What's The Big Idea

Hello World,

Well, I can tell you that I have been around the block, as the saying goes, and I also did not just fall off the turnip truck, believe me. In fact, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to spring anything new on me, and this is not my first time at the rodeo, by a long shot, and that's not just a lot of "been there, done that" sort of new tricks for an old dog, by golly. But it's really true that the one thing that I wasn't expecting on Saturday morning (which was technically October 29th, mind you) was snow and plenty of it, all over our yard. Frankly, we had scoffed at the weather reports that were shrieking about this upcoming winter storm at full volume, and expected at most a little rain and that was about it. But there we were in the morning, out taking pictures of the actual snow (me, shovel snow in October - I don't think so!) and feeling pretty silly in our gloves and rubber boots when it wasn't even Halloween yet, for heaven's sake. And just like they said on the news, the dense wet snow on trees still full of leaves would make the branches so heavy that they would be likely to just break off and fall - which they did in our yard, to the extent that we grabbed our keys and moved both of the cars as far away from anything with limbs as we could get. Of course, we had to scrape the snow off of them first, thanks not.

And just in case you were thinking that our old nemesis Comrade Mischka had really outdone himself this time, and finally gone completely over the top, totally out of control, and around the proverbial bend, I have only one thing to say: "Not so fast!" It turns out that there was another snow storm in early October 1987 that caused so much damage, with trees falling and electric wires snapping under the strain, that the power outages spread to over 300,000 customers in the northeast. (And that was back when we used to think the weather was normal!) I can honestly say that I don't remember that storm, and can find no personal accounts of it in my journals or correspondence of the time. But I can tell you how bad this week's storm was, in comparison to anything else, and that is that even Her Royal Moochiness from next door didn't come over to eat off of our front porch, and this was the kitty who stayed out the whole time through the thick of Hurricane Irene, and laughed in the face of it, so that tells you something right there. Comrade Mischka's got to go a long way to chase off Mooch, and that's a fact.

So it turns out that St. Louis came back and won the World Series after all, and apparently to the surprise of many, who thought they didn't stand a chance, in spite of leading the series two to one after three games. But then Texas reeled off two wins in a row, and the sports prognosticators wrote off the Cardinals without a second glance, basically handing the title to the Rangers on the strength of that alone. Game 6 was rained out, which the baseball analysts concurred was just postponing the inevitable, and they fully expected it would be all over in six games, with the long-suffering fans celebrating in the streets of Arlington for the first time in franchise history. But instead, after being on the brink of elimination, the pride of Missouri roared back, improbably winning the last two games from Texas, proving the critics wrong, and cheering the hearts of the home-town faithful, to the tune of over 47,000 just in the stadium, and countless more everywhere else. So now that they've trotted out all of the old baseball cliches one more time ("It ain't over 'til it's over," "This is why they make them play the games," "Ya gotta believe!") we can finally retire them back into the hot-stove closet for another winter and get on with our lives. After all, some of us have more important things to think about.

For instance, our Halloween costumes. I realize there is nothing new about me chasing around after costume parts, or what Bill describes as my annual scavenger hunt, certainly not after all this time, and it always seems, at the last minute. My problem this time around was that I already had one costume that I really liked, but it didn't fit, and another costume that would fit but I wasn't crazy about it, and I was desperately trying to come up with an alternative idea to save the day. But by the time I came up with my brainstorm (which I admit was a lot to expect from my two poor over-worked brain cells, which I have renamed Dracula and Casper for the occasion) there were only two weeks left to pull together the costume and miscellaneous props to go with it. An even bigger problem was that this is the first costume ever in my whole life that is topical, so if I didn't do it now, I'd never be able to do it ever again, once the current situation passed and everyone forgot about it. This is why I found myself at Party City three times in a week, and each time, the place was mobbed and I had to stand on line, even at 10:15 in the morning on Thursday, and once again, thanks not. But after all was said and done, and copious amounts of money spent for expedited service and travel to far-flung retail outlets for assorted accessories, I think I may have beat this costume idea into shape once and for all, and I'm as ready as I'll ever be to spring it on an unsuspecting public on Monday, or know the reason why. As for Dracula and Casper, they've just gotten wind of the ubiquitous fun-size candy bars that are everywhere at this time of year, and now they can't think about anything else.

Speaking of ideas, one idea whose time has not come, and in fact, may never come, has apparently been embraced by my bank - and mind you, this is not some squirrelly little Mom and Pop's House o' Bucks, but the international behemoth of HSBC, where you think they would know better. Last week, I needed to go to the branch in person to accomplish what I considered two very simple transactions, one deposit and one withdrawal, and which I would have expected to be so routine for a bank with their decades of experience, that I would have been in and out of there in a flash. Alas, not (pause) so (pause) fast. (Very long pause.) It seems that our friends at HSBC (which I'm now convinced stands for "How Slow Business Crawls") must have decided that their customers wanted tellers who were friendlier, rather than being any faster - as if all of us would be going to the bank to socialize, and had nothing better to do for the rest of the day. My two very ordinary transactions, which should have taken about 10 minutes under any normal circumstances, turned instead into a 45-minute ordeal of standing on two lines (or rather, the same line twice) as I listened wearily to the whole life stories of the tellers and the other customers, as they chatted amiably of this and that, rather than concluding their business and moving along out of everybody else's way. I was doubly annoyed because I didn't make the mistake of trying to go to the bank at lunch-time, when I would expect long lines and slow service, but this was a weekday morning before anyone's thoughts had turned to lunch, including Dracula and Casper - and I have to tell you honestly that they think about food pretty much all the time. So here's a big fat super-slow-motion razz-berry for HSBC ("Hours Standing Bitterly Complaining") who somehow decided that I wanted to spend more time at the bank rather than less, as if I didn't already have a million other things to do. After all, these costumes don't just make themselves, you know.

Elle