I was driving to work yesterday and NPR was on and they were talking about Debrahlee, who apparently got fired for being too good looking. She was so good looking that she distracted the men she was working with. No details were reported in this story and it was on the radio, so of course, I couldn’t see a picture. So I was all up on the high horse of my youth, back in the days of the 60s/70s feminst movement. “How can they do that?” I was thinking. Just because a woman is ultra good looking doesn’t mean she is stupid. I would’ve put my fist in the air but it’s not all that easy to do that when you are driving a stick shift in stop-and-go traffic.

I am a baggy old kayak woman these days. I have birthed two children. It’s hard to be morbidly obese if you are as active as I am but I am not as thin as I was in my 20s and my once rather brilliant blonde hair is heavily laced with gray. Once upon a time, I was young and thin and blonde and able to convince at least some of those others, you know, those others who are not girls, that I was kind of good looking. Unfortunately, that kind of made it hard for me to be taken serious at work. Except that I got to be pretty darn good at my job and eventually people learned that I was one of the go-to folks for solving problems. Who cared what I looked like?

At the job I have now, everybody I work with is like me. We are old and baggy but our eyes sparkle with intelligence and creativity (er, at least my co-workers’ do, not sure about mine). We don’t look like Debrahlee and we don’t care that much what we look like, er, except that we don’t want to look like we wear the same outfit to work every day, even though we sometimes do. The thing is that I don’t think this Debrahlee person is any prettier than any other young woman. The one “business suit” I have seen her in is pretty staid in my no-so-humble opinion and I’m not sure why her lawyer (?) thinks it’s good to show photos of her in low-cut blouses on the internet. She’s pretty but she’s not particularly spectacular and I will just about bet dollars that she was fired more for incompetence and/or a bad attitude than for her looks.

I don’t know why she was fired but what bothers me the most about this is that this kind of crap continues to make it hard for young women who happen to be good looking, whether they try to be or not, to be taken seriously in the job market. When a young woman is counseled by an somewhat older woman that wearing a little makeup and a pushup bra (what the hell is a pushup bra anyway?) would help her get a job, well, how far have we come from back in the 70s or whenever? Can you do/learn the job or not? Will you show up at work with a positive, can-do attitude or not? If none of the above, then give your job to someone who will do those things and go sit around watching soap operas or whatever. (Are there still soap operas now?)

It is late and this is a messy writing job but it’s my blahg and I can do what I want to. This morning, I was driving to work and NPR was on and they were previewing a BBC story about a guy who was dead for 15 whole minutes. He talked about his last thought and breath and… then I got to work and they weren’t going to do the whole story until later in the hour and so reluctantly I shut off the radio and went into work. Alas. I am curious about that kind of stuff and I think it would’ve been a better story than the Debrahlee crap.

G’night. –KW

The sun was over the yardarm and someone was at the door. I thought, “those damn solicitors”, and I was about to yell to the GG, “will you get that?” I’m sorry, but door-to-door solicitors are [one of] the bane[s] of my existence and I can’t be counted upon to be terribly polite to them. But then I looked toward our open front door and, to my great surprise, it was our elderly, ailing next-door neighbor. A woman who really shouldn’t be out wandering around the neighborhood alone.

I invited her in. The problem? She couldn’t figure out how to use the telephone book. “I need to call my uncle and see if he’s ready for us to pick him up. His name is Uncly Uncleman and I can’t find him in the phone book.” Fortunately, the GG came along right at that moment and that freed me to go and get our telephone book (yes, we still have one) thinking to myself, “It’s pretty hard to find someone who’s been dead for 20 or 30 or 40 years in the telephone book.” The GG sat down with her and together they looked through the telephone book. They looked up her uncle, her mother, her father. No luck. I was in the Landfill Chitchen madly doing a little lookup of my own. For my neighbor’s own phone number. I heard the GG explain patiently to her that *we* were in the phone book even though we don’t use our phone. Making small talk to reassure a confused elderly woman that everything would be all right. I mouthed to the microwave, “*We* are in the phone book because we are not *dead*!”

We were supposed to meet Mouse downtown for dinner, so I texted her to say we might be a little late. I grabbed my phone, sneaked out the back door, shoved my feet into my purple crocs and dashed across the yard to the neighbors’ back door. Bang bang bang! Bang bang bang! BANG BANG BANG!!!! No answer. I dialed their number. “Your call has been forwarded…” I dialed again. “Your call has…” What was going on? Her husband is of sound mind but he is ill and frail and very hard of hearing. Was he home? Was he asleep? The garage door was shut. Was his car in there? (No, they he probably shouldn’t be driving but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.) Could he have gone out and left her alone? Was he, uh, alive? Bang bang bang. No answer. No answer. No answer. “Your call…”

I went back to the Landfill. I am not good at this kind of stuff. I am not a patient, caregiver type of person. The GG is much better at that stuff than I. It’s not that I don’t care! I care deeply and I am often very much aware of another person’s mental/emotional state. Just ask my kids about when my Moom-dar goes into hyperdrive! But I am not a chit-chat small-talk type person even on the best of days and, since the GG was there to patiently guide her through white pages 101, I flapped and fluttered around.

I interrupted the telephone book conversation to ask her where her husband was. “Is he home?”, I asked. “Oh, no! He’s in Arizona.” Oops. I didn’t like what was behind door number 1, so I tried door number 2. “Where is your husband?” “He’s asleep.” Better. But where was he sleeping? Home? Arizona? Or? I tried one more door. “Is your husband asleep at home?” “Oh, no! He’s with my mother!” Well. *Was* he with her mother? I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be the one to find that out.

Once again, I left them to explore the telephone book. Bang bang bang. Nothing. “Your call…” What to do next? I am a big chicken. I went across the street to Perrynet. They at least know how to contact our elderly neighbors’ son out on the left coast or wherever. After a bit of discussion, one of the Perrynet neighbors and I went back once more to try to rouse the husband. He still didn’t hear the door but, miraculously, he picked up the phone. A few minutes later, he opened the door, just as the GG and the wife came slowly along the sidewalk. Husband gently ushered wife back into the house, needlessly apologizing for the escape. All was well. This time…

Disclaimer: Although I injected some humor into this story, I don’t want anyone to think that I am making fun of my neighbors. We have had a long, friendly relationship with them and it is sad and a bit scary to see them struggling with old age. I don’t think they should be living alone in that big house of theirs. But I have now watched two generations of my own relatives struggle with advanced age and I’ve seen up close how excruciatingly hard it is to give up your independence. There are still a few hardy souls in the generation above me and then mine is next. I have a long way to go but I won’t go easily. Apparently my loverly daughters have already had a conversation about who is going to provide the grandchildren and who’ll get stuck taking care of moom. Aren’t they cute? (-;

Enjoy life to the fullest while you are able. Good night. –KW

And so the youngest of the four granddaughters of The Commander and Grandroobly (no grandsons, sorry) has reached the age of the horizontal driver’s license here in the Great Lake State. She is spending her 21st birthday down here on the Planet Ann Arbor with her cousin Mouse and probably various other people. We were honored to be included at a small birthday dinner for her at Seva. I am glad we are not included in any of the other plans for the evening because I am so tired I can hardly keep my face from dropping onto my keyboard. I do know that the two-year-old that my little brother (her dad) would sometimes refer to as “Foghorn” does not fit that nickname any more. Happy birthday Pengo and good night!

So. A big oil drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico more than a month ago and nobody seems to be able to figure out how to contain the resulting oil spill. The liberals are blaming the oil company and the conservatives are blaming Obama and the conspiracy theorists are blaming, hmmm, I forget who they are blaming. And everybody is angry and sad and wringing their hands. I see it all. I have friends and relatives on every side of the political spectrum. And the religious spectrum. And the environmental spectrum. And a bunch of other spectrums. And sometimes the political spectrum and the religious spectrum and the environmental spectrum and all those other spectrums intersect in some rather strange ways that I can’t even figger.

Okay. When I see oil-drenched birds, I am horrified. When I think about oil washing up on beaches, I am horrified. When I see the maps of what the oil spill would look like if it were mapped over Fin Family Moominbeach, I am horrified. Am I angry? Well, not exactly. There is plenty of blame to throw around. Why didn’t the oil company (and contractors and whoever) adhere more closely to the safety rules that a big deepwater oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico should follow. Why weren’t federal regulators overseeing all of this more closely? Why didn’t the Obama administration act more quickly?

Angry? Well. Mostly I am horrified. But I am not surprised by any of this. It’s just business as usual when a large bureaucratic oil company makes a lot of stupid mistakes that turn into a huge mistake and a gargantuan bureaucratic government takes its time to respond. Sighhhhh.

What is missing in the whole equation as far as I’m concerned is the question of why we have these big oil drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico in the first place. I think it is because weeeeee are dependent upon oil. I certainly am. I drive all over hell and gone almost every day and occasionally I drag myself onto a jet plane and head out to the left coast. And you know what? I LOVE to drive. It is one of my favorite things to do in life. I loooove the 6-speed manual tranny in our little Ninja. Rrrrrr-shift-rrrrrr-shift… Drive? Yes!

This oil spill is a horrific event and there are a lot of people who have made mistakes in handling it. But stuff happens and, as long as we are all as dependent upon oil as we are, stuff like this is going to happen. I don’t know exactly what to do but somehow we have to become less dependent upon oil. But there is absolutely no other way for me to get to work without driving there. And like I say, I like to drive…

Flame me if you want. I have my flame-proof clothing on (-: But I’m just sayin’…

It is Sunday afternoon and I am bored. Why am I bored? I dunno. I live for weekends. Oh, I’ll get this and that and those five other things done this weekend. Stuff that I don’t have time psychological energy to get done during the week. Roight. Oh, I have done a few chore-y and errand-y type things today. I cooked a non-Cheerios breakfast. I kinda sorta got ahead of the chief cook and bottle washer game for the week. I ran roooooomba through her paces. I cleaned the Blue and Only Bathroom (but I do that every day). And attacked the dirty area on the carpet near the front door where people insist on wiping the mud or whatever it is off their shoes. On the carpet. Yes. I walked to the grokkery store and I washed about a jillion dishes.

Still, half the afternoon is left and I don’t know what to do with myself. I could be weeding except it is raining. I could be shopping for new articles of what passes for biz-caz in the world of a baggy old kayak woman who keeps a pair of biz-cazable shoes in one of her desk drawers. On the off chance that visiting dignitaries might come to town. Or a new copy of The Vegetarian Epicure I since I can’t find mine, which means it probably disintegrated and I threw it in the recycle and don’t even remember doing it. Or a new pyramid peg measure (or 10), since I left my fave over at The Beautiful Becky’s the other night (my fave red corkscrew made it home successfully this time). I HATE shopping on Sunday. Driving around here and going to the mall or the big-box stores or even navigating the crowds downtown is soul-sucking. I could (and probably should) be slodging around in the Landfill Dungeon getting rid of cosmic debris. Am I doing any of those things? No I am not! Why? Because I am lazy! I guess.

If I were at Fin Family Moominbeach at this time of the afternoon on a day like today, I would probably go for a walk or fling a kayak in the lake and paddle away. Or I might sit on the beach and actually, you know, read a book. Or at least make a dent in the stack of New Yorkers that I was actually ahead of just a few months ago but now? Not so much. If it was a sunny, windy kind of day, I miiiiiight even lie down on a towel in the sand to read and… Sometimes I might even close my eyes for just a little bit. Here? If I am not doing something constructive, I feel guilty. Even if the GG is sacked out on the couch in the Back Room.

It’s Sunday afternoon (or was when I started to write this). What did you do with your Sunday? Are you feeling guilty for not doing “enough”, whatever that means?

The phone company I hate today is the one that rhymes with mint* and once when I tried to get online to PAY THE BILL, I didn’t have the right password (because someone around here — probably me — changed it for some godforsaken reason) and they insisted that the only way they could send me the password was to text it to the phone, which would’ve been just ducky if the phone in question was in my hand in the Landfill Chitchen here on the Planet Ann Arbor and not sitting over in Dakar with a dead battery. I mean, you guys, do you want yer money er not?!? We’re having a similar little password issue today but I won’t bore you with the details and anyway it is fixed. I think. No one is anywhere near Africa, at least. And we are done with mint as of today, so I don’t need the password any more. Last week, I hated the phone company that would rhyme with bat if you took out a certain symbol and pronounced it as it is spelled and not as individual letters. I won’t bore you with that little incident either.

But I’m not gonna write about phone companies today. I am gonna write about television sets! Specifically OLD TV sets. Good old Sony Trinitrons from the 1980s. Remember those? One of ours is *exactly* from 1980. I remember when we bought it. I remember when we hooked it up to our Apple II Plus as a monitor. The GG would run his probability machine on it and boys would stay up all night playing Space Eggs in my loverly but rickety old apartment on Seventh St. And then there was the time that I came home to the Landfill from somewhere and… No one was here… And… I heard a spooky little sneaking up on someone song doo doo doo doo doooooooo do do do do… The GG and the little mini Lizard Breath had been playing Sticky Bear ABC and had left for some mysterious errand or other and they had left it on the letter “G”, where a bear was sneaking up to steal grapes.

We used to actually watch TV sometimes. I was never above putting my kids in front of the TV now and then. I mean, I also read to them. (Read to your kid a half hour a day? Roight. Try to get my kids to let me stop after a measly half hour.) But there are times of the day when the chief cook and bottle washer needs to get down to business and if a snack and a little TV or a movie keeps people calm and happy for a while, so be it. Mouse would watch a video over and over and over until she knew it by heart and then she’d be done with it and on to the next thing. Later on I (very randomly) remember Clarissa Explains It All and a bunch of Nickelodeon stuff. We *all* (even the GG) knew the Anne of Green Gables videos by heart (and yes, we read ALL of the books too, probably a couple times through, so we know what liberties were taken by the BBC). And Free Willy too, one godforsaken spring break spent at the moldy old Houghton Lake cabin back in the day. Man, am I digressing. And using “man” a lot. What’s with me?

Anyway, at some point we kind of stopped watching TV pretty much altogether. Did the Internet take over or did life get too chaotic to adhere to some TV programming schedule. I dunno.

Today *someone* decided that it was time to get rid of those old Sony Trinitron monstrosities. In fact, he was about ready to load them up into the Ninja to haul over to Ann Arbor Recycle along with a bunch of other old luckyshuckial crap. Problem. We figured out that we would have to pay $100 to dump those old TVs. That would be okay except that they both still work! And they work pretty darn well. Believe me, I was really excited about the idea of dropping those things off today. But even I couldn’t justify spending $100 to get rid of two four working TV sets. So they are on Craigslist. Will anyone want them? I do not know. I would not.

We took some other stuff over to the recycle joint today. Printers and other crap. No TVs. I was taking a kind of Wall-E photo of old appliances and things over there when someone from the Volvo behind my little Ninja said something to me. I turned around and there was a big old golden retriever in the front seat of the Volvo and a beautiful woman and her husband, namely, the parents of The Beautiful Jess, one of my Lizard Breath’s best friends in life. They’ve been friends since middle school and still are now that they both live in San Francisco but that would be a whole ‘nother story and not necessarily mine to tell. I do wish I could get out to the left coast more often.

* I stole this big company rhyming theme from Nancy Nall, a Detroit-area journalist and blogger and friend of friends.

After a long, slodgy Friday at work and then a clumpety bumpety soul-sucking ride over the crumbling Motor City freeways through rush hour traffic, I am hanging out here with the 8 remaining Courtois sibs and some others, just letting all the talk wash over me 🙂

g’night, KW

I have walked a total of seven miles today, according to my iPhone pedometer app. I think it reads a little high on the mileage but close enough. Morning walk, lunch walk, and a short walk after coming home. I always walk at 0-skunk-30. I almost always walk at lunch but sometimes I do other things. I NEEDED to walk after work this afternoon. I had a wonderful time at my job today but it was intense and my brain does fuzzy logic very well, thank you very much, but after a whole day of that, I had to walk things off a bit.

One of our nephews tweeted today about how his beautiful daughter is rather fixated upon books about ducks. Well, been there, done that. Except it was the fine aminal the mouse that my particular daughter got fixated on. The younger daughter, the one that’s in the photo with the chocolate (I hope) face, the one who has insisted on being called Mouse ever since she was old enough to express that desire, and that was earlier than most kids, since she was talking in complete, perfectly enunciated sentences by about 16 months old.

When Mouse was three years old, we would go to the library and she would choose books to check out by scanning the spines of the books on the shelves and picking out only those with the word “Mouse” in the title. Actually, once I figured out what was going on, I think that encouraging her to check out books with “duck” in the title was how I got her beyond the “mouse” books. Duckies are pretty cute too, after all.

I wouldn’t characterize my Mouse as one of those ultra-smart early readers. She was/is ultra smart (nothing to do with yer favo-rite blahgger except for the birth canal) and she read some words pretty early but, in the grand scheme of things, the first time I remember her reading an actual book from start to finish was in first grade. I could be wrong. Who am I, after all? Just a baggy old kayak woman who happened to have a couple of kids along the way.

Instead, I think she was capable of being one of those ultra-smart three-year-old readers. I just don’t think she wasn’t (yeah) totally focused on reading at that time. She could read if she needed to. Like the time during the 1991 gulf war when her baggy old moom couldn’t quite turn off the war on the tiny little TV in the Landfill Chitchen. “Turn off the war, mom.” Over and over. And then the kid who learned how to spell the word “Mouse” at 2-1/2 figured out that “O-F-F” would turn the dern TV (and war) off and make her baggy old moom interact with her.

That is all. I have wonderful friends. Real life and Internet. And relatives (inlaws totally included). I love you all. Good night. -KW

It was a hot morning in July 1980. I was living in a loverly but rickety old second floor apartment on North Seventh St. on the Planet Ann Arbor. I took that place over from The Marquis and The Grand Poohbah of RegenAxe and when I moved out, my buddy Jim Carpenter moved in. (Jim, where are you and how are you doing? Google me!!) The GG was unemployed during the summer of 1980 for probably the only time in his life. It was hard times for a lot of folks that year. When he wasn’t meeting with job recruiters or otherwise pursuing decent employment in the computer information technology industry, he was hanging out on the Seventh St. front porch watching neighborhood life go by.

Me? I was getting up and going to work over there at “that darn” EPA every morning. I would get up and pour myself a bowl of cheerios and eat it down on the front porch. July 16th. I got up and ate my cheerios. Everything was all right. It was sunny, I think. The house faced east and I didn’t look at whatever might be going on to the west. We were not as plugged in back in those days. I didn’t even have a radio or TV on that morning. Who knew that a derecho was on the way? Who knew what the heck a derecho was?

I got into my cute little Ford Fiesta that morning, the vee-hickle that later became “Mommy’s Little Gold Car”, and drove to work. I apparently never looked out the back window because it wasn’t until I got out of my car at work that I noticed the sky was looking a little dark to the west. A half hour later or so, I happened to walk out into the lobby and the sky was DARK GREEN!!! Like midnight, except green. Yiiiy!!! The authorities ordered us all to congregate in a conference room. This conference room was in a part of the building that was basically a big trailer. That didn’t seem very safe but it was arguably safer than hanging out back in the lab with the gas cylinders and things. It would’ve been really fun if a tornado had rolled through and unhinged a bunch of those things.

In the end, as scary as the storm looked, we were unscathed, as were most people here on the planet. As destructive as the derecho was, there was no tornado anywhere. The GG, who will go outside *during* a tornado, had a fantabulous time back in the rickety old Seventh St. kitchen, watching large trees bend wildly back and forth. Fortunately, no trees fell on that house but *many* trees fell in West Park, across the street from us.

The photoooo? That was from this morning. A big storm rolled through and the sky was pretty darn green but, to tell the truth, that photo is a little greener than reality. I could’ve corrected the color but I didn’t. Our storm this morning was not a derecho and, as far as I know, trees were not down everywhere on the Planet Arbor like they were after the July 1980 derecho. A couple of us walked into the lunchroom and calmly watched the storm roll through. Life went on and that little lighted rectangle is just a fuzzy little glimpse of my workplace reflected in the glass.

I hereby proclaim that I am going to travel with as little flotsam, jetsam, and cosmic debris as possible this summer. Once upon a time, I was driving Mouse home from nursery school. I was probably trying to tune out the Wee Sing Dinosaurs tape. Mouse, of course, had other things on her mind because suddenly, out of nowhere I could figure, she said something like, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just take our whole house with us to Houghton Lake?”

At the time, it almost seemed reasonable to me. We regularly travel up and down the Great Lake State to either Houghton Lake or Fin Family Moominbeach. Back in those particular days, our vee-hickle was always filled with kid stuff. Car seats. Strollers. Diapers. Pottys. Bouncy seats. Toys and games and clothes. Stuffed aminals? How could I forget those. I was driving along that morning and probably the song about the brachiosaurus school bus/friendly playground slide was on and I was thinking something like, “y’know, that might not be so bad. Just tie the Landfill up to the back of the Jetta/Exxon Valdez/Indefatigable and haul the whole blasted mess up to wherever.” I kind of envisioned the house flying behind us like a balloon with stuff falling out of the corners. I think Mouse may have had a different vision.

As my kids grew up, I started to schlep books and craft stuff and later on computers and all of the related electronical crap I always feel compelled to haul around, whether I am gonna use it or not. I have just about had enough this year. I am sick to death of schlepping stuff in and out the door of the Landfill. I am sick to death of keeping track of it all when I get to my destination. And then schlepping it all back into whatever vee-hickle(s) we have and eventually back into the Landfill. Why do we travel with all this crap? I flew to California for five days last fall and I did it all with carry-on and I don’t remember missing *anything* I left behind. In fact, I could’ve left a few things behind that I took out there. But I had pretty much what I needed. Underwear and my laptop and my camera. Oh, and a memory card reader to get photooos onto my computer.

I’ve decided I’ve had it with hauling all kinds of carp crap. This summer, I am going to pack my clothes, my sleeping bag, my laptop and camera and the peripherals that go with those. Maaaayybe my “spanner”. Just because. Oh heck. Sometimes there’s a bit of food to be schlepped. I’m even going to try to keep that to a minimum. I am taaarrrred. I am sick of schlepping carp crap all over hell ‘n’ gone. Connecting with the people and/or place you are traveling to see is what’s important. Anything else? Well, usually you can buy whatever you need anywhere (ask me about Walmart bathing suits). Or maybe you’ll find something new and different to do.

Love y’all,
KW