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Idle essays

A New Year’s Eve Tale: Penny and the Poltergeist

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Back in the Day, my mother had a long-haired Chihuahua. She’d coveted Chihuahuas for quite some time, and while I was still in high school in southern California, she’d managed to bring herself to buy this little dog from a breeder. The pooch was chocolate brown all over, and my mother called her Penny. We brought Penny with us to Arizona when my father retired to Sun City.

Well, Penny was quite a little number. Unlike many of today’s specimens, she wasn’t especially aggressive, although in her tininess she could be alarmed by large moving objects and humans. Though she didn’t bite or threaten to bite, she yapped incessantly. This dog would bark at the sound of the sun rising and going down. She barked for no other reason, as far as anyone could tell, than to hear her ears rattle.

One December, I had come home from the University of Arizona for winter break. My father had gone back to sea, claiming he needed to earn some more money to make their retirement secure but really, I suspected, because he’d found full-time shore life less than the paradise he’d hoped for. So it was just me and my mother.

It was New Year’s Eve. My parents’ old friends, Capt. Karl and Mrs. Mabel Brunberg, had recently moved to Sun City, trailing my father as did a number of his other friends and his brother. They invited my  mother over to their house to ring in the new year. Since a fair amount of drinking would be done and I was not of age — I was only about 17 then — I was left at home with the dog.

So, along about 11 p.m., when my favored TV shows went off the air, I climbed into the sack, with the dog ensconced on the foot of the bed.

Down the road was a grody little burg called Surprise. Today this town, having fallen into the clutches of the developers, is a middle-class suburb of stick-and-stucco look-alikes, but in those days it was largely an immigrant labor camp. It was small and quite a ways from Sun City, maybe eight or ten miles off. But real people did live there.

Well, along about quarter to twelve, the locals could no longer restrain themselves. The car horn-blasting, the firecrackers, and the pistol shots in the air began well before midnight.

The celebration was way, way in the distance, so far away it was barely audible to me.

But Penny could hear it. And she didn’t like it.

She started to yap at the first faint sound of a horn blaring into the black sky.

I figured she’d have a little frenzy at midnight, when everyone went outside to shoot and holler, and then she’d calm down and I could finally get to sleep.

Uh huh.

Right on one count. Wrong on the other.

Once she got herself wound up, she stayed wound. Along about twenty to one, I finally gave up and went into the living room to await my mother’s return. Figured I sure wasn’t going to get any sleep in the bed. And maybe a change in venue would quiet the beast.

So now we’re perched on the living-room sofa. It’s a tiny house, no bigger than any of the two-bedroom apartments where my mother and I had lived over the previous six years. The living room, which was too small to accommodate a dining area if the residents wanted to devote space to a television set, was demarcated from the galley kitchen by an L-shaped wall that created entries to the kitchen from two ends.

Parked on the sofa, Penny has calmed down a bit. I pull an afghan over me and hope to catch a few Z’s.

Wrong.

She just settles down, and YAP!!! She’s up and barking. Settles down again and YAP YAP YAP!!! and settles down and…

Damn. This is going on and on. I begin to wonder if maybe someone is actually outside in the darkness.

Not being the brightest of young things, I open the front door. Can’t see anything, so I step outside to investigate.

A light breeze wafts past and whistles through the fronds of the Mexican fan palm in the front yard. And YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP!!!!!

Holy cripes. She’s barking at the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves.

I go back inside and we take up our position on the sofa again.

Penny has just settled down when BING-BONG!

The doorbell rings.

Whaaa? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP  It’s now one in the morning. YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP Who the hell is at the door at one o’clock in the morning? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

I look out and see the neighbors from across the street. Open the door. They’ve come over to wish us a happy New Year. I return the compliment and say my mother is at the Brunbergs’ house. They, probably noticing that I’m a bit pale by now, ask if I’m OK. Stupidly, I say everything is just fine. They go away, leaving me with my nerves unraveled and the dog vibrating like a gong.

This, I think, is getting out of hand. Enough is enough. I decide to call the Brunbergs and ask my mother to come home.

But they haven’t lived there long enough for their number to have been published in the current phone book. (In those days, the Internet had not even been dreamed of.) I get out my mother’s address book and find it is just chuckablock full of scribbled names and addresses. It’s so full that she no longer can list her entries alphabetically. I can’t find the Brunbergs’ number.

So I decide to call information. In those days there was no 4-1-1 (nor was there a 9-1-1). You dialed “0,” got an operator, and she would use the phone company’s records to look up the number you needed.

So I dial “0.” The phone rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP rings and YAP YAP rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP YAP rings and…. It’s New Year’s Eve. Everybody and his little brother, sister, and yapping dog must be calling their relatives long-distance. The operators’ lines are maxed, and I can’t get through.

I consider calling the sheriff, but think better of it. What am I going to say? My mother’s dog is yapping, please come protect me from the wind blowing through the palm fronds?

I consider walking across the street to the neighbors’ house, but…what if someone is out there? Walking around in the near pitch-darkness does not present itself as a wise idea.

The dog and I go back on the sofa.

Penny continues to doze off, jerk awake, and yap frantically, doze off, jerk awake, yap frantically, doze off, jerk awake, and scream YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

She just settles down after a round of yapping, when all of a sudden a weird noise emanates from the kitchen, followed by a loud KEEEE-RASSSHHHHHHH!

Holy SH!T

I leap off the sofa, hair on end and heart pounding. The Chihuahua bounds to the floor, her hackles up, in full dwarfish ROAR.

She charges the kitchen in a cloud of purple YAPs.

I holler Get’em, Penny! Sic’em, sic’em!!!!!!!!!

YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

Penny barks her way fiercely toward the kitchen door, but she’s afraid to go near it.

Finally the adrenalin load subsides enough to restore a modicum of common sense to my addled young brain. I realize that while we were on the sofa we had a clear view of both the hallway and the back door. No one could have gotten into the kitchen without my having seen him. And it’s not very likely that a burglar has been hiding in the kitchen all night.

I work up the nerve to creep over to the kitchen doorway. There I see…

A decorative holiday liquor bottle lid — one of those fake cut-glass lash-ups — has somehow fallen off the countertop and tumbled to the floor. My mother and her friends must have finished off the booze, and she evidently left the lid to the empty bottle sitting there.

But WTF? The counter tilework, as was the style at the time, had a border of lipped tiles that formed a little barrier to keep water from dribbling over the edge and small objects from rolling off.

I actually heard this thing slide across the counter before it fell to the floor. The sound was not CRASH but r-r-r-r-r-CRASH. How the hell did it move, on its own, and cross the lipped tiles to tumble off the counter?

That is a mystery I have never solved. Possibly it was the vibrations from the dog’s high-decibel yapping.

I figure she called up a poltergeist. After all, I was a teen-aged girl, and we know poltergeists are drawn to adolescents. And poltergeists are great tricksters. The spook must have thought it would be very funny to see what the little wind-yapper would do if a real, credible noise set her off.

BOO!

YAP!

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Well, it’s a gray day. I hope you’re not out there driving around or trying to fly around in the snow and ice that seem to have descended on half the country.

Hereabouts, Gerardo, clad in a thick down jacket, is out there shoveling up two months’ worth of mess…he must have noticed at the same time I did yesterday that he didn’t come around last month. He called last night to say he’d be here at 7 a.m.

So. If I were having TG here, the yard would look very nice. 😀

M’hijito and I are going to his buddy’s home for an afternoon of socializing and eating. This has become an annual tradition…getting a bit out of hand, maybe — he says they expect 25 adults and God only knows how many children. So that will be a ton of fun, tho’ how they’re going to fit that crowd into their modest starter house out in the suburbs beats me. But young people have resources and energy that we old folks can only remember vaguely and dream of.

LOL! Some of those dreams are the stuff of nightmares.

Back in the Day, we and the couple who were our best friends each had family to cope with over the holiday, and for both of us it wasn’t all that great an experience.

Barbarella, who was given to even greater crankiness than I — and I’m cranky as a cat under normal circumstances — had to make a vast effort to put up with her hopelessly bourgeois sister-in-law; a brother-in-law who, after, having been thrown out of the state AG’s office for some sort of malfeasance, subsided into quiet sleaziness; a mother-in-law whose life was consumed by supporting the man who married her after she gave birth, illegitimately, to her oldest son (our friend, Barbarella’s husband); and parents who as they aged were slowly sliding into alcoholism.

My then-husband and I had to put up with the woman my father married nine months after my mother died, whom I liked at first but came to loathe for her mind-bending meanness; her proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual, extreme right-wing family and their circle of Ohioan ex-pats; his father, who was simply bat-sh!t rabid; his father’s meek, submissive second wife; and his mother, who was a decent person but whose eccentricities and extreme left-wing opinionation drove me nuts.

Thanksgiving would pass, for each couple, in the company of these worthies. My step-sister, whose idea of cooking involved plenty of boxed items, would prepare what I used to call “flat white food”: a typical feast consisted of steamed turkey with the flavor of sawdust, mashed potatoes, cauliflower…the only color on the table came from the Jell-O salads, usually arsenic green or day-glo orange. Barbarella’s relatives served up similar fare.

Then, after the dust settled and the dishes were washed and the flavorless turkey leftovers were stashed in the freezer (or fed to the dog), we would have our own holiday party:

TGTGIO!

Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over!

Barbarella and I could cook, and I mean really cook. And we liked to work together — we were very good at it. So we would prepare some amazing feast, the centerpiece of which would always be anything but turkey. Leg of lamb, maybe — in those days it was possible to get these marvelous bone-in New Zealand legs of lamb. Haven’t seen them in years…they were so good. But sometimes we might have a real prime rib, or a pork crown roast, or…whatEVER was not turkey. The kids would be fed and relegated to the TV room, which in both houses was far enough from the dining room that the humans could linger forever over their wine and conversation. The dogs would take up residence under the table. And a good time — at last! — would be had by all.

My son’s friends, mercifully, like to cook. So we surely will be served up a meal that does not leave us feeling we need to stage our own to make up for a lost holiday. It’s not easy, though, to turn out enough chow for 25 adults and a passel of children in a tiny modern kitchen with a stupid glass cooktop. So these things are largely a pot-luck kind of thing, with the young people preparing the pièces de résistance and the guests bringing the side dishes and desserts.

We’re bringing fresh cranberry sauce and a carrot dish that I’ve found the young people like a lot.

Whipped Carrots with Apple

You need:

• As many carrots as you figure will feed your guests
• About one fresh apple per package of carrots
• Spices to your taste: a little cinnamon and nutmeg, for sure. If you feel daring, try some cardamom and maybe even some cumin. Take it easy with these — a little goes a long way
• A freaking ton of butter. For one package of raw carrots, about half a cube. Increase according to the size of your carrot output.
• A food processor or blender

Scrub the carrots clean, peeling off any scraped or bruised spots and trimming off the root and the stem ends. Steam or boil the carrots until they’re soft all the way through.

While the carrots cook, peel the apple(s) and cut out the seeds. Cut the carrots coarsely into chunks.

When the carrots are done, drain them and cut them into chunks, too. Place the hot carrots and apple into the food processor, add a chunk of butter, and toss in whatever spices you’ve selected. Process or blend until the mixture is smoothly, gloriously puréed.

You can make this ahead and reheat for dinner. For pot-lucking, we intend to cook up a large amount of this stuff, place it in a crock pot, and haul it to the friends’ place, where it can heat during the pre-dinner festivities and be kept hot and out of the hosts’ way until the feast is served.

There’s really no need to put sugar in this dish, because the apples contribute just the right amount of sweetness. If you’re concerned that it won’t be sweet enough and you’re boiling instead of steaming, add a tablespoon or so of sugar to the cooking water.

wild turkey

Image: Male wild turkey, re-introduced to California. Yathin S Krishnappa. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

A Much-belated, Rainy-day Roundup

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What a beautiful morning! A lovely, soft feminine rain has been falling all night and is still sprinkling down. Every plant that can be moved has been dragged out under the sky, and now Cassie and I are sitting around doing as little as possible.

When we turned out of the sack around 5:30 the patio was flooded — Richard the Landscaper was supposed to have surfaced by now to realign the grade out there, but nary a word has been heard from the old boy since he came by a couple weeks ago. Cassie hates water, and she certainly is not about to wade through a lake to get to the doggy loo.

Fortunately, the paloverde on the west side filters rain so it never floods out there. She managed to reach her favorite peeing grounds by the side door to the garage. But she still got wet, to her profound disgust.

I’ve had a sinus headache or migraine (not sure which) for the past three days. A soggy doggy and a chilly kitchen were not what I had in mind by way of greeting the day. So toweled the dog off, lifted her back onto her doggy blanket, and crawled back into the sack with her. She crapped right back out (do dogs do ANYTHING other than eat, chase balls, and sleep?) until 8:00. Her Majesty’s second awakening, though, was THE awakening, and so we had to stumble off to the kitchen to find food.

Hey, I came up with a potentially promising ad-hoc food combination. The other day Costco had some nice little Mexican mangos, actually ripe of all things. So of course I had to grab a lifetime supply of those. Wanted to eat one of them for breakfast, but in the cold and damp, also wanted something HOT. So the choices were refried polenta topped with fresh cut-up Campari tomato and some scallion and nuts, or a cut-up mango with nuts and maybe a daub of yogurt. Hm.

While studying these possibilities, the light dawned: why not combine the mango and the tomatoes, hold the onion, herbs, & salt, mix in a little sweet tarragon, and then brown some pecans with the frying polenta? And…oh, why not?…top it with some crumbled feta cheese.

Dang! Sometimes i amaze me.

This combination actually turned out to be quite tasty. The feta added a nice tang, and in fact I ended up adding a little crunchy sea salt, which to my surprise complemented the mango nicely. Next time I think I’d add some cumin.

You could wrap up the mango & tomato combination with, say, half an avocado (cut up) in a nice corn tortilla and end up with a lovely snack or healthful quick lunch.

Now that the day has started…it’s been a LONG time since Funny has run a round-up. They’re very time-consuming. Over the past few months it’s been all I can do to keep up with teaching, scribbling a few posts a week, editing, singing, and serving The Queen of the Universe…really, all of those have been in triage mode. And so, let’s look around and see what other folks have been up to.

Windy City Gal is back from her trip to Scotland! She’s a little under the weather, having been battling a respiratory bug for quite awhile, but nevertheless is working and riding and getting back into normal life.

At Thirty-Six Months, Marissa reflects on the need for freelancers to be discriminating about the clients and jobs they’ll take on. To that I can only add and how!

The Asian Pear has a very funny post on getting back into the online dating game. One of my friends actually started a blog where she intended to relate her hilarious adventures in the meat market, some of which were silly beyond belief. 😀 Hope TAP will keep us up to date with these adventures.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche has been coping with what she calls “the week of harrowing” and now (beat me some more!!) is considering adopting another pooch. Well, I can’t call that kettle black, what with the scheme to inflict a brand-new furniture-chewing, floor-pooping, ear-grabbing, dog food-poaching puppy  on the Queen of the Universe.

At Afford Anything, Paula hosts a guest post by a friend (apparently a real one: she even knows how tall he is), who provides a really interesting discussion about how he engineered real estate investments to produce a nice passive income…while he was still in his 20s. The caveat is that this guy appears to be smarter than the average snail, and that he evidently learned enough about the business to know what he was doing and to make some good decisions.

Miranda Marquit holds forth at Bargaineering on tax breaks that are about to go away at the end of this year. Some of them…I had NO idea! Better check it out.

Here’s a really cute and also very smart piece at Surviving and Thriving. Your mom or mother-in-law probably thinks your kids have too many expensive toys…but rarely do they model for you exactly what you can do to keep the tykes occupied in the absence of those shiny gadgets.

Streets Ahead Living is calculating how she’s going to get through the holidays successfully in her present state of penury, first by finding good buys and making gifts and then by raising some extra cash.

Along the same lines, Daisy Flower at Prairie Eco-Thrifter suggests some low-stress, high-sensible ways to deal with this year’s Christmas frenzy.

The Empress of the Blog Universe, Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, shares some wisdom with nine excellent, highly doable strategies for growing a blog.

Check out this canny post by Luke Landes at Consumerism Commentary: fast ones to watch out for on Black Friday. Very eye-opening!

Don’t Quit Your Day Job’s three proprietors have held forth on the question of stock market overvaluation longer than Funny held forth on the great dishwasher adventure. Start with the first post, which appeared on November 3, and move forward. I have to say, the supra-16,000 status makes me nervous…maybe it’s time to buy gold. Or bitcoins. Or…or Coleman lanterns and wind-up radios?

Speaking of 16,000, the PoP’s wonder if they made the right move in paying down debt instead of buying stock or more real estate. That’s the thing about this money stuff: there’s always a “GULP!” moment.

Mrs. Accountability brings up an interesting topic at Out of Debt Again when she asks whether insisting on controlling the money in a relationship amounts to a kind of abuse.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan wonders if readers can even imagine what it was like to live during the Great Depression. I sure can: my parents told me all about it. That’s why I neurotically believe you should never buy anything on time that you can’t pay for today.

Think the grass is greener on the other side of that fence? Mebbe not: NZ Muse and her new hubby are back in Auckland and searching for a place to live. The place makes San Francisco look like the land of bargains!

After 14 years, Money Beagle was finally forced to buy a new dishwasher. Amazing track record, I’d say!

Five-Cent Nickel has an insightful rumination on the apparently inflated value of the Dow at 16,000. Interesting point of view!

Free Money Finance is doing a series on people who earn six-figure incomes. The current interviewee offers an interesting suggestion: plan to change jobs every five to seven years.

At Frugal Confessions, Amanda and Paul are bracing for the effects of his layoff and putting their ducks in a row as fast as they can.

Frugal Scholar, with characteristic good sense, explains why she’s not buying a turkey this year.

At Grumpy Rumblings, nicoleandmaggie ruminate on the effects, psychological and other, of DH’s new job in the real world. When academics and self-employed folks land work in private industry, it feels like money is falling out of the sky!

Abigail is back at I Pick Up Pennies, which was briefly down, is back online.

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{grump!} I hit “publish” instead of “save” awhile back, so this thing probably went out on the wire, as it were, in half-baked form. Oh well. Now it’s off to paying work!

Loafifarious Morning

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It’s a quarter to 11, the morning pot of coffee has yet to be consumed (because it didn’t come into being until about 10:30), the morning walk has not been walked, I have done NOTHING, in 45 minutes Cassie and I are heading for La Maya’s house, and I am not even dressed. Okay, okay…I have an excuse for loafing: I read the magazine-writing students’ papers till 2:00 this morning.

But that was only because I spent the several usable hours of yesterday afternoon loafing.

Today I’ve got to backwash the pool (which in theory I could do right now…), read papers for the other course, shovel off the desk, finish the bookkeeping, figure out what happened to the tickets to the Bach Festival, and really…I should clean house.

The immediate cause for all this celebratory loafing is that I finally finished editing the esteemed Chinese graduate student’s dissertation. That was an experience! It actually turned out to be more difficult than I expected because, paradoxically, her English is better than many Chinese scholars’. As a result, the techno-statistico-psychobabble she was emitting by way of earning a Ph.D. from one of the most prestigious universities in Asia was deceptively understandable. Because I rarely had much trouble catching what she was trying to say, at irregular intervals various nonidiomatic turns of phrase would slip past me. Then when I went back for a second read, my jaw kept dropping.

OMG! Five biplanes just flew over in formation, wingtip to wingtip, their old reciprocating engines thundering away! What a hoot!!!!!

So I ended up foisting the edits onto my sidekick Tina to review, even though I’m taking graduate-student pay from the client and can’t afford to pay Tina a fair rate to read the stuff. She found still more stuff that I’d missed. So that took another couple of days and required me to go through the whole thing yet again, reading behind her. Finally shipped the thing off yesterday, feeling the effects of brain-fry.

There they go again. They must be flying over a Veteran’s Day parade.

Welp, in my opinion, watching guys fly around in old Sopwith Camels is a lot more fun than blogging. And so, away…

Sopwith_F-1_Camel_2_USAF

HAPPY VETERAN’S DAY!

Ringiquette

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Soooo… Here’s a question for you:

Can an unmarried woman who has no male in the offing and all of whose friends know she has no male in the offing get away with wearing a ring on her left hand, especially if it doesn’t look at all like a wedding or engagement band?

The other day while fishing around in the jewelry drawer, I came across some silver rings I haven’t worn in years. Back in the day, I really loved them and wore them all the time.

For reasons that I chose not to appreciate, as the years wore on the rings wore…less and less. Eventually I couldn’t get them on, or worse, I couldn’t get them off. So they got put away and forgotten.

When they turned up last week, I remembered how much I used to enjoy those pieces and wondered…now that I’m thin again, is there any chance the things would fit?

Well. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: they DO fit!!!

They fit freaking perfectly!

Couldn’t believe it.

So now I’m trotting around with one or the other on my maidenly right hand. But I’d love to be able to wear two of them, the way I used to wear two rings or sets of rings back when I was a corporate wife and society matron.

D’you suppose it would be too, too outré and tacky to wear one of these babes on the left and one on the right? As you know, I do have a countercultural streak. But I’d just as soon not cause one of the church ladies to faint dead away…

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