Today we had our Hebrew School Chanukkah play. It consisted in part of the kids talking about what part of the observance of the holiday they found most interesting. One little guy in second grade said “On Chanukkah we eat latkes because they are cooked in oil. Latkes are potato pancakes made out of onions.”
Must be a new recipe.
It has been pointed out to me that I haven’t posted anything new for a month. Sorry ’bout that. I’ve gotten on with conversational intent several times, only to find that the blank page I’m staring at is staring back at me. Disconcerting, that, so I’d close it and go wash dishes or something equally exciting and mentally stimulating. If a sinkful of dishes won’t put you to sleep, Sominex doesn’t have a chance.
But one of the things being up at oh-dark-whatever made me think about was how the internet has changed my concept of friendship. There are people I talk to regularly whom I have never met, and whom I consider not just acquaintances, but friends. Not “online friends”, nor any other qualifier. They are simply friends. Some of them are as nocturnal as I am, and I can get myself online and look to see if they’re about without worrying that I’ll wake someone with a ringing phone. It makes the middle of the night far less isolated. I can be alone if I want to, but if I want to chat I can usually find someone. It’s the same for living in the middle of nowhere. Are my friends scattered from Boston to Florida to Seattle? It doesn’t matter. They’re here.
Of course, this night-owl of a mom is disconcerting for Joseph. He decided, since he woke up anyway, that he was going to see if he could figure out where his Hanukkah gifts were hidden. So he comes tiptoeing out of his room, into the kitchen…and there I was, standing by the sink. Asked what he was doing, he said “uh – why do you ask? Uh-uh- looking for a cat! Do you know where Sophia is?” “You sure you aren’t going upstairs to see if your presents aren’t hidden up there?” He muttered something about mind readers, and decided that going back to bed was the better part of valor. He probably won’t remember it in the morning.
And Sophia just informed me that I should be in bed, not sitting here typing. She was, as is her wont any time I’m seated, perched on the my chair. Sometimes she watches the world go by, looking as sphinx-like as a matronly grey cat can manage, but at such times as this she usually dozes. Tonight, it would seem, she fell too deeply asleep, as she just rolled off the arm of the chair and landed on the floor. She’s jumped back up, and is giving me looks that quite plainly ask why I allowed her to do such a thing, and telling me in very insistent trills and meows that if I were in the bed where I belonged, she wouldn’t be sleeping on such a narrow surface. If I oblige her by returning to bed, she will int turn settle herself against my leg (or on top of my hip, if I’m on my side) and purr me to sleep. Sounds like a good deal to me. Goodnight, world.
“I like having a wife who, when she can’t come up with anything for dinner, comes up with chicken curry.”
Over the past several years, I’ve taken to doing increasing amounts of my shopping online. I’ve never liked malls. I managed to live less than 5 miles from Castleton Mall in Indianapolis for 10 years and walk in half a dozen times at most. I went to the nearby fabric store; I went (occasionally) to the Best Buy across the parking lot, but I did not go inside the mall.
But yesterday I got a phone call that something I’d lost over a year ago had been hiding in a corner of the safe at Toys R Us, where it was finally spotted by an alert employee. So I went to pick it up, and figured while I was there I’d get gifts for my youngest niecelet and nephew. That plan lasted about 5 minutes past the time I walked into the store.
On a weekday morning, it was a total zoo. I didn’t have a cart to maneuver, and still had a hard time getting through the aisles. It wasn’t quite to the level of saying “excuse me” with an elbow, but it was close, and I think the only cure for the sort of “holiday spirit” I was seeing would have been a shot of holiday spirits. (Just because I don’t drink much doesn’t mean I don’t know when most people would say they need one.)
I persevered long enough to determine that they didn’t have what I wanted at all, and then fled. The fabric store (next stop) and grocery were much saner. I told my mother-in-law at Thanksgiving that I wouldn’t be going to a “big box” store until January. I just reminded myself why. And when I got home, I ordered what I’d been looking for. It will be delivered to my door; no gas, no driving, no hunting, no crowd and no aggravation. That’s worth the shipping fee any day.
Usually the first snow of winter is a light dusting, amounting to an announcement. “It’s really winter now, little humans. Time to dig out the snow-boots and your warmest coats and gloves.” It melts off by mid-morning, and then you have a couple of weeks to a month before you have to worry about any serious accumulation.
Not this year. I’d heard there was snow in the forecast, but not how much, so I was expecting the usual half-inch or so. Imagine my reaction, then, when I got up to answer nature’s call at 3:30 this morning, glanced out the window, and saw that the ground had gone from crispy brown (the leaves I haven’t yet mulched) to solid white. There was no wind, so no drifts, but more white stuff was falling at quite an impressive rate. I looked at the roof of my car and realized we already had at least 6 inches, with more piling up merrily as I watched.
The phone rang at 5:30, announcing a 2-hour school delay. And about 8:00, when my son the budding meteorologist went out with my metal yard/meter stick to measure, it was a bit over 9 inches.
It’s pretty much limited to this county and the one to the east of us; lake effect snow (in our case Lake Michigan) is like that. But the weather service is predicting that this will be a particularly snowy winter overall. If the start is any indication, that may be an understatement.
When I was a kid, I kind of had it in my head that each region of the country was prone to its own form of natural disasters. The west had lightning-set wildfires, California had earthquakes, New England got Nor’easters, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were vulnerable to hurricanes, and the plains states had tornados. I learned, over time, that those divisions weren’t set in stone, and that disasters could happen in places they did not usually; that southern Indiana could have a wildfire in a drought year, for example, or that tornadoes could and did happen in the mountain states.
The concept that northwest Indiana could be vulnerable to hurricane-flooding never crossed my mind, though. It’s just about 1200 miles from here to Galveston, where Ike first came ashore. And yet the reality is that the usually 3 minute, 1 mile drive from home to my son’s school takes about 10 minutes and nearly 5 miles, because while I can get to the intersection a quarter mile from home, there is about 700 feet of lake across what is usually the road between the stop sign and the house. It’s not deep, no more than a foot, but that’s quite enough to drown a car’s engine. School was closed the day after Ike came through, because half the district, including our house, wasn’t accessible to the buses.
I understand the mechanics of floods; it’s a part of the thunder-storm vulnerability of this region. But the concept of a storm so enormous that it could fling flooding rains like a child’s pin-wheel across a thousand miles is just beyond my ability to grasp other than theoretically, even as I look out the window at the expansion of our marsh that still blocks our way to the east.
I’m making some beaded jewelry, bookmarks, and assorted sundry other pretties for our temple’s gift shop, so today, in search of appropriate charms, I betook myself to one of the semi-local big-chain craft/ hobby stores. It’s a bit of a drive, but no one local has anything resembling a decent selection of charms and pendants. This emporium has an entire wall of charms, so that is where I went.
There was nothing. Not one single charm that I could use or even improvise from. Rows and rows, literally, of crosses in different designs and styles and metals, but not so much as a basic six-pointed star. I even saw a couple of goddess-charms, though the buyers probably thought of them as fantasy or “New Age” or Art Nouveau. You’d think, looking at that display, that no one had ever heard of anything other than Christianity.
I walked out, thoroughly irritated. On my way from the very back of the store, though, I paid closer attention to things I’d kind of ignored on the way in. There were candies by the cash regsiters, as is common, but these little Altoid-type tins were labelled “Scripture Mints”. The label identified them as fish shaped mints, to “spread the word one piece at a time”. Then there was the sign with the hours. Not content merely to give the information, it went through the week, then said, in larger, bolder type than the rest of the sign “Closed Sundays to allow our employees time for family and worship.”
Putting their faith in their business is their privilege, though I could wish they were a little less in my face about it. But to completely ignore other elements of the culture bothers me considerably more. It feels as though in declining to make the symbols available, they are trying to deny the existence of those for whom the symbols are important. I suppose I should have expected that anyone whose corporate ethos went to the extent of selling “Craft Chain brand Scripture Mints” and announcing that they were closed on Sunday in a way that showed how religious they are would not make the symbols of other religions available. I should have, but I didn’t. Next time I’ll know better. And next time, I think I’ll shop online.
Yesterday afternoon I was very pleased to find that my cell phone was working again. This morning it’s out again. Oh well, eventually it will be consistent again. But meanwhile, if you need to reach me, it’s hit or miss.
On the other hand, since my son and I are going to Mishewaka to visit friends for the day, it shouldn’t be a problem. Once away from this tiny corner of ruralness, the phones work just fine, and hopefully by tomorrow it’ll be working consistently again.
I have a very psyched young gentleman here, so we’re off!
Yes, we had tornadoes through this part of Indiana last night. We also had a spectacular sound-and-light show; one lightning strike was so close my husband and I weren’t sure it wasn’t actually in the back yard.
We are just fine, though. Power went out about midnight, wherefore I took our son out for breakfast, but it was back on by the time we returned. Our cell phones don’t work at the house for the moment. Phone calls require going about a mile and a half. I noticed, as I was out and about today, that there are a lot of such dead zones, so I suspect tower troubles. If that’s what it is, then it should sort itself out as the cell companies do repairs.
And I had another follow-up visit with the oncologist today. She says everything is good, and that my chance of recurrence at this point is less than 0.25%. It can’t get much lower and still be quantifiable, which is a tremendous relief.
So that’s that. Tomorrow I register my kidling for school; the day after that J. and I will go spend a day hanging out with a woman who has been among my close friends since college and her high school aged son. That will be fun; I don’t see near enough of them. I’m very much looking forward to that.
And that’s enough to go on with. Both J. and I are counting the days until school starts, albeit for different reasons. But someone asked me today, just making conversation, what I would find to do with my time once he was no longer home all day. I had some ado not to laugh in her face.
I was about to e-mail a friend of mine to point out that it’s been three weeks since she posted anything to her blog. I know what’s going on in her life because we’ve talked, but what she puts in her blog is different. Then I checked and realized that it’s been very nearly as long since I’ve written anything. So before I say anything to her, it behooves me to attend to my own behavior. In other words, I’ll acknowledge that pot and kettle are equally carbonized before she points it out to me.
So what has our intrepid reporter been doing? A few things. Last weekend we went to an s.f. convention, which had a writer’s workshop as part of its available activities. It was taught by professional writers whose work I very much like, and I decided that I had put enough effort and energy into my writing skills that I might actually get something out of it now. So I signed myself up, and away I went.
My only comment is that I want to do it again. Soon. Often. It was great. There’s an incredible rush in reading the single page you’ve managed to write between the session that ended at 8:00 pm one night and the one the next morning at 10:00 and having the instructor say “that’s a first draft?” Then one gets to hear the comments and suggestions of the others there, about half of whom are published authors and all of whom are creative, intelligent, articulate people. Hearing what they’ve written and getting both to comment on it and to ask them why they chose one method of presenting something over another left me with enough food for thought that I’m still chewing it over a week later. I enjoyed the con; I got to see some people I haven’t seen in a good while, and got to hear some wonderful music and actually share a quiet dinner with a single friend who joined my family. I picked up some marvelous CDs, too, which I have been blithely listening to. I went for a swim with my son, and talked jewelry making with one merchant and costuming with another. But the thing that stands out most for me is that writer’s workshop. I’ll be doing that again. Who knows; maybe I’ll even gather the nerve to submit something to be published? Stranger things have happened.