Life at the Narrow End of the Bell-Shaped Curve

That Resolution Thing

2010-01-01T20:16:00.004-05:00

People have been asking: Do you resolve? And yes I do. Here were my resolutions for 2009:

1. Eat better (e.g., less fat, less white flour, less sugar, more vegetables)
2. Lose weight
3. More exercise (thanks to Coffee Jones and Dino Burger for the Wii Fit we received last month -- it's really increased the exercise for these chilly days)
4. Make four quilts
5. Be a better quilt guild member
6. Get organized with my legal work: more filing, more scheduling and use of the calendar, and more preparation for specific issues.

It goes without saying that I should blog more!

Okay, so how did I do? Well, #1 is an ongoing process, but I definitely eat better than I did a year ago, so I'll give myself a check for that one. #2 is also an ongoing process, but I weigh 12 pounds less today than a year ago, and 20 pounds less than my high point for the year. Importantly, I've lost 10 pounds of the 45 I want to lose by next October 1. That's almost on track, but I can do better!

Exercise -- yes and no. Definitely can do better on that!

Quilting. Well, *sigh* this is continues to be my Achilles' heel. No, I was not a better guild member, and no, I didn't complete 4 quilts. I'm going to drop the guild member thing (I could whine about how far away the meetings are, but who am I kidding? I just don't want to), but I should still be able to make four quilts in a year. That resolution stays put until, damn it, I complete four quilts in a year!

Finally, I won't say my organizational skills improved over the year, but here's why I'm still going to give myself a check for #6: I used to be deficient in my brief writing, a vital skill for a litigator. Well, not this year! As a result of the tragic appeal (for which I wrote three complete briefs in six months) I improved several times over (even if I did lose the case). Ironically, I'm ending my legal career, but it's nice to know I actually tackled that demon to the ground.

Okay, how about for 2010?

Let's keep the first four in place:

Eat better (e.g., less fat, less white flour, less sugar, more vegetables)
Lose weight
More exercise
Make four quilts

And here are the new ones for 2010:
Complete, revise & polish two complete romance novels (not as daunting as it sounds; both are well underway)
Do all that I can do to get published. (See how I didn't resolve to get published? But I play a large part in that, and I resolve to do everything within my power to market myself as a writer and my novels as publishable.)
Be more confident

Okay, so that last one might seem like a ringer, seeing as how I don't come across as shy, awkward, or lacking in self-assurance. But I've been in some situations recently where my first instinct was to run and hide. Well, y'know what? I ended up handling myself just fine, and I'm actually proud of myself for the way I got on. It's not my actions that need adjusting, it's my attitude about myself.

So: scorecard for 2009? Three thumbs up, two thumbs down, and one thumb sideways. Which, frankly, is not too bad. The only resolutions I "broke" were the quilting ones, and while that's disappointing, it's not the end of the world.

P.S. Oh, and did you notice that unnumbered resolution, about blogging more? Well, here -- no, I did NOT blog more here at Narrow End. Nor on the quilt or knitting blogs. (Bad Magdalen) But at my new blog, Promantica? I kick ass.

The Elephant in the Room

2009-12-01T13:00:00.002-05:00

My brothers called me "Ten-Ton Twinkletoes" when I was a child. I was fat then. I'm fat now. About once a decade I would lose a significant amount of weight, then gain it back -- not exactly the traditional format of yo-yo dieting, but also not evidence that I ever really wanted to be thinner.

But some things have changed in my life, and today (Starman and I weigh ourselves and the dog -- yes, the dog! -- on the first of every month) my weight is just below a really (really) round number. I weigh less today than I have in 15 years.

Excuse me while I stop to answer some FAQs. Yes, it is all about nutrition and exercise. Yes, portion control is key. Yes, it is a lifestyle change, not a diet. Yes, I'm taking it slowly: about 4 pounds/month. Yes, I have a specific goal: to lose 45 pounds by next October. Oh, and one more thing: I'm not taking any "herbal supplements" or the like, but I was put on an antidepressant earlier in the year that specifically helps with controlling urges. That's helped a lot. Talk to your doctor before beginning any weight loss or exercise program...

Okay, where was I? Right: weigh less now than I have since 1994. Here's what happened with my weight loss in the 90s. I was in law school at a relatively old age (36 when I matriculated) and I got it in my head that I needed to lose weight before interviewing. Now, I want to make clear that with every single one of my Weight Loss of the Decade experiences, at most I was going from "fatter" to "less fat." I have never, in my memory, been anywhere near "thin" or even "normal." The weird part of that being that my parents were "normal" as children and young adults, and their parents were as well. My aunts and uncles: normal, and their children: normal. So it's a familial thing, but just my immediate family. (I'm clearly the "morbidly obese" one among my siblings; the other three are, at most, overweight.)

Anyway, in the 90s I devised an eating plan I could stick with (low fat, but with lots of white-flour pasta, as I recall) and got down to around 20 pounds lighter than I am right now. Then my brother got married, and as I'm really quite allergic (i.e., I have an involuntary but negative reaction) to my siblings, that scuttled my weight loss. I can actually remember the Dunkin' Donuts "Boston Kreme" doughnut that signaled the change from weight loss to weight gain.

I've known for a long, long time that my weight is connected to my damaging childhood. Not only is overeating "feeding the hungry heart," as Geneen Roth put it, but being fat was like an instant invisibility cloak. I know: weird, hunh. As a very large woman (not only fat but tall as well), I'm hard to miss but easy to look past. That's always suited me pretty well. I didn't much want people looking at me, or perhaps a better way to express that is to say that I was used to people not seeing me. In the manner of damaged children everywhere, I've been able to continue my childhood experiences into adulthood with a few additions. In my case, a whole lot of fat.

I lost weight in the 80s, then had an affair with a married man (where the punch line was him cheating on both his wife and his "regular" girlfriend by sleeping with me), and regained the weight. I lost weight in the 70s, had a family friend say, "Wow, I never knew you had breasts," and regained the weight. I even lost weight in the 60s, when my parents sent me to a diet camp at age 10. I lost 28 pounds (but still not "thin" even at that age), and when my older sister saw me she said, "Jesus Christ," to which our uncle, an Episcopal priest, replied, "No, that's your sister." I regained the weight.

Other than the weight loss at age 10, where frankly my parents could (and should) have done a better job of learning how to manage the family's nutrition (to be fair, I would probably have still found a way to regain the weight, but I wouldn't have had so much help), I take full responsibility for every failed diet and every weight gain. As the bumper sticker says: I AM A VOLUNTEER NO ONE FORCES ME TO OVEREAT.

What's different now? Maturity, I guess. My body can't handle the extra weight now; at my last doctor's visit, I was pre-diabetic, which is an actual diagnosis. Taking the weight off -- and it doesn't have to be all the weight; studies show that even a 10% drop can make a huge difference in one's health -- may well reverse that trend. So I watch my sugar intake, try to eat more whole grains but less of everything else, and walk the dog daily. At least I try to walk the dog daily; I probably succeed 4-5 times a week.

About that really (really) round number I dropped below today? I remember the first time I weighed that really (really) round number. I was 17, I think, and still in high school. I've weighed less and I've weighed more, but until today I never thought, "Not seeing that number again." And today I know I won't see it again. Because whatever kept me fat is being dismantled. I've found the antidote for my allergy to my siblings (I just don't contact them -- and they've never contacted me to ask why), I'm feeding my heart with stuff other than food, and I allowing people to see me. I will have to continue the trend; it's not like my anxieties won't recur. But it's a good start.

Back When I Worked in an Office...

2009-11-21T12:15:00.001-05:00

A long, long time ago, I had a job in a governmental agency. There was a single men's room and a single ladies' room on that floor, and roughly 50 employees. Now, I have no idea if gender politics have improved in the past 20 years, but back then it was possible for a man in the workplace to treat other men differently than how he treated his female co-workers.

[I'll post another day about how women can treat women in the workplace -- gender politics are different but not necessarily better when only women are involved.]

Now I share the fascination with urinals. Keep in mind that indoor plumbing is a relatively modern innovation and wasn't widely available until the late 19th century or early 20th century. The urinal was invented (or at least patented) in 1866. That's smack in the middle of the Victorian era -- weren't they supposed to be all uptight, sexually? So why don't urinals have more modesty? Whether men look at each other's equipment is a completely separate question from why they even have the option.

Back to my agency office. I finally arrived at a theory of gender politics. In a stable office place, meaning one with a low turnover of personnel, it stands to reason that all the men have at some time peed next to each other. I figure the subconscious is a fascinating force of nature, so combined with the powers of peripheral vision, it stands to reason that while men may think they're not checking out whether the guy at the next urinal is bigger or smaller, after a while, they probably have some subconscious notions of where they rank in the (cough) pecking order.

And then it hit me: the man who has a good idea that his is the smallest? -- that's the guy most likely to treat his female colleagues with contempt and condescension. Because even if it's the smallest, at least he's got one! By extension, the guy who is particularly fair and treats women with appropriate equality and respect? He's got the biggest. Stands to reason -- he's got no reason to make some fallacious argument (even subconsciously) about the value in the workplace of having an external male member.

I've posited this theory on a few occasions. I worked one summer at the local energy company in an office where the women were mostly support staff. When I explained my theory, they knew immediately who had the largest equipment and who had the smallest! They were quite happy with that insight into the office politics, as it explained a lot of otherwise mysterious behavior.

Elsewhere, I've been met with disbelief and resistance. And I'll admit, my theory is entirely theoretical. But now I have the advantage of some investigation, albeit highly anecdotal. Check out Christine Kelly's piece in Vice: Men & Urinals: An Investigation. In addition to being delightfully funny, it answers some questions. I did not know, for example, that men instinctively leave an empty urinal between them and the next guy down. (Akin to the empty movie theater seat maneuver, thus avoiding the awkward competition with a stranger for the shared armrest.) On the other hand, nothing in this article disproves my theory that men subconsciously check size and relativity.

Now I just need Ms. Kelly to investigate another pet theory of mine. Supposedly 5% of all adult men have some non-standard sexual predilection. So, in an office with 100 men, can you figure out which one likes to wear women's underwear, which one likes to be dominated, etc. on the basis of how they behave in the workplace? (It's a statistical fallacy to assume any group of 100 men will include precisely one practitioner of each predilection, but then it would be an equal fallacy to assume it includes none. They can't all work someplace else!)

And yes, there is a reason why I don't work in an office anymore. But no, it didn't involve any allegations that I promoted a hostile workplace. I just like to make sense of my environment.

My Erstwhile BFF, the Beauty Queen

2009-11-12T23:07:00.009-05:00

Katiebabs wrote a lovely post about why she writes, and her reminiscences about adolescence reminded me of a great story from my junior & senior high school life. [I should note that Katiebabs has blogged about how intensely abusive and difficult a specific adolescent relationship was for her. I don't want to dishonor her honesty by not acknowledging that it's an act of bravery to write about it. Nothing in my story is meant to diminish what she has survived.]

Anyway, I wrote a comment to her writing post that was probably way too much information, which may be why Blogger ate it. At least I think Blogger ate it, because it hasn't shown up. (She might have her comments set as reserved for administrative review, which is fine.)

But then I thought -- Hey, that's actually a great story, and so precisely right for a blog about being Narrow End! Because, I'm telling you, everything and everyone in this story is Narrow End.

When I went from elementary school to junior high school (it's a middle school now, but in 1967 it was a junior high school), I was a tall, fat, smart, lonely girl. Oh, and young; I must have been 11 in 7th grade. I have almost no memory of who my teachers were, or what I studied. But I remember Susan. She was in my homeroom, and she was very pretty. And had lots of clothes. No, I mean LOTS of clothes.

From the first day of school, Susan wore a different outfit -- a completely different outfit, not mix-and-match -- every single day for eight weeks. I believe I counted 42 different outfits before she had to repeat one. I remember only one of them: a skirt & vest in pinwale corduroy trimmed with embroidered ribbons, vaguely Tyrolean or maybe Scandinavian. (Susan was big on her Swedish heritage.) Perhaps because I was brimming over with admiration for this unique creature, we became friends. Best friends. Sleep-over friends. I can remember her bedroom, with its two twin beds decked out in pale pink nylon ruffles, her brothers Wayne and Fippy (Philip, but as the "baby" in the family he had special baby-talk nickname, including, poor kid, "Fipper-doo"), and her mother. (Tellingly, Susan's father has left no impression on me. I suspect he wasn't home much; his wife made it a very kid-centric household.)

Susan took lessons at the local modeling school. She was pretty in her way; she looked a lot like Susan Dey in her Partridge Family days. At some point, Susan told me that the woman who ran the modeling school had an in with some guy (she mentioned his name, which was of those three-first-names names, like John Robert Benjamin, or something) who was going to be able to help Susan to win the Miss USA beauty pageant.

Now, I might have been the worshipful acolyte, but even I took that bit of "I know a guy who knows a guy . . . " with a grain of salt. After all, Susan was 13 or 14 at the time -- way too young to be that connected. Right?

As I recall, we were best friends until mid-way through 8th grade when she dumped me and took up with some other acolyte, and then the two of them were mean to me. I actually don't remember the meanness, and I suspect it made very little impression on me. (An ironic benefit of having a very very unpleasant family of origin: no one else can really measure up.) After that, I didn't see much of Susan. We were in different classes in high school.

Well, I should be clear: I didn't see much of her in person. But, as fate should have it (and sometimes fate is a very odd duck), I just happened to be watching television late on a Saturday night in 1973 when the local NBC affiliate ran the Miss New York State pageant. (In case anyone doesn't know or has forgotten: Miss America is the older beauty pageant and has a talent portion; Vanessa Williams won Miss America but had to forfeit her crown when it was discovered that she'd posed for nude photos. Interestingly, she was the first black woman to be Miss America, and the first runner up who replaced her was also black. Miss USA -- the pageant my erstwhile friend was trying for -- didn't have a talent portion. The reigning Miss USA was our entrant in the Miss Universe pageant. I believe Donald Trump now owns the rights to Miss USA and Miss Universe.)

So I'm watching this rather low-tech videotape of the state pageant, and there's Susan, in the ubiquitous bathing suit & sash. How surreal, and yet -- when the credit crawl ran after she'd won -- how easily explained. Because John David Henry (or whatever) was listed as the Executive Producer of the pageant.

(As a lawyer, and just to be fair here, I need to say that I don't know that a) the fix was in for Susan, or b) that she wasn't winning fair and square, or c) that John William Bennett was pulling any strings. I just know that she mentioned the name in 1968 and he was the state pageant's executive producer in 1973. Any conclusion you wish to infer is entirely voluntary.)

Okay, so she's Miss New York State, and that means she's going to be a real live contestant in the Miss USA pageant. This was a big deal in my household because, although no one else watched beauty pageants (we were all good women's libbers in my home), even my parents and brother watched this one because they actually knew Susan. And, let me tell you, explaining to my parents what was going on was totally other-worldly. (I have no idea why I watched beauty pageants, but I did. Probably stemmed from my interest in paper-dolls...)

I must now apologize, because I'm about to be a little bit catty. All the young women who participated in that pageant, and in every one I ever watched, were very pretty. But I happened to know -- because I'd seen her in the halls of our high school -- that Susan was wearing a fall. (Anyone else remember them? The predecessors to hair extensions: fake hair attached to a comb that went at the crown of the head and then your hair would be teased and smoothed over the top of the fall and blended in to look like it was all natural.) I did think that was a bit cheesy -- and I didn't even know about the spray adhesive and other gizmos pageant girls used back then.

Okay, cattiness over.

So first all 50 girls come out in state-themed costumes. I suspect Susan's was the Statue of Liberty (because what else?), but I do recall that Miss Illinois was dressed like a Chicago gangster from the Prohibition era. Think pin-striped suit jacket with wide lapels and show-girl stockings in place of trousers. (In my memory of the parade of states, she was carrying a fake tommy-gun, but I suspect that's just my personal embellishment.) We were charmed by that bit of whimsy.

If you've ever watched a beauty pageant, you know that all 50 girls come out once or twice, but for most of them, their fate is sealed by the time the show starts. Bob Barker was the MC for that pageant, and he announced the 12 semi-finalists, who then wore relatively decorous one-piece bathing suits and then, later, pouffy gowns. (In the 70s, it was all chiffon; sequins came later.) Lo and behold, Susan was one of the 12 semi-finalists! That meant my dad had to keep watching. (Seriously, if she'd been knocked out early, he was so outta there.)

More beauty pageantry, and then we had five finalists, and lo! Susan was among their number. So was Amanda Jones, Miss Illinois, the gangster we liked. They got stuffed into a soundproof booth and pulled out one at a time for the Big Question that would elicit the answers upon which the judges would decide who should win. The stage had an apron of sorts: a semi-circular walkway with the judges and audience in front and the orchestra in a pit between the walkway and the main stage. It was on this walkway that Bob Barker had each finalist stand to answer the question. After her answer, she then went back to those individual round disks they had to stand on.

The question was: If you had to go forward or backward in time, which era would you pick and why?

Contestant 1 came out and said she would pick the Civil War because there was such a great sense of brotherhood then.

Contestant 2 said she would go into the future because America was getting better and better.

Contestant 3 (Amanda Jones) said she would pick the Renaissance because there was such an explosion of artistic and intellectual accomplishment. (We all cheered that answer!)

Contestant 4 was Susan. She joined Bob on the walkway, and he asked her the question, "If you had to go forward or backward in time, which era would you pick and why?" She paused, and then replied that she'd stay in the present because America was so wonderful. Bob laughed, reminded her that the question required her to go forward or backward, but not to go too far backward or she'd fall into the orchestra pit! So she regrouped and answered that she would go forward because America was just getting better and better.

Contestant 5 said she would go back to the 1940s because the clothes were so interesting.

Here's the video of who won. (Sorry for the crappy quality, but it's worth watching it for the wonderful reaction of Amanda Jones.) Susan was interviewed on local radio the next day and when asked about losing, she said she knew Amanda was going to win because Amanda was on the middle disk, and the girl in the middle always wins.

Guys, I couldn't make this stuff up, but you can see why it is I remember all this even 36 years later.

I was fascinated by Amanda Jones (my heroine!) for a while. Supposedly, she'd entered the pageant on a dare from her boyfriend, and because there might be scholarship money.

As for Susan, I saw her on the day of our high school graduation. She was snippy, and I may have been snippy back. (Sorry, Susan.) She did enter the Miss New York State pageant for Miss America, but her lack of a talent may have hurt her. She also entered something connected to Miss World, I believe, and also didn't win. I think I learned later that one of her prizes from one of these pageants was a cruise on a Greek liner, and that she married the captain in a cave somewhere in the Greek islands.

Here's the thing, though -- she was just as narrow-end as I am. I mean, really: 42 completely distinct outfits for a 12-year-old? That's some weird parenting going on. I suspect if I could talk to her now, she might well have some stories of how difficult she found it to fit in.

What I Was Thinking About While I Was Mowing . . .

2009-11-11T14:36:00.000-05:00

We live on 24 acres; half is wooded, half isn't. Of the 12 acres that's not woods, the house, barn, garden & lawn occupy two acres. The other ten are meadows, mostly, and mowing them is my responsibility. I have a Ford New Holland 1620 tractor and two mowers: a flail mower that does a slightly finer job (for the south meadow, which is between the house and the main road), and a brush hog for the rough cut that the middle and north meadows get.

The south meadow (pictured at left -- the tiny strip of gold between our lawn and the trees & cow barn in the distance) gets mowed every year, although we're trying the approach of mowing it only once in the autumn, after a killing frost, to encourage wildflowers. The middle and north meadows are bigger, aren't seen by passers-by, and don't always get mown. I know I last mowed the whole property in 2005, but some bits might have gotten done since then.

When not mown, of course, things grow -- predominantly goldenrod and milk weed. We also have a lot of wild roses, which are a poor excuse for the genus Rosa: gangly foliage with more stems than leaves, very prickly, and negligible flowers for about a day & a half in the spring. Blink and you've missed them blooming for the year. Admittedly they can have pretty colored stalks -- reds and even purple! -- but that's far too little value for the pain, literally, they can inflict. (On the plus side, they make a lovely crunchy noise when the brush hog goes over them -- very visceral and satisfying!) If left long enough, the meadows would give way to brush, and then to small bushes and trees (hawthorn and buckthorn, for example) and then to larger trees. Just like we learned in 8th grade science.

Okay, all of that description is to provide the context for what I was thinking about on the tractor this morning, as I did the last bit of the north meadow. Because I hadn't mowed that bit for a while, various small mammals had made burrows and warrens amid the plant life. I know because I can see the holes and even watch as the animals scurry away from the tractor. During a previous mowing of the north meadow, I watched a wild turkey think that if it flew into the stuff I hadn't mowed yet, I wouldn't see it. Silly turkey. On that same occasion, I was working in a particularly lush bit where the plants were almost as tall as I was on the tractor when a buck -- with points and everything! -- leaped out of the brush and with two bounds was over the fence and gone. Incredibly dramatic and just a little bit unnerving.

I don't want to kill any of these animals, although I recognize that by destroying the foliage, I'm effectively destroying their habitat. But I get to do this because -- well, because I can. In human terms, I own the land and that ownership gives me the right to do with the land pretty much what I want. But until I do mow it, that meadow belongs to the animals, and they can do what they want with it. So the real reason I can mow down their habitat is because there's nothing living there that is big enough or scary enough to stop me. Not the deer, and certainly not the bunnies. There is a bear that wanders through our neck of the woods, so to speak; our neighbors have seen it and even taken its picture. I thought about that bear while I was mowing. It might be big enough to scare me if I was just standing around, but on the tractor, I'm sure to be even bigger and scarier to it. Particularly if I raise up the front-end loader!

In effect, the tractor makes me big & scary enough to face down any animal I might encounter. Which is what guns do, isn't it? And suddenly I understood a bit better the reason why the rationale for gun control is difficult to argue to gun owners. Their guns make them feel bigger & scarier, even if they are never likely to face anything particularly threatening. That feeling of safety and security is part of our reptile brains, and thus less susceptible to reason and logic. If I thought my tractor was the only thing that kept me safe from bears, I wouldn't want to give it up either -- and no amount of logic would convince me to.

Here's the thing: all this tells us is that we're animals. And we are. This instinct to be big & scary, and to own the equipment to accomplish that, is not a rationally defensible position. It's not rationally defensible when we humans buy SUVs, which have poor safety ratings but make the driver feel bigger & scarier. It's not rationally defensible when the issue is owning guns. Most of us don't need a gun to defend us against predators, but gun owners really think they do. Our day-to-day lives don't include encounters with scary animals -- including scary humans -- to justify rationally owning a gun. And if you think actually need to kill a deer to survive, then I would suggest you take the money you spent on that rifle and plant a subsistence garden in your backyard.

I actually feel more sympathy with gun owners. Not that does me much good. I doubt there's a card-carrying member of the NRA (and I'm sure I know a few) who would admit that the only reason he or she owns a gun is because it makes them feel like a bigger & scarier animal in a world with big & scary animals. So the argument continues. Maybe they're right and I'm wrong. But my tractor tells me otherwise.

Who's YOUR Hero?

2009-10-28T11:09:00.000-04:00

(And is he anything like the man (men?) in your life?)

I participated in Jessica's envigorating discussion about Anne Stuart's Black Ice. Most commenters like or love the book, and many specifically like Bastien, the rather morally dubious hero. (He's a Jason Bourne type, trained to go undercover, killing as necessary. He's also got extraordinary control over his physical reactions -- all his physical reactions...!) There were a few dissenters, and as one of their number, I'd like to think we joined in the exchange with the right spirit of respect and debate.

Something the wonderful Sherry Thomas wrote got me thinking. She praised the hero in E.M. Hull's classic, The Sheik and said that she (Sherry, this is) would love to shag the Sheik. Interesting. I love that book, which I've owned for decades. I haven't re-read it for a long time, but I know what I loved about it 20 years ago was the despair the heroine experiences when she thinks she will have to spend the rest of her life away from this compelling but difficult man she's fallen in love with. (According to Wikipedia, Hull may have written the book while her husband was serving in WWI. I wonder if her fears fueled the feelings in the book.) Of course, there's an HEA. That's what makes the despair emotional porn, and not just excruciating.

But would I want to shag the Sheik? Um, nope. I pretty sure I wouldn't. (I'm suspending completely the question of whether the Sheik would want to shag me. It's safe to say the answer to that question is No.)

So who would I want to shag? Which is to say, which fictional hero would I want to fall in love with, have a lasting relationship with and, okay, shag -- ?

The Beast. From almost any of the Beauty and the Beast versions. (Except for Judith Ivory's version, where it was more a case of disguise than actual disfigurement.) And most specifically, the Beast of Belleterre, Mary Jo Putney's titular hero from her novella, which I have in A Victorian Christmas. (I think it's been published elsewhere as well.)

The Beast, as a hero, is someone hiding from life, strong and vital but convinced that he's right to keep out of society. The heroine is thrust into his well-ordered and limited life and changes everything. The experience is catalytic for both of them: she falls in love at the same time she's struggling with the isolation surrounding her beloved, and he's given his first glimpse of a life with another human being in it -- a vision that is as seductive as it seems impossible.

In the fairy tale, the beast is hideous because of a spell cast by a wicked something or other. But if you like the Disney animated version, chances are you've thought as I have that the Beast is so much more interesting than the rather bland, generic prince he's restored to at the end. Okay, so that Beast is perhaps more bestial than one could comfortably accommodate (and it only now occurs to me that Bastian is more than a bit bestial in some portions of Black Ice), but he's charming in his diffidence in ways you just know that Prince Charming isn't. And he needs Belle -- and isn't that a wonderful feeling, to be needed?

In The Beast of Belleterre, the hero is scarred from a childhood fire. He's made a life for himself (and some equally scarred animals) but he never expects to marry, have children, or enjoy any companionship beyond that which he's paid for in the past. He does marry as an act of mercy, but he's convinced himself that he must not let his bride see him as he really is. (He hides in a voluminous cloak.) But his bride, while grateful and biddable, isn't as scared of him as he imagines. Their conflict grows in perhaps too extreme a manner, but it's a fairy tale -- and for emotional porn, I couldn't ask for a better HEA. I cry every time!

Back to Sherry and her Sheik. I was thinking about this issue of what sort of hero we're attracted to -- the dark & twisty undercover operative, the dashing & dangerous pirate, the saintly/good/smart guy who turns out to be surprisingly uninhibited in bed, the millionaire needing only the love he can't buy, etc., etc. -- when I realized that there was something significant in my pick as the ONE I would want to love.

Because that's who I married. Twice!

My first husband, pictured below on the left, had been living a relatively quiet life in Hampstead Heath, part of North London, when I swept back into his life. We'd known each other for over 25 years (we met as teenagers when I was sent at age 15 to care for an epileptic great aunt in nearby St. John's Wood) and neither of us had married. I'd fallen in love with him when we were 24 but there was no way either of us could have sustained a relationship back then. (We both come from a long line of late-bloomers.) Hub 1.0 was then, and still is, the family of my heart; I love him today precisely the way I loved him on the day we go married, and I probably always will.

So why two husbands? Well, that is part of the magic of my first marriage -- it made each of us stronger, better, healthier people. And Hub 1.0 was ready to lead his own life, make his own choices, etc. (I like to think I'm not too oppressively dominating a personality, but I'll admit that it was frequently easier for both of us to let me take the lead in life. Understandable, but not optimal.) Coincidentally, I was getting friendly with Starman, pictured on the right.

(For newbies to this blog, my husband is easily identified elsewhere, particularly as "Crosswordman," but I started calling him Starman because his pseudonyms for the cryptic crosswords he created were the names of stars, e.g., Arcturus and Mira, and since marriage we've set puzzles together as a twin star, Aldebaran. Also, we love the Karen Allen/Jeff Bridges movie. At least one of my friends was convinced she'd have trouble thinking of him as anything but Starman...)

Starman is truly a Beast-style hero. He lived alone, didn't get out much, and had even retired from the computer consulting work he'd done in London so that he didn't have to mingle with people. All of a sudden, this American woman was telephoning him, chatting about Woody Allen movies and music. (I was looking for a best friend -- but that's a very long story for another blog post.) I suspect some part of me recognized some part of him, and once he'd satisfied himself that I wasn't going to be a stalker/serial killer, he was eager to have someone to talk to.

Of course he doesn't look like a Beast. Neither of them do. But the Beast conflict is all in the head, anyway -- that belief that he's better off keeping himself to himself. And both my English husbands had that going on. What I brought to them, other than sufficient smarts to do learn how to do British-style cryptic crosswords, was a loving heart and the ability to show them another way of living. It doesn't seem to be enough to make either one of them love me, but it clearly worked. And in the case of Starman, I clearly have the magic woo-woo he was looking for. Go figure.

So, here are the questions: If you had to pick a single hero or hero type, who or what would it be? And is that type anything like the man (men) in your life?

My Winsor List

2009-10-21T17:14:00.004-04:00

Jessica at Racy Romance Reviews invited us all to post our top 16 romance novels in honor of Kathleen Winsor, author of Forever Amber. Here are mine, in no particular order. I've provided a little commentary on each one, partly because I love them all so much, and also because not everyone likes the same things, but it's always fun to learn about new books. And because I'm old, so some of my choices are way before everyone's time! Oh, and one more thing. Sarah at MonkeyBearReviews had a quiz asking which was better, the 90s or the 2000s for romances. Well, I don't "do" paranormals, so you'll see a distinct bias for books published in the 70s, 80s and 90s. No werewolves or vamps here!

1. The Beast of Belleterre (short story by Mary Jo Putney)

I know MJP isn't everyone's favorite author, but I really think this might be *the* book I'd clutch to my bosom as the fire department made me leave the house. It's a novella based on Beauty & the Beast (my favorite fairy tale) in which the hero is so disfigured he hides from everyone. He reluctantly marries the delicate and talented heroine to save her from her brutish father but then can't bring himself even to let her see him. It's not flawless; it's basically backstory, interior monologues and damned little actual interaction between the characters before the end, but it is emotional porn at its finest. Neither of these people thinks that life should be very good to them, and so their expectations are so low that it's hard to see how they'll work their way out of the sadness. But they do.

2. To Love and to Cherish (the first of the Wyckerly trilogy by Patricia Gaffney)

More emotional porn (a theme with me, I'll admit) but done so well and so beautifully written that I actually lent it to my non-romance reading mother. I re-read it recently, and was impressed all over again. It comes the closest, I think, of conveying to the reader that effervescence of falling in love -- passing messages, seeing the beloved unexpectantly and feeling your breath catch, etc. Then it's sad, then scary, then difficult, and by the time they end up together, they -- and we -- are exhausted.

3. Pretty much anything by Jane Feather

I know, this is a cop out -- pick a book, already! But she's so consistently good that no one of her books rises inexorably to the surface. I like Vixen (from her V series) because of a particularly exquisite sex scene (go read it yourself; your results might differ), but is it her best romance? On the other hand, I like the Bride trilogy, set in Edwardian England. She does a great job of conveying that interplay of stuffy Victorian restrictions and taboos with the nascent feminist movement. So those books make you think: how can women consciously trying to make lives for themselves fall in love and still maintain the ideals they set out with? Chances are, if I reread all of JF's books from the beginning, I'd find one that excels, but that's not happening tonight.

4. Any of Julia Spencer-Fleming – or better yet, the single romance you’d get by cutting & splicing all the scenes of Russ and Clare together and their relationship's evolution.

No, not a cop out this time. I like the mysteries just fine, but what I had to re-read immediately was the romance that develops over time in the so-far-seven books in the series. If you don't know these books, start with In the Bleak Midwinter and work through all seven. They are that good, both technically (I think she does the best job with point-of-view) and emotionally. There's not much romance in each book, but what's there, to quote Spencer Tracy, is cherce.

5. Cassandra by Chance Betty Neels

A Mills & Boon/Harlequin series romance from the early 70s, and my favorite of all the Betty Neels books. Hers was a very limited format: Dutch doctor hero (much later in her career, some English heros were permitted), virginal English nurse/dogsbody heroine. Heroine was more likely than not plain ("mousy") but always a lovely spirit. Look, I can't defend these to anyone; you either like them or you don't. But if you like one, you'll like them all, and there are LOTS of them! Runner-up from her backlist is Fate is Remarkable, which has a very satisfying denouement. (Warning: really hackney plot devices at work here: The Other Woman, Misunderstandings, Lack of Communication. You wouldn't want to BE these characters, but *sigh* I love visiting them.)

6. Imprudent Lady Joan Smith

I haven't re-read this one in a long time, but I remember it as being LOL funny. (See, also, Talk of the Town) Regencies, no sex (now, isn't it extraordinary that we have to specify that for a historical period where chastity was so important even the appearance of impropriety was fatal?), but wonderful characters and stories. And seriously funny bits.

7. High Garth – Mira Stables

Vaguely Early Victorian; there's a minor bit about the railroads being built, but it's mostly a domestic romance about a man struggling to make a small holding in Yorkshire (or thereabouts) profitable. After the hothouse bouquets that are today's historical romances, this is like a buttercup: simple and simply perfect. Honorable mention: Miss Mouse (or maybe Lissa, or Honey Pot -- ?). Oh, I don't think she wrote a bad book.

8. Her Man of Affairs -- Elizabeth Mansfield

There's a real class issue here, and for once the hero isn't magically discovered to be the long-lost Duke of Whatevershire. The titular hero is the Scottish clerk who's charged with straightening out the heroine's finances. Lots of lovely Scottish words -- it's hard not to want to use a couple when you've finished the book -- and a genuine conflict that isn't very easily resolved.

9. His Lordship’s Mistress – Joan Wolf

More Emo-Porn. I'll acknowledge that the world is rather sanitized and perfect in Wolf's universe: the heroine is the most courageous person ever, the hero is beautiful, yadda yadda. But oh, my word, when the problems arise, they feel very real. Which of course makes the resolution all the more satisfying.

10. These Old Shades – Georgette Heyer

Probably the grandmother of romances that ask the question, "What happens when the most exalted and self-composed, not to mention powerful, hero meets his match?!" Here it's the Duke of Avon and a French waif/gamine named Leonie. There's a lot of complicated stuff in 18th Century England and France and some rather over-the-top secondary characters but a charming HEA, and yes, some emo-porn. Don't miss the sequel, Devil's Cub, where the heir to Avon meets his match! A very different dynamic; you can't say Heyer was pulling a Betty Neels with the same characters in mildly different books...

11. Sweet Everlasting – Patricia Gaffney

I had to look this one up on Amazon to be sure I knew the title, and I noticed someone commenting that the heroine's extreme other-worldliness and innocence made parts of this romance seem a tad pedophilic. Odd, I'd not thought of that (I'd have indicted These Old Shades or Jane Feather's Vixen before this book), but seeing it written out gave me a moment's pause. At some point, I have to admit that my personal backstory does affect how I feel about it, so sure -- the extraordinarily young-in-spirit heroine is perhaps not wise enough to the world to fall for the hero, but she does and that's really the basis of the challenge they need to meet. Can I say every one should love it? No. Do I love it? Yes.

12. Kiss an Angel – Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Here's another one I'm not sure I can defend. Spoiled heroine gets her comeuppence at the hands of a seemingly cruel "husband." In the wrong hands, that set up never gets out of the "get a protective order" range, but Phillips presents the heroine as needing some tough love. I love a lot of SEP's books, but this one vibrates in a way that others don't.

13. Dream a Little Dream – SEP

My favorite of her Chicago Stars (a fictional football team) books; this one has the heroine really, really down on her luck but refusing to accept charity. Again, in real life her son should be in foster care and the county agencies should be getting her some housing and a job just until she can get it together to get her son back, but in Rom County, all is well -- the hero is emotionally wounded and so they can just about tolerate being in each other's company. I do like it when people rescue themselves by loving others. (One of my favorite movies: Pretty Woman. Say no more.)

14 Daddy Long-Legs -- Jean Webster

This was written almost 100 years ago, but it's a wonderful book. It would be labeled YA now; it's about an orphan with red hair (no, not Anne of Green Gables, but close) who gets to go to college because a trustee provides her with an anonymous scholarship. It's an epistolary novel but I like reading people's letters, and the device pretty much works until the very end, when -- face it, we shouldn't have to read about a kissy-kissy love scene in a letter. It's also a fascinating portrait of an American girls' college like Smith or Vassar back when educating women was not considered entirely respectable.

15a. Maddie’s Justice – Leslie LaFoy

Someone recently asked for suggestions for Western romances. Here's my pick (if anyone's still interested), and I don't think anyone else suggested LaFoy. Her novels run the gamut from hockey-themed contemporary to a range of historicals. This one is particularly good with a beleagured heroine (convicted of murder, wrongly of course) and hero (charged with transporting her until he discovers someone's trying to kill them both) and the slow way they learn to trust each other.

15b. Lynn Kerstan

This isn't meant to be a cheat, although it will look that way. I can't pick any specific one of Kerstan's early Regencies, but they're all good. And I think of her and LaFoy as being in the same boat. Sure, I have favorite LaVyrle Spencer romances, and Linda Howard, and so forth, but those are the big names. I want to recommend authors like Kerstan and LaFoy -- both names that I still instinctively look for in the big box bookstore even if their very best work is already been published.

16. The Rainbow Season – Candace Camp aka Lisa Gregory

I have a soft spot for Camp; she's a lawyer too (or, if she's let her license lapse, then technically she's "trained as a lawyer") and I've enjoyed her contemporaries (as Kristin James), her historicals (as Lisa Gregory) and her more recent books as herself. But this one stands alone -- a book I've reread so many times I could almost quote entire passages. Hero and Heroine get married (forget why, but it hardly matters) and he's on hard times. But he works really hard to be a good farmer and husband; these people enjoy what seems to be a relatively happy married life. Which means the conflict is a bit strained, but who cares -- they triumph over the harsh weather conditions, the drought, and what little misunderstanding there was between them. And live happily ever after. You just know it!

A Cranky Reader's Manifesto

2009-07-11T02:25:00.004-04:00

{But first a word from our sponsor: You know, amazingly Blogger does not actually close down a blog for inadequate postage. Really. But I feel bad about this blog in particular because Sarah T. of Monkey Bear Reviews actually has it up on her blog list, and that's got to feel like a swiz if someone clicks on it and sees that I post once a month. So I'll try to do better. Honest. With the accent on the word "try."}

My backstory.

I was reading romances back before they were sold conveniently in drug stores and the like. I remember reading horrible romances out of the library as a child, books with titles like, "Cherry Stone, Career Nurse." When I discovered Anne of Green Gables, I read the entire series, but I reread the volume where Anne finally falls in love -- or rather, finally acknowledges that she's in love -- with Gilbert Blythe. Never mind that Anne was a much more interesting character as a rambunctious ten-year-old with better intentions than common sense; I only cared that she and Gilbert finally declare their love for each other. *sigh*

Somehow I discovered Harlequin Romances, which back then -- and we really are back in the Middle Ages here, people: 1967? 1969? Let's call it A Long Time Ago and get back to the point -- were all reprints of Mills & Boon romances published in England. As such, all the authors were from the British Empire: English, Scottish, South African, or Australian. I knew all their names, and while some of the books were forgettable, some were the opposite. I recently used Amazon.com's awesome used-book facility to get a copy of Roumelia Lane's Terminus Tehran, a book so memorable that I can recite the plot elements even now, more than 35 years after the last time I read it. (What? No, I haven't read the used copy I bought. I just like knowing that I can!)

In high school, I once got the only A in a history class because a romance novel had some discussion of a Praxiteles sculpture of Aphrodite, and I was the only one in the class who knew that. In college, I majored in Philosophy. My aunt (who had been a Philosophy major as well) commented that I was the only person she knew who had Emanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on the same book shelf as a Barbara Cartland romance.

No surprise, therefore, that I eventually thought I wanted to write romances. Never mind that I'd never taken an English class beyond high school. Never mind that I knew nothing about plot structure, point-of-view, story arcs, character development, or even what made a romance good. I don't recall thinking, "How hard can it be?" but if I had, I soon learned: it was hard. When I heard of a friend's mother, who'd made lampshades out of her rejection letters, I was empathetic. My mother told me that her father described it as "ordeal by market." What a wonderful phrase.

Okay, so I burned my first romance. I suspect I threw away at least one more. I might have a full-length manuscript on 3.5" floppy disks someplace, but I'm hardly going to tear the house apart looking for them. Bad is bad, people, and I wrote some pretty bad stuff.

All of that is to humble myself before I write what I am about to write. I am a cranky romance reader. It's not just that I dislike paranormals, although I do (I'm sorry, but how does fur & claws = hot & happy romance?). It's not even that I know enough about England to make virtually every Regency-era historical romance published today seem like a Sci-Fi/Fantasy in which history is rewritten with the help of time travel, and the Revolutionary War somehow got flipped around, so that 20th Century Americans ended up occupying 19th Century London.

(Don't get me started on the excessive over-use of the word "bloody," which to us here in the States is a colorful and quaint British exclamation, like "botheration," but which in England as recently as 1971 was a Very Bad Word. So, if no woman of refinement and breeding would have been caught dead uttering That Word in 1971, you can be assured that no heroine would have uttered it, or even thought it, in 1815. Try this the next time you see it in a Regency romance novel: substitute the word "f---ing" every time you see "bloody" and consider whether it seems anachronistic. Yes, it really was that bad a word.)

But still I loved reading romances all the way through law school, which I attended at an advanced age in the early 90s. At some point, though, I lost track of who was good. I had a select number of authors I liked, but they were aging out, or switching to more mainstream fiction. I deeply mourned the loss of Patricia Gaffney to mainstream fiction. Her romances are wonderful even today. ("To Love & Cherish," which I re-read a couple days ago, is close to a perfect romance, I think.) I had no trouble packing up hundreds of paperback romances everytime I moved. After all, I just know I'll want to re-read them.

At some point in the last ten years I stopped buying new authors, so eventually the number of romances I bought -- and thus the number of romances I read -- dwindled. Worse yet, even if I found an author I liked among the ones I did read, her work would often lack sufficient originality to stay clear in my mind. The next time I was in Barnes & Noble, I'd look at the scads of titles and authors and struggle to remember, "Now is it Stephanie Laurens that I like, or Liz Carlyle? Or is it both? Or neither?"

To the rescue: The Internet. I love the Internet. I love Epicurious.com, where I can trust dozens of cooks' recommendations and ratings when picking out a recipe. I love the power to plan a trip, make the reservations & buy the tickets all myself. I love Amazon (although I don't love their ratings -- too many gushing reviews, and the "I hated this book" ratings are even less reliable). I love blogging, although I clearly don't love it on a daily basis. (Sorry.) And now I love the romance-reader review sites.

I'd had no idea of their existence until I heard the piece on NPR's Sunday All Things Considered about Smart Bitches Trashy Books. The fact that the host, Rebecca Roberts, seemed the very exemplar of the sceptic helped make the interview loads of fun. (Plus, Candy & Sarah actually used the word "heteronormativity" with what sounded like straight faces.) Better yet, their website has some reviews. I started reading books that they gave As. That led me someplace else, which led me to Sarah T. at Monkey Bear -- now a daily read -- which led me to Dear Author and eventually to All About Romance. I've bought over 20 books (mostly used; I'm sorry to deprive the authors of royalties I know they richly deserve) because they got top marks from some reviewer or other and I've been reading roughly a book a day ever since. (This could help to explain the absence of blog posts, but you and I both know I have no excuse.)

Have you ever noticed that when you first learn of something it's suddenly ubiquitous? Well, it seems as though the mainstream media (not as monolithic as all that, but still lumpable into some sort of generic blob) has recently Discovered Romances. I won't post links to all of it; here's a link to Sarah T.'s discussion on the media's love affair with what I'll call the Ivy League Connection, and one to her post on the larger question of how the media has been covering romances. (If by some odd chance my post here isn't long enough for you, I left a lo-o-ong comment on the latter of those two Monkey Bear posts, and an implausibly -- for me! -- short comment on the former.)

So, here's what I make of all this. The problem with romances isn't that they're stigmatized (although it's undeniable that they are; the only genre I can think of that is denigrated more is porn), it's that the people who love romances haven't wielded enough power to fight back against the stigma. Here are some thoughts about why that might be the case.

It's a closed set (to use a mathematical term). Romance readers read romances, and some of them write romances. Virtually no one who doesn't self-identify as a reader of romances reads them or writes them. Yes, that sounds circular, but think about it. I've read mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, chick-lit, fantasy, young adult, literary fiction, and memoirs. But I don't identify myself as a big fan of any of those genres, in the sense that I'll read a so-so mystery just because I like whodunits. I read specific authors in those genres, or specific books, because I think I'll like them. I don't think that's happening with romances, meaning people who don't consider themselves romance readers don't read romances. Sure Nora Roberts sells a gazillion books every year, but how many non-romance readers are reading her books? And what about Susan Elizabeth Philips or Jennifer Crusie (both of whom write funny, literate, charming romances)? While it's true I think some of their books are better than others, all of them should have cross-over appeal. But do they? (That's a genuine question, by the way. If anyone knows, leave a comment, please.) And if they don't, does anyone?
Hollywood doesn't make films from romance novels. And for people whose reading list is sparked by the cultural zeitgeist, that's a huge hit. Now, I have to tell you that I cringe when I think about Harlequin romances adapted for TV movies. Maybe the resulting show is good, maybe not. But for me, there's something structurally wrong with a literal adaptation of a story that is best understood as a fairy tale. There are two things I think are true of every single romance: A happy ending, and a distinct lack of realism. The happy ending is pretty obvious. But the lack of realism is just as key. We (I think I speak for at least one other romance reader, even if I don't know who that person might be) read romances to escape money troubles, broken relationships (hell, broken toilets!), dead-end jobs, etc. Even people with great marriages, homes & lives still read romances because the jolt of emotion feels good. Trust me, I've had two storybook romances (unlikely but true) and I know all too well that when it's time to pay the property tax bill, the fluttering of one's heart and/or loins dims a bit.

So back to the point about film & TV adaptations. Take a contemporary romance, like any of Nora Roberts' books. The plot is filled with things that could happen in real life, only in the book those situations and activities are suffused with a fairy-dust quality. The heroine is trudging through her life, but we read about how she feels about the hero and we're transported. In a movie, we'd just see her trudging. Even a voice-over isn't going to convey the fairy dust. So after 90 minutes of trudging, the happy ending seems fake, or forced, or ludicrous.

Hollywood does make great romances. (I personally saw Pretty Woman dozens of times in the movie theater; it got so bad that my friends and family would duck my calls if they thought they'd have to see it with me one more time.) They have tons of fairy dust, and their happy endings are just as aww-inducing as romances. They just do it differently. (Case in point: Pretty Woman. Imagine that story as a romance novel. Bet you can't get past the first chapter, where the heroine is revealed to be a hooker. Just too raw for a romance...)
Historical accident. Ask yourself this: Why didn't Jane Austen start an entire trend of literary romances that are studied and lauded as much as her work is? I think it's because Austen's novels aren't in the direct line of the evolution of the romance novel. Her books are richly detailed characters studies with a happy ending (or several happy endings, depending on how you look at it). You could probably trace Austen to Dickens to Grace Matalious (Peyton Place) or Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind) or even Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird). I would argue that today's romance evolved from the Gothic romances of the late 18th and early 19th Century -- wildly unrealistic while also being fun and emotionally satisfying. (Think how much better a happy ending is after a delicious bit of a character's anxiety or desperation. Not too much unhappiness, and not mundane anxieties like in real life, but that moment where you can shed a tear for the unlucky-in-love heroine before she discovers that he is alive!/does love her!/can marry her!, etc.)

But if I'm right, not much in the past 200 years has given romances legitimacy. When I first went to England in 1971, I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to see that my very well-educated and slightly snobby English cousins had a complete set of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances on their bookshelves. (The cousins otherwise read mysteries, including relatively obscure American authors like Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Asey Mayo mysteries, set on Cape Cod.) When I worked up enough courage to ask them about Heyer, I got a characteristic haughty look and something opaque about Heyer's books being quite good. Which she is. (Her Regency romances are meticulously researched, by the way, and I'll give a prize to anyone who can cite me a page where a heroine -- other than Faro's Daughter, perhaps -- uses or thinks the word "bloody." A nice prize. Just give me some time to think of one...)

And other than Heyer? Anyone? Any other names of romance authors who were deemed suitable for snobby cousins' bookshelves? Look, I'm not denigrating romance authors here -- I have my favorites that I'll grab at the first sign of smoke, and I'll defend them to anyone. What I'm talking about is mainstream legitimacy. I don't know why there was an evolutionary parting of the more detailed happy ending stories (Austen, et al.) from the faster-paced, emotionally charged Gothic romance such that Bel Canto (by Ann Patchett) is in one class and To Love & To Cherish (Gaffney, again) is in another. I just think it happened, and it's why our beloved romances are now the third-class citizens in the publishing world.
Which brings me to my final point. Publishers. We've been reading recently about how romances are a $1.5 billion industry. But what are publishers doing to fuel that industry? Potato chip-thinking. The assumption, as far as I can tell, is that the reader doesn't really care that much who she's reading, just that she's reading. Sure, sub-genres flourish or not based on sales (if paranormals didn't sell, they wouldn't get published), but specific authors are pretty fungible, even the great ones (barring the record-busting authors, like Roberts; she's not fungible, per se). I'm sure Avon is happy that Eloise James is getting great press, but they probably aren't pushing that coverage the way Atria (a publisher I've not heard of before) is pushing Jennifer Weiner's latest novel, Best Friends Forever.

[A momentary digression: I've alluded to an evolution of romance novels. So, let's say that Jennifer Crusie's books evolved from the classic contemporary romance novel -- where she got her start, as it happens -- and Jennifer Weiner's work evolved from smart, snappy journalism -- where she got her start, as it happens. Different paths, but their books end up pretty close together if you're visualizing the respective family trees: funny, descriptive, nice story arcs and cheery characters. I suspect you can be certain with a J.Cru book that there will be a heroine, a hero, some sex & lots of laughs; with a J.Wein book, I'd bet on a heroine, some trouble, but lots of laughs, and a life lesson or two. Not really that far apart. But look at how differently they're marketed. I've not seen Jennifer Crusie's closet pictured in Entertainment Weekly, for example. I'm just saying.]

And where do publishers get the notion that we, romance readers, will read anything with a pulse? Because we read anything with a pulse. Okay, maybe not you or me -- we're discriminating readers. But those other romance readers -- you know, the ones we assume are lined up every month to buy all of the series romances regardless of author, or every Regency romance with a ripped bodice on the cover. No, really -- one of those articles recently had a publisher swearing blind that they tried non-lurid covers and they didn't sell as well. Um, Pavlov, anyone? They use lurid covers for 25 years and are surprised when a non-lurid cover doesn't evoke the same response.

And why don't they try making more authors into brands, like Nora Roberts now is? (By the way, how many romances has Roberts written? Do you really have to write in the three figures before you're a brand name? Compare that thinking to Stephen King/Dan Brown/John Grisham/Sue Grafton -- they were all brands before they'd hit double digits.) Because (and here's my manifesto) for once I don't think I'm in the narrow end of the bell-shaped curve. I think that cliche generic romance reader (see what I did with the double meaning of generic? -- and it's after 5 in the morning, people; I'm writing on fumes here) is the narrow-end. I don't think that many readers are that oblivious to who the author is, and whether she's any good, or even whether the book is any good. The problem seems to be that because publishers expect a certain result, they're reluctant to view the data in a contrary perspective. And I bet they're super-reluctant to gather new data. I know they do some market-research, but I suspect it's narrowly tailored to answer questions at the margins of what they think they already know.

In the end, I believe romance readers are punished for their loyalty. (And authors are really punished -- I read a recent blog post on the amounts of money romance authors can expect to earn, and it's slave wages for sure. It does not seem as though a lot of that $1.5 billion is trickling down to the authors!) Because we love romance, and love romance novels, we're expected to read pretty much anything that fits the mold. I'm all for accepting that people's tastes differ, but as the websites like Dear Author & All About Romance suggest, there are good romances, great romances, and not-so-good romances. But they're all marketed the same (other than some blurbs and "New York Times Bestselling Author" tags), and publishers probably think they sell the same.

We have to start proving them wrong.

Coming Out of the Darkness

2009-06-10T20:46:00.003-04:00

Have you ever gone to the movies alone and gotten so caught up in the story, the setting & the characters that when you leave the theater, blinking in the daylight, you're disoriented for a while, unsure where you parked the car?

I feel that way, and I've not been to the movies like that in a while. (We went to see Up! the other day, though -- it was lovely, but it didn't transport me the way I'm talking about.) But it's not the movies that have done it to me this time -- it's a series of books. Six of `em, and I've read them in order twice over, mostly in the last ten days. Frankly, it's been tough to leave Miller's Kill, NY and get on with my life in Kingsley, PA.

The books are by Julia Spencer-Fleming:

In the Bleak Midwinter
A Fountain Filled With Blood
Out of the Deep I Cry
To Darkness and To Death
All Mortal Flesh
I Shall Not Want

There's no law that says you can't read them out of order, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Okay, so why have these books captured my heart in a way no other series has? (And, incidentally, this series has some stiff competition: the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King, the Jack Reacher thrillers by Lee Smith, the Chicago Stars series by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, and several more. This isn't my first bout of "reader's OCD.") It has to be the relationship between the two protagonists, the Reverend Clare Fergusson and Chief Russ van Alstyne. Oh, I've enjoyed the mysteries, and there are some other characters I enjoy, but these two people are captivating.

[And I'm not alone -- Sarah of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books admitted she's read In the Bleak Midwinter three times, and A Fountain Full of Blood twice.

At this point, I’ve become a hyperventilating freakshow about this series. I read all six in a marathon of reading and staying up late, and I’ve passed the name of the author on to anyone who stands still long enough. I’ve read the first one three times, and am re-reading the second.

I can't tell you what a relief it was to read that! If they do cart me away to the padded cell, I'll have a fun roommate...]

Clare is a former Army helicopter pilot, Russ is (like Jack Reacher) a former Army MP, so they have that much in common. But that's about it for similarities: he's now the chief of police of a small town in upstate NY (I gather it's based on Hudson Falls, a town I'll admit I know almost nothing about, despite growing up in nearby Schenectady and Albany), and she's the new rector of St. Alban's, the Episcopal church in town. He's fourteen years older than her. She's a woman of faith, he's a nonbeliever. They don't actually discuss politics, but it wouldn't be too hard to imagine that he's a Republican and she's a Democrat. (There is a brief moment when Russ taunts Clare, "And I bet you vote for universal health care every time.")

When they meet each other, though, they are each meeting their other half, the person that completes one's soul. This is, to put it mildly, extremely awkward -- he's happily married and she's celibate as befits a single priest in a religion that doesn't approve of sex outside of a committed long-term relationship. There can be no question of an affair, and neither of them wants to destroy Russ's marriage. But life without each other is inconceivable.

There's a lot in there I can relate to. I too was happily married when Starman and I got to know each other. I was committed to that marriage; it was what I knew and what I wanted. Luckily for me, Hub 1.0 was ready to "graduate" from our marriage to his own life on his own terms. I realize it seems impossible to imagine a marriage ending without bloodshed and recriminations and some disparity in the effect on each spouse, but I'm pretty sure we pulled it off.

But I can't help thinking it might have gone very differently. If Hub 1.0 had said he wanted to stay married, or if my relationship with Starman had blossomed earlier, I'd have had precisely Russ's problem. In one book, he contemplates what life will be like if Clare leaves Miller's Kill.

He was happy before she came.
Happy like the dead in their well-loved graves. Unknowing, unseeing, unfeeling.
...
[T]he words were stopped in his thoat by the realization that she would be going away. In a year or less. And he would never see her again.
He would get back into his coffin. He would pull the lid down himself. He supposed, after a few years, he might even grow to like it again.

It's not that his wife is a terrible person. In fact, when she does finally show up, she's lovely. She's just not connected to him in the same way that Clare is.

I won't say how all that gets resolved, but I was reading an interview that Spencer-Fleming gave relatively recently about the challenge of balancing the mysteries (murder-misdirection-detection-logic-solution) with the development of the relationship. She said that when she starts writing the dialogue between Clare and Russ she can hum along quite happily, having them trade sassy comebacks, but it's not getting the crime solved. And my thought was, I want to read those discarded scenes! Write a book that's just about Clare and Russ! Of course it doesn't work that way, but it's what I wanted.

What's been so shocking has been the sheer emotional power these books have for me. It's not the depiction of the Episcopal church; I was baptised and confirmed in that faith, but I never went to church (just how the family situation worked out, I guess) and I don't think I was ever touched with any sense of the divine while I was in church -- mostly just interested in the architecture, music, and congregants' hats. Of course, if the local Episcopal church (I say local, the nearest one must be 30 miles away at least) had Clare Fergusson as its rector, I'd be lining up at the door; she's remarkable palatable to nonbelievers like me and Russ!

Then I remembered something. Back in January 1998 I was reading a Susan Elizabeth Phillips romance (don't remember which one, sorry) when something in it, some internal dialogue by the heroine, made me suddenly sit up and think, "So that's how I feel about him!" I'd just come back from England, where I'd met up with Hub 1.0 again after several years. Until that moment, until I read that particular passage in that particular book, I had not consciously acknowledged that I'd fallen back in love with H. (For those who don't know, we'd had a summer together in 1980, and thereafter he was the "what if" guy -- you know, "what if we met again? what if he suddenly showed up after all these years?" -- that guy.) How is it I didn't know my own feelings until I saw them on the printed page?

And another time, back when I was dating a guy from college. We'd broken up in the summer after college and before grad school. I was on the bus back home, and I knew I was supposed to be all heartbroken and so forth, but I just wasn't feeling it. I had to put some sad music on my tape player (remember them, with the headphones?) just to muster up some tears.

It's a symptom of dissociation. I'll know what's going on in my life, but I don't have immediate access to the emotions. Then I'll hear some music, or see a sad movie, or read some book, and I'll be flooded with emotions -- all rather floaty and detached from the situation. It's a survival mechanism left over from my childhood, but honestly until this week I hadn't put it all together: the long drives to Maine back when I was single when I would listen to various tapes and cry the entire way up, despite my genuine pleasure at visiting my parents; seeing particularly powerful movies multiple times because of the disconnected emotions they exorcised; rereading some books over and over and over.

With the Spencer-Fleming books, it's a powerful template of my feelings for both Hub 1.0 and Starman. Oh, everyone's happy now, but I'd forgotten how it felt back in 2006 when that was no a foregone conclusion. I had a bad moment early on that year. Starman and I were just getting to know each other on the phone (after he had satisfied himself I wasn't an axe murderer because, you know, strange American women calling one on the phone were mostly likely axe murderers) and I had that vertigo you get standing on the edge: you're not falling but you could be and you can feel it, the ground rushing up to meet you. I was reading something -- I have no idea now what it was -- and I just started to sob. I cried for hours (I'm not exaggerating this) but I really wasn't sure why.

But Clare and Russ knew, and if I'd had the first few books to read then, I might have seen it in myself. You haven't a care in the world, your marriage is happy, you have no complaints, and then you meet someone who opens an entire dimension you'd not known was there. But you can't have both the safe marriage and the powerful new connection, so you cry. And then you just get on with the day to day.

It worked out well for me; three years later I'm so solidly on terra firma, I can't recreate the vertigo. But those emotions aren't gone, and releasing them as I read and reread and rereread Clare and Russ's story -- well, it's disorienting in a heady way. And blatantly addictive.

Spencer-Fleming has said that she only intended to write five novels with Clare and Russ. The number's up to seven (due out in October; don't expect me to answer the phone after I get my copy) and she's said she's thought of a basis for number eight. Good thing. I don't believe I would be alone in complaining if Miller's Kill disappeared off the Upstate NY map.

I'm SO Over Dr. Phil (and other news)

2009-05-02T12:43:00.002-04:00

I actually deleted my DVR season pass to record all of Dr. Phil's new shows. I think the Octomom killed it, but really I was getting fed up already with his trend toward more sensationalistic programming. Sure, he was doing more Hollywood Babylon pieces (what's up with Britney/Lindsay/Rihanna) and he was doing tabloid crime pieces (who killed Caylee Anthony, etc.) but even his more normal, mainstream folks were running off the rails. All the domestic drama had to be Bigger! Scarier!! More Out of Control!!! than our lives.

I'll admit this -- no matter what the sensational topic, Dr. Phil himself had good common sense advice about it. It's just that his advice to the Octomom has absolutely nothing to do with my life. At least when it was money problems, I could take some nuggets and apply them to other aspects of my life. ("You don't solve money problems with money.")

Also, there are now programs that do what Dr. Phil does, better than Dr. Phil. Intervention, that wonderful program on A&E, does a better job documenting and dealing with drug and other addictions. The Biggest Loser, which I don't watch, must do a better job of dealing with weight loss issues because Dr. Phil adopted that format for his weight loss series. And we personally love Supernanny for her common sense approach to household issues -- and we don't have kids!

It is evidence of something (I'm still trying to work out what) that Dr. Phil rates a blog post after more than a month of no posts at all. My life is both so boring that it really doesn't generate a lot of great stories, and so complicated that it would be nearly impossible to explain. In the boring category we have our recent trip to the Lodge at Woodloch (a destination spa) for some R&R to celebrate our one-year anniversary. Very restful, but not terribly blog-worthy.

In the complicated category, my work in therapy continues. It's very scary, powerful, painful, productive, and nearly impossible to explain. I want to present the efforts of therapy in a positive way, but I need to respect the obvious fact that not everything that goes on in my life is suitable for publication.

So there you have it -- Dr. Phil rates a mention because pretty much everything else is too boring or too complicated to write about.

And you wondered why it had been five weeks. Silly reader.

One Morning in North Yorkshire

2009-03-27T06:08:00.002-04:00

I love it here -- we're in Naburn, a little village on the outskirts of York. Starman is working on his blog posts on the New York Times crossword, I'm writing this, then we'll have breakfast, and eventually we'll be off to York for wandering around time and lunch at Bettys. Bettys is so English that you know the mind behind it is Swiss: a tea room/lunch spot where the wait staff (almost all women) are dressed in a variation of a parlor room maid from an Edwardian costume drama. Like, say, Atonement. The food is divine--don't-tell-your-nutritionist fare: Rosti potatoes, Welsh rarebit, cakes, biscuits, and lashings of tea. You don't want to leave, until you pay the bill and then you're a bit queasy and not sure you want to come back, but that's not a problem for us: It's been over six months, so we've forgotten (or rationalized) the costs. Besides, we're travelling -- it's all Monopoly money!

The most amazing thing happened at the Manchester airport -- I got through the Immigration queue faster than Starman! Last fall, it was the worst -- I went through his EU-passport-holders line with him, only to be told off by the Man for having an American passport, albeit one with a Marriage Visa in it and accompanied by my Brit husband. So back I went to the end of the Non-EU queue, while Starman went off to collect the bags. Yesterday, all the planes that landed just before ours were returning from known-holiday spots -- Jamaica, etc. -- so the queue for EU-passport holders was enormous. My queue? Two people ahead of me. Only one immigrations officer (and she was a trainee with her supervisor behind her, so super slow) but still. I got chatting with the couple behind me. They live near Kennett Square -- in the heart of duPont estate country -- and they were there to visit their son who lives in Wetherby. That's right in the general vicinity of Harrowgate, where Starman and I got married last year. Only I was stunned when this rather soignee American woman announced, "He lives in York-shyer." Um, really? Are you sure he doesn't live in York-sure?

Don't worry I didn't say anything. I don't think I even rolled my eyes. I've been there. I know to say "skahns" instead of "skowns" for those yummy clotted cream receptacles. But I can remember one occasion when I'd been away for almost ten years and, in front my my former mother in law, I told myself to say "skahns" and what came out of my mouth was "skowns." I don't think that's why, years later, she wasn't happy that I married her son, but it didn't help.

I thought about that as we drove southeast to Oxford to see Starman's mother. Fiona is in her late 70s. She has Parkinson's and some form of dementia; three years ago she had a bad fall, and since then she's needed full time care. She's been lucky to be able to stay at home. But she's not who she was before the fall, and certainly not who she was before the Parkinson's. In a sense, I never really met her -- the first time Starman brought me to see her, she was in a nursing home following her fall, and although she was more mobile than she is now, she wasn't a lot more - - well, herself.

If I were a lot younger, this might bother me. Who a beloved's parents are is important. But at our age (Starman is almost in the same age range as me), the identity and significance of the parents-in-law is blunted. His dad died over 25 years ago; I know a lot about Roger, but he's been gone for a long time. My parents died in 1997 and 2000, so they've not been factors for a while. And Fiona, well, there may be a connection between Starman's readiness to be in a committed relationship and her deterioration but I rather doubt it. He'd been on his own for a long, long time -- he was ready.

What matters is this house I'm in at the moment -- Starman's brother and sister-in-law are so wonderful, so charming and friendly, so welcoming and accommodating. We're thrilled to be here, and they sensibly don't allow their lives to be disrupted by our visits. That way, we're welcome any time. And believe me, this is a damn fine place to be. I'm looking out at milky sunshine in the front garden. Daffodils are up, the grass is green, birds are singing -- what's not to love?

Come to Yorkshire -- there are gorgeous place all through England, but this place is special. Just be sure to pronounce the name correctly!

About Those Paper Dolls

2009-03-23T08:10:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago, I volunteered to teach some local peeps how to knit. (Oh, and I have a knitting blog now -- another blog to kill through slow starvation!) At the end of the morning, Hope (a loyal reader -- Hi, Hope!) handed me a present. How sweet, and when I unwrapped it at home, it turned out to be a beautifully elaborate set of paper dolls.

First of all, thank you very much. I can't recall where I mentioned that I love paper dolls, but it's all true, and even at my advanced age, it's nice to get such a great present.

But then something weird happened, and I found out why I like paper dolls. Here's that story.

But first, if you haven't read this post yet, I'd suggest starting there. That way, when I tell you that Mr. Big told me something in a dream, you won't call the men in the white jackets -- you'll know I already have them on speed dial.

But yeah, he did. I was having some dream about solving a puzzle -- gee, I wonder where that comes from? -- and kept thinking, "I have to anagram 'hypnotism' or 'hypnotist' to get the answer," even though that made no sense at all. (I just checked, using the Starman's #1 software TEA, and the only words that anagram to 'hypnotism' and 'hypnotist' are 'pythonism' and 'pythonist.' I don't even like snakes.) When I woke up, of course, I understood exactly what that dream meant.

When I started law school, I had finished up with a therapist in the Albany, NY area, Mike Nichols. Great guy, very bright. I got to be completely precocious with him, like a bratty kid who thinks being "gifted" is license to behave badly. He was very patient with me. Anyway, off I went to law school, assuming I could just get on in life. I didn't make it through the first year before I knew I was crazier than was comfortable, and I needed a new therapist. I assumed it had something to do with not remembering my childhood (kind of a clue, you know?), and I naively assumed that a few sessions of hypno-therapy would do the trick.

Well, someone sent me along to a psychologist at the University health center for an evaluation. I told him everything and at the end of the hour, he said, "You need psychoanalytic psychotherapy," which is what I'd been doing with Mike up in Albany. I promptly burst into tears, which was NOT the reaction this guy was expecting. He hastily looked at the clock, told me to come back for another hour the following week, and bustled me out the door.

In the second session, I basically told him, "If talking about my problems was all it took, I'd be fixed by now. My deal is I don't have the raw material available to talk about . . ."

Now, I need to digress at this point. There was a famous day in early 1997 when I followed directions to a small storefront in South Philly, parked the car, got out, looked around and said to myself, "Who the hell lives here?!" Eighteen months later, I owned a house not a half-block from where I had parked that day. Be careful what absolutist statements you make, is all I'm saying. Fate has a way of getting the last laugh...

What I was trying to tell this guy at the University health center was that I was convinced that hypnotism had to be involved, because otherwise I was going to be talking about what I could remember, and no work would ever get done on the stuff I couldn't remember. My tears convinced the guy -- not that I was right, but that I really believed what I was saying. So he gave me the name of the super famous psychiatrist in Philadelphia who did hypnosis with people with dissociative disorders. Luckily for me, Dr. Famous wasn't taking new patients, and of the two names he gave me, my own delightful therapist ("the Queen Quiche") was the one who called me back.

When I started with QQ (so named because my sessions with Mike Nichols were on Wednesdays, aka "Prince Spaghetti Day," making him the Prince Spaghetti. A friend had a therapist she dubbed "the Czar" or, later, "the Zar" in solidarity. Royalty begets royalty, and as my current therapist is French, she's the Queen Quiche), we tried hypnotherapy. I went into the trance well enough, but once there, nuzzink. No hidden stuff, nothing I didn't already know, no unexplained emotional reactions. Within six months, QQ and I were doing . . . psychoanalytic psychotherapy. For 15 years . . . ! I mean, it's all been good, and I'm a whole lot less crazy than I was back in 1993, so I really can't complain, but -- geez. I had really pinned my hopes on rooting around in my subconscious, pulling up juicy nuggets of significance, talking about them for a while, then pulling up the next one. *sigh* Not to be, I guess.

I'd actually pretty much forgotten about hypnotherapy until my recent dream. But clearly Mr. Big knew better than me (a fairly standard situation) and I passed the word along to QQ that Mr. Big thought it was time to try again.

Which is how I came to find out about the paper dolls. When I go back to my hometown in one of these hypnotic states (not trances, really -- more deep relaxation), it's empty. The school is empty, the streets are empty, and my childhood home is empty. In fact, I'm in the house all alone. I can walk through the rooms -- there's one I don't want to go in, but it's no big deal -- but there's nothing much I want to do. Except for one thing: I want to be on my bed, playing with stuffed animals, or even better, with paper dolls.

Now, I know that I lived in a house with other humans, but this part of myself, the little girl whose memories I can access, lived alone. Presumably, if another member of my family came home, this little girl was swapped out for some other part of myself I haven't met yet. What's so chilling about this sense memory is the vividness of my isolation. I was deeply lonely, of course, but I was being protected from something deemed worse than loneliness. Still, lonely is sad.

And that's why I loved paper dolls. I had a set where the dolls were cardboard and had holes punched in their torsos such that when a dress was put on, it could be laced up like some Tyrolean dirndl. I really loved those dolls, and something happened to them (maybe nothing ominous, maybe they just got thrown away in a routine clean-up) that constituted a loss I still mourn. A few years later, there was a series of comic books about Millie The Model. Interleaved with the stories of three mid-60s models were pages of clothes that could be cut out and used to dress a cartoon model. I meticulously cut those out and kept them in a box under my bed.

It's such a pedestrian activity, getting dressed, but it must speak volumes to the juvenile mind, particularly for girls. I had Barbies (later), and invested a lot of energy into clothing them (literally -- on one occasion I walked ten miles to the shopping mall where my mother worked, so I could spend my allowance on a new Barbie outfit; if I'd taken the bus, I wouldn't have had the amount I needed for the outfit), but the paper dolls were even more primal and powerful, possibly because they took up so little space. (Losing that third dimension will do that to a body.) I still crave that connection, even though at 53 it's a bit hard to justify the actual activity.

So, thank you Hope, for giving me some paper dolls. Now all I need is a little girl who's sufficiently age-appropriate to justify playing with the paper dolls, just helping you know . . .

Me & The Starman

2009-02-19T19:59:00.002-05:00

I got this meme from Dooce, but it looked like fun. In that way that answering questions can be fun. Like, the Bar Exam, talking to a state trooper who's just pulled you over, etc.

What are your middle names?
My middle name is Stuart, his is Ross. (You can imagine the teasing I got when I was confirmed in the Episcopal church. All the other girls could not contain their mirth that I had a BOY'S name as a middle name. It's a family name; I got it from my great-grandmother. In fact, there have been four or five women named Magdalen.)

How long have you been together?
Two and a half years.

How long did you know each other before you started dating?
Hub 1.0 introduced us in London in 1998, when Hub and I were first engaged. I was in awe to meet this famous guy who'd been all-correct for so long that they made him the editor of the world's hardest crossword puzzle. Starman had funny hair back then -- longer and kind of poufy in the front. Not unattractive, just unrecognizable from today. He didn't say much. We met again in 2000 when we sat at the same table at a crossword dinner in Paris. He stared at Hub 1.0 and me throughout the meal, which seemed very un-British. Still wasn't saying much. I saw him twice more before 2006; after the second time, I was genuinely worried that he was ill, which is why I allowed myself to be the Overly Familiar American and email him in late 2005 when we learned he'd quit the editorship. The emails turned to phone calls, and then to visits, but we were Just Friends for over six months before it became romantic.

Who asked whom out?
N/A. There were no dates. I have been on precisely one date in my entire life, and it was with someone I was not romantically interested in, at a restaurant where someone had a heart attack, and the whole experience was excruciatingly awkward. How I've married not one but two Englishmen without dating is just part of my awesome unusualness.

How old are each of you?
I have just turned 53, he's 49. But of course we're both really 6 years old...

Whose siblings do you see the most?
His, despite the fact that they all live in the U.K.

Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple?
He's much better at dealing with my emotional roller coaster maneuvers than I have a right to expect. He's less volatile, but when he is having a bad day, I'm pretty good about it. Thus we avoid most of the pitfalls that I can imagine. It's been a while, but I have in the past had a problem when we're trying to fix something and all of a sudden my Oxford University-educated genius husband loses 50 IQ points and adopts the Blank Stare as a defense.

Did you go to the same school?
Hardly. He went to public (i.e., private) schools followed by University College [doncha just love the contradictions in English education?] at Oxford University. I went to two small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast, then got a master's from a PAC-10 university, and years later got a law degree from an Ivy League law school.

Are you from the same home town?
Again, not even remotely close. I grew up in Schenectady, NY; he grew up in Oxford, England.

Who is smarter?
Hard to say. He's book smart, better read, quicker (except when trying to fix things; see above), and more analytical. I'm more intuitive, better at understanding people, and can make certain deductions more easily. But here's an absolute fact: Hub 1.0 can think rings around us both, and that's saying a LOT.

Who is the most sensitive?
Depends what you mean by sensitive. He bruises easier, but I cry at cotton commercials...

Where do you eat out most as a couple?
We're in a bit of a backwater here in Northeast Pennsylvania, but there's a Mexican restaurant ten minutes away that's run by an actual Mexican guy. His is a great story: a local couple traveled to Mexico, met this kid who had just been orphaned, brought him back to our county and sent him to the local school. After he graduated, the restaurant is what he wanted to do. The menu hasn't changed since I first went there 5 years ago, but it's all good food.

Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple?
Alaska, with Hub 1.0 as our wedding present. Worked out well, and we'd love to travel with him again.

Who has the craziest exes?
N/A. I just have Hub 1.0, and Starman has no exes that I know about, so I'd win except that Hub 1.0 isn't crazy, and we're all good friends. Maybe that makes us all crazy...

Who has the worst temper?
I do. Hands down.

Who does the cooking?
Me. When he was dating, he taught himself to cook, and his chocolate mousse is damn fine, but he doesn't enjoy it, and I do.

Who is the neat-freak?
I expected him to be; his house in Twyford was immaculate. But no, we're pretty evenly matched as mildly untidy. My office gets untidier and then tidier, as does my side of the bed, but I'm not sure that's not just a difference in periodicity.

Who is more stubborn?
It's not a character flaw either of us has in great amounts, but I'll own it.

Who hogs the bed?
Hmmm. I suspect I do, but Starman is too nice to tell me.

Who wakes up earlier?
I do unless he's not been sleeping well. The real answer is the cats, who've been working hard on their devices and schemes to wake us up. They've taken to throwing their furry bodies at the bedroom doors in the hopes that the door might open and allow them access to the bed. A cat purring loudly and walking over us is a very effective alarm clock.

Where was your first date?
N/A; see above.

Who is more jealous?
Look, this is a guy who understood that my nearly 40-year connection to Hub 1.0 was important to me, so all props to Starman for being wise and gracious and open-minded.

How long did it take to get serious?
Six months? Seven? There was the more pressing issue of resolving the status of my first marriage first, but it all worked out pretty efficiently.

Who eats more?
In terms of volume, he does. In terms of surplus to requirements, I do.

Who does the laundry?
I do. If you'd asked who puts the clothes away, we could cue the crickets...

Who's better with the computer?
::cough cough:: Let's put it this way -- one of us is a software programmer, and one us is a lawyer.

Who drives when you are together?
I do. I like it. He doesn't seem to mind. However, if we're in the UK and the hire car has a stick shift, he does. I can manage the roundabouts, but not then also shift with the wrong hand while driving on the wrong side of the road.

Me & Mr. Big

2009-02-08T21:33:00.004-05:00

It shouldn't come as a great surprise to anyone that I'm a little bit unusual. There are clues, after all. . . Like, f'rinstance, I dunno, maybe the fact that my first husband is our most frequent visitor here in Harmony. Or the whole living-on-24-acres-with-a-horse-barn-and-a-tractor bit. Whatever; I suspect my regular readers are rolling their eyes and nodding their heads in impatient agreement. We get it, Magdalen, just get to your point.

Well, I don't write too much about being in therapy because -- well, it's boring, isn't it? And private, I suppose. But mostly boring. I've been in therapy with the same therapist for over 15 years, a fact that is as stunning to me as it must be to any sane person. That's a time frame that might lead a reasonable person to suspect that my therapist is paying for her "weekend house" in the South of France on my centime, so to speak. (And, yes, she really does have a house in the South of France.)

But when I think about it, I don't blame my therapist for dragging her feet. I blame over-engineering. Sure, I had a crappy childhood. Who didn't? (No, really -- we had a houseparty a few years ago, and the conversation came around to everyone's crappy childhood. Out of a field of five people, mine didn't come in first, and might not have come in second.) What makes my childhood interesting is that I had something akin to multiple personalities. (The official name for this condition now is "dissociative identity disorder." And after decades of Movie Of the Week and Oprah eps, it's gone mainstream now -- Showtime has a series!) I don't actually know this for a fact, but what I do know strongly suggests it as a hypothesis.

See, I can remember walking to school everyday, but I have no memory of walking home. Ever. This is noteworthy because the school was roughly parallel to our house, one block over. The "correct" route was to walk down the block, around the corner, and back along the parallel street. But we were sneaky lazy brats -- we would cut through our neighbor's yard (it was a large house that had been split into flats, so no one was authorized to care), jog around the back of someone's garage, down a driveway and along to the school. I remember this walk in the schoolbound direction, but I don't think I ever walked that way back home. I think someone else did that trip.

See, I was the kid who went to school. I remember kindergarten, first and second grades with Miss Alice Duell, and so forth, but I have no memories of home until sometime after my 8th birthday, which was when I was in third grade. (I was in all the grades, they just got accordioned into two years, so I kinda sorta skipped a grade.) But as for who was hanging with the sibs, having dindin with the parents -- no clue. And that would be cool, except for one tiny thing: I weigh over 300 pounds. And I really shouldn't.

So, off to therapy. My therapist is amazing -- a national expert in dissociative disorders (a pretty common psychiatric condition, as it includes post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, suffered by vets and rape victims alike). We tried hypnosis, but it didn't work, and I don't know why. I do get it that someone engineered the fracture into different ego states (a technical term; I'd call them personalities, but I have no idea what that means. I have no idea what "ego states" are either, but at least they're the right label) to protect me, well, all of us, from the unpleasantness of whatever stress we were under. That someone was me as well -- a kind of omniscient engineer of my psyche. Early on in my therapy, this engineer got a name, "Mr. Big." (This was in the mid-90s, so the reference is to a George Raft-type Mafioso character, not Carrie Bradshaw's fella.)

I can tell when a dream has Mr. Big in it because I'll be dreaming of someone very impressive: Tiger Woods, Oprah, Barack Obama. Once Mr. Big was a librarian -- hey, they're impressive too! As far as I can tell, Mr. Big started cracking my consciousness into bite-sized bits early on in my childhood. I almost certainly didn't show up until around age five, and for a while my only role was to go to school and be smart.

The mystery is why, when the reason I had to dissociate left the house, did I get the job of running the corporation full time? Because I knew nothing? That's literally what it felt like to me. It wasn't hard to figure who was the mother, the father, the older sister (although there was that embarrassing Christmas when I didn't know my sister's pet names for me!), etc. I just knew nothing about them. Imagine turning on the TV and there's a movie on that seems really interesting, but you've missed the first half-hour. You can tell what's happening, but there's always some aspect of the plot or the characters that eludes you, is always out of reach. I'll know how my movie ends, but will I ever know how it began?

Okay, back to the point about over-engineering. I can be impressed with what Mr. Big accomplished, but he (she? it?) was still just a little kid. Splitting stuff up so no one part knows the yucky bits was a good move. Getting me to run the show after 1964 was okay, too, I guess. But I'm still driving a circus train with no clue what sort of clowns & critters are in the back. And to top it off, I was the youngest of the bunch. I'm serious -- if I'm right that I showed up around 1961 and all the other ego states were around already, they're all older than me. They are also all still only three or four, or five, or maybe six -- but they were there first.

Now, I don't want to mislead anyone. I don't have active personalities that pop in and out. I don't lose time. I remember everything people say to me, or if I do forget a conversation or the like, it's just because I'm human and not everything makes the same sort of impression. I'm sure there was a time when I did lose time, did get faced with people assuming I knew things I didn't know -- in fact, I can remember some of those panicky situations. But I was seven, or nine, and I just feigned stupidity. Hey, I was the youngest; we're expected to be idiots!

But even if I'm not actively cycling among ego states, I still carry all the scars that come from a childhood dedicated to surviving some horror without knowing what that horror was. The obesity is the worst, but there have been other things. I was for decades one of those "best defense is a good offense" types -- very pushy and know-it-all. I lost a LOT of friends that way, and I miss them. I've been excessively clingy and needy. There are good reasons why I didn't marry until my forties. I've sorted a lot of that stuff out, but the obesity -- that's a really tough nut to crack.

At a guess, I'd say some of my child-like parts feel safer being big. (I was the youngest, remember -- "big" probably means "powerful" in some three-year-old's logic.) It's just so unnecessary these days. Even if monsters lurked under my bed 45 years ago, they're long gone. I can deal with the bad stuff now. I even do legal work in cases with children at risk: incest, rape, physical abuse. You'd think this stuff would make my inner kids antsy, and sometimes it does, but mostly they let me soldier on as a moderately competent lawyer.

[Sidebar: Can I tell you how hard it was when I first graduated as a lawyer -- nearly 40 years old -- and I had to do a full day's work when there wasn't always a full day's worth of work to do and I had bored kids inside my head? See, law firms are not the most efficient structures for motivating staff. Mostly they rely on extreme cases of ambition and greed, with the added buttress of fearing humiliation from a partner. None of which worked on me. Back then, I could work really hard in a genuine emergency; hell, almost all of my studying for final exams was in that category. But my law firm assumed I would work like it was an emergency all the time no matter what, and my inner kids got really really bored. I played a lot of solitaire on the computer that first year, and it didn't much improve over the years. I was NOT a good associate. I'm a lot -- a WAY lot -- better now, particularly because it's only part time.]

So, here we are: I'm about to turn 53, I'm making progress on getting my child parts to let me know what they're feeling (anxiety pretty much 24-7, as it happens), and I'm still fat. I know the equation: eat less, mostly plants, and exercise more. It's pretty simple. The one teensy piece I can't figure out is how to tell a bunch of panicked toddlers and pre-schoolers that we won't die if we weigh way less. I've tried speaking calmly to them, but it's no good. I think it will get good, just not anytime soon.

My lingering question is why Mr. Big -- who constructed this 8-lane highway -- couldn't undo some of his impressive work. I don't need the body equivalent of an 8-lane highway. You're a smart cookie, Mr. Big -- surely there's some way of dealing with that?

There is one quirky possibility. I don't know if I believe it, but it's out there in the literature, so I'll just kick it around. Some people believe that memory can have some link to fat cells. Not sure how that works -- like maybe chemicals are released when the fat cells are shrunken through weight loss -- but the idea is that I'd remember bad bad stuff if I lost a lot of weight. And I think, "Oh, I could handle that, how bad could it be?" but there's a reason I don't the answer to that question. There's a reason I don't remember. There's a reason I wasn't at home for 8 years...

But blogging about this is something I can do. I can assure you, Mr. Big thinks it's okay.

One Dog Night

2009-02-05T21:20:00.003-05:00

It's 3.7 degrees F., and falling fast. They (those mysterious people who claim to know these things but so frequently get it just a bit wrong) say it will be in the 40s (F) next week for several days. We hope to get all the snow off the roof that leaked two weeks ago.

What happened was, I glanced up and noticed some stains on the ceiling of the beer hall (it's a pantry, in effect, and it used to house Hub 1.0's beer in the cooler months; it still houses his beer except for times, like now, when we send it all back to Philly with him because it will be a long time before he's up again). I called the stain to Starman's attention, and while we were puzzling it out, it started to rain in the adjacent breakfast area.

It didn't take too long to figure out what was going on -- there is a shallowly-pitched roof over that area, and it had an ice dam. Too many instances of snow mixed with sleet/freezing rain, and not enough instances of us clearing off the roof. Well, poor Starman had to go out and chip away at it, which he was not enthusiastic about doing. In fact, at first he did a couple feet's worth of clearing close to the house (there's a window conveniently located for easy access to this roof) but all that did was move the leak to another part of the roof, so... I threw him out the window again (this time tethered to the house with the sash from my fuzzy robe!) and stood there until he cleared all the ice away.

We'll need to reroof that bit in the spring, putting down one of those self-sealing, impermeable barriers underneath the shingles. But in the meantime we have a roof rake (of potentially limited value as it's designed to be pulled along the roof from below and we're best able to push snow off from above) and some greater knowledge of how all this works.

Incidentally, I understand the economy is in the toilet, but some things never change. I phoned three roofers in our area, left messages at all three regarding our ice dam (this was before we'd fixed it ourselves) and leaking roof, and not one called me back. Silly duffers -- there was real work available from this. I certainly won't be asking any of them to bid on the redo in the spring!

In other leaky news, I was doing our laundry the other day when I pulled a sock up from the space between the washer and the wall. Sopping wet. And mildewy! (Blecch...) But how had it gotten so wet? Come to find out, the waste water pipe -- a bit of PVC that comes out of the wall at the back of the washer -- has cracked inside the dry wall. Every time I do laundry, it releases water, but as I'm a Wear Everything, Then Wash Everything (WETWE) type, the dry wall has a chance to completely dry out between WETWE sessions.

Anyway, it's been over two weeks since that discovery. We've not run out of clean clothes yet, but the plumber hasn't come by and we're not sure when we'll see him. He told me on the phone that he has a house that completely froze up -- heating, water, toilets, showers -- he wasn't sure how much work he'd have to do there before we'd see him. I hope we see him soon; we've got the Coffee Jones/Dino Burger peeps coming in ten days!

Work is okay. Well, actually it sucks for reasons my cannon of ethics won't allow me to discuss. So I'll just say it's okay and leave it at that. I've been sewing a lot, and really ought to take pictures to prove that, but -- and maybe this is the result of the cold, snow & ice -- I don't feel like it.

In fact, we're not feeling the love of our surroundings these days what with all the snow, wood to be chopped & shlepped, cold weather, and icy walkways. It's too soon to think about moving, but it's not too soon to think about thinking about moving. I talked Starman into investing some money into this house with the aim of getting it in prime condition for sale in 10 years or so when we are ready to leave. It's weird to contemplate -- there was a time when I thought I'd live the rest of my life here -- but it's a fairly work-intensive property, and that's not what I want my, uh, autumn years to be like. And the majority of the work falls on Starman, who also isn't looking so happy all day everyday. I know we'll fall in love again in the spring and summer, but I'm determined not to forget what this has been like.

Ah, but we have our health. A cliche, but I didn't want to end this post on a "poor poor pitiful us" note. We're happy with each other, we have good friends and lovely neighbors, and we really have no business complaining about where we live. I just can't see us as seventysomethings managing with wood supplies and the tractor's snowblower/front end loader for snow removal. The prospect of a conventional house with a conventional amount of frontage to be cleared . . . let's just say it has its appeal right about now.

The List

2009-01-18T14:37:00.002-05:00

I saw this on a quilter's blog, but it's not about quilting. It's a fairly arbitrary list of things you might want to do, or not.

Things you've already done: bold
Things you want to do: italize
Things you haven't done and don't want to - leave in plain font
(And stuff you've done but wished you hadn't -- you've still got underlining in reserve for that; I hesitated to use underlining on the "been involved in a lawsuit" -- I've done it, and it's not fun, but can I really say I wish it hadn't happened? Probably not.)

1. started your own blog
2. slept under the stars
3. played in a band
4. visited hawaii
5. watched a meteor shower
6. given more than you can afford to charity
7. been to disneyland/world
8. climbed a mountain
9. held a praying mantis
10. sang a solo
11. bungee jumped
12. visited paris
13. watched a lightning storm at sea
14. taught yourself an art from scratch
15. adopted a child
16. had food poisoning
17. walked to the top of the statue of liberty
18. grown your own vegetables
19. seen the mona lisa in france
20. slept on an overnight train
21. had a pillow fight
22. hitch hiked
23. taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. built a snow fort
25. held a lamb
26. gone skinny dipping
27. run a marathon
28. ridden a gondola in venice
29. seen a total eclipse
30. watched a sunrise or sunset
31. hit a home run
32. been on a cruise
33. seen niagara falls in person
34. visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. seen an amish community
36. taught yourself a new language
37. had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. seen the leaning tower of pisa in person
39. gone rock climbing
40. seen michelangelo's david in person
41. sung karaoke
42. seen old faithful geyser erupt
43. bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant
44. visited africa
45. walked on a beach by moonlight
46. been transported in an ambulance
47. had your portrait painted
48. gone deep sea fishing
49. seen the sistene chapel in person
50. been to the top of the eiffel tower in paris
51. gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. kissed in the rain
53. played in the mud
54. gone to a drive-in theatre
55. been in a movie
56. visited the great wall of china
57. started a business
58. taken a martial arts class
59. visited russia
60. served at a soup kitchen
61. sold girl scout cookies
62. gone whale watching
63. gotten flowers for no reason
64. donated blood
65. gone sky diving
66. visited a nazi concentration camp
67. bounced a cheque
68. flown in a helicopter
69. saved a favorite childhood toy
70. visited the lincoln memorial
71. eaten caviar
72. pieced a quilt
73. stood in Times Square
74. toured the everglades
75. been fired from a job
76. seen the changing of the guard in london
77. broken a bone
78. been on a speeding motorcycle
79. seen the grand canyon in person
80. published a book
81. visited the vatican
82. bought a brand new car
83. walked in jerusalem
84. had your picture in the newspaper
85. read the entire bible
86. visited the white house
87. killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. had chickenpox
89. saved someone’s life
90. sat on a jury
91. met someone famous
92. joined a book club
93. lost a loved one
94. had a baby
95. seen the alamo in person
96. swum in the great salt lake
97. been involved in a law suit
98. owned a cell phone
99. been stung by a bee

Just What I Was Afraid Of

2009-01-16T16:35:00.002-05:00

I've had an opportunity to think about myself as a lawyer recently. It's been a chastening experience, and while I would love to relate an "It's a Wonderful Life" ending, that's not the way life works.

When I moved here, several people said, in effect, "Oh, just hang out a shingle. You'll get clients." The idea of solo practice terrified me. "I wouldn't be able live with myself. What if I made a horrible mistake?" It wasn't the risk that worried me; legal malpractice cases aren't as common as medical malpractice cases. It was the actual chance of making a mistake. As an associate in a law firm, there were people with vast experience all around me. I'd have had to be comatose to get something wrong, and then I'd have been off the case anyway, so it wouldn't have been my mistake to make. But as a solo practitioner . . . it's not really a question of "if" I made a mistake, but a question of "when."

And that question would be right now. I've made a fatal mistake on a case, and I'm gutted about it. I've tried all the reframing you can think of -- I even had a dreadful moment the other day when I met up with a woman I don't know well, but really like. We were making small talk when I asked, "How's your daughter?" The woman, who's approximately my age, looked stunned for a split second, then her face fell. I hadn't seen her in a couple years at least; I didn't know that her daughter had been killed in a car crash last February (pregnant with her first child, too). It was a horrible reminder that real tragedy happens to wonderful people. So, yes, I've been reminded that there are worse things that can happen, and that I should keep my mistake in perspective.

Only today did it dawn on me that I'm not looking at this right. The alternative to what happened wouldn't have been that I was a perfect lawyer who never made a mistake, but that I wasn't a lawyer at all. Hard to say if the mistake wouldn't have been made had I not been on the case, but what I forget is that if I hadn't been a lawyer on that case, I wouldn't be a lawyer on any of my cases.

So, this where Jimmy Stewart has a visit from an angel showing him all the ways in which people are better off because he was alive. My movie angel would have some B-roll on how my clients would have suffered without my work for them. Uh, yeah, right. Not exactly how things really are. I'm not being unduly modest when I say that only a few people would be only slightly worse off were I not an attorney in the few court-appointed cases I handle. What I really think is that I would be worse off.

Sometimes you just have to do what you're afraid of. The precise thing I was afraid of is the precise thing that happened, and as bad as I feel (and I feel very very bad about this), I still have to admit that it's better for me to serve as an attorney than stay home and not even try.

I truly hope something good comes of all this, but at least I know this. I will be a better lawyer going forward. Small comfort to my clients, and (to be honest) small comfort to me just right now. But it's true, and I didn't need an angel to tell me. I'm better off having tried and fallen short than if I had stayed home and not tried at all.

CrosswordMan & Me

2009-01-02T09:37:00.004-05:00

I'm sitting in front of the wood stove -- a beautiful soapstone stove that burns hotter fires because the stone lets the heat seep out more gradually; we love it! -- and I have a cat on the back of my chair, a dog at my feet, and a husband working on his new blog!

Yup, Starman (whose name is revealed in his blog, so I suppose I could start calling him Ross here, but old habits die hard) has his own blog, CrosswordManBlog. It's one of those blogs that does the New York Times daily crossword puzzle (plus others he works on) and comments on it. He's very clever and word-y, which shouldn't be a surprise to me, but to see it in print is somehow unexpected. Charming, though.

The downside is that it took him forever to get the first puzzle-specific post published yesterday. It doesn't help that the puzzles at the end of the week are the harder ones. Yesterday was the first Thursday puzzle he'd done on his own, and today's is even harder. You don't think about all the things that are culturally specific in these puzzles: football teams and terms, baseball, food products, automobiles, and the letter salad of our governmental agencies' abbreviations, for example. I'd feel bad but for a couple things: he asked for it (I'd have been happy to help him solve the harder puzzles -- the two of us together make even the Saturday puzzle seem quite tame), and now he knows how I felt learning to do cryptic puzzles.

I was introduced to cryptic crosswords decades ago when Hub 1.0 showed me the weekend puzzle (it was the Observer then; the Listener came later for Hub 1.0 and his dad) that he worked on. These are puzzles that require dictionaries -- you're not expected to know the word, so often you figure out a letter string and then look it up to see if it's a word that means what the clue says it means! For an American used to the NYTimes puzzle, which I would solve sometimes with my mother, all this was craziness. I couldn't stop thinking, "Okay, what's a six-letter word meaning hazel?" Well, I didn't know that cobnut is the European hazel, so I'd never solve anything.

I can probably solve a relatively easy English cryptic crossword on my own now, but I wouldn't be fast. My brain still doesn't work that way; there is something about the English psyche that likes untying the intricate knots of good cryptic clues. One of my brothers solves the daily Times puzzle when he's over there, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't attempt the thematic puzzles like the Listener.

The Listener has been called the most difficult crossword puzzle in the English language, and I can well believe it. (There's a couple of cryptic puzzle aficionados in the UK who think the Listener isn't hard enough [!], so they devised a monthly publication with even harder puzzles. One solver I know described the experience as "homework." Even if hard, the Listener is still supposed to be fun.)

And, of course, I wouldn't be married to Starman without these puzzles. If it hadn't been for Hub 1.0's fondness for the Listener, he wouldn't have met Starman or become a customer of the CrosswordMan line of products, which would have meant I'd have never met him, and so some alternate universe goes.

Plus, the three of us enjoy puzzles together. Hub 1.0 was here for the trial in late October, for Thanksgiving, for Cookie Weekend, and for Christmas. Over Christmas, we worked on a diabolical jigsaw puzzle (six dalmatian puppies on a background of white with black splodges), tried to answer questions in this year's King William College test from England (v. hard -- of 180 questions, we got 37 maybe right in the first effort), and hosted a dinner party. And we worked on crossword puzzles.

Everyday is a crossword puzzle of some sort (or relation; I got a su doku puzzle-a-day calendar for Christmas). We'll be out in the world and Starman will announce an anagram of some sign along the highway. I'll see cryptic wordplay where none was intended. I live in a house with several dozen dictionaries.

For better or worse, in sickness and health, in definition-only or cryptic style . . . I'm married to CrosswordMan. What else was I going to get?

December Last

2008-12-31T14:05:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's been an entire month. A month filled with the holidays, of course, and friends & family, gifts (the buying, wrapping, giving, receiving & enjoying thereof), and good food, particularly the 70+ dozen cookies Hub 1.0 and I made over two days. Not too much blogging, clearly, and not enough sewing. So here I am, trying to cram something into my last post of 2008.

First up, how did I do on my 2008 resolutions? Well, first I need to remember what they were, and here's where I looked. I made 6, and my results are mixed. I did lose a fair amount of weight, and then gained some of it back, and have that to lose again, plus a lot more where that came from. Consider that an ongoing resolution. I did get more exercise, but there's always room for improvement there too. And I'll carry forward the eating better item as well. So consider Resolutions #1-3 to be in force for 2009. Number 4, well I did join a quilt guild. It's a million miles away from me (no, really -- across state lines and everything!) so I don't make it to all the meetings, but I love the people and will work to be a better member. Thus, I can tick off #4 from last year as done, and write #4 for 2009 as "be a better guild member."

I did not get four quilts made in 2008, and I'm really disappointed that this didn't happen. I know why it didn't -- I started a quasi-legal career, plus had lots of travel in 2008 -- but I really wanted to accomplish that one. In fact, of all six resolutions, it was the one I felt most strongly about, and the only one I actually remembered a year later.

Finally, I think I accomplished #6, which was to figure out what was wrong with me medically. I am satisfied that I had gallstone pancreatitis, that it was psychosomatic in some respect, and that when I modified my behavior to reflect that reality, the symptoms cleared up. This wouldn't necessarily be the conclusion my doctors would have reached (the psychological component makes body plumbers slightly queasy) but I think it's been borne out. Certainly I am symptom free a year later.

So, here are my resolutions for 2009:

1. Eat better (e.g., less fat, less white flour, less sugar, more vegetables)
2. Lose weight
3. More exercise (thanks to Coffee Jones and Dino Burger for the Wii Fit we received last month -- it's really increased the exercise for these chilly days)
4. Make four quilts
5. Be a better quilt guild member
6. Get organized with my legal work: more filing, more scheduling and use of the calendar, and more preparation for specific issues.

It goes without saying that I should blog more!

December First

2008-12-01T13:43:00.002-05:00

Oh, lord -- how did this happen? I have a whole slew of things I really really really need to do This Month, and while it was Last Month, I didn't have to do them. Guess what today is? (I've included it in the title of this post, to spare you the work for scrolling down to see when I posted this.)

So already I'm feeling late. Now, you may ask why I didn't get anything of This Month's items done Last Month. Um, several reasons, none of them really satisfactory. (A satisfactory reason would have to be pretty extreme: documented abduction by aliens, month-long catatonia, that sort of thing.) First, the Month Before Last was really busy, so Last Month was a huge exhalation of breath, followed by a delightfully relaxed start on long-range projects, like Starman's niece's quilt. Next, Last Month had some natural problems: the election, Thanksgiving, and some emergency dental issues (which have trickled over into This Month, unfortunately). And finally, I just didn't feel like it. Okay?

I have legal work to do. I have to talk to our delightful D.A. about the fact that, while he's such a nice man, I still think he's violating my constitutional rights, and I just can't have that. It's the principle of the thing. I have to buy Christmas presents -- no, really, I don't already have that done! And then there's that dental work.

Plus I'm in food jail. Again. I have to answer to the Wii-ble (Hub 1.0 calls it "Madame Wii" but that's far too mature for the voice that comes out of the TV), which is tracking changes in my BMI. And "Cookie Weekend" is less than two weeks away -- that's when Hub 1.0 comes up and we spend the entire weekend making outrageously yummy cookies to give to people in his office, and this year, to people in Montrose. So I'd better be extra good for two weeks before the Wii-ble figures out what I've been doing that weekend!

And don't think I don't know that I need to be blogging. I've been neglecting you as well.

So much to do. *sigh*

But first . . . lunch!

Finally!

2008-11-18T09:25:00.002-05:00

Here in November, it's snowy and very pretty. Back in Vancouver, it was early September and . . . steamy. Not meteorologically, perhaps, but horologically. To wit: the steam clock!

See the white wisps up around the top of the clock? Well, that's the clever use of a steam vent that the good burghers of Vancouver thought of, and Hub 1.0 -- pictured here with me -- just absolutely had to look see how it worked.

While we were admiring the clock -- which we visited twice to be sure to hear all its on-the-hour toots (which are silenced during the night, so we didn't hear it when we first showed up at -- yes, you guessed it! -- 9:00 a.m.), a street character engaged us in touristy conversation. He was quite nattily dressed for a homeless guy, and he had some good suggestions of where we should go and what we should do. We happily tipped him for his advice and headed off toward Chinatown. At that point, Hub 1.0 went off on his own for a further ramble.

The guys on the beach. Our flight wasn't until the evening, so we thought we'd go to the anthropology museum on the university campus. Upon arrival, we discovered we were literally two days late -- it had just closed for renovations. But that was okay -- we found a lovely bistro for lunch and then explored the coastline of this bay (inlet?) during the afternoon. After that, we returned the rental car and flew home.

Wow! It feels like just ten weeks ago that we did all that. (Actually, that's not even true -- it feels like a LOT longer than that. Something about all the legal work I did in October makes that trip seem like ages ago. Just think; when we started that trip, none of us had a clue who Sarah Palin was!)

Such a Nice Man

2008-11-13T17:49:00.002-05:00

If you haven't been following along, the district attorney for my county commented on a blog post I did last year. (You can see the post, and comments, here.)

Well, as a result of my legal work, I've just had a chance to talk to him on an unrelated topic, and he's such a nice man. Which makes me feel good. Not about his Christmas columns (still gotta talk to him about those...) but about him, and the legal community here, and my small role therein.

So I retract my criticism of him personally, and I am genuinely sorry I judged him without talking to him first. I certainly shouldn't have written so harshly about him. But in a way, I'm glad I got to this place the hard way, because it humbles me (always a good thing) and because it reminds me that this is a good place.

I like Susquehanna County. I really do.

Autumn in Harmony

2008-11-09T10:08:00.004-05:00

I'm back. I've commented on the election here. I've shown the quilt I finished in September here. My legal work has quieted down a bit. (We lost the trial against That Man. I'll let you know if there's to be an appeal. Everything else is continued, or pending, or resolved.) So now it's time to get this blog up to speed.

I'm down to the last day of our trip to British Columbia, although I still owe you photos of Hub 1.0's trek onto Mendenhall Glacier. I also have photos from our trip at the end of September to England. But for now, here are some pretty pictures of life in Harmony this autumn:

From September.

Early morning, to be exact.

And this was an early morning in mid-October.

I just love the colors in this photo. But you can tell we didn't do anything special for this shot. If we had, we'd have moved the recycling bin in the corner and tidied up the hose!

That's Just SO Two Months Ago

2008-11-09T09:39:00.004-05:00

Finally -- we're nearing the end of our epic journey that only feels -- because of delays in my posting the photos! -- like it's taken over two months!

We stayed at this lovely bed & breakfast in Victoria:

It's right across the street from Canada House, the official residence of someone important. In fact, as we walked into town the first day, we saw someone important -- not the resident of the house in question, but a visitor. Still you can tell it's someone important when the car is a luxury town car (Jaguar? Mercedes? something like that) and it's got flags all over it.

Hub 1.0 and me on the porch. Our hostess was a lovely woman who did all the work. Our host was a voluble man who made all the recommendations as to where we should eat. It seems somehow fitting that the only bit of Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican Convention I saw was on the TV in the sitting room at this B&B.

This is Craigdarroch, a stately home open to the public -- it was right around the corner from the B&B -- we were clearly staying in a tony neighborhood! Actually, the point is that it used to be a tony neighborhood -- the mining tycoon who had Craigdarroch built owned a good bit of land, but when his widow died and the kids inherited, a lot of that land was sold and developed into more conventional suburban plots.

Craigdarroch is another pastiche of the stately English home that you find from time to time in North America. Inside is lots of lovely woodwork and stained glass windows; the original furnishings didn't survive because the building was used as a school for many years, and as a nursing home (I think; it's been a while). The current caretakers have gotten some furniture from the period, but it's the building itself that's worth visiting.

No particular reason -- I'm a sucker for early 20th Century children's book art. (Hey, I've spared you the photos I took of the floral collage entirely done in dried seeds -- so Victorian!)

This one's for Hub 1.0 -- this is a finial at the top of the curved staircase. This is precisely the sort of thing that gets Hub 1.0 to declare, "He's rather sweet!"

The view from Canada House (or whatever it was called). The gardens were open, and on some occasion Hub 1.0 and Starman wandered over for a longer walk. This and the following photos are their choices of what to photograph, so where with me you'd have gotten more flowers, with them you get -- well, you'll see.

A pretty view...

Interesting sculpture...

An arty backlit photo of Hub 1.0...

And a turtle. Nice job guys -- diversity in nature and in my blog. I love it!

Scenes From Another World

2008-10-28T09:14:00.003-04:00

It's blowing snow here right now, which is very pretty, I guess, but also very wintry. Combine that with the fact that my side lost in the trial yesterday, and repeated news items about McCain tightening the race, and I need some cheer. So, if the nice folks at FiveThirtyEight don't cheer you up, here are some pretty pictures of flowers, all taken at Butchart Gardens.

I'm a sucker for tuberous begonias, so there are lots of pictures like these. Believe me, I didn't even load them all! It could be that wonderful Pacific Northwest climate, or Mrs. Butchart shared my passion, but I have to say, there were lots of begonias at the gardens. Enjoy!

Hmm... So they have elevation changes, too? Well, it's actually the site of a former quarry. Supposedly, Mrs. Butchart got into some sort of device and planted the nooks & crannies of the exposed rock walls herself.

I like Japanese maples, too.

I love the way light filters through and around those wonderful serrated leaves.

Okay, there's more here than a begonia, but -- yeah, it's another begonia.

Ditto.

We did have a wonderful time at Butchart Gardens. It's nice to revisit these photos on a very different sort of day.

The World in Miniature

2008-10-19T09:44:00.003-04:00

Right behind the Empress Hotel in Victoria is a tiny entrance to a huge world of tiny things. The following pictures don't do it justice -- we didn't try to photograph the train layouts, for example -- and they rather tilt toward toy soldiers (for Starman's brother's sake) and Dickens tableaux (for Starman himself). Still, I owe you some photos, and these are next up in the queue.

If anyone can tell me more about these soldiers, that would be helpful. I'm sure there was some sort of caption, but as Starman has just said (on the other side of the room, looking at these pictures to identify the Dickens ones below), "In a time long long ago, in a world far far away." In other words, we just don't remember what the heck we saw then that caused us to take a photograph that I now can't identify.

(Truthfully, I just think the detail is cool.)

Not Dickens, so I'm guessing I photographed it just because I liked it -- Great Gatsby, perhaps? Actually, what it makes me think of is some Southern (U.S.) college. I don't know why it makes me think of that, but it does. The automobiles are all suggestive of the 1920s, so Gatsby's a better guess.

David Copperfield, I'm assured. The blacksmith's house is on the left.

Pickwick Papers.

Nicholas Nickleby.

Oliver Twist -- that's meant to be the Thames riverfront.

No, not a diorama. This is the actual water in actual Victoria. This was taken around from the southwest of the downtown area. We went to a brew pub (our hosts at the B&B were a bit horrified that of all the great restaurants in Victoria this was the one we were eating at, but we had a fine time) to meet up with a fellow crossword chum of Starman's.

The chum, Julian West, was just about to start a busy campaign season, as he was standing for a seat as a New Democrat. Unfortunately, a couple weeks into the campaign, it was revealed (no pun intended) that Julian had once stripped naked at some sort of bucolic retreat to go skinny-dipping. You wouldn't think that was career ending, but he did so in front of some teenage girls. This was all 12 years ago, but a couple of the women who were there recall it and claim that he was "aroused." Hmmm. I'm afraid in politics in Canada as here, impressions matter -- whatever actually happened, that impression is pretty bad. He withdrew from the race. We were very sorry to read about this -- and we wish him the best in his future endeavors.

Our Regularly Scheduled Programming . . .

2008-10-19T09:37:00.002-04:00

Remember me?

I really apologize for leaving you stranded on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. You’ve had tea at the Empress Hotel, but you’re still waiting patiently to go see Craigdarroch Castle, and there’s a veritable Eden waiting for you at Butchart’s Gardens. (In fact, you may have seen some of that before reading this, as I really do plan to get all that stuff up right away…!)

In the meantime, I owe you all an explanation. In case you didn’t know, we got home from our awesome Alaska & British Columbia trip and two weeks later flew to England for five days. By the time we got home, it was nearly October, and that meant I was going to be a lawyer nearly full time.

I don’t do a lot of lawyering, overall. But it just happened that all the hearings, trials, reviews and such that got continued from over the summer landed in October. In fact, I counted seven court appearances on the calendar in October, two of them full-bore trials/hearings, complete with witnesses, documents, etc., all of which requires preparation.

And then I met April. (That’s not her real name. It’s actually just the month this year that some nice things happened to her. But, although I haven’t met her in person, it seems like it might fit her.) April lives on the other side of the country; her ex-husband and daughter live here. The ex (I’ll call him Mike, for no particular reason) filed in August to have April’s parental rights terminated. There was a hearing on October 3; I had one week in which to prepare to represent April at this hearing.

I made mistakes on this case, like not looking up the relevant statute right away and the relevant case law, but I suspect I did more work than the court was expecting. In cases like this one, the dad has a lawyer, mom has a lawyer, and the child has a lawyer (called the guardian ad litem). Mike’s argument was basically that April was a drug addict who never called her daughter, and Mike’s new wife wanted to adopt the daughter. Understand, Mike’s lawyer and the guardian ad litem have been on the case since the summer. I had a week (well, because of something the court administrator said, I actually prepped in about three days – another mistake I won’t repeat!) in which to get to know my client, April.

What I learned is that she’s an amazing success story. Yes, she made some huge mistakes in her life (Mike isn’t one of them, and their daughter is quite the opposite of a mistake), but in the past year and a half, she’s really turned things around. She’s an inspiration to anyone who thinks, “I can’t undo this damage. I can’t make it up to the people I’ve hurt.” I’m genuinely proud of her, and I’m honoured to be her attorney.

At the hearing, April was on a speaker phone line with her counsellor and caseworker at the inpatient treatment center (the next day she left, a month early because she had done so well). Mike testified to how badly April had been up to 2005 when he left their hometown with their daughter and moved to Pennsylvania. He testified how little contact April had had with their daughter prior to that move. He testified that his current wife wants to adopt the daughter, and how excited his daughter was about the possibility of adoption.

April testified to how hard she’s worked at parenting classes as well as her recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism. Her caseworker and counsellor testified about how great April was, how she’s owned up to her mistakes, has matured and grown, and how well prepared she is to meet her future. (As well as all the touch-feely stuff you might imagine one does at a treatment facility, April had housing and a job lined up. She had even applied to and gotten admitted to a college program, and was smart enough to get financial aid lined up BEFORE the nation’s credit dried up. Smart woman!)

Okay, so the hearing comes down to the issue of whether April had “failed” in her duties as a mother by not contacting her daughter during the months and years before Mike filed his petition. (Mike had refused to let April’s family – who did know where Mike lived – tell April that information, so she actually didn’t even know what state he and their daughter were in. Unfortunately, that’s not as legally relevant as you might imagine. The courts just figure you should try harder to find your kid.) As things finished up, Mike’s lawyer concluded that April’s [alleged] failure as a parent was sufficient to justify the termination of her parental rights.

I had the clever thought (one that made up for my previous mistakes) to offer to provide the judge with a brief on the applicable case law. Bingo! Of course, what I was talking about was the question of whether April’s voluntary steps to improve as a parent trumped her not calling or writing to her daughter. Come to find out, April should probably have won on the existing Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases because no one presented testimony to show that it would be in their daughter’s best interest to have no further contact with April where the state Supreme Court sees the connection with the non-custodial natural parent as very important. I did argue that her efforts are sufficient to qualify as not being a failure as a parent. I also argued that public policy should prompt this court to deny Mike’s petition because it would be a bad message to send to parents that even the amount of work that April did might not be enough.

Anyway, the point of all this is that this is why no one has heard from me for the past six weeks: England, various court appearances, legal research and brief writing in April’s case, and now I have major court cases tomorrow and next Monday, and the Tuesday after that is the election.

Oh, right – I forgot to say, we’ve been active with the election as well. I’m “county counsel” for the Obama Campaign for Change here, so that’s involved a certain amount of work. We also participated with a local fundraising effort for our congressman, so that has been busy.

And I’ve been named to the board of directors of the Maternal and Family Health Services, which provides women and children with health services in 16 counties here in Northeast Pennsylvania.

And I’m learning the “Two-over-One” bidding convention in bridge.

So, many apologies for not writing sooner. I hope you understand.

Britain, oh, and Victoria, British Columbia

2008-09-26T08:14:00.003-04:00

Okay, so you've seen all our Alaska pictures. Well, I'm still hoping to get a hold of Hub 1.0's Mendenhall Glacier photos, but they're not on this computer, and so that will have to wait.

In real life, we're just back from the U.K. We had a nice, if whirlwind visit: we attended a dinner celebrating the 4000th puzzle in the weekly series that, for many years, Starman used to edit. That was a bit of a quirky event -- a great many cryptic crossword fanatics in a smallish hotel banquet room trying, with varying degrees of success, to make conversation. Noise levels were up, and we were at a Quiet Table. As a result, we were mostly unable to get talking to the others at our table -- there were ten people in a circle: two were elderly enough that hearing and being heard were nearly impossible, four were dead quiet folks who just didn't converse even amongst themselves, two were fairly chatty until the wine overcame them, and two were Starman and me. As the one American, I was torn between my mother's staunch conviction that a dinner table HAS to have a dinner table conversation at all times, and my reluctance to reinforce the Chatty Yank caricature. So I chatted, and then (particularly when the wine drinkers to my left succumbed to inebriation) fell silent too.

Our hotel room was certainly memorable. We couldn't make the television work when we checked in. British wiring includes those massive plugs and even has on-off switches on the outlets, but nothing seemed to be amiss. Finally, on a separate wall, I saw a small metal box on the wall that instructed me to insert my key card. Suddenly, all the lights (and the TV) came on! Amazing. Well, if you're a commercial traveler (Britspeak for salesman), this makes sense -- you only need the lights on when you are in the room, plus you always know where your key card is. But they'd only given us the one card, so we couldn't split up. (We were in the F Cell Block, so there was an outer door that needed unlocking before you got to the room. If it's all sounding a bit like a penitentiary, it was.) We did learn that any plastic card would work; we ended up using the card that logs our attendance at a Binghamton, NY movie theater!

The next day, we drove to Ruislip, which is west of London and north of Heathrow. Starman's sister lives there, and we were part of a reunion of all the sibs & offspring. Thirteen people at the table, ranging from 4 to 52. Yup, that would be me as the eldest, which after a lifetime of being the youngest is quite weird. I still worry that these people -- who have been nothing but kind, friendly, open and trusting since they all first met me -- will judge me and find me wildly inadequate for their wonderful older brother/uncle. In other words, I still think like a youngest. [On the other hand, it makes me feel particular kinship with Starman's brother; we bumped knuckles on the subject of baby pictures, lamenting the dearth of photos of the fourth child to come along.] But really, I have no reason to worry, and I know that. If they don't like me, they're far too polite and self-contained to say or do anything. Theirs is a "don't ask, don't tell" family; it may well have not even occurred to any of them that they were allowed an opinion on who their brother/uncle married! And anyway, what's not to like, right?

On then to Wimbledon, and Starman's aunt, now into her 80s: Lady P., whom the family calls Pip. She's the widow of the someteenth baronet Hyphen-Surname, which explained the dark oil portraits of preceding baronets lining the walls. I gather the title died with her husband; they'd had all daughters and the one male cousin died childless. (Which would also explain the portraits; you would assume that they'd have been shipped along to the (x+1)th baronet if the title had traveled.) As an American, I had lots of questions, which I did rather understand wouldn't be polite to ask. (Asking about the transfer of the title was the one rudeness I allowed myself.) What happened to the ancestral home? How anachronistic was it to be Lady P.? Did anyone use her honorific anymore, and did she care?

Mind you, I like Pip -- she's of an era I know a bit about, as my aunts are all in the same age range. Also, being Starman's mother's older sister, Pip is the best indication I'll ever get of what my mother-in-law was like before the combination of Parkinson's and a bad fall started her current gentle slide into senility. I would love to see more of Pip, but she too feels the need to gather the family when Starman is on the doorstep. Only one of Pip's daughters was close at hand, but it was clear she'd invited all three. Not, I think, to see if the American has two heads, but rather to evidence the family connections. I like that impulse, just as I like Pip.

From Wimbledon, which is south London, to Oxford to see Starman's mother, and then on to York. Starman, bless his furry heart, did all the driving on this trip! We do feel particularly comfortable visiting his brother's family -- I know them the best, and planning a wedding in North Yorkshire cemented our relationship. We're hoping they are able to come to the U.S. next summer so that we can return the hospitality.

Okay, so that was the most recent English trip -- back to earlier in the month, and British Columbia. After Alaska, we docked in Vancouver, rented a car, took a ferry, and went right back over to Vancouver Island (where Campbell River is) to spend a couple nights in Victoria. There'll be more photos tomorrow, but for now, we'll share the ones from our tea party at the Empress Hotel.

Those are the Saluki-dog trees at the entrance of the hotel. Tea there is expensive, but yummy. Our bed-and-breakfast host advised us that you're allowed to request seconds, even if the waiter frowns (literally) when you do it!

Us, and the tea. Note that Hub 1.0's default expression is a bit, uh, dour. Remember that for when I get his photos of the glacier trek up -- he's grinning from ear-to-ear, which is not to suggest he was wasn't happy at the Empress Hotel, but that he was euphoric finally to walk on a glacier!

Special Advisory

2008-09-19T07:13:00.002-04:00

Starman and I are off to England today, so posting may slow or even stop altogether for a few days. But we'll be back, and I still have lots of photos of British Columbia to ~~bore you silly with~~ post.

So hang in there. And if you're missing me, remember I have two other blogs that have been getting some attention recently: Quilting in Harmony, and my political blog. Go read those!

Campbell River, B.C.

2008-09-19T07:01:00.003-04:00

For some reason, our ship didn't dock at Ketchikan, but rather at Campbell River. Here is a lovely photo of Hub 1.0, and a rather unlovely one of me. (Everything about the pose I'm in is ill-advised, at least from the point of view of having my picture taken.) What's interesting is that both of us were still recovering from illness -- I had been up and about for a couple days at this point, but still felt blecch, and Hub 1.0 had been under the weather the day before, when it was a sea day and we took no photos.

Anyway, here we are at the waterfront park in Campbell River, a small town on the north point of Vancouver Island, which is not where Vancouver (the city) is located. Vancouver is across some water from Vancouver Island. And to make this even harder to understand, after these photos were taken, we hightailed it back to the ship, sailed into Vancouver, left there, rented a car and took a ferry back to . . . you guessed it . . . Vancouver Island. Silly duffers.

What can I say? We enjoyed our little slice of Campbell River, and we did a teensy bit of shopping (some smoked salmon and smoked tuna for our neighbors who had done such a wonderful job of looking after the cats for us). But if you're thinking, Hmmm, not a lot there, you'd be right.

Skagway

2008-09-18T07:37:00.005-04:00

The ship (not that one, below, but the one our intrepid photographer is standing on) is in Skagway, the last port of call in Alaska. Skagway is an olde-tyme mining town now catering to the tourist trade. Or so I'm told. I was still stuck in our admittedly-lovely stateroom, and thus couldn't join my companions on the excursion from Skagway to Canada through the White Pass. There was a train trip, and a bus trip, with some shaggy dog stories from the bus driver, a lovely woman who explained the ratio of men to women in Alaska this way: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

Lots of twists and turns on this train trip.

Hub 1.0. We just love photographing him, don't we?

This is clearly a diesel train -- there was a steam train excursion, but I believe it went someplace silly, like a spot where you could try panning for gold.

So my two British-passport-carrying pals had to explain to the Canadians what they were doing and why. I was reassured that this was the most casual border crossing yet.

That's the suspension bridge. Did I understand correctly that the only real reason to cross was that the rest rooms were on the far side?

Hmmm -- to cross or not to cross?

The view halfway along.

No idea -- probably a rest stop on the way back.

The highway on the way back to Skagway. I believe the jokey driver said at this point, "Yeah, that's a scary bridge. If you're at all nervous, you may want to close your eyes as we go over this bridge. I do!"

Picturesque Skagway!

Although, honestly, this vista has a lot in common with small towns in the far west -- Arizona, Montana, Wyoming. Wide streets and low-slung shopping emporia.

Sitka

2008-09-17T08:26:00.006-04:00

Sitka is our first port of call -- a small fishing town that used to be called New Archangel (Novoarkhangelsk) when the Russians controlled Alaska. There's a totem pole park, and a raptor center!

I got a teensy bit nervous that they were just going to drop a rope ladder down and expect us to climb down (I could have done it, but it would have made me feel comfortable) but no, in fact, this was a very orderly exit and not scary at all. The perspective of this photo is just weird, that's all.

There was another cruise ship in port with us, which may be what this photo shows. Truthfully, I don't remember every photo. (I didn't take them all, which is part of the problem.)

Sitka!

Outdoor sculpture in Sitka! (We had fun imagining how Mimi would have felt about this whale.)

I told you it was a fishing village.

The guys, providing scale for the totem pole. (Hub 1.0 is 6'4" if you are triangulating...)

And now for some fish. These are salmon -- and no, I don't know if they were coho, chinook, sockeye, or chum -- swimming upstream to spawn. We watched this a long time before it occurred to us that the reason they don't seem to go very far is that they're already "there," i.e., they've reached their spot and are just spawning. At which point they die, so you can kind of understand their lack of eagerness to get on with the job.

These are almost certainly the same fish as in the picture above and the pictures below. We should have taken a movie; it would have been like these photos with maybe a tiny bit of side-to-side fluctuation.

Ah, no -- I lie. This has to be a different spot in the stream, so different fish.

We have spared you photos of all the totem poles. Hub 1.0 did go into the gift shop (mysteriously, you had to pay to get into the exhibit and you couldn't go into the gift shop without paying) to get his sister a book explaining what the figures on the totem poles meant. That allowed Starman and me to sit quietly and watch fish leap out of the water. Way, way cool, and I am very sorry I don't have any pictures of that.

On to the Raptor Rehabilitation Center. When birds of prey are injured, they come to this place, which is set up to allow them to heal without contact with humans. Very cool. Some birds can't recover and be released into the wild, so they become ambassadors, even going to schools.

There's an owl in there, I promise.

There was an interactive feature on the wall outside, so now you can see how big our wingspans are.

6'3"

6'1"

5'11"

Mendenhall Lake

2008-09-17T07:35:00.009-04:00

You may have deduced by now that I'm blogging our Alaska trip a day-at-a-time. Yesterday was just Sitka; today, the ship docks at Juneau. It is at this point in the journey that our intrepid travelers split up. Hub 1.0 went on a helicopter to walk around on a glacier (the British have this lovely pronunciation of the word: GLASS-ier, as if it were more highly polished than the other furniture), Starman went on a canoe trip on Mendenhall Lake, alongside the glacier, and this little piggy didn't get to go shopping but instead stayed home.

I was supposed to meet up with Sarah, a quilter living in Juneau with her Coast Guard officer husband. She was going to take me to the local quilt shops. But at 1 a.m., I had a violent attack of the Dreaded Alaskan Lurgie, as Starman called it -- some virulent form of gastroenteritis that had me confined to cabin for two days. All the resulting photos, therefore, were taken by Starman. (We also have the photos from Hub 1.0's trip, but I'll have to transfer them over from another computer, and I can't promise it will be in chronological order with the trip.)

But first the ship has to dock in Juneau.

Look!

A whale!!

The interpretive storyteller on board, Terry Breen, explained to us more than once why glacier ice is blue, and basically it's the same reason why the sky is blue, as explained to a toddler: Because I said so.

Juneau. A crazy place to put a state capital, as it literally can't be reached except by boat or plane. And the airplane approach is insane, as the imaginary point where the pilot either has to land or pull up is over water and often in the clouds. And if you do pull up, you have to clear the mountains all around, one of which has had all the trees cleared off the top just to keep planes from getting tangled up in them!

Alaska thought hard about moving the capital to the interior, within sight of Mt. McKinley, to a town called Willow, but even though nearly everyone agreed Juneau was a stupid location, the voters decided not to spend the money it would cost to build an entire new capital. What stunned me about this part of John McPhee's book on Alaska, was his recap of how many other states have moved their state capital, in some cases more than once!

Okay, so this is Mendenhall Lake, which can be reached by a bus ride out of town. Starman was on one canoe with some fellow shipmates, while the other canoe had the "grandparents" on it. We never did get the full story, but we gathered that there is (or soon will be) some TV show about grandparents reconnecting with their grandkids. One episode of this show will be about a family on board our ship: grandparents, mom and a couple pretty teenaged daughters. So in the other canoe were the grandparents, the granddaughters, the sound guy, the camera guy, and the guide. Starman figures he'll show up in a background shot at some point in the show...

Yup, I think you can see some of their equipment if you click on the photo.

And that's the glacier! It must be huge; Hub 1.0's helicopter landed and they walked around on the ice and never saw Starman's group on the lake.

One of the pretty waterfalls.

They weren't allowed to go too close to the face of the glacier, so again, it's bigger than it looks.

Glacial ice!

Starman!

Starman with glacial backdrop!

I personally think this is a great photo.

At which point, they packed up and headed back into town. Starman stopped at a shop and bought me a stuffed bald eagle ("Baldy") as he couldn't get flowers. I then had to send him back out for Immodium and air freshener. He was (as always) a star -- put up with my kvetching and moaning, and hung out with Hub 1.0, who was in full tourist mode.

I have to say again, these two guys are so wonderful and such fun to travel with. If I was in a lousy mood while I was confined to cabin (the ship had rules about people who got sick), it was mostly because I was lonely without them. At the same time, I was glad that they got to do fun stuff. They had earned it!

Hubbard Glacier

2008-09-16T08:58:00.003-04:00

I had several misconceptions about Alaska shattered by this trip. One was how big it is, in terms of land. I thought it was big, and it's not. It's mindblowingly BIG. It is so much bigger than you can possibly comprehend that I can't think of a way to explain how big it is.

Another misconception I had is this business with the glaciers. I actually kinda thought there were only a few glaciers in Alaska, and that they were shrinking at an alarming rate. In fact, I thought there was one glacier that was now a half-mile hike from where it used to be just a couple years ago. (I was right about that one glacier, Portage Glacier, which is south of Anchorage, and which is receding at a startling rate. However, to worry about there being NO glaciers left is a bit like saying that because some ski resort close to Manhattan hasn't had good snow for a while, no one in the U.S. goes skiing anymore.)

So, in fact, my misconception unpacks into two misconceptions. First, there are tens of thousands of glaciers in Alaska, half of all glaciers in the world, and 10,000 of the Alaskan ones have names. Hubbard has a native name from the Tlingit (pronounced klink-it) tribe that live off these waters. Some Tlingit elders came on board to talk to us about the glacier, and their livelihoods. They even sprinkled tobacco on the water to encourage the glacier to calve (which is what you call it when a chunk of the face of the glacier falls off into the water), but the glacier must have been wearing the patch, `cause the tobacco had no visible effect.

And, second, not all glaciers are receding. Hubbard is growing, and therein lies a real problem. There is an inlet on one side of the big glacier, so if the glacier advances so much that it cuts off the inlet, that area will flood completely, destroying existing villages. (We saw this on Tougher in Alaska, the wonderful History Channel TV program with Geo Beach.) Which reveals another truth about Alaska: Mother Nature gets the last word.

That's Hubbard. Distances are deceiving: The face is probably 300 - 400 feet tall.

This is a whole other glacier, off to the side.

I suspect the black flotsam on the left is just an iceberg, but we were of course watching for whales.

This is the approach of the tug that carried the Tlingits to our ship.

See those teensy black splodges near the shoreline? Well, I wanted to let you think they were whales, but if you click on the photo, you'll see rather clearly that they're fishing boats. Bummer. We did see whales, but I suspect we have no photographic proof of this. But here's a tip -- go back to the Denali photos and click on the ones with WILD, EXCITING BLOBS. I think you'll be able to tell which are the moose and which are caribou...

And Now, Finally, the Cruise!

2008-09-15T10:14:00.003-04:00

Yes, finally, we're at the point where the land bit ends and the cruise bit starts. We sailed on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner, seen below.

I could bore you with all its stats, but I'm not that dumb. You just want to know one thing. What did our stateroom look like? Well, here it is:

That's the inner half, with a little hallway to the bathroom (not shown, but it was tiled in marble, had a not-entirely-minuscule bathtub for the oh-so-British Starman to bathe in, and a lovely sink area with enough room for all our clobber), a walk-in closet to the left, and our queen-sized bed.

Sorry about the poor lighting, but this is the outer half of our stateroom, with a built in sofa, TV (its only "real" station being Fox, perhaps a subtle clue as to the Republican nature of our fellow travelers), desk area, bookshelves, cabinets with drinks glasses and so forth. (I'm just now realizing we never did drink the complimentary bottle of fizzy wine, and in fact, we left it there for the next people to have. Oh well...) And, as you can see, we have a balcony on the port side.

Me, looking out at Seward, an unremarkable port city that -- like virtually all of Alaska, has magnificent backdrops.

Ah, here you go -- Starman and me, dressed for the safety demonstrations. This gives you some idea of the cabinetry in the stateroom.

We don't seem to have taken any photos of the ship's interior spaces, but they were all lovely. Several dining rooms, some "restauranty" enough to require reservations, an observation lounge above the bridge, a theater, a fitness center that Starman used, spa/salon space that none of us used, a card room that seemed rarely used by anyone, and the list goes on. The swimming pool was quite small and never used; it had sea water in it at various times, but it looked chilly. There were three hot tubs, which did get some use, although we never accomplished it.

And that brings up one of the great lessons of cruising -- it's not as relaxed as you might think. We did manage to attend almost all of the quizzes (winning three or four, I'm pleased to say), and a couple of the concerts. We played a tiny bit of bridge. We didn't shuffleboard (a regret on my part; I like the game), or walk around the deck the 11 times needed to make a mile, although I did take the stairs a fair bit. But if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have done more. Like used the hot tub instead of assuming, "Oh, there'll be lots of time," which is precisely what I did assume, and was wrong about.

Starman doesn't figure we'll take another cruise, and he may be right. I had a great time, but in retrospect a lot of that comes from the fact that I was traveling with two of my favorite people. Cruising does allow for people to split up and do separate things, and we'll see if a more conventional road trip is less pleasant because there's less spontaneity and individualism. (Hub 1.0, Starman and I are planning a road trip to Niagara and Toronto next year, so that will be interesting for the opportunity to compare and contrast.)

Mind you, Alaska is one of the places where a cruise completely makes sense: We went places that aren't otherwise easy to get to. So we were thrilled to have this opportunity. But I think of the people we met who'd signed up for the round trip, meaning 14 days of cruising with two visits to each port of call, and it's clear they were there for the cruise, not for Alaska.

All of the foregoing doesn't alter one essential fact: This was a fabulous wedding present! I think all three of us had a great time, and I think a lot of that is because we travel well together. Which is the coolest, if distinctly narrow-end, part of the trip after all.

Girdwood

2008-09-14T09:25:00.004-04:00

While we were in Denali (the small town of shops and lodging outside Denali National Park and Reserve; it completely shuts mid-September and is Stephen King's Shining territory until the next summer), we stayed at the very best resort possible. Okay, so it's a relative term, and the beds were hard. Big whoop. But we deduce that preceding tour groupies had complained bitterly about the accommodations; we received a little "Chill Pill Package" from the tour groupers that included a miniature black bear (we named ours Gnarly, as in Da Gnarly Bear), some chocolate, and a reminder that the group would next go to Girdwood, where the beds were undeniably nicer.

Before we get to Girdwood, I will explain about the tour. Everything starts with the cruise you pick; as Hub 1.0 was our host on this travel extravaganza, he sat down with us and a guide book to Alaska Cruises 2008 to discuss the choices. Basically, there were three sorts: mega-ships with upwards of 2,300 passengers; smaller, more luxurious ships with fewer than a 1,000 passengers; and very small ships that are less luxurious but more educational (I think of these as the Jacques Cousteau option). All three of us were agreed that we wanted some of the traditional appeals of cruising: fancy dinners, spacious areas on board for activities and relaxing, and a sense that everything's been done for you already. But we didn't really want a mega-ship, so that left two options, Regent and Silversea. Silversea, I can only surmise, is priced to exclude the riff-raff; Regent seemed a bit more reasonable. (I'll talk more about the ship when I do the first of the cruise posts.) Nonetheless, the people on the cruise were definitely in a certain financial stratum. And, as the land excursion is sponsored by the cruise company, all the groupies on our excursion were on the same cruise and able to afford a four-day jaunt in addition, so you can imagine some of them felt they were owed a certain cruise-like standard of accommodation. (Bluntly, I just assumed that half 0f them have memberships at their local country clubs, and all of them are Republicans.)

Okay, so according to our tour guide, Jesse, there is precisely one four-star hotel in all of Alaska, and it's the Alyeska Spa and Ski Resort, in Girdwood. (Side note -- don't let the name Girdwood put you off; it's a lovely mountain resort town southeast of Anchorage; under-indictment Senator Ted Stevens lives there.) Frankly, there was precious little reason to go to Girdwood in August except for the fancy accommodations, although we were afforded the opportunity to go up the funicular to the top of an adjacent mountain for the "view." Personally, I was not bummed that it was completely shrouded in mist -- we were pretty high up (what, 6,000 feet?) and I really didn't feel like revisiting the acrophobia-induced psychosis I experienced in the Colorado Rockies. Here, then, is Girdwood:

Yup, it's Hub 1.0 again. Looking out at the landscape below the cloud cover. Some people had gone up the evening before, which was smart, but my intrepid hikers had gone on a nature walk instead. It was on that walk that the guide explained how the local conifers (one of the spruces; I don't recall if it is the Sitka) grow these enormous galls. I'll let Hub 1.0 post a comment and explain the phenomenon, but in the meantime, here's the funny picture:

More About Denali National Park and Reserve

2008-09-13T12:59:00.008-04:00

Here's what I learned about the Alaskan interior while we were there: It's an arctic tundra environment with a very short growing season that takes advantage of the long periods of sunlight, so what grows there does so quickly and efficiently. There are trees at lower elevations, mostly spruce and light deciduous trees; above the tree line, the predominate plant is willow; there are 30 varieties in Alaska.

Here's what I saw: autumn. In fact, we were assured that autumn had just happened in the space of a couple days; had we been there a couple days earlier, everything that's reddish in these photos would still have been green. There should be some fireweed in these photos; if you see anything pink, that's fireweed (so called because it's the first thing that grows after a wildfire).

At which point, I show you a photo with no particularly interesting color at all. And it's not like I can say what you're looking at, other than it's Denali.

Lower down, trees.

Higher up, no trees.

Yippee! Autumn color, Alaska-style.

More color, and more WILD EXCITING BLOBS!

Hub 1.0, of course. I have a movie that we took on Starman's camera, but I don't know how to load it onto the . . . oh, wait . . . there's a little icon suggesting film! Okay, let's see how this works out. I'm allowed to keep writing while it loads.

The point here is that it's very beautiful, and very simple. I was struck by the people we met on this portion of the trip. The driver who acted as our naturalist guide, Rebecca, had been a bus driver in the Lower 48 before moving to Alaska to do some teaching. She needed a job in the summer, and her school bus driving experience (plus her ability to herd tourists like they were so many second graders) landed her the current gig. As the tourist season overlaps the school year, she abandoned teaching full time, suggesting this is the more lucrative gig.

We also met a young man who went to college in Georgia, I think, and who made a deal with his roommates that they would homestead in Alaska and climb the mountain. He's the one who stayed. He has 15 acres north of Denali, complete with a log cabin he built himself. He can't be all that off-the-grid; I overheard him talking with one of the tour group organizers about a gig later in the week: "Call me."

Mind you, from the John McPhee book I read on the cruise, "Coming Into The Country," it sounds like there's not a lot of land just sitting there for people to live on. Oh, there's a LOT of land, but between the stuff owned by the federal government, and the state, and the native communities, and private ownership, there's not much left. When the guy who homesteaded did it, he paid $5 per acre -- but that was twenty years ago, and the following year the state no longer allowed people to do that. I gather people can just go into the bush and make a home and hope no one notices, but it's likelier than you might think that you'll have the federales flying around in short order suggesting, with some force to their words, that you're trespassing and really ought to leave.

[McPhee wrote something else that stuck with me: If you drive past a house in the Lower 48 that has car parts and truck carcasses rotting in the front lawn, that's a person who's living in Alaska. They just haven't moved up yet.]

Okay, here's the movie. The noise is (embarrassingly) me, breathing hard after climbing a teensy hill.

Alaskan Wildlife

2008-09-11T09:06:00.002-04:00

When Hub 1.0 and I started doing the "50-by-50" trips, we didn't even own a camera. Well, I have a Pentax K1000 SLR -- like the old kind that takes film and is fully non-automatic? -- but we didn't bother with photos. Our thinking was, having a camera means you're seeing what you're seeing always in terms of what sort of picture it will make, which isn't quite the same as actually being there and seeing it.

With the ease of digital cameras, of course, a lot of that issue has evaporated. Starman owns one, and it's teeny tiny, easy to use, and presents negligible interference with the experience. It also doesn't take high-res telephoto close-up shots of wildlife. So, trust me, there was wildlife in Denali, and we even took a couple photos of it. But the best photos were taken on our way out of town -- here's a grizzly grubbing for roots by the side of the highway:

By contrast, here's a grizzly in Denali, grubbing for roots a bit farther away:

And now for what we mostly saw when we looked for wildlife:

I forget what those two blobs were when we saw them -- moose? caribou? more bears?? We knew at the time, that's for sure, but the landscape is a bit free of memorable landmarks, so it's hard to remember what we were looking at when we took this picture.

There is one landmark: the mountain. You can't see it from every vantage point in Denali, which seems incredible when you think that it's 20,320 feet high. And you also can't always see it even when it's in the vista because of its propensity to shroud itself in clouds. This is what we had on the day we were in Denali:

And here you also see the most prevalent wildlife on our trip: other tourists! Oh, we were outnumbered by the bears, moose, caribou, Dall sheep, wolves, foxes, snowshoe hares, ground squirrels, eagles (golden & bald) and lynx that reside in the park, but we saw more humans than animals. Even so, we saw a lot -- everything on that list except the lynx, and even a harrier (we think). We just couldn't photograph them all.

On the cruise, where people were eager to spot sea lions and whales, we overheard a wonderful response to the cry of the overexcited spotter. When the spotter exclaims, "I just saw a whale," the reply is, "Of course you did." Well, c'mon -- it makes sense. A flash of black in the water might as well be a whale fluke; everyone's happier that way. So trust us that those blobs are something WILD! and HUGE! (if you got close enough) and EXCITING!

Back in the Lower 48

2008-09-10T14:19:00.005-04:00

I'm a bit surprised to see that it's nearly been a month since I blogged last, but then when I think about it, I can see why that might be. First of all, I was working hard to finish a quilt top in the two weeks before our trip. So hard, in fact, that although I succeeded, I haven't even been able to blog about that on my quilt blog. Come back later for the hyperlink!

Next, we didn't have the smoothest departure imaginable. On the morning we were supposed to deposit Mimi at the kennel and head south to meet up with Hub 1.0, Mimi was limping badly. This led to an emergency trip to the vet's, on to the kennel to explain why we weren't checking in at that moment, then to a veterinary orthopedic surgeon for emergency x-rays, then back to the kennel, this time to announce that Mimi had pulled a muscle in her back, needed steroids and (dog) bed rest, and could they let us know that she was doing okay? We then headed back home to pack (yes, I'm embarrassed to say we hadn't finished our packing, mostly because we'd thought we'd have lots of time...), rest for a half hour, then head south to meet Hub.

Here's the result though:

That's Mount McKinley, or Denali, as the native Athapascans call the mountain. The local Alaskans call it "the mountain," as in the question, "Can you see the mountain today?" We could, and that makes us very lucky; this has been the coldest and wettest summer in quite some time. Add that to the fact that Denali is also known as "the weathermaker" because it frequently makes its own climatic conditions, and you've got a recipe for disappointment for all those tourists who signed up for a trip to Denali (confusingly, that's also the name of the national park that the mountain is in) only to be confronted with solid clouds.

Hey, Hub 1.0 and I have been there, stared at that. When we went to the Grand Canyon, what we actually got was solid white cloud. As a result, we figure we got to see the mountain because of our "view karma" being in good standing.

Another view:

How postcardal is that?

Here I am, at a spot where the coach driver could pull off and let us tumble out with our cameras.

And here are my travelling companions (Hub 1.0 and the Starman, with Denali between them):

Shortly after this spot on the road, we ended up in Talkeetna, where we boarded the Alaskan Railroad (one of the nice glass-domed cars) and did the rest of the trip to Denali by rail. Hub 1.0 spent most of the time on the platform behind the car, but here's evidence that Starman hung out next to me:

There will be more photos of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, but in the meantime, I won't keep you in suspense: we had a great time, particularly the traveling together bits. And Mimi has recovered just fine from her back troubles. We've agreed that her career as a gymnast is over, but that's probably for the best. I don't really want to ship her off to Houston and the tender mercies of the doggy equivalent of Bela Karoli...

So That's Why This Blog Is Called That . . .

2008-08-11T18:50:00.005-04:00

When I was in fifth grade, our teacher brought in an elaborately carved ivory ball, which had another elaborately carved ball inside of it, and that one had one inside of it, and so on. I was entranced; even at that age, I loved the intricacy of such designs. And I was fascinated by the idea: the carver would start with the exterior carving, and use the holes that design created to start carving away the connections between that ball and the one inside it. I can almost imagine the feeling he'd get when the last bridge between the outer ball and the next one in was severed and the inner ball could move freely.

Of course, you can never see all of the design work; it's just too hard to rotate the inner balls around enough to work out what they must look like if they didn't have the outer ball(s) obscuring them. This sense of the design being there but unseen seems utterly lovely and rather sad, all at the same time.

I've always wanted one of those balls. Of course, these days one can't in all conscience buy anything new that was made out of ivory, but buying something antique seems less objectionable. And, as fate should have it, my friend Dianne has a small booth with antiques in her hometown of Jacksonville, Illinois. When Hub 1.0 and I visited her some years ago, she happened to have one of these balls. I was thrilled to buy it.

Every once in a while, my life seems complicated like one of these Chinese curiosities. No matter which way I turn it, I see something else, but I can never see all of the concentric problems. This happened to me recently. I wrote something on the quilt-related message board I'd been happily participating in, and it rather came back to bite me on the butt. But what I wrote, what it means, how others perceived it, and why I did it, is all very elaborate. I'll try to explain.

Here's the surface story: Someone on the message board posted a comment about "six degrees of separation," which she interpreted as those weird coincidences, e.g., where you strike up a conversation with a total stranger, and it turns out that she used to live in your aunt's house or dated your husband's best friend two decades ago. This was a fun thread, and several people shared their experiences with such coincidences. (My original story was this: When I was in grad school, I got an internship that included an overnight stint shadowing the psych resident at an Albany, NY hospital. When he heard my last name, he asked if I was related to . . . and named my brother. They'd gone to college in Rochester, NY a decade earlier. I also contributed a couple more posts in the freaky coincidence thread in the following days.)

But a lot of people know the "six degrees of separation" game as dealing with celebrities, and those sorts of posts started to get mixed in with the "and then that's when I realized her aunt had been my second grade teacher" sort. Because some members of this message board had discovered an interest in aeronautics, someone posted something about the famous names they had connections with in aeronautics. Which prompted me to post a list of the famous people that someone in my family has a connection to (has met, worked with, etc.).

Now, before you cry out, "Oh, no you dint!" I hasten to explain that I credited the family's "Zelig" gene (referring to the way Woody Allen's character ends up alongside a bunch of historical figures), stated that I'd only met a couple of these people (and I didn't specify which ones) and tried to be tongue-in-cheek about it ("That, and $4.50 will get you a fancy coffee at Starbucks..." was how I closed the post), but yeah, a list of famous names is still a list of famous names. What I thought was interesting was the list itself. Mahatma Gandhi, Susan Lucci, J. Edgar Hoover, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, F. Murrary Abraham, Walt Disney, Isaac Asimov, Yo-Yo Ma, Bronson Pinchot, B.F. Skinner, and Mischa Barton (late of the O.C. TV show on Fox). It's a wacky list.

You can easily guess how this was received by a couple people. The woman who started the "six degrees of separation" post chastized me for missing the point of the weird coincidences thread, and someone else remarked mildly that this smacked of name-dropping. I would disagree with the former criticism, but I cannot deny the latter.

I do know it's a social solecism to be boastful and self-important, and if I'd felt I'd done that, I'd apologize and we'd all move on. But I don't think I'm special because my father met Walt Disney in 1964, or because my mother worked with Eunice Kennedy in 1945 (she used to leave her chewing gum on the telephone -- eww); that would be absurd. What I think is fascinating is that there is not a single famous person in my family (you have to go all the way to my first cousin twice removed to get to the guy who wrote "I, Claudius" . . . and I never met him!) but we all have this weird knack of meeting famous people. What is that about?

One thing it is -- it's narrow end. Humans tend to form tribes, and one tribe comprises celebrities. Brad Pitt dates and marries other celebrities, not Tammy Jo at the local Mickey D's. So if you have a Venn diagram with Famous People in one circle and Non-Famous People in another, they don't overlap. Even if Brad does marry Tammy Jo, she becomes famous, so it's not a problem Venn diagram-wise (whether it's a problem in other respects is debatable). One way non-famous people meet famous people is when the non-famous person does something noteworthy, like be a contestant on Project Runway. But that's not most of us, and it's not anyone in my family.

I clearly belong to the Non-Famous Tribe. But I also belong to a tiny subset of N-Fers that meet famous people without trying to. And because being narrow end is important to me (frankly, in a lot of ways that don't seem to apply to anyone else in my family -- so even within the tiny tribe of N-Fers Who Meet Famous People, I'm the lone wolf thinking about this stuff), I can ruffle through the index cards with the stories of who met whom when and create a list. Which strikes some people as self-aggrandizing.

I was upset when I read the comments on the message board, and I quickly turned it off and haven't gone back. Which brings me to the next concentric ball inside the last one. Why was I upset? Hurt that my new friends didn't "get" what I was about? Hurt that they would think I'm that shallow? I'd be pretty stupid if I thought that way -- theirs is the mainstream thinking on this subject. It is rude to say, "Oh, and then there's so-and-so, and then whassisface, and don't forget whassername!" I thought the context took some of that rudeness away, but I clearly got the calculation wrong.

What hurt was that I'd wanted to share the fact that I have the Zelig gene. I suspect I'm always looking for the time and place where it's safe to say, "Hey, here's this narrow end thing about me," and have people go, "Oh, okay," or better yet, "Hey, me too." Strangely, this had already happened on this particular message board. I'm a larger woman married to a Brit (for the second time, no less), and two other women fit that description (!); in another context, I'm a non-practicing lawyer with a connection to Kennewick, WA, and another woman is also a non-practicing lawyer who lives there now.

So I got a bit defensive, and stepped away from the computer before I wrote something too sharply worded, expressing my outrage that they should so completely misunderstand, etc., etc. And actually, I haven't missed it much. I love the people I've met, and would like to participate, but I'm always gun-shy around groups, and this experience hasn't reassured me. I'm not saying never, I'm just saying not right now.

Incidentally, I just finished reading Jennifer Weiner's book "Little Earthquakes." She wrote "Good in Bed" and "In Her Shoes," which was made into a movie starring Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz. In the movie, Cameron Diaz reads aloud an e.e. cumming poem, "I carry your heart." I saw that movie on the plane coming home in May, 2006, and that poem really expressed the bond I felt with the Starman, who was still Just A Friend at that time. A Friend I happened to feel a really strong bond to, that's all. Anyway, I read that poem at our wedding, and didn't cry too much . . .

I've met Jennifer Weiner. I've been to her house (unless they've moved), and I've eaten quiche that she's made with her own hands. Mind you, she wouldn't recognize me if we bumped into each other at the South Philadelphia Curves, and I know that because we did and she didn't. That's fine. So after reading the book (which I really liked, btw), I checked out her blog, which was interesting because she had just completed a mini-triathalon, and while she's way smaller than me, she's not exactly svelte.

But here's the thing. I don't know Jennifer Weiner. She's not my friend; she wouldn't recognize my name; I can't call her and say Hey. So I think I'm pretty clued in on the difference between "meeting" somebody and knowing them. And even if I KNEW her, how would that reflect well on me? (I say all this, but when one of the Fugly girls wrote back to me in response to a clever and amusing email that I had spent a LOT of time composing, I was truly puffed up with my .4 seconds of [proximity to] [almost-] fame.)

Here, then, are the concentric balls as I see them: On the outside, I posted a message that suggested I was somehow special because my family has met a diverse group of famous people; some people were offended; I was hurt by their reaction. Inside that, we have the idea of belonging to, and not belonging to, various tribes. Did I violate some code by suggesting that I belong to a subset tribe, and was therefore special? Inside that: But I do feel acutely the separateness of being different from the tribe I ought to identify with. And finally, the littlest ball that I can see: I want someone to embrace, or at least accept, my narrow end nature. Maybe it didn't happen this time on the message board; maybe instead I've left people with a lingering nasty taste when they happen to think of me; but maybe someday someone will say, "Yup, I know what you're talking about."

I still have a lot of questions about all this, but I do know one thing: If I had it all to do over again, I wouldn't write that particular post. At the same time, I'm glad I did. It's gotten me thinking about this topic in sharper focus than I normally do. It's a trust issue: Who can I trust with the most personal truths about me? The Zelig gene thing isn't very important, but it is narrow-end. Almost certainly I goofed in how I presented it, but that's a useful lesson in itself.

Oh, and one last thing: My ivory curiosity came with a base:

She looks like she knows how to keep her cool. She doesn't exactly look computer-savvy, let alone ready to master a message board. But she looks like she knows who she is, what she wants, and how to live with her choices.

I'll endeavor to learn from her the way I've learned from the ball on her head!

Renaming the Cat

2008-08-10T10:56:00.002-04:00

Snippet of an actual conversation chez moi:

As Starman walks in the room holding the cat . . .

Me: You know that residential facility where my client's son is? Bridgeview? Well, the staff aren't much older than the residents, so they have to be called Mr. or Ms. and then their first names. You'd be Mr. [Starman] and he'd {indicating the cat} be Mr. Linus.

Starman: But Linus is his surname.

Me: No it's not. {Thinks to self, I was there when he was named, but says instead . . .} If Linus is his surname, what's his first name?

{pause}

Starman: Lionel

{longer pause, while I laugh, hard}

Starman: And he's the Earl of Barfalot.

Mimi and Linus in Harmony

2008-08-05T10:52:00.003-04:00

We have two cats, Linus (pictured here with Mimi) and Polly (who you may never see pictured with Mimi). Linus is totally the alpha cat, and commands much greater respect from Mimi than we do. The rapprochement between Linus and Mimi has been a gradual process, and is hardly finished. Mimi's new freedom -- she can now be outside on leash unsupervised -- has given them new opportunities to occupy the same space. And here they are, doing just that. Isn't that a great photo? (Starman took it.)

Our routine in the evening is this: The cats get fed early on (around 5) with kibble in their dish. We then need to keep Mimi from eating it all, so she's not allow into the kitchen. Mimi gets her food at 7:00 p.m. Yesterday, for the first time ever, she was allowed outside prior to supper and after supper. Combined with all the time she spent outside anyway (which, incidentally, was mostly spent lying around waiting for us to do something, but she did actually play with her blue tire on her own), she was pretty pooped in the evening.

Starman's dream is to be able to watch TV with the cats on the furniture with us and the dog in her dog bed at our feet. So far this hasn't been possible -- Mimi is still so full of energy in the evening that we're monitoring her behavior and actions to the exclusion of all else, including what's on the TV. So she usually gets crated and I take her out at 11:00 for her last pee of the night.

Last night, though, I took her out, put the leash on her, and she immediately flopped down in her dog bed! Uh, okay. So we watched some more TV (and not coincidentally slept late this morning) just to enjoy the experience.

Here's another picture of our dog & cat in Harmony:

Invisible Fence -- Off Leash At Last!

2008-08-03T17:37:00.002-04:00

Mimi! Off leash!! Finally, the day we've been waiting for! At her feet are two new toys: a red Jolly Ball, which is based on a horse ball like the one she already ripped, and a new flying toy that I bought at the supermarket. The Jolly Ball is her new favorite. I bought it online by researching "horse ball" -- that's a game, I gather, that can be played with a horse ball and actual horses -- but when I found this on Amazon, it was clear that dog owners are the real consumers of this product. She doesn't much care for the flying toys; I clearly buy them because I want her to like them. I'll learn.

Mimi in motion, ball in her mouth. This was yesterday (Saturday) afternoon. Starman wouldn't take her off lead earlier in the day, and I really wanted her to start to burn off all that excess energy.

The Jolly Ball is a soft ball, and Mimi has already punctured it. The handle is rigid, though, and sometimes she'll carry it around by its handle. We can claim it and then throw it for her to catch, but she also likes the game where Starman runs after her and she runs away.

Hey, look -- we've actually tired her out. This was taken this afternoon. She had a long morning session with me, and then a long afternoon session with the Starman. That's what exhausted her. It's not hot here today, so even the panting is a good sign. You gotta love a tired dog!

And this was her reward for a stint of distraction training. She loves the car, and was happy enough to just loll on the back seat while we chatted nearby.

I was afraid earlier today that she might have run through the fence when our neighbors drove by. Well, I don't she can have actually done it, but it looked bad for a moment there. We're supposed to do the distraction training on lead, but the running around & play time is off lead. We had done the distraction training (Starman on a bicycle, Starman with the weedwacker, even her beloved Jolly Ball outside the fence wasn't enough to get her to risk the "correction," as they euphemistically call the shock) earlier, with the leash on her. But the leash comes off for playtime, and that's when our neighbors drove by. Mimi raced after the car, but stopped when I yelled, "Back!" She took off after the car, though, and initially I thought I saw her on the road (i.e., on the wrong side of the fence). Doesn't seem to be the case -- when I got up to the driveway, she was up on our deck, drinking water. Good dog!

We still have some adjustments to make. She was happily flaked out in the morning room with me, and Starman had closed both doors to keep her from roaming into the kitchen. I was working on the computer when she shifted slightly, made a quiet but odd noise in her throat, and then peed on the brick hearth. I mean, seriously, the whole thing from dozing comfortably to peeing was less than 5 minutes, and her "warning signs" are bloody subtle, if you ask me. (As she may have been doing!) I don't know what we're doing wrong, if anything, but I do know we did the next bits right. She got her collar back on, went outside, and I cleaned up the stain with Nature's Miracle. The brick is 200 years old and pretty porous, so all I can hope is that soaking in some Nature's Miracle on top of the urine is sufficient.

Just in case you've forgotten that we have two cats, here's one of them: Linus, looking pretty regal on a silk cushion.

Invisible Fence, Day Three

2008-08-01T10:48:00.003-04:00

Okay, so today didn't go so well. We live a long way from anywhere, and we try to keep to a minimum our trips to stores, etc. Blame Al Gore, therefore, for the following story.

Mimi has one leash, which is short (4 feet). That was an deliberate decision when we first kitted her out; it's that much harder to influence an exuberant puppy/adolescent with a longer leash. When we realized we were supposed to get a longer leash for the underground electric fence training, we put it on the mental list of things to get "the next time someone's going to a store..." Which will be this afternoon, when I go to Montrose on business. But I needed to do my part in training and exercising Mimi this morning.

The training was going well. She hesitates when approaching the white flags, and has refused to approach white flags she's been trained to back away from. So far, so good. But we have over 1100 feet of underground electric fencing here, which means a lot of white flags. Meanwhile, she's super-rammy as a result of less exercise in the past two days, which only compounds the problem we surely had after two days of her being kenneled. I walked her, did some training, walked her some more, and then let her play with her blue tire. which is suspended from a nice springy branch of a centrally-located ash tree.

Have you seen the viral email "diary of the household dog & cat?" Don't know who wrote it, but it's pretty funny. The dog's response to everything is "_______ My favorite thing!" (e.g., "Breakfast! My favorite thing!" "Car ride! My favorite thing!") until you get to "Bath. Bummer." The cat, on the other hand, starts "It's Day #987 of captivity," plots his escape by weaving around the owner's legs as he's at the top of the stairs, and comments, "The dog is allowed to leave the house, but then voluntarily returns. He is obviously retarded." I laughed for days remembering that last line.

Well, Mimi would surely write "Playing tug-of-war with the blue tire! My favorite thing!" if she kept a diary. I suspect some of the other entries wouldn't be quite so benign, but that really is her big treat. But, if you can imagine it, it's hard to let her do her leaping & playing while keeping her on the short leash attached to the choke chain. All those contortions don't help. So the following things happened on my watch this morning: she slipped the choke chain, she bit me (TOTALLY NOT HER FAULT -- my hand was too close to the blue tire), she ran off, and yes, she ran through the underground electric fence field. The electric collar is still shrouded (it's not yet been three days) sop there was no electric shock and there wasn't much I could do. She did hesitate at the white flags, for what that's worth.

*sigh*

I will get the longer leash this afternoon. Barn door after escaped horse? I guess, but we'll need it tomorrow when we do distraction training.

"Initial stages of underground electric fence training! Not my favorite thing!"

Invisible Fence -- Day One

2008-07-30T20:18:00.002-04:00

We got the Invisible Fence installed today. Yes, it's a registered trademark or something proprietary, but as we actually bought that company's product and installation, I think I can use their mark without risking dilution.

Kind of a cool system: a delightfully chatty woman named Dorie came around last week to walk the metes & bounds of the area to be wired and calculate from that distance the price. She then stayed for a couple extra hours just chatting; that's the kind of woman she is, and the kind of job she has. We said yes, please, and got today as The Day.

Now, I had rather naively assumed that we'd just need to walk Mimi around the white flags ("Back, back. Good dog!" about a zillion times) for three days, then let her go figure out for herself why we kept tugging her back from those oh-so-enticing fluttering flags. Nope -- this actually has a 30-day training system. And we're just the sort of people who'll try hard to stick to that system. One obnoxious aspect is that we're really supposed not to let her out of the fenced area -- even with the electric collar off her -- for thirty days. That means no more walks along the air strip. Eventually, that will be okay, but for now it sucks. She wasn't getting enough exercise before when I would walk her for 45 minutes (and do 10 minutes of obedience training) and then later in the day, Starman would exercise her for another full hour. Now we have to keep her on leash for a week (!!) and get her exercised inside the fenced area. It's a big area, but there's not an easy walk on the property. I so long to let her off leash! Oh well, this too shall pass.

The installation was a hoot -- and quick, too. Shawn arrived at 9:00 a.m., timed perfectly to coincide with the end of one phone call, a mad dash to pull on some clothes (Starman having driven off to collect Mimi from the kennel), answer a call of nature, and then take another phone call. The poor woman (a client, no less) who called that time was nearly enough hung up on. (I did call her back...) Finally, I ran downstairs to let Shawn in.

He was big & burly, and sported tattoos on each shoulder/arm: A shark's mouth wide open with little fish swimming into range on his right bicep, and an elaborate cross with "Only God Can Judge Me" on the other. As we were walking around trying to figure out the layout of the wiring and so forth, I asked him if it was a one-person job. "Yup," he replied. "Must get lonely," I commiserated. "No," he stated baldly, then offered as how he didn't like people. Oh-kay . . . Nonetheless, I rather liked him. If he seemed surprised when I leapt on the tractor to mow an additional bit of the meadow, he didn't show it. He was great with Mimi, too.

The whole system was in within two hours -- there's a trench-digging tool that also unspools the wire (a "Ditch Witch"), so all he had to do was go back a second time tamping the earth back in place. Some simple wiring, and we were in. Then he demonstrated the training with Mimi, who was fresh from two days at the kennel, and full of beans -- back flips, standing leaps, etc. He had her well in hand, and clearly likes dogs even if people leave him cold.

We then took turns with the training. The "back" command is easy enough -- let Mimi wander near the fence until her collar beeps, then tug her back with the verbal "back" command followed by lavish praise. What's harder is to allow her to play with toys still on the leash. I managed, but I'm glad I only have to do that a few more times.

And that's that for now. In a week, she will be allowed off the leash for good -- she can play and gambol and frolic and get the occasional shock. It sounds like nirvana crossed with The Prisoner.

Progress

2008-07-25T07:45:00.004-04:00

A year ago, after what was for me an amazingly long period of contemplation and review, I took a monumental step.

I did nothing.

I'm talking about my siblings, who don't get mentioned in this blog much at all. Last summer, after a year of living with the Starman, I decided to stop all my efforts to get my siblings to like me, appreciate me, let me join in their reindeer games. I took two months to decide whether to implement this step. I thought about what they might do, or write, or say. I questioned whether I owed anyone an explanation before taking this step. I talked about it to a few key people in my life, to get their reaction and perspective. Then I pulled the (non-)trigger and did . . . nothing.

Turned out to be surprisingly easy. My sibs all have birthdays in the autumn; they didn't get cards. No Christmas presents or cards, or my Totally Impersonal Christmas Letter. [We got gifts from two of them; I wrote thank you notes on Christmas afternoon.] By my birthday, which is in February, the silence seemed to be in place on both sides.

Now, I could write something about how no one questioned this or contacted me to inquire if everything was okay, but that would totally miss the point. I actually don't know and don't care what they think. I just knew that it cost me too much to make what should have been casually affectionate gestures. A birthday card from me wouldn't just say, "Have a great day," it would also say, "Like me, please!" A gift would have dangling from the elaborate wrapping & bow a silent plea for appreciation. It was all too much -- exhausting to maintain, and impossible to satisfy. It was a relief, for me, to stop wanting love from them all the time.

This morning, though, something wonderful happened. I'd been talking yesterday about how my need for friendship had abated over the past couple of years. (I totally credit Starman for this wondrous change, btw.) When I woke up this morning, I had an image of the younger of my two brothers approving of the distance I've let grow between us. Twenty years ago, he'd told me how powerful he thought it had been that I'd insisted people call me by my full name, Magdalen, rather than the nickname ("Maggie") I'd had as a child. "Your name," he told me, "is so personal, and to tell Mum and Dad what they have to call you, that's a great step." (I'm paraphrasing, obviously -- even I can't recall verbatim what someone said to me 20 years ago.)

Well, I can imagine that same brother acknowledging now how powerful it is for me to have stopped seeking their love and approval over and over again. Again, there is no reality here, only my perception. I walk around all the time worried about someone's anger or disapproval; there's no one who feels that way toward me, but old, old experiences die hard. It was nice to wake up with a vote of approval in my head.

A postscript: I read someplace that what made siblings so important was that they are contemporaries with a shared history; you can grow old with them, and that history will always connect you. I'm not sure that the history I share with my sibs is worth revisiting in our sixties and seventies, let alone real old age. But I understand the power of having someone in the same age range who knows where you came from. For that, I have Hub 1.0.

H. and I met in 1971 when we were both 15. I vaguely remember him as a shy, gangly English schoolboy. I'd have been a fat, spotty American teenager. (I've been told by H.'s sister that her recollection was that I was funny. They both seemed impossibly smart and well-educated to me, but I did notice that Sis teased H. unmercifully, which just make me like him more.) I was in London for four months, and had dinner with H.'s family every week. Not quite the same as growing up in the same household, but a lot more knowledge of a spouse's upbringing than most people get.

Hub 1.0 stayed with us last weekend, and it was so nice just to hang out with him. I'm carefully resisting the "ewww" factor if I refer to my ex-husband as being like a brother to me, and anyway, it's not true. We're contemporaries, and both youngest children. We're friends, and our marriage was all about friendship, companionship, and . . . okay, so I was just a BIT bossy! But in a loving way, of course. When Starman married me, he knew that Hub 1.0 was part of the package deal; I wasn't going to lose that touchstone of history and affection that I share with Hub.

I am so aware today of the progress I've made vis a vis my siblings and my complicated, nuanced feelings about them. I've made that journey, I walked every step and climbed every obstacle, and as the forewords put it, every mistake made was mine alone. But I couldn't have done it without Hub 1.0 or Starman. Each of them has played an essential role in helping me to see that I'm not alone. With them, I have my family, and with family, I have my sense of myself.

And that's real progress.

State Maps Update

2008-07-24T22:21:00.004-04:00

I promised you updated state maps. First, the Mimicles:

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/map.php

She's sticking pretty close to home, mostly because we've not been many places since we got her. She's not complaining, though. We're hoping we can get faithful reader Sharyn (Hi, Sharyn!) to renew that invitation to come visit -- maybe late October or early November?? That would score Mimi tons of new states.

And here's the revised state map for Starman. Hub 1.0 noticed that I hadn't credited Starman with Arizona, even though they had walked across the Hoover Dam from Nevada to Arizona. Hey, that counts! Hub 1.0 and I crossed many a bridge (well, okay, a few bridges) connecting two states. New Jersey & Pennsylvania, Vermont & New Hampshire, Indiana & Kentucky (Hub 1.0 did that one, not me), just to name all the ones I can think of. (Okay, three bridges, and that's my final offer!)

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/map.php

[Erratum: In my original post, I had written "New Jersey & Delaware" as two of the states joined by a bridge we had walked across. It's actually Pennsylvania & New Jersey, and my thanks to Hub 1.0 -- who's got a better memory for these treks than Ido -- for pointing out that not only did he and I walk across the Ben Franklin Bridge (a walk I remember all too painfully well, as I blew out my knee and he had to do the tourist thing on his own for the rest of the day) but all three of us walked across a smaller bridge at New Hope. Thanks, Hub!]

I will now leave as an exercise to the reader -- or, to be more precise, Hub 1.0, who's much more likely to find this an interesting research project -- the question of whether you can walk from New Jersey to Delaware. I know there's a bridge, but does it accommodate -- legally! -- foot traffic?

Our Vermont Vacation

2008-07-23T20:27:00.002-04:00

I promised you more photos from our trip, and -- if you ignore the ten day delay -- I am delivering on that promise.

This is a rest area in New Hampshire. We wanted to stop at the Mount Washington Hotel for lunch, so we asked at the tourist information desk here for directions. Well, you can imagine what those directions were: keep heading west and you can't miss it. They were right -- it's hard to miss. It's also hard to visit, as their parking was all under construction. We were being really careful about having Mimi in the car, so with no shady parking we regretfully turned around and kept going until we found a lovely coffee shop with outdoor seating and yummy vegan food. Mimi was allowed to sit with us, and it was a lovely shady spot. And even better: the Mini Cooper that had been so visibly annoyed because I don't drive as fast as I used to, and which had stopped at the same coffee shop, didn't "accidentally" side-swipe us as it was leaving the parking lot!

Next stop: TopNotch Resort & Spa in Stowe, Vermont. This place is clearly hopping in the fall and winter; it had a slight mustiness in the heat of July (and yes, it was hot even in the mountains). The decor indoors is all about huddling together for warmth: communal fireplaces with lots of comfy furniture clustered around them. We literally never set foot in the lounge -- if we weren't in our room, the pool, the spa, or the dining room, we were outside walking the dog.

The spa was great though -- I had an energy realignment "massage," which turned out to be one of those odd admixtures of reiki and some other stuff involving scooping up the air over the client's prone form and sending all the bad juju someplace else. I might have scoffed but for two facts. First, I really enjoyed Ananda Willow (nee Nancy Wright), a woman around the same age as me with a fascinating backstory, starting with how she got that name. Second, I think the massage was having some effect on my subconscious, seeing as how tears were streaming out of the corners of my eyes the entire time. I felt perfectly fine chatting with Ananda Willow, but some part of me was crying!

This is the main pool, where the kiddies are permitted to swim. We used the adults only pool, out of the frame to the right. Check out those mountain views, though! Cool, hunh? this was also the view we had if we ate a meal on the patio. We didn't realize that dogs were allowed there until we saw the Sheltie pack described below. We just never got the nerve to bring Mimi. That would not have been a restful meal!

Lake Champlain. Impossible to describe how beautiful it is, so I won't try. The photo is not doing it justice, even with the Adirondacks in the distance. It's a shame it wasn't a sunnier day. We actually had pretty good luck with the weather. It was pretty hot, though, and that made it a bit harder to do things that seemed like they would be fun, such as renting bicycles and doing the 5 mile bike trail into town. Maybe next time...

I have tons of pictures of the Shelburne Museum, but they can wait for another post. Here's our Mimi at lunch with us at a nice restaurant in Shelburne. I forget the name of the eatery, which is a shame as they deserve the credit for realizing that they could accommodate us up on a paved terrace alongside the restaurant.

We're still learning about travel with a dog. One thing we've figured out is that it doesn't hurt to ask. We were in Ambler, PA the other day and we asked at a bar/restaurant if we and Mimi could eat in the alley (which was set up with tables and already had a foursome of young thirtysomething women, one of whom was showing off her newborn). The woman bartender I asked seemed doubtful but finally relented. It turned out to be a huge success. Mimi was very well behaved, the waitress was charmed ("I don't like dogs, but yours is cute," she exclaimed), the bartender even came out to meet the dog that the waitress had been raving about.

But I was a bit startled when I went to the ladies' room to see a poster up for the "Dog Days of August," an Ambler festival for dogs. A parade, prizes for the best behaved dog, the dog that looks like its owner, etc., and in small print, "dog-friendly dining at select area restaurants." I gotta figure this place was one of those restaurants. Did the bartender not know that her place of business had touted itself as "dog-friendly"?

I tipped very generously, partly because the food had been cheap and partly so that the next time someone wants to eat there with a dog, the staff will think, "Big tippers!"

Back home, with a different dog

2008-07-13T20:21:00.003-04:00

We have a few photos of Vermont, which I'll post in a future installment, but for now can I just tell you how different Mimi seems? She's not perfect by a wide margin, but she's better than she was. She's willing to settle down in a room we're occupying, which means she can be allowed out of the crate for longer. We also think she's housebroken, but that's one of those "how do you prove a negative" situations, so all we can do is continue to reinforce the good behavior and watch out for the bad.

She was such a good travel companion, always happy to be in the car with us. For big trips between venues, her crate was folded up and wedged between the front & back seats, preventing her from trying to join us up front. That still allowed her to rest her chin on either my left shoulder (I was usually the driver), or Starman's right shoulder. We realized that we need a "Dog is my copilot" bumper sticker. Mimi started out barking occasionally in the car (potentially deafening!) but we figured out that if her leash & choke chain were still on her, we could correct that behavior with pretty good results.

We stayed in two Holiday Inn Express hotels -- neither charged us the "non-refundable pet deposit" (an oxymoron in my book), so that was nice -- and then at the TopNotch Resort & Spa in Stowe, Vermont. I'd never been that far north in Vermont; it was great to be within day-trip-distance of the Shelburne Museum. Mimi was welcome everywhere she went, provided she behaved herself. It's evident that TopNotch caters to guests with dogs; we were on "dog row," a ground-floor hallway in the main hotel section. Which was fine until a dog went along the hall and all his/her neighbors started barking in protest/greeting/group dynamics!

We were startled at our first breakfast to see a fellow with three Shetland Sheepdogs at his feet. Then a St. Bernard wandered by and the Shelties got moving: four, no -- five Shelties. This guy (one half of a gay couple, we later realized) had a complete pack with him! The real issue, though, was that there wasn't anything much to do with Mimi at the resort, or even nearby. There was a bike path, but it wasn't quite wide enough to bike with Mimi, so while we both walked her along the path, this proved to be an exercise in control more than a nice stroll in a pretty mountain setting. What would be good would be a dog park at TopNotch, so that Mimi could play with the five Shelties, among others.

We're big fans of the dog park concept, and Starman in particular has gotten good at researching "dog-friendly" travel possibilities. One has just opened up in nearby Scranton, so we figure we will combine a trip there with some yoga for Starman. We're also going to take Mimi with us to Philadelphia for an overnight visit with Hub 1.0. Don't worry -- this time, I asked him first!

So why do we feel like we have a different dog? Well, it's a question of attitude, I guess, or maybe energy. Mimi seems to be more "with us" now that we're back home. She's a bit more attentive, a bit more relaxed, a bit more mature. I suspect we'd have gotten to this place eventually, but it is nice to see her developing into the dog we want.

Our Travels (part 1)

2008-07-07T21:20:00.002-04:00

Here we are, in Warwick, Rhode Island, about to enter the church where two people we had never met before got married. No, not wedding crashing. The bride is Mary's daughter (and Harry's stepdaughter), Laura. Under the little-known federal law, The Nuptial Reciprocity Act of 1874, because we'd invited Harry & Mary to our wedding, we got invited to Laura & Ryan's. (I'm kidding about that law, btw.)

The wedding was lovely, the reception was at a nice country club (which is high praise indeed) with a stunning view of Narrangasett Bay, the bride was particularly gracious to us, and we had a lot of fun. There was even a picnic on Sunday, with new opportunities to eat wedding cake!

But before we could go to the picnic, we had to revisit the awesome dog park in Warwick. We'd gone there on Saturday with Mimi, who really needed more time with other dogs. There were only three dogs when we arrived: a brindled boxer named Damian, an amorous cocker spaniel (you can make the obvious pun; I'll refrain from doing so) named Joey; and a really mellow bull terrier named Bogey. Bogey, despite being un-neutered, permitted Joey's insistent if useless advances. The people at the park on Saturday (we were eventually joined by a retired record company executive with two English springer spaniels) all agreed that Mimi has the look of a Rhodesian ridgeback. Right color, right ears, and even a slight suggestion of the characteristic ridge of fur on her back. Mimi's way too small, though -- she's about 19" at the shoulders. Anyway, every time we've seen a "Rhodie" mix on TV, it's looked like Mimi.

Until we met Gee, pictured here with the yellow football we donated to the dog park. Gee, we were told by his owners, is pure bred pit bull. Now this is perplexing to me because the two breeds recognized by the AKC associated with pit bulls, American Staffordshire Terrier and Staffordshire Bull Terrier, are both not Mimi. She has a faint look of an Am Staff if you catch her just right, but neither type comes in her distinctive cinnamon brown. Gee here is an Am Staff, clearly -- the color (buff) is right, and the ears are right.

Which isn't a huge surprise -- we'd been told that Mimi was a pit mix. It's what she's mixed with that so engages people. Oh, and the fact that she's a love-slut. No, seriously. Other dogs and owners would arrive and she'd be right there at the gate, greeting each new human with a look that fairly shouted, "Hi, there, big guy/gal. Come here often? Care to scritch a bitch who's all alone in the world?" Mostly, people were thrilled to comply.

Here's a partial list of the other dogs we saw: a blue Weimaraner, a foxhound, a corgi, two basset hounds (different owners), two puggles (pug/beagle mixes -- a designer dog) (also two different owners), a Shar-Pei, two golden retrievers in very different weight classes, a Wheaten terrier, a chocolate lab, a border collie, two greyhounds, a great dane, an Irish Setter (everyone went "ooh" when that dog pranced in) and Gizmo, a black Chihuahua - Miniature Pinscher mix. We went today to a wonderful, 6-acre dog park here in Portland where the dogs can run around paths through the woods -- the entire place is well fenced. We met two Old English Sheepdogs and saw -- their owners weren't really feeling like socializing -- another lab and a pointer. On our walk this morning to the Prout's Neck Cliff Walk, we saw a whippet, or at least, a small dog that seemed precisely like a whippet. (I really have to stop looking at the AKC website...)

So, yes, we went to Scarborough Beach, briefly. (Dogs not allowed on the beach, and anyway it was fogged in.)
Here's what we could see at low tide, through the marine layer.

Five minutes of that -- long enough for Starman to get his English toes wet in the Atlantic -- and we decided to head back to the road on foot and go find the famed, but notoriously hard to access, Prout's Neck Cliff Walk. I kept having to explain to Starman that the Cliff Walk is not meant to be used by anyone but the locals. If you happen to know how to get to it, fine, but they (the Prout's Neck Association) isn't going to make it easy for you!

This is on the Cliff Walk, looking at Scarborough Beach through the haze. Winslow Homer lived on Prout's Neck, and there are quite a few of his painting in the Portland Museum. Didn't go see them, though. Nope, we did the Cliff Walk, didn't get a ticket because we carefully parked legally at the state park access to the beach, and marvelled at the REALLY high-end real estate, all inaccessible to mere mortals like ourselves.

Here's Mimi, enjoying her day by the sea. Tomorrow it's off to the mountains in New Hampshire and Vermont. We checked Google Maps on the best way to get there -- we can go 240 miles in 5 hours on all interstates, or 175 miles in 5 hours on the back roads. With gas at $4/gallon, it's back roads all the way!

Tuesday Travels

2008-07-01T19:29:00.002-04:00

Introducing today's guest blogger:
Greetings, blogreaders. Mimi here. Today my pack went on a bike ride, all three of us. I got very excited to see Magdalen (don't ask how I know her name, I just do) on a bike because although Starman (I was told to use that name here; whatever) takes me on bike rides in front of the house, Magdalen never comes too. I like running with my pack.

Today we all got into the other car and drove someplace with a nice place to bike. I run alongside Starman, who holds my leash. This new place to run was very nice, and I could see cars and other people on bicycles. Very exciting, and a bit distracting, which seemed to upset Starman. I don't care. Cars are so wonderful, I just want to eat them up!

After our bike ride, M & S went into a library and came out with four books on CD for our trip on Friday. The first book they tried was "Marley and Me," and it made them laugh because that dog is so obviously unbalanced and out of control. Not like me. I'm very good, although I did have a bit of trouble last night at school. Magdalen takes me in the blue car and I get to be near -- but not near enough! -- other dogs. I get lots of hot dog bits, although honestly I'm getting tired of hot dog bits. Anyway, something was bothering me last night -- bugs kept biting me and there was poop on the asphalt and really no dog could concentrate with that smell right there. It's like sitting at a people school desk and discovering someone left something nasty under the writing surface. And you're supposed to sit still? I so don't think so!

Anyway, I'm a very balanced dog, not like that Marley dog, and I'm very happy. I wish I got to chase more rabbits, and there's that bear smell up on the airstrip that gets me all riled up, but mostly I'm very happy. Oh, right, I forgot. I am NOT happy when they insist on giving me a bath like they did this afternoon. Bleccchhhh. I don't cooperate, though, which is doggy language for "I strenuously protest this insane business of pouring water over my body, you cretins."

But I like running around naked afterwards. M & S blocked both set of steps leading to the deck and I got to run around with all kinds of play toys. Oh, but then there was this rawhide bone, and I really wanted to keep the bone safe. I didn't want to eat it right then, and if I left it, who knows what might have happened to it, so I had to get it off that deck right then and there! I managed to wriggle through the space between the railings and run off with my bone! As soon as I hid it in my den (it's under a pine tree, but it's well protected and no one comes in after me!), I came back and let M & S put my pretty collar back on, and (alas) the leash.

And that was the end of the fun and excitement for me. For today, at least!

Hmmmm...

2008-06-27T12:00:00.002-04:00

Well, I joined a "message group" on Yahoo. I've never done this before, and it's a very intense experience. It's like getting a 100 emails (or more!) a day from people who all know what they're talking about, and mostly all know each other. After three days of this, I should have learned some lessons.

1. I need to start slower. I'll say that again. I need to start slower. Nah, I'm still not getting it. I {pause for emphasis} NEED { . . . } TO { . . . } START { . . . } SLOWER. Okay.

2. Where do people get the time to post as much as they do? None of my business, of course, but I'm just wondering. Or, possibly I'm confused about this because with a couple dozen people posting a couple times a day apiece, and another couple dozen posting once a day, the impression for the new kid is that everyone's talking at once. Repeatedly.

3. Oh, right. I need to start slower. (This applies to a lot of stuff, not just this list. Slow & steady wins the race.)

4. The Internet sure is the place to go to procrastinate. :-)

Are you getting a sense of what I'm talking about? Everyone in this group is lovely, and I really want to make my involvement in the group work, but if that's my goal, I think I'm going about it all wrong. And really, that's a universal theme in my life right now. I need to start slowly, get to know people, assume nothing, NOT try to get everyone to like me right away, and keep it all in perspective. And get on with other things in REAL life while I'm pacing myself.

I think you all know me well enough to be chuckling right now, "Sure, Magdalen, and how's that working for you?!"

States Revisited

2008-06-23T22:50:00.002-04:00

I wasn't satisfied with a map that just showed the "Lower 48" as a solid block of dark red, so I'm back at it, this time with a few more maps.

Here are the states I'd been to before I hooked up with Hub 1.0:

Visited US States Map from TravelBlog

Here are the states Hub 1.0 and I have been to together:

Visited US States Map from TravelBlog

Here are the states Starman had been to before he and I became an item (I'd do a similar map for Hub 1.0, but as he'd never been to the U.S. all the states would be grey, so what's the point):

Visited US States Map from TravelBlog

Yes, folks -- that's Alabama lit up like that. (They were all business trips from when he was a full time software developer.) He's since been to six more, and we'll add a few more with next month's New England tour. I'll update Starman's map after that trip!

Because Starman Doesn't Have His Own Blog . . .

2008-06-23T22:31:00.002-04:00

I will tell you that he's discovered his inner flower:

I am a
Violet

What Flower
Are
You?

This is so accurate it's not even funny (well, a little funny).

And it reminds me of a nice story. Two years ago, when our friendship was blossoming, and in turn causing him to come out of the shadows of his lonely life and into the sunshine of friendship and shared interests, he shyly informed me that he was "a late summer flower." (Which violets aren't, I know, but it's all allegorical anyway.)

Flickr Meme

2008-06-23T10:51:00.004-04:00

This is a game I found here, on a quilter's blog. I highly recommend that you click on the mosaic to get a better sense of what each picture looks like...

If you have a Flickr account, you can go ahead and make your own mosaic. My answers were these:

1. First Name: Magdalen (that dog looks a bit like Mimi)
2. Favorite food: Dessert
3. High school: Linton High School (I only wish my school looked as architecturally cool as this; mysteriously, no one has taken a photo of the Linton High School I went to!)
4. Favorite color: Pinkgreen (don't worry; Flickr totally gets color conjunctions!)
5. Celebrity crush: Bill Nighy ("Charles Kuralt" yielded his gravestone, which was NOT the effect I was looking for)
6. Favorite beverage: Hot chocolate
7. Dream vacation: Alaska (well, as we're going, why not be happy with that as the dream?)
8. Favorite dessert: Boston Creme Pie
9. What I want to be when I grow up: Completely Reconstructed
10. What I love most: Having someone who gets me
11. Word that describes me: Complicated
12. My Flickr name: MagdaleninHarmony

Here's the source for all the photos:

1. Happy Dog Races on Magdalen Green, 2. totoro cupcake 4, 3. linton high school, 4. Shocking pink, 5. Bill Nighy, 6. French Hot Chocolate, 7. Northern Lights with Moon Rising, 8. mini boston creme pie, 9. Instability, 10. Water Park 2, 11. Light can be so complicated., 12. Coffee Jones star quilt

I am grateful to all the photographers -- and can I say what a fun game this is? Wasted LOTS of time!

I Didn't Cheat On This One, But . . .

2008-06-22T20:29:00.004-04:00

Visited US States Map from TravelBlog

. . . I had to count my childhood to get Oregon and Washington. I wouldn't have done that, but Hub 1.0, who was my travel companion to all of the less-likely-that-I-should-go-to-them states (Nebraska springs to mind; I never imagined I would go to Nebraska!) got to the Pacific Northwest for work, and that raised a tricky question. Guaranteed he and I will never go there together (they're off his list, so he's not heading there any time soon), and I have been there. Heck, I lived near Hanford, Washington for a year as a child; that has to count for something.

This would have been a lot more fun if I'd had a blog in 1998 and added states as we did them. It started with New England; we were in Maine when we saw some obscure state's license plate -- Alaska, maybe. That got Hub 1.0 and me talking about how each state's license plates are different. We started to "collect" them, by which I mean we'd watch for them. We saw a Hawaii on the counter-clockwise Beltway around Washington, D.C., for example. The last one Hub 1.0 saw was South Dakota -- he spotted it in Philadelphia as he was heading to city hall to get our marriage license.

After that, it was easy to talk about seeing all 50 states. For years we believed we could get to them all by the time we turned 50 (we share a birth year, 1956, so we figured Hawaii for my birthday in February, and Alaska in August for his birthday). Instead, we ended our marriage by age 50. But not the travel: all three of us (Starman was part of the picture at this point) went to Nevada (state #46) that autumn. That trip was memorable, as they all were. Some states got shortchanged, though: Florida was a night in a motel near the Georgia border, Indiana was lunch across the Ohio River from Kentucky (I forget if we both walked back across, or just Hub 1.0), and Idaho was literally set foot on. (I'm not kidding about that last one -- we were in Wyoming, near Yellowstone, and we had dinner reservations back in Montana so all we had time to do was cross the Continental Divide into Idaho, open the car door and Hub 1.0 put his foot out onto Idaho soil, or asphalt in this case.)

So, whether Oregon and Washington get an asterisk or not, this map is essentially right: just Alaska and Hawaii to go. We do Alaska this summer -- Hub 1.0's wedding present to us is a cruise for all three of us, preceded by a land excursion to Denali, and followed by a short stay in British Columbia as our thank-you to him.

That just leaves Hawaii!

I Admit It -- I Cheated!

2008-06-22T20:17:00.002-04:00

I am a
Snapdragon

What Flower
Are You?

I had to take this quiz four times to get a flower I didn't hate. I WANT to be a hydrangea, and I'm tempted to lie on all the questions until I get to be a hydrangea (or a lilac, or lavender, or a peony, or a lupin, or a lily . . . you get the idea). Maybe hydrangeas ARE liars! Hah!! So there.

Well, they got it right, I guess -- snap & dragon!

Latest Adventures From Camp Mimi

2008-06-19T19:35:00.004-04:00

We've had Mimi for about 6 weeks now. Let's see -- on the good side, she doesn't bite me anymore. . . Also, she's a bit more attentive, particularly when one of us is holding a bit of chicken for her. She has a wonderful new game, which I'm sure is wildly illegal with the doggy rights enforcers: she leaps up at a ball suspended about four feet off the ground, mouthing it until it comes off the tree so that she can run around with it. She eventually demolished the ball, at which point we hung the "Pup Treads" tire at about the same height. She ignored that in favor of the shreds of rubber that had been the original ball until I had a brilliant idea. I stuffed the remains of the ball inside the tire and let Mimi leap at the combination until the ball fell out. After that, she's happy to leap at the tire!

The reason I say that this leaping game is wildly illegal is that we got a lecture from some people at a local kennel. I won't mention who they were; there are still rules about defamation, after all. Husband and wife -- I'll call them Barbie & Ken. Barbie just LOVES animals; she used to be a veterinarian's assistant. She didn't impress either Starman or me when she said happily that she's the one who yells at their dogs. Um, isn't Ken supposed to be the expert at training dogs? we wondered silently. So where does the yelling come in? Strike one against them.

Starman had found these people when he looked for obedience trainers in the phone book. He spoke with Ken on the phone. After a brief description of Mimi, Starman explained that we wanted obedience classes. (You know, the ones where several owner & dog combos work together on sit, stay, down, heel, etc.) "I never talk about classes until after the evaluation," Ken explained. His plan was, we'd leave Mimi there for 24 hours, he'd work with her, and then he'd tell us what needed to be done. So we loaded up her crate, toys, food, lead, etc., etc., and off we went. We got there a bit late, but Ken wasn't there; he was at his cardiologist. We waited, making chitchat with Barbie, for a long time, but no Ken. "That's okay," Barbie soothed. "Call tomorrow afternoon and Ken will tell you when to pick her up." That worked for us; I had to see a client nearby, and the route home took us close to Barbie & Ken. But when we called, Ken refused to talk to Starman because he was eating his lunch. All we wanted was a time to get there so we'd know if we had time for lunch, but no, he couldn't talk even that long. And he wasn't very polite about it. Strike two.

In the end, it turned out that Ken doesn't do classes (!) -- he takes a dog and works with it for two full weeks, then hands it back to the owner. This makes no sense to me at all; isn't the owner the one who really needs the training? Strike three and yer out!

Otherwise, we were lectured about heart worm (not much of a risk here, we decided after consulting our vet), gastric torsion (say what?), and back injuries from the leaping mentioned above. Okay, so maybe that's not the best exercise. We chatted with him for a while, then wrote a bizarrely large check (say, quadruple the cost of a night's boarding), and drove away with our dog. We did get some things out the experience: We were assured that Mimi is wonderful, given a suggestion for housebreaking, shown how to put a choke chain on properly, and told Barbara Lampman's name. That last item was worth the price of admission, although we could have found her more cheaply, I suppose.

I honestly don't think Ken even evaluated Mimi. At no time did he say what he'd done with her, what paces she was put through. Enh -- who cares. I called Barbara Lampman, who does puppy kindergarten (Mimi's too old for that) and basic obedience classes. One's starting next Monday, and as it conflicts with Starman's yoga, I'll be doing the classes with Mimi. Then on Tuesday, I can show Starman what we learned.

But while we're waiting for that, here are some photos showing Mimi being calm. Calm because she's gnawing on her rawhide bone . . .

Calm because Starman's exercised the heck out of her in 90-degree heat . . .

And calm because she's not stupid enough to do anything other than lie down when it's that warm. We love a calm dog!

Introducing, the Ninnyheads

2008-06-18T11:40:00.003-04:00

We need to train Mimi (pictures in a future post, I promise) so Starman took the lead and located a boarding & kennels facility that also does doggy obedience training. The first step was to leave Mimi there for 24 hours for evaluation. Our appointment was for 10:00 a.m., so we decided to make a day of it -- head south for the kennels, then continue on to pick up Starman's CT scan results (he sees the pulmonologist in July), have lunch, go to a movie, do a teeny bit of fabric shopping, get my hairs cut, and head home. An entire day of errands: that's the sort of thing you can only do when the dog's away.

We were nearly into Nicholson when I realized that I'd left the coupons for the fabric store at home. I'd told myself that I needed to put them in my handbag several times (always when I was out of the house, doing something else, in another room, etc. -- you know how that works!), and I'd even uncovered them at breakfast, by accident of course, and put them squarely into view so that I wouldn't forget. Do I even have to repeat that I forgot? No, I didn't think so.

The problem was that the coupons in question are worth about $8-10 apiece, enough so that it's worth using them when I need to buy a lot of one fabric. (I'll discuss the project in greater detail on my quilting blog.) Was it worth the $3.00 in gas to come home and start off again? I checked with the Starman, and he felt it was.

As the trip to the kennels was Starman's responsibility, I trusted him to figure out how to get there. He's very organized, not at all like me, so it was quite a shock when we got all the way to Squier Hill Road, drove its entire length, and no kennels. A quick phone call to the right place, and we found out that there's another bit of Squier Hill Road, and that's where the aptly named Hidden Valley Kennels is located. Twenty minutes later, we got there.

I had been very frustrated with myself for forgetting the coupons, and somewhat frustrated with the Starman, but when he voluntarily referred to himself as a ninnyhead, I had to laugh. Him and me both...

"Hi, we're Magdalen & Starman, the Ninnyheads!"

Postscript: At least we're in good company as eejits: See the news about Tiger Woods, who won the US Open (yay) but did it while he had (supposedly) a double stress fracture in his left tibia (boo). I also read here that it may in fact be something a lot more serious, requiring a knee replacement. That sounds like something that would require 6 months of rehabilitation... You just know some doctor (or, in his case, a phalanx of them) warned him what could happen if he played. So is he that arrogant, that committed, that hard-headed or some combination thereof. I will say this, though -- once he took that line, he didn't fuss about it in the press conferences. His website makes it clear that he wanted the focus to be on the tournament, not his injuries. I bet he didn't think he was going to win!

Sorry for the delay

2008-06-17T13:40:00.003-04:00

My best friend in law school, Eric, taught me this really cool card game, which he identified as "Michigan Rummy" even though I learned later that's a misnomer. (Hoyle, an authority on card games in my childhood home, points out that it's not a traditional rummy game, nor is it from Michigan.) In the version I learned, you deal out all the cards in a standard deck. The players take turns putting a card on the table, starting with the sevens. If the 7♠ has been played, for example, another player can place the 6♠ or the 8♠ on the 7. Without the 7 in any given suit, none of the other cards in that suit can be played.

Before I get to the point of this story -- and thus the point of this post -- I will explain just a bit more about why I love Michigan Rummy. There are four money cards -- if you have any of those four cards in your hand, and you get to play it, you collect all the money that's on that card. Well, I don't think I ever played with actual money. Probably you're meant to play with poker chips, but that's so boring. I like variety. Buttons are good, but we've also used beach glass. Anything that's small and, if possible, lots of one-of-a-kinds so that you can look at your stash while you're waiting for someone else to play/shuffle/deal/whatever. The best stash, though, has to have been the collection of old, foreign money collected by Hub 1.0's family. You know that odd set of pesetas or francs or pence you have after a trip abroad? Well, what Hub 1.0's forefathers used to do is dump these motley coins into a box. And they really traveled: Indian annas, Chinese coins with the square hole in the middle, the Swaziland lilangeni -- stuff like that. There is a fair number of old style English pennies, which are huge; one dates back to 1839, although it's in really poor condition.

We used to play with the entire coin collection when we were in London visiting my former m-i-l. We would play with Susan, Hub 1.0's sister. When it was time to divvy up the coin collection, she got first dibs, but put aside a very nice assortment of goodies for Hub 1.0 and me to take away. That plastic pot of coinage is here in Harmony; they clearly should stay with Hub 1.0 but the fact of the matter is that they're most useful playing cards, and he's never likely to host a card party in Philly. I toyed with the idea of just not mentioning the coins to him; he was more likely than not to forget about them, but that seemed wrong. And bless him -- he totally got the point about their usefulness being site-specific. So, yes, they belong to him, but they stay here.

Back to the game of Michigan Rummy that I was taught. Eric explained that there was a house rule when he was growing up: "no grandpas." It seems his grandfather would have a card in his hand that could be played onto the table, but he'd miss it or something and would instead pay a coin into the ante. Later on, he'd notice the card he could have played, everyone would cry "Grandpa!" and he'd apologize. While it seems like such a move would benefit the other players -- the object of the game is to play all your cards before anyone else and thus win the ante pot -- it can be strategic to hold up a card everyone else really needs to be on the board. So of course if you can play anything, you must play something. That's the No Grandpas rule.

Hub 1.0 and I added a house rule of our own. It's the "Please Play" rule, and it's limited to sevens. Remember that you can't play a six or an eight until the seven is down, and you can't play anything lower until the six is played, or higher until the eight is played. Therefore, if one player was dealt all the sevens, the game's going to get off to a slow start while that person plays the sevens seriatim. Which is fine, but if that person also has some sixes or eights in addition to their sevens, it might be a long time before all the sevens get played. So we felt that it was only fair to be allowed to "request" that a seven be played.

Last night, Starman went to yoga. Hope was there. As we know, she reads this blog regularly. (...but never comments! -- ed.) Hope gently asked Starman, "Is Magdalen ever going to blog again?" and it had the effect on me similar to asking me to play that last seven in my hand.

So, with apologies for the long, long delay, here's my post on Mimi's ability to dismantle a perfectly inoffensive throwing toy.

This is a lovely toy. It has a nice Frisbee-esque quality in the air, and yet is soft enough around the edges not to hurt a dog's tender gums. It's constructed out of very stiff, thick black nylon. Think kids' backpacks -- that sort of material.

This is Mimi "playing" with her lovely throwing toy. This activity is much preferred over just catching it in her mouth. Oh, she started by running & catching, but then she'd worry it vigorously, thrashing her head back and forth to subdue the thing. Finally she got a foot on it and tugged. And tore. And ripped.

Ah, lovely black nylon throwing toy, we hardly knew ye. Rest in peace.

P.S. If you want to know more on Michigan Rummy, let me know. I looked for an appropriate site to link you to, but they appear to play a different version of the game. And they wouldn't include the house rules!

Camp Mimi, Week Four

2008-05-30T09:35:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, Starman and I went to Philadelphia so that Starman could see a doctor. No, he's not sick. He's just the victim of the insanity that is the health care system in the U.S.

Short version: He's British, so when he came here, they (the immigration folks) wanted him to undergo a medical. This involved a chest X-ray, which showed some shadow. Three months later, he had another chest X-ray, and nothing had changed. (He's also quite healthy, i.e., no symptoms, so there's really no reason to think he's got lung cancer.) Nonetheless, the radiologist's report said, "get a CT scan for more information." When Starman applied for a Health Savings Account, he was turned down -- repeatedly -- because in the underwriters' eyes, he has failed to follow doctors' orders. We finally added him to my Cobra coverage just to get insurance to pay for the CT scan and a doctor to say, "No, this man is not sick." This way, maybe we can get proper insurance.

Okay, so we took the Meemster with us. She's actually a very good car dog -- relatively quiet, attentive, well-behaved, and pleasant to be with in the car. She was also very good in Philly; we rang up Hub 1.0 (we had parked in the shade near his office building) and he came downstairs to meet her. [Evidence that we're all WAY too old: I wanted Hub 1.0 to take a photo on his camera of him and the dog so that his secretary could see it. None of us -- and believe me, there's brain power to spare when you get all three of us together -- could figure out how to do it. Sorry, Katrina! We tried...]

And when it was time to walk over to the doctor's office, Mimi settled onto the back seat and slept peacefully for a couple hours. [Here's the necessary reassurances for all you pet-lovers out there: the ambient temperature was under 80 degrees, we left all four car windows cracked open, Mimi had gotten a fair amount of water to drink before we left her there, and the car was in full shade. Believe me, we would not have done this if there was even a chance she'd be uncomfortable.]

We were really reassured by her composure and calm during the day. Of course, that didn't last when we got home, so Starman took her out for a long twilight romp on the lawn to burn off some of her barky energy, but after that Mimi was much calmer. I'm overdue today to get her outside, but she's snoozing -- and snoring -- peacefully, so I'm not too stressed.

FedEx is due to deliver eight (count `em, EIGHT) new outdoor toys for her. She's actually gotten fussy -- I pulled out the red rubber Frisbee (or, to honor Hasbro's trademark, I'll just call it a throwing disk) yesterday, and Mimi looked up at me like "I don't think so," and then went over to the white 5-gallon bucket where her outdoor toys get stored, as if to see what her other options were. Uh, okay, dog. Let me see what else your majesty might like...

On Tuesday, Starman walked Mimi along the dirt track that trails along the south side of the valley we're on. The track eventually opens up, and then evolves into a dirt road named the same as ours but for "South" where ours is "North." What we hadn't appreciated was that there are houses on South Widget Road. Houses where dogs live. And one house where the dogs are allowed outside all day. Untethered. So I get a cell phone call where all I can hear is multiple dogs barking, and Starman saying something. It took multiple calls before the reception was good enough for me to figure out where he was and how I could get him and Mimi.

We were concerned that Mimi not get a complex about these dogs from this encounter, so we both went back the next day. The two dogs in question are a 9-week-old hound puppy (very unstable energy!) and a calm chocolate lab who will obey direction, but if unchecked will act as the wingman to the puppy's attacks. Mimi alternated between being nervous, submissive, anxious, and aggressive. Luckily, another set of neighbors was there, and they were able to explain about the puppy (named Pepper!). The Morgans got leads for Lily and Pepper and took them back to the owner's house. But I still think it was good for Mimi to go back. In a few months' time, if Pepper's owner gets some of the territorial aggression resolved, Mimi could get along okay with those two.

That was less than 24 hours earlier than our time in downtown Philadelphia, and certainly Mimi showed no evidence of having issues, so that's good.

Anyway, it's time I get her outside.

Um, I'm not sure about this one, but . . .

2008-05-30T09:34:00.000-04:00

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister Howitzer of Reasoned Discussion.

Get yours.

Meta Blogging

2008-05-25T11:25:00.002-04:00

If you are a blogger, or just read blogs, or think about blogging, read this article. (Or not -- it's long. Your choice.)

I've read it. It's an interesting but rather scary account of an edgy twentysomething in New York City who blogged, got a job blogging, blogged some more, got accused of blogging, and ultimately decided it was okay to write all about it in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. It made me think about "over-sharing." I don't think I've pissed anyone off about what I have, or haven't, written here, although I have recently been reminded that blogging about something is NOT an acceptable substitute to actually telling someone something. "You read about it here first," is not a good motto for a blogger to have.

At the same time, I've been thinking about the unusual intimacy, or simulacrum thereof, that arises from reading the blog of someone that you don't know. I read someone's blog -- no one I've actually met -- and I have the illusion that I would really like her if I met her in person. But I'm not likely to meet her, and while I think it's more likely than not that I actually would like her, I have to concede I'll never find out. Even if we did meet, we wouldn't become friends. Those are the odds. I'm just happy I get to read her blog, and through that blog, get a sense of her life.

She (this woman; I'll call her Ava for no particular reason) seems remarkably level-headed. She has a job, she has hobbies, she has relationships that are both professional and personal. She doesn't write about anything too intimate on her blog, but blogging is intimate no matter what, so I know more about Ava than I otherwise would. One of the things I like about her is that she seems pretty happy in her life. There's precious little angst in her blog.

A few months ago, Ava made a reference to needing a new "tumor doctor." That was all she wrote, and while I concluded she has, or has had, cancer, I didn't get all worked up about it. Ava does too much to be actively fighting cancer. I don't know from personal experience, but I get the impression that it takes time to fight cancer, and if you don't actually write about those activities in your blog, then your discussions of the non-cancer-fighting activities would reveal the blank spots left from times spent fighting cancer. Chemo, radiation, recovering from chemo & radiation, tests, waiting for test results -- it's all pretty time- and energy-consuming. Or so I gather.

I started reading Ava's blog about six months ago. It's a challenge when you start reading a blog whether you want to read the backlog. I didn't bother with Ava's blog; she posts pretty frequently so I didn't go through withdrawal and need archival material to fill the silence. But the other day, Ava posted about how this summer she wasn't going to get a new MRI to look at her existing brain tumor. She's done it in past summers, but she wasn't going to this summer.

Oh.

Now I needed more information. I went back to last summer's posts, and sure enough, there's a mention of going to the doctor with the huge tropical fish tank to learn that there's been no change. This isn't the traditional cancer survivor, whose tumor was excised but who is living out the five year cancer-free period so crucial in longevity statistics. Of course, there's still stuff I don't know. Is Ava's tumor benign? That would explain a lot; in that scenario, it can't be surgically removed, but she still needs to take meds to keep it from growing because if it grew, it could put pressure on the optic nerve, for example. (She's promised a friend that if she starts to go blind, she'll get to an emergency room.)

At this point, I'm torn. I have no idea what Ava's life is like -- I don't have a tumor growing or not growing inside of me (at least, I hope not...) -- and to the extent that I have a chronic illness requiring drugs, it's a pretty easy drug to take with no side-effects or ancillary concerns. By contrast, Ava's meds cause her to be unable to eat breakfast. Now that's just plain unfair. If I were her, I'd make the traditional time for brunch be 4 p.m. and stare down anyone who didn't want eggs Benedict at teatime!

But then I started to think about what I do know. In a much larger context, I know what it's like to have something monstrously unfair happen, something that sucks, something that changes everything. Who I am, and the life I lead, is all defined and shaped by what happened to me when I was a child. I wouldn't wish my childhood on anyone, but I wouldn't redo those years if given the option. If the abuse and molestation hadn't happened, I wouldn't be me. I can't endorse what happened, but I still celebrate what I've done in my life.

Does that qualify me to empathize with Ava's brain tumor? I rather think not. And I'm not even sure that sympathy is called for. Ava's a wicked cool person. Why focus on the sucky part of her life and not celebrate all the cool things she is and does?

So, here I am thinking about blogging, the curiously detached intimacy of sharing life details on the Internet (in my case, about a dozen friends and maybe one stranger) and reading the life details of other people who aren't much more famous than I am, when the NYTimes publishes a long thing on the topic. Well, not precisely on the same topic, but in the general realm. I don't want Ava to be sorry she posted about her tumor. I don't want Starman or Hub 1.0 sorry that I write occasionally about them. I like blogging, and I'd hate it if I abused the privileges it gives me. And I'd hate it if I made someone like Ava regret the fact that a virtual stranger feels an odd connection with her.

So I didn't comment on her blog about her tumor. I just thought about it. And now I've written about it.

Let's hear it for the noble laptop

2008-05-19T21:16:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting in the "keeping room" at Harmony. (That is, we were told, the historical name given to a space that in modern houses is called a "great room." Basically, an open space with the kitchen, a seating area, and a dining area. The only differences are a) ours has a cosy wood stove, original woodwork, and a massive fireplace where people actually cooked 200+ years ago, and b) it's not at the back of a McMansion.)

I'm working on an English laptop computer -- you can tell this because I have a £ sign, and the quotations marks are in a weird place on the keyboard. Mimi is behind me, happily destroying a rawhide bone. We prefer this to her new game of destroying her chenille bedding inside her crate. Unfortunately, she's a very uh, oral dog. We bought her a lovely extraterrestrial-themed toy intended to be thrown by the human and caught by the dog. Well, she's not much for the catching-in-mid-air aspect of such games, but she loved retrieving it and then "playing" with it. I have photos (which I'll save for later) of what she did to it, given that it's made -- or it WAS made -- of black nylon canvas. Mimi shreds stuff. So far, she shreds stuff that we bought specifically for her to play with, but if she gets much farther with her bedding, I'm afraid that she'll be sleeping on cranberry red chenille confetti.

But the beauty of all this is that I'm in a room that was designed for people to do stuff together, or at least in parallel. The original design of the room was that someone could be cooking while someone else could be playing a game while another person could be reading. In the present instance, I'm blogging while my dog is destroying rawhide. And that's virtually the same as what they were doing during the Federalist period, if they'd had Internet access, right?

In a couple minutes, I'll whisk Mimi into her crate for the evening, then go downstairs to continue working on the baby quilt I'm making. Or maybe I'll do some ironing. Whatever. The point is, for right now, this very minute, I'm minding the dog. Which makes me feel virtuous.

[Of course, if a cat walks in the room -- and trust me, they have more sense than to do that -- the jig is up. There's no &%£*#$^ way I could get untangled from the wires fast enough to stop the dog from "playing" with the cat. But I will continue to enjoy the illusion of being responsible while multitasking.]

Lilac Season

2008-05-18T11:27:00.003-04:00

It's Lilac Season. Yes, I know all the reasons why lilacs are a sadly deficient flower. They only bloom once a year, they make terrible cut flowers, they come in a limited range of colors, and they take forever to get to a nice size. We planted these in 2001, I think, and they're still not where I want them to be.

I don't care. I love lilacs, and they are my favorite flower. Hub 1.0 and I planted nine varietals along the road, intending for them to form a hedge (maybe in another 10 years -- ?). I made a judicious selection from a specialist lilac farm in Canada; I wanted a range of color, floret configuration (single vs. double, for example), and size. But I did pick among those said to have a nice scent.

The first three are pictured here: President Lincoln (a classic "blue" lilac), Charles Joly (the gangly red one), and Edith Cavell (a pleasant white one).

I did try photographing the entire roadside collection, but it's not a very interesting picture. Imagine a bunch of green bushes with dots of color that are barely recognizable as flowers, and you have the right idea.

This is Konigin Luise, and my goodness, she is magnificent this year. Some white lilacs are actually a slightly dirty color, but Luise here is the crispest shade -- making you think of cotton pique, lace-trimmed sheets, or fresh snow.

All the same, I'm fondest of the bluish lilac varietals. This is President Grevy.

And this is President Lincoln. I love this color.

It's funny -- if you saw this plant by itself, you'd say, "Oh, a lilac," and not really think twice about the color. But when you line them all up, you can see the wild variations in color and so forth. Kind of fun.

Baby Charm. No, that's not the official name (which is, possibly, Charm). "Charm" was described on the Canadian lilac farm's website as "pale lilac"; this flower is actually a very robust color in real life. So I don't know if we have Charm here, or what. I don't care. When I ordered all the varietals I wanted, I got the largest size they came in (36" I think), but Charm was only available in a smaller size. After we planted her, she failed to thrive, and actually got smaller!

Hub 1.0 and I worked hard to encourage Baby Charm, as we called her, to grow, and celebrated when she made it to 36". This is the first year she's produced a good show of flowers, and while she bears no resemblance to the description I got from the grower, I love her for sentimental reasons.

Another reason I have to suspecting that I may not have "Charm" here is that there's another clear mix-up in the nine that we purchased. We numbered them from 1 (at the southern end of the road) to 9 (Baby Charm at the north). Here's the list as I recorded it after we'd planted them:

1. President Lincoln (pale blue)
2. Charles Joly (reddish)
3. Edith Cavell (white)
4. Vulgaris -- (lilac)
5. Edward Gardner (pink)
6. President Grevy (bluish)
7. Konigin Luise (white)
8. Katherine Havermyer (lavender)
9. Charm (pale lilac)

Okay, so President Lincoln is clearly right, as is Charles Joly, Edith Cavell, Edward Gardner (not pictured, but a lovely, lacy pink color), President Grevy, Konigin Luise, and Katherine Havermyer (also not pictured). Because I had a small accident with a herbicide in 2003, #4 (intended to be the classic roadside lilac, Syringa Vulgaris) had a set back for a couple years. But it didn't die, and this year the lilac in that position bloomed pretty convincingly . . . pink. In fact, I'm hard pressed to see any differences between it and its neighbor, Ed Gardner. So I don't think I got what I paid for there, either.

These things happen, and there's no reason to be upset. Now, the amount of weeds in my flower beds -- that's upsetting, but now that Mimi is off lead part of the time (we didn't even make it two weeks...), I can get back to weeding. As soon as it stops raining!

A Tiny Bit of Patchwork

2008-05-17T11:25:00.005-04:00

I'll just run through all my reasons for not sewing, or doing anything quilting-related, for the past few months: the wedding, the wedding, and oh, uh, hold on, it's coming to me -- oh, right! the wedding.

But here we are, and it's no longer a valid excuse. (Yeah, right, like "oh, I need to look at the wedding photos!" is going to cut it as an excuse. I so don't think so.) Meanwhile, I'd agreed to sew a 12" block for the Chenango Piecemakers guild. The way this works is, they give you some focus fabric (in my case, it's the large scale blue & white print on the outside of the block) and then invite you to make a block on any design you want.

This proved to be a good exercise for me. I had bought a CD with a lot of blocks on it, alphabetized, and analyzed in terms of what sized pieces you need to cut. This block is called Memory Wreath; I picked it because it had large areas of the focus fabric. (In fact, the large scale print was supposed to be in the on-point square in the middle, but the amount the guild gave me wasn't large enough to cut out the large triangles and then cut out the middle square. I discovered this tiny detail just too late to reconsider my block choice, or figure out another way to cut the triangle. Hummph.)

The rest of the fabrics are from my stash. I wouldn't have this many blue & white prints except that I collected them for a full year in order to make Coffee Jones's "signature color" quilt. Even so, I fussed about over this one single square until I was happy with the final result. I like it, though, and it also helped me with sewing raw-bias triangles. (That's the hypotenuse of the triangles -- it's on the bias of the fabric, which means it can be pulled out of shape really easily.) I had problems with the Harmony Triangle Quilt, which had a lot of exposed bias edges. This time, I bought some spray starch to stiffen the pieces before I sewed. To almost all of you, this means nothing. But look closely -- the points in this block are pretty good. That means they meet up neatly without getting cut off.

So, that's the first sewing I've done in a while. Next up: the two baby quilts I said I'd make before the children in question enroll in day care...!

More from Camp Mimi (almost Week Three!)

2008-05-16T11:55:00.004-04:00

We'll have had Mimi a full two weeks tomorrow, and a lot has happened. She's been spayed, she's peed inside the house (our bad -- a dog's notion of "indoors" and "outdoors" is not precisely the same as a human's, so we've been taking precautions since then, and all's been well), she played with her new toys, and she's learned to sit, almost when we want her to!

Here's Mimi with Starman, on the grass. She loves being outside, provided it's not raining. It's raining now, and that is not making for a happy dog. Tough. You will survive being wet... (and we'll survive the "wet dog smell").
When we first went shopping for play toys for Mimi, we fell in love with a series of realistic animals sold with AKC labels. (I am not sure I believe that a licensing deal by the American Kennel Club guarantees real quality, but at least someone has looked at the toy and said, "probably won't kill anyone..." if only to prevent an ugly lawsuit. . . Um, I'm doing that lawyer thing, aren't I? Sorry.) Here she is enjoying "Possy," her opossum toy. She's very gentle with it, if you consider gentle to be consistent with shaking it vigorously from side to side. She doesn't try to eviscerate it, though, and that's my definition of gentle.

Another AKC toy we've gotten so far is Rocky, the raccoon. We have Bunny, but that's living in the car at the moment, for car travel. We need to get a groundhog, but NOT a skunk. There's a skunk living around here -- we trapped it twice and released it both times -- but we really don't want Mimi to mess with the skunk. If she does, though, Hope (hi, Hope!) has a recipe for what to wash the dog with.

This would be that "gentle play" I was telling you about.

We're supposed to be keeping Mimi from running and jumping for two weeks following the surgery. This is harder than it seems, as she's feeling very feisty just at the moment. We've done pretty well so far, although she is very energetic when she plays with a tuggy toy, and that can't be good for the abdominal wall, can it?

Anyway, that prohibition ends on Wednesday, and we've got to decide if she comes to Philadelphia with us. (Oh, right, I forgot to mention that to Hub 1.0 -- she'd have a crate, mind you, so she wouldn't be any trouble at all . . .!) It could be that I come by myself and Starman stays at home to work with Mimi on expending lots of pent-up energy. We'll see.

We did take her to Conklin last weekend to the annual town-wide yard sale. She was good as gold with people, and particularly with kids. Sat calmly, let people pet her (pretty much everyone asks permission first, even little kids), didn't bark or squirm or anything. The only blot on her record came when she really really really wanted to meet a German Shorthair Pointer (or something of that ilk). She was heeling pretty well until we were about ten feet away, and then she lunged. The Pointer barked, and its owner hustled it away. Poor Mimi was heartbroken. Babe, don't you know it's never good to show how emotionally needy you are?

We met up in Conklin with Scott & Hope, friends of Starman's from yoga. Hope was pleased to meet Mimi but we didn't hang out very long. The next day, I was taking the long (2.6 mile) loop walk we refer to as "Cat Hill." (This is now officially a misnomer, but we called it that because it includes a steep slope to a T-junction. At the top of the hill is a house that used to have stray and feral cats living underneath it. So the slope became known as "Cat Hill" and the full walk is the Cat Hill Loop, primarily because seeing the cats was the reward for making it up the hill, and also because once you'd done that bit, you really had no reason not to keep going around for the rest of the loop. But then the old guy died, and his heirs collected all the cats, and now the only reward for getting up the slope is the knowledge that the rest of the walk is way way easier.) I'd just turned the corner and was walking along the level road north of the (former) cat house when I saw a car coming towards me. I moved onto the grass with Mimi, and promptly fell flat on my face. Who gets out of the car to check on me, but Hope! Small world we live in. (I'm fine, thanks.)

Life with a dog is good. I've lost two pounds since the beginning of the month!

Bride's Side (Part 2)

2008-05-09T11:30:00.002-04:00

My aunt, Thacher, aka "Granny Jones" (Coffee's mother):

Mary:

Harry:

The Jones-Burgers:

Bean Jones, in his wedding finery:

Bride's Side (Part 1)

2008-05-09T11:07:00.005-04:00

Now it's time for the folks I know, are related to, or used to be married to!

In addition to Starman, and Fritz, we have my friend Jay, Hub 1.0, Bean Jones (Coffee's son), and Dino Burger, Coffee's husband:

Hub 1.0:

Hub 1.0's mother, Anne. Now, admit it -- having your ex-husband at your remarriage could be a good sign, or maybe not, but there's no way his mother shows up unless everyone really is okay!

Mary Rosalind, a family friend of Hub 1.0's going way back. She was particularly pleased when he and I married, and I really adore her, so it made sense to invite her. She got some time with Anne & Hub 1.0. As it turns out, she has a lot in common, geographically speaking, with Michael & Bryony. I love it when a plan comes together...

Mary Rosalind's son, Tom. He's -- I hope I get this right -- an art historian, currently teaching at Cambridge. He wanted to come because the wedding was set at Fountains Abbey, and I was so happy that he could join us. Hub 1.0 doesn't see enough of Mary Rosalind and her kids since he moved to the U.S. (although we did attend Rob's wedding a few years ago), so it was nice they had this opportunity to get caught up.

The Groom's Side (Part 2)

2008-05-08T09:43:00.003-04:00

Sam:

Nicky's husband, Fritz:

Fritz talking to Alison:

Camilla's family (Lily, Francis & Sam):

Bryony, Michael's wife, listening to his speech.

Can I tell you how wonderful Bryony was throughout this whole thing? In addition to the obvious over-and-above, such as hosting us multiple times, dealing with the wedding suits for Starman & Michael and Lucy's bridesmaid dress, and responding to countless emails from me, Bryony was a rock through the entire process. We picked Fountains Abbey because they took us there on an outing in 2006, and because of its proximity to Michael & Bryony's home. I could make a cynical comment wondering if they knew what they were getting themselves into with that excursion, but such doubts would be unfair. Bryony and Michael would do the entire thing over again if we asked them, even hosting seven people for the weekend and putting on a wonderful tea & supper party the day before the wedding. These people are complete stars in our book!

The Groom's Side (Part 1)

2008-05-08T09:31:00.003-04:00

Not that we did this, mind you -- we didn't have ushers leading people to one side of the aisle or another. In fact, our only concern with seating was that the bridesmaids have seats up front with their mums. (The "crone" had a seat up front, but we didn't make her mother, my aunt Thacher sit there with her.)

Still, Starman's family was well represented. In the front row, going from right to left, you've got Starman, his brother Michael, Michael's son Jack, Camilla's son Sam and her husband Francis. Behind Starman are his friends Alison & Derek, and behind Jack is Camilla & Francis's daughter, Lily.

Camilla:
Nicky, Amelia's mother:

Lily: My friend Jay, and Alison & Derek. Derek could almost qualify for both sides of the aisle; in addition to having been Starman's co-editor of "the hardest crossword in the English language," Derek was a classmate of my cousin Dusa. They are both well-respected mathematicians, and were co-heads of their class at University. (Co-wranglers?)

{ interlude }

2008-05-07T10:05:00.004-04:00

Just a brief word about the photos. The brilliant Damian took 750 photographs, which he sent to us on a CD in low-resolution format. When I'm picking photos from these to upload, I'm working off a tiny thumbnail, and where there are several shots of, effectively, the same thing, I can't really distinguish the difference from the thumbnails. I may go back and swap out, say, # 403 for #402, but they all look so good, it's not a high priority at this time. It helps that the "models" are so photogenic!

What we'd really like to do is post, in effect, a video slide show with the soundtrack being Georgina's harp playing and the sounds of the wedding guests arriving. This is technically feasible (we don't have the audio yet, but it's coming) but it may take some time.

Next up: The groom's family...!

Our Attendants (Part 3)

2008-05-07T09:55:00.003-04:00

Ah, the ubiquitous "wellies shot." What, you mean every wedding album doesn't have this picture? These were purchased specially for this wedding, and were only slightly less expensive than Coffee's dress. But worth every penny, particularly as a) they can be worn again (unlike the dress, which is a tad situation-specific), and b) they helped to ensure a dry day for tromping around Fountains Abbey. My wellies were not such a perfect color match, but they were -- unlike my specially-dyed shoes -- very comfy.

Thank you both, Coffee J. & Michael, for being so happy and attentive to us on our wedding day!

Our Attendants (Part 2)

2008-05-07T09:48:00.003-04:00

[Starman is totally going to kill me for picking this next picture, where his eyes are closed, but it's such a nice one of Michael. On the left is Camilla, one of Starman's sisters, who is a dead ringer for Cate Blanchett, btw.]

Our Attendants (Part 1)

2008-05-07T09:42:00.003-04:00

Coffee Jones was my "crone-of-honour" (a term that reflects both her wonderful sense of humor and our English surroundings), while his brother Michael was Starman's best man. While it's true that everyone made this event possible, these two people really stepped up, with an honourable mention to their respective spouses (to be seen in a future post), because they really stepped up too. Lots of stepping up took place!