Invisible and odorless

The spider usually sets off the smoke detector in August, so I was surprised to arrive home and  hear a repeating piercing beep.  Went upstairs and opened the smoke detector carefully, not to spoil Mario's handiwork. Replaced the 9v battery.  The alarming beeps continued.

Back downstairs, I gingerly opened the thermostat, again remembering Mario's electrical rescue, and replaced the AA batteries.  The beeps were giving me goosebumps.

Upstairs again to check the doorbell chime.  Back downstairs I found a forgotten smoke detector that's wired-in. This was turning into an Edvard Munch moment with bonus stair-climber workout.

Rounding the corner into the bathroom I find the beep source, the carbon monoxide detector I saved from my parents' house. Isn't carbon monoxide a winter killer?  Every CO horror story I've ever heard clamors into my anxiety between the shrieking beeps.

I move the detector to different electrical outlets feeling guilt for never pushing those TEST MONTHLY and RESET buttons. Should I be getting myself outside into the hundred-degree fresh air before I become woozy and unconscious?

There was that spell in junior high when I wouldn't ride in the car in the Nebraska dead of winter without the window open because I was so sure we were all a-gonna die from fumes. It's a miracle my family didn't just drop-kick me out into a snow drift and drive away. This anxiety was between my two phases of moth phobia, but smack in the middle of the pancake anxiety year.


Now, I could just unplug the *%! bleaking CO detector and throw it in the dumpster, then toddle off to beddy-bye. That story would have the pride-goeth outcome where I drift into a happy sleep with a tad bit of nausea before death.  Or I could let the CO detector keep shrieking, and have a sleepless night worrying about dying, kind of like a bad night camping. Or I could maybe call the Fire Department and have them check it out.


Feeling too torn to actually call 9-1-1, I looked up the phone number in the Yellow Pages for our Fire Department.  Sure, wasting those precious seconds could be the difference between life and death, between dying in my sleep and going outside into the hundred degree fresh air to live another dang hot day. Apparently when it is not a 9-1-1 emergency, the Fire Department phone is answered by a cleaning woman who might be your mom. She hems and haws with you about whether or not your CO detector might have gone a little funny in the head.  She reassures you that putting your call through to dispatch will not cost you hundreds of dollars and could be good for your peace of mind, which you are rapidly losing what with all the shrieking barks of that Tasmanian devil CO detector.

So that's how I ended up with four hunky Plano firefighters in their turn-out pants and suspenders in my kitchen taking readings on their carbon monoxide gizmos and filling out official forms.  They took readings near my gas water heater and upstairs near the gas furnace.  When I mentioned that my fireplace is gas, they ask if I had used it recently.  It was clear they might would drive me straight to the loony bin if I answered yes.  

I thanked them profusely for retrieving my peace of mind, and told them I would be calling my 89 year-old next-door neighbor right away.  "I don't want him to have a heart attack seeing the firetruck."  


"We don't either," they said sincerely.








Let's review what we learned in this Unit, boys and girls:

• Firefighters are our community helpers.
• Check your smoke detectors regularly.
• Stock up on batteries.
• Test your electrical outlets monthly.
• A carbon monoxide detector is a good thing to have, but they don't last forever.
• It's good to know a Mario who can fix electrical problems.
• It's wise to check on elderly neighbors in this heat.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Pairs of pears and polar bears

Twas a hellish last day of the semester with flagrant nose goobies and a pair of preverts in the potty.  Thunder and lightning prevented lightening our teacher moods with an outdoor recess.  We all needed an energetic Strauss polka moment, but twern't to be.

I'm set to teach about pairs and matching.  Have photos of pairs of socks, pairs of mittens, pairs of peppers, pairs of bears and even pineapples.  My students surprised me by being one step ahead. They gave me a pair of polar bear slippers, and let me tell you my tired teacher feet are happy! I might wear them the entire break, even at the public library and in Portland.

In the random coincidence category, I received a gift of pairs--Noah dispensing Post-It notes.  This is the best chuckle of the day, with pairs of giraffe, dolphin, and octopi.  I plan to keep this for a little dose of levity all next year.

Our pair of preschool potty preverts were playing a version of show and tell.  It's not likely to be a reliable predictor of future deviant behavior any more than a preschool art class incident of over-extended glue stick twisting.

 Just don't confuse glue stick with Chapstick and hope you don't have to explain to  Col. Bat Guano:


Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Colonel! Colonel, I must know what you think has been going on here! 
Colonel "Bat" Guano: You wanna know what I think? 
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Yes! 
Colonel "Bat" Guano: I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts. Now MOVE! 


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Water Show & Tell

  The kindergarten student brought a half empty bottle of water to school Monday for show and tell.  It's common for a student to grab whatever is rolling around in the backseat of the car on exiting the vehicle with the vague intent to show and tell that object.  Usually these objects are coloring books, Hot Wheels cars, Legos, or stuffed unicorns with irridescent manes.

With raised eyebrows I asked what the student intended to tell about the water bottle.  He had a plan to explain the importance of drinking water.  "Alright, General Ripper," I thought, "be sure to mention purity of essence and precious bodily fluids."

  Having sneered at the concept, I find myself doing the exact same thing. Don't you just hate when that happens?  For the past week I've been fascinated with water as it changes between vapor, liquid, and solid. I just can't take enough photos of freezing water and ice.

 
The ice formed in rings around rocks in the creek.

 Green ice is creekbed moss through the ice.   
Pebble ice might have formed where melt from the roof splashed on the patio.

 See the ice bead at the end of the twig at the lower left corner?  It sparkled through the window like a giant diamond or a blown glass rod.




Some globes of ice acted as magnifying glasses in the leaf litter, or formed fabulous ruffles.
 Mentally I spent part of my day in a cave.  The better part was spent pondering geologic formations and this most common rock.
 

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Transmit Plan R

Watching our postal service deliver my Christmas presents with USPS Track and Confirm cheers me no end.  Imagine Santa and the eight tiny reindeer being tracked across the Big Board in the War Room. 

Plugged the old "Dr. Strangelove" VHS into the player.  Spread out the road atlas.  Piled up the tiny packages like colored cubes in the game of Risk.  Receiving status and location updates online.  Staying hydrated.  Taking good care of the precious bodily fluids.

My dad reports he was weighed today.  His reports aren't reliable, but he claims he weighs 165.9 pounds including his wheelchair.  Dad would not appreciate a comparison to Peter Sellers' performance.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Rearing caterpillars & frass champions

It's been a poopy hornworm day on both fronts--school and home. Hornworms are those ENORMOUS CAMOUFLAGED DEVOURERS wiping your tomato and pepper plants right off the map.

Caterpillar poop is called "frass", and hornworms are the Texas State Fair champions of frass. They would hold the Olympic World Title of frass if they cared about anything besides eating. They are so good at what they do naturally that it's frightening to consider the possibility of hornworms training with coaches named "Bela" and using performance enhancers.

Tomato hornworms [which are actually hawk moth caterpillars, not worms] are a major garden pest, so I went to the source for pest info, Insects in the City, for a factsheet. Scrolling down through the insect pests I found:

Caterpillars
Asps & Other Stinging Caterpillars
Rearing Caterpillars

This made sense in a confused super-cowgirl mindset. Hornworms do have those nasty pronghorns on their bezoozies. They rear up in a threatening manner then hold very tight when school kids are trying to pluck them off the tomato plants. I bet Slim Pickens could ride a rearing hornworm into a nuclear detonation, and it would still keep eating and creating frass.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Big Board in the Dumpster

You'll be happy to know this is not an analysis of trading on the NYSE. Yes, I listen to Marketplace on NPR on the drive home from work most days. Yes, I stood in line at the post office today watching the tv infomercial about putting twenty percent of my retirement investments into gold. I suppose that is about right. I have a leftover gold wedding ring that could best be considered a retirement investment!

This Big Board is the dry erase board hung over the kitchen sink for eight years. It served as the Master Logistical and Grocery Store Calendar for our household, and highest transportation coordination authority. We all equated it with the map in the Strangelove War Room. Many times we quoted, "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!", as a guiding rule in our post-divorce family make-over. My efforts to organize my crew sometimes led to quotes of Jack Ryan imitating Admiral Painter in The Hunt for Red October:

"The average Rooskie, son, don't take a dump without a plan." Wait a minute. We don't have to figure out how to get the crew off the sub. He's already done that, he would have had to. All we gotta do is figure out what he's gonna do. So how's he gonna get the crew of the sub. They have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub...

My crew is off the sub now. I should have taken a picture before I dumped the Big Board in the trash. It's a strange feeling not being the Condo Concierge/Recording Secretary/Mission Commander for the family. Rats. I suppose I have to manage my own life now!

But first, let's do the numbers... Enjoy the Larry Carlton music that's been showing up during NPR show breaks lately.

Pest Control

My preschool students presented me with a garden poster with their school photos glued onto a drawing they each made. They were extremely excited to tell me what they had drawn to be their character in the picture. "I'm a butterfly. I'm a tulip. I'm a worm. I'm the sun. I'm a snail..." My favorite was the little boy who told me he was a talk-roach.

Went to the condo association meeting last evening which quickly disintegrated into a complaint session on landscaping and pest control issues. Some residents were touting an organic magic elixir which when poured around all the foundations would spin straw into gold. No, wait. That's a different story. This fabulous product allegedly forms a magic force field that repels all insects without being the least bit harmful to humans or dachsunds. When I suggested we confer with the local bug expert from Texas A&M Extension, who happens to be a friend of mine, before trading the condo cow for a handful of magic beans, I got put on the landscaping committee to listen to residents' concerns. Just shoot me. Preschool talk-roaches are cute. Perpetually malcontent talk-roaches with too much time and too little to do are not cute. I may have to sell my condo and move to another town. That's the escape route of many previous association board members and committee members. They may even have a safe house I can use! I will hide under the refrigerator and only come out in the dark of night, then scuttle back if a light is switched on.

Rumpelstiltskin was at the meeting. Our little condominium complex's version of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, our former board president who went "a little funny in the head", showed up with a long list of rants.


If we can't get a restraining order against Rumpelstiltskin, maybe we can spray with amazing OrangeGuard.

USPS

Breezed into my favorite post office in Richardson, TX (Motto: We won't make you want to gnaw your leg off to get out of this trap!) when it opened at 8:30 this morning. Mailing a family portrait of three GQ guys and their old chrome-top mom to my parents. Lucked out and got my favorite civil servant, a chatty English-speaking guy who looks like a somewhat past-fifty former surfer who enjoys his Coronas. I noticed the Buckminster Fuller commemorative stamp on the poster of "new issues", and was stunned to see the stamp came out in July. Where was I? How did I miss this? Why do I feel like I am being sucked down into the rabbit hole of Memory Lane? I don't have time for Memory Lane! Why does the rabbit hole look like the hair dryer of an early Barbie? I've got to get to work!

Flashback to 1976, University of Nebraska... Mary and I decide during lunch at the student union to cut class and go hear Bucky Fuller speak to an association of Nebraska architects in the auditorium of Sheldon Gallery. The auditorium is full, but we slip in and sit on the steps in the aisle. It's winter. I sense our midi-length wool coats bunched around us on the steps, and suspect we had on knee-high leather boots. Bucky is a visionary Mr. Magoo, all bald head and black Coke bottle glasses and high-energy stubborn conviction about better living through geometry. He is much cuter and crazier than the image on the postage stamp... A just-hatched baby archaeopteryx, featherless. You kinda want to rub his head for luck.

Flashback further to 1957, Lincoln. Sometimes I wonder if it was real, but I remember my dad having a homemade model of a geodesic dome in the basement of our duplex when I was two years old. You know how sometimes you think it is an authentic memory, but it turns out to be a distortion from an actual family slideshow to ward off cabin fever during a blizzard forty years ago? You think you travelled to Bismarck, North Dakota in 1960, but it turns out you ate a bismarck with a carton of chocolate milk at a diner in Marysville, Kansas on a rainy day? You remember getting carsick in the backseat of the '54 Chevy when you went driving around the reservoir dam that was under construction in that plastic raincoat that didn't breathe? Still, for the next twenty-plus years you checked North Dakota off on the map of States I Have Visited... So, I maybe just think Howie had that model of a geodesic dome, but for thirty years I expected that when he retired he would build a real dome out in the backyard.

So, the civil surfer servant said, "You really want those stamps? No one has ever asked for those stamps. We can't get rid of them. Didn't that guy make geo-dweeezy domes or something?" The stamps are truly ugly. They look more like Dr. Strangelove-Does-Epcot than Bucky. I will be glad to use them to mail Mary and my parents. The civil servant is crossed off my Prince Charming list, though!

Making a list and checking it twice

Since I was first old enough to read a newspaper (we are talking about over forty years ago here), I've been pondering what four famous people I would invite to my fantasy dinner party. You know those kind of newspaper columns about some local person-of-the-hour: What kind of car do you drive? A rusted-out puke-yellow Chevy Nova with a defective air intake ...What kind of car do you wish you drove? The Rhinemaiden always wishes to drive the 1961 Plymouth Sport Fury...What would you choose to eat at your last meal? A Nebraska corn-fed beef T-Bone, of course, and a baked potato with sour cream...Your all-time favorite TV show? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life, what four books, four movies, and four LPs would you want to have with you? (Ignore the absurd premise of the question).

For much of my life of worrying about these major philosophical questions, I've been inviting Dr. Seuss, Alexander Calder, Jerry Garcia, and Henri Matisse to my fantasy dinner party. Sometimes I decide that I have to invite at least one woman, and that leads to lots of guilt and anxiety. Henri Matisse gets dumped, and I feel just horrible about that. The women I've considered inviting over the years include children's author Margaret Wise Brown, quilt artist Nancy Crow, novelist Louise Erdich, NPR contributor Bailey White, Bonnie Raitt, Hillary Clinton (when I thought she was going to change the health care system), and writer Nora Ephron. I can't ever seem to find a woman with the playfulness, creativity, humor, and impact to fit in with the guys. And who is supposed to cook and clean up at this fantasy dinner, I ask you that. It better not be me. I was planning to retire to the study for port and cigars with the men.

The desert island LP list has two constants; Derek & the Dominoes, and Dave Brubeck's "Take Five". A recording of Mozart's clarinet, bassoon, and oboe concertos is usually on the list. I used to sit out in the front yard digging dandelions and listening to the Top Forty countdown on my AM transistor radio with the earphone on Saturdays in the mid-Sixties. A 45 rpm recording of Petula Clark singing "Downtown" cost 88 cents, and a vinyl LP of Peter, Paul, and Mary cost $3.98 plus sales tax. I made between thirty-five and fifty cents per hour babysitting. Even then I worried about the fantasy dinner guests and the desert island.

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" always leads the movie list. I would be quite willing to trade places with Katharine Ross/Etta Place even if I had to stay forever on the desert isle (or in Bolivia) with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Let me ride just once on Butch's handlebars! I often list "Dr. Strangelove" and "What's Up Doc?" They have mysterious curative powers.

Desperadoes, by Ron Hansen, is always the first book. I know, I know. It's some kind of outlaw attraction that goes along with Butch and Sundance. The outlaw attraction is powerful, and can lead a good woman to marry a no-good gunfighter or a bankruptcy attorney... Pussywillow, by Margaret Wise Brown is next. After that I always decide I should get to choose at least ten books for the island.

I do have my heroes, despite my fondness for outlaws. "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" is my favorite TV show of all time. Mr. Peabody is sooooo my type!


I am hoping if I confess all this I will be relieved of my life-long obsession. Maybe I'll just be too embarrassed to ever mention it again.

Blowing the whistle

Still humming the music from "The Triplets of Belleville", and doing little dance steps, three days after seeing this fabulous French animated film. The whistle-blower in the movie is a ferociously-devoted club-footed grandma training her orphan grandson for the Tour de France. I can't even begin to describe the delights lurking for the brave cinema-goer. "The Triplets..." aren't for the masses, because I don't want to share! So, nanny nanny boo boo...

Well, maybe I would be willing to share if you love

Rocky & Bullwinkle
Toulouse Lautrec
Fantasia
Dr. Strangelove
Eric Satie
Steamboat Willy
I Yam What I Yam Popeye
Rube Goldberg
Cole Porter
78 rpm recordings
Mary Lou Williams
Count Basie
Tom Robbins
Cruella DeVille
Mickey Hart
AND
Charles Addams