I went to the Doctor earlier this week for a basic check up. What a friend of mine used to call a lube and oil job. She talked me into a tetnus booster shot somehow. Now I want to eat a bowl of rusty nails and growl defiantly at the sky, as I gnash pointed metal bits.
We have a fancy brass espresso machine, which is a story unto itself, that produces neat discs of used coffee grounds when you are done.
I usually bang the discs out of the coffee basket into the sink and then put them into a small galvanized zinc container that I couldn't figure what else to do with. It came with plants in it. Anyway, when the container is full, I dump them out onto one of my hydrangeas in a long-term, casual experiment to see if the flower colours will be different from the other hydrangea that does not get the coffee grounds. Making the soil around a hydrangea more acidic changes the colour from pink to blue, or vise versa, or so I have been lead to believe. So far the experiment is still in the inconclusive stages.
Many of the coffee ground pellets fall apart in the sink, so I just wash them down the drain. Why else do we have a garborator there, or as it is so coyly referred to in California, the Insinkerator, or under sink garbage disposal unit. Do not try to google garborator on Google.com, by the way. It wants you to look up carburetor instead. You need to go to Google.ca and then you will have hundreds of results. I was hoping for thousands, but it is a sparsely populated land, and we are not given to writing about household appliances. Until we move south, that is.
I know you're not supposed to use these infernal devices, as they add tons of organic content to the water system every year, thus further complicating the lives of countless fishes. But, what? A few coffee grounds. Besides, I read somewhere they help keep your drains clear. This avoids the use of truly toxic chemicals. So it's all good, right?
Our first garborator died shortly after we moved into our house. Plus it was scarily noisy. We happily trotted off to Home Despot to buy a replacement. We couldn't find one anywhere, so we asked the nice young man, "Where are the garborators?" thus plunging into the nightmare world of California customer service. You would think in an area where so many people speak so many different languages, people would be more agile in interpreting each other. It is not so. Our Home Despot worker, who was clearly trained in Customer Service in Russia, pre fall of communism, wanted nothing to do with us. He was cousins, I believe with the Sunnyvale waiter we encountered early in our sojourn here, who could not comprehend that I was trying to order the basil pizza. To me "bah-zil" is the herb. "Bay-zil" is I don't know what. To service workers in California, it is all one unpleasant mystery best to be avoided by pretending the customers are mentally slow and also invisible.
So, last week the latest garborator died. My husband returned home from the store quite promptly this time; his American improves every day.
He was horrified the garborator had died so soon after it had been installed, although it was a matter of years, and darkly blamed it in the coffee grounds. Needless to say I was skeptical, sticking to my drain facilitating story. Why do I bother, you may ask. Of course when the bad unit was removed, I received this happy report: "So it was the coffee grounds that burned out the motor. The entire bottom of the garborator was packed with them."
People with engineering degrees are so often annoyingly right about these things. But could he explain how sneaky editing had made the season premiere of House a completely different episode than the one they had been appearing to promise us all summer? No.
I do have my uses.
Do you remember extracting prizes from cereal boxes? Dear Reader, I'm not sure how old you are, but when I was young, it was a challenging task.
Sadistic parents would force children to wait until all the cereal was gone before the prize could be claimed, because it would always sink to the very bottom of the box where it sit there for weeks, waiting patient and taunting for the little tykes.
My parents were more permissive and my usual technique would be to completely extract the inner wax paper bag so I could locate the toy and then dig around in the cereal until I could get it. If you've ever done this, you will know it results in a fat round bag of cereal that does not fit well back into its narrow rectangular outer box. What my mother did about this I don't remember.
Just recently I bought my child a box of chocolate Lucky Charms. I don't know how this happened. I really don't. One minute I was in Whole Foods buying wholesome organic Koala Crisps packaged in a box of unbleached, recycled paperboard, nobly generating a automatic donation to an Australian koala habitat simply by making the purchase, and the next minute I was in Target paying for Lucky Charms.
Could it be that I was a victim of a well-targetted marketing campaign? Could it have been the winsome visage of Johnny Depp plastered all over the box in his most becomingly sly androgenous pirate guise? Marshmallow blobs of death for the kids, gazing upon handsome Jack for the custodial adults? And what is with that? He's a dangerous rascal and he can give you the coolest hair and make up tips. What more could you want in a mate?
Well anyway, the deed is done and it's important to be able to find serenity and acceptance and move on.
Because I am not purposfully sadistic I always let my son get the prize right away. I helped him open up the box and what the hell? There was the toy. Right there. Lying on top of the inner bag, sealed into its own little plastic bag. What, you can't let the toy touch the cereal now? They couldn't put the plastic prize bag inside the inner bag? I mean, if the cereal can touch the inside of the inner bag, then why can't it touch the outside of the prize bag?
More important, are we are producing a generation of children who are so helpless, they are incapable of extracting their own prizes from boxes? I shudder to think of what is happening with Cracker Jacks.
I have encountered a number of behaviourists over the past few years due to a variety of circumstances.
They all have unusually positive outlooks, are encouragingly cheerful, and are all very optimistic by nature.
I made this point while meeting with with an expensive private behaviourist the other day. I was telling her about the school district behaviourist. "He's very optimistic about this new program," I told her, "But then of course he would be. He's a behaviourist. You're all very optimistic."
Her eyes shone, she sat straighter, and she said, with great positivity and cheerfulness, "Well we have the data! We have empirical evidence that people can change!"
The modern day mind mechanics. You gotta love them.
I recently itemized the glories of my wraparound blue block sunglasses to a friend:
Unlike the eighties when these sunglasses were more readily accessible, the wrap around blue block is now scarce.
My first pair I bought from a TV shopping channel -- the first and last time I ever did such a thing. I loved them dearly and took them everywhere with me.
I took them on a trip to Montreal one January, when I had wrangled a trip to a trade show my company was attending. It was a bit of a boondoggle, but every now and then I was thrown a bone. We stayed in the luxurious Queen Elizabeth Hotel and went out for expense account dinners at fancy restaurants every night. Enough of my coworkers were partiers, and Montreal brings out the partier in even the most repressed, so it was a great trip and lots of fun.
It was also extremely cold. I grew up in North Western Ontario and I know cold. But this was blasting wind off a large frozen river freezing cold. It rained at one point and then instantly froze, so the whole city was coated in a thick layer of ice. It was treacherous to walk and people were sliding and tumbling down all over the place. One morning walking to the trade show hall, I had my sunglasses in the top front pocket of my inadequate Vancouver Gortex coat. I clutched the binder I was holding to my chest for extra insulation and heard the sickening crack of my sunglasses, frozen to brittleness, breaking in two. Along with my heart.
Many years later I was camping on Pismo Beach with my husband and son. We were out exploring the town's shops and discovered a little sunglasses shack near the beach. The proprietor was an older, friendly woman. She had on sale wraparound blue blocks for next to nothing. I was so thrilled to replace my old friends. I know I should have bought several pairs right then and there, but I opted not to for some reason now lost to me. She gave me a "Schwarzenegger buck" with my change. Funny, she didn't look like a Republican.
In between the periods of wearing my wraparound blue blocks, which I only could wear when also wearing contact lenses, I resorted to clip ons, round circles on my John Lennon style wire frames that I thought looked groovy, me by now at an age where being currently cool was no longer really an option. There comes a time when you mostly give up on being cool, or just revert to the look that was cool when being cool was still possible for you.
Then the wonders of laser eye surgery, and now I'm happily back in my blue block world. The colours are more saturated so everything looks twice as exciting as it should and I can see without being blinded by the glare. In fact, on a sunny day, with my blue blocks on, I have perfect vision, something I have never experienced before. I am still periodically stunned when I can read street signs from half a block away instead of pretty much needing to drive up onto the sidewalks at intersections to figure out where I am.
I wonder if they sell them on eBay?
I was driving home from Tiny Timbers camp where I dropped off my son this morning and was thinking of my wish list for him, and for me too, as I seem to be an ongoing work in progress myself. Which is: to be functional and happy and to not be an asshole.
Here is my reply:
"Another urban myth hits our egroup, this time a particularly appalling piece of homophobic paranoia.
'Question: Does SB 1437 require that references to “husband and wife,” “mom and dad,” or “the family unit” be removed from California textbooks?
I don't know what makes me more crazy -- the homophobia or the exhibitionistic stupidity:
"Dear Mothers Club,
"I am an idiot and I simply must shout it from the mountain tops! Yes! I'm proud to be stupid!"
People have the right to be morons, but do they have to share?
In many ways Scotland compared to England is like Canada compared to the US. Like Scotland, Canada has worse weather, fewer people, and is filled with places named Stornoway, Dunbar, Selkirk, Lanark, Perth, and Bannockburn. There are many Scots by birth or heritage in both countries. They are both lands of great beauty and empty spaces, forests, ruggedness, and water.
In the southwest, where my husband grew up, near to the Borderlands, the land is more English in appearance -- low rolling hills, green everywhere, dotted with sheep and grazing cattle, occasional trees, grids of stone fences overgrown with hawthorn, brambles, roses, sticky willie and honeysuckle. The sides of the smaller roads are lined with thick verges of grasses, foxgloves, thistles, buttercups, fireweed, wild meadow geraniums, Queen Anne's Lace, and nettles.
Nettles were in high season at the time of our visit, poking out everywhere the wild plants were allowed to grow. My son was convinced he was immune to them, and even touched a few to prove his invincibility. Inevitably the day came when he firmly grabbed the nettle that would have the better of him and reacted with predictable drama and horror. Simply stated, it went like this: "Agggggghhhhh, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, Aggggghhhhh!"
In most places nettles grow, they are partnered with dock weed, which provides an instant antidote, as my husband likes to point out each and every time the word or even the concept of nettle arises. My sister-in-law has a most vigilant grounds keeper at Kennox House, her home in Southwestern Scotland, where the nettle in question was growing. Robert his name is and Robert had pretty much managed to eliminate every dock plant within a five mile radius, even as he had inexplicably let the nettles live. I finally found a tiny scrap of dock leaf and applied it to my injured son. It took a few more applications of equally tiny leaves to fully cure him, but soon after, my son was feeling better and had also acquired a new found awareness of stinging plants.
This will come in handy the next time we are traipsing along a poison-oak lined trail in California and my son denies he will be affected. "Remember that time in Scotland..." we'll be able to tell him, and he might just listen.
The definitive comment for me about whether or not The Passion of the Christ was anti Semitic or not, was made by a movie reviewer, whose name I can't remember, who said that all the bad Jews looked Semitic and all the good Jews looked Norwegian.
I think of this comment all the time now when I look at portrayals of Jesus. For the most part, I'd say he had a strong and surprising Norwegian genetic heritage.
Except for one picture I saw in the NY Times of a Christian Lebanese household, where Jesus appeared to be decidedly Mediterranean -- heavy lidded brown eyes, dark hair, long high-bridged nose, elongated oval face. He looked very sorrowful.
I have accomplished some of my goals today -- run useful errands, buy birthday present for friend turning 40 (still a mere babe!), type of list of care and feeding instructions for my son. I also managed to insert a trip to Cafe Barrone, our swish outdoor cafe next to Keplers, our local independent book seller where I also bought a book in anticipation of our upcoming camping trip.
It always feels like a most decadent adventure to go to Barrone's for coffee, as it is located two towns south of us. If we lived in a real city though, we would think nothing of driving 20 minutes to get to a good coffee shop. If we lived in a real city, we would probably avoid Barrone like the plague, as it is very expensive and choc a bloc with networking professionals, affluent women with hairdos, and people dressed in the freaky uniform of the urban road racer biker -- do they wear Speedos to the pool for god's sake, people? -- at an age when they shouldn't. But as we live in a burbish area of bedroom communities, a touch of urban class feeds the soul from time to time.
About that list. I've been procrastinating for years on writing it. Hard denial. Wishful thinking. Strange inertia. Whatever. I know it reads like an instruction set for "How to Raise a Spoiled Brat" but believe me, if you want things to go smoothly it helps. Also, if your goal is merely to teach a 7-year old how to swim passably, build lego cars, or lead him through a day of cheap day camp, and you are not his parent or therapist. The list is especially useful for people who think their job is to teach children how to be obedient and behave normally, regardless of their job description, pay scale, or the consequences of imposing their enslavement to rigidity on other people.
Here it is:
M has some behavioural issues that make it hard for him to follow directions and control his emotions, especially when he is with other children.
Some helpful hints:
– Use positive incentives instead of threats and negative consequences – Keep things light and playful – Give him lots of praise and encouragement
– Don’t pressure or force him to do things he really doesn’t want to do
– He is often very anxious about failing or making mistakes and pushing him too hard will just cause a melt down
– Do make him eat! He may not want to eat if he is too excited, but low blood sugar makes things worse
– Avoid being unnecessarily strict or “firm”
– Be flexible
– Allow him physical space – especially if he needs to blow off some steam or melt down
– Let him move around as much as he needs to
– Let him calm himself down before trying to talk to him about any inappropriate behaviour
– He will often be very upset about having done something wrong which just adds to his emotional intensity
