The Burrow

TBG discovered that his friends in the early morning spin classes all watch  Leave It To Beaver  as they get ready for the day.  He thought it was charming.  I found it alarming.   Yes, it's funny and surprising and interesting that they all ended up there.  But the thought of all those people starting their routines in a hailstorm of bad parental behaviors makes me squeamish. Take today's episode, where June invites Wally's secret crush on a family picnic.... without asking Wally's opinion on the matter.  Or last week, when Ward and June, snooping through Beaver's diary filled with imaginary adventures,  believe the tales are real and decide he's become a reckless and dangerous human being right under their very noses.  Do they talk to him?  Of course not.  They react and act out and the confusion is supposed to be funny. Whoever said that helicopter parenting began in the 21st century? I don't remember any of this.  I wa...

We had a wonderful day celebrating our anniversary on Sunday.  It became exponentially more wonderful when I declared it a No Unpleasant Thoughts  day. Starting a conversation then stopping became thinking a thought and banishing it before it made its way to our mouths.  It didn't take long.   TBG says he still had the thoughts, he just didn't share them.  I was blissfully unaware of that, and I don't think it mattered at all.  There was a lot less foot tapping and random grimacing (I can tell when he's thinking about FFOTUS) and no ranting at the universe. We were curating our space.  Despair was not invited. I woke up on Monday and wished TBG a Happy Absolutely Nothing Day.  I decided to declare that the day came with only one requirement: No Unpleasant Thoughts permitted.   We've been celebrating it ever since. We are citizens of the world, however.   After we get our morning fill of the news (a short shot, not even 10 ...

TBG read the news on the chyron scrolling beneath one of his ESPN talking head shows.   We called Little Cuter immediately.  Our daughter got to squeal (just a little) to us before she said that she couldn't wait to share the news with FlapJilly. Um..... honey.... the kid's in middle school.   My guess is that someone discovered the news right away (a text? scrolling? an alert?) and the scream started there and quickly spread through the student body, releasing joy and love and I knew it would happen  into the ether.   TBG and I have been imagining the wave of sound, the jumping up and down, the impossibility of teaching anyone anything until the good news has been properly processed.   She'll be excited when she gets home.  There will be much hugging and Instagram scrolling.  Joyful behaviors will occur. Mom just won't be first. After years of carefully curating the flow of information to her children, that has to be a bit of ...

It was my Cousin Hilary's birthday.  It's the Kibbitzer's birthday.  It's the day after our wedding; G'ma had a birthday cake for them at our party. The Kibbitzer arrived at our wedding with a world class bruised eyeball. the result of a bike accident best not recounted.  I mention it only because G'ma remembered the fact of him and his injury long into her dementia. It's funny, the things we remember. I spent August 25th thinking about the hand me downs that I hated and the cousin I revered.  She introduced me to  Seventeen  and the nail polish ads therein.  We watched the 4 o'clock Million Dollar Movie on her living room floor.  She took me on a double date when I was just 14. For some reason, G'ma thought that was a good idea. She played the flute and read lots of books and her college boyfriend (now her husband) introduced me to my first serious boyfriend. The Kibbitzer drives to Tucson every winter, and sometimes we're lucky enough to have T...

Spent the day with my sweetie.  I'll be back tomorrow.  It was a great anniversary. 

In September, 1970, I hitched a ride with a cute blonde in a red convertible. In August, 1975, I married him in my parents' back yard.   On Sunday, we will celebrate the passage of time, even though I remember it all as if it were yesterday.   We may be gray and wrinkly in real life, but in my mind I see us like that picture.  Me, in my perfect hat and dress.  He, sweltering and smiling in a three piece suit in the humidity on Long Island after a night of rain.  We were surrounded by those we loved.   Fifty years later, we haven't aged a bit.

  Anonymous  commented on yesterday's post , that it matters where you get your news.  They (using a non-gendered pronoun) heard   that when flying back from Alaska, Trump said he was calling those European leaders and they were invited. To add to it, he called Putin after the meeting to tell him what was done as he said he had promised he would do. Others agreed with my reply: I believe nothing that comes from the White House. Misinformation influencing foreign policy is nothing new (Teddy Roosevelt's Remember the Maine?  Mission Accomplished?).  What we are witnessing now, though, is a total disregard for facts (D.C.'s crime rate? mail in ballot fraud? 7 wars ended?) across the spectrum.  The man picks up a Sharpie and all of a sudden hurricane Dorian is hitting Alabama. https://tinyurl.com/4r4dkntp So, even though it's really trivial in the grand scheme of things, I think it makes a difference whether the foreign leaders were invited by President Z...

On the Riviera, (French President Macron) was having fun with water sports. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian leader, was on vacation in) Greece .   Just a typical, sleepy, Saturday in August for the leaders of the free world.   Except FFOTUS was kowtowing to his puppet master in Alaska.   By Monday, they, and  U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, President of the  European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen,  and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, showed up on FFOTUS's doorstep.  They were not invited.  They showed up with the guest of honor, Ukrainian President Zelensky.  Checkmate; he couldn't turn them away.   He thought he could demand Ukrainian capitulation to the Russian Empire with impunity.  Turns out there are grownups in the world who have no interest in giving Putin a stolen foothold in Europe, and they showed up both to support Presid...

I promised that the garden would be open today.  I wrote it in chalk on the outer wall.  I could not disappoint them.  The triple digits registering on the thermometer could not deter me. If only I had remembered to bring my water bottle. I met the kindergarteners in the cafeteria, exchanged hugs and high fives with the third grade as they came in, and walked back to the garden.  By the time I had opened the umbrella and used the key to turn on the water, in came the third grade garden leaders, with some friends in tow. What can we do?  That's a good question given that the soil is much too hot to host new life.  The weeds are deeply entrenched; not a great first project of the year.  But I remembered that the Much Adored Principal asked me that morning if my water was on.  They are so hot out there.   Did she mind if they got wet?  No... with a smile...  Actions have consequences.    With approved water play in mind, the ...

For the third time this month, Comcast decided that our service was an expendable part of their inventory.  Appointments were promised but never fulfilled.  We stayed home and waited, three times, with no technician knocking at my door. After each failed appointment, the next step was to spend an hour or so trying then managing to reach a supervisor after navigating chat hell.  Everyone along the way wanted to help me reboot the tv.  They didn't seem to care that we'd been there/done that with several prior iterations of the same request, all to no avail. Supervisors eventually entered the chat, all with Southeast Asian names, all totally delightful as chat partners, none remotely capable of securing a technician to resolve the issue.   At the end of each chat session, with an appointment time in hand, I gave the agent a rating of 10.  None of those promises resulted in a solution.  Unfortunately, there is no way to go back in time and change thei...

I haven't logged on to the app in more than a year.... probably closer to two years.... or for however long ago I decided Mark Zuckerberg was unworthy of my clicks.   The reward was immediate - I had so much more time.   I checked on FlapJilly's softball team's fundraising posts until Little Cuter said she'd send me the donation links directly.  Other than that, I was gone. I use it to keep up with my family and friends.  That's what most people reply when I say I'm not on the platform any more.   I now have textual evidence that this is true. Based on the number of phone calls and texts and emails I received last week, I surmised that Little Cuter had posted a picture of our last visit in Indiana.  Their comments told me that most of our adventures had been documented and shared.   It was wonderful that people reached out.  I was benefiting without doing the work.  As long as this keeps happening, I see no reason to retur...

The Lesser Goldfinch, distinguished from the American Goldfish by the males' black armpits, have been around lately. Yes, apparently birds have armpits. The zinnias have been a food truck  for all kinds of birds and beasties. The finches are my favorites.

Sending the National Guard is in there, along with declaring martial law. It's a lot easier to start in a place with no Congressional representation, whose existence is dependent on rules written by that Congress.   Since that Congress is the hand puppet of FFOTUS, and since the geniuses  writers of Project 2025 are the ones getting manicures before approaching the orange menace with instructions, it's not that hard to see where this could be going.   I was depressed and disgusted by his first term.   This time around, I am officially terrified.

I've read three books in three days.   Actually, it will be five books in four days if I stay up tonight to finish Lisa Gardner's stuck on an island with a serial killer on the way thriller. I walked past one of them and had to pause and think; I couldn't immediately recall the plot or the characters.   The library reminded me of due dates. That's what got me going.  It's too hot to do anything outdoors and there are only so many restaurants we can visit.  Tucson is not Chicago or New York; you can't spend three months in museums here.  Mahjong is a rare occurrence; everyone is going someplace for some amount of time.  And JannyLou isn't next door to distract me.   So, I read.   The books were collected from two public libraries' Lucky Day  shelves.  Some are parts of series I enjoy; while I'm immersed in them I can remember each character's backstory.  Some are in large print, which really helps at night.  ...

We've been doing some gentle musing on success, after a conversation with a young entrepreneur. Most new businesses like in her arena fail.  Outlasting the competition might be one measure of success. Running a profit is an obvious metric, one that takes time to achieve.  During that period of deficit/investor financing, is it possible to feel successful? What if this is in some ways ancestral, and that connection is meaningful in an irreplaceable way?   Can spending your days doing something that fills the soul be called success? And who is judging?  Do you answer to anyone other than your investors?  The people holding the financial lifeline certainly have a stake in your definition of success; they probably want a return on their investment.   But they also have a stake in you.  Watching a protege, a mentee, a family member learn and grow and try to do a very hard thing is an intangible reward.  Your success is their success, because ...

Dr. K and Not-Kathy left our house at 10 last night.  We opened the door and gasped.  It was still much too hot. It's a dry heat, so the plants suffer, too.  Evaporation is immediate and there's no condensation to be found.  The water cycle is definitely screwed up. The zinnias' leaves are being sucked dry.  The little bugs are draining the veins and nibbling the edges and the little birds are feeding on those little bugs and the flowers are unhappy. Not-Kathy turned on the air conditioner.  This is a woman who made herself hot chocolate because she was cccccooolllldddd when it was in the upper sixties outside.  She cuddles under my cashmere blanket (thank you wonderful cousins who sent it my way when I was perforated) while we watch tv, the rest of us in shorts and light tops. It's apocalyptically hot in every parking lot in town, newly blacktopped (like at Prince Elementary School) or old and potholed (most everywhere else).  The occasional tree...

Early in my freshman year at Cornell, I sat next to a dorm mate at lunch.  He was the only person I recognized and there was an empty space on the bench beside him.  We ate, chatted, and moved on, separately, to our afternoons. That evening he told me, kindly but emphatically, that I couldn't do that any more. That side of the dining room was for Black students.   I hadn't noticed.  I never did it again.  It was a fast and furious lesson that the world was not operating the way I imagined.   I believed the melting pot theory of Americanism.  Put us all in the soup, stir rapidly, and serve a multi-ethnic masterpiece.  We make Americans out of the raw material that comes our way.  It's what differentiates us from all the other countries.  It's the genius of our republic. That was sold to me in elementary school; I remember the page in my 3rd grade social studies book.  It felt right to me, the grandchild of 4 immigrants who ...

How much will you pay for comfort?  That seems to be the calculation used by every airline and car service I've encountered this summer.  Lyft offers an upcharge for a roomier, somewhat more special in an unspecified way, ride to the airport.  I'm small, have no trouble getting into any vehicle, and I travel light.  There's no attraction for me there.   However, if they offered a clever driver option, like the Russian speaking gentleman who transported me to SFO, I'd pay just a little bit more to have that ride through neighborhoods and roads I'd never traversed, avoiding the inevitable traffic jam through the city and the park, and using Google translate to agree that moving was much better than standing still.  It was a delightful slice of what America is all about,  (I tipped well.) But the airlines are another story.  For the two hour flight to the Bay area, I can feel comfortable in any size aisle or window seat.  I can't see over t...

Pictures of adventures.  Musing on race. Accessing information.  Defining success.  The perfect summer weekend.  It will come.  For now,  I am residing in the bosom of my extended family.