Who ya gonna call?

Home from work. Find myself phoneless. Panic kicks in, narrowing the sidewalk for reason.

Not in the car, under the seat, down in the crevice.

Not in the trunk, but glad my "new" car has a light in the trunk.

Not in my purse.  Dump everything out.  Try again. Still not in my purse, or the car, or the trunk.

Would anyone still be at work? Would they check email before leaving?

That's the trouble with living alone with just a cellphone.  No way to call myself!

Where did I go today? Rode in Janie's car. She lives way out in the country, and I won't see her for five days. Went to Fadi's for lunch, and sat in that goofy booth. Too tall cushion, too close to the pillar. Easy place for a phone to fall out, but be sure to get the cauliflower*.

Loaded stuff into the trunk--a big bag of pinecones.  Phone on the street where I parked?

Not hyperventilating, but getting close.  Go check the mail kiosk and near the recycling cart. It is NOT yet time for dumpster diving!

Did I flush it? Is it on vibrate? Is it out of juice? We're talking a disaster of Biblical proportions.

The last paranormal removal specialists at work received the email, and called my number. They wandered the library listening, listening.

How do I spell relief? G-H-O-S-T-B-U-S-T-E-R-S! Deep down behind a cushion in the back office a little blue phone was playing that song. The phone was found, and even brought to my condo.





I just wanna thank Egon, Ray, Venkman, and Zeddemore, plus Sharon and Pam. And since I can't figure out how to change it, my ringtone will probably remain the Ghostbusters theme song forever. And yes, I still miss those old card catalogs. Also the funny little Ghostbusters who lived in my house.

*Cauliflower--Stewed in its own juices with lemon juice and spices, then fried with zero trans fat oil. 

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Curse of the Spider Woman*

Don't look at me even through squinted eyes. I am toxic. I am Typhoid Mama. No inanimate object is safe. Some animate ones behave too inanimately. It's been bad voodoo all over the place.

So far just since the rodents and the rat snake on the patio:

• Stove control panel died.
• Oven died.
• Microsoft support for Windows Home Premium operating system evaporated.
• Preschoolers took poopy pants to a whole new level.
• Brakes on Buick started grabbing and squawking.
• New electric range is delivered, but the old one is wired directly into the condo electrical system and giant delivery dudes are not authorized to remove old or install new range.
• Canon printer pooped out.
• Preschool pet rabbit plays possum while lead teacher is away on jury duty.
• Giant spider attacked library.

On the upside:

•  I finally got a photo of a funnel web spider.
• The eleven-year-old preschool rabbit revived.
• The lead teacher was not picked for a jury even though she was looking forward to being sequestered.
• The brake work was minor.
• I like Windows 7 and the new Canon printer.
• It's finally autumn.
• The condo mailboxes in the kiosk have been replaced after a year of broken locks and doors.

*Kiss of the Spider Woman was a haunting movie with William Hurt, Raul Julia, and Sonia Braga. Hurt won the 1985 Best Actor Oscar for his performance which did not involve mailboxes or rabbits as far as I can recall.

Once I had an evil eye charm given to me by an elderly traveling coworker.  Alas, I added the charm to a wire sculpture. The old blue eyes mystery of the Florida swordfish reminded me. I never had one of those creepy rabbit's foot key chains, thank heaven. I'm horrified to find they are still "harvested" and sold, even on Amazon.  

And so I close another crazed rant to go reweave my web.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Little black spots before my eyes

The headcold came on slowly, just raw throats in the nighttime for a week.  Easy to blame on ragweed pollen.  Mild earache and slight stuffy nose, just job-related germ-sharing in the preschool room.  Dragged myself through a day at the library Saturday, cursing students and hanging on for a round-the-clock snooze.

Sunday the spots started.  Fell asleep while doing the crossword puzzle to wake up with newsprint on my cheek.  Fell asleep on the couch until a text message from my boss woke me:

We found this snake on our walk, 
caught in the erosion control netting. 
We set him free. Can you ID?



Just a bit of groggy field guiding and googling to identify the speckled king snake. It's a mighty handsome snake I don't really want to meet. Or maybe I do, ah-choo! King snakes are constrictors that eat other snakes, lizards, rodents, and birds.

Things deteriorated from there despite a Skype session with my intergalactic stellar grandbaby. My youngest texted asking what movie he had watched as a child with a silver spaceship and time travel. 
That would be "Flight of the Navigator".

I wondered why I was seeing zipping black dots while I stared out the patio window for a couple zombie days. Was this headache a migraine? Brain cancer? Decongestant side effect? Orange juice overdose? The slow-moving green specks that occasionally jumped from fence to plant were anole lizards, not side effects.

First sick leave day with zinc therapy, vitamins, cough Rx, inhaler, saline solution, ibuprofen and decongestants I was only able to nap and play online Legos at Build With Chrome. Second sick day, I'm lots more perky, still snozzy, but able to see that those rushing black dots are tiny scurrying mice on the patio. No OTC meds will get rid of the mice. Maybe I can borrow the speckled king snake!


© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Do not follow produce into that good night

I offer a motto on this 2011 New Years Day: 

Never follow a pick-up truck loaded with large fruits and/or veggies. 

This guiding principle for life's journey came to me a dozen years ago on an I-35 entrance ramp in Austin, TX.  My eldest son, Speech-Debate, had just spent a few days at the University of Texas attending an honors colloquium for high school seniors.  The other two guys and I drove down to collect him.  Heading home we pulled onto the Interstate behind a pick-up filled with cantaloupes.  Melons started bouncing out of the truck bed and onto the highway, all around our Buick.  Boing-guh, boing-guh, boing-guh!

During this week's long road trip bringing Dad to Texas, we were stuck behind a white pick-up truck carrying watermelons.  Nine hours into a twelve-hour drive Dad discovered the Jeep Commander's passenger side sun visor. He could reach it and maneuver it to the side window and back. The low sun blazed into my eyes, and out, leaving trails like Sixties Kodak flashbulbs. The Arbuckles added intermittent deep purple shadows between flashes. The pick-up's cargo added the threat of imminent watermelon attack. One hill I got ahead of the pick-up. The next I was back behind the danger.  Post Traumatic Cantaloupe Syndrome made it very scary.  Repeat.  Repeat.

My sister and I preferred to compare our four-state drive to Thelma and Louise, but Rodney Dangerfield and Chevy Chase popped to mind. In 1986's Back to School, Rodney Dangerfield's character is inspired by Sally Kellerman's reading of a Dylan Thomas poem .  Nobody will mistake this for a cinema classic, but it was my introduction to the poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And against following the watermelon!
 © 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Hummus phobia overcome

It's only the third of January, but I've already added my new food of the year. Cue the theme song from "Chariots of Fire"! I've overcome my terror of hummus.

Running in cinematic slow motion through the Kroger olive bar to get some roasted red peppers (domestic), then down the canned beans aisle to get the chickpeas, I'm feeling the burn. Thank heaven I already had the cream cheese, olive oil, garlic clove, lime juice, and paprika, so I sprinted toward the tape.

The Woolly Mammoth tried to convert me to hummus in '08. "Until I know what's in the stuff, I'm not going there," I said. It took an interview with Nigella Lawson on NPR to convince me hummus might actually be edible if I made it myself.

And, oh, it is so good I say on Triscuits and boats and planes and trains! That Sam-I-Am is doing high fives and cartwheels at the finish line.

Next up--A friend believes kale is edible. Yeah, right.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

If you brew it, they will come

Dateline: Iowa--This could be the best Halloween story of the year. The economy, presidential campaign, and natural disasters have given us so many terrors that we've reached catastrophe overload. We are desensitized, and feeling pretty helpless to make a difference.

Enter the field of screams from stage right. Can't you see Mrs. Olson with those Folgers' fangs? I vont to dwink your coffee and hang upside down all night until my brains are cooked. [Not that this resembles any college student sons.]

Each morning I drink several mugfuls of coffee, then add my used filter full of grounds to the worm bin. I'm not all that awake, and I've never checked for boiled bat brains in the filter.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa used to seem like the safest place on earth. Powdered non-dairy creamer seemed like one of life's most frightening aspects.

Sending my best wishes to this unfortunate woman who had to endure rabies shots. I hope she got to watch one of Kevin Costner's better movies in the treatment room.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) _ It wasn't just the caffeine that gave an Iowa woman an extra jolt after she had her morning coffee. It was also the bat she found in the filter.
The Iowa Department of Public Health says the woman reported a bat in her house but wasn't too worried about it. She turned on her automatic coffee maker before bedtime and drank her coffee the next morning.

She discovered the bat in the filter when she went to clean it that night. The woman has undergone treatment for possible rabies.

Health officials say that the bat was sent to a lab but that its brain was too cooked by the hot water to determine whether it had rabies.

© 2008 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

The Preschool Zone

Working with preschoolers involves a lot of time spent bending. When John Cusack got off the elevator on floor seven-and-a-half in Being John Malkovich, his back entered The Preschool Zone. We seem to work in the same building.

Working with preschoolers also involves bending time. While I've never read that Einstein taught preschool, I'm sure that's where he first formulated his theory of general relativity.

Space and time bend and curve in Einstein's theories. Space and time bend and curve when you enter a preschool. Gravitation and acceleration spice up both. The closer the student is to the ground, the slower time goes. It is impossible to accelerate the process of six three-year-olds going potty and washing up for snacktime.

Did you ever jump up and race down the stairs in the dark at the end of Act I at the Dallas Opera's Carmen, risking life and limb in your fancy high heels in a vain attempt to beat the line at the ladies' restroom? And the line was how long when you got there? LONG. VERY LONG.

Did you ever attempt to use the womens' restrooms between innings at the old Texas Rangers Stadium in Arlington? Or maybe at half-time of a sub-freezing Cornhuskers football game when everyone's wearing multiple layers? SLOW PROGRESS. SLOW.

Remember enclosing yourself in the reflective triangle made by tri-fold fitting room mirrors? Imagine the entire Rangers restroom line trapped, bent, refracted, multiplied, and snowflaked inside that triangle of mirrors. That's the experience of washing up for preschool snack! Don't even contemplate glancing at the clock!

• The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock.


• Clocks tick more slowly the closer they are to a gravitational mass like the sun.


• Einstein was thinking of gravity as equivalent to acceleration, as a geometrical phenomenon, as a bending of time and space.

Further decelerating the process is the preschoolers' limited understanding of the flush capacitor. That is almost, but not quite, the same as the flux capacitor Dr. Emmett Brown and Marty McFly used to time travel in the "Back To the Future" movies. When you ask a preschooler, "Did you flush?," you get the same look and speed of reply as when you ask Dick Cheney if he orchestrated blowing Valerie Plame's CIA cover.

In The Preschool Zone each and every weekend is a disruption of the space-time continuum. There's always a disconnect from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. Rose Mary Woods once again erased 18 1/2 minutes of Nixon's White House Watergate tapes. Dubya is back to sounding out the words in his goat picture book.

Small children have to rediscover how to work the soap and paper towel dispensers. The lower you are, the longer it takes!

"May I go to the restroom?," a preschooler asks. "Yes," I say. Dinosaurs have evolved into birds when that student comes back to report a problem.

• Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
• I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
• What's the problem?
• I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

She's afraid, she can't do that. What's the problem? One toilet hasn't been flushed. Can she use the other toilet? No, somebody left the seat up on that one. That Einstein! He always forgets to flush!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Bells are ringin'

Unseasonably warm today, up in the eighties--the kind of weather that gives me a headache and sets off my tornado storm senses. On the phone with my dad, the wind suddenly changed, and all the wind chimes in condo alley were set to clanging.

The song in my head is "The Bells Are Ringin'" from the 1942 musical, "For Me and My Gal" (Gene Kelly and Judy Garland). The picture in my mind is from 1981's movie, "Body Heat", with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt and many windchimes on her porch.

Maybe the warm afternoon encouraged these baby spiders to emerge from the silky egg case down in the hole of the plastic playground barricade. Maybe it was just the RIGHT TIME.

Each tiny spider looked like a grain of cornmeal, smaller than a pinhead. Each one climbed up the web strands, and headed off as fast as possible for parts unknown.








© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Frosty's New Years Eve party

You are invited to the hottest cold party to usher in 2008. Frosty the Snowman and all his friends will be doing the Limbo, the Bump, the Twist, the Frug, the Moonwalk, the Pony, the "White Man's Overbite"*, and some New York City Music Hall Rockettes and Kilgore Rangerette numbers later in the evening.



Take the tarp off that lighted Bicentennial disco dance floor. Do you know how to party??? Can you spell D-o-r-i-t-o-s? Can you spell In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida? Can you spell chocolate-frosted sprinkle donuts??

Frosty and friends are so Jumbo Tron! They've got Velveeta, refried beans, and original Ro-tel melting together in the Harvest Gold crockpot. They are having snowball fights out in the front yard.



The elementary art students took the concept of a snowman's party and ran with wonderful results. Some of Frosty's guests may melt just past midnight. We liked learning that Dean Koontz wrote a story about where snowmen go when they melt that is included in his THE PAPER DOORWAY: Funny Verse and Nothing Worse.

My students weren't contemplating "the white man's overbite." Most of them are missing so many teeth they can't bite an apple. Still, disco snowmen brought to mind Billy Crystal's line from "When Harry Met Sally."

*Harry : You meet someone, you have the safe lunch, you decide to like each other enough to move on to dinner. You go dancing, you do the white man's overbite; go back to her place, you have sex, and the minute you finish, you know what goes through your mind?"How long do I have to lie here and hold her before I can go home?""Is 30 seconds enough?"
Sally : That's what you're thinking? Is that true?
Harry : Sure. All men think that. How long do you like to be held afterwards? All night, right? That's the problem. Somewhere between 30 seconds and all night is your problem.


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Baffled, bobbled, and birds

Solutions present themselves free of charge when we forget to worry about the problem in the middle of the night. Last night I forgot to wake up and fret about the broken birdfeeder at school. The birdfeeder is a tube. At the feeder holes with their little perches, the sunflower seeds are deterred from spilling out by little curved plastic pieces inside the tube. Imagine the front door bubble awning outside a chic miniature French boutique or hotel. Now imagine the awning inside the door of the boutique instead of outside. The missing parts of the birdfeeder are the awnings inside the tube. That's why the sunflower seeds are pouring out unimpeded from the broken feeder.


I'm baffled. How can I fix the feeder? It would be a shame to spend money on a new feeder, as this one is autographed by the students from a few years back.


Maybe I need to think like a guy. My ex believed anything worth fixing could be fixed with duct tape, WD-40 or SuperGlue, including, but not limited to, cars, briefcases, relationships and winter Army surplus coats. My sons believed in the restorative power of hot glue and clear packing tape even on eyeglasses. My dad tends toward a lengthy mental approach to problems:

1. Deny the existence of a problem until evidence is overwhelming.
   


2. Cogitate the nature of the problem once acknowledged over a geologic period of time.
   


3. Devise the lowest cost, lowest tech solution.
   


4. Make something out of nothing.
   


5. Remain oblivious to criticism of aesthetic aspects in #3 and #4.

Dad would manage to eventually repair a nuclear submarine with rubber bands, one-by-twos, cardboard toilet paper tubes, and empty three pound coffee cans saved from the late-Sixties. The sub would work, no question. It would probably keep lying off the coast of Newfoundland for another forty years while making the occasional Crazy Ivan turn. Still, it would never quite be the submarine of your dreams.

Baffled on the birdfeeder front, and wishing for a gelid North Atlantic mental escape to beat the reality of mid-nineties on the playground. Hunt for Red October. Submarines. Fred Thompson with the theory of dumping Ruskies. Running silent? But what about baffles:

Baffles are the place in the water directly behind a submarine's propeller where conventional sonar cannot see. The blade's motion through the water creates acoustic distortions and noise which an enemy ship can follow and not be detected. Baffles can be cleared by executing a Crazy Ivan. Shadowing Soviet submarines, in their baffles, was a popular technique used by U.S. Navy submarines during the Cold War.

A little late afternoon daydreaming about Sean Connery and the frigid waters off the coast of Newfoundland. Solutions percolate from the cold North Atlantic. Could new baffle awnings be devised from plastic Easter eggs or the lid from a cottage cheese container? It won't look great, but it will regulate the flow of sunflower seeds. The price is right.

baf·fle(bfl)
tr.v. baf·fled, baf·fling, baf·fles
1. To frustrate or check (a person) as by confusing or perplexing; stymie.
2. To impede the force or movement of.
n.
1. A usually static device that regulates the flow of a fluid or light.
2. A partition that prevents interference between sound waves in a loudspeaker.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Baffles

Baffled isn't Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, a Pal Joey song by Rodgers and Hart. It's not Baubles, Bangles, and Beads from Kismet.

My baffle device didn't fix the birdfeeder. It will be time for a new one this winter--when it is very cold off the coast of Newfoundland. See you then, Sean.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

I've got a Capri-Sun, and I'm not afraid to use it.

Go ahead. Make my lunch.

Over twenty years ago Kraft figured out how to package an alleged juice drink in a foil pouch and market it to harried parents. Capri-Sun drink pouches and similar products are even more annoying than Lunchables and juice boxes.

Bad enough that a Capri-Sun drink pouch contains mostly high fructose corn syrup and water so kids careen around the classroom like pinball wizards with small bladders all afternoon. The packaging is EVIL:

• Straw can't be extricated from plastic wrapper without adult assistance.


• Straw can't be poked into the foil pouch without adult assistance.


• The poking process usually involves leaks of sticky liquid, even when grown-ups do it.


• Straw may be chewed beyond usefulness before it makes it through the poking process.


• Straw may have gone AWOL so foil pouch must be cut open with scissors, and the contents carefully poured into Dixie cup.


• Pouch can be inflated. Some kids find the temptation to quickly consume all the highly sweetened drink so they can spend much of the lunch period inflating the foil pouch like a balloon instead of eating the rest of their lunch.


• Pouch can be launched.


• Pouch can be used as a squirt gun to shoot drink into faces of tablemates.

You'd think a Capri-Sun would come with build-it-yourself bagpipe instructions, but NO! The only good thing about drink pouches is that they take up less room in the nonrecyclable lunchroom trashbag than juice boxes.

All rights reserved 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Great performances

Saturday morning I self-diagnosed severe cultural deficit syndrome. I'm in a rut. Artist, heal thyself! Get thee to a symphony!

What a symphony it turned out to be. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra performed Mahler's Ninth under the direction of Claus Peter Flor. My spur-of-the-moment cheap ticket put me in the Choral Terrace of the Meyerson Symphony Center, behind the orchestra and facing the conductor. Watching Flor's communication with the musicians was as riveting as Mahler's music. Sitting on the narrow bench of the choir loft behind the sound may not be the optimum way to experience an eighty-one minute work. I can honestly say I was "on the edge of my seat" the whole evening (and will need Aleve for my back today).

I also watched Geraldine Page's Academy Award-winning performance in "The Trip to Bountiful". My library is going to withdraw this amazing video because it isn't checking out. What a shame. She had me both on the edge of my seat and on the verge of tears.

on the edge of my seat

Definition: Feeling anxiety, nervousness or great expectation
Example Dialog:
A：Did you go to the US Open this year?
B：I sure did and saw Agassi play Sampras.
A：Wow, that must have been great!
B：Yeah, I was on the edge of my seat the entire match.

I had great fun reading the selection of mixed metaphors from Calvin College English Department.

Makes the hair stand up on the edge of my seat
(Pete Kneppel, contributed by Doug James)

I think I may be climbing up to the brink of my rut.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Trip to Bountiful

Each day that I head to school I feel like I'm going to a land of plenty, a place of abundant richness, curiosity, characters, subplots, and home-grown tomatoes. The playground garden alone supplies me with an hour's worth of research questions each evening. What was that spider? That moth?

This morning my drive to bountiful took forty-five minutes, even though it's only five miles. Rain poured down and drivers crept along bumper-to-bumper on 75. Plenty of time to watch dark clouds, and to remember Geraldine Page in the Oscar-winning 1985 movie, The Trip to Bountiful, written by Horton Foote. What a performance to reward any viewer with patience and attention! What a film to put guys to sleep for lack of explosions and car crashes! At the end of the videotape I was sobbing, and my spouse was snoring.

Working with preschoolers can't be confused with a life of ease, but it's never dull. The phrase "land of plenty" calls up Cockaigne, the fictional utopia, best known by the Bruegel painting of sated villagers napping on the ground "in a lazy, luscious land". I'm happy when my students eat enough of their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to settle quickly into a happy nap.




© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Skidamarink my vinca's sick

Wee Sing a sad patio song this evening. What is wrong with my vinca minor aka creeping myrtle on the hottest day of the summer? I sing a warped horticultural "Skidamarink-a-dink-a-dink". Wee Sing audio cassettes, songbooks, and children's video cassettes in early Betamax format burned that song forever on my memory when my sons were little.

Myrtle is sick! Nothing ever bothers creeping myrtle. It's always been the most dependable of ground covers. True, this has been an odd weather year in the Dallas area. We had lots of rain in early summer, and were slow to heat to our normal uninhabitable Easy Bake Oven daily temps.

I chopped back the creeping myrtle in late June when it threatened to take over the entire patio. I do that every summer, usually two or three times. It didn't show signs of blight in the cool, wet weather. Why are the leaves folded and brown now? The leaves look like they've been carefully folded over and sealed with a white substance to form a pouch. When I pull open the browning leaves, I find lots of tiny, dry, black particles that look like poppy seeds. They don't look like eggs, don't move, and aren't fuzzy or moldy in appearance.







Please comment if you know what is wrong. Myrtle'll love you!

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a dink a do, I love you
Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a dink a do, I love you
I love you in the morning and in the afternoon,
I love you in the evening and underneath the moon.
Oh, Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a dink a do, I love you!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Positive ID

Brought a bunch of gourds to Elementary Art class. I love the variety and color of gourds. Even more, I love teaching children to notice that variety and color.

What's the same?

What's different?

Gourds teach color, pattern, shape, and texture. I just facilitate the lectures, like the person who makes sure the big electric coffee urn is gurgling at an early morning workshop.

The kids were having trouble with the idea of different. I don't know if each gourd in the cornucopia has a different fingerprint or DNA. I do know the kids are aware of tv cop show lingo:

1. You witnessed a burglary. One of these gourds committed the crime. How will you describe the gourd perp to the police detectives?
2. You are asked to go down to precinct headquarters to view a line-up. What distinguishing features will you look for?
3. Please help the police artist create a sketch of the squashish criminal.
4. Be sure to draw both the face and the profile.
5. Which gourd looks like Harry Morgan on "Dragnet", and which looks like Art Carney on "The Honeymooners"? Okay, I didn't ask the kids, but I've always gotten these two confused. Harry Morgan was on "M.A.S.H." Carney was in "Harry and Tonto".

The kids got it. They started looking for each gourd's birthmarks and scars. They compared the weights, widths, and heights. They named each gourd. Their drawings improved. It was intriguing to find they automatically divided the gourds into presumed innocent or presumed guilty categories based on physical differences. Some thought the bumpy white gourd could never commit a crime. Others thought "Cauliflower" was a nefarious mastermind.

It wasn't elementary, my dear Watson, but I was grateful for this artistic trip down to precinct. We named our drawings "C.S.I.: Gourd Squad."

I was left wondering why I could instantly name the "Mod Squad" actress, Peggy Lipton, even though I never watched that late Sixties tv show.

I just finished reading Eleanor Updale's teen novel, Montmorency and the Assassins. Professor Cesare Lombroso is fictionalized in the book. Lombroso is considered the father of criminal anthropology, although his theories about the facial characteristics of "born criminals" are no longer accepted. You can't tell a criminal gourd just by looking at its face, but you can remember its identifying features!

Beyond Banana Bread

On the phone with Dad, discussing food, of course, and I wander out to the kitchen thinking I would stare into the cold refrigerator for a minute and a dinner inspiration would pop to mind. Whoa! What happened to those bananas on the kitchen counter? They looked fine this morning, but now they are so dark and fragile I can barely lift them into the waste basket. They have oozed and stained the counter.

Dad is considering whether to go out for cooked veggies or fresh. Wendy's? Boston Market? I tell him the bananas have got to go.

"What about banana bread?," he asks.

"These babies are beyond banana bread," I explain. We agree that Beyond Banana Bread sounds like a bad summer sequel movie or remake, maybe starring Mel Gibson. We get the giggles, especially when we decide we must each go forward toward our supper destiny with a cry of, "To banana bread and beyond!"

Although we've hung up, I still have the giggles. I see Mad Max himself, Mel Gibson, wearing a Fruit of the Loom classic tv costume for the grape guy. I try to say "beyond banana bread" aloud, but my tongue is tangled in Toy Story-speak with Buzz Lightyear, and it comes out like "Binaca Breath Spray". These bananas definitely belong to the post-apocalyptic science fiction movie genre.

Good grief! Back in the early 1970s when we were wearing gaucho pants, battle jackets, and hot pants all made of polyester double-knit, high school was the land of Binaca. We were all hurrying to our lockers in the halls of high school learning spraying wintergreen breath freshener on our tongues. Life was primitive in those Olden Days Before Backpacks. Bianca had just married Mick Jagger.

Told my youngest that my class was making a life-size papier mache jaguar, and I was still working out the design bugs in my junk-collecting mind's eye. "Just go on-line and get a schematic," he suggested. Oops. The diagrams are for Jaguar cars. My class is making an animal.

Same son went to see the remake of "Bad News Bears" last evening. What was he thinking!? He said it was an awful kiddie movie with cussing. Walter Matthau clones dressed in banana costumes do a Kilgore Rangerette dance routine just off camera in my brain.

Kick-step-kick-turn.

More rotten than the bananas, George W. makes newsreels of "Beyond Arrogance". Twenty-one U.S. soldiers were killed in Bush's post-apocalyptic science fiction Iraq in the past three days while the President touted teaching intelligent design in public schools and disbelieved Rafael Palmeiro's positive steroid test.

On a local level, my son is making a smoothie fruit shake. He fills the blender one-third full of ice cubes, then adds frozen peach slices and frozen berries. He peels a banana, and adds it with a bit of cran-grape juice, some fresh strawberries, and a peeled orange. Turns on the blender, and it freezes up. Put the banana in first! Always put the soft stuff into the blender before the frozen stuff!

Kia Rio

Center-pivot circles of lush green within squares of tan always look like a quilt to me. I drift from watching the ground, to reading the Grisham book, to drowsing, (lather, rinse, repeat)...This Grisham book, King of Torts has many characters, but I can't work up enthusiasm for any of them. Long ago I read a story about lawyers, possibly related to a Native American legend. It seems that our conscience is a rough stone in our belly. It pricks and pokes us, and reminds us to do the right thing. A lawyer's conscience stone is worn as smooth as a river rock, and it bothers his tummy not one little bit.

The flight seems way too short the way a haircut often does. I claim the belly-flop bag, and board the shuttle to the car rental Sunport center. It's so great to be on vacation that I babble to the young mother behind the Dollar Rent-a-Car counter about the last time I was in Albuquerque, twelve years ago. We took our three little boys to a July 4th fireworks display at Kirtland AFB, and my ex locked the keys in the rental car. We had to get the armed forces to break into the car so we could take the tired, dehydrated, over-excited boys back to the motel. I promised the woman that I would NOT lock the keys in the car.

"What are your travel plans?," she asked. I babbled on about going out west on I-40, and up I-25 to Santa Fe. She told me that the Kia Rio I had requested was only good for in-town driving. "It goes great downhill," she says, "but you have to push it uphill." I envision myself driving a Model T across the desert in a grainy sepia photograph. It's not a good visual. Remember the hilarious scenes in "The Gods Must Be Crazy", and the disasters in "How the West Was Won"? You will understand why I upgraded to the Dodge Stratus. As newlyweds, we owned a rusty puke-yellow Chevy Nova called "Old Paint". In the winter it would stall at stoplights in the worst part of town. I would have to jump out of the car, open the hood, unscrew the butterfly wing nut to open the lid to the air intake valve, stick a screwdriver down in the opening, jump back into the car, start it, jump out, remove the screwdriver, screw the lid back on, shut the hood, jump back in the car, turn onto 27th St. and drive off on the ice when the light changed. Each time I did this I recalled a vague story of Isadora Duncan being strangled by her silk scarf while driving her roadster. (Don't quote me on the details.)

I am too old for that stuff. I succumb to the pressure to upgrade to a Dodge Stratus. The Stratus doesn't have much more power than the Kia Rio, but it gets great gas mileage.

Crossing over to the corrugated dark side?

A question came up today about Corobuff. The product didn't ring any bells, especially since I imagined it being spelled "Korobuff". Somehow that sounded like a perfect Greek Adonis or Cretan bull-leaper with a Zonker tan, so I was curious. After all, I'm old but not dead.

Did a little Dogpile search and eventually corrected my spelling. Oh, yeah, Corobuff is the printed corrugated paper rolls we use for stage sets, prom decor, scalloped bulletin board borders, parade floats, and patriotic grocery store displays. I found the site for Bemiss-Jason, the maker of Corobuff and lots of other great art materials like Spectra tissue paper. As I clicked around the site I suddenly found myself in The House of Darkness, a Stephen King website. Get me outta here! This is too much like the day I've had!

While squeezing a plastic bottle of fabric glue this morning, the entire top of the bottle blew off. Out plopped 4 oz. of something that looked like a Ghostbusters prop or industrial-strength Pillsbury cinnamon roll icing, and smelled quite mind-altering. The weirdest part is that the glue now coating my hand seemed to have an ultra-violet glow. Or maybe it was the fumes...

Haven't had so much fun since squeezing the tube of gold printing ink onto the brayer plate a couple summers ago. The bottom of the tube popped open shooting groovy gold goo back on me and my brand spanking new walking shoes. Just beam me up to Oz, Slimer.

Perhaps I should lie down with a cold cloth on my forehead. I keep seeing Mediterranean surfer dudes riding waves of blue bulletin board borders. Alternately, I could go rent "Shirley Valentine" again at Blockbuster.