Halloween census

My tallies have not added up correctly.  I'm afraid there might be hanging chads in my count of the preschool costumes, or maybe my memory is failing.  I'm sad to report that Norton the elderly class rabbit did not get out of his cage to be in the class Halloween photo this year.

1 Bat Girl
1 Bat Man
1 blueberry fairy
1 doctor

5 fairy/butterfly/tutu girls (1 with fever and diarrhea)
1 great pumpkin t shirt
1 Incredible Hulk
1 Jedi knight

1 Minnie Mouse
1 nonparticipant
1 peacock
1 pirate

1 princess

1 royal princess

1 Superman
1 Spiderman
1 tiger in Pull-Ups
1 vaguely pink sparkle cowgirl fairy with wand
_____________________________________
This does not equal 24 children

The elementary class only has nine students at the moment.  Those kids are always asked to be something or someone "real".  Andy and the Statue deserved applause.

Dr. Who
Maria Tallchief
1 ballet teacher
Andy Warhol
The Statue of Liberty
Amelia Earhart
Tim Burton
Queen Elizabeth
Julia Child

*

Most things change, but the popularity of Amelia Earhart for kids needing to read a biography or dress up as somebody famous has stayed the same.  The popularity of ironing has continued to plummet.

**

*Ninja turtle + 20 years or so at the Statue of Liberty.

**The bat is still without power in New Jersey.  Junior Birdman is now a daddy.  I wonder what ever became of the pilot's white scarf!

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Caillebotte drops his chewing gum

If you walk all the way north on the High Line and then look down you might be able to spot the pink blob of Bazooka bubble gum on the pavement far below.  Gustave dropped it intentionally even though his mommy said "No," in a very firm tone of voice.

Caillebotte's On the Pont de l’Europe (1876-1877) is one of my favorite paintings at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth. I love the close-up, cropped gentlemen, the almost monochromatic color, and the structural steelwork shapes.

This was my first visit to the High Line, and only my second trip to New York, so please excuse me for gawking like a yokel. Sorry that "Jeremiah Moss" is crabby about tourists and gentrification in his Chelsea neighborhood according to the 8/21/12 NYT column.  Maybe there's an anger management group for him that meets in the High Line amphitheatre.

The High Line has almost everything I could want in a destination:

Domino 1 2 3

• Cool design
• Repurposing of industrial space
• Native plants
• Awesome views of the city and river
• It's free
• A breeze
• Gelato
• All sorts of photo subjects
• Benches for sitting down
• Giant domino building and fire escapes

Construction zigzags

• Oh, and zigzags. My tiny French student likes saying "zigzag". We fold our nap mats like zigzags at preschool.

Did I mention gelato?

Perhaps there will be another High Line post tomorrow. True, it will be the first day of preschool and then Gustave and I have to take a CPR certification renewal class. And where would we rather be?

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Where is the pasta fest?

Indeed.  Where is it?  Sounds great, but nobody mentioned this event to me.  In an instant I'm fixated on marinara and parmesan.

Where is the nearest pasta fest?  Hmmm.  I went to a fun flea food fest in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) last Saturday.  So tough deciding what to eat!  Finally chose a Moroccan lamb merguez sandwich and a mint iced tea. Delicious, but a long way from Dallas!

 

But, hey, nobody told me there was a pasta fest. I would not have packed a sack lunch.

I need to mail.  Where is the post office? Oops.  Oh that posta fess.  There is a mailbox across the street.

I need a stamp. Alas, the nearest post office is several blocks from here. And that must mean no parmesan for moi.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Back mostly

Back on the solid ground of North Texas.  Reentry has been difficult, but the cool temperature and rain showers are helping my outlook.

Of course it doesn't help that my email has changed to Outlook.com.  For sixteen years my Hotmail account worked  JUST FINE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. 







Please do not fuss with things that waddle along splendidly, OR, if it ain't broken don't fix it! This goose is waddling splendidly in Hoboken, New Jersey. 


© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

The Little Buick Headlight and the Great Gray Bridge

The officer was very polite, confident, and young when he asked for my license and proof of insurance.  He had noted the bottle of Australian wine in the cupholder, and saw it was unopened.  He asked where we were going.  "Home," I said, "to Plano."


Where had my sister and I been?  "We were having supper at a friend's house."  I considered mentioning the fabulous shrimp Louie salad, and the odd recipe for Lemon Crunch that used pecans and cornflakes.

The officer was patient while I dug around in the glove box for the current proof of insurance, then explained the drivers' side headlight was out.  Got a new headlight bulb at Auto Zone first thing this morning.  My sister insisted the used bulb looked like a lighthouse.

 The Little Red Lighthouse is a precious talisman from childhood.  My parents brought it back to me from New York City in 1961.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Book touring #1

The model boat pond in Central Park was frozen the morning of Sunday, 2/20/11.  We were the only people around except for two men with enormous camera lenses on tripods.  The pond's official name, The Conservatory Water, doesn't pop quickly to my mind.  We had just made a mapless journey through the icy Ramble after visiting Strawberry Fields.

Looking up at the buildings of Fifth Avenue, it didn't click that the photographers were watching for Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk.  I was just thinking about Stuart Little sailing across the model boat pond in E. B. White's children's book.  The pond was much bigger than I had imagined as a child.

I was loving everything about Central Park, and sharing it with my son and daughter-in-law.  We were headed to an art museum, but hadn't decided which one.






I just reread the chapters when Stuart Little, dressed in his sailor suit, steers the Wasp across the pond and back racing the Lillian B. Womrath. Perilous weather and a paper bag test all Stuart's skill.

By the time we were finished at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and walking on Fifth Avenue, I remembered the Central Park hawks.  I kept trying to spot a nest on one of the apartment buildings, but was frequently distracted by the amazing assortment of people and shoeware on the sidewalk.

Jumping around Pale Male blogs and websites this noon, I learned hawk copulation was in progress the very day of our visit!

The picture books about Pale Male are too long and advanced for most of my students so I haven't checked them out lately.  Wikipedia lists these three:

• The Tale of Pale Male: a True Story, by Jeanette Winter (Harcourt, 2007)
• City Hawk: the Story of Pale Male, by Meghan McCarthy (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
• Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City, by Janet Schulman (Knopf, 2008)

Now that I can visualize the setting better, I'll look for Marie Winn's book, Red-Tails in Love.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Cash Cab vs golden moment

We never found ourselves answering questions in the Cash Cab during my NYC weekend. I was ready to play! Should I have auditioned?

No cash, but I was a winner on my Presidents' Day final NY taxi ride. Almost as soon as I hugged Danger Baby goodbye and settled into the cab, I started to cry.

"Please take me to La Guardia, and I'll get it together in a minute," I told the driver.
"You miss him already," he answered, and handed me a stack of napkins to dab my eyes.
"I'm just so proud of him and so fond of his wife," I snurfled between blowing my nose and wiping my eyes.

"Isn't it wonderful when your children are both successful AND happy?," the cabbie asked.
"You must be a parent yourself."

"Yes, my son is finishing law school in Connecticut, and my daughter is finishing nurse's training."

What a gift better than cash to have this cab driver's wisdom on the way to Queens!
© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Traffic cones and tortillas

I'm as corny as Kansas in August, but nobody ever called me stylish.  You might have seen me at the corner of Prince and Elizabeth on the morning of 2/19.  I was looking like a traffic cone in my new Polar Tec fleece.  My simply stylish color from Lands' End is "watermelon sorbet", or about the hue of a strawberry DQ dip cone.

Starting my first full day in New York City, my son asked if I liked corn.  Wul, yuh.  But not before coffee.  At least two mugs and a hot shower.  I stared out at inflated plastic grocery bags floating in air above the twenty-second floor between me and the Empire State Building.  There wasn't a moment to waste in the extremely windy sightseeing weekend, but first things first! 

We bundled up and walked to the subway for the ride to Cafe Habana in Nolita.  This roasted corn on a stick is the specialty of the restaurant, and I could have eaten my weight in this Aztec delight. 

These photos come from the restaurant website.  I wish I could photoshop myself into the views for grilled corn, huevos and cafe con leche.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Library collection count

Adding two new libraries to my life list, bringing my count to sixty-two.  Today I visited the Carrollton Public Library at Hebron & Josey.  It seemed like a user-friendly, efficient public library with helpful staff.  I'll be presenting a program about worms and worm composting at the library during the Texas Summer Reading Program.  The theme this year is "Dig Up a Good Book", hence the worm connection.
 
 

I was delighted to finally stand by one of the New York Public Library lions.  I've wanted to do that since I heard Andy and the Lion on Captain Kangaroo's tv show in the early Sixties.  Andy is one of my heroes.  He checks out library books AND he keeps pliers in his back pocket.  Between wire sculpture and Buick difficulties, I often have pliers in my back pocket.  James Daugherty's picture book was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1939.  Just realized when I was asking students to squeeze the clay with all their might last week, I was channeling Andy!

Andy braced one foot against the lion's paw

and pulled with all his might

until the thorn

 CAME

OUT.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Decreasing altitude over a golden NYC

Except for the wind, it was magical.  My fairy godmother AKA my newest daughter-in-law was flying me into the City That Never Sleeps for Danger Baby's twenty-sixth birthday surprise.

We were definitely humping and bumping in our little AirTran jet from Atlanta as we neared La Guardia. Beginning our descent I was loving the golden twinkly lights of New York, recognizing the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, and admiring the lights of the bridges.  Descending lower I noticed a large sculpture of the Earth.  But wait, we were ascending again and still bumping around like crazy.  The pilot came on the speaker to tell us our aircraft is equipped with a wind sheer alert system, and we couldn't land at this time. 

We would circle counter-clockwise again over the twinkly golden lights.  Then we would circle clockwise, and everyone on the plane would concentrate on breathing IN 1-2-3 and exhaling OUT 1-2-3.  We went past the Earth sculpture again.

To barf or not to barf?  That is the question.  I don't want to retrieve the paper barf bag because my sister says that back seat pouch is the home of all Cooties.  Anxiety, I know, is "the shallow breathing of a narrowed mind".  I really don't want to be the first passenger to move from narrowed mind to "chunky industrial-weight puke"* and I don't want to reach into Cootie Central.

There goes that Earth sculpture again.  It is the Unisphere from the 1964 NY World's Fair. Must have read about it in my Weekly Reader that year! 

It's time to visualize Ryan and Ramius steering the Red October submarine up the Penobscot River in Maine and reminiscing about fishing.  Breathe in/breathe out.  Focus on Sean Connery as Admiral Ramius.  Always a good visualization...Breathe in/breathe out.

The pilot lands our AirTran.  We burst into simultaneous applause.  Life is good.  I'm glad to be done with the bonus air sightseeing tour of NYC.  My stomach is one chunk away from industrial-weight! 

*Radioman [shouting amiably over the engines] So you don't like flyin', huh? This is nothin'! You shoulda been with us five, six months ago! Whoa, talk about puke! We ran into a hailstorm over the Sea of Japan! Everyone was retchin' his guts out! The pilot shot his lunch all over the windshield, and I barfed on the radio - knocked it out completely! It wasn't that lightweight stuff, either; it was that chunky, industrial-weight puke! [proferring a candy bar] Here, ya wanna bite?


Jack Ryan: [through clenched teeth] Next time you get a bright idea, Jack, put it in a memo!

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

The Itty Bitty Golden Age

Coming soon to a blog near you, yellow and gold.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Not a right angle in the bunch

Flat on his back in bed, Dad scans the suspended ceiling left to right, right to left, toes to head, and back again.  His eyes are watering.  He says he's been doing "close work all day long". After one bite-size Milky Way, Dad asks, "What do you call a full volleyball court?"  This is not an elephant riddle.

After my bite-size Milky Way I remind Dad I don't know much about volleyball.  Any version I played in junior high PE class was very tame.  I just tried to move any ball that I couldn't avoid away ASAP to become someone else's problem.  I tried to become ill enough to go to the nurse's office before any chance of my having to "serve".  Thank heaven there would be a written test over the rules and rotations of volleyball so I could cancel out my hideous skills drills results!  Dad chuckles, seeming to recognize my self portrait. 

There's some very serious athletic womens' competitive volleyball out there.  Did Dad see some on t.v. today?  "No," he reports, "I don't need t.v. to see volleyball."  Yikes.  There's some seriously demented spectator ceiling volleyball going on out there!  And the court is not square.

"There's not a right angle in the bunch," Dad says.  He claims to have worked all day starting at the upper right hand corner to correct the problem.  He couldn't get any help from "all the people crowding in here", no doubt wearing hard hats.  Dad's mind has jumped from the grids of the volleyball net to his many construction site review gigs as a structural engineer.  We climb around the infinite Escher staircases and weave through the unraveling graph paper of the mind.


I sit for many minutes, eyes closed, knees sore. Climbing stairs in and out of the NY subway stations and the grander Metropolitan Museum of Art, I'm tired. "How far off is it?," I vaguely ask Dad. "Will it get worse than 89 degrees?" No, Dad assures me. It's only a little way off.

Walked through this public hall on Wall Street Saturday afternoon.  M.C. Escher was there playing volleyball. 

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Unwrapped and dezipped

Home from a surprise birthday trip to You Nork, You Nork to see Danger Baby.  His amazing bride cooked up this plan before Thanksgiving, and it has been so difficult keeping the secret! 

Need to do some research on this sherry decanter set I took the dear couple as a gift.  This was my parents' set, and I'm pretty sure my father shipped it to the States from Austria at the end of World War II.  Alas, earning a living might interfere with this interesting endeavor.

The TSA didn't give me a round of applause for my innovative and cheap protective wrapping of the glassware for the dangerous journey through security scanning and overhead bins.  I'm thankful my little red rolling suitcase waited until the return trip to blow out its zipper.  Now it is going to that big baggage claim in the sky!

Why isn't there a cable tv reality show about airport security and baggage handlers?  At LaGuardia I watched families unravelling when their 8:00 a.m. departures were repeatedly delayed eventually until 3:30 p.m.  It wasn't pretty.  Some contestants' mascara ran down their cheeks.  Some husbands went to speak to the airline representative at Gate B5.  They took a wrong turn and they never came back to their obnoxious bickering kiddies no longer able to share the electronic game toy.  It was way more riveting than most cop shows or talent auditions.

Now passengers can bring itty widdle doggies in nylon yurts as carry-on luggage.  What happens when those doggies must deal with flight delays and extended time stuck on the tarmac waiting to take-off?  I feel their pain!

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Spanish flu, terrorists, and colored glass

Starring out the window at the striped clouds in very cold blue-grays and white, I wonder how Mr. Tiffany would have ordered glass for that sky made.  Would he have used multiple layers, or had the brawny, shirtless workers in the glass factory comb through blue glass with a second color of glass at a different temperature.  The process described in Clara and Mr. Tiffany reminded me of those fudge factories.  Ummmm.  Fudge.  There must be some chocolate somewhere in this condo!  I would have enjoyed Vreeland's more if it had been nonfiction with lots of old photos and color plate illustrations.

My escapist reading for the ice storm is The Death Instinct, by Jed Rubenfeld, set in the same time period as Vreeland's novel about Louis Comfort Tiffany.  Rubenfeld's book is just right for conserving electricity wrapped in a quilt for hours at a time.  I'm going to see New York City eventually when I visit Danger Baby and his lovely bride, and then I will go find Wall Street, the JP Morgan Bank, the Treasury Building, the Flatiron, and many other places in these two books.

My book buddy is reading The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Rubenfeld's wife.  Just reading the Wall Street Journal and New York Times reviews of Tiger Mother elevated my blood pressure.  I feel very sorry for Rubenfeld, being married to such a shrew.  But then, maybe he is no prince either.  Sometimes writers are not nice people.

This ramble was meant to be about the coincidence of my recent readings.  Two gifts from my eldest, Last Call and Dennis Lehane's The Given Day, have entwined with the unionizing and suffragettes of Clara, and the Vienna of Death Instinct and The Hare With Amber Eyes.  Very strange to read two descriptions of the items on Sigmund Freud's desk in just one month.


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder