A balanced life. Not.

I don't do those blog memes except on the rare occasion when the question(s) really appeal to me, but an individual question will occasionally jumpstart me on a topic.

This time, the Wednesday Random Dozen (link is to my friend Catherine's answers - she does it regularly) asked ten things I really have nothing interesting to say about, and two others that struck me. Though they rather annoyingly rub my face in my faults:

1. What room in your home best reflects your personality; and

2. How do you maintain a balanced life?

A what? A "balanced" life? That's one of those "shoulds" that nobody actually does, right? Like rotating your tires, or always tightening the #%$ing child-guard cap back onto the pill bottle even when there's no possibility of a small child around, instead of leaving the cap loose and easily removed.

Seriously, I guess most people try to balance their lives but I gave that up ages ago. I work best when I do one thing that I feel driven to do and neglect everything else, and then change course and do something else.

For a week now I have been pounding at the novel (remember my novel? That brick wall I've been beating my head against for over 4 years?). Nothing else. Kitchen's a mess. I've done no business work to speak of. Barely reading, not writing anything else. Just Total Immersion.

It's not a burst of writing enthusiasm. It's more that I want the blasted miserable thing out of my life. Done. Sunk into that great sea of self-published plankton, never to be seen again. My love/hate relationship with it is on the outs right now, and I'd really rather be saying something else than saying what it ... says. Not that I don't still like my basic world-view as depicted in this college dorm of 1973-4. But I've been there an awful long time.

Which brings me to Question One. My alleged office is where I beat on this and other projects, and appropriately enough, it reflects the Real Me to an alarming degree. It's a chaotic mess.

But part of the problem is tchotchkas. Knickknacks, doodads, thingamajigs. In decorating magazines, you see lots of interesting knickknacks on bookshelves, often in front of the books. You can tell that the space is staged and not designed for use. WHO wants to move a gift shop's worth of stuff to get out a book?

In real life, true Book People have a separate place for tchotchkas. I'd give anything to have one, but aside from a single dedicated shelf on which there's no more room, it's a dream for the future. I'd never have shelves like you see in this post, if there were any other place to put these things. I love my tchotchkas and the people who gave them to me. Each one has a story.

The little wooden Viking is a figure I've had since I was 7 years old. I think some classmate gave it to me for that birthday, but I don't really remember. I love it beyond all reason. The moose is a McDonalds toy from at least 40 years later but it seemed to be just what my Viking needed. Some cool little figures come with model railroad gear, and Larry gave me some that were "me" kind of things.

But they get shuffled into weird configurations as I try to gain access to what's behind them, and, just as each knickknack has a story, there's a story -- at least, a sequence of events -- behind the current position of each one, too. Not necessarily an interesting sequence, no matter how odd or amusing the final placement is. Things get bunched and placed inside other things and then moved off to any stable surface when the shelf behind them needs access.

But the process can create a weird version of Accidental Art.

Honest, every one of these nightmares of clutter that you see is exactly as it was, not staged for the photo. Many people would say, "I could not stand all that clutter!" I actually have a hard time with it too. I periodically organize. Then it slowly reverts to its natural state. These photos catch it at its end state in the process and a cleanup is called for. I see no permanent solution until I have the afore-mentioned tchotchka space. But I can cope with it. After all ....

How Not To Get Any Work Done, part 832

He was beginning to regret terminating his psychotherapy. The white discs were back.

~~~

No, I did not make up that funny caption. The creator of this hilarious website called Unhappy Hipsters gives his own delightfully snide captions to the --- well, if you like it, you like it, to each his own, but --- to the minimalist modern architecture photos found in several design magazines.

He also runs a caption contest on occasion (not, I don't think, at the moment), so you'll sometimes see duplicate postings of the same photo with various reader-supplied captions, but there are more new ones as you page back.

Take this pillow and...

Pillows, however great, eventually go flat and limp, not to mention yukky. The only thing to do with worn out pillows is toss them into the guest roo-- I mean, dispose of them in an environmentally responsible manner, and get new ones.

In the department store, I get that sense of foreboding that we all get when we see some version of the dreaded phrase "New and Improved!"

It's Bigger! It's Better! It's Today's Luxuriously Oversized Pillow!

On Pavlovian cue, I am expected to lust after this extravaganza of polyester batting. My brain effectively disabled by the hypnotic code-word, "luxurious," I am now supposedly unquestioning about a few ... questionable things.

One is that: unless the human neck has elongated since standard pillows were invented, having more pillow acreage causes at best no enhancement of one's sleeping experience.

This improves my life how, exactly?

When I try to force the new wider pillows into the old pillowcases, the reason for this innovation becomes clear.

I cram. I jam.It's now an enormous cylinder. I'm not done yet. It's mostly in, but off-the-round. I must rotate the pillow in one direction and the case in the opposite by repeated yanking, until the corners finally line up.

Cool. Now, if I can make it a shape on which a person's head could rest without rolling off, I'll be all set.

For a moment, I toy with the idea that they've worked hard to plant in my mind. That is, to dash back to
Bed, Bath and Be Bankrupt, credit card in hand, and replace all of our too-small pillowcases.

Store employees are watching the parking lot for me and checking their watches. They were told at Inservice Training never to say anything like "Oh, won't you need some wider pillowcases too?" as they ring up the initial sale. That could as easily tank the sale as it could close it for bigger bucks. Hooking the customer isn't enough. Business wisdom dictates that if they get me to take those pillows all the way home, they've landed me for pillows and cases too. I'll be back within days. Hey, maybe (they pray) I'll go wild and get whole new sheet sets...! No no, mustn't ask for the moon when we have the stars.....

Our crack investigative dumpster-diving team has salvaged a disc from the critical board meeting of J. P. SpringFade, Inc., at which this plot was hatched. We now go public with the secret Powerpoint presentation behind this bedding debacle.

Lights, please.











But what they have failed to predict is my ability to predict the lifespan of my new oversized pillows. These initially-lush pillows are cheaply made in China and will deflate enough to fit in the old cases. Soon. Very soon.

More fun than the Sterling Cooper Christmas party

(PLEASE click any page for a clearer view, and to read the wonderful text!)

More annals of book collecting. As I recall, I bought this because I liked the look of it, especially that nice lettering on the spine. Spines are so often faded out in books this old.

The Business Guide, or Safe Methods of Business. By J. L. Nichols. 1898. J. L. Nichols, publisher, apparently the 4th revision.


"Over a million copies sold." THAT is impressive. This book must have been in offices all over the place. I expected Useful. I expected Businesslike, Dull. Interest tables, templates for deeds, bookkeeping how-to.

I got that, but so much more, along with a wealth of wonderful, lovely and sometimes funny Victorian illustrations.

Every single one of its xiii+420 pages -- even preface, contents and index -- has a header with an edifying saying or quotation. Some familiar, many not. A couple needed both facing pages but most were complete on a single line.


Here's my thing about ancient reference books; I use them. This post started out as an homage to old reference books in general, showing several I keep handy. You'll get that post later. The Business Guide seemed to merit its own entry.

This book has everything. For big and small businesses, for retail and farm management, for buying, selling, measuring and shipping. Chapters and tables on "Laws Governing Public Schools," Responsibility for Runaway Horses," "Mints and Assay Offices," "The Cost of Smoking" (!)


... plus almanac-type fast facts on literacy, religion, prisoners, railroads, of use to the businessman. Much more. It's loaded with goodies. I kept wanting to scan more and more pages for this long entry! Gave in twice.




But wait! There's more! You also get the lowdown on various swindles, explained in detail so you can avoid getting taken! The fact that you now know how to run the scam yourself .... no, I'm sure that all readers would use this information Only For Good.




In scams as in other things, the classics never go out of style. Here's one and the author doesn't show you how the page gets cut - the reader needs to look carefully at this page and to figure it out :


But the author never misses an opportunity to talk about values. Thrift, honesty, hard work, the keys to success.


And last but not least, this page is worthy of becoming a mini-poster:

Oh, lots of things. [UPDATED]

Congratulations to the whole Distributive Education class - you each get an A+!

This is a book that I actually picked up in a thrift shop way back in the 1970's. It's a high school textbook, published in 1968.



And it's full of very important questions to ponder. You can click each for a bigger view.



I love the service station -- that Invicta is very much like my first car with those same slanted headlights and BIG fins, but wasn't a convertible.


And I think that the woman in the first picture will get home with a dreadful headache.

Painful or delightful realities

Still in Allergy Mode, still with a swollen head, still housebound enough to grind my life to halt. Still in a lousy mood.

So we're watching The History Channel yesterday and a promo comes on for their Face of Jesus (or something like that) show. It's a search through the art images through the ages, and some kind of attempt to determine what He really looked like. Easter weekend is full of Bible history shows and some of them are interesting and informative, blah-diddy-blah, but this one....

Maybe I react because Jesus's appearance is a perfectly fine matter of curiosity, but some people think it's terribly important. Maybe I react because they're going on about that ridiculous Shroud of Tooraloo, I mean, it's from, like, the year 1300, so why are we still on about that thing? Whenever they drag out the Shroud, I turn off.

I am, as my regular readers have heard ad nauseum, a professed Christian and I really have no problem with curiosity about what Jesus's face actually looked like, but, I don't know, blame my mood.

I groused, "I wish we could find out what Jesus looked like, and that he'd turn out to look like Wally Cox."

Really, I'm so sick of Noble, Craggy, Melancholy, Weight Of The World depictions -- and of Noble Shakespearean Actor voices speaking His words too. I mean, what if He looked like Mr. Peepers? Would people be horrified by a countenance with less theatrical pizazz? Would Christianity take a Chicxulub meteor hit?

But Larry had a better idea.

He said, "No, Jimmy Durante."


Perfect.

Think about it. What would people do? What would *I* do? An endearing, approachable, funny face?

I love the idea. I hope people in general would love it too. Love a Jesus who looked like Jimmy Durante. Take his teachings seriously.

Happy Easter, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.

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.

Relocation

So! We're out on the upstairs porch, where we have not hung out in months. It's a good vantage point for me, so that Larry can show me the yard work he did, which in part trimmed back a lot of limbs and vegetation to get more sun onto my new raised bed.

A ladybug has gotten in and is crawling up the porch screen.

Last summer we bought 4000 ladybugs, and if i can find a picture I'll add it - they seemed to vanish before I could blog about it, but they didn't really. Bit by bit over the summer and fall, it became clear that a lot were around, and as it warms, they or their progeny are reappearing.

This must be one of them, post-hibernation. She'll never find her way back out of the porch. I brush her into my hand and toss her outside.

Wait. There's another one...

And another and another and....

&#*%^$!

A female must have come in last fall, wintered in the molding someplace and hatched out a big, big family. And they're doomed if they stay there. A few might find their way through the cracks, but not many.

Those specks are ladybugs -- if you click it for a larger view, they're more visible.

We really had not planned to do a ladybug relocation, but Larry dutifully got the ladder and I went for the not-Tupperware. He brushed bugs into the plastic container and I shook them outside, while he repositioned the ladder.


Cool - got five this time!

Larry urges one to let the movers relocate her.

Hey, thanks for the delivery service!

(He didn't eat any, at least not while we were out there -- when he popped out from under the eaves, I started shaking the ladybugs out on the other side of the stairs.)

Clever little bugs - they kept hiding in the molding from these Big Predators who were out to capture them, and we maybe caught half of them. The rest -- a few more will find their way out through the crack around the door. Or maybe we'll do another sweep. We got maybe a couple of dozen this time around.

Gardening with allergies

Still haven't caught the gastro-intestinal virus (Thank You, thank You, thank You!!) but my close-up work in the dirt to finish the new raised bed garden did give me an allergy attack of epic proportions. I browsed online for safety masks, but my eyeglasses won't stay on when I wear those stiff ones. I looked at surgical masks, but all the options I saw tie around the head and neck and I hate ties or rubber bands pulling my hair and slipping down. I knew I'd never put 'em on.

Meanwhile Larry had a dental appointment and came home with the best solution ever. These masks that dentists and hygienists wear loop over my ears, and are wonderfully comfortable. The dentist was nice enough to give Larry a half-full box for me! Highly recommended for work that you love but that brings you in contact with allergens.

So - I got my seeds started, in JiffyPots [TM]. Next was how to keep the wildlife from digging in them.



We'd bought a cheap window at Home Depot, to use for a cold frame. Oddly, it's an exact fit for the raised bed, so Larry also came up with this idea for protecting the pots. We used one of the toppers and another broken one to block the uncovered end of the window and thwart our little woodland friends.

Beat the clock

Old box garden in foreground -- and a new one in the background.

We had our first warm day 3 days ago -- a month late (!) -- but I ran out and started this year's garden project, feeling like, in this climate, I really should have started the seeds in indoor pots at least a week ago. Didn't get to it. Maybe tomorrow.

I've been playing Beat the Clock. Not only to have the cool-weather-loving vegetables planted before it's too late, but to get the new box garden built before tomorrow's predicted rain washed the soil out of the wheelbarrow.


This is the new project yall get to watch me do wrong this year! Won't that be fun? What's "wrong" about it is that I've put it right next to the woods, which is practically like setting out a buffet for the wildlife. But for the right amount of sun and shade, it's the only place. It will also get a tall wire fence around it that won't be pretty but might help.

I had to grade the site to make it sit level. Then I needed to weed all the little grass and wildflower roots out of the dirt and shovel it back in.


There. Now it can rain all it wants to.

I used the top layer of concrete blocks from the old box garden -- instead of the one deep box I had last year, they now make two low boxes. The old box garden will stay put, but at a one-block height. It gets used later in the season for heat-loving stuff, so it's secondary priority.

The third reason I'm trying to beat the clock is that everyone here has had a Very Unpleasant stomach flu. In fact, make that two "Very's." I'm fine so far, but, as the Eternal Pessimist, I just know I will get it too. Actually, in this case, I'm more of a realist. So I'm preparing for it (with provisions, laundry, and due warnings to all who might need my services), and wanted this box built before the flu flattens me!

The infantilization of women continues

I never write about abortion, which could be kind of a cowardly thing to do -- I hate getting yelled at -- but in the case of that particular issue, it's more a matter of not having a solution. I don't think there is one, and if i'm going to infuriate people, I might as well save it for something I have a solution for. And I find abortion heartbreaking.

But once in awhile a stand is called for, and in this case it's gotten dragged into the health care debate.

Only, i outrage both sides. I support a woman's right to choose. Abortion is a tragic and nasty thing, but often precipitated by a tragic and nasty circumstance. It's a decision based on her situation and informed by her individual religious beliefs, and the correctness of those beliefs is something I don't think the legal system has any ability at all to determine with even a shred of justice.

But Planned Parenthood keeps sending me emails about how terrible the Stupak Amendment is, and these emails infuriate me just as much.

From an article that seems to be a clear explanation:

[The Stupak amendment] says no health insurance plan receiving federal subsidies can pay for abortion, except under the three exceptions already allowed by federal law. Women who want insurance coverage for abortion would have to buy a separate policy.

The Senate bill took a different approach. It says health insurance plans operating in a new consumer marketplace can cover abortion, but it may only be paid for with private premiums. Money from federal subsidies would have to be strictly segregated from any funds used to pay for abortion. Consumers would have to write two checks to their insurance plan, one for the regular premium, the other for abortion coverage.

Admittedly, I can't see what in the world made National Right to Life call voting for the Senate version "a career-defining pro-abortion vote." The difference I see is only about how the same restrictions would be administered. Maybe people who speak legalese see something I can't. But the Stupak thing -- my liberal friends will ream me for this -- looks acceptable to me.

ONE, it allows plans that get federal subsidies to cover abortion in cases of rape, incest, threat to the woman's life. Those are the "three exceptions" mentioned. I think it should include a woman's health, not just her life, but the Hyde amendment is what set those parameters, and i doubt if any greater degree of coverage could be implemented unless Hyde were changed. Protection for women who've been violated is in place.

TWO, if she wants coverage for elective abortion, she can buy it privately. (I realize "elective" abortion isn't a good use of the term, but I can't find a word that doesn't seem to label non-life-threatening cases as trivial.)

And why the bleep shouldn't women have to ... here's a wild idea .... make the decision to choose the coverage?

"Choose." "Decide." Recognize 'em? Those pro-choice terms we've been hollering for decades?

It burns me to remember supporting the concept of Empowered Woman, entitled to her own choices -- brought to me by the feminist movement. Only to find that same movement now demoting her to an ignorant being of limited thinking ability whose decisions just won't do and must be managed by The Wise Shepherds. The same feminists who loathe the Biblical excuses for limiting woman's legal powers -- "In pain shall she bear children, yet her desire shall be for her husband and he shall boss her around" [1] -- are now advocating a view of women as eternal victims run by their own reproductive urges.

We can't, they claim, have a system that requires women to plan ahead because nobody plans to find herself unwantedly pregnant.

I disagree. Yes, plenty of people lack basic reproductive smarts. That doesn't seem to me to be adequate reason for treating women as childlike creatures who can't plan or weigh alternatives. Remember, the issue is about women who are shopping the exchange for a health plan. Reading plan charts, talking to sales reps, considering options.

It was choice-opponents who said for years that women just don't make sound decisions.

I do understand that poverty keeps people in a survive-the-day state of mind. And I hate that some women say, "It won't happen to me," or feel too strapped or hopeless to invest a few dollars a month in a plan that will save them a lot more money, trouble, and lost work hours later. None of these arguments are without truth to them.

But it needs to be attacked on a different front, like, duh, education. In my legally-uneducated opinion, however much hardship people bring on themselves by not using power they have, the law must treat the right to choose and the responsibility to choose as inextricably tied. Each is meaningless without the other.

As is often the case with politics, I think advocates of choice are fighting a different battle from the one voiced in their emails about hardship. Planned Parenthood sees all these efforts for what they really are -- an attempt by the Right to Life movement to reduce abortion access.

Neither side likes to put its real agenda into formal statements for public consumption. Choice opponents are doing all kinds of little legal dances to wrap the process of getting a legal abortion in reams of red tape, under the guise of Terribly Supportive Concern like "presenting facts for making an informed decision," and "time to reflect."

I despise all efforts to treat women like idiots. But, legally, there's a line, and red tape doesn't cross it. It isn't good and it certainly doesn't treat women like competent adults, or treat people of faith like people who should have freedom of faith. The difficulties that poor working women have in performing all the hoop-jumping are real and need to be addressed.

All i'm saying is that, legally, Stupak's clause doesn't seem to me to breach the basic right, and doesn't set a legal precedent that could be used to dismantle the right.

Part of posting such a thing is to risk being called a terrible Christian and a worse liberal, but I'd be pretty cowardly to disallow comments. So - any and all respectful disagreements are OK, but invective will be deleted.

--
[1] Genesis 3:16. I mean, you know... paraphrased.

Possibly more than you want to know about how my weekend is going

....so I will not say a lot about it, but make it a brief Public Service Announcement. I bought this thing a year ago and couldn't muster the courage to try it, so it occurs to me that others may have the same misgivings.

I was sure that it would cause a burning sensation like the ones I got as a kid, when swimming pool water went up my nose. I hate that a lot but, much worse, I thought it would resemble the sensation of drowning. No way. Pass.

I had to be miserable enough to give in and try it, and o! I found out I'd been wrong. So wrong. Using a neti pot feels wonderful. It needs repeating at intervals over the day, but it feels so good that I don't mind. Maybe it will shorten this cold/allergy/whatever is attacking me.

Happy weekend.

Gimme that Old Time religion

Got cats? Got box springs?

Whose fur this is, I think I know.

We had two problems. One was that Very Hairy Cat, otherwise known as Downyflake, tore open the underside of the box spring (a misnomer - they rarely, if ever, put springs in them anymore) to crawl up into. After living over the years with several cats who discovered this, I'm pretty sure that it's a favorite cat-thing to do. We tried to block access with a messy and dust-collecting little village of boxes which, obviously, didn't even work.

The other, more superficial problem was that the ugly bare box spring showed. (Last photo, inset.) We gave up the bed skirts, for both access and cat-related reasons, long ago. Neither our light summer blanket nor the heavier winter comforter dangles down far enough to cover it.

I honestly don't know whether I read this idea someplace, or made it up myself. But it occurred to me that:

nice sheets over the box springs would disguise their upholstery, and ...

putting those nice sheets over the undersides of the box springs -- i.e., sheeting them upside down -- would block Downy from his little cave.

So we did, after as much fur removal by hand and vacuum-cleaner as we could manage. This should work on any size bed. I individually sheeted each of the 2 twin beds we have pushed together to make a king-size, and used plain ones of a generic color to blend with the linens and the room, but there are plenty of ways to use the idea with anything, from K-mart's cheapest to designer patterns. Here, there's not much point in trying to make it look all HGTV-y since the stored items under the bed are still exposed. It looks good to me. This is a hard-working living space.

With cats.