humor

My life with servants

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I love an obedient nightlight

Glutton or prankster -- I can't decide

Later I will wipe that smile off its face -- I prefer a less self-satisfied toilet lid, but my husband likes it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m old school and consider my appliances, furniture, and gadgets to be servants. I’ve heard all the debates about furniture rights and gadget liberation, but frankly, I find it beneficial to maintain clear boundaries. And although I’m worried that the bedroom set may read this blog, I’m going to write about some of the gadgets we use that have made my life bearable.

Those motion detector lights that I wrote about yesterday; we employ some in our house. One works in the garage, and as I leave each day to go to school, it says, “Watch your step, my lovely. And have a nice day.” Cheeky, but sweet.

Another one stays in the entryway between the garage and the office. This light usually says something like, “I’m sorry I can’t open the door for you, but I do what I can do.” It does double duty because the entryway is also the landing of the stairwell to the basement. That’s where the washer and dryer wait, wondering why they only see me on the weekends. We’re on speaking terms, but barely.

We also have motion detector nightlights in each bathroom and one in the front hall. They don’t require any arm waving to turn on, and they stay lit up almost two minutes after you leave the room. I love obedience, especially in nightlights. The bathroom ones are a bit chatty, and say things like, “May I help you tonight? Not sure where to put your hiney? Let me show you. No, I’m not looking.” The one in the hallway is a bit obsequious and always calls me Madam: “Good morning, Madam. Watch your toes. Madam looks like she needs coffee. The kitchen is this way.” I suspect it would like to move to the living room to be able to watch the TV. Not going to happen. My coffee pot is mercifully silent when it offers me a cup of freshly brewed coffee. It’s one of my favorites.

I try not to speak ill of the servants, but I am uneasy about the motion-operated garbage can. I haven’t decided if it is greedy or just likes to joke around. It works fine, but half the time when I walk by, it opens it maw and asks for more. It has startled both the grandchild and me several times.

My husband has his favorites, too. One is the automatic toilet lid. I personally think it puts on airs. It’s not really automatic. When it is in the upright position, you still have to give it a small push to make it go down. But once you do, it moves along at a steady pace. Then it settles down to do the somewhat thankless job of a toilet lid. I shouldn’t complain; it carries its load.

I could go on, but it’s Saturday. All week long I’ve pushed dirty clothes down the laundry chute. Now I’ve got two resentful appliances to face.

Let there be light

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Regularly appearing on TV

At the place of instruction where I instruct on a daily basis, we have motion detector lights in most of the classrooms and offices. Some of them work better than others.In the classroom I use the most, you have to walk around a bit, wave your arms, jump up and down, and do all kinds of crazy things to get the lights to turn on.  I’m sure I look strange to all of the random people walking the halls. (I use random in the informal sense of  “odd and unpredictable in an amusing way.” This adequately describes both my colleagues and most of the students.)

 

My instructing place this semester is at a smaller campus that is a satellite of the bigger campus, so when we have staff meetings, I attend via interactive TV. While everyone else gathers in a room 30 miles away, I sit in an office staring at a TV, doodling listening and recording my thoughts pictorially. I can see all of  the instructors on my screen, so they look rather small. I’m the only one on my side, so they get a close up of me and can see every move I make.

 

Device used to mute me

The microphone is a small device that looks like the triangular-shaped weapon (shuriken) used by ninjas. It sits on the table and includes a speaker button and a mute button. Sadly, I can only mute myself; there is no “mute them” button. If I leave the speaker on and at a level my colleagues can hear me, every sound I make is amplified. They tell me that when I yawn, I sound like a very bored moose. So I mute myself and do a lot of staring during the meetings.

 

When the director of our program joins us, I try to stare intelligently, stifle my moose impressions, and write copious notes that include “blah, blah, blah” a copious number of times. Thankfully, no one ever sees this copiosity.

 

Two weeks ago, the director joined us and brought papers full of numbers and charts to share. The ITV is set up so that items can be put on a document reader and then shown on my TV screen. As you can imagine, it was mesmerizing. So fascinating that I was not only struck dumb, but struck still. Caught up in the drama and suspense of all those numbers, counting on them to come through, worried they wouldn’t, I was paralyzed with interest. (By the look in your eyes as I watch you through your computer camera, I can see you are equally mesmerized just thinking about it.*)

 

Page after page the plot unfolded. Could Test Results ever satisfy Big Government? Was he cheating on her with Client Reporting? And who was Demographics really?  Just before the exciting denouement, the lights in my room went out. I did the only thing I knew to do; I began to wave my arms wildly.

 

All I could see on my TV was the document. I couldn’t see the staff or director, so I forgot that they could see me. The director stopped in mid-sentence, it became very quiet, and and then she said to staff, “What is she doing?”

 

Did I mention that I was sort of doing jazz hands as I waved my arms around?

 

It’s one of the ways I get the lights on in my classroom. The other way is to bend at the waist and make a bowing motion like you do before a potentate. Thank goodness, I didn’t do that in the meeting.

 

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*I am totally kidding about seeing you through your computer camera. That’s ridiculous. You don’t look mesmerized. But I must say, that hairstyle suits you.

Uncle Sam wants you to give thanks

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In 1941 under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the federal government mandated that Americans give thanks on the fourth Thursday in November.

 

Yes, we are required by Uncle Sam to express gratitude today, but we can do so in any way we like. We can give bear hugs and sloppy kisses to family and friends, corner people and tell them how much we love and appreciate them, pray our thanks, call someone to show some love and then cry if we want to, get sappy counting our blessings, and spill gratitude all over the dinner table. And we can do this with impunity. All day. With food. Until both our hearts and bellies are ready to burst.

 

And pardon. We can do that. I mean if our President can pardon turkeys, why can’t we?

 

So, today, don’t forget to be a good citizen. Give thanks. It’s the law.

 

 

Celebrate the holidays

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The English language learners I teach struggle with pronunciation for several reasons. Often it’s because English has sounds, like “th,” not found in their first language.  Other times they cannot hear or distinguish between two similar sounds, such as “b” and “v.” And there are times they simply mishear. For example, after hearing a short speech by a native speaker, one of my students asked me why the young woman was advocating for hippos. In fact, she was talking about pit bulls.

 

 

Native English speakers also mispronounce and mishear. Children learn “Silent Night” and then ask you why baby Jesus has to “sleep in heavenly peas.” (This is called a mondegreen.) These language errors can cause English teachers who have to grade papers to howl in horror or howl in laughter.

 

 

Language is verbal clay and there’s nothing more fun than grabbing a handful to play with. That’s one reason we read and write, isn’t it? The delight in words.

 

Yesterday at our Thanksgiving brunch, as one of the students left, she said, “Happy Tanksgiving, teacher.” I thought about that all the way home. What if we had a holiday for that?

 

 

Tanksgiving: Day of gifts from the Pentagon to the military

 

Angstgiving:  Yearlong gift-giving from teenagers to their parents

 

Spanksgiving: Day to give to the naughty  (You know who you are.)

 

Banksgiving: Government day to give bailouts.

 

Franksgiving: National Barbecue Day

 

Pranksgiving: National Tricksters Day

 

Shanksgiving: Inmate to inmate prison celebration

 

Yanksgiving: U.S. Foreign Aid Day

 

Thanksliving: Lifelong celebration of the good things in life

 

 

 

 

You always hurt the one you love

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The Mills Brothers

Do you ever wonder what your brain is doing while you sleep? If you’re like me, you also  wonder what it’s doing while you’re awake.

 

This morning I woke up with two rhymes in my head. The first (thankfully) has only one stanza, the second has two.

 

Like the majority of  people who majored in English, I’m a failed poet. That doesn’t stop me from writing it, of course, but when I fail, I tend to fail in free verse. I’m not going to try to fix or clean up the rhymes that were in my head this morning, so if you have a weak stomach, I suggest you avert your eyes from the rhyme scene. It may be too gruesome for you. The first goes like this:

 

Have you seen how love ebbs and leaves the shore

Flowing out to sea, seen no more?

Have you felt the chill when love shuts the door

Quietly because it has other places it must go?

 

I’ve written some posts about my mother recently and have been thinking how she spent her whole life looking for love. She found it for a while, but then lost it when my father died in an accident.

 

One of her pet phrases was “You always hurt the one you love.” She would often say it in a teasing way to my sister or me, but I never paid much attention to it. I learned later that it was from a hit song The Mills Brothers sang in 1944. Mother would have been in her second marriage then, getting beat up on a regular basis. For her, perhaps, it was a hit song in more ways than one. Here are the lyrics:

 

You always hurt the one you love,

The one you shouldn’t hurt at all.

You always take the sweetest rose,

And crush it till the petals fall.

You always break the kindest heart,

With a hasty word you can’t recall.

So, if I broke your heart last night,

It’s because I love you most of all.

 

I attribute my morning’s first rhyming thought to mother and the elusiveness of love. But I mentioned there were two rhymes in my head this morning. Here’s the second one:

 

Little Billy Martin

liked to pick his nose.

He liked to poke, he liked to prod

Then wipe it on his clothes.

 

When friends saw Billy Martin

They always liked to shout.

Stop it Billy Martin

and take your finger out!

 

 

Don’t ask me where that one came from. I don’t have a clue.

 

Bloggers Anonymous

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This is where I stand up and say, “Hi, my name’s yearstricken and I blog. It started in October of this year. The blog, not the writing and the drawing. That’s been going on for years. A lot of it (most?) done in secret. For years I’d make late night walks to the curb to put “stuff” in the recycling container. I didn’t want anyone to see the amount of paper I’d written or drawn on or question me about the amount of time I’d spent scribbling.

 

I have used up more paper than I care to admit. I’m saddened to think of all the trees that had to give their lives to satisfy my needs. As restitution, I have put most of my writing on my computer. The drawings require paper, but I erase a lot, which is a form of recycling. It’s been a while since my husband has innocently picked up a piece of paper thinking it was a harmless grocery list only to find he was face to face with a poem in free verse. That was awkward and unsettling for both of us.

 

My poor family has had to endure a number of painful and uncomfortable moments when I have either thrust a piece of paper into one of their hands or cornered one of them by saying, ‘Would you like to hear what I wrote?’ It’s the equivalent of being accosted by a dirt-encrusted wino who puts his arm around you and asks for some spare change. Except the wino lives with you and is called mother or wife. That’s me, folks.

 

But that’s not the end of my ability to unsettle. Earlier this year, I started sending out my words to a select group of strangers, called editors. You have no idea the amount of sorrow and regret I caused them. Response after response came in saying, ‘We’re sorry…we regret to inform…’ Talk about guilt.

 

So I started blogging. My family is visibly relieved. Editors throughout the United States are sleeping better. And I discovered that blogging is an acceptable form of begging for spare change, or in blogese, asking if someone would like to hear what I wrote.”

 

 

 

The world of blog is full of creative, kind, funny, brilliant, and generous people. And kind, I mentioned that, right? One of these shiny beings who creates ten beautiful things before breakfast every day (or so it seems) nominated me for an award. Her name is kathryningrid. She lives over on kiwsparks street. She has regular parties there, and if you go, she will encourage you to dance, sing, paint, make pictures, and build castles out of words. Thank you, kathryningrid.

 

I am supposed to share seven things about myself you don’t know.

  • I have never owned a house.
  • I deliberately shoplifted once when I was a teenager: a tube of Coppertone. This year I had to have cryosurgery on two small patches on my face because of too much sun exposure when I was young. See, crime never pays. Back then, Coppertone didn’t protect your skin.
  • A few years later, I accidentally shoplifted a tube of lipstick. I was at a drugstore looking at makeup sets and was wearing a wraparound skirt with large pockets. When I got home, I found the lipstick in one of the pockets. It must have fallen in when I was picking up the sets. It was bright red, not my color. I didn’t know how to explain it to the store clerk, so I threw it away.
  • I love music from the likes of the Carter Family and their album Gold Watch And Chain: Their Complete Victor Recordings 1933-1934. My children prefer toothpicks in the eyeballs to this kind of music. Oddly “toothpicks in the eyeballs” is not the name of an actual band.
  • I am not particularly musical but during a very difficult time in my life, I wrote two blues songs.
  • I find it difficult to talk about myself. Writing is different. It’s more like what you do in a confessional: talk about yourself with the hopes that whoever is eavesdropping will forgive you and love you anyway.
  • The first time I took a blood test, I passed with an A-. Not bad, huh?

One of the rules of the award is to nominate others. Three of these websites I was going to pick had just been nominated, so I didn’t include them. Once I have time to work more on my website, I will make a blog roll like I see on the real bloggers’ sites.

  • k8edid – funny and nobody makes buttons like this woman
  • corpora – an applied linguistics researcher who plays with words
  • Boomerrantz – funny boomer ranter who now goes by her real name
  • kvenna ráð – bring oxygen, she may take your breath away

The Law of the Toilet and Stephen Hawking

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This is a rant and it’s short. Like my temper sometimes. Or my dollars. (A day late and a dollar short.)

 

It’s bad enough that toilet paper in public places has to be locked up in plastic boxes. Boxes designed to hold two rolls: a new roll on one side and a roll with five sheets of paper on the other side.

 

There’s a reason for this. It’s the law. Physics said so.

 

You may remember learning about the law of the toilet in physics class. This can be written as N > 5. Let N stand for the need of the toileter who gets down to business and 5 stand for the maximum number of toilet paper sheets allowed on the first roll.

 

Dispenser designers are constrained by this law. They must obey. This means you have to put your hand up the contraption to push open the plastic flap that is hiding the new roll of toilet paper. Said plastic flap only opens about an inch, so you have to use your fingertips to spin the toilet roll in hopes that you can find that loose piece of paper that gets the whole thing rolling. Good luck with that.

 

That was actually my pre-rant.

 

Maybe the designers had an Edison moment and all their light bulbs turned on at once, or maybe they heard that some talented people with long, skinny fingers were getting the second roll started and so the thrill was gone. We’ll never know (unless we hunt them down and force them to talk). But one day, they decided to make it easy for us to get all of the toilet paper we want.

 

They designed dispensers with a small hole at the bottom. These have one gigantic roll of toilet paper in them, and there is always a sheet or two hanging out for you to start pulling. Go ahead, take as much as you would like. Thoughtful, no?

 

No, because as you pull it through that hole in the bottom, the nice flat sheets of toilet paper are transformed into toilet floss. Yes, just like the floss you use for your teeth, only not as strong.

 

The two-roll dispensers obey the law  N > 5 and are based on mechanical physics. The new dispensers are based on string theory. I blame Stephen Hawking.

 

Pushing the right buttons

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Last month when my brother came to Wisconsin for a visit, we spent the weekend driving around to admire the changing colors. On that Saturday, my brother, husband, daughter, grandchild, and I spent the day up north taking pictures, visiting a pumpkin patch, and enjoying the weather.

We went in my car, but my husband drove. My brother sat up in the front with him, and the rest of us were in the back seat. When we came home that evening, we were all tired. My husband pulled into the garage next to his car, and everyone got out except me.

When I reached in my purse, I must have hit the alarm on the key fob, setting off the horn. I started punching the alarm button, but nothing happened. So, I started punching the other buttons that have nothing to do with the alarm. Makes sense, right? While doing so, I locked the doors.

Flustered by my lack of results, all I could think of to do was to keep punching that same button again and again. (The classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.) My husband could see that I was punching the right one. So he thought, if it isn’t her car alarm that is bursting our eardrums, maybe it’s mine. So, he pushed the alarm button on his key fob. Do you see how well suited we are for one another?

Now, both car alarms were blaring. My husband was standing by his car pushing his button, which made his alarm go on and off. I was sitting in the back seat of my locked car doing the same, wondering why my car wouldn’t listen to me.

My brother and daughter were standing next to my car laughing and talking above the din. He said, “Do you think she will figure it out?” My daughter shook her head, “I doubt it.” Then he yelled something over to my husband who knocked on my window and yelled at me to unlock the car.

He opened the door and said, “It’s your other key fob.”

Yes, I have two key fobs. One is actually a remote starter, and the other one came with the car. I had been sitting in the back seat pushing the alarm on the remote starter. As soon as I punched the button on the right key fob, the alarm went off.

My brother and daughter said it was a lot of fun watching us. I wish I could have seen it, but I was too busy sitting in the back seat pushing buttons over and over.

Fall color in Wisconsin

The reds and oranges

Corn for the silo

Words can be tricky

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In the summer of 2010, my brother invited me to visit him in Europe. Although I have lived and traveled in Asia, this was my first time to go there. I still have not found the right words to express how much I enjoyed that trip.

This past summer, he invited me back, and we are making plans for next year. You’re probably thinking I am fabulously wealthy, but I’m not. My brother covered most of the expenses for both trips. And no, I will not introduce you to him.

In Italy, we traveled to Tuscany and stayed in a hotel, a former villa, near Montepulciano. We each had our own room to enjoy the vineyards and olive groves that surround the villa.

By the time we arrived in Tuscany, we had already been to several Italian cities, walked through numerous museums, and seen countless signs in Italian. You can pick up a lot of Italian words if you pay attention.

The rooms were lovely, but one of the first things my brother noticed was something near the ceiling that looked like a camera. The ceiling was high, so he couldn’t inspect it. He turned the lights on and off, but the box didn’t change or light up.

Then he read the guest brochure on the nightstand. The first part was titled “In camera – In room”. He was miffed, so he immediately went down to the front desk and asked the clerk why there was a camera in the room.

The person at the front desk spoke English, but as my brother expressed his outrage about being videotaped in the privacy of his room, the clerk looked more and more perplexed. “No, sir, there are no cameras,” he insisted. Two other workers were at the front desk at the time, and they all nodded their heads.

My brother had the brochure with him and triumphantly pointed to the words. “See, it says right here that there is a camera in the room.”

When my brother came up to my room and told me what he had done, I laughed myself silly. “You knew?” he asked. While strolling through museums, we had seen the word “camera” countless times. It is the Italian word for “room.” Since we had seen it so often, I assumed that he knew too. Although the information in each section of the brochure was written in English (for the English-speaking guests, I’m sure) the titles over each part were in both languages. But my brother didn’t read all of it because as soon as he saw the words camera and room together, he had to protest.

This is one of my favorite memories of our time in Italy. And it’s a memory we share with the entire staff of that villa. I’m sure they have told the story as many times as we have. I know that the entire time we stayed there, the staff smiled at us more than any of the other guests.

The explanation the clerk gave my brother was that the little metal box that looked like a camera was part of the lighting system. My brother accepted that “In camera – In room” was merely a translation, but both nights, just in case, he threw a towel over that metal box before he went to sleep.

The road leading to the villa

The lavender-lined road

More lavender

The villa