The Litmus Test

I read a lot of mysteries. I love Rex Stout and the Nero Wolfe – Archie Goodwin combination of brains and wit are remarkable. Clive Cussler writes intriguing fiction that demands that one is logically following the plot. [The last two books I read were Stout and Cussler.]

In fact, every book I read has the premise that it must be consistent. I read many books. Sixteen so far this month. Admittedly, I listened to one and read the other fifteen. My total is 61 so far this year.

I have come to expect at least a vague sense of consistency in stories. Now the conundrum.

Many people tell stories that are completely inconsistent. What do I do when I am listening to or reading from a story told by someone who is either pontificating or entertaining or worse yet – sharing – and the story line is simply ludicrous? Do I ask if the person has their “facts” right? Do I nod sagely and pretend that I see no glaring inconsistencies? Do I ask if they are trying to make me look like an idiot in the hearing? Do I graciously ignore it?

She did it again yesterday. I have seen glaring inconsistencies in her “stories” for years now. I tried a couple times to ask for clarification and it didn’t go well. I have learned to read what she writes with a grain of salt because the story as told cannot be believed, unless one suspends all cause/effect situations that seem to hold for the rest of the planet.

So I sit and watch people respond to the punch line and bite my tongue – actually stay my fingers. I want to ask the questions begged by the list of “facts” as given and ask how in the world the “punch line” could have followed from that set of circumstances. But I have learned that I am considered to be “too logical” or not very “feeling” when I ask for some sense of the possible when reading her stories.

I have yet to figure out my role in the world. Do I blow the whistle on the stupid people? Do I take it upon myself to show the glaring impossibilities in other people’s stories? Do I just treat it as poorly written fiction rather than a “true life” story? Do I keep quiet rather than rock the boat? Does it do any good to rock the boat for people who can write that type of “true tale” without blushing?

My solution has been to cringe when I see the original and then shake my head in disbelief when others respond to the lunacy without critique. But it irritates me. Not so much that she seems to have a “misty” recollection that defies any logical progression of what might be by now distorted facts, but that people respond to her stories as if they absolutely must be true. How can people not notice the glaring idiocy? Or are they just being kind?

It Takes a Village …

to raise a child. It does because the parents are idiots. I took the dog for a walk around the block. It is getting near sunset and the sun is low in the sky, peeking through the trees when you least expect it. It is a warm, beautiful evening.

I live in a residential area built around a golf course. These are nice new homes moderately priced – or maybe higher than moderate. They are new homes. And I mean new. There are still some under construction.

So I am taking the dog on a restful meander around the local block. And twice, count that – two times – there were very small children playing in the road with the adult not looking on in apparent nonchalance. I believe that the adults felt that their what should be to them precious children were safe because they bought little plastic things that told the cars that belong in the road that there were stupid adults allowing small children to play there.

Each house here has a yard. Many of the backyards are fenced. But that is too restrictive. So the kids need to play in the street. We all remember riding our bikes in the street. I remember that. I even remember my kids doing that. But I’m not talking about riding a bike in the street when you are in middle school.

The first child I encountered playing in the street was riding a low Hot Wheels type plastic toy. She was probably three but may have been as old as four. She was definitely pre-school age. I could find no adult anywhere near although there was a five or six year old on the sidewalk with his bike. I kept looking for an adult because I didn’t think that the plastic SLOW sign was really going to be much of a protective device. I finally found the male adult washing his SUV. I had to be completely around the car before I could see him. I know he could not really be watching the child.

So I continued on my walk thinking how moronic parents have become. Ten years ago when I lived on a cul-de-sac and no one but local traffic was ever on the road, a neighbor told me to tell my then 16-year-old to be more careful when he was driving on the road. Her children were precious and needed protection. I told her that I knew a sure way to keep them from being hit by a car. Keep them out of the road. The road is for the cars. I knew that the only way a driver in that neighborhood could be assured of never hitting any of the kids that lived there was to drive on the sidewalk. No kid was ever on the sidewalk because they were always in the road.

Where I live now is not a cul-de-sac. There is a fair amount of traffic any time of day. At least at this time of day there is not a bunch of construction traffic.

The dog and I continued on our merry way. And sure enough. Another moron. Only this time the female adult was in the front yard watering her landscaping. And the 15 to 18-month-old was playing in the street. She was protected by a bright green plastic SLOW sign set up in the middle of the lane. Why on God’s earth would you teach your child to play in the street? This kid doesn’t know if the sign is out or not or why it even matters. But she knows that the street is made to play in.

A few more houses down the street another male adult is watching two small (6-8 years) boys ride their bikes – in the street. He told me he was watching them ride so that they would be safe. They were four or five houses down the street so I don’t know exactly how this was going to work. But since he spoke to me I mentioned that I remembered when parents taught their kids to not play in the road. He told me, “Yeah, but …” and that was the whole response. I told him that I thought someone was going to feel real bad when they ran over those kids.

What is wrong with parents? There are a bunch of eight-to-ten-year-olds here who drive up and down the street in golf carts. They don’t stop at the stop signs. They don’t stay on the correct side of the road. They just drive without a license in a not-licensed vehicle. When one of them gets killed there will be sadness because the parents were too stupid to protect their children. Unless, of course, one of the golf carts takes out one of the toddlers.

Schedules and Life in the South

I am a happy anal retentive person. I know I am AR. I am happy being AR. I wish everyone was just a little bit more attuned to the details of a smoothly run life.

However, I live in the South. I used to live in the North where 5:00 meant within five minutes of five, either way. Now I live in the South where Monday means sometime in the future.

I have made appointments and missed a day of work so a worker could come to my house only to have that worker not show up and not even call. When I called the boss, the boss said he would check into what was happening and call me back within five minutes. I never heard from him again. I was asking for an estimate so that I could spend a couple thousand dollars for some new faux marble countertops. But apparently in the impoverished South, income means nothing.

We have been talking about pouring a patio off the lanai for at least a year. I live in a community with a Home Owners Association – a group of individuals who know more of what I need to do to my property than I do. I have a permission slip from the HOA so that it is even legal for me to have a patio. I finally got someone to come to the house and say that they agree, and I can have a patio. It was supposed to be poured on Thursday or Friday, with the following Monday at the latest. It is now supposed to be poured tomorrow. It’s going to be twelve days after my original date for having a patio. I am getting all excited.

I went through this same ordeal with the warranty on the house. It was a newly built house with a one year warranty. There was a thirty day warranty as well. That one took me five months to get completed. I was told with the year warranty that it would go much better. It took not quite five months, so it obviously did go much better. Of course, we had to call the national headquarters and threaten legal action to get it done in four months and three weeks, but it did get completed.

I know that service businesses have to deal with the public, quixotic and testy as they may be. But if your job is dealing with the public, then building a public trust and public goodwill would seem to be a major portion of the business. It is in the North.

I don’t know how long it will take me to adjust to this laissez faire attitude. I can only feel that Scarlett O’Hara is waiting for tomorrow for a reason.

Perspective

There is no reality, only perception. Our perceptions are based on our expectations. Our expectations are based on myths of what a perfect life would be.

For the last two months my husband has been complaining that his fate should not have befallen him. He is certain that this is not what he expected. A co-worker, a friend, a golfing buddy, died of colon cancer within months of being diagnosed with it. By the time the cancer was found, it was already stage IV and metastasized. It was horrible.

Without having any symptoms or problems, my husband consented to the indignity of having a colonoscopy. He scheduled the test prior to his friend’s death. He couldn’t go to the funeral because he was undergoing the trials and tribulations of prepping for a colonoscopy. We were certain that the test would come back as his having a clean bill of health.

This is where the perception and expectations collide. It was not a clean bill of health. There was a mass. A fairly large mass. Biopsies were taken. We had to wait until the end of the week to get the results. If you thought I should have put that into this piece already and you are curious, just imagine waiting for days instead of seconds. It was grueling. It was also negative.

The plan of attack, and there was one, was to go the least invasive route first. That meant another colonoscopy with the hope of obliterating the mass. So on our thirty-third wedding anniversary, we were again at the outpatient care center. The mass proved to be both larger and more diffuse, as opposed to being on a “stem” and so it was impossible to eradicate it safely in this manner.

The option now was major surgery at the time of our choosing. We could wait a few months and enjoy the summer. How could one enjoy the summer with a time bomb inside? That was the question. So we opted for the sooner, the better as our strategy. On Tuesday, he underwent a colon resection. Again the lab reports came back as non-cancerous, but slightly changed cells. It appears that if he had waited until the end of the summer to have surgery, he could very well indeed have had cancer instead of pre-cancer.

As to the perception and expectation issue again. For two months, he has been complaining and questioning with “Why me?” I have heard, “This wasn’t supposed to have happened,” more times than I can count. It was NOT supposed to have happened. However, the mass was growing whether it was found or not. Our expectation was that he would be healthy. The point of view I have been taking has been that without the test, without the impetus of a friend dying, he would have died, too. Not having the test would not have made the lesion disappear.

Now we have a summer of getting back to a state of complete health. But it is at least an option to return to a state of complete health. This is not a course of action I would have chosen given all the possible courses of action available. But given the possibilities open to us, I am eternally grateful that the test found the problem and we obtained a solution prior to the cells turning into cancer.

Life is uncertain, eat dessert first.

Why Is It So Hard?

I am computer literate. I know how to do things on my computer. I even have a degree in computer networking. I know this stuff.

I have used Norton’s for a decade now. I am used to Norton’s, I like Norton’s. So far, it has found all viruses and deleted them. Actually, the most astonishing thing I ever got was my sister sending me a virus. But Norton’s caught it.

My computer must be about 13 months old. It came with Norton’s trial for one month and I had a one year subscription to Norton’s as well. It ran out. Yesterday. It has been annoying me for a month, but I kept postponing the inevitable. I also looked at McAfee to see if I wanted to change in midstream. I opted not to do that.

So today there was a huge notice that my computer was vulnerable and the computer bugs were going to ravage my machine and savage my files. I needed to correct this problem or every three minutes another warning notice was going to pop up.

So, I started the arduous journey of updating my system. I was doing both firewall and virus stuff. I opted for the download version since I obviously couldn’t have notices popping up every three minutes for days while Symantec mailed me the disks. Not a problem, I know how to download and all that.

The download didn’t start automatically, but again, I know how to work around that. I finally got the things to download. Notice the plural there? There were two separate, discrete, different [would Roget be proud?] files. Every time it looked like an important page, I printed it out for my records. Good thing I know computers.

So I started to install the anti-virus program. This should be no problem. It didn’t like a spyware program that I had on my computer so I deleted that. Restart as directed [1]. Then I again tried to install the anti-virus program. I got an error message that it couldn’t uninstall Norton 2005, but I told it that I had plenty of space and didn’t mind, please just install 2006. It tried. But it didn’t work because it couldn’t do something about sharing a whole vast gigabytes empty hard drive with a 2005 version. So it uninstalled itself and I had to go online to get a 2005 uninstall utility downloaded. Then it uninstalled the 2005 version. Restart as directed [2]. Then I could install 2006. Restart as directed [3].

Of course I then had to authenticate my new version of Norton’s anti-virus. This takes inputting a 25 character letter/number combination that is helpfully written in a string without breaks or hyphens for uneasy reading. I had the wrong code. So I retyped it. I had the wrong code. Of course, on the paper I printed with my codes, it didn’t say which code went with what program and I had the wrong 25 character code. The other code worked. I was authentic. Did I want to update and get current information? Of course, because without you might just as well have no anti-virus program. So it updated. Restart as directed [4].

Then I had the another program to work with. It installed without incident. Then authenticate. I used the other 25 character code. It worked. But again – restart as directed [5]. The second program, I thought, had a second portion to it. So I installed that. It needed an authentication code. I again typed in the 25 character code. Didn’t work. Checked for errors. Seemed fine. Used the other [insert favorite scatological term here] code and was authentic. This was then installed correctly. Restart as directed [6].

So then I actually scanned my computer for problems. Then did a complete scan for viruses. Since that takes over an hour, I had breakfast, took the dog for a walk, and started some laundry.

My computer is now safe. It took the better part of two hours to get this stuff ordered, downloaded, installed, and my computer restarted so often I was ready to weep. Then another two hours to scan the whole thing.

It’s really hard to believe that computers are our friends. By tomorrow, I will probably be on speaking terms with this machine again. But today, I’m not all that happy with it.

Rewriting History

Women wanted equality. I understand the same pay for the same job and equal opportunity to perform that job. But … what is that other stuff? Equal treatment in history books? Equal presence in literary works? Equal mention in science? What is up with that?

The problem with demanding an equal number of women as men mentioned in textbooks is twofold. First it completely distorts history, science, and literary works. Many very important white males aren’t making it into textbooks because they are 1.) white and 2.) male and that is seen as a double sin. They might make it if they were varicolored and definitely if they were female, but we have too many white males.

We have too many white males because white males did a whole bunch of important stuff. Most of the big discoveries were made and recorded by white males. There is a reason for this. Women were not allowed to be educated which sorely limits one’s ability to produce new ideas. People of various colors were in the same uneducated boat.

By placing innocuous inventions by women and minorities into textbooks, we skew history and – and this is important – make it seem like women and minorities weren’t ever oppressed. This is bunk. It also means that some very important inventions and thought processes are eliminated in history because they were made by white males number 5 and greater and we can only have the first five white males and then five women and five minorities. Just because the most important discoveries are not taught should not be worrisome. There is nothing to see here – move along.

Literature is not evenly distributed between male and female writers. There is no female Shakespeare. Or even a female Boswell. Women were not allowed to write, such that George Sands had to hide behind a pseudonym. Where is a female Shaw? Can we get half credit for Oscar Wilde? Probably not. Cicero didn’t have a wife who wrote, too. Nor did Seneca. Socrates credits having a harridan for a wife with his philosophy, she being too horrible to stay in the same house with, so he went out and thought deep thoughts.

It isn’t that women in history are absent. Helen of Troy made men fight, but she didn’t think of the Trojan horse. Jezebel has a sort of cachet, too.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had both gods and goddesses. Pagans seem to have been willing to incorporate women into their pantheon and grant them the honor due to people who give birth to the next round of men.

Then something happened. One might credit Christianity with reducing women to a secondary role. Early Christians were supposed to have held women in the same regard as men and even allowed them to be priests. However, somewhere along the way, at some point in Western history, women were relegated to the back seat of the wagon. It took us a very long time to get back in the driver’s seat.

Right now, the way history is written in modern textbooks, it seems that women were just as busy making discoveries as those pernicious white males. But that wasn’t true. To forget the important discoveries and literature of second tier men in order to publish fourth, fifth, etc. tier discoveries and literature just because women or minorities were the authors is a total disservice. It denies how far we have come in such a short time. And it also ignores some very important discoveries. Shame on the process that made this possible.

The Library is Closed

I went to the library today because I had no more books on tape [really on CD] to listen to. I can’t stand silence and so I listen to books. Off I went and got some books to listen to and some books to read. All is well on the western front. And then she stuck in this note that said the library would be closed on Wednesday, May 10 for Confederate Memorial Day or something icky like that. That must be a real big holiday with the black population. Just one more perk of living in the South.

But it almost made be cry in a public place. I am having a difficult time holding it together as it is. Mom’s birthday would have been tomorrow. I have always struggled with a birthday gift because there wasn’t really anything to buy her that she couldn’t have gotten for herself. This is a problem that all children have for their parents. I wouldn’t mind at all having that problem this year.

But worse than that, May 10 is the one year anniversary of her death. Last year that came after Mother’s Day, this year it is before. Mother’s Day is a movable holiday, but my father-in-law died on Mother’s Day and so it wasn’t all that happy of a day anyway. Now it’s even worse.

I know that I will get through this next week because I really don’t have any other choice. Here is a hot tip. Buy stock in Kleenex.

For the last two years, I didn’t notice that the library was closed for this wonderful holiday. Two years ago, I was unpacking. Last year, I was pretty busy with other things.

I’m already beyond crabby. I was supposed to go to a play tonight, but it’s about dying and I just can’t make myself go and be “entertained” that way. I’ve yelled at the dog who has done nothing wrong or out of the ordinary. She is a dog and not aware of significant dates. And she lets me get away with yelling at her and then still likes me.

What I really want for Mom’s birthday isn’t presents, but her presence. I wish I had a way of buying that.

There is no joy in Mudville/ Mighty Casey has struck out.

When Does it Start?

I have been retired for two weeks now. I’m patiently waiting for that getting bored part. I thought that two weeks would be about when it would start in. Mostly I thought that because the first week was a scheduled vacation.

Instead, I’m still waiting. I think that if I actually stop scheduling fixer-upper jobs it might help. I am not sure how to include pictures in this type of format. I know the technical part of how to do it and I have a spot I could upload the picture to, I just don’t see a place on the format grid.

Craig and Joel, his business partner and friend, were here for over 14 hours [9 AM til 11:40 PM] on Saturday putting in two new ceramic tile floors. The living room and third bedroom are now beautiful.

Aside: Craig said that diamonds were not supposed to be in living rooms, I said I wanted them to be in my living room. Craig said I should put in a checkerboard pattern and I said I didn’t want that. I wanted the living room completely different from the entryway. Joe suggested a ring around the room in the darker color that was squared and completely offset from the squares in the entryway so I wouldn’t need to worry about them lining up perfectly. It works. I love it.

But getting the floors put in consumed three days. One day was spent moving all the stuff out of the areas being worked on. I had living room furniture in the bedroom and kitchen. The third bedroom ended up in the second bedroom and entryway. The front door could not be opened.

The second day was used to put the floor down. The guys left here at 11:40 to drive back the two hours home. I didn’t particularly like that because I was afraid that the driver would be too tired after working as hard as he had all day. But one can only push so much.

The third day was spent cleaning, and cleaning some more, and then putting the furniture back in place. Who knew that much dirt and dust would go that far? Not me.

The finished project is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I am so glad I didn’t cave in and have the checkerboard pattern because I think that this looks perfect. The green tiles in the living room look brown to me. I know they said they were green, but I don’t believe them at all. The green tiles in the green room look green and they are perfect for in there, too.

So the mess is cleaned up and my house is back in order. Tomorrow I meet with the people who are pouring the patio and coloring the concrete in the lanai and on the patio. I believe that will be another mess.