Confession

Okay, deep breath, here we go..I mailed something for a stranger today. I can almost hear the collective gasp, the thought--how could she? Well, it started innocently enough. I was crossing the street to my car with a flat rate package under my arm, when an approaching car slowed, and then stopped. The window rolled down and a middle-aged woman leaned out. "Do you work for the Post Office?" she asked. "No," I responded, "I am just on my way to the Post Office." "Well in that case," she said, "would you mind mailing something for me?"

I hesitated. "You mean like a letter?"

"Some birthday cards."

"Well...okay."

She pulled them from her dash and handed me three Hallmark-like envelopes, waved, and cheerily sped off.

I looked at them--her return address from two blocks from my house and one of the cards was going to a Very Reverend somebody in Milwaukee. I took them to the Post Office. I mailed them.

What kind of person entrusts their mail to a total stranger? Well, Constance somebody from down the street. What kind of person accepts mail from a stranger? Apparently me.

What does this mean? Well, I think it means that the terrorists haven't won. Unless they have. In which case, I know nothing.

Carry-Out

I really like good food, and I have come to realize that, for me, it is often a reward after a difficult day...or week..or month. I am working with a dietician and I am currently confounding her with yoyo swings of gain and loss. She refers to me as her "wild card." Today I I facetiously brought up the idea of "mindful eating" with the idea that one watches what one eats and then lets those thoughts go with return to the breath. In other words, I am watching myself eat peanut M and M's and the observation is neutral as long as I continue to breathe. She embraced the concept and actually gave it substance with further exploration. This is why I continue to see her--she puts positive spin on my sarcastic output.

But back to the reward aspect of this. I have had a hellish week in many respects, doing what I least like to do--making people unhappy (even if I am absolutely correct in my methods and conclusions). My husband was out playing cards tonight and I was on my own for dinner, so I went to a restaurant I love, that he is lukewarm about. I usually get carry-out there and I don't always tip, though I was feeling a bit guilty about that. I decided I would tip tonight, just because I like the owner as well as the food.

I was glad to see that it was so busy that I had to sit on a chair in the hall, rather than at a table,while I waited for my chicken shwarma. Teresa, the owner, brought it out to me there. When I reminded her that I still needed to pay, she told me that she was buying me dinner for being a loyal customer for the past six years. I was stunned. She has nothing to gain from this gesture because I am already a loyal customer and business is clearly booming. This was reward for the business I had already provided, rather that anything I might provide in the future. The opposite of lobbying, and completely unexpected. What a lovely gesture and one that put the rest of my week in perspective.

And the chicken shwarma? Delicious, as always. Thank you Teresa!

Coincidence

I am sure there are many ways to describe and quantify coincidence. There are those things that happen when we expect them to--that may be coincidence, but it may also be that the reason we expect them to happen is that subconsciously we know they are likely to. So, not so much coincidence as the result of subconscious analysis. Then there are the small world, six degrees of separation stories that I love to collect. Finally, there is probability and coincidence from the mathematical standpoint. What are the odds that your favorite number coincidentally turns out to the same number the lottery picks as a winner?

I think we are talking about the third category here. Last Saturday, we got a somewhat agitated phone call from an attorney who works at the Dept. of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. She apologized for not calling back sooner, but she had been tailgating at the football game and had her phone off. Nevertheless, a call on Saturday from my husband, the Risk Manager at DATCP, could mean only one thing: activation of the emergency phone tree.

There was only one problem. He hadn't called her. In fact, we hadn't called anyone all morning. Nevertheless, she was certain. Caller ID gave his name and the call back number was certainly our home number. There was a garbled message, something about "Did you turn off the phone?" Suddenly the light dawned. Tom's brother had stopped by earlier in the day and asked to use the phone before he left. He had to make a call about his daughter, but he misdialed, hung up, and dialed again.

We live in a metro area of 350,000 and the number of people who can be reached by calling a local number is certainly greater than that. Here is a story problem for all of you mathematicians out there. What are the chances that a wrong number would reach a person who both recognized the name on the caller ID AND had a potentially legitimate reason for getting such a call on a Saturday?

It is enough to make me want to buy a lottery ticket.

Contraband

I heard a story the other day that I thought was pretty funny--though probably not for the people who lived it. Nevertheless, I am prepared to laugh at their expense. This concerns a group of guys who do an annual fishing trip to Canada--rent a cabin, stay a few days, drink a lot of beer and commune with nature. At the border crossing, they were asked if they had any produce. Well, knowing full well there would be no problem (and probably to divert attention from the amount of alcohol they were bringing along) they declared the potatoes destined for the steak dinner on the first night at the cabin.

Oops.

The potatoes were enough of a red flag that the Canadians ran checks on all of them for prior vegetable smuggling convictions. It turned out they were first-timers with the vegetables, but one of the guys had a prior DUI--an automatic felony in Canada. And this from a country that shares a border with Wisconsin--they must be more foreign then they seem. Anyway, they would not admit the poor sap into the country and in a three musketeers gesture, his companions refused to proceed without him.

So they turned back, only to find that their nongrata status in Canada had all the alarms ringing on the US side of the border. In short, the US border patrol couldn't say exactly why, but they really didn't want them back. Not if Canada didn't want them. Caught in no-man's land with a sniper pacing the roof between the two borders, they spent an additional few miserable hours trying to smuggle their potatoes back into the land of their births.

And as I listened to this story, I couldn't help thinking about how times have changed. I remembered the time we crossed from Canada into the US with a car full of chaotic and muddy camping gear and the guy asked us if we had any guns. We invited him to check for himself, and though he didn't laugh as much as we thought he might, he didn't arrest us either.

And the sniffer dog who went into high alert over my carry-on bag which contained a large sheep's cheese from Italy--well I lied to the dog as well as his handler and they looked at me and my two young nervous cheese-smuggling children and let us all walk.

Would that happen now? I am not so sure. A kilo of declared Italian dried herbs (and yes, a kilo of dried herbs does connote a certain something, as well as being a really impressive amount of herbage) did walk through Chicago customs a few years ago, but the reindeer jerky from Norway did not. Apparently there is a ruminant virus in Scandinavia and we don't want to catch it. No, we would rather hold the fort at chronic wasting disease, a prion disorder that I prefer to call mad deer disease. I explained that I had no intention of eating the reindeer jerky or feeding it to other deer, but only wanted it to stuff the Christmas stockings of my (adult) children and claim it came from Rudolph. Maybe I got what I deserved...or maybe the customs guy thought that was an excellent idea and confiscated my jerky to distribute himself.

Either way, the fun is certainly going out of crossing international borders with food, one of my favorite souvenirs. And don't even think of taking anything with dirt on it into New Zealand. Kiwis may seem very happy-go-lucky, but those customs people can be quite severe. Trust me, I know.

I think it is only a matter of time before we are dumping not only our shoes, but all of clothes, into those little gray bins. Then naked through the showers before seeing the sidewalks of any other country. Mark my words.

Compulsion

No, not that depressing French movie--I am referring to behavior that began last Friday when I discovered Bejeweled Blitz, one of the applications on Facebook. Henceforth, I will refer to it as the Devil B, so as not to add to the allure.

Not since Tetris was new have I wasted so much time. My friend Mary warned me, but I see she is posting a score of over 59,000 points in the current tournament, so clearly she is not taking her own advice.

I have been playing Lexulous for a few weeks now and it is fairly sedate. Much like Scrabble, the game it imitates, there is a board, there are letters, and everyone takes turns. Sometimes several days go by between turns, unless you have three players on three computers in the same house. Then it gets raucous with much yelling and thundering up and down the stairs and the neighbors might complain. In short, everyone's idea of good family fun.

The Devil B is a totally different animal. This is the kind of game that causes eye strain, weight loss (or gain) and repetitive stress syndrome in the mouse hand. And all since last Friday. It has all of the ingredients of a good game: it takes less than a minute to learn, but I am still working out the strategy. My scores keep going up, but it feeds me just enough stratospheric success that I want more. The shapes, colors, and sound effects provide enough multisensory cues that I know when I am doing well, and I always want to do better. I thrive on the sound of jewels glissading into patterns of 3, 4, and 5, exploding into thousands of points.

I was talking to some friends recently about keeping the brain active--the goal, apparently, is to keep laying down neural pathways. I am sure I have, but all of my new pathways are causing me to see pink triangles and discs that look like Werther's Original Toffees whenever I close my eyes. I am not at all sure this will protect me from dementia. In fact, could this be causing dementia. At the very least, I am short on sleep.

It has also occurred to me (as I am sure it has to you) that this may be one of the alien plots to subjugate the human race. The first step, after making everyone play this game compulsively, is to withdraw the game. I am getting an error message as we speak. Although my friend Mary is merrily ramping up her scores, I CAN'T GET IN!!!!

I think may need a Devil B exorcist. Either that, or a flight to New Zealand where the jewels cascade, free of error messages.

Currency

Last fall I was out to dinner with a friend. In the usual settling up of the bill afterwards, she gave me a dollar with a stamp on it, directing me to www.wheresgeorge.com. I might not have even noticed, but she told me I should check this out--it was an interesting site. I actually meant to tuck it into a Christmas stocking as a novel (and cheap), activity, but I forgot. Then, afraid I would accidentally spend it before logging on (a shrewd move as it turns out), I stashed it in a galaxy far far away in my purse. There it sat.

A couple of weeks ago I got a second bill with a similar stamp. This caused me to remember the first one, but in the meantime I was craving popcorn, so I noted the serial number and fed it into the snack machine at work. Then I logged on to the wheresgeorge site and my eyes were opened.

I found out that the site is supposed to track the natural life of the currency. I think it is a bit ironic that the natural life of the currency was interrupted by my curiosity about the site itself. Nothing else would have made me hoard a dollar bill for 8 or 9 months. In addition, it turns out that this is a major hobby for some people, like scrapbooking or gambling. There are people who have set loose $20,000 or more in currency, just to see where it goes. There are blogs, chats, opinions. etc. There is also vocabulary. What I had in my possession was a "Wild" and it has a "parent" named Denny. I don't feel as special about it since discovering that Denny has a lot of Wilds out there. Does this suggest anything to you? Or is it just me who feels like I just became a stepmother while wondering about all of Denny's other offspring? Denny must be feeling disappointed about this particular offspring since it was last seen at a Walgreen's in 2008 and hasn't done much with its life. Never fear, Denny, as of yesterday, this dollar bought a cookie and is on the move again.

And the other dollar? I honestly answered the question "Is this note now in your possession?" with a "no"and I got a lecture. Apparently that is a very big rule violation because it might lead to notes being entered out of order. I figured with the Swanson's vending machine company I had a few days of grace, but wheresgeorge did not agree. And this from a site that tracks dollar bills into and out of all sorts of places I would rather not know about. If you happen to see me about town receiving change in my surgical gloves, cut me a little slack. I may know more than you want to about where your money has been.

Cheese of the Goat

They say the best classroom is life itself, and I have to agree. For example, we have all learned a lot about economics in the past few years, especially the economics of oil. We used to think that prices were set at the pump, and having gas stations on four corners of an intersection was bad because it drove gas prices to unreasonably low levels. We now know that gas prices respond to major economic factors such as a hurricane, a leak in an oil refinery tank, or Labor Day weekend.

So you can imagine how alarmed I was to read that, in the past week alone, over 100 goats were stolen from area farms. The response has been a big snicker--from lardhappus: "That'll make a lot of gyros" and abcd: "I'll bet that really got his goat." They are missing the point. We are about the see an unprecedented rise is the price of goat cheese. Based on what I have seen in the oil arena, I would say that it will happen immediately, never mind that not all of these goats were producing milk yet. They represent goat milk futures--so cheese prices will rise today, tomorrow, next weekend.

Being the prudent consumer that I am, I stocked up on goat cheese as soon as I heard the news. But being a consumer, I am sorry to report that the goat cheese has itself been consumed. It was delicious. I am now left at the mercy of rising goat cheese prices just like the rest of you---but don't say you weren't warned.

Children

I was in the grocery store a few weeks ago and a little girl looked at my cart and declared in amazement "Mommy, that lady has a LOT of yoghurt." Her mother looked a little embarrassed--well, it wasn't like they were bottles of bourbon (different aisle), so why the reaction? It made me think about all of the times I tried to stifle my children's opinions, at least in public. While it is true that children can say the darndest (and most mortifying) things, it is usually the truth, and nothing more.

And if actions speak louder than words, children are the living proof. Bored? They will let you know. Wanting your undivided attention? They have their little ways. So as a parent, taking children out in public is always fraught with danger. We don't necessarily want those truths let loose willy nilly. Lately though, I am finding it delightful to be around other people's children, at the grocery store, in their party clothes running rampant at weddings, or simply finding new uses for the flower-girl basket.

Lighten up parents--at least until one of your cherubs crawls under my table at a restaurant, double-dips at the buffet with a finger, or makes a loud and truthful comment about my person. I have my limits.

Chili

I was feeling inspired last night, so I cooked two batches of chili: one for my mother-in-law and one for us. Here are the ingredients for the one we ate. Some of the ingredients are very local, but substitutions are always possible.

Brown:

3 lbs ground chuck
1 onion

Add:

2 large cloves garlic mashed with sea salt
1 yellow pepper, chopped
2 fire-roasted red peppers, chopped
2 serranos, seeded and minced
Medium chili powder from Penzey's
ground chipotle peppers
Adobo seasoning
Chicago steak seasoning (Penzey's again)
dried epazote

Stir a bit and add:

1 large can Rotel (tomatoes and green chilis)
1 large can hominy, drained
a Tupperware container of red beans with liquid, cooked Salvadoran style by daughter Emily

Cook until it looks like a whole rather than the sum of the parts.

Serve with grated cheese and steamed zucchini.

Cairn II

It is instinct that causes us to find partners and breed (or not), but a driving force is certainly the inclusion of our DNA in future generations. I am not sure what it is that causes us to befriend other species and make them part of our families. It does not seem to favor our chances of survival, so I have to conclude that there is a human need to love, whether it be our own kind or others.

Take dogs, for instance. Or one particular dog--the hearth, the pivot point of our family for 15 years. How does this happen? One day you are bringing home a puppy with large uncertainties and no manners, who is basking in the wind of the car vent, and the next, you are curled around the bed of a very sick dog, with the fan trained right on his face, because he always liked it. Is that a suitable final hour of his life? I would like to think so.

His last week was spent in a place he loved, with our undivided attention, because we did not have to be at work. Within eight hours of our arrival home, he was too sick to stand and the prognosis was grim. We could find out exactly why he was sick, but we would not be able to do much to make him better. We made the hardest decision of our lives, and yet it felt right.

We will miss you Bailey--we signed on voluntarily for this sorrow but that does not make it any easier to bear right now.

Cost

I was amused a few weeks ago to read about a small revolt in which the consumer appears to have been the victor--at least for now. I can only imagine the discussion about market priming and timing that took place before Amazon offered a Kindle version of a new release by a popular writer at hardback prices. The Kindle consumers of popular literature (which until then had cost them less than $10 per download), said no, no, we won't go. And didn't.

Good for them, I say. We have been sheep too long, which was made very clear by the rationalization for upping the price. Apparently, it is not cheaper to provide an electronic version of a book. No, the cost is all in the marketing and promotion, and advances to the authors, etc. The paper and ink, and the expense of transporting them are very nominal costs. The reason that Kindle downloads have been so cheap is that they have been subsidized at a special introductory price to support a new market.

Wait a minute. The cost is in the content and not the materials and shipping? Then why is a "pocket" paperback $10, the larger trade version that used to be reserved for "literature" $15, and the hardback around $25? I wondered this the other day when searching Border's for a book that I found in both pocket ($10) and trade ($15). Hmmm, what to buy? Were there fewer words in the cheaper version? Key scenes left out? No, of course not. But I did kind of assume that there were different costs for the printing, the paper, the shipping, etc. Now I find out otherwise. And where does that leave audiobooks at $50 or $60 per set? If the difference between print and audio format is pocketed by the narrator, that is one fabulous career choice that I wish I had considered.

And now I read that piracy of electronic books is proliferating. The authors certainly deserve their copyrights, but based on what I know now, the piracy has been going on a long time and it is consumers who have been walking the plank. Another recent article bemoaned the fact that audio rights were going unpaid when electronic devices read the electronic versions. I don't even know what to say, (and I am a little afraid that I might have to pay someone to say it.)

Do you suppose Johannes Gutenberg had to deal with these kinds of issues? I can hear it now--"But everyone will have access to written materials at a fraction of the cost. The monks who are currently producing books will have no livelihood and the masses might learn to read. We don't need no stinkin' European Renaissance."

Stick to your guns Kindle readers--we sheep are depending on you.

Courageous

Last fall we finally built the kitchen garden that has been in the planning stages for the past ten years. Yes, ten years, since we ripped out the old raised bed, relocated the perennials that lived there, and repeatedly discussed the replacement. Last fall, Tom moved more than a ton of stone, a task especially onerous when one is coerced into an extra layer even after the neighbors have weighed in with their opinions. (Just remember, opinion counts for nothing when set against vision).

Last fall, I planted bulbs and a few perennials and was gratified when the squirrels didn't plunder all of them. This weekend, I added almost four flats of herbs and color in the form of both perennials and annuals. I know I will love raiding this bed for dinner all summer long--rosemary, oregano, fennel, arugula, parsley, savory, chicory, thyme, cilantro. These plants will be watered and lovingly tended.

But my favorite plant in the garden today is the volunteer viola I found growing in the brick patio. This was no nursery plant, carefully fertilized and watered. This is the bloom that had a rough life and beat the odds. I will cut and eat the bounty from my kitchen garden all summer, but this is the plant I will remember.

Cliches

I have a love-hate relationship with cliches. On the one hand they embody the trite, the unoriginal, the shopworn. On the other hand they are linguistic shortcuts, the common currency of our verbal interactions. Imagine if we had to laboriously explain cliches each time they were spoken and you get an idea of how much time we save by using them.

Proverbs are cliched notions that have wormed their way into a folksy vernacular: "A stitch in time saves nine," "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched," etc. I don't really have problem with these; they have stood the test of time (another entry in the cliched phraseology hall of fame). They are so familiar, in fact, that we don't need to produce the whole sentence to convey the idea. Simply stating "don't count your chickens" is enough. Maybe someday we will evolve to the point that declaring "chickens!" (or texting dcyc) does the trick. But I digress.

The cliches that cause me indigestion are the newer ones--those that meet the trite test but are not time-tested (can all those T's be accidental?). New enough that they are often uttered with the air of having hit on a new idea, a clever turn of phrase, but old enough to make me wince inwardly when I hear them. I think in this age of constant and instant communication, this plague of cliches hits harder than it used to--original thought is under constant threat.

Specifics you say? Well okay. How about thinking outside the box? I simply don't anymore. I will think everywhere BUT outside the box. So there.

Can we agree to disagree? No, we can't. What that says to me is "I am right, but my time is too valuable to waste arguing with you." And that just makes me want to short-sheet your bed. Also argue about this topic and any other that comes to mind. You lose either way, believe me.

What goes around comes around. Perhaps, but not as often as it should.

It is what it is. Technically this is a sentence but I think it should be downgraded to a punctuation mark, along the lines of a period. Why? Because it doesn't actually add meaning, other than symbolic, and it will stop a conversation cold.

I could go on, but I think you catch my drift. One of the biggest problems I have with cliches is that they are so seductive. My efforts to avoid using them probably gives my speech a somewhat halting quality, like a reformed stutterer. It is not that I am trying to not repeat myself--I am trying to not repeat myself and thousands of others. That is why I like analogies. Ideally, they are composed on the fly and the most successful are both unexpected and apropos. I keep trying for the bullseye in this extreme linguistic sport.

So, finally, this latest thing of asking questions and then answering them? Talk about total control of the conversation. Do I think this is really lame? Yes, I do. Have I caught myself doing this? Sadly, yes. Did I hate myself in the morning?
You know I did.

Chickens

It seems fitting to write about chickens three days before Easter, and about eggs as well. (My favorite philosophical question has to be the chicken/egg conundrum and I invoke it frequently in a work setting, but this is about chickens and eggs in a very real sense.) It is actually, specifically, about the eggs in this photograph. You may not be able to tell from looking at them, but these eggs came from happy chickens. At least this is what I am told by the man who should know.

Who is this man? Well, he has a place on my list of good people to connect with should the shit ever hit the fan in a major way. Not because he is an attorney (though he is) but because he is also a doctor, and a chicken farmer. Yeah, I know, but no, I am not going to share his name or the location of his farm.

So this is a person who provides both medical advice and eggs, and mostly I take advantage of the eggs. Eggs from happy chickens do add complications to any baking activity. For starters, and I probably don't even have to say this, the ugly eggs get broken and used first. That sometimes makes for hard decisions. The pretty eggs get transferred from one box to the next until finally I feel compelled to crack them into something--an omelet, a pan of brownies, wherever their fate takes them. In addition, each egg must be broken into a separate container--I learned this the hard way because even though they are nature's perfect package, eggs still have a shelf life. (Especially the fertilized eggs which I like to think came from especially happy chickens.)

I like the green ones best and when the green-egg-laying chickens were swept away by the Spring 2008 floods I felt the loss very personally. Fortunately a new generation has matured to take their place and I can once again count on green eggs amongst my dozen. Every once in awhile, I save pieces of shell because they are exactly the color that I want to paint my bedroom walls. For some reason these are eventually determined to be cooking refuse and are thrown away by someone (who coincidentally wants white walls in every room).

Never mind--there are plenty of eggs and shells to take their place--and all of them from happy chickens.

Happy Easter!

Charter

How do I hate them? Let me count the ways, or the whys. Perhaps it was the time they disconnected our service because the automatic deduction of their bill from our credit card failed. You know how you get a new expiration date every two years? Well, that baffled Charter. Or may be it was when they cut off our service the second time AFTER we had corrected the information about our automatic deduction to our credit card. Or was it the fact that both times they tried to charge a reconnection fee even though it was their error that interrupted our service?

Perhaps it is the wasted Saturday mornings on speaker phone waiting for answers, or at the very least, a human voice.

It wasn't the hours our service was out during the Emmys last year--we don't care enough about them to mind that too much, though I did use that as a reason for not handing over our phone service. What would we have done with the time the Emmys were unavailable if we had also lost phone service, I ask you?

No, finally it is about a company that enjoys a virtual monopoly with lousy customer service and yet, does not seem to be able to run a business without going bankrupt.

Did I mention that my niece's husband was expecting to receive some $25,000 as the result of a suit regarding shady overtime practices that Charter recently lost? Hmmm, class action suit, loss, bankruptcy. Could there be a connection?

No, I am seeing things--must be time for a medication adjustment.

Community Supported Agriculture

We love to eat our veggies and we eat them all the time
So I signed up extra-early for our CSA on line.

It was then I saw the check box for a rebate on our dough,
A family health plan kick-back for two years in a row.

Imagine our excitement when we found out it was true.
A prize for buying local, green, and organic too!

But how to spend the windfall? For stimulate, we must.
Obama said we should and in the President we trust.

We thought about more veggies and decided we could not.
A body has it’s limits for kohlrabi and what not.

So, we visited our farmers and sought their sage advice.
What worthy thing could match our rebate with it’s price?

Dave pondered our dilemma as he poured another beer.
It was just the proper temperature, unpasteurized and clear.

Then Tom had an epiphany—he knew what he should do.
He researched all his options, and when that phase was through,

Informed me that that by end of March, and certainly no later,
We’d be toasting to our health from a brand new kegerator.

“It will pay for itself in no time—even faster if we drink more beer.”

CPAP

Everyone who has ever shared a bed or a wall with my husband knows he snores. Since that can sometimes be the symptom of somewhat serious issues, he had a screening in 2003 for sleep apnea. We never heard back, and when Tom asked, his doctor did not seem concerned. All good, right?

Fast forward to 2009. We were talking about the snoring and the screening, and decided it might be a good idea to take another look. "Hmmm," said the sleep study technician of the 2003 screening, "if we had seen this, we would have had you in here right away. You know Reggie White died of untreated sleep apnea. We'll want you in here for the full study."

So, last Sunday, Tom checked into Hotel Electrode. By 1am, his breathing had stopped long enough to kill a small mammal on a couple of occasions, so they slapped the CPAP mask on his face and wished him sweet dreams--REM dreams that is---something he had apparently been deprived of for a long while.

I was a little apprehensive about the whole thing--would it be like sleeping with a coma patient on a ventilator every night? You know the sound I mean--the whoosh thump of someone who is breathing by machine. Tom, on the other hand was elated. A surprising reaction for someone who would soon resemble a fighter pilot at the edge of the atmosphere as he tucked himself in. It was actually easier than I thought it would be and a little harder than Tom expected. The machine noise is more like distant surf and I lull myself to sleep every night by imagining I am at the beach. When the air escape valve is pointed at me, I simply modify the imaginary beach scene to include a stiff ocean breeze. Tom, on the other hand, was disconcerted by the "blowfish effect"--this is when he wakes up with his cheeks puffed out and dried into position. He is learning to keep his mouth shut with practice.

It is the daytime hours that make the minor discomforts worthwhile though. Both of us are experiencing better quality sleep without the snoring and gasping, and Tom has noticed that he has a lot more energy in the evenings. I have also noticed that he is--how to put this delicately?--less grumpy, cranky, ornery, well, you get the idea.

Sleep is such a mysterious state and it is not very well understood. What is clear is that if you don't get enough of the right kind, including REM sleep, it has bad effects on the body, and on other bodies in the vicinity of yours. In addition, if you stagger through life feeling like you have "iron poor blood," it may be oxygen poor brain cells instead. Not breathing is bad for your health (100% of doctors agree on this), but the solution is pretty simple. The mask is your friend.

Coraline

This movie has gotten a lot of attention and it deserves it. I am a little leary of ruining this for anyone by overhyping it, but you can always stop right now if you don't want to be a victim of overhyption...overhyperation...hyperventilation? You know what I mean.

Here is the really important part: SEE THIS MOVIE IN 3D.

I thought this might just be a marketing gimmick to get people to see the movie in the theater. A good gimmick too, for a movie without action scenes and panoramic special effects, but really, wear those little paper green and red glasses like you just left the opthamologist's office? Well, it was a surprise to receive, for only an extra three dollars, some sturdy and stylish 3D glasses that you can wear again and again.

And it was a real thrill when the screen instructed the audience to don the glasses. They have some nifty little special effects to give you a taste of what 3D is all about, and then the movie starts. Well, all I can say is that it is a whole lot of fun for something that is 100% legal, and it has a plot too. Stay all the way to the end of the credits for the visual finale.

Cabin

A couple of weeks ago I spent a long weekend (3 nights, two full days) in a lovely log cabin in Northern Wisconsin. In addition to being relaxing, it was an interesting experience for a couple of reasons.

The first thing was attending the dog sled races. They were held in Land O' Lakes (which is fine for the name of a butter but as I type it, I realize, very awkward for the name of a town). This was a very local event but should attract more tourists than it does. The mushers came from as far away as Canada (not too far) and Alaska (very far) and the teams were made up of anything from the traditional huskies to hounds. The mushers were as young as three in 50-yard mutt dash and a whole lot older for the longer races. I took several pictures of empty space on the racetrack--these guys moved faster than my shutter speed--but I did better at the finish when everyone was tired. There were dogs for sale, but I didn't even look--I will never in my life need as much exercise as those dogs require.

The inventory of what three women bring for amusement to a cabin in the woods is also worth noting: 44 CDs, 8 magazines, 3 newspapers, 6 games plus a deck of cards, 13 books, 2 extra books borrowed from the lodge, and three knitting projects (the latter all mine). That is indoor amusement--there were also three pairs of snowshoes and, in a different category, about 40 pounds of food. I would argue that our supplies for three days would have been identical to what we would need for three weeks. The main difference is that we might have played more of the games and CDs if we had had more time. I might have also read a book or learned Norwegian--I am not being facetious--the "Learn Norwegian in Three Months" program was tallied on both the CD and book counts.

I think this is practice for eventual retirement--we assembled all of the ingredients for a life without work, but we just ran out of time.

Color

I have been knitting a baby blanket since June. It used to be for a particular baby, but she kept growing while I kept knitting, and now it is for a different baby who can't be born until I finish it. I am estimating 2011 at the moment but it could be longer. I like the pattern, but failed to notice that it is knit on needles with the girth of toothpicks. The other problem is the color--or lack thereof. It is a lovely cream, and as December turned to January, I couldn't stand the absence of color in my world a minute longer.

In a fit of color deprivation, I logged on to Virtual Yarns and ordered the yarn needed to knit the lovely Alice Starmore baby bonnet featured on the cover of Piecework magazine last month. I had to hunt around for the colors, which are arranged by categories of nature--plants, birds, water, etc. The prices were in pounds, so I knew it wasn't local, but I was unprepared for the package that arrived less than a week later.

It was wrapped in brown paper with a faint stripe like packages of yore, before bar codes became popular. It had a Royal Mail of Scotland sticker and a customs sticker signed by M. MacLeod of the Isle of Lewis. It made my husband nervous, as do all packages that bear customs labels and finish our address off with "United States of America." I was unable to reassure him as I still haven't done the pound to dollar conversion, but I have to say, it has been worth every shilling, ha'penny, etc. I went right to work on winding the skeins (Mara, Golden Plover, Kittiwake, Poppy, Red Rattle, Whin, Witchflower, Sundew, Summer Tide) and a few days later finished the bonnet. I found out that Alice Starmore achieves her effects by using several hues of a color that are gradually added and subtracted from the pattern. The process is addicting with both "one more row" and "one more color" keeping me going.

It was the perfect antidote to the cream knitting project that never ends, and the perfect project for the middle of winter. And whoever will end up wearing this bonnet can go ahead and be born--I'm ready for you!

Communication

It is almost too much of a good thing these days. When I was young and living overseas, the only practical mode of communciation was by letter. Telephone calls were saved for emergencies and bad news. When I was stranded alone in the Miami airport for three days at the age of 13, my parents were reduced to calling Braniff pilots for insider information on flights and passenger manifests. These days it would be infinitely easier to access flight information via the internet and probably impossible to find out if a minor child was aboard any of those planes. Of course, losing a minor child for three days is probably unthinkable for the airlines now, no matter how tall she is. Times change.

Anyway, back in the day (other than for emergency situations), one had time to reflect, to choose one's words, to limit the message to a narrow audience. Today the communicative landscape has changed so dramatically that we are drowning in words and pictures. Don't get me wrong: I am very happy that I can call my daughter in El Salvador and my son in Minneapolis and not think twice about either call. I can email them, and the rest of the family, at multiple email addresses, layered one on top of the other to escape the spam bandits. I can, as one connection who I have never met put it, "passively spy on my friends" (as well as their friends, to some extent) through Facebook. I have connected with high school classmates, with the interesting person I met on a flight to Madrid in 2003, with my children's friends, and with my peers and relatives. Never mind blogging, IM, Gmail Chat, and telephone texting and email interface--who has the time--and the manual dexterity--to keep up with that? Oh, and did I mention that all three phones in the immediate household work, until they run out of batteries?

This week I accidentally spilled news on Facebook, and my daughter emailed more news that prompted my son to leave the following status on Facebook: "Chris--Oh you didn't know?" I think really, the status should read "you didn't know immediately?"

Again, don't get me wrong. I love communication and there are individuals out there who will attest to that. But I think we are losing the subtlety, the exclusiveness and the individual tenor of our communications. We can stay in touch with everyone within three degrees of separation but we are becoming more generic in order to do it.

Here is the last bastion of individual and idiosyncratic communication. I am looking at a note, in handwriting, on the desk. It says:

The roots of love
What becomes of the broken hearted
Dr. Vu Tues 4pm??

What can I say? Excuse me, while I check my email and Facebook for recent updates.

Cheney

I didn't see this myself, but I understand Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair for the inauguration. Rumour has it he was trying to establish a Worker's Compensation claim before leaving office...