Moving Right Along

My cubicle was like a reverse clown car yesterday.

I thought I had just about everything packed, but stuff kept spilling out of it. Old art boards with layouts from the website we launched eight years ago. Photographs from holiday parties long past. A 2005 calendar with cool pictures.  A dozen old magnets stuck on the side of a cabinet and forgotten.  A smattering of paper clips and push pins. Bobblehead dolls that were giveaways from some long-forgotten sporting event. Pictures of my son going back to babyhood. Matchbox cars (including, I am proud to say, the Monkee-mobile and the Partridge Family bus). And so much more.

It was moving day. And a moving day. I bade a fond farewell to the space I'd occupied for many years.

Over the course of the last week or so, I'd been sorting through my files. Some I shredded, others just pitched. And kept the ones I absolutely had to.

Then there were the catalogs and direct mail samples I've been collecting since 1990. Fortunately, I was able to store those temporarily in a file drawer in my old neighborhood until big file cabinets can be moved over.

Our new area has a lot less room for storage. This is actually a good thing, at least for me, because I tend to fill the space where I work. The more room I have, the more crap I accumulate.

Thinking back on this past week makes me wonder about our house and what's going to happen when we move. My original idea sounds better and better all the time: Tell the new owners that everything in the house is theirs, take only the personal items that can't be replaced, and start over again in the new abode.

In some ways, I will miss the old digs. But our new offices are awesome. I have a window seat (something I've coveted ever since those long car rides to Lima with my two sisters -- I had to sit in the middle seat with the hump at my feet). 

The ability to look up and see the outside world is great for maintaining perspective.

And my plants will be happy, too. 

Now all I have to do is unpack on Monday morning.

Time to start up the clown car!

Life Among the Dust Bunnies

I can still vividly recall, during the holiday festivities at my house, when my mother ran her finger across the top of my furniture, turned to me and gave me "the look."

Sheepish, I shrugged and said, "Oh well."

Yes, I've always been the master of comebacks.

Once upon a time, I emulated my mother. I arose every Saturday morning, did my grocery shopping, and proceeded to give the place a thorough going-over. I spent several hours vacuuming, scrubbing and dusting. I kept up this ritual for years.

Enter husband #2, a beautiful Saturday in Virginia, and his insistence that the dust would be there long after we had left this earth. And if we didn't get out there and enjoy the day, we'd regret it.

Admittedly, it didn't take much convincing on his part.

Over the years, I've cared less and less. The kitchen is a priority. And the bathroom. But the dust bunnies I don't worry so much about.

In a world far, far away I also used to care about the clutter. It didn't accumulate the way it seems to these days. That's what I thought, anyhow, until I pulled out an old photo of my desk from J.B. Robinson days circa 1986 and saw the papers piled all over it. I guess I'll never be labeled a neatnik. Oh well.

Fortunately, from time to time, Mr. Ginley tires of the clutter and ruthlessly plows through piles of stuff, tossing and filing and organizing.

"Do you really need all these receipts? Look at this one! It's for lunch at Piada six months ago. Are you planning on returning that meal?"

But then, He is the master of pamphlets. Whenever we go on a trip, he returns with a pile of pamphlets about places we will probably never visit. He often endures the stares of the Visitor Center Nazis as he clears out their stock. 

But I digress. If digression were an Olympic sport, I'd win the gold every time.

I'm sure there is a balance between being a slob and being obsessively clean and tidy. That state of grace is unlikely to find me in this lifetime.

Sometimes I imagine how my mom would react to all of the chachkas that have appeared around our home in the last few years.

I only wish she could be here now to give me "that look."

Mr. Sandman

Last night, Mr. Ginley woke me up to tell me about his dream. I'd hit him in the head with a flashlight. The details weren't clear. Why would I do such a thing? Was it metaphorical? Was I trying to enlighten him.

I didn't spend too much time pondering. I made my trip to the bathroom and trooped back to slumber some more.

This morning, as I debated whether to leave the confines of my warm, cozy, bed to write my blog, he woke up and announced I'd just shot him. Why? Apparently, my response was, "Because I wanted to." He expressed distress and pointed out that it hurt. He said I was nonchalant about the whole thing. "Did I shoot you just once?" I inquired. Yes. Well, then I guess he didn't do anything terribly heinous to provoke me. Was I just in a cranky mood? Did I shoot him just for snoring? Who knows.

Maybe it's just a cautionary tale not to keep guns around. Or flashlights.

There have been many books written about the meaning of dreams. They help to explain some of the more common ones. Like flying. Or arriving at school/work, looking down and realizing I've forgotten to put on my pants. But the books aren't a lot of help with many of the weird images my brain conjures up in a night.

Much of the time I dream about work. I've spent hours proofreading or agonizing over a missed error. The odd thing is, while the people are the same, the setting varies. In many cases, I'm in a huge building with several floors and banks of elevators, and I never seem to get off at the right floor.

Then there is the dream that I'm at my high school, but I don't recognize the layout, and I wander like Moses through the desert to find my Earth Science class. There is a test that day, and by the time I find the right room, the test is over and I've flunked.

Very occasionally, I will have a really cool dream. When I was little, I saw my grandfather in one of these, walking up and down steps in a heavenly setting. (I sure hope this doesn't mean the afterlife is like being stuck on a Stairmaster for all eternity.)

There was also the time when I had the white light dream. All around me was amazingly peaceful and calm. At the breakfast table, I spoke about it, and my dad very nonchalantly told me he'd had the same dream. That's one I wouldn't mind having again. I like waking up calm and relaxed, instead of stressed and worn out.

If my subconscious wanted to be really helpful, it would dream up the winning numbers for the next lottery.

It's not going to happen, of course. But sometimes it's nice to dream!

Getting Hammered

It seems incongruous for one who spends so little time on home repair projects to want to hang out at the hardware store.

Sure, Mr. Ginley and I will troll for the stuff he needs. Last Sunday, we had to pick up some glass for windows he's repairing. We got what was required for the job, then browsed for awhile, him musing aloud, "I know we needed something else from here, I just can't think what it was."

This time, it turned out to be more light bulbs. So Lowe's became my lunchtime destination on Monday.

My first stop was the light bulb disposal unit. Now that we have CFL's with mercury in them, they have to be properly pitched. So...as directed, I wrapped each little body in a plastic bag and sent it down a chute to hang with all of the other burned out bulbs. It made me a little sad, wondering if there was an analogy there to my retirement.

But I digress.

I found shiny new bulbs to take the place of the old ones and was about to turn around and check out, when I decided to stroll around a little, just for yucks.

Growing up, hardware stores were neighborhood affairs. We had one in our neck of woods until a couple of years ago. Those stores were packed floor-to-ceiling with tools, parts and home repair products of every kind. The cool thing was, you could walk in, hand the guy some gewgaw, and he would have you wait for a minute, then return with a replacement gewgaw. The guy was magical, like a resident Harry Potter. You swore he went in the back room and conjured the thing up. How could he possibly have a replacement part for a screen door that was made in 1926?

Today, we have super stores like Lowe's and Home Depot. They're certainly large. And they have lots of stuff. Maybe too much stuff. In spite of the vast selection, it seems to be more difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. I haven't figured out why this is, it doesn't make sense. But, time after time, I go in there looking for a specific item, and they don't have it. Sometimes I'll luck out and Home Depot will have it. But that requires a second shlep.

And, while sometimes I do enjoy just walking around those places and marveling at all the stuff and imagine someone using it to create something wonderful, many times I just want that part for my aging screen door.

But, I suppose that's the business model, to get you to roam the miles of aisles, to buy lots of stuff you hadn't planned on getting, dreaming of projects that will ultimately be completed by some local guy you find on the internet.

Lowe's knows!

Cooking with Gas

I still remember my biggest cooking flub.

The recipe was my mom's (for spaghetti sauce) and I was a young bride (20 years old), married to husband #1 (whom Mr. G. refers to as my practice husband.)

Anyhow, back to my embarrassing story. The recipe called for a cup of instant coffee. So, I trotted out my Taster's Choice and a measuring cup and poured out a cup of instant coffee grounds and dumped them in the pot. Hmmm. Something wasn't right. A quick phone call to my mother confirmed that I was supposed to make a cup of coffee. The sauce was ruined, I was in tears, and we probably ate out after that because I was too distraught to make anything else.

Anyone who tells you that being a good cook is simple and all you have to do is follow a recipe is full of shit. I'm sorry, but it's true. My grandmother had plenty of recipes, including one for "milk pie." The thing is, I watched her create this concoction, and she didn't measure anything.

"But Grandma, the recipe calls for a cup of milk, and you just poured a bunch in. How do you know that's a cup?"

To which she would reply, "It's just the right amount. You just put in the right amount."

Needless to say, I've never been able to duplicate her milk pie. I've come close, using a recipe I found on the internet, but nothing that really nailed it.

When I was a young lass, Home Economics was a required course. I don't even know if it's still taught in schools. That's where I learned basic cooking and baking skills, including how to measure. I also learned valuable lessons like turning off a mixer BEFORE you lift up the beaters. (Thank you, Holly, my fellow 7th grade student.)

Cooking is an art, and if you consider stick figures and finger painting art, I suppose you could say I'm a cook. Mostly, I make the same recipes I've gathered over the years, the ones that have been deemed acceptable by the Food Approval Committee (aka Mr. Ginley).

One day, I was lamenting to my husband that I'm not a very adventurous cook, that all I can do is read a recipe and put all of the necessary ingredients together. He pulled out my recipe file and pointed to the stained, wrinkled pages. Most of them had notations, adding, deleting or substituting ingredients or altering cooking time or method.

Maybe I got a little something from my grandma after all!

The Oldest Kid on the Block

When did I go from being the youngest person at the office to being among the oldsters?

It's like I woke up one day with cataracts, creaky bones and one unanswerable question on my mind: "How did Justin Beiber become a celebrity?"

I knew I was really out of the loop when I was reviewing material at work last week and one of my co-workers had to explain to me that there really is a "Movember" (Mustache + November). Who knew?

  Admittedly, in some ways I have been left in the dirt as the world moves forward. But, like the old fogey I am, I hold out a certain pride that I can say...

1. I am still able to sing all of the lyrics to the Patty Duke TV show theme song.

2. I enjoyed Beatlemania the first time around.

3. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and I was pretty good at it. Also, I can still work a 10-key calculator. And balance a checkbook (manually).

4. I understand printing fundamentals because I learned the process before everything was automated. (Although, admittedly, I don't miss mechanicals with type that shifts/falls off and I do like the ease of making corrections.)

5. I grew up with the giants of Saturday Morning Cartoons. Including Bugs Bunny, Wacky Racers and Fat Albert. (And Rocky and Bullwinkle are still awesome.)

6. Although I understand (mostly) modern technology, I can appreciate their predecessors...a la vinyl, black and white photographs and ballpoint pens.

7. I know I could use my wits to survive without all of the amenities that have become de rigeur over the last 20 years. Because I survived before. (Although, admittedly, I would miss the Google.)

8. I get shopping malls. And why it was fun to shop at Pentagon City Mall at 3:00 on Christmas Eve.

9. I knew the joy of snarfing Cocoa Krispies and guzzling Coca Cola with all the real sugar and none of the background noise about childhood obesity. (I was so busy running around the fat couldn't keep up.)

10. I get why books and magazines and newspapers that you can hold in your hands are tactile bliss.

Well, I see by the clock on the wall (okay, on my computer), that it's time to wrap this up. No more allusions to old people stuff. So I'll just gather up my bones and shuffle off to Buffalo.

Oops, I did it again!

Tricks or Treats

Okay, I'm going to lapse into "old-geezer-speak" for this one.

In my day...trick or treating was about the kids.

There were not a lot of adult parties or dressing up in costume at work. It was about children dressing up in (mostly) homemade costumes and trolling door-to-door for candy. Every year the urban legends were dusted off and repeated...stories about people putting razor blades in apples and poison in popcorn balls.

Me and Medusa.

Here is how it rolled in our house.

A week or so before the big day, we decided what we were going to be for Halloween. The choices were limited. We had a box of stuff my mom kept, odd masks and old clothes. The basics were: witch (me for several years running), hobo, ghost, devil and pirate. We had a couple of scratchy plastic masks with slits for eyes, nose and mouth, that held onto the head with an elastic string. But my mom did not go out and buy a new costume every year. And we used old pillow cases to collect the loot. Or our book bags from school.

There were a few times when the costume restrictions were lifted. One year, my sister was Medusa in a school play, and she wore the costume my mom made to trick-or-treat. (The downside was, no one could guess who she was.) One year I wore an old suit of my dad's and was Groucho Marx. But that was in high school, and I didn't trick-or-treat, so I'm not sure that counts.

One of my favorite snapshots from our childhood is of my brother, Paul, sitting at the kitchen table surveying his loot, still dressed in his devil costume. 

The upshot is, Halloween was fun. Mom carved the pumpkin, stuck a candle in it and placed it in the front picture window. My folks turned on the yellow porch light and handed out candy while we did the hunting and gathering.

We walked through our neighborhood, and, when we were older and had more stamina, we trolled farther afield, onto the streets of the slightly more affluent, although the pickings weren't necessarily better. There were some houses you made certain to visit to because they had a reputation for good stuff, and others you avoided because the people were just mean about it. And you only went to the houses that had their porch lights on (which is still de rigueur). 

One of Mom's creations.

The night was fun, the candy plentiful, and we ate until Mom put the kabash on the feeding frenzy and made us brush our teeth and hit the sack.

When my son reached the age when trick-or-treating was appropriate, either I or his Dad took him out while the other handed out the goods. We called a halt to trick-or-treating when he hit the teenage years. There has always been controversy over this, some people feeling there should be an age limit, others not. But we've always held the belief that the night is for little goblins, not surly teenagers who wear tee-shirts and jeans and thrust a bag at you and growl menacingly.

These days, we can't have bags of candy around for health reasons, so we don't participate. I miss it, but I don't miss the day-after guilt of having ingested one-too-many Snickers. I do make up little goodie bags for the neighbor kids, just because.

I still like the idea of trick-or-treating. I suppose one day, Halloween celebrations will be reduced to parties at school or at the local rec center and that will be it. Because parents are afraid.

Oh well.

I'm going to end my ramblings with the last stanza from my favorite spooky poem, oft read aloud by my sister, Denise, which used to scare the crap out of me (especially when she got to the last line, which she acted out to great effect). It's by James Whitcomb Riley, and it was written in the late 1800's. It's called Little Orphant Annie:

An' little Orphant Annie says when the blaze is blue,
An' the lamp-wick sputters, an' the wind goes woo-oo!
An' you hear the crickets quit, an' the moon is gray,
An' the lightnin'-bugs in dew is all squenched away,--
You better mind yer parunts an' yer teachers fond an' dear,
An' churish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear,
An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns'll git you
  Ef you
     Don't
        Watch
           Out!