Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Rewriting the Novel: Exhilaration

Well, evidently writing is quite easy if you schedule it into your day. I find I get quite a bit of writing done if I start at 11:00 pm and then write to ... well, let’s see, it’s FOUR A.M. NOW.

Some people say you shouldn’t write for a certain length of time, but aim instead at a certain number of words, say 300 (about one page). That’s crazy. I just wrote for five hours and I have three pages. 

This is not going to be sustainable, but it is quite exhilarating. 

 

NOVA DNA

A few months back I used ancestry.com to accuse my 6th great-grandfather of incest. I based that on the doubling-down of DNA and some iffy generational numbers. “How can my 5th great-grandmother bear my 5th-great grandfather? Oooooohhh.” 

This week I watched a NOVA episode on DNA that explained that it’s a range of DNA matches that determines a generation, and each range can overlap with the next range. So five generations back might be 32-43 matches, and six generations back might be 41-52 matches, and 42 matches might fall in either generation. Plus, the DNA analysis only goes back five generations, so that woman was outside of the DNA analysis anyway. 

The NOVA episode also mentioned that when Ancestry.com checked my BRCA breast cancer genes, they only checked the three most common BRCA gene anomalies out of thousands.

Still, it was an interesting episode of NOVA,. I am ashamed to say I don’t always find NOVA fascinating anymore. Back in the 70s I loved it. The best episode was about Washoe the signing chimp. When I see the chimps at the zoo I always sign “BABY IN MY DRINK” in solidarity.

A visit to Wikipedia reveals that what I actually loved was a BBC show called Horizons, repackaged and re-dubbed for an American audience.  

I have to admit that I conflate episodes of NOVA, Frontline, and American Experience. I have to take a moment to analyze the narrator voice I remember. Sonorous male voice? Frontline. Confidential soft female voice? American Experience. And, based on the most recent episode, NOVA is narrated by a chipper young woman. Encouraging for the girls today who need to get into the STEM field, but it doesn’t match with my ‘70s NOVA memories.

Bumped!

The Missouri rules had Gary and I in phase 1B:

Only now, the rules have been released for my specific county, and Gary and I have both been bumped from Phase 1B to Phase 1C.

If I did not admire first responders and the elderly I might be resentful.

Glasses

Earlier this week I was having trouble reading my work laptop. I adjusted the lighting, changed the font size, it still seemed small and blurry and dark.

That problem lasted from Monday through Tuesday. The work laptop was not a problem on  Wednesday,  but then, Wednesday I was on vacation.

Thursday morning I was getting ready to have a zoom meeting and noticed I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I finally found them in a room I hadn’t been in since the previous weekend. 

It would seem my glasses are so out of sync with my petrifying eyeballs that the glasses don’t correct either my near- or far-sightedness. I just blurring wander around in my long day’s journey into night, and I only notice the problem when I’m between near and far-sight: on my work laptop. Happily, I can look forward to Gary’s current state - eyeballs that have warped so much that my vision improves for a while.

I could also get new lenses, but then I would have to leave the house and stick my face into that eye-measuring device. That thing has too many nooks and crannies, how could they effectively clean it? I’ll just wander around in a fog, fine with me.

Eyebrows

So, as I said yesterday, I’m feeling a little insecure about my appearance lately. That’s why I was delighted that Amazon chose today to deliver a device that will up my eyebrow game: an eyebrow template.

I have great trouble making my eyebrows symmetrical. I know how they’re supposed to look, and the best I can hope for is for each eyebrow and to look good on its own — but they don’t look like each other. I’ll have a round eyebrow on one side and an angular eyebrow on the other,  or Vice versa.

I narrowed down my Amazon choices to two eyebrow devices:

1. Vaguely gynecological adjustable steampunk eyebrow machine:

2. Plastic strap-on templates:

Both translations were equally bad, but “Step 5: Enjoy your beauty” made me laugh, plus I knew there was a chance that I wouldn’t adjust both sides of the eyebrow speculum the same, and I’d just be where I was when I started.

So here I am, and after reviewing all the templates, most of which expected me to have eyebrows growing up into my hairline, evidently I am a Seagull. It says Seagull Eyebrow right in the middle.

One thing I hadn’t considered, all these devices assume you have eyebrow hairs in generally the same area on both sides of your face. This thing made it obvious that one side of my face has now slid down a good quarter inch lower than the other, and if I wanted eyebrows at the same latitude I would either need to shave one off entirely and draw it in, or go crooked. Sigh.

I would not have vertical symmetry, but I could still aim for horizontal symmetry.

Not too bad. A seagull banking for a curve. Left face says “Really?” and Right face says  “why so judge-y, Left face?”

Mail

I should not shudder when I get my junk mail.

The Vanguard fund is the oldest and most respectable of the index funds. It was the first, so it came by the name Vanguard legitimately.

But after I watched The Vow and Seduced, I’m a little skeeved out seeing that name. I wonder if the Vanguard people are annoyed — or if they even know — that a sex cult leader went about calling himself Vanguard. (As if he was the first sex cult leader. Please.)

(I bet they know. I bet some Vanguard executive has HBO and has been in a fetal position for the last few months.)

More Work on the House

Do you have a basement? Is it leaking? Yet? 

Well, when you get leaks, you have two approaches.

1. Patch the walls, dig up the cement, put in a French drain, and try to relieve the hydrostatic pressure ... this adds up to a large investment. And then, do what the wall-patchers say is your last option: fix your lawn drainage issues for another large investment.
2. Skip the patching and go directly to fixing the drainage issues in the yard. It is an awful amount of money, but supposedly afterward your basement won’t whine and bubble up from underneath when there’s a bad storm. 

We have taken path 1, and I wish we had taken path 2. But here we are. Massive trenches are being dug and garden beds are being razed. Thankfully the great stone wall is not a problem.

At least the trench diggers are suffering too. I found myself listening to snippets of their conversations.

”No, we need just another foot. Can you get another foot?” (They did.)

“Bug spray. Do we have bug spray?” (I don’t know why they would need this. It’s December. Did they find an underground cicada community?)

”That bush needs to come out.” (Great! I hate that bush. But yet, it did not come out. I think the trench is being truncated in favor of taking out the bush.)

They suggested it might be done in a day and a half, now they’re revising that to be three days. I might have to stop working at home so I can eavesdrop all the time. 

Electoral College

And this is why I voted in person. The President is now harping that mail-in votes are “illegal” and should be thrown out only in the states where he lost. 

He didn’t lose in Missouri, of course, a state as red as the blood of a deer machined-gunned to death by a beet farmer if the deer had hemochromatosis. Trump won by 56% in Missouri. He won by 57% in my particular county (sunburned deer with hemochromatosis). 

Gary said this would happen — pressure on the electoral college — and I thought he was being paranoid. The big concern now is that either Trump will lean on syncophant politicians and win via lawsuit, or else he’ll be a martyr and win in four years. 

Rewriting the Novel: Resolution

I wrote the first chapter and now I am obediently following the Internet instructions on How To Write a Novel, and they tell me that I am to write the resolution early on. You need to know how your character ends up, and that way you know to start at the opposite end of the spectrum in the beginning, and then you have a spot to aim for and you can pace things correctly.

And damn, it got hard. The resolution has her making a hard and selfish choice, and I don’t like it. First of all, there’s a lot of emotion, and it sounds like a telenovela. Ugh. And I don’t love that  she gets to this point, and that’s sad. I know Jane Eyre got there, too, deciding for self-interest against convention. (It’s not “Jane, guess what, Bertha’s dead,” three times on the wind.) 

Worse, it’s transparently the same choice I would make if I were given the chance to be a fictional person. All the things she says and reasons she gives have been hidden in my mind at some time. Then again, if anyone asks, I can say it was the same decision my mother had to make. That’ll work. Throw my dead mother under the bus.

Well, it’s a first draft, and because she makes a hard decision I can always change it. But it’s not fun. Up until now it’s been a fun challenge, fitting the exposition together with minimal words like a cunning Haiku. Now I have to drag my Mom character through hell.

This is therapeutic , I remind myself.

Outage

Last week the cable company cut the cord on me for several hours. It was inconvenient, of course, given that I was working at the time. The only work I could do was attend meetings on the cell phone. I had no internet, no tv signal, no dial tone, and no Alexa.

And so, these vital questions went un-answered:

Google search: “Where are my kidneys?” 
That question went unanswered because even with a bathroom full of medical imagery, I could not find exactly where my kidneys are. I know generally where they are, but I needed to be more precise. (they  are exactly below were I seem to have pulled my back on one side.)

Alexa question: “Alexa, how long to cook chicken thighs?” And “How many tablespoons of juice are in one lemon?
I decided to swap lunch and dinner prep to use this new free time most efficiently, and dinner was Butter Chicken.

What surprised me was  I have a room full of books, and it never occurred to me to go in there and open a book, old style, and look for either answer. I just decided I wouldn’t know until later.  If I forgot this skill, what will happen with Kids Today, who may have never learned it?

 

 

Heterogeneous

Well that’s embarrassing. 

A reporter just used the word “heterogeneous” and he pronounced it in a way I never would have imagined.

He said “Hetero-genius,” as if he was describing Einstein’s sexual preference. 

Stupid reporter, I thought, he’s going to get tweets about that. It’s Het-er-AH-Jen-us. 

Then, I remembered the banal facade incidents and I looked it up, and damnit, DAMNit, it’s hetero-genius.

Thankfully, I don’t remember ever saying heterogeneous out loud. But I know I have said homogeneous out loud. And I looked that up and damnit, damnit I have been wrong all my life. It’s homo-genius, not hon-MAH-Jen-us.

But wait, I thought, there is that extra “e” that I attributed to British/American spelling. Maybe hetero/homo-geneous vs genous are entirely different words. 

Oh, Jesus, they are entirely different words with different pronunciations that mean the same thing, but for a nuance. That extra e gives the word a scientific slant. So it’s ho-MAH-Jen-ized milk if you’re in the grocery and ho-mo-geneized milk in the food lab? No. Because homogeneized isn’t a word. 

So you know how I will pronounce heterogeneous/heterogenous in the future? “Di-VERSE.”.

Easel

I want a new easel. I love the easel Gary got me a few years ago, but it’s a French easel, great for travel and watercolors, not great for big oil paintings, at least not great for horizontal 24 inch wide paintings like the last few. It’s delicate, but that means it’s a little spindly, a little wobbly when you try to scoot it out of the way.

So I was looking for a sturdier easel on Cyber Monday, and I found an ideal easel on Amazon for  thirty percent off.

How sturdy is this?

I know! Perfection. I ordered it. Did I check the size? No. Of course I didn’t check the size. I’m an idiot: I never check the size. But at least this time, I checked the size before it shipped.

According to the seller, this thing is close to 100 inches tall. I am writing this in a room that is just 100 inches tall. I am 67 inches tall. Stick figure of me for scale.

This is for giant Chuck Close oil paintings.

I have tried to cancel this order and they are “working on it.”

I don’t know how they can deliver it. Seriously. It won’t fit on my porch. 

Update: I checked the SKU numbers and according to the maker,  it is adjustable, with the maximum at 100 inches, but that isn’t reflected in the Amazon description. If worst comes to worst, honestly, I can take a saw to it.

Thanksgiving

Well, welcome to Thanksgiving in the bubble. 

All of this reminds me of the year Mom died, when I celebrated Hannukah so I could avoid the first Christmas without Mom. I think that if life takes away an essential part of a tradition, like a Mom, you can get a little of your own back by breaking with tradition yourself.

So, this Thanksgiving, Gary and I are staying in our bubble, just like all brain-based humans in America, and because life took away our traditional holiday, I’m responding by saying to life, “I can do that too.”

What am I doing? A stupid minor thing, but it delights me. I’m deconstructing our turkey. This year there will be no brown turkey to carve with legs and thighs and breast all in one. America’s Test Kitchen aired an old episode in which they cooked the dark and white meat separately.

(Had I stuck with tradition, I would have also been stuck with a fully frozen turkey on Thursday. I obediently followed the Facebook advice to put the frozen turkey in the refrigerator on Sunday, and when I chiseled it apart on Wednesday night it was still just as frozen. Had I poked at the whole turkey on Thursday morning it would have been unusable. )

I suspect Macy’s is doing the same. They said, “We can’t have crowds at the parade? Well then, all bets are off, we’re tying the balloons to flatbeds and driving them around instead, so there.” I am surprised they didn’t just cobble together balloon video from old parades. 

I expect there were more than the usual number of nuclear families eating brisket or lamb instead of turkey this year, just to get back at life.

As a result, Gary has not stopped raving about the excellent turkey. Separating the white and dark meat is going to be a new tradition.

Skipping Appointments

The doctor’s office called to say our sainted GP will be working in the ICU on the day of our physicals, so I opted to have the physicals with the Physician’s Assistant.

Gary heard about it and stated forcefully that he was not visiting any hospitals with the covid spike the way it is now. The covid is currently a red and silver miasma pulsing out of the hospital roof and floating down to the parking lot. I suppose we could run our windshield wipers and knock all the covid dust off, but it just seems wiser to not risk it.

I also cancelled the mammogram appointment that I made last week. Back then, the woman making my appointment said I called at a good time, there were openings now, when the week before they’d been booked out to January. Now they could get me in a few days. It didn’t occur to me to ask what happened to all those December appointments, and of course all of Saint Louis is under a lockdown. This is an absolutely non-essential mammogram.

I hope my doctor stays safe working in the ICU and dodges the microbes.

Weekend Time

It annoys Gary, but I like to do two things at once - especially if one of the things I am doing is watching television. I like to clean up after dinner and watch television, or do the laundry and watch television. 

(In case you think I’m overly burdened with domestic work, and that makes Gary feel like a slacker in that he is not doing housework and laundry ... to be honest I am usually reading Facebook or doing a NYT crossword from 1998 while I’m watching television. You can add a third task, ignoring the dust and potato chip debris in the room with the television.)

This super-productivity goes dormant on the weekends. This past work week I tabled a dozen things that I needed to do, so I could do them on the weekend - and the weekend came and I did none of those things.

Instead, I just spent FIVE HOURS laser-focused on seeing how I could join a Zoom call with an Alvin the chipmunk voice. I even missed breakfast because I was so intent of doing just that one thing.

Rewriting the Novel: New Phase

Done with the outline and on to writing. Much more fun than outlining. Of course there are new problems.

When I was in the community college class, the teacher commented that there were no noticeable differences between my writing voice and Jerry’s. That day has passed. I am retooling chapter one and now it’s all expository dialog and pedestrian descriptions, which are especially garbage next to Jerry’s really lovely and polished descriptions.

Of course, Jerry’s draft had already been through the garbage phase, plus he was probably in a state of creative mania, so he had that going for him. Right now I’m just getting the characters off the train and into town. 

Another issue is that I’ve shifted to first person, and it’s a false note when my earnest and practical heroine shifts gears into poetic descriptions. I’ll have to get out Jane Eyre and Rebecca and see how they did that. They didn’t do it in the first draft, probably.

Skin

A barbecue place in my area serves deep fried chicken skin as an appetizer.

”Well that’s keto,” I thought, and I ordered some.

Heaven. Two cups of tasty crunchy chicken skin.

Two days later, I made a spatchcocked chicken, and of course the real appeal there is the crispy skin. Gary elected to eat a sub sandwich instead of extra helpings of my spatchcocked chicken, so, before I packed away the leftovers, I took a fork and ate all the crispy skin. Spatchcocked skin doesn’t refrigerate well. Can’t waste it. 

I think my barbecue place should offer turkey skin for the holidays. I also think that Tyson chicken should take all the skin they strip off their skinless breast filets and package it specifically for skin appetizers.

I’ve already bookmarked some crispy skin recipes and I am not even ashamed.

Procedural

We’ve been watching a lot of detective shows lately. (Poirot is back in the rotation - we’re sticking with it, except for the hard pass on the After the Flood episode.)

Every episode has Japp or Poirot or someone asking “where were you at 8:17 Tuesday evening?”

This is how I imagine I would answer that question.

Poirot: “Where were you at 8:17 Tuesday evening?”

Me: “I have no idea. That’s a Belgian accent, isn’t?”

Poirot: (beams)

Me: “All right then. Am I free to go?”

Poirot: “Non! Where were you at 8:17 Tuesday evening?”

Me: “All the days just run together in the Pandemic. Tuesday evening? Curse of Oak Island is on Tuesdays at 8:00.”

Poirot: “You have zee TiVo?”

Me: “Oh, you’re right. I record it for later and watch the whole hour in twenty minutes. Let me check the Alexa app ... okay, it says I played ‘Color My World’,at 7:55. I wanted to play it on my guitar, but I didn’t remember how it goes, and I either have to have  heard it recently or I have to see the words  —“

Poirot: “Yes, yes, madame. How long did you play your guitar?”

Me: “I play my guitar until my foot falls asleep. I don’t know how long that takes.”

It takes twenty minutes.

Poirot winces at my rendition of Color My World.

He chastises me for ignoring page 1 of The Dummies Guide to Guitar which teaches correct guitar posture and appropriate guitar-playing stools.

However, he agrees I have an alibi for 8:17 Tuesday evening.

A New Word for Me

Today I met a co-worker who described himself as a brutally frank over-sharer. 

I thought, “Ah, the distaff version of me,” — only I would be the distaff version of him. I needed the opposite.

I looked it up and he would be the “agnate” version of me. Did you all know this? Am I the only one?

 

Rewriting The Novel: From Planning to Action

Right now the novel is an overly detailed outline. I need to stop planning and start putting down dialog and descriptions, and, you know, paragraphs and the like.

I imagine I will tear right through it and then discover that I have an overly long fundamentally flawed short story. 

Calling this my practice novel allows me to ditch everything that is conventional and to try out the weird ideas that are still showing up at odd times. (The muse is not keeping me up as much anymore, but quite often I’ll watch something that influences how I want this to turn out. I have notes like, “Dark subject needs humor. Don’t want Poirot season 10. Raccoons?”)

I like the idea that it might be humorous, yet dark, because Jerry’s version was so dark and angry I want to heal it. 

This weekend I’m going to rewrite what I have from first-person heroine POV. Really glad I stopped to outline, otherwise I’d have a whole book to rewrite.

Garden Advice for New Gardeners

When I had my first garden, Mom, an accomplished gardener, gave me some advice.

“Don’t waste your money on anything in the White Flower Farms Catalog. It won’t grow even if it says it grows in our Zone. Only plant the things you can find in every nursery in your area.”

The years since have taught me the wisdom of her words. White Flower Farms is still sending me catalogs, and I throw them directly in the trash. 

If I had a child, I would pass on Mom’s wisdom, augmented with my own. While Mom said to plant only things I found in the local nurseries, I would limit that to only plants I see on my street, on my side of the street, with the same East / West exposures. Not just plant hardiness Zone 7, but Subdivision Tree Zone 7a, River Clay Zone 7a.iii.

Or weeds. Plant weeds. My Ajuga and Creeping Jenny look great. 

Ill

I had big plans for today, and then when I woke up I was profoundly exhausted. So exhausted I signed up for a sick day. I thought if I could rest for a day I might fend off any cold or illness that might be creeping up. I decided that if I was still just tired tomorrow then it was just fatigue and I needed to get on with things, just more slowly than usual.

After an hour I thought I would make myself coffee. Decaf coffee plus an ounce of cream and ten squirts of liquid sweetener. It tastes like mocha candy.

I took a sip, then a gulp. Couldn’t taste it. Uh-oh. 

I went back to the bedroom and took a sip of soda, I smelled my hands, nothing tasted or smelled especially strong.  Then I realized I should try something really strong just to be sure before I decided to go get a covid test. I remembered the sweetener I squirt in my coffee is terrifically sweet when you taste it straight, so I went back for the bottle of sweetener, planning to squirt some in my palm and lick it.

After a few “squirts” of sweetener I realized the bottle was empty. 

When Does the Yard Sign Come Down?

I can’t remember when we took down the yard sign four years ago. Perhaps I took it down on the way in to the polls Election Tuesday. I was so confident Hilary would win.

Right now it is 6:30 in Thursday night, and few, if any, of the states that were Too Close To Call Tuesday are any Closer To Being Called. And the President just called a press conference and revealed his plan to contest the “illegal” votes.

Do I leave the sign up until there are no objections or lawsuits?

Well, I just checked, and it seems if I were running for office, I would be required to take down my sign by the second Friday after election Tuesday. 

That will be my deadline, then. He can complain until January 20, but unless Biden gives a victory speech, our sign will be down on the 13th.

Election Update

Gary bounced into my room at four a.m., chanting “Vote! Vote! Vote!”

We got there early and still we weren’t the first. We were very close to the front of the line. Behind us the line stretched through the lot and down the lane to the main road.

We waited in line from 4:45 to 6 when the polls opened. Well. I waited until 5:45, when my lower intestine decided to cast its own vote for Trump, and sent me back home because the polling place bathroom was locked up. By the time I was done with that nonsense, Gary had voted successfully. I came back to pick him up at 6:15. It only took him two and a half hours.

I voted instead at 2. This is my line:

No one was behind me. It took me fifteen minutes total. (I might need to play the bowel card again next election cycle if Gary insists on going early.)

Now it’s Wednesday morning, and it feels like the year 2000, and we’re probably headed for the Pluto and the Supreme Court. It’s a little surreal that FOX has called a state for Biden that CNN and MSNBC have not.

I’m glad I showed up in person so my vote doesn’t end up in court. It was very distanced, safe, we all wore masks and stayed pretty far apart.

Conflict

For the past four years I have regretted that I didn’t hear the 2016 election night results from Rachel Maddow or from Stephen Colbert. Instead we got the grim news reported grimly from CNN. 

That in itself is odd, because Gary follows MSNBC, and he controls the remote for political shows.

Perhaps we heard preliminary information about the results from MSNBC and he became so enraged he flipped to CNN in denial. 

All I know is that if I follow the election on election night, on any outlet, including the Colbert Election Special, I will miss the sneak preview of MY FAVORITE GUILTY PLEASURE ... 

The return of Curse of Oak Island!

... in which millions of dollars are spent and an island is destroyed to find a handful of trash swept in by the ocean or sucked down by sinkholes.

That might end up more edifying than the election results, given that they won’t end with a Trump concession.

Or maybe they will. The neighborhood Trump signs aren’t up this year.

Harding

Our department has taken pains to keep our team United during the pandemic. They’ve invested some time in allowing us an hour of purely social time every week, usually revolving around a theme.

One week the theme was family heirlooms. I brought out my family mandolin and family photo, and mentioned my great-great-uncle being the ne’er-do-well first husband of Mrs. Warren G. Harding. 

People made ooohh sounds, which they shouldn’t have, because Warren G. was corrupt, and my great-great-uncle was a drunk, so  really that just means Fanny Harding liked the bad boys.

I said, “Don’t be too impressed, Harding was the worst president ...”

(pause)

“... Harding was one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had,” I finished. 

One more day.

Election Prep

Remember when CNN convinced me there would be rioting after Obama’s election in 2016? And then there was no rioting at all? People taunted George W. Bush on the way out, that’s about all the rioting there was.

Have I learned my lesson, though? No, I have not. I am now worried that there will be gun-toting mouth-breathing un-masked poll-watchers standing one foot away. The odds are low, but the risks are high. And what will most likely happen is there will be no riot, but it is possible it will be crowded and slow.

To that end, I have purchased a cunning seat that folds up flat. It takes a little work to position ones butt exactly at the center nexus, otherwise one tumbles over.

 

I have already picked out the masks and gaiter I will be wearing.

In addition to looking back at 2008, I am looking back at 2000 and the stalling that got us past the Safe Harbor, if you are wondering why we’re voting in person.  Starting to get excited.

Mysteries

Poirot

We are still slowly binge-watching Poirot, and it is still delightful. The only sad thing is that some episodes dramatize actual Agatha Christie stories, so we start the episode aware of who the murderer is. 

I do love the idea of a fussy person dealing with murder. Poirot tends more to the Monk end of the Monk - Columbo  detective scale. 

But, the best part of the show is not the plot, or the mustache, or the charm, it is the accent. Or, rather, zee accent, mes amis. Poirot will say something and Gary and I will parrot it, trying to mimic the accent. Most recently, pom-poms from a Pierrot costume were a plot point. 

Poirot: “Eet was zee pumpum.”

Gary and I: “Pompom! Pompum? Pumpum. Zee pumpum! Eet was zee pumpum!”

Ellery Queen

I have given up trying to get Gary interested in this show. There isn’t much to binge, it only ran one season in 1975. I remember it because it was the only hour my family spent without arguing. We only saw a few episodes before our family counseling appointment was moved to Thursday nights, and there was no way to record it.

I loved the format (before the last commercial Jim Hutton as Ellery whirls toward the camera and says, “So, did you figure it out?” I loved that. I was thirteen, so I also loved Jim Hutton. If you are young, insert mental picture of Timothy Hutton here.

The oddest thing is that I finally got to see it again, and I remembered far more of it than seems possible. I remember the plot, the intro music, the jokes, the minor characters, the quirks, my Mom’s reaction to a near-accident, and 90% of the denouement. 

Truly, I don’t see how this is possible. There were no re-runs, no videotape. And I know we saw at least three episodes, and this pilot contains almost everything I remember. I also remember Ellery misplacing his teacup on top of his hat, and either that was in a later episode or my Ellery Queen neuron overlaps my Henry Higgins neuron.

I suppose I stored the memory of my family getting along the same way I would remember a breaking news story, so outside the norm that I would replay it in my head to make it real.

It is a shame Gary refuses to watch it, but I am going to dole it out as a treat for myself once a week. 

Apple Watch Drama

This past weekend I went out to do the fall leaves in the front yard. I didn’t want to work on it  after four because I had someplace else to be. Usually I would bring my phone out to tell me the time, but now I have this new thing, a “watch,” specifically they call it an Apple Watch, if you “watch” it you can see what time it is.

When the sun got dangerously low I was elbow deep in leaves, so I leaned down and poked Mickey Mouse’s belly with my nose. “It’s three twenty-two,” he squeaked. Then he gave a giggle, but this time it sounded like a slightly more desperate giggle than usual.

About fifteen minutes later I looked at the watch and the face was blank.

I poked it. I spun the windy thing. Nothing.

“Oh man,” I thought, “I broke the watch. I used the blower and there was dust and I killed it.”

Dead. Last words: “It’s three twenty-two.” (Giggle.)

But with some throb of motherly instinct I brought it back inside and attached it to the charger, even though I knew it was fully charged. I went out to finish the leaves and put the tools away, and then when I went back in, hallelujah, it was born again. It showed the nighttime clock for some reason, but after I cradled it a moment, Mickey was back. Miracle!

I was then late, so I blew out of there without changing my dirty clothes or getting my purse. My joy over the resurrection of Mickey was short-lived, because while I was driving the screen went black again. Then the Apple logo. It was re-booting. 

“Oh no, it has a short, because of all the dirt. I don’t deserve to have nice things.”

A few miles down the road Mickey returned, without any weather data. Finally I realized what was wrong. I had driven to Florissant, but the weather was pointing to my home half an hour away. Then I saw the red slashed rectangle icon and realized the watch was pining for the iPhone. I took it away from Mother iPhone to do the leaves, sat it on a charger where it could see the iPhone, then I left the iPhone behind and drive the watch further and further away from its home base.

Really, Apple, just a little sheet of paper with some instructions. That would be helpful.

Tivo

Gary and I are again establishing ourselves as Werther’s-Certified Old Folks. I am so old I remember my mother’s satin foam Nefertiti coiffure wrap she wore to bed to maintain her salon hairstyle. (I would show you a photo but it is so vintage they may not have had cameras.)

Here is how we recently re-certified in Old. Gary’s ten year old TiVo died. We had a chance to burn the TV technology to the ground and we didn’t take it. Instead of getting rid of cable, switching to a fire stick and streaming, or whatever it is kids do today, we decided to get a new TiVo to replace the old one.

Why? Because we are Too Old to Change (TOtC).

Are the new ways better? Probably. The Young People At Work (YPaW) kindly resisted the urge to say, Grandma, no one has a TiVo anymore, until I pressed them. 

It’s probably a mistake, because Gary says this model is the last one TiVo is producing. Ten years from now we won’t have the TiVo box as an option. And then we will really be too old to pick the best technology. I hope the on-line Best Buy salespeople are kind to us.

New Watch

My brother somehow lost the ability to do basic financial math and made an impulse purchase recently: the new Apple Watch 6.

I offset that bad decision by purchasing his previous impulse purchase, the “old” Apple Watch 3. He got the Apple Watch 3 because the Christmas Microsoft Watch failed on its promises, somehow. I bid him a round number, which I see now is 25% shy of what is being asked on eBay for used Apple 3s. 

I wouldn’t be interested in an Apple Watch, usually. I rely on my Fitbit to track my sleep and occasionally my “exercise.” (You know, I like to get credit when I am gardening or raking anyway.) But the recent Blogography review of the Apple Watch 6 intrigued me, and then the chance to buy my brother’s used Apple 3 Watch arose.

I have had it a week or so, and I must say that after a rough adjustment period I have now bent it to my will. (It was telling me to stand every hour. You don’t interrupt a programmer mid-code, first of all, especially for something like standing, and then you don’t do it with the same alarm that indicates incoming text messages or calendar alerts. Me: “Oh my God! Did I forget a meeting?” Watch: “Don’t forget to stand!”)

I haven’t used it to answer phone calls, though I researched how to do that this morning. Frankly, these are the functions I have used:

Tapping the Mickey Mouse watch face to have Mickey talk to me. I generally know the time, but I am just enchanted by watching Mickey’s shoes tap out the seconds. And then once in the morning, Mickey will say, “Good morning, pal!” after the time. I respond, because I know someday Mickey’s will be the only voice I hear, so I want to keep on his good side. He also says “Good evening!” once a day, but the real draw is when he giggles. It seems random, so it’s a big score when I get a giggle. I kind of want the Roomba and Alexa programmers to add a random giggle, too.

Tracking my sleep. The FitBit just told me how long I slept; this Autosleep app on the watch breaks it down by light sleep, deep sleep, and how close I evidently come to death once a night because my heart rate plummets to 51 beats per minute. Evidently I sleep so hard it offsets the two times a night I get up to pee.

Tracking my heart. Remember when I got the EKG on my front porch so I could switch medications? Evidently, something on the result caused a minor difference of opinion between the drug company doctor in Germany and a US cardiologist. Minor. It didn’t sound like anything I should be concerned about. No doubt when I hear more about it at my physical it will explain those rare moments when my heart skips a beat. 

Compass. I love knowing what direction I am facing. Before, when “the meteor shower will be visible in the Northeast sky” I had to do lots of IPad machinations to find Northeast so I could once again not see the meteor shower. Now it will take very little time to not see the meteor shower.

I like it so far, and I haven’t even tried to play music on it yet or make phone calls through wireless. Sometimes I like my brother’s hand-me downs.

Recall

For what feels like the first time in my life:

• A recall was announced.
• I checked the lot numbers to see if I am affected.
• I am affected!

Technically, I guess Gary is affected, because he’s the only one who uses the Cottonelle flushable wipes. 



When I first told him how I had saved him from a pluralibacter gergoviae infection that would access his body through his rectum and then crawl through his intestines toward his stomach and there infect his heart and lungs and possibly kill him, or at least make his butt itch, he stubbornly said, “Well, I’m still using those wipes. Those wipes are hard to find.”

I then hid the wipes. Clearly the infection has reached his brain.

There was a full box of recalled packages in the basement, plus another one of a different color under the sink. I was sure I caught them all, until I saw this in the bathroom trash:

An empty package! Terrifying! Happily, I ran its lot number and it was clean. Whew.

 

 

 

Food Frenzy

Sunday a food frenzy overtook me, and I wore myself out. I didn’t go out and slay a deer and make venison stew, but I DID make someone deliver groceries to me. 

Then, for convenience, I sliced up all the vegetables and cooked and shredded the pork and chicken. Then I cooked the broccoli, then put it through the potato ricer to squish the water out of it, because it was for the fancy casserole that requires I make cream of mushroom soup from scratch.

I could go on, but suffice to say both refrigerators are stuffed with cooked food, pre-made food, and a casserole that has been measured out (mene mene tekel upharsin ) and is in tiny baggies and Tupperware waiting for assembly.

I had to make a list and prioritize what must be eaten first because we have waaaaay too much food.

Of course, that’s when I thought, “You know, I never got fajitas.” And you were right, GrubHub hooked me up with the nearest Mexican restaurant.

Belly says “AAAAAHHH GET IN ME.”

 

 

Proofreading

My oldest friend and I have been texting. She just had to go through another round of radiation because of a recurrence of the breast cancer she had six years ago. 

This is how I responded to the news that she was almost done with the new round of radiation.

Because she is my friend, she was not offended by “Glad to hear you are almost DIE.”

(And yes, the cancer has stepped back.) 

Clothes

I have worn the same pair of pajamas and the same two shirts almost every day since the pandemic began. 

I know there are celebrities who do this as a way to thwart the paparazzi, Mark Zuckerburg does this so he has fewer decisions to make, but I am doing this as a way to combat change. 

The Coronavirus has brought on too many changes, and waking up every day and switching between my blue pajamas and either my light blue or dark blue shirt brings me a tiny element of consistency. 

Does anyone else do this? What do you all do to combat the Great Upheaval?

Or or you feeling there is too much sameness in your lives now and now you are shopping for clothes online and dying your hair with that color conditioner?

What is your strategy? 

Rewriting The Novel: The Muse Pays An Untimely Visit

I went to bed Thursday night at 9:30. I confess I have a TV in my room. I find that if I start winding down with the news I will eventually be sleepy enough to fall asleep during the Colbert monologue. That’s about 10:30 my time.

I also find if I don’t fall asleep during that window I am doomed to be up for another three hours. That’s why I was up at midnight, doing a crossword puzzle, trying to bore myself to sleep. 

“This is a waste of time,” I thought, “I should work on The Novel. I am so close to having it all planned out.”

I did a little plotting, and just as I was putting the iPad away, it occurred to me that the turn I wanted at the midpoint would be much better at the end. I opened up the plot document again and made that adjustment.

“There,” I thought, “I can go to sleep now.”

”You just try that,” said my invisible Muse, settling in at the foot of my bed, “I’m going to keep you up until 2:00.”

For the next two hours, I would start to fall asleep, and then instead of having my usual dozing images of chickens walking on 2 by 4s, I would see scenes from the book.  I’d almost fall asleep, and think, “Yes, the chicken at the picnic should remind Joe of the snap peas at the farm.” Grope for the iPad in the dark, get to the Joe document, write “joe grbeans farm months to grow s eajlin seconds chicken girl doghouse,” save file, try go to sleep.

This went on and on. I’d almost be asleep, then it would occur to me that the lost boy who appears in the house should be echoed by a boy in the house when she gets evicted. Grope, type, save. “Maggie not dye cut hair should have two dresses.” Grope, type, save. 

Then it occurred to me I could change the point of view of the whole thing and any problems with who-knows-what-when in the Scheme would be resolved if it’s in first person, and that led to all new scenes of explanation, and I think the last thing that occurred to me as I fell asleep was something about how no one has a watch in this crazy town in Oklahoma, and it really bothers Maggie, and she tries to make friends with the one teller at the bank where there is a clock and Zzzzzz. 

That was yesterday in the wee hours, and I’ve gone back to the iPad and it all makes sense, thanks to autocorrect. Interesting. I hope that happens again. 

Toes

I heard a sigh. I looked down at my feet. Spunky Labia, International Toe Porn Superstar, looked discontent.

”Appendage!” she pouted, “I feel neglected.”

So I dug out the gummy nail polish I have not used for seven years and gave her a little makeover.

She’s happy now. I haven’t worn makeup since early March but she’s more vain than I am.

Fajitas

Our dining experiences have been very dull these last few months. It has been months since Gary and I ordered a pizza. For some reason I got a yen to have a date night and order something other than fast food.

As soon as I opened that mental door, my belly growled, “ME WANT FAJITAS.”

”Hm,” I mused, “Fajita‘s might be good. Where would —“

”FAJIIIITAAAAS!’ the belly demanded.

I set Gary on an on-line hunt for fajitas. “I think Applebee’s has them.”

While I know that I have had steak, chicken, and shrimp fajitas at Applebee’s, Gary couldn’t find them on the delivery or pick-up menus.

”Try Friday’s,” I said, while the belly sang a little sing about “F-A-J-I-T-A-S, FAJITAS ARE THE BEST.”

Gary looked and said, “Friday’s doesn’t have them either.”

”LIAR” said Belly.

”That’s so odd,” I said.

He said, “I think maybe it’s the presentation? You know how they always bring them out on that really hot pan? Maybe for the true fajita experience they have to warn you that the pan is hot.”

I talked the belly into Mu Shu Pork, instead, but still, how obstinate is my belly for picking the one food I can’t order?

 

The Novel: Characters Rebel

I have read authors say that sometimes, you think a character’s going to do one thing, and then as you type along the character does something else. 

”Horseshit,” I think, because I am a lady. “How could that happen? The characters are imaginary. They don’t think any thoughts without the writer putting those thoughts there.”

Of course, I’m not actually writing anything at this point. I’m making an absurdly detailed outline. I was working on exactly how I will get to my Big Midpoint Scene, in which the male friend earns the hatred of the heroine by revealing his participation in the big sting and I realized, “What am I thinking? He would never do that. It goes against all his principles.”

I think I can get around it by having him participate in the scheme on a limited basis. That gives me a chance to keep the outline as it is, and then it gives him a chance to spell out what his principles are, in case his principles aren’t clear by then.

Right now he’s stomping the dust off his boots and giving me a look that says, “What were you thinking? Do you even KNOW me?”

Stop Me If I’ve Said This Before: coping mechanisms

Abandoned Draft Version:

c – symphonies neesum dorma bnl Food – can control it 'drugs Smoking – 40 yo smoker Exercises – ed and mcdonalds  

Present Day:

Any guesses? Anyone? I think I was mulling over all the things people do to control their bodies and moods with outside stimuli.

• Symphonies can perk your mood or destroy you, which is an odd thing to pay money for.
• The aria Neesum Dorma can give you goosebumps and make you cry.
• Barenaked Ladies can reset your brain instantly (to a happier time when carefree people left the house and enjoyed themselves).
• Pie can give your heart peace, just like (one would assume) heroin. This is my drug of choice. I tell myself I can control it. (This was drafted 15 pounds ago, before I chose to deal with the pandemic with Pie Therapy. (I’m back on the wagon after my Banana Bread slip-up.)) 
• Smoking — I had just heard from a friend that his mother took up smoking at the age of 40. I said, “Oh, you mean she told you about her life-long smoking habit at 40.” Nope, he insists she decided to become a smoker at 40. I wonder if she replaced pie with tobacco, because I can’t imagine that scenario any other way.
• Finally, there was a very stressful day when a friend, Ed, saw me walk in to work with a six-course McDonalds meal in a bag, took a long drag on his cigarette, and commented how unhealthy my choices were.

I suppose I meant to expound on how we all jack with our guts, our moods, our serotonin in our own ways. (Still, the supposed (mythical!) high from exercise is the least effective, least immediate, and of course is the one most universally approved.) 

I should listen to more music and eat less pie.