Happy Exploding New Year's Eve!

Fireworks have a long and respected history, but I'm just a tad uneasy seeing them in the hands of my pyromaniacal adolescent neighbors. Yes, the explosions are pretty, yes they're awesome, but they're explosives, for Pete's sake! Shooting in the air, in front of my house!

One of said pyromaniacs several years ago caused a fire that destroyed the unimaginably ugly chain-saw carving of a bear on another neighbor's porch. We were all grateful, but kind of sorry that half of the roof went with it. TV News people try to look somber when they report injuries, but I suspect they have a secret office pool to guess how many of us will burn ourselves with our exploding entertainment. Aside from the obvious reasons (danger, destruction, etc.), if I was King of the World, I would ban fireworks for one reason: because they're scary!

Men have come back shell-shocked from every war fought since the Chinese invented gunpowder, yet we willingly re-create battle sounds in our neighborhoods--and call it fun! We are obviously crazy. However, dogs and small children are not crazy, so fireworks scare the bejeebers out of them.

Maybe the problem isn't that we have occasional fireworks; maybe the problem is that we don't have enough fireworks. Maybe kids and dogs wouldn't be so frightened if it was a daily occurence. My daughter recently moved to Naples, Italy. "Mom," she said on the phone, "Neopolitans love their fireworks! The shoot them off for weddings, birthdays, and just for fun. There are fireworks every night!" She took her old dog to Italy with her. Fortunately for him, he is deaf.

Our little dogs are not deaf, and they don't hear fireworks every night. They just don't understand about the Chinese and gunpowder and maniacal boys with matches. At midnight, I'll be on the couch watching the festivities on TV with a trembling dog plastered on each side of me. It's kind of a tradition with us.

Happy New Year!

Wha-a-a?

The TV next to the elevator in my office this morning showed a crowd of Pakistani people shoving and wailing. As I got into the elevator, a 40-ish woman in front of me said, "What’s going on there?"

“They killed Benazir Bhutto yesterday,” I said.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

[Wha-a-a-?]

Woman Goes to Doctor to Show Social Security She is Alive

(This is an actual headline from a KOMO 4 TV Associated Press news story. Honest, I don’t make these things up!)

My 95-year-old Great Aunt says the reason the people in her retirement apartment community are so happy is because they woke up that morning and found out they were still alive. No one should contradict you when you make that joyous discovery. But someone’s bound to give it a try, and that someone is more than likely to be the government.

A 76-year-old woman in Pasco, Washington was told by Social Security that she was dead. She was a little bit surprised. Not only is she not dead, but neither is her 97-year-old mother, whom Social Security hasn't tried to kill off yet.

So, how do you go about proving you're not dead? Doris Pennington brought her very-much-alive self to the Social Security office and showed them her driver's license. They looked at it and told her a doctor's note might help. A doctor's note!? (Um, Doc--could you please verify I'm alive?) So she got one.

It's a good thing she's so lively; I know a couch potato or two who might have trouble proving life still exists in their mostly-inanimate bodies. Even with a doctor’s note.

They say Doris will probably get her benefits reinstated, but they don't know how long it will take. She’s getting a little anxious. Apparently, the prospect of going home to live with mom at the age of 76 doesn’t appeal to her.

I'm Dreaming of a ...Self-Stick Envelope!

We're late this year. I don't know how it happened. Young Geezer and I just finished signing our Christmas cards and putting them in the envelopes. Yes, I'm one of those people who sends a Christmas letter; no, I don't fill it with great and wonderful things we did all year (it would be very short.) This year I wanted to send a photo and a letter. That might have been a little too ambitious for my non-multi-tasking brain.

Somehow, I didn't get as many photos printed as I thought I had, so I had to go through the list and decide who might possibly live through being deprived of a picture of two little middle-aged people. Since the answer was "almost everybody," it didn't take long. Then I found out I miscalculated when I counted the cards, so we wound up putting stamps on three envelopes we didn't need. Getting to the bottom of the pile of letters, I found one page of a two-page letter. I asked Young Geezer to rip open the last envelope because I thought I only put 1/2 of a letter in it. (I hadn't; it was good to go--until we ripped it all apart, that is!)

"Next year," I declared, " everyone better have a computer, because we're going electronic!" Young Geezer couldn't answer; his tongue was stuck on the flap of an envelope. I will, of course, forget I said this, and will recreate another version of this same misadventure next year. But maybe by then I'll be smart enough not to tell people about it. (Nah. Not a chance!) Maybe next year we'll even get a sponge to moisten the flaps of the envelopes (but why, when it keeps Young Geezer so well entertained?)

Ho, ho,ho, Merry Christmas, etc.!

You Got Me off the Couch for THIS?

I tend to gravitate toward dog people. Not that I have anything against cats or cat people; it just seems that we dog people have an understanding, a knowing that we aren't as tough
as we think we are. One of my cat friends sniffed, “Dogs are so needy!” Well, yeah. That's kind of the point, isn't it? Why would you put up with a dog if it didn't adore you, entertain you and follow you around?

I don’t usually have the patience to reason with small children and large dogs. I like my dogs small so I can pick them up for my convenience or their safety. But every once in a while, a big dog steals my heart. Or, as in the case of greyhounds, a whole breed of big dogs.

My Seattle Sis sold her condo and bought a house with a yard so she could get a dog. She was that most pitiable of creatures--a dog person with no dog! After much research and many rescue agency visits, she decided upon a greyhound. She filled out paperwork, jumped through hoops (OK, not literally), had a home visit by the agency, and put up a big, expensive fence. Then she proceeded to fall in love with a breed of dogs that has inspired admiration and love from humans for millennia.

Greyhounds, it turns out, are big ol' couch potatoes. Except for two or three times a week, when they need to run around like crazy dogs. Maybe it's because the rescue greyhounds come from dog tracks, where they are kept in crates every day except when they run. This one pretty much owns the couch and has to be displaced when company comes. Sis talks to this guy, lets him sleep on the bed, and is careful to keep the house cool in summer and
warm in winter for his zero-fat, short-haired body. In short, he has found doggie Valhalla.

Sis believes, as I do, that it’s just plain disrespectful to dress a dog up. That doesn’t stop her from doing goofy holiday photos, usually adding the props with photoshop. Imagine her dog’s surprise (and mine) when she actually made this poor boy wear these things. He had to get up off the couch and he had to wear stoopid stuff on his head to get his treats.

It's not exactly cruelty to animals, but it probably ruined his afternoon (well, for at least
the minute-and-a-half that dogs seem to remember anything.)

I think he looks a little pissed off, don’t you?

Foodies vs. My Immigrant Grandmothers

It didn't used to be cool to be an American who was too ethnic, who continued cooking the food and speaking the language of "the old country." Now it seems everyone is writing articles and stories about the food traditions of their immigrant parents and grandparents, making all of us wish we had such a heritage. My foodie friends smack their lips when they talk about exotic meals only grandma could make. Alas, like many Americans, I am a mutt. My immigrant grandmas came from different parts of the world and their families had to focus more on survival than on cooking.

My Mexican-American grandma's house always enveloped me in the aroma of simmering beans and warm tortillas--the Mexican peasant's meal. My German-American grandmother lived with with us and rhapsodized about "braunschweiger "[smoked liverwurst] on rye, the German-American working-class's favorite lunch box filler.

Mexican Granny grew up on a little ranch in Sonora where food was plain but plentiful-- when the various bands of thugs didn't plunder it during the constant political upheaval in early-20th Century Mexico. (When Pancho Villa's name was mentioned, she spat, "He was not a hero! He was a teef!") Her family hid the girls and the food in secret cellars during the raids, covering the trap doors with rugs and old women in rocking chairs.

German Grandma grew up in Pittsburgh; her father died when she was nine. Food was scarce and she quit school at 13 to work and help support the family. She had sharp memories of going to bed hungry, which prompted her to give my sisters and me ice cream with cocoa powder almost every night as a bedtime snack. Her love of cream came from skimming the cream off the top of the milk in the "spring house" in the not-so-hungry days before her dad died. We heartily embraced her cream tradition, but liverwurst was a harder sell. She never quite got us to love that pinkish brown tube of meat paste the way working-class German-American kids did at the turn of the 20th century.

My foodie friends build family cookbooks full of inherited Italian, Yiddish, and Asian recipes. I have an important job to do for them--I am the gourmand who consumes their creations with gusto and exclamations of appreciation--and I'm good at it!

The flavors of my childhood--tortillas with beans and Jack Cheese, ice cream with cocoa powder--don't tax my minimal cooking abilities. It's a good thing; I can whip them up for my friends any time without searching for exotic ingredients or sweating for hours in the kitchen. Then the payoff: they reciprocate, sending my palate on amazing international journeys as they share the flavors of their childhoods.

I've often heard America called a "melting pot." Maybe this is what we're talking about!

Dryer Balls and India's washer women

I bought a set of those mysterious little dryer balls you see on TV. Two knobby little rubber balls in the dryer are supposed to make your clothes soft without chemicals. Huh?

They do, indeed, make my clothes softer than when they are dried without my little blue buddies. Oddly, they also make the lint trap fuller.

I remember a young Indian woman I worked with a few years ago. She told me they didn't have a washing machine in her well-to-do home in India.

"How do you wash clothes?" I asked. "Oh," she said, "Some people come and take clothes to the river." I had a vision of a river running with suds. That didn't seem right, so I asked, "How do they get them clean?" She laughed. "They beat them with rocks!" I wondered how the clothes turned out. "Soft," she said, then: "Clothes don't last long."

Uh,oh.

I Don't Think the Beavers Did This

I never saw a natural stream until I was 10. I thought all birds were small and brown. And the closest I came to experiencing wildlife was catching tadpoles in the local drainage ditch. I grew up in a flat suburb of Los Angeles, where the streets are a grid and you can't get too lost because you'll run into the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other.

When I moved to the Seattle area, I was amazed that people in the northwest could actually live next to gurgling salmon streams, surrounded by tall, fragrant cedar trees populated by many-colored birds. I've lived here nearly twenty years and I still stop in awe to gaze out the window at the lush green landscape.

We saw a new beaver dam Saturday on the stream by the path where we walk the little dogs. The creek is two miles from our house, in a business park. We noticed the covered 18-inch storm drain pipe coveres were 2/3 submerged. Ducks glided through their new pond, upending occasionally to graze the bottom of the stream. We saw the gnawed tree trunks and the teepee-shaped stumps that proved the dam was a construction, not just natural tree decay.

"Do you know what the leading cause of death in beavers is?" Young Geezer asked. I admitted ignorance. "Falling trees," he grinned. Seeing the size of those stumps, I could believe it.

"What do you think will happen when we have a heavy rain?" I asked, "Do you think they'll open those storm drains and that will be enough to prevent flooding? It was Young Geezer's turn to admit ignorance. We finished our walk and returned home--just as snow began to fall.

Snow turned to rain, more rain, and then more rain. In fact, it's still falling--and today is Monday. I don't know what happened to the beavers and the ducks, but I do know the creek rose so much that the business park was evacuated today. Young Geezer's office is in that business park.

"Why do you think it's flooding so badly this year, when it hasn't before?" I asked him.

"Well, it's obvious," he said. "It's the beavers." I think he was only half-joking.

Somehow, I don't think the beavers did this.




(Picture, "City of Woodinville," by Rick Powell from King5.com weatherpix)