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Vice and virtue

My worst vice is anger.  Loud, obscene anger.

Second worst: ingratitude.

Best potting shed shot I have at the moment. From a rainstorm in May.
Rain has been rare enough to celebrate with photos.

This garden shed was one of my first loves in buying this house.  Turned out, it was roof-caved and rotted, and termite-destroyed, to the point that it was --not hyperbole-- held up only by its siding.

So it's in process of repair.  It's taking forever.  Everything has been shoved into the greenhouse potting-shed part, to let the workers work.  Their job is hard and brutal in this heat.  Whatever they need to do, they should do.

But if I had known it would be this big a job I would not have started any plants for this year.

My gratitude is way lower than it should be.  In a world of slipshod work and charlatans, we've found the best contractor and the best crew on earth.  We can afford it (at least, we can now that Larry has spent months doing the inside framing, by himself and saved probably $thousands).

Using the potting shed was doable until the insulation job, for which a few too many things got shoved into it, and the thousand pound, wheels-won't-roll-unless-powered-on mower took up too much space.  Insulation complete, I wrestled the thing back out, loudly damning it to fires of hell, because I wanted -- not needed, just wanted -- the much easier water source of the sink.

I am angry at this heat.  I am angry at having to get water that isn't scalding, to come out of hoses, angry at the highly temporary loss of sink access.  My anger at this lawnmower came close to getting it put out on the curb for anybody to take.

My virtue is, I guess, perseverance, because I decided it was my problem to solve, and I solved it.  I got it out.  No it does not really weigh a thousand pounds, but unwieldy and un-rollable as it was, it sure seemed to.  And I guess my sign is polite enough not to offend the crew, God, I hope, because they are working in hot, cramped conditions.

I could go into the subject of the gasket-blowing heat, tedium, AND gallons of wasted water in this drought, that are involved in using the outside hoses and hauling water for dozens of plants, but.....that's the Executive Summary.

Some self-discovery going on, too.  I have always thought I would make a great post-apocalyptic survivor, living off any grid, managing water and shelter and food like a Caroline Ingalls on steroids.  But if growing plants and accessing water is this hard for me now, when water comes right out of any faucet I turn.....that does not say anything good about what I thought would be my positive attitude in the face of hardship.

The endless indoor environment problem with Graymatter the Psychotic Cat is making my days difficult, and making indoors unpleasant, so some immature part of me feels entitled to have my way in my attempts to garden.

Right now, I kind of feel like I suk.

Scooter is a better Person than I am, since lack of access to the potting shed affected him too, but he behaved better about it.....oh.  Wait.  He did poop on our bed.  This project has royally screwed up most of his yard access and joy in life.  He deserves happiness more than anybody I know, or at least as much as my poor hardworking spouse does.  Despite not liking myself much for how angry the shed-clearing made me, I can feel good that Scooter has now got access to his birdwatching corner again.

I don't know. It's all some kind of Opportunity For Growth.

Cupcake philosophizing

The phrase "C. S. Lewis said..." is almost as ubiquitous among the Believer crowd as "the Bible says..." and just about as annoying.  Some quote him like he's practically posting from Patmos, and, come on, he's a Guy and as imperfect as the rest of us. But a lot of his stuff was quite cool, and this came to mind today.

This is from his Space Trilogy, specifically Perelandra, in which the protagonist of the series, Ransom, visits a yet-unspoiled Eden world. He encounters fruits ("gourds") of exquisite flavor, and many other plants of mystical properties.

And some berries. Here's the Berry passage:

He made his way gingerly towards the coast, but before he reached it, he passed some bushes which carried a rich crop of oval green berries, about three times the size of almonds. ... It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the rich orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food--the delight of munching and being nourished, a "Sober certainty of waking bliss." A man, or at least a man like Ransom, felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he presently did. The gourds would have required an oratorio or a mystical meditation.

But the meal had its unexpected high lights. Every now and then, one struck a berry which had a bright red centre; and these were so savoury, so memorable among a thousand tastes, that he would have begun to look for them and to feed on them only, but that he was once more forbidden by that same inner adviser which had already spoken to him twice since he came to Perelandra.

"Now on earth," thought Ransom, "they'd soon discover how to breed these redhearts, and they'd cost a great deal more than the others." Money, in fact, would provide the means of saying encore in a voice that could not be disobeyed.

A friend brought us these cupcakes yesterday.

Yeah, I have eaten one and its components were great, so I suspect the rest are too, but I think that they are so over-iced it ruins them.

But I'm probably in the minority. The cupcake trend (I'm told it's passé now) and designer pastry craze, when it involves icing, seems to make the cake a mere platform for icing, both for visual artistry, and for the more concentrated sugar-rush that, I guess, people want. To do the chef justice, the cake wasn't a bland shrug-off to carry the icing, it's excellent on its own merits. Just..... way too small. These things are HALF icing, and honestly, interesting, savory cake is what requires, and better demonstrates, more serious chef-y skills.

These are extremist overkill.  And maybe it's just my continuing irritability - everything annoys me - but I feel constantly bombarded by extremist overkill.

Everything is ultra-loud, ultra-bright, and especially, ultra-simple.  Yeah, you guys will rightly dispute my use of "everything."  But I think it's the loud, simple movies full of cathartic explosions and chases and extreme highs and lows for the characters, that become the blockbusters, and drive more studios to want more of them.

Murder mysteries are boring the bleep out of me, with the extreme highs and lows of the detectives.  So many stock detectives, on personal/emotional skids, utter relationship failures but utter invincible battlers against evil, staying low in emotional wastelands, or turing it totally around and Finding The One, yadda yadda.

And TV.  And not just kiddie message-shows ("You vill have lesson pounded in with sledgehammer, jah!") and Disney Channel ("You vill have laffs and pathos..." see above).

I ran into a rerun of the 1980's sitcom Gimme a Break awhile ago and thought how much it showed its age, not from lack of talent or plot, but because of how quiet it was.  At the time it originally ran, it seemed energetic and full of stagey exaggeration.  Compared to now, it's subdued. Some audience laughs were just low ripples the actors talked right over.  There were sometimes actual quiet beats between sentences. The pace was somehow more natural and that seemed languid. The set wasn't the kaleidoscope of riotous color and object clutter that I feel like I see everywhere, even in good shows.

There are some good house building/renovating shows on HGTV, but I have watched the Fake Conflict Factor rise and rise, every episode of some of these shows having to feature obviously coached people having obviously choreographed arguments, calling the project a disaster and the designer -- or each other -- a failure, so it can all finally come together with a gushing "Oh, I can't beLIEVE it,  this is so-o-o great!"

All emotions are extreme.  All experiences are overwhelmingly pain or pleasure.  I think it's getting harder to train our brains to even perceive, much less appreciate, subtlety, nuance, or complex interplay of flavor, or character.

OK, OK, there's plenty left, and it's always been incumbent upon the consumer to seek out and support better craft.  There are classics, there are great shows and books and cuisine, humane, life-affirming stuff.

I'm not saying it's died.  I'm not even saying that it will die out, only that it's being crowded and marginalized by the need to outshout and outsell the competition by offering the more overwhelming sensory experience. This baker clearly can bake great cake, but she has to make a living, and customers want the towering pile of decorative goo.  Money talks in a voice that can't be disobeyed.

And, sugar addict though I am, I don't like the cupcakes.  I love cake.  Bare cake, even, no icing at all, if it's excellent. These, at least, judging by my one, are buried under a stomach-acid-flaming load of pure butter and sugar, and while I'm free to scrape it off, there won't be much left when I do, not like the days when a cupcake was a cake with icing, not icing loaded on a disc of cake.

The market forces craftsmen to assault our senses and us to work harder to escape from it.

Control Issues. [R] language warning

I've always lived by the idea that we have some control.  Maybe not as much as we want, maybe over surprising things and not always over what we want to have it over, but that applying some wisdom increased our ability to control outcomes. 

There's the Serenity Prayer:  serenity to accept what I can't change but courage to change what I can, with wisdom to know the difference.  Maybe I interpreted that the way I wanted to, more than the way it ought to be interpreted.   And there's the Gandhi quote I repeat over and over:


But life for a few years now has sent disquieting messages that nothing is certain; that being an emotionally well-centered adult requires acceptance of that, and ability to enjoy life anyway.

I sit here in a comfortable house some people would sell their souls for, and I want to flee, and then hate myself for my ingratitude, which is kind of a useless pattern unless I go deeper into why I'm so tense and unhappy.

But the reason is the pervasive uncertainty of it.  A parade of funerals.  Storm vulnerability.  Exposure of this formerly out-in-the-boonies little dirt road to the outside world.

I'm very grudgingly revisiting a book I bought a year ago and have avoided reading : Comfortable with Uncertainty.  The fact that I bought it long ago indicates I dimly realized I needed to deal with the issue, but that's as far as I got.

About once a year we see swaths of road-bank grass on either side of our house, and saplings just inside the woods, brown and wither in an obviously unnatural manner.

It also shows up all over the county, and there was no doubt that the county was poisoning the vegetation, for reasons unknown - I figured it was cheaper than mowing the shoulder.
 
It wasn't quite the reason, but I was close. The other day we caught the county employee spraying nauseatingly day-glow-purple-colored poison along the edge of our woods, and he insisted it was required to keep limbs from interfering with the power lines. Never mind that no limbs are anywhere near the lines.  The worst ice storm on earth wouldn't bring any of those limbs into contact with the lines.  Never mind sending a crew to cut limbs instead -- too expensive.  It's standard county policy; spray poison within X-distance of the lines. The groundwater or marsh runoff be damned.

Not a great photo - but last year's poisoning shows in the brown patch and dead saplings. THIS year's, sprayed the day before the photo, is just starting to yellow out - see  foreground, and background just behind the discarded drink cup.

The bypass highway is one block over from our street, and the traffic noise has always been there, but the neighborhood used to be left alone when it was not a destination to anywhere.  Then the bike bridge brought SUV after SUV of tourists, blocking the road (It's just dirt!  It can't be a road!), dumping trash.  Our neighborhood is theirs to do with as they please.

Take the green snake.

Here comes the bad language. And no, that "damned" in the paragraph a bit above was Jane Austen-esque compared to my feelings about some other things.

In the brush next to our driveway, there lived, past tense, a small green snake.  One morning about 3(?) weeks ago, I came out and it lay dead at the side of the dirt road, its head cleanly chopped off.  Not run over by a car, not attacked by an animal.  Neatly cut by a man-made implement, and left to rot in the sun.

Some total and complete fucked in the head tourist came into OUR neighborhood, decided to walk/jog/bike down our little country lane, did not approve of the little country wildlife on our little country lane, and had the arrogance to decide the snake was not entitled to live.

I understand snake fear.  I understand quick reaction that can't take time to look at head shape -- venomous snakes have distinctive heads -- and I'd have understood if this snake were at all sizable, or had any kind of scary markings.  Some harmless snakes look similar to venomous ones unless you know the markings.

But WHO on this godforsaken planet is LEFT that doesn't know small plain green snakes are harmless?  Who doesn't know that they eat little pests and certainly hurt nobody?  Jerknuts tourists from concrete jungles?

Am I supposed to feel sorry for the daily lives of those property-rights-challenged touristas, and not begrudge them this brief vacation in a place with country lanes whose wild residents are so unfamiliar?

I don't feel sorry for them and I do begrudge them.  They can go to goddam zoos, where the wildlife is protected from them behind walls, and they could realize it's, duh, not their neighborhood or their place to make any bloodydamn decisions here, and they could learn some basic kind of response to new experiences, like, say, leave it alone if it's not affecting your life or wellbeing.  There is no way that this Touron felt threatened or trapped.  The snake was not invading the moron's space.  There was plenty of space to avoid the snake, which lay at the SIDE of a wide road going in two directions.   Even massive ignorance doesn't make killing it, rather than dashing off, logical.

Why couldn't I have caught them at it?  I know, best I didn't.  It would have been unpleasant.

My reaction is awfully big, considering the fact that the species isn't in jeopardy and there are are plenty more little green snakes living large all around the area.  I feel like it's not just another wildlife anecdote, and it's not just another lamentation about how this quiet little street that used to be nowhere anybody would walk to, now is violated by trash and crass stupidity and now, thefts, over and over. 

Someone has broken into our basement again.  Our ground floor linen closet holds only some old bedspreads and a black-and-white screen gameboy.  They were terribly disappointed.  I'd like to disappoint them further with a cartilage-popping kick to the knee.

Someone else has stolen some small hockable items of cherished sentimental, more than monetary, value from inside the house.  Family obligations have sent us off on several short trips in the past few months, and we still think that the people to whom we needed to give access while we were gone would never do this.  We're saddened, angered and baffled because no answer makes sense, except that someone left the door unlocked, but it adds to the bafflement and the uncertainty.

Yeah, we're looking into ways to take back some control over this.  We can do more about the house than we can about the Nature Lovers. No locks will keep away the poison or the trash dumping or the wildlife abuse.

Eventually yall will realize that I am not being funny when I say I am not a nice person. I dream of painful justice.  I also feel like it's been a long time since I posted anything joyful or positive.  Anger is a natural response to most of this and I don't want to beat myself too badly about it, but I do feel spiritually off-kilter in my loathing for so many fellow human beings.

You see dead animals on roads all the time, and I always hate it, but the death of that one little snake just tore it for me.  We feel we have so little control over our home and lives anymore, and it's just the precise illustration of that.

OK, so, Gandhi's quote.  It's about leaving results in other, or Other, hands, but not about saying we can't make a difference.  In our tiny little ways, we help the birds and the garden spiders and an occasional turtle or lizard, and we take some cans to the food bank, and maybe I only need to believe we have power to make an actual difference.  Unless we're given something else to do, these must be what we're meant to do.

And of course, somewhere inside, I have the fantasy that there's a Shangri-La we could get to where there are no natural threats like fires or storms, and no jerks, and I'll never get teed off again and can sit and sip tea in blissful serenity.  I know it's rot, but my knowledge is intellectual, not heartfelt.

I'm not sure I can let go of the need to have some power. The idea that I really have no control over anything disturbs me, so I'm sitting in a comfortable house with air conditioning and a refrigerator stocked with food, and swearing anyway, because I'm starting the grieving process for the idea of Control now.

I may be through the Denial phase but I'm probably gonna be stuck in Bargaining for awhile, mixed with Anger and gloom, before I get to acceptance.  I might not ever get there.  It's not lookin' good.

The Persistence of Jabbering

Just remember - I never said I would confine my Temperamental-ness to Tuesday posts!  This happened this morning and I'm not waiting 6 days to gripe about it.

Long ago, I joined this site for business owners, called Merchant Circle.  You join local networks of other businesses and honestly, I've never put much time into it.  But they send me occasional emails and statistics about how many people have checked my neglected profile and all that.

They sent out a political survey a couple of days ago, I guess to gauge the specific political interests that small business owners have in the coming election, so, since I kind of like doing surveys, I filled it out and hit "submit".

Only I was not allowed to submit my answers.  One question listed 4 forms of social media that, I guess, normal people use to follow candidates and political organizations, only they worded it as you see there.

"DO you follow..?"   This implies that one can answer "no" as well as "yes" but that screenshot shows you what I got when I left it blank.  A red error message.  I  was given no grief about the other questions, which, as you see by the one above it, offered choices I could relate to.

I am required to listen to politicians' self-promotional jabberings via social media.

Well, of course not, the question really means not that I must, but that I do.  Surely I do!  Because everybody does, don't they??

Or at least, anybody who would join a networking site must also want to get campaign messages telling her that "I, the Candidate!"  or "OUR candidate!"  is the one favored by God and the ghost of
[ ]FDR
[ ]Reagan (choose all that apply).

But, no, I do what social media I do to get away from political crap. The truth is that I do follow The Christian Left on Twitter, and nobody can say they aren't political, but they are neither a candidate nor a "related organization."   Maybe i'm defining related organizations too narrowly, by including only those tied to and campaigning for a candidate, not for tolerance and help for the poor in general.

Self-promotion by politicians, in any medium, is, OK, not devoid of, but weak on information. Nowhere did it give me the option to say that I prefer news sources, to see what they really think, plan, contradict themselves, and screw up about.

The degree to which the whole thing is driven by social media now slightly horrifies me.

Refusing it.

This is nobody's favorite subject and I apologize, but when I'm angry and frustrated, I have to rant in my blog, so today, I'm afraid I have to explain why I oppose almost all routine precautionary radiation, and to do that I have to talk about melanoma.

There's high risk for melanoma. There's very high risk.  And then there's me.
 
I am Celtic fair-skinned.

Despite that, at age 14 I got UV acne treatments.

Also, despite the pale Celtic-ness, I tried repeatedly to tan when I was 12-16 or so, and had more scarlet, blistering, skin-peels-off-in-sheets, fever and woozy-head, sun burns than most people ever have.  They say even one of these deep burns skyrockets your risk.  I literally can't count my moderate -to-severe burns.

Also, three generations of my family have developed melanoma. NONE of whom ever had as much burn history as I've had.  My grandmother had 2 of them 30 years apart.  My mother had 2 of them, about 5 years apart.  My brother has had one, 12 years ago.

When my dermatologist recommended the UV acne treatments to 14-year-old me, only one of those cases -- my grandmother's first case -- had occurred and I'm not sure he even asked about that.  It was 1968.  I was miserable over my complexion and I did adore that gentle rosy glow I got every other week(!).

That I haven't had any skin cancers yet is practically a miracle.  It certainly defies science.  I take a lot of vitamins.

But I also avoid any more stupid radiation, especially on my face.

And for a long stretch, that meant no dental care at all.

It is possibly because of damnable insurance companies who create a one-size rule and demand that dentists perform endless dental x-raying to protect the profession from lawsuits.  Beats me.

But in the case of my dentist -- let's call him Dr. Z -- it seems to be an infuriating, yet genuine belief on his part that yearly x-rays are more vital than any mitigating circumstance .... well, mitigates.

It wasn't the case with dentists I saw 20 years ago.  They wanted the x-rays, you bet, and I had to endure the patronizing lectures about  What A Teeny-Tiny Amount!  of radiation it involves, and about How Vital It Was For My Oral Health!  to which I would listen politely, because that was my role in the negotiation.  I understood the bind they were in.  I understand that x-rays can reveal some hidden problem in early stages, a problem that would be much worse when it finally grew big enough to make itself known. 

I'd listen to the requisite lecture. Then they would have me sign a disclaimer absolving them from all culpability and they'd clean my teeth, and I'd pay them and everybody went home happy.

Apparently, now I may not make this decision for myself.  No matter how seriously I have thought it out.  No matter how entitled I am to make my own health decisions.  Dr. Z, who, I repeat, is a truly good and conscientious guy, seems to think that forcing my hand by refusing me as a patient is kosher.  It's so important to him, that the fact that having no dental care at all is hazardous to the health of my entire body doesn't seem to have any pull.

A year ago, because of that hazard, I gave in.  He took a set. I became his patient, and think highly of him, and decided that a one-off set of x-rays was a good trade-off, and we could argue about it again in 5 years or so.

That's where I discovered that something else has changed in the dental profession, because not only did I get to refuse x-rays 20-15 years ago, but my old dentist requested them only at intervals of several years.  Today, ONE year later, Dr.Z demanded more x-rays.  And he and his tech are telling me all the dentists do this now.  It seems that I will have nowhere to turn.

When I gave in a year ago, I had not been to dentist in 8 years.

If that seems incredible, I can only, sheepishly, confess that God gave me the Rolls Royce of teeth.  It's one genetic luck of the draw that I got.  Apparently from my grandmother.  I've had 6 cavities in my life; at ages 14 (4 of them. Bad eating, I guess), 23 (one cavity), and one last one, sometime in my 30's.  One of the 4 1968 fillings was replaced about 10 years ago, the others are all original.  Even without dentistry for those 8 years, I had no problems at all, and those x-rays he forced on me last year revealed .... not a gallblasted thing.

But here I am again.  I refused them today. 

If he denies me care on this basis, I 'll have to hunt and phone and research and try to find someone who will honor my wishes.  It's still an "if" because he let it go today.  Apparently we will discuss it in 6 months, and I pray that all my excellent reasons, especially my family history and personal cancer risk, will allow me to keep seeing him, because he is absolutely wonderful, and is doing it to out of (in my opinion, bizarrely rigid) conviction, not for revenue or any other sleazy reason.  That's the thing.  Finding another one would be a lot of trouble, but the fact that he's one of the best dentists, and best people, I know makes me hope we can work this out.

I don't know if routine precautionary radiation is another topic or not.  I utterly despise it.  Yet I also understand the many benefits it has had to a lot of patients.  Everything is about flying blind and weighing odds, and you won't convince me that it never causes a tumor and only detects.  I doubt if even the imaging industry would claim that, but they do insist that I play odds that their bean-counters post as beneficial to "the whole."   In some cases, and facial radiation is one of them, I absolutely will not do it.

There are things I will never understand

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.

Snark that Springeth Green [PG-13]

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, "%$*#!"

I honestly don't know

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?

Me and Melanie Wilkes

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.

Temperamental Tuesday

I've decided this should be Temperamental Tuesday.

I've had nuisance allergies before. I've never had incapacitating allergies and not breathing for days on end puts me in a foul mood. This week I'd like to be The Queen of Everything and ban the following:


1. "Flirty." If ONE more lameass publication trills about how "fabulous" it is for a woman to be, look, dress, live "flirty," and how she should long to achieve flirtiness, I will have to find someone to kill for it. This demeaning goal for women must be destroyed immediately.

2. Use of the word "dated" on HGTV. "Oh gawd, that is so-o-o dated." Anything that is not steel gray or mushroom beige is "dated." I guess a neat, clean, simple-design working oven that has a dial with numerals in an outdated font won't roast chicken.

3. Spies -- In my novel, I show rather cynical young women making fun of the fictitious college's Seven Ideals. I based these on the Ten Ideals, which were a real tradition at my college that we in the 70's considered a relic of the past. In that, we probably were a little too cynical, and at first, when I heard that the college has now revived it, I thought that might be kind of nice. But come to find out they've revived it as a secret society that evaluates people without their knowledge, including stalking them online to make sure they're Worthy. I am real real glad I'm not a student there right now because I find this appalling.

I know, it's only to give awards, not to criticize or penalize. I don't care. When I read : "Members agree the secrecy is fun and makes sense because it keeps students and employees accountable for their actions by not knowing who might be watching them," I shuddered.

4. Dear Quality Paperback Book Club - Finding me after a decade and sending a perky "We want you back" letter was rather impressive, but writing to my former married name was a big big mistake. If you have this address at all, you know that name isn't listed here and therefore isn't my name anymore. QPBRUstupid?


5. Styrofoam bras. 80% of every lingerie department consists of stiff preformed-foam brassieres that could drive home from the mall by themselves. Really. Go shopping and look. The racks look like a model for a domed colony on the moon.

6. Cell Phone assumptions -- You..have..one..new..message: "Hey, I'm the delivery guy for Chairs-r-Us. Call me back before 4 if you want your chair today. Bye." WHAT is your frikkin number? ...Oh, a thousand pardons, what am I thinking? Those of us who cling to the prehistoric land line and don't have each caller's number displayed shouldn't expect the world to accommodate our idiocy. Let me make several calls trying to chase down your number. I beg your forgiveness. Not.


7. Reptile prints. On clothes. On accessories. On anything. Make them go away.

--
I'll be normal again soon. Honest.

It pays to be well-behaved

There's a new TV show that I am not allowed to watch. OK, not really, but whenever a promo for it comes on, Larry says firmly, "You can't watch that," and I whine appropriately: "You never let me have any fun."

Howe and Howe Tech is about these two guys who build heavy duty vehicles, and Larry is afraid that I might learn too much from it. A working tank, in my hands, would be ... trouble.

But not really for the reason he thinks. Sure, it would be tempting to ... to not have to yield to certain other drivers out there. You know what I mean. The ones in the towering SUV's, careening around you while on the cell phone, who endanger your life. The idiots who cut you off, or take your parking space or who, on a little narrow road, come so close to center to turn left that they block the road so no one can turn in. A tank would be real handy at times, and the temptation would be hard to resist.

This footage ...




has run a bazillion times on Discovery, but the first time I saw it, I was far too enamored of it, and he's never forgotten that.

But I am actually lucid at times and know that avoiding points on my driver license is a good thing. I got my reward yesterday, when the Dreaded Day arrived -- a trip to the DMV to renew my license, an event that not only means I'm older, but means we've lived back here in SC for nearly ten years(!).

I have a clean driving record. I walked in, passed the eye test, and walked out with my license and its requisite mug shot in my hand, within minutes. And it's good for ten years! The Badly Behaved drivers were put through much less pleasant protocols.

So, really, I wouldn't use the tank to crush other vehicles.

No, I would use it to plow a line straight through the landscape from here to Charlotte, NC.

Charlotte is my hometown, and is no longer the pleasant small-ish city I grew up in, so I don't really want to spend a lot of time there. But I do have relatives, relatives I actually like a lot, and friends, and Borders Books, which is nowhere closer, so I'd like to get there maybe just a little more.

But the utter absurdity is that, even though Myrtle Beach is a MAJOR destination for the residents of this now-big city, there's no direct route. The drive is a misery of three-digit bleak highways.

To get there from here -- and these are the major routes anyone takes, I am not even including the local twists and turns that apply to the specific addresses at the start and finish -- you take:

501
to 76
to 52
to 52/401
to 34 (for only about 1 minute)
to 151
which becomes 601
to 74 which goes through several towns,
becoming Independence Boulevard
(traffic, strip mall nightmare) at some point
to ... here's a choice of major arteries (495, 51, 16, others)

The 501, 151/601, and 74 legs are ENDLESS.

The only good part is the halfway point. It's a big, wonderful farmstand/store called McLeod Farms, which has a cafe, picnic tables, and a nice little store full of great produce and delectable baked goods. It makes the drive bearable. Just.

But we drove it 3 times this past year, and I tell ya, if I had a tank, I'd flatten a nice straight route from here to some point on 74 that easily connects to a decent road.

And whatever criminal charges I incurred, they probably wouldn't involve disobeying rules of the road, because there ain't no roads. Not yet anyway. Once I got out of jail, I'd still have my license! OK, maybe not. But I'm not sure it wouldn't be worth it anyway.

Major announcement

Since I occasionally mention the fact that i'm a professed Christian, I need to make an announcement.

I've switched. I've become an atheist. If there were a God, then no child would be saddled with the family that Tripp Johnston is saddled with.

- Ruth
with a cold and in a bad mood

Beware of your credit card company!

I'm sure my readers are all too smart to fall for this little -- I can't call it anything but a scam. But just in case you have not run into this, here's a caution.

If you pay bills online,

WATCH OUT for the date that the website defaults to, as being the "payment date."

Used to be that my credit card company's payment site defaulted to the current business day. ONLY if I logged on after business hours, or on a holiday, or weekend, would the default date flip over, to the next business day. And in fact, no earlier dates could even be clicked on the site.

But those were the Good Ol' Days.

Today I logged on to pay my bill. Just after lunch, at 1:00 PM.

If I had not looked carefully, I would have missed their little deception. My payment date was apparently .... Monday? August 3rd ??!

The bill was due today, and that meant it was about to mark my payment as late.

I thought : "Uh-oh! They've backpedaled the cut-off time to noon instead of 5 PM!"

They have this little drop-down calendar, about the size of a pea, next to the transaction. As mentioned, when their definition of "today" is officially over, that calendar has no previous dates. Your earliest choice is the next day.

But, those little sonuvaguns! (OK, that's not what I really said) ... Today was still coming up as an active option.

I had to arrow back to "Previous month" because, this being the last day of July, it had set itself to its August calendar.

Then I had to choose July 31st.

I paid, and I paid on time. My confirmation said so. July 31st was available all along, but they'd have levied some obnoxious late penalties if I had not noticed their scam and jumped through their little hoops to choose today's date.

Maybe readers are familiar with this practice, but just make sure they haven't snuck it by you !

Don't cry, it's only literature

I don't know exactly what possessed me to buy this book several years ago. I guess, after reading Books and Readers in the Early Church, I got interested in early Christian writings or something.

So I sprang for this thing. It's called Early Christian Latin Poets. I found most of the poets rather uninspired, same old rewording or imitating psalms, blah blah. But the intro to the selection from Paulinus (b.353 CE, Bishop of Nola from 406 CE) intrigued me, when the editor said that one poem "gives an amusing account of three miracles involving farm animals selected for slaughter in fulfillment of vows to St. Felix, set deep in the Campanian countryside."

This is now, officially, one of my least favorite "miracle" stories, ever.

I wish that I could just hate the poem, without getting all emo and genuinely upset by it, but that's what happened. I tried the self-talk technique :

Look, it's only a legend. Check out the iconic Christian literary elements: biological miracle, willing self-sacrifice, even a no-room-at-the-local-inn subplot.

And if something real did inspire the story, this pig has been dead for, like, 1800 years (the stories were old by the time Paulinus wrote about them). Most farm animals become dinner for somebody, including you, hello? and sacrifices fed the poor, so don't get bent out of shape about one pig who's probably fictitious anyway. Is this half as bad as the Abraham and Isaac story?

It didn't work.

Part of this book is on Google Books, including most of this poem (only the first 2 lines are missing), so here it is, if anybody wants to know firsthand what I'm talking about. Start with page 64.

But if cruelty to animals upsets you, I invite you to skip it. Here's the story it tells. Farmer fattens up this pig to a huge size, to make his sacrifice to St. Felix more spectacular than anybody else's, and then sets out to walk him to the Felix shrine, apparently a long journey away, since they have to lodge there someplace.

Only the pig is too enormous for his legs to bear him up. Great planning there, guys, positively failblog-worthy. Anyway, the pig collapses almost immediately and can't get up, and they can't lift him, so the farmers go back for a bunch of small pigs to make an equivalent sacrifice and take them off to Felix's shrine, having no choice but to leave Superpig stranded in the road.

They make the trip, they offer their pigs, they participate in FelixPalooza, they go rent lodging for the night.

Meanwhile, somehow, the huge pig miraculously, with divine intervention, struggles to his feet. And further, he manages to hike this whole long way to Felix-tropolis where this ritual will take place, without getting lost, stolen or eaten by wolf or man along the way. More miraculously yet, his master has taken a lodging out in the boonies because the big crowds made lodgings near the event hard to find, and the guy comes out of his rental hut to find that his pig has tracked him to this obscure place off the trail and is greeting him happily.

Why couldn't this poet be as dull as the others in the book? Because he vividly describes the sheer joy that this pig expresses on finding the jerk, licking and nuzzling him. You'll undoubtedly note that I work up no empathy for the substitute pigs whose emotions aren't described.

Then the poet exults about how the pig's joy ... um ... was actually because it longed for the fulfillment of its Holy destiny. It was overjoyed to be sacrificed.

And I find myself cussing out some asshole farmer who lived 1800 years ago if he was even a real person at all.

A good academician could read it dispassionately. "Symbolic literary elements, blah blah, oral folk traditions, blah blah, early-Christian era transition from pagan practices, yadda yadda." Maybe even find it amusing. Me, all I could think about was this gentle, intelligent animal, indulged to the nth degree all its life and thinking it's a beloved pet, abandoned to die in the road and struggling up to go find the master with whom it was strongly bonded. Only to get a knife to the throat. I tried to switch from calling the pig "he" to referring to him as "it." Didn't work.

Here's my idea of a miracle story : how about, as soon as this twit farmer coos, "Hey, look, my big ol' buddy made it here! You want to be sacrificed, yes you do!" God (Who exists in Eternity and can access sporting goods of later centuries) drops a bowling ball on the farmer's foot and thunders, "Betray this animal's trust and you'll get it on your head next time."

The book's on eBay now. New, it would retail for 35 bucks, so maybe someone will find it a bargain. The rest of the poems may be by other poets and be totally unlike this one, but somehow I couldn't find the desire to pick it up again.

INSERT CELEBRITY NAMES. RUN PROGRAM. LOGOFF.

All attempts to make this a single image, and still make it legible, have failed. You'll need to enlarge each of the three images.

Sorry.

Because an informed public is crucial to democracy:

Before CNN was there to keep us up-to-the-minute on the world's most vital issues, whatever did we do??

I. Hate. Crafts.

All I wanted was a scarf, okay? I know myself well enough not to attempt an afghan or a complicated thing with sleeves and necks and yadda yadda, I just wanted a scarf.

And I wanted one that was wide enough, that felt soft and nice, that was not in some weird trendy color ... and that was not acrylic, or even wool. This last requirement was the most important one, because I hate getting zapped by static electricity. I wanted a scarf of nice cotton yarn that would NOT crackle and make my hair stand on end.

So there are, like, THREE WALLS of yarns in the craft store. And all are acrylic or wool or blends, except two bins of cottons.

The first bin was baby yarn, for very thin, fine, tight-weave work. It would take me 90 years to make something out of that fine gauge yarn. OK, it would only seem like 90 years. I am not craftsy. Anything involving needles and thread makes me want to run screaming out into the night. This project is a means to an end, not about finding enjoyment in the process.

But despite the slim choices, I liked the stuff in the tiny second bin. Organic. Made in USA. Soft, nubby, earthy colors. Pricey, but I thought a couple skeins would... um...

Two hours of work later, you see the result. The book is there (why, of course I chose it at random...) to show just how few inches one skein makes. I've used over half of a skein and barely started. Each skein costs SIX BUCKS. This project will cost as much as buying some cashmere thing from Neiman Marcus.

Yes, I can dismantle this and make it narrower. And I will do exactly that, but one of the reasons I wanted to make my own was to get a wide one, since the current fashion trend is toward skinny things that will not provide much warmth.

So i'll compromise on width, save a skein or two, pay more than I meant to, and wish that the helpful information on the label --which happily explains what needles to buy-- would tell the buyer something like "This skein will make a one-foot square, crocheted."

I really hate crafts.

The last crochet project I completed.

Enough with the present tense

The oddest things annoy me. One is this [insert creative phrases that would ruin my cuss-o-meter score here] trend of writing novels in the present tense :

She opens the letter. The handwriting looks familiar but she cannot place it. It is unsigned. "What's that?" asks Floyd. He puts down his gun and looks over her shoulder.

I used to love Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta mysteries. But sometime in the past few years she quit writing normal and started the whole walk-through thing.

(Well, OK, I also got sick of Scarpetta pining for Benton Wesley or Wesley Benton, or whatever her dreary mopey boyfriend's name is. Even emotionally-anesthetized psychiatrist Alex Delaware and his emotionally-unavailable eternal girlfriend Robin are functional compared to that pair. But I probably would've stayed with the series just because the plots are often interesting. I still read Kellerman's novels and no matter how much Robin irritates me, Kellerman never present-tenses his books.)

Present tense has ruined for me other books that I ordinarily would love. I like historical mysteries, lapped up Instance of the Fingerpost, which dragged for some people, heard about Crimson Petal and the White and couldn't wait to read it. Then I saw it was a walk-through. I put it back and moved on.

Why am I calling present-tense novels "walk-throughs"?. Because I think I have diagnosed the origin of this virus which is now running rampant through publishing. It's rooted -- just my opinion -- in gaming. Originally, in Dungeons & Dragons player manuals, then in guides for video gamers which include blow-by-blow "walk-throughs." Present-tense fiction is not a new invention, but it has mushroomed in the past few years, or so it seems to me. Something's up. I diagnose it as an attempt to sell fiction to gamers.

I never got into video games much, though I did find Need For Speed hysterically funny. But Larry did for awhile and I therefore have read enough game walk-throughs to see the similarity :

Enter the cave. Straight ahead, you see a door. Do not open it! Dick Cheney will shoot you! Look right. You see a freezer. Open the freezer and remove banded bundles of cash. Turn around and walk toward the curtained doorway in the far wall. Six trolls come through the curtain. Quickly throw blocks of frozen cash at them and escape up the silver ladder to your left.

Publishers may be seeking novels that they think may appeal to the gaming population. That's -- I grudgingly admit -- smart. Cultivating a market that's still going to have both pulses and disposable income in 40-50 years is smart business, and might even get more young people reading books.

Anyway, dislike of present tense fiction may be a peculiarity of my own, but it irritates the bejeezus out of me, and here it came again this week. I was ordering something for Larry and had a choice between paying postage, or adding another book to get the over-$25 free shipping. Yeah, I know, like I need more books. Well, anyway, I ran across Away, by Amy Bloom. It looked tailor-made for my taste; female protagonist on a journey through 1920's America. Raunchy, some reviewers warn, but I like dirty books I don't object to explicit passages when a novel has literary merit. Then I checked the text. Present tense.

Why this annoys me so much is kind of a mystery to me. 30 years ago Ordinary People really grabbed me, and that as-it-happens structure worked like a charm. But something changed. Now I want to be told what happened after it happens. First versus third person? Don't care, like 'em both. But the tense matters.

Do I like "knowing" that the events I'm reading about, fictitious though they are, are over before the author tells me about them? Do I find some feeling of security in that?

That's not it though. I can enjoy following an as-it-happens story if it's written in past tense. There must be a literary term for that. What I mean is, each passage is written as though it just happened, but as though the next one hasn't yet. Like this:

Chapter 4

Elizabeth walked into my office and threw a pie at me today.

Chapter 5,

This morning Bingley told me that it was Elizabeth's parking space that I stole yesterday.

It really is the present tense itself that bugs me.

I'm going to order Away and give it a chance, but I still wish more reviewers would mention this tense thing while they're earnestly telling us what to expect if we buy this book. Not all books have enough searchable text to reveal it. Sheesh, doesn't everybody understand that if it's important to me then it's just plain important?

Consumer Life, Part I

This was in today's mail.

Today is July 26th.