Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Rewriting the Novel: The Last Chapter

Our teacher had previously instructed us that our last assignment was to write the last chapter of our novels. I was fine with that, because I have something of an outline, but on the other hand my ending is so far afield from Jerry’s ending that I had to make it up out of whole cloth, like an actual author instead of a plagiarist. 

I relied a lot on dialog, but given that Jerry’s book is full of five-page blocks of description, if I wanted any consistency I did have to make up some visuals. I took his first description of the town and reversed it, so all the noise and motion became silence and stillness. And I left the romantic triangle unresolved but hinted at.

As the teacher initially said, we don’t have to use it, we just need a place to aim for. 

I think next I need to plan some more plotting so I can string together the good parts. I have transcribed one or two of his best scenes, and I have some scenes I thought of myself, stemming from my new theme. For example, his hero needs to die. (Sorry, that’s what happens Jerry, you made me into a cruel hard woman.) After there’s a plan I can weave in his best scenes. I think after that I’ll end up with a framework.

I have an extra forty minutes a day I don’t spend driving in to work now, anyway. 

New Responsibility

Last month my only Facebook responsibility was to announce celebrity deaths.

This month I have an added duty: outing the Coronavirus Task Force Briefing Face-Touchers.

I watch every Coronavirus Task Force Briefing, every day, every minute, and document when a doctor or politico moves their viruses closer to their respiratory systems.

I understand when some people touch their faces. Recently Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue isn’t a doctor, and I assume he’s the Perdue Chicken Magnate, so even thought he touched his face a record eleven times, I forgive him.

I forgive him. He makes no claims to be a doctor or a President.

Actually the president touches his face, on average, only once per briefing.

He isn’t a doctor, like Secretary Ben Carson, shown here coughing directly into his hand:

The people I look to, the ones I ask the most of, are the doctors. Doctor Scarf (I can’t tell you her real name, it’s something like Biloxi, but I am certain we all know her as Doctor Scarf) and then everyone’s favorite: Doctor “I can’t just wrestle the President to the ground [when he lies]” Fauci.

Doctor Fauci is going to touch his face, and I forgive him, because he owns it.

The one that bothers me is Dr. Scarf. She is the opposite of Dr. Fauci.

And then days later:

“Did I touch my face by accident,” sure. Give me a break.

Of course, so you know who never never ever touches his face? Well, two people, the Surgeon General, who should be in charge, and then the man who is actually in charge, everyones favorite cyborg, Vice President Pence.

(And what happened to the dark doctor? Why isn’t she in the meetings any more? Was it the blinking? She blinked a LOT.)

Pence is on camera every day, and he has not cracked once. This has only served to convince me that in the day the Veep touches his face we will all drop dead in our homes and turn to dust. If I survive I will post, “PENCE TOUCHES FACE IT’S ALL OVER.”

Review: The Invisible Man

“Twenty dollars?” I squawked, “Emma didn’t cost twenty dollars!” I appreciate that studios are releasing movies on streaming services, but is this price gouging? I was ready to wait to see if the price went down, given that I did not have high hopes for The Invisible Man movie.

But Gary really wanted to see it, and we have all kinds of gas money in the budget that is taking up space, so why not? 

Was it worth it? Yes. So worth it. 

There was one point when I said, “Oh, damn. I figured out the end.” And no, no I did not figure out the end, they set me up to think I knew what was going to happen and then, man, they veered way off.

It was excellent. Gary said it was like Hitchcock. I don’t know about that, but it was worth 10 bucks per person. 

 

Fast Breaking News

I was working at home yesterday (I suppose I don’t need to specify anymore) and I took a break to get some type of diet snack out of the kitchen.

After my snack I walked back into my guest room/bedroom/office and looked at the news. The crawl said:

US DEATH TOLL SURGES PAST 1,300

I turned on my heel, headed back to the kitchen and ate 6 potato chips and one oatmeal cookie. It seemed the only thing to do.

It reminded me of 9/11/2001. September 11 was the last day I ever used my treadmill. I had been on it daily up till that date. I can’t really explain why I stopped.

I suppose it’s all about control. Why would I diet or exercise to control what my body looks like, if the breaking news says that life is going to kill me anyway?

Car Theft

I have been up for two hours now, and I am still mad that the man helping me rearrange the garage essentially stole my car. We agreed on a price of $2,500, he signed the agreement, drove off in the car, and then I looked at the paperwork and he wrote $200, not $2,500. 

None of this happened in reality, of course. I realize that the car he drove off in was a Dodge Dart. I have a Mini. My garage is perfectly organized. It doesn’t need to be rearranged. If it did I could do it myself, not hire someone, and on and on.

I think is all inspired by the stock market news, because in my dream I was going to invest the $2,500 because the market was so low. Every time time the morning news talks about the market I have a little pang of, “If that guy hadn’t - oh wait - he didn’t.” 

I imagine my senility will be just like this. Dreams that turn into hallucinations that I can’t shake. I need to go stand in the garage and look around at reality.

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/26

This week the lamp went from this ...

to this ...

I thought I’d be in detail mode but I’m still in sloppy mode. I overpainted and I need to add yellow back. I like the water in the vase, though.

The small project is the lemons. It uses mainly transparent colors.

 

 

Disaster Tally, Ho-hum

A week ago there was an earthquake in Salt Lake City, which is not an earthquake area, is it? It reminded me that at the end of February, I woke up and felt a funny vibration. It wasn’t enough to make me leap out of bed, just something subliminal enough to make me start thinking about earthquakes.

I have been in two St. Louis earthquakes, the one in my twenties that rattled the cupboards in our new apartment, and the one that hit a week after Mom died and made the lawyer’s walls sway.

Later that day I found out that the funny vibration was indeed a baby 2.7 earthquake. Still counts though, so now I have survived three earthquakes, one tornado, and a global pandemic. Early days, though, with the pandemic.

Oh, who knows. We are all poised on the brink of death. I know three people who have been poised there for years. Perhaps you get used to it.

Planning Ahead

I took inventory of what was in every freezer and larder.

Oddly, there are no cans of beans. Note: go buy quaranbeans.

Shown below is the end of my inventory. (Those two scrawled lines are “HUNKS CHEES(E)” and “BLUE BERRIE(S)” specifically.) So, here is some of what we will be eating if we are confined for, say, two months.

Do not scoff. I will eat or sell or barter the raccoons. I look at them now and I see fat, peanut-fed raccoon steaks.

I suppose I should have added opossums to the list as well, but they are muscular and I may want to keep them to pull the miniature plows in the backyard cabbage farm we will soon establish.

The skunks, however, will not be eaten or put to work: they will be bred. Remember GlamourSkunk, with her all-white tail and sporty banded legs? She has brought along her brothers and sisters. Their all-white tails are a little thinner, the bands a little spottier, but still miles more attractive than your standard skunk. Gary and I were debating if they were a separate breed of skunk, or mutants, or if we were just seeing recessive genes, and then we started making Mendel charts, and clearly skunk-breeding will be our new hobby.

Texting

I don’t get many texts. Most texts here come from siblings. The Text Ding stimulates an autonomous stomach-sinking response. “Ding!” “Oh god no, now what?”

For some reason on Friday I got more texts than all the rest of my life combined. At one point I was navigating three simultaneous text conversations. Not fun. I was reminded of when I taught Mom to copy and paste: everything was TOO FAST YOU'RE GOING TOO FAST SLOW DOWN.

Also, I forgot which thread had the bosses on it and I cursed, was told to keep it clean, which then spawned a separate cursing thread involving me and the younger set.

I find it amusing that the young co-workers see me as a sweet grandma who does not curse, so therefore my cursing is hilarious. Must remember to curse sparingly around them so I can capitalize on the shock factor.

Luckily, I work with teachers, so they were glad to show me how to use the dictation feature: that was useful. Most important, they showed me how to turn the damn dinging off for specific conversations, which I then did.

Awareness

People are calling this the new normal. No. New Not Normal. New Global Pandemic. 

When I start feeling normal I turn on the news and catch up on whatever Hell is fresh. (CNN, switch your Breaking News graphic to a Fresh Hell graphic.)

As one of the Special Snowflakes who might die from your snot I thank all of you who are staying inside. I’m also regretting my decision to stay on the Gilenya, knowing if I drop it now it’s ... six weeks before my immune system is back up to speed. (I’m glad I looked that up: I thought it was six months.)

Incidentally, as I type this a pundit on CNN is discussing the feasibility of sequestering only the Special Snowflakes and letting everyone else mingle and develop herd immunity. As I have often said during the last month: Jesus Fucking Christ.

I try to stay positive.

• Samuel Pepys had his best year during the Black Plague. 
• I only poop once a week, so I don’t really need toilet paper. Last night I used the shower head to rinse off after a pee, and it’s really not bad. I go right back into baggy pajamas after, so there’s no real problem with any dampness I can’t shake off. I can go without, and this allows Gary to use his standard small roll of toilet paper per poo.
• Thank God for technology: Amazon deliveries, ATMs, FaceTime, streaming, texting, virtual classes, working at home. I don’t know how they made it through the 1918 flu or the Black Death without watching their friends stream all-request piano concerts on Facebook. 

Even with those positives, I am freaking out. How weird is this? 

Review: Emma

(I must say, good call filmmakers for releasing your first-run movies on Amazon during the pandemic.)

I was complaining to someone that the trailer for Emma looked like they were capitalizing on the physical humor, and that frightened me, because that would be like a trailer for the Three Stooges that capitalized on the wordplay.

I was wrong, so wrong. This is the best version of Emma ever. It s a confection. I am so sad Mom died twelve years before this movie was made, because it had all her key components for a period drama: costumes and hairstyles and tea food. I counted three cakes which were not there to move the plot along, they were just there to have a very tall ornate cake. 

Casting:

The new Emma is an actress I have never seen before who makes Gwenyth Paltrow look fat and lumbering. She looks perfect.

The new Mr. Wodehouse is Bill Nighy. I was dismayed when I saw him bounding down steps in the trailer, and thought they were trying to make him healthy. They do not. There are several delightful scenes with screens. 

My one quibble is that the new Mr Knightley is too young to be Mr. Knightley. Isn’t he supposed to be fifteen years older? You can blame my father figure issues, but the scenes where he’s chastising her are not sexy at all.

I quite enjoyed it. I’m sure I will enjoy it even more in years to come, when the school girls don’t make me think of The Handmaid’s Tale and the one footman no longer reminds me of Seth Meyers. It made at least one evening of The Confinement more pleasant.

Rewriting the Novel: Chapter Four

Well, this is the day I should be going to class, but I am not, because the community college was closed, and rightly so. 

I submitted my chapter via email, and supposedly people will be reviewing it and commenting on it. I’m not really sure if it will happen. I commented on one person’s submission. Somehow she thought I was the instructor commenting, which is awkward, and I don’t really know her well enough to correct her.

At any rate, this chapter was a revision of the second half of Jerry’s chapter about the oil well breakthrough. Again, it took eight hours, but I ended up with 12 pages this time. And once again, the revision parts took far longer than the invention parts. I must not be accustomed to revision. Observe the blog. (Waves around generally.)

I added scenes to make Joe’s lack of emotional self-control more of an issue, and an exchange to add his backstory.  I re-read it this morning and it needs many more tweaks. 

The scary thought is that I’ve written forty pages, which amounts to ten percent of a short book. It seems 8 hours = 10 pages, so 80 days at 1 hour a day = 100 pages, times 4 = 320 days. Well, actually, that doesn’t seem so bad. And then I would have a first draft. Well, hobbies usually last me at least a year. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/19

The week the lamp went from this ....

to this ...

I was going to focus on the red petals but then I got caught up in everything else.

And the small project went from this ...

.. to this ...

It was originally supposed to look like the image below. My canvas was square and I had to do some adjustments. I think it’s okay. I think the next one will be better, it’s lemons, lemons are easier.

Dad’s Taste

I know that there’s no accounting for taste, and it takes all kinds, but my Dad had the most vile taste in food. These were his favorites:

• Black licorice
• Head cheese
• Olive jalapeño loaf 

He also liked hard liquor, cheap beer, chalky chocolate, fried bologna, strong coffee, and saltines with butter.

All I can guess is that all the smoking killed his taste buds and he had no idea what he was eating.

This Ancestry research makes me wonder what would happen if he’d had his own biological children. What foods would they have preferred? Braunschweiger, I suppose, and mustard. Testicles. Limburger. And those children would LOVE their testicle limburger braunschweiger loaf sandwiches and say, like Dad, “You don’t know what you’re missing.” 

Drug Trial

I am what my mother would call a scab-picker. I have a little problem, then I pick at it, and worry at it, and worry about it until it’s a major problem. Then I back up, look at my new enhanced problem, and say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous, that’ll never happen.” Sometimes, I consign myself to the Inevitable, but usually I am comforted.

This is why I did a Google search on “Gilenya Covid-19,” because perhaps my drug is the very worst drug to be on at this time. I did need to have respiratory tests regularly during the trial because they suspected there might be some breathing side effects. So that, plus the lack of any lymphocytes to fight off infections, would probably seal my fate and I wanted to know that up front.

The very first Google hit referenced a Chinese clinical trial that will test for the effects of Gilenya on Covid-19, and I thought, well, glad I’m not in that trial: I would die. I was surprised by two things: a) that it was the first hit and b) that any doctor would think Gilenya would help the situation.

Gary surmised that doctors are so desperate they are just feeding every drug in earth to Covid-19 sufferers to see if one is by chance a miracle cure.

The second hit revealed that some people think the respiratory issues that lead to Covid death might be because of “an overly-enthusiastic immune response,” and that Gilenya (aka fingolimod) might be the ticket to killing that immune response. So I suppose that yes, Gilenya might make it easier to get sick, but it also might make it harder to die. 

So there you are. Scab well picked. I might be invincible.

Ancestry Findings

All right, I’ve analyzed every DNA-verified ancestor pus one extra generation beyond that. Not only am I 100% Flat White, I had to go back five generations to find even one twig of the family tree born in another country. Some fifth great-grandmother came from Ireland. I bet if I researched her I’d find out she was the child of some American revolutionary ex-pats, and wasn’t technically Irish.

They’re all painfully boring, too. I was poring over it, looking for some citizen who was not upstanding, and I did spy this interesting anomaly:

Nancy Ann interrupted her string of babies with Mr. Cummins to have an interlude with Mr. Kimbrough, it would seem. I don’t quite understand how my 5th great grandmother could have babies who were also five generations back, unless ... oh dear. Well, no judgement about that.

Post-plague Walmart

Since January Gary has expressly forbidden me from buying the giant big-box blocks o’ of toilet paper that I like to keep in the basement because I like to stock up in case there’s a pandemic or SOME SUCH THING. I now only buy one week’s worth at a time. 

Of course this week he demanded the Walmart pallet-sized toilet paper.  I responded that there’s no relation between Covid-19 and toilet paper, he just suddenly wants to buy it because it’s a Thing he can Do.

”NO ALL OUR U.S. TOILET PAPER IS MADE IN CHINA AND NOW ALL THOSE FACTORIES ARE CLOSED SO THERE WILL BE NO MORE TOILET PAPER.”

So I went to Walmart to take the required photo of the empty shelves.

Check out my photo of this woman also taking a photo of the empty shelves.

We chatted only briefly because she was on the phone. Evidently this woman was giving a live-on-the scene report from the Walmart for her housebound friend.

Gary also wanted soap and surgical masks — no doubt also made in China — so I was trolling the aisles. I kept encountering her taking photos and talking to her friend.

”Soap’s all gone ... why are there no vitamins ... guess people want to stay healthy to fight off the virus ... yeah, no Kleenex, it’s tiny toilet paper ... Fiber One bars are fully stocked, no one cares about that shit...” and then I think her friend suggested the relation between too much fiber / too much shit / too little toilet paper, because she laughed.

And it wasn’t just this woman, everyone added to the party atmosphere. Know that when the Apocalypse comes, if you go to the Walmart, you will find all the desperate people banding together to help each other out. It sounded like this:

Stranger A to the crowd: “Have you all seen liquid body soap, is there any left?”

Stranger B to Stranger A: ”I saw some Palmolive dishwashing liquid, you could use that.”

Stranger C, to the crowd: ”IF ANYONE’S LOOKING FOR t.p. THEY HAVE THESE flushable wipes HERE ON AISLE 24” 

It was delightful. Gary went out and easily found toilet paper at the Dierbergs, so all is well.

Rewriting the Novel: Chapter 3

This week I read aloud Chapter 3, not too difficult because in this class two pages determine a chapter; however, mine was almost ten. One page was all my own original work, and the rest was mostly Jerry, if Jerry went through a surgery that took an entire Saturday to slice him down to one-fifth his original size. I had to edit him harshly because his original chapter was the one that spent fifty pages explaining in detail how every part of an oil derrick works. 

Before I began, she asked me to remind the class who the characters were.

”Well, there’s Silvertop, and Joe, and Maggie — but Maggie does not appear in this chapter.”

“Good! I hate Maggie,” she said.

I said, “Well ... that’s not bad, because she’s the character who changes most by the end of the book.” 

Then she asked, “Is Tangle-eye in this chapter?”

”No, this happens in the morning, and Tangle-eye’s on the afternoon shift.”

”I like Tangle-eye,” she said. This is surprising, because Tangle-eye is a deaf, bearded, lazy-eyed Exposition Man. I suppose she likes him because he speaks in dialect.

Therapy corner: When I read aloud the first chapter one student said he liked Joe. Why? Joe is vain and temperamental. He’s very different from Jerry’s version, in which Joe is clearly a sober Jerry. But it’s my book now, so Joe/Jerry is now my villain and Jerry’s villain Silvertop is now my roguish charming step-father Dan. Why? Spite. Because dead men tell no tales and finish no novels.

My chapter reading was received well. The teacher pointed out I had held the attention of five women with a chapter about oil rigs, so that was good.

Sadly, our final two classes have been Covoided. The teacher has generously offered to finish the last two classes via email, which will be fine with me, especially given she probably won’t be paid for them. She says she does it for the love, anyway.

Birthday Month

How is this month different from all other months? It is Gary’s Birthday Month. He woke me up at midnight March 1 to remind me. This means we must follow Birthday Month Rules: he does no chores and wins all fights.

That’s why I was so surprised to hear him vacuuming his La-z-boy and mattress this week. He’s still suffering from the dust that got in his body and spurred this Type B flu episode that of course he now suspects might be the 1% of Corona virus cases that don’t present with a fever. 

One might think that because he did a chore he might be picking fewer fights, but he’s been particularly feisty this month. 

As you know, the Pence Coronavirus updates have been required TV viewing in our house, and he spends so much time yelling over the VP that I can’t follow what is going on. I complained, and now he pauses the TV while he yells, so now the half hour update takes an hour.

Then I asked him to stop pausing and turn on the closed captioning so then at least I can read the information when I can’t hear it over “LIES! THEY’RE JUST FUCKING LYING! WHAT, DOES HE THINK WE’RE STUPID” (and on, and on, and on).

He said, “NO, I WILL NOT TURN ON THE CLOSED CAPTIONING, IT IS MY BIRTHDAY MONTH. AND I’M SICK.” So, sick rules and birthday rules combine in a perfect storm. This is not going to be a good month. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/12

This week the lamp went from this:

to this ...

(The table looks skewed, but that’s because of the angle I took the photo.)

The small project went from this ...

to this:

I don’t know why, but the small one looks very 1950s to me. 

Circuit Breakers

I’ve had a job in the financial industry for over a dozen years, and on Monday I finally got to see what it looks like when stocks plummet so hard that trading halts. (Trading might have halted in the past 12 years, but I never saw it.) I flipped on the news when I saw the circuit breaker was imminent and I got to see it unfold live. 

The CNN reporter at the exchange was scattered, because clearly someone was talking into her earpiece.  She was saying things like, “There's supposed to be a bell,” when we could clearly hear a bell behind her. I was thrown too, because it was a chiming bell, like a ringtone - I suppose it could have been a ringtone. I think we both expected a blaring bell. Perhaps there was one and the chimes were a warning.

Stephanie Ruhle at MSNBC was her usual steely self, and they had no one on the floor at the pivotal moment, so she just carried on while the number on the screen sat at 7% until she got the official word.

CNBC was, of course, the most phlegmatic, explaining this was to be expected in so many ways. Nothing was on screen but graphs, graphs, graphs.

Milestone for me, though.

 

 

Marked Safe from Coronavirus in St. Louis

Well, Saint Louis has its first case of Covid-19. Evidently a twenty-year-old woman from the fancy St. Louis suburb of Ladue visited Italy, flew back, took the Amtrak back from Chicago, and is testing positive.

I am not concerned for my own health. This woman could live in the Yukon for all it’s going to affect me. One word above reassures me: Ladue.

I have no truck with people from Ladue. I mean, at one time I may have cleaned the houses of people in Ladue, but on those occasions my hands were full of Lysol and I would have been sterilized from any of their germs.

I was further reassured when I read that while she had only unverified symptoms, during the family quarantine, her younger sister who attends Villa Duschene attended a dance at John Burroughs along with her father. (These schools are so tony I don’t even know where they are. At least Chaminade is visible from Hwy 67; these schools must be behind lions and guards and buttressed walls.)

The father and sister left the dance immediately when they discovered they were potentially infected with the real deal, but until then who knows how many scions and heiresses they tainted.

For once, I am finally glad Saint Louis keeps each social class in its own neighborhood. 

Re-writing the Novel: Chapter 2

I rewrote most of the problems in Chapter 1 even before I got the teacher’s notes. (My four-way conversation was tedious.) There’s too much “the loud man said,” and “said the man in the aisle.” I’ve got dialect that can identify one person, but I can’t use the trick of having Person B say Person A’s name because they start out as strangers. I felt a little bad for having her read something I re-worked anyway.

Chapter 2 incorporated far more of Jerry’s work. Still, I didn’t just cut and paste, I tidied up and wove in parts that will come into play later. Because I have A Plan. 

No one else in class has a Plan, and the instructor doesn’t encourage Plans, and the Bird by Bird writing book by Annie Lamott she recommended doesn’t either. Jerry, also, had no plan, which is why his plot’s an afterthought in the last half of his book.

The Plan was why I felt a little smug when she reminded us that the last assignment in the class, three weeks from now, would not be to write our fifth chapter but instead, our final chapter. Everyone else was aghast. I was thrilled, because then I could just hop over that empty spot at plot turn 1.

We meet in groups of four to read aloud our chapters. I find this inadequate because my eyes are on the chapter, so I can’t tell if the others are bored or amused or confused. Still, I truncated my reading when I thought we were going to run out of time for the others, then when we had extra time they suggested I finish. That was nice. 

Hair

I’ve tweaked Mom’s Doris Day Do so there’s a twisted bit on the sides. It has the interesting result that the next morning it retains what Gary calls the “Nike Swoop.”

Patient Zero

I will spend the next twenty years waiting for the episode of Nova in which they track down the Covid-19 Patient Zero. I hope that street meat bat was pretty damn delicious. 

I say twenty years because I think it took twenty years to find the German flight attendant who was the Aids Patient Zero. Well, more accurately, Patient Zero and Typhoid Mary combined.

If they are looking for the Covid-19 equivalent, they should start looking under the nails of the hardest-working Princess Cruise chef.

I’m a little alarmed to read it’s in a US Army base in Italy now. That’s how the Spanish flu spread, they say, it started in a troop hospital, then the servicemen flew home to spread it to all their countries.

My part in the fight against the virus is to document the suicidal level of face-touching that goes on during Pence’s Coronavirus updates.

 

Celebrity Hat: Resurrection

Back in the day, nine years ago, we went to the Kentucky Derby. For a few months I prepared for the derby by making an ornate hat. 


At the derby among lesser hats

It only took a few months make the hat. It was well received at the Derby, and in fact, so well received that it earned the name Celebrity Hat. (If you want to read the genesis and the glory day of the hat, read from this post to this one, ignoring any non-hat details in between.)

Celebrity Hat faded into obscurity, no doubt because she did not go on Dancing With the Stars as Becs suggested. Instead, she made a few trips to work functions, and gained enough of a standing that someone asked to borrow her for a charity event about five years ago.

I took a critical look at CH before whoring her out, and I did not like what I saw. Fine from the front, but chaos in the back. I ended up flipping her backward and adding some nice chunky peonies. Then, when she returned, it was back to the basement for her.

This year, Friend #2 had a charity event, and had that white feather looked more curly than crunched she would have looked perfect. No one who borrows the hat has a pea-head like mine, so this time I got the stapler and augmented the Velcro and now Celebrity Hat has two settings: Pea and Normal.

Friend #2 has now reported that CH had a fine time and was again greeted by the same words she heard at the Derby: “Now that is a hat.”

This time CH will have a job while in storage. I used Saran Wrap to shape that white feather around a Nerf Ball, so she will emerge perfectly curly and glorious the next time she makes a comeback.

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/5

This was the lamp last week:

...and here’s the lamp this week.

Ugh - the lampshade is tilted and it’s really evident I manipulated the photo and I didn’t change all the perspective. Plus I need to add the red to the tulips.

I’m taking it easy on the small piece. This is the first thing in Teach Yourself to Oil Paint, or whatever the name is.

This should go fast.

Gary Adds to His Device Collection

This week Gary added two items to his vast collection of objects he will never use. I assume that I am meant to use them. This is perplexing because these objects have no purpose in our home.

Item One: The Fancy Dyson Ball Vacuum

If you look at our basement stairs you will see every inch of carpet in our house. So of course, he has bought a vacuum. What happened was, he noticed there was a spot behind a nightstand that the Roomba didn’t get to, so he got out the Dustbuster, and it blew some dust back into his face that provoked a sneeze that escalated into a cold that is now Type B flu, the kind you can have without a fever, Ellen, you heartless cow.

So now we have a vacuum (with attachments) that he ... we ... that I can use to get behind that nightstand.

Item Two: The Boiled Egg Peeler

Gary’s been fascinated by this concept since the commercial appeared on MSNBC. You put hard boiled eggs in this device, shake it, and the shells come right off. We got the single serving one, because he ... we ... because I only eat one egg at a time.

You may be familiar with the “Have It Oeuf” version from Bridget Jones Diary:

... but ours looks like this:

I looked at it and told him, “This is useless. I don’t eat hard-boiled eggs. I like soft-boiled eggs. Besides, I bet I can shell an egg faster than that thing.”

So the race was on and the stopwatch was set. It took me fifteen seconds to shell an egg. But the device? Shake, shake, done. It makes a web of cracked egg bits connected by the egg membrane, which you still have to slide off. One extra shake, though, and you just have a damp mess of shell and egg.

And of course it doesn’t work on soft-boiled eggs (I tried: damp mess of shell and yolk) so there’s nothing I can use it for. Much like the fancy vacuum. It will just sit in the collection, useless.

Re-Writing The Novel: Chapter 1

I haven’t tried to write fiction since my college short-story writing class in 1981. And now I’m in this I novel-writing class, rewriting Jerry’s novel.

I ended up ditching what Jerry had in Chapter 1 except for three sentences, so the rest was on me. I kind of enjoyed plotting out the beginning and the end of the whole thing, but writing my first chapter was just odd. Everything I wrote seemed at creative extremes. Either it was something no human would ever dream of doing or saying, or it was something I felt had been done or said in some novel I’d read before. 

I was feeling quite creative at one point, and I thought, “Oh, I should put an orphanage in this boom town, and there should be a scene where one of the oil drillers walks toward the orphanage with a child, and goes in and then comes out alone and goes down the street alone and walks in to the tavern.” That seemed subtle and inventive for about an hour until I realized MAN ABANDONS CHILD TO BE A DRUNK, well, what in my life could have inspired that? So that was cut because it seemed heavy-handed.

It was interesting to workshop it with other people. The scene I felt might have too many characters got the note that it was confusing, and there might be too many characters.  The instructor even felt it the pace might need to be slowed down.

“Slowed down?” I thought. How would I do that? And then I realized novels aren’t blog posts or haikus, and you don’t have to edit things so tightly, that you can spend a sentence or two describing things. 

Also — and I say ‘Also’ because I originally typed ‘Another odd thing that I noticed was that’ but I deleted that, because ‘Also’ works, and I still believe in editing — Also, the one or two spots that made me smile made my fellow students try not to laugh. 

Next week’s homework is the second chapter, which I’ve already done, so I’ll spend my time adding back the descriptions I hacked out of Jerry’s first chapter. 

Young College Man of the Week

Well, last week at the college campus, I met a young man who was concerned an elderly woman (me) was out in the cold, and this week I met another young man. 

I thought he was Matt, the youngest man in my class, and I thought he was heading for my building, so I waved cheerily and said, “Hi! I think you’re in my class!”

”I don’t think so.”

Don’t read that as “Why, you might be, but I don’t think so.” Instead read it as:

(Snort) “Ha. I don’t think so.” 

I initially took it as “You are several decades to old to be in my class,” but now that I think about it for the thousandth time, it could mean “You are not in the same social class as I,” so that’s another nice twist.

I need to stop speaking to young college men. But then, I kind of like experiencing social unsteadiness: it keeps me young.

Shen Yun

If you live in St. Louis and watch either CNN or MSNBC you have seen the ubiquitous commercials for the Shen Yun dance troupe. All you gain from the commercial is that they are a Chinese, they leap, they wear flowing costumes and seem to be adored by a variety of breathless individuals who work in the entertainment field. (One exhorts you to “coooooome” a little TOO breathlessly.)

That’s all you gain from the commercial, but the internet will tell you that the dancers may be from China, but they can’t go back to China because they’re members of the Falun Gong religious practice that was persecuted in China in the 90s. 

(To my relief, Falun Gong is not Aum-Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released SARIN nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in the 90s. Evidently my brain can only store one Asian cult at a time.)

Dance doesn’t appeal to me as much it does to others. I imagine usually this would be very popular in Saint Louis. Sadly for Shen Yun, this isn’t the week for Chinese dancers, because if you don’t do your research you might think they just flew in from China on the Covid-19 express instead of being the children of Chinese ex-pats.