I went to college for this?

It is graduation season here...not the big graduation, but still a couple thousand will get pushed out into the dark, cold world this month.  The local news programs are rolling out stories about how much debt these graduate have & how many jobs there aren't for them & wouldn't they have been better off getting these same no-jobs right after high school?  I am just a little bit burned out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say my husband is a professor.  Most of my friends are education-adjacent.  The town we don't live in (because we live in the small farm community next door), but rely on for just about everything is university-centric.  In sort, the education business is the business that pays our bills.  So, there that is.

Now will someone PLEASE explain to me why it is UNACCEPTABLE to go 17K in debt for a degree but the same amount & very likely more is just fine for a car?  Why isn't the car note a lead story?  I don't really have anything else to say on this one, so I am just going to move on.  Also, in a second full disclosure I should mention I have never had a car loan.  Never.  Never ever.  As a result I drove clunkers for a long time & was in my 30s when I got my first new & not just new-to-me car.  It cost $18,500 & we paid cash.  So you can see how that 17K number the students were tossing around on the radio earlier this week hit close to home for me.

If one person says "well you need a car to get to work, but you don't need a degree to do X job" I will....I don't know.  Spit, maybe. 

A funny thing happens on the way to that degree.  & I am not disputing that in many cases a person could get just as much out of life experience, but some how they never do.  Or at least not often.  Here are a few examples of things you learn in college without realizing you are learning them:

• Finish your work in on time.  This is another personal one for me because I once had an actual employee show up on presentation to the client day EMPTY HANDED.  Because he needed an extension.  & to be fair, he had a degree but it was in computer science & that particular field of study seems plagued with negotiable deadlines so he learned the hard way that in the job-world you get canned for that kind of thing.  Most people learn this in school, but fewer & fewer in K-12. 
   
• Just plain show up on time.  In job-world there are no bells.  Well, very few anyhow.  & plenty of professors don't care if you stroll in late.  Still, a surprising number of them cover crucial business in the first 5 minutes.  For example, the announcement that the final was moved from the room printed in the syllabus to a building across campus was made at the beginning of class.  Yes, it was updated on-line so someone COULD have looked it up but a surprising number did not think to do that. I have specifically asked professors of large lecture classes (where this cavalier attendance is more normal) if there is a correlation between people who wander in late to class & people who lose 45 minutes of a 2 hour exam period running to the new location & pretty much all of them laughed out loud.  I should say that the large lectures involved come with an electronic response thing for in-class participation; the questions are usually simple, & often not graded but they are a good indicator of who is sitting there when class begins & who is not.
   
• Sometimes you have to do things that don't interest you.  Every semester someone says about something "when am I ever going to use this?" & the answer might be never.  But you are going to sit through a lifetime of staff meetings & presentations & be expected to parrot at least some of that crap back before they let you leave the room so you may as well learn how now.  In job-world, if you walk into a seminar on racial diversity, say "this is bullshit" & walk out you will probably get fired.
   
• Sometimes you have to interact with people you don't like...& who may not much like you.  Every student every where has had an unpleasant, unfair, lopsided encounter with a professor.  Sometimes the professor has no idea they are treating you like crap, you are just the 100th person to walk through the door with whatever life shattering problem you have (I'm sorry but after the first few dead grandmothers, they blend).  The reality is that for your professor you are less an individual than one of a herd.  Understanding this will be helpful when you interact with your future boss who is unlikely to be your buddy & may not get your name right for the first few months. 
   
• Shut up, you might learn something.  By shut up, I also mean stop texting & pull out those earbuds.  Maybe it would be better to say pay attention, you might learn something.  In job-world a surprising amount of information is given on the fly.  E-mails have actually helped a lot with this, but plenty of people never get around to putting their instructions in writing.  The only time a you-never-said-that defense ever works is when you already have an unimpeachable reputation for being on the ball.  & there is really only one way to get one of those.

Is 17K a bit steep for these lessons?  Maybe.  But that 17K doesn't nearly come close to covering the cost of the people & the buildings & so on that are needed to teach these lessons...not to mention that actual lesson-lessons.  Sure you could learn them the way Abe Lincoln did, but will you?

As I was writing this I thought of a few collegiate lessons from my own life.  No one else's stories are all that interesting (this includes yours by the way, so keep that office hours chit-chat brief), so I will just give you the highlights:

• My last boss drank his coffee black (he called it neat) & for lunch he preferred tuna on wheat- rye if there was no wheat- with spicy mustard (WTF right?) & sliced tomato.  Under no circumstances should the pickle on the side ever touch the bread.  OKay, that pickle thing is mine, it grosses me out when the bread gets pickle-soggy.  It has been way-more than a decade since I placed that lunch order; it just might be the last thing I ever forget.
   
• When you are standing in the utility room waiting for a fax to go out or come in or binding reports or whatever, take this opportunity to restock the copier's paper trays.  Just do it.  & if you take the last thing of paper from the box, tell someone so they can order more.  If you don't know who that person is, it is probably you. 
• People who have pink eye MUST be sent home.  Even if he is the boss.  Even if he promises not to touch anything on anyone else's desk.  No exceptions.

None of these would have been covered in any college curriculum (& frankly that semester on feminist literature might have given you the idea you weren't responsible for the coffee or the lunch order, but you would be wrong.  You aren't responsible for the coffee because of your lady parts you are responsible because you are an underling.  This goes for the guys too, but in reverse.  As in you are not not responsible because you are a boy & so on), but all of them were skills that are taught on college campuses every day.  Yes, even the pink eye thing.  We can call that one Lessons in Communal Living.

More than I can chew

I have been compulsively working on Bird Trap Blocks for weeks now & trying so hard to keep from blogging about it every day.  Because I cannot stop thinking about Bird Traps, I cannot stop talking about Bird Traps.  You people are lucky, anyone I can get on the phone not so much.  All my waking hours, some part of my brain is arranging, re-arranging; I rotate them, I imagine different parts coming together, I cannot stop. 

Because the Bird Trap Blocks are improv (I like to call it jazz piecing), there never was a set of directions.  One of the guidelines is a plank round of 1/2-square triangles.  In short, I am cranking through 1/2-square triangles.  & the big question everyone who asks about this block is where did they all come from?

In the other side of this post, Block Lotto's week-end update this week is all about How-To's.  So this is my How To tip.  How to take a bit of extra time & build up a supply of random 1/2-square triangles that you might never use...unless you decide to make Bird Traps along with me. 

& now for the meat.  A couple of years ago I made a quilt top of rainbow colored rolling stone blocks.  I was approached by a friend who was looking for a rainbow themed quilt for a regional GLBT fundraiser.  I made the top in a bit less than 5 days.  That's soup to nuts, telephone call to mailing the top off.   I never took a picture of the original & the pics I got of the completed quilt were not digital or I would share, but I loved the top & have been thinking about making one for myself ever since I made it.  So here are the blocks I have made so far for the quilt for myself; the fabrics are different, but the color-concept is the same.

What does that have to do with anything at all?   am glad you asked.  See those on point squares at each corner?  Well, each one of them began as a 4.5" square & then had little squares added, flipped, pressed & clipped to make them what you see.  This means that every single rolling stone had 16 orphan, 1/2-square triangles cut away as scrap.  & all it took was an extra swoop in the chain piecing to gather them together.  This quilt top (& the original) is a 4x4 pattern, at 16 leftover units per block, that means a total of 256 1/2-square triangles going spare. 

If this all sounds a little bit compulsive, I hear you.  & after all I had no idea I was going to be Bird Trap Block possessed when I started down this road.  On the other hand, without that cache of trash I probably would never have thought improv block design was an option. 

Besides, this random piecing has served me well before.  One of my favorite quilts began as the same 1/2-square triangle leftovers from a very large churn dash block table runner.  One of my go-to baby gift quilts (& grown-up quilts) begins with strings.  & I have never been put off just because none of the pieces really fit together.

So my tip?  Uhm.  I guess, if you are already sitting there, piecing & cutting, what's one more for the pile? 

Turn signals

So the other day this thing that happens to me more often than it should happened again. I used to think it was always the other guy's fault but, well, when the same problem keeps repeating a reasonable person starts to wonder if it might not not be the other guy, but instead... Several months ago V** suggested it was probably me.

I am driving down the road. I am coming upon a light. I plan to turn right at the light. There is an emerging right turn only lane before the light. I put on my turn signal & slide into this lane. I am nearly sideswiped by the guy pulling out of the parking lot who apparently thought my turn signal meant I was turning into same lot.

So I am asking: is it me?

I get a lot of signals crossed when I drive. The most frequent is the ubiquitous (down here) confederate flag. I guess some people see it as a way to identify comrades-in-arms...? I find it is a useful way to spot the stoopid people. That's right: if you have a confederate flag anywhere on your vehicle I take whatever I thought your intelligence might have been & cut it right in half. & like it or not, other measures of applied intelligence (high school diplomas for example) are bearing me out. I have lived well below the Mason-Dixon line for 15+ years & I have never, NEVER met a college graduate with such a sticker. On the flip side, the high school dropouts are leading the pack by a margin of 3:1. Yes, I do live in a rural community but the fact it backs up to the largest university in the state should balance that out, right?

In another example, I have a Vote No on 2 sticker on the back of my truck. For those of you who do not know, Florida voted Yes on 2 & it passed, but the sticker is still there. I would take it down, after all when the next campaign comes it will be repeal 2 or whatever, but I am having too much fun watching other people respond to it. At least once a month someone points to my sticker & says the votes are counted, my side lost & I should just get over it. Often these people have McCain/Palin stickers on their own vehicles.

My favorite 'turn signal' though will always be the giant testicles that some men hang from their trailer hitches; I have no hard data but I am pretty sure women do not do this. Usually these charming 'little dick' indicators are made of metal, but there was a ?rubber?plastic? very lifelike anyway pair that was always parked in our local grocery store lot. It was there so often I had kind of figured the truck belonged to an employee & so, apparently did some other people.

I do not spend a lot of my time worrying about how children are impacted by well, anything at all, but I know a lot of people do. I learned that some parents (I am guessing mothers) had complained to the grocery store about this truck (why naked girl silhouettes on mud flaps-another local favorite- were not equally objectionable I never did figure out, but people-&-their-objections are often a mystery to me).

The short version is that despite complaints the store said there was not anything they could do about it, really. So someone took those balls into (her) own hands. I walked out of the store, past same truck & the offending appendages had been neatly sliced from the hitch. Yup, that truck done got hisself gelded.

I seem to have run myself to the end of this particular line & I am still no closer to answering my original questions (is it me?) & now I have another: is it OKay for someone to remove an offending "message" from another persons car?

Three tips for the bride who wants her OWN wedding

I am the last person who should be giving advice on any aspect of wedding planning. This is probably how I happened to work, ever so briefly, as the facilities coordinator (i.e. the booker of weddings) at one of the nicest places around. & in the end I left for reasons that had nothing to do with bridezillas. They really were not that bad. Even more astonishing, if you google my real name, I still come up in connection with this job & it is all good.

While I was in the middle of wedding-central, I could not help but notice that almost everyone had the same wedding over&over&over again. & the dream of every bride was to have her OWN wedding. For those of you who go around calling this 'our' big day, let me burst that bubble. I never laid eyes on the groom of at least half the weddings we booked. Grooms want you to: not spend so much, not drag him into arguments with his mother, not drag him into arguments with your mother, not spend so much & calm down. Also, they would really like it if you could not spend quite so much.

Let me suggest a few small changes that will make your wedding yours without increasing your bottomline:

Ditch the Wagner
For my own wedding, this was never on the table because of that whole anti-semite thing, but frankly everyone of us has also been Handeled up to our eyeballs. I suggested Baby Elephant Walk to a relative & she did not speak to me for a month; I really did not mean anything by it. Also, it was Mom's idea originally, so there! Forget the jumbo implications & just listen to it, it is charming.

A has said he wishes I had told him what I really would have wanted because he would have wanted it, too: the Theme from Peter Gunne. OKay, your heart is set on classical, even though you never listen to it any other time in your life. Fine. Let me suggest the next runner up by Bach. Frankly I have been to plenty of weddings where the best choice would have been Night on Bald Mountain, but brides get very tense when you tell them that. If you want original & traditional (I could not believe how often THAT request would come up) what about Come Haste to the Wedding? Anyway...tip number one: make a musical decision that is your own, not Bride Magazine's, yours.

Lose the dress
That's right you heard me: get off that wedding dress wagon. Instead find a dress you like. That does not highlight your ass (back interest, puh-leeze). A normal dress. Less than 100 years ago it was perfectly acceptable for a bride to wear her dress out for evenings, etc. If you do not believe me take a break from your wedding planning schedule & read some Edith Wharton: she will give you a whole new perspective on married life, regardless which book you choose.

I am not suggesting that you need to go 'theme'; I do not mean get married in jeans or scuba gear or both, unless you want to of course. I just mean $ for a dress you wear once? & then fantasize about passing down to your daughter? Who (maybe) does not exist yet? & may not be speaking to you on her wedding day? Perhaps, because you made such a big stink about her wearing your dress? Here is it...tip number two: a wedding dress is not an investment.

Postpone the honeymoon
It never made any sense to me: get together all the people that are important to you (& a few that almost certainly are not), make a major change in your life that means you will see all of them less & then leave. Why not take this opportunity to spend some time with them? If you think you will get to do this at the reception you are delusional. Besides, after your wedding you will want several days comatose, you can do this at home. A went to work the day after we got married (I was unemployed or I would have, too). We took a vacation later when we knew we would get more out of it. I am not saying never have a honeymoon just that you will enjoy it more if you are still speaking to each other. Or not still mad about the cheese plate (suddenly we are kosher, what got into her?). & so tip number three: take a break before you take a honeymoon.

In the fairness of full disclosure I should tell you I never walked down an aisle. There was no music. A saw my dress before the wedding; he bought it for me as a birthday gift, in a shop in NYC & it was not bride-specific. There were no fancy decorations. We were married by a judge we did not meet with before & have not seen since. There were no friends & family there. Our reception was about two weeks & almost 2K miles later. It still took.

Happy 15th to me & mine.

When pollsters come calling

A has been aggravated by the volume of polls he receives via e-mail. He never answers & therefore seems to get the same one several dozen times. No amount of get-me-the-hell-off-your-list seems to work. & then we got to talking about a technique of mine that has been working very well.

Not long after we moved into this house, we started getting calls asking us what we were watching on television. What did we usually watch. How much did we watch. What would we like to see more of.

What made this all extra-special-stoopid was we always told the truth: we are not watching anything. Cable was not (still is not) offered on our rural road & we were (then) too cheap to spring for a satellite dish we did not have time to watch anyway. We got only one channel: the local public television station. So our morning news program was Teletubbies. Our evening news was McNeil-Lehrer Report. Our favorite Saturday night program; why re-runs of the old Lawrence Welk Show of course.

This went on for years. Every couple months (or weeks) we got a call & they called & called & called until we gave them some kind of answer (this is in the days before Do Not Call). Until one day, I snapped. What are we watching: Gay Porn. In fact that is all we ever want to see. Our family wants nothing but man-on-man action preferably during the family hour. They have not called since.

A few people have suggested my hostile tone was the reason for the shut-off, but I swear I had been much more hostile many times before. I had hung up, I has asked that they stop calling, I had requested their home numbers, I had wondered if they were not just the teeniest bit embarrassed to be somewhere below telephone sex workers & dial-a-psychics. I was already plenty hostile. But call & call & call again, nothing seemed to work. Until I queered their data. & yes I do mean that sentence to go both ways.

This understanding has come in handy since. Most recently we somehow got put on a conservative christian phone-tree clearly drumming up votes for McCain/Palin. I am almost convinced that someone sold them the wrong list because there is nothing in our activities, spending habits, etc. that would give anyone the idea we were either conservative or christian.

The first time I laughed out loud & hung up. The next time I said I did not support the Republican ticket & could they please stop calling. Then I stopped answering when the caller id could remotely-possibly be them. Finally I decided to answer their questionnaire. Question one: have I made up my mind about how I will vote- yes I have. Question two: what was the most important influence in my choosing a candidate- choosing of Sarah Palin as a running mate. Question three: have I campaigned for my candidate- yes, absolutely. Question four: can they count on my vote for McCain/Palin in November- not a chance, I was always going to vote for Obama (a white lie: I was really going to vote for Hilary Clinton, but it was moot by then), adding Palin to the ticket just got me off the couch campaigning for the other side. I actually heard his busy little typing fingers stop & the guy sighed. Final question: what would I say was the likelihood I would not vote for McCain/Palin. & so I told him it was 300%. If I should die before the election I planned to rise from the dead & cast my vote for Obama/Biden. & that was the end of it, no more republicans-in-disguise calls.

I think it is just too disheartening for them to record a statistics so far from their own agenda. I not mean to single out political parties, I think we would all like to makeup our minds & then find that data to prove it. So when it comes to polls that just will not go away, if you can figure out what they really do not want to hear , you can get yourself off the list.

//A reminded me of my gay-porn solution while we were watching commercials during the Science channel's Geek Pride week-end programing. The actual program on the screen at the time was about six degrees of separation & well worth watching. If A had received one of the letters though, he is not sure he would have forwarded it. I, on the other hand, live for that crap. & I am almost certain I would not have deliberately mailed the letter as far away from the destination as possible. Not the first one anyhow.

Spoiler alert: I do not have much respect for people who worry about 'my fair share'.

Several weeks ago I received a Facebook flair from that read: Why do politicians who don't pay their taxes get to spend mine?? Most of the time I ignore this kind of stuff. This is hardly the first "keep your government paws off my hard earned dollars" sentiment that has been expressed near me. This one got my particular attention because the person who sent it does not pay taxes, has not had a job in ?years? & is able to collect a (justified) disability check because of all the people who do pay taxes & the programs those taxes allow to exist.

It put me in mind of a conversation I had many years ago with a computer programmer I worked with. He was complaining that his lifestyle was not an improvement on his parents & that this was the first time in our country's history that this had been so (I am guessing parents in the 1920s & their children who were adults in the 1930s would argue, but none of them were in the room at the time). He was measuring success by the square footage & overall opulence of his home & how many years he had to drive his car before he could afford a comparable new one.

& so I asked him a question (which I thought I already knew the answer to, I admit):

when his wife was recently pregnant, an as-far-as-I-knew perfectly normal pregnancy, did she take advantage of the regular visits & services & medications provided for by our insurance? If such a thing had been available to his mother, would she have considered it a ++ in her quality of life? He never did answer, but I am guessing the answer to both was YES. I later learned the pregnancy had not been normal, there had been a major issue & the issue itself had been discovered during a routine ultra-sound. My point is, maybe quality of life should be measured in more than just the room in which a person watches the best TV that person can afford (or finance).

You don't need me to tell you the latest twist on this particular complaint is "why I am paying for that guy's ____; I lived within my means, why shouldn't he"? It has inspired me to compile a list of things we pay for (well, A pays for mostly ) that on the surface anyhow, mostly benefit some other guy:

School taxes - Let me be clear, we are happy to pay these & think they should be higher. We both believe society as a whole benefits when kids are not roaming the streets like packs of wild dogs & even the career grocery-bagger can read. But the fact remains that people with children have the option of moving their children to a private school & redirecting a portion of public school funds away from this general society benefit & we do not.

We cannot decide that we would rather our school taxes were applied to a local homeless shelter that keeps parents & children together & also provides schooling for both the parents & the kids, but our neighbors can & do get back some money from school taxes & pay their church instead (which has a school their children attend). This is actually twice-irksome; as school taxes here are based largely on local property taxes & these neighbors do not own the house they live in. This means they have not paid in as much in school taxes as they are able to redirect away from the school district.

Health care premiums - Under a previous healthcare provider, we, a married couple with no children, paid the family rate. That means our basic monthly cost to have health insurance was exactly the same as the guy down the hall who had five kids (this was a real guy, by the way. In our small office there was one unmarried man, one married man with five kids & two married men with two kids & us. There was also a married woman with no kids & a married woman with one kid, but they were not on our health plan). All of us (all nine of us, from the first part of the example) were in reasonably good health but the fact remains the consumer of 7/9th of the resource paid 50% of the tab. How many times would you split a dinner check that way before you said "Damn it I had a house salad & you had lobster!"

If you decide you want to spread the cost over the whole office, we paid 1/5th of the bill while using 1/9th of the initital resources, but it was actually bigger than that. In the larger group one child was autistic, one spouse had breast cancer & one employee had multiple back surgeries, but we all had the same monthly fee & deductible. In short, we paid the same amount into a basic plan that we did not use nearly as often. I know because I was the one reviewing the bills that pre-natal care was an option our office elected to pay for (increasing the bill to everyone) & allergy shots were not. Guess which one of these would have been more use to me personally.

We have since changed our provider (nothing to do with this discrepancy) & are now in a plan that is structured differently, although it does still favor families with two children; after that it is pay-per-head. I laugh when I hear people balk at the bill for socialized medicine; as far as I am concerned we have been paying for a form of socialized medicine all this time.

Airfare - our combined weight is, well, lets just say less than 320lb. (& the average weight for men & women in the country is 167.2, so apparently we are absolutely normal). I don't know about you, but I have never been on a commercial flight when at least one person did not weigh in the ballpark of 300lb. I guarantee you, that person did not pay more for a ticket because of body weight. & yet that person will certainly use (fractionally) more resources, every time they fly. I know some big people (I am related to some big people, I love & respect some big people), & I know they gamble that there will be an empty seat next to them (or between them) & that they will be able to take up more room without having to buy that second ticket.

On one memorable flight, a very large stranger was very angry with me because I would not let him raise the arm of the seat between us & squeeze over. He had trouble accepting he had gambled & lost (are there really people who are OKay with being plastered to one side of their seat so someone they do not know can press in on them?).

Many airlines also used to let you take a baby under a particular age at no charge on a flight, so long as that baby sits in your lap. There was a time I flew regularly & I dreaded being pinned in the window seat with a parent & lap-passenger; every time this happened I missed my connection waiting for mom (it was always mom) to juggle the baby & their luggage. Before you assume I did not offer to help, ask yourself how many dry cleaning bills have you have offered to pay after your kid gorped all over the suit next to you; no one ever offered to pay mine. Several did, however, complain loudly that the flight attendants could be more helpful or plentiful... Counting either pounds or heads, most of the time the average Joe Flyer is getting the short end of this deal & has more or less accepted it.

This one has been bothering me more lately because I often fly with a little dog. She rides in a carrier at my feet. That carrier counts as a piece of luggage in my total luggage allocation, so my only other bag costs extra on some airlines. I would be OKay with this (I guess) if I was not already paying the airline over $100 extra per flight to fly the little dog in the first place. There is an element of 'luxury tax' here, I understand that. What I cannot fathom is the passenger-with-baby already getting a reduced ticket who thinks everyone should pay more so she can have more help personally.

Clothing - that's right, clothing. I wear a size 6.5/7 shoe (sometime as a 7/7.5 if the toe is really, really pointy). I have a good friend who wears a size 11. Her shoes use more material, weigh more (therefore cost more to ship), but cost the same as mine. Ditto on jeans, dresses, blouses, etc. Even at my chubbiest, I have never worn the national average size: a ladies 14. But generally I pay the same price off-the-rack as a person who wears an 18. Next time you are shopping, line up a size 10 against a size 18. Depending on the garment, it will be a minimum 1/3rd larger & probably more.

Food - we actually spend a lot less on food than most people because I do not cook beef; I just cannot take the smell, & we do not eat pork (meat being the big part of most grocery bills). But we do pay the taxes that pay the subsidies for these foods to be shipped from large feed lots to processing plants to our grocery store. I confess, this is one why-am-I-paying-for-that-I-never-use-it policy I would like to see change & I do make every effort to buy anything I can locally (not just food, but books & anything else I can. After food & books, there is not much we buy, now that I think about it). Still, we are paying part of the bill to ship a lot of other people's food in.

I realize this all seems like small change but it adds up. & 360+ days a year, I do not mind (OKay, I did mind Fatso bitching about the arms of the seat cutting into him & suggested that next time he buy two seats & maybe this flight he would be more comfortable in the toilet). But really, I do not mind. I do wish, though that before people started ranting about not wanting to pay part of someone else's bills, that they would consider there may already be some one out there subsidizing theirs.

& if that is not enough to make you think twice, there is one group of people in this country who routinely pay higher taxes (often because they are in higher income brackets), have far fewer children than average (& thus are not using either the schools or family health care services they are paying for), & are rarely married (& so pay more in living expenses generally, which is a double-factor here where there is no income tax, but there is a sales tax) & often do not qualify for any spousal benefits, even if they are not living alone.

Rarely married outside of Massachusetts, that is. What happens to the rest of us the day the gay community says "you know what, you are right it is not fair that we have to pay your bills. So we are setting up our own financial system to meet only our needs. Tah"?

//For the sake of this entry, I started looking up our actual numbers. Using the per head model for health insurance alone (if we had paid 1/9th of the office's total monthly bill instead of 1/5th), we would have saved at least 2k every year (or the insurance company would have made a lot more off the whole office). As for the nickel&dime stuff, I bought fabric to make myself a skirt recently: 1.75 yards at $11 per yard. The same pattern size 18 called for 3.25 yards. At this point I decided it would be better to stop.

What would Jane do?

My bookclub is imploding. The short version is there are six members, four of whom would like to read at least a few books that four others absolutely do not want to read. Those of you who can do math know that adds up to more than six. I admit I am one of the first four. & one of the second four. & one member is neither.

So I am asking, what would Jane do? & by Jane, I mean Jane Austen.

For those of you who do not know (cave dwellers, perhaps), Jane Austen is just the most important thing in bookclubia since sliced bread. Since before sliced bread even. & the reason I look to Jane is she managed to dash off several novels, still making the charts approx 200 years later, while being the general dogsbody in her brothers' households. That is she managed these timeless insights into middle class (regardless of where on the social scale they actually ranked themselves) minds while living the most thankless of middle class lives. She wrote her masterpieces sitting in the middle of Regency equivalent of a rumpus room while the kids force-fed dog food to the baby & their mother, too distracted by American Idol said "Jane, deal with that." & deal with it Jane did. & then she went back to writing.

I am not sure what Jane would do about my bookclub. Write a satire perhaps? Now that I think of it, there are a lot of books about suburban bookclubs, hmmmm. What I have decided to do is take a nap. Certainly not what Jane would do, but I am so much more like that faux-overwhelmed middle class housewife than her more worthy sister-in-law.

But what would Jane do while she was writing that satire? Pick herself up, brush herself off & move on to the next book club (or brother's house; she never seemed to run out of brothers). It is not like she had any choice. Neither do I, frankly. If I could no longer find anyone who was interested in talking about books I think I would curl up & die.

Jane also might take up minting new words, as well. Regular readers can add "bookclubia" to "librarical". I expect all of you to use them in a sentence.

What would Nancy do?

I see the stickers everywhere, What Would Jesus do? Who would Jesus bomb? & so forth. & the answers are always so obvious (turn the other cheek; he died before the trebuchet even, so I don't think it ever came up), I wonder that they bother.

I want the bumpersticker What would Nancy do? & yes, I do mean Nancy Drew. I remember when I first met Nancy. If I saved enough Cheerios box tops I could apply them to a copy of her latest adventure (The Secret of Mirror Bay if you are curious). We have been tight ever since. & I am not alone. Nancy consistently appears on popular book lists, for young girls made by young girls as well as what many of our most dynamic women leaders were reading when they were young girls. She is also consistently reviled, & mixed reviews are always my favorite.

Nancy always does the right thing, even if it does not seem to make any sense at the time. She is pursuing suspects & realizes the route they are taking conveniently passes a restaurant she has always wanted to try. She stops for lunch (seems counter productive, does it not). Guess who ALSO stopped for lunch.

Nancy is adaptable & practical. She is (now) famous for her strawberry blonde hair, but that was not her original color. A printer's error changed it on the cover of the 4th (I think) book & so she changed it going forward. & backward, too in the reprints.

Closest to my heart, Nancy accessorizes like no one anyone has ever heard of. Besides the right dress, shoes, bag, convertible, friends, dog, etc. she has her own key making machine right there at home (or maybe her friend does; Nancy always knows the right people). & travels with random & yet ultimately just-the-right thing for whatever life presents. I have a pretty big purse & I have a lot of crap in there & every piece of crap is used every day I carry that bag but at least once a day I look into my purse & I know that if Nancy were with me she would would have that magnifying glass/police whistle/coupon for 40% off my next framing order that was the whole reason I left the house. I remembered the picture but forgot the coupon. This never happens to Nancy.

I am a little worried Nancy might be too smart for us, actually. People talk Talk TALK about Barbie raising unrealistic expectations in young girls. Or Snow White. But no one ever points a finger at Nancy. Unrealistic body images are bad, but an achievable lithe, trim figure if you have the right genes & take up tennis/show riding/ski jumping/tap dancing (doubly useful if you know Morse Code) is OKay.

Even more important, you have to be smarter than everyone else, especially the boys & never let on that you are. Or at least wait until you do not need them anymore. Sure I can do it, but is that really fair on the rest of you. Yes I have conveniently forgotten I forgot that coupon. Or ever lost my keys. Nancy has that affect on me: she inspires me to be better than I am by believing I am better than I am.

//A special thanks to Jennifer Worick who wrote Nancy Drew's Guide to Life & my sister who gave it to me several years ago. I still have it in my purse & yes, I consult it every day, almost, along with the collection of Poems by John Donne (very useful for testing your memory in long grocery lines, I know Nancy would approve). I consoled myself with it when I could not find my keys; Nancy could have found my keys.

Dead grandmother season begins

Let my start by saying my grandmother is actually quite ill. Last week she went into care after living with my aunt for all of my adult life. My grandmother was born in 1916 & was lucid (well, consistent anyway) for most of the time I have known her. That ended quite abruptly, recently.

This has put me in mind of that old college stand-by, the dead grandmother. Tonight is the first exam of the semester & the dead grandmothers will be coming out of the wood-work. A does not but I know of two in his department who do keep a running tally of dead grandmothers for every class they teach. Last time I heard the record for a single semester was 7 but the other prof objected that his 5 should stand on the grounds that he was teaching a much smaller class. That's right kids, some of your professors actually know each other.

I had a roommate who killed off three grandmothers in two semesters. Only one of her grandmothers was above ground before the carnage & the old lady survived it, I am glad to say. A** would have felt very bad had her one remaining grandparent actually kicked while she was killing off imaginary grandmothers.

Sometimes grandmothers actually do die, but lately it is siblings-in-combat. The professors have the same requirement for this as they do for dead grandmothers: documentation from an unimpeachable source. It is always very awful especially as no one ever fakes this one. The student explains why the exam will be/was missed, A grits his teeth & explains the make-up exam process, & a truly horrible event is made just a little bit worse. A is actually relaxed compared to some: he offers a cumulative make-up right around the time of the final (also a cumulative exam). If you miss two exams, that grade counts twice, three exams it counts three times, etc. It just is not possible to do custom make-ups for the 5% that might miss any given exam, even if their reasons are good ones (for you not-math-types 5% of 500 is 25. 25 times three exams plus one final is 100 custom exams per semester).

I admit I do rubberneck all the other reasons an exam was or will be missed: football (I understand the players, cheerleaders, marching band, but random students who did not even travel to the out-of-town game. Really?), fraternity/sorority formal, wedding (not the students own), other celebration of a personal nature, the babysitter was a no-show, car would not start, went to the room the exam was held in last time having no idea it might be somewhere else, etc. This brings us to my all-time favorite, the student who missed his exam because he was doing a religious fast, passed out & did not come to until after the exam was over. No it was not Ramadan or Yom Kippur or Lent. To this day, I am not clear what the kid's religion was.

Before you kill off your grandmother, let me give you some tips:

1-an excuse submitted BEFORE the exam is more credible than the one submitted after. It just is. This is a fine life lesson in general. Someday when you have a job where they pay you to show up, calling in sick in the morning will get you sympathy; calling in sick at the end of the day will get you fired.

2- be consistent. If for example you are missing this exam because of a religious holiday be certain that other holidays requiring your attendance at church or temple or mosque have also been observed. For example, you want to avoid being orthodox for your Engineering final but not-so-much for your Fine Arts final the previous year/same holiday. This just looks fishy. As a rule I would steer clear of this one (unless of course you really are that religious), because it does not work as an afterward reason (did you forget this so-important-holiday was coming up?) & letting prof know ahead of time means there is time to confirm your story. There are few things less fun than saying you cannot take an exam because you need to say rosaries for the Feast of the Ascension only to learn your TA will also be saying rosaries & now you really have to go to church or no one will ever believe you ever again.

3- consider the possibility your professor might not have wanted to be there either. I know a guy who has missed his wife's birthday every year but two for the entire 14 years of their marriage. It is my fault for being born during mid-terms but there you are. When you tell your professor you missed because you had something more fun to do, chances are pretty good he had something more fun as well. The only reason you are not killed-on-the-spot is that there were 400+ other students who DID show for the exam so your not being there did not change whether or not he had to be there. When you ask for the recommendation for grad school or an internship or whatever, though you can be sure this will come up.

There is a trend in higher education to view professors as service providers & students as customers & well, the customer is always right. I naturally come down on one side of this issue rather strongly, but that is not really relevant because with any luck no one will spend more than six years as the customer in this scenario. Then you will be the service provider for the rest of your days.

Employers frown on people who miss presentations because their 5th grandmother has died, they got too drunk at the football game to drive home or they are attending a special mass for Saint Blaze (not the patron saint of strippers, which would be interesting, but the patron of wool carders, so all you knitters out there get to your knees, today is your day) & did not think to mention it beforehand.

If all this sounds a bit brutal, you should know I used to be in the position of hiring newly graduated computer engineering students & nothing surprised them more than the expectation that work (& expense reports) needed to be handed in on time, that they would be at their desks by 9am (not strolling in with a cappuccino at 9:15), & finally that I would rather fire a second-time offender & hire someone new than explain why this would not cut it in the real world. I quickly learned that seeing the guy they cut class with get escorted out of the building by security guards for playing golf on my dime had a way of inspiring a work ethic in everyone else.

Alien abduction

One morning last week, the lead story on the the 'first name in news' or whatever they are calling themselves these days, was alien abduction. The gist, so far as I can tell, is that the stories must be real because they are so consistent. This also clarifies the existence of mermaids & the streets of London being paved with gold. Thank G*d those are true; I was worried.

I do not remember how old I was, "In Search of" was still in primetime if that helps, when one of my brothers turned to me & said "Isn't it amazing that all the advances we have made in 50 years (remember dear reader he said this before even cable television) & those silly aliens are still flying in that outdated saucer-spaceship using the same antiquated medical equipment" Indeed, that was amazing. It remains amazing.

I have about five minutes of TV-news watching ability. Then I just cannot take it anymore. The combination of tabloidism & cannot-get-off-my-shiney-hiney-&-get-a-real-story just wears me out. I have understood for a long time, my whole adult life even, that the point of TV-News is to sell us whatever is in the commercials; this is the same point of all TV programs. Accept it. Move on. I am even tired of the people who complain about product placement. Yes, that happens on news programs, too, look at the coffee mug logos, the golf-shirts, the suits, the jewelery. Grow up. Move on.

What I do marvel at is the level of boredom a person has to have to actually watch entire news programs. I do not mean to mock people who are interested in 'the news'. I am mocking the people who think this is where you get it. If decades of alien abduction stories have taught us anything it is that whatever comes to you in your own house under the auspices of for-your-own-good is bad Bad BAD.

"But where Oh Useless One will we get our information if not through the sacred box?"

How about this: wash yourself (this includes your clothing), open your door, walk out into the world. Look at the sky & behold WEATHER. So as not to become overwhelmed, you should probably turn around & go back to bed.

When you feel up to it, take a few steps (or drive a few miles) to your local public library. I know, I know books are scary but they have ushers, called librarians, that will take you safely through. While you are there you can fall into your old bad habits of watching & surfing but you will do this sitting near people you almost certainly do not know. & chances are pretty good at least one of these strangers will be convinced that something completely off-the-wall is absolute fact. Do not panic: my own library has several copies of alien warning type materials & yours will, too.

While you are there though, take a look at some other things. Maybe a newspaper from another country. Or maybe the local bulletin board. & maybe you will learn that while the global economy is not good, ballroom dance classes are very well attended (what is up with that, really?). Or you could take a break from cyber-stalking the Obama children & instead join a local harpist singing holiday songs (I am not making this up, if you are free 12/14 drop on by)

You know what, never mind. Instead, I have decided that we should all stay inside glued to a machine of some kind (I call shotgun on that most powerful of oracles: the coffee maker). I will soon begin marketing my own line of "I would rather be Useless" t-shirts. Places your orders NOW.