Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

New pet peeve

We watched a few episodes of Your Friends & Neighbors (the new series with Jon Hamm) and now I have a new pet peeve.

Theee times in the pilot  -- if not more -- they show Jon Hamm watching black and white movies. Vaguely familiar movie with vaguely memorable dialogue.

The only reference I caught was Gilda, because it was the classic shot where she flips her hair.

But why? What’s the theme? Why those movies? Jon Hamm’s character does have a lot of sex. Maybe the theme is sex is what gets you in trouble? And if so, meh. I would have liked more significance for the distraction. 

How to do your taxes with ease

Even though someone else does our taxes, it takes me an afternoon to assemble all the information, and even then the adorable tax lady has to call me and ask for whatever page I mislaid or form I forgot, because it's a new form, just for this year.   

Finally, after years of this, I have concocted a system that made the process this year take exactly one hour. 

1) Don't put anything in the filing cabinet fir the entire year. Just plop it on top of the filing cabinet. 

1a) Go through the pile and extract anything tax related.

2) Take last year's tax documents and lay them out on the bed.

2a) Find this year's version of last year's document and separate them with a post it.

2b) Make a pile called New for once in a lifetime weirdness, like house sales.

2c) Make a stack of these pairs with alternating orientations (one up and down, next one on its side) Then double check and glean out last year's forms.

3) Applaud yourself. Seek out husband for more applause. 

4) Look at husband. Realize the new thing for this year was not only the house sale but the damn government required that husband has to take social security so you can be taxed on it. 

4a) Freak out. New thing is too new. New government is too new. News reports suggest you may need to visit the social security office in person.

4b) Try the online social security. Find password for the first of the two logins you will need. Password doesn't work. 

4b.1) Double-check password and find typo. Re-enter password.

4b.2) Steel yourself for multiple layers of navigation.

4b.3) Site reads your mind and says "Would you like your tax form?" SERIOUSLY. Right there, in your face, click Yes, click Print. 

So, today adorable tax lady gets the pile, and she may well tell me it is all wrong, but at least it's down to an hour instead of an afternoon.

Addicted to metrics

The weight loss sites tell you that when you're on this drug, you should only weigh yourself once a month. "Don't weigh yourself once a day" they cry. 

I'm not weighing myself once a day. I'm weighing myself multiple times a day.  I weigh myself before bed, and when I wake up, I'm half a pound less. 

They say addiction is a reaction to a dopamine boost. Who isn't going to get addicted to seeing the scale drop? And it drops while it feels like you are doing virtually nothing. "Belch your way to a flatter stomach."

But, strangely, they say that while on these drugs some people have less interest in everything that brings pleasure. But you know what brings me pleasure? Tracking the numbers. Documenting calories in, calories out, current weight. Not in an OCD way. At least not yet, anyway.

Semi circle of spots

[Today’s 503 error was brought to you by the new server farm hosting the blog. That was the previous reason from a few months back as well.]

This is a close-up view of my face.

Inside the green lines are a new constellation which I call the semi-circulus, which is Latin for semi-circle.

“What is that?” I thought, “Is it ringworm?”

“Age spots,” the Mirror said.

“Or maybe annular excema,” I added. 

“Pretty sure it’s age spots,” said the Mirror.

“Let me see if freckles that follow an arc shape is a side effect of this new medicine.”

It is not. Sad that I’d rather have annular excema or ringworm than age spots.

Monthly weight loss update: Month 1 done

The good: 8 pounds down, better sleep numbers, better respiratory rate. 

The bad: One night I woke up nauseated and belched so long and loud it woke Gary up and as it continued he cried out “IS THERE A BEAR IN THE HOUSE?” 

It is possible that the scale reads low just because I have so much gas in me that I am partially airborne. 

Here’s what we need to see, we need to see Selena Gomez in a tiny evening gown and when they ask who she’s wearing, she opens her mouth and belches. 

Weight loss drug update

Nausea: At the end of week three, the nausea is minimal. I can eat slowly, and as long as I don’t eat anything after seven, I’m okay.

Hunger: Lord, I am so, so hungry now that I’m not as nauseated. I also know I’m a stress-eater, and this week has been pretty stressful on all fronts. This week, I  felt hungry, I put tasty food in my mouth, and for the first time it felt flat. Tasted the same, but no emotional impact. What will this mean? Heroin? Will I start shooting up heroin? (Oh, and that front, next year there are supposed to be pills available instead of shots.)

Guilt: I look online and people spend a lot of energy justifying taking these drugs, especially if they are diabetic and it’s been prescribed by a doctor. Here is mine: I’ve again hit the point where I have maxed out my weight to where it's uncomfortable. I've been here twice. In the past if I eat more carefully I'll hit a 3 lb monthly weight loss. With these drugs, I’ll eat more carefully and hit a 5 lb monthly weight loss. If I had a choice between two investments, both with the same penalties and fees, and one returned 3% on my investment, and the other returned 5%, well obviously I'd pick the one with a higher return. 

At the end of this coming week I am set to bump up to the next dose. Let’s see if I can stick it out. And if I turn to heroin.

Dear God, this is my life now

I’m starting week 2 of the Zepbound now. Ignore all anecdotal evidence your friends tell you. Listen to me, your one true friend. Or listen to my sources who have more than one week of experience. We are unflinching. 

What your friends say: You will lose ten pounds a month. What I say: Factor in your age and your desire to keep your gallbladder. You will lose five pounds a month. This is still 40% more than you would lose dieting and exercising on your own at your age. 

What your friends say: The side effects go away. What I say: You will find you stop provoking the side effects. When the slice of Swiss on your turkey sandwich keeps you dizzy with nausea until two in the morning, you stop eating Swiss. 

What your friends say: You just eat a healthy diet. What I say: Yeah, a healthy diet for a dam-building beaver. It's like 25 grams of fiber. And then you have to throw a huge amount of low-fat protein on top of that, so you start looking at recipes like this one.

Ugh.

AI tells me that 5-10 percent of users stop because of the gastro-intestinal side effects. That number seems low to me right now. 

Drama Hungry

There is a nasty combination when you are well into your sixties: at least for women. Well, at least for me. There's an increase in appetite - all the appetites - coupled sadly with a decrease in drama.

Looking forward to eating the dinner you planned to make? It will be good, but not as surprisingly good as the first time you made it. Any sexual activity is great, really great ... really, really great ... what was I saying ...oh, yeah, great, but it's as reliable as clockwork. Literally. No surprises.  

I know at my age some women develop an appetite for gambling, no doubt to get some element of surprise. 

What you see above is my self-rationalization for why I am still so obsessed with this Fascinating Horror YouTube channel.  Honestly, I can spend hours thinking of these people, going about their lives, boarding a train, taking a ferry, walking under a big tank of molasses, suddenly, boom, surprise, flattened, drowned, suffocated by molasses. 

 

Paint issue

So last April, I climbed up to the left top edge of this sage green painted wall, so I could fix the sloppy paint job Gary had done. 

But when I got up there, I found I had fixed it already.

Evidently.

Last week I glanced up and found that the sloppy paint was back. See it? 

I'm just putting this out there so that next winter, when it's cold enough that the house contracts, I don't look at that CRACK and think Gary doesn't know how to paint. 

And, bonus: I'm not going to worry about the sticking sliding closet door in the entryway, the coldest spot in  the house. 

New Toy

I have evidently lost all skill in painting. Or perhaps my assigned painting time doesn’t line up with my eye-hand coordination days. Or perhaps I need to stop if I have painted something for two hours. 

Anyway, I decided if I can't get joy from painting I can get joy from buying things to paint. Like this little poseable 8 inch Stickybones mannequin.

Easy shapes, one color, no eyeballs and few ellipses, and it reminds me of those exercises in drawing hands, where you convince yourself your hands are a series of connected tubes. He’s my next project if I ever get out from under the croquet balls.

Gary is too much with me; late and soon

I was thinking about the marital arguments we once had. Well, I was longing for the marital arguments we once had. They were so much calmer than the current arguments. And they always stemmed from the same straightforward source: abandonment.

Not there when I came home. Calling to say he wouldn't be home. Not calling to say he wouldn't be home. Being at home and not staying in the living room because the reading light was better in the bathroom. Any time he wasn’t there, generally, poor guy.

But then, oddly, there was always another common fight: the joined at the hip fight. I would want to run out for an errand on the weekend, the only time I saw him, and he would insist on coming with me. And I hated it. Why would I with my abandonment issues hate having Gary with me, which was exactly what I wanted Monday through Friday? Because ... because it wasn't my idea? Because Gary would turn an errand into an expedition? Because what you love is what you hate? 

Somehow with Gary retired I still have the same issues: either he's charging into whatever room I’m in, usually demanding attention while I’m on a Zoom call, or he’s asleep.

I don't know why I can't be happy with what I’ve always wanted. 

Slow motion

As I went in to cash the house sale check, a poltergeist spirit sent by Dave from the great beyond knocked me down. Or perhaps it was nothing to do with Dave, and just the rumpled weather mat outside the revolving door, but in a second my knees hit the sidewalk, then my hands, then my right temple. (My sunglasses skittered across the sidewalk, and my headband popped right off, but my wig stayed put.)

The damage? Right hand and knee are bruised. Right temple has a knot and a scrape.

Strangest of all, I immediately felt like I had a bad bladder infection. 

I asked, "What is wrong with you, bladder?"

"JOSTLED," my bladder cried, "We don't like being jostled!"

Old, as proven by the blog

Back in 2009, in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post expressing my frustrations with how things change and I am not told. 

"You know what? It's probably broadcast in that frequency only young people can hear, except no, I just clicked that link and that is a really obnoxious noise. Don't click that."

“Huh,” I thought. “I remember that noise. It's been fifteen years. I was 47. I wonder if I can still hear the really obnoxious noise.”

Nope. Dead silence. Very tiresome. 

 

 

Concern

Last week I got a package from Amazon. I was walking toward the door, when I heard her repeatedly ring the doorbell. DING DING DINGDINGDING.

"Yeesh, fine," I said, as I opened the door.

"Are you okay?" the Amazon driver said, as she put up her hands as if to protect herself.

"Yes. Yes I am. Why?"

She answered, “Because there’s a pool --- “

“---OF BLOOD ON THE SIDEWALK” I screamed. “I KNOW!"

(Below: tennis ball -sized pool of blood.)

"It's so big!" she cried. "Why is there blood on your sidewalk?"

Good question, nice Amazon driver. I can't tell you. We shrugged, hugged, and said Merry Christmas. 

Joy, mitigated

Things are not at all comfort and joy here at the house.

Spirit

Christmas is coming but there is no spirit. I do have one of the illuminated reindeer out, and he is wearing the mailbox wreath around his neck because frankly, I am doing the minimum this year. Really good chance I won't put up the tree. 

Skin

There’s been news on the Gary skin front. They've determined that it is not fatal or disabling or an allergy to his meds. They are throwing a serious antibiotic at it that is usually prescribed for adult acne.

I’d be elated, but at the first side effect Gary quit. To he fair, the side effect was itchy sores. I was truly thinking about packing my bags, but then the rash began flattening out. He's back on the meds now, the only difference is that he attributes the pain and itch to the meds, not the mystery rash.

Pure Joy for Gary

The only bit of unmitigated good news is that Gary is cutting back on his caffeine consumption. We have discovered that if you pay three times the going rate for a case of soda, Amazon will send you caffeine-free Dr. Pepper. The can is gold, which delights him as much as overpaying for something. 

I have a new favorite thing

The Christmas work party was at the zoo this year, at night, in the cold. The zoo celebrates the holidays by putting out quite a display of  lights, and it leaves some exhibits open (like the penguins and seals) and they keep the other exhibits closed.

There were no lines. No crowds. Five other people looking at penguins. There were three of us in the entire seal exhibit. And speaking of three people: I saw precisely three people I knew. I didn’t join them, instead, I walked by myself all around the zoo, got a coffee, joined a couple honking at the sea lions, thanked a little boy who showed me where the red panda was, and generally hung out at the zoo alone for the first time in my entire life. 

So, that’s what I learned this week: I have a new favorite thing. Being alone at crowded places when there are no crowds. Like when I was alone at the King Tut exhibit in in the Chicago museum. Or when I looked out at Versailles after the thunderstorm and saw no one outside. And, most recently, this event at the zoo. I really need to find other ways to do it.

Curtains

The tab-top living room curtains were stretched and dated, the curtains in Gary's bedroom tore, and after thirty years the linen curtains in the kitchen disintegrated like a vampire in the sun.

I feel like the young version of me would have bought three new sets of curtains. Well, six new sets, because I would not have measured accurately. 

Happily, there were brand new replacement living room curtains in a box in the basement waiting for Gary's "dust allergies" to settle down. So only two new sets of curtains to buy, right?

No. After I put up the new  living room curtains (it's not the dust, fella), I took  the four old panels of living room curtains, ironed them, cut them, and shortened two of the panels into new curtains for Gary's bedroom and changed two for the kitchen. And then I took the scraps and made a green velvet gown with good braid tiebacks at the waist and play-clothes for the seven children I am governess to.

And why? I can measure now, I can wait, I have Amazon. It would have taken far less time to order them. It took an hour and a half to cut, iron, and sew it all. And I'm not short on money. And I'd like to say that I wanted to reuse and recycle, but nothing else in my life is evidence of that.

I suppose I am old. It seems to be a very Grandma move.

Love Language

I was wondering. Do Love langauges correspond to Hate languages?

Like, if I love someone they can touch me, but if I hate them -- well, even if I don’t like them -- it makes my skin crawl. 

I suppose I can picture the inverse of Quality Time. Talk about crawling, the minutes crawl by if you’re around someone you dislike. 

But is there an opposite of Giving Gifts? Where someone you love gives you, say, a pair of earrings, and you like them, but those same earrings -- from someone you don’t love -- make you recoil? I don't mean you leave them in a box, but they make you shudder. I have to say I’ve never felt that, but Gifts are my least favorite love language.

What about talking? That makes sense, two people who don’t like each other just won’t talk at all, and if someone I dislike is talking to me, that is extremely tiresome. 

The final puzzle is Acts of Service. Then again, I do remember workmates who would pre-emptively do my job for me. That was galling.

This all came about because I remembered how I deeply despise it when someone I dislike sits on my bed. Bed sitting should be a love language because it provokes such strong feelings.

Rewriting the Novel: Landmark

Okay, I’ve finished that gaping hole of a middle chapter that only read ‘Build tension” and now that the plot is straightened out I am back to the fun stuff.

1. Shift non-vital descriptions and exposition out of chapter one, shift all the post-resolution details I can to the last chapter.
2. Make a pass to emphasize every one of the senses.
3. Search for every time I write the words “I felt” so I can show-not-tell.
4. Add stronger feelings to the midpoint.
5. Plot the dates and the moon and how much money she has.
6. Make every character’s voice distinct.
7. Correct when minor characters disappear for long stretches.
8. Simplify points when she shows up in five different settings in one chapter.
9. Lop out everything that gives me pause, except for the aunts; they need to go back in but not as dialogue. 

Nine passes left instead of seventeen. Tedious chapter conquered. Let the fun return.

Hair gets a new lease on life

The country western star wig has not been cooperating recently. It has developed kind of a 1970s vibe, and the nice curls that stayed above my eyebrow are all dangling down in front of my eyelashes. All the curls were stretched and wonky. Ends: ratty and tangled.

"This is it for you, wig," I said. "You're all clumpy. Maybe there's one last hope for you. I know I'm not supposed to do this to you, but I'm going to brush you out."

'

I put it in a headband, obviously, and now I'm thinking I could take some scissors to it. 

Halloween Costume

For the halloween party at work I told people I had worked really hard to pack on forty pounds, put on a wig, and develop wrinkles, and I came as a grandma. 

Rewriting the Novel: Some spots

I did a lot of work on the novel over the weekend. I would say three of the seven chapters need major transitions to incorporate new text, plus one chapter needs to be created out of whole cloth.  

What this means is that most of it is polished, and parts are back to the shitty first draft level. If this book were a man, he would be a strong handsome man with good hair missing a hand and with a gaping bloody gouge in his torso.

He needs multiple weekends before we can get back to the fun stuff: the waxing, the buffing and oiling. Sticking by him, though.

Cookies

When the expensive cookies arrived, Gary would only eat the oatmeal ones, because they were “healthy.”

I decided to make him oatmeal cookies, and I turned to the America’s Test Kitchen cookbook because only the most scientifically validated cookies could show my love.

There I found Chocolate-chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries, and turned the page because who has the ingredients for something like that just lying around.

Chocolate chunks. I lost heart here because I didn't even have semi-sweet chocolate chunks. On further reading, it was evident they wanted me to take a four-ounce bar of German's "sweet" baking chocolate and chop it up.

Oatmeal. I had a big container left over because the Trivia Night shortbread called for a quarter cup.

Pecans. Stocked up on pecans because they go into my salad every day.

Dried Cherries. "I don't have dried cherries," I thought, "But maybe that bin in the back of the pantry has Craisins or something." But no. Smiling up at me from the top of the bin was an unopened package of dried cherries from the fruitcake two Christmases ago.

So, pantry destiny manifested. All signs point to cookies.

And they were sublime, only, sadly, I forgot you shouldn't mix steroids and sugar. It wasn't until Gary described the exhaustion he felt after one cookie that I remembered the chocolate layer cake that wiped me out when I was on Prednisone.

I have frozen them so he can enjoy them later, poor fella.

In which I am again confronted with change

That title. That title is in sentence case. This is because the writing style at work has been adjusted so that all titles will be in sentence case.

It seems putting titles in title case is “old-fashioned.” I immediately thought I should write an email in which every Sentence Was In Title Case, But I Did Not.

So, I have been trying to adopt this new title style, because I do want to keep up with the kids today. But it looks so odd. Does It Not? 

Barenaked Ladies - not this year

I think I've been to about thirty Barenaked Ladies concerts, in a variety of states and countries, and now they are playing sixteen miles from my house, and ... I'm not going. It's just not going to happen. 

Gary absolutely cannot go. He can barely stand with a cane with everything this allergy is taking out of him. I could risk it, but I'm living with Gary and all his illnesses.

In addition, he might be past the covid vaccine and on the steroids by then, and his entire immune system will be squashed. 

It's okay. It's not great, but if I wait a few days it will all be up on YouTube. Bummer though. 

If you live in Saint Louis you should go in my place.

Gary is Smarter than I, Yet Again

The time: 2:00 a.m.

The place: kitchen table

I am awakened by the sound of Gary cursing.

Get up, creep in the dark to the kitchen, where I discover Gary has knocked a dime off the table and does not see where it rolled.

He is cursing and searching the floor.

"I got this," I say. With that I get the flashlight, then, and this is genius, I descend the exposed basement steps until my eyes are level with the kitchen floor, and I start swinging the flashlight and scanning like I am looking for relics from the Titanic.

"Or we could do this," Gary says, and turns on the light, instantly revealing the dime.

Tonteen

It occurs to me that I have won the family tonteen, in that I have outlived every single relative, and now I have all their stuff.

(I haven't done this deliberately. People just die young in my family. Jerry at 48, Dad at 52, Dave at 62, Mom at 71.)

I sold Mom's house in 2022, and now the sale of Dave's house is creeping forward. 

But now there is an annoying snag with the sale. He got a home improvement loan, and while the bank told me it was fully paid off, the same bank now says it was not. I'm not too worried about it, but for some reason after slogging through almost two years of this. 

It just takes so much out of me, selling a house. I don't know how other people do it so carelessly.

Present Day

Twenty years ago, in 2004, I was working at Elliot and escorting my niece to trail rides and Cradle of Filth concerts.  I bought a new red Mini Cooper and discovered BNL. It feels like yesterday.

I suppose that twenty years from now, today will feel like just yesterday too. I hope so, anyway.

But as for present day, here I am, enjoying my 62nd birthday. I still like Mini Coopers, my niece, and BNL. In twenty years Gary will be 90, and I will be 82, so perhaps a self-driving Mini-Cooper will take us all to a BNL concert. 

Drug nonsense

Remember earlier this year, when I was so pleased with my new hands-off approach to health insurance? I just pointed out some anomalies to the people being paid and let them get to work on it.

One anomaly was that Gary was charged $5,000 for a procedure or drug that I could not identify. I think I decided it was the x-ray of his foot. 

So, when my latest mail-order pharmacy invoice came back with a credit of $5,000, I patted myself on the back. "There's that five grand," I thought, "See, you just have to be patient and everything gets sorted out."

Then the next day, I called the specialty pharmacy to refill my Mayzent prescription. 

The telephony system said, "Accredo is no longer your speciality pharmacy." Click. Call over.

"That was weird," I thought. I called back and heard the same thing.

Then began a long slog in which I data-mined through phone calls, emails, pharmacy web sites, work web sites. I tried changing to a different speciality pharmacy to see who barked. Finally, this seemed to be the trick: I contacted the prescribing doctor's office, they got on the case and got me back on the rolls, and painfully long story short, I get a new Accredo phone number and was all set up for a drug delivery on Monday.

Monday came and went. No drugs. 

I dropped my "Just be patient, they'll take care of it" stance. I was pretty short with them. I did use The Tone. 

Today at noon I will know if the impatient approach works better than the short-lived patient stance, because that's when the drugs should be here.

I am still proud that I ordered the meds when I had a week and a half left, not down to my last three. But that's about all I'm proud of.

Favorite attire

Remember when the pandemic started and we all started wearing soft pants? 

I did that. Sweat pants, pajama pants. 

And then I went softer. And shorter. And manlier.

I've been wearing the black pair of Gary's original Jockey brand boxer briefs detailed in this post. This post from, dare I say it, 2008. Sixteen years ago. They have a tiny hole where the inseam meets the Man Gusset. (I don't know what it's actually called.)

They are very comfortable and loose. I tell myself, "Because I'm actually wearing the black pair, I don't look like I'm running around in men's underwear." At times I forget I'm wearing them and I run out to the porch, or even the mailbox. And of course, the cunning crotch pocket can be used to hold the mail, if I so choose.

I tell myself the neighbors have no idea. And it makes me feel close to Gary. 

Rewriting the Novel: Tension

I seriously, truly, just made a new document called “Outline.doc” because I am back to square one.

Well, not really all the way back. It just became evident that tension was not building, it was starting and stalling and stopping and starting again. I made the outline to rearrange the first six chapters so her situation got progressively worse, instead of disaster followed by a little setback followed by tearful disappointment.

Hopefully, there’ll be some reason to turn the pages this way.

Rewriting the Novel: FIVE WORDS

So I've been been ignoring this novel for, what, a year? I decided it would be easier if I worked off my latest printout to make revisions. 

I completely forgot that sometime recently I decided to gut the first half. I went to make a revision in chapter three of the on-line copy and found that chapter three now says nothing but "Wait for Joe build tension."

That's it. And you know what I did after that? I dropped a thousand words out of the second half because evidently I like going backward.

Gratitude

I was feeling a little sad. My current wig is quite flattering, but essentially it is a big pile of nylon lies. 

I thought, "I suppose if I want to be honest all I can do is have a hair transplant." I surveyed my body for hairs and discovered, to my surprise, I have only one very small body hair area left. There is so little that, if transplanted, it could all be hidden by a small yarmulke.

I could have felt sorry for myself, but I looked closely and found I have no hair on my legs anywhere, toes to thighs. It was then I realized I have not shaved my legs for a decade. For this I am grateful. 

Vacation Accountability

I have been off work all week, and if things go well the next few days, I will have done all twenty tasks I set out for myself. Tasks included calling strangers and prodding lawyers and other things that require more heart than I usually have on a work day.

I still have two days to pull up 12 feet of landscaping cloth and recycle the cardboard we have been keeping in the great room so it doesn't get infested with cicadas. Even though both things need to happen during the cicada sleep window, I should be able to meet that goal. 

How should we celebrate the great cicada grounding? Shall we gather their little husks and have a bonfire? 

Aurora

I have one item on my bucket list. See the northern lights. 

When I heard about the solar storm I immediately set an alarm for 11 pm, as that was the expected time. Then I settled in and finished watching The Durrels in Corfu.

Damn Masterpiece Theater for sucking me in. I didn't check Facebook until after the (kind of tiresome) last episode, and then I saw post after post of the gorgeous aurora from all my local friends, even one who lives less than one mile away.

I ran outside. No lights in the sky. I ran back in and saw all those posts were dated an hour earlier. Under the belief that the light pollution was in the way, Gary and I drove down a terrifyingly dark road. Still no lights. 

Pouty, I returned home and looked at the Facebook comments. Over and over I read, "Oh, no, you can't see them with the naked eye, you have to look through your iPhone camera.”

Back outside, camera in hand, still no pretty pink and green lights. My “How to watch Northern lights” search said I needed to turn on night mode ... and that wasn’t available until the model after mine.

“Does this mean we still have to go to Iceland?” Gary grumbled. 

Well, yes, because even if I had been in the right place with the right phone, I don't think looking at a camera pointed at the northern lights is the same as seeing the northern lights.

Tornado

Usually I'm quite happy to live near the weather service office, because it makes the TV tornado maps easy to read. The center of the radar beacon is the weather office, which is just a few miles from my house as the crow flies, or, as the tornado spins.

Today, though, I did not appreciate being awakened by the tornado sirens at 4:26 am. The TV meteorologist said there was a tornado right over the weather service office, and the workers there were seeking shelter. It was a little alarming to picture the staff sounding the sirens and then running to their office basement, so I went to my basement too.

Turns out it was just a tiny tornado, didn't even touch down. And I don't mean to suggest the weather service office employees might have been a little excitable. I think Steve on Google maps said it best.

May Day

I was feeling old. I believe it was because I remembered driving with my Grandmother in her car, which was a '55 Nash Rambler. I was six. We were driving twenty miles an hour on Lindbergh Boulevard. We were not making any friends. I realized that few of my work colleagues would have driven in a car made before the sixties, if not the seventies.

Then I woke up today, saw it was May Day, then picked right up with "No work colleagues have danced around a Maypole." I use the words "Dance" and "Maypole" loosely; it was a tetherball pole taped up with crepe paper streamers, and we did not dance as much as plod.

I also feel old because Facebook keeps filling my feed with photos of Green Stamps and Mercurochrome, captioned "IF YOU REMEMBER THIS YOU ARE OLD."

And most of all, I feel old because I was all set to have someone fix my neurogenic bladder today, and now the insurance is stalling, and I am left with a sixty year old MS bladder and no clear path to even short-term improvement. 

I had even spent an evening talking Gary into supporting me. At least this time I knew he'd come around eventually, so I guess that's the wisdom that comes with age. 

White Sauce

I once heard someone defend middle-class casseroles, saying Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup was just pre-made Bechamel sauce. 

I thought of that last night when I made a fancy version of Pork Chops in Cream of Mushroom soup. 

I skimmed the recipe I found online.

I assembled my ingredients: pork chops, spices, portobello mushrooms, lah lah, and on and on, and of course Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup. 

I was about a half hour deep into making this when I read that I should set the soup aside. Why? It was there by the sink, still in its can.

To my horror I discovered that the sauce I'd stirred for ten minutes was a from-scratch version of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, not an augmentation to the recipe I grew up on. 

Verdict: I am looking forward to another serving, and I don't remember doing that with the Campbell's version. However, it took 45 minutes to make instead of five. 

Rewriting the Novel: I am Too Dumb To Write a Book

I got back up on the book pony yesterday. I had ignored a series of problems, and I was ready to take them on. 

Problems:

• Boring bit in which our heroine sends a telegram. I tweaked my interest by making the telegram agent more interesting. 
• Sad part in which she mourns her vanished husband. Moved an already written mourning from one spot to where I needed it.
• And finally, I had earlier taken the identical twin waitresses down to one waitress, because identical twins are a heavy-handed trope. Then I had the problem of how one waitress could cook and wait tables at the same time, and work from before sunup to after midnight. 

How? The logistics didn't work.

Raise your hand if you know.

Seriously, I pondered it ten minutes before I realized that I could go right back to my previous draft, two twins, and just make the twins not identical. Then, I could have two waitresses again with opposing personalities, instead of one very moody waitress. (Or I could keep her moody and have the other automatically adopt the opposite mood, the way I do, with no real feelings of her own. I might like that better.)

But why wouldn't that occur to me during the hour I spent boiling them down to one waitress? Or at least during one of the times I woke up and added something to my notes? Such an easy answer should have been staring at me. I do this when I'm programming too: just hammer out the first solution I think of, and then the second I'm done the obvious easy answer pops up. 

Now I'm excited again, anyway.

Trivia

I wasn't going to go to the Habitat for Humanity Trivia match, even though the core trivia team was going, but they sent out an extra plea the day before ... and I caved. 

I really thought I'd have a contretemps with Gary over it, but all he said was, "Don't forget your mask." 

And, it was lovely, just lovely, everyone was very funny and as I remembered. We did lose by one point. Well, one point would have tied us. And I did discover opera friend Anne knows all the Marvel movies, and I was able to contribute the decade in which Nelson Mandela died. 

And I feel fine. Well, fat from all the trivia food, even though I brought fresh fruit. 

Auspicious start. No more stepping out for a week and a half.