I'm Thinking…No!

Particularly this year, when we may not all be able to meet in person, share a meal, and enjoy family and friends, it’s more important than ever to keep thoughts of our past traditions and fond memories at the surface of our day. All of us have tales of Thanksgivings past that cause us to smile as we recall the warm memories of the holidays.  I repost here some that are my favorites.

Continue reading “A Day of Thanksgiving – Fond Memories”

As you know, I’ve written extensively, perhaps more than my readers want or need to read, about the grocery shopping experience.  Pre-pandemic, I’d go two, three, perhaps four times a week to collect what we needed. Much of that travel reflected a general lack of planning, but I prefer to think of it as spontaneity.  We’d decide in the morning what we felt like having for dinner.  Particularly during Herself’s confinement to the house during her recovery, we transitioned to curbside take-out along the way.  That made Princess Anxiety happier that interaction with the outside world was reduced to, well, nothing.  The exception to that being her daily afternoon run to Starbucks.

Continue reading “The New Era of Grocery Shopping”

People create their own happiness . . . . or not as they so choose.  I firmly believe that, in most cases, if you’re not enjoying life, it’s because a) your expectations are too high, or b) you’re not looking for it in right places.  

Continue reading “Happiness is What You Make It”

Let’s all admit it.  We were sick of campaign advertising.  We became exhausted answering telephone surveys. We couldn’t stand it if one more person reminded us to vote.  (In fact, when I turned on the computer to start writing this the day before the election, a little pop-up reminder about the election came up.)  We were way beyond overload on headlines, “breaking news” and other updates. We’ve heard too much information.  We’ve seen too many debates.  I couldn’t believe that, by voting day, there could possibly be more than a dozen adult Americans that were “undecided”.  So, let’s move on.  Oh, wait . . . now we still had to wait a few more days for all the ballots to be counted.  So . . . . we waited until Saturday, and now it looks like we’ll have to give the Trump Campaign until Thanksgiving to challenge everything, including individual lawsuits to be filed against mail-in voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.  There’s a rumor out on the internet, so it must be true, that he’s also filing litigation against a couple of Canadian provinces and Nepal, just in case.  Once I’ve had a chance to speak privately with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, we’ll have a decision and start planning the inaugural.    

Here’s the thing with elections.  Particularly living in New Hampshire, where the whole election season kicks off about two years before we actually go to the polls, we get a steady barrage of ads as candidates stake out their turf.  More than half of these people we don’t even really recognize.  Is this guy the governor of what?  Colorado, Washington, Ohio?  The mayor of some place out in the Midwest.  There’s always someone from Texas because, well, it’s Texas.  Massachusetts is becoming just as highly represented.  It’s like these two have been a winning combination since Kennedy and Johnson, or Dukakis and Bentsen.  They go together like a horse and carriage, or not.

This year is of course the battle of the “Old Guys”.  I don’t know how either of them even climbs the stairs to the stage, let alone delivers a speech.  Sometimes I think it looks like they dug up Zachary Taylor and Rutherford B. Hayes, fluffed up their hair, propped them in chairs, and had them run again.  They could be running William McKinley type, “front porch” campaigns only from a golf cart or a basement in Delaware. 

Speaking of “front porch” campaigns, championed by James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and McKinley, there is an advantage to keeping close to home, or in terms of presidential campaigns, less Is more.  Often with candidates, the more we see of them the less we like them.  I know that’s true for me of the current White House occupant, who I shall not name because I like to maintain objectivity and lack of bias.  Every morning, as I turn on the news or open my newspaper and see his name boldly announced, my initial thoughts are, “oh, dear God, what’s he said or done now.”  Sometimes it’s just a mindless tweet about something that upset him, or it could be verbally attacking a national leader or country.  

Presidential (or for that matter, any political) debates have taken on the dignity and respect of, well, a combination of dog fights and the running of the bulls.  When, may I ask, did it become unacceptable to wait for someone else to speak?  At what point did the notion of having a courteous discussion of ideas, policies, or even reality become secondary to boldly proclaiming myths and outright untruths?  Does saying something untrue over and over again somehow make it true?  Not really, it’s just that some folks won’t bother to check, and are thus willing to believe what they hear.  Perhaps that’s the most concerning issue with “politics”.  As society becomes more and more complex, it’s more difficult to separate factual information from verbal or printed diarrhea.  

Let’s a make a pact to close our doors, turn off our phones, suspend our newspaper subscriptions, and watch nothing on television but HGTV and reruns of “I Love Lucy” and “The Office” in four years.  Here in New Hampshire, we’ll get a jump on that, starting in February, 2021, when the next crop of presidential candidates starts visiting our beautiful state.  As a working plan, though, I ask all Americans to consider the following process.  Let’s decide who we like better, who has the nicest smile, who has the best handshake, who stands the best chance of getting along with other world leaders, who has the least to hide in their tax returns.  If we as a country can’t even agree on wearing a face mask or standing six feet from strangers, we certainly shouldn’t be considering major policies, reforms, or what the government should be doing for the energy and pharmaceutical industries.  Let’s just use our tried and true American formula.  Congress passes legislation, the president signs or vetoes it, back to congress for eighteen months, then lobbyists bring suit and counter suit, big corporate money arrives like the Mongol Horde, as does Rudy Giuliani and his staff of Russian agents. and then it all goes to the Supreme Court, which will render a decision nobody likes. I certainly trust Amy Coney Barrett to determine our future in fair, objective decisions.  After all, she’s had three full years on the bench.

Best wishes to all my fellow voters.  I’m going back to my bomb shelter and wait for the first volley of Trump artillery to launch from the Rose Garden.

This is a bit longer than usual, and a bit more serious because the topic is.  I believe deeply in democracy, even when I see people on street corners holding signs with slogans for positions I flatly reject or that raise my blood pressure.

Continue reading “Why I’m an Independent Voter”

OK.  I’ll admit it.  I’m now at that in-between age where nobody tells me “how good I look” (which I’m sure they will when I’m 85), but where getting out of a chair is an effort and keeping shoelaces tied requires deep breaths and carries an element of chance. Napping is essential because, heaven knows I’m not going to sleep solidly for eight hours any more.  We’re at that stage where “spry” replaces “vigorous” or “athletic” in descriptions of us. I called my brother last week to wish him a happy birthday.  (He’s much older than I – well, 14 months anyway.) He was on his second nap of the day – a pre-dinner nap that will carry him through to bedtime.  I’m thankfully not there yet, although it’s coming. 

Continue reading “Reminders of Aging”

For those readers that have not met our dear friend, Lady Peacock, well, you’ve missed a treat.  A little something about her for the uninitiated.  As we meander through life, one meets characters that loom large, simply begging that their stories be told.  Sometimes, these people are famous, having achieved a degree of notoriety for an event, deed, or made contributions to society and culture.  In the case of Lady Peacock, as she’s known to her friends, it’s her manner that provides endless hours of entertainment. 

Continue reading “In Quarantine with Lady Peacock”

If you’ve already been done in, don’t bother reading further into this.  However, if you manage to go through life generally pissing off almost everyone you meet, if you’re known as the village curmudgeon, if you’re the keeper of secrets, if you have a spouse or lover that tends toward maniacal jealousy, or if you have lots of money and a gaggle of needy heirs, here might be some helpful hints in protecting yourself from becoming a potential victim. 

The information here has been assembled from years, way too many, in fact, of watching television shows with a murder theme and reading lots of murder mysteries.  My faithful readers know that Herself and I are frequent viewers of Law and Order (mostly Herself), although we’ve worked our way through twenty-odd seasons of Midsommer Murders, as well as many episodes of Death In Paradise, Rosemary and Thyme, Father Brown, and Poirot.  There are some common themes that literally jump out at you in these, so I’m bringing you this information as a public service, although not in any official capacity but as close to a highly skilled sleuth as you’ll find.  We’ve offered our training and expertise to local law enforcement, which has consistently declined any outreach.  Their loss, I’m afraid.

Tip #1 – Dark Roads. 

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people foolishly venturing out for an evening stroll, somewhere between 10 and midnight (according to the medical examiner) in a small, picturesque village where a string of murders has recently occurred.  What are they thinking?  “Oh, yes.  We all heard about Mildred’s death, but I needed some fresh air before bed.”  Or, “No need to walk me home.  I feel perfectly safe.  What’s that lump under the tree over there by the brook?”  Don’t think that riding a bicycle at night is safer than walking – it’s not.  It only brings you to your doom a little faster.  The only person that seems to get around safely on a bike is Father Brown.  Similarly, if you’re driving on a dark, secluded road at night and headlights come up behind you quickly and the driver nudges your rear bumper, by all means hit the accelerator.  Don’t just tighten your grip on the steering wheel and continue on at 35 mph. This is a common mistake, and observing the speed limit is not a good strategy under the circumstances.  And a final suggestion, and I’ve sadly seen this too many times, if you’re on foot and a car is chasing you, don’t keep running down the middle of the road.  Run into the woods, get behind a tree, anywhere but the middle of the road.  

Tip #2 – Dark Alleys

This is typically the city version of the dark country road, where victims have just emerged from the back door of a bar.  Why they choose to go out that way, or step out to this natural crime scene for a quick smoke, I’ll never know. A trash can rattles or an old board cracks, and the victim calls out, “Is anybody there?”  Seldom, if ever, does the perpetrator call back, “It’s me – Pete.  All good here.”  If you’re standing on the sidewalk staring into a dark alley and you hear that same noise, for heaven sake activate that little voice in your brain that says, “run away as fast as you can.”  Investigating cannot end well.  

Tip #3 – In the Bedroom

You may not have noticed this, but I as a trained specialist have observed that a healthy percentage, and I’d estimate at least half, of all homicides happen in the bedroom.  It’s good and bad for investigators, in that the bedding very often will be a great collector of evidentiary bodily fluids, unlike the bricks of a dark alley. However, they still have a body or bodies on their hands. The message here is, lock the damned doors.  If you’re meeting a lover and the husband is liable to come home early, you’ve bought a few minutes to get him out the window or into the closet.  If you’re elderly, with your idle, worthless nephew hanging around for the inheritance and waiting for you to skip your medications just isn’t working for him, you can possibly avoid that ugly situation of a pillow over your face.  Keep the door key on a cord around your neck, so he can’t do the old “push it through onto a newspaper and slip it under the door” trick.  

Tip #4 – Poisons

They’re almost always in a drink.  Putting rat poison in the stuffed mushrooms is very 19^th Century.  No, no.  It’ll be in the wine, the ice tea, or the bourbon that you’re about to sip.  The flavor will disguise the smell, and if you notice that your drink has just a hint of almond, it’s probably strychnine.  (By the way, when I googled the spelling, the first entries that popped up were “Strychnine at Amazon.com”, followed by “Great Deals on Strychnine at eBay”.  Apparently, one doesn’t need a chemist’s license or special credentials to get this.)  Word to the wise, if you’re at a dinner party, make sure you drink something from the same bottle as the host or hostess, unless you suspect they’re also trying to “do in” each other.  If you know somebody that might have a grudge against you and they garden, with several beds of foxglove, don’t drink that bottle of homemade elderberry wine they gave you.

Tip #5 – Be Aware of Your Surroundings

If you think you might be a potential victim, be constantly on the alert to your surroundings, particularly as in tips 1 and 2.  Someone sneaking up behind you with a raised baseball bat or ax could be a sign of danger. Don’t stand there with your mouth open, run away.  Move quickly and learn to duck. This can be practiced in front of a mirror, if you think you might need to deploy evasive action.  Cemeteries at night aren’t necessarily places of rest unless a stone marks your presence.  That gloved hand pulling back a tree branch to get a better look at you is never good.  I’ve often said that if I could see their faces, I could really help out the detectives working the case. Or the person that shows up at your front door late at night is more than likely not there to borrow a cup of sugar.  The greeting, “Oh, it’s you.  Come in.”  almost always screams “homicide about to happen.”  The dagger emerges from the behind the back, the hammer snatched from the tool shed makes its appearance, or the shovel with which to bury you makes its appearance.  You might also keep walking sticks and fireplace utensils well out of sight.

In fairness, I have taken the liberty to include a couple of suggestions for the one on the other side of the sword blade in the interests of equal time.  When you’ve already got a dead body on your hands, don’t throw it into the river on the assumption that authorities will consider it an accidental drowning.  They’ll know if there’s no water in the lungs. Of course, gunshot wounds or strangulation marks around the neck will give the game away.  Similarly, don’t take the body out to sea and throw it overboard.  The corpse almost always washes up on the beach.  Don’t put the body in the trunk of your car – blood seeps through and gets all over the carpeting.  Investigators typically call that “evidence”. It’s best not to drag the body anywhere – the drag marks are traceable and reveal the spot of the unfortunate incident.  Better to wrap and carry.  And if you’re planning something lethal, I would strongly, strongly recommend that you not buy your strychnine on eBay.

In my continuing quest to be insightful and informative, I hope that this has some informative value on both sides.  Warmest regards, as always.

I wrote some time ago about the concerted efforts of everyday objects, created to ease our lives and make everything safer and more convenient, often have the opposite effect.  They work pretty efficiently to make my life more difficult.  That attractive new soap dish that I was refilling and . . . . . you can see where this is going. More times than I can count,  Herself and The Daughter have been on the phone chatting amiably when something inanimate is misbehaving and I respond accordingly.  I can hear the conversation now – “What is dad fixing?”  I’m going to quote again that famous narration in the movie, “A Christmas Story”.  You know the one, where the father is down trying to get the furnace working.  To quote, “in the heat of battle, my father wove a tapestry of obscenity that, as far as we know, is still hanging in space . . .”   Yes, indeed.  I work in profanity the way Picasso worked in sharp angles.

Continue reading “Inanimate Objects II – Still Up by a Touchdown”

Let’s face it – Americans don’t like to wait for anything.  In recent weeks, we’re finding out just how poorly we’re dealing with the whole “stay home and wait out the pandemic” thing.  Students at the University of New Hampshire held a large party in a fraternity house.  The disease spreads rapidly.  A sports team at a local high school, unnamed and unspecified because we really want to protect the privacy of the negligent and stupid, held what is reported in the newspaper as a “social gathering” has, surprise, 18 new cases of coronavirus.  But really, we’ve waited long enough to party, to have weddings in remote locations like central Maine, where at this point 170 cases have now been reported.  And in the latest evidence that God has a sense of humor, a conservative pastor that railed against wearing face masks in his church, inviting everyone in to sit together without masks, was placed in intensive care with COVID-19 this past week. Yes, we don’t learn.  Well, maybe a little. Because after a teenage house party in a wealthy suburb north of Boston, the teenage host and parents face hefty fines. Maybe that’s the message we need. Or not. They’ll just write a check and plead innocent when the cases of illness start mounting. The experts tell us what is causing these spreads, but we’ll do what we want anyway because . . . . . we’ve been wearing face masks too long.  We’ve been social distancing too long.  We’ve been at home too long.  We’ve waited too long for the pandemic to run its course, and this virus has inconvenienced us too much.

We should have known when the first settlers came to North America from Europe and the eastern coast wasn’t enough.  We pushed westward until the Pacific Ocean got in our way, slowing our progress.  “Westward Ho” really meant, “We want more land, and by golly, we’re going to take it.”  Maybe some of it comes from our ancestral roots.  Our predecessors weren’t satisfied either, until “The Sun Never Set on the British Empire.”  Napoleon, Alexander, Hitler, Genghis Khan, all were models of “enough is never enough, and we can’t wait.”  Patiently building the Thousand Year Reich was taking too long.

We like things to be quick and easy nowadays.  Phone calls and eventually emails were too time consuming, so voila – the text.  Speed it up.  Faster is better.  Changing channels on the tv was just too much effort, so the remote was born.  Now it’s even too much to find something we like, so the tv finds it for us.  “Because you watched. . . . . . , you might also like . . . .”  Does anyone even know what a squash looks like anymore?  Of course not – it comes peeled and diced because it takes too long to do that at home.  Pretty soon, you’ll see acres of cubed squash growing in farms across the country.  “Instant” coffee was born because brewing a pot took way too long.  Even that was too much time and effort, so we use “call ahead” on our coffee app so we don’t have to wait when we get to Starbucks.  Fast food was born because, well, “slow” food implied waiting for it to cook.  We want it now.  Sometimes even waiting while a teenager slaps together a burger slows us down.  If we were meant to wait, God would never have given us the microwave.

So, what happened in human development led us to this?  Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers.  They’d stalk wildlife for days, waiting patiently behind trees and bushes for the antelope, which equally patiently would emerge at the riverbank thinking, “I’ll just have a sip – I don’t see anyone around.”  Farmers would patiently sow seeds in the spring, knowing that the produce was months away.  Here in New England, we will anticipate the arrival of “native” tomatoes because they’re better, but the flip side is that we have those other, regular alien tomatoes in the supermarket year-round.  

Perhaps technology has fed impatience into our universal genetic make-up.  The development of the assembly line created in us all, and particularly in the big-time money makers, a desire to do things faster.  It satisfied our thirst for more, but it also made us want more too.  So what if machinery lopped off fingers and hands, we’re getting more stuff made faster. Communication was a major hurdle.  Remember reading about war strategies and orders during the War of Independence coming from Britain by boat and taking two months?  They were outdated when they got here.  How can you fight a proper war that way?  So, Mr. Bell and Mr. Morse set out to fix that problem.  And now we have it – instant communication except where there’s no reception.  

In a rather glaring example of our impatience, you will notice that transportation isn’t exactly what we envisioned.  While Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world were developing high-speed public transportation, Americans made a commitment to the highway system.  So, while Japanese commuters are zipping from place to place in no time, we’re stuck in traffic on the highway.  I know, right?  But we’re in our own cars, and not to worry, we’ll use our cells to make the time productive while we recklessly weave in and out of traffic, illegally using the breakdown lane to gain a precious second or two.  That’s the spirit.  Now we’re saving time.  Or perhaps we should just put ourselves into an Amazon box and . . . . . .

Here’s another example of America’s steadfast impatience.  One day delivery.  “Five to seven business days” is a thing of the past, except for toilet paper and sanitary wipes.  Everything else can be ordered on line and delivered in minutes.  It’s got to the point where I forget what I ordered, so I have to check the front porch each day to see if anything’s out there.  I lean over and peek out the kitchen window.  Sometimes, they deliver things to the back door, which throws me all off.   I’d even look at the delivery dates to see which items would come the fastest.  Cheaper sometimes doesn’t matter.  That one can come on Thursday, while this other one won’t be here until next week.  Next week is the new “unacceptable”.  Who can wait a week?  Our kitchen faucet broke off in my hand the other day.  I have no idea how that happened.  It’s metal and should last forever, but no . . . .  I went across the street to the hardware store and picked up a new one.  Then I called the plumber because, well, I’m not terribly handy with things like that.  My skill set plays more to watching someone else do it.  In a pleasant surprise, the plumber could come the next morning to install it.  Great.  So, twenty-four hours and hundreds of dollars later, we’re back in business.  But I’ll happily pay that to have it working again quickly. 

Welcome to the new era of instant.  Instagram, instant messaging, instant breakfast, instant oatmeal, instant jello.  All the really important stuff is immediate. “Call ahead”, banking apps, because using the ATM takes too long, and waiting for that drawer at the drive-up window to come out so we can put stuff in it, well . . . ., who in the world has the time for that?  We don’t watch television in real time because then we’d have to sit through the commercials.  On demand” is better still, as the commercials don’t even exist there.  These days, we “stream” our lives because it seems like it’s moving continuously so we don’t waste time. We can’t wait for our lives to return to normal in a health crisis, we’ll just bring back normality and whatever happens, happens. We can’t let oatmeal or picking up a latte stand in the way of our valuable use of time and productivity.  We need to be busy, busy, so that we have more time to kick back and relax – that’s what everyone on House Hunters is looking to do – and forget about how busy we’ve been.

Speed – that’s the ticket.