Wallowing in self pity and melted Parmesan

Nobody wants to hear my whole tale of woe. It's not the sort of stuff for Fox News or CNN or even Judge Judy. Instead I will offer two enchanting new short reads and two tiny tales, just little woe-Lite. I will alternate, beginning with a woelette so as to end with an upper. Okay?

• The squash vine borers found our brand new zucchini sprouts in the garden.  After the fancy dressing "bad boys" killed our first zucchini the schoolchildren dug and improved the soil and built a mound. They planted the seeds and waited for the sprouts. They decided which three sprouts looked the strongest, and pulled out the wimps. And the very next day the squash vine borers reappear. A five year old spotted the and started the special clapping signal for everyone to race to the garden. "This is gonna be BAD!," she announced. 

• Chapman's Odyssey, by Paul Bailey is the stream-of-conscious life-passing-before-his-eyes tale of a British poet/actor/professor/novelist. While not as fabulous as I'd hoped, it gave me a new way to think of some of my father's ramblings toward the end of his life.

• Seriously wiped out after my preschool day I got groceries and came home. Put things away in the kitchen, then spent a couple hours with a platypus. When I took the reusable bags back out to the car trunk I found the $3.76 container of shredded Parmesan behind the jumper cables.  The contents were melted into a solid glob.

• Albert of Adelaide is the can't-put-down tale of the platypus by New Mexico lawyer Howard L. Anderson. It's delightful, but hard to explain.  The best description I've seen is "if Larry McMurtry had written Wind in the Willows", although I might have said it was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly crossed with Watership Down. You will be amazed how suspended your disbelief can be!

Much have I not travell'd in the realms of gold*, silver, and bronze, but I did catch a segment on NBC Sunday recalling Olga Korbut at the 1972 Olympics. Found myself suddenly misty-eyed.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

The Good, the Bad, and the Wasps

Wasps have built a nest just outside the window by my computer. They must have done the work in the past few days while I was preoccupied by my dad's infection and hospital adventures.



Wasps are beneficial insects in the gardener's battle against pest caterpillars, but they give me the Lee Van Cleef shivers. Or, possibly, Lee Van Cleef gives me the wasp shivers. I wouldn't want to find either of them sitting at my kitchen table.







This is the best view I've had of wasp behavior in thirty years. As newlyweds our first apartment featured wasp nests outside the big old windows, and all too often wasps inside the apartment. When a wasp was killed as an indoor intruder, the other wasps seemed to have a ritual resembling a funeral outside the window. It was downright creepy. I was sure the wasps were plotting revenge.



Just a year or so ago I finally watched "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" for the first time. The instant Lee Van Cleef appeared as Angel Eyes, I had a creepy plotting revenge wasp revulsion shiver down my spine. I get the same insectile shiver and cold sweat whenever I see Darth Cheney on television!







Paper wasps are the papier mache artists of the insect world, creating their nests from chewed wood and plant materials. From my vantage point, I can watch them working at the hexagonal cells of their nest. When I took this photo they became still for about fifteen minutes. I was feeling guilty for killing them by flash camera, when they got back to business. What that business is, I'm not sure.







© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Hangman AquaNet Gender Challenge

Boys play the classic snowed-in recess game of Hangman like penmanship-impaired Spaghetti Western extras hanging out at the cantina. Clint Eastwood's Blondie (aka The Man With No Name) and Eli Wallach's Tuco play around with hanging in The _ _ _ _, The _ _ _, And The _ _ _ _. String 'em up fast, then maybe shoot 'em down with a dead-eye shot at the very last minute!

At recess, the guys choose very short words. In their minds a man is hung as soon as head, arms, stomach, and legs are drawn on the rope. By then they have frequently forgotten the word they chose, and no one can read the letters that matched or missed anyway because the scrawls are so illegible. Their version of the game is very loud with sound effects and lots of jumping in and out of their chairs and skootching them closer and closer to the board.



When just girls play Hangman, it is so very different. They choose the longest names of teeny-bopper stars possible. Girls use all the different colored dry-erase markers. There's a lot of giggling and whispering and writing in cursive. Most significantly, they make sure the victim is fully accessorized before hanging!





Oops! I forgot the fingernail polish!

I Meant to Do My Work Today

but Al Gore's Web got in my way...

I've got a song in my head, but the tune in my mind is "I've Got the World On a String". It only took me two searches to figure out that "I've got a song in my head" is not one of the verses to that song. Not bad, really. Under three minutes.

Another two searches to find the poem that doesn't go, "I didn't do my work today..." Another five minutes.

The reason I didn't do my work today was that the song in my head was the theme from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". Admit it. Can't you already hear the opening strings and the vague grunting chant? What is it they are grunting? There must be lyrics somewhere. There must be lyrics, and I must find them, if only to save other poor unfortunates from having this song stuck in their head with no relief. I will spare no effort, leave no Google unchurned!

I first heard the theme in 1967 over the earphone of my transistor radio tuned to the Top Forty-Nine countdown on KLMS. Then a skinny kid named Randy brought his 45 to church, and we played it on the Sunday School gray institutional phonograph. Eventually it became one of the two unofficial theme songs of my junior high youth group, the other being Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love". I know, I know. Not exactly "Onward Christian Soldiers", but there you have it.

I remember being confused in 1967, and thinking that Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66 had something to do with "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". We were just learning about South America, and the music sounds strange enough to derive from some lost tribe up the Amazon. But why were they singing, "Uh wonko, Waco"? What did it mean in their language? Why didn't Sergio Mendes change the name to Brasil 67? Why didn't he spell it with a "z"? And why was the movie in the Sergio Leone Mountains in California?

In 1967 we had the World Almanac, a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and the encyclopedia set from the Safeway grocery store. All other research involved going to a public library. Enquiring minds did not feel it was a black mark on their Googling skills if they couldn't find the lyrics to the song, if the grunts could actually be called lyrics. Enquiring minds needed to finish their math homework so they could go babysit the neighbor kids for thirty-five cents an hour. If they survived three hours of that they could walk to the mall on Saturday to buy a 45 rpm record after they finished digging dandelions and listening to the KLMS countdown.

The Webster's was useful when Mom told us we were being "obnoxious and belligerent". We shaped up a bit, but knew she really loved us. It was vacuuming my brother's room that shortened her patience with us.

Sometime between "obnoxious" and "obstinate", my research obsession got out of control. The subject matter was never a cure for cancer or world peace. It was usually identifying butterflies, locating word derivations, or finding pop culture trivia. What exactly did Al Haig say when Reagan was shot?*

When my spouse told me I was being "obstinate and recalcitrant" on a vacation, I knew he didn't really love me, and I wasn't crazy about him anymore, either. No vacuuming was involved. The vacation was already hitting bottom with one son needing stitches, and now I didn't even have a dictionary. It's probably best I didn't have one, or I would have bonked him over the head with it and said, "Uh wonka, Waco!"

And so, I meant to do my work today, but I spent over an hour on an unsuccessful search for the meaning and correct spelling of "Uh wonka, Waco!" I learned that Ennio Morricone composed the soundtracks for Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. As far as the lyrics, I did not pass Go, and I did not collect a fistful of dollars.

I Meant to Do My Work Today
by Richard LeGalliene
I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree
And a rainbow held out its shiny hand—
So what could I do, but laugh and go?

I never did see the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns. Mom wouldn't have approved, vacuuming or not. I did see one really strange Sam Peckinpah movie in college about bringing the pasta Alfredo or something. And what was the name of that boyfriend???

I'm exhausted, and the condo is still a mess. I feel like I've been trapped in Tom Robbin's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. You're just going to have to track that down by yourself!

*This is a freebie: "As of now, I am in control here in the White House." (3/30/81)