Sitting in the Chinese fire drill row

It's so my colors!  Received this Dakine beach/tote bag as a birthday gift from a dear friend to use on my trip to meet Grandbaby O.  I could put everything in it--purse, notebook computer, Kindle, progress reports to be written, snacks, Simon the Genius in My Basement even. When the fellow passenger on the shuttle from Park 'N' Fly going to the terminal realized he'd forgotten his wallet at home, I could give him a sad, commiserating little smile and hug my perfect bag a bit closer.

My wheelie suitcase slid nicely into the overhead bin for row 12, and I settled into the skinny middle E seat.  A pleasant fellow had the aisle seat.  For a long time it seemed the window seat might stay empty.  Ah, wouldn't that be a treat?

The last minute passengers arrived to take the A and B seats across the aisle.  The petite pretty hippie chick sat by that window.  Her boyfriend, a 6'6" blond guy with rasta hair and a black Labrador service dog folded into the B seat.  The dog's head hung over the seat in front, just an inch above the pony-tail of a young Barbie coed. The dreadlocks hung over the seat in back.

Finally boarding is an AARP couple.  The woman wants to wedge a large piece of luggage up into the overhead bin, but is too short to see the bin is already overflowing.  A chorus of frustrated passengers who got up at four a.m. chants, "It won't fit, it won't fit, it won't..."  She squeezes into the middle E seat in the row in front of me after taking her carry-on to the back of the plane. Then she pantomimes instructions for her spouse to sit in the window F seat next to me.  His hearing aid isn't working.  The pleasant man and I exit row 12 so the elderly fellow can enter the row.

Two flight attendants have arrived to arrange a move for the rasta and his dog.  No, he's fine.

"Well, I've never seen the airline seat a service dog in this row."

No, he's fine.

"The service dog cannot sit in the aisle."

No, he's fine.

"The service dog will block the beverage cart."

No, he's fine.  The dog will sit on the rasta master's lap.

"No, I've NEVER seen the airline seat a service dog in this row."

The pony-tail is rolling her eyes.  The AARP man is searching for his seatbelt.

A trade is arranged so the rasta and his dog can sit in the bulkhead aisle, but he won't go without the hippie chick.  Another trade is arranged.

Meanwhile, the AARP man is waving the head end of his seatbelt in the air like a snake-charmer's puppet show, but cannot locate the tail end.  The flight attendants want the AARP man to move across the aisle to the seat vacated by the rasta dog since the plane has pushed away from the terminal.  That means the pleasant man and I will have to get out for AARP man to exit.  He stands up, and I reach under his butt to fish the tail end of the seatbelt from beside his seat.  Why, just lookie here!  We can strap you in now, sir!

"This must be the Chinese fire drill row," says one attendant, with a barely perceptible strain to her smile.

The first beverages are served without rolling over the service dog.  The AARP man is proud that his wife found this better flight to speed them toward Boise, you know where the football field is blue, where their daughter is expecting twins, but they may have an eight-hour layover in Portland.  This is an improvement?  PDX is a nice airport, but I wouldn't want to camp there.

After my nap things are surreal and groggy.  The AARP man's wife pantomimes emphatically that he should get out and walk in the aisle so he won't be stiff.  Swell.  The pleasant man and I exit the row so he can go on a march.  The flight attendants take our beverage orders.  This time the pleasant man and I both ask for coffee,  fresh, steaming coffee.  No sooner are the cups on our tray tables than AARP man wants back in.  We put our tray tables up, and pleasant man steps up.  I burn my tongue on the coffee and spill on my fabulous new tote bag.  My shoulder tremor is acting up.  I stand up and bump my head on the overhead bin, spilling coffee all over me.  Fresh, steaming, black coffee, but at least I'm going to Portland where coffee is major and attire is minor.

AARP man is back in his seat waving his seatbelt puppet.  He is reaching down beside his seat against the window wall for the other end.  He comes up with a very scraped wrist bleeding profusely onto his shirt cuff, and still no seat belt.  His wife freaks and pushes her aisle neighbor out of the way to go running down the aisle for assistance.  I push the Call button.  The flight attendants come.  One goes to get the first aid kit.  She returns with iodine wipes, and warns AARP man that the iodine stains.  We get the wipe package torn open and the wound cleaned with AARP's wife supervising from the next row.  The wipe goes into my coffee cup along with two bandaid wrappers.  I buckle AARP man into his seat and tell him to run cold water on his cuff before it goes into the washing machine.

Swaddling and bouncing a fussy Grandbaby O is going to be a piece of cake by comparison to the flight.  And, true, "Chinese fire drill" wasn't the most P.C. thing for a flight attendant to say.  Maybe Keystone Kops would have been better.





© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Mercury memories

I have a favorite childhood memory from the Sixties, back before we knew that absolutely everything is dangerous. I remember playing with mercury bubbles on the blue bathroom linoleum after a thermometer broke, chasing the bubbles, merging and separating them. It was so cool and well worth working around the glass slivers!

Friends report similar experiences. One wrote:

I did the same thing! It was such fun to collect those tiny balls together, almost like magic the way they melded into a large ball. Don't remember telling Mom that I'd broken the thermometer, just the simple pleasure of playing with the mercury.

That's probably why I can't wait for my May trip to Chicago--well, aside from Danger Baby's law school commencement and meeting his future in-laws. I can't wait to finally visit Millennium Park to see "Cloud Gate". Anish Kapoor's sculpture is like a giant reflecting blob of liquid mercury. Sounds like my childhood dream come true!

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the EPA are busy protecting today's kids from lead and cadmium in cheapo Chinese toys, and that's a good thing. Alas, in the trade-offs between safety and wonder, wonder usually loses. In the Sixties we often got small plastic maze games containing a drop of mercury as birthday party favors. In the late-Seventies a fancier elemental mercury maze toy called "Quicksilver" was popular.

Another mercury memory from the Sixties still doesn't have anything to do with the Friendship Seven astronauts. When you skinned your knee, your mom was likely to paint the scrape with a fabulous stinging, smelly, magenta, microbe-killing concoction of mercury plus bromide or sodium. Mercurochrome and Merthiolate are now known to inhibit healing, and aren't used much. There was a strange rush to having your knee painted with merthiolate. The knee scrape and the sting were often worth it to smell the pungent odor and be decorated with the gorgeous stain. Both products were pulled from drugstore shelves late in the last millennium.

Sixties moms chose up sides based on their preferences for merthiolate or mercurochrome. Later parental popularity contests pitted Bactine against Jaohnson & Johnson's First Aid Cream and Neosporin.

Kids today have a better chance of learning about mercury at the EPA's superfund cleanup site than by breaking an oral thermometer. Practical clean-up instructions can be found at this Colorado website. I sure hope kids get to visit Chicago at least.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Small Hadron Kitchen Collider

Recently received some granite counter-top samples from a remodeling friend who knows I'm incapable of throwing such stuff away. The granite squares have been surprisingly useful as teeny-tiny trivits, and particle colliders.



I gotta say that after a long day with preschoolers, it is very satisfying to smash a clove or two of garlic between cool, smooth, palm-sized blocks of stone. Haiiii-JYAH!!! Splat!



Saturday the CPR instructor explained that there is nothing to be done for a broken toe except to tape it to the next toe and hobble on about life. If you happen to be a karate student or even a black belt, don't whine to your wife about your broken toe. That only gets sympathy the first time. If your wife happens to be at home with three small children while you are off kicking and breaking boards with your foot for fun, you should probably send her a dozen roses and never ever mention your foot pain. Speaking from experience here...

We moved to Texas in 1990. The Superconducting Super Collider being built underground near Waxahachie was big news. I was vaguely concerned about a Big Bang occurring so close to my home, but the day-to-day realities of parenting three boys were more atom-smashing than particle physics.

The boys needed to get to school on time with their lunchboxes, homework, permission slips, and those darn fund-raising order forms each morning. They needed to have their clothes on right-side out, eat a healthy breakfast, and take their asthma/allergy medicines.

Getting to school on time is so important. If you are late you miss the announcements and instructions, and also the settling-down-to-learn part of the morning. This was brought home to me during a truly comic day in sixth grade.

At Eastridge Elementary my sixth grade classroom windows looked out toward "L" Street. Two of my classmates, Ron and Dave, lived across the street from the school. They liked to shoot hoops on the driveway as long as possible before crossing the street for school.

When the first school bell rang, many students entered the school and sat down at their desks. As usual, we looked out the window at Ron and Dave shooting baskets across the street. The second bell rang, meaning students better hustle so they won't be tardy. Ron and Dave were still playing basketball, but they were known for cutting it close.

The tardy bell rang. The school day began. The roll was taken along with the lunch count. The sixth graders should have been sharing "current events", but we were all too mesmerized by the suspenseful drama taking place outside the window.

• How long would Dave and Ron keep shooting baskets?
• Would Ron's mom come outside and yell at them?
• When would they realize that bell they heard was the tardy bell, not the first bell?
• How stupid would they look when the realization kicked in?
• How silly would they feel when they found we were all watching their personal blooper?

By now the entire fifth grade had figured it out too, and was staring out the window. Slowly, the awareness spread down the classrooms on the north side of the school to the fourth, third, and second graders. The awakening was everything we were hoping.

Suddenly dim lightbulbs flickered over the heads of the pair. Ron's mom appeared, hollering. Can you say "skedaddle" boys and girls??? Darryl and his other brother Darryl hitched up their overalls and came tearing across the street and into the school. They even bumped into each other while scrambling for their lunch boxes. Hinckley and Hadley were very, VERY tardy. The show was over.

It was a powerful, cinematic moment, right up there with "Gone With The Wind"-- like watching Harold Edgerton's strobe photography of a bullet hitting an apple--or seeing the Jellystone Ranger nab Yogi and Boo-Boo.

"Some think this Hadron project will create a black hole that will suck in the Earth." I read that in the "Points" section of Sunday's Dallas Morning News. A scientist who worked on both the Superconducting Super Collider project and the Large Hadron Collider answers:

It is not possible for the LHC to create a massive black hole. Massive black holes, which swallow everthing near them and are created by gravitational collapse, require enormous mass. Not even the sun's entire mass would be sufficient. Some theories speculate that the collisions at the LHC could produce miniature black holes. Even if they are produced, they will evaporate immediately. There is no possibility of gravitational collapse.

That's okay. There's no possibility of real science being heeded in a McCain-Palin administration, either. Just dress that moose, feed him a Pop-Tart and send him out to shoot baskets. The whole school is watching

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

No plagues for me, thank you

My walking buddy is rarely so happy as when she has a juicy book about a plague, horrible medical condition, or natural disaster (preferably with egotistical males trying to prove they are smarter and stronger than Mother Nature). I cannot read these books. I shouldn't even read reviews of these books. Onset of symptoms is rapid.

Except for arterial bleeding, I could currently have every condition covered by the first aid/CPR instructor at our certification class this morning. Okay, maybe I haven't been poisoned by plants, snakes, insects, as we sort of skipped over them. I'm not actually choking, and the instructor helped me understand and feel confident about using the Heimlich. It was when he got to concussions and objects poked into eyeballs (don't pull them out) that I started to lose it! Instructions in using Epi-pens for severe allergic reactions hit too close to home. We still had to get through major burns (spray foam shaving cream over the entire burn area to prevent airborne infection--no gels), bones protruding through the skin, and seizures.

I did everything wrong when I suffered a back injury this summer. Asking a friend to lift him probably made my dad's hip breaks worse.

Am I sweating profusely and experiencing confusion yet? Is my smile crooked? Is there a great weight on my chest? Does your Kroger have a defibrillator?

Geez, the recommended way to treat a nosebleed has even changed. Lean forward, not back. Pinch the bridge of the nose. Fold a brown paper bag over and over until you have a tiny square, then place it between your top front teeth and inner lip. I kid you not.

After all that, the resuscitation and chest compression practice was comparatively easy, but the damage had been done. My head is throbbing. The usual restorative beef burrito did not help at all. It may be time to take the preventive measures of putting on my pajamas and hiding under the blanket until a new day dawns.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder