Bad Girl

I have not been so good with the updates lately, partly because I am SOOOOOOOOO TIRED when I get home, and partly because my life is boringly not-unpleasant these days. I did promise to let you hear the library at lunchtime, though; it's here. Turn up the volume.

I'm re-working the library website at school, which is interesting and keeping me occupied, so that was good today.

Big weekend coming up. K turns 25 on Friday, plus Sunday is Easter at the IlS. Going for brunch this year, which means noon; I have no faith whatsoever that the SIL and her family will be there on time. But at least we won't be driving north on the Parkway in all the traffic after dinner.

So, my baby is 25. That's very weird.

And tonight is the first night of Passover. We don't do anything to observe it, but it was so my favorite holiday as a child, a family dinner with Grandpa Sam center stage. It was never about the religion, or even the food, which was ordinary; it was about him. Ah, he was the best.

And so we wish each other a zissen Pesasch, a sweet Passover. Even now, it feels somehow good to know that once we were slaves and became free. There is always hope, and a sweetness to a holiday that commemorates that as spring brings the earth back to life. And for me, memories of Grandpa Sam singing the prayers; Grandma Ida bustling around the table; awful, super-sweet Kosher wine; collecting my little reward of a dollar for bringing the afikomen, the ceremonial matzo, back to the table (kids have to steal it and adults have to ransom it back to continue the service); and tipsy Grandpa laughing all evening after the seder was over and we were singing Had Gad Ya and Dayenu, both of which, now that I look back, were clearly drinking songs, since the tipsier you were, the funnier they got. Next year in Jerusalem! we say at the end of a seder, but my hope for next year is to be here with my family, and with you all.

Ooh, seems to be maudlin day here at the Chai's. Speaking of which, l'chaim! (To life!) And good night.



waiting for FRIENDS :: ENTRY #2021
READING: --- by ---

Hello! Here I Am!

No idea why I didn't write yesterday.

Where to begin? Okay, the liver scan showed -- the doctor hesitated -- something ..

and I interrupted "Yes, I know, a blood tumor; it's benign, I've had it for at least ten years."

So he sighed in relief, but said it has to be checked out for sure, so I'm having an ultrasound on Saturday. He said the problem with tests is that they turn up all sorts of things that turn out to be nothing but have to be checked anyway. Fine. And I'm fine.

I was telling R before that when she moves at the end of March, I will help her all I can and will even take off a day of work that she is also taking so that we can unpack, etc. She thanked me profusely and said that by the way, sometime during the moving weekend, I will probably meet the GF's mother. Oy, the machetenesta! Anyone looking for me to break out in a case of nerves will find it that weekend, I promise!

I was the energizer bunny all day at work and even after, and I'm not even tired yet, which goes to show what one cup of regular coffee in the morning will do for me. And it was gooooood coffee too; I stopped at the best bagel place in town for egg and cheese on a soft roll and a cup of the good stuff.

I am now going to goo up my hands with lotion and put some cotton gloves on, as my hands are like sandpaper and I can't take it another minute.

* machetenesta: Yiddish for which there is no direct English translation; it means the relationship between someone's parent and mother-in-law. The male equivalent is machouten. The plural -- roughly, in-laws' in-laws -- is machetunim. So the GF's mother is my machetenesta, assuming a future marriage. That's all clear, right?



TWO AND A HALF MEN :: ENTRY #1995
READING: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Shpilkes

I've got the shpilkes today, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I've achieved some nice goals today:

1. It's a snowy day and everyone is home, which makes me happy,
2. I got up around 7:30 with a headache but took Tylenol and went back to sleep until 9:30,
3. I haven't left the house all day or even gotten dressed, and
4. I had a nice long workout on the Wii Fit

The headache was not gone by 11:30, which means I got to take some excedrin, which K says for me is like meth, so since then I've done three loads of laundry and worked out for nearly 45 minutes. By the time I was done, the headache was gone, and now I'm left with the need to do something -- but not leave the house, which would require getting dressed, or at the very least, putting on shoes -- and only two real tasks before me: putting away laundry, or putting away the ornaments. I am just not interested in either of those, but I think I won't be able to avoid them for much longer. I'm considering asking the girls to help me with the ornaments tomorrow for my birthday present. But I'll still be on my own for the laundry.

It started snowing around ten, maybe? K had stayed with friends overnight, but I wasn't worried or crazy or anything because it wasn't snowing hard and I knew the driving wasn't that bad. It's still not snowing hard, but steadily all day, and she got home before the roads were even covered. I know that R is out and about today, but with the boyfriend, so, not alone, so I'm not concerned there. So, no crazies today, although recent bouts of the minor crazies have led to an increase in happy pills, starting today. Which, now that I think of it, may also have something to do with the shpilkes. (But I really think it's the caffeine in the excedrin.) I almost feel like spending some more time on the Wii, but overdoing it would not be wise.

Okay, I give up, I'm going to put away the laundry. Ornaments tomorrow, I hope. Or hey, maybe tonight, if I can't sleep. That would be different.



WATCHING FRIENDS :: ENTRY #1960
READING: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke

TV Slave

There is no Law and Order on. (Which is kind of amazing, when you think of it, because L & O is the Saved by the Bell and/or Wings of the 21st century, as in it's on all the time.) Anyway, there is nothing for me to watch no and so I am sad. Not very sad, mind you, but if I were four years old and still me, I would be making The Face. (Or if my grandparents were visiting, it would be The Punim, which is Yiddish for, of course, face.)

I was a remarkably scowly child, and I've been looking for pictures of me making that face, but there are none, because of course I would have run scowling from the room if anybody had pointed a camera at me at such a moment. When I think of myself at the age of, say, four or five, it's with narrowed eyebrows and a downturned mouth. I must have been a real peach.

(What I would have heard my grandmother say is something along the lines of "Gib a kuch affen punim!" which would be "Give a look at that face!" Punim would be pronounced kind of like poonim, emphasis on the first syllable, for all you linguists out there.)

Where was I?

Oh, right. I'm actually in television heaven, because I've been setting up my recordings, and I worked out a way around that PBS show The War, which I'm looking forward to seeing -- they've already shown the first four episodes -- but I'm annoyed by the way they scheduled it, four nights in a row for a week and then the same next week. Like that's not going to conflict with whatever else everyone is watching.

In other news, I had an amusing exchange today with several freshman boys who were in the library after lunch. They had a pile of old yearbooks on the table in front of them, and as I walked by, I said "What year is that?" about the one they had open, and one of them said "72", so I said, "Oh, I'm in 71." Mad scramble for the 71 book. One of the boys says "How do we find you?" and another says, I swear, "I'm sure you were as lovely then as you are now." Is that funny, or what? (And he knew it was funny, he wasn't being weird or fake polite.) I laughed, and patted him on the shoulder and said "You're a good boy." Anyway, they flipped the pages until they found the Hubs, of course, and were confused, and I said "That's my husband," and they giggled and asked if we were high school sweethearts and I said No. One of them looked at my I.D. card so they knew my first name, but they still couldn't find me, so I flipped to the page and slapped my picture and said "There!" and went off to lunch with a smile. This is a very cute freshman class. And hopefully my last class, the last one I will be with for all four of their years. Not a bad way to go out.

I am still hungry. Just thought I'd let you know.

WATCHING THE SIMPSONS :: ENTRY #1592

It Was 30 Years Ago Today ...

Yes, folks, I was married 30 years ago today, on a freakishly hot day. New York City was in its first day of recovering from a power blackout that left the Bronx (where my grandmother lived), among other places, in flames from the looting and lawlessness that came in the dark.

Well, that was cheerful, wasn't it?

So it was hot today, and I had some issues with that, but otherwise a nice day. My big surprise of the day was that I did not get a DVD as an anniversary gift (which is what I gave him, you may recall.) I got this:



You coulda knocked me ovah with a feathah. Now, because the Hubs is not a maven* when it comes to the jewels, I have no idea what this actually is. I can tell you this, though. It's the kind of thing that when I see it on a TV commercial, I think "Yeah, right, like I'm ever getting one of those." My guess is that the woman who works with him and who helped convince him to take me on this trip also told him that he had to buy me something and then she went with him and helped him pick it out. I can't imagine him doing this on his own. This is the guy, remember, who showed up in the hospital the morning after R was born -- 35 hours of labor, here -- carrying a shopping bag, so I thought he had a gift for me (how naive) but he had stopped on his way to the hospital and bought himself a very expensive fishing reel in honor of being a new father and he didn't want to leave it in the car. Nada for the new mommy. Yes, some things we always remember, don't we?

I don't know how I'm going to combine this with what I usually wear around my neck (which apparently he's never noticed me wearing for years and years), which is a gold chain that came from my grandmother with my father's wedding ring on it, but I guess I'll work that out somehow.

Okay, so I'm still working on all my pictures, but here's what we did today. We got to the visitor's center before 8, and when it opened, we got on line to get a guided tour. This means that a guide got in our car with us -- she drove, actually -- and for two hours, showed us all over the battlefield and relevant parts of the town, and gave us a tour, just the two of us. They have six guides available at a time, so if you don't get there early, you have to wait. This woman was FABULOUS. Not surprisingly, it turns out that she does this in the summer and is otherwise a history teacher at Gettysburg High School. She was just great.

After lunch, we went on the tour, so to speak, of Eisenhower's farm, which was very eh. He was not a great president, and his wife was a little peculiar, if you ask me. The house is not tremendously fancy or huge, but has some interesting features, things that Mamie apparently thought were just the best you could get. There were two curio cabinets that were basically filled with crap, the kinds of little things that we all gather over our lives and then dump at a garage sale, except she thought they were treasures. You know, little candy dishes and souvenir-y stuff. The house was very very fifties. One of the really very strange things was that one of the rooms was clearly the maid's quarters because on the easy chair in the room, which was facing the small TV, there was a copy of Ebony magazine from the fifties. Way to say "See? A Negro person lived here."

We went to TGI Friday's for dinner, and guess what? Just because they have a veggie burger on the menu in New Jersey, it doesn't mean they have it in Pennsylvania! They did ask us when we went in if we wanted to be in the smoking or non-smoking section, a question no longer relevant in New Jersey, so the Hubs got to smoke even though he didn't get to eat. (He ate the french-fried string beans, which are delish.)

Okay, so, on to tomorrow. A little more town browsing, a leisurely tour of the battlefield on our own, and a guided walking tour of the cemetery. You remember the cemetery, right? Lincoln came here to dedicate the cemetery; they just asked him to say a few words on the occasion.

* a maven is a person who knows a lot about a particular thing, seriously, and is a kind of connoisseur of it. An expert, sort of, but not in an official way. Not a know-it-all, but someone who just really knows.

WATCHING CSI :: ENTRY #1525

Random Sunday, and Today's Report

Sunday, later

I just remembered this conversation I had the other day with the SCM. I was telling him that I was hoping to buy a pair of rubber gardening boots after school, for working in the wet basement. I told him that I had planned to wear the Hubs' boots, but realized at once that that would be absurd, as I wouldn't be able to walk in them and would probably kill myself just going down the basement stairs. He says:

"You and [Hubs' name] don't wear the same size shoes?"

I swear, I did not know what to say at first. Finally, I said the only thing that really you possibly could say: "No-o-o!" with that tone in my voice that says "Of course not! What's wrong with you?" And he says, after a minute,

"Oh." I just looked at him.

"[Wife's name] and I wear about the same size. We can wear each other's shoes." Now I didn't know where to look. And he continues!

"I have really small feet and hands."

I said, looking at all the important papers on my desk, "Uh ... oh. Okay."

Seriously. What man will say that to anyone?

---

Here's a bit more on the Yiddish glossary. The syllable in caps is the syllable that is stressed. Any time you see "kh", it means the guttural "ch" sound, which you may know from the Yiddish word "chutzpah", often seen in English.

Okay, little bird is faigeleh. That's FAY-gu-luh.
Farblunget, for mixed up, is fah-BLUNGE-it.
Farcokte, full of shit, is fah-COCK-tuh.
Farbissiner punim, two words for a bitter face, would be fah-BIS-sin-ner POO-nim.
Farmisht, bewildered, is fah-MISHT.

It's not knowing where to put the accent, really. Because the words were not originally written in the English alphabet, all English spellings are more or less just the way the word sounds. (Real Yiddish, the way all my grandparents wrote it, is written in Hebrew script, which means there are no vowels used. Don't ask.)

---

So the Hubs finishes all his garden work on Sunday and comes in to take a shower, and comes out of the bathroom, all dressed and squeaky clean, and stands before us at the family room doorway, and K lets out a shriek. I look up and his beard is gone. His beard is gone! He has had a full beard and mustache for about 20 years; K barely remembers him without it. (Or with black hair, for that matter.) He had told us on Easter during the ride down to his parents that he was toying with the idea of shaving it off. And he did. He left the mustache. How does he look now? Like every picture of his grandfather I have ever seen. Like every old Italian man. That's the neatly trimmed little mustache he has. If it were up to me, I'd say grow the beard back or shave off the mustache, or grow the mustache long like Mark Twain. He didn't look like everyone else before, and now he does. It's very weird.

---

All over our neighborhood, and in various parts of town, it looks like the houses have been turned inside out. It looks like there are more possessions out on the curb for trash pick-up tomorrow -- all water-damaged, I presume -- than what could possibly be left inside. Hmm. Our curb is only about half-full, that is, only about half the width of the house. Hmm.

---

Monday, almost 6.00 pm

I have had me quite the day. Grandma Ida would be bursting with pride. (Except she would be kvelling.) I have worked my ass off. My back is very sore (as would be anyone's without an ass to hold it up), but not spasming, as my back is wont to do, just sore and achy from bending and lifting all day. To whit:

I was at Target by 8.15 to buy more shelves (I had bought some nice big ones yesterday, which the Hubs had brought downstairs, but I was getting some smaller ones), and then to the supermarket for a few things, my first trip of the day to the recycling center (with empty cardboard boxes), and then ... home, I guess. I started working downstairs a little after 9.00.

All I can tell you is that over the course of the next five hours, I only stopped to go back to recycling twice, and followed up one of those trips with a short break on the phone with my sister while I sipped a Dunkin Donuts iced latte. Other than that, I worked continuously, assembling shelves, shifting stuff around, taking out more garbage. I filled the curb. I had gotten the latte on my way back from recycling trip #2, and on my way out to #3, I decided that what I wanted more than anything else -- for lunch; I hadn't eaten -- was to fulfill my recent longing for coffee ice cream, so I did that, had an ice cream cone for lunch. I had already worked it off, in spades.

One itty bitty tiny glitch for the day. Trip #3 included an old printer that was down in the basement, never to be used again. After the nice man at recycling took it out of the car for me, I saw ... an ink stain on the front passenger seat. A good inch by two inches maybe. Ink. On the front passenger seat.

Of R's car.

That was the closest I came to breaking down and crying all day. I have her car for two days so that the Hubs' and mine can be serviced. After trip #3, all I had to do was eat my ice cream and drive home. But no. I ate the ice cream (of course), but once I was home, I had to go to work on that stain. I got most of it, but some remains. Now, there's some other kind of stain -- coffee, probably -- only an inch or two away, and much bigger, but you know how bad you feel if you borrow something and can't return it in the same condition. I don't think she'll care since it's not actually a big wet inkblot at this point, but I feel bad about it. I'm also over it.

As you may have gathered, I've had very little to eat today. It seems that the secret to weight loss for me is to keep busy and for it to be hot. I can't eat when it's too hot, and it's 85 degrees now, at 6.10. So here's another year when we went from winter directly to summer, without stopping for spring. I guess when I go back to school next week, I'll find out if the a/c in the new library works.

And now I must eat, because I'm having a whole low blood sugar experience. I was going to cook something -- really, I was! -- but I think something quick in the microwave is a better plan. But of course, first I must post this! I have priorities!


watching Reba :: entry #1440

Better Now

An update, but first, the last Yiddish word I used in the last entry was faigeleh. Literally, a faigeleh is a little bird, and is often a term of endearment for small children, especially girls. My grandmother almost always called me faigeleh, as in "Faigeleh, can you hand me ... " whatever it was, as you might call someone "Sweetie." However, in more contemporary slang (which goes back a good 50 years or more) faigeleh is also used to indicate a homosexual man, or a man with effeminate tendencies. It is not always derogatory, althougth it can be. It can be merely descriptive, as gay now is, or it can be hurled as an insult. But it's not the origin of the English insult fag, which is actually English, as in British, in origin, and comes from faggot, which means a burning bundle of sticks or wood used to start a bigger fire.

Okay, class dismissed.

The rug in the basement is gone, and was not that hard to get rid of. It was a little challenging to get the stuff moved off it, and some things had to be repacked, but the rug cut up into strips very easily, and when the Hubs got home, he carried the pieces outside. I had also left a narrow strip since the stuff on top of it was too heavy; I planned to get shelves and put them up on Monday and then the rug would be gettable, but the Hubs somehow managed to get that out, too. So there are no wet boxes sitting down there, nothing in imminent danger, and I think, nothing prone to smelling. I still have work to do, as in the shelves and re-arranging everything for future safety, but it's all much more managable now. And it turns out that the shelves I need are on sale at Target this week for half of what I paid for the ones I already have, and got a few years ago elsewhere. Score. I may be dropping by Target every day this week until I have enough to cover every basement wall.

I cleaned up my desk. I cleaned up the coffee table. I finished Jailbird. I finished Dead-Eye Dick. So I'm on the move. Next: Galapagos. And getting those bills paid. And I gathered up all the shoes and put them in a laundry basket. Yes, things are looking up. I don't feel so ... okay, whatever the word was that I couldn't find, I don't need it anymore. I'm okay.

Oy. Gotta put the last wash in.


watching Today in New York :: entry #1439

Uh .. I .. Wait a Minute

Not only am I unable to think of a word to describe to you how I'm feeling, I can't even think of a word to describe my degree of .. vocabulary .. ineptitude. Okay, that sounds like a start. Maybe by the time I'm done, I'll have a word for my condition of the moment. I'm sure it will be in Yiddish.

There is just stuff everywhere. Everywhere I look. My desk has random papers and bank cards and flash drives and cleaner's tickets all over it. The shelf that sticks out of my desk -- I don't know what that's called, either, but it's where I live my life -- has four Kurt Vonnegut novels, a copy of my teaching contract, a stack of bills that need to be paid, my keys, my Palm, my iPod shuffle and its huge headphones, and ... my wallet, I think, all on it, on a shelf that measures about 12 by 15 inches. So it's all piled high.

My laundry basket in the bedroom is so full that stuff is piled about two feet over the top of it. Q's carrying basket is still sitting in the living room, even though she went to the vet for claw clipping on Tuesday. There is a pile of about six pairs of shoes -- all K's -- sitting on the family room floor in front of the television. And the piece of furniture that we call a coffee table -- it's really more like a trunk, or a cabinet -- is just too much to be described. Magazines. Dish towels. More magazines. I see a rolled up sock. K's work schedules for the last few weeks.

Oy.

It's not unusual for me to let things go a bit before vacation, because I know that on the first day, I'll get everything squared away. But I don't feel that way at the moment. There is just too much to put away, and not enough places to put it in.

I know what's causing all this: the basement anxiety. I need that space down there to work with, but I don't have it now, and I have to work on that space as well. I don't wanna go down there, not even to do laundry. I want to wake up tomorrow morning and have everything cleaned up and put away. All I want to do now is read.

I told you: if I start a book, I won't want to do anything until I finish it. And I started it. Go me.

I still don't have my word. The only one that keeps popping into my head is farblunget, which really just means lost, confused. I am mixed up, but that's not the essence of what this is. Neither is farkokte, which actually means full of shit. But it's a good word. (Neither of the "r" sounds in these words is actually heard, but they're there, for some reason. Just thought I'd mention it. Or maybe my mother just didn't say it because she was from New Yawk.) But it's got to be one of those far words. Far is the Yiddish prefix for full of. Full of confusion. Full of shit. Farbissener, which means embittered, or, full of bitterness. (Someone with a twisted up, sour look, is described as a farbissener punim, a bitter face.) There's farmisht, emphasis on the -misht, which means more lost in an emotional sense, bewildered. Now I'm getting closer.

But I looked through the Yiddish dictionary, and couldn't find anything else. I miss my grandmother. Not only would she have known the word, she would have my basement sorted out in an hour and a half, everything re-packed and dry, and it would have been like Christmas morning to her. She loved doing that kind of thing, and having been raised in relative poverty on, as they used to say, The Other Side, she wasn't afraid of working like a dog; she was used to it and expected it and was good at it. Unlike her faigeleh granddaughter.

Oy.


watching nothing :: entry #1438

So Far, So Good

[copied from dland]

No cat poop or cat barf anywhere when I got home, so that makes it a good day. TMI, sorry, but it's important here at this end.

Had a very stupid day at school which looked like it was going to be awful and turned out okay. Even so, first thing in the morning, I promised myself a treat for enduring it, so I went to the mall after school and got a new make-up brush and a bottle of skin cleanser. Yes, that was my big treat, but I did have to go to Sephora for it.

I was also going to treat myself to a new denim jacket, as I couldn't find my old one and anyway, I didn't think I could quite fit in it even if I did. But Old Navy only had stupid looking little cropped ones -- who looks good in that? and the men's sizes didn't look right on me at either Old Navy or the Gap. I was going to get a recipe/nutrition program for the computer, but selection is limited when you have a Mac, and I didn't like the one at the Apple Store. So I trotted off home with my little Sephora bag, stopping at Shop Rite for a few essentials but not my whole list. Good choice.

By the time I got home, I was wiped out. I ventured into the basement -- have you ever heard of the Collyer brothers? and amazingly, my denim jacket was right where I could find it, and it fit! (I can't button it, but I think I could only ever do that the day I bought it, maybe.) I took a little nap, and here I am.

My dinner last night with the Chum and the Other Chai was very nice. As always, the Other Chai takes the floor and talks and talks and talks and all you have to do is listen. She's actually quite entertaining to be around, once you get past her always dominating the conversation. It's just the way she is. It's not as if she's always talking about herself or her kid being so great or anything. She does do that some, but she happens to be a world-class teacher and she's rightfully proud of that; otherwise, she can be very self-deprecating and wickedly funny. I see her every day, of course, and the Chum every month or so, and the O.C. made some comment about me and how I look so good and teasing me about wearing make-up now (I always did, but apparently not well) and only then did the Chum say anything at all about the fact that I look completely different than I used to, and how great I looked. Thanks very much, but it came out a little odd, I don't know why. Not bad-odd, just odd. I gushed for a moment or two about my new make-up obsession, and the Chum said Oh, she would never use powders; she likes to custom-mix the colors of her cream make-up. I did not say in astonishment, You WEAR make-up? because turnabout is not always fair play, but seriously. I thought she wore mascara and lipstick. And anyway, if you can mix creams, you can mix powders. She is an artist, after all.

Oy, enough of that. Or, in Yiddish, ganug!

Meantime, K is in DC, the Hubs is at his customory Friday-after-work watering hole, and R has not been heard from this evening. Nor has the Sibs, so things are quiet here. I'm guessing that the Sibs and R will call at the same moment.

My old hearing aids certainly suck. Can't wait to get the new ones back on Monday.

WATCHING THE SIMPSONS :: ENTRY #1417