Taking a snow day

We had a bit of trouble yesterday. It snowed. And apparently Seattle folks don't do snow. The roads are a mess, some communities don't even own sanding trucks, cars are abandoned on the Interstate, and it took poor Mark 3 hours to get home last night. And to add to all that, I managed to lock myself out of the house when I went out on the front porch, in my socks, shoeless as it were, to look at the snow falling - at just the time I was thinking that Mark should be coming home. ("But," I reasoned, "surely he will be home soon...")

So I think it is official. Terminal stupidity.

I have started more blog postings in the last few weeks than (as my father would have said) you could shake a stick at (although I don't know why you would want to.) Somehow I can't seem to make the point that I started out with, or by the time I'm done it appears that it wasn't a point at all. I started something on Holiday Shopping, on Maddie and her meds, on the Housing Market, Gas Prices, Shoppers, Advertisers, Mark's collection of stuff on his night stand, Christmas Technology, and hairdos, all to no avail.

I seem to be pointless.

So, I'm not going to fight it. If something occurs to me, I'll say it. Otherwise, oh well.

Redneck Resourcefulness

A posting by guest contributor, Todd, who writes:

So I'm walking through the parking lot to work today and I saw an impressive example of critical thinking. To combat the inevitable problem of the formation of ice/frost on the windshield during the winter (it is important to consider that an ice scraper can cost the equivalent of 3, 4 maybe even 5 or more packs of cigs, so that solution is out the door), one of the locals has discovered that if you lay your floor mats across the windshield, the amount of frost/ice is considerably reduced. I was very impressed with this display of resourcefulness and decided to share it with you.

(Cathy says: Thank you Todd, for that observation. Things are just going great in WV, huh?)

Thanksgiving, in spite of it all

I was running late this morning and rushing around trying to get ready for work. Having just finished brushing my teeth, I had my mouth full of mouthwash when my phone rang. I had to swallow in order to answer. But it was my co-worker, advising me that things would be slow there today and I needn’t come in at all.

That was a blessing since I dawdled away my evening yesterday watching a PBS reprisal of a Victor Borge special…

Now there are pies to be made! And supplies inventoried to make sure that this ‘best meal of the year’ comes off perfectly. I’m so excited.

So what am I doing instead? With all this free time now, I am looking at the ‘stocking stuffer’ page on Restoration Hardware’s website. Oh well. Easily distractible.

Onward!

Hope your Thanksgiving is perfect too.

All God’s chil’en got troubles

It is a week for giving thanks. Todd is flying in on Thursday morning – Hooray! – and we are all psyched for ‘the best meal of the year.’ Maddie is off her meds and loves Frik again, the missing window covering finally got installed, the river is going down in spite of all the rain, and there is Christmas decorating and cookie baking to look forward to.

Still…

I melted the fabric on my new sofa with my microwavable heating pad. There are two holes in one kitchen drawer, left after we finally realized that there is simply no way to actually install the new hardware on the cabinets. The pizza delivery place hung up on me because I don’t have a local phone number and without that I can’t have any pizza. From West Virginia – my son – there are sad reports that they don’t seem to have ever heard of Starbucks coffee there. From Arizona – the rest of the family – there are shopping woes and public works encroachments and, well, just don’t get me started.

And here at home, Mark is singing Weird Al Yankovic’s new song ‘I’m too white and nerdy.’

Yes, all God’s children got troubles.

Ill-considered

I was glad to hear that OJ and his pseudo-murder-confession book and TV special got cancelled yesterday. In the middle of the flap about it, there were concerns raised about this unprecedented move by a publisher to pull a deal because of ‘content’ (as opposed to legal – plagiarism – issues.) And an interview on the news this afternoon had someone reasoning that maybe the publishers realized that they weren’t going to make much money on this book considering that they were probably going to have to spend a lot of money in legal fees defending multiple law suits over it. Actually, the official cancellation statement said that they thought that the project was ‘ill-considered.’

I thought so too. But I’m surprised that it got ‘censored’ anyway – a criticism that will surely be leveled against that decision in the coming weeks. I’m not especially for censorship, but I know that many, many books never make it to sales because they are just simply bad ideas. Surely this should have been one of them.

In any case, I’m curious about the whole ‘legal’ discussion. Mostly I’m not sure how ‘legal’ considerations play into this subject at all, at this point. Here is a man who is commonly acknowledged as a murderer, but ‘got away with it.’ His situation embodies my feeling that it isn’t really much a matter of guilt or innocence any longer – what is ‘legal’ is mostly a function of back room maneuvering, semantics, technicalities and how much money someone has to throw at a ‘problem.’ Segments of the population think that it’s all OK though. In this particular case it seemed to be OK because the prosecutor’s hairdo was weird, and a policeman made racist remarks, and blacks in this country have had a raw deal and on and on. By all accounts, OJ is out there living a marvelous life, making public appearances, signing autographs, and golfing most of the time. (Yes, he has been arrested several times for his violent temper, but there haven’t actually been any consequences for that either.) He lives in Florida because that state’s laws protect his fortune from being awarded, in damages, to the families of his victims, even though a court said he was liable.

And then he negotiated a deal with a publisher to tell how he murdered two people. That’s entertainment. And, some would say, a First Ammendment Right.

The publisher seemed to think this would be OK, with the simple reasoning that OJ couldn’t be tried for the same crime twice, so they were all still off the hook. There was money to be made. But now it is suggested that maybe there wouldn’t be that much money because they’d likely have to spend a lot in legal fees to ward off lawsuits over it. Notice that this opinion didn’t include any suggestion that maybe they wouldn’t be able to ward them off – just that they’d have to throw a lot of money at them – and it might not be profitable in the long run. So now it turns out to be 'ill-considered.'

Legalities are never going to get us to ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ moral or immoral, sensible or not. There is no legal definition for ‘appropriate’ and not much of one for ‘common sense.’ ‘Bad taste’ or ‘giving offence’ is OK as long as it doesn’t have racial slurs – but if it DOES have racial slurs there is hell to pay.

Gee. Maybe this whole posting was ‘ill-considered.’

Numbers

Looking at an old bank statement, I realized that the temporary mailing address we used when we first moved here – at a private mailbox place – had not only ‘zip+4’ but ‘zip+4+2.’ When did that happen?

I remember when zip codes first started. There was a hue and cry then about depersonalizing everything – even Charles Schultz got on the bandwagon and named a new ‘Peanuts’ character 5: “Our family name is 95472,” said 5. “Actually that’s our zip code number. In fact that was the number that sort of started the whole thing. That was the number that finally caused my dad to become completely hysterical one night.” – Peanuts Treasury by Charles M. Schulz, © 1968.

He was on to something. A 5-digit zip code was bad enough. A 7-digit phone number is worse, and now the area code is usually required besides. Add in social security numbers, lock combinations, pass codes, pin numbers, account numbers, and you just have number soup. Then try to remember the other numbers you should know right off the bat – what percentage will sales tax add to a purchase, what is your current bank balance, what amounts have you put on your credit cards this month, when is your mother-in-law’s birthday, what are the grocery store’s winter hours, and what is the phone number of your favorite take-out place. Yikes!

I am both blessed and cursed by the ‘discovery’ of cell phones and speed dials – I don’t have to try to remember phone numbers any more, but I am constantly on the verge of panic because if I lose my cell phone I’ll also never be able to get in touch with any of my loved ones again.

Well, maybe not.

Anyway, I don’t like numbers. They tend to get squiggled in my head.

When I try to do any arithmetic there is no automatic mechanism in my brain that tells me that, for example, when you add two numbers that both have 3 digits, you shouldn’t get a result in two digits. Or that there should be a noticeable difference between 5 thousand and 5 million.

It doesn’t ‘feel’ wrong to me when I deduct a deposit in my check book instead of add it. When someone is trying to tell me about any kind of ‘how much’ in an exaggerated manner, I have to ask if that is good or bad. In any heated argument with Mark about the news I can never remember the precise statistic from some published study I read that will drill my point home. But he always can. (Or he can make one up knowing I’ll never know the difference.)

Numbers just aren’t my thing. And they are piling up on me.

Decorating

The furniture we ordered for the family room finally arrived and, in anticipation of it being delivered the other day, we cleared out the room and laid down the area rug. And yes, the room was pretty bare.

Sometime over the course of the next morning, while I was at work and before the new furniture was delivered, Frik must have decided it was too bare. He brought in his beloved 'mittens' (stuffed toy) and laid them artfully in the middle of the rug.

Satisfied with the decorator look he had achieved (evidently) he went off to take a nap.

More flood stuff

It's raining again. Floods are warned, again. Bringing me back to the discussion of last week...

I got an 'after' picture 2 days after the floods, when the road was still closed but the waters had subsided considerably.

It's really hard to get a picture of the valley but this is from the east side, looking toward the bridge (the bluish structure in the middle of the picture.)



Compare this to the 'before' picture that I posted some time ago from the other side:


You can see that it's a fairly wide valley, and flat. The river winds through the center of it and is normally about 8 feet below its bank and, obviously, usually confined to the area UNDER the bridge. From either side, you can't usually see water at all. The debris that was caught up in fences and road signs indicates that the water, during the flood, was ALL the way across the valley itself.

A fortune behind the door

According to the news this morning, two lost Renaissance masterpieces were found behind a British librarian's bedroom door. (She died in July - I knew you were wondering who was looking behind her bedroom door and why.) They are expected to sell for $1.9 million at auction.

No wonder fantasy stays alive. These are works by Fra Angelico, painted for his home church and commissioned by none other than the greatest art patrons ever - the de Medici family.

All I find behind my doors are dust bunnies.

Trip review

I was looking at pictures from our trip that I took mostly to remind myself to look things up on the internet when we got home.



Throughout the mountains in western Washington we saw what looked, through the rain and mist, like fall foliage but turned out to be dying evergreens. Vast areas of the forest are affected. So I looked up what might be causing that and found more information than I think I wanted to know. It’s a wonder there is a tree alive anywhere! They are being killed by any number of infestations: Pine wilt, Tip blight; Defoliation by caterpillars; Swiss Needle Cast foliage disease;. The list of tree-killing insects reads like a Dr Seuss story:

• Balsam Woolly Adelgid
• Bagworms
• Western Spruce Budworm
• Douglas-fir Tussock Moth
• Phantom Hemlock Looper

Good grief.

And then there was Butte, Montana. A dying town, one website admitted that almost all jobs there are low paying service jobs and pointedly blamed the legislature and the utility companies for the decline. But it is an Historic town (aren’t they all?) and has a few very obvious oddities. One is a huge lighted statue of the Virgin Mary on a hillside above town. Don’t ask me why – don’t know. But of course you can’t really tell what it is from way down on the highway, so it just comes across as a lighted obelisk in the dusk light. Oh well.

But in the town itself, there are huge red-lighted structures poking their way up through buildings and tress and such as the town slopes up the hillside. These, evidently are Headframes - symbols of Butte’s proud mining heritage. Called gallows frames by miners, they lowered men to work in the underground mines, and also helped to haul up the mined rock. They are “silent sentinels of the era of underground mining that punctuate the Butte landscape like metal exclamation points.”

OK…

I thought they were pointing out the ‘red-light’ districts. Shows you what I know.

Another place has a huge ‘art installation’ of horses up on a hill – not much to say about it except that someone went to a lot of expense and trouble…

And then there are the plains:

And the Badlands:

I love road trips!

(Click on the pictures to open a larger version; then use your browser's 'Back' button to return.)

Maddie on Prozac

Maddie had a terrible time at the vet yesterday. What cat wouldn’t? She got proclaimed, officially, as a fat cat. She had to have a blood test and was brought back from that in the classic hysterical cat pose where her ears are back but everything else that CAN be extended IS extended. But I didn’t laugh. Didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

So now she is on Prozac. Two half-pills a day, until she calms down and regains her sweet disposition. Since we overlapped the pills yesterday by a bit too much, she was really, really calm for a while there. She stuck close and draped herself over me and I spent the whole night dreaming about carrying Maddie around wherever I was going in my dreams. (I’m very suggestible in my dreams.)

I’ve never been a fan of mood-altering substances. But, I’m sorry, a sedated cat is hilarious.

And sweet, of course.

We really don’t know?

While I was hanging out at the mall yesterday, waiting for the water to recede, I was engaged in my favorite sport, People Watching. I was going for the ‘What not to wear’ theme – and there were plenty of examples. Very few people actually dress in a way that is particularly becoming to them, personally. In MY opinion, of course. Of the dozens of people wandering by, only 2 women were what I would call ‘well put together’ in their dress – appropriate-for-their-age style, appropriate-for-their-skin color, appropriate-for-their-body fit, appropriate-for-the-setting look. There was one other young woman that looked OK standing still but who couldn’t walk on her 4-inch heels without an odd shuffling gait so she was out of the running as well.

There were knit skirts over skin-tight jeans. Wild prints on fat people. Too-short, too-long, too-tight just about everything. Odd colors, peculiar styles, bad fits. One mother walked by wearing jeans and a sweater, a coat and boots, and she was dragging a little girl with shorts and a sleeveless cotton shirt and sandals on. I didn’t mind the individual looks – I just minded that they were obviously living in different seasons. There was midriff, mid-thigh, mid-just-about-anything to be seen. And what’s with the kind of pants that ‘lift and separate’ a woman’s butt? Good grief!

I myself was there in baggy and faded jeans and a men’s XL flannel shirt. A true fashion authority, obviously.

Why is this so hard for us?

Home again - update

The waters have receded a bit and one of the bridges is open so we were able to get home this afternoon. The valley is full of water all the way across and the other bridge looks like it is in the middle of a lake. There is a picture on the news of a 2-story house floating down the river, having come loose from its foundation. Another picture is of 5 cows and a llama standing on a small hill, surrounded by water as far as they can see. It wasn’t just us distressed by the flood. And while we certainly weren’t in any danger of property damage, since we live way up the hill from the valley floor, it is still very, very good to get home.

When we tried to get in yesterday, we encountered a roadblock and a rude sheriff whose only suggestion was to 'get a hotel room for a couple of days.' Not very helpful. But we did just that, thanks to the help of AAA (and no thanks to my cell phone which kept dropping my calls to them.) We spent a restless night in a hotel in downtown Bellevue after finding out that there were no vacant hotel rooms within a fair number of miles of us. The night was orchestrated by a Big Foot Monster in the room above us (acting as the entire percussion section) and with traffic noise from the interstate providing the background chorus.

Mark went off to work this morning. And after spending most of the day in the hotel lobby on their internet service reading traffic reports (and waiting in vain for the maids to finish with the room so I could read in peace) I got another call from our helpful neighbor reporting that, Hooray, the bridge was open. We dashed home before it closed again.

And sure enough, Maddie is still hissing and growling at Frik.

She’s going to the vet tomorrow for tranquilizers or something. Completely unhinged, she is.

And I might need some myself.

Stranded

We were supposed to be home yesterday. We had a great drive, were enjoying the scenery... and then our neighbor called.

"Don't bother coming home - you can't get here anyway," he said.

What???

Seattle experienced a lot of rain in the 6 days we were gone. A LOT of rain. Eight inches of rain. And it all ended up in our little valley. And this isn't really a good time to find out that ALL roads that lead to our little community either cross over or run along that little valley with its sweet little river.

Today that is a "raging river," I'm afraid. And the bridges and roads are under water and we are definitely and decidedly NOT at home.

We're stranded.

Here in South Dakota

I thought I should post something, just to keep my hand in, so to speak. We're in South Dakota and doing touristy things like taking pictures in the Badlands and visiting Wall Drug. Oh yes, Wall Drug. So, not much to report but a few observations, nevertheless:

We are happy to be away from Washington's political ads, tired as we are of hearing about how awful and how wonderful candidate Darcy Burner is. South Dakota has its own political ads, of course, but we clearly don't care about them. SD also has an amendment on its ballot to allow people to sue judges and juries when they don't like the outcome of their cases. The interesting thing about this amendment is that it is retroactive. If judges or jury members are still alive, they could now be sued for a decision they made at any point in their lifetime. Fortunately, the description of the proposal for the voters also acknowledges that this is likely to be challenged in court if it passes, costing South Dakotans millions in other court and lawyer fees to argue the challenge. Ex post facto laws are not allowed by the Constitution, even though we have a bunch of them. But we don't care in South Dakota.

South Dakota is also pondering abortion. Who isn't these days? And here is my objection about that. Too many people vote to protect a single issue - abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage - without thinking about what their preferred candidate's position might be on all the other things that actually are likely to come up to a vote during their term in office. How many times, after all, do they actually vote on the Big Issue? Mostly they vote to increase your taxes or pay themselves more or establish new 'awareness' months or remedy their brother-in-law's current cash flow crisis with a contract to repair a road somewhere.

Who was it who said, about voting, that "if it made a difference, you don't really think they'd let you do it, do you?"

Elevator talk

I ran across an article today about a woman who is celebrating 30 years as an elevator operator in the Space Needle in Seattle. I can’t imagine doing much of anything for 30 years – perhaps my marital record would attest to that – and certainly operating an elevator wouldn’t be the thing to stick with me for 30 days, much less 30 years. But this woman obviously loved her job and had a sense of humor about it; and the article had a few irresistibly bright spots.

So, from Kery Murakami, at the Seattle Post Intellegencer, quoting Jenny Dibley, there is this:

“On windy days, ‘when the doors opened, it was like the Marilyn Monroe-thing where my skirt would flare open.’

The dress kept getting stuck in the elevator doors, so Dibley would yank it out. Except for one time.

‘We started going down; my skirt just went up and up. I actually got lifted off the ground and I was hanging from my armpits,’ she said. ‘Everybody was quiet. And it's really true what your mother says about wearing clean underwear.’ “