I subscribe to Heroic Stories (http://www.heroicstories.com/). These true stories of people reaching out to help one another with no regard to their own benefit, are really little doses of antidote to the horrors and outrages that seem to overwhelm us these days. The most recent one was from a man who as a small child was afraid of the water, and how he overcame his fear to save another little boy, and then realized he had to learn to swim. Both kids had their lives given back to them that day.

It got me thinking about three skills that I believe are essential life skills: learning to drive a stick shift automobile, swimming, and reading.

Well, just learning to drive is essential, in my opinion. Even if you never own a car, you never know when you'll need to be able to get around in one. And for that reason I also emphasize driving a stick shift. Anybody who can drive, can drive an automatic shift car. But you might find yourself in a life or death situation and the only vehicle available is a stick shift. Think how awful that would be, with the vehicle right there but useless to you because you couldn't get the damned thing to go!

It's my impression that women are most often dismissive of stick shifts, but as more and more women are working in jobs where that's what's likely to be around - I'm thinking of engineers and building contractors on job sites, but there are plenty of others, I'm sure - it's just crazy for a woman not to know how to drive a stick shift vehicle. It may not be easy to learn (my first attempts in Driver's Ed were a failure, but my first husband had a stick shift Rambler and he taught me), but really, if you're determined, you can get it. Once you figure out that catch-point of the clutch, every stick shift vehicle, whether "on the floor" or "on the column" (do they make those any more? Doesn't matter - the old ones are still around) will be your servant when you need it.

And swimming! It's insane not to teach your kids to swim! Or if you've reached adulthood without it, not to go learn how. There cannot be many places in the USA where there's not someone, and somewhere, to go to learn this vital skill. Even if you never intend to go to the beach, or swim recreationally, you never EVER know when you'll need this ability. Imagine how horrible to have to watch someone drown in a flood or a motel swimming pool because you can't get to them. Not to mention drowning, yourself. Most swimming teachers these days know now to teach someone who's afraid of the water, and no mature adult is going to have anything but respect for a person who wants to learn.

So if you can't swim today, and/or can't drive a manual transmission car - do what it takes to learn. You can do it! And the life you save might someday be your own, or someone you love.

Reading is too big a subject - I'll get to that another day. Besides, if you're reading this, it doesn't apply to you!

I've got this nifty program called Musings that I've set to open when I turn on the computer. It gives a daily quote from some writer down through the ages, about writing, and then it gives a little writing exercise you can do. I don't often do them, because usually I'm pressed for time and just want to check my email or get to my WP to start writing. But I liked this morning's, which said to make up a definition for each of these four non-words, tell what part of speech it belongs to, and use it in a sentence:

malstudious: adjective. designating a student of black magic. If that boy Malfoy isn't malstudious, I'm a purple spider.

shombex: adjective. a gem having one or more facets located in a different dimension than the observer's. The way it teases the eye, I think this Rigellian crystal is shombex.

infergus: noun. A leap taken to a conclusion. It's a bit of an infergus to think that just because James is black means he doesn't like country & western music.

hestie: noun. A flat-chested Irish woman with a grudge. Don't get on the wrong side of that hestie; she'll lay a curse on your butter.

Fun! Musings is Freeware from Grim Software in Nova Scotia: http://www.grimsoft.com. You can try it free for like a month (I think) and then if you want to buy it, it's just a nominal price.

So here we are in the new year. Considering that my mother died on January 1, 2004, this year is already way ahead of last year in the betterness department...unless you're in Sumatra. Somehow the enormity of that tragedy makes anything I might write in here seem despicably self-centered and tiny.

There was one odd thing; the day after the tsunami, my web site got a hit from the northern tip of Sumatra - someone had googled the term "usage of the ellipsis" and gotten my web page that discusses that very thing. But I'm having a very hard time figuring out why anyone there would need that information on that particular day. Is someone's English teacher a really truly frightening hard-ass? Somehow I doubt it.

The world is a very weird place.

I've sadly neglected this blog. Thought I should stick my head in here since it's the last day of 2004 (and I can't tell you how glad I am this year is almost gone).

To mop up: I dropped my efforts at 15@15. I'll resume tomorrow, with my intent to ride my Tunturi bike for 15 minutes a day at setting 15 (that's all I have to do to satisfy my pledge; if I do more it's okay, if I don't it's okay. But I'm sick and tired of hating myself for failing all my goals about dieting and exercising. So I ain't gonna do that any more.)

I haven't been writing daily, but I did participate in National Novel Writing Month, and while I didn't finish the novel I was working on, it did get me much farther along in it, and rekindled some of my enthusiasm for it. And this week while I've been on vacation, I've been doing a lot of editing on a novella I sold to Eggplant Publications, hoping to finish it in time to re-send it to the editor tonight. Didn't quite make that, but I shall tomorrow. Or maybe Sunday; if I finish the work tomorrow I'll re-read it Sunday before sending it to her. Then, I'll go back to the novel. I'd like to have that finished, polished, and have query packages going around to agents and publishers starting April 1. It surely would be nice to sell a novel this year!

I hope anyone who's reading this has a great 2005. Remember: Attitude is everything.

Terry

Whoa, this place is getting dusty!

Well, happy to say, I've been doing a lot better with the 15 @ 15 effort, largely because I committed myself to the National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/), or, as I like to call it, 30DoM = 30 Days of Madness). The concept of completing 50,000 words in 30 days was so frightening that I prepped myself mentally by committing to 15 @ 15 every night, NO TV during the weeknights, and 1667 words per day for the month.

Am I perfect?

Bwahahahahahah!

But I've done 15 @ 15 five out of the last 9 nights (a LOT better than before) and the writing is at 8,000+ words. I've got the next two days off so I figure I'll catch up and pass my daily average. So that's not worrying me.

NaNo frees me up to write crap! And crap I'm writing, but even as it comes pouring out I'm thinking of ways to make it better - once the whole thing's done and it's time to edit and re-write and polish.

To be honest I'm not working on a *new* novel; this is one that's been about 2/3 done for over four years. That first 2/3 is *great* (IMNSHO) and I think that's always scared me off of finishing it - how to make the last part live up to the first part? Well--I've set those neurotic worries aside for NaNo and I'm just cranking it out now. This is an excellent exercise for shucking that writer's block jive right offa my back.

So it'll probably be awhile before I log anything here again. Not that there's anyone coming back daily and being crushed when there's nothing new...

Just a short note this time, to keep me honest. I haven't been doing well on my 15 @ 15 project, nor on my diet. I'm going to keep after myself, though; I know this is just an excuse but I go on vacation Oct. 1 (FRIDAY!!! YAY!!!!) and I've been working like crazy to get things caught up at work before I go, and when I get home I just collapse in a heap. I know it's an excuse. I'm hoping to get a run at it during my vacation and get back into the whole diet-workout mindset again. Not to mention smaller clothes, heh. Besides I feel so much better, so fast!

Anyway. Had to be honest here. Or what's the point?

I've signed up at StatCounter.com to keep track of hits on some of my web pages. It's fascinating! Addicting, even. So far I've had hits from at least 40 different countries! ("At least," because I'm on the free plan at StatCounter so they only track the last 100 hits at any given moment. That's plenty for my uses.)

What's really entertaining is the surprising popularity rankings of some of my pages. For example--my web site's mostly about writing science fiction & my own publication history, and my favorite music (nine inch nails, and Bright Eyes, to name the two chief bands). What's the most popular page? The one with my husband's delicious potato soup recipe on it! (http:/www.mirror.org/terry.hickman/Recipe.html) It gets hits from all over EVERYWHERE! Seems the whole world is on the lookout for a great potato soup recipe. Go figure.

The soup recipe page is in a Warren Buffett-Bill Gates kinda relationship with my Lightbulb Alley page about alcohol toxicity. That one gets a LOT of hits from predominantly Muslim, near-Eastern countries. Isn't that intriguing? Are youngsters yearning for knowledge about the forbidden? Are teachers assigning homework about the evils of alcohol?

Then, running a close third (sometimes charging up to #1 or #2) is the ever-popular ellipsis. I have a Lightbulb Alley page with a Rumor Mill (www.speculations.com/rumormill/) discussion about the proper usage of ellipsis (the ". . ." in prose) in English writing. This page, too, has fans from the world over.

The Lightbulb Alley page on Archery is a big hit, lots of UK and British Isles hits at that site.

Another fun thing is to follow the "connecting link" from a particular hit back, oftentimes to google or another search engine. It brings up the very list that your visitor got when he or she did their search. It's fun, and sometimes baffling, to see what kind of company your own listing is keeping.
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On the 15 @ 15 front, I'm doing well! The weight loss part is going to be slow (I've marked a small loss so far) but the next-day benefits are continuing, enough to keep me going back downstairs. I've been at it a little over a week now, and this afternoon I have to go troop around in a wetland, when the temps will be around 90 degrees. I'll be paying attention to how I weather that; I've been extremely susceptible to heat sickness the past couple of years (and couple of tens of pounds' increase) so I'm hoping the increased physical fitness level, even this small amount, will show an improvement there. Tomorrow I've got even more time outdoors but the temps will be about 15 degrees cooler (the weatherman says) so it won't be quite as good a test.

I don't know if anyone reads this, but there's my status report anyway.

I'm going to tell you how to lose weight for free. You have everything you need, right this minute, to do it. It requires no drugs, no special clothes, no expensive foods, no restrictive menus, no guru. I know this works because I did it myself: I lost 55 pounds in 4 months. (I've since gained it back, and more, so I'm now re-acquainting myself with this process, sadder and wiser. It wasn't the method that failed, it was me falling back into old habits.) This does require an ability to do simple multiplication and addition, so grab a pencil and some scratch paper.


FIRST: If you decide to give this your best effort, the VERY FIRST THING you need to do is to print this off, the whole article, and go to your physician and have her check it out and you out and give you the go-ahead. Consulting your doctor may sound spooky but it's just common sense. Everything that comes after this paragraph assumes you are in basically good health, and you've consulted your physician before going on, and she has said "Go for it!" I will NOT be responsible if you don't do that!!! I'm NOT a doctor, I'm not a dietician.


Here's the lynchpin of my method: Dieticians say that on average, for a healthy adult, it takes about 15 calories per pound to maintain your body weight. That's a very rough estimate and a scientist will go into fits trying to qualify it to death, but it's a good rule of thumb. What does that mean? It means you only need one number to know how many calories you need to eat each day to lose weight. You need to know your target weight. That's all. You don't need to know your present weight, just the weight you want to be. Now--be sensible. If you're 38 years old with three kids, chances are you're not going to ever look like Imam unless you come down with some dire disease. Go for a weight where you can feel good in (or out of) your clothes, that you can be as active as you need to be, and where you have plenty of energy, and you sleep well. Back in 1994, when I lost that weight, I got down to my ideal weight: 125. I felt better, at age 44, than I ever had in my life. I was bursting with energy, my writing ideas just poured out so fast I couldn't ever possibly write all those stories, I had stamina, and heat didn't bother me. So I'm going to shoot for 125 again.


Got your pencil? Take your target weight times 15. Mine's 125 x 15 = 1875. I'm going to try to keep my calorie intake down to 1875 per day. Often, doctors will hand their patients a 1200-calorie per day diet plan. There is no way on God's green Earth that I am going to be able to stay on a 1200 calorie a day diet. But I can do 1875.


See, given that you're in basically good health, the only reason a person doesn't lose weight is because their calorie OUTPUT(body maintenance plus physical activity) does not exceed their caloric INPUT (eating). That's it, right there. Totally simple. And there are calorie charts galore all over the Internet, free for the looking, to help you add them up.


So, theoretically, if I just reduced my calorie input to 1875, I would lose this excess weight. I'm older now so that's not quite as much of a given as it used to be. Drat it. Back in 1994, though, I learned: add exercise, and those pounds do come off. One by one by one, there they go. And it feels GOOD.


Trouble is I HATE TO EXERCISE! Well--that's not 100% true; I hate to START exercising. I work out in my basement, where we have a very nice Tunturi exercycle, a "businessman's" weight set, and a stationary weight set. Once I get down there, and start working out, my bod loves it. It's the GETTING DOWN THERE that's murder, and played a big part in my dropping off my good program a few years ago and getting back out of shape and overweight. I HATE going down those stairs. It's not logical, it's irrational, but there it is.


So I have to work around my own stupid mind. This time, I've come up with a winner. I've pledged TO MYSELF (the only one who counts in this game) that ALL I have to do to satisfy my promise to me, is "15 @ 15" -- that's 15 minutes on the bike at Nm level 15 (whatever that is; I gave up long ago trying to calculate the ergonomics of our ergonomic bike). That's a pretty low
setting, but it's enough at my current conditon to make me break out in a sweat, and for my legs to have that familiar "giant redwood log" feeling when the bell rings and I finally crawl off. If I make that 15 @ 15, I can be done and I can feel great about myself and go on about my business. Usually, though, I mess around with the weights a little bit, do some stretches. Eventually, when I've lost a few pounds, I expect I'll resume the sit-ups (when I reached my goal weight 10 years ago, I was doing 100 a day). If you can feel your pulse on your wrist or throat, by all means have your doctor help you figure out how many heartbeats per minute you should try for to get aerobic benefits -- *I* can never find my pulse so I just wing it.


So what you need to do is figure out an activity that's easy for you to get TO--whether it's taking a walk around your own block, swimming two laps up and down your pool, doing 100 skips with a jumprope--pick something that doesn't require you to go very far out of your way. Talk to yourself about this for a few days. Let yourself realize that this is something you can do to take care of yourself in a meaningful way. Think about that real hard, because I know for me it's a lot easier to make myself feel better when I'm blue by chomping a Snickers bar, than by dragging my ass down to the basement to ride the bike. But the former will only end up making me sadder, while the latter will really be good for me, really show myself love and concern that I would show anyone else in a heartbeat.


This activity that you choose should be small enough that it's not daunting or intimidating. The instantaneous reward is that when you're done, you have another 24 hours during which you can feel *very* superior and proud of yourself. But there are a lot more rewards than that, very quickly.


The FIRST NIGHT I started this, recently, I slept all night. Big deal? Yeah--if you haven't slept all night for years. The next day my hips, knees, ankles and feet felt better than they had since I don't remember when! I wasn't stiff! I felt - dare I say it -- *limber*! And I actually felt more energized that day. I was astounded. Never did I expect such physical bennies after just ONE session! I can't guarantee that for you--but I can guarantee that you'll feel more empowered, less dragged down emotionally, because you have taken that first step toward helping yourself feel better.


Set yourself intermediate and long-term goals. Use family reunions, graduations, birthdays, as goalposts. This is not so you can beat yourself over the head if you're still ten pounds heavier than you want to be by Aunt Gladys's birthday--it's just another incentive to help you talk yourself into doing your daily "15 @ 15" (or whatever you end up calling it -- that's another trick: give it a catchy title. I might even get a tee shirt made of mine, to wear on the cycle). If you just can't make yourself do your thang one day, don't agonize over it. Just get up the next day and make sure you get back in the saddle. I mean it--two days off is death. Likewise, if you stumble and devour half a gallon of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream (my favorite), don't hate yourself. You're human! We stumble! Next day, though--back to the 1875, or 2000, or however many calories your goal weight requires.


One more bit of advice, you might not see much weight loss in the first couple of weeks. If not, keep at it anyway. If you know you're eating right and you're doing your exercising, it WILL come off. It's simple biology, it has to. What might be happening is (ready for it?) you're increasing muscle mass, and that's masking fat loss. This is a very important concept, because for one thing, it should make you aware that JUST watching the scales is a sucker's game. Those numbers are just dumb numbers, they don't really know what's going on. The most important thing about being aware that you're gaining muscle mass is that you need to be conscious of your body. When you work out every day, that improves your muscle mass, and let me tell you, that is a VERY good thing, even if it makes the scales seem demonically stubborn. Why? Because well-toned muscles use up more calories, even when you're not working out. Even when you're just sitting there reading a novel, if you have well-toned muscles, they're burning calories. What's not to love about that??? So do NOT be discouraged if the scales seem stubborn. Keep at it every day! If you're reducing your calorie intake, and increasing your calorie output -- you're GOING to be a LOSER!! I mean a WINNER! Heh.


Forget deprivation diets (no carbs/low carbs? Are you KIDDING????), single-food diets, blah blah. Eat smaller portions, eat as many fresh fruits and veggies as you can daily. Eat according to the standard food pyramid (they're trying to change it but until the experts have settled their differences and devised a new one, the old one will work). Balanced meals. Nutritious snacks. Measure your food! DOn't trust your eyeballs! *My* eyeballs tell me that enough to feed three people is ONE SERVING!! Train yourself by measuring your food. Have "good" snacks with you so you're not tempted by candy machines. Portion out your lunches and package them up so you can just grab them and go to work in the morning.


This is all winner's stuff. Think ahead. Treat yourself right. You deserve it!
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(This was written because when I lost weight before, several women came to me privately to ask how I'd done it. I was taken aback, and I'm afraid I did a poor job of explaining it. Maybe this will help someone, somewhere. Well--I know it will, because I wrote it to help me, too. I hope others find it useful as well.)

This new look is a completely cosmetic change, I have nothing useful or interesting to say. Just whiling away a few minutes. I liked the summery look of this template. Its creator (and I forgot to mark down his name) has a nice sense of color and style.

The links block seems to have been forced down to the lower right-hand corner of this page, in case you're looking for it. Or maybe that's just on this computer.

That's all. Maybe someday I'll be more interesting.

The most exciting thing that's happened in the past two weeks is that I signed my web site on to StatCounter.com for their free services. I inserted their invisible hit counter code on a bunch of my web pages, especially the ones in Light Bulb Alley, a repository for miscellaneous info that I think might be handy for writers or people who just like to pick up trivia. Most of the Alley pages are from the Speculations Rumor Mill, only the best genre writers' online community on the web, IMO.

I had been wondering if maybe I could delete some of the pages under the Alley umbrella, so I thought getting a hit profile of each page would be instructive.

Also, I have a splash page that's ostensibly about Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst's Saddle Creek Records band, but the page for a long time has just had a handful of links to other pages about the band, and to Saddle Creek's site. I was thinking, it's lame to keep that up there when I don't offer any fresh or original or unique material about Bright Eyes.

StatCounter.com gives you a *bunch* of information about who's visiting your pages. I was astounded to learn that people from all over the world were googling for info and photos of Conor, and finding my site! Norway, England, Australia, Canada...I'd originally thought that my two interests, promoting my science fiction writing and my music favorites (Bright Eyes and nine inch nails) might each augment the other in crossover web page hits--turns out, hey, I was right! That lousy Bright Eyes page is in the top three most popular pages on my site!

So now I'm thinking, I just got this great new digital camera with all kinds of photographic power--I'm hitting me the next Bright Eyes show (probably when they produce their next CD--they've had a tendency to launch supporting tours in Omaha or Lincoln and I can get to such a show easily) for some new and unique photos for my site! As a sort of reward for when people come check it out.

The other two most popular pages (aside from the home page) are one on alcohol toxicity, also in the Light Bulb Alley (hits from the Phillipines, Iran, Thailand, Canada, England...) and a page on which I posted the recipe and a photo of one of my husband's culinary accomplishments, potato soup (from all over the US, Canada, Europe, Southeast Asia...) I can't believe how many people around the world are looking for a good recipe for potato soup! Makes me laugh.

It drives home what I've always believed in general, and that the internet has magnified beyond understanding: you NEVER know whose life you're touching.
=================================================================
FYI: StatCounter.com

(I wrote this 4/10/04 and tried to upload it to my blog, but couldn't for some reason. I'm trying again now, not because its prose is so deathless but because maybe another procrastinaor will happen upon it and get a chuckle out of it, and not feel so alone. By the way, I finished the story and emailed it in approximately 4 hours before the deadline.)

So I'm going to get to go to BayCon Memorial Day weekend, thanks to the incredible generosity of a lot of my Rumor Mill friends (their gift of the First Ever Middle of Nowhere Fan Fund to *me* of all people, made it affordable. I can never thank them enough!). And there's a Writer's Workshop at BayCon, that's sort of sponsored or shepherded by Kent Brewster, daddy of all Rumor Mill goodness, and it's free--even though pro writers and editors participate and crit us wannabes' work!

So I sez to my self, Self, you cannot pass this up. (This was about a month ago, when I found out about the MiNoFF award). You *must* write a new story to submit to the workshop!!!

The deadline is April 15th.

I am going to write the first draft tomorrow.

I am an idiot.

Weird food.

This is the kind of thing I concoct when I'm hungry but I'm sick (I've got a rotten cold today):

Four corn tortillas

toast them over an open burner or on a griddle.

Mash together 1/4 C. lite cream cheese and 1/4 C. lite red wine vinaigrette until it's well, well-mashed-together.

Assemble:
four or five slices hard salami
a handful of salad mix; today: spinach, arugula and carrots
a Roma tomato (slice it lengthwise several times so you have flat slices)
a handful of black olives, sliced into hollow coins
green onion, 1/4 C (or less), ends snipped into confetti
shredded cheddar cheese

Lay down one tortilla, spread the cream cheese mix over it, lay down the hard salami.
Put the next tortilla on top, spread the cream cheese mix over it, sprinkle the salad mix over it and arrange the tomato slices on top; salt & pepper the tomato to taste. Put the next tortilla on top, spread the cream cheese mix over it, scatter the black olives and shredded cheese over that. Put the last tortilla on top of the whole thing, throw it into the microwave on HIGH for 20 seconds, get out your knife and fork, and chow down.

Healthy but kinda weird, don't you think?

What *we* do for fun.

I wonder how many other middle-aged couples invest in a pair of walkie-talkies for use around the house? Hubby's had some health problems, and sometimes his knees give out and he ends up on the floor and needs help getting up. Sometimes he's on the back porch and I'm up on the second floor; sometimes he's on the second floor and I'm in the basement doing laundry. So we decided to get walkie-talkies to keep handy, just in case. Also, if he's upstairs and wants me to bring him iced tea my next trip upstairs, they work for that, too.

That is, when you can get them to work. Mine doesn't work reliably. That's what *I* say. *He* says I'm not pressing the Talk button right. Come on! I'm 53 years old! I know how to press a button! He says, You certainly do, but we're talking about the radio unit.

When we first got them home we ripped them out of their package and started fiddling with them immediately. I, superior being, started to read the instructions, but I kept getting interrupted by him talking to me through the walkie-talkie. We were 4 feet apart in our front room chairs.

#%*!static#%*! "What are you doing?" #%*!static#%*! he'd ask.

#%*!static#%*! "I'm reading the instructions, as you can plainly see" #%*!static#%*!

#%*!static#%*! "What do they say?" #%*!static#%*!

#%*!static#%*! "Something about faint signals detection," I answered. #%*!static#%*!

#%*!static#%*! "What's that?" #%*!static#%*!

#%*!static#%*! "I don't know." #%*!static#%*!

You get the idea.

He sent me out to the back porch to see if they worked farther than 4 feet apart. I stood out there with the door shut and he said, #%*!static#%*! "Can you hear me now?" #%*!static#%*!

The first couple of days I kept forgetting to bring mine along in my trips up and down stairs, in and out of rooms. I'd hear him yelling from the back porch, "Turn on your walkie-talkie!"

"Why? I can hear you right now!"

"Because it's fun!"

"Oh, all right." And I'd take another fun trip back upstairs so I could find out via the gizmos that what he wanted was a cheese sandwich and a soda. The kitchen, of course, was ten feet from where he sat and fourteen feet from where I originally answered his yell. (Not that I expected him to go get it himself; he's got a certain amount of disability, remember.)

I'm not sure I can remember seeing anything funnier, or sillier, than two middle aged people volleying:

"Roger!"

"Wilco!"

"Over-and-out!"

"Ten-four!"

via walkie-talkies while standing in the same room. I, personally, yearned all during my childhood for walkie-talkies and my yearning was never satisfied. Tin cans connected by butcher's twine just didn't suffice, and my parents weren't about to spend good money on things that would get broken or lost faster than their body heat faded from the coinage they spent on it.

But I'm a grown-up now. I can HAVE walkie-talkies if I want. Grown-ups can do that. And I'm a grown-up. I'll prove it: get on Channel 3...

Do not mistake the collection of stuffed animals by an old lady in a nursing home as a symptom of dementia or childishness. It is a response to loneliness. It is not air that fills the rooms and hallways and stairwells of a nursing home, it is loneliness. There is enough of it in any given nursing home to fill up the galaxy.

My mom had a tiny, light gray, stuffed rabbit with moveable front and hind limbs, and pink linings to its ears, and beady little black eyes that did, somehow, look friendly. She had several other stuffed animals, of various sizes and colors and putative species, but the little rabbit was her favorite. She arranged, and re-arranged them on her bed, so she could see them and touch them any time she wanted. The rabbit she sometimes held and murmured to. She was not senile.

I thought of this as I was going to sleep last night, and was abruptly reminded of an attempt I made thirty years ago to "do good." I went to the nursing home in the small Iowa town we were living in then, and volunteered to "adopt" one of their residents - visit, mostly.

The old lady they chose for me (I can't remember her name) was at least confused, if not suffering Alzheimer's. She thought I was her daughter. She called me by her daughter's name. I spent an hour with her the first meeting, and she never did realize it wasn't her daughter desperately trying to make smalltalk. I went back a second time, with a little bouquet of flowers, and her wrinkled face lit up. She clutched the flowers and said, "It's so good to see you, Eileen! How's that little girl of yours doing?" I'm not Eileen and I only have a son. It broke my heart. I wondered where the hell her *real* daughter was, and why wasn't *she* here, looking after her mother?

This second visit, the old lady fell silent after the first few minutes, and her eyes glazed over and she stared into space unresponsive to anything I said. After awhile, I patted her hand, said "Goodbye," and left, never to return. I was 22 years old and neither I nor most of the world knew much about senile dementia or how to treat its victims. I felt like a total failure; and I felt totally unrewarded. I had envisioned some grateful old person whose dreary and pain-wracked life would be brightened just knowing that such a caring young person was paying attention to them. And for years, I felt guilty for never going back.

Last night this train of thought left me sobbing in grief, for my mom who may have been lonely but whom I did certainly pay plenty of attention to, for that old lady in the tiny Iowa town, for all the people of the world who are lonely, hungry, homeless, terrified, and alone. For a few minutes it felt like all of it was all my fault - if I could just become a better person somehow I would find a way to make all of the pain go away. But after awhile, I came to my senses and reality, and knew again that one person cannot do it, can only hope to do an adequate job of loving and caring for the people in their immediate family, and that's if they're lucky and have tremendous stores of energy.

What baffles me is that so many people don't even make the effort. How can anyone put their mother or dad into a nursing home and then never visit, except maybe at holidays or birthdays? Maybe that's what those old ladies are asking their teddy bears and stuffed rabbits. I hope the cuddlies give them answers, even if I can't hear them.

I'm sick of listening to hate-mongers' arguments against gay marriage. It's all balderdash, not a serious or compelling or rational reason in the bunch. The last straw was commentary on NPR November 21, by one Stanley Kurtz, who claims to have gay friends, but who has rationalized his way out of supporting gay marriage. His argument is a series of giant leaps of logic, the main one being: allowing gay marriage would somehow dissolve the "symbolic link" between marriage and parenthood, thus endangering (somehow; he never says how) our children. He hurries past the fact that over the years heterosexual couples by the millions have been unable to, or in more recent years, have chosen not to, bear children, and that their existence was never considered a threat to the concept or practice of marriage or a breaking of his mythical "symbolic link" between marriage and childbearing.

We need to keep in mind that marriage was created, first and foremost, as an economic institution, even for the lower classes, even when "economics" meant the sharing or withholding of grubs and berries and mastadon tenderloin. Marriage also served to keep women in an inferior status as long as they couldn't work outside the home and earn their own money. Birth control and the feminist "revolution" have changed that so that yes, we are seeing people delaying marriage until much later than earlier generations, more couples who choose not to have children at all, more divorces, and other signs that the institution as it has been practiced is weakening.

Like any other institution, shouldn't marriage have to adapt as human society changes? You can't say marriage is an Absolute. It was created by human beings (spare me Biblical quotations--you don't find any marriage ceremony in Genesis 1, and besides I'm tired of Christians-- and in the U.S. it's always Christians-- claiming that the rest of us have to live by their rules) and by definition, then, cannot be an Absolute.

But to me, the most compelling argument for gay marriages is so that we finally, legally, recognize and empower committed partners in insurance and hospitalization matters. It is an obscenity and a disgrace that someone who has loved and lived with a person for years, and is now having to watch their loved one die, can be abruptly, totally, cut out of any decisions for that person, by vengeful, ignorant, hateful "relatives" of the dying person. It is beyond my understanding how anyone can justify that.

I have never once heard any argument that convinces me that gay marriage threatens either the institution of marriage or my own personal marriage in any way. No matter how kindly Mr. Kurtz packages his argument, at heart it's still just prejudice. All the arguments I've heard boil down to hate and prejudice. Gay-haters may fool themselves and others who fear gays but they aren't fooling gays, and they're not fooling me. I think that with friends like Mr. Kurtz, his gay friends don't need enemies.

It's been a long time since I posted anything here. Life has been...busy. Much travel, some family health business, lots of work business, plus general laziness.

But I was thinking today, it's high time I got back to writing. Blogging, journalizing, fiction, opinion, essays, book reviews...I'm a writer? Then write, dammit!

Another thing that occurred to me today--and it has more to do with the 2nd paragraph above than it might seem--is that when it comes to eating, I really don't have my own best interests in mind.

That was the hardest, longest lesson I had to learn in going through all the changes I went through via the 12-step programs: what's really in my own best interest?

That's often a completely different question than "What makes me feel good?"

Doing the right thing does not always end up making you feel good. That's a statement in the Voice of Experience. For example, putting my mother in a nursing home was the right thing--the only thing--to do. She wasn't fighting it or anything, she knew (I think, deep down, she did) that she could no longer take care of herself. But after a lifetime of hearing everyone you knew say "I'd rather die than end up in one of them nursing homes," when you have to actually check your Mom into one, it ain't gonna feel right no matter how right you know it is.

Emotions are not always the best barometer of rightness.

Eating a mountain of ice cream kicks the feel-good hormones into high gear, so yeah, I feel *great* gobbling down that mountain of ice cream.

But it ain't in my best interests; it ain't *right*. It's *easier* to make myself feel good by doing it, than by settling for a nice red Bosc pear, and going to bed a tiny bit unsatisfied, food-wise. And telling myself that I've been good to myself by substituting the pear for the ice cream does not give me the same endorphin-laden feelgood buzz that the ice cream would.

Here's the secret: Endorphins lie. Sometimes.

Figuring out when is the trick.

I'll get back to you if I ever master that trick.

Some rambling ruminations this morning...

I often feel like writing, just the act itself, when I have absolutely nothing to say. Is this a result of the intermittent reward principle? Many's the time I've got the most exhilerating rush while writing, just the most unique high--many more times than I would have won at a casino, positing comparable writing/gambling events. So it should be no surprise that I'm addicted to the writing act.

I hadn't thought of it like that before, but it makes perfect sense. I wonder if anyone's ever done a study of the writer's brain chemistry--is there a big release of endorphins when you're "in the zone"? If so, will it be labelled a disorder in the DSMV VI? Will Writers Anonymous 12-Step Programs spring up?

It'd be hopeless, all they'd do would be trade stories and start critiquing -- or editing -- or brainstorming ideas -- or one-upping each other with Awful Rejections yarns.

"Hi, I'm Terry, and I'm a compulsive writer--"

"Are you the one who wrote that one story in--"

"No, no, that was some guy--"

"When's the WotF Contest deadline?"

"Doesn't matter, didn't you know? Those go all year round, quarterly contests--"

"Hey, guys, I've got one that might win that--"

"Let's see it!"

"I only brought 5 copies, you might have to share..."

Yeah, I pity the therapist who tries to start Writers Anonymous groups.

Last night I stayed in the town where I work (50 mi. from the town where I *live*), in a co-worker's basement (a really nice *finished* basement, with a hideaway bed and a bathroom and everything) so that I could arise to the alarm I'd set for 11 p.m., get dressed and wait outside for another co-worker to come pick me up so we could go to an observatory at a lake on the southwest side of town, to see Mars on the night of its closest brush with Earth.

It worked, we got there (us and about 900 other people, I hope they counted 1,000 before the night was through) and peered at the planet through numerous telescopes, and also saw a REALLY cool movie that the University's astronomy and video production people made. There were a lot of photos of Mars--many *from* Mars, like a jaw-dropping sunset picture! -- that I'd never seen.

They had a globe model of Mars, and I decided instantly that I want one!!! Then I thought, where would I *put* it??? Then I thought, I could move my home office into the basement, there's more room down there. And then: Yeesh! That's a big step! Why didn't I think of that before? I wonder if I should...and decided to save that decision for later, after gathering more info. For the moment, I was there to enjoy MARS!

There were people of all ages there, from babes in arms to elderly folks with walkers. The astronomy profs and grad students were great, I got a big kick out of them. They'd not gotten much sleep so they were a *little* goofy, which was fun, and they displayed that endearing Geeks-Unused-to-This-Much-Attention kind of showing-off that I love.

After my co-worker and I watched the film, I went back to the "big three" telescopes to get in line for the one I hadn't looked through yet. In front of me was a trio of folks fresh from a bar somewhere (the alcohol sensor array in my nasal chemistry lab was blinking red lights like crazy), one guy with a Mohawk (more of my people! Yay!) and a lady with lots of jewelry and only slighty slurred speech, and an enormous, handsome black dude with bald head and earring. He got his turn at the telescope and immediately put his hand on it and leaned all his weight on it--then couldn't find Mars in the lens. That scope's grad student had disappeared (probably best; he would have had a stroke when the guy leaned on his scope!) so I told the man, "If you lean on the scope, it'll jiggle so much you won't be able to see anything. They've provided these stepladders with rounded tops for us to lean on." Oh. OK, he said, and tried again, but all that was in the viewfinder was black space. So when another grad student had finished his current spiel I got his attention, and he re-located the Red Planet.

We stopped on the way back to the parking lot to watch the laptop film loop of Mars scenery digitally-extrapolated from radar elevation readings. *Those* were cool, too. I liked the ones that showed faint mists (of CO2, I presume) rising amid the towers and channels of huge canyons.

I got back to the digs at around 2; I'm tired but not too much more tired than usual. And--it was MARS! It was WORTH IT!

If you have an astronomy club or university or public observatory near you--don't miss this spectacular space show!

Throughout my life, I've had a tendency to take on more and more "projects" the more stressed-out I was getting. It's a self-feeding escalation, you see. The secret was that to begin with I was running away from whatever was bothering me at the time, often reality in one form or another. It was many years before I learned that it was just faster (and much less exhausting!) to just turn around and face what scared me and deal with it in the first place. Kept life from getting really complicated, too.

Not that I've entirely shed that tendency, oh no. But now, at least, I know to realize that when I'm committing myself to more and more "projects" that I need to stop and take a look, maybe there's an easier way to achieve relief from something that's bugging me. But first I have to recognize what's bugging me. (Current collection of projects: personal/voluntary: my novel, learning Spanish, organizing all of my photographs; involuntary: husband's recuperation from surgery this fall will require a lot of work on my part. Work-related: committing to creating a poster presentation for a conference in the fall-- in itself, no big deal, but added to the others, just another straw on the camel's back.)

Trouble is, I always have to wrestle with my ego in these little sessions. Turns out that I've always enmeshed my self-image with accomplishing *everything* I commit to doing. When my ego's enmeshed then it becomes a pride thang. "Pride goeth before a fall," I think is the hoary quote; well, let me tell you that phraseology doesn't do justice to the sweat blood and tears that have to be wrung out of me before I can get back to reality.

It can be really painful to face my own shortcomings. Maybe -- and I'm veering into the strictly fictional here because I ain't gonna put my *actual* personal life on the internet -- maybe I snapped at hubby a few nights ago and hurt his feelings when it was really uncalled-for, and I need to apologize. Maybe I spent some money I shouldn't have, and haven't fessed up yet. Maybe I spoke ill of someone who wasn't there to defend themselves (and no, it doesn't ameliorate it even if the person is a slimy, conniving lying bastard of an unelected politician; this is about *my* culpability, not his. Hrmm. I think I'd have to work on that one awhile longer...). Anyway, it's no fun facing up to that stuff.

But awhile back (like, uh, jeez, 17 years? Wow!) I undertook to make myself a better person. Someone *I* would respect. It turns out that that's damned hard, and you don't do it just once. You have to climb that hill over and over again, no matter how much you hate it, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how scared of it you are.

And then when you've done it again, you can look that image in the mirror in the eyes again. And that reminds you why you do it.

As I stood on a corner waiting for a Walk light on the way in to work this morning, I was roused from my reverie by, "Yap! Yap! Yap! Yap!" A lady in a car at the stoplight had one of those dogs I think of as micro-Dobermans: about 10" tall and colored like a black & tan Doberman. He'd spotted me and wanted to alert the world that I! See! Person!

The lady and I grinned at each other. I think she tried to get the dog to get down on the seat and be quiet, but he wasn't having any of it. She obviously didn't understand the seriousness of the situation--there was a Person standing over there! That needed to be yapped at! Yap! If I don't do it, who will? Yap! Yapyapyapyapyapyapyap!

Then the light changed and as the car moved across the intersection, the yaps subsided; the Person had moved out of micro-D's field of vision. Whew! Another danger averted. Good dog. I giggled for another block.

The reverie interrupted was about how this ultra-light sprinkle of rain is your typical mid-summer nostalgia trigger: The air is heavy and warm, and the raindrops splat! individually on the road or sidewalk or patch of bare ground in your yard that's the neighborhood playground, and each drop must kick up a little pouf of dust, because that's what the air smells like. Appropriate sonic accompaniment: Mourning doves calling from two backyards away. Taste: The repulsive-yet-irresistible Grape Popsicle (R). Best if experienced sitting under a huge, old tree with a new Weekly Reader Book Club book on your lap. Ahhh...

This Boomer nostalgia spasm brought to you by: Summer Raindrops.

Here are some of the headlines Netscape's boasting right now:
Seized Ship's Explosive Cargo Equal to 'A-bomb'
10 Secrets Restaurants Don't Want You to Know
How to Find Time to Exercise
U.S.: Recent Attack May Have Hit Saddam, Sons
Woman Delivers Conjoined Twin Girls - and a Boy
Comedian Adam Sandler Ties the Knot [and from the looks of the little dinky photo, she's human!]

I found myself turning to their idiotic daily Poll with outright *relief*: Which artist wears the most outrageous hairstyles? Their poll always irritates me. They *never* include the answer: None of these, you moron. But today, anyway, I was relieved to contemplate the tresses of Kelly Osbourne, Pink, Christina Aguilera, Cyndi Lauper, and Bjork. You know I don't really care, but at least while I'm thinking about that, I don't have to think about...those other creeps.

Last Friday while I was waiting for Josh to pick me up after work, three women passed by on the sidewalk. They're regulars. I often see them at that time and place.

They're all what you would call "huge" women, no doubt clinically obese. Their attire is modest and middle-class, casual, not "office." slacks and blouses, jeans and tee shirts. One is blonde, another has short hair about my color before I started coloring it -- mouse-brown. I don't recall the third's coloring. I'll observe more carfeully next time I see them.

I'm a product of my society (as though that were an excuse) -- until Friday their chief -- their only attribute in my mind was their size.

But Friday one of them had a little jar of soap and a bubble ring, and was blowing bubbles as they walked along chatting and laughing. The light breeze was at their backs, so the bubbles streamed forward a little with the force of her breath, then swung to the street side as they matched the wind. I couldn't help but smile -- that's what bubbles are for, they make you smile.

And then, a full 30 seconds after the women had passed out of my view, the air between the buildings on either side of the street was filled with bubbles! The ones she'd gifted on the previous block were just going by my point of view from inside my building's foyer.

They glimmered in the sun, danced and curlicued in the micro-breeze eddies, and then they, too, were out of my range of sight.

I sat transfixed by the little magic, and then I recalled that these ladies are always smiling when I see them, always engaged in lively conversation.

How our prejudices blind us to the vibrant truth.

In grad school I was a Teaching Assistant, which meant that I supervised the Biology 102 lab a couple hours a week, and that I led a Discussion Group (DG) 3 days a week. The PhD profs would give the students their lectures 2 or 3 days a week, the students then had a lab and a DG on the topic.

I worked very hard preparing my DG materials. I'd go over the topic's more difficult concepts, then we'd do Q & A. I tested them at regular intervals and kept a grade book on their scores.

Most of the students then were the "normal" 19-to-21-year-olds. The course was for non-majors. So I'd look out on this roomful of bored or sleeping students and know that this was all the biology they'd probably ever get. I felt a great obligation to teach them as much as I could. Most of them seemed to feel a great obligation to resist learning.

One semester I had a 50-something "displaced homemaker" in one of my groups. I felt immediate empathy for her. The first day of class she arrived in a bright-colored double-knit pantsuit, nylons and low pumps, and her gray hair was coifed and sprayed into spun-sugar rigidity. She was nervous and timid, and she blanched at some of the students' language--but she was my best student.

I had been where she was, a brand-new college student older than "the norm." I knew intimately her fear of appearing stupid, her doubts about her ability to succeed in college, and the middle-aged semi-fear of "these young people," even though I'd only been 25 when I started college.

I'd also taken the friend of a friend, literally by her shaking hand, and walked her into the Admission Officer's office (he happened to be a neighbor of mine, but by then, my junior year, I wasn't afraid of Admin anyway), and sat with her while she asked him how to apply, whether there were grants, loans, or scholarships she could try for, and whether he thought she could make it through college. (Does an Admissions officer ever say No to that question?) She was a home-salon hairdresser, a single mom, and she wanted more, for herself and for her kids. Her voice vibrated with fear, and though it steadied during the conversation, she never lost her fear, and she still hadn't applied for college when I graduated and left that town.

Years later I saw the movie "Educating Rita." The single shot that still sears my memory is when Rita went to that ivy-covered Administration Building to apply for admission. She stood at the bottom of those stone steps, took a deep breath, patted her lacquered spun-sugar hair (she was a hairdresser too, a lower-class Briton with a savagely chauvinistic husband, and parents who simply couldn't understand her yearning for education), and started up the steps. The lines of her body were tense and crooked with the weight of her entire life pressing down on her--everyone she knew telling her in words, action and attitude that "her sort" didn't go to college.

They shot the climb, brilliantly, from behind Rita, and it was Julie Walters' genius that her whole body, her whole being, told you what a heart-breaking act of courage she was performing. I cried at that scene, for joy and pride in Rita's bravery.

Anyway, my 50-something student's semester resembled Rita's remarkable journey. The first sign was when she started actually discussing biology in our discussion group. Sometimes she even disagreed out loud with the other students.

Then she showed up one morning with a new 'do: short, combed, and left to riffle freely in the air.

By the end of the semester, she was wearing jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers to class.

The strain had relaxed out of her face, and she laughed and teased along with the other students. Of course she got an A, that was never a question. And this former "displaced homemaker" had stepped whole-heartedly into the stream of life.

I felt honored to have witnessed the metamorphosis.

Terry B. deMille

I had a lot of little cowboy and Indian and horse toys when I was a pre-teen. Each one was different. There were some cowboys and Indians that were permanently bow-legged so you could snap them onto a horse. They'd stand on their own but they stood with their legs spraddled in a wide inverted U. I didn't care, I played with them as though they were normal.

I also ignored scale. I had a plastic Palomino about 10" tall at the ears. He was at least 25 times the size of the other toys, but he was part of the cast anyway. He stood stolidly on all four hooves, legs straight, looking straight ahead. To make him trot, I'd pogo him up and down in short hops. For a gallop I'd rock him, back hooves to front, back to front, along the floor or sofa or coffee table.

The furniture -- mostly in the living room -- was my cliffs and mountains surrounding the canyon of the floor. Little Indians hid behind the tops of the sofa cushions, lying in wait for the unsuspecting settlers (or bandits, or cattlemen) to come trundling into the canyon.

The good guy was a spraddle-legged cowboy with his right arm extended forward holding a six-shooter, and he always rode the white trotting pony. There was another identical pony, except he was brown, and the Indian chief always rode him. I don't think I did a lot of battle scenes -- often the cowboys and Indians were all mixed up together in the good guys' and bad guys' camps. I spent many hours Saturday mornings playing with this assortment.

When I got a small package of Army green G.I.'s, they were just folded into the mix. Sometimes I played G.I.'s and Japs (I was born 5 years after the end of WWII), and then the Western figures got assigned new roles.

Then I got a Barbie doll (TM) and she fit pretty well on the Palomino -- I ignored that her legs stuck straight out in front of her as she perched on the saddle.

Many hours. I wish I could remember some of my scenarios, but they just "passed through" me, as Goldberg says, just flowed through my child's imagination and were forgotten, like water in a stream.

I wonder where all those toys are now. Probably in a landfill. Or maybe -- and I hope this -- they got sent to Goodwill and other children got to play with them. I like that idea. By now they might be in some 1960's buff's collection. That'd be great -- they'd be ready for retirement by now.

But I bet they'd like to be on display together, maybe in a basement rec room, watching their owner's busy life. Maybe someday a grandchild will come along and say, "Grandpa, can I play with those?"

I hope he says Yes.

As a writing exercise, I want to write about some time in my life when I felt most out of place. When I started writing that sentence I thought I'd not be able to think of one, but before the sentence was done a memory popped up.

It was a birthday party given by the parents of one of my junior high classmates, I'll label her D.F. She was beautiful in a Sophia Loren-ish way (if you like that sort of thing), and her parents were rich. They hosted all of us in D's homeroom class, plus some of her friends not in our homeroom. Maybe fifty 13-year-old kids.

I don't remember exactly where it was. It may have been in the Peony Park ballroom (I don't think so), or the Blackstone Hotel (maybe), or the downtown Brandeis if it had a banquet room. Wherever it was, it was lush.

The tables bore china, crystal, and more silverware than I'd ever seen in my life. I had no idea what to do with all that silverware. I don't remember who sat on either side of me but I don't think they were friends of mine (that would have been K.R., who was doing fine on the other side of the room).

So I felt very graceless and crude from Minute One. My hair stuck out funny, my clothes didn't feel right. Most of the other girls were stylish and expensive dressers. They all knew how to put on makeup--many of them already wore bras! They never emitting raucous barks of laughter, or bit their nails. They knew what to do with that extra silverware.

We were served sandwiches cut into four triangles and held together with toothpicks topped by colorful cellophane curlicues: red, blue, green, yellow. The bread was stuffed with about 20 layers of meats, cheeses, lettuce and condiments, so the triangles stood up about 5 inches high. I had a terrible time eating those adroitly -- in fact, I didn't. I managed one triangle, and the second deconstructed itself all over my plate and the surrounding (snow-white, of course) linen tablecloth. I left the rest untouched and yearned for dessert.

I vaguely remember sparklers, and a fabulous cake, so we must have had cake. I also remember a uniformed waitress bringing around a silver tray with a collection of chocolates, each one its own little marvel of sculpture. I wanted to take several, some to eat at home, but I at least knew better than that. I took ONE.

The afternoon dragged on, with everyone but me seeming to have a good time (there were, God help us, games). I was so miserable and self-conscious that I wanted to die. Probably others felt similarly, but I was too self-absorbed to notice. That was probably a good thing. I'm sure all I would have been able to do for small talk was make snide comments about the fanciness and how much this all was costing.

At long last, it was over. The Daddies rolled their cars up to the door and mine appeared and I threw myself into the passenger seat and he drove his little social butterfly home, hallelujah. I changed immediately into play clothes and shot outdoors looking for my fort-building, apple-grenade-throwing best buddy. It had rained that morning. There were gutter dams to build, mud to grind into our jeans.

I've learned a lot since then, most importantly what to do with all that extra silverware.

You bundle it up and jam it head-down into that extra crystal water glass.

(OK, OK, my public is clamoring for continuation of this blog. Well, it's a quiet, refined clamor. Well all right dammit, it was just one person. So I'm easy. Sue me.)

Reading the Obits

I've started doing something I never thought I'd do: reading the obituaries. It started after my father-in-law died last fall. Soon after, I saw that the father of a grade-school friend had died; I went to the Visitation that night and saw CT and her sister, whom I worked with in the late 1980's, and got another bonus: the sister had also worked with a guy who was in grad school with me, and he was there, too. I hadn't seen him in *years*.

Then a couple of months later, I saw that the mother of one of my best friends in high school had passed away. I'd lost track of KE and no amount of googling had unearthed her. Now at this sad occasion I would be out of town and couldn't even attend the Visitation. I called the funeral home and gave them my phone number to pass on to my friend. (It was a long obit; KE has twelve brothers and sisters! Unusual in the Protestant denomination we'd belonged to.) The next weekend KE called me from her home on the East Coast. We caught up on all the happenings in our lives over the past 25 years, and now we email each other a couple of times a month. She hasn't changed a bit; just the sight of her name in my emailbox brings a smile to my face.

A two-minute nightly scan of the Deaths page over a couple of months, and two heart-warming re-contacts. The behavioral scientists call this "intermittent rewarding," and it's one of the most powerful conditioning tools known. (It's especially effective in fostering and maintaining gambling addiction.)

So now I read the obits almost daily. I look at the last names first to see if any ring a bell. I think I've seen the parents of a couple of grade-school-mates but we weren't close enough for me to try to contact them.

Then I look at ages. I'm amazed at how many people die in their 40's and 50's! And I have that sneaking feeling that oldsters before me have admitted to: "I'm older than that! I beat her!"

Aha. So it's the Grim Reaper I'm playing hide & seek with here. That's probably why I finally started sorting through the old photos, and reading my old journals, too: totting up, as the Beatles said. I'm at that time in my life when I'm looking back, seeing what I've been through, what I've accomplished, and where I've failed. What's changed about me and what hasn't.

While I'm resolutely forward-looking (nine inch nails vs. the Beatles; Bright Eyes vs. John Denver), this process is necessary, I think, to keep me grounded--or maybe it's to give me a firm springboard for whatever the next step is.

I feel like I have gained some wisdom and that's a direct product of all my fuck-ups. Reading my journals, I realize that there are some areas about me that are still the same, and shouldn't be. In other aspects I've made huge strides--sometimes because of a lot of work, blood, sweat and tears; other times I have no idea how I got from There to Here. There are regrettable gaps in my journals, and even more numerous and gaping ones in my memory.

I don't feel the scorn my younger self expected to feel at the Now Me for reading the obits (which could serve as a nick-name for this whole process). I feel pretty content right-now-this-minute, and that this is right for me now.

And...I'm a little pleased that I have that compassion for myself. That above most other things is very hard-won indeed.

Unless something extraordinary happens, I won't be posting here any more. I just don't have the time or the inspiration. You may find this message for months to come, because Blogger.com doesn't give us a way to cancel our Blogspots. They just leave them hanging out here until they decide to move them to archives, and after that--they don't say how long--they dump them off their servers.

So, don't come back! All you'll see is this message! Visit my web site (it's not updated *much* more often than this blog) if you want to see what I'm up to.

Terry

I'm considering dropping this blog. I so seldom have time to enter anything, and it's only going to get worse as we get more into the wetlands growing season (now through September). I don't know that anyone's reading it anyway.

Just in case someone is, and someone *else* has dribbled coffee down their fronts at this early hour of the workday, I'll supply a Handy Hint from Terry: First, try to do this while the coffee is still damp. Go into the restroom of your choice, wad up several dry paper towels. Stuff them under your shirt, or pants leg, or wherever the coffee stains are. Take another 2 or 3 paper towels and run them under the tap, get them a little wet. Daub the coffee spots. The underlying science here is "capillary action," that tendency of water to follow very tiny tunnels--if you've ever had a nurse hold a spaghetti-thin tube to a drop of blood on your finger and watched the blood rise up the tube all on its own, you've seen capillary action. Anyway, it's also a matter of diffusion--molecules tend to move from an area of greater concentration (the wet paper towels) to an adjacent area of lower concentration (the dry paper towels) until equilibrium is reached, or until you are satisfied that the darn spot is gone and remove the diffusion system (the paper towels on both sides of the fabric). Capillary action and diffusion will (this is my theory) drag the coffee stain with the water, out of the fabric and into the underlying dry paper towels. For dry stains (like you only noticed you'd dribbled *after* the meeting with clients), you may have to use a two-step process. Put a drop of liquid soap (like, out the bathroom's hand-washing soap dispenser) on the wet paper towel and dab the soapy solution into the stain; throw away both under- and over-sets of paper towels and repeat without soap to rinse the soap (mostly) out.

Be forwarned: You'll have a big blob of water on your shirt until it dries, so don't do this unless you can hide out in your cubicle for awhile.

Boy, if I keep rewarding readers like this, soon there won't be *room* for all the hits this blog will get.

It's obviously been a long time since I posted an entry here. If anyone is coming around to read this, I'm sorry about the paucity of entries. I don't know how often I'll be able to post; if you're really interested but get tired (as don't we all?) of coming around here and finding nothing new, you could email me and I'll send you a little note when something new goes up.

Wondering what you can do to help our troops in the Mideast (and elsewhere)? Check this great web site: http://booksfor troops.com

I've got some books, a box, and an address, now I'll be getting some filler (toothpaste, gum, whatever) and my first box will go off Monday!

And if you think this contradicts the previous posting, you're not a very careful thinker.

If Flush LImberger gets his say, I by God get to sound off on my opinion about this war, too.

I'm divided. Well, not really. It'll be great getting rid of that slimy sociopathic dictator. I just wish we could do it *before* we got rid of Saddam. [ba-DUM-boom]

No, seriously, folks, I'm relieved that we're not getting the shock'n'awe that all the news heads are so disappointed not to see. It's a GIANT relief that we're not just pulverising every single object within the city limits of Baghdad. Or however you spell it (patience; I'm on post-operative meds). The fewer civilian casualities the happier I'll be. But I have this nagging feeling that the war opened *this* way instead of with shock'n'awe because the generals just said, "To hell with that; we can achieve the same end *this* way without 100s of 1,000s of dead."

Even if this war is over tomorrow, we'll still be left mopping up not only Iraq but our own newly ragged, filthy reputation amongst our traditional allies--not to mention the love & joy we'll be getting from Muslims and Arabs all over the world. Way to diplome, Dubya. Not that you care.

I think Lileks (www.lileks.com) has a great idea: attach Palestine autonomy to the autonomy of women in Saudi Arabia. Can't have one without the other. It'd be darned interesting to watch what happened after *that* one got signed, wouldn't it? [sigh] That's one of the things I can agree with Lileks about; otherwise I fear we're on different pages, though not different sides.

But I am sure getting tired of hearing that disagreeing with the Occupant of the White House makes me un-American. How ignorant is THAT? And on the other hand, it's heartening to see that several rallies have been held here in Omaha that were publicized as NOT pro- or anti-war, but PRO-OUR GUYS OVER THERE. *That's* something I can get behind, too, and it's encouraging that people from all points of view are not letting Dubya Et Al sucker them into the All-or-Nothing straw man B.S.

But it's sad because the people of this nation deserve so much better than they've got in the White House.

Blow it out yer barracks bag, Lush! [Oops, forgot--you don't have one, do you? You didn't serve in the military.]

SCAM ALERT!!

If you use Paypal, you'd better get educated about the latest email/spam/scam going around. Complete details are at the site linked below; Speculations (www.speculations.com) editor Kent Brewster details what to look for when you receive a notice like this in your email.

Anatomy of a Really Convincing PayPal Scam by Kent Brewster. Spread the word, this is *very* helpful info!

I dated a man for a year and a half during my junior and senior years in collge. (I'll call him Jake.) I loved him with all my heart. He loved, me, too. He worked all over the middle of the USA doing construction for a prefab house-building company. This is how much he loved me: On Friday nights, after 60 or 80 hours of working, instead of riding with his crew-mates all the way back to his hometown forty miles up the road from where I lived, he'd have them drop him off on the highway two miles from my house in town. He'd walk all that way lugging his week's laundry in his duffle bag, along with his lunchpail and sometimes even a small gift for me or my son. He'd arrive at our door exhausted, sweaty, grimy, but with a big grin on his face. On Monday morning, I'd drive him out to the highway with a bagful of clean clothes and a pailful of sandwiches and fruit, and drop him off for the crew to pick up for the week.

I would have married him in a heartbeat, but he was chronically insecure about money, and was saving it as fast as he could, and I was a poverty-level single parent college student. I didn't want to get married before I'd got my degree, anyway. Finally, his financial insecurity led him to leave the state, to move halfway across the country to work for a friend of his who was launching a big-deal new food-processing equipment company. This was the death knell for our relationship, because he was not a long-distance communicator, and I was insecure about love. I'd go for weeks without hearing from him, meanwhile sending him letters, tapes and cards daily. When I'd finally break down and call him, he was always amazed that it had been so long since he'd written or called me. I went through hell. The "friend" was turning out to be, as I wish I'd seen before, a lying sociopathic asshole, and was using and abusing Jake. But you couldn't tell Jake that; after a lifetime of grinding poverty and exhausting manual labor, he couldn't give up the hope that this was his ship coming in at last. Finally, when eight weeks went by and I heard nothing from him, I called him up and more or less gave him an ultimatum: a call a week, or a letter, or I'm finished. I can't stand this. When he equivocated, I told him finis.

Then I went through a year and a half of more hell, the hell of having dumped someone I truly loved. But I would not tolerate playing second fiddle to his friend/employer's nefarious tune. Jake called me once, about a year after I'd graduated from college and moved back to my hometown. Just making sure I was all right, he said. It was a short conversation.

A few years later, I met the man who is now my husband. I'd recovered from the college-years trauma. We started a life together, and I was madly in love with him. We had ups and downs, but since I'm still married to him now 18 years later, I guess we've done well, and though the colors of our love have changed, they are just as vivid now as ever. Anyway, when we'd been married about 3 - 4 years, I got a phone call from my best friend from those same college years. She knew what I went through after Jake left, and after I'd broken up with him. She was calling to say he had called her wanting to get in touch with me if I wanted to. She said "He's got MS. I could hardly understand him on the phone. He gave me his phone number to give you so it would be up to you to call or not, but if you're going to, my advice is: Do it soon."

To this day, writing those words sends a heavy heat of shock and horror through me, and my eyes fill up with tears. Then, it was even worse. Guilt, pain, horror, despair, all filled my body for days. Of course I told my husband what was going on, after the girlfriend called. He expressed sincere sympathy, and the subject was dropped. I went around in a fog, trying to hide the depth and intensity of my emotions from my husband. After all, this was a *past* lover, someone I'd recovered from before I met my husband, and my loyalty was by right and moral, owed to my husband. Besides, I didn't want to hurt his feelings by showing how devastated I was over the bad news about another man. It took me several days to decide to call Jake.

My girlfriend was right. I could hardly understand him on the phone, but with patience and caring we got through the conversation. He apologized for having left me adrift all those years before. I told him I'd long ago forgiven him for that and hoped he'd forgiven me for breaking up with him; he said he never blamed me. He'd left his "friend's" employ, having finally figured out he was getting screwed, and gone to work for the Post Office. He'd worked for them for a few years when he was diagnosed with MS, and apparently the disease progressed rapidly after that. He said his church and his P.O. co-workers had been a great support system, and his elderly mother, now widowed, had moved out there to take care of him. When we hung up, I believe it was in a spirit of mutual love and concern.

After that, my pre-occupation deepened. I have too good an imagination; hearing his voice had summoned up memories of his physical presence: his walk, his touch, his smell, his body. Knowing what MS was doing to him tortured me. But still I couldn't say anything to my husband, especially not these sensual memories. And the thought that I could have been married to Jake, and might have had to *be there now* going through it with him, tortured me more: a big part of me was hideously relieved that I didn't have to do it. Imagination was bad enough. I wrote to him about once a month, cheerful little note cards with short reports of current events in my life and expressions of warm regard. His mother would write back thanking me and saying how they cheered Jake up.

After a couple of months of this I took the whole thing to my AA meeting. It all poured out, all of it, along with about a gallon of tears. When I finished I looked up and my friends' faces were full of concern and a few were crying. One of the newer guys leaned forward and said, "Man, you must be one wonderful person. Nobody I ever dated would ever have wanted to talk to me under those circumstances." My jaw dropped; I didn't feel very wonderful, I felt like a piece of shit. One by one all my group spoke, as they always did. Even those who didn't address my situation, had something profound and moving to say. It helped. One of them said, "I think your husband would be more understanding than you think." I couldn't believe that; I feared losing him more than losing my life, and it seemed just too risky. I'd try to work through this grief myself, and not bother him with it.

A few days later we went out to eat at one of those "blue-hair cafeteria" places. Jake had been with me all day, and by the time we sat down I was near tears, but fighting them desperately. This makes me smile now, but I really thought I'd kept a pretty good poker face. But as I unwrapped my silverware, my husband leaned across the table and said, "I don't know why, when a love affair ends, we think that's the end of love."

No one has ever said anything kinder or more loving to me.

About six months later Jake's mom responded to a letter with the inevitable: Jake had died in his sleep. He rests, of course, in a treasured place in my memory.


The human heart knows no boundaries.

It occurs to me that I do some rather odd things, sometimes. I wonder if I'm the only one, or whether they're really very normal for a human being.

This first occurred to me the other night when I was reading Stephen Jay Gould's Eight Little Piggies. I got to the end of one particularly lyrical and elegantly logical essay, and mourned his death anew. There I am, a middle-aged, highly educated woman alone in bed, hugging a *book*. "Whot?!" I thought, "Whyever am I hugging this inanimate object? What possible good does it do me? Isn't this strange?" And I think I thought a few more miscellaneous things about the way a middle-aged woman's mind starts working. And I turned over and went to sleep.

Then I was cleaning out my Yahoo email box, and I found several really old, outdated messages from someone I only hear from occasionally, but whom I really really like in a cyber-pals sort of way. They were months old. "Why on earth did I keep these?" I asked myself. (Yes, I talk to myself a lot, but that's not middle-age, I've always done that.)

The contents of the messages were trivial. Then it came to me: they're mementos. I like the person very much, and kept the emails because she sent them. I also keep greeting cards, but eventually they are tossed, in my periodic fits of cleaning ruthlessness. These emails are the electronic equivalent of treasured greeting cards. But they're not cards, not even e-cards. They're really just a certain assemblage of electronic nits residing on a hard drive on the Yahoo server somewhere in cyber-land. They're not even in my *house*! But the person who caused them to be organized in that precise order, and uploaded to that server, is special to me, so I don't erase these equally-electronic nits giving me access to them through my e-mailbox, and they cause that particular pattern of light-and-dark to beam out of my computer monitor to be seen by my eyes and perceived and interpreted by my brain as a message from her. Could anything be less warm and fuzzy? Good grief! I think this is downright WEIRD.

But I bet I'm not the only one. So what's being co-opted here? Are we being trained to think like computers? Or are we appropriating the detritus of Cyberville and -- loaves-and-fishes-like -- turning them into paper letters and greeting cards in our minds? To comfort ourselves in the absence or loss of our friends and loved ones.

At least Eight Little Piggies is a *physical* object. And it's a hell of a lot cuddlier than an electron.

It occurred to me this morning that I’ve been a writer all my life. I started a journal as a young adult, and I started college intending to get a double major in biology and journalism. I took journalism classes, and in junior college I served as editor of the school paper for one semester. But it goes back much farther than that.

When I was 5 I think I wrote my first story. It was maybe four lines long, an illustrated work. It concerned a little girl getting a birthday present and discovering it was the same toy as someone else had already given her. “Oh well!” she said laughing. I think the gist was, if one is good, two is better. I showed it to my parents, who reproached me for this evidence of greed.

Later on, in grade school, I found science fiction. I read a lot of Andre Norton, Robert A. Heinlein, and a bunch of others I don’t remember. I’d spin elaborate tales in my head and start to write them down, but my small hands tired quickly of the effort, and I lacked the patience to finish them. I remember standing frustrated in the middle of my room one summer day and wishing, mentally creating, as it were, a marvelous machine into which I could speak, and it would do the hard job of writing my words down. I imagined that this machine wouldn’t be invented until far, far in the distant future that my favorite books told about, and grieved that I wouldn’t be around to see it. I said I was a writer back then, not a good prognosticator.

I had a lot of dolls and stuffed animals, and I’d cast them in my adventures and adopt different voices and many, many scary predicaments--and some happy endings. When I had playmates I’d try to do the same with them. No wonder I got chided for being bossy more than once.

In junior high, in the grip of Beatle fever, I penned a long Beatles story, and Lindsay Bloom, one of my Beatle-loving girlfriends typed it for me. It ran 40+ pages, single-spaced. Lindsay went on to the role of the secretary in Stacy Keach’s Mickey Spillane TV series, and I’ve heard she married one of the actors in The Dukes of Hazzard. I wonder what ever became of that manuscript. Probably ash-canned 30 years ago…or else Lindsay’s holding onto it until I become a world-famous author. Yeah, that’s probably it.

Wow, five days since I made an entry here. Well, it's not because I haven't thought about it. But every time, I'd slough it off with "I don't have anything to say. Why junk up the internet even more with my own useless drivel when there's plenty already?" But between that first thought of "...blog..." and "Why junk up...?" things were going on in my decision-making machinery. I knew that, I just whizzed on past it. Don't worry this isn't going to be a heavy soul-searching. [Whew! I can hear you say.]

Lately it seems like my mental space has been crowded with too much, and it's all my own doing. I've got a little party I'm hosting tomorrow [Eek! Tomorrow!] and the carpet cleaner came twice this past week, so we had all the dining room stuff stuffed into the kitchen, and hubby's been down with a miserable cold so I've been doing all the cooking and of course I had to ram my toes into the cedar plank bookshelves that were stashed *directly* in the footpath into the kitchen and I think I've got a broken toe,

gasp,

and while I was waiting for the carpet cleaner Thursday, and hubby was waiting, miserably, for his cold to lighten up, my new notebook computer arrived so *there's* a couple of hours wasted oohing and ahhing and poking and scowling at the User's manual and it snowed 8" last Saturday so every morning I've had either snow and ice, or heavy frost--latterly *mud* since it's now 50 degrees to clean off my car before heading out for work at 5 a.m.--

gasp gasp!

and I've started a family web site that various members of my family have been clamoring for for several years but no one's showing up to look at it, and I've started sorting through the bushel basket of photos going back to the 1940's (before I was born) and that has been an emotional adventure let me tell you...and I've been maintaining my momentum with the return to my writing after two long dry years of blockage, so I've been thinking a lot about writing, and about *what* I'm writing, and the morning writing exercise has dredged up some stuff I suppose I need to deal with since it pains and bugs me every time I think about it...and I'm behind with the laundry and the kitchen's a mess--

Ye gods. I'm back in the squirrel-cage ferris wheel. This has got to stop! No good can come of it.

So, you see, I really *don't* have anything to say here--that's worth saying. Except I don't need to let my mind be cluttered with such a cacophony of crap. It's high time I made time in my life daily to just Be Quiet.

Let's see, where's my PDA...yup, I've got a free quarter-hour between 2 and 2:15. A.M.

I just laughed myself sick at Jim Lilek's column "Back Fence" in the Minneapolis Tribune (URL at end of this entery; I want you to read *mine* first) about life in the basement during a Chemical Or Biological Weapons Red Alert.

I often disagree with Mr. Lileks on politics but there's no one better--funnier, truer--on home relations (that means FAMILY, silly! Didn't you notice there was no "land" grafted onto "home"?). When he's funny, I end up with my gut hurting from laughing so hard. When he's touching, I weep, and think about his words for the rest of the day. For the many days when he's neither, he's just recording what his life was like today, it's a touchstone for my day. And I love his dog, Jasper.

It takes a real knack to turn everyday life details into something interesting or funny or moving enough to read every day. I mean, I have *my* everyay life going on, too, how dumb would it be to try to "live" a *second* life if all the guy gave you was his daily To Do List?

I can write to everyday details--sometimes. Mostly my imagination fails. I drive 120 miles round trip to work every day. That's the same stretch of I-80 day in, day out. Virtually the only thing that changes (aside from the seasons) is which section of the Interstate is Department of Roads tearing up today?

OK, OK, I know; each minute each inch of that highway is different than a) the inch to either side of it, b) different than it was the minute before, and c) different than it will be in the next minute.

Fine. You go gaze regardfully at that stretch of I-80 with the perspective of a Hindu god. I have to get back to Omaha to visit my mom in the nursing home.

A visit which Lileks could probably turn into a hysterical knee-slapper and a heartstring-tugger. Too bad for you, I can't.

Oh, here's that Lileks column link.

And just for good measure, here's his personal web site. Don't MISS the Gallery of Regrettable Food! The Bleat.

I drive every morning 60 miles through the dark cold. Stars watch me from far away glowing blue-white to show their indifference--but they still watch even though they've long ago moved away from where they first trained their bright beams upon the earth.

Cold night air. Through my life I've been out in the cold dark air many times, and how could such an experience not leave its traces in me?

One late night in frigid northern Iowa in the 1970's I went out into our big front yard. We had a foot of virgin snow out there and where the cold moonlight brushed the snow crystals, millions of tiny stars answered their older mightier brethren. Is this the only answer Earth offers to the haughty gaze of those vast fireballs?

Humans have invented artificial lighting and now our planet is a sphere wrapped in a network of glow. We have embraced our lights as though by keeping the dark at bay we can vanquish that distant hauteur. But the stars continue their stately glide through space, their light speeding for millions of years to strike our ephemeral retinas as though that was the reason those particular photons began their journey long before humanity's ancestors had even developed notochords.

So I drank up the stars and the moon, and the millions of reflected beams from the snow; saw the blue waves of snowdrifts spread across our quarter-acre front yard; saw the darkness between the stars and blanketing the countryside between farmyard lights as not black but the blue so deep it's almost infinite.

I inhaled the night air and felt it freeze the moisture in my nostrils as a sharp, dry, pinch. I thought of myself out there under the mysterious universe as no less a mystery, only so small and brief, it was unimaginable.

Nothing stirred. No bird called, no cow lowed. Even the highway two miles away lay silent, respecting the weight of all those billions of years and all those rays of cold starlight.

You are nothing, the stars thought. Compared to our majestic eons you are less than a breath, a blink.

Ah, I said, but I'm looking back at you.

[This is a very long blog today, and I apologize for that. But I dedicate it to my friend Gregory Koster, and to all librarians everywhere. You're my heroes!]

When I lived in the old farmhouse outside Rutland, Iowa, I became well-acquainted with the librarians in Humboldt, the nearest town large enough to have a library. They were unfailingly patient, diligent, encouraging, good-humored and amazingly knowledgeable.

I researched Anthony Zerbe’s theatrical career there after becoming intrigued with his work on “Harry O.” I discovered the series of books called “The Year’s Best Plays.” I’d look Zerbe up in the Guide to Periodical Literature and go hunt down the references--usually those annual “best of” books, but sometimes a magazine reference. Doing this I was teaching myself library resource skills I would later use heavily in grad school. I also found every play Zerbe was in, and read those, too.

I learned that my sympathies in “Othello” were with the bad guy, Iago. This was partly because that was Zerbe’s role in the play, but mostly because it seems to me that Iago’s the only character without his head up his ass. He’s the only one smart enough to know what’s going on--well to be fair, that’s because he’s instigating most of it--and it seemed like none of the others were aware enough to even feed themselves, let alone cotton onto the outrageously transparent machinations of Iago.

It was the early 1970’s, so environmental issues were in the air. I subscribed to Jacques Cousteau’s 20-volume series on life in the oceans. I had an organic garden, and subscribed to Organic Gardener & Farmer, and applied a lot of their ideas to my own garden. I found, somehow, the book The Organic Gardener by Catherine Osgood Foster, and that *really* turned me on.

All the reading I did, and poring over the pictures, opened up more questions: What is a “cation” that Foster writes about in her description of soil as a living community? I pronounced it “casshun” until I got into chemistry class in college because I didn’t know about ions and how that was the important part of the word.

I stared for hours at the jewel-like fish schools in Cousteau’s books, and the clown fish nestled in its sea anemone protector. How do these masses of fishes know to turn the same direction all at once? How did an anemone know that this was its clown fish and not some interloper?

I read a library book titled The Abyss and thrilled to its first chapter’s description of all the poop and dead microorganisms and creatures’ body parts as a stately, constant rain of nutrients down onto the inhabitants of the sea floor in their eternal night.

One book would prompt dozens of other questions, and send me back to the library. I discovered Inter Library Loan when I’d read every book on biology that Humboldt’s library had.

And still the questions came, springing up out of the pages. I felt insecure about what I was learning, afraid there were some basic things I didn’t know. My thoughts turned to college. There, I thought, my learning would be structured by textbooks and lab experiments and by teachers who really knew it all. I could go forward knowing there were no gaps in my understanding.

My concept of college was built on Dorothy Sayers’ descriptions of Oxford in her Lord Peter Wimsey series; by my one disastrous semester at Dana College--and my rich and highly enjoyable though challenging course in French there under Dr. Sarah Penick; and by a single comment made by one of the college-age senior counselors at Circle R Bible Camp, where I worked the summer after my sophomore year as a junior counselor. “It’s really hard,” she said. “I had no idea how hard it would be.”

I began hungering for that grueling, difficult challenge. I thought all colleges were like Oxford--full of brainy students working around the clock just to keep up, and demanding, if inspiring, professors.

When I at last started at Iowa Central Community College, with a schedule of English, Algebra, Biology, and Chemistry, it was with a wind of terror and excitement at my back. I threw myself into it with all I had. I was almost disappointed when I got all A’s that first semester. How can this be? I’ve never been a straight-A student in my life! This wasn’t that hard!

Of course by the time I graduated from ICCC, my expectations of college and its denizens had altered to a realistic view. Few places were like Oxford--probably Oxford wasn’t quite like my Oxford fantasy had been. But at least I was on my way.

What led my interest, back in that isolated farmhouse, to biology, the subject I’d hated in high school?

Just being there, I guess. Observing the plants (I still remember that the very first plant I keyed out on my own was a spiderwort in the road ditch) and animals (from an abandoned quarry I collected strings of toad eggs and put them into that ditch in front of our house, and couple of weeks later when I went out to the mailbox, there were dozens of pencil-eraser-sized toadlets hopping all over the place) and nature itself (we saw magnificent, eerie aurora borealis almost every winter in that northern-Iowa location).

And I’d been raised with a love of reading. A passion for reading. The library became my lifeline, my connection to a larger world, much larger and deeper than even TV could supply. The farmstead, my family, the local social relationships (community theatre, the saddle club) were not enough. I had a hungry mind, a vivid imagination, and voracious curiosity. The library fed it all, and gave me a step up into the world I wanted to know. I wonder now what those librarians thought of me. Crazy woman? Maybe. I wish they could know how they helped transform my life.

This is how pitiful our computer system at work is: I use a database that was written by our IT guru 12 years ago to store my data on the state's mainframe computer.

Two weeks ago one of the IT people came through while I was out of town and updated my computer and some of its programs. When I got back, I discovered that now, instead of the 1/4-screen, light-gray eye-ruining screen I'd been stuck with for several years, I can now mazimize the data entry screen, it has a black background with big blue, red, green or white letters, AND -- this is the REALLY BIG THING: it now, after these long, 12 years of toil, actually has a Macro capability! This means that all those "clients" for whom I have to enter data multi-times throughout the year and often, in one day? I can just use a macro and fill in all the repetitive data. ("I know, dummy--that's what Macros are for!" -- Well, WHO KNEW??? Certainly not our IT people!)

Isn't it pitiful, in 2003, to be so delighted with a database program that has a Macro facility???

On the other hand, there's something to be said for being so happy with such a small thing that most other people doing this kind of work take for granted. Easily pleased, that's the ticket! Expect nothing (and you learn to do that, working for state government, believe me) and anything, any crumb of novelty or convenience (which in itself is a novelty), reduces you to tears of gratitude.

The only thing I can imagine is that they're fixing to take the whole program away soon, when I'm just getting used to this wonderful "new" feature, and make me keep records in cuneiform on clay tablets.