My dilemma, and other things

First off... I got a Handful bra. Let me tell you, I love it! I have a little bit of cleavage when I wear it- instead of squishing my boobs into my armpits, it squishes them up and together. It worked great for my bike ride this morning, and it's cute enough that I wore it to Madison's concert under a deep V necked shirt- it just looks like a brown tank top.
The only drawback is that it's made in China. Hopefully it is sewn by adults.

Second, I found another cool website. I guess "found" isn't the right word, since once again, Lifehacker did the hard work... It's Supercook. If you tell Supercook what is in your fridge and pantry, Supercook will find recipes you can make. It sounds time consuming, but it really isn't- It took me about 15 minutes, and I can make 935 entrees right now. Which is surprising, since I am out of onion. Supercook also can suggest grocery lists so that you can make more recipes. The recipes come from recipezaar and allrecipes.com. Tomorrow I am going to make Shaker Tavern dijonnaise ranch chicken and pasta.

Third, I went to the optometrist today. I thought that my vision is getting worse, but it isn't. What is happening is that my eyes are taking longer to change from close up focus to far away focus. Because they are getting old. And there isn't anything that can be done about it, really. Since my close up vision is fine, bifocals aren't a good option. Contacts don't help. My best solution is to wear glasses and take them off when I am working... which is what I have been doing. I can wear contacts for sports and special occasions, which is what I have been doing. So I ordered a pair of prescription sunglasses for driving and summer fun. I'm concerned about keeping track of two pair of glasses. Maybe I should go for the chain around the neck, or the clip on sunglasses.

Fourth, I am concerned about the direction of my blog. It's turning into a diary, and that was not my intention. I have come to a Y in the road- do I write whatever the hell I want, since it's MY blog, or hold myself to some made up standard? This is my dilemma.

Crazy Bee Swarm of DOOM!

This may come as a surprise to regular CBL readers, but I have been having a wee bit of difficulty coming up with interesting things to wrote about. I blogged about a pot, for Pete's sake.

This morning was no different than most, I asked myself aloud what I planned to write about on my way to work. I got to work, still no good answer.

Noon, nothing. Haiku?

By 2:30, I am thinking I need a new "weekly feature". At least I have direction on Sundays and Mondays. How about "Ask the Crazy Blog Lady" or.... or what?

3:30, the phone rings. Spencer is home, and there is a swarm of bees in my driveway! Hooray, I can write about the bees. I bet bees are fascinating. I send him out to take lots of pictures.
Madison sends me an email: "We have a MAT OF BEES at our house!"

I skip out of work a few minutes early. What do you do with a driveway full of bees? Call the police? Not me. I call my mom. Mom says to call a beekeeper, who will be happy to come get the bees. She's so smart.

By the time I get home, the bees are dispersing. There are only about 50 left at 4:30, and they are just lumping together. The lump seems to be getting smaller, so we decide not to call the beekeeper.

The bees were all gone by 6:00. Here are some pictures. Spencer says they were more impressive when they were in the air. I would have had a better story to tell if we would have called the cops.

Maybe next week.... FICTION!

I am feeling Eco-riffic!

Today is Earth Day, the day we, as humans and citizens of Earth, should consider and reduce our environmental impact. What do I do to save the planet? As much as I can afford to. I am all for being "Green", as long as it doesn't cost me any "green", if you catch my drift. For instance, I recycle about 75% of our household waste. It doesn't cost me a thing.

I use CFLs, but only because I read that they would save money over the long run. I don't know why no one mentioned how hard they suck when it comes to their main (only) function, which is providing light. Now I have to wait 13 years for the stupid things to burn out before I replace them.

I try to use reusable grocery bags. I have quite a few of them, and I even have them in my car at all times. I have succesfully imported them to the store two times. Why don't they have a sign on the door? "Did you remember to get your bags out of the car?" That would be so nice. Of course, they would sell fewer of those 99 cent bags.

All things being equal, I will choose locally produced food over trucked-in food, and organic over conventional. The thing is, local, organic food costs two or three times as much as genetically modified food from faraway lands. We have a "poor-ganic" diet- we eat healthy foods when they are on sale.

I could do more. I could unplug all my chargers, which are electricity "vampires". I could build a rain barrel. Actually, that rain barrel looks awesome. Especially if I could turn it into an automatic dog water reservoir/ dispenser...

Speaking of dogs, here is my 2009 Earth day project, the golf club cozy:

We have a problem, or rather two problems, in our garage. Our two big dogs, Gus and Murphy, have free run of the garage, via a large dog door. Mind you, we keep no cars in the garage, it is just where we store our bikes and tools and junk. The dogs bring in large amounts of dirt from the back yard. The dirt gets all over everything out there. We have to clean golf clubs, bicycles, the motorcycle, lawn chairs- everything- before we can use them. Quite a pain in the ass.

Recently, Atta Boy canged their 50 pound bags from paper to a woven plastic material, similar to a tarp. I've shuddered every time I put them in the trash, thinking they will never decompose. I started to save them, thinking there must be someway to reuse them... maybe make shopping bags, or weed-prevention fabric... Then, it struck me. I'll cover all the stuff in the garage with custom made, recycled dog-food bag cozies! I'm starting with golf clubs, bikes are next.

Happy Earth Day.

I did an about-facebook.

I resisted joining facebook for a while, but now that I have been at it for a few months, I am glad I joined. I am not sure I have the vernacular down- is it "I have a facebook," "I facebook," or "I am on facebook"? Is facebook like Google- a noun, a verb, a phenomenon? It sure is getting a lot of press lately... here is an article in Time about 10 facebook "don'ts."
I have to say I think the article's author might be a little high strung. I mean, is it so tough to ignore (or accept) a Li'l Green Patch request? I agree with her, however, about the vague status updates. I have a couple friends that really should get to the point already. Jane is praying it will all turn out alright... Bart is thankful... Jemima is on antibiotics....

I like facebook because it has helped my reconnect with my family and friends, who I am geographically distant from. My cousin Megan and I have always been close, but never in daily contact until facebook. Now, I know what she is up to every day and whether or not her kids are sick. She makes me laugh every day.

I get to see another cousin's newborn baby get cuter each week.

I learned that I am friends with a London architect whose work was featured in the cover of the New York Times Style magazine, a middle school principal, a librarian, numerous firefighters,and a whole lot of teachers. My cousins have so many kids that I need a chart to keep track of them. My high school boyfriend is a computer geek. Most of my friends spent the better part of their youth in Washington State. They have since spread to all corners of the US, and one is a real estate agent in Mexico. Some of my friends blog, and some of them write on their facebook (pages?) and I love to read what they write.
I've noticed that people don't change much, which is comforting.

This week, I have re-connected with my numerous cousins on my mom's side. It will be nice to see them at our next family function and not spend the first few hours getting reacquainted. I am the lone only child on that side of the family, so I have always felt like a little bit of an outsider- my cousins always had their brothers to share inside jokes with. I feel a little closer, now that I can see their vacation photos and comment on their status.

I hope facebook turns out to be more like Google- an internet mainstay, than now-obsolete MySpace, which I never used. I don't use twitter, but I will if I have to... Who knows? I may learn to enjoy it.

Aluminum Foiled Again

Here in Oregon, as in many states, we pay a deposit on most of our single-serve beverage containers. Beer bottles, pop cans, and now water bottles... we pay a nickel apiece at the checkout, then return them to the grocer for a refund.

In theory, it's a good idea. Literally tons of glass, plastic and aluminum are kept out of landfills, and our parks and roads are free of beverage litter and broken glass bottles. Most large retailers have machines set up outside the store that count your empties and issue a receipt that you can take in to the store to redeem for cash.

In practice, the bottle bill is a pain in the ass. We have to save up our empties- separate of course, from trash and recycling. Then, we have to remember to bring them back to the store. Then, we have to deal with the three big problems with can returns:

1. Each store is only obligated to accept returns for products that they sell. Which means if you bought Dr. Skipper from Safeway, you can't take those cans back to Fred Meyer.

2. The machines I mentioned earlier are quite prone to fill up, jam, mis-print, reject, mis-read, or otherwise malfunction. This means a trip into the store to the customer service desk. The customer service lady pages the lowest man on the grocery totem to the bottle return area. It always takes him about 5 minutes to finish his smoke, then another 5 minutes to walk all the way through the store to get to the machines. When he finally does show up, he usually does something like the Fonz did to the jukebox at Arnold's, and the machine resets itself and works again for another 40 cans or so.

3. Due to the above problems, a cottage industry has arisen: Seagulling. Seagulls are the men on bicycles who stand about 20 yards away from the machines and wait for people to walk away from their broken machine in disgust, or for someone to throw their Select Diet Cola cans into the trash at Albertson's. You can feel their eyes boring into the back of your jacket, waiting for you to give up. The Seagulls have plenty of time to wait for customer service. The Seagulls have plenty of time to shuttle their wares between grocery stores. The Seagulls are not bothered by the stench of month old beer bottles. I think the Seagulls are getting wealthy one nickel at a time.

I admire guinea pigs.

I am intrigued by "All-or-nothing" social experiments, where people do (or refrain from doing) a certain thing for a specified amount of time, and then report.
"Super Size Me" is probably the most well-known of these social experiments. Morgan Spurlock ate only McDonald's food for 30 days, gained weight, and made a film about it.
I thumbed through A Year Without "Made in China" - I tried to read it, but it was a boring book about an interesting idea- one family's year of buying nothing made in China. They found it difficult. I am not sure whether or not they found it rewarding.
That lead me to Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, which I checked out from the library, in the spirit of the book. I am glad I did, because I found the book unreadable. But the idea... the idea is fascinating.
The "no-shopping" idea may have been inspired by "The Compact", a group that started in San Francisco, with the intent of reducing consumerism by refusing to buy any new products. Mercifully, there is an exception for some "personal" goods.
There was an article in O, the Oprah magazine. The author promised she was going to "live the perfect life" for 30 days. Turns out, she just exercised and ate healthy food everyday. Big deal.
The most interesting account of one of these social experiments was The Year of Living Biblically. It's a great book about an agnostic Jew's attempt to live as the bible instructs- literally- for a year. Funny, educational, thought-provoking. A.J. Jacobs, the author, had an advantage over the others as he was a writer before he became an experimenter. He had previously conducted a social experiment in which he read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in an attempt to know everything there is to know.

I guess I am thinking about these experiments now because I have made my own commitment to write every day for a year. The idea was sort of hatched when Megan, my cousin, told me that she had thought about doing her own 365 project, where she takes one photograph every day and posts it. It turned into an "I willl if you will" situation... and here we are, nearly one week in. I'm not certain I can be interesting every day for a year. If I only had some sort of "thing" I could blog about....

I've considered: No sugar (too difficult), No profanity (not interesting), Give one thing away per day (logistically challenging, but not impossible- however, what's the point?), no TV (too easy)... I read once that if you study any one thing for 30 minutes a day, you'll be an expert in a year. Maybe I'll test that theory. Now, what to study?

Over before it began

The newsletter from the natural foods co-op came in the mail early last week, but I just got around to reading it yesterday. I was excited to see that the co-op will be offering their very popular Beginning Home Beer Brewing class this month. I had found, it would seem, the perfect pastime for my husband and I. I would get the benefit of dabbling, and my husband would get the benefit of beer. Win-Win!
I asked Spencer if he would like to take the class with me, and he amazed me by agreeing, in his own Spencerey way, even though he lacks appreciation for the co-op.
"Which socks should I wear with my sandals?" I think is how he put it. This is significant because Spencer usually just tolerates my goofy ideas, and waits for me to get bored and try something new. He's never participated before.

I read him the course description from the newsletter. Classes are 2 hours long, on Mondays, beginning... April 6. Tomorrow! I was disappointed, as I know from reading past newsletters that the brewing classes fill up fast. I didn't figure there would be spaces available, but I called the store to check.
Lo and behold, there were slots available. In fact, they had almost canceled the class due to lack of interest. I guess the recession has hit the hippies. The guy I spoke to said we could register right before class.
So Spencer and I went to bed, thinking that today would be the beginning of our journey into homemade beer.
This morning, I remembered that Madison has soccer practice tonight, and every Monday. Logistically, it would be difficult, at best, to get her home from practice and fed and make it to the co-op on time. Plus, today is Opening Day, and we have a tradition of eating hot dogs in front of the TV on Opening Day.
So we decided to hope the beer classes are offered again. I think we were both looking forward to spending time together and sharing a project, more than the actual class itself. Well, that's what I was looking forward to, anyway. Spencer was probably just in it for the beer.

Ole Ole Ole

Soccer season started today in Albany, Oregon. About one hour after dawn, SUVs and pickup trucks began filling the gravel parking lot at the city park near the airport. Parents filed across the wet grass to secure a good spot on the sidelines. Players searched out their teammates and began passing their balls back and forth. The balls bogged down in the freshly mowed grass and were followed by small rooster tails.
As game time neared, I dug my whistle and stopwatch out of my bag and removed sweatpants to reveal my referee's shorts and socks. I left my jacket on as long as possible. I asked my daughter to be a linesman, which she was thrilled to do. I think the coaches may have questioned that assignment, as Madison is about as tall as their 7 and 8 year old players, but she is almost 12, and a stickler for rules.
I checked the players' shoes and shinguards, and made sure they weren't wearing any jewelry. I made my same old joke about removing belly button piercings, and they all laughed.
The game came and went rather uneventfully. I only had to stop it once for tears- a redheaded defender had to pee real bad. I think the Daisies bested the Petunias 4-3, but I am not exactly sure since we don't keep score. Everyone's a winner!
I thanked my young linesman for a job well done as we walked to the regulation size Under 14 field for her game.

New Neighbors

I miss Perfect Neighbor Pat. Pat bought the house next to ours about 3 years after we moved in. He bought it from Duke and Kelly, who we called the Puke and Smelly, because if it was funny in the third grade, we like it here in the Headley house. We were glad to see Puke and Smelly go, because frankly, they were a little too uppity for our neighborhood. All the houses in my neighborhood were built in 1964. The houses are all rectangles. We all have two car garages, and we all have washers and dryers in the garage. Which means most people do not park two cars in their garage, because if you do, there is not room to do laundry. But Puke parked his Suburban next to the washer and dryer, and backed it into the driveway each time Smelly needed to do a load of laundry, then returned it to the garage as soon as she finished. Sometimes three or four times a day. They really needed to get to a fancier neighborhood with utility rooms.
We couldn't have asked for a better neighbor than Pat. He was friendly, but not too friendly. He was a salesman for the radio station, and a tennis instructor at the tennis club, so he would come and go a lot. Every time we were outside together, he would say "Well, hello there!" and make a comment about the weather. That's it. He drove a BMW, which was a little too much class for our neighborhood, but we forgave him because he is single. He kept his lawn mowed. He was perfect.
We were shocked when a woman moved in with him. He was 40ish, sharp dresser, good job... we just assumed there was never going to be a Mrs. Pat. We were astonished when he moved out with the woman and put his home up for rent.
The first set of renters had small kids, loud voices and pit bulls. They were gone after a month or two. The next two guys were muffler haters. They liked to warm up their rigs for 10 to 20 minutes, and they were LOUD. Nice guys, but that got old. I was not sad to see them packing up last weekend.
Today, I have new hope. I see that a young couple is moving in. She has nerdy glasses like me, and he has long, but not too long, hair. They have a dog, but no kids.
I want them to be the kind of neighbors that bring over a box of apples from their tree. I would give them flowers or zucchini. They will roll my trash cans up to the house on Thursdays, I'll pick up their newspaper if they go out of town for the weekend.
Maybe we will be friends. Maybe they are the type of young hipsters that entertain, and they will invite us over for grilled tuna. Maybe we will discover that we have things in common, like a love of all things cycling. Perhaps we will wile away many a hot summer evening in the back yard, under a string of white lights, listening to Adult Contemporary music, drinking wine and beer and discussing nerdy things like shopping at the co-op and alternative transportation.
But I'll be satisfied if they just keep the damn grass cut.

The first step is the hardest, I hope.

I am a dabbler. You can see that I dabbled in blogging in 2007. I've also dabbled in guitar, dance, soccer, swimming, running, photography, knitting, crochet, yoga, gardening, bicycling, recycling, freecycling, motorcycling...and now I am back to blogging. It's cyclical, I guess you'd say.
I am back to blogging because I enjoy writing. I wrote an essay, which I posted to my facebook page, about a trip I took with my dad and grandmother. Pushing the "publish" button was a thrill. I can't explain why I was so excited about it. I knew the essay was poorly written and in need of some real editing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it so much I wrote another essay that I entered into a contest. (A very, very small contest) I have since checked out three or four "How to write" books from the library, and done my internet research. It seems the first step to improving one's writing skills is to...write every day. I hope it works. I cook every day, and I'm no top chef.
I have now tasked myself to write daily. Will I publish daily? Probably not. Logistically, it would be impossible, I am not near a computer every single day... although there aren't many days when I am not. I certainly don't want this blog to turn into a list of my ailments, or a tribute to my daughter's achievements. I'm also pretty sure that I don't want this to turn into a blog about blogging.
Here then, is my short story contest entry.

Caller i.d.
by Kaycee


As a teenager, I was a master of the prank phone call. I had my own specialty call that I used to delight my friends at sleepovers and birthday parties. I had a special knack for staying in character and sounding grown-up and professional.
In most towns, kids use the phone book to pick random numbers to call. In Naselle, we used the phone book to choose exactly who we would call. Teachers were off-limits, as were the sweet old ladies who gave full size candy bars for Halloween. There were no strangers in Naselle. It was impossible to call someone that you didn't know without paying long-distance charges.
One evening, I got a little cocky. I'd called two or three folks who didn't hang up right away, or threaten to have the call traced. My friend T.J. dared me to call his grandmother, who was also my school bus driver. My mean, bossy, unhappy, intimidating bus driver, Mae. He dared me. I had no choice. I dialed the last four digits of her phone number- Naselle was so small that the first three digits were superfluous. My friends listened on the extension phone.
"Hello?"
"Yes, Hello, Ma'am. This is Donna at Land-O-Latex in Santa Anna, California. I am calling about an order we received for 12 Galactic Prophylactics." I spoke fast, and used a terrible accent.
"What's that?" She sounded mad, as if she was getting ready to tell someone to SIT DOWN.
"Ma'am, unfortunately, the agent who processed this order did not make note of the size that was ordered. What size Galactic Prophylactic would you like?"
"I don't know what this is about. I didn't order anything."
This is where people either hung up, or got hooked. I always kept the phone book handy so that I could read their address back to them.
"Ma'am, once again, I really apologize for any inconvenience, but the order has been paid for, and is ready to be shipped to P.O. box 48, in Naselle, Washington.... I just need to know what size Galactic Prophylactic you would like." I mispronounced "Naselle" for authenticity.
Mae laughed a little. "Is this for real?"
"Yes, of course, Ma'am. Small, Medium, or Large?"
"Large, I guess."
"Well, ma'am, you are certainly one lucky lady. We will get those 12 Galactic Prophylactics shipped out right away. Is there anything else I can help you with this evening? We have a full line of latex novelties."
"No, I think that's it."

I thanked her, hung up, and my friends and I had a good laugh at how gullible Mae had been. Congratulatory high fives were shared.

Monday morning, as I boarded the bus, I pretended to be looking for something in my bag so that I didn't have to acknowledge Mae. What if I cracked up? When I got to my seat, she caught my eye in the mirror and said, "Good Morning. Donna... is it?". I swear she winked.