The Mange

No, I don't have it. In fact, I believe scabies is highly misdiagnosed. I had a run-of-the mill allergic reaction. Nothing as dirty and junk-yard-dog worthy as scabies. Not that I'm disappointed. Everything in the house got washed, including the innocent puppers.

Itching To Tell You...

The doctor peered at my red streaked skin.

“It’s here,” I said pointing to my legs. “And here” pointing to my stomach. “And here,” pointing to my haunches. “And it’s on my arms.”

“Do you have dogs?” She asked poking at me with a rubber-clad finger.

“Yes.” I said.

“You say the rash moves around your body?” She asked.

“Yes.” I answered.

“I think you have scabies?” She said with a grimace.

“SCABIES.” I was indignant. “How can I have scabies?” I whined.

“If you let your dogs out, they get into garbage.”

After picking up my scabies busting lotion and some anti-itch pills, I left the hospital.

When I got home I looked at my partner with hangdog eyes.

“What did the doctor say?”

“I have scabies”

“SCABIES!”

“That’s what I said.”

“I don’t think you have scabies.”

“Why not?” I said with the force of someone who wants scabies.

Because I’m very susceptible to it. I’ve had it twice before I ever had a dog. If I don't have it, you don't have it.”

“You had scabies?”

The only advantages I can find in allegedly having scabies is that the pills are for anti-anxiety with the side effect that they take away the itch. The downside is that they make me sleepy so I’m napping all the time, or that's another upside.

I thought I was having an allergic reaction. I was having an allergic reaction, to scabies.

Stay tuned for another installment of What’s Eating Me or Visiting the Skin Doctor.

Love's Me Some Cheap Gas

Car Talk

I used to get worked up over drivers talking on their cell phones. Every time someone stopped acting like the experienced person behind the wheel I’m used to in Los Angeles because we drive so bloody much, I’d go through the five stages of grief, starting with denial.

They are NOT talking on their phone!

On schedule, I’d move to anger.

What a thoughtless jerk!

Next, the comfy stage of bargaining.

If you would just move to the slow lane when your phone rings, I wouldn’t have to hate you.

The fourth stage, depression, is the hardest to take.

The world is going to hell in a hand basket. Civility is a thing of the past.

But, now I’ve matured. I’ve reached the nirvana of the last and final stage: acceptance. I recognize it. Now that people-driving-while-chatting-on-cell-phones has a groove in my neurons, I don’t mind the languid way they drive, slowing from 70 to 50 for what seems like no reason. Or the way they turn their blinker on for 10 minutes before they change lanes. It’s a recognizable phenom, a known quantity.

And, sometimes, now I’m the person on the cell phone.

Wind Powered

Which Way Did He Go? Which Way Did He Go?

Turkey Day

Playtime

Bocce B

Signal Clouds

Trained Squirrel

I think there are more than one, but I can’t be sure. It’s because they are wile. They look alike and they act alike with a single-minded pursuit that borders on diabolic: Making my dogs insane.

The squirrel that tortures the dogs running on the cable next to the house must be stopped. It’s in the dogs DNA. Once, I reached out of the window and grabbed the cable—or is it an electric wire?—shaking it with a fierce cry. The squirrel barely made it to the other side of the tight rope and into the waiting trees. I thought better of it when I considered how I’d feel if the squirrel had lost its balance and fell off. What if the fall had killed it? So now, sometimes, I knock on the window and glare at it in solidarity with the pups. Not only does it not scurry away in terror, it stops, looks, and cleans its paws right in front of us.

Now we are enemies, my friend.

Bag of Favors

Los Angeles Dreaming

Bride & Groom

Bumperless

Bumpers. When did we decide that car bumpers are a bad thing? Someone tried to explain it away by saying that car makers eliminated the rubber and metal bumpers of our past in favor of plastic to make cars lighter. Lighter cars use less gas so in a roundabout way they were aiming for fuel efficiency. I don’t buy it. That doesn’t explain how SUVs sprang up at the same time that bumpers disappeared. So instead of a bumper that takes a few scratches and dents that might need replacing after a few run-ins with a shopping cart or an old lady backing out of the bank, the plastic sheet collapses and needs to be replaced at great expensive when it’s tapped. A fender-bender becomes a major repair.

I don’t remember agreeing to plastic bumpers.

Overpass

Short Wedding Video

A niece got married and boy was it a fun party. My partner officiated and walked the walk of fame to great applause.

Diet

My father is obese. So, when my sister and I were growing up, we were either on his diet or we were off his diet. It was Melba toast and low fat cheese or pounds of bacon and crepes dripping with butter, sugar and cinnamon.

Because the gods loved us a little, my sister and I had my mother’s physique. She’s slender and we were skinny beanpoles that could take the gallons of ice cream, homemade donuts, and coca cola straight out of the can.

Food in the 1970s in Alaska formed my eating habits as well. And, because the gods loved us only a little, money was short so my mom had to stretch the family budget. One staple was pork chop and brown rice. Cheap cuts of pork chops surrounded by rice and bullion to soften the meat with simmering white rice that turned brown from the broth. It’s still one of my favorites. How many gorgeous, juicy, expensive pork chops have I toughened up cooking in a stew of bullion? Plenty.

I bring up my history of food because I promised myself that I would never be on another person’s diet again. And, while my partner isn’t heavy by any means, the Prussian/Irish stock shows up now and then in a few extra pounds. One of the things I love about my partner is that there is no diet talk and no action taken. There may be less eating, but no drastic change in the pantry. There is one exception. Peanut butter. You know the kind of peanut butter I’m talking about with the oil on top. My partner dumps most of the oil out so that you end up with peanut paste. It’s disgusting and you have to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to dig it out of the jar and once you get it out you don’t want to eat it and you’ve bent your knife.

As I write this, I’m jumping up to take a bite of a toasted bagel with honey and peanut butter. It's a pain to fit in eating with everything else. That’s a habit I share with Joyce Carole Oats who said in her journal that she wished she didn’t have to waste time eating when she could be reading or writing. Brava!
Besides, I got to the peanut butter jar first.

Night Line

Snowball Running

Dog Fight

Walking Tall

Puddy Tats

Driver's Seat

Penultimate Most Wanted

So, the puppers, Blanche Marie and Stella Sue, hate this squirrel. It's a hatred that knows no bounds and never diminishes. The squirrel is indifferent to the dogs and that's sad. How would you like it if your best efforts to scare away the unwanted by barking, jumping and terrorizing it ignored you and ran down the cable next to the house unfazed by the frenzy?

Most Wanted

Things I Took Away From My Mom

Literally things that I took. Not lessons I left home with, but stuff I walked out of the house with when I moved out.


[photo of ancient Babylonian calculator]

The calculator was made in Japan. Remember when little things were made in Japan? I think that in over 20 years, I've changed the batteries once.

I also walked out with my mom's only slip, and jewelry I didn't even ask if I could have. What a nice mom I have.

Red Squirrel Gray squirrel

There’s an article in the October 7, 2007, Sunday New York Times Magazine about the small, shy British red squirrel being overtaken by the big, brutish American gray squirrel. The gray American squirrels were brought to England as a novelty, but once the aristocracy got tired of them, they let the big bruisers lose into the countryside and the buggers have been causing havoc ever since. How American.

The metaphor of the delicate red squirrel representing traditional English values and culture that is getting overrun by the American behemoth (the gray is a better breeder and more adventurous that its British cousin) has been used before. There was an article, I think it was in Harpers, 15 years ago that used the red squirrel as a metaphor for English cinema. In a nut shell (ha!), films like Brideshead, Enchanted April, Remains of the Day, Howard’s End, and Sense and Sensibility show the Britannia that exists in our imaginations. The stories these films tell are from other centuries with no shadow of the post-colonial, multicultural, you-are-being-videotaped Big Brother England of the 21th Century. The English movies of the red squirrel kind are your basic Merchant/Ivory fare.

Though I can appreciate a Die Hard and an Independence Day, there's nothing like spending quality time with a classic “red squirrel.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07squirrels-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
Squirrel Wars, by D.T. Max, 10/7/07

God Crying

Breakfast of Champions

I wonder how the dollar is doing against the yen?

The Last Frontier

NASA has a photo of the day that can be widgetted on your home page. F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S-!

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

A Series of Unfortunate Mistakes

Mistake #1
Going to bed too early. After an exhausting week, I wanted to read in bed at 9PM. Of course, after a few pages, I fell asleep, as did my partner. We woke an hour later. It was maybe 10 o’clock at night.

Mistake #2
Not admitting that we were awake. That way, we could get up, make coffee, and watch movies snuggled with the dogs in the living room all night. No, we tried to go back to sleep. You may remember that every night is movie night at my house. After listening to an hour and a half of the worst Doris Day movie, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” I gave up, put on my glasses, and watched the last ½ hour of ice skating while generation-wide and family-wide misunderstandings were cleared up in time for the happy slay ride to “The End.” It was painful.

Mistake #3
Dogs in bed. The dogs have taken to sleeping with me. Not my partner, but me. The other side of the bed is free for arms and legs to stretch and move from one side to the back and to the other side without encumbrances. The dogs want to sleep with their mum. I have a dog at my head--on a pillow mind you--having dreams of chasing evil squirrels. She dream barks and dream runs all night. The other dog is at my feet stretched out lengthwise not vertical so I have to curl into a ball on the edge of the bed.

This is not pretty and I'm not making those mistakes again. At least not numbers one and two.

Chatterbot

I’m listening to Professor Dumb-Ass on the normally excellent podcast of Scientific American, “Science Talk.” This smart scientist spent four months corresponding on-line with a computer program. He thought it was a hot Russian babe but it was a computer program called a chatterbot. A chatterbot is a conversation agent. That sounds Russian. The scientist admitted to being fooled because he's a “predator looking for a mate.” In other words (and his words), if he didn’t think there was the possibility of sex at the other end of the “conversation,” he would have picked up the vague answers months before and known it was a chatterbot.

What future was this guy going to have with this Russian babe? 1) if she was real, which she was not, she would only be looking for a way to get out of Russia; and 2) once she was out of Russia, she’d dump this nerd for a hunky Cowboy.

You don’t hear women scientists saying, I need to enhance my breasts because I’m so thin, there isn’t enough fat in my body to make desirable breast to attract a mate. We don’t use the prime directive to excuse bad behavior. In fact, there’s no evolutionary excuse for smart women making dumb choices.

That brings me to evolution. Homo sapiens that we are, we have not adapted to our environment to survive. That’s what Darwinian theory is about. Species find a niche, adapt, and thrive, or they don’t adapt quick enough and die out. Unlike other species, homo sapiens have made our environment adapt to us, and we won’t necessarily survive. So, what we know about how the world works is limited.

The fact that most men—in white America anyway—are attracted to skinny women instead of the best breeders, i.e., women with large hips and big breasts, makes the entire “I’m looking for a mate to procreate because that is the prime directive of all species,” bull. If that were true, the system would be foolproof. And what I see is proof of fools.

http://www.sciam.com/

Packer Backer

Organic Power

Priviledge and Scandal

I’m reading a fun book that I got at the L-I-B-R-A-R-Y. Privilege and Scandal: The Remarkable Life of Harriet Spencer, Sister of Georgiana, by Janet Gleeson.

The allowance that a rich married women got to spend, even if she brought the money to the marriage, was called “pin money.”

18th-century women called their periods, "the prince."

Someday my prince will come and someday my prince will go, forever.

Still In Love

Library Card

An old lady and her old husband came into the library. She had a cane and hobbled to the counter. Her husband picked up a plastic-covered magazine and took a seat.

“It’s my lunch hour, but I saw you and wanted to say hello," said a man in a wrinkled dress shirt pulled tight across his chest as he came out of the back office. “I haven’t seen you in awhile.”

“That’s mine there.” She pointed to two books bound with a rubber band and a slip of paper stuck in the top of one of the books.

“Carl!” She said to her husband. “Carl!”

He was deaf or ignoring his wife, but Carl sat looking at the magazine.

“Carl! I’m done.” She said and waved her cane around to get Carl’s attention. “I have my books.”

Carl looked up and said, “I have to put the books in the car before I get you.”

“I know,” She said.

This took some time.

The librarian went back to his lunch and the library was empty and quiet again.

Will You Marry Me?

No more schoolteachers marrying stockbrokers in the New York Times society page this Fall. No, these are heavy hitting news producers, lawyers and doctors. One in particular made me swoon. An Oxford educated ballerina who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s office until she got married. Oh, before getting her masters in economic and social history at Oxford, she graduated with honors from Harvard and then got a law degree from Yale. And she’s beautiful. What does her husband do? Who cares?

Must See Movie

If you see one movie this Fall, see Once. It will startle, delight, surprise and move you.

The one complaint I have is that they have a terrible webpage, but it's a terrific movie. http://oncethemovie.com/

[Shakey cam alert. Sorry Mom, you'll have to skip this one. It made me a little woozy.]

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Ladies in Waiting

Super Powers

The 40-Year-Old Verdict

Over 40. It has its benefits. Big Benefits. You realize how much time you wasted criticizing your looks, your manners, your bad days, your moods, your choices, your relationships, your family, your mistakes.

All that time regretting, picking on yourself, and feeling bad about your skin, legs, stomach, and toes, was time not spent noticing

How perfect your 20-year-old skin is;
How lush your 30-year-old hair looks;
How wonderful your friends are;
How, from a distance, your family is quite normal;

Wisdom is knowing that the Greeks prized long middle toes. And so do I.

The best things about over 40 are small acceptances that add up to loving yourself.


The Big Benefit, is finally knowing that you have always been da bomb.

Weather Hair

What I love about curly hair:
Curly eyelashes.
What I hate about curly hair:
Hair should not act as a barometer. If it’s dry out, I’m golden. The perfectly formed curls are the envy of all and, as everyone without curly hair says, people pay good money to have hair like that. Sure, on a good day. But if there is a touch of moisture in the air and those curls turn into a frizzy untamable fright, you wouldn't wish that mess on your worst enemy.

Shopping Lilly

One of my favorite mommy blogs, The QC Report: Notes from the Underwire, wrote a funny piece on a recent Lilly catalogue. It’s not too early for holiday shopping.

http://qcreport.blogspot.com/2007/08/pictures-of-lilly.html

What Should You Do?

There’s no denying it, with three pee stories, I have officially moved into the realm of too-many-stories-about pee.

I was worked on a show called “What Should You Do?” for Lifetime TV. It was a great show about women overcoming the most difficult situations they would ever face. They were attacked, stalked, survived fires, hurricanes, rapes, and robberies. You name it, the women we profiled survived it. The premise of the show was to answer the question, what did these women do to save themselves? I admired every woman that I spoke with.

One day I was working on several stories at once and ran to the bathroom to pee. I was distracted and busy and slouched on the seat. When I pulled up my jeans, the back waistband was wet. What the H-E-L-L? I had peed on my jeans. Ick.

There was nothing for it but to go back to work until I dried off. Lovely. Once back at my desk, I tried to forget that I had a pee-soaked waistband. Needless to say, I sat perched on the seat and away from the back of the chair. One of the directors going out to tape a story came into my office to talk. She stopped mid sentence.

“It smells like beer in here,” she said.

“Oh, does it?”

Note to self, pee smells like beer.

What would the heroic women think if they knew that, for one afternoon, they were talking to a woman that “smelled like beer?” They'd tell me what to do.

Sunday Prayer?

Ode to Stephen Cole-Bear

A Sloth of Bears next to Stephen protected by a flag and a vacuum next to a Black Bear

http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_colbert_report/host/stephen_colbert.jhtml

Eagle Rock

It happened at the same time, but a day apart. Driving on the 134 East looking at the town of Eagle Rock stretched to the South, I felt as if I were the first and only person to see this view. The first to see that exact configuration of lights in the houses and businesses, the street lights, stop lights, green lights, and yellow flashing lights. The children growing, dogs walking, couples shopping, cats eating. I had never felt as if I were the first person to see anything. But, the afternoon before that day, while driving on the same freeway in the late afternoon, I saw it.

The town of Eagle Rock is named after a huge bolder with the profile of an eagle's beak. I've driven by it for years. But that day, I drove around the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountain in the late afternoon and saw the shadow under the eagle's wings as it soared from the rock, its beak pointing toward the sky. Why the eagle took so long to show itself to me is a mystery, but I've been the only person on earth to see many things since that day.

Still In Love

Falling for Joan and David

When David was with Joan and Joan was with David. What year was it? 1993 I think. Freshly divorced with cash in hand, I discovered Joan and David and my first pair of expensive boots. It's been a long summer without them, but the fog and cool air bring my tattered, sewn, shoemaker friendly, resoled, multi-tapped, shoelace replaced babies out of the closet. Hello Joan and David.
Welcome Fall.

A Tiny House of One's Own

The idea of these tiny houses brings out the little girl in me. A place to set up an office or put mini-guests or have a tea party.

http://apersonalspace.com/home2.html

We Will Kick Off! We Will Kick Off!

Sunday football, again. At least the Green Bay Packers won, again. What Sunday Football does week after week is remind me of Bill Cosby and the comedy album my sister and I wore out as kids, Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow Right released in 1963.

"We will kick off! We will kick off! We will receive! We will receive!" from Toss of the Coin mesmerized us.

If you've never heard early Cosby, and this is his first comedy album, you are missing something.

A Polygamist's Polygamist

Friday was day two of the Warren Jeffs' trial.  He's the leader of a group of polygamists in Arizona.  I'm a big fan of the HBO show about a polygamist family, Big Love. The issue of forced under-age marriage isn't addressed on the show the way you imagine is the dirty truth. The Jeff's compound profit character, Roman Grant, played with evil glee by Harry Dean Stanton, was supposed to marry a young charge but she stowed away in the Hendrickson's SUV to reek manipulative havoc on greater Utah. That's not how girls raised in a compound are portrayed in the excellent documentary about Warren Jeffs, Damned to Heaven. As a lone investigator into the compounds many illegal activities says in the doc, "You can't deprogram them." All you can do is try and teach ex-members to survive in the outside world. While in the TV world of polygamy, Bill Hendrickson's tenuous hold on family unity, his business interests, and his relationship with a power-giving God are fun to watch, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near Jeffs. One of the lost boys from Colorado City, Arizona, said that Jeffs is actually shy, but power drives him to drone on in a flat monotone for mountains of taped lectures.

Damned to Heaven is in the same category as the wonderful and terrifying book Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer. Krakauer appears briefly in Damned to Heaven. Watch the Damned to Heaven trailer on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1cTk2cJQac