myweekandwelcometoit

Scrap Book

2012-01-16T22:07:00.001-08:00

Hello World,

Happy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend! I hope that in the spirit of the late and lamented civil rights leader, your weekend was appropriately civil, right as rain, and leading the way in good times, relaxation and all of your dreams coming true. Speaking of dreams coming true, the big news around here would be the Giants beating Green Bay in their playoff game, not only in decisive fashion, but on the Packers' home turf besides. This unexpected turn of events has made the beleaguered fans of Big Blue positively giddy, when scant weeks ago, their lovable losers were being written off as hapless patsies and also-rans in their division. But the Giants surprised everybody by turning it on at the tail-end of the season, winning three in a row, and then running roughshod over the Falcons in the Wild Card Game last week. Now even the vaunted Pack has been sent packing, and the hometown faithful could be forgiven for wondering if this might really be their year after all, and a return to the glory days of 2007 all over again. The road to Indianapolis goes through San Francisco for the pride of the Meadowlands, where the local fans hope that their beloved Giants will not be leaving their hearts, I can tell you that.

Meanwhile at work, because of the holiday weekend, the Payroll minions requested that all departments get their time cards in early, and since I was taking off Friday as well, I had to make sure to get them finished on Thursday rather than Friday as usual. Then it occurred to me that since all of the time cards were already submitted to Payroll on Thursday morning, I could cancel the afternoon alarm in my Palm that reminds me to punch out on time. However, when I went to the calendar program to cancel the alarm, this was the first I noticed that rather than saying "PUNCH OUT" on Thursday afternoon, what it actually said was "OYBCG IYT" instead, and thanks so very much not. Obviously I have no one else to blame for this but myself, since I'm the person who sets up the alarms in my Palm, but I think it goes without saying that there's plenty of room for improvement in this system, and I ought to know.

It seems that I'm not the only person with this problem, as our friend good old Bob T. Yokl from the Savings Beyond Price newsletter is another prime example of fickle fingers on the keys. He started out by describing the federal government's efforts to "reduce our U.S. budget deficient" (and we all know that the spell-checker won't help you replace a perfectly good word like "deficient" when what you mean is "deficit" instead) and then presented "a few ideas to get your saving machine oiled, fined tuned and humming" - which in the old days of editors, they would have fined you for "fined tuned" rather than just letting it go out like that. Not resting on his yokels - er, I mean laurels - he summed up by saying that "more and more healthcare organizations are scrapping the bottom of the proverbial barrel to find new savings." My favorite part of this is that it was underlined for emphasis, so we would be sure not to miss it. Well, my personal feeling is that people are going to be scrapping this local yokel instead, at least until he figures out the difference between scrapping and scraping.

Having the same problem with the right word in the wrong context, we have this review of "Color Splash" in the Best Bets section of the TV listings from our local newspaper -

=================

David Bromstad generates an Old World,

customary game room above a garage

=================

Here I'm thinking that they mean "custom" rather than "customary," because otherwise, I have no idea what they're trying to say, and once again, the spell-checker's never going to help you with that. This next one for "Allen Gregory" should be even more obvious to anyone, except perhaps the horoscope computer -

=================

Allen helps out his popular friend

whose sick at home

==================

Ah, so close and yet so far, when you have to wonder whose who is whose, or worse, whose who's whose in the zoo. Also having homophone trouble was this review of "The Walking Dead" -

==================

Darryl is forced to take on

a hoard of walkers

==================

I suppose that someone may have indeed hoarded those walkers, but more likely, the word they were groping for was "horde" instead. Meanwhile, the spell-checker obviously looked the other way when the horoscope computer came up with this tidbit about "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" -

====================

The gang stubbles upon a gold mine

in the world of child pageants

====================

Stubbles? What the heck kind of verb is stubbles? That may be a real word in actuality, but it's certainly not the one that they were aiming for, I'm pretty sure. They did no better with this note about "American Dad" -

=====================

Francine cramps Stan's ability to flirt

with coworkers, but retaliatory flirting

leaves to all-out war

=====================

Heck, "leaves" doesn't even sound like "leads," so we can't blame the homophone trolls for that one, that's for sure. Even worse is this shipwreck of a synopsis for "Hot in Cleveland" -

====================

Victoria's prison pen pal is

way to pay her a visit

====================

Way what, for heaven's sake? Way back? Way out? Way ahead of its time? Honestly, you'd think it would be obvious to anyone that they need to go back and fix that sentence, and not just let it go like that. We actually saw that episode, so we know that the pen pal in question was "on his way" to see her, but the poor over-burdened spell-checker can't help fill in the words that were just plain left out in the first place.

This last one is actually my favorite, and from the front page of the newspaper, where you would think that professional journalists would know better, and not have to rely on modern technology to bail them out, which it apparently couldn't, when they threw this half-baked gibberish at it -

======================

In Westchester County, 75 cents out of every dollar

collected pays for programs that the state requires

it to provide: Medicaid, pensions, pre-kindergarten,

early childhood prevention and probation, among other costs.

======================

Actually, I think that early childhood prevention would be fairly simple to accomplish, but frankly, the connotations are extremely disturbing on many levels. In any event, these are obviously not banner days in print media of all types, with enough strikes against the literary community that the Grammar Umpires would give them a punch out at home plate, or perhaps that would be a "oybcg iyt" instead, and no hoard of stubbles would be able to rescue them, before it leaves to all-out war. Personally, I would send it all back to the drawing board to be fined tuned, but that would be scrapping the bottom of the proverbial barrel, and I ought to know, or my name isn't -

Bob T. Yokl

Park Pass

2012-01-08T20:49:00.001-08:00

Hello World,

Happy New Year! Here's hoping that 2012 will be a banner year for everyone, just stuffed to the gills with happiness, friendliness and wonderfulness for all - in fact, so over-stuffed that they'll have to tack on a whole extra day just to fit it all in. 2012 is a Leap Year, of course, so we have that to look forward to in February. And as we all know, any month that starts on a Sunday, as January did, will feature a Friday the 13th in the second week, one of three that will be coming up this year also in April and July, so prepare to be on the lookout for those. I suppose the general idea would be to steer clear of mirrors, ladders, black cats and other harbingers of ill fortune - or you could just stay in bed and pull the covers over your head, making the bad luck work twice as hard to catch you in the first place. That may be considered the moral low road, but hey, I say if the bad luck can't find you, that's just too bad. Luck, that is.

Well, it's really true that Christmas has finally come and gone, much to the chagrin of retailers all over the world, who might wish that the buying frenzy would just keep going on and on like that the whole year through. (The credit card companies would love it too, I'm thinking, not to mention the President's economic advisers, it goes without saying.) We were on our own for the big day, as our family was otherwise engaged, and we had a chance to savor all the delights of the day at our own pace. We even got to have a nice leisurely breakfast, rather than just scarfing down junk food out of our stockings. The cats came to see what all the excitement was about, and were glad that they did, after we broke out the special treats and catnip toys that Santa's elves had thoughtfully provided for the occasion. Two of our cats were new to Christmas, while the others are already seasoned campaigners in the yuletide theater, but catnip seems to be the universal language that speaks to the young and old alike. Under the tree were the usual gifts of technology, apparel, entertainment, jewelry, and assorted whatnot, and you can believe me when I say that I have the videotape to prove it. Not to mention my commendation from the President's economic advisers for sparing no expense in the holiday lollapalooza, and that's not just a lot of pine cones and holly berries, believe me.

On the last day of the year, we journeyed to Long Island to celebrate Christmas II The Sequel with my sister, whose work schedule made her unavailable at Christmas, when the rest of the world was observing it on the previous Sunday. Even though it was New Year's Eve (albeit during the daytime) it was a spectacular day, around 60 degrees with bright sunshine, and about as unlike December in New York as a day could possibly get, and still be in this solar system. We jumped at the opportunity to visit the Norman J. Levy Park & Preserve on the site of the former Merrick Landfill, which was closed for dumping in 1984 and re-opened in 2000 as a county park. It still maintains a recycling sorting center, but its chief attraction is as the highest point on the south shore of Nassau County, at 115-feet with glorious 360 degree vistas of everything far and wide. The 50-acre park has over 3 miles of trails, wetlands, a fishing pier, exercise course and natural amphitheater for exhibits. Over 200 species of birds have been spotted there, in addition to the resident goats and guinea fowl that help keep the vegetation in check, and prove to be endlessly amusing to visitors. We did not have this idea alone, as the park was filled with joggers and hikers out in T-shirts and shorts, a December rarity that we could only marvel at. The friendly Park Rangers are happy to give tours in their peppy electric tram, and we hopped aboard to see all the sights, including the windmill at the very top. Everything they say about the panoramic view is true, and nothing of an exaggeration - with the Manhattan skyline, the bridges of Queens and Brooklyn, Jones Beach on the ocean, and countless bays in every direction. Because Long Island is flat as a table, they say you can see over 20 water towers in different towns on all sides. We were simply enthralled with the whole experience, and I'm sure the poor Park Ranger despaired of ever getting rid of us after the tour. He didn't realize that he had an unlikely ally, because we had plans for lunch at Denny's, and although it was a near thing, that was about the only incentive that could get us to leave the park on such a beautiful day. Unfortunately, we found that the ogres at Denny's had tweaked their menu to eliminate or alter some of our favorite selections, and it came as a bitter disappointment to me that their delectable Hawaiian Tropical Smoothie has been discontinued by the chain, thanks not. Of course, if we had known that ahead of time, we'd still be at the park now, so at least we made the Park Rangers happy, if nothing else.

Meanwhile at work, since the Feast of the Epiphany was on Friday, it meant taking down all of the seasonal decorations from the department, and the scoffers may jeer (and the jeerers may scoff while they're at it) but it really did happen that they all came down and were all put away in their assorted bags and boxes, and returned to the shelf in the closet for another year. The new little wall tree was good as gold, and all I had to do was pull it off the wall, roll it up and stuff it back in its own handy little bag, as easy as sugar-plum pie. I have no idea what everyone is going to talk about without the wandering Christmas tree to kick around for months in our spare offices this time around, but they can just go ahead and blame the consultants and not me. It turns out that it's a good thing that I came up with the idea for the wall tree instead of the regular table-top tree on its rolling bedside cabinet, because I found out later that I can't get the bedside cabinet out of my closet anymore, and once again to the consultants, thanks so very much not. They not only took over all of our spare offices, but re-arranged our furniture and threw out our file cabinets, so I had to snatch two of the discards and secrete them somewhere in my office so I would have space for my files. One of them is next to my desk, and effectively cuts off the escape route of the bedside cabinet from the closet, so now I can't get the holiday tree's cabinet out of the closet without moving the whole file cabinet first. So it was fortuitous that I already had a contingency plan, because it takes more than a bunch of "Grinch-ultants" to spoil my holiday spirit, and that's not just the eggnog talking, believe me.

In other holiday news, alert readers will be glad to hear that the long-winded porch project finally shuddered to a close in fits and starts, and after the rigorous efforts of the landscaping crew, even most of the construction debris is a thing of the past, with scarcely a loose nail, screw, clamp, bucket, rope, shingle, tarp, scrap wood or shard of glass remaining to be seen. Even the busted-up gutters and downspouts have been carted off, and fresh gravel applied to the driveway, which was nothing but a post-apocalyptic wasteland mere days before. So as they say in college football, you can stick a fork in this one, because it's done. With all that's been going on lately, and trying to get ready for the holidays, Bill thought the thing to do would be to get one of those prefabricated gingerbread house kits that you just assemble from parts, rather than making his own from scratch as usual. However, the kit failed the first test of a gingerbread house - which was standing up by itself with four walls and a roof - and turned into a much bigger headache than it was worth. But thanks to Bill's ingenuity, it did sport a lovely new porch addition on one side, including an original shingle fragment for its tiny roof, to thrill the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Gingerbread in their leisure moments in the great sugar-frosted outdoors. Now that the porch project has been wrapped up, at least we have a gingerbread memento to commemorate it with. Next year, I say we hire the contractors to come back and build the gingerbread house, and at least then we know it wouldn't fall down, by golly, it wouldn't dare. Of course, then we'd have no choice but to hire the landscaping crew to come here and spend an entire day to clean up all the broken glass, before poor Mr. and Mrs. Gingerbread would be able to use their driveway again, sugar-frosting or not.

Elle

Nifty Gifty

2011-12-30T19:21:00.000-08:00

Greetings, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!

My Wish for You in 2012 ~~

May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts.

May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet of $100 bills.

May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips!

May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and

may happiness slap you across the face and

may your tears be that of joy.

May the problems you had, forget your home address!

In simple words ............

May 2012 be the best year of your life!!!

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Now here's a holiday fable we can all sink our teeth into ~~

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Roy Collette and his brother-in-law have been exchanging the same pair of pants as a Christmas present for 11 years - and each time the package gets harder to open. This year the pants came wrapped in a car mashed into a 3-foot cube. The trousers are in the glove compartment of a 1974 Gremlin. Now Collette's plotting his revenge - if he can get them out.

It all started when Collette received a pair of moleskin trousers from his brother-in-law, Larry Kunkel of Bensenville, Ill. Kunkel's mother had given her son the britches when he was a college student. He wore them a few times, but they froze stiff in cold weather and he didn't like them. So he gave them to Collette. Collette, who called the moleskins "miserable", wore them three times, then wrapped them up and gave them back to Kunkel for Christmas the next year.

The friendly exchange continued routinely until Collette twisted the pants tightly, stuffed them into a 3-foot-long, 1-inch wide tube and gave them back to Kunkel.

The next Christmas, Kunkel compressed the pants into a 7-inch square, wrapped them with wire and gave the "bale" to Collette.

Not to be outdone, the next year Collette put the pants into a 2-foot-square crate filled with stones, nailed it shut, banded it with steel and gave the trusty trousers back to Kunkel.

The brothers agreed to end the caper if the trousers were damaged. But they were as careful as they were clever.

Kunkel had the pants mounted inside an insulated window that had a 20-year guarantee and shipped them off to Collette.

Collette broke the glass, recovered the trousers, stuffed them into a 5-inch coffee can and soldered it shut. The can was put in a 5-gallon container filled with concrete and reinforcing rods and given to Kunkel the following Christmas.

Two years ago, Kunkel installed the pants in a 225-pound home-made steel ashtray made from 8-inch steel casings and etched Collette's name on the side. Collette had trouble retrieving the treasured trousers, but succeeded without burning them with a cutting torch.

Last Christmas, Collette found a 600-pound safe and hauled it to Viracon Inc. in Owatonna, where the shipping department decorated it with red and green stripes, put the pants inside and welded the safe shut. The safe was then shipped to Kunkel, who is the plant manager for Viracon's outlet in Bensenville.

Last week, the pants were trucked to Owatonna, 55 miles south of Minneapolis, in a drab green, 3-foot cube that once was a car with 95,000 miles on it. A note attached to the 2,000-pound scrunched car advised Collette that the pants were inside the glove compartment."This will take some planning," Collette said. "I will definitely get them out. I'm confident." But he's waiting until January to think about how to recover the bothersome britches.

"Wait until next year," he warned. "I'm on the offensive again."

Space Race

2011-12-24T13:37:00.001-08:00

Hello World,

Well, for all of us who have survived the holiday maelstrom up to this point, we find ourselves at last at the very brink of Christmas Eve, and pretty soon it will all be over bar the shouting, as the saying goes. I have to say that the holiday started looking a whole lot better for me since I left work early on Monday, and had the entire rest of the week off, and next week also, which turned out to be a good thing, because I was obviously never going to get anything done otherwise, and Christmas morning would have been a bleak and paltry affair, I can tell you that. Fortunately nowadays, the shops all open early and stay open late (if they ever close at all) as well as online commerce at any time of day or night, plus the wonders of overnight shipping around the globe, for those procrastinators among us who need all the help we can get. So while I would not give the elves at Santa's Workshop the absolute highest ratings of all time, heaven knows, with considerable last-minute exertions, at least Santa's reputation will not have been ruined beyond repair, and that's not just a lot of sugar plums, believe me.

Kicking off the holiday week in style, of course, we celebrated our seasonal services of Lessons & Carols at church, which now sports the "politically correct" moniker of Christmas Carols Sing-Along, to eliminate all possibility that we might be trying to teach anyone a lesson about The Nativity, heaven forbid. There's not much left of the old Lessons & Carols anymore without a full-time music director at church, but some of us old-timers still try our best to spice it up just a bit (at least for the sake of the videotaping crew, so it's not exactly the same thing year after year) with extra musicians, duets, and special music that hearkens back to its glory days of yore. It must be said that this often does not pan out as expected, and this time around, I would have to describe it as something of a mixed success, but everyone seemed to have a good time anyway, and that's the most important thing after all. Perhaps not to the late and esteemed J.S. Bach, after the injuries done to his beloved Christmas Oratorio, in spite of good intentions - and we all know where the road goes that is paved with those, by golly, and I've got the hand-basket to boot.

Speaking of the holidays, we have our friends at http://www.folkalley.com/music/holidaystream/ to thank for their seasonal streaming music for everyone to enjoy on their computers or mobile devices, so you can all get your elf on with all the ho-ho-ho you can muster, by jingle. They played a song I hadn't heard before, from country singer Kathy Johnson, called "Let's Keep Christmas in December," and with which as you can imagine, I could not agree more. Actually, I'm okay with getting a jump on the season in mid-November or so, but heck, not August - and certainly not June, which is when the holiday music catalogues start to arrive at church, which is enough to make a grown person weep, and I ought to know. In fact, it was last month that we received one for Easter music, of all things, and I would point out that Easter in 2012 is not until the 8th of April, so that tells you something right there. Of course, I'm always the one to say there's no wrong way to celebrate a festive event, in spite of the Holiday Police, but having a little bit of Easter Bunny with my Thanksgiving turkey is an idea that I am simply never going to warm up to, no matter how early they want to send out their catalogues, and that's not just a lot of marshmallow peeps, believe me.

And while we're on the topic of bad timing, I recently found myself on opposite ends of a chronological anomaly, that made me wonder if the Theory of Relativity had worn out its welcome, like an irritating relative that you wish would go home. Of course, we all remember Jean, the irrepressible bookkeeper from work, who was complaining loud and long about the weather over the last few weeks, which was so quirkily unpredictable that you just about didn't know what to expect next. Now, it must be said that the weather vagaries were nowhere on a scale of the Biblical plagues, and we didn't actually have to look out for an infestation of locusts or raining frogs, or even fire and brimstone, so it may have been annoying, but it was scarcely epic. But it seemed like every day, I would bump into Jean in the hallway, and she would regale me with the weather reports, and as an added bonus, the traffic conditions as a result of the weather's impact in various areas, such as coastal or high-altitude, or the region's highways and bridges. Now, this all came as news to me, since I figure that I work too close to home for the traffic and weather reports to have any real significance in my life, but then it dawned on me - inasmuch as Jean actually lives on campus, you would think that this information would be even LESS relevant in her situation, instead of scouring the updates with the rigorous scrutiny of someone planning to launch a manned rocket ship to another planet, where this data would be of vital national importance. I mean, the fact is that Jean can literally walk from her office to her front door in about 2 minutes flat, regardless of whatever the traffic or weather might choose to throw at us, including locusts and frogs, or even asteroids and black holes, and that's not just the space cakes talking, believe me.

On the other side of that Theory of Irritating Relatives, everyone knows that I work less than a mile from home, as the crow flies, and if I went out on the roof of the hospital with the rest of the crows, I could see our house from there. I can walk the distance in about 25 minutes, and it takes around 10 minutes to drive point-to-point on the average day. Well, it was anything but average a couple of weeks ago, when I left work as usual after 5:00, only to find surreptitious Police activity impeding progress several blocks from my destination, and finally, forward movement stopped altogether in the direction of where I needed to go. Trying to make the best of it, I turned in the opposite direction instead, and attempted to circumvent the blockade by coming at it from a different way around - which turned out to be more difficult than it sounds, since our neighborhood backs on the water, and there is no way to sneak in from behind it, except by boat, and which I had to admit was impractical under the circumstances. Taking another swing at it from a different route, I found even more Police activity blocking the way, only this time when I turned away from the impediment, there was no other avenue of escape open to me except to get on the highway, going even more in the wrong direction towards Connecticut, which was about the last thing I expected to be doing in my usual drive home from across town, I can tell you that. I got off the highway in the next town over and circled back, basically ending up right where I started at the hospital, so I stopped there and called Bill to let him know what had been happening for the last hour since I left work. I had half a mind to just park the car there overnight and walk home, and save myself any more aggravation, but I was determined to take one last desperate stab at it before giving the whole thing up as a lost cause and calling it a day. Once again going in the opposite direction from home, I drove all the way down to the outskirts of the Bronx, crossed over the streets where the Police activity seemed to be centered, and then skimmed along the waterfront on the far side, just barely making it to the safety of our neighborhood before hitting the snarls of traffic stuck on the other side of the same emergency, whatever it was. You can believe me when I say that walking in the front door of the house was not something I took for granted at that point, that's for sure. In the end, my ordinary and very routine 10-minute commute from work to home took over an hour and a half, through four different towns and an inter-state highway, which I not only could have done faster if I had walked, but heck, could have done faster on a pogo stick, and blind-folded to boot. I suppose I should have been glad that the weather was perfectly fine, or it could have been even worse (although I honestly don't see how that could be possible) but I can tell you that I did spend the entire time wondering where was Jean the bookkeeper with her traffic reports when I really needed her, and that's not just a lot of space cakes either, and I ought to know.

Elle

Hello Kitty

2011-12-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Happy Hanukkah! The time-honored Festival of Lights begins next week on the 21st, and the stores are awash with seasonal decorations of all sorts, everywhere you look. I'm kidding, of course - nothing compares to the merchandising juggernaut that is Christmas at this time of year. But I will say that I see more Hanukkah-themed items in the stores now than ever before (which is to say, none at all when I was growing up) so the retailers are finally jumping on board that bandwagon, based on the irrefutable conclusion that if it's in the stores, people will buy it, no matter how arcane or outlandish. In fact, I received a catalogue from our friends at Gourmet Gift Baskets (and please feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com and see for yourself) that featured The Cat Lover's Pampered Cat Gift Basket filled with toys and treats for your favorite feline, which at a whopping $60 is a classic example of what we call around here "This Is Why The Terrorists Hate Us" category of conspicuous consumption. There's no mention of the Kosher version of the Pampered Cat basket, so once again the retailers have missed a bet for Hanukkah gift-giving, and more's the pity for the Jewish cat population, I'm sure.

Speaking of the holidays, I bumped into a coworker in the hallway, who was excited to tell me all about her upcoming plans to celebrate the season in style. She explained that she was going to be throwing a lavish Christmas Eve party for her far-flung friends and relatives, and pulling out all the stops to make it a night to remember - and here I mean, not in the Titanic sense, but something memorable in a more positive way. She gave me a run-down on the menu and decorations that she had planned, and the wide-ranging guest list from near and far. She wrapped up this recitative with what she considered the highlight of the event, namely the anticipated appearance by no less an esteemed personage than one she described as "Barbra Streisand's ex-cousin," at which mere mortals would expect to be suitably impressed. Personally, I don't know what you would need to do to be removed as a relative from La Strident's family, or whether this former cousin was singularly banished, or took the whole rest of the aunts, uncles and assorted other cousins out in one fell swoop, to be forevermore on the outside looking in. Perhaps it's some sort of test that you have to pass to stay in the diva's family, like an eye test, and after a while, people simply don't measure up to the mark anymore, and fall by the wayside. Oh well, whatever it is, at least the ex-cousin in question has something to do for Christmas Eve, and not just sitting around moping over days gone by - or should I say, misty water-color memories of the way we were.

In other holidays news, last weekend I was somewhat under the weather, and a lot of things that should have been accomplished simply never got done. One of which was our annual trek to the nearby VFW Post to pick out our special evergreen from their vast selection of Christmas trees, where Bill's family has been getting their holiday conifers for generations. We didn't look forward to going this Saturday, when the place would probably be packed to the rafters (that is, if they had any rafters) and coming up with just the right tree would be like bobbing for apples in a shark tank, thanks not. So we decided instead to swing by there on Friday after dinner, in an attempt to beat the rush, and scoop up the very best tree that we could find, or know the reason why. This worked out way better than expected, as it turned out that we were the only people on the lot at the time, and certainly got all the attention we could have possibly hoped for, from the idle crew who could not have been happier to see us under the circumstances. Unlike other years, when we have bravely tramped through their rows of trees in bitter cold, icy snow or pelting rain, the weather was perfectly fine, so we didn't have to jump out of the car, grab the first tree that we saw, and bolt out of there before succumbing to frostbite or worse, which has been known to happen. Having the place to ourselves, we were free to wander around at our leisure, and really examine the trees on their merits, all the while savoring that welcome aroma that only fresh pine can impart - and if there's anything more intrinsic to the holiday spirit than that wonderful smell, I don't know what it is. We found a number of trees that we really liked, which is not often the case in the ranks of taller trees nowadays, but only one of them was the first among equals, and we snapped it up without a second thought. Wrestling it into the house was no easy task, I can tell you that, especially with the neighbor's irrepressible kitten Cooper underfoot at every step, and cheerfully oblivious to the danger of a 100-pound 9-foot mammoth fir in relation to a 10-month-old pint-sized kitty, who might weigh all of 3-pounds sopping wet, if that. Through Bill's heroic efforts, we got the tree into the stand, put the angel on top, and it was exactly a perfect fit, not to mention, just like a beautiful Christmas card right in our own living room. Cooper sniffed around for a while, but when he realized there was no Cat Lover's Pampered Cat Gift Basket in sight, he scampered off looking for better opportunities elsewhere. Perhaps even now, he's taking the test trying to get into Barbra Streisand's family.

Normally a Christmas tree would be the only botanical news in our humdrum lives, but not so! After a series of storms, strong winds, rampaging contractors and the inexorable pull of gravity, our yard was looking pretty shabby and unkempt - although it must be said that even in a perfectly kempt state, it's really nothing to write home about for the most part. At long last, the grounds-keeping crew showed up for their final clean sweep of the property, and you can believe me when I say that when they were finished, there was not a leaf, a twig, a stone or a vine left standing that hadn't already been dragged to the curb by their rigorous ministrations. The yard looked like a shivering nude, without a fig leaf in sight to cover itself with, and even the weedy patches plucked clean right down to the bare earth. In fact, their efforts were so meticulously thorough that they even cleaned the leaves out of my bird bath, for heaven's sake, which I thought was going pretty far above and beyond, even for our landscapers - and don't forget, these are the folks who threw out my camping firewood when its ratty appearance obviously didn't meet their exacting standards.

And while we're on the subject of standards, of which there aren't any anymore, heaven knows, I found out something that I didn't know, and in one of the most unlikely spots for it. In yet another glaring example of "Why The Terrorists Hate Us," when I was busy hunting down costume parts in late October, and it seems like I spent one entire week at Party City, I discovered something that party planners and wedding organizers have probably known for years, but came as a big surprise to me. Apparently it has finally dawned on the creative geniuses of various suppliers that people having a special event would be glad to pay extra for color-coordinated accessories to match their party theme - from paper plates and tablecloths, to streamers, flowers and favors. What brought me up short was, yes, an entire aisle filled with bags of single color candies, like mints or M&Ms, rather than buying an assortment and having to pick out just the colors you want on your own. I have to say that it's not only a brilliant marketing strategy on their part, but walking down the rainbow-hued aisle had a mesmerizing effect on someone stupefied from too much Halloween shopping, that's for sure. So now you know that next time there's a call for purple M&Ms, or hot pink mints, you can hurry on over to Party City and stock up on just the right color to match your decor. Just don't tell the terrorists I sent you. Say, is that Cooper with a Kosher version of the Cat Lover's Pampered Cat Gift Basket from Barbra Streisand?

Elle

A Nip In The Air

2011-12-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Here we are, coming up to the third Sunday in Advent already, and the ho-ho-ho-ing is underway in earnest now, with not a moment to spare. In fact, we just came back from the diner, where there were two Christmas trees on cars in the parking lot, so that tells you something right there. Speaking of Christmas trees, this will not be one of those years with colorful tales of the continuing misadventures of our wandering Christmas tree at work, where it rambles from the hallway, to my office, to a spare office down the corridor, all fully decorated on its rolling cabinet with the holiday tablecloth. Yes, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. We not only have a plague of consultants in all our spare offices at the moment, but they re-arranged all of our furniture and storage, so there isn't any spot to set a tree up in the first place, much less an assortment of wandering venues for it to sojourn after Epiphany before getting packed away in the closet. What I did instead was put up a cute 40-inch tree that hangs on the wall, and comes complete with lights, ornaments and other festive decorations - so it's not only out of everyone's way, but also whittled my tree-trimming chores down to nothing. When it's time to un-decorate, I can just take it off the wall, roll it up, and stash it back in its bag for another year. I don't know what people will have to talk about in January and February, without the wandering Christmas tree to kick around anymore.

Speaking of wandering off the beaten path, at least in a linguistic sense, we recently received the 2012 "Not So Great Moments in Healthcare" calendar from our friends at Health Care Logistics, and the cover features a cartoon of an archeologist and his white lab-coated colleague confronting a wall full of mysterious hieroglyphics, with this unfortunate caption:

====================================================

"Don't worry, I'm a Pharmacist. I'm use to deciphering this kind of thing."

====================================================

Ouch! That Pharmacist needed a bottle of grammar pills to come up with "used to" in the place of "use to," because the spell-checker obviously wasn't going to be any help. And while I realize there are no editors anymore, heaven knows (and they do send us this calendar for nothing) I was still surprised that it went out with that goof right on the cover. Also having problems with the right word in the wrong context, this headline in the local newspaper about film-maker Tyler Perry really got my attention:

==============

Perry reaches out

to abuse victim

==============

The trouble with "abuse" is that it can function as a verb, adjective or noun, and it looks the same in all situations. I can tell you that this story takes on a completely different complexion, if like me, you read the headline with "to abuse" as a verb, rather than what they probably intended, with "abuse" as an adjective. I think I would have sent that right back to the drawing board, and come up with a whole different way of expressing that, and not as easily misconstrued. Also not saying what they mean (one hopes!) this tidbit about a local benefit made the front page of the newspaper, and I'm not blaming them this time, since they were just repeating the information that was provided to them about the event:

===============================

Ride For A Cause

Putnam's Seventh Annual Motorcycle Run on Sunday

includes a 70-mile police-escorted ride through Putnam

and Dutchess counties, plus a barbecue lunch and

raffles. Proceeds go to Housing Outreach Prevention

Education.

===============================

I'm sorry, I'm not even in the ballpark with this one, and I'm sure the poor spell-checker not only gave it up as a lost cause, but also fled in horror. What the heck could "housing outreach prevention education" even mean - and by that, I'm thinking, here on this planet in English, and not just some made-up alien language in some other solar system? I can go as far as "housing outreach" in the sense of helping people find affordable living quarters, but the "prevention" and "education" part of this just has me totally stumped. And here they're having a fund-raiser for it, with police escorts, and meanwhile, they've let the horoscope computer run amok and come up with a name that makes no sense to anybody. Talk about sending something back to the proverbial drawing board, this would be the poster child of it, in spades. Of course, things can always be worse, and probably the second time around, the darned horoscope computer would have come up with something even worse, like Prevention Housing Outreach Of Educating Youth, or PHOOEY. (Let's see them get a police escort for THAT!) It wasn't any better at the hospital, where I can't even blame the horoscope computer for this order from one of our nursing units:

=================================

Extra Heavy Duty Steel Drawer Safe with Lock

=================================

Inasmuch as the entire order cost a whopping $28.99, I can't help but wonder exactly how "extra heavy duty" this steel drawer safe might be, lock or not. In fact, I'm thinking that just about anybody with a screwdriver and a hammer could bust their way right into this thing without too much trouble, so I'm hoping that they're not planning to keep a tremendous stash of valuables in there - except maybe some grammar pills, that would keep anything under $30 from being described as "extra heavy duty." And once again coming up with the right word in the wrong context, or vice versa, we have our friends at MEDCOM TRAINEX who sent us an invoice for this curious product:

=========================

Item No. 78566-DVD-9

Preview: Rapid Physical Asses

=========================

Normally, I would say this was pretty funny, and think no more of it, but this particular item set us back $250, so it was obviously nobody's idea of a joke. Luckily they bought two of the same type of thing, and the second one was described as "Rapid Physical Assessment," so at least we could find out what the first one was all about, in spite of its apparent abbreviation problems. In a perfect world, you would think somebody would have noticed this happen on previous invoices, and shortened the description in some way to eliminate the offending remnant. Of course, this would be at the expense of the comedy component, which might be a poor exchange, and we'd be left with only the third item to wonder at, with its tantalizing description of "Stack: Antipsy Mood Stabilizing," which at a staggering $560 is no joke, but certainly sounds like one. My personal favorite from work was an order we placed with a shredding company, with the following services to be provided on a monthly basis:

===========================

REMOVAL OF NIPPA DOCUMENTS

===========================

Now, I will be the first to admit that the federal HIPAA regulations are confusing and arcane, and the average person couldn't begin to understand them. Even in healthcare organizations like ours, it's a continual uphill battle to get the staff to remember that it's called HIPAA and not HIPPA (of which songwriter Chan Romero famously did not observe: "For goodness sake, it's the HIPPA HIPPA shake!") not only because they've long since forgotten what it stands for (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act) but also because HIPAA looks stupid - or at least, somewhat more stupid than HIPPA anyway. But even taking all that into account, I still wouldn't expect two departments at the hospital to combine their (meager) talents and invent a whole new category of protected health information called NIPPA instead, by golly. Of course, everybody knows that I am nothing if not jiggy with HIPAA, but even I would have to concede that NIPPA sounds like a lot more fun, especially if it involves having a few swigs at the Hospitality Tent beforehand, and the heck with the grammar pills. In fact, I would invite the Rapid Physical Asses and police escorts to join in, but I'm afraid the horoscope computer would just turn it all into Stabilizing Housing Antipsy Rapid Prevention Asses Stack Mood Outreach Physical Education Youth or "SHARP AS MOPEY," and I'm afraid that even Tyler Perry wouldn't be able to help us at that point, much less Chan Romero, who also famously did not observe: "Get out your harp, it's the MOPEY MOPEY SHARP!"

Elle

Thanks For The Memories

2011-12-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Happy December! Well, I can see by the ol' clock on the wall that good ole Tom Turkey has doggone flew the coop, and we have landed smack in the season of candy canes and sugar plums, with the clattering hooves of tiny reindeer not far behind, I shouldn't wonder. This is already the second Sunday in Advent, and no time to shilly-shally, if you don't want to be caught short on the big day. They tell me that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the biggest single day for Christmas tree sales, as hard as that might seem to believe, so it's no wonder that you see discarded trees out at the curb on December 26th all over town - from people buying them way too early, and it's only a miracle that they haven't already burst into flames by then. It's bad enough that the Christmas displays are in the stores by September, and they're playing carols on the radio in October. Next they'll be selling pumpkins with holly garland and turkeys with jingle bells, and Christmas trees will be part of the back-to-school extravaganza. Some holidays just don't know when to quit, and this is one of them, where you give it an inch and it takes a mile. At the risk of landing on the Naughty List late in the game, I'd have to say that it's pretty obvious that some jolly old elf in a red suit has the Holiday Police all wrapped up and with a big fat bow to boot. Santa's boot, that is.

In other holiday news, we were invited to the log cabin up north for Thanksgiving, so we hitched up the team and went galloping up there on Thursday morning to enjoy a traditional holiday with all the trimmings. The end result turned out to be somewhat more peculiar than that, through no fault of our hosts, I can assure you. The weather was lovely, from one end to the other, and this is not far north enough for skiing at this time of year, so we expected the highway rest stops to be deserted, or at least lacking in busloads full of skiers. And yet, when we stopped in at Plattekill, the place was jam-packed full of travelers on every side. While we were there, they made an announcement for the bus departing for Woodstock - and I said to Bill that in all the years we've been stopping along the Thruway, we have never in our lives heard a bus announcement of any kind at any time, like it was some kind of transit terminal or something. Then I noticed a young lady hurrying towards me in a leg brace with a cane, and I admit, I thought nothing of it. But behind her was another young lady with a crutch, and then another one hobbling on two crutches with a foot cast. After that was an older woman with a walker, and an old man using two canes. Finally, I said to Bill that my only thought was that this bus was going to some sort of faith healing convention, since it was obvious that these people were never going skiing, that's for sure. We certainly walked out of there shaking our heads, and also watching our step, I can tell you that, since the bus to Woodstock had already left.

We were welcomed at the cabin like the wayfaring pilgrims that we were, and there was no lack of apple cider and pumpkin pie to make the day complete. They also gave us a tour of their new trailer, which may not sound very interesting, but since this is a 27-foot trailer that collapses in on itself top to bottom and also front to back, I can assure you that it is extremely fascinating to see it in action - and thanks to Bill, we have the videotape to prove it. After a wonderful meal, we hiked around the reservoir, which is a continuing delight at any time of year, and I like to think, provides some much needed diversion for the local deer to gawk at. And while I can understand the rude gestures, frankly, I thought all of the protest signs were just carrying it way too far. After we came back, our hosts had some technical challenges to throw Bill's way, but he was more than equal to the task, and we soon had their computer, laptop and big-screen TV all going through their paces like a well-oiled machine. All too soon, it was time to hit the road for the nearby SkyTop Motel, where we had stayed before and looking forward to its reassuring sameness.

Not so fast! Apparently since our last visit, there had been a change in management at the place, and the friendly and hospitable country folks that we had come to know and like, were summarily replaced by what appeared to be gruff and glowering Russians, who lent an almost palpable air of menace to the area that was in no way an improvement, believe me. And I don't mind saying, I love Mother Russia. Of course, I know nothing about them, but they had all the earmarks of KGB agents in a former life, and they were about as well-suited to the hospitality industry, as they would have been teaching ballet on a far distant planet in another solar system. Perhaps it was in deference to their homeland that when we arrived to check in, we found our room was at a bracing 30 degrees, and in fact, was colder inside than if we had slept in the car out in the parking lot. We also found the room slightly the worse for wear since last time, and lacking some basic amenities that sent Bill scurrying to the office to rectify. Extra blankets would have been at the top of my list under the circumstances, but I was just glad to see him come back in one piece and not banished to some draconian gulag in the trackless wastes of Siberia. It must be said that the room did warm up satisfactorily during the night, but unfortunately, I became unexpectedly very sick, and I did not run to the front desk for chicken soup and sympathy, I can tell you that. I was feeling slightly better in the morning, but not well enough to eat, which was a shame since my sister prepared her famous pancakes for breakfast, and I was sorry to miss them. But she packed us up with plenty of left-overs, and sent us on our way with enough cheer to chase the clouds of Russian blues from our memory.

Next we met some of our friends at the popular Eveready Diner in Hyde Park, and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the hallways and alcoves of the antiques center next door, which never fails to amaze and amuse, every time we go there. Although it must be said that their selection of salt and pepper shakers was noticeably below par, they did re-purpose one entire room full of nothing but vintage clocks, which had all of us enraptured in its clanging and bonging thrall. Suddenly it was dark, and time for weary travelers to be heading home, so we climbed aboard our trusty steeds, and dashed into the night with sparks flying. Since I was still under the weather, we lost an opportunity to stop at Denny's for our usual treat along the way, which was disappointing at the time. But it was probably just as well, because I'm sure that the motel Russkies would have called ahead and told them to discontinue their delectable Hawaiian Tropical Chiller, perhaps my favorite drink of all time, and then I really would have been distraught, on top of being just plain sick. In fact, they probably would have made sure that I got stuck with their signature Siberian Gulag Chiller instead, and I'd still be picking the frozen shards of de-commissioned ICBMs out of my teeth even now, nyet?

The best part about coming home on Friday night was that we still had two full days to relax and recover before going back to work on Monday, and not to mention, all the left-overs we could possibly want, and not an ICBM anywhere in sight. So now that the cornucopias are well and truly behind us for another year, we can turn our full attention to the yuletide juggernaut, and launch ourselves into the season at full throttle, with our wallets flapping. The President's economic advisers thank you, I'm sure. Or as they say at the pride of Soviet hospitality, the SkyTop Motel, "Spasiba, comrade."

Elle

The Cluck Stops Here

2011-11-25T20:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a Thanksgiving fable for all pilgrims to enjoy!

=============================

Thanks For The Memory

It was three years ago, or maybe it was two. Thanksgivings come and Thanksgivings go.
I overslept and missed the family gathering at my uncle's house out in the country.

Country folks like to eat early, and like I said, I overslept.

B.A. called about 1 in the afternoon. He was down in Savannah, alone.

"Had lunch yet?" I asked him.

"I was just going to pick up a hamburger," he answered.

"No Thanksgiving feast?"

"No. I had some work to catch up on and couldn't get to Montgomery to my mother's. What are you doing?"

"No plans," I said.

"Catch a plane," B.A. said. "The Hyatt bar is open even if nothing else is."

I was at the Savannah airport three hours later.

We never made it to the Hyatt bar. We stopped instead at a little beer joint just outside the airport. Silent men playing pool

There were a couple of pool tables inside and young men wearing hats with the names of various heavy equipment companies sewn on them were playing. Cigarettes dangled from their mouths. They were silent and expressionless. One got the idea heavy stakes were involved.

A few old men sat around the bar drinking beer. A man and a woman worked behind the bar. There was a jukebox playing country music.

"Keep your mouth shut," B.A. said, "and we'll probably be OK."

Probably.

We had a few beers and played a few tunes of our own. Nobody had spoken to us until a graybeard sitting a few stools down looked up from his can of Budweiser and asked, "Y'all ain't from around here, are you?"

We said we weren't.

"Y'all going to stay for supper?" the man went on.

"Stay for what?" I asked.

"Supper," he said. "We have it here every year on Thanksgiving. It's mostly for the regulars who don't have nowhere else to go, but I'm sure nobody would mi nd if y'all stayed." We didn't say yes. But we didn't say no, either. Lining up for the feast

A half hour later, the door to the joint opened and in walked five or six ladies bearing plates of food. Lots of food. They set up a table near the jukebox. Turkey and dressing. A ham. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Green beans. Butterbeans. Creamed corn. Homemade rolls. There were also cakes and pies.

The customers put down their beers and cuesticks. They lined up, plates in hand, for the feast in front of them.

"Y'all more than welcome to eat," said the woman behind the bar. We got in line.

The food was wonderful. We went back twice.

"You do this every year, huh?" I asked one of the ladies that brought the food.

"They's lots of people don't have nowhere to go on Thanksgiving," she said. "Some of 'em come in here to drink 'cause it ain't as lonely as staying home. We all live in the neighborhood, and we just try to share what we got with others."

We stayed until 9 or 10. We tried to pay extra for the food, but nobody would take our money. Thanksgivings come and Thanksgivings go and, occasionally, one comes along that is very special.

==========================================================

With thanks to http://www.lewisgrizzard.com

Laugh Lines

2011-11-18T21:49:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

And so here we find ourselves, right on the brink of Thanksgiving, which will be next Thursday, and anyone who isn't already prepared for the annual Tom Turkey Trot had better shake a leg - or should I say, a drumstick. An even more remarkable event occurs on the Sunday following Thanksgiving, which will be November 27th, and is the earliest that you can have the first Sunday in Advent, and only happens when December 25 falls on a Sunday. This generally happens about every 6 years, although there was a gap from 1995 to 2004 that it never happened, and personally, I blame the Y2K bug. (Now THERE'S a pop culture reference that's lost on young people nowadays, that's for sure!) So this is just a warning to everyone that once Advent begins, the holiday countdown has really started ticking in earnest, and while it may seem way too early (as I'm sure it did also in 2005) you can believe me when I say that there's no time to waste. My advice to you is to get out there and shop like it's 1988!

Also not wasting time, the World Series has just recently wrapped up, and already they're naming the Cy Young award winners for the best pitchers in both leagues. The AL winner from the Detroit Tigers made the front page of the Sports section with this gushing announcement:

====================

Justin Verlander unanimously won the AL Cy Young

Award, as was expected. Now, the far more intriguing

question is whether he will also take the league MVP

====================

Now, I leave it to the purists to argue whether a pitcher can be a valid choice for MVP, compared to position players who play every day. My question is where was Detroit when St. Louis was winning the World Series? Oh, that's right - they had already been eliminated from the playoffs before the Fall Classic ever started, and I think anyone could hear the ghost of Branch Rickey saying the Tigers could have done that without a Cy Young winner in their ranks, by golly. Not to downplay Verlander's contributions to Detroit's season, but I can't help but feel that a league MVP should at least be on a team that gets to the World Series, if not win the darned thing, because otherwise the "most valuable" part of that is just completely incomprehensible. Meanwhile in the National League, the Cy Young was awarded to Clayton Kershaw of the LA Dodgers, although no mention was made of the league MVP in his case - which was just as well, since the Dodgers finished the season at .500 and a full 11-1/2 games out of first place in the West. I have the feeling that somewhere Cy Young and Branch Rickey are both having a big laugh.

Speaking of laughs (or perhaps "nervous laughs" might be a better choice under the circumstances) alert readers of the AOL Welcome screen on October 31 couldn't help but notice this startling tidbit about pop singer Jessica Simpson:

============================

Simpson finally confirms big news

After months of rumors the star has

finally revealed that she's expecting --

and she did it with Halloween flare

============================

Gee, I sure hope not! I realize that times have certainly changed, and not always for the better, but I'm sure that the wisdom of modern pre-natal care would be to absolutely keep the mom-to-be away from flares of any kind, holiday or otherwise. And for a relatively obscure word with specific and arcane uses, somehow "flare" gets the call more often than not, when people are reaching for "flair" instead, as if "flare" has the better publicist or something. Next it will be winning the league MVP, and then we'll really all be laughing - except Justin Verlander, that is.

In other Halloween news, I admit that I was disappointed at having only 50 visitors for the event, although bringing in the left-over candy from the remaining goodie bags could not have been more popular at work if I tried. I thought it might have been the cold that dissuaded the youngsters from tramping about in their costumes, but I found out later this was not the case at all. Many coworkers said that they had the usual crowds showing up for trick-or-treat, several with over a hundred, and in some places they had to close up early because they had already run out of candy after 150 callers. (Although it must be said that one colleague admitted to me that they packed it in at 8:30 so they could go inside and watch Dancing With The Stars - which I think we can all agree with Jessica Simpson, is no one's idea of Halloween flare, and that's not just a lot of Monster Mash, believe me!) And while I was glad to find out that the holiday is still going strong in the local area, it made me feel even worse about our paltry turn-out, which was the lowest in the last 10 years, except for 2009 when it rained all night. So this was no MVP year around the old homestead, and Justin Verlander has nothing to worry about, in fact, even Clayton Kershaw might have a shot at it.

It was that same weekend that the northeast had been pounded with a freak snowstorm on October 29, which was a minor nuisance and historical curiosity for us, but which turned into a major disaster for many other areas. There were accumulations over a foot around New York, while New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts saw that and much more, with a high of 31 inches in New Hampshire. Transit came to a standstill, as planes were grounded and trains stopped dead on the tracks, stranding travelers in record droves. Over 2 million customers lost their electricity, many of them for more than a week, mostly from the welter of trees that toppled in every direction, not only taking the power lines with them, but closing the very roads that the emergency crews needed to fix the wires. Schools closed, events and sports were canceled, and even businesses that were open found that their employees couldn't get to work. An unexpected victim of the catastrophe (or, what sounds like "How the Grinch Stole Halloween") numerous municipalities imposed a curfew on Monday and wouldn't allow their residents to trick-or-treat for Halloween, citing slippery sidewalks, downed trees, and lack of electricity for street lighting as too hazardous conditions for roaming bands of revelers in costume. So I suppose I should consider it lucky that Halloween wasn't canceled here, and be grateful for the 50 intrepid souls who braved the cold and came to the door, because otherwise, it would have been the zombie apocalypse version of the holiday along the deserted streets - and no amount of Halloween flares would turn that trick into a treat, Jessica Simpson or not. And in the immortal words of Branch Rickey, "We could have done that without you, Grinch."

Elle

Hot Enough For Ya?

2011-11-11T21:03:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Happy Veterans Day! This is about half a red-letter day, compared to how it used to be, with about half of the banks closed, half of the schools closed, half of the businesses closed - and the other half, wondering what all the fuss is about. It's also Bill's birthday, and we both took the day off from work, and it turned out to be an absolutely beautiful day to be outside and enjoy the glorious weather. Unfortunately, it was not such a great day to spend hanging around the house, as it was no holiday for the porch contractors, who showed up early and spent the whole day pounding and sawing, banging and drilling, and stamping about up and down ladders, until you just about couldn't hear yourself think. (And which we all know, is already hard enough on my two poor addled brain cells any more - which I have renamed Dickens and Fenster for the occasion - until I felt like nothing so much as that old Anacin commercial with the hammers in the head, which I probably hadn't thought about in 40 years.) And for the numerologists out there, it was another very special day, where we could observe and be part of a unique moment in time when the clocks struck 11:11:11 on 11/11/11, which certainly made it a holiday for the rest of the numbers, by golly.

Of course, last weekend we finally reached the point when we get to switch back over from Daylight Saving Time, so all of you nocturnal wastrels out there can go right back to wasting all the daylight that you want once again with impunity. In fact, we should probably call this short period of the year the Daylight Wasting Time System, or DWTS, and the heck with Dancing With The Stars, is what I say. Many of us were glad for a chance to "fall back" and gain an extra hour to enjoy in any way that we liked, and it didn't even cause all that great havoc on Sunday morning, with hordes of people showing up at church at the wrong time. Now as the daylight shifts back earlier, it's nice that it's a bit lighter in the mornings, but driving home in the dark is a stone cold drag, and that's no joke. After all, if it was a joke, "The Comedy Rule of Three" would apply, and we'd have the time changing three times a year instead of twice, and the poor daylight wouldn't know if it was being saved or wasted or dancing with the stars, for heaven's sake.

Speaking of jokes, last week was really one for the record books, but for those of us who lived through it, it's going to take a while before we care to laugh about it, I can tell you that. Of course, everyone knows that the ancient rattletrap of a flea-bag where I work is so antiquated that it pre-dates the invention of elevators, and is constructed entirely of mud and straw. It features an old steam heat system to provide heat and hot water, but without any way to regulate it, so once the heat is turned on, the building is many hundreds of degrees too hot to work in, and everyone spends the entire winter with their windows wide open and their air conditioners running at full tilt, just to ward off some of the intense heat radiating from the walls. So it was totally unexpected when the boiler developed a valve problem, and there was literally no heat in the whole building for an entire week, for the first time since I've been there, and to say that it was uncharacteristic for this building would be an understatement of epic proportion. I don't mind saying that in the beginning, people rejoiced (and I was certainly one of them) because it finally wasn't too hot for a change, and people made the best of it by wearing coats and sweaters, and toughing it out in a grim spirit of misery loves company. But it turned into a long cold week, and one day was so uncomfortably frosty that they actually sent us home, which is just about unheard of in healthcare, I can tell you that. (Especially since they were nice and toasty in the main hospital building, where it was probably great sport for them to watch us out their windows, as we huddled outside in the sun in a vain effort to warm up before braving the icy chill in our offices once again.) So while it was interesting for it to be too cold instead of too hot, it really was a textbook example of "too much of a good thing," until even the diehards like me were ready to call it quits.

Meanwhile, alert readers may remember that this was the exact same week that the asbestos team dismantled our furnace at home, while the plumbers didn't install the new furnace until the following week, so guess what - there was also no heat at home, during the very same long cold week, and I'm sure it goes without saying, thanks oh so very much not. All week, the cats were doubled up on afghans, we were bundled up in long johns, and the electric blankets and portable heaters were working overtime, I can assure you. It was too cold in the kitchen to cook, so we ate out a lot, and you can bet that we asked for the warmest seats that they had in the place, that's for sure. Some days, it was so cold in the house that it was actually warmer outside, which I personally thought was just adding insult to injury, and made me wish for a Climate Control Board that a person could complain to. It really was an unprecedented and coincidental double-whammy that I never would have expected in my life, that there would be no heat at home and no heat at work in exactly the same time period, and completely out of the blue, where usually the heat is the least of our problems. I said to Bill that you know things are completely upside-down when the warmest place I go all week is church, which has always been so chilly that everyone routinely wears their coats through the whole service, and people cluster around the coffee urn downstairs for warmth. I have to tell you that as much as I complain about the heat, I was glad when the Engineering department fixed the boiler valve at work, and even more delighted when the plumbers finally finished hooking up our new furnace at home, and it will take a long time before I lose the thrill of those wonderfully balmy BTU's wafting all over me, I can tell you that. Now I can save my long johns for church, where they belong.

And while we're on the topic of the long and short of it, we all received a broadcast email at work to let us know about events around our friendly neighborhood health system, which encompasses four separate institutions in two cities, with thousands of employees and numerous buildings on their sprawling campuses. This particular notice was about the nursing school, which is named for its benefactor, the estimable Dorothea Hapsburg, where the students had created an awareness program for health issues facing the community. Unfortunately, it all ran aground on the rocky shoals of a well-known email drawback, which is the size limitation of the email subject line - so that what we all saw in our Inbox was a memo with this startling subject:

=======================================================

Happenings! Hapsburg Promotes Breast Cancer and Domestic Violence

=======================================================

..... and that was where it stopped. It was the "Awareness" part of it that didn't make the cut, as it ran out of room in the field that was allotted to it, and was swallowed up in the rampaging bits and bytes of the hospital network. In their defense, the complete title was actually included in the email itself, and showed up big as life if anyone took the time to print the message out on paper, so it wasn't that they left the word off like a bunch of incompetent illiterates or anything. But it certainly got our attention on Wednesday morning, in spite of the frigid conditions at the time, and for all the wrong reasons, I don't mind saying. In fact, it's exactly the kind of thing I would expect out of Dickens and Fenster, but before I can let them use the computer, I'm going to have to get those hammers away from them.

Elle

Play Money

2011-11-04T19:56:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

Happy November! I don't know about where you are, but around here, it seems to have settled into a consistent routine of crisp clear days and cold nights that make you glad for warm blankets and fuzzy slippers, or even better, relaxing in front of a crackling fire. I'm thinking that we really need to apologize to everyone, because much to our surprise, in the course of the furnace replacement and asbestos abatement process here, our ancient wheezing furnace was dismantled on Monday morning, and the way things are going, we won't have any heat until next week, and I don't mind saying, thanks so very much not. So that certainly explains this entire week full of cold weather, and let's not forget, after they finally do hook up the new furnace, it will no doubt usher in a new geologic era of sweltering tropical temperatures, most likely with erupting volcanoes and steamy hot water geysers all over the place, I shouldn't wonder. We'll all be wearing tank tops and flip-flops to Christmas shop, and taking the rapid-transit lava flows to work, and it will be known as The Furnace-olithic Age forevermore. So I won't say, "Don't blame me," but I will say, "Don't say I didn't warn you." Sweat bands, anyone?

Of course, Monday was Halloween, and I do hope that a ghoulish time was had by all in your neck of the woods. I had long since given up on my original costume idea, and bought a replacement costume as an emergency backup, which was better than nothing, but I really couldn't talk myself into wearing it. So I was casting about for another idea that I would like better, and scanned the online costume stores for inspiration, but really didn't come up with anything but the same old humdrum and shopworn retreads as always. (It occurs to me just now that nobody even knows what "retreads" are anymore, it's like a rotary dial phone or a button hook to people nowadays.) Inspiration finally struck me from an unlikely source, and that is, ripped from today's headlines, where I realized it had been staring me in the face all along. So if you had been at the hospital on Monday morning, you would have seen in the Purchasing department, instead of the usual secretary, there was the renowned Mr. Monopoly (from the game of the same name) along with his very own protester. The protester in question (actually an 18-inch doll named Robyn) sported her own OCCUPY WALL STREET sign (thanks to Bill, and also said I AM THE 99% on the back) and a $20 bill taped over her mouth, just like the real protesters. This protester's most convenient feature was that she would stand up all by herself, even carrying a sign, so she was an entertaining prop on her own, when not trailing about after Mr. Monopoly in silent reproach.

The burgeoning protest movement had made such an enormous splash in the media, that when I showed up with this costume in the morning, people flew into hysterics everywhere I went. That is to say, the people who understood the concept thought it was absolutely the funniest thing they had ever seen - but for anyone who missed the point, there was just no explaining it to them. For an idea that I came up with basically at the last minute, and had to pull all of the elements together at the eleventh hour, I have to say that I have never had a reaction like that to a costume in my entire life. People laughed so hard, I thought they would hurt themselves. Nobody quibbled over costume details as they often do (as if there's a definitive interpretation of Uncle Sam, for instance, who is after all, a fictional character) or carped that Robyn looked too much of a sissy to be any good at protesting, which I happened to agree with - but you know, it's hard to get good help these days, especially at the last minute. Everyone just seemed to embrace the whole idea with open arms, and have a lot of fun with it.

Going out on my usual rounds of trick-or-treating around the campus turned out to be more complicated than I expected, and don't forget, I've done this in a grass skirt, ecclesiastical robes, and clown pants with a 54-inch waist. But Mr. Monopoly really needed three hands (or an assistant) to carry his walking stick, protester and goodie bag, so getting in and out of doors was especially challenging. Even worse, the costume jacket and hat came with a mask, and it was comfortable enough, but I could only see straight ahead, I couldn't look down and I had no peripheral vision at all. I was afraid of stairs, and even getting on an elevator was anything but routine, I can tell you that. I wouldn't dare cross the street in a mask like that, and I found that if I dropped anything, someone else would have to pick it up. So it turned into a kind of a long afternoon of traipsing about, but I was still glad to bring joy to dreary offices, and the usual parties in Adult Day Care and the nursing home, where they always have so much fun.

In keeping with Mr. Monopoly's reputedly vast fortune (actually, he is often referred to familiarly as Rich Uncle Milburn Pennybags) I eschewed the plan of trick-or-treating this time around, and instead of asking for anything, gave out gaudy plastic gold coins everywhere I went, much to the amusement of the recipients. This turned out to be a good thing, because the treats were even less forthcoming than usual in my travels (and after 20 years of this, that's saying something) and when someone did give me some candy anyway, it made it even more endearing. (One embarrassed staffer gave me a dollar, rather than leave empty-handed, while another offered me his lunch, and I give both high marks for generosity of spirit, however misguided.) It was a fun day, and I didn't have any mishaps along the way, as I thought I would, but all too soon it was time to hurry home and get ready for being on the opposite side of the annual trick-or-treat-a-thon.

Monday night was cold but clear, and I was hopeful that we'd have a good turnout to snatch up the 100 goodie bags that I had assembled beforehand. They started earlier than usual, with the first callers at 6:00 PM, and I thought that was a good sign, but they came in dribs and drabs after that, and in the end, we had exactly 50 and no more. It was all over by 8:30, without even the late stragglers of older kids coming up to 9:00 like they often do. With such a small group, there was no clear favorite, and very few duplicates, unlike other years full of witches and space aliens. Notable by their absence were Scream, Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger, any ninjas or video game characters like Super Mario. In fact, there were only two witches, four princesses, four vampires and five super heroes - including the neighbors' irrepressible Emmett as about the most adorable Batman ever. His little sister Fiona was Elmo, and other visitors turned up as Minnie Mouse, Frankenstein, Smurfette, a puppy, monkey, ladybug, bumble bee, rat, skeleton, cheerleader, cowgirl, zombie, Barack Obama, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. My personal favorite was the very timid, plump white boy dressed as Michael Jackson, of all things, which you really had to see to believe, and even then, it was a tough sell. People showing up with no costume won the day with 17 - and here I mean, a boy in street clothes wearing a party hat, or unidentifiable people describing themselves as "demon hunters" or "working stiffs." But everyone seemed to be having a good time, and at least we unloaded half of our bags, so that was the best part. I brought the left-overs in to work, where the staff pounced on them like, well, homeless people infiltrating an Occupy Wall Street protest for the free food, and I ought to know, or my name isn't -

Milburn Pennybags

What's The Big Idea

2011-10-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

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

Climb Every Mountain

2011-10-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Well, the month is certainly charging along like a morning commuter running late to catch a train at the other side of the terminal, and not letting anything stand in the way, that's for sure. In fact, it's only because there are five weekends in October that we're not already at the last weekend of the month, and those of us (who shall remain nameless, but look suspiciously familiar) who have not assembled all of their costume parts yet would be in very big trouble, I can tell you that. Also charging along is the World Series, which has been narrowed down to the two remaining teams from the championship playoffs, St. Louis and Texas, giving the mid-west something to cheer about, as they battle it out in the best four of seven. At least we can be sure that the fans won't starve to death, between the brewery-fresh beer in St. Louis and the famous barbecue in Texas, this may well be the best tasting Fall Classic they've ever had. (And to the partisans of Philly cheese-steak and Chicago deep-dish pizza, I look forward to your letters.) On our TiVo, we're still watching old Mets games from the end of the season, so as far as we're concerned, the Mets will be winning the World Series again this year, and if nothing else, they've got the bagels to prove it.

In the local haunts, the time finally came, and there was no avoiding it, when the contractors working on our porches had no choice but to tackle our unfathomable crawl space head-on, in order to replace the underlying support beams, the originals of which had long since stopped living up to their name in a big way. To their credit, the crew didn't shirk from this daunting task, but promptly cleared a path through the countless generations of detritus, and turning up a few curious tidbits along the way. There was one old wooden ski (one supposes for an old one-legged skier) and a very old brown one-gallon glass jug that is still filled with some no doubt extremely hazardous liquid. There's one ornate metal candlestick that has the heft and appearance of raw lead straight from the ground, and a small vintage ride-on metal truck that seems to be made entirely out of rust. So far, the piece de la resistance is the large metal poster of the dearly departed leader of the most populous Communist country in the world, Chairman Mao, preserved in all of his socialist glory, so apparently no freedom-loving marksmen were using his poster for target practice or anything of an ironic nature. Of course, every day, I'm fielding calls from the Justice Department concerning the whereabouts of Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa, but I told them they would just have to wait until I finish learning to ski on one leg.

I find it hard to believe that they could have replaced the staff in the local newspaper's TV Best Bets section, and somehow come up with people who are even less competent than the previous crew, but that certainly seems like the case, at least if last week was any indication, where the typos came in eye-rolling bunches that would be enough to spoil anyone's breakfast - or maybe that's just finicky fuss-pot face control freaks like me. This first one from the hit ABC show Gray's Anatomy really had me going, and I had to read it several times before I even got in the ballpark with what they were trying to tell me -

=================

The hallways of Seattle Grace are filled with

interesting individuals after a stamped mars

a comic book convention

=================

Well, we all know by now that the spell-checker is never going to help you in a case like this, if you're going to use the word stamped in the place of stampede, and leaving the rest of us to wonder, what the heck is a "stamped mars" anyway? At least if they had spelled it phonetically as "stampeed," the spell-checker would have caught it and presumably given them the right spelling - although knowing their spell-checker, it probably would have suggested "stamped" as the correct word instead, thanks not. They had the same problem in this synopsis of Law & Order: SVU on NBC -

========================

A dancer is followed him and assaulted

by a man with a distinctive tattoo

========================

Now, I'm thinking that it shouldn't take a whole suitcase full of brains to come up with the right word (home) and put it right where it belongs in that sentence, instead of "him" which makes no sense at all - and which would have been patently obvious to anyone who bothered to proofread that after it was typed, and not even have to rely on the poor overworked spell-checker. I mean, it's not like "home" is such an arcane or challenging word, or even that it sounds anything much like "him" that the two would be widely misused on a regular basis. I just don't know what they were thinking, unless they let the Horoscope Computer loose in the TV section again. That was the only explanation I could come up with for this next entry, from TLC network's Dateline: Real Life Mysteries -

=====================

A family outing turns into a crisis when a

man's wife and son slip from high surface

but a friend suspects it was no accident

=====================

I'm sorry, I don't even know what that means. Is "high surface" some sort of mountaineering jargon that is nothing but unfamiliar territory for a flat-lander like me? It seems to me that in a page full of capsule reviews that average about 40 words each, it shouldn't be necessary to resort to any kind of specialized terminology that you would need a degree in Orography to understand it, for heaven's sake. After all, we can't expect to dig up the late and lamented Sir Edmund Hillary just to help us understand the local TV section, I shouldn't think.

Meanwhile at work, one of our new department heads complained about mail being mis-delivered by our Mail Room staff, in spite of the fact that they have been short-handed, and even at the best of times, is comprised mostly of volunteers and developmentally-disabled adults trying their hardest. When the situation didn't improve fast enough for her tastes, she sent the following memo to our Senior Vice President:

==================

Today was a really bad day in the mail room.

Tricia brought me so much mail I think they were hiding it.

However, when I look closer 10% was addressed to the hospital.

I just opened an interoffice from the path lab and there was mail in.

As I told you, I will be more than happy to her.

When she had to go back to her cart for another pile, I go nervous.

She was a little nervous also. But she did.

==================

Mind you, this person is not only in charge of one of our departments, but is the President of the company that the department has been out-sourced to, believe it or not. I guess this only goes to prove that illiteracy is no obstacle to success, such as it is, and even someone with absolutely no concept of punctuation or capitalization can still get the big bucks - well, at least from the employer of last resort in our fair city anyway. Normally, I would think that an actual business person running their own company would be way too embarrassed to send this sort of immature and ungrammatical doggerel to anybody, much less the Senior Vice President of a healthcare organization, even the likes of ours. But frankly, I was glad she did, if only for her wonderfully quixotic phrase, "I will be more than happy to her," which evokes such blissfully benevolent feelings, that it makes my heart soar to dizzying new heights of ethereal grandeur, or as we alpinists say, high surface. Say, was that Sir Edmund Hillary that I just saw up here?

Elle

Wonder Woman

2011-10-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Greetings from the New World! Of course, Monday was Columbus Day, now only vaguely remembered as the poster child for the "what-have-you-done-for-me-lately" school of revisionist history, and more's the pity, I'm sure. Back in those halcyon days of yore, the dinosaurs and I would celebrate the glorious voyage of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, because otherwise, we'd all still be speaking "Caveman" to this day, and wandering Troglodytes would still be protesting the invention of the wheel as too radical. These days, they probably don't even teach schoolchildren about Columbus, because his heroic voyage of discovery has long since been debunked in so many ways, by so many people, that there isn't hardly a bunk left to unbunk off of anymore. However, where Bill works, they still observe the day as a holiday, so I took the day off as well, and it turned out to be a beautiful three-day weekend that was nice and relaxing for both of us. Unfortunately as a result, we both seemed to have a short week at work that was about as long and hard as a month in the Siberian salt mines, so we paid dearly for our indulgence, I can tell you that. But I will say that Columbus can do no wrong by me, and the rest of the revisionists can just kiss my Santa Maria, by golly.

Speaking of dropping out of sight, one thing you'd never know is actually still going on, would be the baseball playoffs, which seem to have reached a new low in what is usually a high-profile event. But since the Yankees or Mets are not participating this time around, the local media have apparently lost all interest in the proceedings, and you never see a word about it in the paper. I said to Bill that I couldn't remember playoffs with such centrally located teams right in the middle of the country, where you could practically draw a line right through them - Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis and Arlington, Texas all in a row. Heck, the teams probably wouldn't even have to fly from one ballpark to the next, they could just hitch-hike in between games. This can't be the dream line-up of the television executives, I'm thinking, where the sprawling center of this great nation is nothing but a blur to them on trips from New York to California. The old-time Broadway producers used to complain about avant garde theater by saying that it would "never play in Peoria," but I have the feeling that this kind of thing would be right up their alley.

Meanwhile at work, we received a copy of a note from a former patient, which waxed rhapsodic about his or her care and treatment at the employer of last resort in our fair city, with fulsome praise for everyone from the nurses and aides, to the dieticians, physical therapists, clinical technicians and even the housekeeping crew. Singled out for particular merit, it goes on to say: "I would be remiss if I didn't mention my extraordinary surgeon, Dr. Steven Zellindorf and his wonder staff." Now, I happen to know the good doctor personally, but this is the first I'm hearing of his "wonder staff" - which truth to tell, brings the clarion call of "Tom Terrific and His Wonder Dog, Manfred" springing unbidden to mind, no matter how I try to suppress it. Well, I guess it would come as no surprise that this patient had such an excellent experience at our fine institution, with the doctor's "wonder staff" on hand to lend their magic touch to the situation. In fact, probably good old Tom Terrific and Manfred couldn't have done any better in their place, I shouldn't wonder, and I say that without irony.

In other ironic news, one of my hard-working coworkers came in over the weekend recently to catch up on some purchase orders that needed to be completed, and seemed to have a bit more enthusiasm than the sort of pin-point accuracy that we strive for in Purchasing. (Or perhaps it was that darned Hospitality Tent getting in the way again.) Later in the week when I was filing the orders, I noticed that one of them said it was for "SPINAL MIMPLANTS," while another one included "HOLMIUM LASER AND ACCASSORIES." A simple repair became instead "FX ANKLE REAPIR," blades turned into "SCALPEL BALDES," and some poor patient apparently ended up with something called a "SKIN STAPPLER," which I don't even want to think about. This might be what I would describe as the Mad Libs version of purchase orders, and I can't see that it's any improvement over the original, thanks not. Around here, we like to give credit for good intentions, and I applaud her work ethic, but I can't say that she would be considered "wonder staff" at this point, alas.

Our next-door neighbors (ostensible owners of the notorious Cinna-Mooch with the two different colored ears, although she is really a citizen of the world) packed up the family a few weeks ago for a vacation in Cooperstown, to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame and take in the other local attractions. Most people would come home from there with an autographed baseball, or personalized bat, but not our neighbors. No, they picked up the tiniest gray and white stray kitten along the way, and brought him home to the rest of their brood of three cats and two dogs, where he settled right in with the rest of the crowd, by coming over and eating off of our front porch several times a day. (You can only imagine what the contractors thought of him, their ecstasy reached entirely new transports of joy at the sight of him, believe me.) The neighbors call him Cooper, from where they were when they found him, but I said to Bill that he's so tiny that we really ought to call him "Mini Cooper" instead. Now, that's what I call a home run!

Elle

What A Dump

2011-10-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Happy October! Now we're really starting to move into that crisp fall season when the frost is on the pumpkin in earnest, and we'll soon be looking for wool mittens and hot apple cider to chase the chills away. Well, that is, except for Sunday, when it's expected to be over 80 degrees, after last week when it was 50 degrees - so I guess you could say that it's just like the whole rest of the year, which was all over the place, day in and day out, so you just didn't know what to expect next, without carrying a suitcase full of extra clothes to suit every possible climate contingency, including on planets in far distant galaxies. I guess it's plain to see that nothing has changed, so thank you, Comrade Mischka, and may I just say, "I love Mother Russia."

Besides the weather, these are interesting times in sports nowadays, with the anguished cries of "Wait until next year!" being heard in baseball cities ranging from Boston to Atlanta, Cincinnati to Anaheim, Seattle to Houston and beyond. The first round of the playoffs has already found the Yankees being eliminated by the Tigers, while Texas made short work of Tampa Bay in their series. The other contests should be decided on Friday, with the winners of the Philadelphia-St. Louis and Milwaukee-Arizona match-ups facing each other in the next round. There's even bigger news in hockey, at least for those dozens of us ardent fans who follow the sport, because the time has finally come to lace up those skates and hit the ice. The season officially started on Thursday, with the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins losing to the Philadelphia Flyers, which is certainly not the result that the Bean-town faithful would have been hoping for, that's for sure. Meanwhile, the Rangers opened up their season against the LA Kings with a game in Stockholm, Sweden, in an effort to spotlight the international nature of this world-class sport, where most NHL rosters read like a roll call at the United Nations, with players from all over the globe. It's also coincidentally the home of their elite goaltender, Henrik Lundqvist, and a fan favorite everywhere he goes ("Sorry, girls, he's married!" as they used to say in the old movie star magazines) so this was an extraordinary event that was special in many different ways, and a signal honor for the pride of Broadway. But that's not all, or even the half of it, as surprising as it may seem.

Ordinarily, the Rangers' visibility is on a par with the hospital where I work, which is to say that nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to them, and like Cinna-Mooch next door, if they had two different colored ears, no one would notice. But not this season, and not by a long shot, or even a long slap-shot, for some reason. For one thing, they have been tapped to play in the "Super Bowl" of hockey, the outdoor Winter Classic on January 2nd, against the Flyers - which somehow has become wildly popular way beyond its actual importance as just another game in an 82-game schedule, as well as a media darling that gets more attention than the rest of the season combined, including the Stanley Cup playoffs themselves. But somewhat inexplicably, they will also be the stars of the HBO reality series "24/7" where film crews follow the players through their daily routines, and provide an unflinching look at the behind-the-scenes lives of professional athletes. (Although actually, thanks to shows like this, there isn't anything left to be "behind the scenes" anymore, as it's all wide out in the open and on every cable channel, morning, noon and night.) The show itself has been on since 2007, but this is only the second time it has featured a hockey team, so once again, our very own Blueshirts have been singled out for special attention, and as far as I can tell, didn't even need to have two different colored ears to do it, by golly.

Around the old homestead, the porch project has moved into a new phase, where much of the structural framing is already in place, so they've called in the roofers to do their part before finishing up with the floors and windows. We didn't hire the roofing company, they were sub-contracted by our general contractor, so we basically knew nothing about them, and if we thought of them at all, would have probably assumed they would be just like our regular contractors, who are neat, quiet and respectable. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on their choice of roofers, but I will say that by the time I leave for work in the morning, they're already entertaining the neighbors with their raucous Mariachi music played at full-throttle, which is not a sound that you hear much of in our pricey neighborhood, believe me. In fact, if this keeps up much longer, I wouldn't be surprised to find the neighbors voluntarily pitching in to help speed the roof replacement along its merry way, for no other reason than to reclaim the peaceful sanctity of their well-ordered existence. Yet another rarely seen interloper in our secluded enclave is the recent arrival of a Dumpster, which turns out to be a word that you have to capitalize, because apparently like Kleenex or Jello, it's a trademarked name of a particular refuse container, and not just a generic name for any old dumpy dumper type of thing. So now between the port-a-potty on the front lawn, and the Dumpster in the driveway, I really do expect the neighbors to either help make the project go a whole lot faster, or to somehow erect an enormous curtain in front of our property, to prevent the more unsightly elements of the project from being an eyesore foisted upon the population at large. Normally, I would say that I'm as much in favor of maintaining the neighborhood's pristine gentility as the next fellow, but I can't be bothered with that now, because I have to go find my castanets and practice the Mexican Hat Dance before the roofers get back.

Elle

Bust A Move

2011-10-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Happy Jewish New Year! Now is the time that we want to wish everyone out there a very happy L'Shana Tova, and don't spare the latkes, whatever you do. And speaking of new, Saturday will be the first day of the new month, and can cooler weather be far behind? I think not. Soon the frost will be on the pumpkin in more ways than one, and we can go back to enjoying those cool weather treats that are denied to us in the hot weather - at least as some of us discovered when a box of Red Hots literally melted to my computer cart in the sweltering summer doldrums in our living room, and thanks so very much not. I must say that the lingering cinnamon fragrance lends a welcome sensation to my online activities, but the sticky residue is something that I could really do without.

And what might be new and interesting on the local news scene, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. By now, everybody realizes that this is just about my favorite kind of headline:

=========================

Student Had No Drugs, Cops Say

=========================

Ah, for those halcyon days of yore, when a student NOT having drugs would never be considered newsworthy in any way, and certainly wouldn't rate a headline on the front page of the newspaper, for heaven's sake. Why, an out-of-towner in the area scoping out real estate deals for a possible relocation, who happened across that headline while en route to the Classified section, couldn't help but wonder just what kind of a wild and woolly frontier outpost of an urban jungle they were thinking of moving into anyway, and I can't say that I would blame them one bit.

Speaking of property values, we recently received an informational brochure at church that was addressed to us exactly as follows:

========================

Holy Trinity Lutheran Church

Attn: Real Estate Dept.

30 Lockwood Ave

New Rochelle, NY 10801

========================

Now, I admit that I don't know what type of a church you would have to belong to where they had an actual Real Estate Department, but I can tell you for sure that it isn't my church, and that's putting it mildly. In fact, we don't have any actual departments at all, the most we would have would be a committee that's in charge of different aspects of our activities, such as Sunday School, music, youth ministry, evangelism and the like. And it's not that our friends at The Rosette Group Inc. sent this mailing to us in error, when they were trying to send it to commercial management services who really do have real estate departments, because the whole purpose of the brochure was to encourage me to sell them my church property, along with parking lot, parish house and adjacent facilities such as school, sports facility, day-care center, etc. I wish I could help them out, but I'm already the Finance Department and Personnel Department and Security Department at church, and if I take on one more job, I'm afraid the government will step in and bust me under the federal Anti-Trust regulations for restraint of trade, by jingo.

Meanwhile on the home front, anyone can tell you that I'm well known for having extremely relaxed standards when it comes to household hygiene, and I'm not some neurotic germ-o-phobe who flies into a frenzy at the first sight of a stray crumb or cat hair. In fact, I'm on a first-name basis with most of our dust bunnies, and some of my jackets have so much cat hair on them that I sometimes pet them by mistake. So when I say that even I have to draw the line at this product from our friends at the Harriet Carter catalogue, well, that's really saying something, believe me.

==========================

MICROWAVE SLIPPERS

keep your tootsies extra-toasty!

Microwavable foot covers warm up

in minutes and stay warm; deliver

soothing heat for cold winter nights

and mornings.

==========================

Well, all I have to say about that is YUK! I know I can't be the only person who feels that something you wear on your feet has no business being anywhere near some place where you prepare your food, and frankly, I can't believe that this horrendous idea could ever catch on. They cost $15 a pair, so it's not like this is a whole box full of disposable booties that you heat up and then toss after wearing them. No, these innovative horrors are designed to go back into the microwave after you've worn them, and I have to say that the very thought of that turns my stomach, and I'm famous for having a strong constitution. I can tell you that if the newspaper did a story about me with this item, it would never say: "Housewife Had No Drugs," because I would certainly need drugs to have that stuff anywhere near my microwave, and that's not just the latkes talking, by golly.

In other local news, the porch reclamation project is in full swing, and every day, we come home to find more progress has been made, often in astonishing fashion, so you really don't know what to expect next, and each evening brings new surprises our way. So far, we haven't heard of any neighbors' cats going missing, so the dreaded rash of construction cat-nappings has failed to materialize up to this point. As for ourselves, we performed our own preemptive strike in this arena, albeit inadvertently, when one of the strays that we had been feeding on our front porch, summarily and on his own volition, just waltzed right through our front door last week, and settled into the kitchen and library with the aplomb of a seasoned veteran scouting new quarters for bivouac. His coat of deep earth tones and mackerel pattern made him almost impossible to spot out in the wild, and I called him Buster Brown, although admittedly that would be an archaic reference that would no doubt be lost on young people nowadays, I shouldn't wonder. He shows odd signs of having been in a house before (he understands refrigerators and can openers better than most strays) but with enough unpredictably feral behavior to really keep us on our toes, that's for sure. But he seems to understand a good thing when he sees it, and his plan appears to be to stick close to where the cat food is stored, or as they say in the housing market, "Location, location, location." In fact, he's got such a grip on that idea that I'm thinking of bringing him to church to head up our Real Estate Department.

Elle

Lend Me Your Ears

2011-09-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Gosh, doesn't it seems like the month just started, and here we are, at the last weekend of September already, and where does the time go, I ask you that. I always say, once the kids go back to school, the year is basically over from that point, it's just a blur right up until New Year's Eve. The weather has been all over the map, like Comrade Mischka is away for two weeks in the Urals, and the replacement underlings are just throwing darts at a board instead. You'd never know that Friday was the official first day of autumn, inasmuch as it was about 90 degrees at the time with wilting humidity, and the air was so dense that you could write your name in it, which is not an innovation that has anything to recommend it as far as I can tell. At this point, I'm just about ready to wish the notorious Comrade would be coming back from his vacation already, because even though we know that the weather would be bad, at least it would be consistent, nyet?

Earlier in the week, I was having trouble with a program that called for Java Script, and it wouldn't run on my computer until I downloaded the latest version of it from our friends at Oracle. I wanted to see if that worked for other applications as well, so I went to visit our old friends at www.pogo.com, the home of online games of every imaginable description, to take it for a test drive. While there, I tried a few games that I had never seen before, including Word Whomp and Tumble Bees, which seemed simple enough, and with adorably childish graphics that would no doubt appeal to their target audience of game-playing youngsters. Therefore, it was with no small amount of consternation (and here, mortification would not be too strong a word) that I discovered that I was so bad at both of them, that a person might legitimately believe that I was not only illiterate, but had no understanding of the English language to start with. It was a humbling experience, I can tell you that. In fairness, it must be said that I have never done well under time pressure, as I can long since say with honesty that if someone ran up to me on the street, and shoved a microphone in my face, I would never in my life be able to tell them my name on the spot, much less my favorite color - or God forbid, answer any more challenging queries, like how many states there are in the country, or which side won the Civil War. So I did not cover myself with glory in my foray at the pogo game site, and my name (Guest15703) will not be retired with honors in the annals of Word Whomp and Tumble Bees, so don't bother to go there and check up on it. And please don't waste your time asking the other players on my team how I fared at Boggle Bash, because I'm sure they're all still laughing to this day, and I can't say that I blame them, alas.

On the home front, the contractors have accomplished great feats of engineering in their efforts to prevent our ramshackle porches from dis-connecting themselves completely from the rest of the house, and falling headlong into our neighbor's yard. Somehow they have managed to do this without even resorting to supernatural means of turning off the gravity in the area, so this is indeed a significant achievement. They continue to be popular with all of the neighborhood cats as well, and far from scaring them off with their heavy boots and noisy power tools, have probably attracted more than we had before they started. In fact, one day when they were packing up to leave, the ubiquitous Cinnamon (known far and wide as "Mooch" and for good reason, I can assure you) from next door blithely jumped into one of their cars, and was prepared to go home with the man and hope for the best. He had to disabuse her of this notion, since he already has cats at home, and managed to somehow get her out of his car, which is no easy task, and I ought to know, believe me. In light of these developments, I thought it was only fair to warn the neighbors that if any of their cats are missing, they should call our contractors.

Also on the subject of missing cats, our hopes were dashed for bringing into the fold the hypothetical kitten with the two different colored ears (that the contractors had claimed to see in our yard) and in unexpected fashion. I happened to be leaving for work one morning when the workers were on the front porch, and it came as a surprise to nobody when the ever-present Mooch trotted up the steps to supervise the proceedings as usual. "Here she is now," exclaimed one of them, "the kitten with the two different colored ears!" Thanks but no thanks, is all I have to say about that. Bill and I thought that was kind of a dirty trick, after we had gotten our hopes up. The thing about Mooch is that she's such a constant presence in our yard, and has been for so many years, that I can honestly say that we never noticed that she has two different colored ears, which the contractors found so remarkable. So that was one part of the construction project that came a cropper, and in the field of home renovations, we call that an "addition by subtraction."

Meanwhile at work, alert readers may recall the story of the giant electric turquoise temporary boilers that have been taking up space in our employee courtyard since 2001, in their hideous enormous boiler house, until the whole thing burned to the ground in October of last year, in a spectacular conflagration that was a media sensation far and wide. Among us old-timers, we expected it to be a long cold winter of no heat or hot water in our old rattle-trap of a building, since nobody would care if we froze to death at our desks, and it would probably take weeks for them to even notice. (Well, two weeks anyway, after the Payroll staff had died of frostbite, and nobody got paid.) And yet, it was the very next day that another temporary boiler (and why do they make these gigantic things this horrible electric turquoise, do you suppose?) was trucked into the area and wedged into the back of the courtyard, and hooked up around the burnt-out boilers that were still there, with all the heat and hot water that we could possibly want, and then some. We had to admit that we were impressed with their speed and efficiency, however grudgingly. Not so fast! It turns out that the newest replacement boiler was apparently the wrong type of boiler, the kind that uses home heating oil and not natural gas like all of the other boilers that we have on campus - although in any normal business, you would think that this would be the sort of obvious distinction that would be self-evident to anybody who was put in charge of ordering this thing, including the toddlers who were kicking my butt in Word Whomp, thanks not. But apparently this was beyond their capabilities at the employer of last resort, and normally I would say, what the heck.

Once again, not so fast! In these dismal days of skyrocketing oil prices, the hit we were taking for oil deliveries, compared to our regular costs for natural gas, were putting us in a financial hole that we would never climb out of, and as a non-profit organization, we're used to being the in the red, believe me. There's only one reason that I found out all of this, and that's because the Engineering department had to hurry up and distribute bid proposals to permanently replace the boilers once and for all, and sooner rather than later this time around. Suddenly, my phone started ringing off the hook, as every temperature control company in the world got wind of this project (it must be one of those public disclosure regulations for large community projects that are required to be published) and called Purchasing to get in on the action. The calls never stopped, and although it was a bit disconcerting that every Tom, Dick and Harry caller knew more about this than I did, at least I found out about this upcoming undertaking, in spite of the hospital management's best efforts to keep it from me. I can say with complete confidence that this is quite possibly the most popular thing we've ever done at the place since I've been there, as it seemed to get everyone's attention from all over creation, and made people sit up and take notice - whereas usually our profile on the wider scene is on a par with vacant lots or junk mail. In fact, the way things are going, I can tell you that if the hospital had two different colored ears, nobody would notice. In any case, I'd love to just stay here and keep on blathering, but I figure this would be a great time to go back and try my hand at Word Whomp again, after all the toddlers have already gone to bed.

Elle

Door Prize

2011-09-17T20:56:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

So the second week of September has come and gone already, and you won't find me complaining about it, heaven knows. Since the last few weeks, I have a whole new standard for success, and I figure that any week without tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes is one to be commended, and certainly not taken for granted, that's for sure. I won't even cast aspersions on the weather, which went from 90 degrees all of last week with dripping humidity, suddenly to daytime highs in the 60's, and 50 degrees overnight that had us reaching for blankets and hot water bottles, by golly. It may be chilly, but it's been gloriously sunny and dry, and around here that means that all of the doors that were stuck shut in the dampness are now swinging open, and the ones that were too swollen to close, can now be latched with ease. The weather has been just the ticket for our very late roses, phlox and finally some straggly black-eyed Susans, and even the fall crocus and cyclamen have popped up to lend cheer to the landscape. The door to the summer may indeed be closing, but at least it's not being blown off its hinges or flooded over its frame like two weeks ago.

Now what may be new and exciting on the local dining scene, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. For literally decades, Bill and I have gone to the same local diner every Friday night after work, for the same combination of appetizers that we love so much, but which would be too much trouble to make for ourselves at home. So we were understandably jittery when one of the waiters mentioned, I thought in a rather off-hand manner, that they were going to be closed for renovations, which might last up to 3 months. This was indeed a blow! Even worse, we were faced with the appalling prospect that this cozy but somewhat unpopular eatery might close for alterations and never actually open up again, and then where would we be, I ask you that. So we asked the waiter what the staff and other patrons would be doing in the interim, and he named a couple of other places that we could try for the duration. All of them had the disadvantage of being much farther away, and most were so crowded, cramped and noisy that there was no pleasure to eating there. Going some place different every week, we found the food hit-or-miss, and often the traffic and parking were so excruciating that we couldn't bring ourselves to go back.

So it was with joyful hearts when we first noticed the "Grand Opening" sign in front of our trusty old diner, and gaily waving pennants from all of the poles to welcome in a clamoring public, well, the two of us at least. And back we went on Friday as usual, and I can tell you, we soon discovered that we were not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We knew they had changed the name to BLD Diner (it stands for breakfast-lunch-dinner) and we weren't alarmed by what we considered a minor difference. [And I would tell you to feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at www.BLD-DINER.com and see for yourselves, however, unfortunately the site is still under construction and right now has nothing but their name and a "Coming Soon" note. It must be said that often these are the web design equivalent of "vapor ware," which is they give every indication that they will soon be up and running, but in fact, will never get any farther that what is there already, alas.] But when we first got there, at about our usual time, we couldn't help but notice that the new and improved parking lot was parked solid in every direction, compared to the emptiness we had come to expect. Inside, the once light and somewhat bland decor had given way to a more dark and edgy ambience, which might be considered chic, but never cozy. Every seat was taken, even at the counter, and as we gaped around, like a couple of six-headed polka-dot space aliens, we couldn't help but notice that we did not recognize one single solitary soul in the place - from the hostess to the waiters, bus boys, cooks and even other customers. It was like a Mission Impossible episode where they put something up on a spot and then try to convince the bad guys that it's been there all along, at least until somebody accidentally drops that John F. Kennedy half-dollar, and the jig is up. There is no punch line to this story, but it will come as a surprise to nobody that the new and supposedly improved menu does not include our favorite appetizers, and normally this is where I would be saying thanks so very much not, but frankly, words fail me.

Speaking of popularity, lately our property has been the scene of wall-to-wall contractors and their crews, tackling the unenviable job of shoring up our old sagging porches, or know the reason why. A logical person might think that bunches of big burly men in heavy work boots tramping around the yard would scare off the neighbors' cats and resident strays, always on the lookout for a free meal on our front porch, but apparently nothing could be further from the truth. The cats show up in droves as soon as the trucks hit the driveway, as it turns out the contractors couldn't be more popular with the neighborhood cats if they tried, and as odd as it sounds, the feeling is mutual. Rather than consider them a nuisance for being continually underfoot, the workers are infatuated with the lot of them, from the grittiest alley cat to the prissiest princess, and they can't wait to recount their whimsical antics like proud parents. Even the formidable she-devil from next door has won them over - and she's earned no great following around here, even in her own house, believe me - so it won't be long before our contractors are starting the Cinna-Mooch Fan Club, I shouldn't wonder, because they can't get enough of her. They're even on a first-name basis with two skittish strays that we've been feeding for months, who refuse to get anywhere near us, and apparently find this crowd of robust laborers more to their liking. Besides that, they claim to see cats regularly in our yard that we've never set eyes on, like an adorable kitten with two different colored ears. (Of course, there's always the possibility that they've been spending a little too much time in the "Hospitality Tent," as it were, so that can't be ruled out either.) All this time, we thought we would make a hit with the neighborhood kitties by putting out food for them, when all along, all we needed to do was hire a caravan of contractors instead.

So far, my absolute favorite part of the entire construction project has been, of course, a cat story that one of the contractors told me about working at another customer's house. (Whenever you meet other people with cats, you can always count on trading cat stories with them, and this no exception.) It seems that he was working with a different sub-contractor, and someone who had no pets, so didn't have any experience with them. The homeowner's biggest concern was that the workers would accidentally leave a door open, and her precious pussy would escape, so everyone was carefully instructed on the importance of keeping doors closed. This was "preaching to the choir" for the contractor and his cat-loving crew, but everyone realized the problem with the sub-contractor, whose lack of companion animals, they believed, would render him oblivious to the danger. This seemed to be borne out one day when they were wrapping up at the job-site, only to have the sub-contractor suddenly exclaim that he thought the cat had gotten out, and he forgot to go round it up and put it back inside. Whereupon he dashed headlong back into the yard, scooped up the cat from under the bushes - spitting and screeching and scratching with all its might - and threw it inside the front door, just barely closing the door ahead of its desperate attempt to escape. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and left with a clear conscience that disaster had been narrowly averted. That is, until the homeowner returned later and called the contractor to complain that, far from letting out her own little furry darling (who was sound asleep on the bed) somehow they had let IN some mysterious scruffy vagabond that she had never seen before, and had caused no end of havoc until they were able to shoo it back outside where it belonged. Ya gotta love it! Of course, around here we like to believe that good intentions count for something, but I think the moral here is that when it comes to contractors and cats, the Hospitality Tent should be avoided at all costs.

Elle

Toast of the Town

2011-09-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Well, there's no getting away from the fact that the Back-to-School season is well and truly upon us, and it would be impossible to miss the school buses and crossing guards all over town, where we haven't seen them all summer. Anyone who tried recently to do any shopping at Staples or other such retailers can tell you that the crowds there did much to cheer the hearts of the President's economic advisers, as you couldn't get near anyplace that was selling anything even remotely associated with school supplies. Since that category has unaccountably expanded these days - to include such items as candy, electronics, furniture, toys, appliances, cars and even wine - it pretty much covers just about anywhere you might have wanted to go, but didn't dare. So those of us with no back-to-school needs had to take a break from the stores out of self-protection for a couple of weeks, until things get back to normal on the retail scene after the buying frenzy has subsided into just another academic year. One thing I do know after Hurricane Irene, those kids will be going back to school with all the flashlights and batteries they could ever want, believe me - not to mention lunchboxes full of French toast, oui?

Monday was Labor Day, of course, and I hope that you were able to enjoy a nice relaxing three-day weekend that included resting from your labors, in the spirit of the legendary Samuel L. Gompers, and long may he wave, by golly. Around here, the Flag Brigade did another excellent job of flying the colors, upstairs and downstairs, and remembered to bring them back inside again before the weather became a hazard to them. It's true the local weather has been a lot better than in many other places, heaven knows, but it must be said that by the time the flags came back inside, they had both been wrapped completely around their poles, thanks not. And while it's always nice to have a day off from work, I'm sure everyone already knows what I think of those short weeks at work, and this one even worse than usual - since I came down with some sort of stomach bug that was going around, and found myself spending more time in the bathroom than at work, and once again, thanks so very much not. So it turned out to be a rather long and challenging week all around, and I was more than glad to see the tail-end of it on Friday, and that's putting it mildly. Right about now, I'm thinking that some of that back-to-school wine might not be such a bad idea after all, and garcon, toss in some of that French toast while you're at it.

Of course, everyone is tired of me picking on the local newspaper by now, just because they can't seem to put a whole sentence together that is grammatically correct, doesn't leave out any words, where everything is spelled right, and uses the right words to start with, and not just something that sounds close enough to the right word. Honestly, the dinosaurs and I can remember a time when people had to actually know something in order to put out a newspaper, and not just toss any old thing together and throw it out on the streets in the face of an unsuspecting public. In this day and age of technology wonders, it's amazing to me that they continue to make these same kinds of routine errors week in and week out, as if the stories magically write themselves, and print themselves on paper, unseen or untouched by human hands. Or at least, human hands that belong to any English-speaking people anyway. Well, it's all too true that there are no standards anymore, heaven knows, but I will say that these two items from last week really surprised me.

The first is from the Sports section, about a local high school athlete winning an award, and I will say right up front that I have no reason to blame the newspaper for this, however startling this caption may have appeared:

===============================

National gold medal-winning

fencer Jonah Shainberg of Rye,

and his coach Archil Lortkipanidze

===============================

Lortkipanidze??? What the heck kind of a name is Lortkipanidze??? They spelled it the same way numerous times in the accompanying article, so I have to assume that it's right, but it certainly got my attention, when I normally would not find much of interest in a story about high school fencing, believe me.

The next one is a personal favorite, and appeared as a sidebar in a column entitled: "Some Lawmakers Have Spotty Attendance Records." The sidebar was a short list of those legislators who had perfect attendance records, setting them apart from their more lackadaisical colleagues, and giving credit where it's due is always a virtue to be applauded. What set this apart was the headline of the sidebar, which I am reproducing verbatim, I assure you:

===========================

AF ;AILFN A;ILFN A;LDFNAFD

===========================

Ya gotta love it! Mind you, this is how the paper was actually printed and went out to their dozens of subscribers (or however many thousands they claim to have) and not just some slip-shod mock-up they fabricated to test the placement of the stories or whatnot. No, this actually hit the streets in this condition, which even the most ancient of civilizations, carving figures into papyrus reeds or clay tablets, and no technology of any kind at their disposal, would have easily avoided. I tell you, sometimes you just don't know whether to laugh or cry. The reason that it's a personal favorite of mine (and probably why it leaped at me off the page in the first place) is that I often employ the same strategy of typing random letters, which I call a "place holder," in a spot where I need to have text that I haven't decided on yet. Mine always looks something like this - a;ldkjfa; ;lasdkjf a; jf;alsdkfj a; jfalskdjfa; fjalskdjf a;ljfalkdjfa - because those are the keys that my fingers are resting on anyway. But I will point out the big difference between me and the local newspaper is that I always go back later and type in the real text and take out the gobbledygook. This is something that the newspaper staff could learn - that is, if the paper didn't magically write itself and print itself on paper without any human intervention at any point along the way.

Meanwhile at work, we were all recently bombarded with a screaming press release about one of our sister institutions, which is named after a local family of philanthropists ("Mom and Pop's Nursing Home o' Quacks") that the headline assured us was about to "Benefit From Global Project." There was a picture with the Vice President o' Quacks and a representative of the project, and I admit that I couldn't resist having high hopes when I noticed this interesting caption: "MPNHQ was the beneficiary of Morgan Stanley's community commitment and their international corporate project - Global Volunteer Month." After all, Morgan Stanley is a multi-billion dollar world-wide finance conglomerate, and I would think the outcome of their global volunteer initiative would be something not only economically significant, but also a much-needed improvement that was previously out of the recipient's reach, before this magnanimous gesture. So you can imagine that I was more than a little surprised - and here, stupefied is not too strong a word - to read the following:

========================

Now after more than 50 man-hours of work

from 25 employees at the Westchester

Campus of Morgan Stanley,

MPNHQ patients, visitors and staff alike,

have seasonal decorations to adorn the doors

of the residents' rooms.

========================

Excuse me??? It took 25 employees 50 hours to make a box full of decorations to hang on the doors - gee whiz, could they spare it at Morgan Stanley? Heck, even the late great John D. Rockefeller himself used to give out dimes, he didn't have 25 people make door decorations for the poor. It actually goes on to say that it all began in 2010 when the Global Volunteer Month folks got in touch with the United Way for ideas about their project, and then really pulls out all the stops with this gushy finale: "United Way used their extensive experience to facilitate a marriage of resources, opportunity and need - one that made all involved winners, particularly the residents of MPNHQ, who are again reminded of the spirit of volunteerism, exemplified by this company's employees and are grateful for the cheery welcome the decorations provide everyone." Well, I'm sorry, but here you can all please give me a large break. I mean, if they had sent out a press release that a troop of Brownies had donated a box of door decorations that they made out of recycled newspapers and soda bottles as part of an Earth Day program, I would think that was adorable and wonderful. But once you trot out fiscal powerhouse Morgan Stanley and their Global Volunteer Month, then please don't toss me a box of decorations and expect me to get excited about it, for heaven's sake. In fact, I'm surprised that they didn't just give us a box full of flashlights and batteries that the employees had stockpiled for Hurricane Irene, and have United Way throw in a bunch of their plastic lapel pins, and call it a day. Of course, with our luck, they would have given us a box full of left-over French toast instead, non?

Elle

Vive La France

2011-09-03T21:07:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

This may not be true everywhere, but many of us in the local area have much to be thankful for, after the frenzied media blitz that was Hurricane Irene down-sized instead to Tropical Storm Irene, and basically skipped right over us with no appreciable damage, except for some higher than normal high tides that spilled over the most low-lying areas. The winds were strong but not ferocious, and no trees or large branches came down, even in our neighborhood full of old trees. We never lost our electricity, the roof didn't leak, even the basement wasn't any wetter than usual, and that's saying something in this soggy old place. Early on Sunday morning, when I was expecting it to start getting worse according to the weather reports, it was already basically all over, and many of us were wondering what all the fuss was about. Of course, everyone knows that my mother was a Girl Scout leader, and their motto is "Be Prepared," so I figure it's better for people to be ready for the worst, whether it turns out that way or not. And I can tell you that the President's economic advisers must have been delirious at the way the bottled water and generators were flying off the shelves, not to mention, batteries, toilet paper and - believe it or not - cars lining up for blocks to buy gasoline, just like 1973 all over again. So I guess we could say that Irene was a boom in the economy but a bust as a hurricane, which may just be the best of both worlds. As for all of those people who ran out to stock up on milk, bread and eggs - well, I guess they'll be eating French toast for a month now.

Meanwhile at work, on a weather-related topic, you can imagine that we were all pleased as punch when we received a memo from the President of the hospital, thanking us for our efforts during the recent emergency. Incomprehensibly, it actually starts out by saying, "Despite the first hurricane to strike the New York region in more than a century ... " Now, I happen to know this gentleman personally has been working at the employer of last resort for over 20 years, and before that at other area facilities, so he didn't just drop out of a space ship and know nothing about the local weather for the last few decades. So I'm thinking it would come as a surprise to those of us who very vividly remember (and in fact, lived through) numerous major hurricanes such as Camille, Agnes, Belle, Bob, Floyd, Gloria - and the granddaddy of them all, The Great Hurricane of 1938, which slammed smack into Wall Street, and really showed that wall who was boss, by golly. So where he comes up with this "first hurricane in a century" malarkey is certainly a mystery to me, although at home, we tend to explain these types of mental lapses by supposing that someone has spent too much time in the "Hospitality Tent," and that's not just a lot of hurricane punch, believe me.

Speaking of tents, while everyone else on Saturday was at the stores stocking up on hurricane supplies, we headed out to the luxurious Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island for the 51st annual Scottish Festival, which they promised would go on as planned, "rain or shine." Well, there wasn't much shining, but there was mostly just a smattering of rain, and it turned out to be not a bad day after all. We brought my sister Diane along, since she had volunteered to help out at the Island Harvest booth, and she pitched in gamely in spite of the weather. It certainly wasn't as crowded as the last time we went, so we were allowed to park on the grounds itself, and not have to take the shuttle bus from a nearby elementary school, which was much more convenient this way. The skirl of bagpipes was in the air, but they also had many other entertainment offerings, such as a bluegrass band, puppet shows, country dancers, folk music, storytellers, roving troubadours, and even Irish step dancing. Unfortunately, our plans to see our favorite Celtic fusion band, Mac Talla M'or, came a cropper when we arrived too late for their 11:30 show, and they canceled the 2:30 show out of sheer Irene-o-phobia, when we would have supposed these lads and lasses to be made of sterner stuff. It did turn out to be a much scaled-back version of the regular festival, as many of the food or merchandise vendors stayed home, but there was a plucky camaraderie among the tattered remnant, who were determined to give it their all in spite of the less than ideal conditions. Of course, it's got to take more than a hurricane to keep us from buying souvenirs, not to mention, snacks and raffle tickets, so we were glad to find some things to our liking among the limited choices. Alert readers may have already guessed the punch line to this story, where we assuaged our disappointment over not seeing Mac Talla M'or by having a late lunch at Denny's in Levittown, which for us is a special delight that never grows old. And rather than complaining about the pre-hurricane frenzy, I think it's only fair to point out that as a result of that very hysteria, we were able to travel over the Throgs Neck Bridge at no charge, both ways, and with tolls in the amounts they are nowadays, that's a veritable bonanza, pardner.

We also got in touch with my cousin Cheryl who lives nearby, and has seen many of these festivals over the years, as her husband's company provides the audio-visual services on location, and here is normally where I would be inviting everyone to feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site and see for yourself, but I will say that if anybody can find a web page for these people, well, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Cheryl is as Scottish as I am, on our fathers' side of the family, but she also has some French heritage on her mother's side. Now, it must be said that Cheryl doesn't begrudge the Scots their fun, but she wonders why they don't have French festivals and games too, like the ubiquitous Irish and Scottish festivals that populate the weekends throughout the year in every corner of the country. After all, she reasons, if you're going to go someplace and have ethnic food, wouldn't you rather have Crepes Suzette instead of Haggis? Escargots rather than meat pies? Bouillabaisse rather than fish and chips? And not to mention, all those great French pastries, I pointed out with enthusiasm. Personally, I think she may be onto something there, and I can envision a full range of competitions, such as mime contests, tossing the beret, tug-of-baguette, wine bottle juggling, and of course, rudeness and insults in both amateur and professional categories. And let's not forget French kissing, although the judging for that might be a little complicated, I'm thinking. There would be strolling accordions to regale the bourgeoisie with the strains of La Marseillaise and Mademoiselle from Armentieres, while contentedly sipping Champagne and savoring sorbet under their parasols, in their finest haute couture, along with their impeccably groomed French poodles, of course. They would also have booths where experts would conclusively prove that French toast, French fries and French horns have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with France, and never have, eh bien. And instead of little girls in plaid, jumping around and stamping their feet, you could look forward to actual Can-Can dancers putting on a show of high kicks and petticoats, and that would probably be worth the price of admission all by itself, and that's not just a lot of zut alors, believe me. So I say, break out the napoleons and eclairs, brush up on your Voltaire, and let's get this Franco-Fest underway with all the liberty, equality, and fraternity that we can muster. I may not have any French blood in me, but I can tell you if there's pastries involved, then I'm more than ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with mes amis and shout, "Vive La France!" After all, I live in a house with French doors, so that has to count for something, or my name isn't -

Mademoiselle from Armentieres

Shake, Rattle and Roll

2011-08-26T21:30:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

Strange days indeed, as the late and lamented John Lennon once said, and he wasn't far off the mark, I can tell you that. People in these parts could be forgiven for wondering if Armageddon isn't coming a little bit earlier than the doomsayers have predicted in 2012, the way things are going around here, and you don't know what to expect next - which is probably just as well, because it could easily be something extremely bad, and you wouldn't want to know. It seems that somewhere along the line, what was supposed to be the Dog Days of August have turned instead into the Werewolves of London, and suddenly stocking up on silver bullets and wooden stakes doesn't seem like such a bad idea after all.

Anyone would think that a 5.9 magnitude earthquake in the rural Virginia countryside would not make much of a splash outside of the immediate area, and treated as a passing curiosity by everyone else. Not so fast! This unfriendly quake was felt from Florida to Maine, and as far west as Ohio, besides knocking out communications in the nation's capital, and shaking up everything in its wake. They evacuated buildings in White Plains and New York City, while closer to home, the old flea-bag rattle-trap where I work shook on its foundations in a manner that was not at all reassuring, believe me. Luckily there was no damage at this distance from the epicenter, and everyone could go back to relaxing and enjoying the beautiful day. Not so fast! We found out later that there was another separate earthquake earlier in the day upstate around Albany, plus a completely different one that rocked the Rocky Mountains, and another one yet still that punched Peru - and all on that same fateful day. Hmmmm. Does it occur to everybody that the new "earthquake option" has just been installed on the Kremlin's infernal weather machine, courtesy of our old nemesis Comrade Mischka? I don't know about anyone else, but here I'm thinking "da," and for the record, may I just say, I love Mother Russia.

Probably all of the earthquakes would have gotten a lot more long-term press coverage, except for the imminent arrival on the scene of Hurricane Irene, which has turned into the kind of media circus usually reserved for declarations of war or high-profile crime sprees, so you would think that there had never been a hurricane before in the history of the world - in fact, I'm sure by now it has its own FaceBook page, Twitter account, and interactive web site. Everyone has battened down the hatches, moved to higher ground, or at least taped up their windows for the big blow. So far, my favorite was a picture in the newspaper from a coastal town where someone had boarded up their store windows and then painted a message of "Good Night Irene," one supposes, for the storm's amusement along the way.

Meanwhile at work, I had bigger (or rather, much smaller) fish to fry. I have an old metal desk in my office, and one day I noticed that a piece of paper must have fallen behind the bottom drawer, because I could hear it brush against the drawer whenever I opened and closed it. Since I couldn't reach over the back of the drawer for it, I figured I would have to take the whole drawer out to get to it - but first, I would have to take all of my various bags of candy out of the drawer, where I keep them handy for therapeutic mood enhancement, as necessary. Now, I have always kept boxes of cracker and cookies, and bags of candy, in my desk or on the shelf in the closet, and never had any trouble with it, except for the occasional melted chocolate from the extreme heat in that old fire-trap. So I was understandably chagrined (and here, the term "appalled" might not be too strong a word) to discover the tell-tale tooth-prints of furry varmints chewing on the candy in my desk drawer, and leaving little plastic and foil crumbs all over the bottom of the drawer, and thanks so very much not. So now I have to don my plastic gloves and face mask, tossing out half-eaten candy and trying to salvage what's left, and muttering imprecations under my breath that were not for sensitive ears. I finally cleared everything out of the drawer, and wiped it down with alcohol pads inside and out, even the gooey caramel trail the varmints left behind them down the back of the drawer, and it goes without saying, thanks so very much not.

The first thing I noticed when I took out the drawer, was that the piece of paper that started it all was stuck to the drawer itself, which is why it made noise every time I opened or closed the drawer. But after that, I discovered that there was another whole pile of papers that had fallen completely under the drawer, and I never would have realized they were there, because they made no sound at all as the drawer glided smoothly above them. In fact, a couple of them were recent important papers that I would have been looking for, and sooner rather than later, if I had realized they were missing in the first place. Others, well, as the saying goes, not so much. I found some mis-delivered junk mail from 2006 that I was supposed to bring back to the Mail Room, and copies of old memos and forms that should have been filed. Now, it's easy to say that I'm a hopeless loser, and a serious detriment to the organization, but it turns out that I wasn't the only person with this problem. Many of the papers under the bottom drawer were lost by the supervisor who had the office before me, and hasn't worked there since the beginning of 2001, so that can't be laid at my doorstep. My personal favorite was the collection of perfectly preserved business cards from a previous Director of Material Management (who obviously had the same desk) that I never knew, but when I showed them to a co-worker, said he hadn't worked there for the last 35 years. So I guess in the end, we have to thank the furry varmints for inadvertently uncovering this treasure trove of lost documents - and not to mention, the boost to the local economy as I hurried out and bought bunches of plastic containers to keep the varmints away from my snacks, because anyone can tell you that my Indian name is Shares Not Chocolate, and that's not just the caramel talking, believe me.

Speaking of the local economy, I had a little too much of it in the past week, in more ways than one. It all began with some mail trouble at church, where we would find our mail out in the bushes, or in the garbage, instead of being in the mailbox as it should have been. So when I didn't receive the bank statement when it was expected, I figured that it had been the victim of some mischief, and if it hadn't turned up in the bushes by now, it was probably lost for good. So I hurried out of work last Thursday when the bank has extended hours, and stood on line waiting to get a reprint of the July statement, which is not an option that is available on their web site, probably because they want to charge a fee for this. The teller was very understanding, and leaped into action, printing out a replacement copy on her printer in short order. I had some other errands to run, so I dashed off, glad to get one thing out of the way. It wasn't until later that night when I was working on the financial reports that I noticed for the first time that the replacement statement I had picked up was from July 2010 instead of last month, and once again even yet still, thanks so very much not. So Friday morning, I flew out of the house early, since the bank isn't open late on Friday, and went right back to the same bank, and stood on the same line, and tried it all over again. I explained to a different teller that I had requested a reprint of last month's statement, but instead got a statement from 13 months ago, and was taking another crack at getting the right statement this time around. He hopped right on it, and handed it to me hot off the printer, only this time, I checked the dates before I left, and once again, glad to get it out of the way at long last. I admit that even I wasn't expecting the punch line to this story, which is that I went to church on Sunday as usual, and bumped into the worship assistant, who handed me the envelope with the original July bank statement, and I don't mind saying, in a very off-hand manner, which she said she had taken out of the mailbox previously and forgotten to give to me sooner. Well, it's obvious when the gods are toying with us, it does no good to complain about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and there's no point in crying, heaven knows. At this rate, the Werewolves will have the last laugh after all.

Elle

Flight of Fancy

2011-08-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Well, the thermometer may say that it's still the depths of the summer doldrums, but for anyone who watches television, you know that they've already been playing football, of all things, for the last three weeks in cities all over the country, and campuses far and wide. Here in the local area, we can listen to The FAN, a 24-hour sports radio network, and keep up-to-date on everything sports, from the most popular to the most arcane. As soon as the NFL labor dispute was settled, and teams started making deals for available players, the sports commentators couldn't hurry up fast enough to bury the New York Giants for the upcoming season, and this is without a single game having been played, even in pre-season. It seems that the biggest challenge for the team is not going to be their opponents on the field, but winning over the critics, who have apparently already written off their chances as a lost cause, even before the first official coin toss. I guess the good news for the Giants is that they've got no place to go but up.

And as long as we're all looking up, here's another one of those curious headlines that can't help but make you wonder, and scratch your head, if not worse:

========================

Westchester-bound jet lands safely

========================

Now, if this was the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright taking off from Kitty Hawk for the first time, I can see how landing safely would have been considered newsworthy enough to rate a front-page headline. However, in this day and age, when literally tens of thousands of aircraft take off and land all over the world on a regular basis, this would seem to fall into the "dog-bites-man" example of headline writing, which is to say, it leaves itself wide open, with no indication of what makes this remarkable in any way.

Speaking of the wide open spaces, as much as I hate to pick on our woeful local newspaper, when the blunders come in triplicate, as this bunch did, well, it's just too much to resist. It all started in the TV Section Best Bets, with this review of the FX series, "Rescue Me" -

===========================

Tommy takes the time to write his inner

most thoughts and feeling to his loved ones

===========================

Well, splitting up "inner" and "most" there really tends to suck all of the meaning out of that phrase, which you would think would be impossible after all this time. But at least they got both halves of the word right, which is better than they did in this next synopsis of TNT's "The Mentalist" -

===========================

Patrick Jane and Lisbon learn that the Red

John case has been taken away from them

and reassigned to a straight laced officer

===========================

Talk about sucking all the meaning out of something, I tell you, sometimes you just don't even know where to begin. It was another holiday for the spell-checker, since all of the words were spelled correctly, as far as it went, and since they were lacing up an officer, I suppose it was better to be straight rather than crooked. In an odd coincidence, the exact same problem occurred in the Life & Style section, in an interview with author Andrew Gross, explaining why he introduced a new protagonist in his latest thriller -

==========================

"I didn't want to be straight jacketed

into a particular character or role"

==========================

These people obviously needed more help in navigating the straits of better journalism, rather than taking the straight and narrow homophone shortcut that led them to disaster on the rocky shoals of language abuse in their straight laced straight jackets. And I don't mind saying, that's exactly where they would belong, if only there was such a thing, alas.

Very alert readers may recall our old friend Bob T. Yokl of the Savings Beyond Price Newsletter, whose whimsical "antidotal evidence" is still a classic of the genre. In the latest edition, Bob introduces the largely untapped area of utilization management, which he first describes as "a new supply chain discipline" to promote cost-effectiveness. But later in the same paragraph (our friendly Yokl obviously has a short attention span) he explains how "to receive the full payback of this power cost-control disciple." Here I'm thinking, this would probably come as a big surprise to St. Peter and St. Mark, not to mention, the rest of the disciples, by golly. But my favorite part is when he delves into the safety issues that plagued the company that "grew to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world."

=========================

Toyota skimped on inspectors and inspections

and compromised their once ridged quality standards

=========================

I can see the problem immediately, because everyone knows that only R-r-r-r-r-ruffles have r-r-r-r-r-ridges, so when it comes to quality standards, they could possibly say that T-t-t-t-t-toyota has t-t-t-t-t-talent, but they would have to be rigid enough to leave those ridges alone. And the rest of the disciples, it goes without saying, especially if they're wearing straight laced straight jackets, which would bring a whole new meaning to the concept of "supply chain discipline" that I find particularly odious. At least, those are my inner most thoughts on the matter, whatever that means.

Elle

Weekend Warriors

2011-08-13T18:32:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Well, the Ides of August will be upon us before we know it, when the fabled Dog Days could really start barking in earnest. Although I don't know what they could do that would be much worse than the weather we already had in July, with day after day of triple digit temperatures, and humidity that was off the charts, so that even the most robust electricity providers were no match for it. The recent weather around here has been positively pleasant compared to that, but with enough freakish spontaneous storms to remind us that our old pal Comrade Mischka is never far away from the controls of the Kremlin's infernal weather machine, da?

In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it was Comrade Mischka and some of his evil cohorts who managed to turn what should have been a pleasant weekend getaway into something that was not at all the way it was intended. We had plans to visit our friends around Albany, for a splash in their pool, and they were so eager to have us that they actually invited us to come, rather than us just forcing ourselves on them as usual. We had to work around their schedule of being away, and our other friends being on call, so we settled on last weekend when everyone was available, and we had high hopes for good weather. Although it started out with the forecast somewhat inauspicious for our purposes, and we thought we were prepared for a bit of a bumpy ride, it turned out that was not even the half of it.

We started out bright and early on Saturday morning, because we wanted to have plenty of time at the pool, and be ready to dive right in as soon as we got there around lunchtime. Not so fast! It turned out that our hostess had been felled with a severe stomach infection, and had been confined to her bed and no contact with the outside world. This was an unexpected blow, and punched more than a few holes in our plans for the rest of the day, although it must be said that our host did his best to entertain us on his own. We resolved to make the best of it, and waited for our other friends to arrive and join us at poolside for an afternoon of aquatic delights. Once again, not so fast! Our other friends had errands and obligations that took longer than they expected, so they didn't show up until almost 2:00 PM, and since no one had any lunch (here is one place that our hostess really would have come in handy) we headed off to the nearby Circle Diner for a quick bite. Alas, and even yet more once again, not so fast! Although we were seated promptly, they apparently couldn't find anyone willing to serve us, and we sat for 20 minutes as if invisible to the staff, until we finally prevailed upon one of the busboys to send a waitress our way - who they must have dragooned straight from the head of the class at the Surly Waitress School, whose icy manner put the building's air conditioning to shame. I was happy with my fried ravioli, but we found the portions skimpy and over-priced, although luckily served on good sturdy dishes, since our snarling waitress essentially threw them at us from across the table. We hoped that a nice swim might salvage the rest of the day, but by the time we left, it was already so gloomy and threatening that the thought of being in a pool seemed not only unappealing, but downright dangerous, and we reluctantly gave up on the idea.

So instead, we went to check in at La Quinta Hotel, where we had stayed before, and our other friends decided to join us overnight, rather than drive all the way back home on their own. We had some time to relax and get settled in, which was more complicated than it would have been, if they hadn't put us on the 3rd floor in order to get us two rooms together. It's simple enough to get from the parking lot to the 2nd floor by taking the handy stairs, but to get all the way up to the top floor, you're at the mercy of their painfully slow and wheezing elevator, which made the derelict elevators at the hospital where I work seem positively supersonic by comparison, and that's saying something, believe me. I figure that the inconvenience of being on the top floor was in exchange for not being able to assign us rooms next to the elevator, ice maker and vending machines as they usually do, so this was the best they could come up with.

Once all of that was out of the way, we all piled into the car and headed to the 76 Diner for dinner, and the only advantage to our hostess being sick was that we could fit 5 of us in one car, rather than splitting the 6 of us up between two cars. The threatening weather broke loose with a vengeance, and we splashed in and out of the diner in a pelting downpour that got worse as the night wore on. We found their service was much better (although in fairness, it could hardly have been worse) but I was disappointed in the baked ziti, especially since their fettuccine Alfredo is very good. After dinner, we hurried back to La Quinta and jumped in the hotel pool - even our host for the weekend, who already has his own pool at home - and settled in for a relaxing soak in the hot tub. I won't say that it exactly salvaged the day, which was well on its way to becoming a full-blown disaster, but it was a step in the right direction. Then we all turned in for a well-deserved good night's rest.

Did I hear someone say, "Not so fast!" Bill and I were fine, but our other friends had an over-enthusiastic air conditioner that turned their room into a deep freeze, and in the middle of the night, the man of the house was so achy and congested that he had to pack it in and head for home in order to get some sleep. So it was just the 3 of us to enjoy the hotel's buffet breakfast in the morning, and we didn't shy away from the muffins and bagels, mini Danish and donuts, fresh fruit and hard-boiled eggs - although we had to carry it back up to our room to eat it in peace, since the breakfast room was such a madhouse that Bill aptly described it as a "feeding frenzy." After we checked out, we headed over to our weekend hosts to bid them a fond farewell, and found our hostess still under the weather, but well enough to at least wave at us wanly from a distance. The outdoor conditions had dried up somewhat, but not enough to entice anyone into the pool, and we thought it best to leave quietly so our poor bedraggled hostess could continue her recuperation without a bunch of noisy hooligans underfoot, even if they did invite us in the first place.

Since we had to take our other friend home anyway, we were relieved to find her husband much improved after his ordeal, and well enough to join us for lunch at the Kinderhook Diner, where we found both the food and the service were hit-or-miss, especially considering that we ordered nothing out of the ordinary. From there, we spent the rest of the day wandering the capacious aisles at Ocean State Job Lot, which we don't have any of near us, and snapping up bargains on every side. We finally ran out of steam around 5:00 PM and had to call it a day, so we packed up our treasures for the long drive home. It soon became a nightmare of heavy traffic and torrential rain, and the only bright spot was stopping along the way at Denny's in Newburgh, where we were glad to find that the food and the service were both excellent, for the first time all weekend. We finally arrived home, late and tired, but at least the cats were happy to see us, and we were glad to get back in one piece. The way things had been going, that was not something we were going to take for granted, that's fur sure.

So in the end, we drove 300 miles and spent $125 to swim in a hotel pool, which was certainly not what we originally envisioned for the weekend, I can tell you that. But it was nice to see our friends, when they weren't sick, and we tried to make the best of a bad situation. I guess it was just a lucky thing that Comrade Mischka, who loused up the weather to spoil the whole pool party plan to begin with, didn't have any more nefarious cronies than the Germ Genies, the Hotel Hobgoblins, the Diner Despoilers and the Traffic Trolls, or things could have turned out even worse, although I shudder to think how that could be possible. I suppose he might have collaborated in league with the Petroleum Pirates, so that the price of gas would be over $4 a gallon for regular, or something equally outrageous, so nobody would be able to afford to travel in any case. Oh, wait a minute .....

Elle

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

2011-08-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Happy August! I hope that you have been enjoying all the pleasures that summer has to offer, and good weather besides. Although it's true that it is about 6 weeks too late to buy a swimsuit, and the Back-to-School displays have been in stores since Independence Day, there's actually still plenty of time left for hammocks and lemonade, ice cream and watermelon, swimming pools and corn on the cob. The season is short, but packed with opportunities that don't come along at other times of the year (unlike our friends at the car dealers and retailers touting their "Annual Summer Sale" as if they would be having it more than once a year) so get out there and grab it by the lapels with both hands while you can. While you're at it, book an expensive vacation, trade in your old clunker for a brand new model, and take a chance on the home of your dreams. The President's economic advisers will thank you, I'm sure.

Just in case anyone thought that things were getting just a little too quiet and complacent in the local area, along comes this startling headline from last week's newspaper:

====================

No evidence of shots

fired at school

====================

Now, I hate to be the kind of old fogey who's always complaining about the sorry state of modern life, and bemoaning the fact that things were so much better back in the good old days, so that even our old friends the dinosaurs are tired of hearing about it, much less the young whipper-snappers of this day and age. But I do have to say that this headline is a textbook example of what us old-timers would describe as a "non-story" and one that begs more questions than it answers. I can understand that if shots are fired at a school, it certainly deserves a mention in the local press, except perhaps in some wild and woolly far-flung outpost of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where anything goes and usually does. But when there are in fact NO shots fired at a school, in the heart of the bucolic and circumspect suburbs, I wouldn't expect to find that newsworthy in any way, and in fact, I would like to consider it more the rule than the exception on a regular basis. I tell you, you just can't make this stuff up.

Speaking of things that get your attention, it was in June that I noticed this curious tidbit in the TV listings for WNJN, a public broadcasting station in New Jersey:

=====================

Primary Election Night Coverage 2010

=====================

I can assure you that there is nobody more enthusiastic about getting out there and exercising our French fries - I mean, franchise - than yours truly, but even I would have to draw the line at sitting through 3 hours of election coverage in prime time, of primary races from over nine months ago. I mean, many of those candidates have probably already had to resign from office in disgrace by now, the way things are going in politics nowadays, and that's not just the old fogeys and dinosaurs talking, believe me. The political scene fared no better in this review of ABC's "The Killing:"

==========================

Richmond's campaign hopes rise along

with his popularity in the poles

===========================

Either this is another case of homophone trouble again, or this gentleman has limited his efforts to the denizens of the North and South Poles, and frankly, I don't know what it would take to appeal to the elves and reindeers of the North, and the penguins of the South, and I probably wouldn't want to know either. Obviously the spell-checker was no help at the polls, or perhaps they made the mistake of asking Santa Claus instead. They seem to have called out the highway department on this next synopsis of TNT's "Franklin and Bash:"

============================

Franklin and Bash take on a difficult

case that requires them to use their

unique style of courtroom flare

============================

I will have you know that I am not a legal professional, and I don't even play one on television, but even I know that they don't want people to take flares into court, for heaven's sake, and that's really not just the old fogeys and dinosaurs talking this time. The networks may love a flamboyant lawyer's flair, but for everyone's safety, they'd better leave their flares at home. There's no sense making the litigation system even more incendiary, I'm thinking.

I can't close without this perplexing notice that we received from our neighborhood association, about a couple of long-term residents who are relocating out of the area. Except for the fact that I personally know the individual who prepared the notice, I would think this was a recent arrival at our shores, whose grasp of the English language was painfully tenuous:

===========================

Friends are organizing a farewell cocktail party to cheer joyfully to their new life in Connecticut.

You are cordially invited to share cocktails, appetizers and good time.

RSVP by email, phone or in person (walking dog times are great!)

As usual, the wheelbarrel will be on duty for support as needed.

============================

Cheer joyfully? Good time? Walking dog times? And what the heck is a wheelbarrel? (That last one sounds particularly objectionable, like something you would go over Niagara Falls in.) Frankly, it sounds to me like the hosts got a little bit of an early start on the cocktails before they ever started working on this notice, and apparently dragged the spell-checker right along with them, because anybody can tell you that wheelbarrel is not even a word. In any case, I had to tell them that I would be unable to joy cheerfully at the good time, because the dinosaurs and I would be busy watching election coverage from the late Mesozoic Era, when the incumbent Yog of the Dirt Party, was narrowly defeated by the Cold Front's challenger Thak, on a platform of "A Fire in Every Cave." Of course, this was eons before the invention of paper ballots, so the eligible voters had to cast their lots with rocks, and for those of us on the Election Board, dragging those votes around in wheelbarrels was no fun, I can tell you that.

Elle

In The Know

2011-07-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

I'm thinking that people should probably be sitting down before I just blurt this right out, but the fact of the matter is that we find ourselves perched atop the very last weekend in July, believe it or not, and Monday will already be August, as impossible as that might seem. I can't imagine what's ahead for the weather, since we've already had three weeks with the most torrid temperatures and soaring humidity, so that if the fabled "Dog Days of August" are going to be even worse than this, heck, even the dogs will be flying to Canada for the summer, and not just the famous geese of the same name. Several days, the state declared a Heat Emergency, and at work, they asked us to shut off lights and turn off unnecessary equipment, and when even that wasn't enough, they sent us home early. Although why they thought I wanted to go home, where it was hot, rather than stay at work, where it was cool, is a mystery to me, I'm sure. And I realized that it would do no good to sneak downstairs into the Morgue to chill out, when I discovered that the line for that was wrapped completely around the building, thanks not.

On the local scene, alert readers may recall the contractors-in-the-driveway scenario while I was trying to pack up the car for vacation, some of whom turned out to be roofers. They worked their magic while I was away, and I came home to find that all of the gaping holes in our old roof were a thing of the past, with all the patches seamlessly integrated into the rest of the roof without leaving a trace. For the first time in years, our roof was prepared to act in its original capacity of repelling the elements from the outside, while keeping everything on the inside safe and secure. We could not have been happier if the late and lamented Ed McMahon had shown up at our door with one of those big cardboard checks, because for us, it really did feel like we won the lottery. Unfortunately, I said to Bill, we'll never know if it actually worked or not, because now that the roof was fixed, it would surely never rain again in our area for the rest of our lives, or perhaps ever, until the end of time for all we know. But it didn't take long for us to have a few days with tremendous thunderstorms, with lightning crashing about in all directions and thunder booming like cannon fire, and amazingly enough, we didn't have to go scurrying off for pans and buckets like we usually would in those conditions. So that was either an early Christmas present, or a late Easter miracle, but whatever you want to call it, kindly do so with a few choruses of "How Dry I Am."

Meanwhile at work, we received a broadcast memo from the President of the hospital, for the purpose of welcoming aboard what he described as "the most recent addition to our team," who is now apparently our Senior Vice President for Clinical Systems Development. How remarkably coincidental that this position has just been instantaneously created out of whole cloth, and there's already someone on the spot to fill it - and not just any old anybody who happened to be kicking around the place anyway, but some total unknown who comes to us from some entity identified as Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine, of all things. It goes on to say that the person " ... will be responsible for assisting us in transforming our clinics to a patient centered medical home. This will broaden access to primary care, while enhancing care coordination for the patients we serve. An additional responsibility will be developing an Independent Physicians' Association, ensuring a complete continuum of care for our community." I have to tell you that I have been working here over 20 years, and I have a pretty good grasp of healthcare gobbledygook after all this time, and I have absolutely no idea what this means. I walk through the Clinic almost every single day, and I could not begin to tell you what the heck is a "patient centered medical home," much less how this will "broaden access to primary care." I'm sure an Independent Physicians' Association (whatever that is) would be a great idea, but how that ensures "a complete continuum of care for our community" is entirely beyond me. If this was four months ago, I'd say the Yalies were pulling an April Fool's joke on us, because as it is, I have no other explanation for this in any way.

Also at work, I happened to be filing a memo from one of the consultants, about an equipment proposal that listed two different units for comparison purposes. It then went on to say:

=========================
Once we let them know which model we are going with, they will remove the remaining unit from the quote, which will intern lower the quoted amount appropriately.
=========================

Just when you think you can't be surprised by homophones anymore, along comes someone who manages to take the word "intern" and the phrase "in turn," and somehow make them interchangeable, which you would think would be impossible for just about anybody except the horoscope computer. Well, as I always say in cases like this, the spell-checker is never going to help you with this, although you wouldn't think it would take a college education and a wall full of degrees to come up with a whopper like that one, by golly.

Going in the opposite, but not any better, direction, is a memo from the Accounts Payable Manager about a new program for rental equipment that was initiated in October 2010, but without any of the necessary paperwork that should have been processed beforehand. She notes that the expense for the program is about $22,000.00 per month, and none of the invoices can be paid, for lack of documentation. Her final salvo is this arresting declaration:

============================
Please advice if this info is correct. If so this will have a great in pack when the company starts looking for payments.
============================

So while the consultant combines the expression "in turn" into a single word, here in A/P they go the other route by breaking apart the word "impact" and somehow winding up with "in pack" instead, and not any sort of an improvement, as far as I can tell. Once again, the over-burdened spell-checker is going to have no choice but to leave you high and dry, and hanging out in packs, if you can't get any closer to "impact" on your own. [Please see note above about college education, etc.] Actually, my favorite part about the whole thing is not the linguistic transgressions, but the pure hospital-centric obliviousness to the reality of the situation. The program started in October of last year, and we are now on the brink of August, which is a full 10 months later. Her concern is "when the company starts looking for payments," and I'm afraid that I've got a news flash for her. At $22,000 a month, you can believe that the company no doubt started looking for payments last year in November, and December, and every month after that, and hasn't just been sitting around on their hands all this time, until we practically owe them $250,000.00 by now, and never made any attempt to bring it to our attention. Of course, when you're dealing with a place where the interns are great in packs, getting their attention is probably a lot harder than it sounds, particularly when they're busy transforming into a patient centered medical home, and I ought to know. (NOT)

Elle

Picture Perfect

2011-07-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

So here I am, back from adventures in vacation-land, and this was certainly one for the books, and that's not just the marshmallows talking, believe me. I can honestly say that I don't ever remember having this kind of weather in all the years I've been camping, every single day was just perfect, one right after another, eight of them in a row, and it could not have been more ideal the whole time I was out there. I take a weather radio with me so I can keep abreast of the local conditions, in case there's anything I need to be prepared for, and I never turned it on once. Every single day started out beautiful, stayed beautiful, and then turned into a beautiful night of full moons and sparkling stars in every direction. It was like "The Stepford Wives" of vacation weather, and I can tell you that they could sign me up for a time-share of that every year, by golly.

It all started on Friday, when I took off from work so I could finish packing up the car, although it must be said that having hot-and-cold-running contractors all over the driveway made this process a lot more complicated than it usually is. We set off bright and early on Saturday - and even remembered the tent this time - and even better, found out that it hadn't been chewed apart by furry varmints over the winter as might have been expected. There was no traffic to speak of, which is a first in our travel experiences over the years, and we not only arrived at the park in record time, but found both campsites already vacant. In fact, we were surprised not to see the usual "CAMP FILLED TO CAPACITY" sign at the entrance, because it was obvious that there was not a free campsite to be had for love or money, no matter where you looked. We quickly tossed up the tents and rain fly and clothesline, and then hurried to the beach for some fun in the sun. The beach was crowded, as indeed it should have been on such a day, but splashing around in the water is definitely a tonic for what ails you, that's for sure. For lunch, the cheese fries were up to their usual standards, and we made short work of them. This was already way better than last year, when we had all the tedious driving and setting up the campsite, but because it was raining, we never got the reward of spending the afternoon at the beach, which makes it all worthwhile.

After enough sand and surf for one day, we turned toward our next destination, the Gaslight Motor Inn at Medford, where we had stayed last year, and found it much the same, although somehow even quieter. They had been busy refurbishing the rooms since our last stay, and were happy to give us one of the new ones with a 42" flat screen TV, which was nice because we had brought our own DVD player, and had a chance to watch some movies while we were there. The first night, we went down the block to the Metropolis Diner as usual, and glad of it, but the night after that, we found a way to bring our vacation experience to a whole new level. Alert readers may recall that my sister had introduced us to what we thought was the first Denny's on Long Island in Levittown, but we later found out that another one had opened before that in Centereach. So you can imagine how pleased we were to discover that Centereach is handily located within minutes of Medford, and our GPS brought us to the exact spot for dinner, which was a vacation treat that had never been within our grasp until now. Between the weather, the water, and dinner at Denny's, this was about as close to vacation nirvana as we could hope to attain.

In addition to eating out two nights in a row, I can assure you that the President's economic advisers have much to thank us for, as we did much to improve the local economy by shopping at not one, but two Wal*Marts, Target, Walgreens, King Kullen, and numerous CVS stores during our stay, snapping up not only practical household necessities, but also the usual ridiculous souvenirs and junk food that are synonymous with vacations. I'm expecting my commendation from the White House any day now.

Bill went back home on Monday afternoon to hold down the fort, and I hunkered down to setting up the rest of the campsite for the duration. Monday night it was so quiet at the park that I actually didn't need my earplugs, which have been a mainstay of my vacations since the beginning. One big improvement in my campfires this year was bringing along a new "zero-gravity" lounge chair to replace my old busted lounge, and it was not only blissfully comfortable for enjoying the campfire with, but has a handy feature that when you take the lock off, it basically launches you right up onto your feet, so you don't have to try and struggle to get yourself out of a regular lounge and instead wind up collapsed in a tangled heap. On the wildlife front, there were plenty of squirrels, even black squirrels, which are so new to the park that startled campers mistook them for skunks. There were the usual deer and raccoons, and all the blue jays, crows and grackles that you could ask for. I could hear chipmunks, and actually saw a couple in different parts of the campground, but alas, this was yet another year with no bad chipmunk pictures at my site. But I did hear what I believe is an Eastern Screech Owl at night, which is the first time I ever remember that happening. And speaking of firsts, I went to the locally famous Duck Pond to take pictures as I always do, and noticed that there was not a single duck at the place. There were seagulls and mallards and Canada geese, but not one solitary regular white duck to be seen from one end to the other, and this is a pretty sizable pond, believe me. I haven't heard of white ducks becoming scarce, but if things don't change, they're going to have to call this the Goose-Gull-Mallard Pond instead.

It was on Tuesday that I walked all the way to the beach, carrying everything I need to stay there all day, and discovered to my horror that I had somehow forgotten to bring the camera along with me. It will come as a surprise to everybody, myself most of all, that I dumped everything in the sand, and turned right around and walked all the way back up to the campsite to get it. So now it can be officially said that I have finally gone completely insane, because anyone can tell you that there is no one more "old school" than I am when it comes to Wildwood Beach, where there is no such thing as walking all the way back up the hill just because you forgot something. In the old days, the camping old guard would not only laugh, they would have you committed to a shady retreat for victims of sunstroke. So I have now officially joined the ranks of the insane, and lived to tell the tale, and still had a great day at the beach anyway. Although I did get more exercise than I wanted to, that's for sure.

Speaking of more exercise, this was yet another year that the vending machine wasn't working by the ladies room, so every morning I had to walk two sections away to the Registration building, and back again, to get a cold drink for breakfast, thanks not. They also moved the barrel where people dump their campfire ashes, so I spent more time running errands than I really wanted to. But in my travels, I noticed that there was really nobody at the park on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, not even the usual spies that crop up every year with their telltale abandoned-looking campsites. It started to pick up again on Thursday, with a steady stream of arrivals from mid-day until late at night, which is what makes good weather a kind of double-edged sword when you're looking to enjoy a quiet week in the woods. Oddly enough, there was a little bit of a sprinkle on Wednesday evening while the sun was still shining, and we thought nothing of it. But they must have had some severe storms somewhere, because the next day, the usually placid Wildwood briny was a roiling tempest of angry swells, with whitecaps everywhere, and thunderous waves crashing onto the shore so that you couldn't even hear yourself think. This was so unlike an ordinary day at Wildwood that I made a short video of it, because even long-time regulars like me very rarely see any real surf at the place, if ever. The beach was strewn with seaweed and driftwood all the way past the boardwalk and up to the bluffs, which is a good 30-feet beyond the usual high tide mark, so it must have been quite a sight at its height. The waves were so ferocious that they scared off the casual bathers, and even the youngsters were wary of splashing around at the water's edge. I was about the first person to actually brave the breakers, and got knocked down for my trouble, but I stuck with it in spite of the extraordinary conditions. Of course, everyone knows that I am now officially insane anyway.

After an otherwise uneventful week where nothing bad happened for a change, Bill arrived back at the campsite bright and early on Saturday, to help pack up so we could check out on time. This actually worked better than expected, and we had some extra time to just relax and enjoy the morning, without racing around like a couple of lunatics. Then it was off for a last time at the beach, and although it was crowded again, it was another lovely day and nothing to quibble about. When it was time to pack up and call it a day, we were sorry to bid our fond farewells to vacation-land and turn towards home. Suddenly a brilliant inspiration! It occurred to Bill that we would be driving right past that Denny's in Centereach on our way home, and just about dinner time, and why not take advantage of this additional opportunity to stop there once again, thus adding a little more vacation magic to our journey, before we would have to leave it all behind for another year. So that was just about the perfect cap to a perfect vacation, where the weather could not have been more spectacular, and everything else just seemed to fall right into place. At least that's how I intend to remember it, and now that I've officially gone insane, I can tell you that it will do no good to argue with me, heaven knows.

Elle

Off We Go

2011-07-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Well, I see that July 4th has come and gone, and I was glad to have a long three-day weekend to enjoy it with no other obligations to get in the way. The Flag Brigade did an excellent job of putting the flags out in the morning, upstairs and downstairs, and also remembering to take them back inside later, which is not something we take for granted with The Flag Brigade around here, believe me. On Saturday, we got our plaid on for the 88th annual Round Hill Highland Games at Cranbury Park in Norwalk, and a fine time was had by all, particularly all of us fans of our favorite Celtic fusion band, Mac Talla M'or, who are always a special treat to see live. With the sound of bagpipes still ringing in our ears, we headed off to Denny's for dinner, which somehow managed to add even more wonderfulness to an already wonderful day, especially with their delightful new Hawaiian Tropical Smoothie thrown in for good measure. This is my idea of time off for good behavior, and we made the most of it, by golly.

Yesterday it must have been about 90 degrees out, so I was understandably surprised when I leaned against one of the radiators in the house and burned my hand. I walked around and checked, and sure enough, all of the radiators were red hot and tossing off heat like a drunken sailor throwing punches in a bar-room brawl. Having the heat running full-blast in the middle of July is not a common occurrence in our experience, and it must be said that all of this heat in no way improved the interior conditions in the place at the time, I can tell you that. Of course, Bill leaped into action, and dashed headlong down the basement stairs, and soon had the furnace back under control, from where it had apparently lost its steam-powered marbles, either in a misguided fit of unseasonable insanity, or perhaps diabolical instructions from our power company, I shouldn't wonder. On the other hand, everyone knows that I wouldn't rule out the ghost of Affirmed, either.

Meanwhile at work, the stupid little lot where I park happens to be on the street that the municipality runs their road tests for people applying for a drivers license, and on the days when they do this, you can see the dead-end part of the street is parked solid with driving hopefuls and their instructors, just awaiting the signal to begin. Earlier in the week, I was walking to my building from the parking lot at the same time that one of the applicants took off, no doubt with high hopes and cheerful enthusiasm, only to get to the very first corner and drive right over the curb. Ouch! I'm thinking that's not the most auspicious start to the test, and I'm sure our old friends the dinosaurs would agree with me on that, if they would only stop laughing long enough.

Speaking of inauspicious starts, alert readers may recall that my camping gear was moved out of the attic last year, after the furry varmints chewed on it, thanks not, and after I came back from vacation, it stayed in the living room, where at least I didn't have to worry about it getting chewed on by anybody. Unfortunately, the furry varmints had the last laugh after all, because it turned out to be in a spot that was under a leak, and I never noticed it until I was gathering up everything I needed to pack, and was disheartened to find things like the cot and beach towels all soggy, and once again, thanks so very much not. Now, I will admit that taking pre-wet towels to the beach might be someone's idea of a time-saving concept, but it's the kind of slippery moral prevarication that I simply have to draw the line at, and that's all there is to it.

And while we're on the subject of drawing lines, we had a gaggle of contractors at our house earlier, who arrived en masse to consider what might be done about our sagging porch. In fact, there were so many of them, and they created such a disturbance with their equipment, that they actually chased off the neighbor's redoubtable kitty, the omnipresent Cinna-Mooch, and don't forget, this was the cat who plunged head-first into the Vimovo commercial shoot across the street without a second thought. In any case, the contractors decided that they needed to clear some space from the front steps to the side porch, and chopped down some of the more obstreperous weeds along the way, and my poor little pink bleeding heart plant right along with it, thanks not. But I noticed later that they didn't touch the rampant alien mutant poison ivy that was right next to it, they just left it standing right there, waving its tentacles in a menacing fashion, and just as much in the way as anything else that they already cut down. Say, I guess those contractors aren't as dumb as they look, after all.

Alert readers may recall a previous note on the topic of early Christmas music for churches, and by "early," I don't mean early in the history of the Christian church throughout the ages, but early in the sense of arriving in June, rather than closer to the holiday in December. After giving this some thought, Bill had this to say about it:

============================
I also loved the "ready to sing" songs. Makes me wonder if people have gotten SO ahead of themselves that they are impatient with EVERYTHING. Like the fine print on the Regular Songs might read "we are so excited about bringing this new music to you that we are publishing it before the composer is done writing it. Please be advised that early-adopters will be notified when a complete score becomes available. Your results may vary and sample MP3s are not typical."

Or, perhaps, the Ready To Sing songs actually come complete with singers? Maybe you fill in which parts you, personally sing and they provide the missing people? "Even people with desperate performance anxiety can now perform our Ready To Sing songs with no fear whatsoever! All songs come with a pre-certified singer, Ready To Sing them for you."
============================

I think he may be onto something there, and frankly, I love that idea of the singers that come along with the music. Taking that a step further, how great it would be to order Sunday School curriculum materials and have them send a teacher with it; or a cookbook that included a first-class chef; or mail-order plants that came with their own gardener - the possibilities are endless. That last one sounds like a winner to me, although there would probably be some disclaimer in the fine print that they are not required to deal with rampant alien mutant poison ivy, alas.

I took a day off today so that I could finish packing for vacation, and now I'm just about as ready as I'm going to be. In the local area, it spent the day mostly raining on and off, so I'm hoping that it has now gotten it out of its system, and I can look forward to a whole week of beautiful weather, not like last year, for heaven's sake. So nobody will hear from me next week, as I will be out in the woods, and splashing in the waves, and completely "off the grid" in terms of modern technology and electronic gadgets of all kinds. In fact, the dinosaurs even suggested that I leave the tent at home, and fashion myself a lean-to out of branches and vines, but I thought that was taking it a bit too far. I mean, I realize that they find themselves hugely amusing - one might even say of epic proportions - but I had to remind them there's a reason they became extinct.

Elle

One Fine Day

2011-07-01T20:10:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

Happy July! Monday will be Independence Day, of course, and I hope that you will be liberated from drudgery, free from difficulties, and blissfully unfettered from cares of any kind. Many of us working stiffs are looking forward to a three-day weekend, and grateful for an opportunity to relax and recharge our batteries, as it were, and I ought to know. I can't say that this was a short week at work by any means, because I was there every day, but in every other respect, it certainly had all the drawbacks of a short week, and none of the advantages, which is my idea of the worst of both worlds, and thanks so very much not. So I was glad to see the tail-end of it, and that's putting it mildly, and even though I left early because of the upcoming holiday, it still wasn't soon enough to suit me, believe me. Although in fairness, in order for it to have been soon enough to suit me, I would have had to have left at around 10:00 AM on Monday morning, the way this week turned out.

Speaking of weeks, I can tell you that they're not the same old dog-eared and shop-worn chronologic stalwarts since time immemorial, and that's a fact. It was on Monday that our local newspaper printed the following announcement on the front page of their Life & Style section:

=====================
Writers' Week Starts Today

Manhattanville College's 28th Annual Summer Writers'
Week takes place today through Wednesday
=====================

Let's see - that's Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday ...... hmmmmm. To my way of thinking, that falls rather far short of a week, by at least several days on both ends, so much so that a person trying to catch up with Writers' Week on Friday would be sorely disappointed. You would think after 28 years, that the brilliant and creative minds behind Writers' Week would have figured out that three days do not make a week, and instead would have called it a conference or seminar or workshop, and left it at that. Alert readers may recall earlier in the year when this same newspaper brought us word of the locally famous Hudson Valley Restaurant Week, which runs for 15 days, and represents another example of the poor word "week" being misused in such a haphazard manner as to render it a misnomer through no fault of its own. I mean, it seems to me this is a pretty fast and loose interpretation of a very specific word, which actually describes a precise period of time, and you would think that it wouldn't be subject to this sort of linguistic impunity, like any old abstract concept. Of course, there are no standards anymore, heaven knows, and this is just more creeping equivocation, where words have lost all their meaning. Personally, I blame the Theory of Relativity.

And while we're on the subject of relativism run amok, it was on May 7 that I saw a commercial for the new Anne Hathaway movie, titled "One Day," which was being touted as one of the big summer hit films that we could look forward to after Memorial Day ushered in the official summer season. It was getting a lot of media attention, and I kept seeing ads for it everywhere I went, on television, in the newspaper, and on the home pages of several different browsers, over the course of many weeks. Finally I got so tired of it that I actually read the fine print on one of them, only to discover the following unpleasant surprise: [ "In theaters nationwide August 19." } Excuse me??? Anyone who knows me can tell you that math is not my strong suit, but even I can figure out that's almost 4 months ahead of time that I first started seeing promo spots for this, and far from being the hit of summer movies, is a lot closer to the first day of fall than the first day of summer, by golly. Of course, I'm measuring that in standard weeks, not the screwy newfangled 3-day or 15-day weeks they have invented nowadays.

And on the topic of rushing things, I don't know if this can be blamed on over-enthusiasm, commercialism gone wild, or those newfangled weeks they've just invented, but here was another unpleasant surprise showing up at church last week. It was still in June, and is actually the earliest I can ever remember receiving a catalogue of Christmas music, of all things, when it is still literally 6 months before the season of the holly-jolly-ho-ho-holy-Moses, Batman! Our friends at Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing are pulling no punches, flat-out calling their little visitor "Christmas 2011," and all aglow with stars, ornaments, candles, and more herald angels than you could shake a candy cane at, believe me. Although small in size, it comes packed with page after page of holiday sheet music, music collections, caroling resources, musical dramas and pageants, for churches of all shapes and sizes, and singers of all ages and abilities. The part that caught my eye was the selection of what they describe as "Ready to Sing" musical resources, which they highlight throughout their catalogue so that I don't miss a single one. Apparently this is a growing category in music circles, but for me, it begs the question that if these pieces are identified as "Ready to Sing," what obstacles are in the way of the other ones being ready to sing? Do you have to pass a test? Submit an application and have it approved? Plant it in a garden and wait for it to grow? How far in advance do you have to buy something if you have to wait for it to be ready to sing, and besides, how can you tell when it is finally ready to sing? Does it bloom? Smell? Burst into song? Send you a text message, or chirp like your smoke detector battery when it needs to be changed? I'm afraid this is all too much hugger-mugger for me, and while I'm the first to champion the idea that there's no wrong way to celebrate a holiday, I simply refuse to jump aboard the Christmas-in-June bandwagon, no matter how many herald angels they may throw at me, and that's not just a lot of ding-dong-merrily-on-high, believe me.

In other local news, long-suffering fans of the junior pinstripe franchise have become positively delirious in celebrating the fact that the Mets are two games over .500 for the first time this season, as if they had just won the seventh game of the World Series, or even accomplished something meaningful that would have justified their enormous payroll. In fact, they've gone beyond scoreboard-watching (and this is before the All-Star break, mind you) and are already poring over the standings in the Wild Card races, and while I hate to rain on anyone's parade, there's still another half of the season ahead of us yet. But they've had little enough to cheer them so far this year, or even the last several years in a row, so I suppose it doesn't hurt to let them have their fun. Of course, it may not last long, as their lovable losers will be taking on the Bombers in a cross-town rivalry this weekend, who are legitimately in first place, and didn't get there by accident, or even chicanery, although personally, I wouldn't turn my back on the ghost of Affirmed either. So it could be an interesting week ahead, which as we all know, can apparently last anywhere from three days to fifteen days, depending on your interpretation of the term, and at this rate, there's no escaping the possibility that Christmas might be just around the corner. I don't know about you, but I'll start incubating my "not-yet-ready-to-sing" holiday music just in case.

Elle

Boys of Summer

2011-06-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Of course, everyone knows how I hate to be an alarmist, but I feel it's only fair to point out that we've arrived at the very last Friday in June, because next Friday will be July 1st, believe it or not. By golly, the year is half over already, and if you're anything like me, you've certainly got nothing to show for it, and that's putting it mildly. The first six months have just flown by in a blur of missed opportunities, dashed hopes, broken dreams and more wasted time than you could shake a stick at. And I don't mind saying, if shaking sticks at things is not a textbook example of wasting time, then I'll eat my proverbial hat, and toss in the rest of the proverbs right along with it. I can tell you that things are going to shape up around here, and pretty darned quick, or I'll know the reason why, and the rest of the year is not going to be a pitiful repeat of the first half, not by a long shot. The scoffers and nay-sayers can think what they like, and please disregard the derisive howls of laughter from our old friends the dinosaurs, who claim to have heard the same thing from me at least once a year, since the time we first roamed the vast unformed land masses amidst the primordial ooze, and down through every subsequent geologic era thereafter. Personally, I think there's something to be said for the hobgoblin of little minds, and here I'm not just talking through my proverbial hat, believe me.

In the local area, it seems our old nemesis Comrade Mischka is up to his old tricks with the Kremlin's infernal weather machine, and you not only don't know what to expect from day to day, but even more often, during the same day, from one moment to the next. People leave the house in the morning in their boots and raincoats, and by the middle of the day, they're out in tank tops and flip-flops, only to be scurrying for cover when bands of thunderstorms suddenly blow in out of nowhere. A person could be forgiven for thinking that we had all been mysteriously transported to Chicago, where the weather is so famously unpredictable that the local slogan is, "Don't like the weather? Wait twenty minutes." I will say that at the times that it was nice, it was beautiful, and when the poets wondered, "What is so rare as a day in June" (if only they had) it was with good reason. But it was interspersed with so much rain, and cold, and fog, and hail, and flooding, and high winds, and lightning, and every other darned thing, that it was impossible to enjoy. It's at times like this, when I'm shivering in my office and wearing socks to bed, that I always find myself bewildered at the idea that I'll be camping in three weeks, and pondering ways to squeeze more long-johns into my luggage. Right now, leaving the tank tops and flip-flops home sounds like a pretty good start.

If we've gotten this far into June, it stands to reason that Father's Day has also come and gone, and indeed it has. Last Sunday was the time to honor the contributions of dear old dad, and all of the father figures in our lives, and give them the recognition that they so richly deserve. The tattered remnant of our cats did not shrink from the challenge, and showered Bill with some practical household items, entertainment and technology, with not a catnip mouse in sight - although I will say that the vote on that was very close and contentious, believe me. The weather was surprisingly nice, so anyone with outdoor plans for the holiday could make the most of it, and treating The King of The Castle to a special day worth remembering. Not so fast! I was off from work on Monday, and all day long, noticed the same pop-up ad showing up on my computer, everywhere I went from morning to night. It was animated, so a person couldn't help but notice it, and it had a cartoon picture identified as Dad, with this arresting announcement:

==========================
Father's Day is Sunday, June 21
SEND YOUR DAD A FREE ECARD
from myfuncards.com
==========================

Now, this is where I simply have to join in with Dave Barry, and say, you just can't make this stuff up. Here it is, the Monday after Father's Day, and these people are trying to convince everyone that the holiday is still in front of us, and the day after Monday the 20th is somehow going to turn into Sunday the 21st. This sounds to me like the imaginary Comrade Mischka's even more illusory cousin, the nefarious Comrade Sergei and his dastardly date machine, trying to throw a Russian monkey wrench into the clock-work chronology of the month that had been running like a fine Swiss watch up to now. Or perhaps he was planning to use his Way-Back Machine to bring us all back to 2009, when Father's Day actually was on Sunday, June 21, or even more interestingly, racing ahead into the future to 2015, or whenever the next time is that Father's Day will once again be on Sunday, June 21. The one thing I do know is that it isn't this year, in spite of what our friends at myfuncards.com want us to believe, and you can tell Comrade Sergei that I said so.

Speaking of notable dates, far from being the repeat of Father's Day from 2009, Tuesday was actually The First Day of Summer, although since it was a bracing 50 degrees and raining at the time, a person could be forgiven for overlooking the occasion. So now we have officially entered that glorious season of hammocks and lemonade, watermelon and barbecues, swimming and soaking up rays. And so what may be new and exciting in the wide world of outdoor furniture and accessories, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. Luckily, I have the Spring/Summer 2011 catalogue from our friends at Kirby Built Quality Products, and you can feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at http://www.kirbybuilt.com/ and see for yourself. They offer a wide variety of items including benches and tables, message centers, shelters, signs, trash receptacles, and what they refer to as "Site Amenities," in a vast array of styles and colors to suit the most discriminating tastes. Well, that is to say, if your discriminating tastes are in the market for what they describe as products "Made From The Highest Quality of Recycled Plastic Lumber." Excuse me??? If that's not a red-letter, brass-plated, double-barrel oxymoron, well then, the oxies and morons and the dinosaurs and I simply don't know what it would take, because that's a whopper if ever there was one. I mean, if I was making plastic furniture, I certainly wouldn't blare it across the front of my catalogue to begin with, for all the world to see, as if this was some kind of unique luxury that humanity was clamoring for. But the very last thing I would do would be to call it "plastic lumber," which is criminal misuse of a perfectly good word that already describes what it's made out of. You may as well say, "cement lumber," or "steel lumber," or "seaweed lumber," for all the sense it makes to modify a word for wood with a different substance altogether. Of course, the dinosaurs and I realize that there are no standards anymore, heaven knows, and I don't mind saying (with apologies to Joyce Kilmer) here we thought that only God can make a tree.

Elle

Sugar Babies

2011-06-18T20:37:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

So here we are, more than halfway through June, as hard as that may seem to believe, and all sorts of eventful happenings in the local area and also on the wider stage. Of course, Tuesday was Flag Day, and the Flag Brigade leaped into action early in the morning, running up the colors upstairs and downstairs for all the world to oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light and all that. The day started out nice enough, but soon became changeable, and looked like it was on its way to getting even worse. The Flag Brigade was racing across town at the time, and almost made it all the way home before it started raining in earnest, and not looking forward to pulling in wet and bedraggled flags on two floors, besides finding a likely spot to dry them out. Not to worry! Bill, without any prompting, snatched both flags out of harm's way in plenty of time, and brought them safely inside and protected from the elements, long before the panting Flag Brigade pulled up screeching to a halt and ran up the steps. Personally, I would have to say that the ghost of the formidable Barbara Frietchie cannot be ruled out.

In the realm of eventful happenings, the sports scene has certainly been jumping lately, in more ways than one. Although the NBA playoffs started after their counterparts in the NHL, somehow it was the hoops that finished first, while the pucks were still flying. I'm thinking that it must have come as a big surprise in Miami, when the Dallas Mavericks walked off with the Larry O'Brien Trophy in 6 games, in spite of the Heat's highly publicized moves in the off-season to acquire LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, and their plan to trash-talk their way to the title. On the other hand, they don't bother with trash-talk in hockey, they just beat each other up instead, and the battle for Lord Stanley's Cup turned into a tough series that went seven games, all hard played with lots of fights, suspensions, fines and injuries. The Canucks led the league in scoring during the season, but couldn't figure out the Bruins goaltender in the playoffs, and were outscored 23-8 in the series, as Boston brought home their first trophy since the glory days of Bobby Orr in 1972. Meanwhile, Vancouver erupted in riots after losing the final game on home ice, and the disappointed fans took out their frustration in fires, altercations, and a hail of broken glass. Of course, it's early yet, but I can see they'll be in great shape in time for the Waitangi Day riots in February.

In other sports news, there was no joy in Mudville last week, when the Yankees were swept out of their own ballpark by the rival Red Sox, who managed to climb out of the cellar (you remember their woeful 0-6 start to the season) and take over first place, which the Bombers had rightfully considered their own. On a related topic, it seems that the Yank's beloved shortstop is closing in on 3,000 career hits, and the local newspaper has started what they refer to as their "Jeter Meter" to track his progress toward this milestone on a game-by-game basis. I thought that was pretty clever for our paper, where they often have trouble just making the subjects agree with their verbs in the same sentence, or as they might put it: "May king thee sub jetzag re-zither verbenzy say me scent tents."

Meanwhile, the other local franchise has continued to plod along like the .500 team it is, and even when they do a lot of things right, still somehow find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, which is how you get to be a .500 team in the first place. A recent heart-breaking loss prompted one fan to post this impassioned plea on the team's blog:

========================
Is it too much to ask for the bullpen to try and keep the
ERA for the 7th and 8th innings to 10.00 or less?
========================

Any discussion of sports wouldn't be complete without mentioning the recent Belmont Stakes, the last jewel in the Triple Crown, and the longest of the lot, which usually does the job of separating the men from the boys, as it were. Of course, the ghost of Affirmed had already eliminated any possibility of a Triple Crown winner once again, so the only question was whether Animal Kingdom or Shackleford would win two out of three, or whether there would be three separate horses, each winning only one of the races this year. It was the latter this time around, as Ruler On Ice, a 24-1 long shot, splashed home in first place, with two other unknowns behind him. Derby winner Animal Kingdom stumbled out of the gate, never could catch up, and finished 6th, while Preakness winner Shackleford was never a factor in the race and finished a disappointing 5th. No doubt the muddy conditions played a role in the outcome, as some horses have a decided aversion to slogging through the mud, while others seem to have a positive affinity for it. I admit that I'm no expert on the occult, but I think it's bad enough that the ghost of Affirmed can affect the outcome of horse races, without also being able to control the weather before the race even starts, for heaven's sake.

On the local scene, we took a trip with our friends last weekend, to enjoy the picturesque qualities of Sugarloaf, the artist's colony in the heart of scenic Warwick Valley, which is a world away in the rolling rural countryside, and yet only a little more than an hour from our house in the urban hubbub. Bill and I had been there once before, when a colleague was visiting the area from out of state, but mobility challenges prevented us from seeing everything we wanted, so we were eager to go back and take another shot at it. We started out Saturday morning by meeting up at the Chester Diner, and for the first time ever, all three couples arrived in different cars than the last time we had been together, so there was a great deal of "show-and-tell" going on in the parking lot. We had never been there before, so the diner staff had no reason to quail before the prospect of our materializing in front of them, and seemed more than equal to the task, serving a brunch that was a rousing success. From there, it was just a hop and a skip to Sugarloaf (they encourage visitors to use their address of 1371 Kings Highway, Chester, New York 10918 for the purposes of their GPS devices, if you want to give it a try) which was the reason that we picked that diner in the first place. Our friends found the little shops charming, and pronounced the wooden sidewalks quaint, and I don't mind saying, the President's economic advisers would certainly appreciate all the money we spent there - in fact, I'm expecting to receive a commendation from them in the mail any day now. We were surprised that much had changed in Sugarloaf since we had been there, but even still, there was no lack of jewelry and apparel, soap, candles, pottery, stained glass, artwork, furniture and fashion accessories, all uniquely hand-crafted and miles away from the ordinary. We traipsed around all of the shops, some of them more than once, and enjoyed seeing all the beautiful or unusual objects they had to offer. Finally we crammed ourselves and our newly acquired paraphernalia back into the cars, and hit the road.

Our next stop was the Comfort Inn at Goshen, of all places, and here again, we picked this hotel for its proximity to Sugarloaf, so it took us no time at all to get there. The staff could not have been nicer or more helpful, and they quickly put us in three rooms on the same floor, including one that came with its own hot tub. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to make use of it, and the weather was too inclement for the outdoor pool, so that was disappointing. The front desk recommended a nearby tavern for dinner, where hotel guests receive a discount, but we found it too crowded and noisy for our tastes, and instead elected to return to the Chester Diner, which we were already familiar with. For some reason, dinner was not the same rousing success as brunch, in spite of the fact that we are not picky eaters, and had worked up hearty appetites walking around outside all day. We went back to the hotel and settled in for some cinematic entertainment, only to find that was a hit-or-miss proposition, with the hotel's electronic options being inadequate for our purposes. I will say that we had no trouble sleeping, and it was remarkably quiet for a place hosting two weddings, a softball team, a golf association and another commercial client all at the same time. In the morning, we availed ourselves of the breakfast buffet, which was handily located in the lobby so that we didn't have to go out foraging for food on our own.

After that, it was off to Orange County Choppers, of the "American Choppers" TV show, which is a lot more fun than it sounds, and the custom motorcycles are a spectacular sight and not to be missed. We even took a side trip to see the new home of Paul Junior Designs, who has apparently struck off on his own, although the business is not open to the public. All of this sightseeing is hungry work, and of course, there is that Denny's right on the spot in Newburgh, so I guess that anyone could see what direction things were going in here, and they'd be right. We had a wonderful lunch, including their scrumptious new Hawaiian Tropical Smoothie, which is easily one of the most delectable things I've ever put a straw into. We bid a fond farewell to our friends, who had a long trip home in front of them, but since it was still early, we decided to go back to Sugarloaf one more time, and pick up a few more goodies that we hadn't gotten around to the day before. And may I say to the President's economic advisers, "You're welcome." We arrived home without incident, which is our favorite way to travel, and the cats greeted our return with their signature bored indifference, as expected. Heck, they'll never be ready for the Waitangi Day riots at this rate.

Elle

On The Mark

2011-06-12T19:38:00.001-07:00

In this season of graduations, commencements, happy endings and new beginnings, here's a little something for all of the youngsters - and all of us oldsters - out there to enjoy!

====================================

"Advice to Youth" Mark Twain, 1882
Satire:a literary tone used to ridicule or make fun of human vice or weakness, often with the intent of correcting or changing the subject of the satiric attack. There's so much more to learn about satire. Reading a master at the art of satire will be your next assignment. Mark Twain (1835-1910) wrote "Advice to Youth" in 1882.
Being told I would be expected to talk here, I inquired what sort of talk I ought to make. They said it should be something suitable to youth -- something didactic, instructive, or something in the nature of good advice. Very well. I have a few things in my mind which I have often longed to say for the instruction of the young; for it is in one’s tender early years that such things will best take root and be most enduring and most valuable. First, then. I will say to you my young friends—and I say it beseechingly, urgingly—
Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don’t, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offend you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick. That will be sufficient. If you shall find that he had not intended any offense, come out frankly and confess yourself in the wrong when you struck him; acknowledge it like a man and say you didn’t mean to. Yes, always avoid violence; in this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.
Go to bed early, get up early- this is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun; some say get up with one thing, others with another. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with. It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with the lark; and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right, you can easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time—it’s no trick at all.
Now as to the matter of lying. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and ill finished lie, the result of carelessness born of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain , and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable. Patience, diligence, painstaking attention to detail—these are requirements; these in time, will make the student perfect; upon these only, may he rely as the sure foundation for future eminence. Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim that “Truth is mighty and will prevail”—the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal. There is in Boston a monument of the man who discovered anesthesia; many people are aware, in these latter days, that that man didn’t discover it at all, but stole the discovery from another man. Is this truth mighty, and will it prevail? Ah no, my hearers, the monument is made of hardy material, but the lie it tells will outlast it a million years. An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two years—except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course, but that is no merit of yours. A final word: begin your practice of this gracious and beautiful art early—begin now. If I had begun earlier, I could have learned how.
Never handle firearms carelessly. The sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but heedless handling of firearms by the young! Only four days ago, right in the next farm house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work, when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot. In her fright she ran screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right—it wasn’t. So there wasn’t any harm done. It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of. Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his grandmother every time, at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes one shudder.
There are many sorts of books; but good ones are the sort for the young to read, remember that. They are a great, an inestimable, and unspeakable means of improvement. Therefore be careful in your selection, my young friends; be very careful; confine yourselves exclusively to Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, The Innocents Abroad, and works of that kind.
But I have said enough. I hope you will treasure up the instructions which I have given you, and make them a guide to your feet and a light to your understanding. Build your character thoughtfully and painstakingly upon these precepts, and by and by, when you have got it built, you will be surprised and gratified to see how nicely and sharply it resembles everybody else’s.
Source: Advice to Youth Mark Twain, 1882

June Bugs

2011-06-04T19:30:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Happy June! It's hard to believe that we've actually entered the sixth month of the year, and no turning back now. Every day brings new joys in the garden, as the mountain laurel has graced us with its dainty pink flowers all over, and the yard is awash with buttercups in earnest, in spite of the landscapers' best efforts. Also the roses are unfolding on every side, and here we have everything from the creamiest pale pink to the deepest velvety maroon, and even a screaming orange called Gingersnap, that we bought in honor of our beloved princess. They've now been joined by the riotous explosion of wild roses, that no amount of landscapers' ministrations will ever tame. All over town, you also see that now is the time for lovely irises, for those people lucky enough to have them, in every color of the rainbow, although purple is still my favorite. We were surprised to see tall stalks of phlox scattered about in our yard, as Bill and I both agree that it's way too early for that, but there's no arguing with that indescribably exquisite fragrance. The rest of us may be complaining about the weather, but apparently the flowers are eating it up. Speaking of weather, all last week, we had the most ridiculously sweltering weather, exactly like the dog days of August, except 3 months too early, and just much too hot, too soon. Fortunately, Bill had a plan, and put in the window air conditioners when it was 90 degrees inside and out, with humidity off the charts, thanks not. Naturally, this did the trick, and the temperature dropped 20 degrees in one fell swoop. In fact, I wonder that it didn't usher in a whole new Ice Age on the spot, so I guess there must be something to this global warming stuff after all.

Last weekend was Memorial Day, of course, the unofficial start of the summer season, with all the transient pleasures it has to offer, of which one is my sister's historic barbecue for hundreds of their far-flung friends and acquaintances, plus the myriad strangers who just get sucked up into the vortex of its gravitational pull. I usually pick up my other sister at the bus station and bring her with me, but this time around she was unable to attend, so Bill was kind enough to fill in for her, and did an admirable job, considering this was his first time at the rodeo, as they say. We left the rodeo clowns behind, and stopped at Denny's on the way home, where they were complaining that there was no air conditioning, but that didn't slow us down a bit. At the time, there was not another living soul in the place besides us, so we got very attentive service, I can tell you that. I wanted to try one of their newly introduced tropical drinks, but we found out that it wasn't available yet, even though it was being advertised right there on their placemats, so that was disappointing. But I don't like to complain because it seems like going to Denny's is getting to be almost an embarrassment of riches for us lately, since we went on Easter at the end of April, again after the grand opening at Shanti-Bithi last month, and here again on Memorial Day. That's the kind of triple threat I can live with, believe me.

I intended to fly the flags on Monday for Memorial Day, which was also coincidentally May 30, traditionally known as Decoration Day, where usually these fall on two different days. But I thought the weather was questionable in the morning, and we were planning to be out all day, so I reluctantly gave up on the idea, because I didn't want to come home to the sight of wet and bedraggled Old Glory, and the sound of the aggrieved gray-headed Barbara Frietchie spinning in her fictional grave. I suppose it was just as well, because everyone know that we can't count on the poor addled brain cells (both of them) of the Flag Brigade anymore, to put the flags out and bring them back in again, even if we just assign one task each to G.I. Joe and Beetle Bailey, so they only have to remember one instead of both. Obviously what I need is for one of those brain cells to be Barbara Frietchie, and the other to be Betsy Ross, and then the Flag Brigade would really be in business, by golly.

If Memorial Day weekend has come and gone, as indeed it has, then that means that the venerable Indy 500 has also, roaring off into the sunset for another year. There was almost a fairy tale finish by a rookie, who practically led the whole way from pole to pole, that is, until fate stepped in. Our friends at Sports Illustrated describe it this way:

=========================

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- JR Hildebrand was one turn away from winning the Indianapolis 500 and within sight of the checkered flag when the 23-year-old rookie made the ultimate mistake.

Leading by almost 4 seconds with a lap to go, Hildebrand skidded high into the wall on the final turn, and Dan Wheldon drove past to claim an improbable second Indy 500 win Sunday in his first race of the year.

The first three turns went smoothly. Then Hildebrand moved to the outside and lost control, slamming the wall to a collective gasp from the crowd of 250,000. "I got up in the marbles and that was it,'' Hildebrand said.
=========================

I love that part about the marbles, whatever that means, but actually, my personal favorite account of the race is from our other friends at http://www.bleacherreport.com/

==========================
On the final turn of the final lap in the 2011 Indy 500, rookie J.R. Hildebrand wrecked. Dan Wheldon who had finished second in the race the past two years took advantage of Hildebrand's error to win the race.
The finish was under review to see if Wheldon passed Hildebrand before the yellow flag was waived.
It took hours after the race and no announcement was been made on the winner. They delay made it look like an overturn was possible.
==========================

"Waived?" "Was been?" "They delay?" Do I hear the ghost of Casey Stengel wondering, "Can't anybody here speak this language?" It's beginning to make me think that we may have finally discovered the source for the excerpts in the Best Bets section of our local newspaper's TV listings, where this kind of thing is all too common. Here's one that the spell-checker is never going to help you with:

======================
"TOY STORY 3"
As Andy leaves for college the toys are
pack and donated to a daycare but when
things get a little too rough they plan a
daring escape so they can go home
======================

Now, I understand that space is at a premium in this section, but leaving out all of the punctuation makes this description almost impossible to understand. And if the punctuation didn't save enough room, they also left the end off of "packed" and whatever the noun was supposed to be that would have been modified by "daycare," that is, if only it was there when the modifier was looking for it, alas. It was another holiday for the spell-checker in this next entry:

=====================
"PARANORMAL STATE"
A mirror inexplicably levitates and
hurdles itself to the ground
=====================

I realize this is paranormal stuff, but I can't even begin to imagine how double-jointed something would have to be in order to "hurdle itself," which might be considered as a new Olympic sport - The 100 Meter Hurdle Yourself - except for the fact that it would be impossible. It shouldn't take paranormal powers to come up with the word "hurtle" in the place of "hurdle," but I admit that the supernatural is not my field of expertise. The spell-checker is also not going to help you with this one:

==============
"CHASE"
The Marshals track down a prison escapee
who is hoping to find proof of his evidence
===============

I'm thinking it would be more useful for him to find proof of his innocence, rather than his evidence, but here again, law enforcement is not my specialty, so I may be wrong. The puzzling part is these two words aren't even homophones (like cereal and serial, for example) so you can't help but wonder how they still managed to mix them up. Heck, that would be like me mixing up my only two brain cells ..... hmmm, good old whats-his-name ..... uh, you know who I mean ..... oh, it's right here on the tip of my tongue ..... G.I. Frietchie and Beetle Ross, that must be them.

Elle

Animal Crackers

2011-05-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Happy Memorial Day weekend! I hope that you will have an opportunity to enjoy a long holiday weekend, with good weather, and above all, please get out there and take advantage of the multitude of holiday sales and promotions, on everything from A to Z, and I think some other letters that they had to borrow from languages on different planets. The President's economic advisers would thank you, I'm sure. This is one of the uncommon years that the Monday holiday actually falls on what was traditionally identified as Decoration Day, May 30, and not just the last Monday in the month, regardless of what day it is. I have to say that this will be a great advantage to the poor addled brain cells of the Flag Brigade (both of them, which I have renamed Beetle Bailey and G.I. Joe in honor of the occasion) since they won't be required to run up the colors on two different days as usual, and even more importantly, expected to remember to bring them back in again both times besides. That's getting to be just a little too much to expect out of poor Joe anymore, and it goes without saying that Beetle is just a totally lost cause.

In sports news, I see that the ghost of Affirmed was taking no chances with Animal Kingdom as a potential Triple Crown threat, and blew him out of the Preakness, without even waiting for the Belmont. The newspapers made a big deal about this being an upset, since Animal Kingdom had gone off as the 2-1 favorite, but the fact is that Shackleford led the entire Kentucky Derby field out of the gate, and all the way up to the backstretch, before Animal Kingdom came out of nowhere to run away with it in surprising fashion. Actually, Animal Kingdom was a 20-1 nobody who won the Derby to the amazement of just about everybody, including his owners, and perhaps it was unrealistic expectations that fueled the bettors' determination to make him the Preakness favorite, more for sentimental reasons than completely practical considerations. In both races, Shackleford has shown that he can run with anybody, and was certainly not the bolt-out-of-the-blue upset winner of the Preakness by any means, despite what the media would have us believe. Now that the ghost of Affirmed has already worked his evil sorcery once again, with no hope of a Triple Crown winner this year, there's no reason for him to bother influencing the next race in any way at all, so it should be a fair and untarnished contest among equals. It will be interesting to see how the two previous winners do over the longer course at the Belmont, or whether this is one of those years where three different horses win the three different races instead. People may call me an old softie, but I still think that Amare' Stoudemire of the Knicks has the elbows to go the distance.

In other sports news, the time came once again for inter-league play in baseball, and around here, that can mean only one thing - another highly charged matchup of the Big Apple franchises, for bragging rights throughout the boroughs. Anytime they get together, it's nothing but Subway Series mania all over the place, regardless of when it is during the season, or what their records are at the time. In fact, the rivalry is so fierce that one of the Amazing's loyalists on his way to the enemy camp for the game, posted this message on the Mets blog:

=======================
Heading out to the Grand Concourse for tonight's tilt.
Will be sporting the blue and the orange.
Tell my wife and kids I love them...
=======================

As of last week, both of their records were about equal, although the 24-20 Yankees were leading the AL East, while the hapless Mets at 22-23 were in the basement in their own division, thanks not. Speaking of subways, I can tell you that the rivalry is so all-encompassing that the only connection between the #7 train to Citifield in Queens, and the #4 train to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx is at Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan, so that tells you something right there. Anyway, the Mets took the opener, but then lost the next two games, which is about how their season has been going as a whole, so there's no surprise there. They will be going at it again in July, with each side looking to increase their advantage, but I won't be surprised if they end up with exactly the same won-loss record when it's all over, which is how you get to be a .500 team in the first place, and the Mets fans ought to know, believe me.

In other news, it came as a surprise to practically nobody that the world did not end last week as predicted, which may be good news or bad news, depending on your perspective. This was supposedly the brainchild of the venerable Harold Camping, whose decades worth of studying the Bible led him to this conclusion, although in fairness, it must be pointed out that he also came to this exact same conclusion in his book "1994," so his track record is not all that good to start with. Actually, the May 21 date was just for The Rapture, which is, calling the faithful to Paradise, while the rest of the Earth is plunged into political chaos, natural disasters, infrastructure catastrophes and raging epidemics. This is supposed to lead to the actual end of the physical world in October, and at that point, I'm thinking it would probably be considered good riddance to bad rubbish. Not so fast! There's apparently another whole contingent who believe that the end of the world will be in 2012 instead, with everyone from the ancient Mayans, Nostradamus, the Mormons, astrologers and numerologists hopping on board this particular cataclysmic bandwagon. And apart from the classic Mayan calendar, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the mysticism of the Mormons, and the arcane computations of specialists, there is also the hypothetical Planet Nibiru, which (if it existed) is projected to be on a collision course with the Earth next year, so we could be in for a bumpy ride ahead.
The best part of all this is the very same Harold Camping's howlingly derisive dismissal of the 2012 faction, which can only be described as the apocalyptic pot calling the doomsday kettle black, and then some. Personally, I wouldn't rule out the ghost of Affirmed chiming in on this one either.

Last Saturday was opening day at the acclaimed Shanti-Bithi bonsai nursery in Stamford, an event eagerly awaited by their ardent fans all year. Please feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at http://www.shantibithi.com/ and see for yourself. Alert readers may recall that Bill had been pitching in at the nursery to engrave their plant tags, and while they didn't need any engraving done on Saturday, he still went in early to help out in any way that might be needed. Which this time around, involved cruising over to the neighborhood Cosi to pick up lunch for the hard-working crew, and everyone knows that you can always count on Bill to bring home the bacon, or in this case, fruit salad and hummus wraps, thank you very much. It turned out to be a big day for the small place, which overtaxed their tiny parking lot so that the staff had to park their cars at the barn down the block, in order to leave room for the customers. An added bonus was a lecture and demonstration by famed bonsai master Marco Invernizzi, which prompted the folks at the Yama Ki Bonsai Society to hold their regular monthly meeting there, and take advantage of this local stop in the course of his world travels. The nursery offers a variety of plants that can be trained into bonsai, as well as many lovely arrangements that can be bought as already finished products, and attracts a wide range of far-flung devotees and novices alike. They even have a bonsai wisteria in full flower, which at about 18 inches tall really got my attention - since ours at home has long since climbed into our towering sycamore, and now flowers all the way up from the ground to way over the top of our house, probably 50 feet in the air. I obviously know nothing about bonsai, so I don't know what the opposite of it would be, but our gargantuan wisteria would be a perfect example. Another benefit that they offer to their customers is "winter storage" for their precious bonsai, where they keep them protected and maintained in their greenhouses, and safe from the harsh winter elements, so many people came to the opening just to retrieve their own plants from storage, and welcome them back to the family garden once again. They also provide garden design services, and have a wide selection of tools, accessories, books, videos and magazines for the enthusiasts to pursue their hobby. My favorite part was the collection of tiny people, animals and structures that you can apparently add to the landscape of your bonsai display, and make it more of an actual environment, like a train layout, or perhaps just to keep your bonsai company. You know we had to take a bunch of those home, just because they were too darned cute, and not because anyone actually needs anything like that, heaven knows. I picked up two tiny pagodas and a little house, and I was going to get a small horse in honor of Animal Kingdom, but frankly, I know better than to trust the ghost of Affirmed at this point, by golly.

Elle

Calling All Angels

2011-05-21T19:16:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

Well, I don't know about where you are, but in the local area, we just suffered through a week of the most relentlessly dreary weather, as every day dawned gray and dismal, with pelting rain and high winds, and even when it wasn't exactly chilly, it was so clammy that it felt chilly anyway. More than anything else, I felt sorry for the poor chestnut trees, who were trying their level best to put on a show of creamy white blooms in profuse clusters all over, but the inclement conditions made it impossible to appreciate the full glory of them. They would have been a sight to behold in full sun, but were never given the chance, alas. Speaking of sights, that reminds me that when we were at the Open Days house tour two weeks ago, we happened to notice that parked near our car in the lot was a white mini-van with a bra, of all things, which not only looked laughably ridiculous, but was actually so appalling that it was impossible even to laugh at. I can tell you that it was an unforgettable sight, and I mean that in the very most horrific sense of the word, believe me.

And while we're on the topic of ridiculous things, one of the special treats that I enjoyed for Mother's Day was that Bill went out early to Dunkin' Donuts, and brought me home a box full of creme-filled goodness, which didn't last long around here, and I ought to know. But he did point out that there was a big label on the box with the screaming announcement: "0 GRAMS TRANS FATS," with the implication that their donuts are some kind of health food that we can include as part of our complete and balanced diet. (AS IF!) That's like saying that arsenic exists naturally in the environment, and is not manufactured by laboratories, so it must be good for you. I will admit the immutable truth that donuts make me stupid, but hey, even I'm not falling for that one, not even pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top, by golly.

Meanwhile at the employer of last resort, I fielded a telephone call from the evening Pharmacy supervisor, who became frantic when the printer suddenly ran out of ink and stopped, and there was no spare print cartridge to replace it with. So he called me all in a panic and demanded to know what I was going to do about it, since he apparently held me responsible for it running out in the first place. I explained that we would need a requisition to place an order for a new cartridge, which is nothing new or outlandish, whereupon he snorted in disgust (and even through the phone, I could see his elaborate eye-rolling and hand-wringing gestures for dramatic effect) and obviously of the mind that I was the biggest obstacle to patient care that had ever been discovered in the healthcare industry since the Angel of Death traipsed through the Old Testament. "Well," he countered testily, "couldn't you at least call and see if they have it first?" Normally I would say that first we need the requisition and then we call, but I didn't want to seem even more implacable, so through gritted teeth, I said I would call first, and asked what was the cartridge number that he was looking for. "Oh, I don't know," he replied, without a trace of irony or embarrassment. Of course, everyone already knows that I'm much too polite to laugh, but here is where I hoped that he was aware that it was only my good manners that prevented me from treating him exactly the same way he had treated me, by snorting in derision and making rude comments. I guess it was a lucky thing for him that I wasn't really the Angel of Death after all.

Also at work, it seemed like overnight all the paper dispensers in the bathrooms were removed, from one end of the campus to the other, and everywhere in between, which includes numerous buildings, and countless paper dispensers, for the convenience of our patients, employees, volunteers, visitors, and anyone else who needs to use the facilities. The dispensers for toilet paper were replaced by something from our friends at Georgia-Pacific, called SofPull (and please feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at http://www.gp.com/ in case you want to register your dissatisfaction with their product, which I would encourage you to do) and which requires a strangely configured proprietary roll of paper, that is complicated to use and prone to malfunction on a regular basis. Of course, everyone complained about them, long and loud, not that it does any good at the hospital, heaven knows, where complaints are more than just expected, they're a way of life. I happened to be in the ladies room with Jean, our irrepressible bookkeeper, who observed that no matter how you fight with the thing, it still doesn't give you any more paper than it's prepared to give you to start with. She shrugged and then added: "I think they're saving money," as if to find at least a silver lining hidden somewhere in the whole situation. Au contraire, I declared derisively. (That's French for "They call me MISTER Angel of Death, buddy!") I said that's only because people have given up on the bathrooms altogether, they just go outside and pee in the bushes. She laughed.

On the other hand, no laughing matter is our local newspaper, whose unwary readers need to have a strong stomach to get through it in one piece, without resorting to violence, or copious amounts of alcohol, or both. This headline speaks for itself, or rather, it would, if only it understood English:

==================
Hope, desire for change
rein as Haiti picks leader
==================

Of course, the spell-checker is not going to help you choose "reign" over "rein," if you don't already know which is the right one in this context, which apparently the headlines writers didn't. Perhaps they had the Kentucky Derby on their minds, and had a mental picture of Haiti's voters taking the reins of change into their own hands, driving their country down the backstretch of opportunity to the finish line of prosperity, and beyond. Personally, I would send that whole headline back to the stable of ineptitude and leave it there, not to mention, locking the barn door behind it. It was another holiday for the spell-checker in this next item about the NBA playoffs from the Sports section:

====================
Marc Gasol and the
eighth-seeded Grizzlies are
verge of sending Tim Duncan
and the top-seeded Spurs
to the golf course.
====================

No, the spell-checker can't supply the missing words to rescue "verge" from, well, the verge, when "on the verge" is called for instead. This is where proofreading once came in so handy, since it would be a simple thing to spot where the words are missing and fill them in. You can go look it up, it's an actual word, although archaic now, but it used to be quite prevalent, one might almost say, inescapable, back in the old days, alas.

They fared no better in the Life & Style section, in a note about exotic cuisine, although I don't blame the newspaper for this one:

=======================
Two of Rockland's best chefs, Doug Nguyen and Peter X. Kelly,
are combining talents in a two-part dinner series called
"The Raw and The Cooked." Dine on raw dishes such as
scallop ceviche and beer tartare at a dinner April 6 at Wasabi
in Nyack, then head to Restaurant X in Congers on April 27 for
cooked dishes such as quail and pork belly.
=======================

Now, I admit that I'm no galloping gourmet, and I don't even play one on television. But could someone please explain to me how this in any way represents what they describe as a "two-part dinner series?" I mean, they're not only in two separate restaurants in two completely different cities, for heaven's sake, but they're three weeks apart besides. This is where the pop commentator Jon Stewart would be asking: "Wha - wha - wha - WHA - ???" and I don't blame him one bit. You may as well say that professional football and major league baseball are teaming up for a two-part sports series called "The Luau and The Gator," where the NFL plays the Pro Bowl in Hawaii in January, and then three weeks later, the baseball players report to their spring training camps in Florida. Heck, by that reasoning, any two events, no matter how dissimilar or disconnected in time or place, could be considered a two-part series, as long as you come up with a snappy name for it. Mother's Day and the Indy 500 could be "The Lady and The Track." Income tax day and the last day of school could be "The Agony and The Ecstasy." Arbor Day and the Pink Panther could be "The Trowel and The Pussycat," while Election Day and both sides of Daylight Saving Time could be "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," and I leave to you to decide which is which. Oh, I could go on and on like this all day, and be drunk with the power of the pen, or should I say, The High and The Mighty. (Get it?!) Of course, everyone knows that puns can be a double-edged sword, especially in the wrong hands, where an avocado clock could easily be considered The Pit and The Pendulum. And speaking of double-edged swords in the wrong hands, who let the Angel of Death in here?

Elle

War Horse

2011-05-14T21:32:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

Well, for all those people afraid of Friday the 13th, they have reason to be glad that this month has the only one this entire year, to get it out of the way and move on with their lives. There will only be one Friday the 13th in any year that starts on a Saturday, as 2011 did, whether it's a Leap Year or not, unlike other years, where there may be two or three during the year. For instance, any year that begins on a Thursday, like 2009, will have three months where the 13th is on a Friday, regardless of whether or not it's a Leap Year. So if you didn't already have any bad luck this year, you should be in the clear, and better days ahead. Speaking of better days ahead, more and more of everything is bursting into bloom, and a more welcome sight would be hard to imagine. Our front yard is a shimmering carpet of English wood hyacinths, while on the top walk, it's the giant allium stealing the show. The azalea and spirea have decked themselves in their showiest blossoms, but nothing can match the return of the exquisite lilac, with its heavenly fragrance worth waiting for, and often imitated but never equaled. I even saw an errant buttercup pop up on the lawn, in spite of the relentless ministrations of the landscapers, but I'm afraid they were too much for our lamium, primrose and pachysandra, where we traded in their jaunty flowers for the sake of neatness, and not necessarily an improvement, I can tell you that.

Anyone who watched the Kentucky Derby last week can tell you that it was a crackerjack finish, and as the first one out of the gate in the series, it was a true gem worthy of the Triple Crown. To the consternation of the odds-makers, it was the 20-1 shot, Animal Kingdom, who seemingly came out of nowhere to win handily by several lengths over a crowded field. And for an unheralded colt with no expectations, made it look easy, and could have kept right on running, if the race wasn't already over. The feel-good story of the day was the peculiar coincidence of the winning jockey, John Velazquez, whose hopes of Derby glory were dashed when he lost his original mount, as the favorite Uncle ("Keb") Mo was scratched with a stomach ailment just before the big race. All of the other horses were already taken, when suddenly another jockey was injured in an accident, and all at once, Animal Kingdom needed a new rider - and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, actually, it's a fairy tale, because if this was the NCAA Tournament, they would call this a Cinderella story, and they'd be right, even though there's not a basketball anywhere to be seen. Animal Kingdom seems to have a lot going for him in the upcoming Preakness, and even the longer length of the Belmont could be within his range, so a new Triple Crown winner might not be impossible after all this time. Personally, I wouldn't trust the ghost of Affirmed, whose malevolent spirit from the beyond has doomed the chances of countless hopefuls over the years, from Big Brown to War Emblem, without exception or favoritism. So I wish Animal Kingdom a lot of luck, because even if he can beat all the other horses on the track, he's still going to have to somehow hold off the ghost of Affirmed, and frankly, I don't care for his chances all that much.

Of course, last Sunday was Mother's Day, a time to honor all of the maternal figures in our lives, and it goes without saying, long may they wave. Around here, I can always count on the cats to come through for the occasion, and this no exception, as I expect to be set for life in the realms of catnip mice, Fancy Feast and hairballs, by golly. Actually, the cats generally defer to Bill's more refined taste in gift options, and so I expect that he's to thank for the lovely jewelry, flowers, candy, DVDs and tech gadgets, and not a catnip mouse anywhere in sight. Sunday was a beautiful day, so I hope that all of the mothers were able to get out and enjoy their special day. Our plan was to get a jump on the holiday, so we started on Saturday by hopping on board the Open Days bandwagon, presented by the Garden Conservancy (and please feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at www.gardenconservancy.org and see for yourself) and awaited eagerly by horticultural enthusiasts all year. This is a program that invites the public on selected weekends to experience the luxurious private gardens at local estates, which unlike community parks, are not usually open to visitors. We went to the secluded property of a former Wall Street tycoon, a lush retreat of 55 rolling acres, lovingly transformed into a botanical wonderland by the landscape designers at the acclaimed Shanti-Bithi Nursery, and a treat for all five senses, everywhere you go. There are over 350 varieties of maples in their expansive Maple Garden, breathtaking vistas of tulips and daffodils in wild profusion along the walks, and just about every ornamental shrub or flowering tree that you can think of, and many that you'd never be able to think of. The entire property is awash with more creeks, streams, waterfalls, puddles, ponds and lakes than you could ever imagine, plus an abundance of bridges running the gamut from stone to wood to earth to concrete to moss, and even a whimsical rope bridge that Bill and I forswore as being way too precarious for our tastes. An additional attraction is the collection of exotic animals, including camels, zebras, flamingos, llamas, tortoises, emus, monkeys and more, plus an entire aviary of unusual birds and waterfowl. Bill had been engaged by Shanti-Bithi to engrave the identification tags for the plants, so we were invited to attend as part of the staff, and not the general public. As a result, we had an opportunity to join the rest of the crew for lunch at the house, and also got a chance to peek at the newborn serval cats, baby bunnies and turkey chicks in the barn, that was off-limits to the ordinary visitors. It was certainly an unforgettable adventure full of wonder and surprises, and an early Mother's Day treat that anyone would have enjoyed, mother or not, and I ought to know.

Bill and I did the most perfect thing on Thursday, we went to see the new movie "Thor" at the local cinema. By "perfect," of course I mean that Thursday is named after the Norse God of War, Thor, in the same way that Wednesday is named after his father, Odin. Back in the days that I was a young whipper-snapper (this would have been when the dinosaurs were roaming the vast unformed land masses amongst the primordial ooze) Thor was far and away my favorite comic book character, and I scooped them up as fast as my allowance would permit. Obviously, this was way before the advent of what are now called "graphic novels," and deservedly so, with their gritty realism, dark narrative, excessive violence and price tags to match. No, in those bygone halcyon days, a comic book was a simple joy, costing a mere dime or 12 cents, and to pay a whopping 25 cents on a double-issue was considered an extravagance for only the most reckless spendthrifts. Of course, much has changed over the years, and not always for the better, I can tell you that, and many favorite old super heroes have been so drastically altered as to be unrecognizable to their former fans. I wasn't expecting to care much for this newfangled live-action Thor, but I thought it might be interesting to see anyway, so off we trotted to the nearby New Roc entertainment complex, where the movie was playing in several theaters, including the IMAX 3-D version. Even without any visual enhancements, the showing set us back over $20, plus another $20 at the concession stand, so this could in no way be considered a cheap date, at least by the previous definition of the term. [Please see note above concerning dinosaurs and primordial ooze.] We were pleasantly surprised at the film (not $40 dollars worth, perhaps, but still) and thought it was very well done and entertaining throughout. It never lagged, and many of the special effects were stunning. The cast was eclectic, although not distractingly so, and Chris Hemsworth as the title character was surprisingly satisfactory. One standout feature of the story was the almost complete lack of dialogue banalities that plague most science-fiction movies like a contagious disease, so that even the most critical scenes become almost farcical to watch. As a whole, it had much to recommend it, and we were glad that we went. In the film industry vernacular, I would wish that the movie had good "legs," but I'm afraid that's all it would take to summon the ghost of Affirmed, and suddenly the Norse God of War would be turned into the Norse God of War Emblem all over again, by golly.

Elle

Punch Line

2011-05-07T22:09:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

A very (belated) feliz Cinco de Mayo to you, amigos! Thursday was the day for all of us to (virtually) toss off the yoke of oppression and kick the Napoleonic forces to the curb, to the clatter of castanets and plenty of tequila, por favor. I find that native New Yorkers don't need any excuse for a party, and are just as happy to jump on the Cinco de Mayo bandwagon, whereas people of other cultures tend to balk at the idea, using the rationale of "I'm not Mexican" as if it were some sort of a shield that would prevent them from having a good time that they felt they were not entitled to, by accident of where they were born. Heck, I think even the Holiday Police would give everyone leave to be an honorary Mexican on May 5th, so they could enjoy all the hijinks and hoopla the day has to offer. Not so fast! While you would think that a holiday named after a specific day would be the last thing in the world to be a movable feast, the reality is very far from the case. Our local newspaper made a point to encourage us to check out their online calendar for Cinco de Mayo events all over their coverage area, beginning on May 6 and continuing throughout the weekend. To my mind, that's a Mexican horse of a different Mariachi color, by golly, and would have surprised the heck out of Napoleon's army, who sat around and waited for two or three days just to get routed at the Battle of the Puebla that was supposed to happen on the 5th of May. Under the circumstances, probably even the Holiday Police would have to side with the beleaguered French on that one, La Cucaracha or not.

On the local weather scene, this turned out to be the week that the indigenous maple trees exploded into bloom, transforming everything near them to bright green, and not any sort of an improvement, I can tell you that. Every year around this time, I find myself driving what can only be described as an unsightly green fuzz-mobile, where I can't see out any of the windows for all of the maple tree effluvia that's stuck to it. Well, it only took my entire life, but I can now say that I finally wised up, and when I came home, I parked the car away from where the street was already green, into the clear area that was apparently out of the maple zone, so I wouldn't come out to more of that stuck on the car the next day, thanks not. Also the parking lot at work is fringed with alternating pine and maple trees, so you notice that every other space is bright green, and it finally dawned on me to park in the one that isn't, and avoid even more of that being stuck to the car during the day as well. So it was actually a simple thing to solve that entire problem at a stroke, and just goes to prove, I guess, that you can teach an old dog new tricks, although frankly I don't think they should let dogs drive in the first place.

I don't know about anyone else, but it seems to me that the 137th running of the fabled Kentucky Derby snuck up on us, sort of out of nowhere with little or no fanfare, being this weekend already. There were so many horses entered that they had to eliminate two of them from the field, since apparently they don't have a "track stretcher" at Churchill Downs so they accommodate more than 20 horses at a time. As it is, they're going to be running without the favorite, a horse named Keb Mo (or something like that anyway) who had been tearing up the tracks up to this point, but fell ill just before his big moment in the spotlight. This would be a good break for the second favorite, one supposes, and of course, we can't rule out the 20-1 shot, Twice the Appeal, with media darling Calvin Borel aboard. Personally, my money's on the Knicks, with the Rangers coming in a close second, and I wouldn't turn my back on the Pittsburgh Steelers either. After all, the thoroughbreds are only used to running against other horses, they have had no experience competing with Amar'e Stoudemire's lethal elbows, by golly.

After the hospital developed new rules for the use of time clocks, I found it helpful to have an alarm in my Palm set at 9:00 AM to "punch in," and another one at 5:00 PM to "punch out." Somehow when I was using the stylus to enter the information for the alarms, I accidentally typed in "jn" instead of "in," and the same error was duplicated for all of the alarms for the whole month. The consultant who has been taking up space in our spare office all year has the initials "JN," and I don't mind saying, has long since worn out his welcome, and in spades, so every morning when the alarm goes off and reminds me to "Punch jn," I can't help but think that sounds like a pretty good idea. Although when it comes to people to be punched, I have to admit that I don't need an alarm to give me any ideas, because I already have a list.

Speaking of work, between taking off Good Friday, and the Monday after Easter, it turned into two short weeks in a row for me, and trying to catch up after that was no joke, believe me. Everyone knows that I always say that it's the short weeks that are the longest, and this no exception, with one right after the other besides. As if that wasn't bad enough, there was the Secretary's Day luncheon on the Wednesday after Easter, which punched another hole in my day, in what was already a short week as it was, so I despaired of ever getting back on track. Mind you, I certainly don't want to complain, since we're lucky just to be invited to the luncheon in this economy, and it's great to go to a lovely country club, where we can have lots of fun and goodie bags, plus the usual raffle prizes. Of course, there were the requisite boring speeches by local dignitaries, as well as awards, plaques and commendations to be presented to deserving individuals and organizations, but it helps that all of this is offset by a nice meal including ice cream and coffee, which this time around, was served in peppy style with no lagging, unlike usually, when half the people give up and leave before they finally get around to serving dessert. And while I didn't win anything as usual, at least I didn't jinx the whole table, as they won some nice prizes from local merchants, and glad of it, I'm sure. So it turned out to be another wonderful luncheon, and beautiful weather, which only goes to prove that even the weather trolls don't dare rain on the secretaries.

Alert readers may remember that it was in March that we bid a fond farewell to our beloved princess GingerSnap after 13 years in the family, which had the result that we were left with only the little invisible Potfourri as our last remaining female in a houseful of tom cats. At the time, I remarked that she was going to have some pretty big shoes to fill, because GingerSnap was a very special cat in many ways, apart from just longevity. Unfortunately, it turned out that our little Miss Potfourri, her own invisible self, was not equal to the task, as she breathed her last on Wednesday, not even seven weeks since GingerSnap preceded her. That closes the chapter on the whole invisible clan, as she was the last of the five of them, and they all went one after another in a space of two years. So we find ourselves down to the ragtag remnant, and all of them boys, and nothing cute or frilly about the lot of them. But at least they have the advantage that there is nothing invisible about them either, which is a nice change of pace, except for when they have to run in between my feet on the stairs, when a little bit of invisibility might not be such a bad thing, after all. I suppose I should be grateful that they don't have Amar'e Stoudemire's lethal elbows, and they don't turn everything bright green like the maple trees, on top of their other less appealing characteristics. Now this is normally where I'd like to get a jump on things and wish everyone a very early happy Ocho de Mayo (if only there was such a thing) but my alarm just went off and I have to go punch the consultant.

Elle

Johnny On The Spot

2011-05-01T17:58:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

Happy May! Sunday will be the first day of the new month, and how April has flown right by - and I don't mind saying, with no improvement in the weather - is just astonishing. Of course, Easter was just about as late as it can be (in fact, so late that it coincided with Greek Orthodox Easter this year, rather than them lagging behind as they usually do) and after that, the whole month was just about over and nothing left for the April hold-outs to grab onto. On the other hand, because May starts on a Sunday, it means that Mother's Day would be the earliest that you can have it, next week on the 8th, which I am pointing out as a public service to the general populace who may be considerably under-prepared for Mom's big day, basically right around the corner and will be here way before you know it. Also on the early side, I noticed the jolly faces of violets all over the yard, all dressed up in deep purple, pale lavender or creamy white everywhere you look. Just as the magnolias are starting to fade, you can count on the dogwoods to pop open, and always a sight to behold. Anyone can tell you that it's not too early for dandelions, not by any means, even if your gardeners have eradicated them from your yard, they're still a sunny yellow presence in vacant lots and other neglected areas. Everyone else may not know, but I can tell you that it's also not too early for rampant mutant alien poison ivy, thanks not, which I found out the hard way when I was taking pictures of tulips and daffodils in the flower beds, and realized later that I had gotten a patch of poison ivy on my ankle, that was probably the earliest that's ever happened. I'm thinking this just goes to prove that it's not Greek Orthodox poison ivy, I guess.

Speaking of Easter, we were glad to welcome the Easter Bunny with his baskets full of treats, and he came through with the goods, including jewelry, DVDs, scented candles, candy, personal care items, and some healthy organic items that can be indulged in without guilt. In fact, one of them was actually green-apple-flavored edible Easter grass, from our friends at Galerie in Kentucky, although they tell me that it's actually made in Germany, of all places. (Please feel free to go right ahead and visit their website at http://www.galerieusa.com/ and see for yourself.) It's certainly edible, that much is true, although not much of a treat as edible things go, but a big improvement over regular plastic Easter grass, at least in terms of eating it. My favorite part is that they go to all the trouble to put Nutrition Facts on the package, although all of them are zero except for fiber (1%) but it will set you back 100 calories if you eat the whole package. (I dare you!) It must be said that the weather forecast was less than promising when we left home on the next leg of our Easter adventures, but it soon cleared up and turned into a beautiful day. In fact, they could not have asked for better weather for the 56th Annual Easter Vintage Car Parade in Garden City (and here again, you're invited to visit their website at http://www.gardencitychamber.org/ and see for yourself) presented by the Chamber of Commerce, and well worth the trip. It seemed like hundreds of wonderful vehicles of all types, from the 1890's to the recent past, were all arrayed in the parking lots behind the parade route, so that people could have a chance to see them all and meet the owners before the parade started. They were all so shiny and beautiful, and many decked out in their Easter finery, with bunnies, bonnets, carrots and other decorations on cars and drivers alike. The parade was fun and well-organized, as the pride of automotive excellence took to the streets to thrill the enthusiastic spectators lining both sides. By the time it was over, we were more than ready for lunch at Denny's in Levittown, and since we got there later than we expected, we missed the holiday lunch rush, and pretty much had the place to ourselves. I would say that this was a non-traditional sort of Easter, but after all, they've been having this car parade now for 56 years, so I guess that's as traditional as anything else at this point, by golly.

Other notable events of recent vintage would be both the Knicks and Rangers being eliminated from the first round of the playoffs, thanks not, with the Knicks getting the worst of it, by being swept out by the Celtics in lopsided games in spite of Carmelo Anthony - and who probably has no idea of either Ralph Kiner or the legendary Branch Rickey, but it's really true that "we could have done that without you, Ralph." In baseball, the Yankees have improved to 15-9, while the surprising Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies and dratted Phillies are leading their divisions with impressive 18-8 records already. Seattle has finally managed to turn it around, climbing to a respectable 13-15 from a woeful start, while even the Red Sox and hapless Mets have improved to 11-15, which is no mean feat from where they were. Now it's the poor Padres and Twins at 9-17 sharing the worst record in baseball, but I advise the hometown fans against panic because at this point in the season, anything can happen, and usually does.

And while we're on the topic of anything that can happen, we've been notified by the hospital administration that the episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent that was filmed at our facility is to be titled "Cadaver," and showcases our new DaVinci robotic surgery system as part of the plot. It is expected to be the 5th or 6th episode of the new season which begins this week, so please be sure to be on the lookout for that, or even better, have your DVR set up to record it when it airs, and take the worry out of possibly missing some great (local) moments in television history. After all, we wouldn't want the President's secretary to have been unceremoniously tossed out of her own office for nothing.

Alert readers may recall a few weeks ago when I was at a meeting and the term "John Henry" was used to refer to signing a document, making me wonder what that ever-lovin' "steel-drivin' man, Lord, Lord" had to do with anyone's signature, compared to, say, John Hancock, who I considered the poster child for that particular reference. Well, as everyone knows, I'm always happy to set the record straight - or perhaps, "muddy the waters" might be the more apt expression in this case - as we have our research maven, Bill, and his quest for pinpoint accuracy, to thank for the following:

============================
WIkipedia's John Henry disambiguation page says this:

"One's 'John Henry' - formal signature referred to in ironic comparison to John Hancock's famously florid and consequential signature"

But if you dig a little deeper, there's this interesting post.

I think "John Henry" as a phrase meaning signature is simply a mistake. People get their Johns mixed up. But I'll check further and see if there's more to it than that.

I stand corrected...

JOHN HENRY/JOHN HANCOCK - "As every schoolboy knows, the biggest, boldest and most defiant signature on the Declaration of Independence was scrawled by John Hancock of Massachusetts. So completely did it overshadow the autographs of the other founding fathers that the term 'John Hancock' has become synonymous with 'signature' and each of us at the one time or another has spoken of "putting his 'John Hancock' " at the bottom of a document. In the West, a half century and more later, the phrase became altered to 'John Henry,' and nobody knows quite why. Suffice it that, in the words of Ramon Adams's excellent collection of cowboy jargon, 'Western Words': "John Henry is what the cowboy calls his signature. He never signs a document, he puts his 'John Henry' to it!" Incidentally, there seems to be no connection between the John Henry of cowboy slang and the fabulous John Henry of railroad lore, who was so powerful that he could outdrive a steam drill with his hammer and steel. This legend has been traced to the drilling of the Chesapeake and Ohio Big Tunnel through West Virginia in the 1870s - substantially later than the first use of John Henry by cowpokes of the Old West." From "Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins" by William and Mary Morris (HarperCollins, New York, 1977, 1988).

[This final clarification is from our friends across the pond: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/10/messages/147.html ]
============================

And so there you have it, signature fans, and we all (or at least I) stand corrected for casting aspersions on people using a perfectly acceptable alternative to the John Hancock idiom, which obviously has stood the test of time and needs no defense from me. So thanks to Bill and wikipedia and the phrases folks for clearing that up, to the extent that it's possible to clear it up, and we are all better for having learned something new today, I'm sure. Now I see that it's just about time for me to be fixin' to mosey off and punch some cattle afore I ride off into the sunset, so here I'll just put my -

John Henry

Pray Tell

2011-04-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Hop, hop, hop! Here's wishing you a very "hoppy" Easter weekend, and hopes that Sunday morning brings you some very special treats and pleasant surprises. Failing that, of course, you can always go out and shop 'til you drop for things that you would rather buy for yourself, because Easter has long since lost its sanctity as a day of religious observance, and the well-oiled retail machinery is busy churning out sales from early morning to late at night, and it goes without saying, with no qualms about it. It wasn't that long ago that Easter was one of the last sacrosanct days for stores to be closed, and you were lucky to find so much as a deli or gas station open that day, but not anymore, that's for sure. Nowadays, it's just another day of commerce run amok, and over-stimulated consumers out there running amok right along with it, and not a halo or a chasuble anywhere in sight. These days, if the disciples went to the tomb on Easter Sunday and rolled away the stone, they'd find a super Wal-Mart in there, merchandising away 24-hours a day, and don't spare the marshmallow Peeps and chocolate bunnies. Between Easter and Christmas, I'm beginning to think that the most iconic figure representing the pinnacle of business success throughout the ages is not Henry Ford or Bill Gates, but Jesus Christ. After all, there's no major shopping holidays known as "Henry-ster" or "Gatesmas," so that tells you something right there.

Speaking of running amok, the ubiquitous golden forsythia, the joy of early spring, has now been followed by the lovely landscapes of flowering cherry and crabapple trees, as well as stately magnolia and traditional crape myrtle, bringing exuberant color in every shade of the rainbow, to yards and parking lots everywhere you look. Even the maples are starting to bud, lending their bright green to the profusion of pink, peach, rose, fuchsia, red, coral, yellow, orange, lavender, periwinkle, purple and violet all over town. Many of these otherwise non-descript trees, which are so easily taken for granted the rest of the year, put on a show in the spring that is a sight to behold, and a cheery restorative to lift anyone's spirits. Unfortunately for us, our neighbors' newly missing dogwood punches a hole in our usual decorative array of brilliant white flowers along the driveway, alas, and the vista is much unimproved by the loss, I can tell you that. But we console ourselves with our bounteous bevy of daffodils and tulips, which seem to open in greater abundance of colors every day, and even early bleeding heart and grape hyacinths in the flower beds, adding their welcome appearance to the mix. When I was out taking pictures, I stumbled across a creamy white checkered lily, an apparition from days gone by, that I would not have expected in that spot or at this time, and yet, there it was in all its glory. It's all too easy to complain about the weather around here, heaven knows, but apparently the plants are all finding it much to their liking.

And while we're on the subject of plants, of course everyone knows that last week was Palm Sunday, and I can tell you that there was no shortage of palms at church, and they certainly didn't skimp on handing them out and there were plenty for all, which is especially important for those of us with lots of cats. I'm well known for always making a point of saying how popular the fresh palms are with our cats, so that I wouldn't dare go home empty-handed, out of fear for my life, and that's not just a lot of suffering succotash, believe me. So it would probably come as a surprise to everyone, as it did to me, when I got to the bank last Sunday to deposit the offering, and realized that I had completely forgotten the palms at church, which were still in the office where I left them while I was using the computer. You can be sure that I hurried right back there and picked them up before I went home, after all, I may be forgetful and not the sharpest cheese in the cave, but I'm no fool. Suffering succotash or not.

In other news, you don't have to be a fool to appreciate the serendipitous juxtaposition of the upcoming 60th National Day of Prayer, which somewhere along the line was established as the first Thursday in May, and which this year, happens to fall smack on top of Cinco de Mayo, and please don't spare the tequila, por favor. I'll admit that I'm the first person to say that there's no such thing as too much prayer, but teaming up with our brave caballeros south of the border, I can see where the praying would tend to take a back-seat to the partying, and I can promise you that the Mexican Hat Dance would do nothing to put anyone in a meditative state of mind, and that's not just a lot of red hot chili peppers, believe me. Or to paraphrase the immortal Mark (Chihuahua) Twain, "Against the onslaught of 'La Cucaracha,' nothing can stand." So to the malcontents and zealots at the Freedom From Religion ramparts, a quirk of the calendar has accomplished what decades of litigation and protests had failed to manage, which is to render the National Day of Prayer moot, irrelevant, and trampled into insignificance by a relentless torrent of sombreros, castanets and sangria, that would make the Napoleonic forces quail before it, much less stop to pray. So better luck next year, for all of you prayer partners out there, and to that, I can only add a resounding Amen! Or rather, should I say, ay caramba!

Speaking of prayer, the local sports teams could certainly use more of it, in a hurry, and in a variety of different venues, including but not limited to such varied surfaces as grass, hardwood floors and ice, and sometimes, all on the same day. While it's too early for panic on the diamond, the fledgling season has barely gotten off the ground, and already the ship of the junior pinstripe franchise needs to be righted before it goes completely off the rails, and pitches over the falls beyond recovery. With new leadership in the front office and on the bench, the hometown faithful had reason to expect the revamped lineup to jump out to a fast start, maybe even justify their huge payroll for once, before the honeymoon phase wore off and the long arduous reality set in for the rest of the season. Instead, they've been out there playing so far like the under-achievers of last year, and the year before that, and ..... well, you get the idea. In fact, it was during a recent interrupted game that their woeful record prompted one wag on the Mets fans FaceBook page to quip: "The Mets are winning the rain delay." I guess the only thing we haven't lost so far is our sense of humor, although the way they're playing, I expect that will be the next thing to lose. Meanwhile in the playoffs, it's been one ugly loss after another for both the Knicks and the Rangers, and at this point, the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them making a comeback to win the opening round. This is where my idea of having the losers play each other in a series of charity baseball games is starting to look better and better, and while it's true that the Knicks have the height advantage, I'd be willing to bet that Carmelo Anthony can't hit whatever Marion Gaborik throws at him, and with Henrik Lundqvist blocking the plate, even Amar'e Stoudemire doesn't stand a chance, believe me.

We finally decided that it was long past time that we should take our genial new addition, Rusty, to the animal hospital for his shots, blood tests, surgery and all the routine things we have done before we introduce a new stray to the rest of the household. Obviously, this was our idea, and we did not poll Rusty for his opinion ahead of time, but it certainly turned out to be not the most popular idea that has ever been presented to him in his young life, that's for sure, in fact, I'd wager that it way down at the bottom, especially the way things ended up. It all started innocently enough, as these things so often do, when Bill put him into the carrier and closed it up, only to come back later and find that Rusty had found a way to sneak out the side, and looking like he wasn't going to fall for that a second time. Trying to catch him all over again turned into a daunting task that left both sides exhausted and grumpy, and not something that anybody would want to repeat, I can tell you that. But finally he was back in the carrier, only this time, it was tied up with a bunch of stout bungee cords, which were luckily close at hand, since my camping supplies are still handily located in the living room, rather than being tucked away in the attic where the varmints could chew on them, thanks not. Rusty was a hit with the hospital staff, who found him handsome and well-behaved, although I will point out that they didn't chase him around the kitchen for 45 minutes trying to get him into the carrier. Normally, I would bring a new cat in and then leave, picking the cat up after its surgery later in the day, but they surprised me by saying that Rusty was already altered, and so I had no reason to leave him there and pick him up later. The veterinarian said that rescue groups often "notch" the ear of feral cats that they trap-neuter-release, and that certainly fits our Rusty-bear to a "T" because his lopsided ear is much too neat to be the result of an accident or a fight. So it was live-and-learn for us, because it's the first we're hearing of that, but apparently everyone else at the animal hospital said that it's a common practice in the animal protection field. And it made us realize that this was not Rusty's first time at the rodeo, as they say, at least as far as animal hospitals go, but if it was up to him, it would certainly be his last, and that would be putting it mildly. So a gift certificate for veterinary services would not be at the top of Rusty's wish lists for any upcoming holidays, and to be on the safe side, he asks me to point out that includes all spurious holidays such as Henry-ster and Gatesmas as well. Not to mention, the National Day of Prayer, a solemn occasion of reflection and dedication ..... say, who let that Mariachi band in here?

Elle

There Oughta Be A Law

2011-04-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

Hello World, Happy Cat Sunday! For everyone with cats at home, you know that Palm Sunday is their favorite day of the entire year, as they just can't get enough of those fresh palms, which draw them like a magnet from everywhere in the house. I can tell you that the florists are missing a bet, not selling them year-round to pet stores, because they'd make a fortune. And don't think our cats wouldn't be applying for their own credit cards, and hitch-hiking rides over there, because they would, you can believe that. In other botanical news, in spite of the unpredictable weather in these environs, the spring flowers continue to explode all over the place. Already we see that the hyacinths are out in earnest, and our backyard smells heavenly from one side to the other. We even have some early tulips, which seem not only very hardy, but obviously must taste terrible, because usually our neighborhood juvenile delinquent squirrels chew the tops off of the tulips before they have a chance to bloom. Our pansies are putting up a brave fight on the porch, in the face of some very cold and nasty weather we've been having lately, and their cheery faces are certainly a tonic for what ails you, that's for sure. In fact, like the cats with Palm Sunday, I'd be happy to vote for Pansy Sunday, which I think would have the same euphoric effect on people that palms have on cats, and that's not just a lot of ecclesiastical compost, believe me. While we're on the subject of things you can believe, or rather, that are simply impossible to believe, I just noticed yesterday that the Sunoco station around the block was actually selling regular gasoline at the staggering price of $4.11 per gallon, of all things. I can't imagine what the premium grade must be at that rate, but I'm sure I don't want to know, and luckily I'm driving a car that doesn't require it, or it would be a long time between fill-ups for us, I can tell you that. I'm beginning to think that Fred Flintstone car that you propel with your feet is looking better and better all the time. They had a cartoon in the newspaper last week about gas prices during the tenure of different Presidents, and by golly, people can complain all they like about Richard Nixon, but gas was 25 cents a gallon back then, which is a number that I can certainly live with. Heck, at this point, I'd even go for the 55 cents under Gerald Ford, and I say, let's dig the guy up and give him another shot at it. And speaking of ridiculous numbers, the early baseball standings are enough to make the sports prognosticators tear their hair out, and the local fans despair all over the country. Living down to its historic designation as the AL "Least," the Yankees jumped off to a middling 7-5 start, while the favored Red Sox wallow in the cellar at 2-10, and sporting the worst record in the majors so far. Heck, even the lowly Orioles are 6-6 already. It's Kansas City and Cleveland knotted up in the Central at 9-4, while Texas is running away in the West at 10-3, and 4-10 Seattle has yet to get on track. In the NL East, the dratted Phillies are leading the pack at 9-4, with the Marlins on their heels at 8-5, and the hapless Mets find themselves in the basement with their sorry 4-9 record looking like a bad investment for the size of their payroll, thanks not. Cincinnati barely leads the Central at 8-5, while the surprising Colorado Rockies are all alone at 11-2, the best record in baseball, and for which they should send Mayor Bloomberg a plaque, since it was our very own Mets who handed them a bunch of those wins, and once again, thanks not, I'm sure. In other sports news, the NHL season ended with the Rangers squeaking into playoffs on the very last day, when they won and the Carolina Hurricanes lost, only to enter the playoffs against the mighty Washington Capitals and promptly lose the first two games. There are 16 teams in the first round of the playoffs, making the local fans happy all across the nation and in two countries besides, although it must be said that the long-suffering fans in New York, Chicago and Phoenix already have reason to fear for the worst, and it may not be long in coming. The NBA also wrapped up its regular season, and the playoffs are starting this weekend, also with 16 teams in a variety of cities around the country, although I'm afraid that I cannot tell you which ones specifically. A cursory perusal at nba.com shows the playoff brackets and game times, but without the team names, only an acronym of the city and an infinitesimal pictograph of their logo, and if you're not really familiar with NBA teams, it really doesn't help you much. Some of the teams, like DEN and MEM are easy to figure out, but I admit I was stumped on the likes of NOH, SAS and OKC, for example - so unless the NBA has expanded its horizons and fielded teams in Nohopahu, Hawaii and Saskatoon, Canada and Okca, Turkey; well, then I just don't know what else to tell you. In any event, the Chicago Bulls drew first blood in the playoffs against the Indiana Pacers, while the poor 76ers got stuck playing the Heat in the first round, and I'm sure the Knicks will have their hands full with the Celtics as well. My personal feeling, since the playoffs line up with such propinquity in the number of teams and dates, is that they should pit the first-round losers in the NHL against the first-round losers in the NBA in a series of charity baseball games, followed by the second-round losers in each, which would at least give the home-tiown fans some entertainment value for their shattered playoff hopes. And some of those home-town fans might be us, so I'm thinking, the sooner, the better for this idea. And so it came to pass that one week dragged into the next while Bill was still in Rental Car Land with the cute-ish maroon Kia Spectra, and he was starting to appreciate some of its particular advantages, notably that it was better than walking, especially in foul weather. While it may not have been the peppiest vehicle to ever roll off the assembly line, it was sturdy and reliable, with enough room to be comfortable, and enough features to be convenient. Suddenly the rug was pulled out from under him, so to speak, and they swapped his ride for a smaller blue Hyundai Sonata, which they considered a step up in automotive class, but which Bill found did not suit him at all, and a few days of that was more than plenty. So on Friday, he dove back into the used car waters, and surfaced with a 2004 Dodge Neon that was in his price range, with the added benefit that they gave it to him the same day, all registered and inspected and everything, so you can't beat that. It's a nice looking, almost sporty 4-door sedan, that is dark gray with a spiffy metallic finish and chrome wheels, not to mention the requisite spoiler to round out the look. It's the closest we've ever come to a new car, being a mere 7 years old, and has many of the amenities that come standard on new cars nowadays, that have heretofore been nothing but a mystery to us, such as key fobs that open the doors remotely. It's surprisingly roomy for a smaller car, and more comfortable than the Kia (which wouldn't be hard to do, because as much as I liked the Kia, it was like sitting on a park bench) and we found it remarkably clean and shiny, inside and out, for a used car with relatively high mileage. So we've entered a new chapter in our lives, as we bid a fond farewell to the Buick, our faithful steed, and welcome the new Neon (which Bill has named Snatam Kar, in honor of the CD that is stuck in the car stereo, and please feel free to check out her web site at www.snatamkaur.com if you need some quiet reflection) that we hope to enjoy for many years to come. I don't mind saying, it's got some pretty big shoes to fill, and it's not going to get by on its looks forever, even with that spoiler on the back. Earlier in the week, we had all gotten an email at work from the President of the hospital, with the following unexpected message: ================================ Tomorrow, April 13, the hospital is hosting a shot for the TV program "Law & Order: Criminal Intent." The crew will be on campus from 8:00 AM until mid-afternoon. They will be using OR-3 for their filming, as well as my office. The disruption should be minimal, but your cooperation in keeping our focus on healthcare will be appreciated. ================================ My favorite part is where it says that the "disruption should be minimal," which is a curious statement from anyone who has worked at the hospital for very many years, as he has. It's been proven time and again that ANY extra-curricular activities on the property can bring the normal functioning of the institution to a standstill in a matter of moments in most cases. Please feel free to ask me about the demolition of the smokestack, or even better, the enormous crane that installed the gigantic turquoise temporary boilers in the employee courtyard, lo these many years ago. I saw staff standing around and gawking at these events that I hadn't seen at their desks in so many years, that I thought they didn't work there anymore. Even an itinerant hawk making a lunch raid on a resident pigeon was enough to draw the kind of a crowd that the annual Safety Fair could only hope for. So as far as being a disruption, that goes without saying. But the other part is what you find out if you have any experience with filming, which is about the opposite of what most people expect. When the idea is first suggested, everyone seems to approach it with enthusiasm, and they all say: "How exciting!" or "This should be interesting!" or "I can't wait to see the celebrities!" Then around half-way through the proceedings, just about everybody has changed their tune, and now all you hear is loud moans of: "Never again!" It held true at the hospital on Wednesday, as the caravan of trucks rolled in, debarking the dozens of technicians and service staff, and copious welter of equipment everywhere, and suddenly what might have seemed like a good idea in theory, was turning into a nightmare in reality. Everyone complained that they couldn't get from one side of the building to another, there were no elevators to be had, and even the President's secretary ("Her Executiveness") was summarily chased out of her office for the duration, and nowhere else to go, poor thing. So it didn't take long for them to wear out their welcome, and probably the feeling was mutual by the time all was said and done, and both sides probably happy when it was time to pack up and call it a day. So I would advise you to be on the lookout for an upcoming episode of LOCI that has an acknowledgment in the credits to the effect: "With no thanks at all to The Employer of Last Resort in the Queen City on the Sound," and you'll be sure to know which is the episode in question. I would tell you more, but that would be a spoiler, and after all, my name isn't - Snatam Kar

If I Had A Hammer

2011-04-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

Hello World, Play ball! Well, the baseball season has finally gotten under way in cities all across the country, although it must be said that tossing around the old horsehide in April can be an exercise in character-building that is not for the faint-hearted, and that goes for players and spectators alike, in some of the more inhospitable climes. And while it's a well-known axiom that early season records are no indication of things to come (after all, no one expects the Red Sox to go 0-162 simply because they started the season 0-5) it can't be overlooked that the Mets are already playing like a .500 team, with a record of 3-3 in their first two series out of the gate. I suppose there is something to be said for the old standby reassuring sameness, although I have to point out that it is Lent, and so those are words that I am not at liberty to use at this time. Speaking of time, for anyone who wondered when the switch-over to Daylight Saving Time would have occurred under the old schedule, I have the answer to that, because my Palm just changed the time over to DST finally on Monday, April 4, springing ahead belatedly to join the rest of humanity at long last, thanks not. This is the kind of Johnny-Come-Lately that's not going to win any punctuality awards, and that's not just a lot of peanuts and Cracker Jacks, believe me. Meanwhile at work, I found myself at a meeting recently, where someone used the phrase: "You can just put your 'John Henry' right there." Now, I realize that the mighty John Henry was a steel-drivin' man, Lord, Lord, but I'm not sure how much his signature would be worth as a guarantee of integrity, compared to a more upstanding citizen such as John Hancock, for example. And while we're on the subject of integrity, I was on the phone last week with an insurance adjuster, who was emphasizing the fact that we all need to protect ourselves from the threat of lawsuits these days, because as he put it, "There are a lot of scrupulous people out there." Personally, I'm more worried about the unscrupulous people, and if we have to worry about the scrupulous ones as well, by golly, the world really is going to blazes in a hand-basket, and at this rate, we're all bound to die with a hammer in our hands, Lord, Lord. Also at work, I answered a call in our department from one of the executive secretaries in Administration (and please remember that she called me, not the other way around) who said she needed to ask me a question about someone in another department, that is to say, oh you know, what's-her-name ... and here, she just sort of trailed off with a resigned air of bewilderment and unable to continue. At that point, I admit that I laughed and said I couldn't help her with that, because I would never be known for my ESP, so without any further clues, she could not count on me to come up with the person in question. She apologized, and made a point to acknowledge all of the many things that I always do for her, and here she's asking me to be a mind-reader on top of everything else. "Oh no," I assured her. "Heck, I can't even read my OWN mind anymore, much less someone else's!" She laughed. Alert readers may recall that Bill and I enjoyed an interesting train adventure in January, rather than driving the Buick all the way to Albany and back, in order to spare the balky transmission even more wear and tear. We don't like to complain about the Buick, not only because it's 25 years old, but also because we've had it for 10 years and it hasn't given us any trouble in all that time. But when Bill took it to work on Monday and tried to back up into the driveway, he discovered to his chagrin that was no longer one of his options, as the transmission had unilaterally decided to reduce its mobility selections to moving forward and standing still, while going in reverse was now a thing of the past. Fortunately, our mechanic was still in front of him by just a couple of blocks, and he was able to drive forward over there without needing to back up at any point, which was indeed fortuitous under the circumstances. The mechanic declared that the day had come, as we knew it would, that the noble Regal was past repairing, and it was time for us to part ways. Even worse, since he's our usual source of replacement cars, he said that he had no cars available for us to take off his hands, because he claimed that the economy is so bad that nobody is getting rid of their cars, and may I say to the President's economic advisers, thank you so very much not. Striking out on his own, Bill's first try was at local used car dealer around the corner from his job, where they had a couple of nice cars that were reasonably priced, but our eagle-eyed mechanic voted them both down after a cursory examination. Undaunted, Bill then walked over to the hospital to pick up the Escort from the parking lot, and drove to another used car dealer across town, and they offered another nice car, but with high mileage that didn't bode well for the future. This time, the mechanic not only voted it down, but trotted out the whole tag-team effect with the mechanic and his son playing the good cop/bad cop routine, until Bill threw in the towel and gave it up as a lost cause. On the other hand, they're not the one hoofing it to work every day, and not being able to go anywhere that's not within walking distance, day after day and no end in sight. Besides that, it was turning into a busy week, with lots of places to go and people to see, and mine wasn't any better, so we couldn't even share one car between us and still get everywhere we needed to go. Finally he had no choice but to rent a car for the duration, which is how we wound up with a cute maroon Kia Spectra, and it's been keeping us going ever since, albeit slowly, as Bill is convinced that it obviously needs more peanuts for the squirrel-in-the-wheel that's under the hood. It at least has the advantage of going backward as well as forward, but the legend of John Henry has nothing to worry about, because it's not going to be this squirrel that dies with a hammer in its hand, Lord, Lord, and that's also not a lot of peanuts and Cracker Jacks, believe me. In these uncertain times, we've started off on a safety kick at church, where we grabbed everything out of the files, including the mounds of historical records in the balcony, and moved them all to a secure location off-site as a precaution. This wasn't done in a blind panic, but a more methodical process, at least for some of us, with the intended result that our important documents would be protected from any unsavory individuals for their own nefarious schemes, whatever they might be. As I said, this was a methodical process for some people, but what I found myself doing was snatching everything I had from the file cabinets, and just tossing it helter-skelter into my car with no rhyme or reason. Then I just ended up carrying it all around with me everywhere I went from then on, from pillar to post and hither and yon, and dragging parts of it into church with me on Sunday when I would need something filed or updated. I finally got tired of this last week and took a look through what I was lugging around, and in the cold light of day, the realization eventually took hold that I didn't really need to take everything that I had originally grabbed, such as my spare mouse pad, paper-clips, scrap paper, tape dispenser, magnifying glass, batteries, hidden stash of extra pens, blank envelopes, wooden ruler, push pins, rubber bands, key tags, tissues and golf pencils. In fact, I would go so far as to assert that returning them to their place in the file cabinets would in no way jeopardize the security of the church's sensitive information, which prompted the pastor to concur: "Probably not the FIRST thing they'll go after." Amen! But I will say that unlike the legendary John Henry, that steel-drivin' man, if it comes to a final showdown at church, I doubt that anyone will be writing folk songs about me if I die with a mouse pad in my hand, Lord, Lord. Elle

Thanks A Million

2011-04-04T20:09:00.001-07:00

Hello World, Happy April! It finally looks as if spring has really sprung in these parts, and the early spring flowers are a joy to behold, especially after wrestling with Old Man Winter all this time, and I don't mind saying, good riddance. The crocus were open two weeks ago when it was still snowing, but now we have very early daffodils and jonquils in the sunnier areas, as sunny and yellow as anyone could hope for. I see now that the scilla and blue squill have also popped open, with the white anemone and blue windflowers not far behind, and always a treat to find them scattered about in wild profusion, brightening up even the shadiest recesses, however remote. In the backyard, I actually spotted a hyacinth, which I think is much too early, even by early standards, but there was no disguising its cheery pink petals and heavenly fragrance, that's for sure. And while it might be rushing the season, we couldn't resist adding a splash of color to our front porch with pots of pansies, whose cheerful faces can't help but bring a smile to the most winter-weary among us. At work, even the forsythia has busted out all over, and a more welcome sight would be hard to come by. We even have our very own forsythia in our front yard, courtesy of the previous neighbors, who put up a decorative ersatz fence along their driveway, in between their yard and their own forsythia, so that's how it ended up in our yard instead - and not like we kidnapped it out from under their noses, like one of their cats. Meanwhile at church, the multi-hued carpet of crocus has given way to the riotous golden explosion of creeping ranunculus everywhere, front to back and side to side, like a thousand little rays of sunshine all came to play in the same meadow, and spreading joy far and wide. So there are certainly encouraging signs and harbingers of better days ahead, everywhere you look, and Old Man Winter can just head right on out of here and keep going. Or as they used to say in the old TV Westerns, "There's a train leaving town today at noon - be under it." Although the new month has only just started, April Fools Day has already come and gone, although I find that it almost never takes all the fools away with it, more's the pity, and we're still stuck with them, like it or not. For many cities, the first day of the month also brought the Opening Day of baseball season, which as harbingers of better days ahead would be hard to beat. It came as a surprise to nobody that the fabled New York Yankees won their opener, as their opening day record is an impressive 65-45 going back to 1901, which is almost a .600 winning percentage that is not to be scoffed at. On the other hand, it came as an unpleasant surprise to me that the junior franchise in the city lost its opening game, because their opening day record up to last year was an amazing 31-17, or a .646 winning percentage, in spite of many long years languishing in the basement of the standings. One good thing about being in the basement is there's no place to go but up, that is, unless you're the heroine in a horror movie, in which case, you would be down there in your skimpy lingerie with a broken flashlight, of course. In other sports news, they're finally wrapping up March Madness, now that it's April, and apparently the NCAA hasn't invented the "month stretcher" so that their signature tournament finishes in the month that it was named after. They tell me in the NHL that there are only four games left to play - with the plucky Rangers holding onto a playoff spot by the very skin of their teeth, and frankly, they don't have that many teeth for this to be the most effective strategy - in spite of the fact that we won't be seeing the Stanley Cup finals until June, believe that or don't. The same is true in the NBA, where the season is winding down, and teams are jockeying for playoff spots like Dennis Rodman going after a rebound, and while it's true that both Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell have more than twice as many career rebounds, it's the rabid Rodman contingent who insist their man is the Rebound King of all time. (That reminds me of a funny story about a vintage NBA playoff game, where the young announcer has gone totally bonkers over a perfect shot that he claimed could not have been blocked by anybody in the history of the game, and he just kept going on and on, and gushing over it, and finally said to his partner, "Bill, I don't think even Wilt Chamberlain could have blocked that shot, do you?" And the legendary Bill Russell, who was acting as a guest commentator in the booth at the time, deftly delivered a knock-out punch with his withering observation: "Only if he was here." Ya gotta love it!) Despite the propitious acquisition of Carmelo Anthony, the hapless Knicks continue to squander their chances in these last games, until their playoff hopes are fading faster than a Michael Jordan fade-away shot, although here again, he'd have to fight off the Kobe Bryant loyalists as to who deserves that title, and personally, I wouldn't turn my back on the Dennis Rodman faithful either. Meanwhile on the economic front, it can't come as good news to find out that the US Postal Service is raising their postage rates once again, although at least the one-ounce first-class rate remains the same (outrageous) 44c as before, with only the second-ounce rate increasing from 17c to 20c thereafter. Postcards will change from a ridiculous 28c to an even more ridiculous 29c, which is an exorbitant affront to society that would have made our proud forebears howl in derision, and who would have considered a penny postcard an extravagance not to be indulged in. According to a USPS announcement, beginning in 2011 "all first-class mail one-ounce rate stamps will be issued as forever stamps," which is to say that they will be non-denominated, with no amount printed on them, and sold at whatever is the first-class rate at the time. (Personally, I think that being non-denominated sounds like what happened to Gen. Leonard Wood, who lost the nomination to Warren Harding in the much maligned "smoke-filled room" convention of 1920, a victim of political shenanigans that were scandalous even by the lax standards of the day.) Taking matters into their own hands for financial stimulation, I was approached by a coworker from upstairs who asked if I wanted to join in on their lottery ticket for the upcoming Mega Millions Jackpot for a mere $5 investment, against potential winnings of, well, many mega of millions, I guess. I had to turn him down, on the unassailable grounds that I didn't have $5 to my name at the time he asked me, which is a pretty sad state of affairs, or as Bert Lahr once famously quipped in a movie: "I'd have to float a loan to weigh myself." It seems that everybody else upstairs and down the hall went in on the venture, and while I'm happy to wish them well and good luck, it must be said that if they win, our entire Finance department is suddenly going to become a ghost town. Speaking of work, even the most oblivious individual couldn't help but notice that things have gotten a lot less temporary in the temporary replacement boiler situation in our employee courtyard lately. Alert readers will recall the ill-fated day in October 2010 when I was off, and the temporary boilers (which had been taking up space in our courtyard since 2001) suddenly erupted in flames and took out everything in their path, including the cavernous boiler house that had been built around them, and had just recently enjoyed its own renovation project, alas. The very next day, speedy crews from the boiler maintenance company cleaned up the danger zone to a fare-thee-well, with only the rusted empty hulks of burnt-out temporary boilers as evidence of the recent catastrophe. Immediately after that, another temporary boiler was hauled in on a trailer, and hooked up so we were once again provided with all the heat and hot water that we could ever want, which I don't mind saying, in that old rattle-trap of a flea-bag building where I work, is often what can only be described as too much of a good thing. The new temporary boiler required longer connecting pipes and hoses to do its job, since the original temporary boilers were still in the way of moving the new one closer to the building, but that never slowed them down, although it must be said that it added considerably to the unsightly aspect of the situation. Perhaps a more gullible person might suppose that the eventual plan would be to dis-assemble the rusted empty hulks of burnt-out temporary boilers and remove the debris, to make it possible to maneuver the new temporary boiler into the same original position, where it might not be more decorative necessarily, but much less of an inconvenience in the courtyard. As for the rest of us, we saw the handwriting on the wall when we noticed that the trailer under the new temporary boiler was now sitting flat on the ground, and no longer exhibited any wheels by which it could be moved. It also sported its own chain-link fence, with no-nonsense posts that had been drilled right into the concrete foundation of the courtyard, not just propped up on the surface for show. Yes, dear friends, that's yet a third temporary boiler in our courtyard that's not going anywhere, by golly, and it can't be long now before the plywood shows up for another temporary boiler house, so that we will end up not only right back where we started, but even worse. Frankly, I think that's the kind of rebound that even the mighty Shaquille O'Neal couldn't pull off, but for all of the Dennis Rodman fanatics out there, you didn't hear that from me. Elle

Pot Luck

2011-03-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

Hello World,

Happy Spring! It's really true that Sunday, March 20, was the official first day of spring according to the calendar, although it seems that someone forgot to tell the weather trolls, because we had more snow the very next day on Monday, which was about as welcome as you would expect after the kind of winter that we've just had around here. And just when we thought we were finally out of the proverbial woods, and going in the right direction, on Wednesday we got hit with yet another storm that they described as "wintry mix," but which instead ended up as regular snow, with actual accumulations, and thanks so very much not. And since it started as freezing rain and sleet, by the time I got outside to clean off my car in the morning to go to work, it was about two inches of icy slush stuck onto the windows, and getting that to budge was no joke. Speaking of jokes, later that same day, the sun came out and it turned into a beautiful day, which was really just a cruel prank by the weather trolls toying with us on top of everything else. I may as well say right now that if the poll takers come around asking for my opinion of the weather trolls, I've got some news for them, and it won't be good, believe me.

Speaking of news, I would be remiss if I didn't mention [and here for the sake of public safety, I must point out that sensitive readers should be sitting down for this] that we've had actual dial tone and telephone service at our house for two weeks in a row now, as impossible as that might seem. After wrestling with Verizon since December, and having literally hordes of repair people in and out of the house week in and week out to no avail, we are finally back in contact with the rest of the world, through the miracle of copper wire technology, a mere one hundred years after the invention of the acoustic communications device that has been taken for granted by generations all this time. Not by us, by golly, not after this, I can tell you that. Everyone who came here said the wiring in the house was fine, but the wire out of the house was bad, the wire on the pole was no better, and the wires at the cross-box were even worse, so even after they fixed the immediate failure, it was just a matter of time before something else went wrong. The last guy finally decided to just re-route our entire house connection to a different pole with a new wire, thus eliminating all of those other bad connections at a stroke. Of course, at first we didn't believe it, because nothing ever seemed to work for more than two days at a time, but now it seems like this might really have solved the problems once and for all. And that sound you don't hear is the aggrieved Alexander Graham Bell, who is not spinning in his grave, after his namesake minions have finally restored us to the ranks of humanity who are enjoying his crowning achievement of the 19th century, which has given us so much trouble for the last four months, and through no fault of the late inventor, I'm sure.

In other local news, the home-town fans were understandably elated to welcome Carmelo Anthony to the New York Knicks, along with his teammate Chauncey Billups from the Denver Nuggets, in a just-under-the-wire deal at the trading deadline that gave their perennially disappointed faithful reason to hope in the future. Now with two genuine marquee players, the Knicks are suddenly being considered as legitimate playoff contenders, although like the first day of spring, apparently no one told the rest of the league, as the current line-up has continued to play like the .500 team they have been all along, thanks not. However, I'm sure we all want to believe that a new day has dawned for the storied franchise, with the promise of a return to the glory days of Willis Reed and Walt Frazier, although even by today's standards, I'd say that these young men have some pretty big shoes to fill, Clyde.

On the home front, we bid a sad farewell to our beloved princess, the redoubtable GingerSnap, who spent
nearly 13 years as part of our family, since first showing up in our driveway one day in 1998. She had a lovely personality, which was sweetly docile without being timid, and although she wasn't the type to pick a fight, she also wouldn't back down from anybody, from the smallest to the biggest. Over the years, she saw them come and go, and she just kept on going, in spite of some significant health issues that may have slowed her down, but never kept her down. Bill looked through the chronology of our cats, and calculated that GingerSnap lived with, through, around and concurrent with 27 other cats in our household, which we figure is some kind of a record that has not been matched before or since, and at this rate, never will be. So now we find ourselves down to our last female in the entire family, who also happens to be the very last survivor of the Invisible Cats, the Little Miss Invisible Potfourri her own self, and I don't mind saying, she's also got some pretty big shoes to fill, by golly.

Meanwhile at church, the powers-that-be sent out a notice about a special congregational meeting to be held next month, to discuss important matters that could not be put off until the next regular congregational meeting in January. My personal feeling was that it would give us a chance to brush up on our chair-throwing and name-calling skills, since we never get to use them any more at the annual meetings, where peace and harmony prevail, and I haven't slugged anyone with a hymnal in so long that I can't even remember anymore if the green one or the red one packs more of a wallop. We'll have to wait until next month to find out what the actual purpose of the meeting is, because all the letter reveals is "to hold a discussion and create any resolutions" in response to a statement from the Lutheran hierarchy, and long may they wave. I know that people think church meetings are hopelessly boring, but this is the part that really got my attention: "A pot lunch will be served." Hey, far out, man - it's the hippy-dippy flower children tripping down the path of enlightenment, to turn on, tune in and drop out just like the good old days! I say let's go totally psychedelic and break out the hashish brownies, hemp tea and space cakes, so we can party like it's 1967, and I'll bring the black light if you'll bring the incense. (I'll repeat that for those of you on drugs: "Incense and peppermints, meaningless nouns, turn on, turn in, turn your eyes around.") In the interests of proper church probity, it must be said that what they probably meant was "a pot-luck luncheon" which is something else altogether, and not nearly as interesting, but I'm not giving up on the MaryJane aspect of this meeting, which might just turn out to be a blast from the past in more ways than one.

And while we're on the subject of things that make your head spin, I was on the phone with one of the hospital vendors who was spelling out a catalog number for me, and actually used the expression: "That's 'K' as in 'candy cane'," and apparently without irony. Of course, everyone knows that I'm too polite to laugh, but I admit that this was one of those moments where I just held the phone away from me and stared at it, as if daring it to make some sense of this, by sheer force of will if necessary. I mean, it's one thing to say "K like cat," instead of kitten, but to come up with two separate words, neither of which has a K anywhere to be seen, that takes a special kind of - well, I don't know what it takes exactly, but frankly, I wouldn't rule out hashish brownies, that's for sure. Also at work, there was a novice orthopedic sales rep who had somehow managed to get on the wrong side of one of our administrative heavyweights, the imposing Katherine Monahan, who chewed her out loud and long, and basically banned her from the premises for the rest of her natural life, as well as whatever after-life she might have had in front of her. I got a phone call later from the territory manager, who assured me that everything was going to be straightened out, and he was going to come in and "smooth things over with Ms. Moynihan." Now, I'll admit that I like a practical joke as much as the next fellow, but I had to tell him flat-out that if his plan was to smooth things over, the most important thing was for him not to call her Moynihan when her name is Monahan, believe me. After raking the new sales rep over the coals, I'd hate to think what she would have in store for this poor schnook, after calling her by the wrong name, but if I was him, I'd be on the lookout for flying hymnals, and plenty of them. And whatever you do, don't eat the brownies.

Elle

Hand Jive

2011-03-20T20:28:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

And so here we find ourselves on the other side of Daylight Saving Time, and lived to tell the tale, and even St. Patrick's Day has come and gone, with all of its anachronistic parades and various panoply along with it, not to mention, green beer. Last Friday, I took the day off from work for my birthday, and it was a lovely and peaceful day, where I had a chance to relax and enjoy myself, and then we went out to dinner, which is always a treat. After that, it was presents, and there were no complaints on that score, I can tell you that. Although possibly my favorite part of the day was an electronic birthday greeting from a colleague who sincerely wished me a very "Happy 29th," and right about now, I'm thinking that has a pretty nice ring to it.

Meanwhile, back at the employer of last resort in our fair city, one of our departments organized a bridal shower for their secretary who is getting married next month, and many of us were glad to be invited to join in the festivities. I found out later this was supposed to be a surprise, which certainly made us old-timers roar with laughter, because the one thing that has never been able to survive in the hospital environment, for as long as we've all been there, is a secret. I said flat-out that a surprise shower would be absolutely impossible, in spite of voluminous HIPAA regulations and decades' worth of educational training on confidentiality and privacy policies. Or as the director of Practice Management famously quipped: "People here know things about me that my own family doesn't even know."

Speaking of things we might be better off not knowing, we have the following unsolicited (one supposes) testimonials from patient families, about the quality care they received from our medical professionals, or at least, that's what I think they're trying to tell us:

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Once I arrived, I was surrounded by the most caring ER staff,
who immediately comforted me and made me fell "right at home"
until my family arrived.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Personally, I'm hoping that no one made this person fell, in spite of what it says, because that would probably be of no help at all, and would be unlikely to induce anyone to write us a nice letter afterward. Obviously, this is one of those cases where the spell-checker is not going to help you avoid using the word "fell" instead of "feel," either the person who originally wrote the note, or the secretary retyping it for distribution. The next one certainly had room for improvement:

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
During my Mother's stay, both she and our family members
have had with the nurses and aides have been exceptional.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Well, sometimes you just don't even know where to begin. You can read that sentence numerous times, over and over again, and find that there is no increase in comprehension at any point, no matter how many times you do that, I promise. I can't even tell if they left out a word, or what went wrong for the meaning to get so lost that it never showed up again. And in fairness to the writer, once again the error could have been on the part of the person transcribing the message for distribution, but even here, I can't figure out what they did to foul it up so completely. At our house, we would blame this kind of thing on the horoscope computer, but HIPAA regulations prevent me from checking the hospital census to see if the horoscope computer's mother was one of our patients.

On the other hand, things in the local newspaper have fared no better, starting with a couple from the Sports section, where they were just a little too eager to get their ideas across, and perhaps as a result, their brains (such as they are) were moving too fast for their fingers to keep up:

====================
Raymond Felton had
17 points and 15 assists
in the Knicks' win over the
Wizards, who have yet win
a game on the road.
====================

Well, the spell-checker is really not going to help you if you just plain leave a word out, unless "yet win" is a newly accepted construction nowadays. And we all know what I always say about going back and looking over what you've written (what a concept!) or God forbid, having actual editors whose job it is to catch these blatant kinds of routine lapses. The next one suffers the same sort of problem, but as routine lapses go, at least adds an element of entertainment, however inadvertent:

====================
In a league known for its trash-talking, even the NFL has
gotten of hand, so says Ray Anderson, the vice president of
football operations ...
====================

I'm certainly hoping that our pal Ray did not really say "gotten of hand," which not only doesn't mean anything, but even if it did, doesn't sound like it would have meant what he wanted to convey anyway. In fact, if they were trying to rein in trash-talk, that might very well be one of the expressions that would not make the cut, I'm thinking, and poor old Ray would find himself sitting on the wrong side of the trash-talking fence this time around, and no one to blame but himself.

Going in a different, but no better, direction is a recent front page story about local flooding, with this inapt quote from AccuWeather meteorologist Mike Pigott:

======================
"This storm will certainly
exasperate flooding problems ... "
======================

Well, you don't even know if you should laugh or cry sometimes, and gnashing of teeth might not be out of order either. Here again, you have no way of knowing if the speaker simply misused the term "exasperate" when he meant "exacerbate" (one hopes) or whether it was the newspaper that printed it incorrectly, but you wouldn't think in this day and age, that it would be beyond the possibilities that someone would catch this error before the newspaper was actually out on the streets, and spoiling everyone's breakfast with its shoddy grammar. I don't know if the flooding problems were exasperated, but I can tell you for sure that I certainly was exasperated, and that's putting it mildly. Ah, for those halcyon days of yore, before the mass extinction of the editors, when newspapers didn't just print any old word they felt like, as long as it was close enough to the word it was supposed to be, alas.

They were having their own problems in the Life & Style section, first with this feature story about the Academy Awards, which began by throwing statistics at us in a headlong fashion:

=======================
More than 37.6 million viewers
watched with baited breath ...
=======================

Now, I never do understand why people insist on using phrases that they obviously don't understand, such as "bated breath," and then don't bother to look them up to make sure that they aren't making a grammatical fool of themselves, until you're up to your eyebrows in plucky stars described as "troopers," or someone whose interest has been "peaked," or telling someone else to go "pedal" their papers elsewhere. After a while, it's homophones run amuck - excuse me, I mean, amok - and devil take the hindmost. Our friends at enotes.com, in an explanation of the "bated breath" phrase used in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," were having none of it, and although identified it as a "much misunderstood phrase," nonetheless never mention the word "bait" at any point in their commentary. So for all of you anglers out there, aiming to reel in the Bard on this one, I'm afraid you're on your own.

I find that the other one makes even less sense, but for a different reason, in an article about cleaning stains off of clothing and shoes:

=======================
Dip a clean, soft rag, ring out
most of the excess moisture, and
wipe off salt stains. Repeat as needed,
and let leather fully dry before wearing.
Products are also available,
including follow-up leather conditioner.
=======================

Yes, they really did use the term "ring out" in place of "wring out," and for heaven's sake, you shouldn't even need the spell-checker to keep from making an elementary mistake that even the most backward schoolchild would be able to avoid. It's enough to make us language purists ring our hands, and feel like we've been put through the ringer, at least in the "Holiday For W's" version of this column. But besides all that, I'm afraid I'm not really in the ballpark with them on the part about "products are also available." By giving the hypothetical products no modifiers of any kind - such as "specialty," "shoe care," "related," or even "commercial" - the whole sentence stops short of having any meaning whatsoever, as it sinks under the weight of every miscellaneous product in the entire world that might be available. At our house, we would say that the cock-eyed horoscope computer churned that one out, after coming back from visiting its mother in the hospital, but unfortunately, HIPAA regulations prevent me from compromising the privacy of our patients. However, if its mother was having a bridal shower at the hospital, well then, all bets would be off, and as Ray Anderson can tell you, it wouldn't take long before this sort of thing had completely gotten of hand, by golly.

Elle

Crack of Dawn

2011-03-13T13:27:00.001-07:00

Hello World,

Well, people should probably fasten their seat belts, because we may be in for a bumpy ride ahead, I'm thinking. In the first place, this weekend would be the switch-over back to Daylight Saving Time, so let that be a lesson to all of you wastrels who have been out there wasting daylight for the last four months, because that gravy train has pulled out of the station at last, and left you up in the air without a paddle, lying in the gutter along the boulevard of broken dreams, as it were. Saturday night would be the time to "spring ahead" an hour, and if you're planning to go to church in the morning (which I hope you do) you'd better step lively if your church, like mine, only has one service, thus giving you only one chance to be there at the right time. Of course, earlier in the week was Shrove Tuesday, followed by Ash Wednesday, formally ushering in the season of Lent, which will continue until Easter on April 24, and it goes without saying, everyone should be on the lookout for grouchy Christians who have given up chocolate for the duration. (Personally, I think they should have to wear signs.) So this has already been an eventful week, but that's not all. I think it would be safe to say that I was more surprised than anybody when I came home from work Wednesday and found that the city had sent its minions around to scoop up last year's leaves, which had been conglomerating all over the streets since December, and at this point, to say "at long last" would be way more than an understatement of epic proportion, and that's putting it mildly. For months, the ill-fated leaves had been buried in snow, frozen with ice, manhandled hither and thither by snowplows attempting to clear the roads, and finally, pummeled by rain coming down in sheets, until they were a slovenly and bedraggled mish-mash of their former windrows. As I said, I believe this had more of an impact on me than anybody else, because one such conglomeration was right in front of my car on the street, so every time I wanted to go anywhere, I first had to back up away from the pile, and then drive around it, which managed to be even more annoying than it sounds, on the morning that I backed up into the container full of recycling, and then had to spend the next 15 minutes picking up cans and bottles that had been scattered all over the street in every direction, and thanks oh so very much not. Now suddenly it looks like an actual street again, where actual people live and conduct their busy lives, and not some hillbilly backwater, where the treacherous roads are designed with deliberate obstacles to keep "them gol-dang revenooers" from destroying the family's clandestine moonshine still, by cracky. It was certainly a red-letter day around here, and even more welcome for being so utterly unexpected, and we probably would have hightailed it down to the still and broken out the moonshine to celebrate, that is, except for it being Ash Wednesday and all.

But even that's not all, believe it or not, and as incredible as it might seem, there's even more yet still. (No, I don't mean the moonshine still that we're hiding from the revenuers, this is a different kind of still altogether, believe me.) It dawned gray and dreary on Monday, March 7, after an entire night of drenching rain that caused massive flooding all over the region, with the ensuing accidents, power outages and emergencies that were to be expected under those conditions. It was still drizzling as I was getting ready to go to work, but lightly enough that there didn't seem to be anything at all alarming about it. And then I happened to glance out the window and noticed that it was in fact SNOWING, which somehow managed to be even more unwelcome than the pelting rain that we had all night, and you can believe me when I say, thanks oh so very much not. Later in the day when I was at work, suddenly the sun came out, of all things, which was about the last thing I would have expected on a day that started out the way it did. And then the world went completely nuts and the planets blasted out of their orbits, because the next thing I heard was the unmistakable sounds of the ice cream truck under my window, and at that point, well, you could have knocked me right over, and no amount of backwoods hooch would have brought me around again. Inasmuch as it was a bracing 40 degrees in our fair city at the time, I must say that it did not strike me as the most auspicious moment for this purveyor of frozen treats to be peddling his wares on the street, but there he was nonetheless. Personally, I'm thinking that selling moonshine out of a truck would have made more sense at that temperature, but there's probably a reason that they don't let people do that, I suppose.

It was the very next day - March 8th - which represented the first day that I was able to wear sneakers to work so far in all of 2011, and not have to wear boots because of all of the snow, ice, rain and other perils underfoot that made it impossible to go anywhere in sneakers since the end of last year. I can't ever remember that happening, where the conditions were so bad for so long that I literally could not leave the house in sneakers, not even once, for weeks on end, or risk taking my life in my hands at every step. So this was my idea of a milestone on our long-awaited journey into Spring, and all harbingers along the way are more than welcome. In fact, I noticed that we already had crocus open in our yard, and their jaunty purple flowers are a sight to see, not to mention, a tonic for what ails you. It's our very own vernal moonshine, and the revenuers can't do anything about that, by cracky, try as they might.

Speaking of weather, we had yet another torrential downpour on Thursday night, where it rained cats and dogs all night, and somewhere between the pooches and the kitties, one of our circuit breakers tripped in the basement, throwing one entire electric zone in our house into utter blackness, without a clock, night-light, electric blanket or answering machine left performing its central purpose for love or money. When we got up in the morning and flipped it back on again, it wouldn't stay, and tripped over once more, so it was clearly having more problems than just the obvious one. I decided to try unplugging the GFI outlet that was on that circuit, in case there was some trouble with the bird bath heaters outside that was causing it to trip. That seemed to solve the problem at least temporarily, so I left the heaters unplugged so as not to tempt fate. Later I realized that if I wasn't going to plug them back in, I may as well put them away, and not leave them and the extension cords out in the wet and cold if I wasn't going to use them. So I dried them off and packed them away, and now I feel that it is incumbent upon me to announce to everyone in the local area that they should be prepared for an unprecedented wave of frigid temperatures and arctic conditions, the likes of which have never been seen in this geologic era, and to one and all, please accept my heartfelt apologies, and don't spare the long underwear.

I know this will sound silly for something that is not what I would consider a movable feast, but the reality of it is that St. Patrick's Day will be next week on Thursday, in spite of the fact that the newspaper has been rife with pictures and stories galore of what they always refer to as St. Patrick's DAY parades, starting as early as two weeks ago (which was still technically February, mind you) and going for the next two weeks, which will be a whole week after the sainted saint's saintly day of sainthood recognition, I don't mind saying. Now to be honest, I really don't care when various people, organizations or municipalities want to have their parades and observances, and I'm always the first to say that there's no wrong way to celebrate a holiday, and this is no exception. But for heaven's sake, please don't call them St. Patrick's DAY parades, when they are plainly NOT on St. Patrick's Day, or sometimes even close to it, and could just as easily be called a St. Patrick's Parade, while making no reference to whatever any old day you care to have it on. After all, the leprechauns will be just as jolly, the shamrocks will be just as green, and the green beer will be just as, well, whatever it is, without perpetuating a linguistic anachronism that is not only erroneous, but unnecessarily annoying to the language purists out there, and believe me, we know who we are. I'll be the one wearing the green long underwear, with a jug full of XXX green moonshine, by cracky.

Well, here is a horse that I was never expecting to ride around the barnyard again, and that's not just a bunch of buffalo nickels, believe me. Of course, many of us are "of a certain age" and remember when the "wheat" pennies were the common currency, and it is not beyond memory since they were replaced in 1959 by the newer pennies with the Lincoln Memorial on the back, and so they have stayed all these decades later. And everyone knows that they've been saying for all these decades that the federal government is going to do away with pennies, because they cost more to make than their face value is worth, and yet they just keep churning them out anyway. And for the benefit of collectors, our friends at the U.S. Mint created all those fancy new state quarters, and all the new dollar and two dollar coins that nobody uses, they just keep them in a drawer at home. And they also came up with redesigned nickels in honor of the anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition, which were interesting and educational, and unlike the stupid state quarters, still managed to look like real money instead of Monopoly money. And then the Mint went out of its collective mind, and redesigned the penny, of all things, still with Lincoln on the front, but with a new and more decorative shield on the back, instead of the Lincoln Memorial, but which at a quick glance was so reminiscent of the Memorial that people wouldn't even realize that they had them in their pockets all along. And so you would think, as I did, that would be the end of it, and surely the coinage horse would be put back in the currency barn, and nobody would be riding it around the barnyard once more, and we could all get on with our lives. Not so fast! A coworker was collecting money in her piggy bank for church members making a humanitarian trip to Haiti, and I emptied my desk drawer of loose change that I had found in the street, or that people had given me in exchange for postage stamps. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but some newfangled penny that I had never seen before in all my born days. Once again, it has the same old portrait of President Lincoln on the front (that guy's got some union, by golly) while the back, according to our friends at about.com, represents Lincoln's professional life in Illinois (1830-1861) and shows a young Lincoln newly nominated for the U.S. Senate standing in front of the old capitol building in Springfield, Illinois. And that's not all - it turns out that this is not some numismatic aberration by some kook at the Mint, there's actually a series of 4 different designs, including one with the legendary log cabin of his birth, one with him splitting logs, and another has the U.S. Capitol building at the time of his inauguration, with the famous dome still under construction, including scaffolding and mechanical cranes in profusion. Mind you, the one I found by accident has a mint date of 2009, so they are obviously not the newest thing under the sun, and in fact, predates the "shield" penny, which was released in 2010. But it certainly came as a surprise to me that anybody would wait 50 years to redesign the lowly penny, and then come up with 5 different designs in two years, like this was some meteoric Hollywood starlet with a new line of designer clothing, for heaven's sake. Personally, I think they should send the revenuers out to the U.S. Mint to smash up their moonshine still before they come up with any more harebrained schemes to waste the taxpayers' money, by cracky, and that's not just the green beer talking, believe me.

Elle

Do The Doo

2011-03-06T18:38:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Happy March! In the local area, it's almost time to start believing in the month that comes in like a lion, but will actually turn into a lamb before it leaves, and what a welcome transition that will be, after the remorseless cold and snow of the winter we've just been through. Just this week, I noticed the first of the early spring bulbs already pushing their pointy green tips through the ground, with the promise of colorful flowers not far behind. With the cheery sunshine and warmer temperatures lately, the snow finally melted out of our yard at long last, receding along the culvert, and exposing the casualties of damage done by the landscaping crew in their over-enthusiastic plowing of our driveway - the forlorn wreckage of busted yard lights, mangled bushes, the tattered remains of our address sign - the full extent of which had been hidden under a deep white winter blanket until now. No doubt about it, we've either got to get smaller landscapers or a bigger driveway, because otherwise, it's going to cost us a fortune in replacement yard lights, bushes and signs every winter, I can tell you that.

Of course, everyone knows how I hate to be an alarmist, but I will admit that I have been remiss in not noticing that there has been an insidious trend taking place over the last little while, and in many ways, right under our very noses. It was Thursday morning when I was heading to work, and going past the Sunoco station around the block, and couldn't help but notice that the price of regular was a whopping $3.76 per gallon, with the premium at an astronomical $4.15, which would seem impossible except that I saw it with my very own eyes. It seems that the last time I looked, or actually got gas myself, the price was not anything like that, because it certainly got my attention in a big fat hurry on Thursday. Why, I'm sure that I'm not the only old-timer who can remember back in the day when I first started driving, and gas was 25 cents a gallon, the idea of ordinary gasoline for cars being over a dollar would have seemed laughable, and even in the oil shortage days of the 1970's, when gas did finally get over a dollar, you can believe me when I say that people back then would never stand still for these kinds of outrageous gas prices, it would have been simply unthinkable. There would not have been ink enough in the entire world for all of the incendiary letters that people would have written to their representatives, and the wholesale riots would have been epic in proportion. Nowadays, people don't even notice, and whatever the going rate is at the pump, they pay it with a shrug, and probably just as glad that it's not even higher, for heaven's sake. If only our old friends the dinosaurs had known back then how much more valuable their remains would have become in this day and age, they probably would have held out for better royalties, by golly.

Alert readers may recall that two weeks ago, we were surprised to find that there was dial tone once again on our phone, which used to be routine at our house, but since the beginning of December, well, not so much. In fact, at that point, it was so far from being routine that we were flabbergasted at this turn of events, as a technological innovation that we would have taken for granted just months earlier. At the time, however, I refused to get all starry-eyed about it, since there had been other occasions when we had dial tone for a day or two, before losing service once again. Alas, this turned out to be another one of those cases where we did have actual dial tone for three days, only to discover later that we were suddenly right back where we started, when it was replaced by the sounds of utter nothingness and plenty of it. And unlike last time, when they at least provided us with an inadvertently amusing repair message for people to enjoy if they tried to reach us, this time the result was nothing but an annoying "fast busy" signal that was neither helpful nor entertaining in any way, and thanks so very much not. And so the evil minions at Verizon have accomplished what his arch-rival Elisha Gray never could, by keeping the brilliant invention of Alexander Graham Bell from becoming a reality, at least in our house. I'm sure the dinosaurs know exactly how he feels.

And while we're on the subject of sounds of silence and otherwise, I found myself the recipient of an inadvertently melodic message at work last week. I had gotten a frantic phone call (in Purchasing, there is very rarely any other kind than frantic, although interestingly enough, it never seems to be about medical supplies, this type of hysteria is usually reserved for a lack of copy paper, inter-office envelopes, paper clips, business cards and Post-it notes) from the Radiology department about a refrigerator that they had sent a requisition for, and wanted to find out when it would be coming. I had to tell the over-wrought young woman that the requisition had been sent to Finance for signatures, and hadn't been returned yet, and we couldn't place the order until the paperwork came back downstairs. At the time, she seemed to take this in stride, but it wasn't long after that I received a copy of her panicky email to the department supervisor, in a tone of desperation which declared: "According to Purchasing, the refrigerator PO has not being singed!" Personally, I don't know if they sing at the requisitions in Finance, or just sign them instead with no musical accompaniment, but I did my part by giving out with a rousing version of "Camptown Ladies" that would have made Stephen Foster sit up and take notice, even all these years later, rest his soul, and that's not just a lot of doo-dah doo-dah, believe me.

Last week on Thursday was our anniversary, as we prepared to celebrate 28 years of wedded bliss, although I forgot that I had a meeting at church that evening, so we ended up celebrating on Friday instead. We had dinner at the diner, which is always a treat for us, regardless of whether there's an occasion or not, and then came home to find the anniversary bandits had left presents for us as well. We set right to it, and unwrapped gifts of apparel, snacks (organic, if you please) entertainment and handy household items that were just what the doctor ordered for those chores around the house. I also took a giant leap into the cutting edge of fashion, as Bill presented me with a beautiful silver Pandora bracelet (and you can feel free to go right ahead and visit their web site at http://www.pandora.net/ and see for yourself) with little silver hearts and cat charms to go along with it. Apparently these are all the rage nowadays among the fashionable elite, so now I can count myself among their number, and take my place in the fashionista ranks with the best of them. Although I'm afraid the farting bedroom slippers are going to have to go, and as Stephen Foster can tell you, that's also not just a lot of doo-dah doo-dah, believe me.

And speaking of wedding bells, it was many years ago when we were first married that we had a very special cat in our lives, the irreplaceable Mimi, our superstar Persian, who has no equal and never will. One of his less popular habits was that he would practically climb inside your mouth to see what you were eating, because he was sure that it was something that he was desperate to have, and right that instant.
Mimi was very highly intelligent, so I would always find that I was using logic with him, and point out what I considered the obvious flaw in his reasoning - for instance, saying things like "cats don't eat Twinkies," or "cats don't drink iced tea," or "you wouldn't even like blueberry muffins." But no matter what it was, and no matter how carefully I explained that he didn't want it, he would hound me for a taste, and invariably would scarf it down and ask for more, even the aforementioned iced tea, which I'm sure he only did out of pure orneriness. He didn't want to miss a chance at anything, whether it was butterscotch pudding, potato chips, cinnamon buns, pizza, corn muffins or whatever, he wanted his shot at it, and you can be sure that he wouldn't give up until he got it. Well, now it seems that one of our new additions, Flopsie, has taken a page out of that old book, as I found myself fending him off last week when I was trying to eat a quick meal in peace. I was in a hurry and just heated something up from a can, and although he's not as sharp mentally as Mimi, I still patiently explained to him that he really didn't want this item that he was pestering me for, and I could give it to him only to have him turn up his nose at it and walk away from it, so it would have been all a lot of aggravation for nothing. But I finally gave in and let him have the last of it at the bottom of the bowl, whereupon he polished off the final portion of my Spaghettio's in short order, and apparently would have been just as happy if I opened up another can just for him. Of course, we love Flopsie in a very special way, but you can bet that I'm going to think twice before trying to eat any blueberry muffins around him, that's for sure. Oh, and if Elisha Gray shows up with my dial tone, please ask him to go peddle his patents elsewhere, and take his doo-dah with him.

Elle

Shell Game

2011-02-26T20:58:00.001-08:00

Hello World,

Well, I don't know about where you are, but in this area, February has been a brisk cold month full of disagreeable weather, which managed to wear out its welcome in short order, and when it finally breathes its last on Monday, I can't say that there will be a lot of people sorry to see it go. In fact, even last week we had more snow, which was supposed to be just a dusting or very scant accumulations, but wound up being more than six inches, most notably on the sidewalks, where Bill did his usual heroic job of shoveling, and with no complaints, which is the best kind. One good thing was that the implacable quagmire of left-over snow everywhere that has hounded our existence since December, finally in some mysterious fashion, seemed to all melt away in a single week, even though it has still been cold the whole time, although it did get slightly warmer from the low twenties into the mid-thirties for the most part. I think it was a combination of two things that really made the difference, the first being that we didn't have any more significant snowfalls for two weeks in a row, while before that it seemed like a weekly occurrence, and about as welcome as you'd expect on that kind of schedule. The other was that, taking advantage of the hiatus of fresh snowflakes, the city came around with bulldozers and dump trucks to pick up many of the gigantic snow mounds that had been scattered about like haystacks throughout the burg, which immediately made it easier to get around and feel like things were getting back to normal. So this last snow didn't have the same kind of impact falling on bare ground, as the same amount would have had on top of the left-over horrendous mess that was here before, and already it's just a (less than) fond memory. Sort of like February after Monday, and good riddance.

And speaking of good riddance, while I wouldn't go so far as to say that I've been catching up on things around here, I did finally do laundry for the first time in recent memory, at least in this geologic era, and I also put away clothes from the last time I did any laundry, and I can't even remember when that was, so you can imagine how long they've just been lounging around on the clothesline since then. In fact, I realized that these clothes were so old that some of them were made of fabric that had been hand-woven on looms before the Industrial Revolution, with such novelties as buttons made out of shells. I'll admit that there were many among them that I didn't even recognize as clothing of mine, and while I appreciated the jaunty pre-Colonial style about them, I really thought the powdered wig was just way too much.

And while we're here in the Colonial era, I should bring up a note that I received recently from a colleague, who was commenting on a brochure-in-progress, and complained about what she referred to as the "boarders." Now, this is where I say, "Shiver me timbers, lads!" and the captain of the brigantine rallies his crew with shouts of "Away all boarders!" in the heat of a historic naval battle on the high seas. Unfortunately, it wasn't that kind of brochure, so I can only assume that it wasn't marauding sailors that she objected to, and more's the pity, I'm sure. Although if her ire was directed to the decorative design around the outside, I would have expected her to come up with the more appropriate "border" instead, and not fall into the homophone trap where the spell-checker is never going to be able to dig you out of. And that's not just a lot of bored boarding borders, believe me.

Also not saying what they mean (one hopes) we get the following from our friends at New Rochelle Patch in a story about a fire at the historic Union Baptist Church in our fair city -

================================
City Manager Charles Strome said no cause has yet been determined in the Union Baptist Church fire. He said the building department will determine if the Main Street facade is structurally sound or will have to be demolished to prevent it from fall into the street.
================================

I'll have you know that I have actually met the City Manager in person, and I sincerely doubt that he ever said anything like "prevent it from fall," as they have paraphrased it here. Alas, for those halcyon days of yore, when there were actual editors to catch grammar lapses like this one, rather than just sending them out over the information super-highway for everyone to see, and many of us, to wail and gnash our teeth at. Or even better, those halcyon days of the future, when computer programs will alert people to these types of fundamental mistakes - where a word may be spelled correctly, but it's still the wrong word nonetheless in its context - or better still, prevent them altogether. Of course, that does rather smack of a little too much artificial intelligence on the part of the computer programs, and I think we've all seen enough science fiction movies of technology run amok to realize that sort of thing can all too easily become a double-edged sword in the wrong hands, and no good can come of it. Personally, I can tell you that I'm not going to fall ..... er, I mean, stand for it.

And what may be new and exciting in the world of casual dining you may wonder, and well may you wonder. Funny thing about that - after years of bemoaning the fact (loud and long, and not to mention, year in and year out) that there were no Denny's restaurants anywhere near us, so that we could only enjoy them when we traveled hundreds of miles out of our area, suddenly all that changed like a bolt out of the blue. We went to Long Island to visit my sister, and nothing unusual about that, and were planning to have lunch at the diner as we normally would. Au contraire! (That's French for "Hold the macaroni!") She said she had a surprise for us, and directed us instead to a small and crowded strip mall along Hempstead Turnpike, where they have astoundingly opened what is apparently the very first Denny's on the island, in Levittown of all places. It's in the strangest location, squeezed into this squatty and cramped block of shops, with an inhospitable parking lot that is not for the faint-hearted, believe me. But if you can somehow manage to find your way to the place after all, it's a real genuine Denny's with all the trimmings, and is doing well enough that we had to wait on line to be seated on Saturday afternoon, and there was just as much of a line when we left as when we got there. We didn't take any chances, but ordered our usual tried-and-true favorites, including their shocking blue Pacific Chiller, which tastes better than it looks, at least to me. Unfortunately, this wasn't one of the Denny's with my favorite dessert, their scrumptious coconut creme pie, but we were too full for dessert anyway. We certainly weren't going to quibble over trivialities, after literally decades of fruitless yearning for a Denny's anywhere nearby, and suddenly one just pops up under our very noses and without any fanfare. So what started out as a humdrum day for us, full of ordinary places and routine errands, instead turned into a red-letter day in our lives, and way beyond our wildest dreams coming true at long last. In fact, I got so excited that I popped off one of my shell buttons, and had to borrow one of their brochures to wrap it up in, although frankly I didn't care much for the boarders, I can tell you that, me laddies.

Elle

Still Life

2011-02-19T20:22:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Happy Presidents Day weekend, and I hope that you will be able to make an executive decision to enjoy a long holiday weekend full of all the pomp and circumstance that anyone could possibly want, with plenty of Hail to the Chief for good measure. Things are already better in the local area, as we had an entire week with no precipitation of any kind (in our house, we don't use the "S" word anymore, after all the fluffy white stuff we've been through) and the weather finally inched its way above freezing, so that it felt almost balmy by comparison. At work on Friday, I had to cross over the campus to another building, and it was positively delightful out, and seemed just like spring, in stark contrast to just a few days ago. In fact, it was two weeks ago, when we were still gripped in the icy fist of implacable winter with piles of snow and ice everywhere, that I heard the first spring birds and their jaunty songs of hope and rebirth in the neighborhood, and a more welcome sound would be hard to come by, believe me. Bill even spotted a robin, and as harbingers of spring, they set the standard, so it's another encouraging sign for winter-weary people yearning to break free of the arctic doldrums, or at least see the light at the end of the tunnel that's not another oncoming blizzard, thanks not.

Of course, Monday was Valentine's Day for romantics everywhere, full of hearts and flowers and plenty of chocolate, which as a gift has that "one-size-fits-all" kind of quality that makes it so appealing. We had an appointment after work and then went out to dinner, which we usually don't, so that was a special treat, followed by presents that I don't mind saying, were up to Cupid's usual standards, and not to mention, extremely delicious as well. The holiday also represented another milestone, in that it was the end of the Christmas caravan for another year, as the day before we finally exchanged gifts with the last errant family member who had not been previously available for any of the other gift-giving opportunities along the caravan route up to this point. So we can finally pack away our sugar plums and mistletoe at long last, and take down the stockings, although if anyone thinks that I'm going to trust them to the evil clutches of the furry varmints in the attic, well, you can just believe that it will all be very far beyond their grasp.

And speaking of things that are beyond my grasp, this is one that I would not have figured to be in that category in any way, shape or form, up until now. It was years ago that I inherited a chair at work when I changed offices, because my old office was too hot, and I left my desk and chair behind to make a clean break of it. This was not a bad chair, as chairs go, but as chairs go, this one wouldn't - it simply didn't want to roll for beans. After using it for a while, I noticed that two of the casters would roll, but refused to swivel, so that you could go in one direction, but not another, unless you got completely up and turned the base of the chair in the direction that the casters would go. One day I remembered that when I moved into the office, and was re-organizing the furniture, I discovered a box of casters, which I put in the credenza to keep them out of the way. I decided to dig them out, and hoped that they would solve the problem, but I soon found out that there was a reason they were still in the box and not on the chair, because they didn't fit. All at once it dawned on me that I could just as easily buy a box of replacement casters that would fit, and after all, how expensive could it be for five lousy casters, and make my life so much easier - why, it would be a bargain at twice the price. Not so fast! Apparently casters have become "fashionable," and you now need a masters degree in Chairology in order to figure out what casters will fit what bases, and on what surfaces, and with what safety features, and on and on and on. I read all the descriptions, and picked out a set that I thought would do the trick, but when they came, the stems were too long to fit the base of the chair, unless I wanted to disassemble the decorative sleeves that covered the base so it didn't look unfinished. In a fortuitous coincidence, two of the sleeves were missing anyway, so I banged out the two bum casters that wouldn't swivel, and replaced them with two of the new casters, on the theory that it would at least have to be an improvement. It's true that the stems stuck up above the base and looked unsightly, but the casters worked a lot better, so I considered it a fair trade-off. After a while, I decided that I now knew enough about casters to pick out the right ones from a catalog, so I could replace all of them, and enter a whole new world of carefree mobility in the office of the future. So once again, I found myself with a box of replacement casters, and this time, that came along with two sets of stems to suit whatever the hypothetical chair base might throw at the unwary office worker. Amazingly enough, it turned out that the stems that would fit the chair base wouldn't fit the casters, and vice versa, so I ended up with yet a third box full of replacement casters that wouldn't work on the same stupid chair. I finally had to throw in the proverbial towel, and recognize that replacing the chair casters was obviously way beyond my meager capabilities, and required a mystical and arcane super power that I did not possess, and probably never would possess, and I should just give it up as a lost cause. Honestly, for the amount of time and effort and money that I have spent in trying to replace the casters on this chair, I could have long since built my own chair from scratch and be done with it already, and get on with my life. Still-life, that is.

Last week, I wanted to use the phrase "winter of our discontent," which is certainly well-known enough to anybody, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what comes after that, so I looked it up online. Of course, Shakespeare can be a more than a little abstruse, and the Internet is awash in pedantic sites about The Bard, and stuffed to the gills with pedagogues. Luckily, I stumbled upon our friends at http://www.enotes.com/, who were happy to oblige, and no dry and fusty pontifications for them, by golly, this was the James Bond of Avon - shaken, not stirred:

================================
Now is the winter of our discontentMade glorious summer by this son of York;And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our houseIn the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Richard, the future king, opens his play not by protesting his discontent, but by celebrating an upturn in his family's fortunes. His brother Edward IV—they're sons of the Duke of York—has wrested the English crown from Henry VI and the Lancastrian house. So those who simply quote "Now is the winter of our discontent" are doing these lines a disservice, since the "now" actually modifies "made glorious" (i.e. "The winter is now made glorious summer"). To translate more loosely: "The oppression of our family, which made life like a long winter, has been turned to a summery contentedness now that my brother is king." Edward's emblem is the sun, and the radiance of his glory has dispelled the clouds that "lowered" (frowned) on the House of York. Richard's string of metaphors runs adrift, though, when he begins talking about burying clouds in the ocean.
=================================

I just love their sly editorial comment (on Shakespeare, no less!) about the metaphors running adrift - as opposed to "aground" - with the clouds in the ocean. Stuff like that just tickles me.

And speaking of running adrift, as it were, I'm sure that everyone will be glad to hear that we've turned yet another corner in the ongoing Verizon saga at our house, which has so far had a lot more corners than I would have originally supposed. In fact, this one might lead a more optimistic person to imagine that the winter of our disconnect really was now to be made glorious summer and dispel the frowning clouds over the House of "No-Bell" in the bosom of the airwaves at long last. I came home from work on Wednesday and picked up the phone in the bedroom, and what to my wondering ears should appear but a dial tone, of all things, which has been sorely lacking, lo these many weeks on end over end, and then some. We were agog with amazement at this revolutionary concept, only about a mere hundred years after the invention of the apparatus in the first place, and here it was, on our very own phone. Our euphoria was soon cut short when we realized that with the dial tone, we could indeed make calls out, but we still couldn't get any calls in, which I suppose made it good for us, but bad for the telemarketers, which is what I would describe as a mixed blessing. After all, we can't expect much in the way of economic recovery if people can't call us on the phone to sell us insurance, aluminum siding, chimney cleaning, or carpet shampooing, so I'd say that Verizon still has their work cut out for them on this problem. As for me, I refuse to get all excited about having a dial tone at this point, after all, we've been known to have dial tone for two days at a time on several occasions already, only to have the rug pulled out from under us later. And let's not forget that I know a thing or two about rugs, believe me, and still have three boxes full of replacement chair casters to prove it.

Elle

Ring Leader

2011-02-13T18:40:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Happy (almost) Valentine's Day! As the happy occasion dawns on Monday, I wish you copious amounts of sweet treats, romance, and lace-trimmed apparel to make the holiday a very special one for you in the annals of Cupid's handiwork. As for myself, I'll take mine in chocolate, and plenty of it, and thanks ever so. I can't say that the cats are much to be counted on for events like this, as their taste runs more along the lines of bat-a-birds and catnip mice, but fortunately Bill makes up for their shortcomings, and then some, so no worries on that score. After all, I already have enough bat-a-birds and catnip mice to last me a lifetime, believe me.

Speaking of lifetimes, it seems a very long time ago that there was anything worth watching on television, and we find ourselves in that dreaded time of year between the end of football and the beginning of baseball, when we have to make do with basketball and hockey, or give up on televised sports altogether for the duration. Not even the Pro Bowl in front of us, since they moved it to before the Super Bowl for some inexplicable reason, and thanks so much not. There isn't even arena football or winter baseball to fall back on, like there used to be, which although seriously unlike the real thing, were still entertaining on their own merits. It's hard to believe that cable sports networks will take time up in their schedules to show high school field hockey, and yet nobody could keep arena football up and running, to give us something to look forward to over the winter. In any event, I suppose the good news is that Pitchers and Catchers will be reporting to their respective spring training camps in the South next week, and after the kind of winter that we've been through in this area, if those aren't the most beautiful words in the English language, well then, I just don't know what it would be. There's nothing like the return of the Boys of Summer to give us all a reason to hope in better days ahead.

Of course, the big sports news was the Green Bay Packers winning the Super Bowl last Sunday, and bringing home the aptly named Vince Lombardi Trophy back to where the home-town fans naturally feel that it belongs. It was quite a game, close enough to be interesting, and with the odd turnover here and there to keep it from being dull or predictable, as these big games so often are. Then there are always the infamous Super Bowl commercials, which are alternately hilarious, controversial, adorable or offensive, and sometimes, all at once. In fact, something else that fits all of those categories happened last week, I think on Saturday, when they announced the MVP for the NFL 2010 season, although why they would pick a time like that for this particular announcement is a mystery to me, I'm sure. It turned out the overwhelming favorite was Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, so apparently the outcome was no surprise. Now, please remind me again, where exactly were they on Sunday? Oh yes, that's right, they were at home watching the Super Bowl on TV, having been eliminated from the playoffs by the JETS in January, and to Mr. MVP, no thanks so very much, and plenty of it. This is my idea of a bad call, and I don't mind saying that I am unanimous in that. Or in the immortal words of Branch Rickey, "we could have done that without you, Ralph."

And while we're on the subject of things that make no sense, I would like to inform everyone that we have turned a corner in our lack of telephone service at home, and in fact, I invite everyone to give us a ring and get it right from the horse's mouth, as it were. It was obviously beyond their abilities at Verizon to actually repair the telephone service, so instead, they inserted a recorded message on our line, with what sounds suspiciously like a semi-literate goon who announces: "Da numba you have cawd is terminally outta service. Please try again." I can promise you that it is extremely entertaining, as recorded messages go, and well worth the cost of the call. I'd be less than candid if I didn't say that we both would have preferred having the phone service fixed, especially after this has been going on almost three months at this point, but I have to admit that this quixotic message is a close second as a consolation prize, and has proved to be extremely popular among people we know who have tried to reach us recently. As hope springs eternal in the human breast, we have not given up on the idea that Verizon is still trying diligently to repair our telephone service, and what the goon - excuse me, I mean the recorded announcement - is actually trying to express is that the number is only "temporarily" out of service, and not "terminally," which is what it sounds like. At least that's our hope, and although this has been the winter of our discontent in the field of telecommunications, we are looking forward to it turning into the glorious spring of our jubilant contentment, as we return from the land of the incommunicado, and leap once again into the sunshine of ringing bells and answering machines, like the rest of the civilized world. After all this time, I can tell you that I will never be so happy to hear people trying to sell me aluminum siding or chimney cleaning again in my whole life, and if anyone wants to sell me insurance or shampoo my carpets, I would probably remember them in my will at this point. What the heck, I've got to leave all those bat-a-birds and catnip mice to somebody.

Elle

Pull A Rabbit Out Of A Hat

2011-02-05T20:16:00.000-08:00

Hello World,

Hong Kong Bok Choy! It's time once again to wish everyone a very healthy and prosperous Chinese New Year, and don't spare the dim sum! We have now roared out of the Year of the Tiger, and hopped into the Year of the Rabbit, which may sound timid and uneventful, but this is very far from the case. The year has been described thusly: "In Chinese mythology, the Year of the Rabbit symbol represents longevity and it is believed that the Rabbit enjoys a close relationship with the moon. Westerners may refer to the man in the moon, but when the Chinese peer up at the moon, what they see is the Rabbit standing by a rock, holding a cup that overflows with the elixir of immortality. As symbols go, this is considered one of the finest." As far as people born in the year: "Although generally calm, gentle and loving, Rabbit people can be very ambitious and intuitively know how to get ahead in the world. They are good listeners, kind and sweet by nature, and are therefore often sought out as popular and trusted friends. Generally noted for their physical beauty, Rabbits like to surround themselves with beautiful things. They have a good eye for art, design and fashion, and are usually at the top of anyone's Best Dressed list. Others may call the Rabbit timid, but those born under this sign rightly view themselves as wise and cautious. Because a Rabbit’s overall approach is calm and considerate, they make excellent teachers. Coupled with their organizational skills, they are well suited for supervisory positions. They are detail-oriented and happiest when engrossed in intellectual activities. However, since they are basically reserved creatures, they do not thrive in competitive environments." You share your birth year cycle with the likes of Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Angelina Jolie and Jane Seymour. So anyone born in the years of 1903, 1915, 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999 or 2011, this is your year, so get out there and party like it's 4709, 4708, or 4648!

Of course, Tuesday was Groundhog Day, and depending on which famous groundhog prognosticator you subscribe to, they either did or did not see his or her shadow, meaning we either will or will not have six more weeks of winter. But a good time was had by all, and no groundhogs were injured during the course of the event, so I consider that a success even if an unanimous decision was not reached on the shadow hypothesis. And as everyone knows, Sunday will be Waitangi Day once again for our friends Down Under, although with the explosive situation in the Middle East at the moment, I'm not sure how much attention the world is going to pay to the usual riots and controversy surrounding this annual South Seas donnybrook, and probably just as well.

And speaking of donnybrooks, we find ourselves finally staring down both barrels of Super Bowl Sunday at long last, which this time around will pit the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Green Bay Packers, both of whom are no strangers to the gridiron winter classic by any means. The mavens in the NFL hierarchy, in their infinite wisdom, decided to hold the Super Bowl in Dallas this year rather than Florida, ostensibly because the weather is about the same, and also to make use of a brand-new stadium that was just built for the Cowboys. Only part of that worked out, because it's true that the stadium is still there, but it seems to be surrounded by about 6 inches of snow in every direction, thanks not. In fact, yesterday I called one of the hospital vendors in San Antonio, and their recorded message said they were having a snow emergency in the area, and I should expect wait times on hold to be longer than usual. People can say what they like about the vagaries of cruel fate, or the gods toying with us, but personally I prefer to believe that this only goes to prove that our old nemesis Comrade Mischka is really a Jets fan after all.

I should also report as a public service that the week after next will bring us Valentine's Day on Monday, for anyone who is not yet prepared to sweep their loved one off their feet with the perfect romantic gift, they've still got some time to pull the rabbit out of a hat, as it were. (No, not Angelina Jolie, let's not be ridiculous here.) This is another year where we have lucked out, and find that Cupid's special day is not falling during Lent for a change, so we can indulge in all the pleasures of the occasion without guilt or restraint, and don't spare the chocolate. In fact, Ash Wednesday isn't until March 9, making everyone wait for Easter until April 24, which is about the latest that I can ever remember it, and a quick search online shows that it hasn't been this late since before 1982. There's apparently a very arcane and mystifying computation for arriving at the date of Easter every year, and our friends at wikipedia.org devote several long and incomprehensible paragraphs to detailing the specifics of the process, but it can be somewhat summarized as follows:

====================
In western Christianity, using the Gregorian calendar, Easter always falls on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25, inclusively. Christian churches use March 21 as the starting point in determining the date of Easter, from which they find the next full moon, etc. [Eastern Orthodox Christianity uses the Julian calendar, which is why their Easter often falls on a different date.] Each year, the lunar month beginning with a new moon between March 8 to April 5 inclusive is designated as the paschal lunar month for that year. Easter is the 3rd Sunday in the paschal lunar month, or, in other words, the Sunday after the paschal lunar month's 14th day.
====================

Well, actually, that's just about as clear as mud, and it's a wonder that they can get people to agree on when Easter actually is every year, with all of the ballyhoo and folderol they have to go through to get there. It's only a lucky thing that this process hasn't been taken over by the warring factions of the St. Patrick's Day parade, or the fight over the actual date would be tied up in litigation so long that we'd never get around to the marshmallow Peeps and malted milk eggs before it was time to start all over again.

Speaking of dates, it was on Tuesday morning at work that someone asked me about an order that they said should have arrived "earlier in the week," which prompted me to observe that it then could only have been yesterday, since there was nothing else that was earlier in the workweek from Tuesday morning. After all, they haven't invented the "week stretcher" yet, so as it stands now, "earlier in the week" from Tuesday morning doesn't leave you much to play with. In other news on the work front in the local area, it was the unwelcome combination of heavy snowfalls and freezing temperatures that created a patchwork of huge snow mounds throughout our fair city, wherever the plows could push them, in their efforts to clear the streets and no place to go. There's been no possibility of anything melting, so we've been stuck with them ever since. Bill happened to notice one such towering pile on the corner as he walked past our mechanic's garage, and the enterprising proprietor had propped a large sign on top that announced: FREE SNOW, presumably to anyone in the neighborhood who might be interested. Then there was the owner of a bagel shop at the train station, from his location under an overhang, with a sign that offered ICICLES 10c to 25c for his commuter patrons. So the weather may be throwing at us everything that it's got, but we still have our sense of humor, thank heaven.

And speaking of humor in unexpected places, last Sunday was the annual congregational meeting at our church, in spite of the prevailing conditions at the time, and it went off without a hitch and right on schedule. Unlike previous years where the SWAT teams were on stand-by, the National Guard on high alert, and the FBI ready to spring at a moment's notice, this meeting was short, amicable, productive and on-topic throughout, which I don't mind saying, is a novelty that has caught many of us by surprise, and has taken some getting used to, compared to the old days. In fact, it's getting to the point that us old-timers are starting to lose our skills in name-calling, fist fights and throwing chairs, where once we were at the top of our game in these categories. Why, I doubt that I could hit the broad side of a budget deficit dissenter with a metal folding chair at 20 paces anymore, much less toss a bulletin board clear across a phalanx of rampaging ushers like I used to. I tell you, the old ways die hard, and it doesn't even hardly feel like we've really had an annual meeting when everything is so calm and civilized, and people are still speaking to each other when it's over. But on the bright side, there was plenty of delicious salad and pizza, fried chicken and pasta salad, plus brownies and cake, which all managed to take some of the sting out of it, for those of us hoping for a little more excitement. And thanks to our mechanic, everyone who showed up left with a bucket of free snow.

Elle

Belly Flop

2011-01-29T20:01:00.001-08:00

Hello World,

Of course, everyone knows how I hate to be an alarmist, so I feel it's only fair to warn all of you to be sitting down before you read this, because apparently the world as we know it has ceased to exist, and will never be the same again. Perhaps Time magazine said it best:

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On January 13, 2011, just two weeks before Saturn turned retrograde in Libra, humans in the Western world woke to the disruptive report that their star sign had changed. Or rather that their star sign was probably never the one they thought it was. The response was astronomical, even though many Americans think about the zodiac only when reaching for conversation with models and hunky yoga teachers. Apparently, the best way to get folks to care about their star sign was to try to change it. "Despite not really believing in astrology, I hereby insist on remaining an Aries," said TV host Rachel Maddow, echoing the prevailing sentiment.
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Apparently all the hubbub started when someone from the Minnesota Planetarium Society, with the unlikely name of Parke Kunkle, observed to a local newspaper that "because of the idiosyncrasies of the earth's orbit around the sun, the stars do not match up with their allotted zodiac months ..... and it hasn't for hundreds of years. Moreover, there's an additional constellation that the sun passes through in December known as Ophiuchus, which never made it into the zodiac we thought we knew ..... signified by a guy holding a snake, whose members had no idea how they were supposed to behave." Well, you can only imagine the hue and cry this is going to set off, near and far, far and wide, from pillar to post, and all the way around Robin Hood's proverbial barn and back again. Not so fast! It turns out that Western astrology is not based on the movement of the sun in relation to the constellations anyway, but rather on the movement of the sun and planets through the seasons of the year, which means that in the northern hemisphere, the zodiac signs haven't really changed. "The stars are irrelevant to the zodiac," notes astrologer Rick Levine. "We could call it planetology, but that would be stupid." Oh, THAT would be stupid! Frankly, I can't think of anything to add to that which would be an improvement to letting it stand on its own merits. But at least now we all know what will be the new pick-up line in bars: "So, what sign did you used to be?"

In other news, alas, there is no joy in Mudville, as the Jets' improbable run in the playoffs came to a woeful end in Pittsburgh, when the region's beloved Gang Green slammed headlong into the fearsome Steel Curtain, and it turned out to be the final curtain for their legions of disappointed home-town fans. But it was fun while it lasted, and they still did better than many people expected, and way better than their room-mates at the as-yet-untitled new Meadowlands Stadium, the stinky Giants, so that's something anyway. Even better, the management took the opportunity to make no announcement about the coaching staff, one way or another, which is the kind of management style that I can live with. After all, this isn't planetology, for heaven's sake.

Meanwhile at work, I happened to be downstairs in our old rattle-trap of a building when I bumped into the director of Telecommunications in the hallway going into the computer department, and even through the slightly opened door, I could see that all heck had broken loose inside, compared to the last time I was in there, which was fairly recently. Apparently they made the mistake of complaining about the heat, or perhaps it was the cold (that building only has the two extremes, there's no happy medium) which sent the evil minions from the Engineering department scurrying over to cause trouble. They explained that in order to reach the radiators along the wall, it was necessary for the computer department to disassemble and relocate all of the cubicles in the area (this must have seemed like a hilarious practical joke at the time, that they're probably still laughing about in Engineering) thus displacing the six people who are supposed to be working in there, to keep our computers and telephones up and running on a 24/7 basis that is no joke in a hospital setting. This is just like moving, because you have to disconnect everything, pack it up and push it somewhere else, and tear everything up so nobody can get any work done. It's enormously disruptive to everybody, and obviously productivity goes right through the floor, which would not be hard to do in that building, with the floors being what they are, heaven knows. I told him that he had my full sympathy, because this was actually the worst of both worlds, where it's just as much trouble and aggravation as really moving, but in the end, you wind up staying in the same crappy place you were to start with. Sort of like the new zodiac signs.

Here's a story from the past, as this all started in the weeks before Christmas, which seems like a very long time ago now. It seems that the DSL service was acting up at home, and finally became so sporadic that we threw in the towel and called Verizon to come over and see what they could do about it. They sent a man over who installed a splitter outside the house, to separate the regular telephone service from the DSL, so a problem with one would not affect the other. It worked great for two days, and the service never sounded better on the phones all over the house. Then Bill needed to make a call one day, and found no dial tone, which surprised us because that was not part of our original complaint. We have a testable junction box in the basement, so he trotted down there only to find no service there either, and thanks so very much not. So we called them back, and they sent somebody else who said the problem was on the pole behind our house, and he would put in a service request for the "pole guy." So then they sent the pole person who said it wasn't our pole, or even the pole out on the main street, but the cross-box around the block, and he put in a service request for the "box guy." So then they sent the cross-box person who finally fixed it, and once again, the service never sounded better throughout the house. Two days later, I needed to make a phone call, and (this is so not a surprise that it can't be considered the punch line of the story) there was no dial tone at the phone or the testable junction box in the basement, thanks again not. So just about two months later, we still have no phone service that we can count on, which is amazing to me, especially after the telephone has been invented over 100 years ago, and in almost 30 years of living here, we've never had this problem before, and suddenly they can't get the thing to work more than two days in a row. It's only a lucky thing that we're such unimportant non-entities in the larger scheme of things that nobody ever needs to reach us, or this would be pretty darned inconvenient. Personally, I can't wait for them to send us a bill for December and January, because we're going to have a great big laugh over that, I can tell you. On the other hand, I think they're still doing better than at church, where they honestly believed they could install a special box on the wall of our boiler room next to the alarm panel somehow by remote control from the central station without coming to the church at all, which would have been worth the price of admission, if they could have pulled that one off, by golly.

Also on the local scene, it was another one of the neighborhood cats that was coming around at all hours of the day and night for a hand-out, and seemed much too timid and delicate to be out in all sorts of conditions like any old beat-up alley cat, and our hearts went out to the poor thing. We couldn't help but wonder if he had been truly abandoned, or was so neglected by his owners that they didn't care if he was out in the elements all on his lonesome. I called him Flopsie, because he had long white silky hair like a bunny rabbit, with black-brownish parts on his head and down his back, and the most adorable pink nose that I've ever seen on something that doesn't hop. He had a good appetite, and didn't look as scruffy as some strays we've seen, but he had a bad limp which made us worry for his safety in the great outdoors. So one day, I gave him a plate of food and left the front door open, and he trotted right in. We put him in the kitchen with Rusty, and they seemed to get along fairly well, although Rusty is young enough that he's a bit more boisterous and assertive than Flopsie would probably prefer. We figured that if he really did belong to anyone, eventually people would come around looking for him, and then we'd know. Weeks went by without a word from anyone, and each day we were more and more amazed that this lovely and docile animal could have been abandoned by anybody, he was just the sweetest and dearest thing in the world. Finally, one day when I was staying at home and waiting for the Verizon guy (again!) the woman next door (not the people with the ratty fence, but the ostensible owners of the notorious Cinnamon and also Squeaky, who Bill is convinced are in the Federal Witness Protection Program and were given cats as part of their cover) asked me if we knew anything about one of their cats, which they hadn't seen in several weeks. Now, we were still feeding a variety of cats outside, so I asked her to describe the missing cat in question, and at this point, she managed to describe it so badly that if I didn't already have her cat in my kitchen, I would have had no idea what she was talking about. She said he was a shaggy gray tabby with white feet, and white under his chin, which is so far from what he actually looks like that I almost laughed. I said I didn't think so, but we would be on the lookout for it, and when she said he was declawed, I bit back the thought that sprang into my mind of what the heck were they letting him out for in the first place. Her description was so unlike Flopsie that I really wasn't sure, but when I checked him more carefully later and found that he had no claws, my heart sank. We really had mixed feelings about giving him back to the neighbors, since we felt that he should not be outside on his own, but on the other hand, we couldn't in good conscience keep a cat that belonged to someone else, especially after they asked us about him. So it was with a heavy heart that I went back to her and admitted that we had their cat, but I had to say that with that bad limp and no claws, for heaven's sake, he really shouldn't be outdoors where anything could happen to him, and we would be worried sick about him, especially in bad weather - and then I found myself saying, "I can't understand how the heck you ever got him to go outside in the first place, since he's been in our house, all he does is sleep on the stove, and he never looks at a door." Maybe it was something about my fierce protective instinct for this beautiful creature, but all at once she said, "Why don't you keep him? He doesn't like our other cats, and he's afraid of the dogs, so he'd probably be happier with you anyway." So rather than losing this treasure that we had acquired under false pretenses, we were able to welcome him into our home with open arms and a clear conscience after all. Of course, this does nothing to refute our reputation as cat-nappers, heaven knows, and I would be glad to blame it on planetology, but frankly, that would be stupid.

Elle