The Burrow

We're going to get smarter. I'll be back next week, with things to say about Christians and Muslims and Jews and modernity and friends and Ithaca and college and life without a car. And, about weather and flora and travel and friends. Til then......

I just spoke to a wonderful young man. Wes is his name, and dispute resolution's his game. Say what you will about Kobe or LeBron, Wes is the best player at his position in America today. If you've been following the saga of my computer from hell, you know that I wasn't asking for much. All I wanted was a device which would recognize the peripherals and not annoy me. A machine which promised reliability in the simplest of operations : turning on and off. A machine which didn't thwart my every attempt to cut-and-paste in a document (in fairness, this may have been a Vista issue) and which would allow me to download the driver for my printer from the manufacturer's website and to install that driver efficiently. Without 3 different downloads, each resulting in a different error message/help window. Without random demands to save a document I only wanted to print and then not letting me save it once I'd given up and decided to go along to get along with the damn t...

Explaining Twitter to TBG today over lunch, I began to think about popularity. He'd asked me how people knew about your tweets. "Depends on how popular you are, I guess." But then I wondered, if you tweet and no one cares are you really anyplace at all? Living in the fast lane, being off the grid, achieving your 15 minutes of fame -- these I understand. Assessing your social status based on the number of Facebook friends you've acquired is a little more difficult for me. Some of it is generational, I know. In my age cohort it is still acceptable to eschew social networking sites. I think I am friends with everyone in my address book who's also on Facebook, but that is nowhere near the totality of people with whom I am in contact. I wish they all used it (the birthday reminders are especially lovely!) but they don't and I understand why. The idea that everyone else would care that you'd finished exams or gone to the dentist or (my favorite) were bo...

There is a lot of wildlife where I live. The quail eggs have hatched and the babies are little puffballs waddling across the road with mom in the front and dad in the middle of the street watching for traffic. Seriously - he looks both ways and squawks at the last one to hurry up and waits until they are all on the other side of the road before he flies - low to the ground, it's more skipping than actual flight - over to join them on the sand. I've seen at least 2 families - one has 6 or 7 chicks and the other parents are just tending to 2 - in our front yard today. There are other families along the street; one stopped traffic in 2 directions at the intersection this morning. Shades of Make Way for Ducklings . A coyote just walked across the street. He's one of two who travel through our neighborhood. I've never had a nodding acquaintance with a wild animal before. It's very strange. The first few nights we slept here we were aggravated by the teenage boys hootin...

Spent 3 hours of a beautiful holiday weekend setting myself up to be crushed. Wonderful. So glad to have invested the time and energy. Especially the energy. Cornell Lacrosse was, improbably to some, in the finals of the NCAA Championship series. Playing Syracuse, their cross-lake rivals. The only place in NYState with worse weather than Ithaca. I can't even type full sentences. I just have random bits of emotion floating from my fingers to the screen. Cornell was leading until the last 4.5minutes of the game. Up a goal early, they capitalized on Syracuse's inability to play through the entire penalty period and scored 3 goals within 1 second of the end of 3 man-up possessions. Just as Herb Brooks admonished his Olympic Gold Medal team, Cornell played til the whistle blew. And they were rewarded for their efforts. Up 3 goals with 5 minutes left to play. 3-0 when leading in the last 2 minutes of the game this season. And boom-boom-boom they fall apart, let Syracuse score, don...

I used to march in the Memorial Day parade. I was dressed in my Brownie uniform, and then in my Girl Scout uniform - replete with those hated anklets. I wore them because they said you couldn't march without them and marching was too cool to pass up, but the shame............ All the school bands marched too, and Benjamin Road provided the materials and the labor to make the capes the high school kids wore. There must have been a military presence there, but I didn't pay enough attention to notice. I was marching and I knew that, all over America, other kids were being Americans and marching, too. It was great. In Marin, the Memorial Day parade was always good for a controversy or two. Or three. Should the anti-war protesters walk alphabetically in the main march, or have their own march, or walk 50 yards behind the official march? I especially liked this discussion: should weaponry be allowed? That was fairly disingenuous even for Marin. There were bands at this parade...

Today's Kevin's birthday. We've been friends for nearly 40 years. His parents were my "faux parents" at graduation. My favorite picture of that day is all of us sitting on and around his (very impressive) father's lap on the steps of the Mies van der Rohe building with the big glass windows and the broad concrete steps. We've lived through girlfriends from Minot and his exile to St. Louis and his absolute refusal to pay for parking (even in Chicago - in the winter - when the movie was about to start). I can't watch The Big Chill without remembering his mother's comment as our crowd left the theatre (of course she came - she was a part us, wasn't she?!) - "Why don't they just grow up?!?" And we laughed, because we knew, even if she didn't, that we were them and we weren't ready to be grown up. Not quite yet. Board games and old movies at The Biograph and basketball on the hoop over the door between the kitchen and the liv...

A question for my female readers over the age of 15: Would you go back to being 12 again? OK, you can stop screaming now. I am absolutely confident that the thought of living through that year or so makes you want to leave the room and begin drinking. Even if it is 6am. And you're underage. Or your medicines contraindicate it. I don't care how old you are, you still remember. It's a horrifying idea. The year The Little Cuter turned 12, I was sitting at the kitchen table writing the 10 or so holiday cards I'd send to my close but far-flung friends. "I'm doing...... TBG is....... The Big Cuter's so...... and The Little Cuter is trying to survive being a 12 year old girl." TBG, reading over my shoulder, was appalled. How dare I? It was pure projection. Just because being 12 was a nightmare for me didn't mean the the same was true for our darling daughter. It was inappropriate and unsuitable and I should stop writing it. I let him...

G'ma wouldn't dance with me this afternoon. Not to the polka. Not to the waltz. And certainly not to the bebop. Yes, it was The Wednesday Social at the old folks home and the residents were out in full force. Free wine, free beer, free snacks --- almost like a fraternity party. Well, ok, not exactly, but as close as G'ma's likely to get these days. There was a notice in the mailbox that a box had arrived, so we went to the desk and collected it and brought it back to the chairs where she'd been sitting with friends. We tried to open it. Was there a sale on tape? Were the contents so valuable that opening the box required 6 hands, 1 pen knife and 5 minutes of giggles? Suggestions were given, the box was turned over and over, the knife wasn't tough enough, and we finally just gave up and ripped it to shreds. The ladies decided that it was the most fun they'd had all week. Inside, an old friend had framed a picture of the African Violet she'd taken from G...

Tony Kornheiser is off Monday Night Football. I agree with him - he did get better over the 3 years he tried to be entertaining and sometimes almost maybe well not really all that often got there. Now Chucky will be sitting in the booth, waiting until another slot in the revolving door that is NFL coaching opens up and lets him slip right back in. *** Howard Cosell was sui generis; I can't think of MNF without Howard's face and voice lurking in a back corner. I never could hate him quite as much as it seemed that I ought to hate him. Maybe because he and Daddooooo weren't that different. There was something about men of that time and place and background that made them look for the slippery banana peel instead of smelling the roses. **** Stephen A. Smith and Bill Walton are blessedly absent during these playoff broadcasts. Smith is just an idiot - yes, I know that's an easy out but he really doesn't deserve more finger movement on the keyboard. Walton...

Computer problems put me in a place unlike any other. I whine. I can't concentrate on anything else. The angst permeates every piece of every day. I'm not exaggerating. The Cuters know to steer clear, but that only makes it worse. I ought to be the grown-up. I ought to be able to fix it. It's not my fault that this new Dell won't recognize my Nikon or my Ipod or my GPS. How could it possibly be my fault? The machine was delivered. I unpacked it. I plugged in the cables and connectors correctly. It turned on (which was somewhat of a miracle since the unit it was replacing never did turn on -- even after I spent 2 hours dissassembling the green boards in the back of it with the tech guy urging me on from somewhere in southern Asia). I uploaded the necessary software - the newest iterations, which came directly from the products' websites. When the first USB port didn't work, I tried another. And another. I plugged the keyboard into the offending por...

Bull Durham (20th Anniversary Edition) (Sorry, regular readers. Further notes on newspapers - which was promised on Friday - will have to await another post.) *************** Professional baseball has farm teams. Promising players can be drafted out of high school and sent to the minor leagues to hone their talents and become the emotionally mature adults that living away from home on $23/day while surrounded by tobacco chewing and spitting equally mature young adults will make them. More academically inclined (and, perhaps, less physically talented) high school seniors would go on to Arizona or USC or Stanford or LSU or Texas and graduate before being drafted and sent to the minor leagues where they could continue to hone their talents while being the emotionally mature adults that spending 4 years on a college campus as a pampered National Champion had made them. (If I've gotten this far without your wondering where the Bull Durham link is lurking, then you're probab...

I'm one of a dying breed, or so I've been told. I read newspapers. Lots and lots of newspapers. And I read them every day. I can't eat my oatmeal without the comics and Ann Landers (or whoever is writing that column now.... it'll always be Ann Landers to me). I read the local news to find out who's been robbed or crashed a car into a light pole or won a spelling bee or donated her house to the homeless coalition. High school sports are a big part of my morning, too. Softball, wrestling, track and field - I'll never go to watch them participate, but I keep up with the standings and know when CDO beats Salpointe . Memories of Sunday morning on the living room floor with Newsday 's comics still make me smile. Letters to the Editor were always good for a diversion - did I know anyone who'd been published? What was for sale in the want ads? Then, on to the Sam Goody ad in The New York Times ; plotting where to invest my allowance based on whose albums were o...

I like old movie credits. TCM 's movies are run with the credits first, so I know in advance that I'm going to love the music since Leo Forbstein is the Music Director. Natalie Kalmus is listed as the color coordinator for almost all the Technicolor movies we watch; I remember this because I had a classmate in elementary school named Marlene Kalmus so Natalie's name jumps out at me from the credits every time. I note dresses by Adrienne and Irene and wonder why Edith Head used two names. Then, the movie starts and, having "read the introduction" through the credits, I'm well prepared to enjoy the show. Occasionally, the credits are actually part of the film. Juno is a great example of this; video snippets allow all the characters to update their status (I especially like the track team) as the main characters sing and the credits roll at the end. Out-takes during the credits are often some of the best parts of the movie; watch Jamie Lee Curtis try to ...

There's not a woman alive who can honestly say she's never thought about her weight. Positive thoughts, negative thoughts, disgusted thoughts, proud thoughts - we've all had them. *** I remember how excited I was when I finally weighed 100 pounds. I was 15 or 16 years old. Daddoooo took me to Jahn's Ice Cream Parlor in Rockville Centre where we splurged on double banana splits (with extra whipped cream and nuts, please, and 3 cherries). *** Seret introduced me to the concept of thoughtful eating. "Making wise choices" about what went into your mouth was a very nice way to explain healthy eating to a 4 year old. *** The notion of obesity as a contagious disease was a funny story line in Boston Legal, but I think it has some merit. Listening to Max, the morbidly obese 16 year old brother and son of the equally unhealthy father/son team of Biggest Loser contestants, makes it clear. He liked being one of 3 "big guys". Neither he nor his brother we...

Maybe it's not "too easy for the Cavaliers this post-season". Maybe they are just that good. LeBron denies a basket, lopes down the court and stuffs it in for 2. Delonte West, faster than a speeding bullet and stuffs it. ***** I wrote that when Dick Stockton said it, about 2 minutes into the first quarter of the 4th game of the Eastern Conference semi-finals series. It was a "reminder post" - just there so that I'd remember to use it. I'd fix it up later. Then I went back to watch the game. And the Cavaliers were suddenly behind. And LeBron couldn't make a lay-up. And the Hawks were stealing the ball. And I knew that it was my fault. I'd jinxed it by writing it down. Anyone who's ever "had a team" knows what I'm talking about. Maybe you have your lucky shirt. Wearing that Frank Gore jersey focuses your energy, and Frank feels it. You know he does. Perhaps it's a towel you wring and un-wring and wring again dur...

I'm as big an NPR nerd as the next Ivy Leaguer . It's always the first button on my car radio. I cried when Susan Stamberg retired and smiled when Scott Simon married. I was as proud as his mother must have been when Jason Beaubien went from KQED to NPR's Foreign Desk. I've inculcated the love into others, too. There's a generation of girls who played soccer in Northern California between 1992 and 2003 who will forever associate Car Talk with riding in my car to early Saturday and Sunday morning games. The Big Cuter and I still laugh about "driveway stories" - the ones that force you to stay in the car so you can hear the end, whether you're in the driveway at home or the parking lot at the Santa Cruz Beach/Boardwalk . My email describing Middle Brother's "real lawn" lawn furniture - made on his lawn with grass seed over chicken wire - was the closing item read by Neal Conan on a Talk of the Nation program on Do-It-Yourself projec...

G'ma and Daddoooooooo never fought on Mothers' Day. At least not in the morning. We three kids would be dressed and waiting for Daddoooooooo as soon as the sun was up. First stop was the florist for a gardenia corsage. Wrapped in a big box with an even bigger white ribbon it had the longest pin through the foliage. You had to be very very careful not to touch the flower or it would turn brown. That's why the pin was so long; Mommy wouldn't have to worry about brushing the petals with a pin that big. Then we went to the bakery for a prune danish. We never bought anything else that morning, though we usually had fresh rye bread and rolls and cookies on Sundays. But on Mothers' Day we were all about Mommy. And only about Mommy. Home to the kitchen, where eggs and toast and coffee (instant with just enough milk and 1 sweetener in the blue packet) went on a tray decorated with whatever craft projects our teachers had helped us to create that year. Lilacs o...

TBG and I have acquired, without any forethought or planning, friends who are much younger than we are. Decades younger. Many many decades. I'm not babysitting the Amster's sons when they are here playing Leggo s. Just ask the 5 year old: "She's not a babysitter. It's a playdate." Having moved the Cuters' toys from Chicago to Marin to Arizona over the last quarter of a century, that is welcome news. My role is strictly support staff. I find "the guys" and the kids create the world in which they destroy each other. We switch heads and weaponry and headgear and pennants. They fantasize moats and dragons and - as if by magic - out comes the dinosaur box and we have "real" monsters to attack our forts. When we needed "something way bigger" for protection, Construx provided just the pieces we required. (An aside: how sad is it that Construx are no longer available?) The neighbors get into the act, too. A grandson visiting ...

There were some strange people at the gym on Sunday. The Amster and I can usually count on welcoming smiles from the regulars as we lift and grunt and sweat and lift again. We've been at it together for almost two years, now, and it just keeps getting better. Not that we keep getting better. Like everyone else who's ever exercised on a regular basis, occasionally we have been derailed by life. But we're still having fun, with her Army mojo and me quoting Arnold between sets. Most gyms have a demographic - 20-somethings on the prowl gyms, women who want to show their exercising selves only to other women gyms, 50+ retired Yuppies and their much younger trainers' gyms, serious 'roid gyms. Our gym defies categorization. Tattoos are everywhere, and TBG and I were taken aback at first. Body art's not our thing (just ask my nieces) and we were about ready to dismiss the wearers. That is, until TBG watched the most heavily decorated young man gently and kindly ...

The first summer we lived here I fell hard for Caesalpinia pulcherrima, the Mexican Bird of Paradise. Went to my favorite nursery and bought 3 gorgeous just about to but not quite in bloom 5 gallon plants the day before the yard guys were coming to spruce up our little piece of the desert for the first time. I always liked working along side the garden guys. In Marin, Jose and his crew loved the plants as much as I did. They'd randomly stroke the tops of the agapanthus as we talked, slight grins on their faces as the leaves tickled their palms. You can't go wrong with landscapers who caress the plants they tend. So, when Len and Linda drove up with their worker bees, I was there to meet them. Dressed in long sleeves (I do learn , and sometimes I remember, too) and my pants with the rubber pads in the knees and my yellow waterproof clogs and my wide-brimmed hiking hat, I was ready. Trowel in hand, I offered to dig the trench for the spaghetti tubing to the first Bird ...

Gardening in the desert is unlike anything I've ever done before. And I don't mean just unlike any gardening I've ever done before. This is the first time I've ever willingly put my body at risk because I was having fun - our yard is filled with prickers and glochids and spines on which I kneel or against which I brush with alarming regularity. I don't like getting up close and personal with wild creatures, and yet here they run rampant as I putter. I like doing what I want to do when I want to do it but here I seem perfectly content to wait for the air to cool down so the snakes will go back into their holes. I love the feel of cool, dark soil with big, fat earthworms inching their way along. At least, that's what I remember that soil feels like. Here in the middle Sonoran Desert, 2350' above sea level, no matter what they say, this is dirt. I know what soil feels like, and this is definitely dirt. This ground laughs at trowels and demands the picka...

SILVER LINING DEPARTMENT:  Because it took Mine That Bird's trainer so long to crutch to the winners' circle, the jockey got to trip around the track, high fiving his big smile red coated escort and bumping fists with the guys in the blue Visa logo jackets while the crowd roared its approval.  The announcers were silent as Calvin Borel shared his joy - a perfect tv moment. ************************************** Why was Pizza Hut (via Yum Brands) the lead advertiser for The Derby when Louisville is Papa John's corporate backyard ? *************************************** Charles Barkley is becoming much less interesting as we both get older. ****************************************** I liked Jack Kemp - he wasn't as annoying as most Republicans are.  RIP, Congressman. ************************************************ TBG used the foliage surrounding the course at Quail Hollow to deduce that it wasn't in California and so couldn't be where we'd vacationed with T...

I love the Kentucky Derby. I love the hats and the bugle and the colors and the mint juleps. Especially the mint juleps. We used to host an Annual Kentucky Derby Party, with printed invitations and bow-tied bartenders. We had Kentucky Derby stirrers and napkins and betting tickets, which I bought directly from Churchill Downs. The race was on tv's in a couple of rooms and 60 or 70 of our closest friends and associates would yell and scream and laugh and hug. We always talked about having a live Dixie-land band, but we always decided that they'd just be one noise too many, so we stuck with some cd's on random repeat and no one seemed to care. Today, the track was a mucky mess ("fast wet" pronounced the announcers who agreed that they each knew what the other meant, but neither of whom deigned to share with the class) and there were a lot of very well-dressed people tromping through it. So, I had to wonder aloud to TBG : Do those people HAVE TO or GET TO wal...

I was watching a pick-up basketball game while doing my push-ups at the gym. 6 guys in their 20's, none of them particularly buff, all wearing shirts. So, I wondered, how do they know who their teammates are? Quickly recognizing the color of your side's jersey, looking for shirts or skins, these are pieces of information which I've always imagined to be critical while playing a team sport. Hmmmm. I was doing 4 sets of 15, so there was lots of time to watch. And as I watched, I realized that they didn't need to recognize their teammates. They weren't passing. They weren't playing defense, except against the ball. It was run-and-gun, look-at-me shooting. Not basketball. I've followed college basketball since the 1970's - it was either learn it or lose TBG to the NCAA for the semester. I came to love the flow and the pulse of the game. There were only 5 players to keep track of and I knew them not only by number but by their faces and their physi...

"Are you going out in THAT???" I feel that way, sometimes, reading grammatically incorrect newspaper articles or blogs, or listening to newscasters and sportscaster mangle the language. Doesn't anybody care anymore? Are we living our lives so publicly now (says she, blogging away) that the boundary between formal prose and conversation and the lapses we allow in private has disappeared? TBG asked me last night if grammar had really changed so that "come to the mall with Jim and I" is now acceptable. Our local paper has a terrible time with it's and its, and so do some of my favorite correspondents and blogger s. The Little Cuter and I go around correcting people all the time, and yes, we accept their critiques right back. How else can we improve? I always thought that speaking well was the cornerstone of broadcast news. Walter Cronkite, Jim McKay, Susan Stamberg - these people could think on their feet. Because it's not only reading the copy, it's im...

"Are you going out in THAT???" I feel that way, sometimes, reading grammatically incorrect newspaper articles or blogs, or listening to newscasters and sportscaster mangle the language. Doesn't anybody care anymore? Are we living our lives so publicly now (says she, blogging away) that the boundary between formal prose and conversation and the lapses we allow in private has disappeared? TBG asked me last night if grammar had really changed so that "come to the mall with Jim and I" is now acceptable. Our local paper has a terrible time with it's and its, and so do some of my favorite correspondents and bloggers. The Little Cuter and I go around correcting people all the time, and yes, we accept their critiques right back. How else can we improve? I always thought that speaking well was the cornerstone of broadcast news. Walter Cronkite, Jim McKay, Susan Stamberg - these people could think on their feet. Because it's not only reading the copy, it's imp...