scribbling

Post Holiday Deus ex Machina

No Telling


The holiday break is officially over in the morning and I’ve misplaced my work ethic. Maybe I left it in my other purse.

Coming off of the end-of-semester madness, I rode an adrenaline-tide clear into Christmas Day. There are crossed-off lists to prove this, although I was so thorough I threw them away afterward. Something happened Christmas day that made my metabolism, my forward motion, my internal combustion, go dead still. It wasn’t gradual. I’m telling you, at 10:30 a.m. on Christmas Day, I exhaled and tuned into a slug.

That was fine for a day, so I let it continue. The next morning I woke up at 8:20 or so, completely horrified. I never set an alarm (not that I normally need one) and slept without waking for nine hours. Those who know me best understand the seriousness of such a thing. I’m a five-hour sleeper, the one who drives everyone crazy by staying up at all hours and rising in time to make coffee at five. I’ve spent my whole life tiptoeing around while others sleep.

It scared me, sleeping all those hours. Whatever had switched off the day before took over my body, and now I’ve spent the past two weeks moseying through my days, slug-like, instead of strangling every single minute for a few more seconds. It’s been lovely, really, but it’s over tomorrow.

I just can’t wrap my head around it. On Thursday there will be rooms full of students, and I’ve a sneaking suspicion they’ll all be much more sluggy than I am. My job is to bounce into those rooms and get their internal clocks moving again, start the cogs and wheels and such humming. They’ve been staring blankly at television or computer screens for four weeks now, the academic legions of WE will need to wind our own rusty clocks first and in a hurry.

When I taught high school and enjoyed Christmas breaks that lasted, oh, an hour and a half, this never happened. The thing is, I’m not sure if I want to complain about it too much since the slug that I’ve become is fairly comfortable and reclining.

Too much leisure is worse than too little. Time to make a cup of coffee and dropkick myself back into living. Don’t worry, I’ll be quiet.

*****

P.S. – In my quest for threaded commenting – something WordPress does that Blogger doesn’t – I installed a commenting system called Intense Debate. Nice, but not as easy to use or pretty as I’d hoped. I guess I’ll hold out until Blogger adds threaded commenting, which I’m sure they will. I’ve asked nicely and all.

The downside is that in uninstalling my experiment, I lost a few comments. Please forgive me.

Now, Where Did I Put That Coat?

No Telling


I’ve just run around the house making all my faucets drippy to save the pipes. Forget global warming, folks, there’s a serious rend in the fabric of the earth’s karma going on here. Single digits and temperatures that start with a minus sign in Arkansas? This is the land of bubbling-tar streets and heatstroke. It’s meteorological terrorism.

Worse yet, I can’t find my coat. Honestly, I only wear one a week or so out of every year, and it’s always an all-weather, trenchy-thing at that. I’ve located the liner – those are always zipped out and discarded anyway – right where I left it in the hall coat-closet. In my house, that’s a little room where we hang graduation regalia and old prom dresses. I may have to go out in the world tomorrow morning wearing all my sweaters at once and looking like the homeless fellow who hangs out in front of the shoe repair store on VanRonkle Street.*

All this weather ridiculousness would be forgiven if it would simply snow. At least I’d have good reason to stay indoors and have no need of a missing trench coat. The smattering of surprise snow we had the other day lasted about half an hour. Now it’s colder than Anchorage, Alaska around here and there’s nary a residual flake.

I’ll make another trip around the house checking drips and closets and such before calling it a night. Wish me luck, and pray for snow.

* Don’t worry about our friend on VanRonkle. I have it on good authority that he’s enjoying the warm comforts of several Christian homes during this weather. We take care of our own down here.

Forty Percent Chance

No Telling


I‘m waiting on the snow. If it means staying up half the night, fine. I know those of you who live in the Snowy North may be shaking your heads, but down here snow’s a brief luxury. Just the merest Weather Channel mention of it makes me feel like a little girl again. I may need to start right now digging in the hall closet to find a coat.

In fact, it might be time to do a little snow-dance just for good measure. I don’t know. Last time I did that we were locked in a solid block of ice for a week and giant tree limbs fell, breaking like chandeliers all over Davis Street. I might have danced too emphatically.

Cross your frosty fingers for me, and don’t you dare do the math on the date under the photo.

Little Black Dress

No Telling

It’s called Spring Cleaning for a reason, but those of us who teach know the long holiday break is really the best time to pare down and clean out. A little extra time on my hands, the New Year a blink away, my birthday just after, and past that the beginning of another semester – so many beginnings need a fresh decor.

Besides, I just finished a massive online design job for someone else, and it made me want to fiddle with my own small space. So, a little-black-dress blog makeover. It was great fun to make and infinitely cheaper than redoing my living room.

My inspiration was this picture of Coco Chanel. Such a powerfully creative woman who, bless her heart, definitely needed to eat a sandwich now and then. Starvation aside, she’s impeccable. I don’t know a living woman who can sit at that angle without a few biscuits creeping out of the dough, Spanx or no Spanx.

I’ve just begun my New Year’s Resolutions. The first three are “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” I should probably take that to heart and stop worrying about the list.

My celebration tonight will be simple. Em is glamming up in her own little black dress for an evening at the Peabody with her gentleman friend. The Perfect Grandson and I will be home having a “pawty” – we’ll play with cars and watch Robots at least twice. I figure we’ll ring in the new year around 7:30 tonight with a little apple juice. There will be years and years when he’s too cool to spend New Year’s Eve with his MiMi, so I’m taking our “pawties” when I can get them.

I want to wish a happy New Year to everyone. My hope is that all of us are healthy, happy, and writing during 2010.

Planned Obsoletion

No Telling

I‘ve been sitting here staring at Huffington Post’s photo slideshow. It’s called “12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade” and it’s funny in that way that makes you laugh and shake your head just before you cry.

Many of these took me by surprise – I guess I’m such a geezer that I missed out on some kind of sea-change. Yes, I received a Googlewave invitation about a month ago, and no I haven’t clicked on the link yet. You can’t expect much from a gal who collects manual typewriters anyway, so that should give me a pass.

Just so you’ll be In The Know, here are the twelve things that are suddenly obsolete in the past ten years:

1. classified ads in newspapers
2. dial-up internet
3. encyclopedias
4. CDs
5. landline phones
6. film and film cameras
7. Yellow Pages and address books
8. catalogs
9. fax machines
10. wires
11. calling people on a phone
12. hand-written letters

Are you kidding me? I still have (or do) at least nine things from that list. To be honest, the daily business of our university would come to a halt if the fax machine went down, so it’s not just me.

I started thinking a bit on the whole idea and it only gets worse. I have a whole gaggle of obsolete skills – many of which cost me good tuition money to learn. I can take shorthand, queue up records for radio, edit sound tape with a cutter and – um – tape. I can drive a stick-shift. I can operate both a film projector and a slide projector, and – stand back – I know how to lay out an entire newspaper using wax, Exacto knives, and a light board.

None of these skills mean anything anymore, but I can understand that. It’s been quite a few years since technology shoved it’s wide shoulders to the front of the line. I always hated shorthand anyway. That’s not the problem.

The problem is speed. My music has gone from record, to reel-to-reel, to 8-track, to cassette, to CD, to digital in an instant. I’ve bought The White Album six times. If we can lose landline phones and speaking to another voice over them in only ten years, what’s next?

Some of these may pass by without much notice, but there are at least two generations of Southern women who’ll have to die before the hand-written thank you note does. Just sayin’.

Dumptrucks and Reindeer

No Telling


Santa came and paper flew. We’ve been dodging power-hits from the T-Ball set-up for two days now. We’ve built and trashed a few dozen block buildings, put together puzzles, colored with fat crayons so frantically that we’ve got to make another ticky-tack run tomorrow so we can show these beauties off properly.

And there are vehicles – trucks, cars, fire engines, tractors – all with appropriate sounds. The ladies in the house are finding all this varoom varoom business a tad mysterious, but it seems mighty important to The Perfect Grandson. He speaks “race car” more fluently than we do.

It snowed here for Christmas, although only for about half an hour and only between midnight and one o’clock. It didn’t stick and it didn’t stay, but I saw it blowing sideways at the streetlamps and it was a lovely gift. It rained for a week before the snow, devastating and stranding most of the state in floodwaters that have only just today begun to recede.

We had love and food and presents and family. With the flooding and events more dreadful, there are others who did not, so I’m grateful. There are always little miracles even in the worst of times.

The Perfect Grandson swears he saw a reindeer in our front yard.

“Sugar, where did you see the deer?”

“Wight dere.” He pointed at the postcard of grass that is our front yard.

“What was he doing out there?”

“Eatin gwass. Wet’s go, MiMi. I fina deer.”

We bundled up against the cold and searched for it high and low. We live in the middle of town, but it’s not unlikely there was a confused deer wandering the streets. Around here, things like that can happen. But what he saw was no deer – The Perfect Grandson says he saw a reindeer. And I believe him.

Good God, Woman, Cover Yourself.

No Telling

This woman wanted to be our Vice President. Thankfully, she’s not. Now she’s apparently so in love with media attention that she can’t make a proper wardrobe decision.

I know this photo was taken for a fitness magazine, so don’t even go there. By now she should know better. Would Margaret Thatcher have done anything like this? Hillary? Any woman who wants to be taken seriously in the political arena should keep her thighs to herself.

There are seventy-eleven reasons why this woman should be ignored. To list them all would only invite undue attention and feed the beast. She doesn’t even deserve my negative energy. Besides, the day they pranced her out at the convention as the Random Republican Female Answer to Hillary Clinton almost gave me an aneurysm. I won’t have time for that kind of reaction again until after finals.

I’m not buying her book, I’m not watching her interviews. With any luck, she and the book will be in the remainder pile just in time for Christmas. That’s gift enough for me.

It Seldom Gets Any Better Than This

No Telling

My glowing post on the fine gathering of Conway NaNoWriMo scribblers has been preempted for breaking news straight from the Log Cabin Democrat. This is certainly the mother of all hijacks, and it happened in my own backyard. Practically.

Two shipping containers full of Kotex and baby wipes and whatnot, whisked away by feminine hygiene pirates in the dark of night. Local police feel certain they were stolen for the shipping containers alone, as it’s unlikely they’ll fence the goods. As one official noted, “It isn’t like a trailer load of flatscreen TVs.”

Do tell.

I‘d prefer to imagine a whole band of young mothers, desperate in these tough times, clipping padlocks and absconding with the goods. Gals sitting around the dinette table in some double-wide, drinking box-wine and splitting up the loot – that sort of thing.

Five days before the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, this is a gift indeed.

No, I Haven’t been Lost, Stolen, or…

No Telling

…in the hoosegow. The one-two punch of midterm papers coupled with the sweet release of Fall Break has me a little shell-shocked. Especially since I spent the first day of the break wringing a tissue and running from computer to television over Falcon the Balloon Boy.

I still don’t precisely know how I feel about that whole business, but I’m crystal clear on a few things: I’m glad he’s safe. I want to know why he wasn’t in school. I want five minutes alone with tornado-daddy to discuss the finer points of parenting.

Don’t get me started.

At the beginning of this four-day Fall Break, I made a list of all the delicious, non-academic things I would do. Didn’t do any of them. I clearly accomplish more when I’m up to my eyeballs in too much work – something to do with forward motion and deceleration. A little free time and I languish.

Enough of that.

It’s Rained So Long, the Whole World Smells Like Catfish

No Telling
Photobucket


Forty days and forty nights, or thereabouts. A break here and there doesn’t really matter, because the rain only eases to lure me outside so it can begin again.

And it’s cold. Well, plenty cold for Arkansas. It’s in the 60’s here and all of us are scrambling for winter coats and portable heaters. It’s like living Portland. Or London.

I‘m guessing that neither place smells as bad as this, though. In the spring, we generally have quite a bit of nasty weather, but the temperature is lifting, greenness is poking out of the ground, and everything takes on a sort of sweet respiration. In the mack-daddy steam of the summer when temps hover in the 100s and 110s, the rain makes a sort of sizzling hot-tar smell. It goes away though, and on the worst days going out smells a little it’s raining tadpoles.

In the fall, it rains mud-bottom river catfish everywhere. It’s thick, I tell you, like the clouds just sucked up the worst parts of the Arkansas River and dumped it on your new shoes. If you stand still long enough in this weather, you’ll smell like you’ve fallen off a river barge. Musty. Mudcat-fishy.

This afternoon I trudged across campus in the mist and landed in a classroom that had the air off, the windows down tight, and the fifth class in a row of twenty or so students dripping catfish-rain all over the industrial carpeting. Ten minutes in, the smell was unbearable.

The Weather Channel – which is unfailingly incorrect most of the time – says we’ll be out of this mudcat-smelling hell by Friday. We get the weekend off, it seems. Monday it’s supposed to throw down again and last for days.

I’m actually looking forward to the ice storms.