Forced to eat chocolate ice cream

Dad did not want to awaken from his nap to eat the dip of ice cream, so I had to keep it from going to waste.  Sitting on the uncomfy chair in the corner reading about the Cherokees and the Trail of Tears, I licked the plastic spoon.

Good to get out of the condo with the dripping bathtub faucet after working through an online training course about recognizing child abuse. Dripping faucets are bad.  Catching drips = good.  Using caught drips to refill toilet tank or water houseplants is not such a bad thing.

Child abuse is bad.  Getting credit for doing free online training is good, especially while wearing my jammies and polar bear slippers.  Nuking the leftover spaghetti and meat sauce for breakfast is neither good nor bad.  It is just easy and comforting on the day off from school honoring Martin Luther King.

Moral or immoral? Legal or illegal?  Black/white clarity seems just the stuff of  fabric arrangements for my grandbaby play mat.

In 1977 we considered the world far too doomed to bring a child into.  We fretted about the demise of small towns in the Walmart invasion, acid rain, the inequality in our economic system, the dang military-industrial complex, quality of life issues, whether using a crockpot to make lentil soup was selling out, and the inherent evil of polyester double-knit. We put henna rinses in our hair, grew alfalfa sprouts on the window sill, and gagged down carob chips.  We read Wendell Berry poems.

Carob chips will never be chocolate.  Few puzzles have the answers on the back page.  Being an adult was not what we expected.  It was soooo gray and blurry!

Being a parent was unexpectedly wonderful.  Maybe being a grandparent will be as well.

I'm into cole slaw.  Cabbage.  Down to basics.  Stone Soup!  No frills, except:

Dad eventually awoke to swallow his afternoon meds and drink a 4 oz. protein shake.  His new roommate groaned about cold lotion being applied to his itchy diaper region.

"Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts."

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Wendell Berry (1973)

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Llama giraffe amaryllis

Please meet my new pet amaryllis. LLama is its name, although it llooks more llike a giraffe.  LLama is the tallest amaryllis I ever forced.  LLama is forcing me to llearn to spell.  LLama llooks llovelly in my mama's red Dansk bowl next to the Woolly Mammoth's volcano clay vase.

I've llooked up "amaryllis" in the Big Red Dictionary at lleast five times in the llast month.  I'll probably llook it up another dozen times before the two stalks finish blooming. In the meantime, LLama will help me remember calyx, sepal, stamen, pistil, and corolla.

Not that corolla!  The brown 1980 two-door Toyota Corolla still holds a fond corner in my heart.  It was the first car with my name on the lloan papers.  The truest thing my ex ever said was, "If we'd bought two of those Corollas we would still have one running."  It was a great little car, although llacking air conditioning.

Back in 1980 I was very torn about buying a foreign-made auto which would seem unpatriotic to my dad, seem a tiny deathtrap to my mom, and require me to learn to drive a stick shift.  For some reason I dreamed last night that I would have to drive a manual transmission vehicle to "save the day" and get us to the airport in time for the LLas Vegas flight.  I couldn't remember how to shift gears.  I couldn't hook the U-Haul trailer onto the car. Worse, I had misspelled all the names and numbers in my cell phone contacts list so I couldn't phone a friend for help.

We didn't have A/C in the '80 Corolla, but we were blessedly lacking cell phone technology.  My mother has become a frequent character actress in my recent dream movies.  So far, she rarely plays herself.



 © 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

A good week for toms and tallies

Tommy can you hear me?  Although Thomas is still in the top sixty-five male baby names, I can't remember teaching any boys named Thomas, Tom, or Tommy.  I am intrigued by baby naming trends, having taught preschoolers for a ridiculously long time. I often wish I'd kept a tally of student names. The associations that accompany those names could be cautionary tales for expectant parents!  Let's just say that if you want your daughter to always wear panties to school, don't name her Chloe or Alexandra!  Statistics will bear me out on this. Should you need a kid to run for help, ask for a Jack or a Mike.


As a teen I worked in the hospital kitchen preparing special diets for diabetics and other patients.  One of my duties was tallying the orders marked on patient menus, including the special dietary requirements and special requests.  This was a good gig, sitting near the fan in the relatively cool dietary office.  Compiling this count required shortcut abbreviations:

tom jce = tomato juice

FF = fat free

SF = salt free

VW = 6 vanilla wafers

LD = 3 Lorna Doone cookies  

van pdg = vanilla pudding

crax = 5 saltines

RA cherries = Royal Anne cherries

WP RA cherries = water-packed Royal Anne cherries for diabetics

soft RA cherries = canned pitted Royal Anne cherries 

WC = whipped cream 

It's the pits when you can't have WC on your red jello cubes:  

I'm so lucky to have the promise of good toms from Janie to get me through each day until lunchtime.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Identifying the Cham Cham Cham bird

Nearing the highest part of the Bois D'arc Trail the song was becoming the mantra of the world, or at least of the High Meadow area of Oak Point Nature Preserve.  The "cham cham cham" seemed to come at me from every direction and from overhead.  It might have been coming up out of the trail into my feet, too.  In the trees the Cham Cham birds were camouflaged, but loud.  They were bouncing their chant back and forth like a sweet gong in a chamber of mirrors, or Paul Horn's flute inside the Taj Mahal.

Finally an epicenter--a smallish bird sitting up like a miniature meadowlark on a barbed wire fence.  Meadowlarks are bigger, and sit on fence posts.  I can't pull their song from my tone deaf memory, but this is definitely not it.

Pulling out of the Cham Cham bird's gravitation, I walk up toward Old Morton Vale Road. The birds are in the trees and brambles, and on the wires overhead. Their joy is too great to be interrupted by my intrusion. They sit tall and chant, and they are yellow in the late afternoon sun!

My camera is not really bird-on-a-wire quality. My fifty-six year-old wrinkled neck is sunburning as I stare up, just as it used to burn flying kites on the beach, and just as full of joy in the moment.

I must know. Maybe I will never know. Maybe I should sit down in the tall grass and just listen to this unknown bird. Maybe it is magic. Maybe it is all connected:

• Vinyl, cassette, cd versions of Paul Horn Inside the Taj Mahal owned over three plus decades.
• Can't count the copies of John Janovy's Keith County Journal I've given away or worn out. I'm honored to experience the dickcissel's magnetism after all this time.
• The giant dandelion in the low meadow is the road map. 

Janovy's chapter about dickcissels is entitled, "Love, Joy, Money, and Pride".  What motivates us to write these blogs, walk these trails, trace connections, and be open to new songs?  I take pride in posting a fine-tuned product, but I blog out of love and joy, to record and savor the strange, cockeyed, interwoven wonder of life.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Hospital delirium and dietary flashbacks

Pam Belluck's story in the 6/20 New York Times described to a tee my dad's hallucinations in the hospital following his second hip break in 2007. When I read it online, I instantly knew a half dozen people to forward the story. We all have terrifying experiences with elderly parents, hospitalized and completely out of their minds. For five days, while I stayed with Dad in his hospital room, he alternately believed I was my deceased mother, or the Devil running a small town Depression Era picture show projection booth. I watched Dad writhe and rip out his IV, then converse with the midnight aide about sandwiches and ice cream like a perfect gentleman.

According to Belluck's article, a spell of hospital delirium increases hospital stays, and the likelihood of being sent to a nursing home or rehab facility. It aggravates chances of future dementia. I would add that it undermines the relationship between an elderly person and his responsible children and relative.

Many factors contributed to my father's delirium. He'd been through surgery with general anaesthesia and serious pain pills. He was in an unfamiliar setting where it was difficult to tell night from day. He was awakened frequently for vital signs checks, IV changes, and increasingly difficult blood drawing for lab tests. Being a hospital patient is much like participating in a sleep deprivation study. The hospitalist doctors did not know my dad, or realize his confusion was abnormal. The eerie lighting and constant beeping were reminding Dad of his WWII foxhole experiences, not helped by the sounds of Care Flight helicopter landings on the roof and snowplows outside on the street.

Two things helped Dad move out his worst delirium. First, getting the anaesthetic and narcotics out of his system. Second, a very simple switch to a TV channel that showed lovely landscapes all day, and constellations and galaxy images all night. Did the doctors or nurses suggest turning on the TV channel for Dad? No. The aide who brought him a sandwich and some ice cream at 3 a.m. on the fifth day was the one who flicked on the TV.

Talked with my friend who cares for Alzheimer's patients. Her sweet, five foot tall, roly-poly client described fighting a Bad Man who was squeezing her arm, managing to "kick him in the groin and reduce him to a vegetable" before shoving his body into the "rolling black cart with the shelves".

Holy cow, stuff that squeezing man in the cart! He's the blood pressure cuff. I've had a few anxiety attacks when I was trapped in the grocery store pharmacy self-check blood pressure machine. I've wanted to kick that cuff into vegetable status myself.

I worked in the hospital kitchen for five years beginning in 1970. We had big carts that were black and stainless steel. We served the patients' trays in an assembly line, then loaded the trays into the carts. The trays slid into grooves. It seems like the carts were plugged in and the hot sides were preheated, and the cold sides chilled before we loaded the trays. Each cart probably held thirty trays. The doors closed. Then some teen boy would drag the cart away to the elevator.

After patients ate, the nurse aides would load the dirty trays of dishes back in the carts and the process reversed. We unloaded the carts onto a disassembly line that fed to the giant dishwasher. Then some teen girl would steam clean and disinfect the cart, dry it, and shove it back to its parking place.

We did all this as fast and with as much flirting and banter as teenagers can. We were the supper shift, 3:30-7:00, and we wanted to get out of there early. We were making $1.21/hr., and wearing hairnets and white uniforms. When we worked on the weekends or school vacations, 6:00 to 2:30 we couldn't understand the full-timers who made the work last as long as possible to fill the shift.

Anyway, I'm quite sure a person could be shoved in one of those steamy carts if they'd been kicked in the groin and reduced to a vegetable. Especially a soft, canned vegetable with Low Salt.




© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

#60 on the library hit parade

The latest addition to my library life list is the Pritzker Legal Research Center at Northwestern University. Danger Baby has pretty much lived in this library for the past two years, rarely looking up from his work to scan Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan toward Navy Pier.

"Who was this Pritzker fellow?," I asked him. Some billionaire. Indeed. Jay Pritzker and his family started the Hyatt Hotels as just one facet of their financial empire.

Danger Baby and I also visited the namesake Pritzker Pavillion at Millennium Park for my first real life encounter with a Frank Gehry design. The pavillion made me remember curling irons and hot steam rollers, not to mention carrot peelers. I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

Since I was visiting the city of Wrigley, Gehry's design also made me think of Doublemint, Spearmint, and Juicyfruit. How many foil gum wrappers would it take to make a pavillion?

This was not, but could have been, named the Farrah Fawcett Archery Range.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

BIG snows

I started this post a week ago in solidarity with my sister's family and the Woolly Mammoth at the beginning of the Washington, D.C. area's Snowpocalyse. It never occurred to me that the DFW area would have its own record-setting snow. Our nine inches yesterday tied a record for the most snow in any one calendar day. Nevermind that it will be long gone before the pot of split pea soup.

"This winter is like the big snows of the Sixties," says the helpful shoveler at Dad's house in Lincoln. On Christmas Day they got 9.5 inches, and it wasn't slushy and quick-to-melt like here. Lincoln has had 38" of snow so far this season, bringing it into the top ten winter totals, with weeks to go. That's the word from the High Plains Region Climate Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

I remember walking to Eastridge Elementary between piled up snow taller than me. It was like a snow lab rat maze. Other times we walked atop the hard-crusted drifts right down the middle of the streets. As a teacher, I try to imagine the logistical nightmares in those Sixties schoolrooms getting all the kiddies into their snowpants and galoshes and mittens-on-strings...
Life for my mother was pretty hectic in the early Sixties. When this picture of my brother was taken my sister was an infant and I had not yet started kindergarten. That the winter snow film wasn't developed until July 1960 is a good indication that time and money were in short supply. I was looking through a box for photos that only exist in my mind, but the images are very clear in my memory.

On February 11, 1965, Lincoln got 19" of snow, part of the snowiest month on record, with 26.1 inches. That must have been a rough year for parents of bickering children stuck inside with cabin fever. I know exactly what I was wearing (black stretch pants with foot stirrups, tan/white/black horizontal stripe knit top) when my mom hit her limit. We were all going OUTSIDE, and we were going to WALK up to Clark Jeary nursing home at Eldon Drive and A Street(Mapquest says it is 0.76 mi.) and back in the snow. Mom would pull the sled so my sister and brother could ride some of the time. At the time it seemed to be uphill all the way, both ways, which isn't true, of course. We were properly bundled, but the cold and exertion knocked a lot of obnoxious belligerence out of us. When my boys were young I was often near that parental point, but without the snow cure available!

Great snowfalls of my memory in Lincoln, Nebraska, according to National Weather Service archives:

--Jan. 3, 1971, 11.4"
--Dec. 18, 1973, 9.7"
--Mar. 19, 1977, 8.3"
--Mar. 26, 1983, 7.6"

Results of one blizzard are still very evident in the city. The October 26 storm of 1997 with 13.2" of heavy snow devastated Lincoln trees that had not yet lost their leaves.

I walked around the condominiums this noon and was glad to see only one tree with a big fallen branch. Last week's pruning probably helped spare us other damage.



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Time to create new passwords

Farhad Manjoo did not tell me to use lemon juice for invisible ink to make coded spy documents. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for Slate, but he may not have been a Cub Scout. Farhad convinced me to make new user names and passwords for online accounts today, by way of his column reprinted in today's Dallas Morning News.

I've had fun creating file names ever since my first computer math class at East High in 1972 or so. Back then we did our programming assignments by typing a punchtape. The computer was somewhere in a big room up the Interstate in Omaha, and I can't remember how our punchtapes got to Omaha to be run. I do know Mr. Beckman was our computer math teacher, and he wasn't properly impressed by my witty file names.

Spent several hours today working for a friend of a friend building a filing system. I tried to create logical file names for him to access his teaching materials, but old Mr. Beckman was on my mind. Could I understand enough about how this friend of a friend thinks to make a filing system that fits his retrieval process?

According to Farhad Manjoo, automated systems can analyze our computer and online activity to discover all our account passwords. Pretty amazing since I can't figure out the way my Dad's memory encodes things for future recall. Tonight Dad is watching baseball and trying to get his mind around the proper spelling of Andy Pettitte's name. I don't understand why this is important to his personal filing recall. I can't hack into his system.

So much of teaching preschoolers involves asking questions to help kids realize they already know their own answer. How do we help them build their inner filing and retrieval systems?

What are the questions we ask to create our own mental organization? What do we ask to decode another person? How can an automated program uncover our secrets?

Farhad Manjoo recommended a technique for creating nearly-uncrackable passwords that are still memorable enough when we want to log on:

1. Begin with an original, personal, memorable sentence.
2. Turn it into an acronym.
3. Add some symbols, numbers, and capital letters.

To that I would add in vintage American Bandstand Rate-a-Record style:

1. Make sure it has a good beat.
2. Dance to it.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Boca Negra and Otter Pops

The Woolly Mammoth and I spent a Sunday morning at the Petroglyph National Monument. This was my third or fourth visit to the park over fifteen years, and I was dismayed to find civilization encroaching like a bad case of cockroaches. Everywhere we looked from the top of the mesa, new homes were just a shoe's throw away.

To add a particularly unsettling soundtrack to our hike, a popsicle truck was driving up and down the residential streets. The song clearly drifting up to us was the tune that begins Firesign Theatre's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus".

Yes, this is the Sunday morning popsicle truck in question. Who buys popsicles before noon? My son, the Woolly Mammoth, would have bought a popsicle if he had the money. Instead, he eats several Otter Pops per day.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Barrymore's sandwich

A recent staff birthday lunch set me off on a taste trail. One teacher brought tiny sandwiches with flavored cream cheese fillings. Some were salmon, some sun-dried tomato, and others chive. While good, they only reminded me of excellent cream cheese sandwiches served at Barrymore's in Lincoln in the mid-Seventies.

Black olives and walnuts with thin-sliced rye seem to have been components. I've been experimenting for a couple weeks, and have a tasty spread, although I no longer know if it bears any resemblance to the Barrymore's filling. My first effort was so heavy on pressed garlic that I gave myself a dreadful headache, so this is quite toned down:

Place in medium bowl and blend with hand mixer on medium high until smooth:
12 oz. store brand cream cheese spread
1 fresh basil leaf
1 stalk of fresh dill
1 sprinkle of garlic salt

Drain and chop:
12 pitted kalamata olives
1 oz. sliced sweet pimientos (1/3 jar)

Add olives and pimientos to cream cheese along with 1/3 cup walnut pieces. Mix with rubber spatula.

Use spread on crackers, toasted sourdough, sliced rye. Pretty darn good.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Sangria Seventies and smashed silos

Looking at my son's photos of Spain--Malaga, Valencia, Granada, Barcelona, Madrid--the Moorish art, the palm trees outside the fort, the Gaudi cathedral and the bullfight rings. Excuse me! Wasn't that a pitcher of sangria on the metal cafe table overlooking the beach??

Back in the Seventies in Nebraska drinking sangria and eating Doritos was considered multicultural awareness. It was a primitive time, I try to explain to the Woolly Mammoth. Diversity was deciding whether or not to put Everclear in the pitcher of jug red wine with the slices of orange and lemon from IGA and the carbonated soda.

What should one serve at a Seventies retro party?

• French Onion dip made from Lipton soup mix and served with Weavers wavy chips
• Knorr spinach dip made with canned water chestnuts and served in a bread bowl with Rye-Krisp and fresh broccoli florets
• Hot cheese dip melted in the harvest gold crockpot made with Velveeta and Rotel
• Fondue with beef cubes and peanut oil
• Crepes with creamed seafood and spinach
• Iceberg lettuce with alfalfa sprouts and Ranch dressing
• Tab without cyclamates

Does one really need a lighted dance floor for a Seventies retro party?

• Not if one has a disco mirror ball and/or a lot of citronella candles for an outdoor event.
• Be sure to dig out those Grand Funk Railroad and Bachman Turner Overdrive LPs. Three-part names are very Seventies.
• Fake ferns in macrame hangers are essential and cannot be switched out unless you are wearing leg-warmers.
• Not if one has a Foosball table.
• Persons with pseudo wood paneling in their basement rec rooms or chili red shag carpet are exempt from all sangria aesthetic regulations.
• Not if one can fit in a Quiana shirt and waffle-soled shoes.

The images flash by quickly. So many talking heads on the tube tell of floods. ..tornadoes, declared disaster areas... the caved-in silo between the corrugated metal outbuildings looks just like a Frank Gehry masterpiece from a junior's year abroad Spain visit.

Sangria was introduced to the U.S. at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. It is basically a very inexpensive and efficient way to get you drunk with red wine, fruit slices, and 7-Up. An extra spirit is usually added--brandy, rum, vodka or gin-- to send you off bullfighting with windmills, or designing architectural masterpieces. It's authentic Seventies, so dip that Dorito in the Velveeta!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Sleepless Walking Down O, P, and Q

More thoughts on moving mental furniture:

By the time I was seven, I was spending lots of mental energy fighting off sleep by visualizing the route from Lincoln to Pierce, Nebraska. I would imagine walking the 120 miles from my house to Grandma's, by way of Seward, Columbus, Madison, Norfolk, and Hadar ("Hello Hadar, See Ya Later!"). I would visualize the Blue Boot shoe store signs and windmills along the two-lane highways just in case I ever had to run away from home, or perhaps be called upon to assume the role of my parents just like Bert Park's description of the duties of Miss America's runner-up.

What are my little preschoolers visualizing to keep from surrendering to a nice afternoon nap? What mental furniture are they rearranging? What routes are they reviewing? Why do they fight so hard against the after-lunch siesta cherished by everyone from college freshman to senior citizen? It's the sort of thing that makes me lose my marbles...

We all have things we fret about to ward off sleep or to retrieve sleep at two a.m. I review the Seven Dwarfs, the Seven Deadly Sins, the strange names of the Goss sisters (Loy, Billy, Vin, Effa Dale, and Alice June), the three members of the superband Cream (I forget Jack Bruce). "The whole nine yards" refers to machine gun ammo. It was Bobby Gentry who sang "Ode to Billy Joe". Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic. Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. The Greek alphabet--pi rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega won't ya go to sleep!

Yesterday at the post office after writing out the Express Mail and customs forms to mail the camera battery charger to Italy, I couldn't remember the four number PIN for my debit card. Yet I can blurt out the fourteen numbers of my library card with ease.

My dad and I have tried mental strolling down the main street of Pierce from the 1920s through the 1970s. Other times I contemplate the shimmering, revolving Hamm's beer sign with the bear in the canoe I saw walking into the package store in Columbus, Nebraska, that time when the public restrooms in the park along the river were locked. Must have been my first time in a tavern, as I can still see it clearly over forty years later. Maybe 1963... Hamms the beer refreshing...Hamms the beer refreshing...



I've lost the ability to name the counties of Nebraska by their assigned car license plate numbers based on population. Yes, Lancaster was 2, Douglas 1, Sarpy 3, Hall 8, and Platte 10. I've forgotten the rest, even Red Willow County. Colfax? That's something to worry about at two or three a.m.



Some nights I attempt an imaginary 1974 university pub crawl. These sleepless icy sidewalk treks begin at 13th and Q Streets inside the Hong Kong Pizza King, the spiritual home of ham fried rice. They head west to Casey's at about 11th and P with the chili dogs, then across the street to the tavern that had dime draws. What was its name? Across P again past Der Loaf Und Stein, the Greek hangout, which was later transformed into a quiche/french onion soup/spinach salad/fern bar. Then down the alley from 13th to 14th, from O to P to Barrymore's.

Barrymore's was my favorite space. The bar was in the backstage area of the old Stuart Theater. What could be finer than sipping a bourbon sour while staring up into the catwalks? Maybe having a sandwich of cream cheese, walnut, pimentos, and olives on rye?

Back into the icy alley toward 14th and the Zoo Bar. Paying the cover charge for live blues from Chicago. Or maybe a stop at The Watering Hole where the decor was peanut shells and lost car keys nailed on the wooden beams?

Do rabbits contemplate their fortune cookies after lights out? I've been dreaming that Norton, the class rabbit, got loose in the Walgreens where my sons used to work. The bunny would be better off picking up take-out from Hong Kong Pizza King and planning his next escape up Highway 81 through Humphrey and David City.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

1971 Yearbook

Sorely lacking in holiday spirit, I listened to my son tell of his Goodwill quest for a really ugly Christmas sweater to wear to a campus party. I haven't wanted to decorate the tree, fuss with giftwrap, or do anything else to acknowledge the holiday season. Maybe a trip to the land of ugly sweaters was what I needed to get in the spirit. Why isn't there an annual tv special of silly Seventies holiday attire?

The first winter of my parttime job serving up cream of wheat in the hospital kitchen, the dishwasher boys were wearing platform shoes, "baggies" high-waisted, wide-leg pants with extreme cuffs, and reindeer ski sweaters. These were the guys we wanted to cruise alongside through McDonalds, accompany to a movie, or, GASP, go bowling. Why were perfectly normal Nebraska corn-fed beef boys wearing Elton John shoes???




© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Feeding the artist

The art students were comparing notes on feeding the dolphins at Sea World during our popcorn break. Maybe that was what started it. Or maybe it was all the descriptions of devastated hospitals without food. My dreams are water-logged, and I realize that my inner artist has been without the foods on its specialized diet for too long.

My hospital kitchen job ($1.65/hr.) during high school and college involved making some special diets, as well as dishing up jello, mashed potatoes, cream of wheat, and beef consumee. We high school kids horsed around and socialized a lot, but we worked hard, and knew that our labor was important. Once during a big blizzard in '72 or '73 we were snowed in after our supper shift. Snow kept coming down and the wind chill kept going down. Parents couldn't come pick us up, and probably wouldn't be able to get the breakfast workers to the hospital.

It must have been Christmas time, because there were no students in the nursing school dorm across the parking lot. The head dietician asked us to stay in the dorm overnight so we could work the six a.m. shift. The patients would have to have breakfast.

After work, we plunged through the drifts and blasting wind over to the dorm, where we played basketball in the gym. Mostly, we stared out through the ice crystals forming fantastic designs on the windows at the drifts swelling in the parking lot.

None of this begins to compare with the dedication and ordeals of hospital workers in the Katrina disaster area. It might explain why I dreamed last night about one of the girls I worked with at Bryan Memorial thirty years ago, though.

My artist diet requires higher than normal visual roughage, time to read and to write, opportunities to see art, and to make art. I can get along on a regular diet of tater tots and folding laundry for the short term, but it's obvious when I need a nutritional supplement!


Besides visiting the DMA and listening to Glenn Gould playing Haydn's piano sonatas, I watched two opera videos this weekend.

Squirrels jumping into transformers

Now that I think about it, the whole explanation seems unlikely. During snowstorms back in Nebraska in the late-Seventies the electrical transformers on power poles would sometimes explode quite loudly around our neighborhood of small, older apartment houses. We believed that the explosions were caused by cold-crazed squirrels leaping into the transformer units. This was twenty years before I heard the term "suicide bomber". Our lights would flicker after one of the explosions.

Whenever I make pork chops and Spanish rice, I get a visual memory of looking out to the northeast from our apartment balcony window toward the alley, the parking lot, and the power pole with the transformer all covered with four to six inches of snow.

The one-bedroom apartment had bright Husker red shag carpet. The kitchen was one corner of the living/dining room. The fridge and range were harvest gold. We were the newlywed managers of the 8-plex, so our rent was $145 a month! Our phone bill was $7/month. We didn't have a car payment on the banana yellow rusty Chevy Nova. Our black and white t.v. was about 12" diagonal.

Our crockpot was avocado green. And yes, we had macrame plant hangers.

We got up early to use the snowblower and shovel so the residents could get their cars out of the lot and up the gravel alley to go to work and school. I would brown the thick pork chops in a heavy cast iron skillet. Didn't have to add oil to the pan then because the chops weren't trimmed of all their fat.

Put the browned chops into the crockpot. Add a can of stewed tomatoes with green peppers, one canful of water, 1/2 tsp. dried parsley, 1 tsp. chili powder, 1/4 tsp. sage, 1/2 tsp. salt if you are young and don't even know about blood pressure, and 1.5 cups uncooked rice (not Minute Rice). Stir. Plug in crockpot, and set on low. Go to work and school. Come home and shovel the lot and sidewalks again. Collect rent checks. Vacuum stairway. Serve pork chops and Spanish rice with Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Wash dishes by hand. Listen to Miles Davis.

Attention to detail

It's the little things that make all the difference. Having posted about North Texas cricket infestations, fire ants, and Dubya's cabinet, it is time to come clear. Entomology is the scientific study of insects. Etymology is the study of the origin and historical development of a word. Etymologists rarely need nets, and entomologists don't carry loaded dictionaries. Eighth graders are a fascinating species to one and pure torture to the other. My junior high English teacher got so disgusted with those of us sentenced to her honors class that she literally threw the book at us. It is mighty scary when a sixty-five year-old woman in black Wicked Witch of the West shoes starts spittle-ranting a roomful of kids who don't get "Beowulf". When she becomes imbued with the strength of an Olympic shotputter and throws Webster's Dictionaries around the room you are going to be scarred for life.

Despite Miss Madsen, still twitching her mustache and communicating her eternal disdain from the Big Junior High in the Sky, I am thankful for an outstanding education in English. I am grateful, too, for the climate of recognition of authority if not necessarily respect that still existed in the schools of the 1970's. Zeus and his lightning bolts could never have been as motivating as a well-heaved dictionary and the threat of Your Permanent Record.

Say "Ah"

My intermediate students were so into building constructions out of tongue depressors and the colorful lids from Crayola markers that I had to force them to go home at the end of class. We save all the lids when we throw out dead markers, and they accumulate rapidly. The class explored ways to build the constructions for balance and sturdiness, and got into a friendly competition for the most levels/stories. The results are quite trippy! Viewed from the side, the tongue depressors disappear, and the bright marker lids seem to be standing in space. Next week we want to put the constructions on a lazy susan. I'm thinking about possibilities for related collages and crayon resists, and looking at Amish quilts.

Feeling flashed-back to my first visit to the Poster Joint in 1970 Lincoln, Nebraska. A failed gas station had been converted into a black light gallery near the campus. My dad took me on this junior high counter-culture expedition. I purchased a Clark Gable GWTW poster, and a glow-in-the-dark Tweety Bird with my babysitting money. From there it was a slippery slide to fringed purses and Peace Sign candles from Pier One.

The DMN Fashion section featured Twiggy/Jean Shrimpton looks last week. I'd be very scary in fishnet stockings and white lipstick from Yardley! I could go for a Marimekko paper dress, though.