Playing Possum

Last night we took Excalibur for a late night walk, as usual. Ex shot out of the door to the end of  his leash and snatched a poor opossum out of the shrubbery, all in the few seconds it took us to shut the front door. He got a few mortal shakes in before obeying Ron's command to "DROP IT!"  Ex left the poor lifeless opossum curled up by the garage door while we went on with our walk, chattering about this surprising event. How could our lovey dovey Ex have killed something? In just a few seconds? We were proud and repulsed at the same time. We felt safer, knowing that Ex might protect us from an intruder (well, if the intruder were an opossum). But what about the body? What does one do with deceased wildlife? Bury it? Throw it in the garbage? Say a blessing before casting it off in a fiery funeral pyre on the canal? All Ron would confirm was that it would have to wait until morning. But not before I could take a picture, I told him. We returned home from our walk, and the opossum was......gone. Apparently it was not actually dead, just "playing possum". How interesting to have witnessed this "playing possum" tactic, used by an actual opossum.

This morning I had to do a little internet research to learn more about this.  It seems that the opossum is not actually carrying out a conscious defense move. It's a reflexive action more like passing out from sheer terror. The whole body goes limp, the tongue hangs out, the eyes roll back, the heart rate slows, breathing is very shallow, the whole bit.  After perhaps 15 minutes with no further activity, the animal's body knows that the coast is likely clear, so it wakes up and walks away. (Thank you, aaanimalcontrol.com .)

Now Alyssa thinks the opossum in question is going to gather up all his friends and attack us during one of our evening dog walks. I assured her no, the opossums run away when you open the door, much like the Monty Python knights running away from the Killer Rabbit. This particular opossum was just too slow to outrun Excalibur!

Talk to ME

I emailed information on an account to a company underwriter. It was precise, concise, and informative. My name, address, phone number, fax number, and email address were included in my email signature. The male underwriter responded…..to my boss. My male boss. What the hell? If I have sent you something, reply to ME. If you have a question on my email, speak to ME. If your question is something only my boss can answer, I will forward it to him. All you have accomplished with this maneuver is pissing me off and moving yourself to the top of my “Dickhead” list. You have just shot yourself in the foot because I am not inclined to send any more accounts your way.

This is not a work bashing comment. My rant applies to anyone who doesn’t reply directly to the person who asks the question: doctors who share medical results or information with family members other than the patient directly and sales people or customer service people who circumvent  the client with the issue. Yes, there are times when I have neither the time nor desire to deal with a particular topic and I will tell you, “Please discuss that with my husband.” Otherwise, please afford me the common and/or professional courtesy I deserve just for reaching out to you in the first place.

Keyboard Kitty

I am a forceful typist. By forceful, I mean I type so hard or so fast or so resolutely that I wear the letters  off my computer keys. I have done this on every keyboard I’ve ever used at every office I’ve ever worked.  My employers are always trying to give me new keyboards because THEY can’t type on keyboards with letters missing. I just don’t see the point. I know what the letters are, whether they appear on the keyboard or not, and I will just wear off the letters on a new keyboard, so why bother changing it out?

We’ve been doing some computer upgrading at my current office, with a lot of the work being done after hours or on weekends so as not to keep us busy little worker bees from our appointed tasks. I guess the boss and the computer guy finally got so frustrated with trying to type on my keyboard with the missing E, R , I, O, S, D, K, L, C and M that the boss finally went ahead and ordered a new keyboard.  A white box arrived from Amazon for my boss and I brought it into his office.  “Wait, one of these is for you,” he said and passed a shiny new keyboard my way.

I got started changing out the keyboard at my desk.  After a few moments, I noticed a red smear on some of my paperwork and realized I was bleeding. Somehow I had cut my finger during the opening of the box, or the hookup of the keyboard….I don’t really know where or how. Not to worry. I just dug around in my handy Mary Poppins bag and pulled out a bandaid. Expecting a typical beige bandaid, I was surprised to find a “Hello Kitty” bandaid under the wrapper. Who knows where that came from or how long I’d had it, seeing as my daughter is now 20 years old.

 And then of course, looking at “Hello Kitty” on my finger, I couldn’t help but sing.

Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur.

Happy kitty, sleepy kitty, purr, purr, purr.

Thank you, “Big Bang Theory,” for placing that obscure song in my subconscious. It tickled my day.

Crunchy Cookies

We recently planned a Saturday visit to Alyssa’s school for her Alpha Omicron Pi BBQ. She had mentioned in passing that she would like to have some homemade cookies, so we decided to surprise her with some chocolate chippers.

Ron was off from work the Friday before we left so I included “cookies” on his “honey-do” list before I went off to work. He just laughed when he saw that on the list and said he wasn’t going to make the cookies. Although he does most of the cooking, I am the baker in the family, and he lends the muscle when I need some thick dough mixed.

After dinner on Friday evening, Ron took the initiative and got the cookie dough started. Maybe I should have been a little more hands on when I saw him take his glasses OFF to read the recipe on the chocolate chip bag.  I went into the kitchen while he was mixing and washed all the utensils and mixing bowls. My only request was that he mix the dough with a wooden spoon and not an electric mixer.  Once he was done mixing, he commented “this doesn’t look right”.  I went back into the kitchen to spoon the dough onto cookie sheets. The color of the dough was fine but the texture did look a little off. I tasted the dough. Sweet and crunchy!  I was sure that Ron had used all the right ingredients. I began going through the recipe. “How much flour did you use?” “How many eggs did you use?” “How much brown sugar did you use?” “Two cups.” “How much white sugar did you use?” “Two cups”. Therein was the problem. Instead of ¾ cup of brown sugar and ¾ cup of white sugar, he had used 2 cups of each.

With no idea how to fix that ratio of ingredients, I threw that batch of dough into the trash. Alas, no cookies for Alyssa on this trip!  We did take her clothes shopping as a birthday present.  Nothing a little retail therapy won't fix, right?

Reflections on Dotsy

My dear friend Carole’s mother passed away on Sunday, June 19, 2011, at the age of 82. Carole’s family moved into the house three doors up the street from us on Willow Drive when I was about 10. Our first encounter was when I went outside to tell her to stop swinging on our tree. We had a split rail fence along the side of the yard and there was a swamp maple growing next to it that had a large branch growing at just the right height for a child to jump off the top fence rail and swing on the tree branch. My father, however, was vexed to see children doing this and would always tell me to go outside and tell my “friends” to get off the tree before someone got hurt and sued us. Didn’t matter that not all those children were my friends, nor even that I had no idea who some of them were. My father would yell at ME, so I would trudge outside to the tree as directed and ask everyone to lay off the swinging. 

Carole and I became childhood friends, and are still friends over 35 years later. We enjoyed marathon Monopoly games, watching the Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Comedy Hour, playing with Barbies, going to the beach, listening to music, drawing, writing, walking to Cumberland Farms to buy cigarettes for our parents, and scouring the TV Guide for Marx Brothers or Gene Kelly movies, and setting our alarms for 2am so we could get up and watch those movies.  We spent weekends sleeping over each other’s houses, staying up late to watch Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and the Midnight Special, and going to each other’s family get-togethers. We had our moments of friction because there is a 3 year age difference between us, and when you’re very young, 3 years can make a big difference, but we managed to maintain a solid friendship.

Carole’s mom, Doris, was a unique character. After high school, she studied drama in NYC and appeared in some off Broadway plays before she married, and she never lost that acting persona. Conversations with her involved hand gestures, chest clutching, dramatic pauses, and a nearly southern-like drawl. I would not have been surprised if she had invited us out to the sun porch for a mint julep (or more likely, a lemonade). In fact, my own voice developed as a result of impersonating her. I used to pretend I was Doris and call Carole out sick from school and cancel her dentist appointments. Now, people always remark on my telephone voice, and some suggest I should work for a 900 number.

Doris was a tiny woman, and lovely in her Scandinavian blondeness. She never learned to drive and rarely left the house, other than to chat over the fence with the neighbors. Her home was decorated in blues and whites: white slipcovers, blue bottles and clear bottles filled with blue-colored water on the windowsills, blue and white accent chairs and pillows. Carole and I used to joke about how much blue and white was too much blue and white (and how we laughed at the irony many years later when she decorated her own living room in blue and white). Doris was obsessed with magazines, and would sit for hours reading and “getting ideas”.  I don’t think she ever threw a magazine away. She kept her clothes under tables draped with fabric so that she could keep her magazines in her dresser drawers. She was crafty, and the house was full of craft projects that she had begun but never quite finished. She also kept a vacuum cleaner close at hand and whenever a wayward bug or spider would appear, she would swoop down on it and suck it into the vacuum.

The Wall kitchen held a small bistro style table with a white Formica top. There was no need for paper because phone messages and notes between the family members were simply written in pencil on the white tabletop. Sometimes Carole’s father would draw funny pictures as well. You never knew what you were going to see on that table. The kitchen also had a radio that was usually tuned to “Bob and Ray”. You could always hear laughter from the kitchen when they were listening to this comedy show. When family members traveled out of town, once they arrived at their destination, they would phone home with a collect call for one of the characters on the Bob and Ray radio show. Doris would just reply, “I’m sorry, Mr. Whoever isn’t here right now” and hang up. It was their way of letting Doris know they had arrived safely without the expense of a long distance call.

Sometimes when Carole and I were in her room, Doris would open the door to ask us a question, and Carole would scream at her “GET OUT OF MY ROOM!!” and Doris would get this wounded look on her face and shrink her already tiny self into a smaller person and say to me, “she’s so fresh to me”, before closing the door. (This is really funny now because Carole just recently found a letter from her grandmother to her mother from when she was about 3, stating what a “fresh brat” she was.) One time Carole and I were in the back seat of her parents’ car on the way to visit her family in Kearny, NJ, and a car passed us holding a big head of curly hair that I was positive belonged to some guy I had just met at a party a day or two before (at 18, it was all about the guys for me), and I begged Carole’s father to catch up to that car so I could get a better look to be sure. As he was a conservative driver that normally didn’t hit the speed limit, we were surprised when he stepped on the gas. Then Doris started with her “Oh, Bobby, please don’t drive so fast!!” and curled up in a scared little ball in the front seat. Needless to say, we did not catch up with the other car.

When Carole was pregnant with Michael,  I picked Doris up to take her to Carole’s baby shower. Doris came to the door and looked in horror at my beloved Z28 with the T-tops removed. She ran back inside for a scarf to tie over her perfectly coiffed hair, and later she told Carole proudly, “I rode in a convertible!”

Carole’s parents often came to my house for my parents’ parties. (Martinis for everyone!) Doris was a big hit with my mother’s sisters with her entertaining stories. My Aunt Ann once asked her if she was an actress. When Doris said no, Aunt Ann replied (with a few martinis under her belt), “Well, goddamn it, you should be!”   I remember the day my own mother died, and Carole’s parents were the first neighbors to come over the house along with all our relatives.

Although you wouldn’t think it at first, Doris possessed an admirable inner strength. I remember being so surprised when Doris accompanied Carole, her first husband Gabe, and their son Michael, on a visit to Lebanon to meet Gabe’s family and see his homeland. I would never have imagined in a million years that Doris was capable of that. Doris also had to cope with a son and daughter in law that were not the best of parents to their own children, and helped raise those children. She endured the deaths of her husband Bob, her son Robby, and her granddaughter Aja.

When Carole remarried and formed a blended family under one roof (Carole & Tom, her son Michael & mother Doris, her nephew Damon & niece Aja, and Tom’s sons David and Anthony), Tom christened Doris “Dotsy”. It became the perfect name for her personality and unique quirks and will be the name we all remember her by.

I am so saddened by Dotsy’s death, not only because of the great loss this is for Carole, but because thinking of her brings me back to such a different place and time.  Back to a time in childhood when everyone was still there. No, we weren’t perfect families. We weren’t even functional. But we were intact. Before parents, brothers, sisters and children left us, in body or spirit. Before we had to grow up and live in the real world.

Goodbye, Dotsy. Though you were small in stature, you were grand in presence and you have left a hole in our hearts.

Spring Has Sprung

Just before summer arrived, I took the “Springtime Album” class at Strawberry Fields Scrapbook Shop, presented by Stayce DeWid. I just love Stayce. She is from Huntington Beach, California, and she is an educator for Tattered Angels, so she travels the world teaching classes using Tattered Angels products, and she also teaches online classes from her home.  Her scrapbooks are gorgeous and she’s so much fun. Every time I see her, I discover something else that we have in common.

Behold the gorgeous Spring album created in Stayce’s class:

Stayce's sample had fewer pages as she had removed some from each section, but I just sprayed my extra pages with Glimmer Mist and used my leftover paper from class.

Stayce’s beloved mother in law just passed away yesterday so she is having a tough time right now. Sending love and hugs to you across the miles, Stayce.

Bleu Cheese Hair

When I go to Indulgence Salon to get my hair “refreshed”, Patty always asks what color I’d like to be. I always respond with “something reddish brownish purpleish”. The last time I was there, this color description seemed to crack up one the stylists, Jenn. I think it’s more of an “I don’t care, surprise me with whatever you’re trying to get rid of or a new product you want to try”  rather than “I want champagne #328, with some wheat #849 highlights on the crown, and ash blonde #192 lowlights”.  

Star, Jamie, Patty, Jenn, Val

Just before my last visit, Patty and the girls had all been to a hair show in Orlando so they had lots of new samples to try out.

Star put my color on, and after letting it cook for a while, Jenn rinsed me out. Patty gave her some sample shampoos and conditioners from the show. As Jenn opened the little plastic containers, she said “I’m a little wary of hair products that come out of a bleu cheese container.”   When I asked her how my hair looked, she confirmed it was definitely reddish brownish purpleish.

Tada!