Boy would I write a different story if I came up with this idea.

If it were up to me, the heroine, when told she really cannot just leave the regular world and live in the bookmobile, would buy an old RV and start her own, everyday-life Bookmobile.

And if she didn't go that route, still, I'd have the otherworldly librarian suggest it when she expressed her discontent with her life and asked to stay.

She couldn't supernaturally amass the books of someone's life, but she could stock her 'mobile with all the books that she loved, books that helped her and fed her soul through hard times, and she could set out to help unhappy night-wanderers by finding just the right book for them.

This, of course, is my concept, not the author's. Freedom of speech, right to say what she wants to say, yadda yadda, but I like my concept vastly better.

What I would put in such a bookmobile could be a whole post, but here's where I'd start:

The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse.

I often say that writing a novel doesn't mean I know diddly about literature. It's not modesty, it's the truth, and when I have an impression of some genre or period in literature, I'm likely to be simpleminded in the extreme and to embarrass myself by voicing it, but I'll go out on a limb and say this :

18th century poetry is, like, the Intermission in literary history, where you can take a break between the religious poets and their Journey to Death, and the Romantics and their "My Love is in The Grave" and Life's Fragility, and just go have a Coke and candy bar in the warm light of the lobby.

Sure, some poets of other eras get happy and some get serious here too, but so much of the book is loaded with humor --often deliciously biting humor-- joy, and hope. There's a whole, admittedly "the Titanic is unsinkable," kind of feeling that the amazing discoveries we're making about the cosmos are the beginning of our mastery over pain, wear and decay, injustice and conflict, everything. Life still hurts but there's light ahead; Reason will banish it all.

So far, all that optimism is quite unfulfilled, but mostly, reading this poetry is a joyful interlude.

So I'd certainly have a bunch of copies of this in stock. "Feeling low? Dip into this."

Winter thoughts

2011-01-25T14:33:00.007-05:00

I'm breaking one of my rules for blogging and commenting. I don't post stuff I write when I'm beat from one of my periodic insomnia cycles, and I don't post stuff I write when I have a headache.

But today I have a nasty pounding sinus headache and I'm posting anyway, not because there's anything terribly Deep to say but because this year is weird and so are my winter thoughts.

As a kid I'd say it could not get hot enough for me. That changed a couple decades ago, probably by means of my aging metabolism, but I still was not a Winter Person.

That may be changing. As years of attempts to get the kids attracted to the idea of moving to even a liberal, artsy southern area, have failed, our focus is changing. We're thinking on establishing ourselves back in NJ again, not at all soon, but in time.

When we lived there for 4 years I could NOT WAIT to be back in the south. This past summer seems to have dealt a death blow to my love of summer.

Obviously this past summer was emotionally hard, but the heat was so brutal that I'm not sure I wouldn't have turned against summer anyway after that one. Blazing heat, all day, every day, every errand and outing bracketed by having the life force sucked out of me by a searing hot car, a trek across broiling asphalt, and back again.

Winter has set in and has been as weirdly extreme as summer was. Ordinarily we get snow flurries maybe once every couple years. Snows like last February's are once-in-20-year things. This year we've had flurries with minor dusting three frikkin' times, including my birthday. The picture above is from the first one when it was still a novelty. I haven't bothered taking pictures since.

And in between - true set-in cold, cold that kept the little bit of snow accumulation around in crevices and shady patches for days. Winter Lite for a lot of climes, but nothing that life here is designed for. Cold barn of a house. Lots of static electric shocks, one of my least favorite things.

And I don't care. I like the winter. I think I could get rather into living somewhat farther north. Not way up, not to get buried for weeks and deal with snow in May. But someplace where a nice stretch of winter can stop my feeling that I should be accomplishing this or that. Weather that makes itself the dominant force of the day so that I forget the past and ignore the future and think only about layering, getting supplies in, and hunkering in my reading chair till dinner. I've never lost nostalgia for our wonderful Victorian NJ house, and feel like, if we could have the right house, comfortable, away from traffic noise, set up just the right way for our life, I could love the seasons.

There's a very good, but painful, novel called Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, about a woman cruelly abused and her hibernation-like healing through a long protective winter that cocoons her until she's ready to come back to life and kick some ass. There I am.

It's more of a current thought than a decision, and I know that processing this past year is a part of that and will keep moving forward. But as our future family life shifts north, it would certainly be useful if my feeling that winter can be a friend hung on. This year, it's my friend.

No, actually I loathe the open floorplan.

2011-01-10T13:24:00.000-05:00

Awhile back, Larry and I started watching HGTV at lunchtime, when there wasn't anything cool on the History/Discovery/Nat Geo channels -- or at least, when those had reruns of reruns.

It was a nice escape and it sort of fed my home-voyeurism. I love glimpsing other peoples' houses. Another show on Discovery called It Takes a Thief -- where real former thieves broke into real peoples' homes, with the owners' consent, to show their security weaknesses -- was a lot of fun for the same reason.

So we'd chill with our sandwiches in front of Househunters. On this show, they take real people who are househunting and show us 3 of the places they consider, then follow them through on their final choice.

I figured from the start that home product-purveyors are heavily invested in the network and have an agenda : "Make the viewer want to remodel, redecorate, buy stuff!" That's above-board enough to be OK by me.

But I, really, innocently, thought that this message would be subtly imbedded in a wide variety of home styles. You know, the something-for-everyone thing.

At some point, the dreary sameness of the houses, of the hunters, and of the whole blasted thing began to show. Not long after that, it became distressingly obvious that the show exists not to push products, but to push standardized styles and samey products.

There's alleged variety -- lofts, condos, houses, older and newer developments. But the same sentiments are voiced the same way repeatedly.

The buyers are so coached that watching it is kind of like being one of those Rocky Horror Picture Show nuts who's seen it 4000 times and can recite the scripted lines right along with them. If one more dimwit says the precise phrase "I love the high ceilings and the open floorplan!" my brain will melt.

I won't say that real people never want open floorplans, Like anything else, some like them, some don't. But if you judged by this show, you'd think that caves were all anybody wanted, ever.

Because builders love open floorplans. They can sell you a lot more square footage without forking out to build "outdated" things like full second floors, when a partial second floor "open to below" will let you display Michelangelo's David or the Buckingham Palace Christmas tree, and says trés elégante to potential buyers who've turned their brains off. Or interior walls, with all those tedious things you have to put into a wall, like framework and drywall and paint and outlets and wires and wage-hours and stuff.

Hunters seem unconcerned about the Grand Central cacophony of noise as every downstairs activity -- laundry machines, TV, kitchen clangs and clatters, phone calls -- resonates together. And we mustn't even think about watching our heating dollars waft up into the 18-foot ceiling of our massive Great Room.

HGTV is paid well to try to convince you that this is what you want. When househunters see older houses that still have those terribly outmoded features, like rooms, or, God Forbid, white kitchen appliances, they wrinkle their noses.

And if they see the ubiquitous high ceilings, guhrayuhnit countertops (that's "granite" countertops; they all worship granite and they all pronounce it like that), and stainless steel appliances, they brightly approve these things not as mere preferences, but as necessities.

HGTV has got it down, man, but honestly, when they get a 30-ish-year-old guy to walk into a nice, well-planned, color-coordinated kitchen, look at synthetic countertops, and say, "Those countertops will need updating," it takes implausibility to new heights.

The word, trained into the potential buyers with painful obviousness, is "need." They clearly are told to say, not that they want to update the kitchen, but that they will "need" to. Like a white stove won't cook and a fridge that's not steel won't keep the milk from spoiling.

And we must love open floorplans. Living, kitchen, dining rooms all have to flow into each other like one big Dark Ages Great Hall.

Not.

Give me walls. No matter how much building material and effort you have to grudgingly expend to do it. Got that?

Sweet memories of profiteering

2010-12-27T19:40:00.006-05:00

Every year on this day, I hope to recreate an exciting event of the past. When it fails to materialize, I accept that and move on, but Hope springs eternal. Every year on this day....

I go to the Barnes and Noble site and beeline for the end-of-the-year clearance sale. But every year, I'm disappointed. Because The Big Bible Blowout happened only once and will never happen again.

I'm surprised that it happened at all, and I strongly suspect that somebody got way fired for it. But 4 years ago, an enormous load of super-expensive Bibles got listed in the sale books for five dollars each.

I mean, expensive editions. Not just King James, not just those cheapie "gift" Bibles with stiff paper and cramped print. Big ones, leather ones, study Bibles, modern translations. 50, 60, 80-dollar Bibles. Very very resellable.

I'm a bookseller. I have a Pavlovian drool-response to great book deals.

4 years later I can still feel the adrenaline rush. Copies of the choicest items were selling as fast as I could click "add to cart" but despite a few "sorry- sold out!" notices, I managed to score two shipping boxes of assorted editions.

Then I proceeded to sell them for tidy profits. Every one of them.

This is the kind of crass, Scrooge-like person I am. I felt just a little bad about it, but, as even some of my most Christian friends pointed out, I paid what the seller asked, I stocked what our customers wanted, and I sold it to our buyers at a price that was nice for them as well as for our book business.

Ever since, I check B&N late in the day on Dec 26th or early the 27th. The instant I see the lovely "end of year clearance" banner, I'm on that "Shop now!" button like a duck on a junebug, but never again have they made such an error.

I kind of feel sorry for whoever put premium Bibles in the clearance sale back in aught-six. Not easy to get a job reference after that debacle.

But in my declining years, as I reminisce over the good times, I'll remember the sweet profit I made on Bibles when Opportunity knocked.

I keep telling yall, I am not a nice person.

Blessed Christmas!

2010-12-24T12:06:00.003-05:00

May wonderful things come your way now and through the coming year.

One hundred Christmases

2010-12-05T21:21:00.002-05:00

My great grandmother, Iola, age 8, got this from her oldest sister, Bell, who was 17.

There were 3 sisters. Bell, Iola (the giver and recipient of the first book, above), and Jessamine, who as a small child got nicknamed "Precious" and was called Precious all her life. Iola named her own firstborn -- my grandmother -- Jessamine, and she, aged 7, got this from her namesake aunt.

Again to my grandmother, now age 10, from her own mother.

And another to my grandmother, now age 12, from her mother.

And now we come to my mother, age 1, receiving a gift from Iola who's now a grandmother. Someone in each generation gets the Jessamine nomer. My niece is the 5th generation to have it.

Again to my mom from her grandmother, Iola, whose name has now become "Granny," and is the name I knew her by as well. She's holding a newborn me in this photo, and I do remember her.

To me when I was 9, from my dear godmother.

To me from my mom. Signed by her, on behalf of my beloved stuffed animal menagerie. You'll notice that I was 29 years old. I never outgrew my love for the stuffies, though Hurricane Hugo took most of them.

Books. Best Christmas gift there is.

Quit being so subtle

2010-11-29T15:55:00.005-05:00

I think we're all supposed to get with the program and hop on board with....with some kind of name for today. What was that again?

Wait! I'll think of it. Just give me a minute.....

Bread and Peace

2010-11-29T10:16:00.015-05:00

Universal Prayer
Alexander Pope, 1738

Father of All! In every Age,
In every Clime adored,
By Saint, by Savage, and by Sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood:
Who all my Sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art Good,
And that myself am blind;

Yet gave me, in this dark Estate,
To see the Good from Ill;
And binding Nature fast in Fate,
Left free the Human Will.

What Conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than Hell to shun,
That, more than Heaven pursue.

What Blessings thy free Bounty gives,
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when Man receives,
T'enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to Earth's contracted Span
Thy Goodness let me bound,
Or think Thee Lord alone of Man,
When thousand Worlds are round:

Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land,
On each I judge thy Foe.

If I am right, thy grace impart,
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find that better way.

Save me alike from foolish Pride,
Or impious Discontent,
At aught thy Wisdom has denied,
Or aught thy Goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's Woe,
To hide the Fault I see;
That Mercy I to others show,
That Mercy show to me.

Mean though I am, not wholly so,
Since quickened by thy Breath;
Oh lead me wheresoe'er I go,
Through this day's Life or Death.

This day, be Bread and Peace my Lot;
All else beneath the Sun,
Thou knowst if best bestowed or not,
And let Thy Will be done.

To thee whose Temple is all Space,
Whose Altar Earth, Sea, Skies!
One Chorus let all Being raise!
All Nature's Incense rise!

Please excuse ... a Spatula Gross-Out

2010-11-24T15:11:00.006-05:00

This is sort of a public service announcement, because I never, ever, thought to pop the head of a kitchen spatula off its stem -- I mean, it's tightly on, so I never thought it was supposed to be dismantled for cleaning.

So I tend to assume everybody is like me, and needs to know about this. If, however, you regularly think to clean the post and head of your spatula(s?) (spatulae?), then disregard this notice.

Larry and I were making Thanksgiving pumpkin pie for the family bash tomorrow and thankfully (no pun intended) he did think to pull off the top.

Gross. Me. Out.

This has led to :
(a) using a different one that is all formed in one piece, and
(b) dismantling and cleaning several spatula(s?) (spatulae?).

Hoping that I have not ruined your Thanksgiving,
I remain,
grateful for so many things,
including my interesting and delightful online friends,

Ruth

As video rental stores sink slowly in the west...

2010-11-21T20:10:00.011-05:00

There's kind of a downside to having a home-based business.

Not that I'm real big on social conversing -- it's low on my list of enjoyable activities, below washing dishes. Honest. But when you work at home, you really don't want to use the 'net for everything. It's nice to see a human being on occasion, in, you know, actual stores. It's nice to know our shopkeepers and have them know us, and it's nice to have a town of active businesses, instead of a town of empty storefronts and jobless locals.

So we make our weekly rounds. We've become friends with the people who work at the post office. They know us at the grocery store, and do nice things like honoring my discount coupon, good only on an order of $75 or more, even though my total came up $1.73 short of eligibility. And they know us at the diner and bring me a diet cola as soon as they see me come through the door. Yes, at breakfast.

And we rent videos the prehistoric way. We've been regulars at the nearest walk-in stores.

That's "stores," plural, because they keep folding. We make video rentals part of our regular errand run, and the store closes. I mean, with no notice; we show up and it's an empty room with several dvds lying under the return slot on carpeting imprinted with vanished fixtures, a Chik-Fil-A cup abandoned on an empty shelf, and a Dear John letter on the door.

So we feed our dvds into the return slot to join the forlorn pile on the floor, drive to the next nearest place and become regulars there. Then that one tanks. We're on our third one.

It's weird to get nostalgic about a company like Blockbuster, but we've enjoyed it. I like the staff, and get some good ideas and suggestions from them, and yak with them about our cats and their car trouble and so on.

Blockbuster used to give us one-week rentals. That was nice. Then they cut it to 5 days. That's a pain, but basically still means a once-a-week trip, so we adjusted.

Today, we got there to discover that they've switched to 3-day rentals.

Not that 8 miles is an arduous drive, or that much of a fuel economy burden. But we NEVER go that route for any other reason, and there are a bunch of [%$@#!]ing traffic lights to wait at, and that just tore it. The new 99-cent rentals are swell for somebody, but little in that category appealed to us, and engineering our own 5-day rental period by incurring dollar-a-day "late fees" means a [%$@#!]ing automated "reminder" phone call each day, and adds up too fast if you take home more than one.

So. It looks like I'll be following the rest of the human herd to Netflix. I wrote BB to tell them so. Their stores are "competing" with the convenience of the internet/mail order providers by making store use as INconvenient as possible, which makes no sense. I told them that, too. Likely, they want to stop serving through stores and ferry us all into their own net service, but why keep spending money to make the stores less competitive??

Anyway, I guess my BB card will now join my collection of defunct cards.

Link by link, and yard by yard

2010-11-13T16:57:00.001-05:00

There are 9 ribbon-chains, so far. One is sort of displayed along the back of the couch, the others are in heaps. Each is about 12 feet long. That's a guess. I'm about 5 foot 2, so a doubled-over length my height would be around 10 feet. But I keep adding links until I hold it up with my arm extended ceiling-ward and the doubled-over chain touches the floor.

It's very pleasant work, in anticipation of a Christmas that I'm pretty sure will not go down as being the Best Ever.

Bookmending - repair that repair!

2010-10-27T14:32:00.011-04:00

Another book-repair post, largely information that my regular readers have run into here before, or knew anyway. It may be new to passers-by.

This is a case where I took a book apart because the bad repair job someone did on it was driving me nuts.

I try not to let people who repair books badly annoy me so much, but years as a librarian, facing well-meaning ladies who would put stripes of Scotch™ tape across the pages on each side of a binding break, and hand it to me with a beatific smile and an "I helped you by fixing this poor book" -- while I tried not to dive across the desk and conk them with it -- depleted my stock of patience. Which was never high.

Tape on pages doesn't hold a book together, it only pulls on the pages it's attached to, crumples and rips them, it makes a mess, why do they think it will help??

But anyway, this is different, and I ought to have a little more tolerance for people who glue the text block into the spine. It's wrong, but I grudgingly admit that it seems logical to them.

To any readers who don't know this :

The actual spine of a hardbound book is, 99% of the time, not supposed to adhere to anything.

This seems counterintuitive but it's true. The text block has a backing that extends onto the book cover, and attaches there only. Then the attached part gets covered up by the endpages.

Yes, really, trust me. Pull down any hardcover book and peer down inside its spine. You can. You can even hide notes and paper money in there if you want to. That's because it's unattached, OK?

Allow me to illustrate with a 2174-page 1935 Lincoln Library, which is huge enough for its structure to show clearly in a photo :

Back to the problem book I worked on: someone, many years ago, glued it back together by gluing the text block to the spine, and not only that, but didn't even place the text block correctly inside the cover. He/she slud (past tense of slide - implies sloppiness, as opposed the too-neat word "slid") it down to the bottom edge.

URGH.

Here, I'm gently separating the spine from the text-block (the text-block is the complete bundle of actual pages). It's worth a very careful try, though in most cases, they won't separate and you need to leave it as is. In this case, the repair job was so old that the glue had become nice and brittle, and released the spine intact :

Fixed now. As well as I can fix it. The spine is now free from the pages, shown by the inserted dollar. It's more obvious in the Lincoln Library photo, further above. I can only make the book so neat after what it's been through, but handling it doesn't drive me nuts anymore.

Sigh of relief

2010-10-23T15:20:00.002-04:00

OK! So. I might be tempting fate by saying this, but it looks like another hurricane season has let us off the hook. The season isn't over until November ends, but it's quite a bit past its peak now, and we're -- knock wood -- starting to relax.

The worst part of hurricane season for me has always been worrying about my mom. The idea of her home getting swept away was particularly awful for her, and she was the first to admit it. It dated back to 1937, when her own mother was seriously ill and my mom, age 10, was sent out of state to live with relatives for a year.

Mom was an only child in a very close and loving 3-person family and the brief loss of her home, without knowing whether her mother would recover, was traumatic. The possible loss of "home" was a hard prospect for her ever after. (My grandmother, by the way, recovered nicely and lived to 86. Wish the doctors and her family could have known it then!)

In 1989 Hurricane Hugo took everything in their downstairs storage, but the house and most contents came through fine. But as we prepped in 2008 for what looked like 3 serious storm threats, when she was older and very sick with (alleged) pneumonia, I was very worried about what the loss of her home, if that happened, would do to her.

And I'm not worried about it anymore. She never had to face that and I am more grateful for such a mercy than I can express.

We're getting good at storm prep. I know where everything I want to save is, and won't forget some of the most important things -- quilts, blankets, afghans, all with special associations and all of which would make recovery from a major home loss easier. Things that connect me with loved ones are great to hold, but even better when I can wrap them around me :

The beautiful afghans my mother-in-law crocheted for Larry and for me;

Another lovely afghan made by my great-grandmother in the 1940s or '50s;

A quilt my mom bought for me, here in Myrtle Beach on a trip 30 or so years ago;

My blue plaid blanket that went to camp and to college with me;

Sheets and Pooh blanket from the kids' childhood;

A throw, gift from the kids to their dad.

Lots more. Some of which will go with us, and some of which we'll seal into plastic bins (in plastic bags, bins taped shut; make them as impermeable as we can) and wedge into a closet that we think will come through intact enough for the boxes to remain. Rained on or not.

And if we can get enough of this stuff out, or protected ---- some part of me is weary and fed up and thinks, "Who cares what we come back to!"

Only a part of me. If it really happened, I'd care a whole lot, I know. It's the weariness speaking. I don't really need a great cleansing flood. I do need a vacation though.

If you get a hairdo, you can be Episcopalian too!

2010-10-18T15:04:00.007-04:00

Our church directory photos, around 1970. Both taken at the same time, so why we're not all in one photo, I don't know. I thought there was one of the 3 of us (my father's work schedule not allowing him to make the assigned appointment. Yeah, right.), but I can't find it.

Really makes you wanna rush to your nearest Episcopal Church and sign right up, doesn't it?

Marsh shadows

2010-10-09T13:51:00.003-04:00

Shadows lengthen over the Murrells Inlet marsh, as the sun nears day's end. Tide's coming in, too.

Series of photos taken between 4:00 PM and 6:30 PM EDT,
on October 8th, 2010.

This is the view from my folks' yard, looking over toward Huntington Beach State Park.

To see it bigger, here's the link to the flickr file!

Squirrel, interrupted

2010-09-11T17:17:00.005-04:00

My unillustrated "I LOVE The History Channel" post

2010-09-04T12:23:00.007-04:00

Wish I could provide a picture for you. You'll have to settle for my description.

So, at lunchtime, a few minutes before noon, we turn on the TV and surf around till we stumble on The History Channel.

HC's morning program was almost over, so we watched its last few minutes. According to HC's online schedule, the show was "Countdown to Armageddon," about the end of the world, including the Book of Revelation and all the weird symbolism in it. As most of these channels do, History Channel ran promos at the screen bottom for other shows.

One interviewee -- we tuned in too late to catch his name -- described the Antichrist and the infamous "666" mark: "He will require that everyone have The Mark of The Beast on either his right hand or his forehead. Without this mark, no one will be able to buy or sell."

As he spoke, a promo for "Pawn Stars Marathon" appeared at screen bottom.

I just love The History Channel.

Books and ribbons

2010-08-30T19:35:00.003-04:00

We went to Books-A-Million the other day, like we need more than the umpteen thousand books we already have, but sometimes a little retail therapy is nice. I usually have no interest in the self-help section, but this time I wandered over to it. After lots of scowling at the offerings, I found a book on grieving that looked fairly helpful and intelligent.

Then I put it back. I've found or been given 2 books and a website already. Is there really any reason to get another book? I think that in some way I pictured grief as kind of an assembly-line process, where 4 workers could build a car 4 times as fast as, say, one doing it alone, so 4 sources would make me feel better much faster! Nah, probably not.

I bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, instead. I'm impressed! It's good.

Last year I discovered the mental health benefit of making chains out of shiny, colorful Christmas ribbon. It started as a way to use up tangled messes of old ribbon, but became so much fun that when I ran out, I began scouring gift-wrap displays to buy more. By January, the good colors were gone from local stores, and I began searching online for metallic ribbon dealers. That's where I finally happened on Mystic Alley. I bookmarked the site, but the year was going in other directions and I didn't get around to picking my colors and ordering.

Last week, I realized it would be a happy activity to get back into, so I ordered a box of ribbon. A very big box. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Mystic Alley is great to deal with, by the way, fast, accurate, and service-oriented.

That's a standard 12-inch LP album, which I put in the box only for size-reference. It was not obvious how big the box and the contents are, so I used the album to show the size of the ribbon reels. Only then did a cat come helpfully along to pose with the box and make it unnecessary. She couldn't do that before I went to the trouble to hunt through our albums and find it. Certainly not.

It takes as long as it takes, but we're all doing OK.

Grief, briefly observed

2010-08-24T19:55:00.001-04:00

It's not going to become a grieving blog. Grieving is a major part of my life right now, and if I've learned anything at all, I've learned that "the only way out is through." I wouldn't try to bury the feelings and Soldier On like everything's swell, but I haven't got much in the way of words or insights so this is a one-timer.

One thing is that my feelings change so often. I could write about Sad, or Lethargic, or Life is a Joyful Gift, or Irritability, or the peaceful feeling that Mom's life was complete and fulfilled, or the frustrated, angry feeling that she got cheated out of some years. Pick any one, and by the time I get it written up and reviewed and spellchecked, it isn't even the way I feel anymore and I've shifted into one of the others.

Maybe the one unusual thing about my experience is that I got such a long, long, deferment from grieving. I've never really experienced this before. They say that all major losses -- job loss, divorce, etc -- are types of grieving, accepting a loss and remaking your life. I did that during my life-implosion in 1994 when my job and my brief marriage tanked all at once. But this is different. That earlier sorrow was one of grieving my own illusions, facing the reality that people I'd trusted were not who I thought they were. But this is the loss of one of the best people I'll ever know. There's no "something better" out there.

And it's odd that grieving feels so new, because I dearly loved my grandparents. We were close. They were my advocates and supporters. My grandmother sent me to graduate school. Funded the whole thing. I could do so little for her in return except visit her in the nursing home, write them funny letters, give her university souvenirs and, when I was done, my diploma.

But the era of great trips to see them on their farm, of all the good times, was so long over by then. By the time I lost them, they'd had years of illness and it felt more that the "real life" of having them had been gradually going away for awhile.

Mom was born in 1927. This cherished little girl made it through a decade before antibiotics were available. I remember my grandmother telling me how parents worried about getting their babies to live through their "second summer." The second summer was a precarious time, I guess because when breastfeeding ended, its immunity benefit ended too, and they seemed to have a somewhat higher death rate.

This baby lived to be over 80, flew in jets, owned a computer, had children and grandchildren, yet I feel like she was entitled to more years, and I guess I'm still at the grief-stage of looking back, thinking, Why didn't TWO doctors find the infection years ago? She'd be here. She still seems so close. 6 weeks ago, she stood in their kitchen scrambling an egg, and I feel like she's barely moved out of reach.

Most of my readers, unlike me, have been through grieving long before this, through deaths timely and untimely. I feel guilty about finding Mom's death a few weeks short of her 83rd birthday "untimely," but there I am.

But on her last day in the hospital, my Mom said to me, with a smile, "Don't worry about all this. It's just ridiculous." I didn't know what she meant, but she either knew, or had decided, that life was ending, and wanted us all to feel that this was right. I guess she deserves to be taken at her word on that, so I will get there. Eventually.

Meanwhile, here's a flickr photo set of my beautiful, dear, funny mom. One of the smartest people I ever knew, and what stands out about her to me was her complete lack of bullshit. She could see through, and cut through bullshit in a heartbeat. I think that's what I treasure most about her, but there's plenty more.

Two oddities

2010-08-13T12:57:00.009-04:00

If i have any literary ability or culture at all, it's due to my mom. She took me to plays and musicals, locally, and in New York and London. We rifled old bookstores and junk shops together. She introduced me to Brookgreen Gardens when I was 11 years old. I haven't been able to go to Brookgreen in the last couple weeks, though it's usually my favorite de-stress place, but things are progressing and I'll get back there soon.

She also took me to The Big Library: the downtown Charlotte Main Branch library. Going "downtown" was an expedition and a special treat. One subject among many that I got into while browsing the Big Library was English history. I was the usual romantic teenaged girl -- I read all the library's books about the abdication of Edward VIII, which fascinated me even as it became quickly clear that romance was the least important part of that story.

One book that they had on the subject was this rather vitriolic thing called Gone with the Windsors. The author, who had spent his journalistic career writing food and hospitality books until then, was so outraged by the Duke of Windsor's sentimental and sometimes self-contradictory autobiography, A King's Story, that he felt compelled to write his own book about the events of 1936, in which he took the couple apart piece by piece. Some justified criticism and some serious over-the-top snark.

Awhile back, someone offered the book, now a library discard, on eBay. She's a Charlotte seller who gets a lot of the library's discards, and I'm pretty sure it's the same copy I checked out when I was about 14, since it came from the main library, not a branch, and they only had one copy.

It's one of the thousand things I've thought about in the last two weeks. "Mom would get a kick out of knowing that I now own the same copy! I never thought to tell her! Now I can't."

I can't tell her things anymore. This will keep happening a lot for awhile, and on occasion for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, last week Dad asked Larry and me to walk around the yard and make notes of things that needed to be done to the landscaping. I pulled a pad of paper out of my mass of junk on my desk shelf, and this photo fell out.

Mom and my dear dog Sparky, around (?) 1971.

They both live on in my heart, but that doesn't cut it for me. Whatever comes next, we apparently are on a Need To Know basis about, and the Higher Power doesn't seem to think that we Need to Know, so all I can do is hope that the photo tumbling out for me was a little message that she's there with loved ones, and with all her favorite animals, and that she's as delighted and joyful as she looks in this picture.

Purpose

2010-08-05T09:15:00.005-04:00

They say that everything happens for a reason and it could be true or it could be bull that we use to comfort us in loss, I'm not equipped to determine that, at least not right now. I do think some things can be turned to a purpose. I also think I have a need to do that right now, whether it matters or not, so put up with it while I share a little, possibly useless, wisdom I've gained just in the past couple weeks.

If you're diagnosed with pneumonia, and it's not the first time, make sure it really is pneumonia. Whatever your age, though the elderly usually are less strong for the fight.

There are some bad bacteria out there. Tuberculosis is one but it's not the only one. Another, biologically related to TB, is called MAC and acts much the same, and needs pretty much the same treatment.

MAC is different from TB in that we all get exposed to it all the time -- it's a common bacterium in the environment, we get little bouts of it and our systems knock it out quickly.

But if you've got a vulnerable zone, as my mom had in her left lung since a bad bout with pneumonia in 1965, MAC can settle in and become chronic. Ordinary courses of antibiotics, for secondary bronchitis/pneumonia things, won't kill it.

Several chest X-rays, which revealed the colony of bacteria over the past 2-3 years, all were diagnosed as individual bouts with pneumonia. The same shadow appeared, over years' time, in the same place on the x-ray. And I guess it wasn't totally illogical to mistakenly think that she'd repeatedly get pneumonia in the same vulnerable location. But it was a pouch of MAC, and settled in over, the doc guesses, 5 years or so.

If .... if. The "if onlys" may be a very natural reaction, and I'm not inclined to either diss myself for having it, or to dwell on it and let it fester. My mom's doctors tried. We got her to better ones, but it needed to happen years ago.

She was ready, even happy, to stop the fight. It had been a harder, longer fight than any of us realized, circa 5 years of it sapping her. She'd had enough. None of us feel that, things being what they were, there was another outcome.

So maybe things have a purpose and maybe some that don't can, still, be turned to a purpose. Don't live with an infection like this for years. It's not necessary.

Passage

2010-07-30T07:36:00.003-04:00

My dear mom died night before last. We'll be, not offline at all, but very occupied for the next while, regrouping and helping my father who is staggered by this.

Peace out.

I honestly don't know

2010-07-22T09:04:00.005-04:00

I have no time to pay attention to ANYthing going on in the world right now. OK, yeah, if I can write a blog entry, I could instead spend my time googling the mosque-at-G-Zero controversy and look at all sides.

I'd rather rant so here's what I think. I have no idea whether this mosque would be a shady attempt to slyly install something with radical Islamist ties there, or whether it's just your basic mosque of your basic Muslim faith.

Instead I'll spin off on what I'd like.

I'd like a mosque, a cathedral, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple, and a scientific foundation to be built at G-zero. All 5, in a circle. And in the center of the circle, a school of tolerance, sanity and, duh, knowledge, administered jointly by all 5.

I really have nihil patience right now with all this endless shit. I want all parties to call a halt to violence, put-down rhetoric, kinder-and-gentler "for your own good" urgings. I want a world of "This is who we are. If you want to know more, we'll answer your questions."

GOD I am SICK of all this SHIT. So much time, so many resources and lives wasted on it. All I wonder is, will the world grow up before it ends?

It's back.

2010-07-20T19:24:00.002-04:00

Our gold medallion, for Top-Rated Seller status.

I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves.

2010-07-12T15:51:00.007-04:00

- Waldo Lydecker

You can say, and I'm not arguing, that Laura is sentimental melodrama.

Yes, it's full of 1940's social protocol and silly hats. Yes, as all my Twelve-Step Group friends have said many times, the love story is based on disaster bonding, the Lady and the Cop have little else in common, it isn't True Love.

But as filmmaking it's so well-crafted that it mends some of those plausibility seams, and if you don't buy that, it's still sumptuous to watch. The one Oscar it won, out of 5 nominations, was for cinematography, but the art direction was nominated too and the two work together. I don't think there's a single object, moment, or shadow in the movie that wasn't chosen to be there, and chosen well.

I find new things in it every time, which is why yall are being subjected to More Than You Wanna Know about why I love this movie. Complete with not-great screen shots in which I sometimes concealed the dvd-player controls and sometimes forgot.

Here in this flashback, Waldo Lydecker tells the detective how he used his newspaper column to mock the talent of Laura's painter boyfriend. Laura, still unaware that Waldo wasn't just her caring mentor but her stalker, found the column witty and insightful, and dumped the boyfriend.

The screenwriters could have written this scene various ways. Waldo is telling the story, but viewers could have seen Laura delighting in the nasty column all by herself - she'd certainly have told Waldo how great she found it. Or he could have come over to her place to observe her reaction, but sat with her at a breakfast table, with Laura fully dressed.

Instead they brilliantly, creepily, place Waldo there in her bedroom, while she, in negligee, is served breakfast in bed.

The camera pans away from Waldo quickly and focuses on a medium close-up of Laura giggling at the column. Possibly to allow censoring if the Hays Office balked. But Waldo is definitely there and that adds an icky intimacy to their relationship. It's filmed to demonstrate both how un-platonic his feeling for her was, and how clueless she was about that fact. It's wonderful detail that adds dimension to the characters and a quiet clue to the murder motive that the viewers might or might not catch.

Everything in this movie is about detail. Starting with something little, look at Gene Tierney's outfit in the flashback scenes depicting the fateful day Laura Hunt introduced herself to famous critic Waldo Lydecker.

The costume designer has to outfit Laura for a major character development that takes place within a few hours.

This is a just-out-of-high-school Laura Hunt. Pre-success. Pre-sophistication. But smart, tasteful and ambitious, which is why she wants a celebrity to endorse a product and get her ad campaign noticed. In the restaurant scene, where she's vulnerable and naive, she wears a tasteful but unsophisticated suit with a boxy jacket. The jacket has a demure white collar and cuffs, country girl dressing professional. Shot down by the acid-tongued Lydecker, she returns to the steno pool at her ad agency.

But he has seen something exceptional in her - or sees a predatory opportunity. Take your pick. I choose both. Anyway, the repentant Lydecker comes to see her that same afternoon, to apologize and give her the product endorsement she wanted. But their roles have flipped. Now he's the uncomfortable one, on her turf, and wanting her approval. Laura has taken off the jacket and her outfit now looks, still unsophisticated and demure, but sleeker, showing innate good taste and self-esteem.

More great costuming -- as the plot thickens, we need to suspect several people, including the weak, passive Shelby. How to make this dork seem menacing...?? The coat. If he just stood there in his business suit with that gun, he'd look goofy, but with the coat over his shoulders like a villain's cape, he looks potentially evil.

The sets .... Oh my. There are three New York apartments shown, all belonging to well-off artsy folks. Each is unique, each reflects the owner. Waldo Lydecker, famous columnist and radio personality, has it all, including a leopard-skin chair in his bathroom, and a collection of masks on the wall that includes, as Detective Mark McPherson notices, one scary one given a central spot.

Laura's aunt is also well-off, but her taste is a little more classic and even staid. Hers is the home of an older woman with money, who wants acceptance by high society but can't entirely extinguish her showgirl origins (That, by the way is in the book - the movie doesn't bother to explain her) or lose her taste for superficial pretty boys who love her money.

Laura, now 5 years into being mentored by Lydecker, has been influenced by his tastes, but still likes sentimental music. And ruffles. The first few times I watched Laura, I thought those ruffled lampshades were just 1940's kitsch, but the sets are dressed with a lot more character insight than that. Laura Hunt is a self-made woman, with sophistication modifying her sentimental tastes, but not eradicating them.

My dvd of the movie has features including commentary by a film professor who mentions something I too noticed, but I think the professor misses the meaning in it. That's the importance of Bessie, the maid.

The film professor says that this, in which Detective Mark McPherson meets Bessie, is an unimportant little scene, but it's not. Bessie is a vital force in the movie.

The movie is famous for its theme of the detective falling for the dead women whose murder he's investigating. He doesn't fall for her portrait, whatever other observers say about it. The portrait that the people who loved her draw with words does it. Bessie loves her employer deeply and blisters Mark's ears with a tirade about Miss Hunt's virtues as a kind, giving, wonderful, true lady,
and this is the testimony that tips the scales for McPherson.

Bessie is the method by which the script makes a case for these two possibly having a reality-based love story. Bessie is a hard-knocks Irish woman who hates cops: "I was raised to spit when I saw one." She destroyed evidence to help her beloved Laura keep a good reputation even in death, and she's proud of it.

And McPherson is smart enough to admire Bessie, to let the evidence problem slide, and to see the value of having her as an ally. In that one short scene she drops her cop-hating ways and becomes his biggest fan. Watch her through her few scenes in the rest of the movie. She looks at him as though he made Laura rise from the dead.

Bessie sees that both Mark and Laura are exceptional people, each transcending the world he or she comes from, and it's her devotion to both that symbolizes a solid and reliable bridge between Laura's and Mark's worlds.

The film professor also mentions that Bessie wears the same outfit two days in a row. "It's a one-outfit role" she laughs. I don't think that's it.

Same dress, different day

For a maid who's been presented as uneducated, rather superstitious, and as having a black-and-white view of people, that is a very classy, tasteful dress. Especially for her to come do housekeeping tasks in.

She has actually just come directly from the funeral, according to the book, and apparently they wrote a funeral scene for the film but ditched it. That could explain her nice dress in the first scene, but not the fact that she's wearing it the next day, too.

Nothing says this, but the attention to detail in this movie is so good that I'm pretty dern sure we're meant to see Laura's kind and close relationship with Bessie in that dress. I think Laura gave Bessie the dress and that's why she wants to keep wearing it. Strictly my opinion.

Judith Anderson. I LOVE Judith Anderson. You just have to listen as she delivers lines nobody else could speak without sounding like they had a mouthful of graham crackers:

"He knows I know he is just what he is. He also knows that I don't care."

I love Vincent Price, too. Watch him clench his jaw when he's nervous. Watch him always try to make himself look good, so that when he really is telling the truth, and when he's not, he's hard to sort out.

Clifton Webb. Sarcasm at its finest. "Haven't you heard of science's newest triumph; the doorbell?

This is one case in which the movie is an improvement over the book. The book has a point-of-view problem that filmmaking sort of renders moot. In the novel, several characters narrate, but in each one's segment, the author is forced to tell us things that the current narrator couldn't know, so it kind of shifts into a vague omniscient narrator. I've been told that this is called "author intrusion." They dropped the narrator idea in the film. The camera simply takes us through the investigation.

Just watch it, or watch it again, in a good print. It's a lot of fun.

Me and Melanie Wilkes

2010-06-28T11:35:00.009-04:00

I just finished a Live Chat with a rep to voice my concerns about problems with our online business. (I'm avoiding searchable keywords in this post.)

I wasn't expecting to get our highest-rated seller status back, but wanted to protest the policy, show what it's like on this end, explain the need for some kind of dispute/appeals process, and, basically Bitch Nicely.

Larry does more business work than I do, especially lately, but he told me "You need to contact them because I will turn into a New Yorker if I do it." I, on the other hand, will turn on the Southern Cream and Sugar.

Which I did, quite calculatingly. I was raised southern, raised to Work It and know how, but I also grew up in a different era from the one in which the people who taught me Southern Lady Behavior grew up.

I grew up in a revolutionary era; protests, feminism, skirts that did NOT cover our knees. One grandmother really had trouble with that. But not with short skirts (short within reason) when one was standing or walking. In particular, it was when sitting that a lady's skirt always covered her knees, and that was often achievable even with a mid-thigh skirt, if it wasn't a tight one. Ever after, I could feel very comfortable on my feet in a short skirt, but always spread it over my knees when sitting, or felt, if not guilty, at least aware of it when the style didn't allow knee coverage.

See what yall who weren't raised Southern missed? There are odd rules you don't even know about.

Anyway I was a grouchy anti-authority child in an era that encouraged that, and most of those proper southern behaviors became things I could do but not things that were a real deep-seated, autopilot part of me.

So with the online representative, I was partly calculating and partly not. Honest, there wasn't total cynicism in my niceness because I used to work for a county government, and got it in the face when someone was displeased with rules made way above my head. I hated the fact that hardly anybody grasps the obvious, which was that *I* had no power to change a rule for them. I know well that these reps are in the same boat. I've been on the receiving end, do NOT want to dish it out.

But I also knew that turning on the charm would make him/her (it was a her) more likely to listen. Nice, even vaguely witty words were more likely to get read, even if i repeated the complaints (A whole technique of its own -- rewording, to make it less of a dead-horse-flogging, and more like a clarification, or a refinement of the original thought), and my suggestions passed upwards (about requiring the customer to tell them what upset them, even if they don't tell us, thereby allowing appeal). Couple of repetitions of it being about power to dispute for us, couple of repetitions of how there really ARE nutjobs out there, who shouldn't have unquestioned power to hurt us financially. Blah blah.

And when I was done I felt wrung out.

So, Melanie Wilkes.

(This clip is completely unnecessary for this post, and both hilarious and annoyingly hyped up, but the part where Carol Burnett tells Dinah Shore to go stick her head in the punchbowl starts at about 1:45. It kinda goes with my point.)

Melanie in Gone With the Wind, typifies a woman who's physically fragile but mentally/emotionally strong. Much more adaptable to change than is her poor lost husband Ashley. Quite approving when Scarlett shoots the marauder, lies magnificently when the family out in the field starts to run home at the sound of the shooting, and has no compunctions about hiding the body.

But nice. Sweet. Self-sacrificing. And fragile.

It's supposed to show that physical fragility and mental strength can coexist, but as I look back on all the times I've gone into gear to Charm The Bleep out of someone, it tires me awfully. Not just now, not just stress or advancing age. Always did.

I don't think Melanie faded away at the end because "she never had any strength, all she had was heart." I think niceness sucked the strength out of her. Niceness Kills! That punchbowl can drown you. You know, just a thought.