Tales from the Shark Tank

Living out in one of the vast areas between the incorporated cities, I’m learning more daily about what passes for logic. The phone system and post office are two prime examples.

Technically, our house is on a postal rural route attached to Hebron, Indiana. Hebron isn’t that far away. I checked, and from my driveway to the grocery store is a matter of 4.5 miles. But Boone Grove is far closer. The community itself is .7 miles up the road, and the post office exactly a mile away. I can walk there and have more than once. The U.S. Postal Service considers the Boone Grove post office too small to be economically viable, and yet assigns homes that are literally close enough that you can see them from the p.o. to either Hebron or Valparaiso, which is 14 miles away. If there is any logic at all in that, I’m sure I can’t find it.

And then there’s the phone system. Neither the area code nor the local carrier differs between Valpo, Hebron, and Boone Grove, with Valpo being the furthest out. But Valpo is a local call, while Hebron is not. And Merrillville, where my husband works? Just the other side of I-65 from Valpariaso, it’s not a local call either, at least not on my land line. If I want it to be local, I use my cell phone…the one with the Indianapolis number, kept so that I would continue to be a local call for the people there.

Now, can anyone make sense out of any of this? I’m well aware that borders and boundries are generally artificial constructs, but this little red hen considers this is beyond ridiculous.

My son has been seduced by that ultimate femme fatale and symbol of female stereotypes, Betty Crocker. Yes indeed, the advertising that made an indelible impression upon him was not the campaign for the latest in Transformer toys. It was for a specialized cake pan called a “bake ‘n fill”. It’s a collection of 4 cake pans which enables one to make a bowl-shaped cake to be filled with whatever the heart desires. Personally, I’d fill a chocolate cake with whipped cream and fresh strawberries, but that’s me. My son fell in love with ice-cream cakes, and that’s what he wanted me to make for him to assemble and decorate. I looked at the thing, and concluded that I really couldn’t improvise effectively. But we were getting ready to move, and I did not want something being delivered just in time to be moved.

On the other hand, what better way to make the new house a thing of anticipation rather than fear than to tell him that the object of such intense desire would be obtained when we arrived at the new house. And so it was. Yesterday in the midst of shopping for school supplies, getting a back-to-school haircut, meeting the teacher and all the other chaos attendant upon the resumption of academic endeavor, we stopped at an emporium noteworthy for the number of products available within its walls originally advertised on television. So we searched the premises of Bed Bath & Beyond and indeed found the magic device. Then we picked up an appropriate cake mix (having not yet unpacked my mixer, flour, etc.) and brought it all home.

And so today we have made the cake, which is even now cooling in preparation for being filled with ice-cream. It is indeed a lovely bowl-shaped thing, with a cookie-like base layer ready to complete the enclosure. And I have just two words for the next endeavor I have in mind, since I have already indulged in the gadgetry. Baked Alaska.

I’ve been seeing billboards the last week or so that advertise broadband internet in some of the tiny towns surrounding the farmhouse. I took note, but what really caught my attention was noticing one of the billboards next to a cornfield in any area visibly as isolated as our new location. We contacted them, and it turns out that having expanded their wireless broadband service in northwest Indiana about two weeks ago, they’re already backed up a month on installation orders. I’ve got a date scheduled, and hopefully when their techs test they’ll discover that we can indeed get a signal sufficient for access.

But those billboards are their principal type of advertising, and the response has all but overwhelmed them. That’s what the demand for broadband is out a very short way from the cities. And I would think that would tell the big companies something. If they run their services out there, they will have customers and lots of them. People are willing to pay for the service, if only they have the option. Establishments such as Panera’s make a fortune on people who come in and get a meal there because they can get the broadband access that isn’t available at their homes. I lost count of laptops the last time I went in there, and once our son is in school, I suspect I’ll become a regular either there or at South Bend Chocolate Company, which offers both access and wonderful tea (and chocolate). When they run fiber-optic lines, the communication companies have to be right past all these farms and tiny towns. Why do they doubt their services will be used if they run the line two tenths of a mile to the side? That’s the distance between the nearest fiber optic line and the little town nearest us. But when asked, the company representative said they hadn’t had requests for service. I suspect more likely is that people like me got online, checked the availability of service and were informed there was none, and weren’t so much as offered the option of asking to be informed when service became available. That was not offered to me until I called on the phone.

The long and short of it is that I think that the big communication companies are making assumptions without accurate data, and making the lack of broadband demand in rural areas a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I hope those same patronizing executives find themselves with egg all over their faces as the little company that’s actually bringing broadband out here takes off and flies.

This morning’s paper contained an article of great personal interest. The Court of Appeals has ruled on my freedom of religion case, the one that made the papers a few months back. We won by unanimous vote of a three-judge panel. They never even got to the constitutional issue; they ruled simply that Indiana law forbids the courts from interfering with parent’s right to make decisions unless there is some specific reason to believe the child’s physical or emotional health or safety are at risk. “I don’t like/ understand what you believe” is not sufficient reason. More, neither the judge nor the commissioner had given a specific reason. That, so far as the Court of Appeals was concerned, was the end of that.

There were some quotes from the original judge saying that his original ruling had been based on misunderstanding. I am here to tell you that if he still misunderstood what was involved after the hearing on the first attempt to fix the problem, then he was distinctly hard of listening that day. I’m sorry; I was there. His entire attitude was “I’ve made up my mind, now go away and don’t bother me.” But I have to agree with my husband. The conversation for which I would have liked to be a fly on the wall was the one between the judge and his master commissioner, who made the initial ruling that the judge later affirmed and got blamed for. I suspect “look what you got me into” was the least of the things he would have had to say. And I’m also quite glad to be out of Marion County, as I suspect it will be years before I become merely another quiet, competent attorney to that judge.

But I think the thing I am glad to see is the clarity with which this “non mainstream religion” was explained by the local, very conservative paper, and even more the utter respect with which the whole matter was treated. These are Witches, but at least as far as I can tell, there have been no witch hunts. Even the editorials that the paper printed ran along the lines that the judge should keep his orders off the parent’s faith. I suspect a lot of people have learned a good deal, both about a tiny minority religion that worships nature and the earth, and about why the limits our system puts upon the courts are so important. All things considered, I suspect this may well be my last case that has anything to do with family law. If it turns out to be so, I think it’s a good note on which to go out.

My son was helping me to clean the sliding glass doors this morning. I had done one before he noticed what I was doing, and being enchanted by the potential for mayhem inherent in the spray bottle of cleaner, announced his intent to assist, and so did the following conversation occur:

“That one’s already done, honey.”

“How do you know when it needs to be washed, mom?”

“Oh, I clean them when they have things like nose prints on them.”

“I can make nose-prints!” And he proceeded to do so. Then he grinned up at me and asked “Now should I spray it, mom?”

Whereupon the previously cleaned glass was duly sprayed and cleaned again, now being in need of the attention.

The lack of connection to the internet is making me feel more isolated than I would have thought possible. Of course, the current condition of the phone line doesn’t help. It’s been attacked by static monsters. It’s supposed to be fixed today, but so far it hasn’t happened that I can tell. I do believe it’s being worked on, as it’s rung a couple of times with no one on the other end, and I’ve seen trucks down the road at the switching station.

But yesterday when I called home on my cell to ask if I should pick anything up for dinner, the call ended abruptly in my small son’s delighted shriek to his father. There was a deer in our back yard. I shall have to investigate what herbs they really dislike, so that I can actually grow a garden here. But I have time for that; it will be Spring before I’m putting in my beds. It’s only the bulbs I’ll need to attend to this fall, and nothing eats daffodils that I know of. We have no television reception to speak of, but J. is watching the wildlife, including the marsh birds across the road. I’d much rather his “Mommy, come look!” be about herons than super-heroes.

I won’t be able to cook much until Wednesday. That’s when the guy from the appliance store comes out to change the plug on my dryer and hook up the gas for the range. But I can do a lot to veggies with a microwave once I get my glass cookware unpacked, so that’s today’s project. I’d like to go out to the local farmer’s market, but I have to be home for the Verizon tech, just in case he needs to get into the house – unlikely, but possible. I don’t want to give them any least excuse not to fix the line, as I’ve already used the magic words “Utility Regulatory Commission” to encourage them to come sooner than three weeks hence. It worked admiriably. As my husband is fond of saying, I don’t cheat fair at all.

Our son is enrolled for school. The one he will be attending, which serves the entire southern half of the county, is a bit less than half the size of the one he came from. I liked the adults I met tremendously. I liked the informality they gave to the process. Having put on their website that I had to bring my son’s birth certificate and proof of residence with me, I was asked for neither of those things. I simply said “I’m living in Kathy’s parent’s old farmhouse” and the discussion was over. That was a pleasure. Shopping in Merrillville was not. It was congested and busy and no one paid attention to where anyone else might be standing or needing to proceed. But Valpariaso, which is actually the closest town big enough to have a hardware store, is another story. Anything I want I can find there, and without the bustle of the Chicago bedroom community mentality.

I find the isolation here refreshing, but the comments I get about it from the folks who come out to install/ repair/ deliver/ whatever disquieting. Yes, I know I’m half a mile or so from any other human. It’s actually a great relief. I can be incredibly sociable, but really, I relax in the quiet. Right now I’m watching a thunderstorm blow in across what looks like nothing so much as a vareity of bamboo and may well be. It’s gorgeous. But the comments make me feel like a character in a badly written thriller, ignoring the foreshadowing of the director and going about in blithe ignorance of the hideous fate about to descend upon her.

But I have my very own streetlight. So I suppose I shouldn’t worry unless it mysteriously goes out in the middle of a howling blizzard. Right?

The movers have come and gone, and most of those possessions we intended to take with us are now in our new home. I figured out what the square footage of the house is, and concluded that my eye-ball estimate was generous. It’s exactly twice the size of our very first apartment back in 1987, and a solid third smaller than the house we moved out of. We’re coping with the usual run of minor annoyances. I hadn’t realized, for example, that 30 amp plugs (the kind used by dryers and stoves) are not standardized. So while there is a 30 amp line for the dryer, the plug on our dryer does not fit it. Furthermore, it is evidently not legal in this state to sell a converter that would make it possible to plug in an appliance with a different prong pattern. So since I seem to have a choice between putting a new cord and plug on the dryer or a new socket in the wall (and messing with a 30 amp line), I have acquired the necessary materials to put a new cord and plug (it’s all one piece) on the dryer. At least for that one I don’t have to worry about working with a high-voltage line. I just don’t want to have to worry about whether I actually managed to turn it off while I’m working, y’know? And frankly, if the dryer looks at all confusing when I get it apart, I’ll call in a pro to do that, too. Some things I am very respectful of, and high voltage is one of them.

The movers could not maneuver my desk up the stairs no matter what they tried, so it is now in the garage. It’s nothing special, really. What it had to recommend it was that it’s left-handed (which is to say the long end with the drawers is to the left rather than the right) and of a good size for me, so when I saw it on a Goodwill run, I picked it up. But frankly, it’s an ugly thing. So it shall probably be freecycled once life settles down a bit. And I discovered rather the hard way that moving two adults is quite a different thing from moving with a child. Friday my beloved husband took our son everywhere and anywhere that gave promise of keeping him busy and out from under the mover’s feet, moving help from an eager 7 year old being rather like military assistance from the French. Saturday (delivery day) it was my turn. We stayed with my in-laws, who have a huge house, and I took my own good time getting out of town. The end result was that we’ve another trip or two to make, but my van should manage it nicely. Thank heavens for my chosen family, who are planning a weekend painting party for Labor Day weekend.

My internet access from the house is dial-up, and even that is unreliable because our phone line varies between poor and impossible. So I am sitting in Panera’s, getting this written and dealing with my e-mail. Spoiled woman that I am, I think one of the things I miss most is my e-mail and IM. But Verizon has chosen the wrong person to tell that they can’t send a tech out to fix the line for three weeks. I have no hesitation in contacting the Utility Commission, which has previously been known to take a very dim view of slow customer service for something considered a vital service. I haven’t raised hades yet because they had the excuse that there was no one to meet them during the day, although of course they won’t give you a more accurate estimate than “sometime between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.” But now I’m here, and the wheel has plans to begin squeaking loudly.

So long story short, the end is in sight. We’re all under one roof again, and if we’re working between two houses, at least it’s the one we’ll be staying in that’s our operational base, and not the one we’re leaving. Our son absolutely loves the new house, and even more is thrilled at having Daddy living with us again. We had gotten a futon to use as a guest bed, intending it to be the last thing we took out of the old house. But our son has adopted it as his bed, so we left his twin bed behind instead. Since we’re the sort of folks who must have a guest bed, we’re getting another futon. That one may end up in the house in Indy for a little while, so that there’s a place to sleep for out of town members of the family home renovation crew. And if the worst that comes of this is an electricians bill and and periodic sojourns in Panera’s or the Chocolate Cafe to get a broadband connection, I’d say life is fine.

No, that isn’t a misspelling in the title. When our son was tiny and beginning to talk (which he did very early, and then stopped, a common autistic pattern), he would say the last syllable or two of a word instead of the first. So his stuffed dinosaur was “Saur”, and his pacifier was “fier”.

The movers came on Friday as scheduled, and as I had anticipated, all sorts of things appeared from behind assorted furniture that hadn’t been moved in years, like the entertainment center and the plethora of bookcases. Among the flotsam washed ashore were no less than six “fiers”. When it was bedtime or he didn’t feel great and wanted a pacifier, we would call the resultant hunt a “fire drill” for obvious reasons. Now, of course, we know whence they all vanished. We’ve thrown them away, but I’ve figured out what the collective word for pacifiers has to be. It’s a brigade.

Moving day is Friday. We’re moving into a house substantially smaller than the one we’re in, and we’ve overflowed this house as it is. I have to clean out the fridge tomorrow afternoon, so that it’s ready to go when the movers come, and I’ve disposed of about a third of our book collection and will be disposing of more at the other end of the journey as I unpack.

My parents know all of this. So Mom calls and offers to bring over food, and Dad calls and asks if I want him to order books for our son, or cookbooks for myself, from his endless and ubiquitous bookclubs. What part of “emptying the refrigerator” doesn’t preclude adding to its contents? And what part of “getting rid of books” adds up to acquiring more, which we will then have to find storage for? Mind you, their own home shows similar incomprehension of the basic laws of physics, so I’m not terribly surprised. But right now, when I’m under the gun to get everything ready to go, it’s beyond annoying.

Yesterday afternoon I had grand plans involving a friend staying with our small son while I availed myself of a hottub. I haven’t had the chance to work out or swim as much as I wanted to this summer, but I do have the membership and the accumulated tension to make hot water sound like a marvelous idea, even when the weather is, as a friend puts it, hotter than a supernova with indigestion.

I called the friend who was trying to give me a break about the time he was getting off work, as I didn’t know if he was going home first or coming directly here. Turned out the answer was neither, as his car was deader than a doornail. Without thinking much about it, I asked if he needed a rescue in my son’s hearing.

“Rescue? Mom, do we need to go to the rescue? I’ll get my shoes on!” And he shot off upstairs to find his sandals, as I laughed and made sure the jumper cables were in my car. On the way back downstairs, he grabbed his sunglasses and put them on (it was twilight), announcing “Now I’m cool!” I’m Mr. Cool Car Rescue Guy!” And he strutted out the door and climbed into my mommy-van, face glowing with a wrap-around grin, on Heroic Good Deeds intent.