Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

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 to 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 wsys 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.

Fridge Drama

A few weeks ago I smelled a bad, bad smell from the Immortal Amana Garage Refrigerator/Freezer (IAGR/F). I tracked the smell to a veggie burger in the freezer. I threw it out and IAGR/F smelled fine.

Then the smell returned two days later. I wiped everything down. The smell was greatly reduced.

A week ago I put several frozen bagged items in the IAGR/F freezer. Sure enough, days later, smell was back, bags were puffed up. I thought I might wipe things down again, and I finally wondered "Why am  I wiping water out of my freezer?"

Yes. The IAGR/F seemed dead. It sounded dead. I mourned him briefly, until I thought to check the electrical outlet.

Also dead. 

Gary went to the basement and flipped (almost) all the switches, until he yelled up, "HEY WE DO HAVE THAT GFCI SHUTOFF THING IN THE BATHROOM MAYBE THAT'S WHAT'S WRONG."

I yelled down, "THAT THING IS JUST FOR THE BATHROOMS WHEN WATER GETS INTO THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS."

But of course, that was the problem. Gary had solved it and he strutted like a burly peacock all day. 

Usually we would have know the circuit needed to be reset because Gary would have used the blow dryer in his bathroom or I would have turned on the X-Ray illuminator in mine, but neither of those things happened in the weeks the power was off.

So now, I have ordered this lovely nightlight for the medical bathroom, and if the heartlight is off I will know to save the refrigerator.

Still don't know how the GFCI got thrown, we don't have the Christmas lights up.

Three Old Purses

Over 15 years ago, I bought a purse.

It must have been around the time that I comforted myself that I wasn't spending thousands on a purse. Just hundreds. "Well," I thought, "I will wear it for years, and it will all even out."

And, it did. It has just recently begun to show the slightest bit of wear on a knotted loop where the strap attaches.

If I were to trash it today, it would have evened out to about $15 per year. 

Sadly, this company doesn't sell this exact purse today. That's probably because when  you open the purse there are slots for multiple credit / id cards nestled in the center. You Kids Today with your iPhones and your Apple Pay. You don't want my card slots.

But I do. Therefore, thanks to Poshmark and eBay I now have more purses.

The two on the right aren't knock-offs: they changed the clasp because of the wear pattern, and you see the two newer ones attach with a lobster claw instead of the loop that wore out.

So that's another thirty years of purse there, each for an additional 60 bucks. Two bucks a year. Sweet.

And actually, I'm replacing that fragile loop on my original black purse with some braided craft leather, so I might not ever even need to use the two additional finds. I might die first. 

I do also have a big heavy classic Coach purse (too big!), Mom's wee little classic Coach purse (too small!), a satin evening clutch, a floral needlepoint purse with too-easy access, and of course the Big Rubber Chicken purse. 

So I am set for every eventuality when it comes to purses. Never buying a purse again. It feels good.

Two New Wigs

Wig One

This past month I considered exciting yet uncrowded places I might go when I inch out of the house. One of those places is a glass factory featuring demonstrations. I went a few decades ago. It wasn’t too hot for me and the MS, as I recall, but there was an open fire.

"Well damn," I thought, "I can't go. All my wigs are made of nylon and they would be ruined by the heat. Hmm. What I need is a human hair wig. But, I already feel guilty paying hundreds of dollars for a nylon wig: I cannot pay thousands of dollars for a human hair wig."

(And then, of course, I thought, "How hard is it to make a wig? I've reupholstered a loveseat. I've made cheese, I wove a basket, I sewed my wedding dress." Frankly, though, it sounds hard.)

Happily, there's a wide range of quality in human hair wigs, and there are even human hair wigs that are permanently one tenth the cost of higher-end human hair wigs. I found one that was the same as what one would pay for a synthetic nylon wig. 

So I got one. I needed I could go out to a bonfire, stick my head in an oven, or stand next to a glass blowing demonstration in this pre-permed human hair wig.

This one goes by simply "Hu-man."

Wig Two

This is another attempt at beachy waves. Unlike the long-gone Beachy Hiltler, it came with bangs.

I think i'll call this one FLOTUS, for First Lady Obama, who is about my age and was criticized for wearing bangs. 

Sous Vide Bacon

I've had my sous-vide for years, and I’ve always skipped the bacon recipe. I do like the idea of cooking bacon in bulk though. I’ll cook all the bacon at once in the oven. However, now I’m tired of the cleanup, so I thought I might give the sous-vide bacon recipe a shot.

Best thing? It said I could just chuck the bacon into the water still in the package. I love doing that with the pork tenderloin. 

The bacon cooked until the next morning when I noticed fat globules dancing about my sous vide water, and then I spotted the package seam that had opened up like the Deepwater Horizon.

I also read the ingredient list.

Sure. Bacon in STURDY plastic packaging. Now you tell me.

The bacon was still in the pack, just a bit soggy, so I just fished it out and started again with all the bacon sealed in a sous vide bag this time.

It never quite cooked, though. I decided that’s because I’d used thick-cut bacon. After  a day or so I gave up and fried it all up in a pan.

First bite of bacon? Gah. Hideous. 

I eventually realized that after the breach the bacon must have been simmering for hours in water infused with melted plastic. I suppose I should have thought of that, but I was so enchanted by the dancing fat globules I never considered the bacon.

I bought more bacon, thin bacon this time, and tried again the next day. This time the lean part darkened, and the fat part rendered, and then when I did the final "searing" step (often called "cooking the bacon") it all disintegrated into Baco-Os. Tasty, yes, but not really bacon. More uses, though. I'm throwing it in everything.

I’m sure next time I do it, it will be easy, clean, and painless. This time was a nightmare though. 

Books of My Youth

When you were a child, were there were books you never wanted to return to the library?

There were three books like that for me. I bought one of them a few years back, and I bought the other two tonight.

You Have to Draw the Line Somewhere. I was a repeat offender with this book. Checked it out, kept it for months, checked it out the next year, and so on, so much so that Mom almost bought the book for me on sale when the library cleaned out its shelves. That was the hardback, which today goes for 40 bucks, but I got the paperback for six a few years ago.

Wearable Art. I kept that one for a year, and it was the reason I surrendered my library card the first time. This was a gorgeous book with gorgeous clothing. Later it inspired me to sew a vest out of the scraps from my wedding dress.

Analog 9. This science fiction anthology had two unforgettable stories: The Gold at the Starbow's End and Answer "Affirmative" or "Negative".  The first one speculated what would happen if you gave scientists a lot of free time, and the other had a computer that recited poetry if you asked it to be more specific. 

I bought copies of Wearable Art  and Analog 9 last night. I do remember being a little disappointed when Adult Me read You Have to Draw the Line Somewhere. I am certain Wearable Art will NOT disappoint, and I can't wait to see what the other stories are in Analog 9.

I feel like I'm opening a retirement community for old friends.

Favorite Book

So I noticed that my favorite movie, Brief Encounter, and favorite book, Jane Eyre, share a similar theme of People In Love Not Having an Affair.

I know Brief Encounter appeals to me because the children are considered in the love triangle. Yet in Jane Eyre, the children are not a consideration: they get left behind. She chooses starvation over Adele, and then when Jane has money in the bank she abandons an entire classroom of children the minute she has her wind hallucination, utterly unaware that Bertha’s dead and there’s a crowd-pleasing ending waiting for her. 

So why does Jane Eyre get a pass? I suppose I must think natural-born children are the only ones who count. That’s peculiar given that my stepfather was the only father who counted. 

Or maybe I’m not as judgemental with fictional characters as I am with myself. That certainly makes sense.

Favorite Movie

Okay, Poor Things did jostle Brief Encounter off my Favorite Movie pedestal, but only briefly, and only because it features a brain-damaged woman with a funny walk who blurts out everything in her head. It was funny, but it was not the hilarious romp that is Brief Encounter.

Granted, many people think Brief Encounter is sad, but that’s because it is told from the point of view of the adults. They need to reboot that movie, make the children the focus, and call it Pantomime.

Because really, the kids are the driving force of the plot. Little girl Margaret keeps her parents together just because she exists. Could I do that? Evidently not.

And of course, thank God for that; I am ultimately thrilled Mummy got us a better Daddy.

Rewriting the Novel: Fresh Eyes

I think -- with all the rearranging and rethinking -- that it’s been at least a year that I’ve read the novel from start to finish. 

Oh my lord, people. So, so bad. Forget Anne Lamott and her “shitty first draft.” I’ve got a “shitty fifth draft.”

And it’s obvious stuff. The first line, the one that’s been re-written more than all the rest? 

It read:

The train engineer might have thrown the brake, but my body still moved full speed toward Oklahoma City. It didn’t feel like full speed; time slowed while I flew toward the seat back one row ahead.

I thought, “What? Why not just say ...”

The train engineer might have thrown the brake, but my body kept moving toward Oklahoma City. I felt like it took forever to slam into the next row of seats.

My plan for the day was to work on the new gap I have after the first plot point. I have to explore her feelings when her husband disappears. I was dreading writing new stuff. I might prefer it to re-writing old stuff.

I Return to the Guitar

Let us say that one can only play the guitar like a trained monkey, one has no ear, and no talent, but one has trained oneself to plink out tunes given sheet music without an excessive number of flats and sharps. 

How long would you say it would take that person to get back to that pitiful state, given they did not touch their guitar for one entire pandemic?

“No time at all,” you say, smugly. “Muscle memory does not go away.”

Okay, maybe, but you know what does go away? Knowing what each of the six (SIX!) strings is named. Then how to tune the guitar. Then picking out a basic scale by ear - no - by looking at a chart on the internet, then eventually by ear, then singing out each note as you play it. And then after that, re-learning the staff, and connecting that note on the staff with where that note is on the strings. 

Two hours and forty-five minutes later I was able to play the easiest song ever, David Bowie’s gift to beginners: Space Oddity. Ground Control to Major Tom, here is a song, put your helmet on ... to the tune of these two notes. 

After that, I was able to play Maggie May, and the song that does seem to be in my bones: Jupiter the Bringer of Jollity / I Vow to Thee My Country.  

So, it’s either sad it took me hours to get back, or it’s encouraging that it only took me hours to get back.

I Have Absolutely No Idea

Sometimes I get ideas for things to document on the blog, and I make a short post as a draft.

I composed this on Thursday night at 7:30.

This week I learned wayr painstkmg askew. As you do. There's no text in the post to give me any idea what I was thinking about.

What is particularly odd is that this post is dated at 7:30 on Thursday. At that moment I was remotely watching television with a friend. I watch on my iPad and talk with her on my phone. There's no way that I would switch away from my phone app to type. (If that's what you call that jumble of letters.)

I certainly hope I figure it out before the "This Week I Learned" post on Sunday.

Crows Volley in Response

The crows have rejected all the jewelry bits but for one: a silver ball. That one is gone. 

It was the biggest item in the trove I left last week. I imagine the crows looked at the little pins and staples and said, “Well at least this silver ball isn’t a choking hazard, I will take that.”

You can see their favorite below, right side.

This is the new set I have put in the tree. The bottom one is silver with rhinestones, for any crows with no taste. As for the other two, crows may end up worshipping the graven image of the silver bird and the bicycle may spur them on to make new crow technology. 

And, I know, I’m doing this backward. Humans give the food, crow give the trinkets. I am establishing myself in this relationship as the trinket bank. Totally possible the crows will say, “This crazy lonely human, trying to forge a relationship with crows for god’s sake, seems to have all the shiny objects a person could need.” However, a f riend reports a story of crows that began to “pay” a man by giving him actual folding money. That would be good.

UPDATE ===================

It has been one day and the bird and bike are gone. The crows caw, "Representational objects do not occur in nature! This is magic!"

Easy Diagnosis

I don't know if they still have this article available free, but I found this deep dive into a writer's medical diagnosis fascinating. That poor man.

I, on the other hand, had the most straightforward MS diagnosis ever. The gastroenterologist got it in two questions. "What are your symptoms / Do you have MS?" (No, I chirped.) There was a brief delay of a year of ruling things out before I discovered that I had answered that second question wrong. 

I am an easy diagnosis in general, even for buried psychological issues.  When I had trouble at work after Mom died, the work counselor got the answer in two questions too. “What are you working on when you start to cry at your desk? / What is an annuity?” At least that time I answered the second question correctly. (The answer was an annuity is an investment that pays out at death, with a death benefit, when you die, death, deaddeaddead, oh.)

The marriage counselor got it in one question. He looked at Gary’s grey hair, turned to me, and asked, “How old were you when your father abandoned you?”

So I’m easy, but I know that writer’s diagnosis journey is typical for most people with MS, with its dead ends and switchbacks. I know how lucky I am and how awful it must be to get sicker and sicker, usually because each specialist can’t see the big picture. 

How awful would it be to have lived fifty years earlier, with no treatments and no MRI? How lucky are we? How lucky will people be fifty years from now, when the first and only question will be, “Can you spit into this tube and wait for the AI to find the bad chromosomes?” It makes me want to follow the writer above until medical science catches up with him. 

Dishwasher

So we have a new dishwasher. I calculated that a dishwasher can cost almost three times as much as long as it lasts three times longer. (Twenty years, it claims.) I'm also happy to pay extra if it shuts off when water-in does not equal water-out; that way my wood kitchen floor will not warp for three months when the dishwasher floods. 

It is German and fussy and demanding. It requires a constant supply of salt to keep the water soft. (It did make me wonder if that was all my old dishwashers needed.) I watched as the installer added salt before he left, and then after his empty test run the display demanded "ADD SALT.'"

(Salt Vampire from Star Trek, young folks)

I ignored the salt message, because I was waiting to watch the auto-open feature in action. That is what sold me on this model. When the cycle is done, the door pops open invitingly. (This washer is German, fussy, and not yet in menopause.) 

I pictured it would promptly give a little sigh, and a pop, and then the door would be ajar, oh, half an inch. But no. After I waited for what seemed like twenty minutes, a robot arm inexorably pushed the door open three inches, and then the display continued to flash "AUTOOPEN" for another stretch while it vented all the steam. Then the door wouldn't detach from the robot arm. Eventually I hit some buttons and the display read "PULL DOOR OPEN," when it should have read  "YANK DOOR OPEN REALLY PUT YOUR WEIGHT INTO IT."

Everything was fine after that, only I did stand for five minutes with my hands full of dirty silverware because I forgot it had a super secret skinny upper drawer with slots for the cutlery instead of a basket. 

I loaded it, but I haven't run it again, but really it kind of scares me now. I don't yet have the rinse fluid it demands, and I know it's already pissed off about the salt.

Cooking Soup

I  assembled all the ingredients for my French Onion Soup before I began to cook. Broth, onions, butter, cheese. No bread: skipping the bread/crouton calories. 

It took me four hours. I had a recipe; I followed the recipe. Only, I didn't just cook the onions, I caramelized the onions. I added a taste of beef base so it was stronger. I added some dry brisket scraps from last week. I used sherry for half of the red wine. Okay, I didn’t follow the recipe. But I tasted everything as I went, and it was terrific. 

Then I noticed the Provolone was a funny beige color around the edges, but I just cut that off, as you do with cheese, and soldiered on. The recipe said to add Parmesan on top of the Provolone, which I did, and I broiled it, and let it cool, and tasted it.

The first bite was horrible. But it was all Parmesan. No problem. I pulled off the Parmesan layer. Still had the Provolone layer. 

Next bite. Still horrible. The Provolone was pre-pandemic Provolone. I didn't think cheese could go bad in the freezer, but it must have. That layer was peeled off.

The next bite was great. The balance of sweet and salty with the onions and the broth was perfect, as it had been when I tasted it. Then I hit a bit of brisket, and realized I hadn't tasted the brisket, and remembered -- too late -- that in my attempts last week to re-hydrate the dry slow-cooker brisket, I had added just a touch of Liquid Smoke to the water.  So now my manly smoky brisket was bathing in ladylike onion soup. 

"Not to worry!" I thought, "I will just buy some Gruyere cheese to replace the Provolone and that will be strong enough to match with the brisket!" 

No. No I won't. BECAUSE THERE'S A SHORTAGE OF GRUYERE CHEESE. (If you can even get real Gruyere, because evidently now the U.S. courts say that we can take any garbage and call it Gruyere.)

Gary says all soups need a day for the flavors to meld, so I still hold out hope.