The day got away from me and then the 49'ers got hold of me and then James Patterson wouldn't let me go.
I'll be back tomorrow with all things debate.
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Monday, September 9, 2024
Tech Made Me Smile
Smiling is not something usually associated with my interactions with technology. Groaning, moaning, growling perhaps, but not smiling. Not until Friday.
I was in my closet, evaluating outfits for the evening, when faintly, right at the edge of my brand new right hearing aid's capability, I heard the first few bars of Humoresque. A little louder, it switched to my left ear, and I realized it was my phone's ring tone.
No way on God's green earth would I have heard that without my updated assistive devices.
Even better, as I walked out of the closet toward the rest of the house the sound became progressively louder. The music led me right to my phone.
I don't remember who called. I was entranced. I was tempted to call my cell from the land line (don't judge; yes, we like our land line) just to do it all over again. Tech that seamlessly enhanced my life was hanging over my ears.
It turns out that what I found remarkable is mundane. Dr. K just nodded and asked if I had Bluetooth.
I do. The technician at Costco asked me the same question, so I'm sure a connection was made. It's still a wonderful surprise.
And it kept getting better. I can listen to music from my phone, obviating the need for the very cool but suddenly useless ear buds gifted by my son. I listened to Cory Booker's Instagram inspiration for my day instead of reading the words with the sound off because I'm sitting on the couch next to a football-comatose-husband.
They are smaller and charge faster than their predecessors. They come with a warranty and cleaning help. And they gently alert me to the fact that my phone, though no longer in my sight or within my hearing distance, has begun to demand my presence.
Tech that makes me smile. Who knew?
Friday, September 6, 2024
And Then....
As if yesterday wasn't enough, today Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against the Texas State Fair.
Because there are not enough fried items n a stick? Brother counted 58 varieties at the Iowa State Fair; was Texas not competitive enough?
Because the rides were terrifying or the lines too long or the weather wasn't great?
Nope.
The State Fair decided to ban weaponry.
The State Fair of Texas prohibits fairgoers from carrying all firearms, knives with blades over 5.5 inches long, clubs, explosive devices, ammunition, chemical dispensing devices, replicas or hoaxes, or weapons of any kind. This includes concealed carry and open carry of firearms anywhere on the fairgrounds including Cotton Bowl Stadium. This policy does not include elected, appointed, or employed peace officers.
In the past, licensed concealed carry was permitted. Not anymore.
Every year, the State Fair of Texas has an ongoing safety and security assessment, adding and adjusting security measures to ensure a safe environment for all fairgoers, employees, and vendors. For us to continue offering a safe event for all, we feel this is an important measure to implement.
Just like Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, the fair says check your guns at the door. Apparently, Ken Paxton thinks he knows better.
Once again, I have no words.
Thursday, September 5, 2024
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Done In By the Heat
The scholars kept asking if the garden was open. My car's thermometer registered in the low 90's. I wasn't planning to garden; I had neither a hat nor water. But the little boys already had hold of my hands and their destination was clear.
I was hooked.
There's not much to do when the temperatures are so high. Mr. Guy, our landscape manager, weed whacked the giant cluster of weeds beneath the hose bib, which spread out to the near garden bed. He swept up a lot of that which he cut, but there was still a lot to do.
These two set to work without being told, proudly displaying their collections of hay and dead plants before depositing them in the giant white garbage bag which is, for the time being, living in the middle of the garden.
Tasked with clearing out the beds, the scholars discovered a tree, albeit a very small tree. After some discussion about the merits of a tree growing in the garden bed, extrication was begun.
Though they toiled diligently, the big boys learned a lesson about the resilience of native plants. They find a comfy spot and hold on for dear life. And hold on this one did.
The whistle blew and recess was over for them before they'd made much progress. This little one sat all by herself for a very long time, using her fingers, a variety of trowels, and a hand rake, all to no avail.
Classmates came to help.
Getting closer and closer became more and more frustrating, but there was laughing, not cursing, and I was reminded why I love my school garden so much.
It was at this point that I realized I was sitting on the bench, wondering if I had the energy to walk into the shade. The garden's closed, I announced, and we all headed for the shade of what our still stuck in the garden tree would be if we didn't try to kill it.
We agreed that it was too hot for words, thanked one another for the help and the fun and the garden, and then I went inside and the nurse gave me ice water and an ice pack for my pulse points and some more water and quiet conversation.
Grandmas shouldn't be out in the heat without a head covering and water and access to lots of shade. Yes, to answer TBG's question when the wrung out version of his wife flopped into the house, I did learn my lesson.
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
100 Best Books?
Full of chutzpah as usual, the New York Times decided now was the time to discover The Best Books of the 21st Century.
It's not 25 years into the century. What prompted them to query hundreds of literary luminaries? Did they grow tired of promoting false equivalencies in the news section, so decided to swing their attention to literature?
There are no poetry collections (if I missed something let me know) nor histories. The marvelous new translations of the ancients are missing, too.
I've read 10 of them, and put down two of them (Atonement and The Corrections
I found familiar authors and missed many of the African and Indian novelists I've read over the last few years (
100. Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
99. How to Be Both - Ali Smith
98. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
97. Men We Reaped - Jesmyn Ward
96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments - Saidiya Hartman
95. Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel
94. On Beauty - Zadie Smith
93. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
92. The Days of Abandonment - Elena Ferrante
91. The Human Stain - Philip Roth
90. The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
89. The Return - Hisham Matar
88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis - Lydia Davis
87. Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters
86. Frederick Douglass - David W. Blight
85. Pastoralia - George Saunders
84. The Emperor of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee
83. When We Cease to Understand the World - BenjamÃn Labatut
82. Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor
81. Pulphead - John Jeremiah Sullivan
80. The Story of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante
79. A Manual for Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin
78. Septology - Jon Fosse
77. An American Marriage - Tayari Jones
76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
75. Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
74. Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
73. The Passage of Power - Robert Caro
72. Secondhand Time - Svetlana Alexievich
71. The Copenhagen Trilogy - Tove Ditlevsen
70. All Aunt Hagar’s Children - Edward P. Jones
69. The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander
68. The Friend - Sigrid Nunez
67. Far From the Tree - Andrew Solomon
66. We the Animals - Justin Torres
65. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
64. The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai
63. Veronica - Mary Gaitskill
62. 10:04 - Ben Lerner
61. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
60. Heavy - Kiese Laymon
59. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
58. Stay True - Hua Hsu
57. Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
56. The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner
55. The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright
54. Tenth of December - George Saunders
53. Runaway - Alice Munro
52. Train Dreams - Denis Johnson
51. Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
50. Trust - Hernan Diaz
49. The Vegetarian - Han Kang
48. Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
47. A Mercy - Toni Morrison
46. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
45. The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
44. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
43. Postwar - Tony Judt
42. A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James
41. Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
40. H Is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald
39. A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
38. The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño
37. The Years - Annie Ernaux
36. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
35. Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
34. Citizen - Claudia Rankine
33. Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward
32. The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
31. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
30. Sing, Unburied, Sing - Jesmyn Ward
29. The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
28. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
27. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
26. Atonement - Ian McEwan
25. Random Family - Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
24. The Overstory - Richard Powers
23. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - Alice Munro
22. Behind the Beautiful Forevers - Katherine Boo
21. Evicted - Matthew Desmond
20. Erasure - Percival Everett
19. Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe
18. Lincoln in the Bardo - George Saunders
17. The Sellout - Paul Beatty
16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
15. Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
14. Outline - Rachel Cusk
13. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
12. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
11. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot DÃaz
10. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
9. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
8. Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald
7. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
6. 2666 - Roberto Bolaño
5. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
4. The Known World - Edward P. Jones
3. Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
2. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
1. My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
Monday, September 2, 2024
Labor Day
(This is one of my favorite posts, every year. )
My Zaydeh was a paperhanger. So was his son, my uncle. They belonged to the Paperhanger's Union. When he retired, my Zaydeh got a lapel pin and a photograph of himself and the also-retiring Union Rep. The Union Rep got a pension and health insurance. No one knows if he got a copy of the photograph, too.
It was that kind of complicated relationship to Labor, with a capital L, that dominated my growing up years. Daddooooo's father owned a business. G'ma's father was a worker. That dynamic influenced their relationship in the same way that her parents' accented speech and his parents' religious devotion were there, bruising the edges of what must once have been love but wasn't anymore.
I sat on my Zaydeh's shoulders as he bounced me around the living room, singing Zum Gali Gali, a Zionist work song with one line, repeated over and over: the pioneer is meant for work; work is meant for the pioneer. When I needed a biography for a book report in second grade, G'ma suggested Eugene Debs. I was the only one in the class who wrote about the Wobblies, who knew that a Socialist ran for President from prison, who understood the plight of the working man. It was communal, it was powerful, it was us-against-the-establishment, the entrenched, the people in our way.
There was a sense that he was on the right side of an argument I didn't know we were having.
Daddooooo inherited his father's shop, working alongside his brother and the cutters and pressers and seamstresses he'd known his entire life. He took care of the girls, the worker bees, the ones who created what he tried to sell. He struggled to make a success, and failed, and among those to blame were surely the Union Guys.
I didn't understand his anger. I'm not sure that he did, either.
We needed unions - the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved that protections were necessary and that management had no interest in protecting the welfare of the worker. Without collective action, nothing could be achieved. G'ma told me stories of her parents marching in Solidarity Parades, though never when Daddooooo was around to hear. It wasn't worth giving him the chance to trash her parents' politics.
The battle between labor and management, waged over my kitchen table.
It's there, today, in discussions about the minimum wage and immigrant labor and teacher tenure. The answers don't come any easier, even six decades after Zum Gali Gali.
Stores are open, gyms and restaurants and car washes are welcoming my patronage, and it's Labor Day for crying out loud. Let the workers go home and enjoy the last weekend of the summer.
A girl can dream......
Friday, August 30, 2024
The Yellow Bus
Mentioned by dkzody in a comment, after I'd read about it in the NYTimes Book Review, I took myself to Barnes and Noble and bought The Yellow Bus.
It's much better than Shel Silverstein's much lauded (and by me, much loathed) The Giving Tree. The nasty boy turned to man just abuses and abuses that tree, and the tree just waits there and feels grateful to be helpful, even as there is less and less to give. The protagonist never changes. He just takes and takes. My synopsis has always been hurt me, hurt me again, I'll be here the next time, too.
Ugh.
Loren Long has a different take on the whole altruism thing.
Inspired by an abandoned school bus he passed while walking with his dog, Long imagined the history the bus must have lived. He thought about the town in which it lived. And then, with milk cartons and xacto knives and paper mache, he built a 10' model of the community he'd go on to draw in the book.
His sons told him he was crazy. Reading about the creation tells a different story, though.
Building it and painting it and then sketching it and painting the illustrations from it was, the NYTimes says , “the most fun I’ve had practically since junior high school.”
It brought him joy.
And for that yellow bus, all the changes and all the uses end the same way - by bringing joy.
It's a simple story with captivating images. The verbiage is calmly repetitive. The town is drawn in shades of black and grey; the bus and those who use it are colorful and different and very interesting. It drew in the English language learners and two kindergarten classrooms; they were enchanted by the whole thing.
Joy is everywhere, I told them once, I realized that they might not have heard the word. We practiced joy by making big...no, bigger...no, bigger smiles, by being the happiest we've ever been.
The Giving Tree leaves me feeling melancholy. The Yellow Bus fills me with joy.
*****
I may have overstepped just a wee bit when I mentioned that they might have heard the word joy on tv. I might have said that if they did, it might make them break out a big smile. I might have said it didn't matter who said it. Looking out at the multi-racial faces in front of me in each of the 3 rooms I've visited so far, it's possible that I said She might look like you.... or you..... or you....or He might be old, and look like me.... but it's still joy.
Just a little subversive, but also cluing them in to what's going on around them, which is not a bad thing if they are introduced to it through joy.
If I'm asked, that's what I'll tell them.
I probably won't mention that it brought me joy.
Thursday, August 29, 2024
Drive Cycle Reset
Who knew that such a thing existed? Certainly not TBG and I.
His 2014 BMW's dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree. There were unusual rumblings from deep within the vehicle. He called and was told to bring it in right now. He did. They worked on it for a day or two, reset the doohickey on the whatchamacallit, and all was well.
Or so we thought.
The car drove beautifully. TBG took his notice from the DMV to the Emissions Testing Center with a smile on his face. He left 10 minutes later, with a deep frown.
Apparently, all that work at the dealership involved turning off certain important sensors and computers. Those have to go through a Drive Cycle Reset in order for the car to be tested. If the sensors aren't available to be tested the car has not failed the test; that would be something the Emissions Testing Center could help us with. There are signs alerting us to that.
If the sensors aren't ready to be tested a Not Ready paper is produced. No one is upset that this occurred. Just drive it some more, on the highway and in town, and you'll be fine.
He did just that for a week. Went back to the ETC. Still wasn't ready.
Rinse and repeat. Three more times. The last time, we drove with a print out from the interwebs with detailed instructions on resetting the drive cycle. This included 0-50 from a dead stop, idling in gear, overrunning (letting the engine slow the car, not the brake), and a variety of slow down and speed up intervals that had me using the timer on my phone to be sure we met every specification.
It was a ridiculous but enjoyable afternoon. Not so much the result today when, for the 4th time, the car was unready to be tested. The technician was delightful and apologetic. He'd seen this story before. He had nothing to offer except condolences for the situation. The office next door could have helped us if the car had failed, but not ready was not something they were equipped to handle.
Off to the dealership, which had nothing to offer, either. Their Service Manager could drive the car around and try to reset it, but there were no guarantees. The representative was awfully sorry. So were we.
I am now waiting for the BMW Genius to reply to my email. Perhaps there will be a solution. Perhaps not. The problem is that the test must be completed in order to renew the car's registration, which expires on the 31st of this month.
He probably shouldn't drive the car with expired tags. He can't reset the drive cycle unless he drives the car. This is a conundrum.
If the BMW Genius can't help us, he will just have to try not to let a police car get behind him and notice his 2024 tag. If he's stopped, he has ream of paperwork in the car to explain the situation.
Fingers crossed............
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Something New! - A Short Rant
I was perfectly happy with the grocery store's old credit card screen. It did nothing to annoy me. For the last two days, I've had to opt out of text messaging when I enter my phone number to insure I receive all the discounts I'm entitled to in exchange for sharing my purchasing habits.
And finding the opt out space is not easy.
It's new! chirped the cashier when I grimaced.
I am not interested in new. I like old and familiar, like Tim Walz's flannel shirts.
I do not want to be tempted by offers or enticed to spend more time doing something of marginal interest. Google has a new feature that's announced in its own window, which appeared without my consent. I do not want to learn how to search even deeper by clicking here and dragging there.
It's enough of a rabbit hole as it is.
As I live the last section of my life, I am content with what exists. Maybe that old dog just didn't feel like learning any new tricks.
For today, at least, neither do I.
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