Bad News

When I was a child my friends and I used to play a common “what if” game and ask each other questions such as “Would you rather be cold or hot?.” These would rapidly morph into morbid questions such as “Would you rather die in a fire or by drowning?” I used to choose cold over hot as I reasoned that I could pile on the sweaters and jackets to warm up but there is so much you can take off to get cooler.

At a certain point you risk arrest if you aren’t in the privacy of your own home.

In my 50’s I have decided that I must have anticipated my new internal heating system by a number of decades and haven’t changed my mind.

I remember this game every time I think about receiving bad news about a medical test (for instance) but the questions I ask myself are different. I ask myself “Would I tell anyone about the bad news or keep it a secret?”. Would I be a strong fighter or would I become completely depressed? I know which choice would be healthier but that doesn’t mean I would make that choice.

These important decisions (reactions) are usually made by adrenaline. Adrenaline becomes a very poorly behaved sub brain when called upon to act.

So I honestly don’t know the answer. I know that I would want to be strong and that fighting is healthier.

Bad news of one sort or another has become an epidemic in – I was going to say both sides but I really mean all sides of – my family over the last several months. There have been several serious surgeries which have had us waiting, white knuckled, for news of survival never mind success, broken bones, cancer, lyme disease, as yet undiagnosed alien cell colonies, and thats the short list.

Some of this is the result of our older and much beloved parents beginning, somehow all at once, to suffer from older parent things. The rest of the generations have not, however, been spared.

And really I have to wonder, Is it random? Are we on the wrong side of the statistics? Does God have us in his cross hairs?

This perfect storm began before Thanksgiving and does not appear to want to let up soon as one individuals serious surgery has incremented to two and another’s treatment plan was ratcheted up from not fun at all to downright unfair.

The only way out of this for any of us is up so I am dashing off an official request to adrenaline traffic control.

Send out the fighter jets.

Aim carefully.

Friends and Family

Outside there is a stubborn patch of snow located in an odd spot at the base of the deck stairs. We’ve had several sizable snow storms which have been followed by temperature extremes of unseasonably warm and then unseasonably cold weather. The vast majority of snow has yielded to the rain and warmth but this stubborn pile remains.

On cold days the pile of snow is crusty and loses a little height to evaporation into the dry air – but not much. On warm days the pile softens up a little and shrinks a bit in breadth but still it hangs in. This will eventually disappear but its current stubbornness reminds me of families.

Families don’t always look the same and are not even comprised of the same individuals over time. Marriage, birth, divorce and death change the size, shape and membership but connections of blood and promise keep us family. Though even the nature and the strength of the connection may change it is the fact of connection that matters.
Years and years (and years) ago I wrote the following poem which really was about that idea:

This is an excerpt (the rest was especially bad)

We are not your ordinary family, connected
Word and blood to one another – as if that could
Break us even in this gamble of relations
Call it experiment if you wish to enter, we will
Take you in, no rules, enter, exit as you please,
The substance will remain .
. . .
Lean in to touch it if you can find an edge, amorphous as it is. . .

Changing shape is something we all have in common. What we don’t have in common is how we treat each other or whom we consider full members.

I’ve never understood family rifts and feuds, members not speaking for years for insignificant reasons. The loss, in balance, almost always outweighs the silly cause.

There is, after all, a bit of the practice society to a family. We need to get it right amongst ourselves before letting our members loose on society at large.

Resolutions

This is the day we resolve to be new people. We have been given our annual mulligan and even the most pessimistic among us think that this time we can do better.

Of course those of us who have been through a few cycles of New Years Resolutions know that most of them are doomed to failure. If it was worth doing at all you might just as well have started on a random Thursday back in October.

But there is something more contemplative about the short days of winter. There is something about the tradition of New Years that has us taking stock, weeks in advance, of the shortcomings we’d like to repair before Spring.

Excerpted from my list:
I have not spent enough time with my friends or my family for as long as I can remember. I could write a thousand I’m sorry’s in the dust that has grown thick on the surface of my close relationships. Its mostly my fault. I know this.

There has always been a reason. The reasons have always been good but I’ve decided to make friends and family a priority this year anyway.

I miss you all.

I’ll may actually call and you may actually see me.

You’ve been warned. . .

NBC vs itunes: A Regular Consumer is Caught in the Middle

Perhaps I am a little off topic here. I am certainly not the demographic that Apple is mainly targeting with itunes. I am probably not the demographic that NBC is targeting. Surprise surprise. Regular people who are over 50 years old also depend on their ability to receive content through other than mainstream channels.

I work in a home office and am at my computer far longer than the average work day. Since my job involves using multiple monitors and the office pets are not terribly conversational I have turned to watching online tv. Often I have an episode of Top Chef or Project Runway going while I work. If I miss something (as I often do while concentrating on actual work) I can rewind, replay and not miss a bit.

Another reason I watch certain shows this way is that I am able to enjoy shows my husband might not necessarily like. He’d watch them with me but why make him suffer through an episode he doesn’t really like when there are many shows we both enjoy?

I depend on itunes a lot and have spent a lot of my hard earned money there. A lot.

I have also discovered that the streaming (free) content on abc.com is technically far superior to that of the other networks. Coincidentally, and luckily, many of my favorite shows are on abc. (psst, I’d love to see Women’s Murder Club added to their online lineup).

The rest of my favorite shows are, for the most part, on Bravo and PBS. So I wasn’t terribly concerned when I heard that NBC was not going to continue selling its shows on itunes. Most of those I was happy to watch at night at their usual time. I actually didn’t know that Bravo was an NBC network.

Having enjoyed recent seasons of Top Chef and Project Runway imagine my dismay to discover that in the middle of trying to purchase entire previous seasons yesterday that they were being taken off itunes even as I pressed the buy button. Thinking it was just a fluke or network problem I’d push the buy button again and again only to get the message “This content does not exist in the American store. It may have moved. . ” I am paraphrasing.

Bravo doesn’t have anything but video clips on its website. Netflix doesn’t have the dvds. Someone is losing out on the chance to get a lot of my hard earned money and I’m definitely going to blame NBC.

But it would have been nice if itunes had sent out a “Buy now if you want it warning” to folks. Their loss too.

In the Midst of The Holiday

You notice I didn’t say season. The Holiday begins at some point before Halloween and continues through Valentines Day. For a while I was calling it Christmaween (this is when you try to pick up Halloween candy prior to Halloween and discover it has already been replaced with Christmas candy. You’d get away with it except the wrappers have holly sprigs and are either red or green. If you want generic candy you might want to stock up in August.

I don’t know about you but my extended family is notorious for scheduling holidays around our own schedule – so while the rest of the world is celebrating Christmas on December 25 we are celebrating a mini Christmas complete with tree decoration and gifts on the day after Thanksgiving (because everyone is here and they won’t be on Christmas day). Our neighbors celebrated Thanksgiving the day before Thanksgiving because they both had to work on the holiday itself. (Hospital patients require care every day of the year).

In the interest of full disclosure we will probably celebrate at least three Christmas’s before we are done (and will fold Hanukkah in as well).

I was wondering about this concentration of holidays. Remember we continue on to New Years and then Valentines day.

All of these holidays are an obvious ploy to keep us as distracted as possible from the depressing and increasingly short days. To some degree it works.

Thank God.

After 50: Skin + Mirrors

When I was younger I was never big on makeup or skincare of any kind. Mostly, I was too lazy. It was probably a really good thing I didn’t endlessly wash my face with soaps and special cleansers because I have sensitive skin and that would have been bad. Usually I just swiped at my face with a wet washcloth.

The fact that I was more bookworm than sun worshiper was also a good unintentional healthy skin choice.

So I am not exactly sure what happened to me but at approximately age 45  I suddenly became interested in makeup and skincare. (Also clothing, handbags and shoes. but thats a subject of a future post). Well, ok. Really it is because things started to go south in an alarming way from the ever increasing amounts of grey in my hair to wrinkles and brown spots and what I swear is the beginnings of jowls.

Jowls!!!  So I had good reason to finally take measures.

Now honestly, the only way to counteract jowls and those funny wrinkles over my upper lip is to smile broadly and I can’t do that all the time because I would look insane. Distraction works well so I concentrate on good hair and am actually toying with barely noticeable eye makeup.

So I have been on a hunt for the best anti-aging skin cream out there. I’ve tried several even though I’m basically skeptical. Generally I have tended to believe the people who say you can’t alter wrinkles by slathering something all over your skin. However, the increasing number of baby boomers has nearly elevated the wrinkle thing to a national emergency so now there are actually products available that do something.

Having tried Strivectin SD for about 6 weeks now I’m pretty convinced it works. Do follow the directions though which means three times a day. You can get away with less frequency after a while (my own opinion).

Its really expensive but a little goes a long way. I use it on my face and my neck and my hands and absolutely look better.

I convince myself it is a more affordable choice than remodeling the bathroom with new mirrors and more flattering lighting. Unfortunately outdoor lighting is not under my control.

Fall Garden, Seeds, Seed Pods and Sculpture

I spent a good portion of my day performing part of my annual fall garden clean-up and appreciation ritual.  Really I dabbled. There is a lot more to do but as I worked, throwing out rotten old plant matter and collecting things to save I began to see Fall at its best.

I have always liked the look of certain flowers as they turn shabby but I am in awe of seedpods and things that are wonderful dried.  This is the end of the season for these plants but they are at their most beautiful. After a while I had collected some hydrangea to dry, some honesty, a pile of sunflower seed heads and vines of bittersweet. I placed several of the sunflower heads facing out in the suet baskets of the birdfeeders and brought the rest inside for later. It really is only fair to give these seeds back to the birds because they planted them in the first place.  I peeled the outer layers from the honesty, scattered the seeds about and plopped the hydrangea in a vase (no water).

The tufted titmice, sunflower seed aficionados, were at the feeder immediately and didn’t seem at all shy.

Though even the sunflower seed heads seemed like sculpture I couldn’t get over how beautiful the moonflower seed pods were.

Several weeks ago I picked bunches of herbs to dry. They were nice and ready so I gently squeezed them into flakes and put them into jars. My favorite is the dill seed which smelled wonderful. I put the dried lemon verbena in a dish and am trying it as a potpourri.

When I see nature look gorgeous at the end of the season it gives me hope.

Even though yet another birthday is bearing down on me like a land missile.

Surviving IKEA

Working at home. After a while using the dining room as an office gets old. It’s not an efficient workspace – especially if you need to spread things out and hang things up as I do. Its hard to invite friends over for dinner unless you want to have a techy theme party and use keyboards as place mats.

When my husband and I moved into this house a few years ago there was already an area in the basement that was framed out with two by fours – someone had clearly meant it to be a home office. A phone hookup was already there.

So I casually ventured about a week and a half ago that I might just throw up some sheetrock and move downstairs.

Well. I am not going to tell you just how we got from that conversation to where I am today but I am sitting in my new office. It has track lighting, a bunch of outlets, has been sheetrocked and plastered and wi-fied.

And it was done by professionals. I know! It’s a miracle.

But, of course, I needed office furniture -and there were those bookshelves we had been talking about for a few years. Huge piles of books have been inaccessible in cardboard boxes (also in the cellar).

Last Saturday my chivalrous husband borrowed a truck and off we went to IKEA.

This was my first time there so I thought I was doing tremendously well by bringing the catalogue all marked up with what I wanted chosen beforehand. [my desk] [my chair] [our bookcases 3x]

First: things they don’t mention in the catalogue or in the store and which I I didn’t see until I looked the links up online to share with you here. Under good things to know – “2 people are needed to assemble this furniture” (they are talking about the bookcases). I’m not two people but I did it myself (and I have the bruises to prove it – they are very heavy). It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know or they might still be in their boxes.

Anyway – back to the store. Our version has the shopping area on the second floor and arrows telling you where to go. The problem is the arrows seem more like a cattle herding device than a wayfinding aid. There used to be (perhaps still is) a hospital routing system that had arrows on the floor that actually said where the arrows were sending you. IKEA might want to consider that. They may also want to consider handing out floorplans. Perhaps they do. I never found one of those lists you were supposed to mark up either. I used my catalog for reference.

I did finally find the items I was looking for (unfortunately the green chair I wanted wasn’t in stock so I chose black and the aspen desk base was also out of stock so I had to get white.

Now to find the stuff (warning – this is the worst part). When you find yourself in the cavernous warehouse portion hauling a big flat cart it is not a thrill to find that office stuff (which they confusingly named workspace stuff )is located in aisles 3, 6, 7, and 9.

Somehow the desk base was not classified as workspace stuff so required intervention by a very helpful IKEA worker who found it on the computer (but the computer was wrong). Another miracle (luck) and we found it anyway.

On to the bookcases. We found the bookcases (also not easy and not, as I thought, alphabetical). We hauled the very heavy boxes onto the cart, headed up to the checkout and waited in line to be told “you dont have everything you need for your bookcases”. Apparantly they came in two boxes. One box said 1 and another said 2. Unfortunately neither box said 1 of 2. @!#$%

My very chivalrous husband took the already heavy cart back to get the three more heavy boxes. I stayed and paid for the items and waited for him to return – which he did, red from effort and muttering “this is my last trip to IKEA”.

It could have been worse. Much much worse. We could have gotten back from our trip to IKEA, returned our borrowed truck only to find we needed those three boxes so I thank that helpful check out person.

The upside? My office furniture was so easy to assemble I finished it that day. I did the first bookcase on Sunday the rest yesterday and we’re done. I love all of it. Clearly a lot of work went into designing the pieces so they would fit together correctly, easily and solidly. The only tools I needed were a hammer and a philips screwdriver. They provide the rest of the tools.

My husband may not go back but I probably will.

September in the Garden

I haven’t done a garden post in a while. I’m not quite sure why – my garden has practically been doing jumping jacks to get my attention.

Especially exciting is the flower bed I started this season. It certainly doesn’t look new – I’ll have to thin and re-arrange but here it is in all its glory and to think this spring I thought it would be full of bare spots all season.

Annuals help in that regard – so do the sunflowers and the I-don’t-have-words-for-how-huge the Cosmos grew. They are honestly 7-8 feet tall.

Check them out in comparison to the sunflowers.

And the roof.

Here the cosmos are up close. I had to stand on my toes.

And for good measure the nice Japanese Maple and the Black Eyed Susans.

Cooties

Remember cooties?

I honestly thought it was a short lived social aberration confined to the late 50’s and early 60’s. Of course that was when I was a child – which explains why I made that erroneous assumption.

Cooties was the grade school way of separating the popular from the untouchable kids. It was a quick and efficient way to separate “us” from “them”, usually gave the “us” group a power high and the “they” group days, weeks, months or even years of agonized misery. Cootie catchers were a popular part of the whole cootie thing but unfortunately were not meant to be a treatment, instead served as sort of an official medical test for the disease

The “us” group usually morphs into a “clique” by high school which is really a genteel term for what would be considered a dangerous street gang outside high school walls.

Now it took me years to catch on to the fact that Cooties is a chronic, recurring, lifetime affliction (similar to those unmentionable chronic diseases that flare up when your immune system is down). The first sign came when I realized that cliques never really went away either – they just went underground and disguised themselves variously as “social circles”, book groups, boards, committees and the like.

So anyway, it wasn’t long after that discovery that I could feel the old case of Cooties flaring up.

Seriously, they need to come up with a vaccine. Its a pretty serious disease.

For more information on this debilitating chronic disease read the wikipedia article here. Since cooties adheres to Darwinian principles it is crucial to not admit to ever having had or even having known anyone with Cooties. Diseases which should be ruled out prior to diagnosis include hypersensitivity.

Note: This is an anonymous column written by a mystery guest writer. Everyone knows I’m an “Us” and don’t have Cooties. No one here in Stepford does.