Getting old before my time

I know that I'm not that old.  I do.  But sometimes I feel old.  It might have something to do with having four surgeries in eighteen months, but it goes deeper than that. I will present the evidence and you can tell me what you think.

Twelve Reasons I Think I'm Old

1. Classic Rock stations play music from my childhood.
2. I care deeply about retirement. (Although this could be because I'm an accountant.)
3. When dining out I spend half an hour evaluating different options based on whether they will work with my specific physical, dietary, and financial requirements.  99% of the time I decide it's easier to eat at home.  Besides, then I don't have to put on real pants.
4. The "hottest bachelors" in People Magazine look like they aren't old enough to vote, let alone get married.
5. I've paid less than a dollar per gallon for gas, and it doesn't feel like it was that long ago.  Except it was nearly 20 years ago, and this is why I'm old.
6. I'm not too cool to do that stupid dance.  I'm just pretty sure my knees aren't up to it.
7. Similarly, I now take glucosamine for my joint health.
8. Children I once taught are married with school-age children of their own.  These are not the kids that got knocked up in high school.
9. Movies and television shows from my childhood now look really old.  Have you tried watching an episode of MacGyver?  It's grainier than Perry Mason was when I was a kid.
10. Speaking of Perry Mason, it started in 1957, which means that it was about as old when I was watching it as MacGyver would be to my kids today.
11. Buildings my age have dry rot.
12. It has been thirty-five years since the Blazers won the NBA Championship.  I'm getting old here, people!

So, since I'm officially old, here's some fun nostalgia from my childhood.  A lot of it is very local, so it may only work for kids who grew up in Portland watching too much TV.

The Pop Shoppe.  When I was a kid we always had a red crate from the Pop Shoppe full of bottles of soda.  We'd take the crate of empty bottles back to the Pop Shoppe and exchange them for full bottles of all different kinds of soda.  It was like magic!  I miss it.  This is silly of me since I can't drink soda any more (because I'm old) and if I did I could always get it at Cosmic Soda Pop and Candy Shop.

The Kite Man.  Just watch the commercial.  Either you saw it as a kid or you didn't.  Either way it is WEIRD.  The 'stache is awesome, though, isn't it?

Ramblin' Rod.  I told you I watched too much TV.  When I was a kid the coolest thing in the world was being on Ramblin' Rod and getting to smile into the camera and cheer for the cartoons.  Now the whole thing seems creepy to me, but much of my childhood does.  This clip on YouTube is especially awesome because it mentions The Pop Shoppe.  (I am not receiving any endorsements from The Pop Shoppe.  I promise.)

He-Man.  Yet more TV.  Is that all I ever did?  Yes.  Back then excessive TV-watching was considered a sign of intelligence.  I'm not going to provide a link to this one because it still gets some syndication, which I find especially impressive considering how absolutely dreadful the show is.  

Hostess Choco-Bliss.  I spent my childhood consuming a lot of Hostess treats.  However, by the time I reached adolescence the pathetic Ding-Dongs and Cupcakes of my childhood were replaced by the wonder of the Choco-Bliss.  Two layers of devils food with a whipped chocolaty filling and chocolate frosting.  Mmmmm.  I was walking to 7-Eleven to buy one of these tasty treats in high school when I was picked up by the cops for violating curfew.  That's why they discontinued them.  They were contributing to the delinquency of a minor.  X-Entertainment has a nice discussion of the demise of this particular snack cake and a really awesome TV commercial.

Is there anything you are particularly nostalgic about?

A Lesson in Humility

Isaac watching the aliens land . . . or something.

Anyone who has children knows that they are one big, long lesson in humility.  No matter how much we know about children in general - from training or practice - our knowledge is useless with our own.

The main reason for this is because kids are not like a souffle or even like a puppy.  They are all completely different.  No matter how skilled you are at dealing with one child, you are guaranteed to be thoroughly inept at dealing with the next one.

My son is a blond, blue-eyed, corn-fed Nebraska boy who slept through the night at two weeks of age (because he had a stomach the size of a two-year-old).  As a baby, he was cheerful and fun and a little kooky.  He loved to make noise and bang his head against things.

It's not a coincidence that Jacob looks exhausted.

So my husband and I thought, this is easy!  Let's have another!  I still looked six months pregnant, anyway.  Why not go ahead and get the second child over with?

What we didn't realize was that Isaac had been born to give us a false sense of security.  As soon as my morning sickness returned, my son became a different boy.  He learned to throw tantrums, and that strong, solid boy had strong, solid lungs.  He screamed like he was being disemboweled, and I was frankly too tired to care.  My second pregnancy had made me the size of a small RV.

Then my daughter finally arrived.  She was beautiful, with luminous dark eyes and shiny, dark curls.  The first night I was so amazed at her perfection that I didn't sleep at all.

I still wish I'd slept that night.

Isn't she gorgeous?  So cute, and yet so evil.

Because I certainly didn't sleep after that.  She screamed nearly non-stop for the next twelve months.  She refused to take a bottle, so I couldn't be separated from her for more than an hour or so.  It didn't matter.  No one wanted to babysit her because she'd scream the entire time.   

She refused to eat any food until one day we were having dinner at a nice restaurant, at which point she became famished.  She refused to take a single step (or let her feet touch the ground) until she was about seventeen months old, and then we found that she was a wanderer that required constant supervision or she'd just leave the premises.

Nothing that had worked with her brother worked with her.  Telling her no made her laugh.  There was no use in pushing her or punishing her.  To this day she has the strongest personality of anyone I have ever met.

My kids are nine and ten now, and they're great.  I love my kids.  Other people even love my kids (Mindy stopped screaming).  They get good grades and are thoughtful and diligent.  Okay, so Mindy gets sent to the principal's office a lot, but she reminds me that it's definitely less often than it used to be.

However, this is just the calm before the storm.  How do I know that?  Because I used to teach high school and I have worked with teenagers for years.  I feel pretty confident in my ability to relate to young people.

And if there's one thing I've learned from parenting, it's that pride comes before a fall.

The Guilt of Economizing

One of the most consistent parts of my personality, second only to my love of talking, is that I am cheap.

I have generations of economical German housewives in my heritage - solid women built like linebackers who could feed a family of ten for nearly nothing and saved all sorts of things for future use: aluminum foil, tape dispensers, etc.  In fact, my grandma died nearly a decade ago and I still have some gift wrap that I inherited from her that she bought on sale in the 1970s that I'm slowly working my way through.  It's hideous, but, by golly, it wraps gifts!

Mindy's garden of lettuce and kale.  I'm so proud!

My cheapness gets a good, regular workout at the grocery store.  I do most of my grocery shopping at WinCo.  The company began in Boise, has stores all over the western United States, and is a marvelous place where everything is a great deal.  It's not like a Grocery Outlet or a Save-a-Lot where you never know what you'll find.  WinCo is a full-service grocery store.  Does it have the best produce?  No.  Does it have a classy deli?  No.  It doesn't have much organic food, either.  In fact, it doesn't even take credit cards or bag your groceries.  However, it is cheap, and I find I spend between 20% and 40% less by shopping there.

Sometimes I do feel a little awkward being the only person there not using food stamps, though.

Unfortunately, there isn't a WinCo in my town.  I force myself to shop locally for smaller shopping trips because the cost of gas and the time expended to drive up to the closest WinCo really takes a lot of the fun out of shopping there.  However, it causes me physical pain to put things into my cart at normal grocery stores knowing I'm spending too much on them.  I find myself thinking, "$5.98!!!  This is $3.29 at WinCo!  AUGH!"  And then I get to the checkout line and my one bag of groceries is $65.00, and I have to bite my tongue to keep from sounding like a 90-year-old man who remembers the depression.

My tomato bins.  Very classy, huh?

Recently my cheapness has come head-to-head with my desire to pursue a healthier, more socially-conscious lifestyle, and this is a problem.  I watched Food Inc., which I recommend wholeheartedly if you want to feel guilty about what you eat and never be able to go into a McDonalds again.  I cried through the entire movie.  I am not joking.  After watching it I was determined to eat only local, organic food.

But do you realize how expensive local, organic food is?  It's insane!  And right after watching it Safeway had a deal on extra lean ground beef for $1.99 a pound and even though I knew that those cows and the men butchering them must have been soundly abused to get me meat at that price, I bought eighteen pounds of it and most of it is still in my freezer today.  Every time I pull some out I'm torn between glee at getting such a deal and shame at caving in to big agriculture.

Nothing says nutrition like
food growing in a Home Depot bucket.

The issue is just not that simple.  (Nothing ever is.)  Many of the practices of big agriculture, much like big banks, are absolutely appalling if you do any research.  Between poor labor and business practices, environmental abuses, and dirty political lobbying, hardly anyone who is not on the payroll of one of these companies would really want to have anything to do with them.  However, big agriculture sells really cheap food, and most Americans don't have the luxury of buying local and organic.  They're just trying to put food on the table and don't much care what it is.

So what's the solution?  Honestly, I have no idea.  I couldn't choose a political party, either.  That's why I'm baking my own bread and raising my own produce and going to my farmer's market even though sometimes the cost gives me heart palpitations.  But I'm also still shopping at WinCo because those prices are really, really good.

Dreams do come true!

A friend at work who read (what is now an out-of-date version of) Ravenswood commented that my writing style reminded her of Dave Barry.  Perhaps I should have been offended.  Ravenswood is not a weekly humor column.  It is quality young adult fiction!

(I need to learn to say this with a straight face.)

However, the truth is that I spent many of my formative years reading Dave Barry's books and columns, and I love his work.  A fair amount of my goofiness can be traced to those hours spent burrowing through a stack of Dave Barry books.

I like to think my Dave Barry addiction was an improvement over my previous love of Garfield comics.

Another humorist that I adore is Bill Bryson. He gets bonus points from me because he lived in England for 20 years, thereby also satisfying my love of all things British. He's written some fabulous books, and I have a copy of I'm a Stranger Here Myself in the library of my guest bathroom right now.  It's a collection of observations on living in the United States after spending so long in England.  You are welcome to come sit a spell if you'd like to sample it.

One of my favorite Bill Bryson books is The Mother Tongue (not in my bathroom, unfortunately).  My college roommate introduced me to this book, and therefore to Bill Bryson, when we were both English majors.  That was before I became a CPA and she became a Theology professor, both infinitely superior to that other career option for English majors: working as a receptionist.  (I did that, too.)

What is my point, you ask?  My point is that although I've always dreamed of being a bestselling novelist (and never, oddly enough, of being a CPA), I must admit that I've also dreamed of being a humor columnist.  Unfortunately, with newspaper subscriptions down, there's not a big demand for them any more.  I never really understood how you got into that kind of gig, anyway.

The good news is that with the miracle of the Internet, I don't have wait for someone to be willing to pay me before I can write my own column!  I can make my writing instantly available to the whole world.  Okay, so only a couple dozen people read it so far, and I'm "working" for absolutely nothing, but it was never about the money, anyway (she blithely says because she has a day job).  It's about the satisfaction of amusing people.

So I hope you have enjoyed my "column," and that I have made you laugh or at least given you an excuse to procrastinate.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I think it's time for me to go read a bit more Bill Bryson.

Crazy World of Pinterest

If you haven't been on Pinterest, you should have a visit, just to see how strange our society really is.  It's a website that allows you to "pin" a picture and web link to a virtual board.  It can be addictive, but I've found that, due to the repetitive nature of what gets pinned, the novelty wears off fairly quickly.

Repetitive?  Oh, yes.  According to Pinterest, our society is obsessed with the following: food, dresses, food, decorating, food, braiding hair, food, alcohol, food, eye shadow, food, jokes, food, exercise, and food.

If you look up my boards on Pinterest (there are no Facebook-like privacy settings, so feel free), you'll see that I mostly pin recipes, which isn't terribly shocking considering my obsession with cooking.  Look up anybody you like and you'll see what makes them hit that "Pin It" button.  For instance, a few months ago I came across the Pinterest profile for the wife of a friend of mine.  She'd pinned a bazillion pictures of children and child-rearing tips, even though she has no children of her own.  I hope he knows he has fatherhood in his future.  

In fact, most of the people on Pinterest are women, so I'm a little concerned by all the pictures of nearly naked women on there.  They all have a comment under them like "Great diet tips!" or "How to lose weight in a healthy way!"  Really?  Is seeing a woman in a bikini with hips like an adolescent boy and no body hair an incentive to exercise?  Frankly, it makes me want to sit and have another cookie (according to the Pinterest picture at right, cookies should be pink!).

One of the most consistent trends I've noticed on Pinterest is that you can serve anything in a canning jar.  What?  You didn't know that canning jars were vital to a well-laid party spread?  Oh, ho ho!  Yes, indeed.  Canning jars are not just for jam and pickles any more.

Why, just look at the following:

I've never liked oatmeal, but perhaps that's because
I never ate it cold out of a canning jar!

A wash tub filled with bottles of beer or cans of soda is not enough.
You must serve a variety of mixed beverages in canning jars! 

Salad in a mason jar.  Why?  Because bowls are so 2010!

A few weeks ago I gave you a link to a website featuring Weight Watcher recipe cards from the 1960s.  The site makes fun of the absurdity of the recipes and the absolutely appalling way that food was staged for photography back then.  A few minutes on Pinterest, however, and I've come to the conclusion that nothing has changed.  We're still making crazy recipes and serving them as weirdly as possible.

So have fun on Pinterest, and may all your cookies be pink and all your oatmeal come in a Mason jar.

Jane, Jane

I'm an Anglophile.  I've read lots of British literature and have been working on the quality of my faux-British accent for decades (it's way better than Madonna's).  I love fish and chips and British ale and tea and digestives and the absolutely adorable way that British people are so inappropriately polite.  Most of all I love British humor and British accents.

When I'm sick or recovering from surgery as I have been recently, I tend to get all the BBC versions of Jane Austen's novels on DVD and watch them.  Jacob came out of his office the other day and asked me if I had been watching an Austen movie.  

"Yes.  How did you know?" I asked.

"You're speaking with a British accent."

Oh.  Right.

My favorite book of all time is Jane Eyre.  I've loved it ever since I read it when I was a kid, and it amazes me how completely different it is every time I read it.  My long-suffering husband even read it aloud with me a few months ago, and we had a fabulous time with the vocabulary.  I'm positive that Charlotte Bronte made some of those words up.  

The latest film adaptation, although a very simplified version, is really lovely.  Michael Fassbender is far too attractive to be playing the role of Mr. Rochester, but I didn't mind at all.

I should probably stop watching that movie.

I also love Jane Austen novels and read them over and over again.   Pride and Prejudice is my favorite, but I love the silliness of Northanger Abbey, too.   Although not all the film adaptations are very good - the camera work in the 2007 BBC version of Persuasion kind of gave me the creeps - I'm always up for watching one.  

My love of British culture is not limited to Victorian novels, either.  I recently started watching the new show Sherlock on Netflix and can recommend it without reservation.

I have been to England.  I was there for six weeks back in the mid-90s.  The experience taught me several important things:

• There is not enough ice
• British food, by and large, is pretty awful
• Line-dried jeans are crunchy and not okay with me
• You have to be utterly mad to drive in England

That doesn't mean I'm not desperate to go back for another visit.  For one thing, I've heard the food has improved considerably.  For another, I need to make it up to Scotland this time.  Those accents are even better!

A day of Norman Rockwell & torture

As you know, yesterday I posted sweet pictures of my children and the childhood memories we shared over the breakfast table.  It was all very Norman Rockwell.  We ate scrambled eggs and homemade banana bread.

Then I spent the rest of the morning torturing Piper in Ravenswood, since the novel is suddenly no longer complete and I have to try to write a new climax and ending for it . . . again.

As I was telling my kids over lunch (yes, we talk a lot at meals), the way you make fictional characters do things is to torture them.  If you don't torture them, then they act a lot like real people do.  They read books and watch TV and surreptitiously pick their noses - none of which makes for great literature or even a fun read.

You know how when you read a good book you get to the end and kind of wake up and think, "Whoa!  Where am I?" because you've been so sucked into that world?  Well, the same thing happens when I'm writing, which means I really felt like I'd spent the morning, to some extent, torturing Piper in my selfish attempt to get a full-length novel out of her.  The poor girl took it all quite well, I must say.

The most heartbreaking thing about yesterday's efforts, for me, is that I again have all this first-draft stuff that will need several revisions before it rises above crap, let alone blends seamlessly into the rest of the novel.  For one thing, I managed to drop ninjas in there.  I've mentioned in my blog before that Meagan saved me during last year's NaNoWriMo by suggesting ninja pirates to me, thus freeing my novel Blue from a heroine who was content to wander in a blissful meadow all day (I wish I were kidding).  The ninja pirates were awesome, and I got a new favorite character, Sebastian, out of the deal.

However, I can't have ninjas in all my books.  If I ever do become a bestselling author or even (fingers-crossed) a respected one, I don't want someone writing their dissertation on the meaning of ninjas in Amy Moran's novels.  I want them instead to write about my use of food as a reflection of family dysfunction.  It's a consistent theme, and would make a great thesis.