Mind Like a Rabid Mongoose

A Gallant Lady at the Theater

2011-08-18T04:15:00.000-07:00

My sister Monica and I are having a wonderful time on the road, going down to nephew Bob Roland's wedding's down in North Carolina.

We got on the road around 8:00 a.m., Monica's Jeep stuffed to the gills with everything from yeast for baking, to Chiavetta's BBQ sauce to my rolling bag with my cross-stitch supplies.

We made stops about every hour and a half, partly to relieve our aging bladders, but also to relieve the stiffness in the joints that settles in when one is cramped inside a car.

One of our first stops was at the magnificent and gleaming welcome center at the Pennsylvania border, with a panoramic view of Lake Erie. The gentleman working there gave me some free coloring books featuring Pennsylvania history for me to send to my sponsored children in Guatemala.

There were two Japanese families there, with 4 daughters altogether, and while the girls gamboled in the picnic area, and one of the dads took pictures of the Lake, the other parents slumped at picnic tables, staring at the big minivan they had rented, the expressions on their faces clearly reflecting that they were contemplating murdering the idiot who had come up with the plan to transport 4 lively girls across across the United States in a minivan. No doubt the idea had belonged to the guy with the camera.

We hit our first check in Pennsylvania, where we stopped for a restroom in a construction area, stumbled upon a Brewster's ice cream/Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs restaurant, and after we stopped for a nutritionally dubious lunch, we got totally turned around trying to get back on I-79. The Pennsylvania signage for the detour was typically obtuse and inadequate, and we almost got trapped in a Moebius loop of poorly marked roads.

Upon entering West Virginia, the speed went up to 70 MPH, and the cars whizzed past us at dizzying speed on the winding moutainous roads. The scenery was magnificent, but the poor Jeep labored up the steep mountain grades.

At one point, we saw a billboard perched on a mountainside, and at first, we could have sworn it said, "Hiring?...Jesus Christ," but upon closer observation, we discovered it read, "Hurting?...Jesus Cares." We were relieved, because at first we were afraid that Jesus had been having a rough time since the economic downturn of 2007, and that if that were the case, surely His unemployment benefits would be running out by now.

At one point, we passed the "Stonewall Jackson Resort" state park. We wondered what the resort activities could be -- routing Union troops on horseback?

We were also amused by the names of some of the towns in WV -- "Nutter Fort," "Flatwoods" (were the trees 2-dimensional?), "Lost Creek" (surely, if they'd been able to name it, they'd been able to find it), "Mink Shoals," "Little Otter" and "Big Otter," and finally, "Big Chimney" (no doubt where the Big Otter, like Winnie-The-Pooh, got trapped and had to fast before he could be pulled free by the Little Otter).

After we got to the hotel, we were decided to go see the movie "The Help," because we had both loved the book so much. Around the middle of the film, I noticed an elderly lady get up from her seat, trip over the lighting strip on the floor, get turned around, and then fall slowly, throwing out her arm to break her fall. Unfortunately, the arm snapped like a twig. Many of us rushed to her aid. Her daughter supported her, and a physical therapist in the audience held her arm in alignment, while Monica and a man ran to get assistance.

Eventually, the paramedics arrived, and the movie was paused and the lights came up to give the paramedics a chance to work. At one point, the dear lady mumbled that she was so sorry to have given so much trouble to everyone, and I piped up that it wasn't all bad, because now she was surrounded by 5 handsome men who came to her rescue. She chuckled, and then raised her good arm in farewell, to a chorus of, "You take care, now!" "We'll be praying for you, honey!" and the universal, "God Bless!"

The movie resumed without incident. Naturally, Monica and I got a little lost on our way back to the hotel, but at last, the Big Otter in the Big Chimney guided us back home.

What adventures will today bring?

There's something very, very twisted about gmail

2011-08-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

It's free, so I know shouldn't complain, but if you write an email about your cat, you get an ad pop up at the top for cat trees. VERY creepy, because gmail is reading the contents of your email. It's kind of like an electronic stalker. Only without the threat of gmail showing up naked on your front porch and asking if you ordered a pizza.

Anyway, tonight, OUT OF NOWHERE, this ad pops up: "Sporrans for every budget. www.usakilts.com." I had no emails about the Scots, men in skirts, men with nice calves, woolen socks, porridge, highland reels, nervous sheep -- NOTHING. (Sorry for that last one, Scottish listies. I'm a very, very, very bad girl, and a man with nice calves wearing a kilt should come and spank me.)

So, what part of gmail's fevered imagination thought I was pining for a sporran? Which I suppose is better than pining for the fjords, because then I'd be a dead parrot.

Man, I have got to stop sending out emails after 1 bottle of Woodchuck hard cider. That stuff messes with my head.

Two out of three housecats surveyed surprisingly do NOT like Chiavetta's chicken

2011-06-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

For those of you unfortunate souls who don't live in Western NY and have never experienced Chiavetta's BBQ chicken, you're missing one of this region's great cultural and gastronomic contributions to Western Society. If you want to raise a bucketload of money for your organization, you invite the Chiavetta's people to come to your location, and you put out signs announcing they're coming.

On the appointed day, a Chiavetta's truck will roll up, and a young man will efficiently set up a BBQ pit on your location and get the coals going. He will then spend the next couple of hours roasting half-chickens, drenching them with a giant paintbrush soaked in Chiavetta's famous marinade. The brush will not touch the raw chicken, but the marinade is showered on the chickens by the deft flicks of the cooker's wrist, the way a priest showers the congregation with holy water from an aspergillum (yes, I had to look up that word).

Meanwhile, the people wishing to raise money will have their Styrofoam clamshell containers ready, and volunteers will be standing by the boxes of coleslaw and potato salad that Chiavetta's provides, spoons in hand, ready to dish out sides. Chiavetta's also provides rolls, packaged butter pats, and sealed packages of utensils/salt/pepper packages.

A volunteer will toss the white roll and pat of butter into the clamshell after the chicken and the sides have been loaded. I have been such a volunteer, and once customers see the signs and smell the chicken, you can't keep up with the demand. Plop chicken, scoop sides, toss roll and butter, close clamshell, drop all into a plastic bag with the little package of plastic utensils and salt/pepper packets, hand chicken to customer, customer hands money to money taker. Lather, rinse, repeat, until all the chicken is gone.

I was once at a park selling chicken on a fine autumn day, and from an adjoining park, over a quarter of a mile away, a woman beelined to our location like a desert traveler homing in on an oasis. "I smelled Chiavetta's!" she exclaimed.

Once all the chicken is cooked, the young man will douse the coals, and pack up his cooking equipment. In a neat environmental miracle, no sign of the giant cooking pit is left once the Chiavetta's truck pulls away from your site. It's like they were never there, except the air remains redolent with the delicious smell of roasted chicken, and the volunteers' ears are assaulted with the weeping of customers who arrived too late to get any chicken.

Chiavetta's sells their wonderful marinade to a grateful public, and no Western NY household fridge is complete without a bottle. (For those of you out of state, it's available on Amazon.com.) I wanted to send a bottle to my cousin Ken in Japan, but the USPS won't allow you to ship liquids in the mail. So, the stricken people of Japan will have to continue to labor under the dual burden of recovering from the earthquake, and not eating Chiavetta's chicken.

Recently, Chiavetta's opened up a take out store in Lockport, in Niagara County, and have billboards advertising the location here in Buffalo, in Erie County. I'm told these billboards have led to increased salivation within Buffalo's city limits.

Anyway, I had to tell you that story to tell you this story.

I was running errands this afternoon, and everywhere I went, I saw signs in churchyards and schools: "Chiavetta's BBQ Fundraiser on Saturday." Naturally, I was filled with an intense longing for Chiavetta's chicken, a longing almost as strong as the lost soul feels for his Creator.

I had time to swing by the take out store, and it was my lucky day, because a brace of half-chickens had just come off the outdoor roasting pit. I took a half-chicken home, tantalized the whole way by the odor filling my car.

As I was eating my dinner, my 3 cats came to investigate, lured by the scent. I tore off 3 pieces from the drumstick, for while the meat is tender to the point of falling off the bone, it's still my least favorite part of the chicken. I set out the 3 pieces in bowls on the floor.

Ninja raced up, grabbed her piece, and scurried away with it, having learned in a hard school that running away from the larger and more aggressive Sybil is the only way to hang onto your share of rare table scraps.

Sybil and Skippy looked at their pieces of chicken, then turned to me with puzzled expressions. "It smells like chicken," I could almost hear them say, "but what's that weird vinegar smell?" Their shares remained untouched.

Ninja slinked back to the chicken twice more, hardly daring to believe her good fortune that the other 2 cats hadn't gobbled up their pieces. With each return visit, Ninja would give the other cats disbelieving and condescending looks of scorn: "Wow, what a pair of dumbasses." I could only concur with her assessment.

For more information on Chiavetta's:

company website:
http://www.chiavettas.com/index.php3

history of the company:
http://buffalofoods.net/blog/chiavettas-barbecue-legends/
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After Midnight, Mollie's Deer Cheat on Her

2011-04-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

Our sister-in-law, Mollie, and her husband, Paul, are deservedly fortunate enough to live on 19 acres in the country. Every day, 4 deer daintily wander onto their property and graze in the twilight hours. They're a delight to the eyes and a balm to the spirit.

But Mollie's deer have a dark secret.

Last night, I had to drive out to Lockport after work. My car just got a new transmission, and in order to reset the transmission computer so it would pass inspection, the car had to be driven over 100 miles. I decided to see exactly how far it is to Mollie and Paul's, and also exactly how long it would take to drive there.

I arrived after midnight, and immediately turned around to head home. On my way back to Buffalo, as I was driving up the country road perpendicular to Mollie's road, I spotted 4 ghostly shapes in a neighbor's yard. I pulled over to the shoulder, and 4 gracile necks raised up, and 4 pairs of liquid dark eyes gazed shamelessly at me.

Bold as brass they were, openly grazing on the neighbor's grass, not even attempting to hide their perfidious disloyalty at feeding in another yard. I powered down the window on the passenger side. "Shame on you!" I scolded them. Not even deigning to reply, they all flipped me the whitetail and bounded off into the trees.

That's the trouble with these modern whitetail deer. With their natural predators gone, they've evolved from the shy woodland denizens they once were into sassy, insolent, 4-legged vermin with no fealty whatsoever. Like the thoughtless teenaged beauty who cons her way through life on her good looks, the whitetail relies on the attractiveness of its dainty legs and large eyes to get away with trampling on the feelings of others.

Well, I'm on to you, faithless herd of ungulates. Don't expect me to fawn over your beauty any longer. I now know that as soon as my back is turned, you're off to greener pastures.

Naked Neighbors, Derelict Delinquents, and Produce Porn

2011-04-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

Well, our new neighbor, "X," who started off with such high promise, has displayed a ... dismaying character trait. No, no, not his boyfriend, "Y," who's a delightful young man. I'm talking about ... well, keep reading.

My nephew was out in the yard, grilling hot dogs in the 40-degree weather (hey, we're hard-core BBQ-ers here in Buffalo; if it's above freezing, we fill our propane tanks). He looked up at the sound of X's back door opening. X was letting his dogs out, and he wasn't wearing any clothes. Yup, absolutely starkers. You have to admire both his comfort with his own body and his resistance to cold weather.

Now, I'm of two minds on this. I'm a big girl, in more ways than one, and it's perfectly easy for me to turn my lawn chair so my back is to X if he continues to stroll his backyard in the nude. Or, if he's a particularly fine male specimen, to turn my chair to face him, in order to better admire God's handiwork. I could even make signs with scoring numbers on them, to hold up like they do at the Olympics. But there are 4 children under the age of 13 in the yards adjacent to X and Y's house, and I'm not sure I'm quite comfortable with that.

We figure this was just an aberration -- perhaps his previous yard was more private, or he didn't think anyone would be outside to see him in chilly weather, or it just slipped his mind that he didn't have any clothes on. But if it happens again, I think I'll make him a nice pot of homemade soup and bake some bread, and gently suggest to him that if he doesn't want to see my 50-year-old boobs, that he needs to cover up his junk when he goes outside. That's right. I can go to the nuclear option of flashing him. Gravity has not been kind, and I'm not afraid to blind anyone who gets in my way.

But the really alarming thing that happened was the reappearance of those horrible neighbor children who used to live in the parsonage house next door. "Z," the sociopath who regularly publically beat both his siblings and the neighbor children, and who regularly pilfered other children's toys and screamed obscenities, showed up with his siblings for a play date with one of the nieghbor children. It was a chilling sight. It was like watching that rabid coyote you had trapped and relocated months ago slink back into the neighborhood and snatch up your cat and rip out its entrails. Doesn't that kid have a new neighborhood to terrorize? Other children to fill with fear and loathing? Dammit, I thought we'd seen the back of him.

Well, that's all that's new on the mean streets of Buffalo. Except for the wet snow that was falling earlier, and is now turning to rain. It's mud season here in Western NY. My niece and I went to the Burpee website on Friday and gazed at pictures of tomatoes and peppers, weeping in longing for a planting season that seems so far away. This time of the year, only Burpee vegetable porn enables us to slog through another day until the weather gets warmer.

Do Red-Tail Hawks Hate Methodists?

2011-04-01T04:57:00.001-07:00

So, there I am the other day, driving along Niagara Falls Blvd., a busy 4 to 6-lane commercial thoroughfare, when I get stopped by a red light. I look off to me right, where there's a Methodist church, its 2-story brick facade facing the highway, with the giant metal letters of its name affixed to the facade. And then I see this red-tail hawk repeatedly attacking the metal letters. It was really kind of graceful; he was hovering in the air, then swooping, then hovering again. It was an impressive aeronautical feat.

So, was there some prey animal hidden behind the letters? A weary pigeon, resting there? A nesting sparrow, trying to build a home? A mouse or squirrel who had laboriously climbed the bricks, hoping to find refuge behind the letter "M"?

Or, do red-tail hawks hate Methodists? Was this hawk a godless Commie pinko? Is the red-tailed hawk some sort of religious fanatic, who objects to the acronym TULIP* to explain Methodist theology? (BTW, does anyone else ever mix up the 5-part TULIP with the 5 pillars or Islam? Or is that just me, who has this image of a stolid Methodist housewife trying to deliver a covered dish of mac and cheese to Mecca?)

* http://www.reformedreader.org/t.u.l.i.p.htm

Forget Spiderman. I've Got a New Superhero

2011-03-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

It's my cousin Ken. He's is a blood banking specialist, currently working in a hospital 50 miles from the stricken reactors in Japan. I found his account very moving in its understated eloquence. Read from the bottom up.

http://cbbstoday.org/nollet_fukushima.php

The First Robins and Mormons of Spring

2011-03-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

Spring must really be here. I've seen robins, and tonight, looking across the street at Mighty Taco, I saw two young clean-cut men in black pants, white shirts, and little black name tags on their shirts enter the restaurant.

The Mormons are a little early this year. Perhaps global warming has altered their seasonal migratory patterns,

I direct you to one of my blogs from 2008, in which I fondly recalled mom's yearly predatory wait for the Mormons to show up.

http://rabidmongooserus.blogspot.com/2008/02/discussion-on-rosary-army-forums-made.html

The Chronicles of Sybil, Part 5: "Get your paws off my squirrel boyfriend, you feline hussy!"

2011-03-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

There may be a catfight in my future. My little cat Skippy was sitting in the windowsill when Son of White Ears came to pay court to Sybil, who was elsewhere. SoWE eyed Skippy with surmise.

Skippy is only a little more than half Sybil's size, and she has long angora-soft fur in muted shades of gray, cream and orange, very like a squirrel's pelt. Skippy crouched down in predatory mode, her muscles quivering, twitching her fluffy tail. SoWE got up on his hind legs, his little front paws clutched to his chest, his head cocked in indecision.

Sybil then appeared on the windowsill next to Skippy, and SoWE hopped between the two felines, before he finally raising his paws to the window in front of Sybil. He then trotted away along the windowsill, with Sybil charging after him. On her way, she cuffed Skippy out of the way.

Oh, Son of White Ears. What a dangerous game you play. Do you mean to sow the seeds of discord between Sybil and Skippy? Are you preparing to transfer your affections to the seemingly softer and sweeter Skippy?

Notes on "The Chronicles of Sybil"

2011-02-21T11:54:00.000-08:00

The 4 posts below started life as emails to my friends and family. Part 1 was written in December, 2010, part 2 in January, 2011, and parts 3 and 4 were written in February, 2011.

The Chronicles of Sybil, Part 4: I Spoke Too Soon! Son of White Ears Lives!

2011-02-21T11:52:00.000-08:00

After a hiatus of almost 3 weeks, Son of White Ears returned! I could tell it was him, even across the street, because Sybil rushed to the window and began pawing it frantically upon seeing a squirrel hopping towards our yard from the neighbor's yard.

SoWE leaped to the windowsill to say hello to Sybil, causing her to try to claw her way through the glass, then he jumped to the bird feeder and began feeding. Sybil was the most animated I've seen her in days, beating her paws against the storm window the whole time he fed. SoWE jumped to the windowsill again before he left the yard, and got up on his hind legs to press his paws to the glass and peer in at Sybil.

So, where has he been? I have my suspicions. There's a big slut down the street, an obese white cat with gray patches, who lounges in her owner's front window. She doesn't even wash her fur properly; the white fur is a little yellow. She has "skanky ho" written all over her. Her owner throws seed out onto the lawn for the birds, so SoWE wouldn't even have to climb to a bird feeder to get some food.

On his second trip to the windowsill, I note that Son of White Ears now has a tattered left ear. Someone was scrapping with him. Perhaps it was that white cat down the street, who clawed him once she found out he was a cheatin' no-account. "Oh, don't you pretend with me, 'Mr. Look at the Pretty White Patches on My Ears.' You think I don't know about your stripey girlfriend up the street? The crazy one with the big green eyes? She may be too stupid to figure out you're a two-timing scoundrel, but I won't put up with it. Take THAT! Yeah, you run, boy! You go back to that Sybil, and don't you come 'round here no more!"

I can see this all ending up in the tabloids, complete with pictures of the sobbing female feline participants, their mascara running, being hustled into separate Buffalo Police Department squad cars, each proclaiming their love for Son of White Ears. Meanwhile, he'll be off to the side, smoking a cigarette and fingering his gold chain, telling another cop, "Man, b****s be crazy. They were all up in each other's faces, scratchin' at each other. Man, I just stepped off to the side and let you all take care of it." (Which is exactly how it played out when the teenage girl next door was visited by the other girlfriend of her boyfriend. The other girl, Crystal [whom we later rechristened as "Crystal Meth"], attacked our neighbor, and was hauled away, kicking and screaming, while the feckless boyfriend recounted to the cops why the girls were fighting over him. That's what I love about Buffalo, the free street theater.)

So that's the game you're playing, is it, Mr. Son of White Ears? You'll come to visit my Sybil when the weather is good, but when it gets to to be too much trouble to come up the street to feed here, you'll go feed in the yard of the first feline trollop who lolls in the window for you? Sybil may have forgiven you enough to want to try to break through the glass to rip you to shreds, but I don't like anyone to trifle with the affections of my baby like that. You can just take your windowsill strut somewhere else, Mister.

Like Little Milton sang, "Cheatin' Is A Risky Business."

The Chronicles of Sybil, Part 3: Sybil Waits In Vain For Her Cross-Species Lover

2011-02-21T11:50:00.001-08:00

I fear I have sad news to impart. Son of White Ears, the importune squirrel suitor to my deranged mackerel-striped tabby cat Sybil, has not been seen at the bird feeders, nor at the office window ledge, for almost 2 weeks.

His fate is unknown, but we fear for the worst. Was it the neighborhood red-tailed hawk? Was it an automobile? Was it the bitter cold snap we had a couple of weeks ago, when the blowing snow and sleet made it impossible for bird and squirrel to venture forth to raid the bird feeders? For you James Thurber fans, could it have been a shrike that carried off Son of White Ears? Perhaps a shrike named "Stoop"?

One of Son of White Ears siblings has been to the feeders, but Sybil knows it isn't her Romeo, for, while she reacts with a quivering alertness to that squirrel's appearance, she's not radiating the white-hot carnivorous intensity that Son of White Ears produced in her. Sybil seems dejected, staring out the windows all day, barely exhibiting the murderous relish with which she usually watches the birds.

I try to comfort Sybil, telling her that "fellas is grief." They tell you they're just going out for a pack of cigarettes, and then you never hear from them again. They don't write. They don't call. They update their Facebook status from "in a committed cross-species relationship" to "eaten by a hawk" or "run over by a car" and don't even warn you. You have to get the news from the Twitter feeds of your mutual acquaintances, that bitchy junko and that obnoxious downy woodpecker, the one that thinks he's so damned special because of that red spot on the back of his neck.

At least Son of White Ears didn't knock her up before he disappeared, leaving her to raise a litter of mutant squirrel-cat offspring on her own, trying to stretch her food stamp budget to feed 6 or 7 buck-toothed mouths. I've offered to reinstate cable TV, so she can watch movies on the "Lifetime" channel while eating Haagen-Daz ice cream and wearing ratty old pajamas, but she has refused all my attempts to console her.

She's crouched on the cat tree facing the window right now, her paws and tail tucked under her, staring out the window dejectedly like a furry feline meatloaf. What's next for Sybil? Will she find a new love? Will she start writing dark poetry? Will she stop bathing and make a suicidal gesture by swallowing her catnip mouse? How can I comfort my bereft cat?

The Chronicles of Sybil, Part 2: Multiple Dense Layers of Stupid

2011-02-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

Well, it's official. I'm now 100% sure that my dim-witted mackeral-striped tabby cat, Sybil (she of the multiple personalities, who has recently attracted the amorous attentions of the squirrel, Son of White Ears), does not have a brain in her head. I think what fills her skull is multiple dense layers of stupid.

One of the cat trees is my office is triangular in shape, has a bottom cave-like fixture, then 3 carpet-covered poles arising from the cave, topped with a triangular carpeted perch. As the cat tree is positioned (very securely, have no fears) on top of a book shelf, the height of the top perch is 7 feet off the floor. Sybil loves to scramble to the top, somehow convinced that being very high up makes her bigger than everyone in the room. "I am Giant Cat! All fear me!"

Tonight, while on this very narrow perch, 7 feet above the floor, she started to chase her tail. When she caught it, she'd bite it, then growl angrily -- "Hey! Who's been biting my tail!"

Round and round she goes, and where she stops ... is the carpeted floor 7 feet below. But don't worry, no Sybils were harmed in this stupid pet trick. She immediately scrambled to the top and started chasing her tail again.

It has been suggested to me that the top of the cat tree is really a TARDIS landing pad, and that Sybil's whirling dervish act is an attempt to summon The Doctor, to take her away on a fabulous adventure through space and time.

While that would be very cool, I don't think that's the answer. I think it's more like watching the NY State Legislature in action, and we're merely dealing with multiple dense layers of stupid.

The Chronicles of Sybil, Part 1: Sybil and Son of White Ears

2011-02-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

Some of you may remember my post last year about my extremely dim-witted and bipolar mackerel-striped tabby rescue cat, Sybil. I recounted how I have bird feeders outside the windows of my office*, to attract birds to entertain my 3 rescue cats, but that I was worried that Sybil was too excited, racing back and forth between the windows, tense and quivering, sometimes rushing at the screen or the window in a vain effort to attack the birds and squirrels at the feeders.

I didn't tell you then about Mr. White Ears, the squirrel. I called him Mister, though I wasn't sure of his gender. He was a large, magnificent squirrel, with enormous tufts of white fur behind his years. Bold and unafraid, he raided my bird feeders, and often hopped up on the ledge outside my office windows to gnaw corn kernels right in the faces of my cats. I never actually caught him at it, but I suspect he often raised the middle claw of his front paw to flip the bird to the cats. About 2 years ago, I glanced up from my computer to see the neighborhood red tail hawk carrying away a huge squirrel in her talons, a squirrel conspicuous for the large white tufts of hair behind his ears. "Goodbye, Mr. White Ears," I intoned as an epitaph.

Well, it seems that Mr. White Ears was able to pass on his genetic code before he shuffled off this mortal coil, because the following spring, a small squirrel appeared at my feeders, sporting white tufts of hair behind his ears. Son of White Ears, as I dubbed him, soon proved to have also inherited his father's swaggering insouciance, taunting the cats, challenging the starlings, and driving other squirrels away from the feeder. He grew large and fat and glossy due to his raids, and is now almost as big as his progenitor. He possesses bold, sparkling black eyes, and a magnificent bushy tail.

Lately, though, I wonder if something else is going on. After he raids my feeders, Son of White Ears now hops up on the window ledges -- but only when Sybil is the cat staring out at him. He puts his front paws on the glass of the storm window and turns his head to the side, staring at Sybil with his liquid black eyes with what I can only describe as an expression of longing. Sybil responds by lashing her tail and pawing frantically at the inside glass. I know what's going on inside Sybil's tiny brain. She has so very few thoughts, that it's always easy to determine what she's "thinking." She's saying to herself, "KillKillKillPleaseComeCloserSoICanKillYouKillKillKill."

But what is going on inside the mind of Son of White Ears? At first I thought he was merely taunting Sybil, but then I began to wonder if perhaps he was harboring a death wish, coming within range of Sybil's deadly claws, only spared a messy death by 2 panes of glass. My niece, Julye, however, has a new theory.

Julye has also observed Son of White Ears, and she concludes that the squirrel has conceived a forbidden passion for Sybil. Perhaps he's unsure of her species, and has decided she's an unusually large, black-striped squirrel, and wishes to sire giant, fierce, striped warrior squirrels on her, so he can begin a campaign of pillage and conquest. Or perhaps he does realize she's a cat, but has a kinky wish to live on the wild side, and date a hot, dangerous girl, the kind You Don't Take Home To Mother. Especially since your Goth feline girlfriend would proceed to devour your mom and all your siblings.

So, what are Son of White Ear's motives? Is he merely incautious, arrogantly taunting, despondently suicidal, or passionately enamored? Is this the squirrel equivalent of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name? Thus making him the Oscar Wilde of his species? Should I furnish Son of White Ears with a pen and paper, so he can write satirical Victorian farce? It's a very strange situation. Please help me to divine the motives of Son of White Ears.

*I work out of my home as a medical transcriptionist.

"I felt the earth move under my feet ..."

2010-06-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

I know this story will be a big yawn to anyone who lives in an active geological zone, but we had an earthquake rattle Buffalo yesterday at 1:41 p.m. The quake was actually centered up near Ottawa, Canada, but it shook us for less than a minute.

I hadn't realized what had happened until I read the article in the Buffalo News about the earthquake. (URL to article below.)

I was taking a break in the backyard at that point, and I was sitting in our frame swing, facing the little 12-foot pop-up pool we have, when the swing hit the side of the frame. I thought I had swung sideways by accident. Then I noticed the pool was agitated, with waves rocking it a little side-to-side. I thought the little motor pump must be having a malfunction, and I was just about to get up and call my niece so we could investigate if the pump was faulty, when the pool settled down and stopped rocking. How 'bout that!!

Oh, Canada, how we love you. Even your earthquakes are polite.

http://www.buffalonews.com/2010/06/23/1091832/area-rattled.html

The "UK $2500 stranded friend" email phishing scam

2010-06-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

Two of my friends fell victim to it, one in NY and one in DE. Here is a warning email I sent out. Tell everyone!

It starts with an email from a credit card or bank, which looks authentic. It tells you to go to that site (in one case it was "www.chase.com") and enter in personal information, including your SSI number. People know they're not supposed to do that, but they do it anyway, because the email looks so authentic. (Both of my friends have Master's degrees and they fell for it. My rule of thumb is to never open an email from a bank or credit card, but I delete it, then I call the company and ask why they wanted to speak with me.)

The scammers, who seem to be based in the UK, then go into your email account and change the passwords and the security questions so that YOU cannot get in. Then they hijack your address book and send out this email to all your friends, entitled "I need your help":

"Hope you get this on time,sorry I didn't inform you about my trip in Wales Uk for a program, I'm presently in Cardiff and am having some difficulties here because i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable things were kept.I want you to assist me with a loan of $2500 to sort-out my hotel bills and to get myself back home. I have spoken to the embassy here but they are not responding to the matter effectively,I will appreciate whatever you can afford to assist me with,I'll Refund the money back to you as soon as i return, let me know if you can be of any help. I don't have a phone where i can be reached. Please let me know immediately.
Thanks

Name of your friend
phone number of your friend, off by only a couple of digits from the real one"

It's always a request for $2500 and your friend is always stranded in the UK.

My friend in NY had charges put on her credit cards, and she had to change ALL her financial information, as well as get a new email account. She also had to notify Social Security, and it took her days to get it all sorted out. The scammers like to put expensive airline tickets on the stolen credit cards, in addition to pocketing any money that concerned acquaintances send their "stranded friend."

Today, I received a scam email, as above, on behalf of a friend in DE, and I immediately called her up to warn her. I also emailed all her friends on her behalf to warn them not to send $2500. My DE friend said her bank had already had a fraudulent change in put on the card, but she doesn't have to pay it, because she jumped on the information so promptly.

After I sent out this email, I got this one from my cousin Judy, with more helpful hints:

My cousin Judy, a computer expert, offers the following suggestions to avoid scams. -- Claire Nollet

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Dear Claire,

It's amazing how many people get tricked by these scams, but they do look so official.

FYI: One of the ways to quickly check the veracity of a link in an email is to hover your mouse over it. Usually, the REAL URL will appear in a small pop-up note (as shown in the JPG), making it easy to see that the message is bogus.

Also, all of the time, a bona fide banking company website will have that little logo in the upper right corner, the icon of the lock, indicating a secure website. Much of the time, the scammers forget that detail.

When I get one of these emails, I (1) set my email to show the "long headers" (ie, all the routing information) and then (2) forward it to the company that's allegedly sending the email. Generally, it will work to just send it to "abuse@" followed by the domain name (eg, abuse@chase.com).

best regards,
- Judy

!@#$%^&*+! cottonwoods

2010-05-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

*sniffle* *sneeze*

!@#$%^&*+! cottonwoods have started shedding their fluff or cotton or whatever it's called. Thus starts three weeks of allergy misery and numerous boxes of tissues gone through until they finish shedding.

Sometimes the fluff is so thick in the air, you swear you're in the middle of a blizzard.

I hate cottonwood shedding season. Excuse me. I have to go blow my nose now. *sneeze*

Four hours of my life I'll never get back ...

2010-05-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

Broken Turtle: Earl Turner's Ghost

After reading my gifted friend Fran's thoughtful post (link above), I decided I should finally force myself to read "The Turner Diaries." I'd never gotten around to reading them, because I had once forced myself to read "Mein Kampf," so I figured I had suffered through enough poorly written, illogically argued, tedious, disorganized racist claptrap for one lifetime.

But what also decided me that now was finally the time to take the plunge was when I came across some right-wing website that claimed that the cassette taped recordings of the prison interviews between Timothy McVeigh and Lou Michelle (the basis of Michelle's book "American Terrorist") had been faked. Now, I happen to know where the cassettes have been hidden all these years, and the very trustworthy person who hid them for Mr. Michelle, so I know they're real.

After stumbling across the conspiracy theory website, I decided to try and find an online version of TTD, because there was no way I was going to pay to read it. Even walking to the corner library I deemed to be too much effort. I found an unabridged copy on some white power website, God help me. Each chapter had a photograph of a blonde girl at the top, who had chilly, kind of dead, ice-blue eyes. I suppose she was supposed to be some Aryan Nation masturbatory fantasy.

Anyway, I plowed through TTD, and I was amazed -- at how poorly it was written -- and how many hyphens -- that damned author Pierce used -- in his writing. It was boring in the way pornography is boring, with its wooden characters, stilted dialog, improbable plot twists and ludicrous stereotypes. I'm disappointed that The Master Race has such poor taste in literature. You'd think that such evolved, superior ubermeunchen would have more refined literary palates.

The only redeeming point he raised was his fear of government identity cards that tracked your every move. Now, perhaps in the 1970s, when he wrote the book, Pierce couldn't have imagined how sophisticated credit card companies would become in parsing your life based on your spending habits. I've read they can tell when you're contemplating divorce, based on what your buying habits. But we VOLUNTARILY apply for credit cards, and we don't seem to mind how detailed a picture of our lives can be constructed from what we buy.

Ditto the internet. We want ease in surfing the net. We don't want to have to re-answer a lot of security questions every time we visit certain sites, so we allow those sites to create cookies for us, and user profiles. Most people don't seem to care that a perusal of your ISP can yield a very precise picture of what you're thinking about, based on your browser history. I mean, even gmail, which I use, peeks into the contents of my emails, and if I write that my cat is constipated, several pop-up ads appear on the side of the screen, offering to sell me feline purgatives.

And all of these tools to figure out what you were thinking, what you were buying, who you were chatting with, were all available to The Powers That Be even before the Patriot Act. Now, with probable cause, the gov't can hack into your computer and your credit card history and know pretty much what it wants to know about you, and few people are complaining about the Patriot Act, because no one wants to appear, well, unpatriotic.

Unlike the evil government in Pierce's book, which instigates all the anti-privacy legislation, WE, the people, did 90% of the gov't's work of yielding up our secrets in our present society, merely with our hunger for credit cards and unbridled net surfing. Of course, I'm not sure you can have a modern society where there's complete privacy. It does seem there's a trade-off between prosperity and comfort and convenience, and how free you are. Sure, you could drop off the grid like the Unabomber, but he was living in a 10x10 unheated shack, and I'm pretty sure most of us don't want to do that.

Still, the fact that Pierce had ONE valid point in an otherwise enormous pile of steaming diarrheal horse droppings, does not make TTD worth anything more than kindling, or perhaps emergency toilet paper on a camping trip.

I managed to get to the middle of the book, where our glorious white heroes started dropping nukes, then I figured I had suffered enough for my sins, and I zipped down to the epilogue. (I filled in the rest of the plot with a trip to Wikipedia.) Pierce posits that a mere 10 years after the beginning of the glorious revolution, all the non-white people in the world will be dead, courtesy of nukes and biological and chemical weapons, and the Master Race will skip happily off into shining new future, no doubt singing a rousing chorus of The Horst Wessel song as they go.

Right there, Pierce shows a pitiable lack of understanding about biology. In the 1970s, MAYBE 20% of the world's population was "pure" European. Of those, I'm sure Pierce would only consider half of them to be pure enough to be allowed to live. So, 10% of the world's population is going to kill off the other 90%. Do you know how many nukes The Master Race is going to have to drop to bring about this happy outcome? And not only would there be survivors, but those survivors would be pretty pissed. (Just read "Last Train from Hiroshima" and you read accounts of people who were 600 feet from ground zero who managed to survive to old age.) Not to mention the fact that there'd be so much fallout from all the weapons that ANYONE who survived would not be living in a golden age. Unless you count the golden light emanating from their radioactive balls, the DNA of which would NOT be conducive to fathering superior offspring.

But let's forget radioactive fallout, let's assume the planet will be usable. 10% of 3 billion people (the number of people alive when Pierce wrote TTD) = 300 million people. At most, half would be capable of breeding. Down to 150 million people. But they'll be scattered over the whole planet, now that they have all this lebensraum cleared away by destroying all the inferior types. This will isolate them even more genetically, especially when you consider that most people will have to go back to farming, since the infrastructure needed to support modern farming (petroleum plants that create fuel to make fertilizer, factories to make tractors, etc.) will have been destroyed in the revolution. You're going to be left with isolated pockets of humanity who will end up like the Amish and other groups who have too few ancestors. Within a few generations, the inbreeding will result in all sorts of autosomal recessive diseases that will start to enact a heavy toll on the humans that are left.

But the real problem with Pierce's book is that he ignores the evolutionary nature of our species. God forbid his tiny brain should be cluttered up by inconvenient things like science and facts and the preponderance of evidence.

Evolutionary anthropologists say there's really no such thing as "race" -- after all, you go back far enough, and we ALL came from Africa. But what you CAN speak of is the likelihood that certain groups of people from certain historical geographical areas are more likely to exhibit certain biological markers. Like cystic fibrosis in Caucasians, sickle cell in those of African descent, Tay Sachs in Sephardic Jews, etc.

Many of those markers, of course, developed in response to an evolutionary pressure -- CF in response to dysentery (regulation of electrolytes), sickle cell in response to malaria (red blood cells with sickle cell trait are harder to infect with the malaria parasite), and Tay Sachs in response to TB. (Starting around the end of the fall of the Roman Empire, many Jews in Eastern Europe were herded into ghettos, where close quarters were perfect to spread TB. Since Jewish people traditionally married exclusively within their religious group, the process of evolution was, to a certain extent, speeded up, and Tay Sachs appeared only about 1500 years after the Diaspora of 70 C.E.) Those individuals who carry the TRAIT, not the full-blown disease (that is, only one copy of the recessive gene), have somewhat of a resistance to those diseases.

Also, any time you're speaking, for example, of traditional Muslim societies in the Middle East, you must take into account the very common cultural practice of marriages arranged between cousins, which tend to amplify hereditary diseases. Spinal muscular atrophy, for example, is twice as common in the Middle East, with 1 in 20 people being carriers, whereas throughout most of the rest of the world's population, the incidence is uniformly 1 in 40 people are carriers.

But you also have to take to into account the fact that people don't stay still. They move around. And when they move around, they have sex with the locals, and "pollute" the pure gene lines. There are few "races" on earth that have escaped breeding with "outsiders," especially in parts of the world that were crossroads, or in countries like ours. If you were to examine the genome of every human on the planet, a whole bunch of people would be pretty surprised to find genetic markers that show that somewhere back in history, one of their ancestors got frisky with someone of a very different ethnic background.

And what about the reports published last week about Neanderthal blood! My goodness, it looks like 1% to 4% of the genome of the average European, and some other non-Africans, is composed of Neanderthal genetic material. It looks like the ONLY members of the species Homo sapiens who DON'T have Neanderthal blood are those who never left Africa. To me, that argues that Africans who never left Africa are the ONLY "pure race" of Homo sapiens out there.

After all, the Neanderthals went extinct. That would suggest they weren't genetically cut out to survive evolutionary pressure. One might almost call them inferior to Homo sapiens! So all those superior master race Aryans are in fact 1% to 4% "polluted" by the blood of an inferior, extinct, NON-HUMAN species. Oops. Kind of hard to swagger when you're a low-browed knuckle-walker, now isn't it?

Pierce, were he alive, would find some way to explain this away. People with closed minds are always quick to cherry-pick through facts, and discard the ones that don't fit their preconceived notions.

I suppose I'm glad I read TTD. Know thy enemy, and all that. I just wish it hadn't been so poorly written and so improbable. If I'm going to read dystopian literature, I want something that's posits a PLAUSIBLE future, so it can scare the crap out of me, like "1984." "The Turner Diaries" was just so overwhelmingly unrealistic that I was merely bored. THIS ludicrous piece of pulp was the manifesto that launched Timothy McVeigh onto his path of mass murder? THIS is the Bible of the neo-Nazis? The paucity of imagination of a mind that finds TTD compelling reading is just kind of sad.

Even L. Ron Hubbard put on a better show, for pity's sake.

The nature of charity

2010-05-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of April, a 60-ish-year-old woman with 8-year-old boy in tow, comes up to me outside the Chinese restaurant, where I've got my $5 chicken and snow peas (so obviously I have discretionary money to spend on fast food). She politely asked me if there's a church close by with a food pantry around. She said the kid was her grandson, mom is on the crack pipe which is why she's raising the boy, and they're out of food. I said Holy Spirit church across the street has a pantry, but she says they checked, and they're out of food.

It was a plausible story, unlike the folks who come up to me to ask for bus fare (see earlier blog), and then get flustered when I offer to wait for the next bus and buy them a day pass. It was the 26th of the month, and a lot of pantries are out by then.

Then she asks if I could help. I started stammering about how I had gotten laid off from my second job in December, and I don't really go out to eat very often ... basically explaining why I'm not reaching into my pocket and giving her money, when I obviously have enough dough to throw around on take-out food. Which she seemed to accept, and said it was OK, but that made me feel like crap.

But then came the part that really got to me, and made my feelings ambivalent -- the little boy makes a praying motion with his hands and gives me this pleading grimace, and a kind of half bow.

I felt very uneasy about that. Leave the kid out of it -- have him stand off to the side so he doesn't have to hear his grandma abase herself with the story about the momma on the crack pipe, and don't make HIM help with the begging. Sure, use him as a prop -- I might not have bought her story at all if the kid hadn't been there, but don't have him within earshot when you put the bite on people.

I told them to wait, I'd be right back. Then I went home and loaded up a bag with a jar of peanut butter, a package of muffins, some little bags of peanuts I wasn't going to eat, a big bag of instant oatmeal, a couple of packages of dried fruit, a few cans of tuna, a couple of boxes of spaghetti noodles, and some cans of tomato products to make spaghetti sauce. A lot of it was stuff that I might have thrown out in a couple of months if I hadn't gotten around to eating it, because it was stuff I bought last fall as emergency rations in case I got snowed in, and I was dutifully eating my way through it this spring so as not to waste the food.

I drove back and handed the grandma the bag. She took the stuff, although looked sort of dubious about all of it -- like this wasn't food they were used to, and weren't quite sure how to prepare it. I gave them quick instructions on how to make marinara sauce, and how to make the instant oatmeal. But at least the grandmother took it, instead of thrusting it back into my hands (the way the bus money people refuse my offer of a day pass). I could tell they would have preferred money, but the $5 chicken meal had tapped me out for the week.

So, what is the nature of charity. Is it still charity if you feel a little resentful or uneasy about the object of your charity? Shouldn't you give joyfully, or don't give at all? I think I would have had no uneasy feelings at all if she hadn't brought the kid into it. I mean, if her story was true, it must be humiliating to have to beg for food, especially if the reason you're short is because your daughter is drug-addicted, and here you are, struggling in your old age to care for a young child, when you thought all that was behind you. But was it really necessary to teach the kid to make praying hands and bow down and beg? That's the part that bugged me.

So, would Jesus bitch-slap me for caring one way or the other about the circumstances? He only said feed the hungry, not feed the hungry to make yourself feel better. What does it say about my character that I have no problem whatsoever sponsoring a couple of kids in Guatemala through Christian Children's Fund, but that I'm uneasy about giving food to a lady from my neighborhood? Do I only like poor people if they're comfortably a few thousand miles away, or if they're a food pantry donation box in the foyer of my church, where I don't have to look them in the eyes, and feel their uneasiness about lowering themselves to beg from strangers?

A beautiful lady on the bus

2010-05-14T20:15:00.000-07:00

I rode around on the city buses today, learning the routes after I met Mollie and Jenn on Niagara Falls Boulevard.

As usual when I ride buses, I saw many interesting things. The first was a black poor lady waiting at the bus stop with me. She had an on a very unfortunate matching pants suit made of bright fuscia velour. She was about as large as I am, and I'm afraid her hygiene wasn't very good. The outfit had ... stains, and she had a defeated air about her. She used a disabled person's Metro card. When she got off the bus many stops later, her departure was discussed in loud hoots and insults by some fine young things who had been loudly dropping the F bomb the whole trip. They sneered at how "stanky" she had been. May they never be middle-aged, out of shape, disabled, and forced to use public transportation, where they can be the object of ridicule by uncaring, thoughtless young idiots.

The next was 2 young Muslim women, modestly attired, wearing headscarves in the Indonesian style, their demeanor very quiet and ladylike. Each of them was carrying a little pink bag from Victoria's Secret. I loved the juxtaposition.

But what made my day was the middle-aged lady with Down syndrome who got on at the University turn-around. She sat for a few minutes, perusing her wallet, and she flashed her cash (someone should tell her not to do that) before putting the wallet into her backpack.

I then happened to catch her eye, and gave her a big smile. As is usual with people with Down syndrome, they often won't smile first, as they've sadly become accustomed to having their friendly overtures rudely rebuffed. But when I smiled at her, her face lit up in a beautiful, huge smile. "Hello," I said, "how are you today?"

"I'm great!" she beamed. "How are YOU?"

"I'm terrific. Isn't it a beautiful day?"

"Yes!" she assured me. "It's very sunny!"

When I got off the bus, I leaned towards her and said, "It was very nice to meet you. I hope you have a very nice day."

"You, too! I hope YOU have a nice day!"

And so I did, my day made by a person with a beautiful soul. We're going to see far fewer of her kind in the future, as up to 80% of babies with Down syndrome are aborted in this country. I'd much rather share a long bus ride with this last lady than with all the fine young beauties of the world.

I wonder whatever happened to the neo-Nazi mom?

2010-05-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

This was in 1997 or so. I had nearly died with cancer 7 years before, and I was at a point where I figured I could mouth off, 'cause what the hell.

In any event, I had gone to a dollar store in Claymont to purchase some gifts for the guys at my brother's group home for the mentally retarded. David was going to have a birthday party, but I wanted the other guys to have presents to open. Most of them were totally ignored by their families, and gifts didn't come to them often.

I was in the toy section, when a white mom and her 5-year-old came near me. The mom told the girl she could pick out a doll, because she had been so good that day. On sale were 3 very cheap Barbie knock-offs. Two of the dolls were white, one was black. The blonde doll had a pink dress, the brunette had a blue dress, and the black doll had a yellow dress. The little girl picked out the black doll. "Oh, why do you want that one?" her mom asked, picking up the blonde doll. "Look at this one. Isn't she pretty? She has a pink dress on. Pink is your favorite color."

"No, I like the dolly in the yellow dress. Look how curly her hair is, and the yellow dress is so pretty."

"But what about this dolly, then, the one in the blue dress. Look how long her hair is."

"But I like how the dolly with the yellow dress is brown, because the yellow looks so pretty with the brown."

"Well, you can't have that one!" snapped the mom. "Pick one of the other ones, or no dolly at all!" The girl sulkily picked out one of the white dolls and wandered off.

Now, I knew exactly what the mom's problem with the black doll was, but I wasn't going to say anything. It was sickening, but it wasn't exactly child abuse in the legal sense. But then Nazi-mom turns to me with a wink and said in a confiding tone, one white person to another, "You have to be so careful with kids, so they don't pick up the wrong ideas."

That's when I snapped. "Yes, you certainly DO have to be careful," I purred. "You have to be careful to hide from your kid that only about 20% of the world's population is white, and that the other 80% are starting to get really pissed off that we expect them to kowtow to us simply because our dermis lacks melanin. And that their sheer overwhelming numbers will eventually force white people to grant them full equality lest we be shut out and made obsolete."

"We have to be careful to hide from our kids that white people have committed some pretty heinous crimes over the centuries, from slavery to colonialism to genocide, all in the name of a bankrupt ideology that says that White is superior. We have to be careful to hide from them the kind of strategies that will make them successful in life -- namely, tolerance, the ability to work with others, the willingness to accept each person on their own merits instead of pre-judging them by some arbitrary and idiotic standard that has no meaning. And finally, we have to be really, really, really careful with our kids to shield them from any opinions other than our narrow ones, because you know what that leads to -- independent thought, and the ability to appreciate that mom's outmoded ideas are full of shit."

I stalked off to the front to pay for my purchases. Bitch face followed me outside, towing along that poor kid, and she rushed over to the pickup truck where hubby was waiting. Pickup truck naturally had a Confederate flag in the back window, and a gun rack. She screeched to her husband about how that fat race traitor getting into the station wagon had insulted her. Mr. Inbred lumbers over and bellows about how I had insulted his wife, blah, blah, blah. I retorted that maybe if he would take the bedsheet with the 2 eye holes cut in it off once in awhile and stop listening to what the tiny-dicked troglodytes at his Klan rallies told him, that he might get a clearer view of the world, and realize what a cretinous yahoo he was. I then drove off.

I'm astonished I wasn't punched or shot. But damn, it felt good.

"Breaking Bad" once again causing uncomfortable thoughts in season 3

2010-04-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

For those of you who've never heard of it, "Breaking Bad" is a show on the AMC network that concerns a high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who learns he has stage III lung cancer, though he never smoked. The treatment that he needs -- which probably won't cure him, but may buy him 2-5 years -- isn't covered by his HMO, and will cost about $100,000. He and his wife, Skyler, are the typical stressed suburbanites. Their house is worth less than they paid for it, they still owe 15 years on the mortgage, they have no retirement savings, no college savings for their son who has cerebral palsy -- and they have a child on the way.

in desperation, Walt decides to cook a few batches of meth, but he has no idea how to sell the stuff, so he turns to a former student of his, who is on the peripheries of the drug world. You have a lot of sympathy for Walt, a pretty decent guy until all this crap fell on his head, leading him to a life of crime.

I won't go into all the details, but Walt's product becomes a huge success, due to the professional purity of it (Walt is a VERY good chemist, even though he never had much ambition in the chemistry world). He eventually attracts the attention of Gus, a seemingly affable and upright Hispanic businessman who owns a chain of fried chicken restaurants, as well as an enormous commercial dry cleaning factory and other legit businesses.

Turns out Gus is actually a drug kingpin, who launders his bazillions of dollars through his legitimate businesses. In the last episode, he's able to lure Walt back into the cooking business (Walt had a crisis of conscience and swore to give up "cooking") by ushering Walt into the meth lab of Walt's wet dreams, which is secreted under the giant commercial laundry. Gus tells Walt that the purchase of chemicals for the lab will not be noticed under cover of the laundry. The toxic smoke will be cleaned to EPA standards by the chemical scrubbers already in place for the laundry, and ditto, the toxic sludge will be disposed of correctly.

So here you are, the viewer. On the one hand, you see that this is a "safe" operation, which won't harm the environment, unlike your average meth cook done in someone's kitchen where their neglected toddler sits and eats stale Cheerios, and where the waste products are dumped in the backyard. Also, the quality of product is so pure, that it will cause less damage to the addicts than the average polluted meth produced under bad conditions using improvised materials. Part of you says, "Hey, if morons want to kill themselves with meth, who am I to stop them?" And all the money "wasted" on the "war on drugs" might be put to better use building rehab clinics.

On the other hand, you know that study after study has shown that the purer the product, the more addiction rates go up. The more ER visits you have. The more deaths you have. Also, child abuse, domestic abuse, and property crimes soar when the meth is really pure. And when the quality drops, and the addicts don't get as satisfying a high, suddenly applications to rehab facilities go way up. Also, over the course of 2-1/2 seasons, the viewer can point to a minimum of 200 deaths that can be directly traced back to Walt's meth, including a spectacular mid-air jet crash involving 2 jets that slammed into each other as a result of the inattention of a grief-stricken air traffic controller, who was devastated by his daughter's drug overdose.

Damn the producers for making a show that forces me to think, and disturbs me. I'm a good American and I don't LIKE to think!

My neighborhood is astonishingly unlucky for cars

2010-03-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

About once a month, as I'm walking along in my neighborhood, a gentleman will approach me, saying his car has broken down, and could he have some money for a bus ticket. His home is usually very far away -- Niagara Falls, Tonawanda, Cheektowaga, whatever, so the fare required will be at least $4 or $5 dollars, so he can buy a day pass for all the transfers.

Tonight, this happened again, as I was walking up to the Chinese take-out place for some lo mein. A man came up and gave him the usual spiel. I then launched into my usual spiel, which begins, "Oh, how awful! Let me wait for you up at the bus stop, and when the next bus comes along, I'll step on board and buy a day pass for you."

He demurred, as these gentlemen always do. "Oh, no, I couldn't ask you to wait." As usual, I assured him it would be no trouble, that I should be delighted to do so, but he said he didn't want to trouble me, and couldn't he just have the bus fare?

I countered, pulling out my cell phone, "Well, how about this. Why don't I call someone for you, a friend or family member, to come pick you up." As is always the case, by some amazing coincidence, NONE of the gentleman's friends or family members would be available to get such a phone call, and couldn't he just have the bus fare?

At this point, I pull out my final step in this little dance, and say, "Do you know, it's the strangest thing. About once a month, a stranger comes up to me, saying their car has broken down, that they live very far away, and will need at least $5 to buy a day pass for the bus. Why do you suppose it is that so many cars break down in this neighborhood, and when they do, that the person who owns the car always lives so very far away and needs exactly $5 each time?"

At this point, the gentleman usually gets very huffy, and says that they were on the way home from WORK, that they're a WORKING PERSON, and they don't know what I'm talking about, and they stalk off.

Now, to be fair, I imagine that at least one, or perhaps more, of these panhandlers have actually been people whose cars have broken down, and who have nobody to call to come pick them up, and who do in fact live very far away. And that out of Christian charity I should just hand over the $5, giving them the benefit of the doubt. But I might actually be more inclined to part with a dollar or two if the person said, "Hi, ma'am. I'm a drunk and/or junkie. I need some money for a fix. I know I shouldn't ask, but could you please help me?" The unexpected honesty might actually surprise a couple of dollars out of my pocket.

Until that day comes, though, I'll keep playing the "my car has broken down" game. I take a certain grim satisfaction with it.

Hawks, Birds, and Cats

2010-02-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, I was just about to settle in back to work in the late afternoon when I looked out my office window and saw a red tail hawk in the snow in front of the neighbor's garage, evisterating a large bird, surrounded by a drift of feathers.

I called Joe down, and we crept out the front door. I told Joe I thought it must be a male hawk, as they're smaller than the females, to which he replied, "That's weird." I'm so proud of him -- he's already noticed sexual dysmorphism in our species.

We stayed well away from the hawk, but he didn't appreciate our regard, so he picked up his bloody, ravaged prey and flew away across the street. I suggested to Joe that we go look at the remains and try to deduce what kind of bird it used to be. Joe seemed impressed that I might know what species it had been, and I said I might not be able to be sure, but we'd try to figure it out.

From the size of the pool of blood, we knew it wasn't something small, like a sparrow. We could also tell the size of the prey from the stomach contents which the hawk had discarded -- whole kernals of corn, too large for a sparrow or finch to eat. I explained that as a carnivore, the hawk would have very little use for corn, which was why he had tossed it aside. Joe said that was a waste of corn from my feeder, but I said that it wouldn't be wasted -- a rat or rabbit or squirrel would be along presently to take care of the mess.

I said that it had to be a species large enough to consume whole kernals of corn, and also large enough to leave such large tail feathers. Joe wondered if it was a crow, but the feathers were shades of gray. I wondered if it was a bluejay, but Joe said the feathers weren't blue. We concluded it had been a pigeon, a fat, corn-fed pigeon, and a nice meal for a hungry hawk in the dead of winter. -- Claire

ADDENDUM, 02/18/2010: We now think the victim was a mourning dove, as I have plenty of them, but I did see a pigeon with blue feathers this week. And the red tail hawk has taken to perching in the topmost branches of the enormous maple across the street, looking down on my bird feeders. I can tell he/she has arrived, because suddenly, all the bird feeders are deserted. I look up, and sure enough, there's our giant bird of prey.

On another note, I'm worried about Sybil, my rather dim-witted third cat. As many of you know, I work out of my house, and in my first floor office, I've installed bookshelves underneath all the windows, and put cushions on the top of the bookshelves so my 3 cats can look out the window at the assorted bird feeders (2 new huge ones for sunflower seeds, suet feeders, corn cob feeders and finch socks).

Ninja and Skippy (4 years old each) seem to just enjoy watching the birds. They're very interested, but not tense. But Sybil (3 years old), gets VERY excited watching the birds. She tenses up, and her muscles get hard as a rock, and if a squirrel or bird lands on the windowsill in front of her, she starts quivering violently, pawing the window, and if the weather is warm, she charges the window screen. She spends her whole day going from window to window, watching the birds and getting very excited over and over.

Is this bad for Sybil's health? Is she pouring too much adrenaline into her system? Should I get rid of the bird feeders? Has Sybil become like one of those strung-out freaks who play video games for days on end, unable to wean herself from the adrenaline rush? Will she become hollow-eyed and palsied, living on a diet of Mountain Dew and Cheetos?

I ponder these deep questions, in between waiting for the next visit the hawk makes to the take-out deli in my front yard.

Semper Fi, Daddy

2009-11-10T19:39:00.000-08:00

This is how I remember my Daddy telling the story, so if I got any details wrong ... well, I did my best, and there's no way of checking, because Daddy's gone now. He was a career Marine Corps aviator, and he was the finest man I ever knew. He loved God, his family, the Marine Corps, and the United States of America. In that order.

On this, the birthday of the Marine Corps, I'd like to share this story. Daddy called it, "There ain't but six kinds of people in the world."

I apologize for any offensive language! I'm quoting the story the way Daddy told it.

OK, it's 1948, and Harry Truman has just issued an executive order requiring the Armed Forces be integrated. From what I understand, he wanted to do more in the civilian arena, and the NAACP was pressuring him to do more, but Truman knew that the Southern Democrats, who had tried to run a presidential candidate solely on the plank of segregation, would never pass any civilian anti-discrimination legislation. So the Armed Forces thing was a sop to African Americans, and a gesture that he was against legalized discrimination. Truman was probably as much of an unconscious bigot as anyone of his class, time, place and race, but I think his innate fairness probably felt racial discrimination was wrong.

Dad was a Major at some Marine Corp base in the deep South. I know it wasn't Parris Island, because it supported a Marine airbase, and it was a lot smaller. The Colonel of the base called dad in and delegated the implementation of the executive order. I got the impression from the way dad told the story that the Col. wanted nothing to do with the foolishness, but he impressed on dad that he wanted things to go smoothly. It was a lawful order, God help them, and despite what the Col. thought of it personally, he wasn't going to have the order fail on HIS base.

Additionally, the USMC was the most segregated among the Armed Forces. Black people were actively discouraged from joining, and if they did get in, they were really discriminated against, and there were hardly any black officers in the USMC. The Navy was pretty bad, too.

Dad assembled his team. There was his assistant, a Jewish guy named Lt. Lipschitz. And then there was the black drill instructor, Master Sargent Johnson, who was responsible for getting the African-American Marines through boot camp (the white recruits had their own DI). As you may know, USMC DIs are among the toughest people on earth. They eat raw rabid pit bulls for breakfast. Dad presented the problem to them, and asked if they had any good ideas. Johnson leaned forward with an evil grin and said, "Well, now, Major, I have me some ideas. Here's how I think we should play it ..."

A couple of days later, dad ordered all the troops on base to assemble on the parade ground, officers and enlisted men both. Dad stood in front of them, and said in a ringing voice, "Gentlemen, today is an auspicious day for the United States of America. For centuries, the greatness of our nation has been tarnished by the blight of racism. But now, that blight is starting to lift. Our Commander in Chief, President Harry Truman, has issued an executive order requiring the integration of the United States Armed Forces." I can see dad pausing at this moment -- he had a great sense of theater, a carrying bass voice, and on this topic, the deep-felt conviction that prejudice was evil.

Dad continued, "I've been ordered by our commander, Col. X, to implement the President's order. We are on the cusp of history, gentlemen. Future generations will look on this moment and applaud our actions in beginning to redress an ancient wrong. Gentlemen, you'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you participated in this moment, and they will thank you for your part in paving the way for a more just world." Dad looked at them sternly. "Gentlemen, we MUST make this work. If we fail in this first step, the enemies of freedom will seize upon our failure and will say, 'See! The United States doesn't really believe in democracy!' If we fail, there will be no difference between us and our enemies who enslave Eastern Europe."

Dad then outlined how all facilities on the base would be integrated, from barracks, to the mess, to the PX, to the recreational facilities. "I know some of you will be dismayed by this turn of events. Some of you will be frightened or angry. I know this is strange for some of you. But gentlemen, we have been given a lawful order by our Commander in Chief. We are MARINES. Marines follow lawful orders. I know I can count on you to uphold the honor of the Corps by following this order."

When he was through, dad then gestured to Master Sargent Johnson. "I've asked the very competent Master Sgt. Johnson to make clear to everyone the standards of behavior we expect from you. Master Sgt., the floor is yours." They saluted, and dad waved Johnson forward. Johnson lumbered to the front, and stood menacingly in front of the assembly.

"Listen up, maggots!" Johnson barked. The assembly braced. Johnson was a mountain of a man, all corded bulging muscles, and he radiated a dangerous tension. "There ain't but six kinds of people in the world," he informed the Marines, pacing in front of them. He gestured at dad. "There's white folks, like the Major here, and then there's white trash." Next, he pointed at Lt. Lipschitz, and drawled, "There's Jews, like the Lt. here, and then there's k***s." He glowered meaningfully at the black Marines in the crowd. "Finally, there's black folks, and then there's n*****s."

"Now, I don't give a rat's ass what kind of maggot you are," Johnson continued. "We can't control what you think. But we can control what you sons of bitches say and do. And we say -- " he jerked a thumb at dad and the Lt. -- "that you'd better watch every goddamn word that comes out of your ugly sewers, and keep your opinions to yourselves. Because," he growled, "if there is ANY trouble, or a whisper of trouble, then you will be in a world of shit.

"Any white trash that acts like a turd gets handed over to the Major for discipline." Johnson pointed at Lipschitz. "And any k***s that cause trouble get handed over to the Lt." Johnson then smiled malevolently, and dropped his voice. "But any n*****s that cause even a lick of trouble, well, your asses are mine. And by the time I get through with you, you'll wish your nappy-headed mamas had never given birth to you."

The assembly broke up, and the integration began. There was no trouble.

But a couple of months later, dad stepped into the officers' club with an African-American Marine Lieutenant. Dad had been teaching a class, and the Lt. was one of his students. Dad offered to buy him a drink at the O club. Well, when they walked in, the place fell silent. As they passed the bar, a man at the bar muttered audibly, "Damn, I guess we have to let ANYONE in here nowadays."

Dad sat the Lt. at a back table, and went to the bar to get their drinks. After he placed his order, he leaned in close to the officer who had made the comment, and dad pitched his voice so only the young lout could hear him. "Lt., were you at the assembly we had a few weeks ago?"

"Yes, sir," the lout replied warily.

"Then I guess you remember what the Master Sargent said about how discipline will be meted out to folks who make trouble over integration."

"Yes, sir," the lout said, obviously unhappy about where the conversation was headed.

"Well, here's the thing," dad said, collecting the drinks the bartender had brought. "I'm kind of busy these days, and I don't think I have time to waste adjusting your shitty attitude. I'm thinking maybe I should turn you over to the Master Sargent." Dad said the lout turned green. "Or, you could learn to keep your mouth zipped, and in about 15 minutes, you come over to my table with some drinks for me and the Lieutenant. Then you sit down and have a drink with us. We're drinking bourbon. On the rocks. Your choice, son."

Fifteen minutes later, a piece of white trash brought over three glasses of bourbon on the rocks to dad's table, and choked down his own drink while sitting next to one of the white folks, and one of the black folks. 'Cause there ain't but six kinds of people in the world.

One of Satan's minions said hello

2009-10-31T02:43:00.000-07:00

So I was working tonight, and I went for a walk up to the corner at around 2:00 a.m. (on 10/31/2009) for a breath of air. A car pulls up to the corner and stops before turning onto Delaware.

A white guy with greasy shoulder length hair, wearing a pair of bright red devil's horns on his head, rolled down the passenger window and spoke to me. "WAAAAUGH!" he yelled, "I'm one of Satan's minions! Long live the Prince of Darkness! WAAAAUGH!"

"Whatever, dude," I replied amiably.

"YEAH!!! Whatever! DUDE!" he yelled back, before the car peeled off into the night.

I only hope the driver of the car hadn't been ingesting whatever Satan's minion was on.

WAAAUGH!!!!

Thoughts brought on by Chris Rock's "Good Hair" documentary

2009-10-23T21:59:00.000-07:00

I haven’t seen the documentary yet, but the phrase “good hair” does flash me back to one of the most heartbreaking things I ever witnessed, back in 1994.

I worked for a children’s hospital, and my 14-year-old niece and godchild was coming in for spinal surgery. The surgery was about 5 hours, so we were in the waiting room all day. My sister, a reading teacher, was beside herself with worry, and even my stoic brother-in-law was fretting. I had gotten the day off to wait with them.

Another family was there almost all day, too, a black family whose 5-year-old daughter was in for a day of testing. They were in and out of the waiting room all day, as the little girl would get a test, then come back to the waiting room. (She didn’t have a life-threatening condition, just something that would probably require surgery.)

The girl was a charmer, and rightly doted upon by her parents. After awhile the girl offered to read a story to my sister to cheer her up, and my sister was delighted — children and books are her passion. The girl was open and approachable, without being bratty the way some kids are when they want attention from strangers.

It was obvious that her parents lavished time, attention and love on her. Her hair was elaborately braided with lots of little beads, and it was obvious that her family had read to her, and listened to her, and had communicated her value to her. She had been raised the way every child deserves to be raised, and it showed.

After several hours, she came and sat by me. My hair was below my waist at that point, and she started stroking my hair while I read her a story. Finally, she said, “Your hair is so pretty.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “And I love your hair, too. I wish I could have pretty braids like yours, but my hair is too thin, and I’d look silly. But you look beautiful.” (Every word of it true. Other than the fact that my hair was 3 feet long at the time, there was nothing remarkable about it. There was just a lot OF it.)

“Oh, no,” she said, “your hair is prettier than mine.” She said it without sadness, just a trace of regret over something that can’t be changed, and has to be accepted as the truth.

“Well,” I said, “my hair is DIFFERENT, certainly, but it’s not prettier. Look how shiny your hair is, and what a beautiful color it is. Do you know, I have to DYE my hair, because my regular hair color is so boring. And I’ll never be able to braid my hair like yours, ’cause like I said, my hair is too thin.”

But she wouldn’t be dissuaded. Her final comment was, “No, your hair is better. You have ‘good hair.’” I chanced a look at her mother then (the dad was off getting coffee). The mom looked like someone had ripped her heart out. I know I must have had some sickly apologetic look on my face, because the mom had the courtesy to give me a little “don’t worry, it’s not your fault” kind of wave.

My sister saw the whole thing, and we talked about the incident a few days later. I can still recall the rage I felt, that here was this beautiful little girl — smart, charismatic, articulate beyond her years, cherished, surrounded by people who loved her — and yet this s***hole society of ours had convinced her that there was something wrong with her. That the very hair that grew out of her head was deformed and second-best. That despite having the greatest riches that anyone can possess — a loving family — she felt like there was something fundamentally lacking in her. I wanted to hit somebody, but I had no idea who.

"Pork for the Poor" afghan raffle

2009-05-09T09:08:00.001-07:00

Hey, everyone, here's the afghan I started working on in January. It's finally done, and it's a beauty. It's nice and heavy and study. I used ribbing afghan stitch, and the afghan used over 10 skeins of yarn. For those of you who know crochet, you know that that equals an afghan that will keep you warm on the coldest of nights. I used acrylic yarn, so it's washable.

Now, as to why I made it: This afghan will help lift one or more Third World families out of poverty, because we're selling raffle tickets on the afghan, with all proceeds going to Heifer International. Heifer international is a great organization (check them out at www.heiferinternational.org). They give pregnant farm animals (or breeding pairs of animals) to indigent people, teach them animal husbandry, then the families give away the first born of the animals to other poor families. Meantime, the first family is making money off the first animal -- milking it (cows, goats, camels), or collecting the eggs (chickens, geese), selling the offspring (pigs, birds, etc.). Or the family is improving their nutrition by eating the eggs or drinking the milk.

The raffle will be Memorial Day weekend, May 22-24, in Walton, NY, where my nephew Jim is involved in the annual bluegrass festival/pig roast known as "The Big Ass Pig Roast." (www.bigasspigroast.com) If we sell 120 tickets, Heifer International can buy one pig for one poor family. if we sell 240 tickets, 2 pigs. 360 tickets, 3 pigs. You get the idea.

So, c'mon folks! It's a great afghan, a great cause, and the raffle tickets are only $1. What have you got to lose?

The care and feeding of a Ninja

2008-11-30T19:38:00.000-08:00

Ninja has had to start taking calorie supplements, a paste called Nutri-Cal. She's too much of a lady to fight it out at the cat bowls, so when greedy Skippy and Sybil finish scarfing down their kibble, they rush over to muscle Ninja away from her bowl.

The Nutri-Cal is doing wonders for her. She was getting terribly bony, and her fur was a little dull. She gets a half-tablespoon a day, and while she's still a little too thin, she seems much healthier and more energetic.

But there's a downside to everything, and in Ninja's case, it's a sad addiction to the paste. No matter how quietly I start unscrewing the plastic cap, Ninja hears, and zooms into the room as though transported by Scotty on the Enterprise. She abases herself dreadfully, meowing up a storm, and pawing my leg.

I see her gray paws appearing over the edge of my desk all day, and she's even taken to jumping on the desk, looking at the tube of paste next to my keyboard.

I should have known the paste would create addiction -- look at the strung-out eyes of the cat pictured on the Nutri-Cal tube. That's a cat with a monkey on his back. I wonder if I should find a meeting for my cat. "Hello, my name is Ninja, and I'm a Nutri-Cal addict." "Hello, Ninja!" the other cats will chorus back.

Bad haiku in time for Christmas

2008-11-30T07:24:00.000-08:00

There's a challenge at the Bujold list for people to invent sonnets and haikus in tribute to model trains under the Christmas tree. These are mine (cats feature prominently in my "work," and I use the 3 line/17 syllable haiku, not the 5/7/5 syllable method). I'd say enjoy, but bad haiku is torture. But those who have cats might get a chuckle. I may attempt limericks later in the day.

Loud train snakes under tree
Next to the bright gifts
Orange cat strikes, train derails

Boy waits long next to tree
Control box in hand
Cat lies on tracks -- train on!

Sometimes you just can't stop cutting the cheese

2008-11-29T09:43:00.000-08:00

So, it was Thanksgiving morning, and I was preparing the cheese tray I'd promised to bring to my sister's house. I arranged the cut cheese slices on my 20-inch oval ceramic tray, with the 8-ounce Brie circle in the middle, in pride of place. The other 3 pounds of cheese (extra sharp cheddar, Monterey, jalapeno Monterey, jalapeno Havarti, and Colby) were arranged in slices in decorative rows surrounding the Brie. The tray was full, but not over-crowded. Being my father's daughter, I worried there wasn't enough, so I called my niece Julye.

"I just finished slicing the cheese for the cheese tray," I said. "There's only 3-1/2 pounds of cheese. Do you think that's enough, or should I go to the store for more?"

Julye sighed. "Claire. Think about it. There are only six of us going to Monica's house. You have 9+ ounces for each of us. That's 900+ calories, not counting the crackers people are going to put the cheese on. If we all ate that much cheese, we'd be too bloated for dinner."

And so it turned out to be. At the end of the day, I ended with 2 plastic bags full of cheese slices, plus about 3 pounds of crackers. I expect I'm going to be very sick of cheese before I get to the end of the supply, but at least I don't have to buy any other protein source for the next ... oh, couple of weeks, I expect. I like cheese, but I don't like it that much. I wonder how well it would freeze.

New Crochet Group in Western NY/Buffalo Area!

2008-10-02T07:01:00.001-07:00

Mollie and I met a woman, Jen, at the yarn store. We bonded over yarn (who wouldn't?) and she wants to start a crochet group! We talked about how expensive it is to keep up a Meetup.com group listing, so I said I'd post it on my blog, and see if Google search picks it up. So here's the entry!

Young Master Goldfinches Came to Call

2008-08-21T06:15:00.001-07:00

Mr. and Mrs. Goldfinch are hard at work harvesting my sunflowers just before they'd be ripe enough for me to do so. What beautiful birds! They appear often, flying from flower to flower, testing the seeds for ripeness, like an oenophile at a wine-tasting festival.

Later in the morning, two birds landed on the sunflowers, and at first I thought they were female goldfinches, then I realized the feathers were too yellow to be the subtle, tasteful olive coat of the female goldfinch. But the black wing feathers weren't as dark as a male goldfinch feathers.

I then realized that Mr. and Mrs. Goldfinch have been successful raising a family, and that I was seeing the two young Master Goldfinches! Their parents obviously told them where to find the good stuff, because they each chose a sunflower head and systematically denuded them of seeds. I've never seen juvenile goldfinches before.

The three cats watched them intently, in frustrated silence, with Sybil occasionally licking Skippy's ear.

Duplication is the mother of altruism

2008-08-19T14:26:00.001-07:00

I was at the side of the house facing the next-door church's back today, hacking down the jungle-like weeks that have grown up. Houses in Buffalo are odd -- On one side, your property line extends about a foot outside your windows. You have to go into the neighbor's yard to get to weeds. I'd let the church yard side go, because no one from the church ever goes out there, but I realized I'd have to tackle the mess when I heard the gang of kids that Joe plays with talking about "hunting bees' nests." I went outside and saw they were poking weeds with long sticks. Their mother and I told them that was Not A Smart Thing To Do.

I decided I'd have to clear my strip of land, plus the overgrown weeds at the back of the church, to keep the kids from killing themselves by disturbing hornets. I'll be able to weed-whack a lot of them, but some things need to be cut down with shears.

Joe was helping me today. I'd pull a big weed down (some very like tiny trees) and point to where I wanted Joe to cut. He'd attack it with the garden shears, and was especially proud of himself when he hacked through a very thick stalk. He then hauled off the branches for me and loaded them onto our tiny wheelbarrow.

I discovered a 6-foot thistle plant -- thankfully, it hasn't released its seeds yet. I pointed out to Joe the purple flowers that were nursing hundreds of seeds, and the origin of the word "thistledown." Joe then learned that the thin garden gloves I provided him still allowed the thistle spikes to come through and pinch his hand. Even when he ran in and got his rubberized Spiderman glove, he discovered that the Spider was no match for the Thistle.

We did in fact find a few insect nests, but they were bumble bees. Joe saw how harmless they were, and when one landed on a nearby sunflower, Joe was fascinated to see the little pollen sacs on its back legs. I'm going to point the nests out to the kids on Friday, when they arrive to spend the day with their mom. I'll tell them to avoid them, because I refuse to spray bumblebees, because they're harmless pollinators. As soon as my back is turned, and Joe isn't playing with them to tell them to stop (he has a good influence over their behavior), they'll no doubt start poking the nests with sticks and will get stung. They love sticks.

I pointed out to Joe that I had let the rose plants there run riot, and that I'd have to prune them back ruthlessly this fall. He noticed some faded blooms, and asked if he could have them for his mother.

In any event, during all Joe's hard work, we discovered a plastic figurine in the weeds. It's one of those transforming cyborg-human figurines little boys like to play with. I said to Joe that this was his lucky day, and see how much one could profit from gardening? He then replied that no, he recognized that this figurine belonged to his friend Aaron, who lives next door, and he was going to put it on their porch so Aaron would find it when he came home this weekend.

I was so touched. I praised Joe for his altruism in giving back a toy that his friend would have never found on his own, even though no one would have known if he had kept it.

He then tossed over his shoulder, as he ran off to their porch, "Besides, I've got one just like it at home."

Duplication, the mother of altruism. Who knew?

51 pounds and counting (down) plus job search (unfruitful so far)

2008-08-15T00:33:00.001-07:00

Back in November of 2006, I wrote to my family that I had lost 47 pounds after the surgery, from my highest weight which was in February of 2006.

I was conspicously silent after that, and one of the reasons why was that last autum (2007), I discovered that had gained about 25 of that back.

I've been trying to be careful, the last couple of months especially, and the new electronic scale I bought at Walmart last week* shows the weight loss total is now 51 pounds (from February of 2006). Of course, when I emailed some family and friends about this, I said the total was 56 pounds ... because I'm bad at math. Or I was hungry and not thinking straight.

The scale seems to be accurate, as far as we can tell, although Julye liked her old analog, which showed HER to be 8 pounds thinner. But the new scale seems to match what our doctor's office says.

Meanwhile, all the jobs I applied for at the local hospital system and Windsong Radiology didn't pan out, but I have an application in to Julye's Y for the 5:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. shift, plus I told them if they couldn't give me 5 days a week, that I could work the same shift at the Delaware Avenue Y up the street on the days I wasn't working for them. At least a few days a week at Julye's Y looks like an almost sure bet (I hope).

The Y only pays $7.15/hour (NY State minimum wage), but I get a free Y membership, and if I force myself to stay for an hour after work, maybe I can accelerate my weight loss. I have a beautiful embroidered denim jacket that I bought in 2005, thinking it would fit, but it never did. Last summer, I could get it on, but the sleeves were really tight, and I couldn't button it. This summer I can button it! And move my arms! And my red denim jacket, which I could button last year, but couldn't sit down wearing it because it was too tight, I can now sit down while wearing it.

Back to jobs -- my line count has been good enough to qualify for overtime on the weekends, so with the Y job and a few hours on Friday and Saturdays, that should equal the MedQuist job, AND the paycheck amounts would be more reliable. Plus, it gives me most of Friday and Saturday off.

*sigh* The neverending battles. Weight and no money.

*I wanted a scale that went up to 400 pounds -- NOT THAT I WEIGH 400 POUNDS, but when you get above a certain weight, some scales start to go wonky unless there's a much higher upper weight limit. So, I'm looking online, and all the scales I saw were over $100, sometimes WELL over $100. I was discouraged, until I happened to be at Walmart and saw this scale marked at $29.99. Said it went up to 400 pounds. Works just dandy. Good thing I didn't blow money on an expensive scale!

possible preface for my "autobiographical novel"

2008-08-14T21:24:00.001-07:00

I wrote this book as an autobiographical novel for a number of reasons. One reason is that the funny incidents I relate in this book were only worthy of a chuckle as they happened, but by taking the kernel of the incident and twisting it out of all recognition, I hope the incident will produce guffaws. I can well remember when I first realized I could make people laugh, that my actions could produce such reactions in other people. It was the only power I ever craved over other people, the ability to make them laugh.

Also, I was hoping to discover some truths about myself. I wanted to know why I seem to have no ambition, why I am such an underachiever. I thought that if I could rearrange the facts of my life, deleting a sibling here, adding a sibling there, and eliminating and adding other factors, that I might find out whether my life would have been different. Would I have become a doctor (the pinnacle of my father's dreams for me), or would I still end up being an office worker? Did my circumstances and my bipolar disorder shape me, or was I just born complacent and happy to be an underachiever?

In other words, is there something wrong with me, or am I fine just the way I am? I wrote this book to try and make peace with my life.

Finally, I made this work a fictional work because I didn't want to offend anyone who ever knew me and interacted with me. If you see a character in this novel who seems to resemble you, and causes you to say, "Hey, I went to school with her, and now she's writing about me!" please banish that thought from your mind. The character you think is you might be 5% you, but the rest of the character is an amalgem of other people and the ferment of my fevered mind.

Here's an interesting thing about prunes

2008-08-14T21:18:00.000-07:00

They FERMENT. I opened a container of prunes a couple of months ago, then put the lid back on and put the container into a rubbermaid container. I opened the rubbermaid container tonight, to get some prunes to eat, and I was rocked back by the odor of fermenting prunes. Not a rotting odor, and not an unpleasant odor, but they were definitely fermented.

I just thought they'd dry out, the way raisins do. I was going to put them in some oatmeal.

I feel betrayed by the prunes.

And I wish I knew a way to make wine out of them.

Stupid prunes.

Note to self: If you open a container of prunes, try to finish them up quickly, or put them in the fridge.

Go suck a huge bowl of putrid HIV-infested dicks, PETA

2008-08-07T01:21:00.000-07:00

OK, by now you've all heard about that poor Canadian man who was riding on a Greyhound bus out of Edmonton who had his throat cut by a deranged fellow passenger, and who then was beheaded and cannibalized. According to The Globe and Mail, here's what PETA had to say:

"PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, Man. — An animal rights group has tried – and failed – to run a newspaper ad comparing the beheading of a passenger on a Greyhound bus last week to the treatment of animals by the meat industry.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, said on its website it would run the ad in the Portage la Prairie Daily Graphic.

However, city editor Tara Seel said the newspaper had no intention of running the ad, which uses imagery of “an innocent victim's throat” being cut, in reference to the slaughter of cows, chickens and pigs on factory farms.

“His struggles and cries are ignored ... the man with the knife shows no emotion ... the victim is slaughtered and his head cut off ... his flesh is eaten,” reads the ad, which is posted on the website."

How DARE they add to the anguish of the poor victim's family. How DARE they. How dare they add to the anguish of the killer's family. Isn't it bad enough that the killer is a madman who snapped and did a horrible thing, about which he now seems horrified and bewildered? But now PETA has to take the tragedy of his psychotic break and use it as a cheap publicity ploy.

There's a class act, PETA. Torture two groups of family and friends, rub vinegar and salt into their wounds, because it offends you that humans eat hamburgers.

"Oh! But they want to help animals!" you say. How about this: PETA doesn't want you to have pets, because that's slavery. Set your cat free, and let him fend for himself. Doesn't matter if he gets hit by a car and dies. After all, they've killed thousands of pets themselves (check out www.petakillsanimals.com).

PETA doesn't want you to have lifesaving drugs. The research for those drugs involves animal research. So when your granny asks you why they haven't developed any new drugs to cure her cancer, you tell her that PETA says, "Man up, Grandma, and bend over and take it up the ass like a real man. You're toast, because we value the life of a white rat over yours."

PETA gives money to enviro-terrorists who blow up medical labs and free animals within. PETA doesn't want you to eat meat and drink milk. PETA has mocked Christians by putting of pictures of crucified pigs, saying, "Hogs died for your sins." PETA has told kosher butchers that they're perpetrating "holocaust on a plate." PETA objectives women by putting up pictures of naked female celebrities to chide you for wearing fur.

PETA doesn't give two flaccid dicks about people. They don't want humane animal research; they want no animal research. They don't want humane slaughter; they want no slaughter. They don't care if a scientist trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's is working in a lab late at night if that would derail their plans to blow up the lab.

And this latest ploy to play off the Greyhound murder ... those sons of ...

SUCK it, PETA.

A few years ago, I was running errands along a busy highway when I saw PETA protesters in front of the KFC where I always took my brother and his roommates from the group home. I wasn't hungry. But damned if I didn't pull in and buy a chicken breast. Then I pulled out in front of the restaurant and ate it in front of them.

That Thanksgiving, a PETA protester put some flyers in our apartment building's lobby on Thanksgiving Day, telling us all the reasons why we shouldn't eat turkey. I fetched a magic marker and wrote across the front of one, "I just ate some turkey. Its suffering made it DELICIOUS." The rest of the people who were present in the building that day then defaced all the other flyers.

OK, I acted like a complete, insensitive, rude, ignorant douche. I will freely admit that. But I'm alive today because in 1990, I underwent seven months of heavy-duty chemotherapy for cancer. All those drugs had been tested on animals. I hope I'll be celebrating my 18th anniversary cancer-free in November (things look good so far). Every anniversary, I make a toast: "Thank you, family and friends. Thank you, hardworking scientists. Thank you, doctors and nurses and lab techs and support staff. And an especial thank you, poor little lab rats, without whom I wouldn't be here."

In 2000, my grand-niece and namesake died at the age of 9 months, 9 days from an inherited disease, spinal muscular atrophy. The wonderful scientists who are trying to find a cure for that hideous filthy disease, that slowly suffocated our precious baby girl by paralyzing her respiratory muscles after months of paralyzing the rest of her, are using animals. (Go to www.fsma.org to read about what a farking nightmare type I SMA is. Leave a donation if you've got the money.)

Yes, someday we'll invent "petri mice" or some vat-grown tissue (thanks for those two ideas, Lois McMaster Bujold) that will somehow mimic a live animal, and we can use that to test drugs on. I hope I live to see it. I would rejoice on that day. But right now, people -- mothers, daughters, brothers, fathers, tiny grand-nieces -- people are dying of all kinds of diseases, and the research into those diseases will, unfortunately, kill a lot of lab rats. I feel horrible about that.

But not as horrible, as devastated, as howlingly desolate as the day my infant grand-niece suffocated to death.

Do NOT give me that "a rat is a horse is a human" crap. Especially not if you've ever gotten an immunization, or ever taken any prescription or over the counter drugs, or if you ever plan to avail yourself of modern medicine when you get sick. Most of the successes of modern medicine have been built on animal research.

OK, I've had my say. You can pile on now, and pillory me for being an animal-hating, human-centrist, sadistic, cruel and evil pile of streaming dog droppings. Call me what you want, roll out any argument you choose. I respect your right to do so, but this is one issue on which I will not be moved.

Oh, and don't get me started on those twisted freaks from the Westboro Baptist Church, who wanted to travel from their cult homebase to Canada to parade at the murder victim's funeral. Their signage was going to shout that God Hates Canada, and this murder was proof of God's hatred of Canada's legalizing gay marriage (there's a logic train that derailed somewhere along the way). So, does that make the murderer, by all accounts a paranoid schizophrenic who was in psychotic fugue state, an agent of God? By the logic of "Reverend" Phelps and his browbeaten/brainwashed progeny, the killer IS an agent of God. WTF????????

Because it's Caturday on FARK

2008-07-12T20:23:00.001-07:00

To explain: Every Saturday on fark.com (a comedy news website), there's always a thread called "Caturday." People upload pictures of their cats, and share sentimental stories about their pets. It's pretty sappy, but it's one of my guilty pleasures. People also add humorous captions to the pictures, in the LOLcats style. (LOLcats is this very strange internet phenomenon where humorous captions are added to cute pictures of cats, and the spelling and grammar is usually weird, presumably because cats can't spell or follow English grammar. Some of the pics are hilarious, and others are just stupid.) Anyway, I was kind of missing dad today, so I shared the story below.

Note: The picture above is not actually a picture of my cat Barbie, it's just a generic pic I downloaded off the 'net, but it looks a lot like her. Second, I think the whole "Rainbow Bridge" thing is a little schmaltzy, but the Caturday folks on FARK really like that kind of thing, so I added it. Third, dad didn't cry over Barbie, but it makes for a better story if he does. So, without further ado, here's the tail -- I mean, tale -- of Barbie's last days:

My orange tabby cat, Barbie, lived to be 19. In the last year of her life, the only thing she could eat was London broil, hand-minced by me. I lived with my dad, who was almost 80, because he had bad emphysema, and needed someone around the house, although he could really do quite a bit for himself. Dad was raised on a farm during the Depression, and every time he saw me mincing Barbie's steak, he'd grumble, "Can't BELIEVE you're giving STEAK to a d****d CAT!"

I worked the night shift so I could be there during the day for dad, and one day I came downstairs at 2 p.m. and heard the food processor going in the kitchen. Dad liked to get big beef roasts from the supermarket on sale and grind up his own hamburger. I peeked around the door of the kitchen, and what did I see? Dad was standing there, with Barbie at his feet, and she yowled at him. He said, "What? You want some more? Well, all right, I guess you are kind of thin. Here you go," and he dropped a hunk of fresh-ground hamburger on the floor in front of her, which she gobbled up.

Neither of them heard me, because they were both pretty deaf by that point, but this performance repeated itself about 3 or 4 times before I walked into the kitchen and said to my dad, "So! Shouldn't give good beef to a cat, huh? You are SO busted!" He cleared his throat and acted all gruff, and said, "Well, the d****d cat was bugging me. Kept meowing at me. I just did it to shut her up."

Dad used to also take a lot of naps, and when he didn't know I could hear him, I'd catch him patting the bed or the sofa and saying to Barbie, "Well, come in if you're coming in. Need help getting up? All right, here you are. Good girl. Lie down now." I'd come in 30 minutes later and find them totally sacked out, with Barbie nestled against his stomach.

On her last day of life, I heard her howling at 5 a.m. She often did that, so I ignored her and went back to sleep. I got up at 8 a.m., and found her in the laundry room. She'd had a stroke, and was all messed up. I washed her, and told dad we'd have to go to the vet. It was Sunday, so the vet didn't open until 10. I wrapped my baby up in a towel and held her against my chest. She purred the whole time. Dad drove me over to the vet, and I reclined the passenger seat so she could lie down on my chest. She purred more loudly than she had ever purred in her life, and never stopped until the vet eased her off over the Rainbow Bridge.

I caught dad crying that night. Said he had something in his eyes ...

God SO knew what He was doing ...

2008-07-08T10:54:00.000-07:00

when He invented water.

It was a hot day today (for inner city Buffalo), and I was increasingly miserable as the day wore on. I work at home, and I had to force myself to sit in front of that computer. The last hour I worked, I was almost frantic because the time was passing so slowly, and it wasn't until I finished work that I could ...

GO OUT INTO THE POOL!

We have one of those 12-foot pop-up pools, and when I jumped in after work, it was just heavenly. The way our yard is situated, only a couple of neighbors can see in, and the back of some commercial buildings abutting our backyard block out a lot of the light from the street lamps. It was as dark as it ever gets out back, no one else was on their back porch, so it felt like I was all alone.

When you float on your back in the water, arms and legs spread out, you can't hear a thing, and you slowly rotate in the water, watching the silent airplanes overhead. There aren't many stars, because we're in the city, but the wings of the moths overhead occasionally catch the faint glimmer of the street lights, and look almost like shooting stars.

I spent the first five minutes so stunned by relief from the water that all I could think was, "Praise God. Praise God. Praise God." And then it's so easy to pray, because it's so silent and comfortable ...

Water is a wonderful thing. No one praises the miracle of water enough. I think I'll be able to sleep now ...

A perfect day with the Divine Miz M (and the equally Divine Miz J)

2008-06-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

Strawberries and wild cherries and Mollie and Julie. The only thing it needed to complete our fun would have been the presence of Monica, who was slaving away, cleaning up her classroom for the summer.

Julie and I left early, around 8:30. We stopped in at Monica's, where Mollie had been staying overnight, to help her pack her things, and all the jam-making supplies Monica had kindly packed for us the day before. Monica was already at work!

We then followed Mollie to her new house. The house is great -- but the setting, oh, the location is what elevates it above "nice house" to something sublime. The house is totally shielded by many mature trees on all sides, so that you can't even see the country road it rests beside. From the front of the house, you see the lawn sweeping down to the dense woods. From the kitchen window in the back of the house, you look out over a lawn dotted with apple trees and see a little brown barn next to a good-sized pond. Mollie walked us down to the barn and the pond. Growing all around the pond were wild cherry trees, heavy with red half-ripe fruit and maroon fully-ripe fruit. We picked handfuls and spit out the pits like peasants.

Then it was off to the berry patch! The day was muggy, but not too hot, and the sun didn't come up until we were almost done picking. Mollie and I were merely steady pickers, but Julie was a picking machine, and soon we had 31 pounds of strawberries to lug back to Mollie's house to process. After we stopped for lunch! The gentle exercise had made us ravenous, and we grabbed Subway sandwiches on the way home. (I recommend the pepper-crusted turkey, with jalapeno cheese.)

After lunch, we settled into the dull work of hulling berries. By the end of the day, we'd actually gotten all but about 5 pounds washed, hulled, and either made into jam (two double batches), or put into the fridge to keep until tomorrow's jam-making session.

The residents of the pond kept us entertained, for we could see fish jumping after fat flies all afternoon! Some of the fish made such big slaps on the water that I was sure they were at least 4-pound bass! The house had been owned previously by a bariatric surgeon (a really good profession in Western New York, where the inhabitants are all too fond of good food and lots of it.) The good doctor had stocked the pond with bass, and my evolutionarily-primed atavistic hunting urges kicked in, and each fish jump only sharpened my eager gaze on the water. The pond has aerators to keep the algae down, although the former owner didn't leave instructions on how to turn them on, so we didn't get a water show along with the fish show.

After awhile, I needed to stretch, so I walked down to the pond, where I noticed that there were more cherry trees than I had spied that morning, and that all of them had lots of ripe berries, each about the size of my thumbnail. I turned my shirt into a picking basket, and quickly rounded it out with the fruit, each cherry yielding and sweet under my fingers. When I had filled the shirt with all the ripe cherries I could see, I walked back to the house, and began pitting them. They were so perfectly ripe, that one quick squeeze popped out the pit (which was half the volume of the cherry), and within 30 minutes, I had two cups ready to go.

And Just in time! Julie and Mollie were getting ready to cook up the second double batch of jam, and lots of crushed strawberries joined my cherries in the cooking pot. In no time, we had several jars of rich deep red jam. We tasted some, and the flavor was like a sweet wine, with the cherries adding a complex undernote. Julie and I left the plain strawberry jam behind to cool overnight, but we each greedily secured our own jars of the cherry-strawberry, and carried them away.

We had to leave before poor Monica had gotten through her school work, although she did intend to come over that evening and spend time with Mollie.

Alas, we had to leave all too early. It's always like a vacation to spend a day with Mollie, and the temptation is to stay up all night just to have the pleasure of talking to her. But we'll be back tomorrow! The rest of those hulled strawberries won't turn themselves into jam!

The only thing that would have made the day even more perfect, if I may use that overworked phrase, would have been if "Grandma" Betty could have been with us. Even into her 80s, Betty was a champion strawberry picker, and worked like a trojan, picking and hulling. I know she would have gotten a real kick out of the gorgeous view out the kitchen window, and nothing would have made us happier than to have her with us.

I set Monsignor's cat on fire

2008-04-15T12:33:00.001-07:00

OK, so that's the bad news.

The good news is, he's not hurt, and I'm not even sure he realized he was on fire. And you really can't tell unless you pet that one patch of fur and then smell your hand.

So here's what happened: I run a rosary making group on Tuesday mornings in the rectory, where the parish office is. Monsignor's black cat, Shadow, prowls around the rectory looking for people to pet him. The group is not really catching on -- I only have one or two regulars, and they didn't show up today. I run the group way in the back room, near the rectory kitchen, in the room where they count the money.

I have several new rolls of #9 twine from FNT (we make all cord, but also cord and bead rosaries) that I haven't gotten around to cut yet, so when I saw a little candle in a votive glass, I thought I'd measure and cut rosary twine with flame from the candle.

I was well along with the twine cutting when Shadow came into the room and jumped into the chair next to me, looking to be petted. So I put down my twine and started to pet him. After several minutes, I turned away so I could throw away the clump of hair he'd shedded on the chair. In that second, Shadow jumped on the table, and as I turned my head back, he walked right next to the votive, and fire leapt up his coat -- a 6 by 2 inch sheet of flame. Horrified, I patted out the flames with my hands, and they went right out. I picked up Shadow and checked him -- the fur was a little rough in that patch, and was fractionally shorter, but seemed all right otherwise.

Well, I blew out the candle and let him go, and he sauntered off while I sat there frozen in terror. The room stank of burned fur, and I had this vision of what would have happened if I hadn't noticed the cat was on fire in time -- I would have been arrested and booked wearing my Rosary Army T-shirt.

Shadow came back later, and wanted to be petted again. He still smelled like burned fur, so I picked him up and spent 10 minutes petting him. Luckily, he's one of those cats that drools when he purrs, so I was able to use his own spit to clean him up. He looked pretty good, and really, you could hardly tell anything was wrong. There was barely any smell by then.

I slunk out of the rectory an hour later, and Monsignor offered to hold the door for me while I wheeled out my cart full of supplies. Shadow was sitting on the secretary's desk, and he meowed at me, and inclined his head to be petted. I wonder if I should bring treats and a toy next week to keep him quiet.

Lemonade was only one of her weapons

2008-02-08T22:07:00.000-08:00

A discussion on the Rosary Army forums made me recount the story below. It's only slightly exaggerated, and details the unholy glee my mom took in lying in wait for Mormon missionaries every summer. Enjoy! -- C

My mother used to lie in wait for Mormons, who came every summer, as reliably as swallows to their nests. The JWs she just sent on their way, but she had studied the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and all the Catholic apologetics about the flaws in the Mormon religion so she'd be ready. She'd so sweetly invite those poor earnest boys in, sit them down with lemonade and sandwiches, and then grill them unmercifully. She'd start them off in the living room, letting them get comfortable before she began the attack. Then the action would move to the dining room, so she could lay out all her books and materials. (She had a special drawer in the linen sideboard where she kept her own copy of the Book of Mormon, a Catholic study bible, and her notes, stored handy next to the Christmas tablecloths.)

When they saw she wouldn't be an easy conquest, some of them would try to flee, but she'd ply them with more lemonade, and offer to make them a meatloaf. "Oh, surely you're not going to leave before my husband gets home, are you? He served with so many brave Mormon men in the Solomon Islands during the war, and I know he'd like to meet you. You HAVE to stay to dinner. I INSIST."

I'd meet dad in the driveway when he got home from the office, and he'd notice the bicycles right away. "Your mom's torturing Mormons again, isn't she?" he'd chuckle. "How's this year's crop compared to last year's?"

"Not too bad," I'd reply. "The big one's got his game face on, but the younger one," I paused to sneer, "looks like he's going to start crying."

"Now, now," dad chided me, "Give the poor boy a break. You've never been on the wrong side of your mother in a theological discussion. You'd cry, too, trying to come up with logical answers to her questions." He shook his head fondly, "What a MIND that woman has!" He stopped for a moment, lost, no doubt, on that day back in 1939 when he'd met her and had been so impressed that the next day he walked over to her college and tried to browbeat the registrar into giving him her I.Q. score. When asked by the suspicious and hostile bursar why he wanted the information, he had replied, "Because she's the woman I want to marry -- think of what superior children we'll produce, with that brain of hers!" The bursar had chased him away, telling him to peddle his papers to the eugenicists over in Germany.

Then I'd take daddy's briefcase and he and I would go inside, where the poor Mormon boys would look up with pleading eyes, hoping this new face would offer them respite from the attack. Their relief was short-lived, though, as they discovered that dad had the knack of asking them leading questions to lead them back into mom's traps. By the time the theological tag-team would finally let the poor Mormons stagger away, hours later, they were usually pale, sweating, and shaking. They'd have huge wet patches on their white shirts under the arms, and their black ties would be crumpled. Daddy would take pity on them and load their bikes into his car to ride them home. Mom would chuckle in an evil, pleased way while I helped her clean up.

I wonder how many of them subsequently converted to Catholicism?

I remember she'd lay in her supplies every spring, stocking up on non-caffeinated powders to make soft drinks, so she'd have something to serve the Mormons when they came. I made the mistake of reaching for the lemonade mix one year when I was 12, and she almost chopped my hand off, snapping at me, "Don't drink that! That's for the MORMONS!"

Another day in the life of middle-class "poverty"

2008-01-29T19:11:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd advertise anything on this blog, but I gotta give a huge shout-out to the Aldi grocery chain. From what I understand, the chain started in Germany, and MAN, can this store stretch your shopping dollar. It's a really bare-bones place -- you rent a cart for a quarter, only getting your money back when you return the thing to the corral, and you buy your own bags (5 cents for paper, 10 cents for a VERY sturdy plastic bag).

Aldi's mostly doesn't carry brand-names, except maybe around the holidays, when they'll get in M&Ms or brand-name chips. Everything else is their own brand, at sometimes jaw-dropping prices -- 99 cents for saltine crackers, $1.19 for graham crackers, <$2 for butter, etc. The selection is bare bones; for instance, they only have white flour. Not whole wheat, not oat flour, not bread flour. They have about 5 kinds of spices, and their pharmacy section pretty much consists of aspirin and vitamins. No cosmetics, no shampoo, no soap. Their brands of cereals aren't too bad -- I prefer Cheerios, but at $1.39 for 15 ounces of Aldi's "Crispy Oats," I'll forgo the Cheerios. Their dairy section is superb. Every common kind of cheese and yogurt you need. I wouldn't look for Brie or sheep's milk mozzarella, but if you like cheddar, Monterrey jack, American, and regular old mozzarella, you're all set. Interestingly, though, they don't have 1% milk -- they have 2%, whole, and skim, though. And only in gallons, no smaller sizes.

Their meat section is hit and miss. They get all the meat shipped in, packed in vacuum-packed packages, from a central location, and some days you have a good selection, and other days you have practically nothing at all. They have lots of frozen meat, though. The frozen skinless boneless chicken breast bag is a great deal at $6.96, and a boneless turkey breast is just under $10.

The vegetables and fruit are always fresh and of good quality, but you don't get 5 kinds of onions -- you get one. You get one kind of potatoes. One kind of oranges. One kind of apples. Bananas are 39 cents a pound. The frozen section is pretty good -- they have a few brand-name pizzas, but their own brand of thin-crust pizza is only $2.29 for a 12-inch pie. It's kind of crappy pizza, but if you have an 8-year-old kid who's not fussy, it's a pretty good deal.

They have a lot of canned goods. I've tried all the condensed soups, and while I wouldn't mind cooking with them, I still like Campbell's for the eating of soup. The tuna, mayo, and other condiments are on par with national brands.

Anyway, I spent $60 today and got enough food for 2 weeks. The menu might get a little monotonous, but Lent starts next week, so monotonous is no problem. There are a few things I need to get at the "regular" grocery store, like matches, corn meal, bread flour, and a few other things, but 90% of my grocery shopping is done.

Let's see, on another note, I've walked to church twice in the last two days. It's 1.4 miles round trip, so my cardiovascular system is pleased with me. I brought rosary making supplies with me in a tiny plastic container today, and while we were all saying the rosary after Mass, I was able to finish one cord and bead rosary, all but the last two knots. I also stopped by the parish school and left a message for the religion teacher saying I'd be happy to teach her kids to make mission rosaries, so I may be wheeling a tote up there soon to teach rosary making.

Miz J and I have also been looking longingly at tomato and pepper plants online, and J has this year's garden all planned out. But it's going to be at least FIVE MONTHS before I get to sink my teeth into a fresh tomato, fragrant and hot in my hand from the sun. I could weep. I'm down to my last 5 pints of frozen spaghetti sauce I made from our tomatoes and peppers last September, and I'm dismayed at the idea of making more using CANNED TOMATO PRODUCTS when this sauce runs out.

I've also been diligent about recording my points on the Weight Watchers site, which is good, because Miz J, who knows my password, tartly observed that I seemed to not have eaten over the weekend, as I hadn't recorded any food. Well, Pinocchio had Jiminy Cricket as his conscience. Maybe if J keeps kicking my butt, I'll become a real girl one day.

Gotta get back on track

2008-01-28T05:33:00.001-08:00

Pam -- I didn't record my food for two days, and I consequently went off the rails a little. (Because food that the weight watchers point tracker doesn't hear about OBVIOUSLY doesn't equate as real calories. Dad had this same sort of magical thinking; if he only ate half a cookie now, and then went back later for the other half, that somehow the calories wouldn't get magically transferred to his gut. Actually, the calories from the cookies would have had to fight with the calories from the booze for space there; at least my food calories don't have any competition for setting up territory.)

So, back on track today. How about you? Didn't hear from you this weekend. I was pretty busy -- on Saturday, I went out to my sister's house to teach a friend of hers how to make cord and bead rosaries. It was a lot of fun. My sister took pity on me because of that new checking account snafu, and sent me on my way with a bag of pasta and apples, plus a $20 to get gas until the long-delayed paycheck finally arrives.

I was supposed to host a rosary making group, but everyone RSVPd no, but just as I was on my way out the door with a big box of rosary making supplies, one of the members of the group showed up, 40 minutes after when the meeting was supposed to have started, but she saw I was on my way out of Dodge, so she decamped. (run-on sentence alert!) Actually, I thought she had dropped OUT of the group because of an ambiguous email I had gotten, so I was kind of surprised to see her.

Hope I didn't scare her off; I accidentally implied she was in an incestuous relationship with her brother. (She's engaged, and a young man was with her, so I said, "Hey, I hear congratulations are in order -- when are you guys getting married?" She gave me a peculiar look and said the man was her BROTHER, whereupon I burbled inanely, "Oh! Well, then obviously I hope YOU GUYS aren't getting married!" Yeesh.) Well, I sent her an apology email, and we'll see if she shows up in two weeks.

Lent's a comin'

2008-01-26T17:49:00.000-08:00

I posted my ... hmm, what to call it? My Lenten wish list of sacrifices? Anyway, I posted it on Rosary Army. It's probably too ambitious, but I'm going to give it a shot. The Lenten fast is going to be have to be modified. I'm going to do the less than half meal/biggest meal/less than half a meal thing you're supposed to do with the traditional fast, but I'm going to have to add a small snack as well, because of the diabetes medications. If I drop my blood sugar too far, I'd be in trouble. Anyway, here's the post: -- c

I like to reread C.S Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters." I also try to find something else relevant to read, although my days of forcing myself to plow through the likes of "The Confessions of St. Augustine" are over. I don't have it in me anymore. ("Intellectual spiritual enrichment.") I'll be giving up fiction *sob*, and I'm going to try really hard to give up television (which should be a genuine sacrifice, because USA Network has new episodes of "Monk" and "Psych.") (This kind of falls under "spiritual sacrifices" -- in my mind, anyway.)

I can't go to Mass every day, because I have to get my grand-nephew to school 3-4 mornings a week, depending on his mom and dad's schedules. But I want to try to go to Mass every day I'm not getting him to school. I'm going to try and pray all 20 decades of the rosary every day. (This is "spiritual enrichment.") I often work 10 hours a day, though (I have 2 jobs), so I might not be able to do that, unless ...

I kill two birds with one stone, as it were -- I want to make one wire rosary, 1 cord and bead rosary, and 1 corded rosary every day during Lent. ("Corporal work of mercy.") If I listen to rosary CDs while I'm making them, I think I might be able to combine the praying and the making of the rosary at the same time.

Finally, I want to do the old-fashioned Lenten fast. I'm on Weight Watchers online program already now, so I guess I'm going to have to do some math about what the point values are for each meal, and stick with that. ("Physical sacrifice.")

Almost forgot to mention -- no other internet sites but Rosary Army and OLRM.

I have a really good Lent when I hit my five categories, above.

The catalog arrived today in a plain brown wrapper

2008-01-24T15:15:00.001-08:00

I took the catalog away immediately, so no one else could see it and take it away from me. I opened the glossy pages, full of pictures in lurid color. Everything offered for sale was so round and glistening, so tempting and ripe. I perused the catalog for over an hour, my breath coming faster and faster as I gazed in longing at the pictures, wishing I could buy everything I saw. I found myself groaning with naked desire.

Yes, indeed, I love it when the Burpee seed and plant catalog arrives every winter. They have a new variety of white cherry tomatoes I'm itching to try.

Wednesday food, 01/23/2008

2008-01-24T06:17:00.000-08:00

Pam -- this is a copy of my weight watchers log. Based on your weight, you get a points allowance to spend every day on anything you want. As you lose weight, you have fewer points to work with. I get 42 points a day, which sounds like a lot, but a Mighty Taco Nachos Deluxe is 15 points, and I think a pint of Haagan Daz is 17 points. -- C

Morning
4 Tbsp Carnation Coffee-Mate Sugar free hazelnut 1.5 points
3 cup black coffee 0.5 points
1 serving apple cake/reduced sugar/oat flour 6 points
Subtotal 8 points

Midday
1 pt spag sauce/2 oz spag/2 tbls parm cheese 9 points
1 small apple(s) 1 point
Subtotal 10 points

Evening
1 cup 2% reduced fat milk 3 points
1 cup General Mills Cheerios 2 points
1 large banana(s) 2 points
2 Tbls creamy peanut butter, with salt 5 points
Subtotal 12

Snack
3 cup black coffee 0.5 points
4 tbls coffee mate sugar free 1.5 points
1 cup cooked dark meat turkey, chopped or diced 8 points
1 package Betty Crocker Chicken fettucine alfredo 4 points
1 cup cooked frozen green peas 2 points
Subtotal 16 points

Food POINTS values used 46
Food POINTS value allowed 42
Food POINTS values Balance over (-) under (+) -4

Exercise
10 min housework, vacuuming 1 point
30 min housework, laundry 3 points
Activity POINTS values earned 4

Notes
I'm only guessing on the apple raisin cake; I made it myself to use up a bunch of wrinkly apples. 1/2 the flour was oat flour; 1/2 white. 1/2 brown sugar; 1/2 Splenda.

"Housework, laundry" I'm guessing is equivalent to "housework, doing dishes and cleaning a kitchen" -- which is not on the weight watchers list.

I don't know what the real value of the noodles were -- I used whole wheat noodles and the sauce packet from a tuna helper mix -- but without the tuna. I guess 5 points is about right.

My spaghetti sauce has a lot more fiber than a commercial sauce. I add canned beans and soy flakes to increase the protein and fiber without adding fat.

old post from RosaryArmy forum (2006)

2008-01-22T22:55:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd move it over here to my blog -- parts of it were inspired. -- C

Dear Jill and Oz -- thanks for the greetings. This is a really neat website, and it's inspired me to break out my rosary making supplies again. After the fire that destroyed my apartment in December, I was able to salvage some of my extensive collection of beads and twine and plastic crucifixes and medals (I've been making them in the mission style favored by Our Lady's Rosary Makers, but I want to learn the all-knot method, too).

I had actually been surprised to salvage anything. My main work station was right near where the fire started. I was in the habit of getting rosaries partly completed -- crucifix, OF bead, 2 HM bead, OF bead, medal, and first decade -- then the rest of the rosary would go really fast. I'd partially complete 100 at a time, then finish them up later. Also, I could bring partially completed rosaries to the nursing home where my brother is, and the ladies there could feel the accomplishment of getting a whole rosary made because I had done half the work for them.

Well, I had just gotten my 100 rosaries half-made when the fire broke out (oh, yeah -- this was a month after a college kid had run a red light and broad-sided my car), and my little rolling cart with all my carefully sorted beads and cord and nail polish (to stiffen the cord ends) and knotting tools melted into a giant ball. The firefighters threw the whole thing out the window, and I remember looking at the thousands of melted colored beads thinking, "Wow. It looks like the Jolly Green Giant raided the M&M factory and then got sick afterwards."

(Oz -- The Jolly Green Giant is the advertising icon for a food company in the States that produces canned and frozen vegetables. In the TV adverts, he towers over rolling, buucolic farmland, supervising the growing of his vegetables while dressed in a fetching off-the-shoulder tunic made of what appears to be giant spinach leaves. He then places his hands on his hips and bellows out jovially, "Ho, Ho, Ho!" to which a female chorus responds, "Green Giant!" One summer in college, I worked in a factory that canned vegetables for the Giant. My job was to lean over a huge vat and fish out damaged vegetables with a kind of net. As my parents intended, it made me appreciate my college education. M&Ms are small round chocolate candies with a colorful candy shell -- "Melts in your mouth! Not in your hand!" I discovered that was a huge lie, of course, when I was 5, and tested the theory by holding a handful of M&Ms in my pudgy little palm until they were reduced to a varigated chocolate goo. The current M&Ms advertising campaign involves two human-sized M&M friends, one plain, and one peanut. They extol their tasty virtues to people, then react with stunned betrayal when they invariably get eaten at the end of the ad. The campaign is kind of creepy and disturbing. Almost a suicidal cannabalism. But I digress.)

As I sorted through the remains of my possessions in my apartment after the fire, I'd find a container of beads here, a roll of wire there, some crucifixes over there ... my obessive compulsive habit of putting all the beads into Chinese soup containers had saved a lot of my store of beads across the room from my work station. All in all, I was able to pack up 4 boxes of rosary making supplies. I never really inventoried anything, though -- I just put like stuff together in boxes -- rosary supplies, cross-stitch supplies, charred financial papers. My dear sister Alice (may she wear a crown in heaven) came down for a week to help me go through everything.

It all got put into storage, while I moved North. My boss let me be a telecommuter in NY as I had been in Delaware, and in January, I moved in with my other sister, Monica, until I could buy a house with the insurance settlement. Right after my cancer diagnosis in February, with the help of my niece-in-law, Julie, I found a beautiful 1925 duplex in North Buffalo with restored woodwork, and entirely new electrical system, and granite counters. Unfortunately, the walls had been vandalized by the previous owner. We presume she was on an acid trip when she picked out the paint colors, which would have been considered too gauche and outre for the walls of a Tiajuana brothel.

When we painted in April, it took at least 3 coats of paint in each room to cover her gaudy colors. My favorite room was what I came to refer to as "The St. Patrick-Hamas room" because the green was so blindingly intense that it looked like St. Patrick had been recruited by terrorists, had strapped on an explosive device, then blew himself up in the room. The room next to that had been painted a violent salmon pink, with one wall inexplicably painted bright lavender. The curtains in that room were fire-engine red, with giant yellow flowers on them. The room beyond that was bright orange-yellow, with giant triangles of canary yellow glossy paint superimposed in a strange pattern.

My nephew Rob and his wife Julie moved in upstairs with their son, and I moved in downstairs ... just in time for my (completely succesful) cancer surgery in May. After some complications, I've finally been released (largely) from medical care, and can now enjoy my house. But more importantly, I can start giving back to the world after all these months of taking support and help from my friends and relatives. And that means it's time to start making rosaries again! -- Claire

Nobody on the RosaryArmy forum thought this was funny

2008-01-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

Hey, Pam -- When I posted this, I got all kinds of sympathy from the rosary makers on RosaryArmy forum! It was supposed to be funny! (If I ever get around to writing my autobiographical novel, this will be one of the chapters. Everything in the incident is true, except for having to go to the hospital. I only paced around the dining room table for hours with a hideously scratchy throat, and welts on my arms and mouth. It's a funnier story if I almost died. Or maybe not. Lemme know.)

So -- you want we should start blogging about our dieting successes and failures starting tomorrow, Wednesday? -- C

quote:
Originally posted by ClaireTinBuffalo

quote:
I have kind of a grotesquely funny story about frog legs, allergies, my dad, and the loss of childhood innocence, if anyone wants to hear it ...

Claviel responded:
Sure. I'm all for funny stories involving food.

This is where I began the essay, "My Froggy Summer of Love"

Well, you don't need to twist my arm ...

As I've said above, I'm violently allergic to most fish. Almost died at 18 months, etc. Also, during much of my childhood, my dad was on the road as an independent engineering consultant, but when he was home, he made a real effort to take me fishing, hunting, etc., and to do projects together like building bookcases and erecting fences for our grapevines.

When I was 8, in 1969, we lived in Massachusetts in a small town with a rustic stream nearby that was chock-full of big bullfrogs. I loved to hunt the frogs -- strictly catch and release. I just enjoyed the slow wading through the cool water, careful not to disturb the croakers, then the sudden pounce and the amazing feeling of this cold, wet, wriggling live thing in my hands. Not to mention the multiple splashes and croaks of all the other frogs diving for their lives. Then the silent stalk again when the frogs had resumed their perches on the lily pads.

It was a lot of fun. The mud was cool and squishy between my toes, the sun was hot on the back of my neck, and when I got tired of molesting the frogs, I'd go sit in the entrance of the big drain pipe that ran under the country road. It was shady and quiet there, and the dragonflies whirred past, the frogs croaked, and the redwing blackbirds called to each other while I chewed on grass stalks. You couldn't hear Walter Cronkite talking about kids dying in Vietnam or about low-browed, knuckle-walking bigots shooting civil rights workers. It was just me and my frogs, one perfect summer day after the other.

Dad came home one summer day after a particularly long road trip. I regaled him with my frog-catching exploits, and a thoughtful look came into this eyes. "You're that good, eh? Do you suppose you could catch me about 8 really big frogs?" I swelled up as big as the bullfrogs' necks as I assured him that it would be easy for me to do that, because wasn't I the best frog-hunter in all the town?

I had visions of our next big project. Surely, Daddy was going to help me build a big pond in the backyard. We'd dig a hole and line it with something -- maybe we'd even pour cement, and put in a water pump. I could bring reeds and lilies from the stream, and we'd have a beautiful artificial pond for a family of frogs who would have lots of baby frogs. When there got to be too many frogs, I'd take the extras back to the stream and release them into the wild.

These plans bloomed more and more elaborate in my mind as I walked the mile to the stream, where I caught 8 frogs in no time, and lugged them back in Daddy's fishing net. I had to stop frequently on the way home to splash water on them (I'd brought an empty milk bottle and filled it in the stream) so they wouldn't dry out before I got home. Surely while I'd been gone Daddy had taken the rototiller and dug a big hole and was filling it with water from the hose, and would have the new frog pond all ready when I arrived.

I dragged my net full of frogs into the backyard and saw my dad near the water spigot, just as I imagined, but there was no pond. Oddly enough, Daddy had gotten out the smelly old piece of plywood on which he skinned and gutted fish, and his big fish knife. "Great! you really did catch those frogs! Say, they're beauties, aren't they?" Before I could ask where the pond was, he swung the net out of my hands, and snatched a frog out of it. The next thing I knew, my poor betrayed frog was lying on his back on the board, and Daddy had lopped of his hind legs. Daddy washed off his legs under the spigot and tossed the body aside.

"Yessir!" he said. "There's nothing like french fried frog legs! You're in for a real treat! And we can bury the bodies under the new blackberry bushes -- terrific fertilizer." One after another, my green friends went under the knife, the light dying out in their bulging eyes -- but not before each of them gave me a look of mute and accusatory reproach.

Long story short, while Daddy went inside and breaded and cooked the legs, I buried the rest of the frogs under the blackberry bushes, apologizing to them the whole time. I dragged myself inside when Daddy called me, took one reluctant bite of frog leg, and promptly broke out in welts all over my face, arms, and torso. By the time Daddy had finished gnawing his frog legs, Mom was yelling at him to start the car, because couldn't he see it was the fish incident all over again, and I needed a shot of adrenaline in the ER? I passed out on the way to the hospital.

Thus ended my Summer of Love.

For the can collectors, redemption (what should have been in the first post)

2008-01-22T19:21:00.000-08:00

It's trash night here in my neighborhood in Buffalo, and everyone has put their trash bins and recycle boxes to the curb.

in the middle evening, the weekly visitors come, pushing their battered shopping carts piled high with bags stuffed with beer cans, pop bottles, and the like -- anything that carries the 5 cent redemption label. Some of the visitors just look through the recycle boxes and take anything there that's worth 5 cents. The other visitors, more desperate, actually open up the big blue trash bins, and tear holes in the smelly white plastic tied bags inside, hoping to find something to redeem among the coffee grounds and used cat litter. In the gutters, the cans and bottles that careless pedestrians have dropped all week get collected.

If I'm out for a walk, I talk to them. Trash nights are good nights -- they get $20 when they haul their teetering carts to the supermarket a half mile away and load their take into the recycle machines. Other days, with no curb trash to pick through, they walk all over the city and are lucky to get $5.

Some of the visitors have bad coughs. Some slur their speech and weave a little. I suspect most of them don't have homes, although they're wary of questions and don't reveal much.

On the days when I grouse about having to work two jobs (out of my own home as a telecommuter, no less), sitting in my warm house, sipping hot tea out of a clean mug cupped in my scrubbed hands, on the days when I'm feeling sorry for myself, I think God prompts me to look out the window and notice the visitors with their cold hands and their smudged clothes. I can't help wonder if they'll get through the eye of the needle before I do, to find redemption.

Pray for them, my friends. It's sleeting tonight on trash night, and redemption comes 5 cents at a time.

For the can collectors, redemption

2008-01-22T19:19:00.000-08:00

Hi, Pam -- I posted this last week on a Catholic forum. Thought you'd like to read it. -- C