scooter nation

Black Warrior Files: Confessions of a Counterfeit Coxswain

2008-09-14T20:19:00.006-06:00

cox·swain (kŏk'sən, -swān') noun

A person who usually steers a ship's boat and has charge of its crew.
A person in a racing shell who usually directs the rest of the crew.

At approximately 7:15 this past Thursday morning down on the Black Warrior River, I parallel parked a boat. Not a motorboat or a sailboat or a yacht. Not even a canoe.

At approximately 7:15 this past Thursday morning, I parallel parked a 4-seat rowing shell.

Parallel parking is, in fact, my one god-given talent. I firmly believe that everyone is born with the innate ability to do one thing really, really well—better than everyone else. My sister Weathergirl, for instance, can find a bargain every time she goes shopping and, since shopping is an engrained trait for the women in my family, she goes shopping quite often. As evidence, I offer the time she found me a brand new J. Crew turtleneck sweater on sale for $2. My uncle, the Italian Godfather (no, I’m serious, he’s Italian and he’s my godfather), does even better than Weathergirl—he finds perfectly whole, amazing things on the side of the road and in the “discard” pile at his office job. A modest catalogue: two papasan chairs (with cushions), a snowblower, two solid oak executive desks, a waterfall veneer sideboard, an off cut slab of marble.

Me, though—my talent isn’t flashy, it’s purely functional. Barring unforeseen events or dreadful distractions (like small children or dogs running into the path of my car), I can sink a parallel parking space in one go no matter what I’m driving. Part of this may simply be a result of my learning to drive in a mini-van and an extended bed pick-up truck—compared to that, every other vehicle seems small and maneuverable. Part of it is, I’m sure, just ridiculous overconfidence. But the end result is the same: I can park anywhere. Even with eighteen people watching me. On Manhattan. In the snow. During rush hour.

But for all that, I have never parallel parked a boat.

Technically, I didn’t really do any of the actual parking. The four people rowing the boat did all the work—propelling us toward the dock, compensating for our direction when I asked one of them to stroke while the rest waited. And really, we needed help getting over to the edge of the dock—I misjudged the distance, brought us up a couple of feet away from the edge so that another rower already on the dock had to grab an oar and drag us sideways a bit. But all in all, considering that I am not actually—nor should I ever be—a coxswain, it went pretty well.

Up until three months ago, I never dreamed I would be parallel parking a boat on a random Thursday morning down on the Black Warrior. I never dreamed I would be down on the Black Warrior, period. And then I got that email from the Enthusiastic Creative Writing Professor.

The Enthusiastic Creative Writing Professor is really involved with interesting, athletic pursuits around town. She works with the no-kill animal shelter, runs the odd 10K, and sends emails inviting the rest of the faculty to get involved. Normally, when Enthused sends an email, I scan it, think “that would be fun, but I don’t have time,” and move on. But the email about the Black Warrior Rowing Club got me interested, mainly because I thought, somehow, that Enthused was the ring leader and that this was, somehow, some informal event—you know “show up and we’ll give you an oar.” The time worked for me—6–8AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was just for the summer. Dues were only $25.

“Only $25?” I said to myself. “Huh. How bad could it be?”

I am not, by nature, a very athletically inclined person. I ran track back in the 8th grade. I played pick-up soccer games (not well) in high school. I once managed a Curves (for Women) gym. That’s about it. But rowing seemed like something accessible for two reasons: (1) I’ve always been into canoeing and kayaking, which also involve propelling oneself across the water with a long stick, and (2) I grew up outside of Boston. Growing up anywhere in a 50 mile radius of Boston automatically predisposes you to be mildly obsessed with rowing crew. It also means that you actually know that rowing exists as a sport and not simply as some quaint pastime that died out in the 1900s.

So that Tuesday, I showed up down at the docks expecting to see Enthused and a handful of other enthusiastic professor-types, which I did. I also saw a whole lot of people I didn’t know being herded by a very tiny, very efficient, very young woman with crossed oars tattooed on her shoulder and a license plate that read USROWING. Enthused called her Coach.

That was my first clue that maybe this was a bit more involved than I’d thought.

Fastforward three months. I now show up on the water three days a week at 5:15. When I’m not pretending to be a cox, I row bow seat (front of the boat) in a woman’s 4+ shell. I row starboard, so my one oar sticks out to the righthand side of the boat, but since I’m facing backwards, to me, it’s the left. Enthused rows port in front of me. We’re looking at maybe going to a Master’s rowing competition some time in November—once we figure out how to get all four of us rowing at once, of course.

I’m not very good.

Coach says I’m getting better.

Here’s the thing: I love it. I love scooting across the water in this boat that moves like a giant waterbug. I love rowing underneath the McFarland Boulevard bridge and listening to the morning commuter traffic clatter far overhead. I love that the river at 6AM is so photogenic it makes runway models look common.

And last Thursday, when I was pretending to be a coxswain because we were short handed, I got to parallel park a boat.

The local paper ran a story on us this morning and had this accompanying video clip on the Tuscaloosa News website. If you’re smart, you can pick me out in one of the boats—I’m in the yellow visor.

Green and Clean . . . ish

2008-06-28T17:56:00.003-06:00

So I've been absent for a while. I could tell you all sorts of stories, but really, I'd rather offer the latest installment on Being Green in a Red State.

At our present juncture in homeownership, Expat and I are working towards Green, but we’re not quite there. In all honesty, we’re really more of a Cool Mint. Possibly an unfortunate Sea Foam. Oh, we’ve got the basics down. We’re switching all the lights over to compact fluorescents. We don’t run the air conditioner unless the house is just too muggy to sleep. As our appliances die (like the dishwasher) or get stolen (like the washer and dryer), we’re replacing them with Energy Star. For the eventual remodel of the kitchen, we’re already considering cabinets and countertops made of sustainably produced, renewable resources, and the fact that the flooring in the living and dining rooms will be either bamboo or engineered, reclaimed hardwood is a foregone conclusion. But these things aren’t really Super Green. These things are trendy. In order to really make a difference, Expat and I really want to go beyond trendy.

Take, for example, green cleaning products. I’m a little obsessed with the idea of nontoxic cleaners at the moment. Every time I go to Barnes and Noble (again, Tuscaloosa has exactly zero independent booksellers that sell things other than textbooks and unwieldy Civil War tomes), I gravitate toward the eco-friendly home improvement and renovation books and drool over projects that would be wonderful if I could afford them and let’s face it, I can’t. But right next to the home improvement books, right in the same section, are the green household cleaning books. The first one I picked up, Green This! Greening Your Cleaning by Deidre Imus, was a little preachy, what with opening with those statistics on childhood cancer and all, but hooked me by telling me that most everything I need to clean my whole house could be found in my pantry. The two I’ve decided that I like the best, though, are the more step-by-step “if you can’t do this, then at least do this” guides: Green Up Your Cleanup by Jill Potvin Schoff and my all time favorite, Squeaky Green : The Method Guide to Detoxing Your Home by Adam Lowry, Eric Ryan, the guys who make the Method brand cleaning products that they sell at Target. The Method guys sit down and discuss (quite clearly and irreverently) why carpet is highly unsanitary and how ironic it is that we worry about eating organic foods and then clean our kitchens with pesticides. But to that I say this: can you honestly tell me that some weird mixture of white vinegar, lemon juice, baking soda, and water is going to zap the mildew colleting behind my kitchen faucet better than Clorox? Really? It might be more healthy, sure, but will it be as effective?

And then there is the problem of the kind of house Expat and I have purchased. There are certain parts of our house—certain key problem areas that have been problem areas since the house was built back in 1972 or 1974 or 1976 (there’s some debate, here)—that simply refuse to be cleaned with anything but, say, full strength ammonia. Like my kitchen floor. My kitchen floor is vintage 1970’s, avocado green linoleum—or at least it was when it was put down over 30 years ago. By the time we moved in, though, it had been waxed and somewhat stripped and waxed and somewhat stripped heaven only knows how many times, and meanwhile it had been scuffed and scraped and stomped on with years of dirty shoes. Add to that the fact that I am pretty sure Verna Smith—original homeowner and product of the 1950s—did her fair share of greasy frying in the kitchen and probably didn’t do such a hot job getting all that greasiness cleaned up (our kitchen cabinets stand testament to this) and it’s no wonder that our floor was now more like scum-colored linoleum with an avocado green undertone.

When my older neighbors all eventually came over to say "Hi," every single one looked at the floor and said “Oh, those old floors. You’ll never get that clean. You’ll just have to replace them.”

And just like that, it became more than a desire for clean floors. It became a challenge.

Undaunted, I tried lots of things to restore my vintage 1970’s kitchen floor to its full avocado-green glory: regular old mopping, spot cleaning with white vinegar, scrubbing with more traditional cleaners like Soft Scrub (with bleach), straight up Clorox, old fashioned elbow grease. So on the surface, the floor was clean, but the surface was really just old scummy, greasy wax. It wasn’t really clean. It was clean-ish.

Now, I’m not necessarily the world’s most tidy person. I am by nature a Piler. I bring things home and stack them into neat piles all over every flat surface available: the counter, the dining room table, my desk, my dresser, and when I run out of raised surfaces, the floor works just fine. This is not a conscience decision on my part, more of an ingrained trait passed to me from my Piler mother on some strand of DNA, but while my mother’s Piling stops at papers and bills and magazines, mine extends to other mediums. Clothes, for one—by the week’s end I have the dirty pile at the bottom of my closet floor and several clean piles scattered around the bedroom of things I thought I might wear one day but decided not to and then never got around to hanging back up. Then there’s the laundry, which I wash religiously every week and then fold right away, but which then tends to linger in the laundry basket in its neat, square piles while my husband and I pull necessary items from it as the next week progressed.

But what separates me from people who have to sniff their shirts to decide whether they can wear them one more day is that, while my piles are messy, they are most certainly not dirty (with the exception of the dirty clothes, which are supposed to be dirty and which are always put in the same spot, so as not to be confused with the other piles). Besides the differences in denotation and connotation, there is a larger, more cosmic, innate difference between being messy and being dirty. I’ll own messy, sure. But I have never been dirty. Never ever. Dirty is gross.

And the sad truth was that my kitchen floor was deep down, 30-years-old dirty. It wouldn’t matter if I gave up Piling altogether and became the poster child for the organization section in RealSimple magazine, unless I did something about it, that floor would always be dirty. I knew that something more colorful and sanitary lay beneath the scum, I just had to find something to cut through it.

Then my mother mentioned ammonia.

As the Method guys put it, “The problem with ammonia is that the toxic ingredient in it is, well, ammonia.” Ammonia burns your lungs and your eyes and your throat and your skin and can be really awful for people with asthma and is deadly if you’re exposed to enough of it. It’s dangerous to have around the house because it doesn’t come with a child safety cap and it looks just like water. It’s not naturally a liquid—ammonia is a gas, specifically NH₃. But you know smart people. Some smart person somewhere figured out how to make it not a gas, bottled it, and there you go, household ammonia. So-called household ammonia is really just a solution of some NH₃ dissolved in water; once its opened and exposed to the air, it immediately starts evaporating and turning itself right back into a noxious, stinky gas. But it’s also a really good cleaner precisely because it evaporates—it leaves behind absolutely no residue. Plus, it’s cheap, so lots of frugal homeowners use it because it can clean everything from floors to countertops to windows.

Mom mopped her floors with diluted ammonia for years—she likes the no-sticky-residue trait. And sure, we’re probably all going to die some horrible death as a result of inhaling the fumes, but at least we had floors we could be proud of. The more I looked at my scummy kitchen floor, the more I began thinking that maybe one little bottle of ammonia wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Maybe. Just to get things started.

So I bought it. The first time I used it, I was very careful. I opened all the kitchen windows and the back door. I closed off the kitchen from the rest of the house so the cats couldn’t get in (and to contain the fumes as much as possible). I wore pants and long sleeves and those long plastic gloves that make me feel like a 50’s housewife doing her dishes. I had a paint fume mask—the kind all those residents of Beijing wear when cycling to work to block out all the smog. I bought a scrub brush just for the ammonia mixture. I even had an ammonia-only bucket. Screw green. I was red hot and ready to up my toxicity if it meant not feeling like I had to apologize for my floors. The whole “It’s not my dirt! I swear! It was here when we got here!” routine isn’t going to work forever.

At first, I tried using a standard 1 part ammonia/2 parts water ratio. It moved the scum a little, but not much. Then I tried 1-to-1. Again, not much luck. It was as if my house was taunting me: “You think a little water is going to do it? Awwww, you think your little eco-conscience hocus-pocus is going to work on me? Screw you, hippie. I was built back when DDT was legal! You ain’t got nothing I haven’t seen. Mmmmmwaaahaahaaaaaa.”[1]

But no DDT-era house was going to get the best of me. Annoyed at the scum and at the previous owners and at myself for introducing miles of noxious fumes into my already less-than-stellar indoor environment, I finally just splashed a little full strength ammonia right out of the bottle onto the floor and let it sit there for a minute while I stepped out onto the carport for a little not-so-noxious air. When I came back inside, I gave the patch a half-hearted swipe with my scrub brush, fully expecting to just pack everything up and call it a day when the scum didn’t move.

Here’s the thing: it came clean. There, shining up at me, was a funny, splash-shaped patch of pure, unfiltered vintage avocado.

I sighed, uncapped the bottle, and set to work dousing patches of floor with full-strength ammonia. The difference was so startling that, indoor air pollution or not, I couldn’t bring myself to stop. I worked on my hands and knees for two hours and got through 2/3 of the kitchen floor. I took lots of air breaks. I set up a fan to pull the bad air out through the windows. I spent a fair amount of time standing under my carport gasping the cool Alabama spring air like a fish. And at 10PM that night, I called it quits. I had found the true linoleum. I knew how to get to it. That was enough. I’d get back to the other part or the floor later, after my lungs and eyes had some time to recuperate. I packed it all up, rinsed everything, tossed all my cleaning cloths and my clothes into our Energy Star washer, and put myself into the shower where I rinsed all remaining fumes and bits of floor scum off with my all natural, biodegradable olive oil soap, and scrubbed my hair with our sustainably-produced Aveda shampoo (with natural flower essences).

I felt like a phony. Like a trendy eco-consumer. That night, as I crawled into our 100% cotton sheets, I was definitely an unfortunate shade of Sea Foam.

So far in my personal battle for Greeness against my house, House=1, Sparky=0.

[1] DDT was outlawed for general use in farming in the United States in the year 1972, but it wasn’t banned for use in agriculture worldwide until the 1995 Stockholm Convention. So technically, lots of houses were being built until fairly recently while DDT was still legal somewhere, but really, we’re going for the spirit of the thing.

Black Warrior Files: Blast from the Past, or, Ann! Scoot Over and Make Room for that Meteorite!

2008-04-15T16:46:00.006-06:00

In addition to cliché, a portion of this post title reeks of double entendre: (1) I’m writing about the Alabama Museum of Natural History; (2) I have had this post sitting on my computer, half-written, since, um, February. But as with all things past, it’s best not to dwell. Onward!

So my locavores and I have been embarking on a series of walking field trips this semester. Under the clever guise of “learning,” we’ve been fleeing the Island of Misfit Desks (a.k.a., Morgan Hall, Room 305) and taking advantage of the nice weather and the vast amounts of neat stuff practically oozing out of Flagship State U’s pores. Just across the quad from our antiquated classroom facilities are real antiques—thousand-year-old antiques—well-maintained and sometimes cleverly displayed by the archeologists right here on our very own campus.

Our trips to the campus museums have all been unguided, impromptu descendings-upon more so than organized events. I like to keep things interesting for the person manning the front desk by turning up with fifteen freshmen and letting them loose because, you know, they’re adults. The people at the front desk are not always convinced of the whole Freshman/Adult Phenomenon, but the woman at the Museum of Natural History was far more zen that the woman at the Paulbreabryant Museum, so I felt pretty good about the whole affair. And I don’t really just turn them loose. We do, after all, have to think about something vaguely constructive. Typically, we walk to a destination and I dole out a few questions for the group to think over and consider carefully before shooing them off to take notes and think deeply. I had intended to give my students their questions on the front steps before going inside.

“Hey, gang, let’s gather up here on the steps for a minute—”

“Why?” Mark cut in before I could get any further, shifting his backpack on his shoulder and grinning. “So you can get a picture?”

Truly, it’s amazing how much my students humor me. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind until he said it, but of course, I did have my camera . . .

Cheesecake snapshot secured, we waved at the bright red OPEN sign, climbed the steps and shoved our respective ways inside, coming face to snout with a big brown bear, neatly preserved and standing freely in the front foyer, begging to be touched. Of course, we all respected the sign urging us not to touch it, but I really, really wanted to. Really. Just a quick pat on the head. Deep down, all large-scale taxidermied mammals are definitely, definitely begging for a pat on the head.

What wasn’t begging for a pat on the head was the giant, room-filling skeleton of the zeuglodon, or the Basilosaurus cetoides (there’s some debate about what it “should” be called) on the museum’s second floor. Turns out that Alabama is home to several impressive, complete skeletons of prehistoric whales. Whales! Because pretty much the whole of the southeast was well and truly covered with water. And whales. And sharks with pointy teeth.

Anyway. The zeuglodon hanging out on the second floor is almost a complete skeleton and he’s mighty big. He’s also a fine specimen of Alabama’s Official State Fossil. Until the moment that the very earnest woman at the museum’s front desk uttered that phrase, I hadn’t known that state’s had Official State Fossils. Everyone know that states have nicknames (Heart of Dixie), and state birds (yellowhammer) and flowers (camellia), but fossils? Come on. I know that we all like to thumb our noses at other states and make out like things are so much better on our side of the invisible boundary (road conditions and highway maintenance notwithstanding because, dear god, we all have better roads than Mississippi and Eastern Tennessee; Eastern Tennessee should secede and nickname itself the Orange Construction Cone State) but really? We’ve digressed to fossils? Surely we have more pressing things on which to pass official legislation. The fairly pressing water shortage in the Southeast, for example. Or possibly that pesky war we went and started in someone else’s desert.

Of course, our zeuglodon kicks my old home state of Massachusetts’ ambiguous “dinosaur tracks” three times around the block. Just, you know, as long as we’re digressing.

The museum itself is somewhat impressive for what it contains: a large collection of pottery from the Mississipian Native Americans who lived in Moundville; a handful of impressive skeletons from all over (including a mammoth skull from Beloit, WI!); a gorgeous collection of beautiful hand drawn native Alabama fish illustrations; the authentic Studebaker wagon that Professor Eugene Allen Smith used to traverse the state and catalogue it’s wonders in his mid-1800s geological survey; and, my personal favorite, the only meteorite known to have struck a living person.

Imagine, if you will, lying down on your living room couch for a nice afternoon kip when suddenly, a chunk of space rock a little bigger than a softball comes flying through your rental house’s roof, hits your giant old-school 1950s wooden radio, and ricochets toward the couch you happen to be lying on, whacking you in the arm and very much disturbing you nap. Welcome to the life of Ann Hodges, a Sylacauga, Alabama, resident and the only person known to have been struck by a meteorite. It caused quite a scandal. Lots of seizing of the meteorite by various official bodies and landlords, a lawsuit, a few newpaper articles. And now, it sits on the second floor, somewhat eclipsed by the suspended zeuglodon, safe behind Plexiglas, preserved for anyone who wanders in to see.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Anyone who wanders in. Aside from school children and families, who really wanders in to the Museum of Natural History? Who really cares about Professor Eugene Allen Smith or the building (Smith Hall) that bears his name and houses his Studebaker wagon? Would my students, for instance, have ever gone into the museum were it not for our walking field trip or some other class that used the museum as a teaching tool?

More to the point—perhaps more uncomfortable to consider—would I?

Maybe. Eventually. Probably not.

But hey, look what I can say since I got to go: my Official State Fossil is better than your Official State Fossil.

Now go find your Natural History Museum, wander in, and prove me wrong.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

2008-03-13T10:41:00.004-06:00

(Aside: I wonder how many hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts have started with that same overused but apt title.)

So you've probably noticed the comics I occasionally usurp and use here on Scooter Nation--my dear friend and fellow ex-desk hostage the Cooking Junkie turned me on to Married to the Sea and Natalie Dee a while ago. It's this husband and wife team in Ohio and I have to say, I'm glad CJ pointed me in their direction because hitherto, in my opinion, the only good things to come out of Ohio were the Wright brothers and my MFA thesis adviser (not at the same time, obviously). Not only do I find some of their comics terribly apt and wickedly funny in that not-laughing-out-loud-but-will-chuckle-to-myself-all-day sort of way, but I also love their T-shirts and very much want to own several of them (note to Expat: my birthday is in April. Hint, hint).

But I am sadsadsad at the fact that I will really never be able to own or wear even if I did own (and really, what's the fun in that?) this shirt.

Our dear friend the Fabulous Public Sphere Theorist refers fondly to all musicians who pay the bills with church work--myself and her own organist husband included--as "whores for the Lord." It's true. I haven't attended a church as a member or a parishioner since I was about 17 and started getting paid to show up and sing. This doesn't cause me any spiritual angst and it hasn't yet motivated any existential crisis. But this . . . this T-shirt changes things. In all my years selling my voice to churches, I've never really felt that my wardrobe was restricted, mainly because you can wear a choir robe over anything. Yet in this incarnation of my church job, I'm not the director of an adult choir. I'm the director of children's music. Imagine, if you will, the questions from a hoard of 10-year-olds if I showed up wearing this shirt. And then imagine the hoard of parents. The phone calls. The emails. The moral outrage of suburbanites who feed their kids McDonald's on the way to soccer practice. "This is Alabama. We take God seriously here. We do not want our children exposed to cartoon people gallivanting in champagne saucers. On a Wednesday."

But beyond the simple logistics, the sad fact is, no one at my current church job except maybe my friend and boss, THE Tenor, and quite probably all the other voices for hire, would get it.

Maybe I could wear it on a Thursday.

Nation News: Really, I Just Want to Show You My Laundry Room

2008-03-05T21:20:00.009-06:00

First, let me preface everything by saying that our house was a definite steal thanks to the abysmal housing market (thank you, W--couldn't have done it without you). We have way more space than we ever thought possible in a first home; a great lot with a wonderful yard; and very nice, quiet, largely retired and elderly neighbors who have all come by and offered to let Expat and I borrow (1) a chain saw, (2) a pressure washer with a 40 foot hose, (3) a full-sized pick-up with a cap, and the people across the street are coming by sometime next week "when it's convenient for y'all" and (4) bringing us dinner. I'm not entirely sure if this warm welcome is due more to our neighbors having naturally giving natures or if it's more relief to see that the house on the corner is inhabited once again, but either way, I'm not one to turn down a free dinner. After waiting 4 months for this house, I feel like we've earned it.

The Elderly Shyster whose house we now own went bankrupt sometime before we started negotiating a contract. The thing is, he didn't tell anybody, at least, not right away. As I hinted several months ago, we were supposed to close in December, then they asked to move it to January so we said "Sure." But then we got home from Christmas Down Under and found out that (a) they were bankrupt, (b) we were now buying from the bankruptcy court, and oh by the way, (c) someone had "found" the hidden key that the seller's real estate agent had left out for the pest inspection folks and "stolen" the washer and dryer that we were supposed to be getting as part of our contract.

I ask you, what kind of opportunity thief steals a washer and dryer? Particularly a washer and dryer from 1976? The house was still full of all their other stuff, like the antique writing desk in the front hall or the crystal in the china cabinet in the dining room. Crystal and writing desks will fit in a trunk. But a washer and dryer? That takes planning. If they were really stolen by mystery thieves, well, I'll eat Expat's Fluevogs.

Anyway. We had to wait 23 days for the case to go before the court and for the court to approve the contract. You wait 23 days because the courts have to list the property as being for sale for that long to give potential buyers the chance to scrape some cash together, etc. Mr. Bankruptcy Lawyer, who was now acting as the trustee for the Elderly Shyster's assets, assured us that these things almost always go through and could Expat and I just get dressed up and troop down to the courthouse for a few minutes during the hearing? Of course we could. Why not?

Court went well. We showed up, looked earnest and responsible when we waved to the judge, and were set to close on Valentine's Day. Turns out the Elderly Shyster actually owned lot 22 and a sliver of lot 23. Mr. Lawyer hadn't realized that the Elderly Shyster had 2 deeds--one for the house and one for this piece of land. Never mind that knowing these things is Mr. Lawyer's job: even I had to acknowledge that the Elderly Shyster must be one of the World's Most Frustrating Clients.

So where is lot 23 and what does it have to do with the house? Ah, grasshopper, lot 23 is the strip of land by the street running the entire length of our lot--where our driveway sits. What's so big about the driveway? Well, aside from being ridiculously steep, the bank wouldn't give us a loan on lot 22 until we had the deed situation with lot 23 sorted out because otherwise, technically, we would have no entrance or exit (egress) to the property, so technically we couldn't use the property, so technically they couldn't loan us the money.

I told them that technically, the house has more than the carport entrance and that technically we could just park on the lawn or the street and I promised to technically only use the front door, even for the moving truck.

My very good-natured banker just laughed and it was like I could hear the voice of that woman from Little Britain, "Computer says no."

We rescheduled the closing for the 22nd. Mr. Lawyer worked some lawyer voodoo-magic and pushed the snippet of lot 23 through in less than a week.

And this time, finally, it happened. We closed. We even got the driveway.

In celebration we spent that entire weekend and the first part of the week ripping up carpet, taking down wall paper, and slaving like mad to get the laundry room cleaned and painted in anticipation of the delivery of our brand new, bought-'em-with-reimbursement-money matching Kenmore high efficiency washer and dryer, a.k.a. the Miraculous Machines.

They came a week ago. These are the sexiest pieces of plastic and steel you've ever seen. They are so silent that even James Bond could learn a thing or two about working in stealth from them. The washer has a time-delay cycle in case I want to load it the night before and have it kick on in time to ave clean clothes in the morning. The dryer has a setting called "Hang Dry" for clothes that aren't supposed to go in the dryer. Even on the normal setting, when my clothes come out of the dryer, they aren't hot like they have always been at the laundromat, they're just dry. Forget sports cars and yachts: my washing machine can wash 12 bath towels at once in under 45 minutes. We don't even have 12 bath towels, but if we did, I would wash them. All of them. Just because I could.

So the next time you visit, we'd love to have you stay with us here in the 1970s (and really, the wall paper is getting it's very own post soon). Oh, and bring your laundry. I really don't mind.

The laundry room before, with their junk and the machines that got "stolen."

The laundery room after (ignore the vintage linoleum). Sexy, sexy!

Black Warrior Files: Bama’s Pluck and Grit

2008-02-18T21:09:00.012-06:00

Type “college football museums” into Google and inside the first five hits, you get two for the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana, and three for the Paul W. Bryant Museum located right here in good old Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, right next to the Flagship State U conference center. The shadow of Paul William Bryant, known of course as Paul Bear Bryant (in local parlance, pronounced always as one word: Paulbearbryant, or phonetically, Pawburbri-an, with a long i), hangs over everything that is Bama to the point that I sometimes feel, walking around, like I’m living with a walking ghost. It’s a very different vibe to being on a campus with that other winning college football coach at Big State U in Pennsylvania. That other coach is no ghost, he’s a living legend. Literally. When you see him walking on campus, he smiles at you as you rush past to teach your next. He donates money to the English department and the library. He still runs out onto the field with the football team. Sure, he’s got a full-sized bronze statue to him out in front of the stadium, but he’s alive.

But Paulbearbryant’s ghost is bigger than any figure any living coach might cut walking across any campus to date. Case in point: Big State U has an All-Sports Museum; Flagship State U has the Bryant Museum. Granted, the Bryant Museum does cover the entirety of the Alabama football tradition, but the video at the heart of the exhibit is about Bryant’s life and his legend, about 1/3 of the museum space is dedicated to Bryant pictures and memorabilia (like his entire office right down to the Green Bay Packers mug on his desk), and shrines to Bryant appear around practically every corner. My personal favorite? The Paulbearbryant Coke bottles and the crystal replica houndstooth hat on the velvet revolving turntable in the lighted display case. I’ll bet the hat is even the right size. Nothing says “overkill” like crystal that would fit on your head.

I take a class to the museum every semester, partly because its very existence is bound to inspire a little writing, mostly because pretty much none of my students have ever been. This semester, I went with my Honors freshman comp class, which is focusing on living locally (I’ve cleverly titled it “Think Globally, Write Locally: Locavores, Rhetoric, and You”), among other things. Only one of my fifteen students had been before. I asked them to go, to take notes, to think about what it means or what it says about Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, that we have a museum dedicated to the Bear. Some of them might write about it on their blogs. See, we’re trying a little experiment this semester: each student will keep a comprehensive blog in place of a final paper. We’ll see how they work out. I’ll have them all linked to Scooter Nation by tomorrow. And I’m not going to lie. I’m shamelessly using my own blog space to (ideally) spur my students on to a little writing of their own. We’ll see how that will work out, too.

As for the museum, well, even an Auburn fan like yours truly has to give credit where credit is due. Bryant more than just defines the sports tradition here in Tuscaloosa. In a way, Bryant’s legacy defines the best of Southeastern Conference football: a sense of history, of pride, of deep-seated tradition that’s handed down from family member to family member. It’s the sort of stuff we like to trot out when we’re making fun of the South, and admittedly, the parents who name their children “Bryant” or saddle some poor unfortunate kid with the middle name “Bear” really do need to reconsider their priorities (and to be fair, so do those Auburn fan parents who name their kids “Aubie”). Tradition and custom in the South are a catch 22. On the one hand, let’s all agree that any state that does not make an effort to recycle glass and that, in response to recent school shootings, is considering allowing students and teachers to carry guns on college campuses (because obviously arming more unstable young adults is a good way to ensure everyone’s safety) is not the most “with it” of states. On the other hand, there’s something comforting about settling into a place where barbeque sauce recipes are handed down from one generation to the next, where family names get passed along like hand-me-downs and everyone who’s anyone belongs to the DAR or the United Daughter of the Confederacy or both, and where one man’s legacy has the power to inspire thousands long after he’s passed. Southerners are fearless in their pride. Then again, I guess it doesn’t really take a crystal houndstooth hat to tell you that.

Crystal you could wear on your head.

Gen-u-ine Paulbearbryant Coke.

Local News Tuesday: Fat Only Feels This Good Once a Year

2008-02-05T21:26:00.000-06:00

Attention, attention! We at Scooter Nation have a very important PSA: Mardi Gras started in Mobile, Alabama. That's right. The Zulu Krewe might be strutting their stuff over in NOLA, but over in Bienville Square (could we sound more Frenchy?), the Mystics of Time are sending throws and moon pies out to the crowds, too. Not only that, but in case you're not from around here, Mardi Gras doesn't just stop with the big cities. Mardi Gras is part of the Gulf Coast identity. Every small town from Texas to the panhandle of Florida and beyond gets into the action. Public schools give everyone a four day weekend. The local Mardi Gras societies throw balls. The whole region buzzes with a collective on-your-second-beer-and-don't-you-feel-good vibe.

And before you turn your mainstream Mardi Gras nose up at those small town parades, consider this next point very carefully: Mardi Gras is not about getting drunk or even about flashing your boobs at every Tom, Dick, and Bubba--Mardie Gras is about catching free stuff. Never mind that you don't really need two pounds of silver Mardi Gras dubloons; purple, green, and gold thong underwear; inflatable bananas the size of a German shepherd; or piles of moon pies of varying quality (good = Lookout; so-so = small foil-wrapped no-name ones; stellar = Lookout double-decker moon pies zapped for 20 seconds in the microwave. Amazing). Mardi Gras isn't about need. It's about glut and decadence and catching obscene amounts of cheap plastic shiny beads that smell like motor oil because let's face it, whatever they're coating those things with can't be good for the environment and yet we allow small children to chew on them anyway.

Catching obscene amounts of beads that smell like motor oil requires focus and strategy. You can get drunk on cheap beer and show your boobs to random men any day of the week, but that's not going to help you map out a smart way to catch the Knights of Ecor Rouge parade four times in one night or make the crucial dive at just the right moment to scoop up that one perfect strand of elusive aqua blue beads. And in small towns, you can find a place to park and you can walk to the parade without the fear of being shot or mugged and no, I'm not exaggerating. And at the end of the parade, when you've caught more than you can hold and you don't really need or want any of it because where will you put it when you get it home and what could a grown person possibly do with beads that smell like motor oil, you can hand your entire plastic grocery bag stash to the nearest passing grade schooler and he will smile shyly and take it all and you can walk back to your car whistling to yourself, sated. The thrill of Mardi Gras is in the hunt, the chase, the perfectly timed dive.

But save a few moon pies. And try them in the microwave, just once (unwrapped on a plate, people). And if you get a banana one--one of those ones with the impossibly orange coating--mail it to me. God knows I love a banana moon pie.

The Black Warrior Files: Nature Trumps Nurture—Again

2008-02-04T21:41:00.000-06:00

What sets the South apart from the rest of the nation—and I mean really sets it apart—isn’t the drawl. Texans have that, too, and as any good Southerner will tell you, Texas is its own country and ain’t no friend of mine thank you very much. It’s not in the manners either (Midwesterners are quite a lovely and polite people, too), or the overuse of Cool Whip as one of the top five dessert ingredients (Jell-o pudding, sweetened condensed milk, Karo syrup, and butter, for you curious types). It’s not even the religious devotion to SEC college football, the prevalence of lifted trucks with oversized tires, or the “Honk if you love Jesus” and “W: The President” bumper stickers. What really sets the South apart isn’t something we’ve bought or created, rather, it’s a part of the region just as much as kudzu is a part of the landscape: Humidity.

You might think that you know about Humidity—that everybody knows about Humidity. She fills your bathroom, fogs the mirror, and wraps around you when you step out of a hot shower. She sits on your skin like plastic wrap when you walk into the locker room after your daily workout. These little, tentative brushes with Humidity might make you think you understand her, but really, you’re just flirting, waving to her when you think about it. Ignoring her when you don’t. We who live in the southeast, though, we passed flirting sometime between when Jesus walked the earth and the Baptists came to tell it on Red Mountain. We’ve long since married Humidity, divorced her, married her again, and resigned ourselves to the idea that she will always, always sprawl over more than her fair share of the bed and want to cuddle when you just want to sleep.

Such is Humidity’s presence in the South that I can write about her at the beginning of February because she waltzed in today without so much as knocking and plunked herself smack down in the middle of winter. My first clue came as I stepped from this morning’s shower and the residual drops of water left behind by my towel didn’t instantly evaporate into the thirsty air. My second was the practically audible sucking sounds of my skin rehydrating after two months of forced air central heating. By the time my hair burst into a frizzy halo and all the ringlets around my hairline came out to play, I was already past caring. trudging across campus somewhere around 11AM, I lost my will to be a productive and engaged citizen of the world and instead found myself longing for clichéd and vast veranda, for a Cracker Barrel rocking chair, and for a tall, clinking glass of sweet tea. The rest of the nation might think that we're just lazy and can't move at a normal pace, or that it’s the heat that slows Southerners down, and we let them think what they will because we don’t want them to know. In truth, we yearn to give in to Humidity’s seductive caress. To feel her warm breath on our hair. To hear her contented sighs as she bathes our glistening skin and sinks into our very bones until we are drunk with moisture, shedding coats and scarves without cares and driving home slowly, dreaming of cold fruit and cold drinks in tall, clinking glasses. Even at the beginning of February.

The camelia buch outside of Gorgas House on U of A's campus also likes the humidity.

Local News Tuesday: Gittin’ Trashed in Tuscaloosa

2008-01-29T22:08:00.000-06:00

Up until about five months ago, I had never dug in a trash can except when I thought I’d thrown away money. In fact just eight months ago, when I was sitting in my cubicle in Madison, slaving away at the Evil Desk Job and considering my future new life in Tuscaloosa, digging through trash cans never really crossed my mind. Likewise, I can safely say that retrieving someone else’s Mostly-Empty Beer Bottle from the gutter or someone else’s Forgotten Aluminum Soda Can from under a desk didn’t factor in to my plans for hobbies I would pursue once I started my new job as Hip Young College Instructor.

We’ve already mentioned that Tuscaloosa isn’t, perhaps, the best place to live for someone who enjoys saving the planet one #2 plastic bottle at a time, but I never expected the non-recycling mentality of my students and neighbors to so radically change my own actions toward what I’m sure most of the human race considers trash. Take, for instance, the Mostly-Empty Beer Bottle incident from a few months back, which could be viewed by some as the Beginning of my new hobby. It’s December and cold-ish for Alabama (read: low 50’s, high 40’s) and Expat and I are getting out of the car heading to a reading put on my some of my fellow MFA-holding instructors. We’re downtown in the evening. We park in one of the street-parking spaces outside the downtown furniture store. I notice as I step onto the curb that there are 2 out-of-place, empty glass beer bottles kicked onto their sides and resting in the gutter. I start to walk past them and instantly, I have a vision of some city worker reaching down and tossing them into the bag before throwing it onto the trash truck. I shake my head and say to myself “Forget about it.” And then I feel guilty. I mean, if I don’t pick them up, who will?

I sigh. “Hand on a minute, Expat.” I trudge back to the car, pick up the bottles, open the back hatch and stick them inside.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take these home and rinse them out and we can take them to Birmingham with our glass recycling.”

He looks at me and blinks. “You’re going to start collecting trash?”

“It’s not trash. It’s recycling.”

But folks, let’s face it, trash or recycling, I am nonetheless picking up someone else’s cast offs. Someone else’s waste. I’m touching things that someone else has drunk out of (since most of what I pick up are, indeed, beverage containers of some kind or another). Still, it’s like I can’t not do it. I save my own trash until I can find someplace to recycle it. At any one time I probably have at least one plastic bottle in my backpack, just waiting for me to walk past a plastic recycling bin. At that rate, what’s the big deal about picking up someone else’s? It doesn’t weigh much. No one will know that it’s not mine when I throw it away. There’s only the minor inconvenience of someone Witnessing Potentially Embarrassing Behavior.

I’m of two minds about the Witnessing. On the one hand, I recognize that to most folks, it seems icky and weird to pick up someone else’s trash. On the other hand, when they see me pick it up and watch me carry it to a recycle bin, there is some small part of me that hopes they might be motivated to do the same with the next plastic bottle they come across. Perhaps I’m being idealistic, here, but part of me can’t help but think “Hey, if I can get just one person to consider before they chunk their Diet Coke can in the trash, that’s something, right?”

Of course, if it were simply a question of picking up obvious cast offs and stopping there, that would be one thing. But friends, it doesn’t stop there. Hello, I’m Sparky, and I’m a Trash Can Retrievaholic. It’s true. Everyday when I leave the classrooms where I teach, I pick up the small can by the door and pick through to fish out the recyclables. I usually find 2 or 3 cans and 1 or 2 bottles per day per class. I then take said cans or bottle and carry them across the hall to the recycle bin, which, in most buildings, is less than 10 steps from my classroom. And for the one building I teach in that doesn’t offer recycling? Well, my students know that if they finish off a bottle of water during class, they can hand me the empty bottle at the end of class and I’ll do what I always do: carry it around in my backpack until I find a recycle bin. Could my students do this very same thing themselves? Sure. Would they? Um, no.

Now add to this the fact that right now, this week in Tuscaloosa, all of the city recycling trailers—those ones I wrote about in that other post—are full. This past Sunday, I decided to empty out my garage of the mounds of recycling that I’ve been collecting for the past month, so I did what I always do—I packed the back hatch floor-to-ceiling full of paper, plastic, aluminum, and steel and trundled off to the collection area. Unlike most times I’ve been to drop our recycling at the recycling trailers, this past Sunday, the trailers were completely full. Of everything. People had begun piling their bags and boxes of recyclable goods next to the trailers. Plastic bottles and sheets of newspaper were blowing everywhere.

“Well,” I grumbled, “At least people are recycling . . .”

I decided I’d just hold on to my recycling rather than leave it outside. So I went home. But rather than unload the back hatch, I just left everything there. “I’ll take it to a different site tomorrow,” I told Expat.

I didn’t get to check any of the other drop off locations on Monday, but today I made a point of driving to the location near campus in between my classes. I had it all planned. Walk to the car. Drive to the other drop off point. Unload the car. Park. Walk back to teach. Perfect. Except that my plan B site was just as full, if not fuller than plan A. With plan B, I managed to squeeze all of my magazines and the aluminum cans in (barely), but there was no hope for the plastics, which were taking up the bulk of my trunk. I gave up and drove back to campus, but who knows how many well-intentioned recyclers will be so disheartened that she drives home and just throws it all away? Not only that, but how much of the environment am I saving when I waste heaven knows how much gas tooling around town looking for an empty, or at least not-overflowing, recycling trailer?

So now I really have no choice but to endure Expat calling me “Trash Lady.” I am. I think when you’re carrying other people’s things around in your back pack, it’s one thing. But when you’re trucking them around in your back pack and your car, to the point that you can’t even fit one bag of groceries in the back hatch, well . . . as some of the more refined Southern ladies might say, that’s just tacky.

Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what folks had in mind back when I was in college in Birmingham and my friends used to say they were heading over to Tuscaloosa to get trashed. I don’t think this is what they meant at all.

Scooter Nation on Vacation: Brisbane

2007-12-30T06:09:00.000-06:00

Whatever you do, don’t pronounce Brisbane the way you think you should pronounce it or you run the risk of getting laughed at and called an ignorant Seppo. In local parlance, it’s Briz-b’n. As far as Seppo, that’s short for septic tank or Yank, which is what everyone from the US is to your average Aussie, whether you’re from north of the Mason-Dixon or not.

We landed in Brisbane after a 13 hour flight from L.A., during which time I watched Ratatouille, Nancy Drew, and Shrek the Third on the in-flight, on-demand movies before falling into that long-flight stupor that inevitably overcomes you when you’ve been awake and moving from airport to plane to airport to plane to airport to really big plane for more than 20 hours. This time, upon landing, I did not make the mistake of intently watching the seductive and hypnotic baggage claim go around and around the way I had five years ago after my first Ridiculously Long Flight, which meant that this time, my center of gravity did not suddenly slip away and I did not suddenly pitch backwards into the wall. I took this as a good sign and felt very much like a Wise and Seasoned Traveler. And this time, I got to go through the Australian and New Zealand nationals customs line with Expat (a.k.a., the Short Line) because after five minutes of waiting alone in the Other Line, the nice man in front of me pointed out that, since I am now Expat’s wife and not the girlfriend, I count as family and therefore get to reap the benefits of Expat’s nationalness.

We are visiting Expat’s family for the Christmas holiday and Brisbane was the first stop. Expat’s grandmother—his dad’s mother and Expat’s only surviving grandparent—lives in Brisbane. Expat’s dad, the German Australian Father In Law (GAFIL), was coming up for the few days we were in town before we went to visit Expat’s mom in Melbourne. Oma is a tiny woman—both Expat and I have tiny grandmothers on our respective father’s side. Tiny and active. Oma’s house is built in the traditional Queensland style: elevated by one floor with the garage underneath. Initially, Queenslanders were told that this was to prevent flooding, but really, it’s to make repairs from termites (or white ants as they call them) easier and less costly. It’s a lot cheaper to replace a stilt than it is to replace a whole wall. As a result, everyone walks up a flight of outdoor stairs to get to the living area of most Queensland houses, which means that Oma walks up and down a flight of stairs many times every day just to get from her garage laundry room to her living room. Like I said, active.

A brief geography lesson: most Australians live on the Australian east coast (the side that faces the Pacific, closest to California). As we all know, Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere, which means that going north in Australia is a lot like going south in the US—the climate gets more mild and more moist as you get more towards the equator. Granted, moist is a relevant term for a country that’s been in severe drought for the past six years, but you get what I mean. Anyway. Much like the Southern US has a reputation for producing uniquely odd residents, so does the northern part of Australia. Of course, this doesn’t exactly apply to Oma. For all that she likes to say “This is an Australian household,” Oma herself is German.

Expat’s grandparents immigrated to Australia after World War II when the GAFIL was only 5 years old. Germany was a wreck, job prospects were few and far between, and after serving for more years than anyone cares to remember, Expat’s grandfather wanted to put as much distance between himself and the German army as possible. I’m a little fuzzy on the details as to why they chose Australia—I think it was simply a case of opportunity and means—but they arrived, they settled, Oma and Opa found work, they bought land, they built a house, they merged old German traditions with new Australian ones. Still, at no time is the family’s German heritage more evident than at Christmas. As Expat likes to point out, only a stubborn German would crank up her oven and bake 12 different kinds of traditional German Christmas biscuits (cookies) in the middle of a 100 degree Australian summer in a house that does not have air conditioning. But Oma does. Every year. Last year, Expat asked Oma for the cookie recipes, which she wrote down on three sheets of paper and mailed to us. I tried making a few. Expat said they were good but not quite Oma’s. This year, I got to try Oma’s Christmas cookies myself and I had to agree: last year’s attempts were pretty good, but Oma’s . . . Oma’s are perfect.

FYI, even though it’s balmy and in the upper 70s to mid-80s in December, the major shopping areas in Brisbane still decorate for Christmas with snowflakes. Despite the abundance of palm trees, they truck in live evergreen trees. They do take advantage of the climate and plant the poinsettias right in the ground, and they do get around in brightly colored sun dressed and flip-flops (thongs), which are, also FYI, not allowed in the new casino that’s taken up residence in the old, historic Treasury Building. Gambling is 100% legal in Australia—well, “pokies,” as they call the computerized slot machines, are legal in all sorts of bars and the retired services clubs, which are like the VFW halls in the US. Expat and the GAFIL like to take $10 each and go play the 1 or 2 cent machines and drink beer, which is exactly what we were headed to do in Brisbane at the Treasury Building casino when the security guard stopped me and told me “No rubber thongs allowed.”

My first thought: What underwear am I wearing today and how does he know and surely it isn’t rubber?

My second thought: Wait, these flip-flops are suede, thank you very much. And beaded. And they match my dress.

The Treasury Building casino.

But no, it didn’t matter. In the end, all I got to see was the outside of the historic Treasury Building because some fuckwit concerned citizen of the world decided that clearly, all people in flip-flops are bums and don’t deserve to see the inside of the Treasury Building. For the record, Expat was wearing shorts and a T-shirt (untucked) and boat shoes. The GAFIL was wearing his usual uniform of sneakers and baggy, sporty khakis, and some work-affiliated polo shirt. I was wearing a very nice, calf-length, empire-waisted sundress with said matching fancy suede beaded flip-flops and a lovely Vera Bradley handbag and make-up, for crying out loud. As we left, I tried to find a woman on the street who wasn't, in fact, wearing flip-flops. I couldn't. Maybe the Treasury Building casino is just sexist.

Still, there were plenty of flip-flop friendly sights to see in downtown Brisbane and the suburbs beyond. Expat’s grandmother actually lives in the somewhat southern suburb of Yeronga, which boasts all sorts of lovely houses; fascinating plant life (I actually got to see a mango tree—a mango tree! In somebody’s front yard! With real mangos on it!); interesting birds; and very nice local cafes which serve all manner of tasty pastries and pretty coffee. Fact: all Australian cafes (and there are a lot of them) serve pretty coffee. Beautiful coffee. Positively brilliantly made, espresso-based coffees with the perfect balance of rich espresso, fresh milk, and delicate foam that make me want to weep when I consider what I have to go back to. Drip filtered coffee as Americans know it simply doesn’t exist in Australian cafes. When you ask for a coffee, they ask what kind and yes, you pay $3.60 every time but with the exchange rate, that’s more like $3.05 and anyway, it’s brilliant so who cares?

The Yeronga Bakery.

The mango tree on the way home from the bus.

Pretty coffee!

When Expat and I left for Melbourne 3 days later, Oma sent us with $100 for spending money, a tin of her Christmas biscuits lovingly wrapped, and most importantly, her love.

If the rest of the trip is anything like this, I may never come home.

The GAFIL, Oma, and Expat. What a cute family!

Black Warrior Files: Fall Comes . . . And Goes . . . And Comes . . . And Goes . . .

2007-12-04T20:50:00.000-06:00

So back in, oh, September when the fall foliage reports started coming out for New England and the upper Midwest, I started getting ready for the fall that would surely come south eventually. I hauled out the sweater boxes and checked that the sweaters we all there and clean and ready to be worn once we finally got that first fall day. I dug out my knee-high men’s tube socks that I started wearing under my jeans that first winter I moved back up to the Frozen North in 2002. I found my favorite scarf. I was ready for Fall.

But like a bad date who leaves you waiting on the porch for 35 minutes, Fall didn’t show.

As some of you may recall from my last winter in northern climes, I am not one to necessarily cherish temperature extremes that tend toward the negative. Trust me. Back in February, when Expat made the decision that the job in Alabama was The One, I did a happy little gig in my snowboots in my cubicle right there under the roof of my former Very Corporate Employer in front of God and everyone (read: the industrial Cannon laser printer that shared my cube). Still there is something of merit to the way the air snaps in those first fall days, to the way the sky looks So Blue it almost hurts. I knew that in coming to Alabama, I would be sacrificing a few things, I had just hoped (quietly) that one of them wouldn’t be fall.

And then, just as my heart was laid low by the endless string of mid-to-upper 70s weather the start of November, just when I was truly running out of fall-ish T-shirts and was about to resort once again to springy aquas and limes and sleeveless dresses, Fall showed up one day wearing Rainbows, a Hawaiian shirt, and a slightly sheepish grin.

“Where’ve you been, man?” I asked him.

“Oh, you know, around,” Fall said and scuffed his toes in the dirt.

He brought with him the scraps that had fallen to the bottom of the fall foliage bag and started scattering them judiciously around the Flagship State U campus. One week before Thanksgiving, just in time for Indian corn and pumpkins and my Grammy’s open-faced apple pie, a few trees erupted in a riot of color. It was subtle, elegant, and all the more impressive because it was so selective. Unlike a New England fall, the Southern fall doesn’t inundate you with color. The Southern fall is all about the second glance, the quick double take, the rounding of a corner only to have your breath knocked out by the one, lone, fiery maple.

I turned to Fall. I was impressed. I said so. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Neither did I,” he said. “I’m all out, though.” He gave the bag one last shake and folded it under his arm. He reached into the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and pulled out a pair of Ray-Bans. “Think I’ll head to Destin. I’ll send you a postcard.”

It was true. The fall foliage map on the Weather Channel’s website didn’t extend past Birmingham, as though the rest of the state was simply boycotting anything other than brown that year.

Today, we had our first truly fall day, temperature-wise: down into the 30s at night, the 60s during the day. The students are running around in hats and Columbia jackets and those unfortunate Ugg boots that don’t seem like they’re going out of style down here anytime soon. Expat used it as an excuse to finally break out one of those sweater vests that make him look particularly English-professory. I finally unearthed my little red coat with the hood and put on a pair of knee-length socks. Sure, it’s odd for Fall to wait so long, but he made it in time. Just in time for the holiday sales. Just in time for Christmas.

This weekend, the city of Tuscaloosa will host its annual Christmas Afloat parade, where residents along the Black Warrior River light up their boats and parade down the river after dark and spectators side out on the banks on lawn chairs and huddle under blankets and drink hot chocolate. And maybe by then laid-back Fall will have sent me that postcard from Destin. One of those ones with a palm tree lit up with colored Christmas lights, or a girl in a bikini wearing a Santa hat. “See?” he’ll write. “Aren’t you glad I waited until December?”

I sure am, Fall. I sure am.

Close Encounters of the Worst Kind

2007-11-28T13:43:00.000-06:00

They say “good fences make good neighbors,” but for those of us who fall into the Renter category along with some 34 million other U.S. households, that little piece of folksy wisdom could stand a little updating. Something along the lines of “good plumbing habits make good neighbors.” Specifically, perhaps, “Not flooding your upstairs bathroom and then not telling your downstairs neighbors makes good neighbors,” but that might be a little too wordy to work as folksy wisdom.

Yesterday afternoon at approximately 4:00PM, just when I was settling onto the couch to work up the latest Local News Tuesday post, just as Expat was headed to take a shower and change into more Appropriately Professorial Attire so as to cut a dashing figure at the evening’s lecture and dinner to follow, just as we were getting on with our Very Important Lives, Expat made a discovery.

“Honey? Come here for a minute.”

I walked from the couch to the bedroom to find Expat crouched on our closet floor, smelling his hand.

“Uh-oh. Is one of the Pre-Kids protesting?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. What do you think?”

I crouched, too, and pressed my palm onto the cheap beige carpet that covers the floor of every apartment in our entire Yuppie Apartment Complex. It squelched when I pressed it. Regardless of how much protesting it was doing, no cat had that much pee in its bladder. An exact, dark replica of my handprint was left when I pulled my palm back and sniffed. “I think it’s water. I wonder where it’s coming from.”

We stood up, looked around, scratched our heads. I walked around to the bathroom, which is just on the other side of the closet. I flipped on the light and stepped in the puddle. “Shit.”

The water was coming from the air conditioning vent over the sink. It had completely covered the floor in front of the sink vanity. It had saturated the carpet in front of the bathroom. It had crept down the wall and oozed into the closet, saturating the carpet there as well. It was leaving long, dark stains across the ceiling. It was creating a bubble in the plaster next to said air vent. And it was still dripping fairly steadily.

I called the apartment complex office while Expat hauled clothes off the closet floor. I told them to hurry. Then, I decided to go upstairs.

Our upstairs neighbors are a very nice middle-aged, middle-class couple with two Mercedes and three school-aged kids. We think at least one of the parents works for the new Mercedes plant. The kids come home from school, lock themselves in while they wait for their parents to come home, and then, from what Expat and I can tell, either: (A) jump like monkeys from one substantial piece of furniture to another; (B) shoot sizable, thudding arrows at the closet door; or (C) reenact death-defying action movie sequences in the living room, some of which require very energetic footraces and the overturning of said substantial pieces of furniture. On any given evening, we sit on our couch and determine their afterschool activity by the severity of the wild swinging of our overhead living room fan and the amount of plaster dust that sifts down from our popcorn-blasted ceiling.

The daughter answered the door when I rang the doorbell. I’d guess she’s about 13 and is definitely the Middle Child.

“Hi, I’m Sparky, your downstairs neighbor and I was just wondering if your bathroom was, perhaps, flooding.”

“Well, my brother came home and found it all covered with water. We weren’t sure what happened.”

I put on my very best Understanding Adult smile. “Oh, how weird. Well, do you know if the water is still running? I mean, can you tell where it’s coming from?”

“Um, well . . .”

“Tell you what—can I come up and have a look?” I walked past her as she opened the door, her face relaxing with visible relief at not having to explain the situation.

The bathroom in question was locked. Younger Brother (about 9 or 10) was stamping around on the carpet outside, soaking up the water with what appeared to be a baby blue bed sheet. Middle Sister pounded on the door, telling Older Brother (about 14 or 15) to open up. He did. Their bathroom wasn’t just covered, it was submerged in what I guessed to be a little less than an inch of water. The cheap hall carpet, while gradually absorbent, seemed to be acting as a partial dam when faced with such a large quantity, allowing the water level in the bathroom to rise enough to make the plastic wastebasket bobble a bit in its place beside the toilet. The toilet in question was sitting silently—in fact, no running water could be heard at all, which I took to be a good sign—but the noticeable brown smudges around the upraised toilet seat didn’t add much to my comfort level.

“So what happened again, exactly?”

Middle Sister slid her eyes from my face to the wall just beyond my head. “We don’t know. My brother just came home and found it like this.”

“Ah, right. Okay, well, I’ve already called maintenance and they should be stopping up here first, so when they come, be sure to let them in, okay?”

“Yes ma’am. Thank you.”

I headed back downstairs. Expat went ahead and took his quick shower. Then the maintenance men began showing up in a steady caravan. I explained what I knew. They nodded. “Plugged toilet,” they said.

“All of this?” I said, waving my hands toward the heap of soggy towels I’d used to soak up the water, to the stained and suspiciously bubbly ceiling, to the squelching carpet.

“Yes, ma’am. Toilet stopped up and overflowed.”

“They said they don’t know how it happened—that they just came home and found it like this.”

“Told us that, too. But you caught it just in time—it hadn’t soaked into the underlay.”

“So it probably happened this afternoon?”

“Probably.”

“And I’ll bet they just didn’t know who to call.”

“Most likely.”

“And I’ll bet they tried flushing the toilet more than once.”

“I’d say. Probably embarrassed.”

“Probably.” I nod. I can understand this. Kids get embarrassed. They worry what others will say. They worry that they’ll get in trouble.

Expat understands it, too, but can’t quite get past something. “Poo water? We had kiddie poo water dripping into our bathroom?”

“Well, it was clean water by then, you know—just overflow from the toilet.”

“Which was clogged with kiddie poo. I don’t want no kiddie poo water dripping on my head!”

I know my husband is serious when he trots out the double negatives.

Yet in light of this, in light of all of this—the poo water, the bulging plaster, the severe and wild swinging of the overhead fan—I can sit down on my couch and smile.

We close on our new house in about 1 month. A 2,100 square foot house. A monument to 1970s wallpaper that surely deserves a post of its own.

Before that can happen though, we have a few updates from Local News Tuesday and the Black Warrior Files that I need to get back to.

And before that can happen, I need to go by some renter’s insurance. You know. Just in case.

Away-Game Weekends, or Who I Saw at Barnes & Noble Friday Night

2007-11-09T20:31:00.000-06:00

It happened. I told you it would.

It happened tonight as I sat in a plush overstuffed chair in the cafe reading (alternately) the Barbara Kingsolver book I'm assigning next semester for my freshman class on acting locally and the serial young adult fantasy book that I've been stealing peeks at in every chain bookstore we've been in since this summer. I read a lot of books that way—bits at a time, two books at once. Admittedly, I was indulging more in the book on the 6th grade reading level, but it discusses socially concious actions and treating te environment with respect as well . . . just the environment in a magical kingdom far away. With mind-talking ponies. And dragons.

It happened just like I predicted in a post in the not-so-distant past. There I was, sitting in my chair, and Daine, the main character, had just turned into a squirrel but had turned herself back into a person again with the help of a magical badger and her mind-taking pony when all of a sudden—

"Well, look who it is."

"An English teacher sitting in a bookstore reading a book on a Friday night."

I blinked and tucked my embarrassing paperback under my right thigh, pulling the respectable hardcover onto my lap and opening unconvincingly to some page in the middle. "Oh! Hi, guys!"

Two of my 18-year-old male students grinned down at me in my overstuffed chair.

"Whatcha reading?"

"Just this book for one of my classes next semester."

"Oh yeah? Hey, what are you teaching next semester anyway?"

Crisis averted. We chat for a few minutes about my spring class schedule. I introduce them superficially to Expat, who's sitting in his own comfy chair next to me, engrossed in his book about the evils of Blackwater. Expat grunts. My students wave and venture off to their own Friday night browsing.

I slip my paperback from under my thigh and start to open it when another passage from Kingsolver catches my eye. She makes her own cheese. In her own kitchen. With milk she buys at the grocery store. I didn't think you could make cheese with milk you buy at the grocery store . . .

Expat gets up and wanders away from his chair. I'm reading about the New England Cheesemaking Supply. Expat sits down next to me and heaves a huge sigh and I look up and see the wrong sneakers, the wrong jeans, the wrong color shirt and—

"Rocky!"

Rocky is grinning at me like a little kid who's just managed to get you with salt in your coffee instead of sugar.

"Hey! Stella and I are on a date—like an actual date, without the child—and we came here and look who's here already!"

Rocky is a fellow instructor at Flagship State U. Stella is his tenure track wife who teaches in the composition program with Expat and the reason that they're here. Rocky is from Philly. He runs every day at 5 in the morning, except a few weeks ago because his cruising baby daughter pulled a solid metal lamp onto his foot.

Stella appears and laughs nervously at herself and Rocky and their failed date. "It's been so long since we went out that we don't know what to do when we go out." She wrings her hands and glances around anxiously.

"Expat and I are kind of on a date. But we just come here for fun whenever."

Expat walks up and we all laugh again and I slide my young adult fiction into a side cushion in my overstuffed chair.

I told you it would happen.

Local News Tuesday: Wear the Old Coat, Buy the New Book

2007-11-06T20:58:00.000-06:00

Last week, a glorious thing happened here in Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City: we finally got a bookstore. A real bookstore. One that doesn’t specialize in used textbooks or local SEC football team merchandise like framed watercolors of dead coaches or that giant wall clock my dear, dear husband keeps threatening to buy. One that actually sells books that you want to read. One with a CD section that features more than Kelly Clarkson and Unfortunate Country Albums. One with a café and a café menu chock full of overpriced, Not-Quality Lattes (NQL) and overpriced, Calorie-Laden Gooey Things (CAGT). One that epitomizes Corporate America and all that it wrong with mass market book publishing today, where you can get everything that Oprah and Dr. Phil have ever written, along with a smattering of Real Literature and excellent calendars, bulk greeting cards, and Nifty Bound Writing Journals perfect for aspiring zen haiku-ists.

Expat and I haven’t been this excited about a Barnes & Noble since we lived in Small Town, PA, where an evening trip to the B & N did double duty as both a hot date and a research excursion. Even then, though, there was a small, local alternative bookstore, one that was just a short walk from campus and that actually made really good tea. One that still sold used books you actually wanted to read, not just last year’s edition of your organic chemistry textbook (because it was definitely not my organic chemistry textbook. Maybe yours. Maybe my college roommate’s.).

But here in Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, there is no small local establishment that purveys anything other than T-shirts with witticisms like “Rammer-Jammer is Everything” and “Got 12? WE DO!” and approximately 8 million copies of that Sports Illustrated issue that came out over a month ago featuring a profile of the new coach written by our local, tarnished celebrity journalist. Not exactly stimulating reading material.

The entire English community at Flagship State University is as giddy as a kindergarten class with a new playground. When the invitations for the special sneak preview/open house from 6–9PM (the night before opening day) appeared in our faculty mailboxes on campus, the buzz around the department was audible, a persistent simmering hum. When we got word that the composition committee was, in fact, supposed to meet that very same evening starting at 5PM (and we all know that committee meetings always take more than an hour), the grumble among some instructors was drowned out only by the wailing and gnashing of teeth of others. In Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, missing your chance to get first dibs on the NQL, CLGT, and that heady New Store Smell was something worth gnashing about.

The sneak peak was Tuesday. The official opening was Wednesday. Expat and I held off until Wednesday afternoon. I was worried it might be crowded and it was somewhat busy, but we could still find a good table in the café. We felt like we were cheating on Capture, but even so, we sat. We did our respective work for our respective classes. We drank our respective NQLs. We browsed our respective favorite sections. We ogled the cookbooks. We sat and read books that we had no intention of purchasing, just to read them, just because we could.

There are dangers, of course, to the Glossy Corporate Bookstore in the Small College Town. Dangers that might only be seen by an English faculty member, dangers I had forgotten since leaving Small Town, PA. What would I do, for instance, if one of my many students caught me indulging myself with children’s picture books or quizzing myself in the latest Cosmo or devouring some Really Bad Fiction? The glory of living in a Mid-sized Midwestern City, like Madison, and not having a very high-profile job was the anonymity of it all—the ability to walk into Borders and not talk to or otherwise engage anyone except the Seattle’s Best barista. The ability to check out for the day, drop into an overstuffed chair, and read with reckless abandon until the store closed or I was too hungry to concentrate and the CLGT offerings just weren’t cutting it. Here, though, here I have to be on my guard. I have to be glib and ready to talk at a moment’s notice. I have to remain alert.

So is it worth it? Is it still worth getting excited over the glories of the Corporate Chain? Is it worth rolling around and reveling in that heady New Store Smell and drinking inadequate coffee, even though it makes me feel like I’m cheating on Taylor the Latte Boy and his fabulous local coffee establishment? Is it in fact worth wasting a Local News Tuesday update to regale you with my own sick, twisted, entirely contradictory Glossy Corporate Fascination?

I don’t know. Let me finish this Pumpkin Spice Latte and this issue of RealSimple and maybe read through this new cookbook while I wait in line to pay for my new Nifty Bound Writing Journal and I’ll get back to you.

Local News Tuesday: Recycling—So Easy A Caveman Can Do It

2007-10-30T20:11:00.000-06:00

The mid-sized, towable recycling trailers outside of Skyland Elementary were disturbingly empty. As I emptied the three large, handled paper retail sacks from The Gap and Pottery Barn that my husband and I had begun using as makeshift recycling bins into the recycling trailer that was closest to the road, I was overcome by the vastly empty, lonely feeling that I was the only person in Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, who recycled. Anything.

The recycling trailer itself seemed to support this fear in appearance alone. Parked next to two others on a poorly mown strip of patchy grass next to the older elementary school, the trailer and its trailer friends were painted a stark bathroom white, mottled with patches of rust. In shape, they looked like huge, elongated coffins with sharply angled tops. Across the tops were five separate black doors, individually hinged and made from the same tough plastic as industrial 40 gallon trash cans, like five large cabinets. The doors were at shoulder height to your average adult standing on the ground, but they were angled and tall, which meant that opening them required you to stand very close to the trailer and exert a fair amount of force. They were also lettered in all caps—CARDBOARD, PLASTIC BOTTLES AND MILK JUGS, MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS, IRON AND ALUMINUM CANS. To dispose of your recyclables, you lifted the appropriate door and dumped the appropriate material into the appropriate compartment within the recycling trailer.

I started with the cardboard. Cardboard was the label on the leftmost door. Being an English major, it made sense to me to move from left to right, and besides, I had a station wagon–hatchful of broken down moving boxes that Expat and I had used in at least three or our past five moves and that were now too ratty to keep or pass on. Thankfully, all of them would be just small enough to pass through the door on the recycling trailer, so I heaved the door open and got started.

Heaving the door open to any large industrial steel bin is enough to cause me some small amount of anxiety, particularly in the South or during the warmer summer months in colder climes. Aside from the obvious fear of stench or decay, there is always the secondary fear of other things living in the industrial steel bin, like giant roaches or the occasional rat or possibly a stray possum. The Dumpster in the garden home complex where my mother lives in Southern Alabama, for example, is known for the skittering of large roaches, the contingent of angry wasps that guard the trash very closely, and the rather industrious raccoon that like to stare at you with reflective, beady eyes should you decide to walk your trash to the Dumpster during his prime foraging hours of about 10PM to 5AM. It had been a while since my last encounter with angry wasps or a raccoon. Admittedly, the trailers being set as they were against a lovely backdrop of open, abandoned lot and noisy highway and surrounded by absolutely no useful cover didn’t seem an especially conducive environment for larger mammalia. And in theory, since the trailers contained recyclables and not garbage, I shouldn’t have to contend with any of the pests frequently associated with decaying food. So while somewhat reticent, I nonetheless stepped in close to the trailer, swung open the lid-like door, and stood on my tiptoes to peer inside before heaving my crumpled boxes into the trailer’s belly.

What I saw inside did not do much to reassure me.

What I saw inside of the compartment so clearly labeled CARDBOARD were about a dozen 20 ounce plastic bottles and a glossy advertising supplement from the Sunday paper.

Since I've just moved from a state where signs like “Welcome to Middleton, Wisconsin’s Recycling Leader!” commonplace, the lack of recycling in Tuscaloosa has trumped even the lack of Quality Coffee Shops and the overwhelming lack of Quality Cheese. Here is a city where “trash” and “recycle bin” mean one in the same to most people, where rather than walk an extra 6 inches (inches!) to recycle the aluminum can they just finished chugging Diet Dr. Pepper from, they will simply throw it into the trash can and move on. Here is a city that does not recycle glass. At all. Never mind that, unlike plastics, glass can be recycled indefinitely because its actual molecular structure doesn’t deteriorate when it’s reprocessed. We’d rather just throw it away so the animal foraging in the landfill can get all cut up. Stupid animals. What are they doing in our landfills anyway?

Having gone to undergraduate in Birmingham, just a short 45 minute drive away from Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, I thought I understood the Southern mindset on recycling: I’ll do it as long as I don’t have to do any extra work. The Pricey Liberal Arts College (PLAC) I attended did a wonderful job of this: recycling bins were on every floor of every dorm, prominently displayed in every academic building, and extras were placed at prominent entrances to things like the library. They were clearly labeled. They were, in many cases, closer than the trash cans. At Big State U up in the section of Pennsylvania that most natives refer to as Pennsyltucky—known primarily for its trout and its rivalry with Indiana for the highest annual enrollment in the KKK—they’ve taken things a step further. Recycle bins are not only prominently displayed in all of the buildings across campus, they also stand side-by-side with trash cans at every corner in downtown Small Town. Even the homeless people in Small Town recycle. I know. I’ve seen them.

The thing that gets me though—that really gets me—is that while the majority of people in other parts of the country might indeed identify as Christian, no one flaunts it as much as the folks south of Mason-Dixon. That Bible Belt moniker? They’re proud of it. Jesus is more than all right with them. So if we all love God, and if God created the earth, and if the earth is God’s “footstool,” as he mentions once or twice, and if he decided to “glorify the place of his feet” with firs and pines and whatnot like he says in Isaiah, then shouldn’t we be all about some glorification of God’s feet, too? Perhaps we could at least reconsider throwing glass away for God to step on.

This month at the Not-Quite-A-Mega-Church-But-Trying where I now work (when I’m not teaching for Flagship State U) has been Stewardship Month. Stewardship Month is really just church lingo for Money Month, or for Tithe-So-We-Can-Run-The-A.C. Month. For the past four weeks, the head pastor has been putting a brand new spin on the same old message: give God back his money, people. God’s the reason you have it, it’s not really yours, and so on. But as long as we’re being good Christians down here in the Bible Belt, what about being good stewards of the rest of that which God gives us? You know, um, the planet? Right. If we were really concerned with good stewardship, you’d think they’d be able to walk 10 feet to recycle. You’d think they wouldn’t leave it to those crazy Norwegians up in Wisconsin to make up for the havoc the good ol’ boys are wreaking.

And if that’s not enough to make you reconsider, think of it this way: if the man was turning water into wine, I would be willing to bet—only a small amount, since Jesus doesn’t really condone the whole gambling thing—that he would be all about turning old beer bottles into Glassphalt for paving some roads. Or, if you’re more into the phenomenological end of things, thinks of it as rebirth, resurrection: forget Easter baskets. This spring, lets trot out festively painted recycling baskets. Far fetched? Not really. Which one would teach your kids more about death and resurrection: bunny-shaped baskets full of teeth-rotting, calorie-rich sugary crap or taking a pile of dead cans to the recycling center?

Friends, luddites, people of Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City: what would Jesus do, here? What would Jesus do?

The Black Warrior Files: Who’d Have Thought That Love Could Be So Caffeinated?

2007-10-27T19:41:00.000-06:00

Tus • ca • loo • sa (tŭs'kə-lōō'sə) noun

An overly fashion-conscious, football-mad college town nestled in the big bend of the Black Warrior River. Established 1819. Population ≈ 80,000.
The home location for Scooter Nation (ironically lacking in scooters or any other fuel efficient vehicle).

[Origin: Choctaw/Native American black warrior; diriv. tushka, meaning warrior, and lusa, meaning black. For Choctaw Chief Tushkalusa, circa 1500s]

The city of Tuscaloosa has exactly one Quality Coffee Shop and I am currently sitting in it, as I tend to do, doing work on a Saturday afternoon and sipping a perfect sugar-free, fat-free latte (per Virtual’s individualized nutrition plan), or as Expat calls it, a Why Bother. At least, I tell him, it’s not a Super Why Bother. A Super Why Bother is sugar-free, fat-free, caffeine-free, and really, at that point, why bother indeed?

Sugar-free or not, Capture Studio Cafe makes the best lattes in town. This is partly because all of the baristas are arts and humanities majors or graduates; as we all know, a degree in the humanities develops excellent critical thinking skills and qualifies you to work one of three places: a coffee shop, an Italian restaurant, or a bookstore. The good lattes, however, are also largely due to the good coffee that the owner/proprietor of Capture, let’s call him Taylor the Latte Boy (TLB), uses in all of the shop’s coffee creations.

Now, Expat and I got all high on locally roasted coffee when we first moved to Madison and discovered Just Coffee. Local businesses could sponsor different kinds of roasts and, since Just Coffee is based in Madison, the roaster would roast them up, slap store-specific logos on them, and the sponsoring stores would sell them by the pound. The ACE Hardware on Willy Street was the place for the ACE Black and Tan blend. Jenny Street Market sold its great medium roast. Revolution Cycles peddled Revolution Roast, a dark, oily bean that made the whole house smell dark and nutty and warm. But good local coffee was just par for the course in Madison: every shop (and their were lots of shops), it seemed, marketed its own variety of locally roasted something-or-other, most of it fair trade, all of it 800 times tastier than the burnt-beans served up at the local Starbucks.

Fastforward. Scene change. Welcome to Tuscaloosa, Our Fair City, home to the University of Alabama, a mediocre SEC football team, no fewer than 15 barbeque purveyors, an oddly prevalent number of good consignment shops, and only four local coffee shops. Of the four, two are on The Strip, the major student area immediately off-campus, and are therefore Ridiculously Busy. One is an oddly Christian gifty-type shop just across the river in the neighboring community of Northport; it sells Foofy Coffee, big muffins, good shortbread cookies, and pretty much anything sterling silver that can be emblazoned with a cross. Which brings us back to Capture.

Capture started as a video production and photography company. It’s in the historic downtown part of Tuscaloosa in the bottom floor of an extremely cool historic 3-story, a little less than a mile away from The Strip, and a block away from the good consignment shop where we sometimes find Really Good Stuff for Really Cheap Prices. It’s too far for much undergraduate traffic but just right for professors and grad students who like working away from their desks. Now, I haven’t specifically asked TLB about the exact evolution, but to the best of my knowledge, the coffee shop was just a happy byproduct of having this company in this space in downtown Tuscaloosa, almost as if TLB and his crew of arts and humanities majors sat down, put their heads together and said hey, while we’re working on photos with these jittery brides or developing webpages for these hapless businessmen, why not ply them with a kicky atmosphere and some caffeinated goodness? Why not put our artistic talents to good use and come up with a clever urban logo and paint scheme and room design? Why not furnish the place completely in tables and chairs and couches from IKEA? And while we’re at it, let’s work up a good menu for that Panini press and oh, what the heck, let’s use some local, socially responsible coffee!

Higher Ground Roasters are located over in Leeds, Alabama, due east on I-20, in between Birmingham and Atlanta. They believe in buying fair trade, shade grown coffee at a fair price from farmers using sustainable farming practices. They sponsor local causes, like Black Warrior Riverkeeper and the local Literacy Council. Their goals, as stated by them: “To purchase the best coffee available anywhere, to roast it to perfection, and to make it available—fresh—to anyone.” That’s what Expat got excited about when he found their website one day up in Madison, while taking a break from packing. He had hitherto been making elaborate plans to keep our household well-stocked in Just Coffee—bringing a case of it with us, ordering it online, getting friends to ship it down on a regular basis, but one night he looked up from the laptop and smiled. “Honey, look! There’s a local coffee roaster in Alabama!”

“There is?!”

Having spent 12 of my formative years in the Heart of Dixie, I considered myself a fairly good authority on What Alabama Had and What Alabama Sure As Hell Had Not. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Alabama frequently gets a bad rap (yes, we have indoor plumbing—you’re thinking of Mississippi; no, we do not sit on our porches and play “Dueling Banjos”—you’re thinking of Georgia), but let’s be honest, Alabama—specifically Tuscaloosa—is not known as a major outpost of culture and open-minded social consciousness. By my reckoning, Alabama Had: barbeque; fried catfish; sweet tea; Republicans; guns; armadillos; banana pudding; Old Shitty Cars jacked up on New Giant Tires with Super Shiny Rims; katydids; roaches; water moccasins; Jesus; pickup trucks sporting decorative Rebel Flag frontplates, gun racks and multiple six-foot-tall antennas skewering paint-protecting tennis balls; Antebellum Houses with Large Porches; azaleas; SEC Football; Civil Rights museums; a boll weevil monument; peanuts; cotton; white sandy beaches; hurricanes; and a Small Contingent of Intelligent Liberals. Alabama Had Not: local coffee roasters; hybrid cars; Real Maple Syrup.

Yet here I sit on a blustery Alabama fall afternoon, drinking a warm Why Bother out of a kicky oversized mug, marveling at the tasty goodness of Capture’s fair trade house blend (Bolivian, medium roast).

Like I said, Quality.

Wedding Pictures (Finally)

2007-09-05T20:59:00.000-06:00

So here's a random post for you: in honor of our second wedding anniversary (a.k.a., the Fluevog Anniversary, on which both Expat and Sparky bought fabulous shoes they did not need because they were on sale at the Fluevog store in Chicago), Expat and I finally had actual, honest-to-god, sit-down-with-a-photographer, shots-to-send-to-relatives "wedding" pictures made by none other than Big (of Big and Little fame). We did this in June/July shortly before the Great Migration and I am just now getting around to sharing them.

The veil actually belongs to Little. Being that Expat and I trooped down to the local courthouse with representatives of the Matic and Seven Red clans in tow, I didn't actually have a veil of my own. Big said he wanted to "try something" and I long ago learned to trust him when he gets that maniacal look in his eye . . . Sepia-toned veil kisses: cheesy? Perhaps. Fun? Totally.

As for the shirts, Topspun and the Better Half of the Fashionable New Yorkers (turned Chicago . . . ans? Chicagoites? What do you call people from Chicago? Chitownies?) decided that Schmozer was a suitable smooshing together of last names for a girl who didn't want to change hers and a guy who didn't care. Here at Scooter Nation, Team Schmozer rules. The shirts were a Valentine's present to Expat (note who's number 1; consider who let him be number 1).

So think of this post not as narcissistic pandering to the collective ego of we here at Scooter Nation. Think of it as an omage to Big's amazing ability to capture an honest smile by making grown people do silly things.

Both Sides Now

2007-08-17T08:36:00.000-06:00

This time last year while I sat in my windowless cube and performed menial editing-related tasks for my Very Corporate Employer, I often contemplated Weathergirl's cushy college schedule with envy, thinking to myself "Man, I sure wish I had a fall break for no good reason. Those holidays are awesome. *sigh*"

This morning, I am finding myself resentful of said holidays, college-created or otherwise. Like Labor Day. Who needs Labor Day? Certainly not my freshman honors students. They should have to come to class and actually labor on Labor Day. Why? Because of my nice neat syllabus schedule, that's why. Because I forgot about Labor Day when I was putting it all together and now, thanks to some silly national holiday (for which half of the work force doesn't actually get to take off anyway—how many Bath and Body Works clerks have you seen taking it easy on Labor Day?), I'm having to cut readings and do some major Tetris with my assignment dates to fit in the 6 papers that the state of Alabama requires me to assign.

And don't even get me started with Thanksgiving. As Expat says, "Forget Thanksgiving. The students should just go eat a turkey sandwich in the caf."

Hello, shoe. Meet the other foot.

On the other hand, this is definitely the most pressing concern of my morning. My laundry is done, my kitchen is clean, and I have had 8 hours of sleep. Plus, I'm not even teaching yet, so I can stop playing Tetris with my syllabus whenever I want and go, I don't know, shop with all that money I don't have or read a book or actually set foot in the apartment complex gym and see what it's all about.

Oh woe, woe the impossibly hard life of a college instructor, doomed to sit in coffee houses and curse public holidays while sipping a skinny vanilla latte. The horror, the horror.

Scooter Nation Relocation: The Spider that Snapped the Freeze

2007-08-11T21:38:00.000-06:00

If I had forgotten exactly how big the bugs in Alabama are, the Massive Spider in our guest bathroom certainly served as a clear reminder.

I had been living for months—years, actually—in the relatively bug-less north, unconcerned with anything larger than a cricket. Granted, this was the year of the eleven-year cicada in Chicago, but we only really encountered those from then enclosed safety of the Subaru, so I don't really feel that they count. No, on the whole, I had gotten off easy. And in getting off easy, I'd gotten soft. No longer could I simply sense the coming of segmented bodies on skittery, jointed legs. No longer could I reflexively whip off my right shoe and aim a sure death blow even in the dark. No longer could I stand cooly with a drink in my hand while the interloper in question scurried along the living room wall and say with blasé calm, “Oh, leave him alone. He's just a little garden orb spider.”

I was not blasé when I encountered the Massive Spider. In fact, I believe my exact reaction was “Oh, shit it's fucking huge.”

And it was.

It skittered from possibly inside, possibly beside the guest bathroom to roughly halfway under the Brand New Toilet Plunger that we had just bought for our Brand New Apartment. I think it was trying to hide, but half of it's spider body and most of its spider legs were still sticking out, sort of like when a dog sticks his head under a chair and thinks he's hidden while the rest of him is still clearly hanging out in the living room. With the Massive Spider, it just looked like it was trying to walk off with the plunger.

The plunger, for the record, was sitting right next to the toilet. And I, for the record, was just sitting down on said toilet to pee when I heard the definitive rustle of the Massive Spider.

Expat and I had just come from a great Mexican meal with the head of Big Alabama U's composition program. We all started off with a Happy Hora margarita each; she treated us to whatever we wanted, then plied us with flan and a second margarita and by the time we were done, Expat and I were staggeringly grateful that La Gran Fiesta was only un pequeño way from home. We walked in our own front door too loud for the Pre-Kids to be very happy with us and proceeded to laugh at them and at the boxes in the living room and at the fact that it was Friday and we had almost been in Alabama for one whole week.

By the time I thought to pee, I Really Had To Go. I scattered the cats on my sudden sprint to the guest bathroom, whirled to shut the door and undo my pants in one fluid movement, and sat down on the toilet with a decided thunk. Then and only then did I hear Massive Spider in its frantic scurry for cover. I jumped up before expelling a single drop, hoisted my pants and opened the door in one fluid movement, and raced to the kitchen to grab our Brand New Can of Raid.

I once spent three months in a platform tent in the woods of Tennessee defending hapless (and harmless) daddy longlegs from hordes of shrieking junior Girl Scouts. I spent countless weeks trying to explain to 10-year-olds that the little spiders weaving webs over the girls' beds were actually more interested in eating mosquitoes than in biting sleeping Girl Scouts and that really, we were invading their homes, not the other way around. It didn't matter. Countless worthy arachnids died on my watch, many by my own shoe in a wild effort to stop the shrieking of said Girl Scouts.

The spider in my bathroom now was nothing new. Had I been sober, perhaps, and had the spider been in context (read: outside, next to the campfire pit) instead of my guest bathroom, I might have recognized it for what it was: a wolf spider, or more specifically, Rabidosa rabida—the Rabid Wolf Spider. Oh, it's a fearsome name alright, but the Rabid Wolf Spider is harmless to humans. They rarely bite and they never go on the offensive. If for some reason one should bite you, it's about like getting stung by a bee: not pleasant but hardly deadly. Wolf spiders don't like being inside; they like dry leaves and grasses and if you see them inside, they're there by mistake. The best thing to do for a lost wolf spider is to herd it into a Tupperware container and set it free in the backyard. The problem is, they're big—an inch-long wolf spider isn't uncommon, and that's not counting the legs—and they're hairy. Big hairy things that should be outside aren't usually well received when seen inside, particularly when they crawl out from unexpected places and surprise someone, particularly when they are surprising someone who is out of the practice of dealing with large bugs, someone who is somewhat tipsy from margaritas and who Really Has To Go.

Instead, after my initial outburst, I quietly and efficiently squirted the hell out of the Massive Spider hiding under my toilet plunger with an unnecessarily large, plum-colored aerosol can of unscented Raid, (roach and ant formula). It ran after the first squirt, darting around the toilet and up, into the light brown wicker waste basket I've had ever since I can remember.

And it wasn't until the next day, after Expat had come and flushed the Massive Spider down the toilet, after I had relieved my need to Really Go (in the other bathroom), after the only trace of the margaritas was that vague, hazy headache behind my eyes, that I stopped to think about the Massive Spider.

In case you haven't figured it out, I feel bad for killing it.

The Massive Spider wasn't doing anything more than jumping out from behind my shower curtain and saying the equivalent of a spider “boo.” I probably scared him more with my wild running/unzipping/door slamming than he did me. I mean, I wasn't the one trying to hide under the toilet plunger.

But this wasn't just a harmless encounter. This was my initiation back into Alabama culture. This was my right to claim, my legacy by virtue of living several states south of the Mason-Dixon line, where every household comes equipped with the KJV and a monthly Terminex plan.

And like any good Southerner coming home after years in exile, I reached out, grasped this legacy with both hands, and aimed, unflinching, at the skittery, jointed-leg interloper in my bathroom.

I Am Not Dead, I Do Not Sleep

2007-07-11T07:46:00.000-06:00

I am moving to Alabama in 2 weeks.

I. Am. Freaking. Out.

But never fear! I will be back with more gripping news and anecdotes regarding:

Our latest anniversary here at the Nation (a.k.a., Year 2: The Fluevog Anniversary, following on the heels, so to speak, of Year 1: The Hitchhiker Anniversary);
The fact that we've finally taken our wedding pictures;
Why Sparky suddenly became wildly blog-shy last month.

Oh, and the title lyric for this post might be a bit obscure for most of you. In absence of a true post, have a read from Mary Frye, 1932 (and the ensuing debate around the poem). You can also go here, install the Rhapsody software (it's free), and listen to Eleanor Daley's choral setting; it's number 12 on the list and it's one of only two pieces I've ever sung or directed that can reduce a choir to tears in just the first read-through.

Zoot Suit Debacles: Step Away from the Thesaurus

2007-06-10T18:00:00.000-06:00

The following post is brought to you by the Society of English Majors Against Wanton Thesaurus Use (SEMAWTU).

debacle n 1: a tumultuous breakup of ice in a river; 2: a violent disruption; 3a: a great disaster, or b: a complete failure.

I love the word debacle as well as the next person. It's fun to say—somewhat goofy sounding, yet descriptive. I have, in fact, used it in the past to describe most of the antics of my first roommante after college, the Mistress of Calamity, who was known to set our kitchen on fire by placing bags of potato chips on lit stovetop burners and who was also known to make up Imaginary Boyfriends with Imaginary Dogs who need to be taken to Imaginary Vet Appointments simply to get out of an afternoon of work so she could come home and either (A) ride her bike or (B) take a nap. In these instances, the events that followed the placing-of-chips-on-stove or the lying-to-boss-about-pretend-boyfriend's-dog are, I think, aptly described by the word debacle.

I do not think that, regardless of the multiple definitions Webster's affords us, I would have chosen to use debacle in the following context:

In 1943, Mexican gang members, known for wearing so-called zoot suits, clashed with white soldiers for eight nights in what is now called the zoot suit riots. Police arrested more than 600 Mexican American boys and men, most of whom were victims in the debacle.

I ask you, dear reader: whatever happened to connotation and denotation? While the denotation of debacle could certainly be applied to the 1943 riots, something about the connotation might prompt me to go with a more weighty or grave word, like mayhem or rout or even something as simple as conflict. Or perhaps just come out and say that the boys and men were "victims of harsh police action," since that's what you're going on to imply. But debacle? Does the author even know, truly, what debacle means?

Frankly, the whole incident smacks of Wanton Thesaurus Use, offering Attentive Citizens of the World yet another reason to avoid placing a thesaurus in the hands of a Would-Be Author hell-bent on using it. It's dangerous. It may be habit forming. It could, in fact, result in an excess of debacles. Or beatings. Or breakdowns, collapses, crack-ups, defeasances, defeats, devastations, disasters, dissolution, downfalls, failures, fiascos, overthrows, ruinations, shellackings, smashups, trouncings, vanquishments, or washouts.

Or "zoot suit debacles."

Remember, friends don't let friends engage in Wanton Thesaurus Use.

Confession is Good for the Abs

2007-06-02T20:02:00.000-06:00

Since the coming home of Expat and the visitation of the GAFIL, I have to confess, I have not been sticking to the nutrition plan that Virtual oh-so-carefully composed for me.

Now, before all 1.5 of you who bother reading my sporadic missives begin to chide, let me preemptively say that I have not completely thrown in the towel on the nutrition plan. I'm still (usually) eating Virtual Approved breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. I am still (usually) drinking sugar-free Foofy Coffees instead of truly Foofy Coffees. And I'm (usually) making Good Choices at dinner: I get the fish tacos and veggies instead of the bacon, cheddar, triple beef burger with fries. I eat smaller portions. I (usually) skip dessert.

And even though it's Killing Me Softly with Free Weights, I am still dutifully going to the gym and sticking to my lifting/cardio routine (even though I had to repeat week 2 of my lifting routine because I was frantically cleaning the house and packing and, oh yeah, driving the 15 hours to Pennsylvania to fetch said Expat), which involves lots of me standing on one leg and either bending over in some capacity without losing my balance or lifting various amounts of weights while balancing on top of a box and trying to maintain Good Form. If nothing else, by the end of my first month's program, Ralph Macchio will have nothing on me.

No, I have not thrown everything away. In fact, since the Two Weeks of Eating Out with the GAFIL at Restaurants that Expat and I Could Never Afford Ourselves began, I have not regained any of the five (yes, five!) pounds I lost in the first week and a half of my plan. I have Maintained and the Maintaining itself is, for me, a huge victory.

But oh, dear reader, I have sinned.

I have eaten fried fish. Fried cheese curds. Fried frites.

I have eaten bread—white bread—at dinner. With butter.

I have consumed non-sugar free Foofy Coffees. Non-diet soda. Very non-diet beer.

I have eaten occasional bites of chocolate. Of tiramisu. And of ice cream.

See here's the kicker. Here's the absolute truth: I just take joy in food. Not even in the eating of it, more in the spirit of it. Of what it stands for and who it brings together. You can invite a good friend over to just hang out, or you could say "Hey, let's go to Nattspil and get mussels and pizza and a few glasses of Prairie Moon." And you know, if you say that to one good friend, they'll suggest that you invite a few more, and before long, you'll be a laughing, talking, big group of friends out for a Good Time. People bond over food. Few things make us feel more cozy, more comfortable in our own skin, than a Good Meal because Good Meals are had with company we like to keep close.

And I don't think that Good Times and Good Meals should count against me. Not in the long run. I don't think they should somehow sneakily convert themselves into unsightly bumps and lumps on my body, since every calorie has been consumed in some act of love or bonding. Perhaps that's why they refer to things as Love Handles—they are not so much handles for loved ones to grab, but evidence to the rest of the world that you clearly have a handle on love. That you're not afraid to take your GAFIL out for Wisconsin beer and brats and cheese. That you're not going to miss out on Important Rites of Passage. Like the doctoral graduation dinner. Like the 21st birthday celebrations. Like the first time that the Fair Eyed Daughter of your good friends, the Fashionable New Yorkers, tries ice cream at the only farm in town where you can actually see the cows that your ice cream comes from.

You can't sit these things out. You can't stand in the wings, clutching your nutrition plan to your chest and muttering countercurses to the calories. You have to plunge in and order the single scoop of Oreo with peanut butter sauce and whipped cream and a cherry on top so that when you laugh as Miss Fair Eyes winces at the cold of her First Bite, then instantly and insistantly reaches for more, you can know that you're laughing with a shared delight. That this shared moment is Important. That Good Times and First Bites are fleeting.

And later, you can do 45 single-legged bicep curls to make up for it.

Parting pictures

Miss Fair Eyes and the Better Half of the Fashionable New Yorkers.

And, just for kicks, my Newly Doctored Expat. Heaven help us all.

Strange Way to Tell You That I Know We Belong

2007-05-31T21:28:00.000-06:00

The Pre-Kids and I had worked out a Routine. I would come home, peel the wedged and crumpled pieces of mail out of our impossibly small apartment building mailbox, walk slowly up the stairs, unlock the apartment and shove the door open, arms brimming over with the mail and the Tupperware from lunch and one of the several large bags I used to carry all of my Very Important Things. Wilbur would be waiting just on the other side of the door. He knew what the Subaru sounded like as it shuttled up the drive and into the parking space. He had watched me from the bedroom window as I gathered my armload from the backseat. He knew my footfalls on the stairs.

But I knew him.

When I shoved open the door I would hiss and tisk and scold him away from it. He played his part well, backing inch by inch until he would finally whirl and twist and run t stand next to the scratching post. Not scared of me. Just waiting. After dumping my whole armload on the kitchen counter, I would feed them. Wilbur knew this. He also knew that sometimes, when I was very tired from working my usual 12 to 13 hour day, I would forget that he was just on the other side of the door. And sometimes, because he is a cat and cats are never really Wholly Good, but always sometimes Devilishly Clever, he would slide past me with one fluid leap and bolt for the laundryroom door. This was not part of our Routine, though, so I won't talk about it here.

I would drop everything. Feed them. Pursue Orville with a plastic syringe full of liquid liver-flavored beta blockers. Medicate Orville. Collect my dinner from the refrigerator and sit on the couch, flipping on the television for company and watching whatever crime/detective/medical/suburban drama happened to be on at 9:00 CST. I ate at the coffee table most nights, except when I ate while standing next to the sink in the kitchen. Sometimes, I would get home at 8:00 and eat and then go to the gym because the Biggest Little Gym Ever also has the Most Amazing Hours and I could workout until 11PM. Most nights, though, I would eat, brush my teeth, change into my pajamas, and then sit on my bed with the laptop, looking at craigslist even though I knew I did not need a motorcycle or a free-to-good-home blue heeler pup or a vintage waterfall dresser with mirror.

The cats liked all this very much. I would talk to them sometimes, but for the most part, we were quiet, communicating with blinks and sighs and listening to the night noises of the Edge of the Edge of the Hood. When I sat near the head of the bed with my computer, they would assume their respective positions at the foot, Orville curled at the righthand corner, Wilbur in the left. When I finally turned out the light and slipped under the covers, I slept in the middle.

Now that Expat's home with the visiting GAFIL, Wilbur does not always wait for me on the other side of the door, but sometimes comes yawning from the bedroom some five minute after I have already been home. Sometimes, the Pre-Kids have already been fed. We are no longer silent together; they have to talk for attention and I have to talk to be polite, to appear Affable and Well-Adjusted.

Expat calls the Pre-Kids names and makes fun of their wimpy meows. He calls me names and swats at my bottom when I walk past him in the kitchen. He whines when I don't bring him his morning coffee while he's still lying in a coma-like state in the bed clutching all of the covers to his chest. He grumbles about having to cook to my nutrition plan while he's making another perfectly-seasoned, made-from-scratch dinner with the locally-raised meat and asparagus we picked up at the Dane County Farmer's Market last week. He hates that I use the snooze button on my alarm clock more than once. He snores just infrequently enough and just loudly enough to be Really Frustrating at 3AM.

And two days ago, even though he was out for afternoon drinks with his father, Expat left the bar and walked down the street to help me pick out a pair of Ultra Fabulous, impulse-buy sale shoes, just because I asked him to.

The Pre-Kids and I had worked out a Routine.

I still peel pieces of mail from the metal mailbox. Now, though, I have someone to help me sort it.

It's A Nine-Hour Drive from Me to You

2007-05-17T11:46:00.000-06:00

The sign I posted on my office door before closing it immediately upon arriving at work today:

Sparky is unabashedly Rocking Out to Fountains of Wayne. Feel free to interrupt her with questions, etc.

She didn't think you would want to hear her singing along at 7:30 in the morning.

I stopped the singing along part when my office mate, Mr. Reliable, arrived at 9:00, but the first 1.5 hours of my morning definitely, um, rocked.

Tomorrow, I'm blowing off work to drive 15 hours to see Expat (finally) graduate, to introduce my German/Australian Father-In-Law (GAFIL) to my Very Handy Father and Weathergirl, and to then drive said 15 hours back to Madison with said GAFIL and all of his stuff, and Expat and all of his stuff. I just dropped $350 getting the Subaru tuned up (apparently, it needed a new swaybar and a few bushings and a wheel alignment and . . .), I have cash and quarters for the obscene amount of tolls through Chicago and the Vast Flatness that is IllinoisIndianaOhio, and I know exactly which tollway service plazas contain my favorite venders of the very necessary Foofy Coffee.

I. Cannot. Wait.

Seriously.

Until then, I shall continue Rocking Out. Quietly. To myself.

And an Hour in the Shower is the Best That You've Got

2007-05-07T22:15:00.000-06:00

I don't know much about getting accurate weights and all that, so I don't know if this is a particularly meaningful number, but as of 10:45PM this evening when I completed Virtual's grueling Day 2 workout, and according to the fairly reliable old-school doctor's scale at my gym, I weighed three pounds less than I did last Thursday, when I weighed myself at approximately the same time in the same place wearing about the same thing.

Accurate or not, I still did the Dance of Joy right there in the locker room in front of God and everybody.

In my past life (read: ten days ago), this would have been cause for Celebration with Ice Cream.

Tonight, it was cause for Celebration with Long Hot Shower, Extra Steamy, with a Side of Uber-Girly Body Wash.

And now, it's time for some Serious Progressive Farmer Sleep, as my first roommate after college, the Mistress of Calamity and General Debacles and a former Progressive Farmer magazine intern, used to say. Not even the jackhammering road crew working on the beltline that is about .5 miles away from my open bedroom window here on the Edge of the Edge of the Hood can stand between me and my Dreams of fitting back into my favorite jeans.

Lean Meat and Veggies—No Carbs. Oh My

2007-05-05T19:06:00.000-06:00

We here at Scooter Nation are Making History.

We have grown tired of Unhip and Frumpy.

We have foresworn our Cupcakeness.

We have hired a Cybertrainer.

"A what?" you ask.

A Cybertrainer.

I first heard about Virtual and her Cybertraining gig from the Matic clan matriarc. Once Mommymatic started waxing poetic about some "total-lifestyle-altering, kick ass plan" she'd gotten from Virtual, I started thinking, "Hey, maybe I should get one of those."

This month, I did.

I have gone a whole two days on my new nutrition plan. I quite like parts of it. Virtual isn't all about no carbs, she just particular about what kind of carbs I eat and when. I get to eat bananas and apples and oranges, Kashi chewy trail mix bars, cheese, lots of vegetables whenever I want (well, sort of), and even the occasional skinny, small, sugar-free Foofy Coffee. God, I love Foofy Coffee.

Of course, yesterday, I thought I might die without my usual half-box of crackers and/or dry cereal. I was Very Cranky. Then I went to Target, you know, just to walk around, and found a pair of Super Fabulous Earrings for $1.47, and how can anyone be cranky after that?

Tomorrow, I will commence the Very Structured Exercise Routine. This will be a stretch for me. My idea of a good workout is hanging out on the treadmill through all of Boston Legal while reading some mindless fantasy fiction or the latest women's magazine from the gym's rack, then doing my 15 minutes of stretching and heading home. Oh, and sometimes I run. Tomorrow, I'm aparently going to be trying something called a "single leg balance to touchdown" that Virtual has promised will "make your legs and glutes burn like no other." This, admittedly, isn't something I typically strive for. Burning of any kind—sunburns, razor burns, heartburn, the possible burning of my soul in eternal hellfire— isn't really high on my list, unless you're talking about Expat, my Hunka Hunka Burnin' Love, but even at that, I'm not the one burning.

But we'll give it a go. By this time next month, I shall be svelt . . . er. At the very least, I will no longer be consuming my weight in Wheat Thins. Worst case scenario, I end up with lots of cheap earrings from Target.

After all, we have to try. We've foresworn Cupcakeness.

And the Caissons Go Rolling Along . . .

2007-04-30T12:32:00.000-06:00

Soldier and War Books Sparky Has Worked On

Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Ancient World
Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Middle Ages
Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Early Modern World
Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Nineteenth Century
The American Army in Transition, 1865–1898 (in the American Soldiers’ Lives series)
Life during Wartime: Civilians in Wartime America from the Colonial Era to the Civil War
Civilians in Wartime American from the Indian War to the Vietnam War
Civilians in Wartime Asia From the Taiping Rebellion to the Vietnam War
In Pursuit of Liberty: Coming of Age in the American Revolution
The Vietnam War (in the Daily Life through History series)
Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Europe, 1618–1900

Fact 1

I have somehow become the Editor-Who-Does-All-War-Books at my place of employment. I am also the Editor-Who-Does-All-Horribly-Written-Biographies (Dr. Dre: A Biography, Alex Rodriguez: A Biography), much like my workmate, Mr. Reliable, who is the Editor-Who-Does-All-Books-Related-To-Christianity (The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Condensed and Updated Edition) as well as the Editor-Who-Does-All-Craft-Related-Encyclopedias (The Art of Jewelry Making: An Encyclopedia, The Art of Needlepoint: An Encyclopedia).

Fact 2

I do not actually like soldier books or war book or books about the lives of soldiers at war (never mind the Horribly Written Biographies).

Sparky's Hypothesis

It’s Karma. The Karma Police found out that I eked by in college with the minimum history requirement and that I used to pass my multiple choice history tests in high school by using a Very Elaborate Method of guesswork. They also found out that I generally think most talk of soldiers and wars is Very Boring. This is, I believe, a hang up from growing up outside of Boston, 30 minutes away in any given direction from some great American Revolution battlefield or monument or bathtub where Paul Revere might have bathed, where every grade school field trip ever revolved around visiting a village green or a rude bridge or an old boat off of which tea might have been thrown.

I was born in the Cradle of the Revolution. At the time, I would have settled for perhaps the Cradle of Love, or maybe even a Rather Nice Hammock. In grade school, I didn't care about the bullet hole in the old window that probably dated back to a 1776 musket. The Freedom Trail didn't seem all that free to me or to my classmates, forced, as we were, to listen to senior citizen volunteers drone on about the path the Redcoats probably took through the city as it stood at that time or about the architecture of the Old North Church. Then, I didn't care. Then, I didn't want to know.

Now, though . . . now, I have to know. It's my job to know.

It’s all about some Karmic Payback.

Real Life Stories: Pink Ladies are the Greatest

2007-04-27T12:28:00.000-06:00

I know that some of you were perhaps skeptical of my unabashed declarations of apple love a month or so ago. As proof that my worship of the Pink Lady is not simply some passing fancy taken up by a Lonely Dissertation Widow, I offer up this actual conversation from last Saturday morning.

SCENE: 8:30AM, Walgreens, Verona Wisconsin, approximately 1 hour before the Small Liberal Church choir begins it's dress rehearsal for the Schubert Mss in G. SPARKY, the choir director, is purchasing a stick of deoderant since she seems to have forgotten to put any on prior to leaving her apartment on the edge of the edge of the hood. She enters the store eating an apple, hastily grabs a stick of Degree, and begins her walk up to the main counter. MAKE-UP SALES LADY (MUSL), who has been stocking the nearby shelves with tweezers, intercepts her.

MUSL (smiling)

Do you need to check out?

SPARKY (distracted)

Oh, yes please! That would be great.

MUSL

I can help you right over here at the cosmetic counter.

SPARKY (handing over deodorant)

Thanks.

MUSL (as she’s ringing up the deodorant)

That’s a really nice looking apple. Fugi?

SPARKY

Huh? Oh, no. It’s a—

MUSL (interrupting)

Oh! Is it a Pink Lady?

SPARKY (surprised)

Yeah! I mean, yes. Yes ma’am, it’s a Pink Lady.

MUSL

Oh, I love those Pink Ladies. So sweet!

SPARKY (gushing, hands over her debit card)

Yes, and always crispy. I really like the fact that they’re always crispy.

MUSL (earnestly)

Always. They’re really good apples.

SPARKY (boldly)

I think they’re the greatest.

MUSL (still earnestly, hands back debit card)

They really are. Do you need a bag?

SPARKY

Wha? Oh, no. No thanks.

MUSL

Well, you enjoy that nice apple.

SPARKY

Thanks! Have a great day!

SPARKY exits, beaming. MUSL casts a longing look at the half-eaten apple as SPARKY leaves, then goes back to stocking tweezers.

It Was Poetry

2007-04-20T13:01:00.000-06:00

This post really belongs to a friend I went through the MFA program at Big State University with: the Chic, Polished nonfiction writer. Actually, it really belongs to a her colleague, but Chic was the one who sent me the email that got me thinking. Chic started teaching at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, PA, a year or so ago. We write back and forth sporadically, things like "Hey, Expat got a job!" "Hey, I'm getting married!" "Hey, we're getting a house!" "Hey, I wrote a Real Book!" Big stuff.

And as for her latest email . . . well, this is Definitely Big. I hope you'll read the link as well. I don't often get political when I blog, but this isn't political. Or it shouldn't have been. It was just Old Poetry.

"For those of you who don't know, a white box was left next to a trashcan in front of Wright Hall at Shippensburg University last night. Wright Hall houses both the English Department and ROTC. As it turns out, Kazim Ali, a colleague of mine in the English Department, was seen leaving the box by a student member of ROTC. Kazim, who is Indian-American, left the box, as he's apparently done numerous times before without incident, got into his car, and drove away. The student called the police, telling them a Middle-Eastern man with out-of-state plates left a suspicious package in front of Wright Hall. Classes were cancelled and several of the surrounding buildings were evacuated. The state police bomb squad was called, and ultimately gave the all-clear a little after 6:00 last night.

"The white box contained old poetry manuscripts.

"When you have a minute, please read Kazim's take on the events on his website: www.kazimali.com"

When I'm Back From the Road and You're Out On It (The One Where Sparky Gets Caught Up)

2007-04-10T22:15:00.000-06:00

So let's see . . . when last we left our heroine—I mean really left her (think back to March)—she was having an gender identity crisis and wondering what to do about it. Since I know you're all hanging on the edge of your respective seats, I shall tell you: it resolved itself.

I actually suspect that it was the Savvy Editor who was collaborating on this giant project who fixed the problem for me, quietly, in a private email to the Confused Editor. All I know is that about ten days later, shortly after another email exchange in which the Confused Editor referred to me again as “he,” I got an email from her apologizing for the gender confusion. “I believe I owe you an apology for the 'he' and 'him',” she said.

I was absurdly overjoyed with this news and I had a little celebration in my cubical in which I bounced on my wonderful balance ball (which I use instead of a chair and you can just shut up and stop knocking it because it has saved my lower back from Certain Doom) and laughed and then sat and listened to girly music on the internet. It was a Thoroughly Satisfying resolution, I thought.

In between the Unfortunate Gender Confusion and the ultimate resolution of said Confusion, I got to see Expat.

Yes, dear readers, my long lost husband and I were reunited for all of four days during our house hunting trip in dear old Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

I told you I have Much Newness to convey.

The short version: Expat's been hired as tenure track faculty in the English department at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, to start this fall (please don't count the number of prepositions in that last sentence). So this summer, we're moving. We always knew that Madison was a place of temporary residency and given the snowstorms predicted over tonight and tomorrow, I can't say that I'm going to be sorry to leave. At least, not the climate. The people, yes, and the city is very cool . . . but I digress.

So we met up at the Birmingham airport (BHM) and I need to remind you all here that I did my undergrad in Birmingham at the cleverly named Birmingham-Southern College, so I've flown out of and back into BHM plenty of times, but had never once met my husband there. His flight arrived before mine so it was strange, then, to walk out of the terminal and see him sitting where so many friends from college had greeted me after various trips and such. And then, it was just so good to see him. He was sitting with the laptop, doing god knows what, waiting. When he saw me, he smiled, and even though I'm sure I had a goofy, head-splitting grin on my face, my eyes went teary.

“Hello,” he said, still sitting, coiling the laptop power cord and stowing everything carefully before standing to hug me.

“I'd forgotten how cute you were,” I said, stupidly. And that was all I could think to say for a minute. And then, “Come here. Just put the damn laptop down and hug me.” And then, as an afterthought, “I won't step on it. I promise.”

He raised his eyebrow and stood. “Of course you won't step on it because I'm putting it away.”

And I laughed and we hugged and I buried my head against his shoulder and it Felt. So. Good.

The house hunting trip in and of itself is a story worthy of another post, but then it was over, and we were back at BHM and Expat's plane left before mine, so I walked with him through the security line as far as I could and thank god there was the security checkpoint that forced me to walk away and check in at my own gate, otherwise, I would have cried, I think, or held onto his hand and begged him not to leave. I know that sounds pathetic. That's because it is. I am. And I'm okay with that.

And then Weathergirl came to visit me and we had wonderful pictures made and imbibed every evening with dinner and once in the middle of the afternoon just because we could and she analyzed my knitting and told me that it wasn't as bad as I'd thought and then she bought yarn to make me a hat. We went down to New Glarus and bought Polish pottery for our Very Dramatic Mother for her birthday (all three of us have April birthdays) and spent a fair bit of time shopping for cute outfits for pictures and for Big Tacky Jewelry that Weathergirl can wear on camera when she's, well, doing the weather. Dressing for television takes more forethought than you might think. For my fairly reserved, cautious sister, the Big Tacky Jewelry makes things even more difficult. Being a vocal performance major who truly loves being the center of everything (I am a soprano, after all), I adore Big Tacky Jewelry and gravitate it to it with unwavering devotion. Give me bright colors and giant rhinestones any day of the week—the more sparkle, the better. Teaching Weathergirl to embrace the purple, plastic, emerald cut beads and the silvery-coated graduated faux pearls in all their Splendid Flashiness was an absolute delight. Convincing her that these things will appear Normal on stage or on camera, as the case may be, was a slightly more arduous task, but in the end, she came away with several fabulous pieces that even I could envy.

She was quietly pleased. She wore them that week and I caught her toying with the overlarge diamond-shaped plastic amber earrings dangling from her lobes and admiring her own reflection in passing store windows more than once.

The pictures with Big were, of course, a Phenomenal Success. We went on Weathergirl's actual birthday itself, and if she got tired of smiling sometime around hour three of our little photo shoot, she didn't let it show. We had fun. We wet to a playground and took pictures on playground toys. We Dressed Up and stood in awkward positions in front of somber backdrops, smiling as if these were normal things to do, never mind that one of us was standing on a phone book or craning her neck so that we looked like we were looking at each other when in reality all I could see was the corner of the fireplace. Little was a dutiful photographer's assistant, moving light boxes when told, never arguing with Big's sometimes seemingly hairbrained directions, and muttering funny asides under her breath at just the right moments to send Weathergirl and I into peals of laughter, even as Big was striving for, perhaps, a more contemplative, serious shot, and I was reminded again how they compliment each other so well.

Afterwards, we all went out to dinner and toasted Weathergirl's 21-ness with Frou-Frou liquor drinks and good Wisconsin fare. On the way home, Weathergirl sighed. “I like them. They're funny.”

“Did you have a good 21st birthday?”

“Yeah.” She smiled and looked out the window. “I did.”

“Me too.” She knew what I meant. “I'm glad you're here.”

And I was.

The Second Easter Miracle

2007-04-09T10:03:00.000-06:00

The Dreaded Trumpets were in tune.

Thanks be to God.

In Dread of Trumpets

2007-04-07T22:32:00.000-06:00

I only wish the Dreaded Trumpets I face tomorrow were this cute.

Tonight, I don't want to go to bed because I know what tomorrow holds for me: the Dreaded Trumpets. Two Dreaded Trumpets, waiting there promptly at 9AM in the sanctuary of the Small Liberal Church where I work as the Music Director. I did not want the Dreaded Trumpets—they were Thrust Upon me by the Church Council approximately three weeks ago with nary a thought as to what it actually means for those of us who spend hours coordinating the music for worship, and believe me, until you yourself have had Dreaded Trumpets Thrust Upon you, you really have no idea the magnitude of this Inconvenience.

I did not want to hire Trumpets for this year's Easter service because Easter Trumpets are never in tune. Never ever. Unless you live in a Big City with Real Musicians, which happen to cost Big Money. And basic musicality issues aside, I simply don't have the time or energy to worry about hunting down and hiring and working with two out-of-tune Easter Trumpets. The Schubert Mass in G, which we're doing in two weeks, comes with it's own set of problems (namely the Five Strings we'll be throwing into the mix and the fact that my full conductor's score still has not arrived from Kalmus, the company I ordered it from online, even though I paid for overnight shipping two weeks ago). Plus, the Trumpeter we dragged in at the last minute last year wasn't really all that and a bag of chips, and of course they use him every year and thus, church politics being what they are, if I hire a Trumpet at all, one of them simply must be him. And then there is the simple fact that I am Not Really a Conductor and so I naturally prefer to avoid throwing unnecessary complications into the mix. Top that off with the fact that I've resurrected (so to speak) a piece that I positively loathed during high school (out of necessity—it fit with the whole Easter Joy thing and it's fairly easy), and Easter 2007 is shaping up to be this little church musician's own Private Hell.

Yes, you heard right: I am Not Really a Conductor. I have never even taken a conducting course and yet I somehow convinced these sweet, earnest Midwesterner's that I would be a great Music Director and have thus far gotten by on my innate ability to pick crowd-and-choir-pleasing pieces, my unflagging energy, and my brilliant ability to Fake It Like No Other. Oh, and I actually organized the music library and had some choir cubbies built for their folders and hymnals. They love me for those choir cubbies.

There is a distinct difference between being a Director and being a Conductor. Conductors have graceful nuance and subtlety; I look more like the drum major leading the high school band during the halftime show (BIG hand gestures, VERY precise beat patterns that are occasionally in the wrong time signature). Conductors coax elegant performances out of choirs—indeed, they all seem to have singers; by contrast, I have a very devout group of earnest and somewhat capable choir members. Conductors and their choirs can do wonderful things with dynamics; my choir has two volume levels: loud and less loud. Conductors inspire their choirs; I corral mine. Ultimately, I think I hold things together through sheer bossiness and a sense of entitlement than comes (I believe) from knowing that I have done an awful lot of really good music when singing with past choirs and that I can continue to trot out and do well because most of the members of this choir probably haven't sung them before.

Smoke and mirrors. Razzle dazzle. That sort of thing.

But tomorrow, I have Trumpets. And while I am a competent and capable musician, I am not always a confident one. Oh, I'll pull it off. I always do. And it's not like this is the National Cathedral or anything. It's not like the members of the Small Liberal Church will notice if we hopelessly screw things up. But I will notice. And maybe that's why I am avoiding going to bed, pretending that by staying up extra late, I will somehow avoid facing the Dreaded Trumpets and my Easter Fate.

And as if to pour salt in the wound, after I fake my way through tomorrow's Easter service with the Dreaded Trumpets that the Council saw fit to Thrust Upon me, I then have to work with the Youth Choir on the piece that they picked for Music Sunday. Nothing says worship quite like Bon Jovi.

But really. Just once I think it would have been okay for the Son of God to rise without those damned Trumpets.

Twin High Maintenance Machines

2007-03-30T13:38:00.000-06:00

So my kid sister, Weathergirl (referred to in previous posts as the Meteorology Major), is coming to visit me for her 21st birthday. We have Big Plans. We are getting haircuts. We are going out to eat and drink. We are going to have our Seven Year Portraits made at the insistence of Our Very Dramatic Mother. We are going to invest modestly in the American economy and support capitalism, because as green as I may be in some things (laundry and dish detergent, bath soap, cleaning rags, meat and produce), shopping is something that the women of Scooter Nation were born into. Like a religion. Or a cult. The Sisters of Scooter Nation, aka, We Who Shop.

The Seven Year Portraits are a bit of an anomaly, I’ll grant you. My sister and I are almost a neat seven years apart in age, so every seven years, our ages are, in fact, multiples of seven. Don’t ask me to explain why my Mother—who holds a Master’s in music and couldn’t figure her way out of a paper bag—is obsessed with multiples. All I know is that Weathergirl and I had pictures made together at 1 and 7, then at 7 and 14, then again at 21 and 14. It’s now time for the 28 and 21 shots. Of course, Weathergirl and I roll our eyes at this—particularly as we get older. Our Very Dramatic Mother doesn’t exactly give us a choice in the matter—she refers to us, at Seven Year Portrait time, as the Greatest Works of Art she has ever invested in: “I spent good money on those braces! And contacts! And zit cream! You are my Picassos! I deserve to hang you on the wall if I want to.”

You see, perhaps, where her moniker comes from.

But we are, nonetheless, Rather Excited.

As a matter of fact, this year I’m Especially Excited because my friend Big (of Big and Little fame) is going to shoot them. And this year, you know, both Weathergirl and I are pretty much past that whole Teenage Awkwardness, so they might actually turn out to be something other than those Horribly Embarrassing Pictures that Mother Hangs on Her Walls. You know the ones. You hate them. She loves them. They’re the kind that you dread people seeing, especially when your significant other visits your parents for the first time and sees them and chokes back wild laughter because dear god, you looked horrible.

Of course, since passing the Teenage Awkwardness, I have now entered into the Evil Desk Job Frumpiness, but Big has assured me that with digital photography being what it is, he can remove any unsightly bulges and maybe even take a few subtle pounds off of my Ample Hips.

I asked if he could give me bigger boobs, too.

He asked, “How big?”

Oh yeah, baby. Not only will we feel like movie stars, but we can be air brushed like movie stars, too.

Picasso, here we come.

General Note

Apologies to my faithful readers (all 1.5 of you) for the extended absence—I do have Much Newness to convey! For now, though, I must madly clean my little hovel. If our Very Dramatic Mother taught Weathergirl and I anything, it’s that when company comes, Thy House Shall Be Spotless, and sister or no, Weathergirl counts as company. I do have my priorities: 1) Do mounds of laundry. 2) Terrorize Pre-Kids with vacuum. 3) Write prolific blog posts.

Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls

2007-03-10T13:49:00.000-06:00

I have a Dilemma: thanks to the amazing wonders of email and the total lack of a need for face-to-face or phone-to-phone communication, one of the freelance editors I work with via the Evil Desk Job thinks I'm a Boy.

This Dilemma is entirely caused by the gender neutrality of my Given Name: Robin. It's spelled like the bird but also like the traditional boy spelling because I am, in fact, named after my Very Handy Father. His name is Robert, but here's the catch: so is my grandfather's. So my grandparents used to call my dad Robin. Which he hated. At about age 13, he stopped answering to it and started only answering to Rob, which worked pretty well, but my Yankee Grammy still called him Robin half the time. Then I came along, and what better way to make your family stop calling you an Unfortunate Nickname but to bestow said Unfortunate Nickname upon your child? People routinely respond to this Named-After-My-Father scenario with “Oh! How Southern of your family!” to which I have to reply over and over again, “No, not really. My dad's side of the family is from Massachusetts. It was more a matter of convenience.”

In my whole life I have known only two boy Robins (excluding fictional ones like Christopher Robin or Robin the Boy Wonder or Brave, Brave Sir Robin, or famous ones like Robin Williams). I know four other girl Robins, three of whom I met in college and one who I just met last year. After we moved from Massachusetts to Alabama, I became the only Robin in the entire Fairhope public school system, a status that I retained until my senior year when another little girl Robin turned up in the first grade.

The fact that my name is somewhat uncommon has never really bothered me—I've gotten so used to it that I'm actually surprised when I meet another Robin. I can't really fathom what it would be like to know lots of other people with my name. Weird, I think. I mean, I already have a hard time if I'm in the same room with a Rob or a Robert because when people call out a name to get your attention, they really only emphasize that first syllable, so of course I turn around and of course I'm not the person they're talking to, which bugs me. I can only imagine what it would be like to have that happen all the time. Still, maybe I wouldn't care so much if I had a more common name like Julie or Stephanie or Jennifer if it meant that people wouldn't confuse me for a boy.

And the thing is, not even my middle name helps people out of this one: Lee. Spelled like the boy's name. Again. This one I have to thank my Very Dramatic Mother for, since it's her middle name, too, and it got handed to me like some heirloom quilt. Actually, it was my Southern Grandmother's idea—my Very Dramatic Mother had wanted to call me Robin Maria. I'm not sure what would have been better given those two choices. On the one hand, Robin Lee makes my name entirely gender neutral except for the fact that it hearkens back to a Rather Famous Southern General from the days of the “War of Northern Aggression,” as my eighth grade history teacher called it. On the other hand, Robin Maria, while very comfortably female, makes me sound either somewhat Latina or rather like one of Columbus's ships.

To compound the naming issues, we might as well add to all of this the fact that I have always had nicknames. Certainly the most common are Rob, Robs, and Robbie/Robby. Those that developed on their own through various circumstances too numerous to go into are Robina, Robino, the Great Robini (pronounced like Houdini, which became Bini for short), Robiña, Robinski (shortened to Binski), Bin, Robsy, Bobsy, and Bobbin. And just yesterday—in light of the Current Dilemma with said gender-confused freelancer editor—one of my workmates dubbed me Robinetta.

Of course, this freelancer is definitely not the first to confuse me for someone with a Y chromosome. I know it happened occasionally throughout grade school, but the issue really came to light when I started receiving college recruitment literature addressed to “Mr. Robin Lee ———.” Southern Methodist University was, in fact, so determined that I was a boy that they continued sending application literature to Mr. Robin even after I called to correct them. I didn't apply apply to Southern Methodist University. I routinely get magazine and credit card offers addressed to Mr. Robin. The World Wildlife Federation thinks I'm a guy, but a guy who cares about saving baby seals and who occasionally orders WWF checks with pictures of whales and polar bears and deer.

But as to my Current Dilemma: this is a whole new realm of gender confusion. Here is a person with whom I correspond fairly regularly via email, querying about jobs, answering editorial questions, passing invoices back and forth. Here is a person with whom I have a sort of working relationship, who has been laboring under the mistaken impression that this Robin Lee who sends her work is actually a Mr. Robin Lee and not a Ms. Part of me was more than a little taken aback by this realization. “I mean, how can she think I'm a boy?!” I asked my fellow Team Editorial member, Mr. Reliable. “I use exclamation points and smiley faces in practically every email!”

Mr. Reliable just grinned and rubbed his beard and shook his head. “Man. I don't know. I don't usually think of Robin as a guy's name.”

And then there was the question of what I should do about it. Did I correct her and make her feel foolish? Well, it wasn't that big of a deal. I mean, her confusion was Understandable, sort of. It's not like she did it On Purpose.

“Maybe in my next email I'll just drop a line about my husband,” I said to my friend and one of our project managers, the Keeper of the Perpetual Candy Dish. I was standing in her office, eating the cherry Jolly Rancher she offered me in consolation.

Candy looked at me for a second, “Well, that could work, but if she already thinks you're a guy . . .” She let the sentence hang there until—

“Shit! You're right! She might just think I'm a gay boy-Robin. Well, damn, that won't work.”

Clearly, I was Stuck.

Or more correctly, I am Stuck. I still have not resolved this issue. I spent the rest of the work day yesterday writing emails and trying to read them as though they were from a boy—I don't sound like a boy when I write—or trying to work out clever ways to insert the fact that I am a women into the closing lines of my correspondence—From one woman to another? No, that sounds like a self-help columnist. Women of the Editing World Unite? No, too socialist. Maybe Mrs. Robinetta Lee? No, that makes me sound like I'm 80 . . .

I guess the thing that amuses me the most about my Dilemma is how much I am alternately bothered by it and intrigued by it. Of course anyone can be anything they want to be thanks to technology—I could go online and paint myself as a middle-aged retired footballer who raises cockatiels—but the thing that gets me is that I wasn't even trying. I'm a Nonfiction Writer, for the love of Pete! I don't make stuff up because I don't have to because there's so much Good Real Stuff to write about already. But here is someone who's made up a fake Robin to stand in my place—a Not Me. A Boy Me. I could be a boy to this woman forever. What then? Should I change how I write my emails to her? Should I become more of what I would perceive as manly or boyish? How the hell does one write emails like a boy anyway? Wouldn't that just be perpetuating some skewed myth of gender appropriate language or behavior? What does she think of my ☺and !!!? That I'm gay? Because only women and gay men use excessive punctuation and emoticons, clearly. How narrow minded of her to think that. But wait, does she? How narrow minded of me to think that she thinks that. Wait, am I irritated that she thinks that I'm a guy or am I now irritated that she thinks that I'm a guy and she assumes I'm gay???

Ow. See? This is what happens when a few Feminist Theory classes from Grad School meet up with a Real Life Gender Debacle.

Screw it. I think I'll put on some make up, curl my hair, and maybe go buy Something Pink.

Is "Entmoot" One Word or Two? A Day in the Life of an Editor

2007-03-06T10:20:00.000-06:00

So at this very moment, I am creating production files for one of the (Too) Many, (Too) Many Books I'm working on this week and this Has. To. Be. the Very Worst Final Spell Check Job ever to date. Ever.

Read On . . . Fantasy Fiction is a book for teachers and librarians and anyone vaguely interested in suggestions on which fantasy books to read. The author included clever puns for headings, such as "Fan-to-Sea: The Best of Nautical Fantasy", "Flights of Fantasy: High-Flying Fantasy to Read on an Airplane", and some just plain too-cool-for-school headings, such as "Steaming Up the Looking Glass: When Romance Is Nice, but Sex Is Better" and my personal favorite, "It Was the Dark Lord in the Conservatory with the Candlestick: Fantasy for Mystery Readers."

But people, do you know how many made-up words are in this thing? So many, in fact, that MS Word infomed me that it was going to stop putting the red squiggly line under them because it was Overloaded.

And do you know who is responsible for the Final Spell-Check on all those words that have Overloaded the poor spell-checker? That's right: me. Just think about that, for every book out there, some Poor Schmuck of an editor has had to sit and click Ignore once, Ignore once, Ignore all, Ignore once for every weird last name, purposefully misspelled word, foreign term, or perfectly normal word that the spell checker doesn't have in it's Meager Vocabulary.

Or, in my case, every instance of Valkyrie, aether, Umscrumug, greffyn, and hradani.

*sigh*

Maybe I'll skip it. I mean, aside from "Quidditch" and the odd elvish word from Tolkien, who's really going to know if these words are misspelled or not?

And I Miss You Like My Left Arm That's Been Lost in a War

2007-03-04T23:14:00.000-06:00

Chapel Apple was waiting for me to come down the stairs to the bus. I could see her standing just beyond the slush puddle in a lime green North Face jacket approximately two sizes too big for her, wearing her rainbow hat that she'd thought she'd lost the last time I was in New York in winter. Which would have been about three years ago, maybe four.

We hugged. “You found it,” I said.

“Oh, yeah! But I lost the gloves that go with it.”

We laughed and the wind whipped past, suddenly, catching my breath. I remembered, again, that I'd forgotten to bring my hat.

I grabbed my bags from under the bus. I'd packed two small suitcases instead of one larger one so we could carry them more easily on the subway. I was Planning Ahead. I knew that the Port Authority was a ways away, in Manhattan terms, from Harlem.

We were standing at the corner waiting to cross the street—I was worried about not stepping in the slush puddles, about not taking up too much space on the corner, about not looking like a Tourist or a Bumpkin or the Unhip Frumpy College Friend now carrying a few extra pounds and wearing her frumpy Wisconsin snow gear in this place where you have to be hip and you don't carry extra pounds and my god, I was the only person I knew who didn't have an iPod. Who did not actually even know how to work an iPod. And what was I doing here anyway? And how did I get so far removed from all of this, from this kind of life that I could have had, maybe, if I'd pursued it?

“Oh, gee,” Apple said, too obviously to someone standing behind yet sort of in front of us in all the bustle, “Imagine seeing you here.”

“Yep, I was just hanging out down here around the Port Authority,” said the Clever Rockstar as he crowded in to hug me.

“Clever!” He took the bag Apple was carrying and the two of them ushered me across the street as the lights changed. “I thought you couldn't come! I thought you were auditioning, or something.”

Apple pursed her lips the way she does when she's managed a Good Surprise. “Oh, gee. Why would you have thought that, Sparky Lee? Hmm.”

They shuttled me into the subway entrance and debated the best sort of subway pass for me to buy. Apple worked the automated ticket machine for me. I was so concerned with lifting my suitcase over the turnstile that I forgot to slide my subway card and I rammed the bar full across my hips, stopping short. Tourist. Bumpkin. Unhip Frumpy College Friend.

Clever slid my card through for me.

We stood in a little cluster at one end of the platform, my bags in the center. I was worrying about not getting pushed too close to the platform edge. Apple was saying something about the rats. Her hair was short and wild from her hat and a stray lock was hanging, perfectly, on her trendy purple glasses frame—it looked good. She looked good. So did Clever, in his stylish winter hat (They make such things?) with his iPod wires hanging from his coat. Young. Hip. Urban.

“Oh, here Sparks.” Apple stuck her hand into one of the many deep pockets on her lime green coat and offered me something. “I brought you a hat,” she said. “You can keep it.”

I smiled. I took the hat and put it on—it was a little too big and covered my glasses at first.

We laughed.

“It's perfect,” I said.

“It's good to see you, Kid,” Clever said.

“Yeah,” I said, and stopped worrying. I looked down the platform for a quiet minute before smiling again. “It's really good to see you guys, too.”

Two Big Shout Outs

2007-02-24T20:39:00.000-06:00

First, go read this post especially if you're a woman. It gives you a whole new reason to love your vacuum.

Second, I opened my apartment door this afternoon and what should be lying on my doormat but a padded envelope from my friends, Big and Little. They sent me a mixed CD. The only other person to send me mixed CDs ever is Mr. JCCW himself, and I have to say, Big and Little's contribution is giving Mr. JCCW a run for his money. Tonight is definitely the first time I have ever heard a honky tonk version of "Gin and Juice." It Totally Rocks.

Don't believe me? Check out Snoop singing along with the Gourds version on YouTube. Want a copy? Let me know. I have nothing better to do. I'm shut in for The Blizzard.

Pink Ladies Trump Vegas

2007-02-24T13:10:00.000-06:00

Pink Lady apples are maybe the Greatest Things in the Whole Wide World. Now I know that in a previous post I might have intimated that Other Apples were, in fact, greater, but that was before I came to appreciate the Pink Lady in all it's Great Pinkness.

First of all, they really are pink. No kidding. Pink and kind of greenish yellow, which may not sound too appetizing, but my favorite colors when I was 8 were totally pink and green (and my favorite animal was a unicorn) so I was Ridiculously Excited. Secondly, they're Always Crunchy. Always. Few things in life disappoint me more than a mealy apple. Thirdly, I Wasn't Allergic. This, admittedly, is a personal appeal since for the first 25 years of my life I was Allergic to all manner of fresh, uncooked fruit and some nuts, including almost all varieties of apple. I still cannot eat Red Delicious apples. I will not bore you with the details of what happens when I do, but suffice to say it's not particularly healthy. But the Pink Lady has never treated me wrong. Ever.

Apparently, there are a lot of people who feel this way. Apparently, I'm a little late to hop on the Pink Lady wagon. There are Pink Lady fan clubs out there, lurking on the Internet. There are T-shirts and recipe books and histories of the breed. In fact, I would tell you all of the history and such, but Judy here has already written a great article (plus a recipe) about it, so you can just check that out on your own.

Late though I am, I am devoted. Thursday night I even cheated on Beefy Gym Boyfriend for my Pink Ladies. Instead of going to the gym before settling in for my weekly Grey's Anatomy fix, I went to the grocery store. I needed change for laundry and since The Greatest Bank Ever is actually located inside my local grocery store, I figured I might as well restock the old apple drawer.

In a way, I was also cheating on my good friend, Fluff, the Amazing Medical Illustrator, but not so blatantly, since Fluff lives in Chicago. (Fluff is hitherto the only blog-mentioned friend who has had the forethought to choose her own blog-name. She's clever like that. You'll have to ask her for the full story sometime.) See, I joined the gym not just because of the Evil Desk Job-induced hips, but also because I made a deal with Fluff: this year, she and I are going to Exercise to Las Vegas.

This is a figurative goal, of course. We're aiming to rack up the miles from Chicago to Vegas through various forms of activity. Initially, Fluff was going to try exercising to Birmingham since that's where she's from, but when I said I was up for it, we decided to shoot for Vegas, you know, because it sounds a little more exotic. Fluff and I were housemates in college—we shared a bathroom. She was on the women's soccer team and she taught swimming lessons and lifeguarded in the summer. In other words, she was the antithesis of Sparky-the-Inactive. And then we both went to full-time grad programs, known more appropriately in some circles as 20+ Pound Programs. No longer were we fit and lithe as in the days of old. Me being me, I wrote a few essays about it. Fluff being Fluff, she joined a gym and started running. And this year, she launched the Exercise for Vegas plan. In her first week, she did something like 20 miles.

Clearly, I had to step things up a bit.

Because Fluff is a True Friend, she's invented ways for me to earn miles without actually doing strenuous physical activity. For example, if I drink my eight, 8 oz. servings of water in one day then I get a half-a-mile. 15 minutes of heavy lifting (like when I reorganized our basement storage unit) is worth a mile because it's hard and usually involves multiple trips up and down multiple flights of stairs. Spending 1 hour at the grocery store is worth half-a-mile because I'm walking and bending and stretching. Oh, and 15 minutes of stretching is worth half-a-mile, too, because it's good for your muscles and keeps you limber.

Still, she was racking up 20 to 25 miles a week with her running and cycling whereas my weekly all time high was about 5. (Have I mentioned that I am a Cupcake?) When she got the roller blades, I knew I was going to be in some serious trouble.

Right after I joined my new gym, I tried an exercise class and thought that I might just keel over right there. To my defense, it wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. Some of the Really Nice People who go to the church where I work and who have been members at the Biggest Little Gym Ever for years invited me. They said, “Oh, you should come to this class! It's all about strengthening your Core and the teacher is really wonderful.”

I had worked on my Core before. I had done yoga and a little bit of pilates. I knew how to stretch and balance and focus and I thought that sounded pretty good. I said I'd love to come. Class was at 6AM on Wednesday morning. I said I'd be there.

The thumping workout music started while I was stretching on my floor mat. This should have been a clue, but it was 6AM and I was Rather Groggy. Perhaps this was one of those hybrid classes that combines a little bit of cardio with more yoga toward the end. Not so, my friends. 45 minutes later my abs were screaming so loudly that they heard them in Green Bay. “Wasn't that great?” asked the Really Nice People with their Perfectly Neat Teeth smiling.

“Yeah,” I panted, prostrate on my floor mat. “Great.”

I checked the gym schedule when I got home. 6AM, Wednesday: Ab Blast. I actually attended a class called Ab Blast.

Two days later, I threw my back out. You know, because my Core hadn't fully recovered.

These days, I'm starting a little more slowly. I think my high for the week is now up to 10 or 12 miles, thanks my water and my stretching and the banks of treadmills and countless free weights at the Biggest Little Gym Ever. Fluff says that's okay. We'll still make it to Vegas by January 1, 2008. I'm not so sure, but I'm trying to do my part, pull my own weight, so to speak. Make her proud. And Beefy. I want to make Beefy proud, too, since he's so loyal.

Except on Thursday, when I went to the grocery store. I had to. I had eaten my last apple. I was out of spinach. And zuccini. And I figured I should pick up some mushrooms. Except for a few stalks of wilted celery, my produce drawer was gapingly empty and this would not do. Beefy and Fluff would just have to forgive me. I needed my Pink Ladies.

My Boyfriend's Back

2007-02-22T23:34:00.000-06:00

Ever since I've gotten married, I've been collecting boyfriends. It's true. I used the plural because I've had more than one. Don't worry, Expat knows. Well, he knows about most of them.

My oldest and best boyfriend worked at the World's Greatest Music Store two blocks from my apartment on the edge of the edge of the hood. Quickwit the Sheet Music Clerk started flirting with me right away, telling me as he took my orders for extra copies of SATB anthems that he liked taking orders for me because that meant he would get to see me when I came back to pick them up, and that he would pine for me until then. He showed me fancy software I could use for my voice lessons, appreciated my random knowledge of 80s cartoon trivia (the name of the band that Gem had was the Holograms), and even let me come into the back room to listen to the latest track he'd mixed. Plus, Quickwit could find anything in the store; always a bonus when your boyfriends are helpful. He had a band and about a year into our music-purchase-driven relationship, he invited me and Expat (a very classy touch, I think, to acknowledge The Husband) to come and hear them play. But my Eccentric Mother was in town, visiting me for the first time ever since I'd left Alabama (four years ago), so I told him that I thought maybe—just maybe—it wasn't meant to be. He sighed, and nodded, and kept his bottom lip from quivering as best he could. “I understand.”

And then he moved to Atlanta.

Really, it was that Quickwit's Real Life Girlfriend had gotten into music grad school at UGA, so she and he and their two cats were making the big move together, but I learned my lesson: when one of your boyfriends invites you to hear his band, you go. Period. You may never get another chance.

But I wasn't completely faithful to Quickwit, I have to admit. There were others I saw on the side. I had two different Hardware Store Boyfriends at two different hardware stores—Young Paint Mixer and Old Key Cutter. There was Grocery Store Boyfriend who liked to ask me every time I checked out how I was planning to cook the meat I was buying or if the No Pudge Fudge brownies were really any good and which ones did I like the best. (Yes. They are the most amazing brownies ever. I like the chocolate raspberry.) And then there's Very Earnest Bank Boyfriend. Earnest helped me set up my checking accounts the very first week I moved to Madison. He wears salmon colored button down shirts and is going to school at the U. We were hot and heavy there for a while when I was working part time, but now that I've settled into the Evil Desk Job, we seem to see each other less and less. But these things happen.

My latest boyfriend might not even know that we're dating, but I think he does. He came with my new gym membership at the Biggest Little Gym Ever down the road from my house. I joined about a month ago because let's face it, since I stopped managing at the Curves (for Women) gym last May, I have been markedly sedentary at the Evil Desk Job. Oh, you can go ahead and tell me that I still look great, but as Shakira says, my hips don't lie.

Anyway. Beefy Gym Boyfriend is Big—Eat You For Lunch kind of Big—and he has tattoos. Not that tattoos say much about your toughness these days. I mean, I have a tattoo and I'm a Cupcake. It's more the size of his upper arms—the enormity of the tattoo canvas, if you will—and the fact that the tattoos are neatly set off by his stylish black wife beater. His upper arms are roughly the size of my lower thigh except unlike my lower thigh, you can tell that they're mostly muscle. On his left arm, he has a black outline of what seems to be a Native American woman. On his right, a dream catcher the size of a dessert plate, complete with dangling feathers and beads and the whole nine yards. Beefy doesn't appear particularly Native American himself—more like neo-Nazi skinhead with an impeccably shaved skull and a neatly kept goatee. Like someone you would see on WWE. Or maybe at a monster truck rally.

Beefy doesn't actually talk to me because he's much too focused—on the elliptical trainer. You might not think he was an elliptical trainer kind of guy just to look at him, but I know that in his heart of hearts, he is Deeply Committed to cardiovascular health. On the rare chance that all of the ellipticals are full, you can find him on one of the three ancient stair-steppers in the corner. Like I said, Deeply Committed.

The strange and perhaps somewhat disturbing thing about Beefy is that he is always at the gym at the exact same time as I am. Always. This is no easy task, since I am not yet a particularly regular gym-goer. I usually go in the afternoons except when I go in the mornings or after 9:00 at night. I'm there on the weekends, but only sometimes, and never on Mondays, except when I am. How he finds me, I'll never know. Maybe he's a stalker and he waits in the bushes outside until he sees me leave the house in my workout clothes or with my stylish Nature Conservancy canvas gym bag with the Ugly Bird on the side. Or maybe he lives at the gym. Like that kids book My Teacher Sleeps in School. That would explain the never-changing black-wife-beater-with-gray-bastketball-shorts outfit. Maybe he has the girl who works the font desk call him every time I walk in (this seems most unlikely since it hinges on the girl at the front desk actually knowing my name). Maybe he just has a sixth sense.

I'm going to the gym tomorrow night after work. Don't tell Beefy—let's see if he shows up on his own. If he does, maybe I'll finally work up the nerve to say something witty and memorable. Like Hi.

Little House on the Prairie, Anyone?

2007-02-05T09:58:00.000-06:00

Signs your house is too cold:

1) The 2 sticks of butter that you set out on the counter at 7AM to use for making Practically Perfect Cookies were still too firm to cream with the sugar when you finally got around to it at 3PM. Clearly, when the instructions said "room temperature," they were thinking of someone else's room.

2) Your Chinese evergreen is turning brown.

3) Upon closer inspection, you discover that there is, in fact, a slight draft seeping between the frames of your windows and that the frost that you had originally thought was on the outside of the window is actually on the inside of the window. Your bedroom window, to be precise. Your bedroom windows, specifically.

Way too Laura Ingalls Wilder for me, thanks. Tonight, we'll be pulling out the Big Guns. Tonight, my hair drier and I will be doing a little shrink wrapping.

Bitter Cold Arctic Invasion

2007-02-03T00:00:00.000-06:00

Dear God,

Thank you for making sure that Expat received job offers from universities south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Please, God, let him sign with a school far, far removed from the Arctic Circle—a place with no snow removal budget, perhaps, where the phrase Bitter Arctic Cold Invasion would never be uttered on the nightly news. We do not need the sight of ice fishermen on Monona Bay to be happy. We do not have to walk on water in its solid state. We do not have to have White Christmases, or White Anything, for that matter. We don't ski or snowshoe; shoveling is not my favorite pastime.

Most Fair and Merciful God, if you see fit to place us in a Warmer, Friendlier Climate, I promise to strap on my toolbelt and once again take up my hammer and my speed square and the workplace-provided nail gun and volunteer at least twice a month at the local Habitat for Humanities site. I would even attempt roofing, despite my fear of gradual inclines 20 feet off the ground, and I would not get upset this time should the site manager accidentally fell a tree on top of my boombox. I would not complain about the Summer Monsoon Season and I would remember to smile when an Isolated Thunderstorm occurred in my yard instead of my neighbor's. I would plant Your favorite flowers—I would figure out what Your favorite flowers are—and I would tend them with great care. Better still, I would voluntarily plant flowers in other people's flower beds and tend them with great care, thus sharing my gardening prowess, given by You, that I might better my own little corner of the world.

Most of all, God, I would stop cursing the snow and ice and sleet and cease harboring ill will toward the meteorologists who coin phrases like Arctic Invasion. I would instead applaud their creativity; most people think of Invasions as things that only involve aliens from outer space or ground troops or foreign plant species. Those Weather Channel meteorologists are thinking outside the proverbial box. The should be congratulated. Instead, I am too cold—my Heart is Too Cold—to really notice.

I know that this is the part where I'm supposed to say something about not my will but Yours, but God, I'm trying to be realistic. Please. Hear my cry. Hear my call. Hear my chattering teeth. Have Mercy upon me and my poor, poor hypothermic soul. Move me, Lord! To a home in the sub tropics! Or at least see fit to send me a floor-length down parka and several more pairs of Cuddl Duds.

Thank you, God, for today and all days—especially those balmy ones in the mid- to upper-60s.

Yours even unto negative 30 (but hoping for something above freezing),

Sparky

PS: If You were trying to make all those “when Hell freezes over” promises come true for folks, You might want to reconsider. It's just a turn of phrase, you know—something we say down here as a bit of a joke. Sorry if You knew that one already, just trying to save You from a little Godly Embarrassment.

Real Women Use Power Tools

2007-01-30T19:58:00.000-06:00

My father, the Builder-of-Planes and All Around Handyman, taught me how to do just about everything. I can unclog my own drain (without Drain-O, thank you), build my own shelves, replace my own brakes (with his help and his jacks), hang my own pictures, drive my own moving truck, hang my own wallpaper (well, my mother's wallpaper), paint my own rooms, and in general fix most anything that breaks around the house. When Expat needed the nifty magnetic strip we bought for his kitchen knives hung, centered and level, over the sink, I did it for him. When we bought him a tie rack, he waited three weeks until I got around to mounting it to try it out. It's not that Expat can't do these things for himself, but why should he? He has a wife with a good eye, a steady hand, and not one but two levels, who is fearless with her electric drill.

So a month or so go when I decided that what I needed most in the world was a set of hooks for my hallway, I did what any DIY buff would do: I made them.

Making them was not, of course, my first choice. I did look into purchasing a set of said hooks at the local Targét, but a small set alone was going to cost $20, plus it weighed, like, 50 pounds all by itself and I'm sorry, my walls wouldn't be able to support that in this flimsy, drafty, 1970's vintage apartment. They'd be so busy holding the hooks up that I wouldn't be able to hang anything on the hooks for fear of sending the whole thing crashing to the ground, walls and all. No, I needed something lighter and longer, because I had a lot of stuff lying around the apartment—bags and coats and vests and scarves—and I knew from watching Clean Sweep on TLC that all of these things could be stored in some clever way somewhere useful to make my space more functional. And since I could really knock down the hall wall, gut the adjoining spare room closet, and insert 16 x 16 wall cubbies painted in bright turquoise for all of my things without seriously jeopardizing out security deposit, I decided to settle for a four foot 1 x 3 and eight hooks from the "See. Spot. Save" bins at said local Targét (four hooks per pack, $2.50 a pack—I bought two).

Just one problem: I didn't have a board.

Enter the trusty Church Choir.

For those who don’t know, one of my many jobs is that of a Church Music Director. I won’t go into the details now, but suffice to say that my music degree has finally come in handy for something other than weddings, funerals, and the occasional rendition of “Happy Birthday” in Italian. My Church Choir Members (CCMs) are all Parents with Houses and Garages, which got me thinking about My Parents and their respective Garages. And what do My Parents have in their respective Garages? Random piles of Scrap Wood.

I don’t understand the Scrap Wood/Parent Garage phenomenon in its entirety, and that’s okay. I’m perfectly willing to accept it on its terms. Like God and the Tooth Fairy. I don’t really know how it works, I just know that wherever there is a Parent Garage, there is most likely a Scrap Wood heap lying off to one side next to the mini van. Perhaps on Saturday mornings when the Garage is open and the Parents are distracted by Yard Work, the Scrap Wood slinks into the unattended Garage and settles along the right-hand wall for a little nap. Garages are cool and dry with Nice Firm Floors, just perfect for Scrap Wood naps. And, you know, maybe the Scrap Wood simply decides not to leave. At first, the Parents don’t notice and when they do notice, they don’t think anything of it because the Scrap Wood is just Always There. A fixture. A familiar sight. A part of the Garage.

So, I asked my Church Choir if, you know, any of them had a random Scrap of 1 x 3 that I could just have. For free. Because I am Poor and they are Good Christians and Parents with Garages. And of course one of the baritones (children ages 5 and 8) brought one to our next rehearsal. He’d had it in his Garage. He wasn’t sure where it came from—maybe the Last Owner left it.

And presto! Just like that, I had my wall hooks. I took a little time getting them ready—a little sanding for the splinters, a little paint around the edges, a few coats of gloss stain. But thanks to my fairly extensive, preexisting supply of Home Improvement Tools acquired through the years during other Home Improvement Projects, in just two short evenings and one hour on a Saturday afternoon, I had my hooks. I stained the board using long even stokes with a natural bristled brush and left it to dry overnight on the kitchen counter, resting easily on a Cookie Cooling Rack—who needs saw horses? I measured and evenly spaced the hooks along my board, drilling holes and screwing things together and using my Pier 1 coffee table in the middle of my living room as a workbench—who needs a garage? I found the studs with my trusty stud finder. I predrilled the holes and used the level when fastening the board-with-hooks to the wall. And before the cats even had time to get annoyed with all the ruckus, my hooks were up and mounted and holding all of the clutter that had been running rampant in the Fairly Small Apartment.

And Sparky stepped back and surveyed her Work and saw that It Was Good.

Now, if I can just get around to staining the bed we bought from Ikea four years ago . . . I just need a few more Cookie Cooling Racks.

Coldhearted Snake

2007-01-22T22:41:00.000-06:00

"Not Too Cold: 19 Degrees"

This was on the screen tonight during the weather portion of the 10:00 news. I offer it now in support of my previous claim that meteorologists should not make Small Talk—written, spoken, or otherwise.

Since when is any temperature ending in "teen" Not Too Cold?

Need I remind everyone that water freezes at 32 degrees? We're talking about a liquid becoming a solid here, people. And what are people made of (mostly)? Exactly. Last time I checked, one could still contract frostbite in 19 degree weather. Hypothermia surely is a bit of a threat in 19 degree weather. Many gardeners would wrap their flowering shrubs if they knew a 19 degree night was coming on. Most of us would bring our pets indoors. And I'll bet that tomorrow morning, my car doors will be frozen shut. Again. For the third day in a row.

As for that Small-Talk-Making Snake who likes to post such bold, unsubstantiated claims in print at the start of the nightly news, well, I suppose he could be right: 19 might not be so cold . . . for a penguin.

Somebody get me a tuxedo. And some flippers.

I Think I Miss You Most On Wednesdays and Saturdays

2007-01-21T00:11:00.000-06:00

Tonight I ate a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner for the fourth night in a week. It wasn't your standard American-on-white grilled cheese, it was a classy grilled cheese on multi-grain with Colby (made in Wisconsin) cheese. I call it my Green Card Grilled Cheese—no Americans here, thanks.

The funny thing is, I used to hate grilled cheese sandwiches. I think there was a point in childhood where grilled cheeses just went the way of hot dogs and apple juice: I hit my limit on them and simply couldn't face them anymore. I still can't drink apple juice. Apple cider, sure, but only the real, unpasteurized, sweet sticky brown stuff. I grew back into hot dogs once I figured out that you could buy all beef kosher one and cook them on the grill until they were almost charred. I like my hot dogs with very pronounced grill marks. Grilled cheese, though. That's one I never saw coming.

I was never very good at cooking grilled cheeses. They never really browned or crisped the way they did when other people made them. I just figured it was the pan or the stove or, well, me. I supposed it was possible that I wasn't meant to make grilled cheeses, which was okay. I didn't really like them, I just occasionally liked the thought of them.

And then, we went to Ella's.

I can't quite remember what Expat and I were doing the day we decided to go to Ella's Deli for lunch. Something over on the east side of town. Maybe something green card related. Anyway, we'd never been and Ella's is a Madison tradition—a Midwestern Jewish delicatessen worthy of another post. And pictures. Lots of pictures. To document the, um, interior. Anyway, I really wanted to try the matzah ball soup, but I also wanted a sandwich and there, on the menu, was the soup and grilled cheese combo. The matzah ball soup was so-so (hard matzah balls—no where near as good as the ones in the soup my college boyfriend's mother makes) but the grilled cheese . . . odes are written about such things. Cheddar on pumpernickel, cut on a diagonal and served on a diner plate. And it was crispy. And . . . buttery.

Butter.

Of course. My previous grilled cheese attempts all occurred about 5 years PB (Pre-Butter). Until I met Expat, I didn't really cook with butter. Not really. I used it for baking, but otherwise I used olive oil or Pam for things that required it. Most of the time, I just relied on my trusty non-stick skillet. Butter was bad. It had saturated fats and calories. If I needed something to slide easily out of a pan, I could just spray it. If I needed a spread on my muffin, I used Fleischmann's Olive Oil spread.

And then Expat and I moved in together. And then we got cable. And with cable, came the Food Network. And with the Food Network came more Thinking About Food. And after not such a long while I began thinking that maybe Fleischmann's wasn't the way to go. Maybe I'd be better off using something with only two ingredients that I could actually spell.

And all of this was leading up to that moment in fall 2006. Sitting there in Ella's, I had an Epiphany: my grilled cheeses needed butter.

The trick, it turns out, is to butter one entire side of each piece of bread, top to bottom, side to side, even the edge of the crust. Not a lot of butter, just enough to cover. And you don't want too much cheese—just one even layer between the two slices. To make this work with the Colby (which is cut in round slices), I have to use a slice and a third of another slice. I like to leave it on one side for a few minutes on medium-high heat, until the bread is almost burned, and then I flip it. The second side never takes as long as the first. And when its done, I just slice it straight down the middle—it fits better on the square plates Expat picked out for us when we got married.

Tonight I slid my Green Card Grilled Cheese onto one of the small plates (not the dinner ones) and sliced up an apple to go with it. I made one of my “spritzers” with orange juice and lime seltzer water. I sat down on my couch and ate at the coffee table in front of the TV. They were showing Seabiscuit. I munched on my sandwich—the crisp bread was perfect.

I only make grilled cheeses when I'm alone.

Who knows. Maybe tomorrow, I'll actually feel like cooking something.

Reckless Winter Made Its Way

2007-01-17T13:52:00.000-06:00

You know, Wisconsin is cold.

Case in point: our high for today is supposedly going to be in the low-twenties. At the moment, we're hanging out around 17 Fahrenheit (-8.3 Celsius), but regardless, I don't think they should be allowed to call anything in the low-twenties a "high." I mean, it's below freezing; how "high" can it possibly be? I think that once the temperature drops below freezing and stays there, they should have to call it the "low" and that the low should really be called the "We're ~~fucked~~ screwed" temperature. "And the low for today will top out at around 26. Tonight, we're screwed at negative 4."

My sister, the Meteorology Major, might disagree with me here. I mean, yes, technically 22 is higher than, say, 4 (check out that Friday forecast. Woohoo), but it's all below the point at which water becomes a solid and do we really need to keep counting beyond that anyway?

And answer me this: do the meteorologists who tell me the local weather every evening all have to make horribly un-funny jokes about the number of blankets we should have on our beds or the amount of time it will take me to shovel my car out in the morning? What is funny about these things, really? I don't need to be reminded that my morning commute will take longer than the usual fifteen minutes. I don't want to hear quips about breaking out the long underwear and the goosedown comforter. And why do the other broadcast journalists sitting at the news desk have to egg them on? Why can't they just say "Thanks, Joe" after the weather report and leave it at that? We really don't need them to state the obvious. We really could probably figure out simply from the numbers and the little icons of clouds dropping snowflakes that "it looks like another cold one out there" without having perky Little Miss Anchorwoman saying it, all the while smiling into the camera with her Perfectly Even, White Teeth.

To be fair, the cold has kept the snow that fell two days ago looking a lovely powdery white. I was dragging the trash out (a fabulously glamorous image, of course) on Monday night and really had to shake off the cold weather "bah-humbug" to appreciate the glittery beauty of it all. Of course, it was 11PM and the whole neighborhood was quiet, which helped—quiet like that doesn't happen often when you live on the edge of the edge of the hood, one block from the Beltline. Even the trash can was quiet as I dragged it down the unplowed driveway and balanced it precariously on the easement in front of the sidewalk. In quiet like that, you can actually hear the snow falling—soft and dry, like very far away rice krispies crackling in a bowl.

Snow deserves this sort of quiet. Standing out there in my boots and my vest next to my trash can, I decided that perhaps it's not so much that I dislike the snow. Perhaps it's that I dislike A) living in the city in the snow and B) having to get out and do things in the snow. When I was a kid and my family lived in Massachusetts out in the country, it was different. There wasn't much to do anyway and it was already quiet. Snow made more sense there. Maybe that's why I thought I liked winter. Maybe I do like winter. Certainly it makes me much more appreciative of spring when it finally arrives. Maybe what I really don't like is the news room banter about wearing a scarf or being a good time to move to Florida.

For the sake of all the grumpy Cold Weather Wimps like me, I sincerely hope that once she graduates and unleashes her predicting prowess on a news station somewhere in the USA, the Meteorology Major steers clear of such cheeseball (however well-intentioned) philosophical musings on how long it will take me to shovel out my driveway. I have hope that, perhaps, she'll skip pointing out the obvious need for a hat in favor of something more original, like statistics for how long it takes hypothermia to set in, perhaps, or maybe a list of smart things to keep in your car incase you get stranded in the snow. She could include personal anecdotes, like the sleeping bag that's good to 20 below that our Dramatic Mother makes her keep in the trunk of her car "just in case." She could say things like "And it's nights like these that made Mother buy me that sleeping bag, folks." Or maybe the Meteorology Major will include a Cold Weather Wimp Grumpiness Scale just for me—something to measure the level of grump that the coldness will be likely to cause. I would even give her permission to use a picture of my face in a scowl for a graphic. Well, a scowl and a hat.

Because even I can predict that it’s going to be another cold on out there tonight, folks. If you’re headed out, don’t forget your hats—our Cold Weather Wimp Grumpiness Scale is in the Hypothermia Blue zone and it doesn't look like it will be creeping back to the Friendly Frostbite area any time soon.

Seasonal Anti-Depressant Beverage

2007-01-14T23:29:00.000-06:00

So around 5PM this evening I was sitting in my hooded sweatshirt that's three sizes too big for me on our old couch with the ripped slipcover in my small two-bedroom on the edge of the edge of the hood feeling extremely frumpy and pathetically sorry for myself for no good reason. It was dark and cold and last night, it snowed, much to the delight of all of the native Wisconsinites who, in Expat's words, have been quite convinced that Global Warming is happening right here, right now, to them—as if greenhouse gases have some inexplicable vendetta against cheese and beer and bratwursts. I, on the other hand, had hitherto been quite convinced that I had done something Extremely, Cosmically Right and that the universe was rewarding me with only Mildly Annoying Rain and lows in the 40s. But no more. Here I was, cold, lonely, a little bored, and thoroughly uninspired to do any of the chores I had laid out for myself. Somehow, three loads of laundry, a Very Necessary trip to the grocery store, and cat boxes that don't change themselves aren't terribly inspiring at 5PM on a dark, cold, lonely, boring, snowy winter evening.

“What's wrong with me?” I wailed to Wilbur, who sat at my feet complaining about the weather.

He didn't know. He told me I should get up and turn the bathroom sink on for him to drink out of (but not too much, just a trickle, thank you), and that I should then do the laundry and take him with me to the basement.

“Well, I'll give you the water, but the laundry is a one woman job this week, buddy.” I sighed. I got up off my frumpy rump, and on my way to cater to the whims of my spoiled cat, I had an Epiphany: I. Needed. Coffee.

It had been at least four days since I'd had any caffeine. You'd think that the weird headaches and strong urges to nap constantly would have been a clue, but to a self-professed non-coffee drinker, they were simply annoying, unexplainable anomalies. I missed Expat, I told myself. And it was dark. That was all. I was just in a Funk.

Still, even I couldn't deny the small tremble of excitement at the bottom of my stomach the instant that I remembered coffee. It was like the week before Christmas or your birthday—the joyous anticipation of a Much-Loved Event. I was going to Have Coffee. I was not only going to Have Coffee, but I was going to arrange my chores around the Having of Coffee. There was just one problem: I didn't actually want coffee.

See, I don't like regular, make-it-in-your-coffee-pot-at-home, drip filtered coffee. I like Foofy Coffee. Foofy, flavored, sugary, coffee shop coffee. I like mochas and lattes and frozen frappuccinos. I like drinks that cost as much if not more than your average beer. With whipped cream on top. In a little cup with a cardboard sleeve and a sippy top so I won't spill it.

Clearly, I wasn't going to find this in my kitchen. Clearly, I was going out.

Lucky for me the local Midwestern chain coffee shop was on the way to the grocery store, so I could Have Coffee and complete the Very Necessary grocery shop.

Before Wilbur could bat an eye, I had ditched the oversized hoodie in favor of a far more slimming hoodless model, donned my ski-bunny earwarmer band and my best pair of pigtail holders, and stepped out into the cold, snowy night. I was cute. I was warm. I was going to Have Coffee.

The coffee shop had a big sign advertising its new sugar-free flavors. Now, I'm not normally one to go for anything artificially sweetened, but it was already 6PM and I figured that I didn't need to get jacked up on caffeine and sugar, so I decided to give it a go. One sugar-free chocolate-raspberry latte (2%, no whip) later, and I was a happy camper. Actually, I was a happy shopper. I was warm, I had a latte, and I even got one of the shopping carts with a cup holder so I could shop and sip. I was so happy, in fact, that the super market seemed to be just a little brighter, just a little shinier. As if to corroborate this, as I rounded aisle three I came face to car-shaped kid-cart with a five-year-old singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” at the top of his lungs. My Very Necessary shop flew by. I bought Pink Lady apples. I bought spinach. I bought a Rotisserie Chicken.

The writers at Real Simple magazine have been telling me to buy a Rotisserie Chicken for years. “It's already cooked for you,” they say. “It's rotisserie, so it's not too fatty,” they say. “You can do a lot with it.” And there in the deli section of my local supermarket, I decided: maybe they're right. I mean, at $5 for a 3lb, already seasoned, already Rotisseried Chicken, how wrong could they really possibly be? Sure, I could go buy my own fresh whole three pound chicken and roast it myself at home and have the satisfaction of knowing that I had seasoned it and tended it and roasted it myself . . . or I could just buy one for the same price and not have to season it, tend it, or roast it myself. As I checked out, I thought “That's my Rotisserie Chicken passing over the scanner.”

I sipped my sugar-free chocolate-raspberry latte and swiped my bonus card. I was pleased. I was happy. I was a new woman.

And maybe that's it. Maybe that's just what I need this winter. Maybe what I need to get past the dark and the cold and the boring and the Missing of Expat is really just a Foofy Coffee and a Rotisserie Chicken. There are certainly more expensive ways to self-medicate. Maybe I'll write a book about it and make millions: Coffee and Chicken: A Lonely Girl's Guide to Getting through A Midwestern Winter.

Remember, folks, you heard it first at the Nation.

The Bed's Too Big, The Frying Pan's Too Wide

2007-01-13T20:54:00.000-06:00

We here at Scooter Nation have known for quite some time that this day was coming. We have been planning it, anticipating it, dreading it. We have been packing and making phone calls and sending emails. We have been fast, thorough, and sharp as a tack. We have been touring the facility and picking up slack.

And last weekend, we moved Expat back to lovely, exotic Small Town, Pennsylvania.

We did not want to do this. We are not separating or doing a trial separation or getting a divorce. We are, instead, getting a PhD. Well, Expat's getting a PhD. So I suppose in a round about way, I'm getting a PhD, too—for a husband.

We moved out to Madison 18 months ago for Expat to do research in the Wisconsin State Historical Society's archives. He is not nor has he ever been a student at the UW. He is, instead, a student at the Big State University in Pennsylvania. He had one paid year between a fellowship and banked teaching releases, but that was it. Last summer when he signed his contract renewal, he agreed to a research assistantship for the fall that would allow him to stay in Wisconsin six months longer. The catch? He owed Big State University two sections of teaching, payable this spring semester. Oh, and he couldn't graduate until he completed them.

This was fair, we figured. Big State U essentially payed Expat to sit in Madison, drink beer, eat cheese, and work on his dissertation for a year and a half. The least he could do was go teach a few classes. And at the time, Spring 2007 was as remote as the UP, eh.

Remote, that is, until last weekend.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, the drive to Small Town, PA, from Madison, WI, is 12 to 15 hours, depending on how the traffic is moving when you hit Chicago and depending on how many times you stop at the travel plazas with the Gloria Jean's inside for 16 oz. black and white mochas. You need to have about $20 in change and small bills for all of the tolls—Ohio is the most expensive stretch at $9.25 (they just raised the rates)—and be prepared to use at least three tanks of gas one way, which we definitely did. For a man who thought he “wouldn't need to take much,” the Subaru was packed solid front to back (the seats folded down, of course), side to side, and floor to about 8 inches from the ceiling. (Admittedly, two of the bags and one of the pillows were mine and I had insisted that we bring the air mattress for fear that, once we got to Expat's newly rented house, we would have no place to sleep, but nonetheless, the car was full of mostly-not-my stuff.)

The house Expat is renting for the semester is actually the house he was renting when we first started dating over four years ago. At that time, he had a roommate. At this time, he doesn't. In fact, this time will be the very first time that either of us had ever lived alone in all our almost-28 years. Ever. We both went from living at home to having roommates in college to having roommates in grad school to living together to being married. And now that we're married, we're single again for the first time. Well, of course we are. Why wouldn't we be?

At this point you may be wondering, “Why didn't Sparky go with him?” Ah, grasshopper, lest we forget, Sparky has a Real Job working for The Man. The Man doesn't let Sparky scoot off to distant college towns for five months on a whim. Nor does the Lease we're in with the Nicest Landlady Ever. Well, the Nicest Landlady Ever probably wouldn't care as long as we continued to pay her rent, but who wants to pay rent on an apartment they're not using?

No, I was definitely coming back to Madison once The Move was complete. The Move was going to be a quick thing—one day down, stay the weekend, one day back, lots of errands in between. Expat wouldn't have a car once I left, and his new/old house was in an Even Smaller Suburb of Small Town, which meant no grocery store or drug store or anything, really, except the Breakfast Diner and the Pizza Place, which were now in the same building, so you could get stromboli for breakfast or waffles for dinner. You know. If you wanted.

By the time we finished unloading, cleaning, loading trashbags, unloading trashbags, loading the stuff from our storage unit, unloading the stuff from our storage unit, cleaning again, buying and loading and then unloading all of the stuff necessary to reasonably outfit a house, and then cleaning some more, we were exhausted. I decided to stay an extra day. We went out and drank flavored martinis—well, I drank flavored martinis. Expat drank beer. We came Home and went to bed. Got up, went grocery shopping at the Fancy Grocery Store, came Home, unloaded, went to the Cheap Grocery Store, came Home, unloaded, realized we hadn't cleaned the refrigerator. Spent 2 hours and half a bottle of 409 cleaning the refrigerator (a feat worthy of another post). Did I mention that we're friends with the guys who rented the house before Expat? Maybe they thought that leaving us their food from May 2006 was a nice gesture. Anyway. Put the perishables away. Decided to toss the expired stuff in the pantry. Tossed everything in the pantry (canned pineapple from 1998—mmmm, Botulism). Reloaded the car with my stuff. Went to bed. Got up, got dressed, got moving. I dropped Expat on campus—kissed goodbye in the library loading zone—drove Home.

Home.

I used to think that Home was where my bed was. My bed is definitely in Madison.

Right now, Madison is definitely not Home.

Talking Loud and Saying Nothing

2006-12-26T15:25:00.000-06:00

What kind of a Christmas morning is it when James Brown doesn't Get Up?

Thanks to those classy Aussie's over at triple j, we can all put a little Funky Drummer into our New Years. For those of you who, like me, are spending Boxing Day at your desks instead of at the malls, plug your headphones into your PC and check out this James Brown Mix Tape (don't let the few seconds of distracting garble at the beginning throw you).

Make It Funky, y'all.

Pre-Kids, Part 2: Our Own Christmas Miracle

2006-12-25T22:58:00.000-06:00

Then

My cat has heart disease. My cat, Orville, who makes me laugh every day (which not even my husband or Garrison Keillor can do) has a problem with one tiny valve in his heart. His huge, perfect heart. And it beats too fast. His Big Heart beats almost twice as fast as it should—as it reasonably can. A heart is only designed to go so fast, to work so hard, and if a heart works too hard, things thicken and harden. Hard hearts don’t beat as well as soft, supple, healthy hearts. Hard hearts don’t, in fact, beat at all.

I found all this out a little over two-and-a-half months ago at our local veterinary medical teaching hospital. Our regular vet had found a Heart Murmur and referred us to a Specialist for a Full Work-up: chest x-ray, EKG, and an echocardiogram. I made an appointment and we saved our money—two car payments-worth. My parents said we were nuts; my mother in fact said “Well, you can always get another cat.” But this was our cat—our Pre-Kid. Orville was our responsibility. We adopted him. We agreed to be responsible for him—for his health, for his well-being. We didn’t say that we would sometimes be responsible. We didn’t say that we would be responsible as long as it didn’t cost too much. I mean, if we didn’t take care of him, who would?

When The Specialist told me that Orville would be on beta blockers for the rest of his life, I tried very hard to understand her. “Why beta blockers?“ I asked. “Isn’t that what people with high blood pressure take? Does he have high blood pressure?”

“We used them to slow down a patient’s heart rate,” she said. “Orville doesn’t have high blood pressure, he has mitral valve dysplasia—he has a misshapen valve. And right now that’s leading to prolapse—the valve isn’t closing properly, so his heart is leaking a little bit. That’s what’s causing the Heart Murmur.”

“Leaking?”

“Not bad, but a bit. See, blood in the heart is only supposed to move in one direction. The heart pumps and forced blood through the valve and then the valve shuts behind it, like a flap door, keeping the blood from flowing back the way it came. But Orville’s valve isn’t closing properly.”

“So how do we fix it?”

“Well, we can try the beta blockers. His heart is definitely beating too quickly—we can at least take some of the strain off the muscle and see if that helps the valve. Ideally, if we can control this through the medication, the valve won’t thicken and will perhaps have a chance to work more normally than it does now.”

I asked her if we could get the medication in a liquid. We could. The pharmacist would even flavor it. Like liver. My cat would be taking 0.63 cc’s of liver-flavored beta blockers twice a day for the rest of his life. Actually, he wouldn’t be taking them: Expat and I would be administering them. Twice. Daily. And oh, by the way, they would need to see him for another heart monitoring echocardiogram in about two to three months, just to check on the status of things. Just to tell us how much longer his heart might work.

I called Expat on the way home from the teaching hospital and told him the news. We both hoped that the beta blockers would work. Expat said, “He has such a Big Heart. I hope that Big Heart doesn’t kill him.”

And so, every twelve hours for the next three months Expat and I dutifully chased Orville out from under the bed or the sofa or the dining room table, sat on him (well, more like crouched over him, keeping him immobilized with our knees), and squirted 0.63 cc’s of “liver juice” into the corner of his mouth, much to Orville’s dismay. The first week was rough—he hid from us, eyed us warily when he wasn’t hiding from us, and seemed generally edgy and unhappy. By the second week, things had calmed down a bit; Orville no longer glared at us from under the bed as though we were interrogators at Gitmo. By week three, he seemed to resign himself to the fact that this was just how it was going to be: that his loving Pet Parents were just going to periodically sit on him and squirt icky stuff down his throat while telling him that he was a good boy, and the rest of the time he could get away with murder. Not such a bad rap, all things considered.

And all things considered, the medicine seemed to be working—at least, from our very nonexpert vantage points. Expat and I both agreed that his wee heart rate was slower and we chided ourselves for never recognizing his old, rapid rhythm as abnormal. He was just easily excited, we said. He was always hyper, we thought, and hyper cats must have hyper pulses. But once that initial phase of distrust wore off and Orville started sitting on our laps again, we knew how wrong we had been. When he fell asleep on my chest and I felt a slow, relaxed, easy thump as his little ribcage rose and fell, I knew that the butterfly beats of old were wrong. I felt guilty—how could I have missed it? How could I not have known?

Now

Given our dutiful attention to his medication schedule, I expected to get at least some good news when I took him back for his three month check up last week. Maybe the vet would think his heart rate was much better. Maybe his Heart Murmur would be a little less pronounced. Maybe his valve would be okay—maybe it wouldn’t have thickened all that much. I was Thinking Positive.

The Veterinary Resident who did the preliminary exam was a very nice man about my age who seemed a little nervous but who handled Orv with such care that when his eyes widened and he looked up from his stethoscope and my writhing cat and said “I cannot find The Murmur,” I just assumed he hadn’t been pressing the stethoscope to Orville hard enough.

“Do you want me to try holding him for you?”

“Please.”

He tried again. He placed the stethoscope on Orville chest and stared at it, as if willing it to hear the irregularity for him—as if maybe he could look through Orville with his x-ray vision and see The Murmur.

Nothing.

Orville, meanwhile, with his cat’s way of morphing into water when he didn’t want to be held, wasn’t making anyone’s job any easier.

“Look,” I said to The Resident as I dragged Orville for the third time from his carrier—which he despised five minute earlier, but which was now his favorite hiding place—and placed him back on the examining table, “What if his Heart Murmur is gone?”

“Gone? That Murmur was a four on a scale of six. It was very pronounced. A four is a Very Pronounced Murmur. I cannot understand why I cannot hear it. . . Let me listen again.”

After round three, The Resident threw up his hands and announced that he would be back in a few moments with The Attending, who would talk with me further about Orville’s condition, what we needed to do today, and what might be happening with the Very Pronounced Murmur.

“The Murmur is gone!” The Attending looked up from her stethoscope and smiled. “This is wonderful.”

“Can it do that?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Yes, yes. This is the best case scenario. This is what we hope for when we put a patient on beta blockers.” She smiled and handed Orville back to me, who promptly spilled through my arms and down the front of my shirt, and vanished into his carrier.

“So do you still need to keep him today?”

“We’ll still need to do the echo to see what the heart actually looks like, but we’ll skip all the other stuff today. You can come pick him up in a few hours.”

So I left him there and went to work. Orv was ready later that day. The Attending and The Resident came out together and handed me the carrier.

“He was a model patient,” The Attending told me. “We didn’t even have to tranquilize him to do the echo. And his heart looks wonderful. That valve is closing properly and everything seemed to be flowing beautifully.”

“And his Heart Murmur?”

“Gone. Completely.”

“Completely?”

“Completely.” She smiled. “Of course, he will have to stay on the beta blockers for the rest of his life, but given the success we’ve seen with them, I’m going to say that you don’t need to come in for another check up until next December.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She shook my free hand. The Resident shook my free hand. “I’m glad you couldn’t hear The Murmur,” I told him.

“Me too.” He smiled. “Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

I paid the bill and left with Orville. I needed to get him home; it was almost time to give him his medicine.

Shepherds Ask for Flannel; Wisemen Stay Inside

2006-12-21T13:47:00.000-06:00

We here in Scooter Nation are confused, befuddled, and generally stumped. We do not understand the compulsion of otherwise reasonable adults to don bed sheets and tie hand towels to their heads and rent pettable livestock and stand around in 10 degree weather (negative 3 with windchill), looking at a plastic baby doll. We are simply flummoxed by the idea that there are enough people willing to don bed sheets and towels and rent pettable livestock that this bizarre event can take place—sometimes simultaneously—in multiple churchyards by the side of multiple roads in multiple counties in multiple Midwestern states, all with varying degrees of below-freezing temperatures.

The Midwestern obsession with the live nativity is, in a word, insane. For a people known for their farmer-like practicality and polite but firm rejections of anything that is not “normal” (i.e., Chick-fil-a: “A fast food place that only sells chicken sandwiches? Chicken biscuits for breakfast?! Well, I guess if you like that sort of thing.”), they seem quite content to throw sheets over their Columbia jackets and wade out into the snow to pet donkeys and ogle someone’s supposed Jesus-look-alike Bitty Baby American Girl Doll. Never mind that Jesus was born in the Middle East in the desert where it’s warm and definitely not in Wisconsin or Minnesota or North Dakota or anywhere remotely close to the Canadian border and the Great Lakes Snowbelt. Forget the fact that Jesus was actually, in all probability, born during the summer months and that the only reason we now celebrate his birth in December is most likely because of a neat tie-in to the pagan calendar and the winter solstice. And what about the fact that Jesus probably looked nothing like the pasty white doll wrapped up in someone’s old twin top sheet?

Admittedly, Midwesterners do not cast aside all of their practicality for these events. If you can look past the obvious absurdity of the situation, you will find that live nativities (at least, the ones witnessed by your friendly local Scooter Nationalists) are organized with a drill sergeant’s precision and timing. Participants—well, human participants—work in shifts of 30 minutes each, sort of like a tag-team event. Every half hour, one team of shepherds and wisemen and angels and Jesus-bearing parents troops inside to thaw and eat cookies while another team of shepherds and wisemen and angels and Jesus-bearing parents takes their place. I have never actually witnessed the changing of the guard, so I am not 100% sure of the tag-team logistics. It’s like a religious quantum physics problem: can two Marys exist, even temporarily, within the same plywood-and-plastic-tarp stable? Two Josephs? Six wisemen—or wise persons, as some more inclusive churches might call them? Does Team One slip out a handful at a time, like people discreetly leaving a lame party? Or do the 10 paint-lights illuminating the scene black out for a moment and when they’re flipped back on, a new cast is suddenly standing there in the old cast’s place?

Down along the Gulf Coast of Alabama where my mother lives, live nativities seem to make a bit more sense—at least climatically speaking. Typically, the stable is set up next to that one palm tree on the church property to lend some vague Middle Eastern essence to the scene. Visitors to the live nativity can get away with wearing just a light jacket or a glitter-painted, iron-on-appliqué Christmas sweatshirt. In the Deep South, Mary and Joseph don’t have to tag team with anyone to prevent hypothermia from setting in, and the shepherds, angels, and wisemen don’t have to fret about freezing extremities. No on wears mittens. And every once in a while you’ll see a real live baby (albeit a 6 month old instead of a newborn) wrapped in some swaddling clothes over its footy pajamas, sleeping away while a young Mary earnestly watches the manger to make sure the rented cow doesn’t get any ideas.

And maybe that’s why the Midwesterners do it. Maybe once upon a time some well-meaning transplanted Southerner decided that it was high time Mary wore mittens. Maybe they do it to prove to the rest of the country that hey, a little snow isn’t going to stop the baby Jesus. Maybe this whole live nativity obsession is bigger than we at Scooter Nation ever thought, and the Midwesterners are just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—what if they’re wearing bed sheets up in Canada right about now? Or Greenland? Or Russia? And what if they aren’t insane? What if the one question that Saint Peter asks you when it’s your time to go is “What part did you play in the live nativity, my child?”

Which is why we here at Scooter Nation are seriously considering putting our hands up next year. We may not understand the Midwestern obsession with the live nativity, but you don’t have to understand something to respect it: consider brain surgery or my all-wheel drive automatic transmission, for example. I can handle a 30 minute stint in the snow—I’ve got long underwear. Just sandwich me between a few sheep, I’ll be all right. And make sure my sheet’s flannel.

“It’s No Fun to be The Man” (The One Where Sparky Talks about Corporate America)

2006-11-09T19:23:00.000-06:00

Anyone who says that a job in Corporate America isn’t very interesting clearly doesn’t work for my employer. It’s not just interesting, it’s downright fascinating from perhaps an anthropological standpoint—exciting, even, in a creepy Very Corporate/Enron/Days of Our Lives sort of way. Life at my Very Corporate place of employment is, in fact, a Dilbert comic come to life with a little bit of the intrigue borrowed from 24 and a little bit of Office Space, just to round things out.

Case in point: This week, the New Guy got busted by the Big Wigs (BWs) at Corporate for attempting to stage a full-scale, take-no-prisoners, kill-‘em-all-and-let-god-sort-it-out Take Over and Raid of our little Midwestern-based publishing vendor. Oh, and while they were at it, the BWs fired the New Company President who hired the New Guy because, you guessed it, they were in cahoots from the get go.

Dallas, anyone?

So about a month or two ago, everyone at my publishing company was informed that the New Guy was coming in to analyze our “workflow” and make us more “efficient.” This was nothing new. The BWs at Corporate routinely ask us why we aren’t making the sort of money they want us to be making. (Reality check: we are a publishing vendor, not a hedge fund!) Occasionally, the BWs send someone out from the main office in Virginia to slum it with us in Madison for a few days, in hopes of enlightening us as to what we can do better in order to make more money for the BWs. So when the New Company President showed up one week with the New Guy in town, everything seemed totally normal.

The New Guy analyzed things. He made organizational charts and talked a lot of mumbo-jumbo about “Six Sigma strategies” and “5x growth” and adding “1000 seats” to our India operations. He asked really great questions like “Why do we use so much paper? Do we have to print everything?” and “What would happen if I moved all of the office equipment into the editorial office and took away your cubicles?”

We learned to ignore him.

But then, one day, the New Guy moved into the Big Office up front. He started making personnel changes: he moved my immediate boss, the Editorial Queen, into the corner office and he turned our General Manager into a numbers guy. One guy got fired. Another quit. Four more left to pursue other jobs. We started having weekly “all hands” meetings in the front conference room, during which we all huddled around the conference table to stare at the Star Trek conference call phone and listen to the voices of the BWs in Virginia. He changed people’s jobs—he decided that instead of having editors and project managers, he would just mush us all together and create one do-it-all role, and oh, by the way, we wouldn’t be getting any real training, we would just be expected to pick it up as we went along.

At the time, I thought This is it! This is the stuff of Dilbert lore! This is what Corporate America is all about!

Of course, this being my first time working for The Man, I thought that this was how it was supposed to be—that this was what I had to endure in order to get a decent salary and good benefits. I mean, I had dental for the first time in 4 years. Obviously to get dental, I was going to have to put up with a little shit.

So when they told me that I was going to be one of the guinea pigs for the new workflow, I went with it. It was okay. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was catching on. Last week, I created a few job schedules and learned how to approach my contacts at the publisher. On Monday, I got my first job back from file prep in India and filled out my very first job report. I was getting the hang of it. I was ready for this so-called “5x growth.” I kind of liked it, even . . .

And then, at our first training meeting on Tuesday, the Editorial Queen informed us all that as of 10:00 that morning, the New Guy no longer worked for us. And oh, by the way, we wouldn’t be having the training because we would probably be reverting back to our old workflow. But that was all she could tell us for now.

“But wait, wasn’t New Guy here this morning?”

“He was.”

“And now he’s just gone?”

“He is.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”

That afternoon at 4:00, we had a video conference with the BWs in Virginia. They gave a few vague explanations for the immediate dismissal of the New Guy and the New Company President, something about trust and ethics, saying that their counsel advised them not to release any details.

And that was that. Case closed. No hope of learning any more, left to wander back to our cubes in stunned silence . . .

Until yesterday when, midafternoon, our General Manager let fly the sordid tale of conspiracy and treason. (Okay, well, really he just told one of my very blunt coworkers who just flat out asked him, but it sounds much more soap opera-ish the other way.)

Apparently, the New Guy and the New Company President had plans. Big plans.

The New Guy and the New Company President were planning a TOTAL COMPANY TAKEOVER.

They saw the potential in the situation: Big Corporate Office over 800 miles away, Small Publishing Subsidiary chillin’ in the Midwest with no real leader but several Big Customers . . .

So they started telling corporate that we weren't making any money, that we were going down, that they needed to sell us off. They were looking for a new office space in Madison, which they couched as a “more convenient workspace centrally located for all the employees.” They were making tons of sales calls, drumming up new business left and right. They were telling us that we were preparing for tons of new growth.

They weren't telling Corporate about anything.

Their plan, in all its sneaky glory, was to totally shut down our Small Publishing Subsidiary and to poach the ENTIRE staff to operate their new company, while simultaneously walking away with all of the big, new accounts they had secured.

Just one problem: they didn’t tell any of us their sneaky plan.

Unbeknownst to the New Guy or the New Company President, our old General Manager was still plugging away, sending his regular reports to the Big Wigs back in Virginia, letting them know how operations in Madison were going because he’s good like that and because no one had ever told him not to.

When the New Guy walked into the General Manager’s office one day to tell him not to, the General Manager got extra suspicious.

“Why can’t I email the BWs?”

“Because they don’t want you to. All communication from Madison to Virginia goes through me from now on.”

So of course our General Manager did the only thing a sensible, honest, suspicious person could do: he started forwarding everything to the BWs.

The BWs were pissed, but savvy. The BWs waited until they had enough proof, retained counsel, and immediately sacked the New Guy and the New Company President.

All of this on a Tuesday before I’d had my second cup of coffee. Clearly it was going to be a very long week.

((Fade to deeply contemplative, schmaltzy piano soap opera theme music))

[[Large Announcer Man Voiceover: Tune in next time for another riveting episode of As the Page Turns, when Sparky has a fateful run-in with the filing cabinet and contracts amnesia while trying to save the office from the pregnancy-crazed project manager about to give birth to the two-headed alien baby. Too bad she never got that second cup of coffee.]]

Pie in the Sky (The One Where Sparky, Expat, and the Cooking Junkie Go Apple Picking)

2006-11-01T21:54:00.000-06:00

(This post was created yesterday, but for various reasons that shall go unnamed *cough, crappy internet connection, cough, cough* could not be posted . . . )

October 31, 2006

This last day of October is sunny and windy and deceptively cold: an appropriate bookend to the beginning of the month, and especially to that first weekend when Expat and I and our friend, the Cooking Junkie (CJ), drove out to rolling Cross Plains, Wisconsin, to go Apple Picking.

The people who pick their own apples in October are the same people who cut their own Christmas trees in December and pick their own blueberries and strawberries in the summer. These are Family Traditions. We like Family Traditions. We like knowing that once a year, we’ll blow off the laundry and the vacuuming and the college football, and tromp out into the day to chop or pick living things and drag them back to our houses to remind ourselves of what it’s like outside the next time we’re stuck at home vacuuming and doing laundry. People like us also tend to grind their own coffee, change their own brake pads, knit their own scarves, and make their own birthday cakes from scratch, but these do not fall into the larger Family Tradition category, they are instead Small Habits of Which We Are Proud.

But as far as Family Traditions go, I think I love Apple Picking best. I had been planning this trip for months—really, since Expat and I went apple picking last October. In my own lived experience, prior to the Apple Picking, there was the Apple Getting, in which my little Massachusetts Family Unit drove an hour and a half to this one particular apple stand in Woodstock, Connecticut to bring home bushels upon bushels of apples for cooking and eating and saucing, and gallons upon gallons of unpasteurized cider for mulling or for drinking cold straight out of the jug. Apple Getting was perhaps more on the scale of a Grand Family Tradition; it happened every year from the time I was old enough to form memories until I was eleven, when we moved from apply New England across the country to the Land of Cotton-Not-Apples.

Returning again to an apple-friendly climate meant again finding an orchard to love and prize above all others, and last October, I fell hard for the first one I visited. I loved Appleberry Farm from the moment I saw the hand painted apple sign stuck into the median at that intersection out by Target—nothing fancy, just a bright red apple and an arrow pointing out into the country. The big wooden sign at the first turn off had 5 small pumpkins balanced along the top. “Look!” I said, “Pumpkins!”

Expat grunted.

We drove on. A few turns later and wide, neatly mown orchard spread out around us and the small store building stood uprightly in front of us, red and rustic looking, as an apple orchard store should be, and I knew that this was the beginning of something good. Case in point: we went back this year.

This October I invited out new friend CJ to tag along because CJ (as you might have guessed by her aforementioned full blognomer) has a thing for food and is also a Believer in Family Traditions, which is a very important quality to look for in a fellow Apple Picker. We met at 10AM. We donned out hats and scarves and mittens and gloves, but not our big jackets, as it was really Just Fall, and beguilingly bright and sunny. We piled into the Subaru and Subarued our way across the city, past the now-familiar signs and down the gravel drive. We piled out of the car, trooped into the store, and picked up our peck-sized pick-your-own bags. And then, we went to consult the Map.

Orchards, of course, usually provide a map that shows where patrons can pick and where they can’t and which apples are where, etc. Some orchards give them to you to take with you on your picking adventure, but at Appleberry Farm, there is only one Map, hand-dawn on hot pink paper, laminated and staple-gunned to the post right outside the little store’s front door. Having one central Map must certainly cut down on the amount of paper trash that may or may not get dropped out in the orchard, but it does lend itself to a few problems. For patrons who forget to read it altogether, it means two things: A) you’re blissfully unaware of the picking boundaries and which trees you can and can’t pick from, and B) you have no idea what kind of apples you are picking. For those who, like us, give the Map a brief read-through and then charge fearlessly like seven-year-olds out into the orchard, it means two slightly different things: A) you know that there are apples you can’t pick, you just can’t quite remember where they are, and B) you know approximately where different kinds of apples start and stop, but only just enough to be angsty about whether you’re picking cooking apples or eating apples, and for some of us, this distinction is crucial.

But for some of us, this is not.

Take, for example, my husband. Expat’s favorite thing about this whole endeavor isn’t that he gets to choose the very apples with which we will bake tasty desserts, or that he gets to spend a whole morning outside in a rustling orchard. For him, the fact that he gets to try the apples before he picks them trumps all other potential excitements. While I circle tree after tree looking for the perfect pie-making specimen, Expat yanks any old thing off the nearest branch and commences chomping. And on this trip, he had chomping competition. Whereas I seem to feel some inexplicable Catholic guilt about eating apples for which I’m not technically paying, CJ and Expat tried every kind in the orchard (sometimes twice) and—since none of us could remember anything from the Map—loudly declared their preferences for “this grapey-red one over here,” or “the big ones from this tree over here.”

By the end of it, of course, we had all eaten more apples than we could really hold—more apples, probably, than any of us had eaten in months. We took our heavy bags back to the store, pulled gallons of dark, thick unpasteurized cider from the cooler, and lined up with all the parents and 10-year-olds paying for their respective bags and gallons. On the way out, we bought Styrofoam cups of hot mulled cider for 50 cents, and apple cider doughnuts, and one caramel apple for yours truly. We ate and drank and felt decadent. Not Corporately Decadent, but Honestly Decadent—rich in Good Things from Good Earth and Good Hands. Rich in Good Traditions shared by Good People.

And already, I cannot wait for Apple Picking next year.

Sparky’s Favorite Apples (for the record)

Empire (eating)—always crunchy, nice and small, sweet-tart
Honeycrisp (eating)—always crisp, oddly pear-sweet, pretty pink skin
Macintosh (eating and baking)—classic “apple” taste, does double-duty with class
Courtland (baking)—big, hearty, hold their shape like no other, great

In which I was very decadent.

2006-10-19T18:56:00.000-06:00

Once a year my Very Corporate Employer does something Very Corporately Nice for me: it sends me to Chicago—all expenses paid—to attend an editing class at the university.

Tonight, Chicago is cloudy and cold. My class ended at 4:30 and as I walked from the conference center in the pre-evening light, the grey buildings and bundled pedestrians scuttling along in their long woolen coats with their scarves pulled up to their eyes made me shiver. Expat is off gallivanting about town with one of his BA buddies, so I am alone on a Thursday night and not otherwise committed to one of the Many Jobs that run my life, as I would be were I at home. I could do anything I want, I thought as I walked. Shop the Magnificent Mile, sit quietly in a café and read a book, maybe even go see a show. But the first thing I really wanted at 4:30 this afternoon was to drop off all of my books and pens and corrective tape dispensers back at my Very Corporately Nice hotel room. So I decided to make a quick detour back to said hotel room before embarking on my fantastic solo jaunt of the city . . .

. . . and I never left.

This evening at about 5 o’clock, the grey light filtering sleepily through my room’s windows said to me, “But Sparky, just look at your freshly made bed. Look at those Real Feather Pillows that someone plumped just for you.”

“No thanks, grey light filtering sleepily through my room’s windows,” I said, “I’m young and in the city. I don’t need to look at Real Feather Pillows. I should go out. I should do City Things.”

“Maybe you should,” it said. “But maybe you should have a look outside and enjoy your Very Corporately Nice 38th floor view first.”

“Now that I can do,” I said. And I looked. And I saw the matchbox cars trundling through the intersection, and the matchbox busses with the big numbers painted on their topes bussing around, and the tourist boats docking for the night, and the tiny ant-people scurrying into buildings and blowing along sidewalks and pulling their winter hats down tighter onto their heads.

I shivered. I turned around and looked at the Real Feather Pillows.

“See?” said the light.

“I see.”

And as I shrugged off my coat and hung up my hat and scarf, I decided to do a very City Thing.

Tonight, I stayed in.

Tonight, I kicked off my shoes and curled up with the in-room dining menu. I made a phone call to the local Chinese/Japanese place that partners with my hotel. And just because I could, I ordered egg drop soup to go with my salmon skin and spider rolls. I plumped up the Real Feather Pillows and settled in to catch up on a little blog reading, and less than 45 minutes later, I was sitting on my bed, sipping hot soup from a Styrofoam container and splitting my chopsticks.

My supper was delicious.

My bed is Very Corporately Comfortable.

My cold-natured little body is fantastically warm and relaxed.

And maybe later, I’ll call the Italian restaurant downstairs and order a little something Italian for dessert.

Pre-Kids, Part 1

2006-10-10T22:09:00.000-06:00

Expat and I aren't parents. Not yet. Maybe once he finishes his PhD and we both have Real Jobs. For now, though, we fall in with all those other twentysomethings who only have to worry about taking care of the laundry and the cooking and a few houseplants and whose turn it is to vacuum the 900 square foot, two-bedroom apartment we call home. This might explain why I was so desperate to get a cat: one can only elicit so much of a response from a golden pothos.

We adopted Wilbur and Orville from a great local (mostly) no-kill shelter fifteen minutes from home. We went in to get one preferably declawed older cat. We came out with two 4-month-old kittens (Expat's fault, not mine). And suddenly, we were having discussions about boundaries and discipline and enforcing rules with consistency. We had to decide what doctor to take them to and what food they should eat and whether or not their behaviors were normal for little guys their age. We bought them toys to encourage smart development. We debated the catnip issue: to try it, or not to try it, and was this the best thing for our boys? What about the occasional accidents: were they really accidents or was Orville trying to tell us something? And somewhere between the first little head cold and the long lecture about leaving Expat's things exactly as he left them on the bathroom counter, the kittens became more than just kittens. Somewhere between New Kitten Week Two and Week Six, the kittens became Pre-Kids.

For the record, we are not pet parents the way some owners of small yappy dogs are pet parents: we don't dress our cats in matching outfits or tie ribbons to their ears or carry them with us in handbags. We do, however, lapse into talking about them as though they are children, which Expat will be the first to tell you, they are not. ("How can I be their father? Who would I have to knock up to pop out a nasty furry thing like that? It's a cat, Sparky. A cat.") They come up in idle conversation at bars, in restaurants, at our Labor Day cookout. I email pictures of them to our friends and I call my mom to tell her when one of them does something especially cute. When we meet other pet parents, especially those parents of cats, we gush and coo and compare notes on our respective Pre-Kids.

In return for all this unabashed love and adoration—and, perhaps, the all-natural dry kibble I feed them twice a day—the Pre-Kids themselves purr and cavort and fetch and chase and open cupboard doors and chase spiders and wreak general havoc upon their scratching post day in and day out. Not a day goes by when they don’t make me laugh. I’m serious. I have laughed every single day since that day back in August of 2005 when we brought them home and Orville crawled up our pantry shelf and went to sleep on top of the Tupperware flour canister. Every day. Not even my husband can make me laugh every day. Not even one of my favorite cartoon strips in the local fishwrap. Not even Garrison Keillor.

And that’s all the news from Lake Furbegone, where all the Sparkys are strong, all the Expats are good looking, and all of the Pre-Kids are above average.

Scooter Envy

2006-10-04T21:21:00.000-06:00

It's official.

I have one monster case of scooter envy.

I see all these UW-Madison college students back again for the fall semester, cruising along on their Vespas and Yamaha Vinos and Honda Metropolitans and I positively ache. That should be me, I think, with the wind making my trouser-cut jeans legs flap, ruffling the small sprigs of hair sticking out from beneath my little helmet. I should be the one zipping in and out of the bike lane, waving jauntily like I was Eddie Izzard on Dressed to Kill, saying "Ciao" and smiling at everyone. That should be me getting 90 to 100 miles per gallon of fucking expensive gas, piling incidental groceries into my front scooter basket, or stowing my purse in my little secret under-the-seat storage compartment.

Life would be better on a scooter. It would be better now and would have been better 12 months ago, when I was still managing a Curves (for women) gym. Instead of stumbling out of bed at 4:30 every morning and wobbling out to the used Subaru to make my miserably early commute, I would have hopped out of bed and bounded down the stairs. After settling on to my zippy little scooter (covered in mounds of reflective tape and beaming its very bright, perky little light into the half-darkness of pre-dawn), I would zip away from our apartment, out of the hood, through the ghetto, and into middle class suburbia. I would whiz past those early morning walkers in their wind suits and track pants, ducking and weaving at my top speed of 45 miles per hour through all the quiet little streets, thrilling in my position as lone vehicle on the road.

The women who worked out at my gym would be envious. They would know that my happy and carefree demeanor was a direct result of owning a scooter. They would become disgruntled with their own positions as kid chauffeurs or head-errand-runners. They would sell their mini-vans and Chevy Suburbans and Volvos, trading in trunk room for scooter bliss. They would start making their husbands drive the kids to math club and tennis lessons. They would all ride to Curves on their scooters. Other women at other Curves would see what was happening at my Curves and they would trade in their kid-mobiles for scooters, too. All of Madison and the surrounding areas would suddenly be overrun by these middle-aged women on scooters, running their errands in cute helmets that they appliqued at the Scrapbook Shop. Together, we would become Scooter Nation, like Red Sox Nation, only we would be banishing the Curse of the the SUV instead of the Curse of the Bambino.

People would notice. Gary and Diane Heavin, those unfortunately conservative Curves founders, would start marketing a limited edition Curves Vespa, which you could only purchase with Curves bucks that you earned at the gym by exercising three times a week. Women would become more fit and more independent, setting better examples for their kids in terms of health and fitness, and establishing themselves as equals within the home, not just as errand-runners and laundry-doers.

Slowly, steadily, we would start a revolution, not just for women, but for the environment and for the world as well. Just imagine what would happen if all those soccer moms traded in their SUV's for earth-friendly mopeds. Emissions would go down, the hole in the ozone layer would start to heal itself like the lungs of a smoker who quits, and the wild weather in the tropics would calm down such that the hurricane center would only get through the letter 'C' in the alphabet. The oil barons would rent their clothes and tear their hair. Italy would become the world's new super power, borne to greatness on the back of Vespas.

George Bush would be impeached for calling scooters "unAmerican." A woman would get elected president--a nice forward thinking liberal woman. With a scooter and a Curves membership. And at the close of her inaugural speech, she would look into the cameras and say "And I want us all to remember that this is not my victory. This is a victory for the American people. This is a victory for the world. This is a victory for Scooter Nation. And this would never have been possible without that one woman with courage enough to ride her scooter out of the hood at 4:30 every morning to open that door for women everywhere."

And off in the distance, as the sun melted into a bright red shimmering puddle on the horizon, you would see the silhouette of one small woman zipping off into the great unknown, scooter basket full of incidental groceries, sprigs of helmeted hair blowing like her pant legs in the breeze.