Thanks for That

Posted on 06/26/2017 by chick

I was sitting in my office one day when Livia came in and asked, “What does ‘f—‘ mean?”

I had recently made a promise to myself to be honest when the kids asked about swear words. But still, I attempted to evade the question. This was Livia, though, and Livia is persistent. My attempts at evasion failed. So I had no choice. I told her what it meant, in the most polite terms, and she seemed satisfied with my answer. No big deal.

But thanks, Faithful Reader, for whatever it was you did that exposed our children to the “F bomb!”

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Aimless & Pointless

Posted on 06/25/2017 by chick

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Grade: C

I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t like Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, but I didn’t say why. Sorry about that. It was months ago that I finished the book and returned it to the library, so my memory isn’t fresh, and I don’t have a copy of the book to use as a reference. This review will suffer for it. Sorry for that, too.

The book starts with a teenage musician (Nick) who is playing with his band at a nightclub. He sees his ex-girlfriend in the crowd, which upsets him, because he’s still heartbroken from being dumped. After his band finishes playing, Nick asks a girl he doesn’t know (Norah) to pretend to be his new girlfriend so that it will look to his ex as if he has moved on. Nick and Norah hit it off, and so begins an up-and-down romance that takes them all around the city, all night long.

There wasn’t much beyond that for plot, leaving me with the feeling that it was both aimless and pointless. But I’m not a member of the target audience (young adults), so I have to wonder if that was part of the problem. When you’re young, you do a lot of “hanging out,” which isn’t exactly a goal-oriented activity, so perhaps the story wouldn’t seem so aimless and pointless to young adults. And perhaps the incessant angst of the main characters would strike a chord with them, rather than reminding them of bad romance novels.

But, while I think young adults might like the book better, I wouldn’t recommend it for them either. There’s a lot of swearing and content of a sexual nature, not to mention alcohol abuse. On a related note, I’m still mad at Norah for leaving her drunk, unconscious friend in the hands of some guys she didn’t even know. It all worked out in the end, but every girl in the world needs to know that you just DON’T DO THAT!

But, to end on a positive note, I will say that Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist had its moments. Here is one of them:

We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment.

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What a Mess!

Posted on 06/19/2017 by chick

Total chaos in the kitchen!

Not caused by my cooking. No, blame the refrigerator. It has this problem where it freezes up inside and then water pools in the bottom and finally leaks onto the floor. Yesterday it peed on the floor again, and after we were done cursing and wringing out our wet socks, we decided to finally fix it properly. But fixing it meant thawing it, and thawing it meant emptying it. So there’s food and refrigerator shelves all over the place. We tried to save everything, but the thawing has taken so long that everything except what we were able to squeeze into our small “beer fridge” will probably have to be thrown away.

In a way it’s good, because we needed to declutter our fridge. A certain someone had stashed numerous half-empty jars of salsa in there. And a certain someone else was apparently hoarding ketchup and salad dressing packets. And as is the way of these things, this big mess led us to other hidden messes, which I am glad are now cleaned up.

I feel a little like Rain Man, though. I don’t handle this kind of disruption well. The kids don’t mind. I served them a fast-food dinner as a carpet picnic in my office, which they enjoyed. They didn’t object to a toast-only breakfast this morning.

When I suggested to my husband that it will be costly to replace everything, he scoffed. Then I did some simple math for him. He had to admit that the math was alarming, but then he said, “Your estimates are based on unopened, unused items that have not lost any value.” He has a point, but then again, we’re only going to buy unopened, unused items!

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Roses, Books, and Popsicles

Posted on 06/14/2017 by chick

I always try to get out to see the wild roses at this time of year. Today I finally had the chance. I took the kids with me to the nature trail at the library. We took care not to get too close to the edge of the trail (to avoid ticks and poison ivy) and to move at a brisk pace (to avoid mosquitoes). It’s no fun to be paranoid, but better safe than sorry. We couldn’t get close to the roses for most of the walk, but toward the end there was one giant bush that was safe to approach. They smelled wonderful. We also stopped at the memorial garden and smelled the peonies. Then we went into the library. We talked to the librarian about good books for a boy of Marshall’s age, and she suggested some good series for him. With an armful of books for Marshall and a Barbie movie for Livia, and a few books for Mommy, too, we left the library and hit the grocery store, where we bought some popsicles for the kids.

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Watching a Wasp on the Ground

Posted on 06/10/2017 by chick

She examines the landscape of rocks and dirt, and tosses aside what she does not like, until she finds just the right pieces. One by one she gathers her prizes, carries them back to a hole in the ground, and stuffs them inside. Then all around the plugged-up hole she grooms the ground, shaping and arranging, with an angry buzz at every stubborn rock and rough patch. Is she like me, irritated by how much labor lurks beneath the simplest tasks? Work complete, she flies away, and though I watched her from the beginning, even I cannot say where was the hole.

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Digging Out

Posted on 06/10/2017 by chick

A recent post had me on the brink of being buried in my piles of unread newspapers. I not only managed to dig my way out, but I also took the paper beast by the neck and looked all the way down its throat to see what was inside. And my goodness, what a full monster it was!

What did I find? All sorts of things! The New York Times is an amazing newspaper, particularly The New York Times Magazine, which comes with the Sunday paper. You never know what you might find on any given day, though. Here is just of sampling of the sorts of things that I’ve found so far.

  • There was a wonderful piece by Sam Anderson about the power of the comma. My favorite part: “Never underestimate a comma. . . . A sentence with a missing comma is a horse trailer coming unhitched on a highway at 70 miles per hour. A sentence with an extra comma is a boulder in your swimming pool.”
  • An interview with Fran Lebowitz, in which she said, “In my lifetime, I’ve read one zillion mysteries. That is not because I care about who did it. I don’t care. And I almost never figure it out. . . . I have reread mysteries numerous times and I don’t even remember who did it. I’ve read all the Agatha Christies. I’ve read all the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout. He wrote many of them, but not enough for Fran. I’m always hoping to find one I’ve never read. . . . One thing I like about mysteries is that they end. Which is true of so little else.” This is how I feel about mysteries, too!
  • A disturbing poem called “March” by Laura Kasischke. It begins like this: “It’s the murderer who got away with it, sitting / on a park bench thinking about snow / and how it’s over. Little flower-faces peeking out of dirt to shriek Hello!” I had never heard of this poet, but she has at least two collections of poetry and several novels to her name. I am interested to read more of her work.
  • A great quote on the difference between the class system in England and the class system in the U.S.: “At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.” (Richard V. Reeves, author of “Dream Hoarders”). Like a lot of people in this country, I have been getting more and more concerned about how wealth is distributed in this country.
  • This great proverb by Saadi, a 13th-century Persian poet: “Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them, like serving a walnut shell without the nut.” Imagine how you’d feel if someone said they were going to feed you but then gave you just an empty nutshell. That’s outrage, in a nutshell!
  • Speaking of nuts, there was a great article by Michael D. Shear that mentioned how Obama ate only one snack at night and that it was was always exactly seven almonds. Obama said later in an interview that he doesn’t actually count the number of almonds, and that this was just a joke between his wife and his chef about how he needed to loosen up. I enjoyed both the original article and the follow-up. These days, I enjoy anything that gives a glimpse into Obama’s personal life. I’m nostalgic for the president who ate nuts in moderation, now that we’re saddled with a president who is nuts and doesn’t understand the meaning of “moderation.”
  • A tip by Malia Wollan on how to break down a door, which said (among other things) this: “Do not hit a locked door with any body part other than your foot. You will be tempted to use your shoulder. Don’t.” Good to know! The Tip is a regular feature of the Sunday magazine, and the subjects are varied (“How to Build an Igloo,” “How to Avoid Icebergs,” “How to Tell a Ghost Story,” etc.). Most of the tips are useless to your average person on your average day, but that’s part of their charm.

I took all these wonderful gems (and many more), cut them out, and pasted them in a scrapbook that I call “My Inspiration Book.” If I were ever to run out of things to write about, I know my scrapbook would give me inspiration. Without this scrapbook to hold the best parts of what I’ve read in the newspaper (and magazines, and the Internet), I don’t know how I could have avoided being buried in it all!

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Ick!

Posted on 06/08/2017 by chick

I just happened to glance in the mirror as I was washing my hands this evening. I saw what I assumed to be a tiny piece of food on my neck (I’m not a neat eater, so that happens sometimes). I scraped at it. It didn’t come off, so I scraped harder until I finally got it onto my finger. Normally I would have simply flicked the speck toward the trash, but since I couldn’t remember having eaten anything dark and flaky, I looked at it first. That’s when I realized it was actually a nymphal tick. Ick!

This was really upsetting, because I didn’t spend that much time outside today, and I was fairly careful. I wasn’t careful enough, though, and that’s bad. Most nymphs are infected with Lyme. Our children’s doctor told us that the rates are so high in our area that they just assume every tick has it. If I hadn’t looked in the mirror just when I did, that tiny little thing would have gotten in my hair. It would have sucked my blood and infected me, and I never would have known.

Trying to look on the bright side:

  1. It’s not the ticks you find on you that are the problem, but rather the ones you don’t find. Finding this one was not a bad thing. It was a very good thing.
  2. I got to use the word “fomes.” That’s how I mentally referred to my clothing as I was throwing it into the washing machine. “Fomes” (pronounced “foe-meeze,” pl. “fomites”) is any item or material that could have disease-causing agents on it. I like knowing weird words. Weird words are good.
  3. I looked the word up to make sure that I was using it correctly. I couldn’t find it in many dictionaries. It seems to have been replaced with “fomite” (pronounced “foe-mite,” pl. “fomites”). That doesn’t surprise me, because nobody likes a singular noun that sounds plural, especially if it has an irregular plural. Now I know to use the more modern and totally hip “fomite.” I learned something new, and that’s a good thing, too.
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Blast from the Past

Posted on 06/02/2017 by chick

I found this tiny piece of paper on the floor in my office while I was vacuuming today. The New Haven Register is a newspaper that I used to deliver, and this piece of paper is a receipt that ought to have been given to a customer as proof of payment. Sadly, my customers didn’t always pay me, so I sometimes had receipts left over. I thought I had thrown them all away, though. I can’t believe this thing followed me all the way from my hometown in CT and the year 1985!

I’m beginning to think that the past is trying to speak to me. First there was the note from 2009 that I found, then the note from 1992 that my friend Sprite found, and now this. But, if the past is indeed trying to speak to me, I have no idea what it’s trying to say! My husband has an alternative theory. He says this is a message reminding me to tip my newspaper delivery person.

What do you think?

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Less Talk, More Hugs

Posted on 06/01/2017 by chick

Heard around the house:

Husbands should be hugged, not heard.

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Bloggadee

Posted on 05/31/2017 by chick

Silly thing about me:

I organize my digital photos by year, with a subfolder for each month. Sometimes when I have a lot of photos that could (or ought to) go on the blog for that month, I create a special subfolder for them. I name it differently every time, but always something with “blog” in it. Among those I’ve used are Bloggy, Bloggyblog, Blogadiddle, Blogadee, Bloguh, Blogeuh, Blogggga, Bloggeda, and Bloggation.

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