Time and space

My snatches of computer time are few and far between these days, it seems. Whenever I have a chance to blog, I can't remember anything I was going to post. And whenever I have those great ideas, I can't get to the computer right away. Somewhat annoying, but less so the busier my life gets; perhaps blogging is - and rightly so - taking a back seat to my real life. Rather than watching things through a camera lens, as it were, to be enjoyed only in rewind mode, I'm actually savouring each moment for what it is instead of constantly sizing it up for blog material. Yes, surely that's it: a lapse in blogging indicates a healthy awareness of the passage of time and a renewed commitment to live life to the fullest.

Ha. Who am I kidding? CVS has become a full-blown craze, overshadowing blogs with a mighty vengeance, and the main things I want to blog about are the incredible bargains each week. But I'm not going to bore anyone with that, and I'm not going to post pictures, because that would look greedy and boastful and because it's already being done all over the internet. (Don't worry, we donate all the extra stuff to worthy causes.) (Um, okay, and then get a tax write-off, yeah. But other than that, it's totally altruistic.)

I tried an experiment a few weeks ago. With the price of gas spiking up every week, I was going to practise contentment by staying at home as much as possible, limiting my shopping trips to once a week or so, and focus on making our home as castle-like as could be. (Did I already post this? It sounds somehow familiar. I think I've gone through this particular resolve before.) 

Well, the experiment fell flatter than a pancake, and not in a pleasant, crepe-like flat-pancake way, either. We did not do well with those long days at home. I chafed at all the great deals I was missing, and felt nervous when the stockpile of diapers dipped down to dangerous levels. It's been too hot to walk to the playground at all but the earliest hours, and there are only so many hundred times one can read the same books without going stark raving mad.

So we ditched the experiment this week, and all are much happier for the result. Turns out I enjoy dashing out every day, and the girls do better with errands to break up the monotony of a long day. Running errands every day shortens the duration of each trip, so the time spent out is a pleasure rather than a torture. And our closets are once more full of tp, diapers, and organic tomato sauce. I think I might just scrape by with only five or six shopping trips next week.

People who CVS are bad-grammaring

There have always been those types who, unable to put themselves to the trouble of finding the right word to use and fitting it into the right context, simply grab onto the handiest approximation of what they intend to convey and slap a good-sounding ending onto it.

Pretending to turn a noun into a verb by appending a suffix to it - for instance, pretending to turn a noun into a verb by suffixing it - is a common and long-standing trick. I know this, of course. Language has been evolving for eons, and eventually the modified word passes into accepted usage. I mean, nobody bothers to police the non-verb-ity (nounity? nouniness?) of microwave or contact any more.

But nowhere has this trend been so starkly egregious as in the recent wave of CVS enthusiasts. 'Had fun CVSing!' or 'Good trip CVSing!' is their motto, without bothering to analyse what precisely it is they did at CVS. Was it, indeed, shopping? Well, then, why not say so, to wit, 'I've been shopping at CVS!'? I know, I know, it takes up so many more syllables that way! 'I've been CVSing!' they declare, with all the pithiness of the good bargain-hunters they are. It stands to reason that those people who are careful with their money would be likewise conservative of extra syllables.

What if we started applying this funny little grammar freehand to jolly well any area of life? The results could save us thousands of wasted breaths a year:

'I'm fooding!' vs. the cumbersome 'I'm eating food.'
'He's bathrooming' vs. 'He's using the bathroom' or even 'He's in the bathroom.' (Because, of course, in our world, no one would ever broach this topic in the first person.)
'I was carring' vs. 'I was riding in/driving/washing the car.' (See how deliciously sloppy and unspecific the first instance is? No need to waste time pinpointing the exact nature of the activity.)
'I'm typing text' vs. 'I'm texting'? Oooh, slippery slope.

The six quirks quiz

Thanks to Queen of Carrots, I get to come up with six unspectacular quirks to share. I do believe that memes were invented solely to pull uninspired bloggers out of writing slumps. And I had to ponder long and hard to come up with at least one that didn't involve language. (I mean, that would have been dreadfully lame, if quite accurate: 1) I don't like it when people misuse apostrophes; 2) It grates on me when people mangle turns of phrase, i.e. step foot inside or making due, etc. Unspectacular in the extreme.)

1) The title of this post makes me think of what the Guinness Book of World Records lists as the world's trickiest tongue-twister, to wit: The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.

2) Whenever we sing Amazing Grace, I quietly murmur (quietly, so as not to disrupt the mood of reverence), in the last stanza, 'We've no fewer days to sing God's praise...' I can't help it. I just can't bring myself to sing bad grammar. And it works, too, because there are two notes on that word anyway. Why didn't they just write it the right way to begin with??

3) I never tried to play the innocent naive sheltered homeschool debutante, but I'm on ongoing alert to discover just how incomprehensive my education in the seamier side of the ways of the world really was. Michael is frequently put to the task of having to tactfully tell me what, in colloquial language, I just said. Only recently did I learn that the phrase 'knocked up' somehow means, of all things, 'pregnant,' and not, as I had always employed it to mean, knocked about, as in, well-versed in the school of hard knocks, my-head-is-bloody-but-unbowed, that sort of thing. Pity. Apparently the English language is a veritable minefield of double entendres and low-class allusions. Figuratively speaking, mind you.

4) I wax very sarcastic when people misuse the word 'literally,' apparently mistaking it for just another adverb, interchangeable with 'really' and 'like, totally.' ('It literally fell into our laps!' they gush. 'Really?' I inquire, craning my head upwards to look and, possibly, take cover. 'That's amazing!')

5) I have never dyed my hair, but I have boxes upon boxes of hair dye stashed away in my closet should occasion require it. Just a couple of weeks ago I bought a set of fake French manicure nails. I keep staring at them, wondering if I dare try them on.

6) Ten years ago, when I moved across the country, all my worldly goods consisted of a bed, a dresser, and four boxes of stuff. Five years ago, when I was preparing to get married, all my worldly goods consisted of a bed, a dresser, a closetful of stuff, three bookshelves of books, one bookshelf of knick-knacks and other junk, and a hopechest. At least it all fit into one room. Today, my stuff sprawls to fill an entire house. Granted, Michael contributed some stuff and we got a lot of loot at wedding and baby showers, but my oh my where did all this stuff come from? Why doesn't money multiply that readily?

Now the rules are that I am supposed to tag six other people for the meme, but I always like to leave these things open (no pressure and all that, plus I can never keep track of who's already done it.) So it's a self-tagging meme. If you want to play, jump in and join the fun.

I am not cut out for this

We've been battling sickness here for some time, and it's usually been low-grade enough to overlook. Between runny noses for the girls and a sore throat for me, I haven't yet declared it to be a full-fledged cold. Michael, however, succumbed in grand style a couple of weeks ago. He doesn't get sick often, but when he does he does it completely. He was sick over the weekend, and ended up staying home from church as well as from work the next couple of days.

So I got the girls up, fed, and dressed on my own, which I do every day, but this time it felt overwhelming. We drove to church alone, and I got them checked into class by myself and went to Sunday school on my own. I had to unpack the stroller on my own, collect the tired girls after class, and keep them happy on the drive home.

I kept thinking how glad I am not to be a single mom, and feeling slightly ashamed of being so overwhelmed and tired by just a few days of running things on my own, when so many people do this every day of their lives. Military wives do it for months at a time. I admire these people so much, and I'm so glad I have a strong, (mostly) healthy husband to tag-team with.

I was feeling all full of contentment and gratitude when Michael got better, and resolved to be more thankful than ever for my life, now that I'd learned to appreciate how good I really had it. Enter these last two weeks.

Michael has had computer training for work several days last week and this, necessitating a longer drive and late nights (a couple of nights he just stopped off at the office afterwards to catch up on work and the girls never saw him at all that day).

Ever doing my part to save on gasoline costs, I coaxed Michael to take the car so I wouldn't be tempted to run out on frivolous errands. Yesterday I still had a scratchy throat, so I decided to stay home from choir, too. We would stay home this week, make our home our castle, clean up from top to bottom, and learn contentment in our circumstances. Which is a noble resolve, but I was never one to flourish in solitude, far from the madding crowd. The days have been long, and Saturday will come not a moment too soon.

Happy Mother's Day to you, too

Now don't think I'm taking umbrage at all those well-meaning good wishes, but Mother's Day is another one of those heavily marketed Hallmark holidays that I just don't buy into. I certainly do believe in honouring one's mother, but I think it should consist of the same common courtesy and respect that motivates one all year long, and not be reserved for one glorious hurrah a year.

This aversion to all the fuss and feathers may have something to do with the fact that my 'love language' (cleverly hidden in quotation marks so you won't sneer at me if you don't buy into the Five Love Language philosophy either) doesn't lean toward the giving of gifts, and certainly doesn't go anywhere remotely near the giving of overpriced, mass-produced, unoriginal cards and flowers. If I liked expensive, trite, generic cards for my birthday, then I'd probably enjoy getting them for Mother's Day, too.

I don't know why everyone pretends to think it's such a nice treat for husband and children to take Momma out to eat for Mother's Day. Most Americans eat out a lot anyway, so why should it be any big deal? And anyone can spend money - eating out requires no forethought, no sacrifice, no effort. The real treat would be to fix Mother Dear a meal at home, and clean up afterwards.

Finally, I have no earthly idea why so many blessed people - whom I am most emphatically NOT the mother of - wished me a Happy Mother's Day on Sunday. Isn't that something you say to your mother?

There, I've got that off my mind, and can rest easy until next month, when I'll have to get on my soapbox again and explain why I am not spending any money on Father's Day.

A little learning

Jane is prodigiously proud of her rapidly expanding vocabulary and cognitive skills, and never misses a chance to trot them out.

Yesterday, when she walked by, I remarked, 'Hi, big girl!'

Jane grinned and replied, 'Hi, medium woman!'

Then she turned to Ella and said, 'Hi, little baby!'

She paused. I could almost see the wheels turning in her head. Then she looked at me. 'Where's big man?'

Three years ago today

Five years ago today

Dangerous cheapness

It's been growing on me lately, as our cost of living has gone down while our standard of living seems to be going up, that free stuff has a sinister side effect. It seems like the perfect win-win situation, the ultimate symbiotic relationship between manufacturer, retailer, and consumer (and can a symbiotic relationship even go three ways? -or is it strictly a two-party deal?): the producer gets name recognition and product awareness, the retailer gets business, the consumer gets free (or cheap) stuff.

But ponder a little while (and I am willing to ponder anything late enough at night) and it becomes apparent how the ready availability of free stuff can erode morale. It's a known fact, of course, that we prize highly that which costs us dearly. Scarcity, or even the appearance of scarcity, causes us to hoard resources, while abundance encourages us to live it up. And even my efficient nature is struggling against the impulse to grow callous and lax in the face of apparent plenty. It's becoming harder and harder to wrestle with extracting the last few dregs of toothpaste from the tube when there are two dozen fresh tubes in the drawer, and last week I tossed out half a spoiled loaf of bread with far less gnashing of teeth than would have occurred if it hadn't been free to begin with.

There are a couple of reasons why I still won't give in and be a totally wasteful consumer. For one, I'm not sure how long this spate of feasting will last - I keep thinking that the deals must dry up sooner or later - and I don't want to have gotten too comfortable at an unsustainably high standard of living when reality sets in again. For another - well, I still don't like wasting things, even if wasting free stuff hurts me less. That's just my personality, and quite possibly those feelings would erode entirely given enough time - many people seem to have no qualms about tossing away things which cost them little effort to acquire.

I wonder whether this is an attitude that we're seeing challenged and shaken up by the recent climb in grocery prices. Perhaps American consumers were getting too spoiled by low prices of
cheap goods, and that had a lot to do with the wasteful consumerist mentality that ran so rampant. So is this rise in gasoline and milk prices really a blessing in disguise? An unwanted lesson in character development?

I've also been re-thinking a lot of my opinions on the importance of maintaining a low cost for goods and services. Well, my evolving opinion on Wal-mart is a post for another day, but in short, I've come to see the value of high-priced, quality merchandise. As Ma Ingalls would say, 'Enough is as good as a feast.' All other things being equal, and in a free market where the end price is a natural result of supply and demand, why shouldn't it be just as good to spend a given amount of money on fewer but higher-quality food items that will all get eaten, as to spend the same amount on far more stuff half of which ends up going to waste?

(I had to toss in the remark about the free market as an expression of my irritation at the ongoing farm subsidies, which make corn syrup so cheap to produce and hence so readily available. So now cheap and deadly high-fructose corn syrup is in everything, but it's an artificial construct, because it really wouldn't be that cheap otherwise.)

Oh boy

The ever-wise and all-knowing Pearls, having solved the problems of modern marriage with their previous best-seller, now turn their attention to another troubling matter: the case of the rebellious teenager. How can you be sure that your children will not jump ship 'as soon as they think they can survive without the family—some as young as sixteen years old'? Buy this book to find out.

(I'm guessing that this book doesn't have the answers for those unfortunate parents whose kids jump ship under the age of sixteen - bummer. Maybe you'll have to wait for the sequel on that one.)

Me was homeschooled

67

It's not just thinking of all the countries, it's getting them spelled right. If I hadn't worried about capital letters, I probably could have done more. Not to mention all the time I wasted trying 'THE Bahamas' and 'THE Philippines.'

Love and war

An interesting conversation last week touched on a long-standing debate I've had in my mind, and the issue is still unresolved. But first, a bit of background.

You may remember Michael's brother Eric, who got married last June. He had a month with his bride before being shipped off to Iraq for several months. He returned in February, and we found out last week that they are newly expecting. Great happiness and all that.

When we shared the good news with friends, it led to a discussion on marriage in wartime - specifically, what would you do if the love of your life was about to be shipped off to war?

On the one hand, waiting might sound prudent because you will have the chance to test your love for each other. You don't have to get trapped in limbo between feeling single and married. Being separated for such a length of time would put an incredible stress on the first year of marriage.

On the other hand, it might seem better to get married and have at least what time you can together. This line of thinking prevailed quite a bit in WWII.

Then someone mentioned a further point. Suppose you did get married, and the love of your life did in fact die. Would it affect your future eligibility to be a young heartbroken widow, as opposed to a young heartbroken fiancee?

And then we fell into further speculation. Suppose you did decide to get married first. Would you try to get pregnant before he leaves? On the one hand, if you're fairly certain of his safety, you might decide to wait, so as not to have him miss the child's arrival. On the other hand, if there's a significant chance that he will die, you might want to have a tangible reminder of him - pass on the family name, and all that - some bright hope to comfort you through the grief and loss. On the other hand again, much as you might want a reason to go on living, single motherhood is really hard - wouldn't a framed photograph do nearly as well?

I've very glad I've never had to face those tough choices. I'm grateful that Eric is home safe and sound, but now my young cousin Angela, who got married last Thanksgiving, is in much the same situation. Nothing I can do about it but pray for the collective safety of our brave troops over there.

Sticker shock

When we were in Holland, we felt the pinch of the falling dollar, especially as everything seemed more expensive than it should be to begin with. My brother calculated that gasoline, at 1.52 Euro/liter, worked out to about $9/gallon. Now, of course the Dutch can just bicycle everywhere, and many of them do. The towns are very small, and the way the streets are laid out, on the same cobblestone grid from the Middle Ages, it's faster to get anywhere by foot or by pedal than by car. Moreover people routinely bike to work, up to 20-mile commutes. So perhaps they don't feel the high price of gasoline as keenly as we do.

The groceries, however, there is no getting around. Did I mention that things are smaller in Holland? The portions are smaller, the refrigerators are smaller, and the egg cartons are smaller. (Standard size is six eggs; large is ten eggs; you can't buy a carton of a dozen eggs anywhere.) Everything is on the metric system, which is handy for calculating the price per liter or gram, but you're still stuck not knowing how many lbs. of potatoes you're buying.

Fortunately we had brought most of our groceries with us - dried beans, packs of tuna fish my family smuggled past customs (apparently you're not supposed to take meat into the country, but having lugged provisions across the Atlantic, they were not about to jettison their precious cargo, so it came in undeclared), canned fruits and vegetables, TVP, rice, noodles, and assorted oddments. We frequented the grocery store for our daily bread, the potatoes (which are government-subsidised and hence fairly cheap), and the occasional half-kilogram of butter and liter of milk for coffee.

It was with relief that I anticipated the return to American prices, only to discover that these had shot up alarmingly in our absence. Gasoline has topped $3/gallon, and by a very wide margin indeed. Therefore I am making a concerted effort to stay at home these days.

You've heard that Holland is a small country...

Back at last

Our impressions of Holland are much the same as they were last time - impractical plumbing, small spaces, friendly people, wonderful food - so we needn't go into all that again. Possibly the most memorable part of the whole trip for me was coming down with a horrific cold the day after we arrived and fighting with said cold the whole blighted trip, thus rendering all my memories overshadowed by a fog of sneezing and sniffling which left me wondering why on earth people ever took snuff so as to do this to themselves on purpose.

We're getting back on track now. Jane and Ella are still waking up rather early in the mornings, which is probably good for us all. Oh, but it's good to be back!

JAMBOG, Phase II

(See here for rules.) (See here for Phase I.)

Scenario #3: You're imprisoned in an old castle dungeon. Guards stand outside your cell. A moat surrounds the castle. How do you escape?

Katy shivered in the cold darkness of the old castle dungeon. Dressed only in her pyjamas, she rued the day that she had come begging to the gates of Castle Bruster. 'Only a little scoop of ice cream,' she had implored, but the merciless Baron had thrown her into the dungeon rather than part with one scrap of his lavish medieval feast.

Presently Katy took heart. Surely she might contrive a way of escape. She scanned her cell for inspiration, and noticed, to her surprise, a cup of coke sitting on the bars in the window. An idea struck her with blinding force, but she quickly recovered, and called for the guard:

'Oh! Guard!' Katy called out, trying to think of a plausible excuse. The guard unlocked the cell door and came in to see what was the matter, and Katy quickly threw the cup of very flat coke into his eyes. He staggered and tripped, and in a trice Katy seized the keys, swung the great door to, and locked it behind the guard.

Quickly she ran down the flagstone hallway, looking for a way out. Just as she reached a larger passage, she heard a clamour of loud shouts and footsteps. Katy looked about her for a hiding place, but there was none. At the last minute, she seized the large, silver globe of a light from the hall lampstand. When the patrol of guards came around the corner, they saw what appeared to be a gypsy sitting on the floor, waving her hands mysteriously over a magic ball.

'Come! Look ye into my crystal ball and see what your futures shall hold!' Katy intoned.

'That ain't crystal - that be silver,' protested one of the guards, licking his ice-cream cone, for they had just come from the medieval feast.

'Well, come look into its silver depths, and see how crystal clear your future shall become!' Katy replied. Interested, the guards all peered downward. Katy set the ball spinning at the guards, who dropped their ice cream cones, slipped, and went down like ninepins. Katy darted around them and rushed up a stone passage.

She found herself in the castle kitchen, where the roaring fire sent out a cheerful glow. There were cod sizzling on a pan over the fire, sending out deliciously tempting smells. But Katy had other fish to fry. She spotted a huge colander of alfalfa sprouts which the cook had left out, and an idea flashed into her head. Gathering up bundles in her arms, she ran up to the highest turret and arranged the sprouts into a rough semblance of a bird's nest, which she curled up in the middle of.

Within a very few minutes, the giant rocs circling the castle caught sight of her and came swooping down. One of them clutched her in its talons, whisked her across the moat, and set her down gently in safety. And thereupon was she at liberty to continue her quest for free ice cream.

Fashion Tirade

Of course there's no such thing as objective fashion, because what we inherently find attractive is inevitably going to be coloured by the pervading fads and trends that have shaped our cultural awareness. But it is slightly frustrating to me to be so completely unable to find a decisive answer on what specific looks actually look the nicest, without regard to what sleight-of-hand they're trying to accomplish.

The driving force behind most fashion 'looks' seems to be mainly concerned with creating the illusion of tallness and thinness. Vertical lines (not stripes! Because that would be too obvious!) are supposed to lengthen and slim the figure. Skirts that stop just above the knee are supposed to make the legs look longer, as opposed to the drab, mid-calf length, which makes the legs look dumpy. Boot-cut jeans balance the legs, making the thighs look narrower in context. Skinny jeans give a slimming line and make the legs look longer.

I have yet to read a useful piece of advice on which look actually looks the nicest for its own sake. Since I am pretty happy with my shape, I really don't feel compelled to resort to optical illusions in my wardrobe; I'd much rather not waste time agonising over whether a particular style causes me to look - even if ever so slightly - like something I am not.

This annoyance of mine carries over to the perpetual articles in magazines and what-have-you, where we're regaled with Tips For Disguising Figure Flaws and Ten Easy Ways To Look Up To Five Pounds Slimmer. My thought is, rather than waste all that time and energy and effort studying these principles, buying new clothes, tanning, etc., why not just go ahead and lose the five pounds? I mean, if it's a legitimate figure flaw that needs to be fixed, then fix it. Otherwise, stop worrying about it.

Redbox rocks!

A few weeks ago I gave Redbox a try for the first time. I'd read about it online and heard great things about it, but when I finally got around to trying it out, I was less than impressed. The 'free' code I'd been proffered didn't work, and the customer service rep with whom I spoke seemed ambivalent about solving the problem for me and even suggested that the code malfunction might be a common problem. I wrote a very thorough email to customer support, listing my perturbations and suspecting them of pulling a bait-and-switch by deliberately offering free goods/services which were merely designed to lure new customers in.

Customer service responded in fine style. I received a very courteous and apologetic response, explaining that the glitch with the code was a temporary issue, that Redbox really is in the habit of offering absolutely free rentals, and giving me two free codes on the spot as a goodwill gesture. Their reputation properly restored, I gave them another chance, and now commence to sing their praises. Both codes worked like a charm, and I became hooked.

Redbox, in case you haven't heard of it, is like a vending machine of new release DVDs located in various popular locations such as Wal-marts and McDonalds. Check their website to find one near you. The cost is usually $1 a day, but there are so many free codes emerging that you can pretty much get one for free any time you want.

It works for Redbox, because if you are late returning your DVD, you get charged $1. Still, that's not much for a movie rental (and hey, last I checked, Blockbuster was charging $4.29 for new releases!) So far we have always been prompt about returning our movies on time, and the location is very convenient. We are definitely fans.

Reflections

Ten years ago this year I left Oregon.

My oldest younger brother, now twenty, was ten when we left. That means that he's spent half his life in Oregon and half in Virginia. The others, still younger, have spent most of their lives in Virginia. For some of them, Oregon - my childhood home and all my growing-up memories - is but a distant memory.

The children I used to babysit are now old enough to babysit my children.

And here's the real kicker: as of next month, I will have lived as long in Georgia as I ever lived in Virginia!!

Oh, and while we're at it...

Since we're going back to Holland next month, I thought it high time to post these neat pictures of European-style lights (that, and the winter games are on):

JAMBOG time!

(See here for a list of rules.)

A Drink
From Days To Come
"We checked in with the hostess and sat at the bar to drink a Coke and enjoy the cigarette smoke while we waited. Scott was talking about something at work and I was sitting in the bar stool leaning on the bar and sipping my Coke ..."

A Light
From Focht Tales

A Food
From The Real Food Revolution
"I tell my kids that we're going to have bird's nests for lunch."

Something Cold
Need I say more?

Free ice cream is here again!

I will not miss this again, quotha. (Somehow I have missed it every single year I've lived where there are Brusters.) Michael was aghast when I told him, all gushing and bubbly, about my discovery and my plan to dress the girls up in their pyjamas, and wear my bathrobe over my sweats, because that's the closest thing I have to actual pyjamas, at least that could be worn in public.

Gold and dross

I'm sure you all have seen (or heard of) that little demonstration of time and priorities using a box of sand and some bricks. Someone performed it in our Sunday school class a few years ago, but I'd read of it elsewhere, and I think it's a terrific visual presentation.

Basically, you have a box full of sand, and a stack of bricks, and you're told to make them both fit into one box. If you try to cram the bricks into the box full of sand, you will discover that they will not fit: they simply will not occupy the same space. But if you put the bricks into an empty box (Ha! I caught you, a la Sherlock Holmes! I never told you that you had an empty box! [but then, as I told someone recently, who was complaining about S. H.'s habit of making himself look clever by withholding important information so that the reader could not out-guess him, Come on! This isn't Encyclopedia Brown we're reading! You're not supposed to figure it out on your own!]) , and then pour the sand in around it, then it will fit (at least more so). The idea is that you have to start off with the really important things in life, and fit the less important things in around them, or else the unimportant things will crowd out the important things.

Such is the way I feel about this season of my life. The more bricks I try to cram in, the more swiftly the sand flows out of the hourglass of my life...oh, well, never mind the metaphors. This is not, by the way, a roundabout (and that word always makes me think of England) announcement of the end of my blog, merely a meandering mulling over the sparseness of posts recently.

Sometimes blogging is sand. Fun sand...sandcastle-building-worthy sand...lie-lazily-in- the-sun-and-ignore-my-cares sand...but sand nonetheless.

All right, now I shall go off and do the dishes. Again.

I couldn't have said it better myself...

...especially about the imposting and the sorcering.

Fetch and carry

One of the most mind-numbing aspects of keeping up with little people, whose energy and creativity seem limitless, most especially in comparison with my own, is the setting things to rights by insisting on believing that everything has its proper place, and should, ideally, stay there.

Far more minute - and thus more irritating and camel-back-straw-breaking than the endless repertoire of dishes, dusters, and laundry - is the unending courier duty of patrolling the hallways, counters, couches, tables, and tupperware drawers to ensure that used tissues, clean laundry, dirty laundry, foodstuffs, hairbrushes, papers, utensils, and the like didn't get misplaced by little hands. Jane and Ella are fond of picking things up and just following me around the house, distributing random items in their wake, quite apart from their intentional foraging expeditions, where they hide the magnets under the bathroom sink, because they are making popcorn. As if in space, objects drift casually through the house, coming to rest peacefully in the odd nook or cranny.

There seem to be two possible destinations for these unfixed objects: in full view, which is annoying to me because it gives the appearance of clutter and makes me feel, no matter how much time I spend running around putting things away, that my house is falling apart and I just put that away three times already this morning and what's the use of it all, or out of sight, which is only slightly more dire, because it may turn out to be something that we may require before we happen to discover its resting place. Asking Jane where she put the nasal aspirator is decidedly unproductive.

Legs and letters

I am constantly amazed at the little bits of profundity Jane pops out with. I should be writing this all down in her baby book. But at the rate I am going, I am doing well to remember to share it with Michael that night, let alone blog about it. Two clevernesses come to mind, however:

This morning she was admiring herself in the mirror and reading off the letters on her shirt. Now, she knows all her letters and the main sounds they make, but we've kept it simple thus far and only introduced her to the short vowel sounds. In absence of formal school time, I've taken to spelling out short words whenever I can and walking her through the sounds. Her shirt read, 'Dept. of Cute,' and she was happily reciting the letters.

So I decided to make a giant leap forward and introduce her to the concept of long and short vowel sounds. Leading her to the garish letter magnets on the fridge, I spelled out CUT and explained how, without an E, the U made an uh sound, but when you add the E, it makes the YEW sound! Never missing a trick, she said, 'Let's add the Z!' And then proceeded to line up all the rest of the letters, in order of colour.

Then this evening, she was running around sans-culottes. As I washed the dishes, I overheard this ensuing conversation:

Jane: Jane's legs are naked!
Michael: Yes, they are.
Jane: Jane is wearing no pants!
Michael: No, you're not wearing pants.
Jane: Just legs!

Silver linings (or not)

Sara's recent post about grey hair, and our response to it, reflects a lot of similar thoughts I've had on the topic. On the one hand, of course I want to accept my age. (But of course, I don't want to look too old while doing so.) Of course I want to age gracefully. (But just not too soon.)

I've wondered what I'll do when the time comes to deal with it. Aside from all the problematic health concerns linking cancer risks to darker hair dyes, and the problematic costs associated with the natural (e.g. henna) dyes (well, for that matter, surely even the most dastardly carcinogenic hair dyes must get expensive after a while), there's the old Institute baggage of the notion that we must accept ungrudging our ten unchangeables, such as aging and death.

(I don't actually believe this anymore, by the way. Death is inevitable, but that doesn't mean we don't strive to fight it every chance we get. It's a product of the curse, and therefore not something that we should just accept glibly without protest.)

Of course there seems something inherently dishonest about dyeing one's hair, just to pretend that one looks different from how one really appears. But that hurdle can be quickly resolved by pointing out that it's just as dishonest to wear makeup and coloured contacts, or to shave one's legs, or to get braces, or wear high heels.

No, my biggest problem with the notion of dyeing one's hair is the societal concession to an inflated standard of beauty. Just as the popular advent of make-up ('Painting like an Indian,' as Dad Gilbreth jeeringly called it in Cheaper By The Dozen) last century leveled the playing field for the masses and undermined the relative natural beauty of the genuinely good-looking, so the widespread and almost universal dyeing of hair gives us an inflated notion of youth. Most women who would otherwise go grey do dye their hair, because everyone else does, so we have come to associate grey hair with an exaggerated sense of oldness.

For that reason alone, I'd be eager to see society re-establish a rational, sensible acceptance of grey hair as compatible with vibrance and youth. But am I going to participate in countering the current trend? Probably not until the backlash grows to be a widespread phenomenon. No blazing of fashion trails for me.

I read recently (maybe in a review of this book?) that various tests and studies had proven that grey hair only advances the perception of one's age to the average viewer by three years. Whatever. I don't need to look three years older than I am. When I am thirty, fair and square, I will be perfectly happy to look thirty, thank you very much. Meanwhile, I will try very hard not to stress about it, since stress is supposed to bring on ye old hoary head.

Snow!

We had a winter storm warning on Wednesday, which was shortly followed up by the winter storm itself. Atlanta promptly shut down; as the first flurries of white flakes came down, every activity was canceled and the stores ran out of bread, milk, and toilet paper. I thought it was an urban legend when I moved here, but it's true: whenever it snows here (not too often, granted) people flock to the stores to stock up on supplies.

Meanwhile, Jane and Ella enjoyed their first brush with snow:

I know things have been slow with the recent writers' strike...

But honestly, is this the best they could do?

I won't tell you what movie I just finished watching, because that might give it away, but in the fit of scoffing that resulted I came up with the following obvious plot devices employed by low-budget and apparently desperate writers:

- In the dramatic confrontation scene, where the Hero confronts and fights with the Villain, sufficiently immobilise the Heroine so that her role is reduced to helpless screaming. For best effects, rig it so that her screams coincide with the most tense moments of the struggle, to further distract the Hero and highten the suspense. Give her enough of a free hand that we can waste precious screen moments by cutting back and forth between the epic conflict and her frantic struggles, but not so much that she breaks free and does something actually productive, such as clobber the Villain.

- When the relationship threatens to drag, bring in an additional potential love interest. Make her blonde. Trot her out and let her run her paces for a few scenes, then dust her off and return her to the wings from whence you plucked her so that the main characters can get on with their spectacular misunderstandings.

- Throw in a few sunset scenes. Zoom in on close-ups of the Hero's and Heroine's fake sobbing (didn't any of these people read Encyclopedia Brown?? Come on, we all know that when tears run from the outside corners of the eyes, they're not real!) in an attempt to distract from the obvious paintedness of the sunset.

- For good resolution, simply pair off characters with the likeliest candidates. Kill off all the leftovers so that nobody ends up alone.

$100 sapphire...check. Now what?

When we went on our Alaska jaunt last summer, I think I mentioned that the high point of the trip, aside from the abundant food and the midnight chocolate, was dashing about from shop to shop at every port of call, collecting free trinkets. My plan was to work some of these into nice little Christmas presents, which didn't pan out so well, as a recent cleaning frenzy unearthed the crumpled bag of treasures buried under some obscure pile of Deal-Withs. Ah, memories!

One of them is a blue sapphire. It was billed as genuine, and touted as being worth $100. Is Alaska really so short on tourists, and long on sapphires, that they've taken to giving these little gems away as a thank-you gift for visiting their humble shores, you wonder? Not quite - rest assured that they have a plan. When I entered the store, flourishing my stateroom coupon, I was offered the incredible chance to have the free stone mounted in a ring or pendant for only $50. Never one to throw good money after...um...well, no money, I declined the offer and walked out of there with my head held high, clutching my $100 sapphire, with no notion of what to do with it but with a very strong fondness for it, as, after all, it was Genuine, not to mention worth $100.

(This is not an isolated incident, by the way. Another store promised free freshwater pearl pendants, and then spent several minutes explaining to me why I needed to buy their $10 sterling silver chain to wear the pendant on. Finally they just gave up and let me have the pendant. I still haven't figured out what to wear it with.)

Now we're being followed by rocks

Just finished watching Pirates III and all I can say is, What? That's it???

No, seriously, now what? Is there going to be yet another movie to tie up all the rest of the loose ends satisfactorily? Hate to wreak havoc on this nice trilogy motif we had going, but there has to be a better resolution than once every ten years.

This is the woman scorned like which Hell hath no fury.

A minor diatribe

Internet shorthand will always be with us (at least as long as we have the internet), but that won't stop me from gnashing my teeth at all the little expressions I find particularly irksome. And the one which at this moment has aroused my derision is the phrase dh, shorthand for, I can only suppose, Dear Husband.

A small part of me (a very, very small part) wants to like the convention, because it sounds so charming and refined to refer to someone as Dear. It also sounds almost British (as in, 'Dear Charlotte,' or 'Dear Mamma'), and anything British is sure to score high points with my passing fancy.

Another part of me wants to stop being annoyed by it, because some people whose writings I otherwise like tend to employ it, and I don't want to catch them in the crossfire of my snide and possibly quite irrational dislike.

Another part of me wants to encourage any instance of niceness and civility in our language that I find, because of course it is laudable to consider one's husband dear, isn't it?

But mainly I just find it annoying. It's a very tiresome cheapening of the language, like a case of chronic italics in an impressionable teenager or the overuse of the word 'love' to mean all things from mildly be interested in to passionately adore.

And why the need to perpetually tack on the chirpy adjective? It almost suggests some kind of insecurity, that one needs so flamboyantly to wear one's heart on one's sleeve and insist how dear one's husband is. It seems to imply a kind of superiority, in stark contrast to those of us poor saps who are so blase as not to publicly call our husbands dear at every opportunity. If you're content to let your husband off with the mere title of husband, which is nothing if not prosaically descriptive, without any reference to the state of your relationship with him, well then! We can see just how loving a wife you are!

In fact, why stop at dh? Why not go gung-ho for this Positive Speech thing and make up all kinds of cute little acronyms to demonstrate vociferously just how wonderful and healthy and enthusiastic we really are? How about my brat (beautiful righteous adorable tot) or my lunk (loving unselfish nice kid) or my gross (gorgeous reliable opinionated svelte spouse)? Yes, why don't we start scattering these little tidbits throughout our conversation and see if the wonderful trend will catch on?

Or is the point to be deliberately unintelligible? Is that why the lazy but somewhat onomatopoetic LOL was abandoned for the more obscure, erudite, and hence now wildly popular ROTFLOL? Because if it makes too much sense, then it wouldn't be clever and original enough to use it, now would it?

Goldilocks

Jane is quickly getting the world all figured out and, per her perfectionist nature, methodically and systematically putting everything in its place.

It happened a few weeks ago that she noted a difference in heights by commenting, 'Jane is little; Mama is big.' Mama did not like this depiction, and promptly informed Jane that while Papa may be big, Mama is medium. So Jane dutifully took in this tidbit of information and proceeded to run with it (in a very methodical and systematic way, of course).

Many days later Michael coughed, and Jane commented, 'Papa's big cough!' She then turned to me and observed, 'Mama has a medium cough.'

Jane is not satisfied with one-sided conversations, so I must not only acknowledge what she says, but agree with her whole-heartedly:

Jane: Papa has a big cough!
Mama: Yes, Papa has a big cough.
Jane: Mama has a medium cough!
Mama: Yes, Mama's cough is medium.
Jane: Jane has a little cough! (cough, cough)
Mama: Yes, Jane has a little cough.
Jane: Ella has a smaller cough!
Mama: Yes.
Jane: Ella has a smaller cough!
Mama: Yes, yes, Jane, Ella does have a smaller cough, doesn't she??

These conversations happen fairly frequently now, and they tend to be rather predictable.

Jane: Papa has a big sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Papa's sneeze is big
Jane: Mama has a medium sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Mama's sneeze is medium
Jane: Jane has a little sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Jane has a little sneeze.
Jane: Ella has a smaller sneeze!
Mama: Yes, she does.

And the possibilities are endless. Jane will never run out of gambits.

These boots were made for walkin'

There is a little sketch somewhere by a famous artist of a man with multiple limbs doing cartwheels inside a big circle, the point of which is to prove that the length of the arms, fully extended, should exactly match the height of the body, or thereabouts. There are also optical illusions out there involving top hats and brims, which have something to do with ratios of height to width and all that.

Apparently footwear manufacturers draw their inspiration from these tidbits and decide that the circumference of a woman's calf must exactly match the length of her lower leg, from knee to heel, even including, say, a four-inch stacked heel for good measure (stop and admire my self-restraint for not ending that sentence with 'to boot.' Ha, ha!) From which you are to conclude that my long quest for a good-fitting black boot (or any colour boot, for that matter) continues unfulfilled.

I don't have particularly skinny legs. I am not plump, and I think my calves are about right for my height, and so it bothers me no end that absolutely no boot out there exists which will fit properly. All I want is a nice pair of basic leather (preferably zip-up) boots. I am past caring about price and will gladly pay any amount (and I already checked, and they don't sell boots at CVS) of ready money just to buy a good pair of boots that could last me a few seasons. Seriously, this search has been on for most of my married life, and you would think that at least one season they might come out with a normal boot for a normal-sized leg.

New Year's resolves

At present the only thing I am absolutely set upon involving the course of the near future is the determination to go out to dinner tonight. That may not sound too ambitious, but considering how rarely we eat out, it could be a milestone.

Last year, for some reason (I can only assume we were given a gift card), we went out to Red Lobster on New Year's Eve, which is as good an excuse as any for establishing a tradition. While there, we used a coupon for a free appetizer (still good, by the way) and ended up getting charged $0.50 more than we should have. When I called the manager the next day, she was extremely gracious about it and mailed me a $10 Red Lobster gift card by way of apology. Which brings us around to this year. We have evidently not spent it yet, so I signed up Michael's email address for the Fresh Catch Club and we're going back for second helpings this year.

But you mustn't think that we never eat out at all. Why, just yesterday we actually went to Zaxby's for lunch (although, granted, we didn't spend any money there either, thanks to this). Hmm. In the eccentric spirit of last year's resolution to gain weight in 2007, perhaps a doable New Year's resolution for us would be to spend more money in 2008.

Christmas pics

Home again, home again, jiggity-jog

We're back again. We went to Ohio for Christmas, and I missed posting on the shortest day of the year, so I'll pause here to point out that the days are getting colder and longer now.

The Trip was fun but exhausting, and we remembered anew why we do not like long road trips. Jane was a perfect peach, but Ella the Cheerful One was peevish for much of the 12-hour drive back. Now that we're safely home again, we think we'll stay here forever.

The past few days have been devoted to catching up on laundry, unpacking, and writing thank you notes. Meanwhile I've played about with more kitchen alchemy. Upon my discovery that blue cornmeal is far superior to white or yellow in fiber and protein, I substituted blue cornmeal in this recipe with great success. I also snapped up five gallons of organic milk, which provided the perfect opportunity of trying out queso blanco, which actually worked:

Ten years ago

I have been writing a diary, more or less, for over ten years now. It was sporadic in the beginning, grew into an intense daily regimen for many years, and then, as Michael appeared on the scene and dispelled my superfluous angst, it dwindled away to brief and pragmatic updates at longer and longer intervals.

Recently I pulled an old volume from the shelf, dusted it off (not only has married life mostly dispelled my propensity to write down deep cogitations, it also seems to have removed my fascination with reading and re-reading my entries from the recent or distant past and contemplating whether I've changed much since then), and looked up December 1997, just on a lark, to see where I was ten years ago.

I had just read an article about double dactyls, a recently-invented (well, relatively speaking) poem form with very rigid parameters. I think the strictness of the rules fascinated me, because I popped off with one straight away:

Utterly uppity
Arrogant Aragorn
Knew that his shortcuts would
Never go wrong;

After a fight or a
Dawn he'd alight for a
Post-expeditional
Dinner and song.

Ha, ha! It still strikes me as terribly clever, although my far older and wiser self (who also happens to have access to high-speed internet for quick research purposes) realises that it was really more of a McWhirtle, because of the absence of a nonsense line.

Do they sell bigger ice cream scoops at CVS, too?

Due to a flush of sales and coupons at CVS, we're wallowing in Edy's ice cream this week. It always surprises me to discover that most people don't love ice cream quite as much as I do. No matter how not hungry I am, I will always be happy to spring for ice cream.

After a nice dinner, I got out the ice cream and prepared to shovel out the portions. Michael mentioned that he wasn't that hungry, and would probably just take a couple bites of mine. That would not do, so I offered to serve him a bowl of Small Helpings, to which he acquiesced. When I brought him a very modest portion, he exclaimed, 'That's Small Helpings?'

'Yes,' I explained, and pointed to my bowl: 'That's Regular Helpings.'

'No, my dear,' he told me, 'that's Rose Helpings.'

Can I help it that it was free? Free stuff makes me feel reckless and unrationing. I don't have to make it last because I can always go out and 'buy' more tomorrow.

Pictures and conversations

I have been trying to teach Jane the proper conjugation of verbs recently by phrasing things different ways in conversations with her, like this:

'Jane, did you go to class today? Yes, you went to class.'
'Jane, did you see the squirrel? Yes, you saw the squirrel!'

It makes for a bit of a repetitive monologue on my part, but it seems to help clarify the rules somewhat. Or at least it would, if English weren't so chock full of irregular verbs and exceptions to rules.

Last night I was winding her down for bedtime and asking her questions about her day. She remarked, 'Jane plew with Cate.' That one threw me for a loop, and it was only after further questioning that I figured out that she was applying the blow...blew/throw...threw rule to the word play. I can't say that I blame her.

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Ella, meanwhile, finally cut her third tooth on Monday. She is fond of pulling herself up on furniture and then panicking when she finds herself stuck there - kind of the opposite of the classic 'Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!' After disdaining solid food for months on end, consistently spitting out and spluttering over every single spoonful we tried to feed her, she has decided in the last week or so that she does actually like solids, on her terms. Meaning, she will still automatically spit out anything we try to put in her mouth, but if we put her in the high chair and hand her the goods, she'll dig in with a right good will. Having recently read the Little House books, I am reminded of Laura's comment on trying to teach the calf to drink from a bucket: 'In the end, some of the milk was inside the calf.'

Still scrambling

No matter how ardently I intend to be prepared for the Christmas season, it seems that every year finds me catching my breath and saying, 'Whoa! Is it December already?' I mean to have our tree up the day after Thanksgiving, promptly. I mean to play Christmas music every day, all day long. I mean to light the Advent candles, really and truly, this year, start an unforgettable family tradition and all that. And, most of all, I so want to hang up stockings on the night of December 5th, and have a jolly celebration of St. Nicholas Day, thus cleverly avoiding the whole Santa Clause dilemma once and for all.

Oops. Is it December 7th already? Well, at least I'm thinking about Pearl Harbor.

Still inspired

The kick has lasted all week. Now I want to go out and spend exorbitant amounts of money on real cookware with lifetime warranties. Well, actually, I'd like to find said cookware on craigslist for a modest amount of money, but anyway, either way, it's not happening in the near future. Still, at least I'll stop scoffing at people who put Calphalon on their wedding registries.

I've always despised non-stick pans because you can't use metal utensils (wire whisk? Hello! How else do you propose to make non-lumpy gravy?!) in them, but now I learn that you're not supposed to use metal utensils on cookware at all, period, because metal on metal causes tiny cuts and scrapes that eventually degrade the integrity of the pan. Wow! The answer is rubber, plastic, or reinforced nylon. So now the great question is, Does CVS sell high-quality reinforced nylon cooking utensils?

Cheapskate Gourmet, by Mary Hunt

Here is my book review of a book that I am currently all gaga over. Because this is not a serious blog, I am giving my off-the-cuff, top of the head, completely partial impression of a book I haven't even finished yet. But the parts I've read are so good that I know I'll like the rest of it. I'm already inspired to gather up all my knives and take them off to Kroger for a free sharpening (did you know that most grocery stores' meat departments offer free knife sharpening??)

Well, I started off by reading aloud a quote to Michael on the way home from church, and now he's reading the book to me. We are both thoroughly engrossed by it, the cheapskate bit being the part I like, and the gourmet bit being the part he likes.

I felt particularly moved by the author's account of how she used to dismiss exact measuring by reasoning that 1 cup plus 2 Tbls. flour just meant use a little more than a cup, and how her repeated cooking flops convinced her that following directions precisely was critical. Now, I haven't got a long history of cooking flops, exactly, but I still appreciate the detailed explanations of what can go wrong when the directions are not followed precisely.

Inspired by the call to excellence, I leaped up in the middle of a lemon muffin recipe and dashed to the kitchen to try it out. I even scrupulously followed the part about 1 cup plus 2 Tbls. sugar, going so far as to get the Tbls. measure out to get the job done properly. All was going well until I got to where it said that the 2 Tbls. sugar were for the topping.

Oops. I should also be as enthralled by the instructions to read all recipes thoroughly to the end before beginning.

Serious blogging is not for me

Whenever I leave a comment about a controversial topic on a high-profile blog, I am reminded again and again (yeah, about all four times) why I do not blog for notoriety or pay. The time it takes me to craft my comment, thoroughly editing my work and restructuring my sentences for the utmost clarity and incontrovertibility, and providing ample documentation in the way of links and references, is overwhelmingly intense and somewhat reminiscent of writing a college paper. I just don't need that kind of stress in my life.

I come away from writing such a comment completely exhausted, and for days afterwards I can do nothing but hit the refresh button on the computer to see what came of it, and mope if it was taken ill. (See? See? Grand sweeping generalisations like this one are all well and good on a private blog such as this one, which I can still maintain the illusion that only about ten of my very closest friends ever read, but would be hacked to pieces in a matter of minutes by the sharks circling for fresh blood who will clutch at anything to de-bunk an opposing point of view.) Whew. Not that I'm taking this too seriously or anything.

So I continue to scoff at all the articles on how to make money off of your blog, and how to increase blog traffic and all that. Because that's all well and good for those mercenaries who care more about money than about freedom, but I'd rather live my online life light-hearted and lilting, unfettered by the need for comment moderation, painstaking revision, careful retractions, edits, and updates, and RSS feeds that notoriety demands.

To link or not to link?

When discussing and disparaging items of interest, it occurs to me to wonder whether it would be better form to link directly to the item in question, or not to do so. There seem to be compelling reasons both ways.

Pro:

* Linking enables the reader to check out the source directly, thus circumventing any unintentional slant given by a paraphrase or quote.
* Linking gives the reader direct access to the original writer, with which the reader may check out facts and ask for clarification.
* Linking provides accountability for the linker, who knows he or she may not misrepresent the piece to which he or she is linking, for the sake of making a straw man argument.

Con:

* Linking requires specific finger-pointing, leaving the shelter of vague platitudes for the out-on-a-limbishness of direct confrontation.
* Linking may provide unwarranted attention to a subject which had much better be left to die in peace.
* Linking may lead to the charge of gossip, in that it names names.

Why is this a subject matter of particular interest to me? Because I occasionally stumble across things which irk me, and I wish to point them out for the sake of waxing vexatious thereon. But, of course, I do not wish to gossip or launch personal attacks. But, then again, if I honestly disagree with or disapprove of something, wouldn't it be better to call it out in the open so all could judge for themselves instead of taking my word for it that I am right and the particular instance I am anonymously citing (for the sake of protecting such instance's privacy, of course) is wrong?

Consumer rave - Publix

Here is the why and wherefore of this post.

****************************************

November 15, 2007



Publix Super Markets Corporate Office
ATTN: Consumer Relations
PO Box 407
Lakeland, FL 33802-0407

To Whom It May Concern:

This letter is to report on a recent satisfactory exchange with your consumer relations department, and to commend you and your employees on an excellent level of customer service, both at the corporate and at the store level.

To give a bit of background, on a recent shopping trip I found a flyer at my local Publix (Store #xxx) with a great coupon inside. It was the last flyer on the rack, but the coupon, matched with the then-current sale, provided such a good deal that I asked at the customer service desk whether there were any more flyers in the back. The gentleman at the counter could not find any more, but told me that they should be getting more flyers in a week or two. He voluntarily offered to write me a rain check for the sale price, since the coupon, when it arrived, would be valid for several more weeks.

Over the next few weeks, I checked back, but never saw any more flyers in the store. Finally, this past Monday, I returned to the customer service desk and asked whether any more of those particular flyers had come in yet. I was told that the new frozen foods flyers had already arrived, but those were not the ones containing the coupon. It appeared that that flyer had not been replenished.

After I returned home and reviewed my copy of the flyer, I decided to call Publix Consumer Relations and see if they could offer me any assistance in determining whether there were any more copies available. I explained the situation to the representative handling the call, and she took my name and number and told me that she would look into it. I regret that I did not note her name, but she was very gracious and professional.

She was very efficient, too, because I received a message the very next day from Mr. xxx, the manager of my local Publix store. He stated that he had located one copy of the flyer in question, and was attempting to track down more copies from other locations. He left his name and number, asked me to call him if I had any questions, and assured me that he would see that I was informed when and if the other copies became available.

The next day I received a follow-up phone call from xxx at the local Publix. He verified that he had one copy of the flyer in hand, and stated that Mr. xxx had succeeded in locating a shipment of the flyers, which were being sent in from the Florida office and should be in the store the next day. He asked how many I needed, and said that I could come in the next day to pick them up.

I have been extremely impressed with the prompt and exemplary handling of this situation. My inquiry was immediately addressed, and all parties involved went above and beyond what might be considered routine customer service to provide outstanding assistance. The location of the extra flyers and the delivery of those flyers to my local store was an extraordinary courtesy.

This experience only serves to reinforce my positive impression of the level of service and courtesy I have experienced with my local Publix store. In previous interactions with the front desk staff, whether it be over a sale price, a returned item, or a rain check, I have always been met with competence and a sincere willingness to solve the issue at hand.

I write this letter to commend your employees on a good job well done, and to express my appreciation for a company where such a high quality of customer service is valued.

There are some things that money can’t buy. Publix has cemented its good reputation in my mind, and I will continue both to shop there and to recommend it to my family and friends.

Sincerely,



Rose Focht

Consumer rants and raves

And a word spoken in due season, how good is it!

I believe very firmly in speaking one's mind. (Well, aside from the convention of social repression where you don't blurt out your every thought. There are times when I'm a firm believer in the value of keeping your mouth shut.) So when something comes to my attention which demands address, I generally go about addressing it.

If I have a problem with a business or a product, I will take that problem to someone who should be informed, and who might be able to ameliorate the circumstance. I have generally had very good results with this course of action, as most companies have great PR standards and are sensible enough to realise the incalculable value of a satisfied customer.

By the same token, I want to make sure that I am properly acknowledging the brilliant success of Good Business, so I've long made it my habit to point out and commend instances of excellence. This is almost more important to me than the complaints department, and though not so personally lucrative (a concern/complaint about a product/person/situation usually nets me a free replacement/coupon/gift card by way of apology/please-don't-ditch-our-business), it's very emotionally gratifying.

I've read that humans tend to express negative feedback and positive feedback in a ratio of nine to one, and I'm not surprised by that statistic. From working in operations, one of the more thankless lines of duty, I've learned that people don't tend to express the good (mostly because it drops below their radar screen) but they will express the bad. (For instance, you would never get an email gushing about how well the toilets are working today and thanking you for all your hard work on the keeping-toilets-running front, but you sure as anything will get a lot of feedback if one of the toilets isn't working.)

So, to counteract this worldwide conspiracy of negativity, I've made a point to follow through with my opinions, both bad and good. I've always been an avid letter-writer, and the results have usually been satisfactory. And my latest resolve is to post these letters as occasion merits, for two purposes: to punish the evildoer, and to reward the good.

It's really just an expansion of the word-of-mouth principle, where a good reputation is priceless. If something is mishandled, and the situation is not satisfactorily resolved, then I need to carry through with my threat to discredit the foolish, short-sighted, penny-wise-pound-foolish manager who is unwilling to concede the point in order to retain a satisfied customer. And when something is handled exceptionally well, then I want to spread the word so that others can enjoy the same quality of service and satisfaction. Of course, there is no ulterior motive in publishing my experiences, and you may rest assured that I am not getting paid by any product or company to badmouth or compliment. All thoughts and opinions are expressly my own, independently arrived at, etc. etc.

Better eight than never

In which we list (you guessed it! but only because you read the rules on the other blogs already) eight random things:

1) I spent almost an hour online researching the title of this post. I was trying to find the correct spelling for the American pronunciation of the Egyptian number eight. Searches on Arabic numerals led me down some fascinating mathematical rabbit trails, but no closer to a clever title.

2) I can count to ten in Arabic.

3) I flew on the flying trapeze in a real live circus show.

4) The only TV show I ever watched live (well, not actually live, as in the studio: live, as in, when it first aired) was the premier of House (and that only because we had just spotted Bertie in Sense and Sensibility, and were curious to see him in an American role. I hear the series isn't that great, despite being wildly popular with the masses). Every single other TV show I have ever seen was a re-run or the DVD.

5) CVS is my new favourite place to shop.

6) When Jane and I stand on the scales together, we still weigh less, combined, than I did by the end of my pregnancy with her.

7) Michael was always one of my favourite names, but I knew I could never name a son Michael because, well, it kept making the top 10 lists. Falling for MLF was a convenient way to have a legitimate excuse to name a son Michael.

8) I used to like worms, but now I don't. On the other hand, I used to hate onions, and now I don't.

Thanks to the Queen for that little diversion! Due to my late-night lethargy and lacklustre linking skills, this is a self-tagging post, meaning that if you want to join in the fun, then consider yourself tagged by all means.

Cooking for control freaks

Sometimes I amuse myself by reading those tips in various magazines and cookbooks on the proper way to cook and bake, and I can barely repress snickers and sneers at some of the totally impractical suggestions they come up with. For your edification, I provide you with the following silly rules, and the obvious logical reasons why you should disregard them:

- You must gently spoon flour into the measuring cup, and then carefully level it off with the back of a knife, thus getting three implements dirty instead of one. Do not scoop it directly with the measuring cup, or you will compress the flour ever so slightly, causing you to end up with more flour than you need. (When you are scraping the excess flour off with the knife, of course, that will not compress the rest of the flour into the measuring cup quite so erroneously.) Ha! We all know that there are a very few such recipes out there in which a few grains of flour one way or the other makes all the difference in the world as to how the final texture turns out, but most recipes are flexible enough to stand the slight variation that the tiniest bit of compression would allow.

- You must break eggs into a bowl, one by one, before adding them to the melange in the mixing bowl. This will enable you to pick out bits of shell, should they fall in. Ha! And we all know that you can only pick eggshell out of a bowl that has only eggs in it, as opposed to a mixing bowl that has oil and butter and sugar in it as well! Eggshells that fall into mixing bowls instantly sink to the bottom of the batter, while they magically float on the top of raw eggs, thus allowing you to pick them out all the more easily! Right.

- You must melt chocolate in a double boiler. Now we all know that extreme heat does weird things to chocolate. So obviously, you're not going to want to melt chocolate over a boiling hot burner. But if you don't have a double-boiler (which, in my opinion, is one of those specialty items - like escargot forks - with a very narrow range of usefulness - actually, escargot forks probably come out ahead in the narrowness-of-usage-to-difficulty-of-storage/hassle-of accessibility ratio), and you don't want to bother rigging up a pot of boiling water atop which you balance a metal bowl in which to melt the chocolate, then you will find that melting chocolate in the microwave works like a charm. Really, it does.

Time for another post

The house is once again free of guests, and I'm reveling in the free use of the computer once more. You can't just plop down to check email and read blogs when there are guests about, especially when said guest is already at the computer checking his/her email.

Much has been happening around here, which thought I'll put on hold until I have finished pondering the construct of that sentence and why it is that I always fall back on the 'much' approach rather than the 'lots [of]' approach. 'Lots has been happening' or 'lots has happened' works, but only on the presumption that you were going to fill in an indeterminate amount, the implied 'lots of stuff has been happening.' And 'stuff,' especially 'lots' of it, just sounds clunky and uninformed. Or you could pretend that you were going to say 'lots of things have been happening' (ooh! That's helpful and specific!), and then you feel silly for going to all that trouble to spell out the phrase, proving that it works grammatically, and still end up with a vague platitude that needs to be expounded upon.

I have therefore concluded that 'much' just about always sounds more elegant and polished than 'lots,' despite their being pretty well synonymous (unlike 'I' and 'me,' which people insist on believing to be interchangeable, with the vague impression that 'I' has the slight grammatical edge, leading them to use it whenever in doubt of the two). For proof positive of this newfound theory, let's just experiment with a few literary examples:

****

'What do you want with me, Spirit?' asked Scrooge.

'Lots.' It was Marley's voice.

****
For unto whomsoever lots is given, of him shall be lots required: and to whom men have committed lots, of him they will ask the more.

****

The sun is up; why aren't you?
The Jaize A'Castles have lots to do!

****

Yes, quite; just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? And that concludes my grammar check. Back to the stuff and things.

So between houseguests last week, and Thanksgiving next week, and babysitting this week, and church and choir practise and play group and trying madly to spend up all the money in our FSA before the end of the year (does ANYone else out there need another free blood glucose monitor? Specifically someone in VA, whom I can send it to by courier next week?), we've been keeping pretty busy. That's all for now. Off to eat more free ice cream and hazelnut chocolates.

A bit of history, a goods and services review, and a diatribe on consumerism

When we traveled to NJ for Eric's wedding in June, we stayed overnight in an hotel. And when I made the reservation, we got some information on a rewards program called Traveler's Advantage, which put us on the mailing list for a few other similar rewards programs.

I am always very cautious about any membership clubs where money changes hands, especially where a free trial is offered to lure me in. I did my homework and discovered that this program (and many others) is run by Trilegiant Corporation (TLC), a company which doesn't seem to have done anything technically illegal, though there have been many complaints filed against it with the Better Business Bureau, mainly to do with deceptive advertising and unscrupulous collections. It seems to be mainly an issue with fine print, where people can very easily get ripped off. I don't blame them for being confused, but neither can I blame TLC for taking advantage of people's forgetfulness and carelessness. After all, that's how manufacturers make money on rebate products: they count on a certain percentage of fallout in the follow-through.

So I agreed to the trial period, and ended up with a complicated set of instructions for gasoline rebates, which I did follow through on, and I did remember to cancel the membership before the free trial period ended. This sort of thing, by the by, is like playing with matches, along the lines of listening to time share pitches with the intention of not buying just to get your free gift: you must have iron determination and nerves of steel or you will get caught. Do not enter into it lightly.

Later, I got another offer for anther one of their fronts, called Great Fun. The premise of this little program is that you sign up (for free, of course), and get a membership card which entitles you to all kinds of discounts on dining and entertainment. Trouble is, once the annual fees start kicking in after your trial period runs out, you'd have to be spending a whole lot of money (and at their participating retailers, too) to justify the membership fee. Five percent off an admission to a particular movie theater bears a striking similarity to using a manufacturer's coupon on a name-brand item: it's probably tricking you into spending more money on something you didn't really need anyway.

After I got all the membership information, I decided that there was no way we could ever come out ahead with this program, and we didn't need any temptations to spend more money on dining and entertainment. I called the company and asked to cancel our membership.

But wait! There's more! After I listened to spiel after spiel about how much money this program could save me, and I insisted again that it wasn't for me, I was offered an extension of the free trial so I could take advantage of one more special offer: a set of rebates totaling up to $40, just for giving Great Fun one more try!

So I waited again, and found that these rebates were even more complicated than the gas forms: there were four $10 rebate forms, to be sent in with any eligible receipt, each one good for only one quarter of the year. So right there, I would have to be a member for the whole year to cash in on this, and not cancel my free membership as soon as I got my payout. Not only that, but the rebate form for this quarter was the entertainment one: I had to send in a receipt over $10 for a movie ticket, video rental, concert, or other cultural event, to receive my $10 rebate.

I thought about that one. I looked up our records in Microsoft Money to verify my suspicion: We have not spent any money in the leisure category for the last three months. No movies, no rentals, no admissions, no tickets. I guess we don't have any fun.

So I called the company back again to cancel in earnest, and explained that it just wasn't the right program for us, because we spend so little on entertainment that the cost of membership wouldn't be justified. When the representative started in with the 'But have you considered all the savings and advantages...?' plea, I replied, 'Let's take the rebate that's valid for this quarter. I don't have any receipts that would qualify. We have not made one single entertainment purchase in three months.'

That stopped him cold, and he quickly canceled my membership for me. He simply had nothing in his notes to counter that scenario.

The first weekend away in two and a half years

On Thursday, my mom drove down and stayed with the girls so that Michael and I could get away for the weekend. It was the first time we've spent a night without kids since Jane arrived.

We attended our choir retreat in the lovely Callaway Gardens, where we spent several sessions learning music for our December Christmas program. This retreat had all the classic elements of a perfect retreat, including good fellowship, wonderful food, plush accommodations, lovely scenery, productive and inspiring sessions, and a very entertaining magic show. During our downtime we walked through parts of the lovely gardens, and took in the live butterfly hothouse and the birds of prey demonstration.

It was so fun to get away, and though we missed the girls, we knew they were in good hands. We must do this every year.