Eclipse of reason produces squirrels

Merlin whispered to me that a miracle may occur Monday, August 21st, in the early afternoon. There's a slight chance a significant number of Americans may look up, up and away from screens of their phones, tablets, and computers, the wizard mused. Even the toddlers!

Wooooee cool, I whispered back. I didn't know they could still do that! Will it be dangerous???

Indeed, hinted the magician, this foretells an era of liability, litigiousness, and neck strains. These are anxious times deep in the pit of your being. Lo, the tower will fall in darkness and dragons will battle in the sky.

On the upside, there will be increased tourism on Guam. You can watch it all in real time on your devices with hashtags and tweets. Just don't look directly!

Resources:

• Cut and paste optometrist warning. 

We have received numerous calls regarding the proper way to view the solar eclipse. None of the glasses, sunglasses or dilating glasses provided by our office are safe to use during the viewing. Glasses must be stamped with an ISO 12312-2 certification. Any product without that designation is to be deemed unsafe. Looking at the sun without proper protection can cause irreversible retinal damage and is not advised. Unfortunately, our office can not supply you with this product.

• Your library might still have free viewing glasses. It definitely has information on making a cardboard box eclipse viewer as a family bonding DIY project.  
• Prefer your device? There are apps for the eclipse.
• Unlike the Super Bowl, there won't be fantastic Frito and beer commercials, or sparkly scantily-clad lip-syncing superstars. This is not a real spectacle!
• Check in with NASA for science! Science is a real thing! We used to study it in school!
• Merlin and Walter Cronkite looked alike with those bushy owlish eyebrows.
• Planning to try the interlaced fingers and kitchen colander methods myself.
• History of astronomy? Be brave.
• Solar research? 
• One more interesting video on your device.

Merlin has drifted off on a time-travel nap, and I'm trapped in the body of a squirrel.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Can I book my kid's birthday party?

Like many Americans opening their laptop, or quaintly, their newspaper, this week you may have wondered about the pictured field trip to an interactive kid-friendly museum.  Can you book this glowing orb place for a birthday party? You had the Critter Lady for last year's birthday party, and the bouncy house the year before that. Kroger could make a glowing global sheet cake, easy. Maybe the museum hosts overnight lock-in slumber parties for preteen scouts and church groups.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Walmart dropping

So many reasons to resist a trip to Walmart, but there it is. I feel Wendell Berry angst every time I go pick up a prescription at the small rural community killer, thanks to Bert Evans, Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Centennial College.

Mostly I dread the post-apocalyptic flocks of mutant grackles grackling at full blast in the parking lot and taunting me from the roof of my Buick. Plus, one never knows what one will step in alighting from one's carriage.

Last night the grackles could not be heard over the howling wind. Steering my shopping cart against the gale was nearly impossible. Wind chill was eleven degrees.

Just six hours earlier I strolled in balmy seventy-degree air snapping phone photos of glorious leaf colors. And what weirdness propelled my mission to Walmart's pharmacy?

The voice mail said only, "Noses. I'm not getting Libby." It had to be code.


© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

I could make one out of tin foil!

Much needed fun came my way today as I considered the possibility of wearing a hat at the wedding of my youngest son. Could this mother of the groom even chew gum and wear a hat at the same time?

Not even if I trained all day on Lumosity! The last time I wore a hat for fashion and fun, Jean Shrimpton was on the cover of Vogue. My hat was a coral color, and I tied a silk scarf patterned like a peach petroglyph around the crown. I was seriously groovy in my own mind. My lipstick was frosted white and my eye shadow was Yardley blue or kitty cat green.

But, still, hats... vintage hats from my great aunts in that round hatbox, yes!

Seems like this hat would be perfect except for the color...If it were made of aluminum foil the extraterrestrials could tune in to the ceremony. With these antique hat pins I could increase my signal range.



© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Frosted Flakes Chatty Cathy

Technology demands upgrades. Upgrades demand online chats for service and support. 

Chat agent : Can I have you turn OFF your device and remove the SIM Card.

Me : Okay.

Chat agent: Perfect! Once your SIM Card is out let me know please :)

Me : do you have any hints for getting it to slide out?

Chat agent: Sure! You can do this with the back of an earring or a paperclip! :)

Me : now what?

Chat agent : 

I will ask you to blow on the SIM Card and the Sim Card tray please.

Me : LOL.  Done

Chat agent: I know! I know! It looks silly! But I promise you it works! :) Perfect!  Can I have you insert the SIM Card in and then turn ON your device:)

Me : okay ...  android is starting

Chat agent: Yey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Me : It let me call a number!!!

Chat agent : Seee! I told you it worked! : ) Test it out! :)

 Me : just like fairy dust!

Chat agent: It was all you! :) You see you needed to give life to your device! :)

Me: Good night with sleepy sands my dears! 

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Mystified frosted flakes in a concealed-carry world

Life feels SO serious lately, what with candidates as pleasant a gagging on a tongue-depressor, endless pledge drives, and the death of the department store. We need mystery fiction, cozy, historic, romantic, with or without cocker spaniels. Throw in some biplanes, dessert recipes, and secrets in an Antiques Roadshow clock. 

Library work is rarely glamorous, but it does have publisher blurbs inside dust jackets that inspire curiousity, wonder, and wacky visuals!

It's another day of agony at the dentist's office for ninety-two-year-old poet-sleuth Victoria Trumbull when a fellow patient, wealthy Mrs. Wilmington, dies in the next cubicle. It's an unfortunate, though seemingly not murderous incident, but the receptionist is hysterical. With the police shorthanded due to an upcoming presidential visit, Victoria takes on the case. As she wrestles with her ex-son-in-law, a three-million-dollar will, four greedy heirs, and a deadly dental clinic, Mrs. Trumbull discovers that nothing in the case is quite what it seems-- Adapted from dust jacket flap of Bloodroot by Cynthia Riggs.

1. 92-year-old
2. wrestling 
3. ex-son-in-law
4. dental agony
5. poet-sleuth

I want to be there when the 92-year-old poet-sleuth wrestles her ex-son-in-law over three-million-dollars just to see the hyphens fly.

Texas gun culture and workplaces don't mix on multiple levels. Governing bodies are trying to set policies for carrying concealed weapons on the job. It's been a bad couple weeks in the Man vs. Machine category with recalcitrant printers, obstinate computers, and demon-possessed coffee-makers. I shot the copier, but I didn't shoot no vending machine. 

In other workplace mysteries, I accidentally looked inside the break room fridge.  Birthday Cake @ 3:00 Today introduces plucky human resources professional Jemima Benefits who must find the killer in this forensic culinary thriller before moldy leftovers claim another victim. Sequel May 2017  working title:  Case of the Queso Crockpot.

Remember this -- any workday when you don't show up on the nightly news is a good day. Don't wrestle, write haiku.


© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Blue is my world now I'm without you

Health class teachers warned us about flashbacks. They could occur at any time because of dangerous choices we might make in our adolescent years. White Rabbit... Stairway to Heaven... Truckin'... These might sneak up on us at any time in our life and we'd be sent straight to the loony bin.

I didn't expect to have a severe flashback while waiting my turn to have fabric cut in JoAnns. Nobody expects the Paul Mauriat "L'Amour Est Bleu" flashback. My mental turntable was spinning at 45 r.p.m., a floral corduroy Nehru dress was floating above my eyes. I'm sure I was on my back in a yard of mostly crabgrass and clover with a transistor radio earpiece wrapped around my ear, clutching the KLMS 1480 Superhit 1+ 48 Survey.

Factoid: Paul Mauriat's orchestra easy listening single was a number one hit in the U.S. for five weeks in early 1968, the only record by a French artist to every be #1, and the second longest instrumental behind the theme from "A Summer Place". Oh, geez, I never even warned my sons about the dangers of Percy Faith and his Orchestra! Talk about a gateway drug!!

Too much squinting at the sun and then at my watch might have been the trigger. Used the last square of cyanotype fabric in our short patch of sunshine, and rushed to order more. How would a sunprint addict make it until delivery?

Of course, by choosing blue quilt fabrics at JoAnns...

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

MOG PEPO is not what you think

NWA fall of 1977

MOG PEPO is a condition closely associated with MOBO. UNESCO should create an NGO humanitarian relief organization to deal with this international challenge even though contagion vectors are not yet clearly defined.

Glossary:

MOBO -- Mother of boys only
MOG  -- Mother of the groom
NGO  -- Non-governmental organization (relief)
PEPO  -- Panic early, panic often (motto)
Tencel  -- A semi-synthetic form of rayon
FCO  -- An alleged airport in Rome
CFA -- Compostable formal attire
NPR -- Pledge drive
TLT -- Think lovely thoughts (Mind over matter method for Darling children to achieve lift-off after Peter Pan blows the fairy dust on them)
NWA -- Newlywed apartment (SEE Macrame)

Imagine how very delighted my youngest son will be when I arrive at his destination wedding location with a roller bag full of plastic newspaper sleeves, then sit on a stoop weaving and braiding the bags into  a stunning full-length formal gown appropriate for all MOG occasions.

We receive a minimum of four "newspaper sleeves" every library day, and most days several more. Hmmm. Perhaps macrame. Tying the knot...

I'm not suggesting the wedding guests remove and compost their formal attire right there at the reception.  That would be bad on several levels. Thinking more about how to make extra space for souvenirs in my carry-on luggage for the return flight.


© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

A measure of control

a gauge of rainfall
a measure of anxiety
a tiny bit of breathing room

walnuts

strange growths on the balcony
mushroom swelling beneath mint and trumpet vine

gnats
eye of newt
a blast of trump
spores galore but better every day
gaining

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

White out

Unprepared for the sudden snowstorm on a weekend trip to Grandma's house, we fashioned booties of aluminum foil and plastic bags to get out in the snow, 1967. A chronically "special" visitor to the library wear hats, foil helmets to protect from space rays, plastic bags like shower caps. Toilet paper bandages wrap around Jacob Marley's toothache. A Salvador Dali mustache of twisted Kleenex, 2016..

We are all in our assorted mental blizzards and white obsessions. Sometimes digging out. Other times hunkering down. Staying in touch with my family members in the East Coast blizzard this weekend. Watched the cell phone video of the bulldog running in the snow. The bulldog is sometimes running upside down or sideways.

Family vehicle owners shovel and shiver. Those who rely on mass transit play Monopoly, take artistic photos, and run low on wine. A good reason not to own a car!

I'm not making much progress reading Edmund de Waal's White Road : A Journey Into Obsession about porcelain and white clay. The book reviews didn't mention it was nap-inducing!

Cutthroat Monopoly : That sibling with the evil landlord gene. Piling on the houses and hotels, Park Place .Boardwalk. Making you PAY. What do you remember about blizzards? I spy with my little eye a lot of white:

White-haired great aunts and spinster schoolteachers doing jigsaw puzzles at folding card tables. Popcorn shooting from the air popper; potato soup with homemade egg noodles; wind-sculpted drifts overhanging roof eaves; staying under the quilt with Kerouac's On the Road and a bottle of port. That wine stain is still on the white quilt. Being trapped with the dorm roommate who played Nights in White Satin and A Whiter Shade of Pale over and over. The world covered in clean white snow before it all gets ring around the collar.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Pantone trending office decor

2016 promises to be excellent based solely on the announcement of Pantone's Colors of the Year: Rose Quartz and Serenity. Not "Baby Pink" and "Baby Blue", these colors are chillier, more elemental and glacial.

The Pantone copy mentions "mellowing" and "mindfulness", "reassurance" and "security", "gender equality and fluidity". I'm hoping for just a hint of reassuring clarity, or at least translucence. Should hell freeze over and Trump become President, I will be signing on to any ship seeking the Northwest Passage.

In my winter funk I celebrate the translucence of rose quartz and the magic of its name for young rock collectors. Removing my heavy silver and Picasso marble earrings this evening was a lesson in the enduring magic of names. "Tiger eye", "snowflake obsidian", and "fool's gold" tumble in my mind with gypsum, talc, mica, jasper, agate, geodes, calcite, and playground "pea gravel".

Pantone is a system for communicating color specifications across mediums, but is its color of the year a prediction or a report? Thank heaven 2015's color, Marsala, has passed the crown to Miss Quartz. Call it a fortified wine if you wish, but marsala was a bit too rotting fruit and bodily fluids for me, with a Lubbock dust storm stirred in.

The rose quartz in the photo is fist-size. I've had it for decades sunk in aquariums. Remove algae accumulation in the dishwasher or a bath with Efferdent fizzy denture cleaners. Then it's ready to make my new office totally trendy.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

You can't see me!

I’m not really here!

Went behind the fence to retrieve the wood building blocks, binoculars, and other toys that had been thrown over. These photos are the back side of the bird blind with its feeding shelf of birdseed and peanuts. This squirrel was acting so oddly I started to think she was really stuck like Santa in the chimney. Did she eat too much? As I walked to either side, she would turn her head, but didn't move a bit otherwise. When I finally got within a foot and a half, out she popped and ran off lickety-split.

• Wait a sec! Does lickety have one t or two? Only one, and I just plain don't have time to wonder about "a lick and a promise" this evening. Not going there. 

• Also not wondering how the squirrel would look hiding behind the arras with Polonius in Act 3, Scene IV.

• Was the squirrel waiting in the wings for the cue to enter, stage right or stage left and say, "Aha! Now we know the identity of the murderer"? 

• Was the attempt to become invisible a sign of squirrel intelligence? 

I keep trying to write a post about the many things I learned while preparing my "Trim a Tree for Wildlife" program, most particularly about receiving a gift pamphlet about commensal rodents. This, again, is not the evening for that endeavor. 

Online Etymology Dictionary indicates "mensa" is related to table like mesa, not moon or monthly. The meaning of the high IQ Mensa organization: 

The word "Mensa" means "table" in Latin. Mensa is a round-table society, where race, color, creed, national origin, age, politics, educational or social background are irrelevant.

That's all just dandy, but I want the squirrel to eat at the birdfeeder, not at my table, no matter how smart and theatrical it is.

Oh, and olly olly oxen free!

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

A few new strings is all

Got it now. Thanks! Wrapping the stair rail with holiday lights did the trick.

Yes, it's late to be getting the Christmas commercial spirit. Not so belated for THE REST of the holiday outlook. You know, those parts with meaning, family, friends, gratitude, joy, wonder, waiting, weather changes, music, sharing, postage stamps, senses, and twinkly lights. Particularly blue twinkly lights, but also white, purple, pink, and assorted. As many strands of 70-100 lights as needed to make it seem complete, and just $2.98/string.

 

While I was a-wrapping the railing the little family in the next apartment emerged. How many months have they lived next door? Why do we never cross paths? Now we have exchanged greetings. It's not wassailing, but it's a start toward neighborliness.

Time is a-flying now. It flew up the flue while you gawked at the gorgeous, bright, soggy fall leaves. As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an atomic leaf-blower get sucked into a giant plastic bag.

So few days left in the year to tell people I hold them dear. The days are so short I don't even unplug the extension cord for the lights.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Invention is all in the name

In the late Seventies/early Eighties there was a grocery store concept known as "PLAIN LABEL". PLAIN LABEL generic canned goods were a step below store brands, and the contents of a can of CORN might be more salty liquid than kernels. PLAIN LABEL beer and light beer in their black on white cans were something of a sensation of minimalist aesthetic and low price.

EMPTY

As a young homeowner/parent without a penny to my name, I purchased TUNA and PUFFED RICE.

Just a hint of dandelions

Recently our esteemed governor has had some issues with a fantasy federal military plot to take over Texas. In the days of PLAIN LABEL beer we worried that grocery newcomer Albertsons was a front for a Latter Day Saints takeover of food sources. I kid you not.

It's all about the names now. Generic BEER does not have the same appeal as Saint Arnold Fancy Lawn Mower. The son formerly known as Woolly Mammoth reports when he first tasted an I.P.A. his tastebuds hollered, "grass clippings".

MIRAGE is the name coined by that former Woolly Mammoth son for his punchbowl concoction of pink grapefruit juice, gin, and Campari--an appropriate name both atmospheric and predictive of imbibers' mental state.

Did the Woolly Mammoth invent this recipe? Heavens to Betsy, no. My own pink grapefruit and gin concoction was variously known as the "Pinewood Bowl," the "Leaky Radiator," or the "Stranded Sunburn". Grenadine may or may not have been in the thermos. The impaired vehicle was the '61 Plymouth Sport Fury. Of course!

ELI WHITNEY is the name given by a Lunch Bunch alum to a poor college student punch of gin and "blue drink". BLUE DRINK is that pseudo-raspberry cotton candy econo fake juice well known to starving students. And therefore a punch made with cotton candy blue drink and gin was named for the inventor of the cotton gin. And, yes, it is nearly undrinkable!

Your challenge is to invent a punch or cocktail worthy of the name ROBERT FULTON. Let me know what you concoct.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Don't talk to me before nine

Enough with the personality trait, communication style, learning style, Briggs Myers, My True Color tests. Just give me a shirt printed with this warning:

Do not talk to me before nine.

Okay, maybe three shirts in different colors* so I don't have to do laundry every night. I like the ambiguity of not specifying a.m. or p.m. On the back of the shirt it should say:

Don't make me pick up the phone. 

         You know how to email.        

     You aren't Lindsey Graham.       

I love my job! I have my own cubicle. It's a grownup version of the cereal box fort at the breakfast table. I won't swipe the illustrations from this blogger, but do check them out.


*Cheerios yellow, Wheaties orange, Frosted Flakes blue







© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Dropping my printer/scanner off Everest

Full disclosure: It has been a long week since we've seen the sun. At work I'm trying to craft a perky civic presentation about the economic impacts of litter. Asleep perchance adreaming I'm dancing en pointe atop a leaking Seventies waterbed. Commuting in the freezle drizzle I'm obsessing about the plastic bags and milk jugs washing into storm drains on Coit Street. My Canon printer/scanner should be punted off the planet because of its My Image Garden program. AND, yes, AND I've got a bad case of Billy Joel earworm. "Only the Good Die Young" has been playing continuously in my head since Monday.

So Sherpas having to pick up litter behind climbers on Everest was the LAST STRAW. The wind is howling. The mountain is moaning. The ice is shifting, but that's just my trip to Kroger. It's thundersleet with gusts to 45 mph. Heck, Billy Joel was 45 rpm.

The back story: Still pondering The Dallas Opera's icy Everest opera premiere. A young coworker with a fondness for hats reminiscent of Danger Baby and the Woolly Mammoth sports both Everest styles. Attempting to scan the Playbill cover set off a really ugly adventure with Canon's My Image Garden program. Uninstalled and reinstalled the printer/scanner, but I reserve the right to toss it off a mountaintop if it doesn't clean up its own high altitude litter.

So just stop whining and get your reusable bags out of the car when you go shopping. Bundle up if it's cold. Go paperless where possible. Don't annoy Mother Nature. She so DOES NOT want to build a snowman with big-eyed Disney princesses. She will send them on blind dates with Billy Joel.

Nepal's government imposed new rules last year requiring each climber to bring down to the base camp 8kgs (18 pounds) of trash the amount it estimates a climber discards along the route. Climbing teams must leave a $4,000 deposit that they lose if they don’t comply with the regulations.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Falling on ice krispies

Wrenched myself out of a horribly vivid dream of slipping and falling on a shiny parking lot sheet of ice. Not everyone can hurt their shoulder while sleeping! But it was so real--exactly like the parking lot down the flight of frozen stairs to the Buick. The Advil was real, too.

The lesson here? Going to an Everest opera, haunted by the winter stay in my dad's hospital room after his fall, and reading a Russian novel can make a person feel like a jack-knifed 18-wheeler on an interstate ramp. Reading the novel wrapped in quilts on an unpaid snow day can make that person identify with the Russian peasants, not the glamorous, straying nobility.

 

Chicken soup and a heating pad.

Crossword puzzle, not Karenina on the Kindle.

Be safe in your dreams and on the sidewalks!

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Dense fog on Memory Lane

Sitting there in America's best airport staring at the carpet while my Kindle recharged and my fish tacos digested, I gradually noticed folks in my gate having way more fun than usual. Their jackets said "The Spinners", and their guitars gave my brain a little poke. Musicians. What decade? What hits? What recent casino gig? Headed back home to Detroit by way of Dallas. Couldn't just walk up and ask them. If I had a smart phone I could google, but deferred gratification is a sign of maturity.

So back to my eBook, Olive Kitteridge. It was fitting to read about old married people and old widowed people, especially blunt and abrasive ones this month. And you know, that amazing actress was in a tv show I didn't watch based on the novel. That "Fargo" pregnant actress who was married to Bill Murray and in love with Bruce Willis in "Moonrise Kingdom", but I kinda think is married to a Coen brother. Can't google her either, so I'm feeling more mature by the moment. I might even wait until I finish the novel to google the actress!

I sense an S in her name and a Mc slowly rising from my deep subconscious. The Magic 8 Ball says It is decidedly so. About the Spinners all I get is memory fog, Oregon drizzle and, "Your call is important to us, please stay on the line..." 

So I'm working my way back to the answers:

Seventies

Could It Be I'm Falling In Love 

Spirit Mountain Casino January 18

BONUS: Yes, I had suede sandals this color that year

 (and even double-knit wide-cuffed bell-bottoms)

© 2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Learning curve in the rear-view mirror

The most difficult part of my assignment was locating the fleet services desk in the maze of offices and garages. Next time I'll take a big ball of string, bread crumbs, and the departmental ID code number.

The gal on the phone at the feed store asked if I meant "straw" when I asked for "hay bales". Just so you know, a two-stringer is 14"x36"x18" and a three-stringer is 16"x48"x24".

So, at the fleet services desk they hoped I wouldn't mind that the pick-up truck had a camper on it. No problem. Well, except the problem of not being able to use the rear-view mirror. And we all know objects in side mirrors are closer than they appear.

The guy at Wells Bros. Feed Store stuffed six two-stringer straw bales into the camper-covered pick-up bed. That was maximum capacity. No need for the tax-free ID number as there's no sales tax on straw. So many things to learn! No matter that they were all out of corn stalks.

When I got back to work I had to clamber up on the tailgate and drag the bales out. A bale is not as heavy as I expected, but I wouldn't want to carry them around all day.

Driving the fleet pickup was a bit trickier. I kept getting stuck to the bare foam of the seat, then sort of falling out the door. The pickup seemed to be lumbering like a tortoise, but was actually going 45 mph. The speed trap cop ignored my City vehicle.

ODAA  Other duties as assigned
OJT On the job training
OLDP Old lady driving pick-up
ODAT One day at a time
What was the name of that author from Sri Lanka? Michael...  Ondaatje

Green Acres is the place for me!

Green Acres is the place to be. 
Farm livin' is the life for me. 
Land spreadin' out so far and wide 
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside. 

New York is where I'd rather stay. 
I get allergic smelling hay. 
I just adore a penthouse view. 
Dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue. 

© 2014 Nancy L. Ruder

Two out of three tadpoles agree...

...Legs are good.

Personality is next to nonexistent. Tadpoles don't do much. They are not nearly as exciting as cannibalistic dragonfly nymphs. Still, I am astounded that I netted three amphibians for today's wetlands presentation. The event was a grand success and all had a great time, except for maybe the tadpoles. They declined to answer a brief online survey questionnaire after they had been returned to their pond of origin.

© 2014 Nancy L. Ruder