Madwoman of Preserve Path

Musings from a mother of a groom

2010-04-14T14:55:00.003-06:00

I can't believe that my baby boy is getting married in just a little over a week. It's the weirdest feeling. He's been in a relationship with this girl for 10 years (I'm not exaggerating), and I certainly expected it. But still, I can't quite get used to the idea. After April 24, there's no getting out. He's committed. Not that I want him to de-commit, I don't. I want him to stay married, forever and ever.

How do I explain this? With every new marriage, there's joy and elation and giddiness, to be sure. There are months of planning and gobs of resources that go into the wedding. But there's always this little rattle of foreboding lurking just under the surface: Will they be happy? Will they be content? Will they avoid regret and mistakes? Will they be able to pay their bills? Will their kids be healthy and intelligent?

Don't get me wrong: I trust my son's judgment, and I love his bride-to-be. She's a wonderful woman. They've grown up together and each is the other's best friend. If I were a gambler, I'd say this was a sure thing. Even so ... .

I remember the same feeling before my own wedding nearly 33 years ago. I was so scared the night before I could hardly sleep. What, I wondered, if I was making the Biggest, Most Horrible Mistake? And how could I possibly tell my mother I felt like fleeing? I imagined the whole scenario in my head, ending with the part where my mom could never show her face in church again because her horrible daughter embarrassed her so. And that was that. I regained my composure in the morning, walked down the aisle and got married to a guy I love more than life itself. Still do. Whew.

I've decided that nobody who gets married should do so without that little flutter in the pit of the stomach, that little nudge of doubt. Because lots of marital success is like gambling at the casino. Sometimes you hit it big, but most times, you barely break even. But if you can live your life as though tomorrow will always be better than today, I think you'll be OK. What's that line in a song from "Annie"? "Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow. You're only a day away." Here's to many tomorrows, darlings.

Because I should

2009-12-14T11:20:00.002-06:00

Surprise! I'm back! I'm posting again on my blog before year's end because a.) I can and b.) I'm tying up loose ends today.

Those of you who know me know I've been a work-widow for six weeks and counting. My husband and I have never been away from each other longer than four or five days in 32 years. This is not my idea of marriage, but you go where the work takes you.

So, what does one do when one is abandoned for the almighty dollar and left to her own devices? She learns to be self-sufficient. Not that I'm not already; just about anything he can do I can do better (said with bravado). Not really. But I've discovered I can start the snowblower and brave the blizzard to clear the driveway and get my car out of the garage ALL BY MYSELF. But I don't like to. I've also discovered how to take out the garbage AND bring back the cans and the recycling bins ALL BY MYSELF. But that's not fun, either. Most of all, I've discovered that I can handle the husband's business paperwork like a charm. I've even found that the more I know, the less I stress about it because I'm not seeing piles of paper on every surface of the house, I'm not listening to the boss whining about how far behind he is, and I have better eyesight, finger dexterity and paper skills than he does. So if he can handle the verbal customer service, I can handle the on-paper variety. Plus I'm getting pretty good at Quickbooks. So the old dog can, indeed, learn new tricks. Even brag about them a little.

What else does she learn? Well, here's what I'm not going to like if I'm widowed permanently someday: I don't like eating dinner alone, but I'm OK with drinking alone (which leads to early bedtime). I can't reach the stuff on the top shelf without a chair. I can't decide whether that funny noise the furnace is making is worth worrying about. And a good backrub is priceless, as is someone who laughs at my jokes and hangs on my every word. I even miss his snoring. There's a certain security in hearing that sound, even though it keeps me awake sometimes. I know I'll eat my words here, but I sorta miss it.

So the house rather echoes these days, and I've turned into a quite-slobby old lady with a cat. Don't worry. My old self will return before Christmas, as will my other half, I hope.

Social media smoshal media

2009-09-21T16:18:00.002-06:00

So I get a lot of crap from my husband about having a Facebook page (which, I might add, he's never even seen). He's too busy and too important to waste his time on such things. Well, good for him.

And I get another lot of crap from some of my friends who are convinced that I'm going to go to Identity Theft Hell because someone's going to steal my identity and all my money (well, they can have it all ... ) because I like to post pictures of my grandkids and dogs and cats and my cabin on my Facebook page AND I like to shop online. Someone would like to be me? Have at it, I say.

And I get some (but not a lot) of crap from my kids and their friends who think (but probably just won't say it) that I'm too old and just a wannabe 30-something to enter into their Facebook world. One of their friends would "friend" me? Horrifying! But I do like to eavesdrop because it's one way to get to know them and keep up with their interests without embarrassing them in public. On the other hand, I do understand their pain because I have an ex-nun aunt who once wore fishnet stockings and miniskirts and said "fuck" in front of her mother when she was, like, 40. And my own mother used to sing Simon and Garfunkel songs (but in her own mom-ish style) while she washed dishes. You know? It just didn't work. That was back in the '70s. Most young people seemed to think that adults over "a certain age" should just back off and not try to be something they're not (trendy? cool? interesting?). I'm not convinced that the under-40 crowd doesn't think the same thing today.

So screw 'em all. I like social media. Except Twitter. I'm way too wordy for 140 characters.

Let's hear it for the old guys!

2009-07-20T15:04:00.004-06:00

This week we heard all the golf gabbers opine on Tom Watson's remarkable loss of the British Open. Besides his collapse in the playoff round, there was that pesky missed par on 18. Oh, and he's 59, for chrissakes. Just too damned old to stay sharp. Ran outta gas. He's supposed to be dead or at least soaking up pee in the nursing home. And did you see the wrinkles?

Well, young ones, just remember: Just because you're old doesn't mean you lose passion. Can you imagine if someone just pulled a plug on all of us just for committing the sin of aging? There'd be nothing to strive for, no future to ponder. And no elder golfers holding us up on the course.

Which reminds me: I was reading the "Irish sports pages," as one of my colleagues calls the obituaries, this morning, and I clicked on one that I thought I recognized. Not so, but I read six or seven of the guest book entries and wished I'd known this person. I hope when I die people will remember me as witty, welcoming, generous and helpful. And smart, too, because I value "smarts." Clearly, I have a little work to do. What would you like to be remembered for?

Don't worry: I'm not dead

2009-06-19T12:11:00.003-06:00

Some of you loyal "Madwoman" readers (OK, all three of you) are wondering why I haven't posted anything in this blog since April. Here's why: I have an acute case of laziness. I just don't have any creative energy right now. My mind feels like a pile of mush. So there's that and a generally short attention span.

I'll be back one of these days, after I finish up a few other projects, like learning to use my new iPhone. When I figure that out, they'll probably invent something that sucks the thoughts from my brain and beams them to yours. Meanwhile, don't worry. I have no thoughts. When I do, I'll write.

No more birthday treats ...

2009-04-23T11:09:00.002-06:00

"Call it the Birthday Treat Ban," reports today's Star Tribune. "Starting this fall, students will no longer be allowed to bring celebratory food or gifts to share with classmates, a move that principals say they're making out of concern about childhood obesity, allergies and the feelings of kids whose parents can't afford to buy treats for the whole class."

At last. I don't remember when all this overfeeding and overcelebrating started, but I think it might have been in the late '70s and '80s, when many of us mothers entered the outside-the-home workplace. We started sending all kinds of treats to school to make up for our absence in our kids' lives. We felt so guilty for having to make real cash money to afford our overpriced houses that we showered our kids with too much of everything so they would know we really loved them more than the jobs and the real cash money and the too-big houses. Us Baby Boomers really blew it on this one. The results? We created kids about whom we now complain. They act "entitled," we say. Well, duh.

Around the same time that mothers began sending 40 perfectly decorated clown-themed petit fours from Woullet's bakery to Mrs. Smith's third grade, the great birthday party competitions began. Before that time, kids' birthday parties were affairs lasting a couple of hours with a rousing game of "drop the clothespin in the bottle" or "pin the tail on the donkey," modest presents for the feted child and homemade cake and ice cream. For a real thrill, sometimes there was homemade Chef Boyardee pizza. Anyway, those parties grew into all-day and overnight, with trips to pizza palaces and pony rides for all. Storytellers, clowns, Sesame Street characters. Helium-stuffed supersized balloons. Goodie bags. "Themes" and matching paper cups. You had to have a damned staff to run a 5-year-old's birthday party. And yes, you had to have ... drumroll, please ... a party coordinator. Oh, the pressure of it!

Well, I'm all for simplification. My kids will probably tell you their parties were pretty lame. But there's some mother at Echo Park Elementary who's really disappointed she can't make little Billy's day "really special" and crepe-paper companies predicting a drop in streamers futures.

My suggestion? Send Billy with a really good lunch and a napkin note telling him how much you miss him today. Tell him you love him even more than you knew you could love somebody. Tell him today how happy you were on the day he was born. If Billy doesn't think that's enough, don't worry. Someday, he will.

Weighty matters

2009-03-09T14:04:00.005-06:00

When I was a young girl, I always felt fatter than anybody else. Of course, now when I look back at old pictures of myself, I know that wasn't true. I wasn't a petite beanpole of a girl; I was sturdy and strong. But, truthfully, I see now I was slender. Normal slender.

That was about 75 pounds ago. A friend took a picture of me while we were on vacation. I'm a frickin' tank, and I hate it.

With my son's wedding coming up here eventually, I have, in the possibility of a photographer's camera catching the width of my backside, some real motivation to lose weight. Besides, I feel miserable. I am actually aware of my middle because it uncomfortably collides with my waist. I hate shopping because I hate the clothes available to me. Now I'm not yet in the "X" or the Women's sizes yet, but I'm close. But it's still miserable to drag dozens of jeans into the fitting room only to find one pair -- in a size larger than all the others -- into which this burgeoning body can budge.

So here's what I've eaten today: my calcium, multivitamin and glucosamine supplements, a banana, a cup of oatmeal with Splenda, a cup of coffee, a half of a raised sugar doughnut at this morning's staff meeting (I couldn't help myself!), a cup of spinach with balsamic salad spritzer, a vegetable beef Campbell's Soup at Hand, 10 wheat pretzels, a Braeburn apple and a cup of mint tea. Not too appetizing, but dinner awaits. About 800 calories worth.

Here's what I figure I can have for dinner: six spears of Schwan's asparagus grilled in about a teaspoon of olive oil, a grilled chicken breast with a sauce of about 4 T. fat-free sour cream, a cup of sliced mushrooms and a sauteed onion, a medium potato with about 5-6 sprays of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and a Schwan Healthy Creations bar for dessert. That brings me to about 725 calories, so I can have a 4 oz. glass of chardonnay (about 75 calories).

I'd love to hear your 800-calorie dinners. Bring 'em on!

I'm effed

2009-02-25T11:38:00.002-06:00

Today the Star Tribune proclaims, "A new study involving nearly 1.3 million middle-age British women -- the largest ever to examine alcohol and cancer in women -- found that just one glass of chardonnay, a single beer or any other type of alcoholic drink per day significantly increases the risk of a variety of cancers."

But it wasn't the story that caught my eye. The online comments were hilarious. Here's a selection:

"But masterbation is still good, right? C'mon, man. Don't change this on me now."
"Oh for Pete's Sake!! We all have to die of something. I wish the research doctors would just shut up already with this crap. Drink red wine ... save your heart. Drink wine or any alcohol ... die of cancer. Gaah! Whatever."
"News Alert: Scientists have discovered that everyone who has cancer has a heartbeat. They also have found that continuing this behavior increases the chances of getting cancer."

So here's the deal: I'm trying to lose a bunch of weight, so I'm pushing it at the gym every other day. I'm trying not to eat junk. I'm trying not to snack. It's Lent. I'm offering it up. Plus, it's supposed to snow again tomorrow, which means I get double credit, right? Or something. If I must stop drinking wine now, I'm just totally screwed.

Old friends are best friends

2009-01-30T15:23:00.003-06:00

Twenty years ago, I cut my journalistic/public relations teeth in a job I wasn't much prepared for at another St. Paul college -- my alma mater, at that. I was all of 26 years old when I started, and I think I made a grand sum of about $16,500 a year. I had been a golden child as a student: honors in English, a practically perfect G.P.A., faculty who showered me in adulation. What I didn't know: They'd treat me like crap as soon as I joined the administration. And the place ran like a harem with PMS. Three presidents, three bosses and seven years of loyalty later, my job -- and my salary -- was sheared by half in a fit of cost-cutting. That was the beginning of the end of that journey.

But along the way, I had worked with some really lovely and talented people who, like me, needed jobs to survive and endured no small amount of abuse to put food on their tables. One, Barb, a graphic designer, had a houseful of kids ranging from teens to preschoolers. She was enormously talented and, of course, she could hardly wait to get outta there. After she lost a child in an auto accident and her husband to a heart attack, she designed books for a small local press. Today, she paints. After unspeakable tragedy (she doesn't remember most of it, she says protectively), she still smiles.

I had lunch with Barb today -- our first in 20 years. We're going to do it again. Life is short, so I might as well spend it with people I really, really like.

The dad of the whole country!

2009-01-20T14:49:00.002-06:00

I enjoyed a lunchtime jaunt with my grandsons. Their dad is away on business today, so I drove them from school to daycare. I've always found "cartime" to be a great conversation. Today's topic: Our new president, "Rock Obama." Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Me: "So, Owen, what does a president DO?"
O: "Well he's like the dad to the whole country. And he gets to ride in a helicopter!"

That just about sums up the job. Good luck, "Rock." Don't disappoint us.

Insomnia, again

2009-01-09T13:58:00.003-06:00

I remember when I used to have to set my alarm clock halfway across a room so it'd annoy me just enough to get me out of bed. My sleep-coma produced spots of drool on my pillowcase. More often than not, one of my arms would "fall asleep" so profoundly that I'd have to use the other arm to pick it up and shake it awake. If you asked me my name when I opened my eyes each morning, I'd have no recollection. Then I became a mother.

After 25 years or so of retraining myself, now I am a perfect insomniac. I wake if light enters my field of vision, if the clock radio clicks softly just before the radio alarm goes on, if my husband breathes heavily in his sleep, if the bell on the cat's collar tings as she slinks down the hall. I swear a feather drifting to the sidewalk could wake me. Permanently.

Why is it that every little anxiety, discomfort or obsession magnifies to the height of Mount Everest when you can't sleep? Here's the short rundown of my latest four hours of frets a few nights ago:

-- That we'd lose our house to the bank and end up living in Nate and Sara's basement. Mind you, we've never even had a late payment on the mortgage in our 20-some years of having one. Besides, Sara would never make me live in the basement, would you, dear?

-- That I really need a haircut and I bet Shannon, my hairdresser, is going to raise her prices again, damn her all to hell. She's worth every cent she earns, and she's much nicer than the priest in the confessional and has better breath too.

-- That this funny backache that's irritating me is probably the beginning of some fatal disease I can't pronounce. Except a Tylenol licked it in no time, and I hardly ever work out four days in a row like I did this week.

-- That someone in my office will find out about this blog, forward it to some powerful administrator and have me fired on the spot, and then we would (you guessed it) lose the house to the bank and end up living in Nate and Sara's basement. But my co-workers who read the blog have told me they enjoy it. Don't give me up, girls.

-- That I will never, ever again have acrylic nails, and I really like them but they cost too much every month to maintain. In reality: Who gives a rat's patootie about fingernails?

-- That I need a new swimsuit, and I hate to shop, but we're going to Florida in February and I don't want to look like an idiot. Yeah ... but will a swimsuit really change that? And who the heck there knows me and cares what I look like? As my grandma would say, "Who's going to be stopping their horses to gaze at you?"

-- That someday, when I'm dead, nobody will really care one way or the other, unlike the case of my friend Emilie who just died and hundreds, literally hundreds, of people went to her funeral and love just poured forth. Well, she earned that the hard way. I, on the other hand, hope to get run over by a truck when I'm 85 or so. And my kids will cry, won't you, kids? God knows, you know how.

-- That my pillowcase has a hole in it, and who has holes in their pillowcases? That's just plain neglect. And that's no invented fret; it's the truth, I'm afraid. And don't get me started on FEARS.

Farewell, Emilie

2008-12-26T17:16:00.006-06:00

My friend Emilie Lemmons died on Christmas Eve after a short but intense battle with sarcoma. She leaves behind a 2-year-old, a 10-month-old and the love of her life. She was only 40. I still can't think what I can write about her that will do her justice.

Emilie and I weren't "close" in the same way she was close to her dear friends. We had only about a half-hour of face time and a handful of phone calls over the six or seven years I knew her. Ours was mostly a professional relationship: she was a reporter for our archdiocesan newspaper awhile back, and I was just another PR flack supplying her with story ideas and sources. But we had a "karma" between us. Whenever we talked, either via e-mail or on the phone, we got into all these conversations that had nothing to do with our original purpose. I've always thought that, had we been neighbor ladies back in the '60s, we'd have spent entire days letting the kids run wild while we talked over the back fence.

When she became a mother and decided to stay home with her little one, she began freelancing. And then there was one more little one, and she was hooked on motherhood. She started a blog when she was trying to get pregnant and wrote terrific columns on parenting and her inner life. She was so happy. Life was good.

We began e-mailing each other at least once a week over the past year. I don't even remember how that began. She read (and commented on -- yay!) this blog, and I read hers devotedly. She was an amazing writer and thinker. Funny. Smart. Gutsy. She was a terrific mother. I was -- and continue to be -- impressed at the depth of her spirituality. We had many conversations about that, and each time we did, I felt like someone out there was making me a better person, dragging me kicking and screaming toward heaven. Now she's gone. Selfishly I wonder if anyone will be able to pick up where she left off. Mostly, I thank her for her ultimate goodness, the positive force she was in the lives of others.

The Basilica of St. Mary should be packed for her funeral on Monday, as she touched so many people in her short life. I suspect her friend Molly Guthrey Millett, a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, will tell about that in a column in Sunday's paper.

I won't say goodbye to Emilie. Thanks to her, I know I'll see her again, no matter how doubtful I am. I just have to get to heaven to do that. Dang it, Emilie. I don't know if I'm saint material.

My letter to Santa

2008-12-17T12:53:00.004-06:00

Dear Santa,

I've been sorta good this year. If there’s any room on the sleigh, here’s what I hope you can bring for me:

1. A new, solid gold checkbook. The old one is practically empty and is duct-taped together. And, while you’re at it, bring a giant shredder for all those equally useless retirement account statements. Then, deliver a set of angel wings to President-Elect Obama. He’ll need to arrange something miraculous. Alternate gifts: a "Will Work For Food" sign and a matching handbasket.

2. A new ignition switch for our pontoon boat on Cedar Lake. We thought we’d make it through the summer without one repair, but we didn’t and then one of our kids and his friend got stranded when it was too cold to get out and swim. (We thanked our neighbor, The Little Bohunk, for towing them to shore, but maybe you can bring something nice for him, too. He likes switches, too, and things with engines and machinery of all types.)

3. Big bottles of bubbly for my husband's loyal customers. They kept us afloat, or at least treading water, all year. A case ought to do it. Maybe next year we’ll have you bring two cases, but at this point it looks like we may be drinking them both ourselves. (Note to Santa’s Elves: Call us for new shelves in Santa’s Workshop, new windows on the North Pole house or those fancy shower doors that Mrs. Claus keeps whining about.)

4. Boxing gloves for the grandsons but skip the Ultimate Fighting videos. They need to work their way up, and they promise not to practice on their new preschool friends.

5. A perpetual calendar for the grandsons' parents, so they can schedule the next 14 years of babysitters, birthday parties, drivers, carpools, basketball games, spring sings, choir concerts, driver’s ed, swim meets, hockey games, track meets, entrance exams, dance lessons, art shows, college visits, graduations, awards assemblies, proms,tux rentals, limo rentals, all-night grad parties and beer busts. Don’t bother with a checkbook for this pair. The money will just fly out of their pockets on its own.

6. A Sherpa for No. 2 daughter and her boyfriend. Those gory medical books that she reads and the million-page law texts that he hauls around can give people hernias. If anything happens to the Sherpa, the boyfriend should have his J.D. in time for the lawsuit or the daughter can prescribe something for the pain. In a few years, they’ll need a new checkbook for all those grad school payments, so you might as well pack it onto the sleigh while we’re thinking about it.

7. A friendly visit by Martha Stewart or the HGTV guys to the new home of our son and his fiancee. Maybe they can advise what paint colors enhance Xbox 360 and what style of tap handle can dress up a kegerator. Then, perhaps, they can help them pick a nice color palate for the wedding. What goes with "soon"?

That should just about do it. Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!

Oh, and before I forget: Throw in some world peace, please. Merry Christmas and love to you all.

The Madwoman

Excuses, excuses

2008-12-08T12:50:00.003-06:00

Our friend Meg recently blogged about all her excuses not to blog. So, feeling creatively arid lately, I offer my own list:

I am busy:

1. Wrapping the caramels that I made before Thanksgiving (it's OK, they won't go bad, all ye food safety experts) and I'm not done yet. Caramel wrapping inflicts stickiness on keyboards.

2. Watching the Weather Channel for hints of The Big One (that's a snowstorm in these parts, pardner).

3. Counting the days till my son really moves all his crap out of the house. Him, I could keep. His stuff is becoming rather unmanageable now that his sister's stuff is keeping it company. When, you ask, will his new house be ready? Soon, I'm told. They're plastering Sheetrock and the wood floors get refinished next week. I'm going to make one of those little calendars with the doors (think Advent calendar, but that would be sort of sacreligious) counting the days between "Sign the papers and go into debt for the rest of your life" to "Move every last thing you own out of your parents' house so they can rent out your space for $500 a month."

4. Ticking off the hours until my two-week (count 'em!) Christmas vacation beginning Dec. 22. Working at a Catholic university has definite advantages. Every day I pray for our admissions and financial aid people, as our livelihood depends on them.

5. Crocheting the lacy little snowflakes I intend to give all my favorite people at Christmas because I'm too broke to buy them anything. Which is really a blessing after all: Curling up in my chair with the cat at my feet and watching those weepy holiday specials while I work is much more fun than trudging through the mall, tossing hundred-dollar bills at ungrateful store clerks. And I don't have to chirp, "Happy holidays!" to anyone.

6. Drinking leftover eggnog -- the real stuff laced with bourbon and rum. You can't drink this eggnog and blog anything readable.

7. Watching our students begin to walk in their sleep, a spectator sport that culminates in finals week and graduation. Winning scores come in for for number papers written, tests taken and hours awake. Style points: Unwashed hair, beard overgrowth, wrinkled clothes. Lightning round double-scores are earned for talking to themselves and forgetting their iPods in the library.

8. Writing the annual Sirek Christmas letter. I'm lying about this one because I haven't really written it yet -- just taking notes. This I know: It won't be a parody of "A Visit From St. Nicholas," a.k.a. "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."

9. Trying to lay off the sweets and favor the gym so I can avoid embarrassment in Florida -- although almost anything goes in the Land of Inappropriate Clothing for Body Type. I scored four free airline tickets this year from forgotten American Express points, and the other benefiting couple is likely to pick up the rental car charges, so presto! I have a free vacation coming in February! Yay me!

10. And my basic cover-all excuse for my blogging ineptitude? I'm just trying to keep it together until after the solstice. No, I'm not a witch -- I'm a b--ch. I need sunlight to be a nice and creative person. These short winter days put me to sleep and make me cranky. All I want to do is lay in bed and eat massive amounts of dark chocolate and drink gallons of chardonnay. So this is a month of epic scenarios, Good vs. Evil in constant showdown: Do I simply take a little snooze before I go to bed and sleep 12 hours, or do I scream at anyone who drops a Christmas cookie crumb on my floor after I've gained 10 pounds because it's all the fault of Jesus for being born in the dead of winter?

Happy holidays :)

No mutiny on bounty here

2008-11-21T12:58:00.006-06:00

It's almost Thanksgiving. I've been thinking a lot about that -- thanksgiving, not just the holiday at which we celebrate it -- lately. Seems like every morning the clock-radio wakes me, some newscaster is bemoaning the stock market's consistent slide, the automakers' imminent collapse, global disaster ensuing: LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!! News at 6. If foreclosure doesn't find us, global warming will. If we don't stop eating, we'll die early deaths. Red wine makes us fat and drunk, but happy and cancer-free. Huh? I'm all confused. I don't know what to be afraid of anymore. It's just. Too. Much.

There's been a mutiny, and we just refuse to be thankful for what we have. Not "have in comparison to someone else" but "have," period.So, I'm retreating from all of this. Instead of focusing on everything that's gonna drive me to an early grave or send me to hell in that handbasket I'm so fond of, I'm honing in on what I have, and what I'm thankful for.

For starters: So far I have a roof over my head and a comfortable mattress. That's all good. I'm sort of creaky and have brittle fingernails, but I'm not too wrinkly and have all my teeth. That's good, too. I have health -- a gift for which I can give thanks every day. I have people in my life who love me and show me, in small but touching ways, that I am important to them: My husband, for example, doesn't get irritated about my crashing around in the kitchen or starting up the washing machine or even running the vacuum before he wakes up in the morning. He knows I'm a neat freak and doesn't complain about it, just lets me do my thing.

I have a car with good brakes and a house with three working furnaces (well, one's for the garage, and one's for the workshop). I have terrific neighbors, including a wonderful public high school right across the street from my house. I enjoy watching the kids come and go to school and especially like the nice big scoreboard (I can see that when I'm doing dishes) when the girls play softball. I can see the horizon from my deck, my own version of wide-open spaces in the heart of suburbia. Sometimes, I can see fireworks displays from other cities there. It's very cool.

I have a tree in my yard that has to be 100 years old. Isn't that amazing? And my crysanthemums keep coming back year after year. A miracle.

I am thankful for the view outside my office windows, the words on my bookshelf, and the Internet. And that is not all, no. That is not all. What makes you thankful? Share the bounty.

Kittehs know best

2008-11-07T12:05:00.001-06:00

The Longest Day

2008-11-04T12:58:00.004-06:00

You know, I've been up since 2 a.m. I was so danged excited over the prospect of a new president that I could hardly sleep. I finally got up at 5:45 and was at my polling place when it opened at 7. And I was probably 200th to show up! Elderly election judges had us snaking in lines all over the Crown of Life Church social hall.

Remember the old days of levered voting booths? Coocooned by this neat little curtain, we clackety-clacked our selections and voila! When we opened the curtain, our votes were magically counted, and the ballot was cleared for the next voter. I missed those today, especially because I was seated at a table to while my fellow voters in line stood looking over my shoulder. I might as well have turned around in my chair, held up my ballot and asked, "Say, neighbor, whaddya think? Will my vote for Obama push him over the top?"

Now, we wait. This isn't like playing a bar video game and having a running total of the score. We have to wait for the polls to close. By the time we have a winner, I might be awake for 24 hours, or the suspense might kill me. I know I'm wearing my lefty heart on my sleeve, but I hope the result is worth waiting for, and I remember this election for the rest of my life.

Make them stop? Please?

2008-10-27T14:51:00.003-06:00

You want to know why I haven't been able to blog much lately? Don't know. I think my brain has turned to mush and I'm suffering from too many campaign commercials. They've bored little holes in my head and my brains are oozing out onto the sidewalk. By Nov. 4, I should be about as attractive and smart as the Headless Horseman. And about as broke as ever, unless Barack (or, perish the thought, the other guy) starts throwing bags of money into the crowd at his inauguration parade. That'd beat saltwater taffy any day. What was I writing about again?

Oh, what a beautiful morning ...

2008-10-07T14:03:00.002-06:00

Today's grayed over with driving rain. Obama and McCain will duke it out on national television tonight, but I don't want to watch. Al Franken's coming to campus tomorrow, and the Colemanites are already whining to the media about it. (I hope they know you can't have a stick on a sign around here because then it becomes a weapon.) I'm afraid to open the quarterly statement for my retirement account. I haven't even made the house payment yet this month because business sucks so much. We're determined, however, not to become a statistic, so we trudge on. Pass the tuna casserole.

All day today, I've endured the students of the voice teacher downstairs. Lots of showtunes, over and over and over. "Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day. I've got a beautiful feeeee-ling! Ev'rything's goin' my way."

Yeah, right.

She gots spirit, yeah, she do

2008-09-29T14:14:00.003-06:00

Maybe Sarah Palin needs a writer, or at least a filter. Witness this quote from Mrs. Articulate in a recent interview with CBS' Katie Couric:

"We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It's very important when you
consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and
comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's
Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those
out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia,
because they are right there, they are right next to our state."

Uh, not to be disrespectful, but WTF? What DID she say? I can hardly wait to hear her debate Joe Biden on Thursday night. High comedy is promised. But it might be an experience not unlike watching old "I Love Lucy" episodes, when I'd put a blanket over my face because I was so embarrassed for women everywhere that any one woman could be so cute but sooooooo STUPID.

There. Got THAT off my chest. And now, about that $700 billion and that cardboard box down by the river with my name on it.

The whirl begins

2008-09-09T14:23:00.004-06:00

Some of you might be wondering, "why does she have this blog but she never writes in it?" Some others might wonder, "Doesn't she ever take cool pictures like the other smarter bloggers do?"

Answer No. 1: I'm really, really busy lately, now that school is back in session and my real job gets in the way. Plus I help my husband with his business stuff (so we can, like, eat and live in a permanent structure that is nowhere close to "down by the river"). I love to write in this blog and would do so all day long, just to please you, but oh, well ... .

Answer No. 2: I don't even own a digital camera. And my offspring can tell you what a poor photographer I am, always cutting off heads or sneezing while clicking the shutter. The results aren't pretty. So use your imagination. And read, damn it. That's what words are for. You don't need pictures all the time! This is not Life magazine or People or Us Weekly.

But anyway ... I'm dying to talk to y'all about Sarah Palin. OMG. Seriously.

Gold medal month

2008-08-12T14:21:00.004-06:00

So how did the girl who was always picked last end up being such a sports junkie? The family sports gene totally missed me: I can't play golf, don't really get into hiking and climbing and hunting and fishing, would rather sit in the cabin and read all day than waterski or swim and play volleyball. But I am an Olympicsholic. I admit it.

I can still remember where I was when that little Romanian 14-year-old, Nadia Comaneci, scored her first perfect 10 on the bars in 1976 (I was standing there in my underwear, ironing in a stifling second-floor walkup apartment overlooking West Seventh and Randolph in St. Paul). And Mark Spitz? No matter what Michael Phelps does in the pool, Spitz is still my all-time favorite McDreamy.

Maybe it's because I raised a bunch of athletes and did a little swimming myself a very long time ago that I realize how extraordinary these Olympians are. Their dedication to perfection is something I find quite awe-inspiring. Sometimes, of course, it's downright obsession and probably borders on madness and narcisism. Nevertheless, the Olympics are still a blast to watch, and my anemic patriotism gets a free boost, too, despite living in the city where John McCain is having a great big party next month.

This year I'm glued to the TV as I am every four years, although I haven't stolen any planks from the garage for a makeshift balance beam this time. I just can't get that dismount down.

Remembering Cathe

2008-08-06T08:51:00.004-06:00

A little more than five years ago, a dear friend from college, Catherine, died after an on-again, off-again battle (she called it "inconvenient") with breast cancer for years. She was 49. Her little boy was 11. It broke our hearts.

Cathe had a way of collecting friends like some people collect coins. She polished all of us and scooped us together in a pile. Lo and behold, we became friends, good friends who gather several times a year to flirt with Italian waiters, eat too much and drink a bunch of wine. Sometimes we top it off with a forbidden cigarette, just because Cathe liked being a bit of a rebel.

After she died we had a tree planted in her honor on the campus of her alma mater, the College of St. Catherine. Each spring it boasts pink blooms, and a bench now graces the site, too. On July 31, the anniversary of her death, I sat there again, drinking in a kind of silence almost antithetical to Cathe's nature: She was Irish and never shut up, except sometimes in church, and even then she usually found something to whisper and giggle about.

As I sat there thinking about Cathe, I hoped there is, indeed, the afterlife to which we Christians cling. I have some good gossip I need to tell her and I need to feel again the special kind of exhaustion that endless laughter brings. I need her to tell me a story. I miss her "cackle."

Suddenly, my reverie was interrupted. Someone walking to his car after a campus summer music conference had burst into a perfect-pitch rendition of "Amazing Grace." Thanks, Cathe.

My 'basket' list

2008-08-05T12:33:00.003-06:00

I see that actor Morgan Freeman, one of my favorites, had a serious auto accident yesterday. So here, with every good wish that he recovers from his injuries and in the theme of one of my favorite Freeman movies, "The Bucket List," is my Top 20 things I intend to do one day, in no particular order:

1.) Drink really good Irish ale in an Irish pub, in Ireland.
2.) Eat a meal in Tuscany.
3.) Publish a book of my poems.
4.) Go to my grandkids' grade-school "spring sings."
5.) Go downhill skiing again (I haven't since Nicole was born), as it was the only sport that didn't embarrass me.
6.) Dip my toes in the Pacific Ocean; closest I ever got was being sprayed by its mist on a foggy cruise of San Francisco Bay.
7.) Run a 5K. Really, I would. I just don't know if I could.
8.) Learn to back up while towing a trailer.
9.) While I'm at it, learn to back up using rear-view mirrors.
10.) Dock the boat all by myself.
11.) Learn to take good pictures that don't cut off heads.
12.) Learn to play bridge or chess or some other mentally challenging game. Best I can do is 500 and cribbage, neither of which I can even remember how to play anymore.
13.) Make pasta from scratch.
14.) Continuing the food-preparation theme, I'd like to bake a pie with a lattice crust. They're so pretty, but I've never tried it.
15.) Put my boxes of photos in some kind of order in albums before I forget who's pictured.
16.) Make a quilt.
17.) See the Grand Canyon.
18.) See Mount Rushmore.
19.) Ride a bike or walk to my office at least once. It's 9.1 miles. I clocked it yesterday, and I can do this.
20.) Lose 20 pounds before Nate gets married.
21.) Just for good measure (you've heard of a baker's dozen, haven't you?), learn to play the piano.

Instead of calling this a "bucket" list, I think it should be called a "basket" list. As in handbasket. Because that's probably where I'll end up at the rate I'm going.

Huh?

2008-07-28T14:54:00.003-06:00

Nobody ever warned me that I'd turn into a blathering idiot when I hit 50. I can't remember shit (sorry, Mom, that's your word, I know). I repeat myself, repeat myself, repeat myself; swear I brought things home but instead left them elsewhere (yes, Nicole, my favorite cooler was still at the cabin), look for clothes I sent to the Goodwill long ago, have imaginary friends and can't remember quite significant things I did 20 years ago. I get back from vacation and can't remember my e-mail PIN. Thank God I wrote it down before I left. So far I haven't left my keys in the refrigerator, but I know that could be coming sooner than I expected.

I thought only truly old people did this. Heck, my mom didn't start getting "scattered" like this until she hit 70-something. And instead of letting this frustrate her, she just bought more PostIt^TM notes.

So far this isn't all that debilitating, luckily. I don't usually get lost in the car, embarrass people or myself unintentionally or act legally insane. I probably annoy my children and my husband more than I do myself -- they already know I'm kind of OCD anyway. But when I try to lighten up a bit and am not compulsively tidying my house/workspace/dresser drawers, this is what happens. Promise me: If I get dangerously forgetful, hide the keys in the fridge. That would scare me into submission.

And the rockets' red glare ...

2008-07-15T14:49:00.005-06:00

Sorry for the blog lag here, but we escaped to Cedar Lake for a blissful 10 days that went by in a blink. The days began with some of the best babyback ribs I've ever tasted in my life, courtesy of friend Seth Roxberg, whose parents, Dick and Ellie, have a place in Isle and invited us for a yummy Fourth of July picnic. Seth rubbed and sauced and smoked those ribs lovingly all day, then we fought the mosquitoes for them until we were stuffed. The next night, the Roxberg womenfolk joined us for our traditional Cedar Lake fireworks display.

Our neighbors on the bay, Ken and Jaci Gangl and their family, began the tradition when all of our kids were little. One of their friends, a pyrotechnician par excellance, got us all hooked on shooting mortars high in the sky over the lake. We had the only yard open enough not to burn up our cabins or our boats, so our yard has been the fireworks' stage ever since. Ken begins shopping early in the spring, then a few weeks before the fourth he wires and packs and sets all of these fuses and God knows what else. This year he had back surgery on June 30, so he got everything set before he went under. That's dedication.

It's probably illegal or something, but our lake association kicks in a good $500 or so for the fireworks, and everybody gets a half-hour of beauty and booms that rivals any professional display. Boats bob out in the center of the lake and honk their horns with appreciation. We hear "oohs" and "ahhs" and whoops and whistles after each launch. We all get a kick out of that. It's the highlight of the summer. Our kids still act like they're 10, planning their calendars around the fireworks, except now they pencil in the kind of beer they'll serve at this blessed event.

Before anybody gets all "you'll blow your hand off" over this post, know this: Ken wires the whole thing for remote control. It beats the days when he and a cadre of brave 40-something men (including my fire-obsessed husband) used to run around in the dark with blow torches to set these things off. (Rule of thumb: Never stand over a mortar to see if it's lit.) That really set my heart aflutter. All I could see was the headline: "Twin Cities father maimed in stupid fireworks display that he helped to orchestrate." Now the same 50-something guys can safely flip a few switches. And we do move the boats away from our dock. Maybe next year we'll set the thing to music. Or maybe we'll play some Sousa on an old boom box. We have to retain the event's "amateur" ambience; that's part of its charm.

This is one of those crazy traditions that make memories for children, just like the Fourth of July kiddie parade in Virginia, where I grew up. We used to dress up in costumes and decorate our bikes and parade the entire length of the main drag, Chestnut Street (from the mine pit all the way to Silver Lake, which seemed like miles when I was four feet tall) -- and at the end, people from the Chamber of Commerce or something gave each participant a quarter. For that quarter in 1964 or thereabouts, I marched down Chestnut in a hula skirt and a Hawaiian print bra when it was 36 degrees at parade time. Then I headed right to the Pic 'n' Pay and spent it all on candy. Which costs a lot less than Coors.

OK, I'll bite

2008-07-01T10:36:00.011-06:00

Emilie and a bunch of other women posted this on their blogs, and I can't resist. Besides, it's a reader-grabber. It's the NEA's "Big Read" list; they guess the average adult has read six of these illustrious titles. How sad is that?

We're instructed to: "1.) Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read. 3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE.4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them."

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

The Bible (but, of course, I'll never finish it)

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

1984 - George Orwell

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (twice!)

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (once in high school, once in college, twice in grad school ... let me tell you about all the incidents of golden imagery in this book ... oh, my. This is the perfect American novel.)

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

Emma - Jane Austen

Persuasion - Jane Austen

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Dune - Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

Dracula - Bram Stoker

The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

Ulysses - James Joyce

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (several times)

Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

Germinal - Emile Zola

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession - AS Byatt

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

Charlotte's Web - EB White

The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Faraway Tree Collection

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais!)

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

Watership Down - Richard Adams

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Happy anniversary to us

2008-06-18T08:47:00.006-06:00

It's our 31st wedding anniversary today, and I woke up in bed by myself this morning. Sigh. So I got up, went downstairs and found my sleepless partner dozing in the chair. His knee hurt. And his business has him in a worried funk. I always thought by now we'd be taking it a little easier, the kids would be on their own, we'd be done paying for schools and basketball camps and swimming lessons and iPods. But I didn't think we'd be paying $4 a gallon for gas, that groceries for two would cost over $100 a week (at one time, that fed a family of five quite nicely), that I'd be prayin' for furnace season to end, and that we'd be 10 years into a struggling family business.

But all finances aside, do I have a regret in the world? Not one.

We are blessed. Thirty-one years ago today we started something pretty rare. He's still my best friend, and I'm still his. He still makes me laugh, and I still put away his laundry. It's a fair deal, even though most young couples would think we're old-fashioned. Together we raised three fabulous children, of whom we're so proud. They're like badges of honor on the sash of this marriage. Do we have disagreements? Sure. But doesn't everybody?

Sometimes you have to be thankful just to be there -- to be present -- for each other. My friend Arlene's dad, Clarence Vail, died a few days ago. There's a story about him in the St. Paul Pioneer Press today. When he died, Clarence was 101, and he and his wife, Mayme, had been married 83 years, longer than any other couple in America. Their secret? Nothing fancy: Just respecting each other and working together to get through the day, the month, the year.

Facing an uncertain future is always a little easier with a hand to hold. And I'm still so grateful we were able to keep a promise we made so long ago.

If it's all the same to you, those are laugh lines, not wrinkles

2008-06-10T12:13:00.009-06:00

MinnPost writer Christina Capecchi, one of this blog's few but esteemed readers, has an interesting piece today on wedding trends that reveal our society's obsessions with celebrity, its stunning lack of self-esteem and its amazing gullibility: "Here comes the bride -- picture-perfect, thanks to the likes of Botox, veneers and stunning makeup."

About to become a bride herself, Capecchi has interviewed providers and pushers in the "personal services" industry who aim to make brides (and their mothers, mothers-in-law and little dogs too) feel not quite good enough to walk down the aisle without having a little "work" done. Now I don't know about you, but just the thought of a Brazilian wax makes me catch my breath a little. If you think anyone's gonna stick a needle in my face, you have another thing coming. And if my teeth are crooked, old and not bright white, well ... that's what photo retouching is for. As Popeye said, "I yam what I yam." I'll be a mother-in-law, with gray hair and a girdle, I guess. (Unless, of course, I can wean myself from wine except on weekends and get to the gym a few more days a week.)

I do hope, however, that my soon-to-become daughter-in-law doesn't get sucked into all of this self-flagellation and knows she's beautiful just as she is, inside and out. I'm reminded of a line from a song in the 1965 TV version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Cinderella": "Do I love you because you're beautiful or are you beautiful because I love you?" (Nostalgia alert: You can swoon over the dreamy prince here. I used to pretend I was the princess, played by Lesley Ann Warren, who, I might add, has crooked teeth and a funny smile and is breathtakingly gorgeous just the same.)

Sha na na, dip dip dip dip ...

2008-06-09T12:31:00.005-06:00

We have a job-seeker at our house -- a 23-year-old, engaged-to-be-married guy who's a good dresser with lots of ambition, is easy on the eye, has a bachelor's degree in business communication, reliable transportation, a little job experience in radio and remodeling and washing cars. Take my son, please ...

It's a tough row to hoe for these newly minted college graduates. I remember looking for that first job, writing cover letter after cover letter, blanketing the world with my resumes and trying to act all mature and confident when I actually got to beg a real person to hire me. When I finally succeeded, I think I was making all of $5 an hour, a living wage in 1977. I was thrilled to have the job even though I basically hated it because I'm really not an extrovert and had had to be with people ALL DAY LONG. I didn't like the job much, but it sounded good on paper. My first child was my little excuse for a graceful exit since I am not a quitter and didn't want anyone to call me a job-jumper.

Now job jumping is normal behavior and a sign of ambition. Go figure. I've been in the same job 20 years. Does that mean I'm not ambitious? I don't think so. I'm just lucky and content and have good health insurance. Why mess with a good thing? I know some corporate types who would gladly trade places with me. Besides, right now I am wearing flip-flops and a pair of bermuda shorts and have had one tiny phone call all day long. I get paid for reading, writing, editing, advising, planning. All the things that one nearsighted, wardrobe-challenged, introverted grammarian can do. And lately, I get paid for being the devil's advocate, the "common scold." Everyone needs at least one.

Not exactly Perry Mason

2008-06-05T14:48:00.003-06:00

On Saturday I officiated at an argument worthy of witness by the Supreme Court. The defendant? Owen, age 3. The prosecutor? William, 3 himself.

W: "A truck is a car with a box."

O: "No it's NOT. It's a truck. A truck is not a car."

W: "Yes, yes it IIIIISSSSS! A truck IS a car!"

O: "No it's NOT! A truck is not a car, it's a truck!"

This conversation continues escalation, punctuated by a good-sized slap to the head, followed by another, at which point the parties were returned to the bench. Sobs all around.

Me: "Owen, you're right. A truck is a truck. And Will? You're right, too. A truck can, indeed, be a car."

O: "Nonna, that's not right."

W: "Yeah, Nonna, that's not right."

Me: "Well, at least you can agree about something."

Case dismissed.

Mommy blogs

2008-05-29T09:29:00.003-06:00

The St. Paul Pioneer Press has its own "mommy blog," surrounded by its new MinnMoms.com site. This whole "mommy blogging" phenomenon is fascinating to me, particularly because women have talked like this with each other for years, using whatever technology was available to us.

I wrote gobs of letters to my best girlfriends in high school. We talked incessantly on the phone (the kind with cords, horror of horrors) in college and when our kids were young; one of my 30-something neighbors saved me from toddler insanity with daily naptime phone calls and the knowledge that she, too, was still in her pajamas and had not brushed her teeth yet. Now the only way we can get hold of each other is via e-mail (one of my friends travels for work all the time, another's kids are of the age that seals her butt to the driver's seat around the clock, one works night shifts in her nursing job) and blogs. Whatever way works, I say. We crave connection. It's a girl thing, my husband would observe. He's not being sexist here. Women are the glue that hold the world together. If no one nurtured relationships and communication on this earth, we'd have blown ourselves up long ago. But I digress.

Even the national media are taking notice of "mommy bloggers." Dooce.com's Heather Armstrong showed up on the Today Show recently.

What puzzles me about the "mommy blog" label, though, is the kind of packaging that other media appear to be imposing on women who blog and the audiences who read their work. Traditional media try to create their own versions of these blogs and fail miserably. You'll note that MinnMoms, for example, has topical areas, most having to do with children. OK, that's because it's a site for mothers. But it's odd that I find nothing on the elections or economics or other national issues that must concern mothers. I was hoping to find out if Minnesota mothers are gunning for Hillary because she's one of them, if they find Obama more appealing or if McCain's trophy wife speaks (sorry, Republican friends). I'm wondering how the moms in Hugo are managing to find their kids' school clothes. I'm pondering how the women affected by China's terrible earthquake are managing to get out of bed in the morning, their only children gone.

Because in the real "mommy blogs" (if we should call them that at all), these subjects do, indeed, come up. Women of all ages and stages do more than cook, shop and care for kids. We think, pray, philosophize. We've been doing it, I think, since the beginning of time.

My kind of nerds

2008-05-27T12:16:00.003-06:00

OK, if I were ever going to be a revolutionary, I'd join these guys, profiled in the May 21 Chicago Tribune:

Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson have not wasted their lives.They fight a losing battle, an unyielding tide of misplaced apostrophes and poor spelling. But still, they fight. Why, you ask. Because, they say. Because, they must.

Springtime streams of consciousness

2008-05-16T12:39:00.005-06:00

When I first graduated from college, I had a corporate job for a national retailer, Donaldson's. For those of you too young to remember "the Little D" (the "Big D" was Dayton's), the department store was headquartered right across the Nicollet Mall from its bigger, classier sister. I toiled in the basement, right next to the loss-prevention guys who acted furtive and tough like CIA agents. I, on the other hand, was a sales trainer and part-time employee publications editor for HR, one of a first wave of female corporate-support employees who weren't secretaries. On my $5 an hour salary, I could barely afford the clothes it took to work there.

When spring and summertime came to Nicollet Mall, it was as if something in the downtown stores and office buildings sprang a leak. People flooded onto the sidewalks and plazas on their lunch hours, lolling anywhere green after months of being trapped in the skyways or of scurrying quickly to their cars, hunching into their collars, chins to chests, against the winter winds. It felt a little like it did on campus in the spring, minus the Frisbees flying and the couples making out on the quad. The whole world cried, "ahhhh!" and breathed a collective sigh of relief.

That's how I feel today, the last day of the university's academic year. Commencement is tomorrow. The campus is lush with new grass and well-tended flowers. I love the sound of lawn mowers and the smell of freshly cut grass, and I enjoy watching students pick up their caps and gowns, giddy and terrified at the same time.

After tomorrow, there will be three whole months where I won't be racing to work to nab a last-available parking spot, when the phone won't ring incessantly, and when the deadlines relax a bit. It's a time when I have a nice little cushion in most days. Although I'm working, it's less frantic. Because most students are away during the summer months, news surrounding their escapades slows down, too. (That's good, because we've spent most of the year in media hot water for one reason or another.) I will get the flowers planted. I will spend most weekends at the lake.

Tomorrow, my oldest daughter will be awarded a master's degree in art history -- a pretty awesome achievement, considering her twins are just 3 years old. Last weekend, my future daughter-in-law graduated with her bachelor's in nursing. Next week, my son has some job interviews scheduled in the Twin Cities and is moving home until he and Sara get settled and employment becomes gainful. Last week, my dearest uncle died at 77. Wednesday is my mother's 80th birthday, which I can hardly fathom. And yesterday, my good friend told me that she was finally marrying the guy I set her up with 25 years ago. It's a time of transitions, of celebrating pasts and futures. Transitions used to scare me a bit, and now I welcome them. I've come to realize that the dips and turns of this roller coaster -- which sometimes raise my stomach to my throat -- are good for the soul and make me realize just how adaptable we are. Rather than growing more set in my ways with age, I aim to savor sponanaeity. What are we celebrating next? I'm in ... .

In the merry month of May

2008-05-06T13:48:00.002-06:00

Isn't she lovely? Isn't she wonderful? This is my grandniece Annalise (hey, that rhymes!), wearing her "Sweet Pea" outfit that I bought her in Vero Beach, Fla. Mike and I had dinner at Vero's Ocean Grill one magical night last January; the attached gift shop, where I JUST HAD TO BUY something, has all kinds of cool stuff (I highly recommend the purses ... fabulous!), but I digress.

Miss A is almost six months old and is charming as all getout, don'tcha think? We also got her some yellow sunglasses to match, but somehow I think that little moonface has outgrown them. Couldn't you just smoooooosh those checks?

Where are my sandals, anyway?

2008-04-30T14:09:00.002-06:00

The sun shines today. Ahhhhhh. We need it, crave it, here in Minnesnowta. It's been a gloomy winter, full of the stress of economic downturns, angriness in the workplace, illnesses among my family and friends and all kinds of news that just makes people cranky and raw. So I think I'll go for a walk when I get home to breathe some fresh air, feel some light. Take a deep breath. We need a psychological as well as a meteorological summer. Key the Beach Boys. It's time.

Prayer for Emilie

2008-04-25T09:38:00.004-06:00

T.S. Eliot started his most famous poem, "The Waste Land," with an equally famous phrase, "April is the cruellest month ... ." No truer words than his today.

I found out yesterday that a young woman I've known professionally (and, thanks to the blogosphere, I feel like I "know" her well), Emilie Lemmons, has an aggressive kind of cancer, and the prognosis isn't good. She has two little boys -- a newborn and a wee toddler. My heart is breaking for her. I've posted a link to her blog over on the left-hand side of this page if you want to read her eloquent posts.

Over the past several months I've become a fan of her writing. I started reading her blog because I loved her columns in The Catholic Spirit, our archdiocesan newspaper. She has a way of turning a phrase, matched only by an effervescent spirit, an energetic intellect and a joie de vivre. Whenever I read her column or her blog, I usually came away smiling. Until yesterday, when tears came instead.

Here is a faith- and love-filled woman in the prime of her life, bravely facing a dragon. She is strong beyond compare, but this is so, so ... wrong. How can I not blame someone, something, God, whatever, for something like this? I just can't get my head around it. So I fall back on my old crutch, prayer, and keep up a mantra day and night. Surely, in my immature faith, if I storm heaven (like a kid imploring, "Mama, Mama, Mama" over and over until she answers, "WHAT??! What IS it, child?"), then God will give me just what I want. Sound familiar? I know, I know: God doesn't always give us what we want, but he's said to give us what we need. And he answers all of our prayers. I can't not believe that, even though the cynic in me always points out that both are pretty unbelievable options. So what, what can be done here? Pray? What will prayer do? Well, my hope is that it's the best thing, the only thing, to do.

Join me in a prayer for Emilie, won't you?

Bon appétit

2008-04-17T15:32:00.004-06:00

3-year-old Owen Spaghetti Face had this to say as we dined last night.

Me: "How's the spaghetti?"

O: "Weawwy, weawwy good!"

Me: "Yep, that mom of yours makes good stuff, doesn't she?"

O: "Uh-huh. She's a good cooker. Like Rattatouille."

Yo mamma

2008-04-15T13:07:00.008-06:00

The May issue of Real Simple hit my mailbox yesterday (I know, I know, not exactly The Nation or The New York Times) and last night I curled up and read a neat series of short essays by women writing about things they learned from their mothers. My favorite: One writer listed the top five things that her mother felt were essential to a well appointed home. They were: fresh flowers, a good-size dining room table, white wine and a cat. I forget the thing in the middle, but it was spot-on and just as genteel. You could almost imagine this woman answering the door: She'd straighten her hair, check her earrings and smile sweetly.

What might have been my mother's "essentials"? Well, our home always had four or more kinds of store-bought cookies, three kinds of ice cream, a really big bottle of Gallo Rhine, lots of scratch paper and back issues of the National Catholic Reporter. In earlier years, you could add a carton of Pall Malls and gobs of gloxinias (which nobody else I knew grew from seed). And a 20-pound cat who was rather vicious. When my mom answered the door, she had to check first that Penelope hadn't scared the visitor half to death.

Dumb and dumber

2008-04-08T10:03:00.003-06:00

Author Susan Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Unreason, is raising some intelligent eyebrows among the MPR crowd and on editorial and books pages of some dailies. Even USA Today, usually a bastion of vanilla journalism, opined, "Have we become a nation of frogs simmering our brains and future to death in a warm bath of mindless infotainment, rotten schools and a proud contempt toward rational thought?" I've been wondering the same thing.

The other day I got a raft of e-mail messages from several university students, who, bless 'em, are busy and typically don't write sentences longer than four words in an IM. But I was kind of taken aback when their messages were chockful of spelling errors. Not just little dumb typos, either. Big dumb mistakes, like "their" for "there." And even "their" was misspelled. Another: "shure" for "sure" in three different messages from the same person. These were e-mails from presidents of student organizations -- even the president of the student government. Poor spelling reveals poor thinking, in my mind, and at least displays a general lack of credibility. Or (and this is probably the case) absolute laziness.

I kick myself for being drawn to the likes of "American Idol," "Dancing With the Stars," and even "Wife Swap" on TV when I know I should be at least watching, um, "Jeopardy." And when my amazingly well-read mother admits to "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" I know we're in trouble. Why is it so much work to not only be intelligent but to stay that way? Because we're lazy, too.

It's gonna get us in big trouble, people. It already has. Intelligence is essential to self-governance, and we're a nation full of lazy buggers who want to fall back on platitudes, patriotism and and, yes, mindless pap. And if we don't do something to push ourselves a little harder, we'll get kicked off the planet.

So ...

2008-04-08T09:05:00.004-06:00

Why is it that I always think of nifty things to write in my blog, while I'm driving? Then I get a case of writing constipation when I actually sit down at the screen? Ugh.

Other questions I ponder today include the following:

Must I whine every time I blog?
When is the effin' sun gonna shine for longer than two hours?
How did I ever live before e-mail? (Answer: Probably much more calmly.)
Does anyone ever read this thing anyway?

Sigh.

Love,

Andy Rooney

Zzzzzzz

2008-03-25T15:14:00.004-06:00

I have Easter weekend church-and-family overload. Here's the highlight reel of my last six days:

Wednesday - Drove 200 miles to fetch 80-year-old mother who doesn't drive to the Big Bad Cities so she could spend Easter with us. It was a lovely day for a drive (at least the first half). She talked nonstop for 200 miles. She brought soup for us, which we ate for dinner on Wednesday. Senior citizens like salt and think red wine is "tart." The end.

Thursday - Spent two hours in church and went to the grocery store again. I bought lots of white food and talked religion with mom. She likes to talk about religion and especially priests she doesn't like. I don't.

Friday - Watched it snow. Cleaned house. Shoveled snow for an hour. Spent two hours in church. Went to the grocery store for stuff Mom needed. Like vanilla wafers and other colorless food.

Saturday - Took Mom to the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory to see the spring flower show, which was nice. Cooked half of Easter dinner. Spent three hours in church. Went to the grocery store again because GodknowsitsnotgoingtobeopenonEaster and the world will end.

Sunday - Made the rest of Easter dinner and had the kids and grandkids for a few nice hours full of very salty food. Seems like all those "traditional" dishes are seasoned with mostly sodium. I was up every hour all night long, chugging water.

Monday - My husband, God love him, took Mom back home and was willing to attack the list of stuff that needed fixing at her house. Remind me when I'm 75 that I will need a small apartment when I'm 80, or a staff to care for me and my house and my stuff. I went to the gym for two hours to recharge my salt-swollen body, ran some errands in the sunlight, played Legos with the grandboys for a few hours, listened to music that contained no references to crucifixion nor resurrection, drank a couple of glasses of chardonnay and (my bad) took a coupla sleeping pills and went to bed, alone, at 9 p.m. Ahhhhhh. Happy Easterisover. Alleluia, alleluia.

We've got it all in West St. Paul

2008-03-10T13:49:00.004-06:00

West St. Paul painter Carolyn Swiszcz (whose name has too many consonants for me to pronounce) and photographer Wilson Webb have created a cute little YouTube video tribute to our fair city. It captures the place so perfectly. You have to watch it right now.

What's for dinner?

2008-03-04T10:21:00.003-06:00

A friend recently bemoaned the fact that when she eats crappy she feels crappy, too. Likewise. Garbage in ... . Anyway. It's the time of year when food utterly bores me unless it contains alcohol and grapes. So if you have any bright ideas for dinner, I'm all ears.

This is on the menu at our house the rest of this week:

-- Pork tenderloin, baked sweet potatoes, fresh spinach-red onion-craisins in balsamic vinaigrette

-- Whole wheat ziti with turkey meatballs in souped-up store-bought marinara sauce and some kind of salad

-- Nicole's great pot roast if I can ever thaw the danged thing in advance. She browns the roast, then braises at 300 degrees for about four hours in a sauce made of 8 oz. Coke Classic (with the sugar!), a can of cream of celery soup and a 1/2 envelope of dry onion soup mix (like Lipton). Weird but absolutely fabuloso. Throw into the roasting/braising pan your peeled tates and carrots and voila! Perfect pot roast!

-- A Lenten meat-free dinner on Friday: grilled cheese, tomato, avocado and red onion sandwiches and Campbell's fancy soup in a box. I like the tomato-basil kind myself, but they also make a great butternut squash soup, too. Comfort-o-rama.

I love to cook, but at this time of year it's nice to keep the grocery list at a minimum. Money's tight and it's too danged cold to be lugging bags and bags of groceries across the windy parking lot at Rainbow. Besides, if I slip, I'll break a hip or something and miss the gardening season.

Speaking of gardening, it's seed catalog time! Spring can't be far behind!

A chilly school day and other ruminations of parenthood

2008-02-20T09:18:00.003-06:00

This morning is one of those that make me long for the days of former Gov. Arne Carlson, who famously closed schools when he thought it was too cold for man or beast. On my way to work this morning, the thermometer registered a balmy -13. And the windchill was -30-something.

Then again, I don't have kids in school. Thank God. I am so glad to be finished with those years. I feel like I went to grade school, high school and college at least four times: once myself, and once again for each of my children. When the first kid starts school, the experience kind of takes you back. It's a nostalgic kind of thing: You get a kick out of the wide-ruled notebooks, the No. 2 pencils, the first experience of detention, the challenge of dealing with a bad grade, a cold shoulder or a broken heart. By the time you've done this over and over and over again, it's just plain tiresome. Makes me wonder how those St. Paul Irish-Catholic moms with the nine or 10 kids managed to keep sane by the time the last one got on the bus. An old friend, a middle child among nine, said her mom "went on retreat" a few times. Only when she was in her 40s did she learn her mom actually went into rehab for alcoholism!

Today the whole "kids in school" phase of parenting is even more difficult. I notice that parents of students at the university where I work are involved to a point of being so overprotective that I think their kids will never earn their independence. But the world is much more a place to be protected from than it ever used to be. When I was in college I called my mom (or she called me) about once every couple of weeks. A long-distance phone call was like a bon bon: an expensive, short-lived treat. Today, college kids talk or IM with their parents every day.

Parents of young children, please note: You really won't want to talk to your children every day when they're in college. If you have more than one child, this practice will frazzle your nerves and wear you out. You don't need to know when your kid fails a test, had his car booted for unpaid parking tickets or yelled at a slobby roommate. He'll work it out without you, and he'll work it out better in the long run. Really. Look at it this way: When your co-workers steal your lunch from the employee fridge, who you gonna call? Mom? Seriously.

To be continued ...

If this is some kind of copyright violation, so sue me

2008-02-14T11:30:00.003-06:00

One of my friends sent this wonderful cartoon today. It serves to remind me that in matters of life, love and money, you have to make room, above all, for laughter. Trite but true, laughter makes it all bearable. Happy Valentine's Day to everyone who makes me laugh so regularly. I think I'm losing weight because of it. Really, it's working!

OK, boys and girls. We're having a contest

2008-02-11T14:50:00.001-06:00

To come up with the best Valentine's Day idea for our significant others. You first!

Psst. Right now I'm procrastinating, hiding and looking busy

2008-02-01T13:53:00.000-06:00

My husband thinks I sit in my office and fart around on the Internet all day. Yes, I say, I do this for a living. They pay me good money (well, not so much) to do so. But today I really AM farting around and not working very much because I am tired, sort of depressed and feeling really quite desperate, and I just don't want to write or edit anything important. So I shan't. I shall fart around all I please until it's time to go home. Then I shall watch mindless television, drink a bit or two of wine, snack on something fattening and welcome Miss Barky McSchnauzer for the next two weeks.

Miss Barky is the purse puppy belonging to a pair of my husband's better customers, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell (not their real names), and so he volunteered us (i.e., ME) to care for her during their two-week jaunt to St. John (like that alliteration, you language geeks?). Miss Barky (not her real name, either) comes with her four little boots so her tiny little paws don't get raw with road salt when we walk her each day. Which -- and the Howells probably wouldn't believe this -- we don't do. I can't stand walking dogs. Hey, I tried it when we had one of our own. I just don't like doing it. You can't really get going at any decent pace when you walk a dog. It's not like the treadmill, unless yours is all herky-jerky and downright stops and sniffs sometimes. But we act like we'll dutifully walk Miss B morning, noon and night just so they won't worry that they're dropping off their little dog into the clutches of hell.

I still like Barky anyhow, even though Maisie, the cat who lets us live with her, will probably retreat into the rafters down the basement for the next two weeks. Barky really does bark, and Maisie just hates all that damned noise. Besides, she has to eat her food on top of the dryer, for godssakes, when Barky is around or there won't be any. It's enough to drive a kitteh krazy.

No, I am not drinking anything at the moment. I am in my office where no one is watching me. They should know better than to leave me alone with the Internet.

Merry Christmas!

2008-01-22T15:37:00.000-06:00

OK, so I didn't get the cards done this year. I'm a little, uh, late. Hey -- if we were multicultural (or at least if some of us were tanned) and we weren't standing in front of the ginormous Christian symbol, I would wish you a happy MLK Day, a day late! Which I do anyway.

It's a nice picture of our family anyway, isn't it? We had the photographer son-in-law take it when we were in Florida (in the lobby of Disney's Vero Beach Resort) shortly after New Year's Day.

Photo notes: The young lovers in the middle got engaged on Christmas Eve. They're quite attractive, don't you think? And there's Emily's boyfriend in the yellow shirt. Isn't he handsome? They had to stand me on a high step so I wouldn't disappear completely. What can I say? I gave birth to these tall, Germanic children. The Reich would have been proud of me. But one day, one day, a recessive gene and poof! One of my grandchildren or a stray third cousin twice removed will be, like me, short and sunburnable. In the meantime, I have 3-year-old grandboys who look old enough to be in kindergarten, am dwarfed by everyone in my family and get the 30 sunscreen all to myself. It is a tad intimidating to scold with an index finger shaken to, uh, a belt buckle. Oh, well.

'Little boxes on the hillside ...'

2008-01-16T09:05:00.000-06:00

There's a certain kind of twilight at this time of year that reminds me of how it felt to come home from school when I was a kid. I don't know why that is, but around 4:30 in the afternoon, when I drive home from work and pass the row of little '50s houses (read: ticky-tacky boxes), it takes me back. In the late '50s and '60s where I grew up, it seemed we didn't pay too much attention to people's houses. In the postwar building boom, they all looked alike. Yeah, some people had great gardens and gorgeous lawns, but everyone's houses looked alike: little "living" rooms, eat-in kitchens, a couple of bedrooms (if you had three, that was large) and a bathroom. Most had cedar-shake siding (making them a bugger to paint). Some had shutters or awnings, but most had little "curb appeal," to use a term foreign to our parents, beyond a "picture window" in the front.

These standard houses made visiting pretty easy; you could always see who was coming up the walk, and you never got lost in a friend's house because it was identical, in most respects, to yours. Because of that, you didn't spend a lot of time envying anyone's house. Neither did your parents. You didn't hear grownups talking about so-and-so's beautiful countertops in this pre-Pottery Barn world. You might have heard a mom or two sing the glories of coved-corners in her linoleum floors, but that's because they were easier to clean, not easier on the eye. Appearances weren't all that important, I guess - no, wait. Appearances were important, but not in the way they are today. It mattered that your home was tidy and squeaky clean because that elevated your moral standing in the community. It mattered that you tipped your hat or nodded when greeting someone on the street because friendliness was valued even more than privacy.

My musings have to do with trying to figure out how I can employ these basic values comfortably in the consumerist, individualistic world in which I find myself now.

I'm not done with this post yet ... to be continued.

Dear Santa: Pall Malls and a DustBuster, please

2007-12-20T13:33:00.000-06:00

Last night I managed to lure my husband to the Mall of America for a little Christmas shopping, about an hour's worth before my neck started to get a little stiff and my eyes began to glaze over -- a tipoff that claustrophobia, loud music and plain old volume overload were taking their toll. So we bought three gifts and left. The rest, we'll make or order online. Yeah, it's a little late in the game for that, but I think I'd rather shop naked at a gas station convenience counter than go to the mall or any mall again this season.

I just hate to shop. No doubt about it. I hate it more fiercely than just about anything other than Republican politics, war and famine. While some women are consummate shoppers and do it almost recreationally, I am (you've heard of the AntiChrist?) the AntiShopper. I go out of my way to avoid shopping whenever I can. My home and my wardrobe are living proof: Both are pretty spartan. It's kind of embarrassing, especially when many of my contemporaries are at the House Beautiful stage of their lives.

Yeah, I admire nice clothes and beautiful homes, but I'd admire them so much more if I didn't have to shop or pay for the myriad items our bodies and abodes display. I find myself overwhelmed by too many choices, colors, styles. I find beauty rather easily, so when someone says, "What's your favorite color?" I can't pick one. Scarlet? Love it. But depending on the day, I might feel maroon or chartreuse. Beige comes on in waves, especially when purple is nearby. And then, when I see the prices, I must make still another, more difficult choice: beauty or, uh, food? Soon, my whole being cries, "Retreat!" I get a much stronger sense of well-being when I open a full fridge than when I dig through a stuffed closet.

There is one type of store, however, that I tolerate quite well. I enjoy old-fashioned hardware stores, the kind with sawdusty boxes of odd-size nuts and bolts in the back, where items have prices scrawled in grease pencil (no UPCs, no scanners in these places) and a guy named Dick or Wally can find anything you need. And not only does he remember what you bought there last. He remembers what your dad bought there too. Hey! Maybe I could do my Christmas shopping at the Hardware Hank. Heck, it worked for my Dad. Then again, he thought a DustBuster, a "bottle" and a carton of Pall Malls to be "just grand" Christmas gifts. He might have been right after all.

Norway's not cold at all

2007-12-05T15:24:00.000-06:00

Reading about Walter Mondale’s appointment today as Norway’s new honorary consul, I saw a link to a new Norwegian producer of, you got it, galoshes. I saw some cute yellow shoes on the page and gave it a click. These little numbers are called “Swims.” But you don’t think sex sells everything, take a look at the gallery of these ladies galoshes. Whew!

Funny. My dad used to call these overshoes “rubbers.” I can just hear the howl of 13-year-old boys everywhere.

But I do like the shoes anyway.

Read between the lines

2007-12-04T10:54:00.000-06:00

In my world we talk a lot about journalism ethics, and how the craft of journalism is changing; some might argue that good journalism is dying. Why? Well, because many people write well enough to establish some credibility with readers, and these people now generate audiences for themselves even though they know nothing about the tenets of good journalistic practice. Anyone with a computer and Internet service can pretend to tell you what he or she thinks is true. But these new media stars don't think about fairness. They don't care about libel laws. They don't much care for facts, really. And they surely don't tell all sides of stories. They write the sexy parts (which attract the readers) -- or the parts they want us to hear (mainly their own voices). And because most people don't understand the difference between writers who are educated, ethical journalists and pundits with an ax to grind, from Ann Coulter to Coleen Rowley to Jon Stewart, most of us suffer as a result. We just don't learn the truth about issues because we end up listening to the wrong sources. Informing ourselves used to be fairly easy: read a couple or three good newspapers, watch a national newscast, and you could be pretty good to go. Throw in National Public Radio and Bill Moyers, mix well and boom! You could watch an issue and feel fairly confident that you could figure out what was really going on. No more. Now it's really tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. There's just too much out there to choose from, and you really have to read and listen carefully, or you'll fall victim to the stupidity -- yes, stupidity -- that's now passing for journalism in this country.

Let me put it this way: Just because someone has a smart mouth, an applauding audience or a series of clever sentences doesn't make him or her worthy of our respect. Think for yourself, but do your homework.

Old? Who you callin' old?

2007-11-19T15:19:00.000-06:00

Yesterday my first child turned 29, which is a little weird for me. Somehow, it's OK to have kids in their 20s but not their 30s. So I'll be trying my damnedest to a.) grow up by next year and b.) not turn into a cranky old woman. Cranky, maybe, but not old.

I pondered this age thing a bit this weekend when my 3-year-old grandsons succeeded in literally knocking me down (thank God the bones aren't brittle yet), and when I made a trip to the doctor's office over the weekend for a flu shot. When I was younger, I threw caution to the wind and took my chances with influenza -- which I don't think I've ever had. What's next? The gout? Shingles? At a bit over the half-century mark, I have already started the head-bobbing that comes from wearing bifocals, grunting when I put on my socks, plucking hairs from places where they just have no business growing, and exhibiting these funny "age spots" (which really don't "fade" no matter what you put on them) on my hands. Gray hair? Plenty of it. Extra weight? Way too much of that, too. Memory loss? Uh-huh. There's no turning back, I guess.

But I can put up with all of that. Here's what I do wish, however: that Gen-Xers and Millennials that I know would stop dismissing me as terminal and unhip and treat me with a little respect, please, because I AM older and I DO have some experience and I AM, for an , um, older person, pretty cool. At least I don't feel like I act crotchety. Much. I just like people who can read, spell properly and listen as much as they talk. So there!

As seen on TV!

2007-11-13T15:29:00.000-06:00

OK, so on Sunday I spent a whole silly hour slicing the season's last crop of rhubarb. It was kind of woody, not the best -- that's usually reserved for early June, when it's so succulent and makes your teeth squeak when you chew it. But I know I'll crave rhubarb pie in the dead of winter, and pies are pretty forgiving -- the sugar covers up anything -- as long as the flavor's there.

This time I lugged out the Cuisinart food processor from the dusty confines of the bottom of my pantry. This thing has has jillions of blades, some of which I've never used, that chop vegetables into shapes ranging from julienne strips to something looking strangely like my cat. But it's great for chopping celery and rhubarb into tiny, paper-thin slices. It appeals to my precise (some might say anal retentive) nature when all these little slice are just the same size.

Not wanting my handiwork to go to waste and freezer burn, I also hauled out the FoodSaver^TM, that nifty little machine that vacuum packs food into FoodSaver^TM bags for the freezer. I lined everything up on the counter, even located the instructions because I'd already abused one of these machines to the point of product replacement. It made me a little nervous when I saw a sticker on the bottom of this one that said "reconditioned," but I pressed on. An hour later, I was cursing and still had not sealed a single bag. Reading the instructions again, I was advised to wait 20 minutes before attempting to restart the machine. So I just figured, screw it, and put the damned thing back in the cabinet with the other labor-saving devices designed to keep women tied to the kitchen. It was that or send it to FoodSaver heaven.

But wait! There's more! I came home Monday night and thought, it's been more than 20 minutes. I'll try the friggin' FoodSaver^TM again, just in case I haven't really made the thing crash and burn. And whaddya know: Lo and behold and glory hallelujah, it worked. I now have two, count 'em, two perfect-measured packs of frozen rhubarb, all ready for Grandma Therese's Rhubarb Custard Pie in February. I'm feeling quite smug.

Shhhh. The password is ... "password."

2007-10-29T10:44:00.000-06:00

The old game show, "Password," still gives me a tummy ache. Maybe it's because the only time I ever got to see Allen Ludden and his cast of stars was when I was holed up in bed, home sick from school. It came on right after "As the World Turns" every day. (An aside from the "I know way too much useless information about TV stars" files: Allen Ludden was married to actress Betty White, a.k.a. silly Sue Ann from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and one of "The Golden Girls.")

Anyway, I learned a lot about the English language from "Password." I even had the home version. What could be more fun for a kid with a pretty good vocabulary? The "Lightning Round" could make me a little queasy -- pressure, you know -- but I discovered there was pretty good money to be made from knowing what words meant: at first, $50 per correctly guessed word, can you believe it?

The reason I started thinking about all of this "Password" business is that the word, "password," morphed from its early military and speakeasy days into game-show usage and now is the second half of the "username and password" combo to enter a secure Web space. Which brings me to a mini rant for the day.

Apparently it's just not enough to have a plain old username and password today. Now you have to be able to answer challenge questions like, "Who was the best man at your wedding?" or "What is your mother-in-law's middle name?" or "What color was your second pet's third toenail?" to enter a supposedly secure Web site. It's becoming a whole new game show in itself. I can't even get the answers right when I have written the questions myself!

Today, case in point, I entered a site to be left unnamed, to pay a bill. "In an effort to serve you better," it said (that's always the reason), I had to list answers to FIVE challenge questions that I could remember answers to later. Heck, I have a hard time remembering what I did yesterday, much less the answers to a bunch of questions that I chose today. The thing is, I can answer questions today that I'm asked today and not necessarily will I answer them the same way tomorrow or six months from now. You see, I'm a "shades of gray" person. Answers aren't necessarily always the same. It depends on when one asks them. So, when you ask me, "What was the name of your first pet?" I'll retort, "My first pet when I was a kid? Or after I was married?" And when someone asks me, "What was your grandmother's middle name," I'll wonder, "Which grandmother?" The frustration is dizzying. Which makes me queasy, in need of a cold washcloth on my head, a hot water bottle on my belly and "Password" on the telly.

Seems like 10 minutes ago

2007-10-23T14:50:00.000-06:00

I love lists, I was reminded yesterday when I heard a radio show host musing about his Top 10 movie soundtracks. I got to thinking, do I KNOW 10 movie soundtracks? Oddly enough, all I could think of was Rodgers and Hammerstein's score from the old TV version of "Cinderella." When I was 10, it was a TV special starring Lesley Ann Warren with her charming crooked smile and the handsomest guy I had ever seen playing the prince. He was dreamy, really. I wanted him with all my heart. But back before VCRs, you'd have to wait for "the repeat," when the network would decide to air the show again. Nevertheless, I fell in love not only with the prince but with the music and still can sing just about every song from that show.

Just last year I learned that the 1965 version was a remake. PBS aired the original 1957 version -- starring Julie Andrews, who was absolutely gorgeous then, with a voice as clear as a child's and a waist as big as my wrist. And although early TV productions were pretty crude fare, filmed with only a camera or two and cardboard sets that looked like a high-school play, there was something wonderful and raw about them.

But back to Lesley Ann and the dreamy prince. These songs still make me weep with prefeminist joy: "Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" and "Ten Minutes Ago." Now close your eyes, pirouette and pucker up.

Life sucks, and other adventures of grownups

2007-10-16T11:36:00.000-06:00

Well, Monday began full of its usual promise, then slowly unraveled. Gray, cold rainy. My office phone continues to ring: People are still pissed off that UST didn't invite Desmond Tutu to speak here. Our staff gets to listen to their self-righteousness. We have taken hundreds of phone calls over the past 10 days or so. It's tiring, and I wish these people would get over it. I was sympathetic, now I'm just plain tired of tirades from the left, tirades from the right, Israelis, Palestinians, anti-apartheid activists, peaceniks, blog-readers. Right now, they're all nasty.

The phone rings again: It's our new college graduate, due to begin his first "real" job that day, voice shaking. The job has fallen through. Some HR person has told him, "guess we weren't supposed to offer it to you without authorization from corporate" or whatever. Dozers. Jerks. Idiots. They haven't thought that they're cutting off a real person at the knees. I ache for him.

We hear that our next-door neighbor -- who lives in our old house -- has had a stroke and may not know who we are. We never see lights on there anymore. He and his housemate may have to sell the house, as it takes two incomes to afford the payments. His partner is a realtor, and you know how that work is going these days. Meanwhile, he's making breakfast at 3 a.m. because he doesn't believe the clock nor wonder why it's still so dark.

The pattern continues through the evening. Some of hubby's potential customers decide that naw, even though he's put in so much time on their bids and plans and projects, well, they've just decided to call someone else. Sigh. Customers often don't think much of your work being your family's bread and butter, your self-esteem, your raison d'etre. For some reason, these kind of losses feel like knife wounds. And in this economy, these blips are tough to weather.

I didn't sleep well last night, with all of these things aching in my mind. Even the cat was pacing. Ick.

Weekend winners

2007-10-08T09:36:00.000-06:00

Every so often No. 2 daughter gives us cause for a real nice party. She ran the Twin Cities Marathon yesterday. It may be "the most beautiful urban marathon in America," but the 2007 edition earned "sweatiest" honors. It was 73 degrees at race time, and by the time we strolled up to watch around 11 a.m., runners were already dropping like flies. Actually, at Mile 23 I saw few runners but lots of haggard walkers. A spectator with a huge mastiff caught the eye of an exhausted runner toward the end of the race. The tired marathoner quipped, "Ya think we could ride him?" Also heard from an entrant on the course, near race end: "When IS that fucking bus coming by?"

Congrats to Emily for finishing, much to the relief of her mother, in under five hours. And congrats to her sister, Nicole, for going beyond the call of duty in the Sister Support Department, entertaining her twin toddlers along the course for two hours while we waited. (Note to readers: A marathon will interest a 2-year-old for about 5 minutes. A marathon will interest a 2-year-old on a sugar high for about 3 minutes.)

Special thanks go to our favoritest niece and nephew-in-law, Amy and Kurt, for a marathon party (read: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) to mark the occasion. There's something special about a day that starts with mimosas and Bloody Marys at 9, continues with strawberry daquiris and ends with Johnny Walker. I won't go into what that something is, but ... a belated toast to our No. 3 child, Nate, who just nabbed his first real job. Here's to gainful employment and another marathon: the repayment of student loans! Huzzah!

Mundane musings

2007-10-03T10:42:00.001-06:00

Sorry I haven't been blogging very regularly over the past few weeks. School's back in session, which means I'm actually working in my office all day long. I'm so busy that I come in around 8:30 in the morning, look up at 4 p.m. and wonder what happened. It's kind of like being on another planet for much of the day, then driving home and discovering that everything is sort of like I left it. Which is disappointing, sort of.

So call me a loser, but I recently discovered that I can watch all the TV shows I really like (but, in our house, are pre-empted by the guy who holds the remote) online if I decide to take a lunch break. Woo-hoo! So I can watch "Ugly Betty," "Grey's Anatomy," "Desperate Housewives," "Brothers & Sisters" and all those chick shows for which I regularly earn my husband's scorn. I love the Internet!

Fade to black

2007-09-24T14:50:00.000-06:00

My office windows overlook the beautiful Mississippi River, interrupted only by the Mankato stone of the St. Paul Seminary. The seminary's oldest, turn-of-the-century buildings are beautiful and stately, but the administration building and student residence, circa 1985 or '86, have some kind of toxic-looking mold growing on them. Maybe it's from pollution or lack of sunlight on the east side of the building or whatever, but every time I look up, I see these golden stone buildings, blackening. It's a little weird because I feel like it's some kind of sign. Time for a sandblasting, I guess. In more ways than one.

Annals of the unemployed

2007-09-10T15:01:00.000-06:00

I'm in the prayer mode for all my unemployed relatives: my recent-college-graduate-with-school-loans-to-pay son, my baby-on-the-way nephew-in-law, my long-unemployed nephew who has been living off the earnings of his now-unemployed girlfriend. Sheesh. What's with all of this joblessness? How's a person supposed to eat? For some, like my nephew-in-law, job loss leads to great offers from competitors. For others, like my son, the luster of that shiny new degree is starting to fade with the reality of the crappy job market; he'd probably shovel shit if you paid him and you can't lose what you didn't have, but it hurts just the same. So say a little prayer, hum a little OMM or remove a pin from the voodoo doll, would ya?

What's your name?

2007-09-06T12:09:00.000-06:00

Someone I know has a penchant for calling one of her buddies, who's a little spacey but of normal intelligence, "Retard." The other day, I asked her, "Why do you do that? You wouldn't call another friend, who has skin darker than yours, 'Nigger."" She was pretty mad at me.

"How can you even equate the two words like that?" she railed. I stood my ground.

When I was a kid, we used to call stupid kids "retarded." That was before we knew much about real mental disabilities, and we called the people who had them "retarded." Like they could catch up if they only hurried. We also had great fun telling "hair lip" stories until one of our mothers had a new baby born with a cleft palate. He couldn't nurse and had to be tube fed until he had surgery. Our mothers shushed our "hair lip" imitations, so we turned the "hair lip" jokes to "retard" jokes.

A few years later, I learned that "Mary," a sister of one of my mother's friends, was "retarded." I was shocked. Hadn't a clue she couldn't add numbers, drive a car, read a map and do other grown-up things. I always thought Mary was just a friendly, funny and kind woman who enjoyed hanging out with her older sister.

Fast forward about 20 years. My son had to do some volunteering (I know, that's kind of contradictory) during confirmation class in middle school. One of his friend's parents invited him to help his Special Olympics swim team. I learned a lot about mentally challenged kids that year, and so did my son. He was lucky to have one of my "Mary" experiences.

Do we ever grow out of our human penchant for making light of others' misfortunes, weakness, difference? Maybe not. Witness what we still make fun of here in Minnesota: Iowans, drunks, Indians, immigrants ("Ole and Lena" now are "Ahmad and Muhammad"). Do we laugh? You betcha. We're sooooo not perfect here. But maybe we can work a little harder to care about the folks at the butt of our jokes, and we'll eventually grow out of the name-calling years.

If I had money I'd be as annoying as Martha Stewart

2007-08-28T13:21:00.000-06:00

I'm all about preventative medicine. I've always been good about scheduling an annual physical, getting regular oil changes, replacing batteries on smoke detectors and writing new addresses in my address book. I balance the family checkbook to the penny. I look up words I don't know in a dictionary rather than just figuring a reader will understand my phonetics. I sew on buttons rather than throwing shirts away. If they didn't make so much noise, I'd still have cleats put on my shoes.

There's a certain sense of peace -- and some might say it's because I'm a control freak -- that I get when chaos doesn't reign. I love crawling into a neatly made bed and never searching for lost keys and glasses. But am I wasting my energy? With the time it takes to keep track of my life, I could be throwing a kick-ass party.

Buh-bye

2007-08-13T15:02:00.000-06:00

Funerals are such interesting phenomena. Family funerals are even more interesting. Last week I retrieved my mother and joined in the funeral rituals for my 89-year-old uncle, her last brother-in-law.

Depending on whom you talked to, Fred was a genius; a wonderful, giving soul; a kind old alchoholic; a lonely packrat; a gay man so closeted he couldn't even admit homosexuality to himself; or just a cranky, selfish soul who never grew out of his father's house. I've heard he was a nice guy, but that I rarely experienced personally, other than as the delighted recipient of a birthday or Christmas gift. Mostly, I remember being a little scared of him, even in my adulthood. He was a very large man with a booming voice. He didn't much like little girls like me -- especially nonathletic little girls who hated camping, couldn't paddle canoes and flunked out of the Girl Scouts. He didn't like my mom, either, because she was one of those "Feminazis" who spoke her mind and thought we should get out of Vietnam.

So, as I listened to my uncle's friends eulogizing him that day, I couldn't help but wonder who they were talking about. I never met that guy.

Fred's funeral was a combination of overt Catholicism drawing together in communion the devout and the irreligious -- the traditional and evangelical in the same pew with the very nearly atheist. Seated in the front row of Holy Rosary Cathedral were my quite-Republican Aunt Pink and her like-minded daughters, with whom I very nearly incited a political riot before Mass (oops, sorry, y'all), and my West Coast and Duluth cousins, whom I'd describe as progressive but whom the ironically nicknamed Pink labeled "bleeding heart liberals," hippies still. Guess it depends on what you'd smoke if you could still smoke, huh?

Seated in the second row in this impressively displayed caste system were my mother and me. But that's OK. Being invisible had its benefits: we didn't have to recite the readings or bring up the gifts or participate in any other liturgical folderol that made the hippie-cousins feel like hypocrites. Oh, well. At least I knew the prayers and songs at Mass so I didn't embarrass anybody. Being relegated to the second row was a bit like being stuck in the middle.

Afterwards, we drove up to the cemetery for the obligatory prayers at the gravesite, then drove out to my cousin's place on Duluth's Park Point for an unplanned family gathering. We had a nice time -- some got reaquainted and the rest of us got quite drunk. So Fred would have been pleased either way, and this day really was a memorial to him in that regard. He didn't much like social gatherings for the pure pleasure of social gatherings. He was all about purpose. Then again, he liked, as my cousin Sissy so ruefully pointed out in a eulogaic limerick, his Old Crow. So sitting around drinking while gazing upon Lake Superior seemed apropos on the day of his memorial.

Buh-bye, Fred. Oddly, I'll miss you.

Uh-oh

2007-07-31T14:38:00.000-06:00

Good thing I don't work at Clarian Health, a health care group in Indianapolis. Apparently they're using "decentives" to get folks to shape up. They may fine their employees by deducting money from their paychecks if they're too fat, smoke or have high cholesterol scores. Somebody who's a mess could make $30 less a year. Now I have the smoking thing licked, but my belt size and high cholesterol could cost me.

Here's the story from Clarion's news release:

Clarian Announces Health Care Changes For 2008 and 2009

06/25/2007

Indianapolis--January 2007 saw the introduction of Clarian Health's mission strategy: A Call to Change. Through billboards, television and radio commercials, as well as community events and health fairs, Clarian has issued a call to all citizens of Indiana to take control and improve their health. Not only did Clarian issue a call, but the organization and its employees are acting on it.

There is no shortage of news stories or political speeches about the rising costs of health care, how much money and productivity companies lose due to employees who are sick and cannot work, or how unhealthy lifestyle habits such as smoking are affecting Hoosiers and resulting in higher hospital utilization.

Year after year, headlines remind us that Indiana has had the dubious distinction of being one of the most unhealthy states in America. However, there has been no significant improvement in this status and a comprehensive solution is nowhere in sight.

As Indiana's health care leader, Clarian has been a leader in exploring ways to better manage and reduce the cost of health care. Like other organizations, Clarian is looking for ways to help improve the health status of its employees. Focusing on health prevention and wellness, Clarian is actively working to improve its employees' health by incenting and empowering them to lead healthier lifestyles.

Beginning in 2009, all Clarian Health employees who elect to participate in the organization's medical insurance plans must complete a health screening (body mass index, LDL cholesterol, glucose, blood pressure) and Health Risk Appraisal (HRA).

In 2008, the HRA is necessary for enrollment in company-sponsored plans with employees self-reporting their health risk results. One self-reported health risk will be a statement of tobacco use or non-use status.

Also new in 2008 will be a health risk charge of $5 per paycheck for medical plan participants who have used tobacco within six months of their HRA completion date. This is an effort within our health plan changes to provide an incentive for employees to adopt healthier lifestyle habits.

"Any employee currently enrolled in medical coverage or electing coverage during open enrollment will need to complete the HRA to obtain coverage under the medical plan as of January 1, 2008," said Steve Wantz, senior vice president of Administration and Human Resources. "Clarian has carefully weighed the pros and cons as well as conducted research surrounding this approach, including a timed series of focus groups with Clarian employees," added Wantz.

"Clarian Human Resources and associates from Clarian's Wellness staff have structured this program based on measurements and guidelines from the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute," stated Brian O'Connor, director of Benefits for Clarian.

Clarian is notifying employees of the medical plan well in advance to ensure they "know their numbers" and allow employees time to address any personal areas of risk with their doctors before the screening and before the 2009 benefit changes go into effect.

Clarian will offer free screenings for blood pressure and BMI during the summer and fall of 2007 for employees interested in obtaining these health measurements. The organization will offer a variety of resources and support, as well as education about health risks, to employees who "know their numbers," and who want to make positive change toward improving their health and lessening their health insurance premium costs.

"The information provided in the HRA will not be used to exclude anyone from our medical insurance plans," said O'Connor. "We hope that employees learn about one or more health risks they may not have been aware of, they will take steps to protect their health and, by addressing those risks, no longer fall into a high-risk category for some or even all of the risks identified by the time the 2009 plan changes take effect."

Wantz added, "This is really part of our Call to Change mission communications strategy. This time, we are asking employees to make a personal call to change."

Employees who have a health risk they would like to address or want help quitting tobacco can find help through a variety of resources at Clarian.

A reasonable alternative will be in place for those employees for whom it is unreasonably difficult or medically inadvisable to satisfy the standard for any particular health risk due to a medical condition.

"We are as committed to the health and well-being of our employees as we are to that of our patients," stated Wantz. "As both a premier health care provider and employer, Clarian is in a unique position to provide the necessary resources and support to our employees seeking to improve their own health and make that personal change."

Next thing you know, some education organization might fire me for having a low IQ or something. It's a good thing I got that master's degree awhile back.

And one more thing: If anyone who works for me ever writes a news release this full of B.S., I may be tempted to fire them on the spot.

If I ran the paper

2007-07-30T10:01:00.000-06:00

Sometimes people ask you what you do. "I'm in media relations," I say, PRspeak for "I write the stories the university would like to see in the paper, word for word." I could also add, "I get paid to grovel and beg."

Today, one of our secretaries (er, ahem, "administrative assistants") would like the St. Paul Pioneer Press to carry news about an exhibit on Page 1, with color photos of the paintings, just because they think it'd be cool and this is Very Important to Their Marketing Efforts. She just doesn't understand why our art exhibits aren't more newsworthy. At least the neighborhood paper should take more interest, even though not a one of the artists actually lives in the neighborhood.

The exhibit will be in our "Lobby Gallery," a couple of ugly display cases in a hallway outside an auditorium. We don't have a real gallery, which some reporters view as a weak commitment to the arts. But, dang it, people should be lining up anyway.

Tomorrow, maybe they'd like the artists to be interviewed on the CBS evening news. They paint landscapes. Everybody should like landscapes. Heck, I love 'em.

So, without further adieu, if I ran the media, here are today's headlines, livebreakingnews!!! from the university:

Fabulous free art exhibit opening Sept. 17, but wait to see it until Oct. 5 when organizers really want you there
Theater season opens with "Eleemosynary," a play you can't even pronounce
Don't miss "First Friday," which has nothing to do with the Catholic Church ever
Four more rich people join the board
University raising a bajillion million trillon dollars and why you should care so much about this
Still no word on med school feasibility; we're too busy with lawyers at the moment

Sum-sum summertime

2007-07-16T13:33:00.000-06:00

So, what is this fantasy called "summer vacation"? May brings graduations and cabin-cleaning; and June, graduation open houses and weddings. A traditional week at the lake around the Fourth of July begins that month, then we work-work-work to pay for it. In August, I start to get the back-to-school tummy ache. And then it's over. Whaaa? The summer's nearly over? What the heck happened?

I missed hosting a deck party, didn't get the blue hydrangeas replaced, forgot to make Bloody Marys and barbecued ribs and sit on the dock all day, didn't get one deer fly to bite me. I missed an overnight with my best friend in a tent made of blankets over the clotheslines. I didn't read one trashy novel or get a sunburn. I didn't make ugly necklaces out of snail shells I found on the beach. I didn't play hearts with boys at a picnic table. I didn't catch a fish and I didn't get a leech on my leg. I didn't do anything spontaneous, and dang it, that's what summers are for.

I was thinking about this while watching fireworks the Saturday after the fourth (which in and of itself is a travesty ... one should never have to stray from shooting off fireworks on the night of the fourth and that night alone). When I was a kid, it seemed the fireworks always ended way too soon. In Virginia, the Fire Department paid for about 15 minutes of rockets' red glare, and that was it. We stepped over the goose poop on the shores of Silver Lake, picked up our Army blankets and went home. Now my cabin neighbor uses my Cedar Lake yard as the staging area for better fireworks than we ever had in my hometown, and he satisfies my yearning for an hourlong display. This is an improvement of a memory. But the Cedar Lake fireworks, no matter how splendid, can ever replace the Silver Lake fireworks in my file of summertime lore.

But I digress.

The trouble with our summertime memories is that we usually do one fun summertime thing every summer we're alive. In my case, that's only 52 fun summers, and at least five or six of them I can't remember at all. But in our minds, these memories all collapse into one, so every summer we look forward to reliving the whole lode. I want to have every summer back to visit each year. If that actually happened, I'd be totally exhausted, bug bitten and sunburnt. But I'd have had a blast.

What did you do during your summer vacation?

I retreat!

2007-07-11T13:00:00.000-06:00

As many of you know, I have a rather sensitive B.S.-o-meter. That is, in the words of Lily Tomlin, "No matter how cynical I get, I can never keep up." I'm not a particularly touchy-feely type, don't like to "network" and am not particularly into smalltalk. I'd rather not say anything if I had a choice to give an undeserved compliment. I'd give away used cars and wear flipflops to the White House. You get the idea. So here are the pluses and minuses of an annual exercise in B.S. to which I'm subjected each year: the annual employee "staff retreat."

My colleagues and I "engage" in this day-and-a-half affair at the university's pastoral Gainey Conference Center on the outskirts of Owatonna, Minn. Usually we talk about our department's plans and goals, university issues and challenges and other meaty stuff. Sometimes it can be pretty useful. Most of the time, not. But I'll admit I love to go (totally out of character for me, see above) because the Gainey chef prepares awesome food, the booze is free and I get my once-a-year opportunity to go bowling in a real bowling alley. Oh, and I almost forgot: I get a whole bed to myself on retreat night, complete with TV remote. So I hog both sides of the bed, snore without interruption and watch all the "Sex and the City" I can stay awake for. Then I sleep in, have a huge Gainey dining room breakfast and get to work about noon.

This year, I was a little more impatient than usual with the whole thing. We had all the plans-and-goals talks, but we had a guest speaker, a marketing futurist who ironically seemed ill prepared. About all I remember is her telling us how excited she was to be there and commenting on our "wonderful energy." Gush. Ick. She wore an up-to-there black sleeveless dress with a peek-a-boo neckline and stilettos (hello, inappropriate!) to show off her great legs. OK, so I sound jealous. Maybe so, but I still wouldn't have worn that getup to a professional meeting. During part of her presentation she showed us the "Mentos and Diet Coke" video. Big whoop. Saw that at least two years ago. I can't imagine how much we paid her. Nothin', I hope, because that's what she delivered. A big fat zero. If I made money that way, I'd feel guilty.

Next, we invited a university staffer for a little presentation on "Learning to Love Mondays." Its message: Motivation comes from within. You can't motivate someone. You can learn what motivates them, but you can't "make them" motivated. No shit. But it was pretty good compared to the morning sexpot's exercise.

After we got all the other presentations and work stuff done, we had -- you guessed it -- a happy hour-and-a-half and another great meal. And instead of going bowling, our Owatonna-native co-workers arranged for a crazy scavenger hunt through their lovely town. Picture this: four carloads of very competitive and professional adults plied by a little alcohol, chasing through the streets of a small town with cameras, photographing themselves next to landmarks in a race to return first to the starting point. The town's residents, not to mention the police, must not have been amused. But we were. It was a blast -- really! Most fun I've had at a meeting like this in years. Next time, I'm wearing tennis shoes and bringing a water pistol to fend off other competitors who a.) laid on our car hood to prevent us from leaving for our next photo op before they could; b.) zig-zagged so we couldn't pass them on a city street; c.) sped -- in a car -- on a city sidewalk; and c.) nearly wrestled me to the ground to prevent me from getting a photo. So I didn't get to go bowling. Things were looking up.

This morning we took a tour of an Owatonna treasure, the old Farmer's National Bank building, now a Wells Fargo bank. Designed by Prairie School architect Louis Sullivan in 1908, it's spectacular -- a must-see spot in the city. Arrange a tour if you go. The bank has a marvelous guide who knows the place inside and out. Here are some photos I found online. I couldn't do it justice myself. Maybe this is where we should have started the retreat in the first place.

Rare days in June

2007-06-25T15:10:00.000-06:00

My mother-in-law, God rest her soul, had little "isms" that seemed to define her joie de vivre. One I remember well was her describing the perfect summertime day as "like a rare day in June." We all knew exactly what she meant: around 80, little humidity, birds singing, flowers blooming, grass greening, kids happy -- just one of those "ahhhhh" days. We had one of those at the lake on Saturday, except for the humidity part. Seems we always have that in Minnesota these days. Daughter No. 1 and the boys were with us, so that was a pleasure, as usual.

We had blueberry pancakes for breakfast, and in my grandsons I have found two young men who truly appreciate my cooking. "Omigosh, cake-cakes!" Owen cries, eyes level with the griddle. This is followed by a half-hour of stickiness and blue faces, hands and tablecloth. (Geez, I had forgotten that the Indians used blueberries as a kind of permanent dye.) This culinary excitement is diminished only by a second favorite -- hotdogs for lunch -- and a third, being allowed to eat dinner at the coffee table on one's knees, watching "The Lion King." (I know, I know, the TV dinner is a bad habit for which I will not apologize. I'm just trying to compete properly for the Cool Nonna title.) Alert parents, please note: I pledge not to introduce them to soda. The Mr. Freeze pops were Bumpa's idea. I'm just sayin'.

Old Love

2007-06-18T13:21:00.000-06:00

Happy anniversary to us! Mike and I were married 30 years ago today. We must be having a good time, as time is flying still. How does it feel to have been married so long? Well, for us, I think "happy" about sums it up. Minnesota singer-songwriters Neal Hagberg and Leandra Peak have a beautiful folksong, "Old Love": "We don't have to say I love you / Quite as often as we used to / Old love just goes without saying / But we'll still say it anyway."

I remember wondering, even striding confidently out of the church on my wedding day: Is this going to work, or am I making the biggest mistake of my life? Thirty years later, I can say it's been a wonderful adventure. Some days have been like chocolate mousse with a glass of good port -- a sweet adrenaline rush. Others have been like a baby's rice cereal: nasty tasting and thin but good for you in the long run. It takes a bit of both for a good marriage. Otherwise, you'd be kinda undernourished.

When I witness the rash of divorces among my contemporaries, I can't help but ask, "What is so hard about being married?" Plenty, I guess. But here we are, doing something really hard and actually enjoying it. I guess we've always been grateful to God that, at least, we have each other. We could have lots less. That gratitude is what keeps us humble and growing.

The down side, of course, is that we're at the stage of our lives when death and separation seem more imminent that they did in 1977. The threat of loss is palpable, and I find myself pondering the unthinkable. How ever will I endure someday the loss of my great ally, my dearest friend? I know he thinks about the same thing. And it goes way beyond filling out life insurance applications and working out the will. I feel an ache in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it, but think, I must. So we work extra hard to make these our best days ever. That sounds corny, I know, but love means that you take special care in making memories, each for the other.

We're having dinner tonight with some good friends who, incidentally, were married on the same date as we were. Like us, they're still married, too. It's nice to know there are some of us left! So, as Forrest Gump says, that's all I have to say about that.

Ahhhhhh

2007-06-15T12:58:00.000-06:00

It's Friday. Why do we say "TGIF" and why do most of us bounce out of bed Friday mornings? It's all about the anticipation: Yippee, Saturday morning sleep-in! Hurray, lazy Sunday! Woohoo, kissing the office buh-bye for the weekend!

The reality is, we had too much on Thirsty Thursday, fought the bends on Friday morning, woke up with the birdies on Saturday, skipped church and felt guilty Sunday, and poof. The weekend's gone. By Sunday evening, we're exhausted from cleaning, shopping, running and playing. We try to pack those 48 little hours with all of it, just in time to start all over again on Monday. Not that I'm not a glass-half-full kind of girl.

But yes, next Friday, I'll have that Friday excitement. Who knows what a weekend will bring? Enjoy yours, gentle readers.

Insomnia

2007-06-12T13:59:00.001-06:00

I can remember a time when I used to sleep so soundly on my stomach, arms at my side, that I didn't even wake up with pillow hair. Now I look like like 2004 Bega Bad Hair Day organizer Chris Murphy when I get out of bed. (Leave it to the Aussies to come up with a celebration of the occasion.)

Anyway, menopause brings with it not only nasty hot flashes, but killer insomnia. I have no trouble sleeping like it's the end of a binge for the first two hours. But, by about 1 or 2 a.m., I'm hotter than hell and wide awake. Not "hotter" in colloquial usage either -- just plain, old organic hot, as in feeling like a blast furnace. It wakes me up, so I head for the icemaker and a glass, padding into the kitchen, fanning myself, until my sheets cool off and I can come back to bed. But then what?

The nights used to feel like they went by in a minute, and I'd hit the snooze alarm five or six times before dragging myself out of bed in the morning. Now these hours feel like thousands of minutes that I've watched tick by on the digital clock, one by one by one, until the alarm goes off, and I'm relieved to be upright again.

What do you do when you can't sleep? In case you've never listened, middle-of-the-night talk radio is a real adventure. I can't imagine what these people who call in every night are doing in the daylight world. There are truckers, of course, who love it when the announcers invite them to "rip one off," i.e., honk the horns on their big rigs. There are some with disabilities, some who never leave their homes, some who have lost their jobs. There are the very old folks who call to share their World War II memories or fume about their medical problems. There are the weather spotters who call to say it's hailing in Cottage Grove. And then there are the authors who have written books no one will ever read, and WCCO's overnight guys are their very real friends. I sleep so irregularly that I feel like I know some of these people. Strangely enough, I've imagined what they look like and remember the last times they called in.

Kevyn Burger says when she can't sleep she sometimes mentally walks through the houses she used to live in when she was a child. I suppose I could do that, but Mom and Dad had one house, and it's pretty small. One of my friends gets up and bakes or irons. Now her whole family is overweight; I imagine they can't even get into those freshly pressed shirts. I'd get up and write, but I don't want the clicking keys to wake anyone, and I usually just lay there in the dark and listen to the oddball callers or radio ratings-killer shows like "World of Aviation" and "Imagination Theater." Gives new meaning to the expression, "The Dark Side."

When the sun comes up, I step into the shower and wash my hair. I'm a morning person, after all. It's the best time of the day.

Playdates and other nonsense

2007-06-11T15:04:00.000-06:00

I do media relations for a living, and a query that came across the desk today was from a national parenting publication. The subject: "playdates." I never heard the term before my grandsons were born, and now I hear about "playdates" all the time. There's something inherently wrong about making a date to play. Playtime is spontaneous, unplanned, devil-may-care and past your bedtime. Playtime can mean something will get broken, like a window with a golf ball, or that Barbie's bangs will be sheared to the roots. And a date? That's something planned and calm, like dinner with candles, a darkened movie theater or maybe the opera or a nice walk along the river. A date is what leads to playtime, I suppose, or is it vice-versa? Hmmm. You tell me. But this whole "playdate" business sounds suburban and snooty to me. It just screams "Woodbury!"

And screaming (ya like that segway?) is just what this young and innocent couple from Minneapolis will get used to when their six new little babies hang in there. Good luck, Morrisons. More than that, actually: I'm praying for those little guys. They're your beautiful little miracles. And I want you to have, well, playdates.

I left my heart ...

2007-06-08T10:12:00.000-06:00

Well, back to reality. Spent late last and early this week in San Francisco, home of great gastronomy, at least two seasons a day, and the ever-popular Lefty O'Doul's, a bar with limitless potential for inducing women to behave badly. I so enjoyed the Irish piano player and a few too many Irish ales at this SF eatery, but it was well worth it. I bounced back the next day for a great late lunch at the House of Nanking, a popular but not-to-be-missed dive in Chinatown. Other highlights: a trip to the wharf for some seafood, shoe-shopping and people-watching in Union Square, a sun-and-wine run up to the Napa and Alexander valleys on Sunday and a ferry to Sausalito on Monday, capped with a peak dining experience at Wolfgang Puck's Postrio. I left my heart (and my wallet) in the city by the bay.

Note to self: Next time, bring warmer clothes. In this city, there's really no need for air conditioning. In fact, the Kensington Park Hotel where we stayed didn't even have it. Speaking of the hotel, this was a nice, convenient one. Service was good and the price was right. I'd stay there again, but never during a heat wave.

Sometimes, try as you might, you just can't have it all

2007-05-30T15:01:00.000-06:00

There was a time, "back in the day," when I would have counseled my daughters to go after whatever they wanted: Of course it's possible to be both a princess and and astronaut! It's possible to be president of the United States or CEO of a company or head coach of the Gophers and a wonderful wife and a fabulous mother -- all at the same time. But hindsight again reveals itself as 20-20. I read a story bemoaning the difficulty of retaining women in college coaching positions (click on title for link), and I thought a little about my job. Twenty years ago, I found that balancing this fairly responsible-but-low-profile job here in UST's News Service with a pretty good family life was, well, very satisfying. I felt a little guilty for being an underachiever, though, since all my friends made more money and enjoyed higher career status than I. We were graduates of Women's Colleges. We were Expected to Succeed!

Well, I'm thinking that many of us redefined success, and some of this now means that we have options. But choosing among them isn't something to neglect. Nobody can juggle all those glass balls at once without stopping occasionally to take a look at how pretty they are. I'm very happy that I was able to have three kids, breastfeed all of them, have a flexible family daycare provider, help with homework, attend all their band concerts and show up for playground duty occasionally -- all while finishing graduate school and writing, editing and pitching university news stories to the media. I might not have made too much money, but I have these kids who are marvelous people. Had these other things distracted me too much from being their mother, they might not have turned out that way. Yeah, it can be frustrating juggling all those balls, but some you can drop, and some you can't. You do, someday, have to figure out which ones are most precious and hang on to them. The others, you can always pick up another day.

Take that, you bitch

2007-05-29T11:40:00.000-06:00

If I hear about one more friend with breast cancer, I'm gonna ... .

Well, here's a chance to bitch-slap that horrible disease. With a click on my creative headline, you can pledge Debby Godbout's walk in the Breast Cancer 3-Day. She's a friend of my friend Linda, who was diagnosed just before Christmas. This walk is dedicated to Linda, who is now our favorite perky bald chick.

Or, you can make a pledge to someone else or give a gift to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Do it to throw a "bon courage" to longtime Twin Cities journalist Kevyn Burger, who just learned she has breast cancer and is having a mastectomy on Saturday. Here's a special prayer, Kevyn.

Or do it to remember my friend and college classmate Mary Anne, who should be spending her time making the best caramels in Mendota Heights instead of finishing up chemo, or my favorite non-writing gossip columnist Katherine Kortz, who lost her long battle with breast cancer a few summers ago. I think of you, Kathe, whenever I see "your" tree blooming at St. Kate's.

Every dollar can help destroy breast cancer -- so our children and grandbabies don't have to deal with it anymore. There has to be a cure. We just haven't discovered it yet.

'Fessin' up

2007-05-24T11:18:00.000-06:00

Here are a number of things about which I could be embarrassed in person, but to which, here in Blogland, I can just admit:

1. I am addicted to "American Idol."
2. I love White Castle hamburgers, even though those little cardboard boxes that they put them in actually taste better than the burgers themselves.
3. For me, "Days of Our Lives" is a guilty pleasure.
4. Wine has made me fat.
5. I have actually thought about cosmetic surgery. Never done it, mind you, but I'm getting a chicken neck, and it actually bugs me. Maybe I'm listening to FM107 too much. All those self-help gurus, dermatologists, designers and fashionistas are starting to sound rational.
6. I hate every second of working out, even though I make myself do it. Where is this endorphin rush that people talk about? Where is the tightening flesh, the rosy glow? It just makes me sweaty and gives me gas pains. Sigh.

Ohhh, say, can you see?

2007-05-16T08:55:00.000-06:00

With every passing year, it becomes clearer to me that I will not be able to make enough money to survive retirement. The point was driven home yesterday during a trip to the "vision-care center" to replace my scratched-up specs. Of course, I need "progressive" lenses -- what folks used to call trifocals but which no longer have the little lines that made old people look like old people. Progressives make us look kind of like old people, but without the squint. But I digress.

I love the new glasses that have magnets to attach sunglasses. Except most of the available styles made me look like Miss Richfield or Buddy Holly. So I found another pair that I really liked, although they didn't come with the nifty snap-on sunglasses. I thought I could just buy some clip-ons, but nooooo. These glasses wouldn't accommodate clip-ons. I had to buy separate prescription sunglasses. So I bit the bullet and bought those too. To the tune of nearly $800. This is after they gave me a $200 discount as a return customer. Whew.

About four years ago, I paid $500 for my last pair of glasses, which included clip-on sunglasses. That should mean that with the rate of inflation and rising prices, I should owe a cool million for a pair of glasses when I'm 80. This I cannot afford. If I wear the new glasses and sunglasses that I bought yesterday for four years, they'll cost me about 55 cents a day. My husband is right: I AM high-maintenance.

Baby, oh baby!

2007-05-15T11:38:00.000-06:00

So how was my Mother's Day, you ask?

"Why, thank you," I reply. "It was lovely. My son's girlfriend (and her mother -- thanks, Lori) prepared a delicious brunch before we headed to college commencement ceremonies for our youngest child (hip-hip-hooray for the end of tuition payments!). Ceremonies were the usual -- very nice with the requisite amount of boredom so we could chat with our guests. Afterwards we enjoyed a nice get-together with the graduate at Grandma's, the Duluth saloon where we had dinner the night we began this college journey. Good margaritas. Way good."

And then what?

"Well, then I drove my mother back to her home in Virginia."

And then?

"The phone rang. It was Mike with fabulous news: Amy and Kurt are pregnant! Amy is a best-loved niece, and Kurt is her best-loved spouse. They've been married awhile and wanting a baby in the worst way. So in November, we shall have another little grandniece or grandnephew to smother in kisses. I'm so excited that I'm planning a yarn-shop run tonight and digging out the crochet needle. Might as well get going on the baby blanket!"

So it really WAS a Mother's Day, wasn't it?

"It WAS! Whoever thought up that holiday did a bang-up job. I really like Mother's Day."

The entertainer

2007-05-10T13:06:00.000-06:00

Well, the Piano Man did not disappoint. For a 58-year-old dude, he can still outrock and outplay just about anybody. And the guy can still hit all the notes. We had a blast at his concert last night at the Xcel Energy Center. More later.

"Contentment"

2007-05-07T09:07:00.000-06:00

That was the first word I thought about this morning. For some reason, it just popped into my head, like the voice of God. (Maybe it was, who knows?)

The word was so strong, I even said it aloud, to no one, right after my first sip of coffee.

Contentment is the gift of middle age, I think. I want for nothing, really -- other than a nice hunk of cash to pay off the debts. But do I hunger for success, the basic necessities of life, friends and family, more, more, more? Nope. I'm content. As I was cleaning house this weekend, in fact, I came upon lots of items I could do without -- things that we absolutely yearned for when we bought them. Now even greater contentment could be had in giving some of them away or in pitching them into a solid Dumpster.

So, it's often "contentment" that I seek as I reorder the disorder of the house, straightening piles of papers, discarding old socks, wiping the dust from a table. For me, golden contentment is what drives me to "contend" with the grass-stained mess of living. I think that's why I enjoy a regular weekend in solitude, so I can straighten and sift to my heart's delight.

Which is what I was doing Sunday when the phone rang.

It was son-in-law, calling daughter, who was studying at our house (which has become the library, remember?). Grandson No. 2 had taken a spill and split open his head, requiring a trip to the hospital for stitches. So down the street I headed, to stay with Grandson No. 1 while the others took off for the repair. William and I had a little lunch, chatted about chameleons and bugs in the National Geographic, watched birds ("teet-teets" is what Will calls them) from the kitchen window and listened to the 50 mph winds wailing outside. After the adrenaline rush of his brother's busted head, followed by three bowls of macaroni and cheese and a dead-quiet house, Will was asleep in seconds. With my companion crashed, I had nothing to do for two hours. I had read the paper and magazines of interest, poured myself a swallow of Chardonnay and just sat there. It occurs to me that for me, contentment dresses in an apron and holds the tools. It's task-oriented, requires a purpose, needs the polish of a job completed. I was a little itchy to get home and get something done.

And so, to finish this little tribute to contentment? Later ...

I won! I won! I won!

2007-05-03T11:25:00.000-06:00

Remember the scene in "A Christmas Story," when Darren McGavin's character wins "a major award"? He dances around the room, chanting "I won! I won! I won!" He wins the leg lamp, of course, and he's quite thrilled about it, even though he's not quite a connoisseur of such things. I know the feeling.

A few weeks ago during a bored moment, I visited the St. Paul Pioneer Press' "Contests" page and entered a contest to receive tickets to the May 9 Billy Joel concert at the Xcel Energy Center. Lo and behold, "I won! I won! I won!" So I dutifully dropped into the Pi Press lobby this morning and picked 'em up. Of course, they're not the crème de la crème of seats, but all the seats started at $51.50 or something. So I got at least $200 worth of tickets for a great big fat nuthin'. Very satisfying no matter the outcome.

Is the Piano Man my favorite singer? Nah, but I hear he puts on a great show. Would I pay good money to go to one of his concerts? Probably not. But am I delighted to be going anyway? You bet! It's a little like the rush you get when you find a designer shirt for $5 and it fits. Would you have purchased it for $200? No, but it'd become a favorite item if you got it cheap. So, sing us a song, Billy. We'll see ya next week.

I now have it on good authority ...

2007-05-01T15:47:00.001-06:00

... that our youngest child is really, truly, graduating from college on May 13. I've seen his name on the "marching order," where he's 463rd in line -- so there! I'm quite thrilled for Nate. And now I feel as though I've done my duty as a parent: ensured that he successfully completed a college education and all of that. The rest is up to him now (like paying for a good chunk of it, ugh). He can go ahead and be a bum, even, if he wants. Not that he would or could. At least not before he pays off his student loans ("Ugh, excuse me, Mister Railroad Man? I can't ride off with you in that boxcar until, like, 10 years from now when my loans are paid off. Will you come back and collect me then and take me to that cardboard box down by the river?"). At least now he has a starting point: he can be an educated bum. And no one will ever be able to take that education away from him.

Attention: The Watsons have left the building

2007-04-24T12:05:00.000-06:00

Alleluia, they have risen! Our No. 1 daughter, son-in-law and their pair o'boys, that is. Mike the Builder finally finished their 8-month remodeling project, and they've moved down the avenue into their shiny "new" home. It really is beautiful, and I know they're going to love living there. They have great new neighbors, a gorgeous huge yard just waiting for Patrick's deft green thumb and more closets and crannies than they have stuff to stash. So I'm quite happy for them.

And I'm happy for us, too. Our house is now very minimalist and "ours" again. I took out the upholstery cleaner and scrubbed my so-dirty-they-stiffened kitchen chairs (where the boys boosters had perched) last night. They stayed clean all the way until this morning. And they're still clean. Holy Heloise! Now we have quite a few more repair and patch-up and clean-up projects in the wake of the Watsons, but what I like best is that they're little projects that Mike and I can do together. I feel like I haven't seen my husband since August.

But there's a down side, of course. I got home from work last night and tripped over ... nothing. I went to work out and came home and got great wet kisses and knee-hugs from ... nobody. The cat has returned to her strident self and is sprawled on the counter again. (I thought she might have forgotten about that.) I missed one little person or another, who greeted me nose-to-nose each morning, imploring "Nonna UP!" It was just a little harder to get out of bed to greet the day today.

So while we're awash in silence last night, we had two visitors: our daughters. One wanted a quiet place to study. The other wanted to use the computer. Quote for the night: "We're done being a boarding house and now we're a library."

Whew, it's Friday

2007-04-20T12:10:00.000-06:00

It's Friday, thank the dear Lord. What a week it's been: a national tragedy at Virginia Tech on Monday and the fallout of hypervigilance and edginess on all college campuses this week ... work coming out of my ears while we hang on, short staffed ... housework, laundry and ironing up to my butt ... stitches for my grandson last night when he tried to move a retaining wall with his head ... my husband madly scrambling to finish Daughter No. 1's house so they can move this weekend. Arrrrghgh!

But a lovely Thursday intervened. My daughter Emily treated me to dinner at her apartment last night, followed by a wonderful performance by Emily's boyfriend, Mathew, as Lancelot in the Chaska Valley Family Theater production of "Camelot." It's been awhile since I'd been to a community theater to see anything, but this has to be one of the hardest working casts and crews I've ever observed. They do 10 or more performances of this 3.5-hour extravaganza, and it was absolutely terrific. I always loved the music from "Camelot," even if the story is kinda sappy. But how can you not weep over "If Ever I Would Leave You"? Mathew out Goulet-ed Goulet. Really.

Enjoy a preview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlSsynGljqI

Silent scream

2007-04-17T08:51:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking today about Edvard Munch's astounding 1893 painting, "Silent Scream." Sure, it's become kind of a cult/kitsch image, used on everything from T-shirts to beer mugs. But today, in the wake of the worst mass killing ever to take place in the United States, it captures so accurately the emotions of those of us who work and study on U.S. campuses.

As you might guess, it's a bit busy in the university's news service today, so I'll edit this post later. But this is where my head is at the moment ...

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz ...

2007-04-10T13:08:00.000-06:00

I wonder where the birdies is. With the 4-7 inches of snow in the forecast (I'll believe it when I see it), it's tough to think spring. Although Easter was a lovely one: 40-ish but bright and sunny. The robins were trilling and tulips began sprouting a bit in the warm sun. I'm sure they wondered, "Is it safe to come up yet?" By later today, they'll be sorry.

Speaking of Easter, we had the most fabulous Easter dinner with our friends the Haselmans, parents of our son's longtime girlfriend, Sara. Sara's mother, Lori, is a terrific cook, making me understand completely why our son hardly ever eats at his own house. (I've offered to pay her for his board, but she refuses. Now if I could just get her to cater my family gatherings, I'd have it made.) For Easter dinner, she even smoked her own ham and dyed Easter eggs employing a unique dye-transfer process -- she used men's silk ties. I am not kidding about this. The ham was amazing, and the eggs looked, well, luminous and totally unlike my Everyday Easter Eggs colored with the Paas tablets and vinegar. I actually spent time gazing at these eggs. I didn't think we should eat them. They were artworks. And Lori is much nicer, prettier and friendlier than Martha Stewart. Entertaining is a real skill, you know? How she makes it look so effortless, I'll never know. I'm usually answering the doorbell while I'm searching for my underwear.

A retirement plan

2007-04-05T14:32:00.000-06:00

As I stood munching on cocktail shrimp and sipping bland sauvignon blanc at yet another UST retirement party this week, I thought: the retirees are starting to look more and more like me. In a mere 13 years, if this place doesn't kill me first, I could be standing before a cake and colleagues, thanking them for putting up with me for 32 years.

Hell, I want to retire now. I'm tired of rushing to get everything accomplished every day. I would like to draw on my pension, take a nap in the afternoon, write some good poems while I still have brain cells left, and stand in the Hallmark card section as long as I can laugh. I would like to weed my garden on a summer morning before it gets too hot. I would like to polish my silver and appreciate the pretty things which I now keep hidden ... and tarnished. I'd sit on my deck and have breakfast and listen to the radio and watch the birds. I'd shop for shoes before my ankles got puffy. I'd go to the market every afternoon and get just what I'd want for dinner. I'd stop running on the treadmill at the gym after dark -- which I do now because I just run out of daylight -- because old people should not be out at night unless they're dancing and have a driver.

But I'll want to be an old woman who still looks pretty good and has laugh lines and cool glasses. I'll want someone to say that I'm a real character, even if I'm a little eccentric. I'll still want people to tell me dirty jokes, and I'll still want to laugh aloud. What do you want to do and be when you retire? (A funny word, don't you think: re-tire? Get tired again? I don't think so. Hmmm.)

Growl, piss and moan. It's Monday.

2007-04-02T10:49:00.000-06:00

So. My co-editor at work, Patty, moved to another job within our department, leaving me two nincompoops to help me. (They're not nincompoops, I guess. They're just not Patty.) Anyway, so now I do two jobs, mine and hers, while we make the adjustment. Ugh. I will miss Patty greatly, as she's been like the left half of my brain for nearly 20 years. I spent more time with her than with my own husband, for heaven's sake. And we developed that "communication by intuition" style that often made the men in our department stare blankly and wonder what happened. Everyone should have a Patty on the job. Now I can't even afford to take a sick day (like I should have today.) Whine, whine, whine. There. I feel better.

Ah ah ah oh oh oh oh, ee ee ee ee ee ee

2007-03-29T11:05:00.000-06:00

I have a new office on the fourth floor of Loras Hall, right across the drive from the St. Paul Seminary. In fact, if it weren't for the seminary, I'd have a knockout view of the Mississippi River. Instead, I see the seminary chapel (which is nice enough) and clusters (flocks? bevies?) of men in cassocks on the sidewalk below.

I like the new office. It's bigger than my old one and faces west (which I like for the cool mornings and beautiful sunsets) and is off the beaten path of the rest of my department. But here's what they didn't tell me before I willingly exited the rest of my colleagues upstairs: the university voice faculty have offices right underneath my chair. Which means their students inflict their screechy scales, arias and the same five bars of a single showtune (something from "Oklahoma!" -- which is just the dorkiest musical ever written) over and over and over, for hours on end. I'm not a great fan of choral and classical vocal music. And bad sopranos sort of give me a headache. So I plug my headphones into my computer speaker and drown 'em out with Dylan or Joplin or talk radio.

OK, now I'm sounding like a crotchety old person. Never mind. Apologies to music lovers everywhere. I tried to like opera, but I got over it.

On the other hand, since the grandkids were born a few years ago I've been revisiting neat songs, books and poems for little ones. This is one of my favorites: "Little Potato," recorded by a group called Metamora. Listen here http://www.starbittrune.com/Jack/littlepotato.html

Nothin' wakes you up like a little vomiting

2007-03-28T14:03:00.001-06:00

G'day, erpwretch. It's a lovely day on Preserve Path. Woke up this morning to little William, 2, puking up his breakfast. There's nothing like a little morning vomit to set the tone for the day. All day long, when you feel an odd twinge in the gut, you think: am I gonna get it too? Or, when you stand up too quickly and give yourself a quick case of the whirlies you wonder, am I gonna get it? I think I'd better go lie down for a bit ... .

Drinking from the antihypochondrial side, we have rain, blessed rain, today! It's a nice, slow, steady drip that'll make the flowers just jump out of the ground. We've had such a drought for the past several months that any humidity seems like a gift. I can finally stop itching now, if only I didn't feel so queasy.

Color me beige?

2007-03-27T15:04:00.000-06:00

Well, here it is: My very own blog. If you read it, thanks. If you don't, thanks. But as long as I got the account, I figured I'd better write something here. And I'm a writer, you know? That's what we writers do.

What should I write about? Hmmm. I'm naturally opinionated, so that oughta be easy, but it's not. I need to care for your sensibilities and I just can't "spew." There's no grand event imminent, like the birth of a child or the advent of some new activity. There's just my, uh, life. Which is: 50-something, white, female, marriedforeverandever, suburban, well educated, professional, mother/grandmother, nonspectacular. That's "extreme" me!

I could tell you some deeply personal things, but quite frankly, I'm just not that interesting. I love to write and read poetry and drink good wine (even better simultaneously), hate to pose for pictures because I always blink when the shutter goes off, blush when I'm embarrassed and think I'm fat. I love my husband and have never had an affair. I love my children and have never beat them or intentionally made their lives a living hell. I'm about as bland as your Aunt Gert. Spiritual in a fallen-away Catholic genre. Liberal but not bleeding heart. Privileged but not spoiled. Champagne taste, beer budget. But I'm OK with that and unapologetic.

I've never really written like this about myself or my raison d'etre before. Have you?