Well, it’s finally spring at chez mousey.  Although with the global warming it sometimes feels like summer.  We’ve already had several days with temps over 85º and humidity that seriously threatens the structural integrity of the underarms of our shirts.  We ran the air conditioner in April.  Sorry, Mr. Gore.  I’ll buy some organic lettuce to offset that indulgence.  Or maybe some organic chocolate.  They make organic chocolate, right?

 

But, anyway, Jay and I have decided to start a new tradition.  We both have spiffy digital cameras.  There are 260 parks in Madison.  So, instead of sitting on our tushes all day each Sunday, we’re picking one a week and doing some shooting.  We’ve got enough parks to last us five years.  Okay, more like ten, because when the lightning and hail strikes, and the snow blows, and the temperatures start hovering around “sauté”, my tush is getting re-parked on the couch.  But on days like today, we take a field trip.

 

Last week we went to Lake Farm Park and saw mud turtles, ducklings, and a Green Heron.  This week we got a bit more ambitious and hit the Arboretum.  We putt-putted along Arboretum drive at a staid 20mph until we finally found the area my parents used to take me when I was a kid.  (Mom loves lilacs.  They have a whole wad of them.)  Then we parked and hiked and hiked some more.  We took a lot of pictures.  Well, Jay did.  I managed eleven before the batteries died.

 

We saw azaleas and droopy beech trees and four huge wild turkeys.  We wandered through the woods.  Jay said he felt like he was on “Lost”.  That was funny, since later we saw a map that said we were in the “Lost Forest”.  And right at the end, when we were headed back to the car, we saw some weird stork-like birds.  We got some good shots of them so we could look them up in the bird book when we got home.  I joked that they were probably “red-headed herons” or some obvious name.

 

They weren’t.  They were Sandhill Cranes.

 

 

I didn’t recognize them without the fire coming out of their butts.

 

 

I’m sure all of my loyal readers (the number of which, I just found out, has increased 25% - Hi, Pleas!) have heard of a certain female rocker’s supposed joke about saving the planet one square of toilet paper at a time.  Well, it has inspired me to alter the lyrics of one of her most well-known songs.  Ms. Crow, you’re welcome to them; just call me first, okay?

 

 

I’m feeling kind of dissed

I’m sure not feeling marvy

That rocker Sheryl Crow

Is tryin’ to regulate my TP

 

“You don’t need yards of it

Despite what you’ve been taught

Think about Mother Earth

When you are on the pot”

 

“One

Square can soak up a ton

I wanna tell everyone

That when they flush

I wanna tell them that

I’ve

Got no sense of shame

One single square isn’t lame

To wipe your butt…

One square can soak up a ton.”

 

"We've done some crummy stuff

And hurt the planet's karma

Let's do the things it takes

To stop this global warming!"

 

Every time I turn around

The seat is up

The seat is down

Has she nothing else to do

Than fret ‘bout habits of the loo?

Does she ever take a poo?

 

“One

Square can soak up a ton

I wanna tell everyone

That when they flush

I wanna tell them that

I’ve

Got no sense of shame

One single square isn’t lame

To wipe your butt…”

 

She

Needs a kick in the bum

I might need 45 squares

To wipe myself on...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You know how people way to be careful when you knit a gift for someone?  That the item you spent hours and days and weeks of slaving over your needles to create may languish in a closet, or even *gasp!* be re-gifted or donated to Goodwill?  Well, several years ago I tempted fate and knit a gift for my sister’s wedding.

 

I couldn’t afford anything on their registry, and had no idea what else they needed.  So I delved deep into my creative-crafty side and knit them a car blanket.

 

I’d found three bags of garish acrylic yarn at a local thrift store, and decided to make a patchwork pattern of squares called “Trip Around the World”.  That the periwinkle blue, burgundy, lemon yellow, lime green, crimson, and bright orange colors of yarn didn’t actually “go together” didn’t matter at the time.  They were cheap, they would last, and there was enough for a good-sized blanket, one that could be thrown on the ground for a picnic, or draped over two chairs to make a fort for a future niece or nephew, or for whatever use they wanted.

 

So I knit and knit and knit, and finished up the edging while I was sitting at the auto shop waiting for my oil change the day before the wedding.  I folded it the best I could, found the largest gift bag at the discount card store, and packed it inside.

 

My sister sent me a generic thank you card, and that was the last I heard of it.

 

Until this winter.

 

Back last November, my brother-in-law was one of the many PS3 fans camped outside a big-box store waiting to be the first to buy the new gaming console.  He’d prepared well, with long underwear and sleeping bags and blankets enough to keep him warm through an unusually cold night, including the car blanket I’d made for their wedding.  But the guy in line behind him hadn’t.

 

This poor guy was slowly turning into a popsicle.  And my brother-in-law felt kind of sorry for him, so he offered him the blanket.  Next Guy In Line took one look at it and, with a level of disdain not usually seen in a resident of the glamorous and sophisticated metropolis of Green Bay, Wisconsin, declined the offer with a comment that the blanket was “just too ugly”.

 

Hours passed.  The mercury fell.  My brother-in-law was toasty, but NGIL was getting to the point where he couldn’t feel his ass.  Eventually necessity trumped fashion, and he humbly asked if he could borrow the blanket.  And my brother-in-law, nice guy that he is, handed it over.

 

The next morning, when the store was opening and the gamers were beginning to stir from their slumber, NGIL handed back the blanket with a heartfelt “thank you”.  And what he said next (according to my sister, who told me this story this Christmas) was something that made all the knitting and purling worthwhile.

 

“It may be ugly,” he commented, “but it sure is warm!”

 

 

Never

 

ever

 

ever

 

let

 

your

 

nerdy boss

 

play

 

with

 

your

 

new

 

digital

 

camera.

 

 

Ever.

 

 

So last night Jay and I were enjoying our Friday night out and we got to talking about… honestly, I don’t remember what.  We tend to have these rambling conversations.  One minute we’re discussing root beer floats, the next minute, how the IS guys at work are freaking out over the three-weeks-earlier Daylight Savings Time change, and two minutes and an abrupt left turn finds me gloating over the money I saved on the oil change I got Thursday.  (What’s not to gloat about?  It isn’t every day that you take a coupon for an oil change and get free fuel injection cleaner and two-for-one windshield wipers thrown in.  Heck, it isn’t even every three months or 3,000 miles.)  But anyway, we were scarfing down fish, because it was Friday and it’s Lent and we’re in Wisconsin and some deep, deep genetic marker triggered an intense yearning for cod, batter, potatoes, and lots and lots of grease, and you know fish fry has no calories because it just slides right through you.  At least that’s my story.

 

But anyway, we were talking, and somehow I started reminiscing about when my high school band director hugged me.

 

Now, George was a nice guy.  He was short, about my Mom’s age, and had an odd fondness for Sousa marches, which we clarinetists hated because of all the tweedly-deedly-diddly parts.  (No simple quarter-note melodies for the clarinets.  If the clarinet part of a Sousa march had anything less than a sixteenth-note on it, it was a typo.  The horn section got all the easy stuff.  Damn horns.)  But anyway, George was a pretty decent band teacher, for a trombonist.  He and Greg, the choir teacher, made up the music department at my high school.  And no, we didn’t call them by their first names… at least, not to their faces.

 

Our high school was pretty small: about 450 students in grades 9-12.  At the time (I’d really rather not reveal exactly how many years ago this was but, suffice it to say, a baby born my freshman year would no longer be expected to have their ID ready at the liquor store) my high school was known for their gymnastics team and their music program.  Competition to get into the elite performing groups was pretty stiff.  And I was a really shy kid.  I mean, excruciatingly shy.  As in not making eye contact, not going anywhere by myself, I’d-rather-not-call-for-time-and-temperature-because-what-if-they-hang-up-on-me shy.

 

But anyway, when I was a freshman, all band students were required to have once-a-week private lessons.  You’d leave study hall and go down to the band room and sit there with the teacher and play through all the stuff the band was working on.  I never got through a lesson without breaking into tears of humiliation and frustration.  George must have thought I was a basket case.  Here’s this little fifteen-year-old, and she’s using up all my kleenex.  Good thing snot doesn’t damage a wood clarinet.

 

When I was a freshman, we had a talented pool of seniors that were the leaders of the music department.  After they graduated, there were a lot of places to fill; in band, in choir, in the audition-only performing groups.  And everybody – I mean everybody – auditioned.  Even I sucked it up and warbled out Bread’s “If” from my fourth-grade Piano Book Of Contemporary Tunes.  And then we waited.  And then it was Monday.  10:06 am.  The end of second period.  And Greg was posting the lists.  And I had to go to Geometry class.

 

The long, long, walk down the hall to the bandroom seemed to stretch forever, and no one would get out of my way.  Didn’t they realize?  How couldn’t they know?  My future was on the line here, and when my best friend met me halfway down the hall and stubbornly refused to give up any information or even hints of what she had seen 52 minutes earlier because she was lucky and got to take Choir instead of being bored to death by length and circumference and pi, and for heaven’s sake, just tell me!  But no.  She just pushed me to the chalkboard and the three pieces of lined paper taped to it, names written in pencil in Greg’s distinctive handwriting.  Under “Chamber Choir”:  my name.  Under “Swing Choir”:  my name.  Under “Madrigal”:  my name.  I had to touch the paper before I could believe it.  I’d hit the trifecta.  The turkey.  The hat trick.  I was IN.

 

Fast-forward to the end of the next year.  George had asked me to play the alto clarinet part in a top-level-difficulty piece we were performing for Band Contest.  Not Sousa, but an Asian-inspired piece that had its own variety of tweedly-deedly-diddly stuff.  We’d practiced every day for three solid months, over and over and over until we could sing the stuff in our sleep.  Unfortunately, we had to perform it on our instruments, and while we were awake.  But anyway, we’d finished and packed up and were heading to the bus to go home, and we didn’t even know how we’d done.  Some years we didn’t find out the judges scores until school on Monday, but this year George came walking out of the host school with a big ol’ grin on his little German face, and as we were waiting to get on the bus he told us we’d scored a First.  A gold plaque to hang on the bandroom wall.  And as we all broke out in cheers, he hugged me.  And he told me it was all because of me and my alto clarinet.

 

I wonder if, at that moment, he remembered the weepy kid from two and a half years earlier.  I didn’t really compare the two until last night, with Jay and the hash browns and cole slaw and bran muffin, that I ordered myself, looking the waitress straight in the eyes.

 

Any self confidence I have now was planted in the music department of my high school.  Summer camp fostered it, college fed it, and meeting Jay has brought it to maturity, but it was George and Greg that figured out how to overcome the little voice that always told me “you’re not good enough”.

 

One of these days, I should thank them.

 

 

Maybe it’s some kind of pre-set, yearly thing, kind of like the program in your computer that resets the clock to daylight savings time.  Maybe someone was doing research on the area weather and realized that it was almost exactly a year ago that we were supposed to have the Storm To End All Storms.  Because the local meteorologists are at it again.

 

Remember last year, when they were predicting that all Heck was going to break loose, that schools would close and roads would turn into bobsled tracks and that we should all stock up on canned spaghetti, plastic sheeting, and duct tape?  Well, it’s been almost exactly one year.  One year, eight days, and an assorted number of hours, minutes, and seconds.  Apparently those persons hired by the local network affiliates to track the insane mood swings of Our Favorite Mother (Nature, that is) need an occasional hit of the white stuff.  Snow, that is.  Frozen flakes of fury, falling in a frenzy.  If you believe the weatherpeople, every molecule of moisture in the Upper Mississippi Valley is gathering to deliver a giant smackdown on the city.  The forecasters include the rest of the southern half of the state, too, because despite the belief that most of the residents have that this city is the center of the effing universe, there are other towns and villages and people out there that are going to get dumped on, too.  But it’s mostly the city.  How we all need to be Prepared!  Because there is going to be a Lot! Of! Snow!

 

A confluence of low pressure systems, jet streams, Pacific moisture, Gulf Coast Moisture, cold air, the planets in alignment, the stripes on the woolly bear caterpillars, and the thickness of beaver houses has produced all of the signs that the meteorologists need to predict that this one will be a “doozy”.  They point to the red spiky lines and the blue bumpy lines and the wavy orange line, and with barely suppressed ecstasy describe the Storm That Is To Come.  This one is going to have heavy, wet snow; blowing and drifting, and whiteouts that will make Martha Stewart’s sheets look positively dingy.

 

“But,” they told us, “It won’t start until late Saturday night.”

 

Which is why, I guess, when I looked out the window at 6:00 pm last night (which was Friday, by the way), I could barely see across the street.

 

And why the plows have been out on the roads scraping off the eight inches of snow that has already fallen.

 

And that was just the first wave.  The wave that evidently caught the meteorologists off guard.  They must have been too busy focusing on the second wave.  The one that is supposed to dump up to fourteen more inches on us tonight.  Because it seems that Ma Nature wants us to be able to empathize with New York State and its one hundred freakin’ inches of snow.

 

And, like good little lemmings, we all rushed to the grocery stores and the liquor stores and wiped them out.  Between the storm and the BIG Wisconsin – Ohio State basketball game tonight, there isn’t a morsel of junk food left to buy, and the cartloads of booze being purchased by beardless boys in Badger garb boggles the brain.  Centuries from now, when archeologists dig our bodies out from the glaciated layers that are due to begin shrouding us at any moment, they’ll know immediately why we died.

 

It won’t be the cheetos, the chips and dip, or the nachos.  It won’t be the adult beverages clenched in our cold, cold fists.  It won’t be the fact that the Badger basketball team isn’t as awesome as the sportscasters (who apparently are under the influence of the same psychotic snowstorm-generated powers as the meteorologists) say they are.

 

Those future archeologists will take one look at the grimaces on our frozen faces and the remote controls clenched in our other fists and know what killed us.

 

It was the realization that this city isn’t the center of the effing universe.  Or any other universe, for that matter.

 

Now, excuse me.  I need to go buy some more duct tape, before it’s all sold out.

 

 

It’s old.  I love old.

It’s pink.  I hate pink.

It used to sit on the bathroom floor in my parents’ house.  I love the nostalgia.

It now sits on the floor in my bathroom, and I only use it a couple times each month.  And when I do, I usually hate the results.  Because it never lies.  Whatever number it gives me, I know is the truth.  And the truth is a weighty issue.

 

It’s my bathroom scale.

 

About a week into 2007 (yeah, I’m a procrastinator.  I made my New Year’s Resolution a week late.  I figured that way it’s not a New Year’s Resolution, so it won’t be destined to be broken like all the other NYRs I’ve made) I decided, after a long, critical, depressing look in the bathroom mirror, that I really need to take control of my weight before it takes control of me.  The lumpy, bumpy bits were starting to get even lumpier and bumpier, and there were ever so many of them, and, well, there are only so many formless sweatshirts one can shove into ones closet before one runs shrieking into the night.  Especially after one tries on a slinky black velvety-drape-y camisole, and even though it’s a ladies’ extra-large, it doesn’t look like what you expect peeking out from under a dressy jacket.

 

It looked like a pajama top.  A pajama top that was two sizes too big in the shoulders, and two sizes too small ‘round the tummy.

 

And before one walks to the hardware section of the store with cami in hand, looking for a tape measure to see if this so-called “extra-large” item of apparel is really an XL that had a “small” bottom piece sewn on by accident by some seven-year-old Indonesian sweatshop slave, one looks down at oneself and realizes that it’s not the clothes that are out of proportion.  It’s me.

 

And so began the quest to re-size myself.

 

Out with the potato chips, popcorn, and cheezy poofs.  In with the trail mix and string cheese.  Out with the hot chocolate; in with the chamomile tea.  No more lemonade mix for my bottled water – now it’s Green Tea To Go.  I restrict portions during the week, and indulge on weekends, but with healthier foods.  Nuts.  Dried cranberries.  Stuff that doesn’t have an interminable list of preservatives and additives on the label.  Nothing radical, just food that’s basic, closer to what comes out of the ground or off the animal.

 

It must be working.  This morning, the little pink box in my bathroom told me that I am now nearly 7% less weighty than I was last month at this time.  And that is making me happy, happy, happy.  So happy that I tried out a new patisserie in town.  I celebrated with pain au chocolat.  And I can tell you that this city still doesn’t have a decent French pastry shop.

 

But in the end, that really isn't a bad thing.  I hate that my wallet is now 11.5% lighter.  But I love it, too, because those over-baked, dry pastries won’t tempt me to inhale half a dozen of them every Saturday morning and thus balloon to proportions that even the baggiest pajamas can’t hide.  Because I am not one of those slackers that thinks flannel below-waist-apparel is appropriate to wear out in public.  Even if there are cute little monkeys printed on them.

 

And that’s the truth, from a not-so-weighty miss.

 

Whew.