Sunday was really cold, compared to the unseasonably warm weather we enjoyed last week, and it made me giddy. I don't hate hot weather. Don't get me wrong. It's less of a hassle going anywhere when you don't have to worry about coats for big people and babies, and shoes, and keeping socks on little feet that think they NEED TO BREATHE! But this time of year has been my favorite for as long as I can remember.
It feels like once school starts, there's one thing after another to look forward to in the fall. I'm not going to lie. I still am excited for the entire month of September, because my birthday's at the end of the month. Now that my daughter's birthday is at the beginning, my dad's birthday is in the middle, and mine's at the end of the month, we're pretty much covered for celebrations for every other week in September, and I think that's great!
When the NHL isn't locked out, the beginning of October means hockey season's coming. In the past, since we got our season tickets, that meant we'd go to a hockey game most weekends, either on Friday or Saturday night from October until Christmas. This beginning part of the season is when everything's all shiny and new. Hope is alive and well that THIS is the year that Lord Stanley's Cup is going to parade down Delaware Avenue in Buffalo. It doesn't matter if the Sabres lose a game or two here at the shiny, new beginning of the season, because the season's young, and they still have a bazillion more games to play! Granted, NHL fans of all stripes have to imagine this wonderful feeling of uplifting optimism this year, which might be why October is a little darker for this Sabres fan this year. My game night jerseys hang forlornly in my closet.
But at least there's still Halloween to look forward to! Then it's not too long before it's Thanksgiving, which as a holiday, I can pretty much take or leave, for many reasons, but I get excited The Day After Thanksgiving, because that's the day we break out the Leg Lamp and put it in the window. If we don't get the Christmas tree put up, at least it's on the agenda. If I've bought presents already, I can wrap with glee and set them around the living room to use as decorations! As long as the Christmas music stays put in the window that opens up the day after Thanksgiving, and then fades out just after New Year's Day, I really like it. Everything from right about now, Early October, until New Year's is more glamorous, more glittery, more magical. After New Year's, it's just cold and a long stretch before things get interesting again, really.
So back to this time of year. Rozzie and I went out on Sunday, so she could do her constitutional, and I could keep her from chasing the Amish who were parading up and down the road out front, and I caught a whiff of what I think of as Halloween Spirit in the air. It was cold. I could hear the trees in the windbreak creak a little. The farmers have been up in the field on the other side of the windbreak, cutting cornstalks, so there was that smell, faint, in the air. The wind carried on it a wink and a whisper of "Something fabulously wicked this way comes..."
It makes me smile every year.
See, I don't go for the gory-scary Halloweens that a lot of people over the age of 11 like. I was never big on horror movies. By that I mean I avoid horror movies at all costs. I don't like to be horrified. I DO believe in ghosts, and I do think the whole idea of them is fascinating, a little unsettling, but not because they're reaching through my television set to suck me into a void, rather because there's so much we don't understand about the darker recesses of our universe. We know the normal, and things like that walk along the normal and are the stuff of legends and superstitions and stories of things that go bump in the night.
So someone else can do up their house with fake blood coming out of the walls, and zombies grappling up out of the overgrown front yard, and the Dementor-looking grim reapers meant to hang from porch ceilings. I don't go for rotting anything. My Halloween style is much like an amplification of my every day style, which runs on the dark side anyway. I wish our house had come with a really cool, goth-looking wrought-iron fence and twisty trees. The skulls on the mantel wear seasonally-appropriate hats. One year, one of them wore an aviator's helmet and goggles and the other one wore a black, spiky Wicked Queen tiara. If we got more company up here on the hill, I'd go crazy with glittery spiderweb festooning the woodwork and windows, and black candles, little skulls on everything (okay, the little skulls on everything is a year-rounder around here, much to Shane's chagrin). I sometimes put out my little candle-holding skeletons on the deck. They're scary-cute. Sort of Tim Burton. You'll never see one of those nasty, big, hairy rats with the red eyes- and if you do, we're actually trying to kill it, so if you can help us with that, there'll be a bounty in it for you.
My Halloween style isn't exactly Disney-esque, but let's just say, I felt right at home in the Haunted Mansion ride at the 'World. Halloween with a sense of humor instead of a sense of horror. A holiday with a wink and a crooked grin and a whisper of "Something fabulously Wicked this way comes!"
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Monday, October 8, 2012
CPR Refresher Course for HealthCare Providers, Or "Where I had no business being!"
When I started working as an assistant with Shane, I had to be certified in CPR, in case things went really, really pear-shaped with a patient in the chair. I never minded the CPR training. I feel (in theory), like knowledge is power.
That first CPR training was pretty rough. I vaguely remembered learning CPR enough to get my First Aid Badge in Girl Scouts in the fourth grade, but let's be honest. I half-assed that, collected my badge, and fluttered on to the next one, because Girl Scout badges weren't so much a way to reflect on things I learned and would maybe ever have to use in real life, as they were a way to make my green sash look all flashy with sewn-on bling at Girl Scout get-togethers.
And wouldn't you know, because I was going to the CPR class with a bunch of healthcare providers, I wound up in the "CPR Refresher Course for Healthcare Providers." Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit! I started out at the bottom of the hill and went down from there. The whole time, I felt a palpable sensation of pure panic, no two ways about it. I watched the video with clenched jaw and dry mouth as they the people on the training video bandied about doctor-words like "sternum," and talked about going two finger-widths up from the xiphoid process, to prevent lacerating the liver when you do chest compressions, I full-out freaked.
"Shane!" I hissed at my husband, Doctor Blake. "Shane! Where's the sternum?"
He looked at me like I was crazy.
"Are you serious?" he whispered back. My eyes bulging out of my head and the visible and throbbing vein in my temple must have made him realize yeah, I was serious. "Breastbone!"
Sonofabitch, he was right. I knew that. I KNEW THAT!!!
Another dentist we worked with was sitting on the other side of him, and I saw her roll her eyes and make a pfffffffft face. I realized I'd stupidly played my 'English Major' card that day, and made a mental note to just be hyper-vigilant, to figure out on my own what this xiphoid process was, to avoid more rolling eyes and pffffffffffft faces from the Genius Gallery. I looked around. I was the only one in the room dutifully taking notes. Strike that. Furiously taking notes. I was writing notes from the training video as fast as my pen would move. I didn't want to miss anything. Everyone else in there, all doctors and dentists, and the hygienists from our office, were relaxing in their folding chairs, a collective air of ennui about them. They all knew where the sternum was, without having to ask my husband. They didn't have to sit there wondering what a xiphoid process was or what it did, besides lacerating internal organs!
Then out came the dummies. The big-people dummies were all Annie, and the baby dummies were Baby. Annie! I remembered Annie from Girl Scouts! Geeze Louise, she sure didn't look any better on this day than she did when I was nine. Man, that was too bad.
And I watched all the doctors and dentists and hygienists deftly do their chest compressions and simulated rescue-breaths on Annie and Baby. They all made it look so easy.
"Yeah," I overheard Dr. Rolly Eyes saying to one of our hygienists, "when I was doing my dental residency at Hershey, I took all the Code Blues I could get."
Good for her, I thought. I also thought 'One time, at band camp....' and went on watching our boss dentist save Annie's life and her baby's.
All too soon, it was my turn, but I'd prepared. I'd been watching the real healthcare providers. I felt pretty okay with this. So the instructor turned me loose on Annie, and right off the bat, didn't I start doing chest compressions too low- right on the xiphoid process the instructional video had said NOT to compress!
"Well, aside from a lacerated liver," said the instructor, her voice trailing off in an impatient arc. I knew my idiocy was keeping her from getting home in time to catch Wheel of Fortune. Thing was, I wasn't doing it for attention or anything else. I was outclassed, outsmarted, out of the CPR kiddie pool, where I should have been.
"Sorry," I said to her. "Sorry, Annie."
Compressing up where you're supposed to compress was a lot harder to compress, and now I was all afraid of hurting Annie, and puncturing her lungs, along with having lacerated her liver by pushing on the xyphoid process and all. They decided to have me demonstrate knowing how to do CPR on Baby, and come back to Annie. Great idea. Let me kill Annie's baby before coming back to finish her off!
Getting me through the practical CPR training was painful for me, painful for the instructor, painful for the healthcare providers unfortunate to have had me thrown in with them in their class, and painful for Annie and Baby, for sure. The written test, everybody else sailed through. I sat there, staring at my paper, trying to see the questions and multiple choice through the tears in my eyes. It was getting really late, and another group needed to use the hospital conference room, so my test became an exercise in cooperative test-taking, and I was shooshelled out with my "CPR for HealthCare Providers" in my wallet.
Did it look impressive as hell to see when I'd open my wallet to pay for after-work Hershey's therapy, and see that CPR for HealthCare Providers certificate? Yes it did. Did I pray every night that nobody would drop on the floor with a heart spell or a choked-on marshmallow with only me around? You betcha.
I also went home and Googled everything about CPR I could find on the world wide web. I dug out Shane's Gross Anatomy Lab Manual (gross in more ways than just one- that thing actually went into cadaver lab with him....), and read up on anatomy in general, and the structures in the chest cavity in particular. Right there, in illustrated (and messy) glory, was the sternum, the xiphoid process, the lungs, the liver that you don't want to lacerate with the xiphoid process.
The next time we had to do the CPR training, we weren't in the "Refresher Course for HealthCare Providers." We were in the CPR course for just anybody. The rules were simpler. The instructor was better. When I started to freeze up, trying to be perfect, the instructor actually smiled kindly and said that mostly, any CPR is better than no CPR to someone who's stopped breathing, and you can't really hurt them by doing CPR. I wanted to ask if she'd talked to Annie and her lacerated liver, but instead, I absorbed the mantra that any CPR is better than no CPR.
When the headlights came on, I was not the deer in them, at least as far as the class was concerned.
In theory, I know what to do. I know that if you sing 'Stayin' Alive' by the BeeGees while you're doing the chest compressions, and do the compressions in time with that song, that's about the number of beats per minute you need for the chest compressions. I know that most likely, if you have to do CPR, you're going to get puked on, and you're probably going to break some ribs. All small stuff, when the situation is life or death.
I still can't be sure I wouldn't be the deer in the headlights, if the headlights were shining on me in a real situation. I'd like to think that everything that's happened since that day in 2002, when I was placed in the "Refresher Course for HealthCare Providers" has helped me keep a cooler head in emergencies. I mean, I've gotten sort of lost in an airplane- a couple of times, even, and found my own way back to my home airport without having to call Cleveland Center to vector me home. I practiced and practiced how to break a stall in that plane. I practiced and practiced what to do when an engine's out, either partially or wholly, enough so I stopped getting that sick feeling in my gut whenever my flight instructor would pull back the throttle and mixture and cut the engine. And then the day we really needed to make the landing the first time at the airport, with no option of a go-around, the day my plane's engine decided to crap out. I knew just exactly what to do, and the rest as all about keeping calm and doing it. I'm here to tell the tale, so training and being prepared works.
And now that I have a little kid in the house, I want to make sure that in the event of some emergency, I'm able to do something, not be the hysterical mother who's helplessly ringing her hands while waiting for help. So I have some work to do. CPR, first aid. This time, I'm really going to earn that First Aid badge, and not give a rip about a patch on a green sash.
That first CPR training was pretty rough. I vaguely remembered learning CPR enough to get my First Aid Badge in Girl Scouts in the fourth grade, but let's be honest. I half-assed that, collected my badge, and fluttered on to the next one, because Girl Scout badges weren't so much a way to reflect on things I learned and would maybe ever have to use in real life, as they were a way to make my green sash look all flashy with sewn-on bling at Girl Scout get-togethers.
And wouldn't you know, because I was going to the CPR class with a bunch of healthcare providers, I wound up in the "CPR Refresher Course for Healthcare Providers." Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit! I started out at the bottom of the hill and went down from there. The whole time, I felt a palpable sensation of pure panic, no two ways about it. I watched the video with clenched jaw and dry mouth as they the people on the training video bandied about doctor-words like "sternum," and talked about going two finger-widths up from the xiphoid process, to prevent lacerating the liver when you do chest compressions, I full-out freaked.
"Shane!" I hissed at my husband, Doctor Blake. "Shane! Where's the sternum?"
He looked at me like I was crazy.
"Are you serious?" he whispered back. My eyes bulging out of my head and the visible and throbbing vein in my temple must have made him realize yeah, I was serious. "Breastbone!"
Sonofabitch, he was right. I knew that. I KNEW THAT!!!
Another dentist we worked with was sitting on the other side of him, and I saw her roll her eyes and make a pfffffffft face. I realized I'd stupidly played my 'English Major' card that day, and made a mental note to just be hyper-vigilant, to figure out on my own what this xiphoid process was, to avoid more rolling eyes and pffffffffffft faces from the Genius Gallery. I looked around. I was the only one in the room dutifully taking notes. Strike that. Furiously taking notes. I was writing notes from the training video as fast as my pen would move. I didn't want to miss anything. Everyone else in there, all doctors and dentists, and the hygienists from our office, were relaxing in their folding chairs, a collective air of ennui about them. They all knew where the sternum was, without having to ask my husband. They didn't have to sit there wondering what a xiphoid process was or what it did, besides lacerating internal organs!
Then out came the dummies. The big-people dummies were all Annie, and the baby dummies were Baby. Annie! I remembered Annie from Girl Scouts! Geeze Louise, she sure didn't look any better on this day than she did when I was nine. Man, that was too bad.
And I watched all the doctors and dentists and hygienists deftly do their chest compressions and simulated rescue-breaths on Annie and Baby. They all made it look so easy.
"Yeah," I overheard Dr. Rolly Eyes saying to one of our hygienists, "when I was doing my dental residency at Hershey, I took all the Code Blues I could get."
Good for her, I thought. I also thought 'One time, at band camp....' and went on watching our boss dentist save Annie's life and her baby's.
All too soon, it was my turn, but I'd prepared. I'd been watching the real healthcare providers. I felt pretty okay with this. So the instructor turned me loose on Annie, and right off the bat, didn't I start doing chest compressions too low- right on the xiphoid process the instructional video had said NOT to compress!
"Well, aside from a lacerated liver," said the instructor, her voice trailing off in an impatient arc. I knew my idiocy was keeping her from getting home in time to catch Wheel of Fortune. Thing was, I wasn't doing it for attention or anything else. I was outclassed, outsmarted, out of the CPR kiddie pool, where I should have been.
"Sorry," I said to her. "Sorry, Annie."
Compressing up where you're supposed to compress was a lot harder to compress, and now I was all afraid of hurting Annie, and puncturing her lungs, along with having lacerated her liver by pushing on the xyphoid process and all. They decided to have me demonstrate knowing how to do CPR on Baby, and come back to Annie. Great idea. Let me kill Annie's baby before coming back to finish her off!
Getting me through the practical CPR training was painful for me, painful for the instructor, painful for the healthcare providers unfortunate to have had me thrown in with them in their class, and painful for Annie and Baby, for sure. The written test, everybody else sailed through. I sat there, staring at my paper, trying to see the questions and multiple choice through the tears in my eyes. It was getting really late, and another group needed to use the hospital conference room, so my test became an exercise in cooperative test-taking, and I was shooshelled out with my "CPR for HealthCare Providers" in my wallet.
Did it look impressive as hell to see when I'd open my wallet to pay for after-work Hershey's therapy, and see that CPR for HealthCare Providers certificate? Yes it did. Did I pray every night that nobody would drop on the floor with a heart spell or a choked-on marshmallow with only me around? You betcha.
I also went home and Googled everything about CPR I could find on the world wide web. I dug out Shane's Gross Anatomy Lab Manual (gross in more ways than just one- that thing actually went into cadaver lab with him....), and read up on anatomy in general, and the structures in the chest cavity in particular. Right there, in illustrated (and messy) glory, was the sternum, the xiphoid process, the lungs, the liver that you don't want to lacerate with the xiphoid process.
The next time we had to do the CPR training, we weren't in the "Refresher Course for HealthCare Providers." We were in the CPR course for just anybody. The rules were simpler. The instructor was better. When I started to freeze up, trying to be perfect, the instructor actually smiled kindly and said that mostly, any CPR is better than no CPR to someone who's stopped breathing, and you can't really hurt them by doing CPR. I wanted to ask if she'd talked to Annie and her lacerated liver, but instead, I absorbed the mantra that any CPR is better than no CPR.
When the headlights came on, I was not the deer in them, at least as far as the class was concerned.
In theory, I know what to do. I know that if you sing 'Stayin' Alive' by the BeeGees while you're doing the chest compressions, and do the compressions in time with that song, that's about the number of beats per minute you need for the chest compressions. I know that most likely, if you have to do CPR, you're going to get puked on, and you're probably going to break some ribs. All small stuff, when the situation is life or death.
I still can't be sure I wouldn't be the deer in the headlights, if the headlights were shining on me in a real situation. I'd like to think that everything that's happened since that day in 2002, when I was placed in the "Refresher Course for HealthCare Providers" has helped me keep a cooler head in emergencies. I mean, I've gotten sort of lost in an airplane- a couple of times, even, and found my own way back to my home airport without having to call Cleveland Center to vector me home. I practiced and practiced how to break a stall in that plane. I practiced and practiced what to do when an engine's out, either partially or wholly, enough so I stopped getting that sick feeling in my gut whenever my flight instructor would pull back the throttle and mixture and cut the engine. And then the day we really needed to make the landing the first time at the airport, with no option of a go-around, the day my plane's engine decided to crap out. I knew just exactly what to do, and the rest as all about keeping calm and doing it. I'm here to tell the tale, so training and being prepared works.
And now that I have a little kid in the house, I want to make sure that in the event of some emergency, I'm able to do something, not be the hysterical mother who's helplessly ringing her hands while waiting for help. So I have some work to do. CPR, first aid. This time, I'm really going to earn that First Aid badge, and not give a rip about a patch on a green sash.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Alternative to What? Music
Remember the '90s? For some reason, I've been stuck there a lot
lately. One reason is a game called "SongPop." Since I'm still pretty
new to the game, I don't have a lot of playlists to pick from, so the
"90s Alternative" playlist comes up very often.
In the nineties, if you wanted to sound like a Cool Kid when someone asked you what kind of music you liked, you'd affect a pose of slouchy not-caring-ness and shrug and say 'I like Alternative,' and everybody knew what you meant. Except before I even graduated from high school, "Alternative" was more like "Allthereistoturnthedialto."
Even at the time, it was hard to really put a finger on "Alternative," because everybody called themselves "Alternative." Everybody was rebelling against some machine, but few of us knew what it was we were rebelling against.
I never gave it much thought back then. I just liked the music. I'd grown up listening to the Beach Boys and Elvis and the Beatles, all great, great music, but something about listening to "Alternative" music made squeaky-clean, goody-two-shoes me feel a little badass. But this game, which puts U2 and Joan Osborne and Nirvana and Duran Duran on the same playlist for us to guess the songs, got me wondering just how something so ubiquitous, and in a lot of cases commercial, could have ever been called "Alternative."
I didn't have it then, but now, I have the power of the Internet, so I checked around. 'Alternative' music, as it turns out, began as a term for music that started out with independent labels, which a surprising number of acts did. And it became a catch-all to mean anything from independent rock to college rock to postmodern to post-punk. It's one of those terms that's a big, overstuffed, jumbled-up duffelbag that means everything and nothing.
Alternative to what?
You get older, and get more confident in your own tastes, and care less about being a Cool Kid. It's not enough explanation to drawl "Alternative" when someone asks you what music you like, especially if you're stuck in a car with someone and you don't have the sand to put on your earbuds and listen to your own iPod. Say you tell them you like "Alternative," thinking music in the vein of Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins, and U2, and what you get instead is four hours of "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" That right there would make me think about throwing myself from a vehicle moving at highway speeds, before even the first "Yippie-yi, Yippie-yay!" Especially now, since we're kind of out of the "Alternative" movement, and can look back and see borders between the different kinds of music that huddled under the "Alternative" festival tent in the '90s.
And since we've passed the decade point of the passing of the 1990s, it's even okay to admit that you didn't really care much for the Alternative Music of the 1990s at all. Nobody's going to trip you in the lunchroom over it. And if they do, they're the ones with issues, not you. I don't fall into the camp that didn't like any of the music back then. I have very strong likes and dislikes, and even some music from then I'm tepid about. But I do have to say, I couldn't stand it when everybody wore flannel shirts for every occasion. And 90s hair frustrated me to no end, with all its half-hearted, sulky, dirty lifeless flatness. I'm a big-hair, lots of makeup girl. I'm really more glam-rock than grunge, so in that respect, and also with Ace of Base factored in, and the whole junior high thing, the 90s were a little bit of a personal Hell for me in some ways.
So no matter how old you are, like the music you like, and I'll like the music I like. If the Nineties taught us anything, it's that if you don't like what's on this station, you have Alternatives.
In the nineties, if you wanted to sound like a Cool Kid when someone asked you what kind of music you liked, you'd affect a pose of slouchy not-caring-ness and shrug and say 'I like Alternative,' and everybody knew what you meant. Except before I even graduated from high school, "Alternative" was more like "Allthereistoturnthedialto."
Even at the time, it was hard to really put a finger on "Alternative," because everybody called themselves "Alternative." Everybody was rebelling against some machine, but few of us knew what it was we were rebelling against.
I never gave it much thought back then. I just liked the music. I'd grown up listening to the Beach Boys and Elvis and the Beatles, all great, great music, but something about listening to "Alternative" music made squeaky-clean, goody-two-shoes me feel a little badass. But this game, which puts U2 and Joan Osborne and Nirvana and Duran Duran on the same playlist for us to guess the songs, got me wondering just how something so ubiquitous, and in a lot of cases commercial, could have ever been called "Alternative."
I didn't have it then, but now, I have the power of the Internet, so I checked around. 'Alternative' music, as it turns out, began as a term for music that started out with independent labels, which a surprising number of acts did. And it became a catch-all to mean anything from independent rock to college rock to postmodern to post-punk. It's one of those terms that's a big, overstuffed, jumbled-up duffelbag that means everything and nothing.
Alternative to what?
You get older, and get more confident in your own tastes, and care less about being a Cool Kid. It's not enough explanation to drawl "Alternative" when someone asks you what music you like, especially if you're stuck in a car with someone and you don't have the sand to put on your earbuds and listen to your own iPod. Say you tell them you like "Alternative," thinking music in the vein of Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins, and U2, and what you get instead is four hours of "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" That right there would make me think about throwing myself from a vehicle moving at highway speeds, before even the first "Yippie-yi, Yippie-yay!" Especially now, since we're kind of out of the "Alternative" movement, and can look back and see borders between the different kinds of music that huddled under the "Alternative" festival tent in the '90s.
And since we've passed the decade point of the passing of the 1990s, it's even okay to admit that you didn't really care much for the Alternative Music of the 1990s at all. Nobody's going to trip you in the lunchroom over it. And if they do, they're the ones with issues, not you. I don't fall into the camp that didn't like any of the music back then. I have very strong likes and dislikes, and even some music from then I'm tepid about. But I do have to say, I couldn't stand it when everybody wore flannel shirts for every occasion. And 90s hair frustrated me to no end, with all its half-hearted, sulky, dirty lifeless flatness. I'm a big-hair, lots of makeup girl. I'm really more glam-rock than grunge, so in that respect, and also with Ace of Base factored in, and the whole junior high thing, the 90s were a little bit of a personal Hell for me in some ways.
So no matter how old you are, like the music you like, and I'll like the music I like. If the Nineties taught us anything, it's that if you don't like what's on this station, you have Alternatives.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
This Was Our Friday
Yesterday was just loads of sequential vortex fun, here at the house. See, it all started about a month ago, the (hot) day of Zoe's birthday party. I realized that our refrigerator's ice maker, which has been in service for five whole years, had kicked the bucket. There were bigger things to deal with, though, and we haven't really had a chance to deal with it or figure out just what the problem was, until yesterday.
Shane said it could be as simple as the water line being frozen, so he unloaded the whole fridge and freezer, stocked our other fridge downstairs (the 30-year-old "beer fridge" that never has any beer in it) with our perishables, and unplugged our kitchen fridge to give the line time to defrost. Since there wasn't anything else he could do while we waited for things to thaw out, and since Zoe was taking a nap upstairs, he decided to go to NAPA in search of lightbulbs for his car or whatever guys go to NAPA for. And I thought I'd impress the daylights out of him by having the refrigerator all cleaned and shiny when he got back.
It started out smooth enough. Both the fridge and freezer were empty, and my Scunci Steamer, a bottle of half-and-half white vinegar and water, and a microfiber cloth and a Magic Eraser made easy work of the spills and such that accumulate in a refrigerator between Big Cleanings (read: in the five years we've had it- oops!)
And then I noticed, sticking out from under the refrigerator, a ball of white dog hair. Geeze Louise! If I'm going to clean the refrigerator, I ought to clean around and under it, too! So I got our central vac's 30-foot hose and commenced to prodding blindly under the fridge. Then I heard what sounded like an area rug getting sucked up inside the hose, and I stopped short. I also stopped because I suddenly had no suction, but I could hear the unit downstairs really revving.
A clog! NOOOOOOOOOO!
Well, I still had the refrigerator bins and removable shelves to wash, but a plugged-up central vacuum hose counts as an emergency in my world. Otherwise, I'd just stuff it back in its cubby and forget about it until I have a big mess to vacuum up, and then---- no suction! So I set out to try to find out where the clog in the hose was, and to push it back out. I knew WHAT the clog was- dog hair!- because after my hose got stopped up, I took the face plate off the refrigerator grate and had a look. It looked like quilt batting under there. No wonder things got plugged! Big wonder we haven't had a fire here because of it!
Shane still wasn't home- how long can it take to find stupid light bulbs for a car, anyway? So I had to muddle through and try to figure this out on my own. First off, I duct-taped all the Swiffer Sweeper handles together that we have in the house (3 of them), which got me a third of the way through the sweeper hose, if I was lucky. I spent way too much time trying this tactic, when it dawned on me that since the hose was clogged with a batting-like hair ball, maybe if I sent a bunch of quarters down the hose, and shook it really good while doing so, the money would dislodge the hairball, and all it would cost me was a little dignity and some dirty quarters, since I'd need to perform this delicate surgery out in the yard, where I'd have enough room to really stretch out that hose and not beat up the floor while I flailed it around.
In went 50 quarters. I counted them as I sent them down the sweeper hose. And I shook and shook the hose, making sure to agitate whatever was in there loose. When I got the hose collected back up on the porch, I got all 50 quarters retrieved, and.... just some residual dust from inside the hose. So again, with the quarters and the shaking, and.... same thing. If that hairball somehow let two loads of quarters through without getting dislodged and forced out, it was a magical hairball, for sure!
I was starting to feel that sick, panicky feeling, though. That meant the clog was not in my hose, but somewhere in the ductwork between the outlet in the kitchen and the vac unit in the basement. And Zoe was upstairs crying because she'd woken up from a good, long afternoon nap, it was five o'clock, and she was ready not to be up in her room anymore. And how could I bring my sweet little girl back downstairs to a house with a plugged-up central vac unit?! And where was Shane? Damn that car, and damn his cell phone, sitting and mocking me on the kitchen island!
Just when I was building up a good head of steam, I caught the back end of a bright snot-green car rolling through the intersection. On a good day, the car is something-something official green. On days like today, when I'm frustrated, the car's snot-green, and a big time-suck. I have a love-hate relationship with Shane's hobby, in other words.
But, I had to remind myself as he put the car in park in front of the house, it wasn't Shane who'd sucked up a giant hairball in the sweeper and plugged it up, so he didn't need me to start yelling the minute he got out of the car. And he seemed to be in a good mood, which is the kind of mood the car puts him in, and I didn't want his trip to have been all for naught.
"Ummmm, I sort of plugged up the vacuum," I said, and proceeded to tell him all about my repair efforts.
"Oh, not a problem. We just need to snake it," he said, almost cheerfully. That snot green car has magical powers. If I'd said this to him on a work day, when he hadn't been driving the car, I would have gotten his "Shane look," which Zoe also gives me if I do something she doesn't like.
Within fifteen minutes, he had the duct all snaked out, and the big quilt-batting-like dog hair ball sat in a big pile in the middle of the basement floor. And the central vac hasn't had this much suction in ages. And after I washed my declogger quarters, I've never had cleaner parking meter money.
But there was still the thing that set all this off to begin with. The ice maker. After we got everything cleaned the rest of the way up (the refrigerator and freezer are SPARKLY inside!), we plugged everything back in, and.... no ice. So the thing is really, really dead. But happily, Shane thinks it might be the sensor, and that with the $40 part, he could maybe fix it himself. So there's one on its way, as I type.
And just in case there's really no fixing the ice maker, we've already talked about what our endgame is. We're just going to buy a portable ice maker unit to make our ice, and fill up the tub in the freezer, to continue with the through-the-door ice service we've become accustomed to in the last five years, because first of all, I LOVE my refrigerator, and I'm not about to go looking for a new one, simply because the ice maker, which is really kind of a fragile, pain in the butt little part of the entire unit, broke, and more importantly because we're afraid that if we got a new fridge, we'd end up remodeling the kitchen, which would make the rest of the house look shabby, and next thing you know, this house is gutted again, and us, the kid, and the dog are living in the yard in a travel trailer for the next ten years while we work on the house.
It's the way of the Sequential Vortex, people.
Shane said it could be as simple as the water line being frozen, so he unloaded the whole fridge and freezer, stocked our other fridge downstairs (the 30-year-old "beer fridge" that never has any beer in it) with our perishables, and unplugged our kitchen fridge to give the line time to defrost. Since there wasn't anything else he could do while we waited for things to thaw out, and since Zoe was taking a nap upstairs, he decided to go to NAPA in search of lightbulbs for his car or whatever guys go to NAPA for. And I thought I'd impress the daylights out of him by having the refrigerator all cleaned and shiny when he got back.
It started out smooth enough. Both the fridge and freezer were empty, and my Scunci Steamer, a bottle of half-and-half white vinegar and water, and a microfiber cloth and a Magic Eraser made easy work of the spills and such that accumulate in a refrigerator between Big Cleanings (read: in the five years we've had it- oops!)
And then I noticed, sticking out from under the refrigerator, a ball of white dog hair. Geeze Louise! If I'm going to clean the refrigerator, I ought to clean around and under it, too! So I got our central vac's 30-foot hose and commenced to prodding blindly under the fridge. Then I heard what sounded like an area rug getting sucked up inside the hose, and I stopped short. I also stopped because I suddenly had no suction, but I could hear the unit downstairs really revving.
A clog! NOOOOOOOOOO!
Well, I still had the refrigerator bins and removable shelves to wash, but a plugged-up central vacuum hose counts as an emergency in my world. Otherwise, I'd just stuff it back in its cubby and forget about it until I have a big mess to vacuum up, and then---- no suction! So I set out to try to find out where the clog in the hose was, and to push it back out. I knew WHAT the clog was- dog hair!- because after my hose got stopped up, I took the face plate off the refrigerator grate and had a look. It looked like quilt batting under there. No wonder things got plugged! Big wonder we haven't had a fire here because of it!
Shane still wasn't home- how long can it take to find stupid light bulbs for a car, anyway? So I had to muddle through and try to figure this out on my own. First off, I duct-taped all the Swiffer Sweeper handles together that we have in the house (3 of them), which got me a third of the way through the sweeper hose, if I was lucky. I spent way too much time trying this tactic, when it dawned on me that since the hose was clogged with a batting-like hair ball, maybe if I sent a bunch of quarters down the hose, and shook it really good while doing so, the money would dislodge the hairball, and all it would cost me was a little dignity and some dirty quarters, since I'd need to perform this delicate surgery out in the yard, where I'd have enough room to really stretch out that hose and not beat up the floor while I flailed it around.
In went 50 quarters. I counted them as I sent them down the sweeper hose. And I shook and shook the hose, making sure to agitate whatever was in there loose. When I got the hose collected back up on the porch, I got all 50 quarters retrieved, and.... just some residual dust from inside the hose. So again, with the quarters and the shaking, and.... same thing. If that hairball somehow let two loads of quarters through without getting dislodged and forced out, it was a magical hairball, for sure!
I was starting to feel that sick, panicky feeling, though. That meant the clog was not in my hose, but somewhere in the ductwork between the outlet in the kitchen and the vac unit in the basement. And Zoe was upstairs crying because she'd woken up from a good, long afternoon nap, it was five o'clock, and she was ready not to be up in her room anymore. And how could I bring my sweet little girl back downstairs to a house with a plugged-up central vac unit?! And where was Shane? Damn that car, and damn his cell phone, sitting and mocking me on the kitchen island!
Just when I was building up a good head of steam, I caught the back end of a bright snot-green car rolling through the intersection. On a good day, the car is something-something official green. On days like today, when I'm frustrated, the car's snot-green, and a big time-suck. I have a love-hate relationship with Shane's hobby, in other words.
But, I had to remind myself as he put the car in park in front of the house, it wasn't Shane who'd sucked up a giant hairball in the sweeper and plugged it up, so he didn't need me to start yelling the minute he got out of the car. And he seemed to be in a good mood, which is the kind of mood the car puts him in, and I didn't want his trip to have been all for naught.
"Ummmm, I sort of plugged up the vacuum," I said, and proceeded to tell him all about my repair efforts.
"Oh, not a problem. We just need to snake it," he said, almost cheerfully. That snot green car has magical powers. If I'd said this to him on a work day, when he hadn't been driving the car, I would have gotten his "Shane look," which Zoe also gives me if I do something she doesn't like.
Within fifteen minutes, he had the duct all snaked out, and the big quilt-batting-like dog hair ball sat in a big pile in the middle of the basement floor. And the central vac hasn't had this much suction in ages. And after I washed my declogger quarters, I've never had cleaner parking meter money.
But there was still the thing that set all this off to begin with. The ice maker. After we got everything cleaned the rest of the way up (the refrigerator and freezer are SPARKLY inside!), we plugged everything back in, and.... no ice. So the thing is really, really dead. But happily, Shane thinks it might be the sensor, and that with the $40 part, he could maybe fix it himself. So there's one on its way, as I type.
And just in case there's really no fixing the ice maker, we've already talked about what our endgame is. We're just going to buy a portable ice maker unit to make our ice, and fill up the tub in the freezer, to continue with the through-the-door ice service we've become accustomed to in the last five years, because first of all, I LOVE my refrigerator, and I'm not about to go looking for a new one, simply because the ice maker, which is really kind of a fragile, pain in the butt little part of the entire unit, broke, and more importantly because we're afraid that if we got a new fridge, we'd end up remodeling the kitchen, which would make the rest of the house look shabby, and next thing you know, this house is gutted again, and us, the kid, and the dog are living in the yard in a travel trailer for the next ten years while we work on the house.
It's the way of the Sequential Vortex, people.
Friday, October 5, 2012
My Big, Fat Mess
Last week, Mom, Zoe, and I went shopping on my birthday. Zoe was the big winner of the day, coming home with a closetful of new outfits that she probably didn't so much need, but they're adorable, so there you go. That's not to say I didn't see anything I liked. Some stuff was a lot like other things I have in my closet and wear, so there was no point in buying more, since by rights, I should really hoe out the closet anyway.
But there was this one top in Penney's. It was a black sleeveless shell, with a subtle peplum and a belt, and was made of a fabric that looked like leather, but it wasn't. It was right up my alley, and as Mom agreed to keep Zoe occupied, I took a Size M and Size L (there was no Size S, but it probably didn't matter, as the fabric, while not leather, offered no stretch anyway) into the fitting room.
I've been packing on a few pounds lately, so I started out by trying on the Size L. Happily, it looked huge on me, like I'd cut a neck and armholes in a garbage bag and cinched a skinny belt around the middle. So I hung it back on the hanger nicely, wrapped the belt around it, and cinched it back up, just like I'd found it.
I was a little giddy, pulling on the Size M. I really loved the looks of this top, and I was imagining how I'd wear it as-is, while it was still warm, then add a long-sleeved top underneath when it got cold, making it sort of a pullover vest. I was thinking of all the places I could wear it, and already feeling a little bit cool and rock-starrish.
The reflection didn't match up with my expectations. The drop from the shoulders to the bust darts was too long for me, putting the bust darts an inch too low and making me look not like a rock star but a droopy-boobed fashion victim. I stood there in the mirror for more minutes than I really needed to, pinching at the fabric, wondering if I just took up the shoulders a little bit, would it render the armholes too small? What if I ran a seem down the sides, too? Nipped it in just a little more? Mmmmmmmaybe. But then I realized the top had a worse flaw than too-low bust-darts. It cut me off right at an awkward place, making me look shorter and wider than I already am. Having the peplum around the bottom didn't help matters much. That just added a horizontal line to confirm suspicions.
In disgust, I peeled the top off, hung it nicely back on its hanger, wrapped the belt around it, just like I'd found it. After all, it's not the Penney's sales associates fault that the clothes didn't fit me, so why should I pay forward my bad feelings and make them pick rejected Worthington shells off the fitting room floor? That's no way to be!
Before I put my own black three-quarter-sleeve fitted T back on, though, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing a generic Spanx tank, which I bought in bulk the week after Zoe was born, to smooth things out and prevent back fat, and also to keep from exposing a lot of boobage while wearing a deep-V-neck. And I saw a chubster looking back at me. My London "Boyfriend" jeans with 4% spandex that I was wearing, that I always wear, which fit the best of any jeans I've had in my adult life, didn't really do anything for me. I looked short-legged, thick-legged, stocky. I figured it was just because I had the black Spanx-like tank tucked in, and things were cutting me off at a weird angle, so I put my own top back on. I think that made things worse. Now I looked chunky AND a little frumpy.
Didn't I remember looking in the mirror this morning and thinking I didn't look all that bad?
Well, maybe not. I was lucky enough to have "snapped back" after Zoe was born, pretty quickly. I had to pack away the maternity pants a week after she was born. I'm not bragging. I had a good base of muscle tone, I worked hard at keeping fit while pregnant, and then the rest is probably luck. I was also not a skinny-mini before I was pregnant. I was around 140, and I was back to that weight by New Year's. The scale has crept back up to 147, 150 in these last few weeks. 150 is the weight I held steady at for weeks during my pregnancy- until about the 20-week mark. I know, because I weighed myself every day and kept track in a notebook. I've been able to stay in the same pants and tops I wore before Zoe, and after Zoe. They're just a little tighter on some days than others. So I probably hadn't really, actually looked myself over that much in the mirror that day or any day in a while, really. What I was seeing in the mirror that day at Penney's wasn't an awful muffin top lopping over my jeans, or pronounced backfat, or an ass like the back of a bus, but I was seeing "thickness," "puffiness," just a lack of definition.
When I stomped out of the fitting room, I told Mom that if I could put my own clothes back on the rack and walk away that day, I would have, because I didn't like how they looked on me any more than I liked the way the top had.
I work out almost every day. I can do a hour-long intense step workout without being winded (tired, soaked in sweat, noodly muscles, yes, but not doubled over and struggling to breathe), I can lift heavy weights. I can lift up Rozzie, who weighs a good 70+ pounds and haul her up the stairs at a good clip. So I'm not so much out of shape. But it's a lie that I tell myself over and over that a) I weigh more because I have more muscle, and b) I work out a lot, so I can eat whatever I want.
The thing is, the kitchen trumps the gym, hands down. I know this, when I track what I eat. I can burn 400 calories in an hour, and then come up to the kitchen and wipe that out with one big spoonful of Nutella. Or six pumps of syrup in my coffee (really, all I need is about 3 to make it sweet enough). Or half a dozen cookies.
I know that a lot of factors can make a person carry more weight than they need. Sometimes it's an underactive thyroid. I had mine tested when I was 30, and it came back squeaky clean. I know I should probably go have this checked again, just for good maintenance, but I don't think underactive thyroid is my problem. Back when I had it tested, I kind of hoped that it was the problem, because then I could pop a pill, get all the levels straightened out, and be skinny! I know some people have metabolic disorders that cause them to burn what they eat veeeeeerrrrrrrrrrry sloooooooooooowly. Some people are genetically predisposed to be larger- they're the "big-boned" folks. I don't think I can use that excuse. And everybody says it's easier to put on weight and harder to take it off after you have a baby, but a lot of the fitness mentors I follow have had two or three babies and don't have this thick look like I do. Disorders like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) can be both a result of being overweight and a contributing factor of overweightness. The jury's still out on whether or not that's a problem for me, but I've read that even if it is, as far as weight goes, it can be overcome with hard work- diet and exercise.
The thing about this current Big Fat Mess I have myself in is that I put myself in it. When I was younger, I enjoyed a fast metabolism, but I was never skinny (skinny's not what I'm going for, even now- I do have muscle buried like treasure under the layer of chub, and I want THAT to show through!). I never paid much attention to what I ate and got used to not having to, to stay reasonably thin. Then I'd lie to myself and say that since I work out, I don't really have to skip dessert. But the thing is, I don't have an excuse, and I don't have somebody else to blame this on. It's all me, and that really sucks.
Except, it kind of doesn't. See, instead of sitting helplessly by, lamenting that something- I don't know what, but something- is making me fat, and I don't have any control over it, and I'm just helpless to watch that scale creep up and up and up while I find bigger and bigger pants, I know that it's been my own bad habits that are making me a thicker version of myself than I want to be. I got myself into this big, fat mess. I have the power to get myself back out of it.
Yes, I do!
But there was this one top in Penney's. It was a black sleeveless shell, with a subtle peplum and a belt, and was made of a fabric that looked like leather, but it wasn't. It was right up my alley, and as Mom agreed to keep Zoe occupied, I took a Size M and Size L (there was no Size S, but it probably didn't matter, as the fabric, while not leather, offered no stretch anyway) into the fitting room.
I've been packing on a few pounds lately, so I started out by trying on the Size L. Happily, it looked huge on me, like I'd cut a neck and armholes in a garbage bag and cinched a skinny belt around the middle. So I hung it back on the hanger nicely, wrapped the belt around it, and cinched it back up, just like I'd found it.
I was a little giddy, pulling on the Size M. I really loved the looks of this top, and I was imagining how I'd wear it as-is, while it was still warm, then add a long-sleeved top underneath when it got cold, making it sort of a pullover vest. I was thinking of all the places I could wear it, and already feeling a little bit cool and rock-starrish.
The reflection didn't match up with my expectations. The drop from the shoulders to the bust darts was too long for me, putting the bust darts an inch too low and making me look not like a rock star but a droopy-boobed fashion victim. I stood there in the mirror for more minutes than I really needed to, pinching at the fabric, wondering if I just took up the shoulders a little bit, would it render the armholes too small? What if I ran a seem down the sides, too? Nipped it in just a little more? Mmmmmmmaybe. But then I realized the top had a worse flaw than too-low bust-darts. It cut me off right at an awkward place, making me look shorter and wider than I already am. Having the peplum around the bottom didn't help matters much. That just added a horizontal line to confirm suspicions.
In disgust, I peeled the top off, hung it nicely back on its hanger, wrapped the belt around it, just like I'd found it. After all, it's not the Penney's sales associates fault that the clothes didn't fit me, so why should I pay forward my bad feelings and make them pick rejected Worthington shells off the fitting room floor? That's no way to be!
Before I put my own black three-quarter-sleeve fitted T back on, though, I looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing a generic Spanx tank, which I bought in bulk the week after Zoe was born, to smooth things out and prevent back fat, and also to keep from exposing a lot of boobage while wearing a deep-V-neck. And I saw a chubster looking back at me. My London "Boyfriend" jeans with 4% spandex that I was wearing, that I always wear, which fit the best of any jeans I've had in my adult life, didn't really do anything for me. I looked short-legged, thick-legged, stocky. I figured it was just because I had the black Spanx-like tank tucked in, and things were cutting me off at a weird angle, so I put my own top back on. I think that made things worse. Now I looked chunky AND a little frumpy.
Didn't I remember looking in the mirror this morning and thinking I didn't look all that bad?
Well, maybe not. I was lucky enough to have "snapped back" after Zoe was born, pretty quickly. I had to pack away the maternity pants a week after she was born. I'm not bragging. I had a good base of muscle tone, I worked hard at keeping fit while pregnant, and then the rest is probably luck. I was also not a skinny-mini before I was pregnant. I was around 140, and I was back to that weight by New Year's. The scale has crept back up to 147, 150 in these last few weeks. 150 is the weight I held steady at for weeks during my pregnancy- until about the 20-week mark. I know, because I weighed myself every day and kept track in a notebook. I've been able to stay in the same pants and tops I wore before Zoe, and after Zoe. They're just a little tighter on some days than others. So I probably hadn't really, actually looked myself over that much in the mirror that day or any day in a while, really. What I was seeing in the mirror that day at Penney's wasn't an awful muffin top lopping over my jeans, or pronounced backfat, or an ass like the back of a bus, but I was seeing "thickness," "puffiness," just a lack of definition.
When I stomped out of the fitting room, I told Mom that if I could put my own clothes back on the rack and walk away that day, I would have, because I didn't like how they looked on me any more than I liked the way the top had.
I work out almost every day. I can do a hour-long intense step workout without being winded (tired, soaked in sweat, noodly muscles, yes, but not doubled over and struggling to breathe), I can lift heavy weights. I can lift up Rozzie, who weighs a good 70+ pounds and haul her up the stairs at a good clip. So I'm not so much out of shape. But it's a lie that I tell myself over and over that a) I weigh more because I have more muscle, and b) I work out a lot, so I can eat whatever I want.
The thing is, the kitchen trumps the gym, hands down. I know this, when I track what I eat. I can burn 400 calories in an hour, and then come up to the kitchen and wipe that out with one big spoonful of Nutella. Or six pumps of syrup in my coffee (really, all I need is about 3 to make it sweet enough). Or half a dozen cookies.
I know that a lot of factors can make a person carry more weight than they need. Sometimes it's an underactive thyroid. I had mine tested when I was 30, and it came back squeaky clean. I know I should probably go have this checked again, just for good maintenance, but I don't think underactive thyroid is my problem. Back when I had it tested, I kind of hoped that it was the problem, because then I could pop a pill, get all the levels straightened out, and be skinny! I know some people have metabolic disorders that cause them to burn what they eat veeeeeerrrrrrrrrrry sloooooooooooowly. Some people are genetically predisposed to be larger- they're the "big-boned" folks. I don't think I can use that excuse. And everybody says it's easier to put on weight and harder to take it off after you have a baby, but a lot of the fitness mentors I follow have had two or three babies and don't have this thick look like I do. Disorders like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) can be both a result of being overweight and a contributing factor of overweightness. The jury's still out on whether or not that's a problem for me, but I've read that even if it is, as far as weight goes, it can be overcome with hard work- diet and exercise.
The thing about this current Big Fat Mess I have myself in is that I put myself in it. When I was younger, I enjoyed a fast metabolism, but I was never skinny (skinny's not what I'm going for, even now- I do have muscle buried like treasure under the layer of chub, and I want THAT to show through!). I never paid much attention to what I ate and got used to not having to, to stay reasonably thin. Then I'd lie to myself and say that since I work out, I don't really have to skip dessert. But the thing is, I don't have an excuse, and I don't have somebody else to blame this on. It's all me, and that really sucks.
Except, it kind of doesn't. See, instead of sitting helplessly by, lamenting that something- I don't know what, but something- is making me fat, and I don't have any control over it, and I'm just helpless to watch that scale creep up and up and up while I find bigger and bigger pants, I know that it's been my own bad habits that are making me a thicker version of myself than I want to be. I got myself into this big, fat mess. I have the power to get myself back out of it.
Yes, I do!
Let's Go To The Mall!
When I was a kid, going to the mall was a Big Deal. We didn't have tons of money to throw at the Mausoleum of Commerce, and also, the mall we liked (The Arnot Mall, baby!) was an hour and fifteen minutes away. I really didn't know any other mall. We didn't go on vacation much when I was a kid, and the other mall within reasonable driving distance was in Olean, also an hour and fifteen minutes away, but it didn't offer as much stuff. Early-early on, they had an AM&As, but that wasn't enough of a draw to lure us from the Arnot Mall.
I remember being instantly happy whenever we walked in the entrance at the Sears end. We never parked at the main entrance. I never understood why until I started driving. We could get closer up by Sears. Back in the day, when there were a lot of stores not filled up, the mall featured walls with a pen-and-ink cityscape, to make it look as though Big Things Are Coming Here! instead of "we can't fill our shops."
The way the mall smelled always made me happy, too. There were a few leather stores sprinkled throughout, so there was always the rich smell of leather. Not Wal-Mart leather, Mall leather. Up and down the wide skylit corridors were big stone planters that you could sit on, and fountains that added a chlorine smell to the air. It wasn't anything that would gag a (normal) person, but it was like when you walk by the hotel swimming pool when you're on vacation. Great American Cookie Company somehow managed to make the entire gigantic building smell like cookies, and the newsstand on the Other End of the Mall sold pipe tobacco. Vanilla Cavendish was always my favorite one to smell. Back then, people were allowed to smoke in the food court and the common areas. The smell of pipes and cigarettes just sort of spiced the air. Either the ventilation was really good in the mall, or there weren't enough smokers to make the air feel close and choking like it can when somebody's smoking in a full car with the windows up. Trust me, mixed with all the other mall smells, it all worked.
If Yankee Candle could make a scented candle that smelled like "Shopping Mall in the 80s," I'd buy it by the case and burn it whenever I need a lift. (I need a lift a lot sometimes) The closest I can get to recreating the smell is a Yankee "Leather" candle (I think that one had a short run) burned simultaneously with a "Vanilla Lime" Housewarmer. If I clean the bathrooms and kitchen with some Clorox Clean-Up, it gets it closer.
And then there were the stores! What a cavernous Aladin's Cave of Wonders! Besides the anchor stores: Sears, JCPenney's, Izard's, Hess's (their store sign looked like a giant wrote it on the wall in light-up red lipstick!), and Bradlee's. The anchor stores were all right. We pretty much only ever shopped at Sears, which accounts for my super-stylish Mainframe wardrobe, and Bradlee's. Back in the day, the Arnot Mall had a Science Store. It was my favorite, followed closely by Topkapi/Claire's. I still have boxes and boxes of junk jewelry from there that I feel silly wearing but can't quite part with. (Zoe, meet your inheritance!) There was a 5-and-10 store called McCrory's, where you could buy just about anything you wanted. Sam Goody sold sheet music, so in later years, I spent a king's fortune in there, as well as in the music store, where they sold pianos and band instruments.
I bought my very first thing at DEB, which was a lot cooler and darker lit back then, in the tenth grade. It was a dark blue velvet off-the-shoulder semi-formal for homecoming that year. It was 1993. Off-the-shoulder was where it was AT. I loved that dress so much that I wore it to homecoming the next year too. Nobody paid that much attention to what I wore to stuff to have it matter. I still have that dress. I wouldn't be able to zip it up now, but I have it, and I'm not getting rid of it, ever.
When I was in sixth grade, we bought our first family computer, a Tandy, at Radio Shack. Errrrrmagerd, typing that sentence just made me laugh so hard I almost peed my pants. Go ahead and read it again and have a chuckle, yourself. And plus, that baby had a dot-matrix printer. FROM RADIO SHACK! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhahahahahaahah! But think about it. In the late fall of 1989, even a Radio Shack Tandy with a dot-matrix printer was a pretty neato piece of computing equipment, and not everybody had one. This was our big splurge purchase for the family that year, and I remember we bought it on a Sunday. I remember this because we got home from church and changed and piled back in the Voyager and headed to Big Flats. Wouldn't that just smack of preciousness if we'd not changed out of our church clothes before we went? Oh, man.
My love affair with the mall continued through high school and college. There were other malls, the Susquehanna Valley Mall and the Lycoming Mall, but the Arnot Mall was still "My Mall." Things changed over the years. Anchor stores came and went. They remodeled and took out the planters and fountains and put in a new, less impressive fountain at Center Court. The Mall looked brighter and shinier, but it wasn't the same experience. Some of the magic was lost. More and more storefronts emptied. I went to graduate school in Philadelphia and lived ten minutes away from the King of Prussia Mall, an ENORMOUS shopping mall, double decker even, with snootay stores alongside more modest ones. I loved going there as an escape after I got home from class. I worked for a short time at Bath and Body Works at the Plymouth Meeting Mall, a smaller double-decker mall that was even closer to my apartment.
I think that's when I started to sour on malls in general. There were new shopping centers popping up all over the place then. There was a particularly beautiful one, the Metroplex, on Chemical Road, and it featured Target, and Barnes and Noble and DSW and a Giant- the Eastern PA version, not like Giant in Wellsville. Everything was right there, right off the Blue Route. My drive home would all but deliver me into Target!
Maybe it was all that retail overload when I was in graduate school, or maybe it was the rise of online shopping (which I am passionate about), but by the time we moved home, I could happily go for months without setting foot in "My Mall." Things around the mall had grown up enough that I could get everything I could ever want or need at the new plazas, and I wouldn't have to haul my bags around while I walked through the mall. Shop at Old Navy, park at Old Navy's plaza, bring out your bags, when you're done, move the Jeep down the line to Barnes and Noble's part of the plaza, then dash across and hit all those stores on the WalMart side. My world was complete when Target came in. If I went to the mall at all, it was for a specific thing, in a specific store, and in I'd go, but my specific thing, do a hot-lap around to see which stores were still there, lament the ones that were gone, and look around with something of a sneer at the empty storefronts. I wouldn't linger. I thought it was so much better to drive to the plazas, and move the Jeep whenever I changed stores.
Then something happened to make me almost love the mall again: Zoe came along. The first time we took her to the mall, she was a week old. Literally, seven days old. I was in the very depths of something post-partum-y, beating myself up during all the sleepless hours for sucking at being a mom, sucking at keeping the house presentable, just sucking in general. I felt like getting out would maybe help me breathe again, and we needed to have some work done on our Challenger at the dealership, so Shane drove Zoe in the Jeep, and I drove the sassy car and listened to my music on the hour-long drive. While we were waiting on the Challenger, we took Zoe and the Jeep to the Mall. Shane was after a tool box, a big one like mechanics use, and he wanted to check out Sears.
I was on pins and needles the whole way from Chilson-Wilcox to the Mall. So was Shane. He was so nervous about week-old Zoe waking up and screaming that we drove around Arby's and ate the tepid Beef'n'Cheddars in the parking lot of the old Ponderosa. He didn't want her ruining anybody's lunch. As it was, she slept the whole way there, the whole way around the mall, the whole way back out to the Jeep, and all the way back to Chilson-Wilcox, where she woke up, insistent on being changed and fed (awkward, because she wasn't on the bottle just yet).
But back to the Mall. It was our first trip out with the baby carrier and the stroller. We opted for the travel system, so the carrier was supposed to snap easily into the stroller. And it would have, if I'd have RTFM before we headed out. There was a little learning curve on that bit, but we eventually got it! And it was great, because Zoe could go from vehicle to stroller, and into the Mall we went, where she could slumber in peace while we leisurely roamed the mall. I noticed a lot of other parents with strollers that day at the mall. I even saw a couple moms changing their babies and nursing, right in the corridors! They had the same Hooter Hider I did! Wow!
I wasn't quite "there," even with the Hooter Hider, but hey, there were other parents at the mall, and they looked like they were doing all right!
On a more extensive trip to The Mall a few weekends later, Shane and I learned what a pain in the ass it is to constantly snap out and snap in that baby seat in the Jeep, when we traveled the plazas. The mall didn't make us do that. Just one snap, and we could wander for hours if we wanted to! This was GREAT!
As Zoe got less content to ride around in the bucket seat, and we started leaving it in the car and just strolling her around in her stroller, we really have come to appreciate the ease of mall shopping when it comes to that stroller, not to mention how fabulous that big basket on the bottom of that stroller is, all those places to hang bags, in the mall. When we want to get out and go somewhere, we can take Zoe and the stroller to the mall, and make a day of it, minimizing taking her out into rain, or burning sun, or traffic. She gets to people-watch, we get some exercise, and eat, all right there.
So now, when someone asks me what I want to do on a day when we're all bored, my refrain is the same as it used to be, Let's Go To The Mall!
I remember being instantly happy whenever we walked in the entrance at the Sears end. We never parked at the main entrance. I never understood why until I started driving. We could get closer up by Sears. Back in the day, when there were a lot of stores not filled up, the mall featured walls with a pen-and-ink cityscape, to make it look as though Big Things Are Coming Here! instead of "we can't fill our shops."
The way the mall smelled always made me happy, too. There were a few leather stores sprinkled throughout, so there was always the rich smell of leather. Not Wal-Mart leather, Mall leather. Up and down the wide skylit corridors were big stone planters that you could sit on, and fountains that added a chlorine smell to the air. It wasn't anything that would gag a (normal) person, but it was like when you walk by the hotel swimming pool when you're on vacation. Great American Cookie Company somehow managed to make the entire gigantic building smell like cookies, and the newsstand on the Other End of the Mall sold pipe tobacco. Vanilla Cavendish was always my favorite one to smell. Back then, people were allowed to smoke in the food court and the common areas. The smell of pipes and cigarettes just sort of spiced the air. Either the ventilation was really good in the mall, or there weren't enough smokers to make the air feel close and choking like it can when somebody's smoking in a full car with the windows up. Trust me, mixed with all the other mall smells, it all worked.
If Yankee Candle could make a scented candle that smelled like "Shopping Mall in the 80s," I'd buy it by the case and burn it whenever I need a lift. (I need a lift a lot sometimes) The closest I can get to recreating the smell is a Yankee "Leather" candle (I think that one had a short run) burned simultaneously with a "Vanilla Lime" Housewarmer. If I clean the bathrooms and kitchen with some Clorox Clean-Up, it gets it closer.
And then there were the stores! What a cavernous Aladin's Cave of Wonders! Besides the anchor stores: Sears, JCPenney's, Izard's, Hess's (their store sign looked like a giant wrote it on the wall in light-up red lipstick!), and Bradlee's. The anchor stores were all right. We pretty much only ever shopped at Sears, which accounts for my super-stylish Mainframe wardrobe, and Bradlee's. Back in the day, the Arnot Mall had a Science Store. It was my favorite, followed closely by Topkapi/Claire's. I still have boxes and boxes of junk jewelry from there that I feel silly wearing but can't quite part with. (Zoe, meet your inheritance!) There was a 5-and-10 store called McCrory's, where you could buy just about anything you wanted. Sam Goody sold sheet music, so in later years, I spent a king's fortune in there, as well as in the music store, where they sold pianos and band instruments.
I bought my very first thing at DEB, which was a lot cooler and darker lit back then, in the tenth grade. It was a dark blue velvet off-the-shoulder semi-formal for homecoming that year. It was 1993. Off-the-shoulder was where it was AT. I loved that dress so much that I wore it to homecoming the next year too. Nobody paid that much attention to what I wore to stuff to have it matter. I still have that dress. I wouldn't be able to zip it up now, but I have it, and I'm not getting rid of it, ever.
When I was in sixth grade, we bought our first family computer, a Tandy, at Radio Shack. Errrrrmagerd, typing that sentence just made me laugh so hard I almost peed my pants. Go ahead and read it again and have a chuckle, yourself. And plus, that baby had a dot-matrix printer. FROM RADIO SHACK! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhahahahahaahah! But think about it. In the late fall of 1989, even a Radio Shack Tandy with a dot-matrix printer was a pretty neato piece of computing equipment, and not everybody had one. This was our big splurge purchase for the family that year, and I remember we bought it on a Sunday. I remember this because we got home from church and changed and piled back in the Voyager and headed to Big Flats. Wouldn't that just smack of preciousness if we'd not changed out of our church clothes before we went? Oh, man.
My love affair with the mall continued through high school and college. There were other malls, the Susquehanna Valley Mall and the Lycoming Mall, but the Arnot Mall was still "My Mall." Things changed over the years. Anchor stores came and went. They remodeled and took out the planters and fountains and put in a new, less impressive fountain at Center Court. The Mall looked brighter and shinier, but it wasn't the same experience. Some of the magic was lost. More and more storefronts emptied. I went to graduate school in Philadelphia and lived ten minutes away from the King of Prussia Mall, an ENORMOUS shopping mall, double decker even, with snootay stores alongside more modest ones. I loved going there as an escape after I got home from class. I worked for a short time at Bath and Body Works at the Plymouth Meeting Mall, a smaller double-decker mall that was even closer to my apartment.
I think that's when I started to sour on malls in general. There were new shopping centers popping up all over the place then. There was a particularly beautiful one, the Metroplex, on Chemical Road, and it featured Target, and Barnes and Noble and DSW and a Giant- the Eastern PA version, not like Giant in Wellsville. Everything was right there, right off the Blue Route. My drive home would all but deliver me into Target!
Maybe it was all that retail overload when I was in graduate school, or maybe it was the rise of online shopping (which I am passionate about), but by the time we moved home, I could happily go for months without setting foot in "My Mall." Things around the mall had grown up enough that I could get everything I could ever want or need at the new plazas, and I wouldn't have to haul my bags around while I walked through the mall. Shop at Old Navy, park at Old Navy's plaza, bring out your bags, when you're done, move the Jeep down the line to Barnes and Noble's part of the plaza, then dash across and hit all those stores on the WalMart side. My world was complete when Target came in. If I went to the mall at all, it was for a specific thing, in a specific store, and in I'd go, but my specific thing, do a hot-lap around to see which stores were still there, lament the ones that were gone, and look around with something of a sneer at the empty storefronts. I wouldn't linger. I thought it was so much better to drive to the plazas, and move the Jeep whenever I changed stores.
Then something happened to make me almost love the mall again: Zoe came along. The first time we took her to the mall, she was a week old. Literally, seven days old. I was in the very depths of something post-partum-y, beating myself up during all the sleepless hours for sucking at being a mom, sucking at keeping the house presentable, just sucking in general. I felt like getting out would maybe help me breathe again, and we needed to have some work done on our Challenger at the dealership, so Shane drove Zoe in the Jeep, and I drove the sassy car and listened to my music on the hour-long drive. While we were waiting on the Challenger, we took Zoe and the Jeep to the Mall. Shane was after a tool box, a big one like mechanics use, and he wanted to check out Sears.
I was on pins and needles the whole way from Chilson-Wilcox to the Mall. So was Shane. He was so nervous about week-old Zoe waking up and screaming that we drove around Arby's and ate the tepid Beef'n'Cheddars in the parking lot of the old Ponderosa. He didn't want her ruining anybody's lunch. As it was, she slept the whole way there, the whole way around the mall, the whole way back out to the Jeep, and all the way back to Chilson-Wilcox, where she woke up, insistent on being changed and fed (awkward, because she wasn't on the bottle just yet).
But back to the Mall. It was our first trip out with the baby carrier and the stroller. We opted for the travel system, so the carrier was supposed to snap easily into the stroller. And it would have, if I'd have RTFM before we headed out. There was a little learning curve on that bit, but we eventually got it! And it was great, because Zoe could go from vehicle to stroller, and into the Mall we went, where she could slumber in peace while we leisurely roamed the mall. I noticed a lot of other parents with strollers that day at the mall. I even saw a couple moms changing their babies and nursing, right in the corridors! They had the same Hooter Hider I did! Wow!
I wasn't quite "there," even with the Hooter Hider, but hey, there were other parents at the mall, and they looked like they were doing all right!
On a more extensive trip to The Mall a few weekends later, Shane and I learned what a pain in the ass it is to constantly snap out and snap in that baby seat in the Jeep, when we traveled the plazas. The mall didn't make us do that. Just one snap, and we could wander for hours if we wanted to! This was GREAT!
As Zoe got less content to ride around in the bucket seat, and we started leaving it in the car and just strolling her around in her stroller, we really have come to appreciate the ease of mall shopping when it comes to that stroller, not to mention how fabulous that big basket on the bottom of that stroller is, all those places to hang bags, in the mall. When we want to get out and go somewhere, we can take Zoe and the stroller to the mall, and make a day of it, minimizing taking her out into rain, or burning sun, or traffic. She gets to people-watch, we get some exercise, and eat, all right there.
So now, when someone asks me what I want to do on a day when we're all bored, my refrain is the same as it used to be, Let's Go To The Mall!
Thursday, October 4, 2012
How to Break a Stall
Back when I was learning to fly planes, an integral part of training was learning how to stall the plane and then recover. I hated this training at first. It's arguably one of the most violent things a beginning pilot needs to learn to do, and it scared me witless. See, there's a rule of thumb that if you don't stall, you can't spin. You have to stall before you can spin, and you don't want to spin unless you're an acrobatic pilot, which I was not. I didn't want to spin!
Luckily for me, maybe, spinning isn't on the syllabus for a beginner pilot. But stalls are.
There are two kinds of stalls I learned: Power-On and Power-Off, and if you're going to get a pilots license, you do a lot of stalls, because it needs to be a reflex, it needs to be entrenched in the reptilian part of the brain. In a stall, especially if you've let it happen close to the ground, there's no time to think. Deliberation can mean death. It's counter-intuitive, a little bit, to think that when you're stalling, and the plane's sinking, to push the nose down, but that's how you break the stall. You have to descend a little bit (quickly) in order to get your airspeed back up and climb at all. If you pull back on the yoke and make the nose go even higher, your stall's just going to get worse and the ground's just going to get closer.
Power-Off stalls, which teach you what to do if you stall too soon during landing, are initially easier to put the plane into, because you configure the plane for landing (flaps down, gear down if you have retractable gear, mixture rich, throttle to idle), then glide to the appropriate airspeed and pull the yoke back until the plane starts to buffet and your stall horn is going off in your ear or your stall light is blinking like crazy. Welcome to the stall!
How to fix it is you smoothly push the yoke forward to push the nose of the plane down, push in the throttle, and gradually get the flaps back up and get back up to airspeed.
Power-On stalls are meant to simulate stalling on take-off. I hated these the most, because they are terrifying, especially in a Tomahawk, which have the reputation of having the tail fall off. My flight instructor always called our bird the "Traumahawk." Anyway, Power-On stalls are where you configure the plane for take-off, then let the throttle rip, and pull back on the yoke to make the plane go nose-high until it buffets, buffets, buffets, b-u-u-u-u-ffets, and then you just nose down to break the stall and gain your airspeed.
The trick to both stalls is that to get up to spiffy for any checkride or flight review, a private pilot has to stall and recover within 100 feet of the altitude you were at when the stall began. At first blush, this seems like some pain in the butt impossible feat to pull off to impress the hell out of somebody from the FAA. Well, and this is what made stalls the most terrifying thing for me, was that you practice them over and over again so that if it happens on take-off or landing, you won't have hundreds of feet below you to play with, to get your stall broken and recover enough not to crash.
Once I got over being so afraid of the buffeting, and I got onto how to break the stalls and recover, and what do you know, even do so well within the test standards, it was empowering. That's not to say that my mouth didn't go dry whenever it was time to "do stalls." Just because I found stalls empowering, doesn't mean I learned to love them. Ever.
It kind of applies out of an airplane, too, when you're in some kind of stall of the psyche. Happens to me a lot, those stalls of the psyche. The thing I find is that when I pull back on the yoke, doing what's logical or what I think is right sometimes just makes the stall worse. Sometimes I have to do the thing that seems like the worst thing ever to do when I'm on the way to crashing back to earth, pushing the nose down, to get my momentum back, to break the stall.
The good thing about it is that just like in the airplane, the more I break my stalls of the psyche, the more automatic it becomes.
Luckily for me, maybe, spinning isn't on the syllabus for a beginner pilot. But stalls are.
There are two kinds of stalls I learned: Power-On and Power-Off, and if you're going to get a pilots license, you do a lot of stalls, because it needs to be a reflex, it needs to be entrenched in the reptilian part of the brain. In a stall, especially if you've let it happen close to the ground, there's no time to think. Deliberation can mean death. It's counter-intuitive, a little bit, to think that when you're stalling, and the plane's sinking, to push the nose down, but that's how you break the stall. You have to descend a little bit (quickly) in order to get your airspeed back up and climb at all. If you pull back on the yoke and make the nose go even higher, your stall's just going to get worse and the ground's just going to get closer.
Power-Off stalls, which teach you what to do if you stall too soon during landing, are initially easier to put the plane into, because you configure the plane for landing (flaps down, gear down if you have retractable gear, mixture rich, throttle to idle), then glide to the appropriate airspeed and pull the yoke back until the plane starts to buffet and your stall horn is going off in your ear or your stall light is blinking like crazy. Welcome to the stall!
How to fix it is you smoothly push the yoke forward to push the nose of the plane down, push in the throttle, and gradually get the flaps back up and get back up to airspeed.
Power-On stalls are meant to simulate stalling on take-off. I hated these the most, because they are terrifying, especially in a Tomahawk, which have the reputation of having the tail fall off. My flight instructor always called our bird the "Traumahawk." Anyway, Power-On stalls are where you configure the plane for take-off, then let the throttle rip, and pull back on the yoke to make the plane go nose-high until it buffets, buffets, buffets, b-u-u-u-u-ffets, and then you just nose down to break the stall and gain your airspeed.
The trick to both stalls is that to get up to spiffy for any checkride or flight review, a private pilot has to stall and recover within 100 feet of the altitude you were at when the stall began. At first blush, this seems like some pain in the butt impossible feat to pull off to impress the hell out of somebody from the FAA. Well, and this is what made stalls the most terrifying thing for me, was that you practice them over and over again so that if it happens on take-off or landing, you won't have hundreds of feet below you to play with, to get your stall broken and recover enough not to crash.
Once I got over being so afraid of the buffeting, and I got onto how to break the stalls and recover, and what do you know, even do so well within the test standards, it was empowering. That's not to say that my mouth didn't go dry whenever it was time to "do stalls." Just because I found stalls empowering, doesn't mean I learned to love them. Ever.
It kind of applies out of an airplane, too, when you're in some kind of stall of the psyche. Happens to me a lot, those stalls of the psyche. The thing I find is that when I pull back on the yoke, doing what's logical or what I think is right sometimes just makes the stall worse. Sometimes I have to do the thing that seems like the worst thing ever to do when I'm on the way to crashing back to earth, pushing the nose down, to get my momentum back, to break the stall.
The good thing about it is that just like in the airplane, the more I break my stalls of the psyche, the more automatic it becomes.
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