Operators Are Not Standing By, So Relax

For a while I thought we had the perfect outgoing message on our phone, but it turned out the answering machine was just broken.

We like to put some effort into our outgoing messages. It's kind of discouraging when you call someone and all you get is "You have reached XXX-XXXX. Please leave a message." Where's the pizzazz? The humor? The toying with the caller's neurons? Really, if that's the best you can do you might as well just turn the thing off and let the phone ring.

When Kim and I first got married, we had a message that said, "The number you have reached, XXX-XXXX, is imaginary. Please rotate your phone ninety degrees and try again." Nothing like a little higher math humor to liven things up, that's my motto. Or at least one of them. There were probably half a dozen people in our combined circle of friends who got that joke, but we snickered every time and really, whose answering machine was it, anyway?

Kim grew tired of our old kitchen phone a long time back - something about the screen on it not showing any actual information, combined with the fact that you couldn't talk on it and operate the microwave at the same time for all the interference, little things like that - and finally got around to upgrading to a new phone about a month ago. Like the old one, this one came with a digital answering machine built in, and we sat around coming up with ever more ridiculous ideas for what to put on the outgoing message. It passed time that we would have otherwise spent working.

Eventually we came up with something that had all of us - including the girls - laughing to ourselves whenever we thought of it, and we decided to go with it.

"You have reached XXX-XXXX. No one is here to answer your call, but don't despair! Your call is important to us. To continue in English, press one. Para continuar en espanol, oprima el dos. To speak to a non-existent operator, press three. To express anger at this pointless button-pushing, press four. To express sarcasm, press five. To exercise your fingers, press numbers six through eight repeatedly. If you have had enough of mindlessly pressing buttons, press nine. To leave a message, wait for the beep. BEEP! No, really, here comes the real beep. Thank you for playing, and good luck."

Yes, it was ridiculously self-indulgent and about half an hour long, but we liked it anyway. You have to keep yourself entertained in this world.

But the thing is, from that point on we received absolutely no messages.

Now, on the one hand, this is kind if disappointing. You want people to call with things that are important enough to tell you about even if you aren't there, and after a while with no messages you begin to question whether anyone out there knows you're alive.

On the other hand, it's not such a bad thing to be overlooked the rest of the world sometimes, especially since most messages are of the "here is a task I'd like you to do" or "vote for this person or the earth will go spinning into the sun" variety. People who really want to get hold of us know to send emails or make Facebook posts. I only got an answering machine in the first place because I needed it for job-hunting, way back in the early 90s, and I still view it as more of an intruder than anything else.

So there was a profound ambivalence about the lack of messages is what I'm saying here.

But after a while it begins to get suspicious. Surely somebody wants you to do something for them. Surely somebody is running for office somewhere. And the longer the "0" sits up there in the message counter, the more you begin to think the problem lies not with a cold and uncaring world - a fact that never stopped messages from arriving before - but with your answering machine.

Perhaps the message was simply too long.

I recorded a shorter one today and then tried to call in. Nothing. I left multiple messages for myself, and still: "0." But I don't know that - I think I left messages. And, honestly, I'm annoyed at why I don't just pick up the phone and answer myself. Who do I think I am? Such nerve.

So right now I've got the answering machine turned off because I can't find the manual for the phone in order to try to fix this problem and I'd rather people didn't get their hopes up about leaving a message and then wonder why nobody ever calls them back. Don't even get me started on why phones need manuals. I am old enough to remember when phones came in one color (black), had rotary dials, were sturdy enough to use as murder weapons and were about as complicated as an ice cube tray. They were appliances. Now they're technology again, and they don't quite work.

So, no messages for a while. If you need me, you can always make a big pile of phones in your back yard and send me smoke signals. I probably won't get those either, but the bonfire will be cathartic.

Turning Over Some Old Leaves

We spent most of this weekend raking other people's leaves.

We do this every year. The leaves fall down sometime in mid-October or so. We make noises about raking them up. And sometime around the end of October, we get a giant windstorm that blows all of our leaves away and replaces them with someone else's leaves.

This year the winds came from the south, which means that our leaf-load was rather high. Our southern neighbors for several houses down have more trees than we do, and none of them are evergreens. If the wind comes from the north or west, though, we make out like bandits. From the east it's pretty much a wash.

Kim was first out with the rake, as she is the one who tends to notice these things. I've read stories of widowers who never change the decor in their homes or apartments once their wives pass on - not out of any intent to create a shrine to a departed loved one, but simply because it never occurs to them to do so. All I can say is that Kim had better outlive me. Either that or we had better do all of our decorating in "classic" styles designed to last.

It was a gorgeous weekend here in Our Little Town, with temperatures more like May than November. Seriously, it hasn't been this warm here since Labor Day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the woodland elves were doing whatever it is they do when not posing the garden gnomes suggestively, and it was time to play outside.

So Kim piled up about six cubic yards of leaves and declared it to be leaf-playing time.

The girls took this and ran with it.

They made a fort out of them.

 

They jumped in them.

They dive-bombed them from the zip line.

They ran through them.

Really, it was a shame to rake them down to the curb for pickup tomorrow, but so it goes. They went off to play with some friends in the late afternoon, and I took the opportunity to re-rake all those leaves and deposit them in the street for the sweeper to come by.

I really wish we could burn them. I've always loved the scent of burning leaves in the fall.

Clicks and Whistles

I have hit the age where I am not entirely sure why I am in pain.

Somewhere on Wednesday I must have done something to my right knee that it found objectionable. I have no idea what that might have been, since the first I noticed this problem was when I tried to sit down in my office chair, and usually that does not involve any noticeable exertion or contortions.

The knee does not particularly want to bend anymore, at least upon first rising, though periodically it relents on that point and decides it wants to bend sideways. It has also been taking lessons in Xhosa, apparently, and has begun speaking in clicks and whistles. I am not sure what it is trying to say. "You're getting old," perhaps.

This is not an isolated occurrence, unfortunately.

My lower back has been giving me problems for years, ever since I tried to move a box that I shouldn't have tried to move, shortly after arriving in Our Little Town. That I understood - there was clearly a cause and effect in operation there - but since then I find that there does not have to be any discernable cause to get the same effect. Sometimes it just does that.

When I was younger, in order to achieve this level of pain I would have had to have done something that I would still be talking about today.

There would be a story - a long build-up, a crisis moment, a rueful conclusion. I could tell this story and people would feel sorry for me and buy me drinks. Or look at me pityingly and tell me to stop doing things that hurt me.

But there are no stories anymore, and I don't really know what it is I could stop doing.

Drinks still accepted, though.

Darwin In The Dining Room

I’m trying to decide if hamsters are the bravest creatures on earth, or the stupidest. Or whether this is a distinction worth making.

Ever since we started bungie-ing (how exactly does one write that word?) their cage down on top of the little shelving unit in the dining room, there have been no repeats of the earlier episode where the cats knocked the cage to the floor in order to crack it like a walnut and get at the meat inside. And I think the hamsters are getting a little cocky about it.

Mithra usually leaves them alone – they clearly are not canned salmon and therefore hold no interest for her – but Tria is fascinated. She will climb up to where she can stare directly into their cage and just glare at them for a while.

Eventually this gets old. It’s not like the cat has a lot of things to think about while she is staring at the hamsters. “Hamsters,” she thinks. “They look like food.” What more is there to say?  And so, after a short period of analyzing this, Tria will slowly reach up to the cage and begin batting at the grillwork, which the hamsters like to climb (why? because it’s there, I suppose – who knows with rodents) hoping to snag a hamster.

Now you would think that a critter the size of a hamster – a critter clearly designed by God and nature as a snack for larger and more pointy-edged creatures – would know enough that this was a bad situation, and that they should retreat to a more defensible position. Or at least get off the stupid grille.

But no.

Look carefully at this photo. Do you see the small brownish lump just to the right of Tria’s paw? That’s Hammy. Or Vee. Either one. And do you know what Hammy (or Vee) is doing? Fighting back, that’s what – nipping at Tria’s claws, trying to bite the paw that’s about to feed on her.

Nobody has ever proven that intelligence has survival value over the long run, but this is ridiculous.

Of course, Tria cannot get into the cage - that being the point of the cage, after all - and the hamsters are usually far enough from the edge that they can’t be damaged by her claws, so it becomes something of a standoff after a while.

Seriously, why do we have a television?

Why Can't Us Again?

Because the Yankees, that's why.

Well, the WFCs will have to relinquish their title, apparently, having lost Game 6 to the Yankees in rather convincing fashion. It was clear pretty much from the beginning which was the better team in this Series, but the better team does not always win and so I held out hope for the Phillies.

I do like this bunch of players that they have now - they don't quit, and they always think they can pull one out of the fire. They play hard.  They seem surprised when they lose. I hope the team can keep together for a few more years.

I didn't watch too much of the Series, really. I missed the first half of Game 1 handing out candy at Not Bad President Elementary. I missed all of Game 2 attending a fundraiser for the local YWCA, who eased my pain by having a number of local chefs put me into a calorie coma with their donated skills. And the stress levels were just too high to watch all of the innings in the other games - I'd peek in here and there to see how they were doing and often watch a couple of innings before heading off to do something else for a while. This was true even for Game 5, which the Phillies won. Although honestly, a six-run lead with one out in the 8th inning should not be that exciting nor should it end with the tying run at the plate.

During this World Series I have discovered that I seem to have raised two genuine Phillies fans.

Oh, it's not just that Tabitha and Lauren watched almost as much of the Series as I did, or that Tabitha especially would ask me questions about the games as they progressed. It isn't even that Lauren was excited to wear her Phillies shirt to school on the same days that I wore mine to teach at Home Campus (my students put up with me good naturedly).

No, I think it became clear that you can take the gene pool out of Philadelphia but you can't take the Philadelphia out of the gene pool when I flipped over to the game during a commercial break in tonight's episode of Mythbusters (of course we were watching Mythbusters - be real). The girls instantly looked to the corner of the screen, where it showed the Yankees winning by a score of 4 to 1 at the time. "We're getting crushed!" they cried. "We're going to DIE!"

Optimism is not the byword of the true Philadelphia fan.

And so others celebrate somewhere else, and last year's WFCs have to go back to the drawing board for next year. On the plus side, though, I get my life back, and it was quite a ride while it lasted.

Go Phillies!

A Day at the Museum

The girls were off from school on Friday, so we decided to cash in some of the furlough time that we are required but not permitted to take and go off to the museum. We'll explain it to the state somehow.

We like museums around here. I ran one for five years, and Tabitha and Lauren still miss the place - I used to take them with me sometimes when I closed up the place for the night, making the backwards loop through the buildings and locking doors behind me. And the Kid's Museum to the south of us is always a big hit, even though they're getting a bit big for the place. A couple summers ago we even spent some time at the Smithsonian, which just floored the girls.

Museums - good things.

Last August Kim and the girls went to the Milwaukee Public Museum as part of a Girl Scouts field trip, and Tabitha and Lauren have been talking about it ever since. It's the coolest! The fab! Teh Shiny! Made of pure unadulterated awesome, simmering in awesome sauce with awesome-flavored awesome-bits on the side. Naturally, they wanted Dad to see this storehouse of amazements too.

So off we went.

The Milwaukee Public Museum is in some respects a throwback - a mad jumble of haphazardly-explained artifacts, displays and hands-on exhibits that has no particular overarching theme other than being an effort to put as much odd stuff under one roof as possible. It's kind of like a college dorm that way, only without the odor of stale beer. Although this was Milwaukee, so finding that wouldn't have been all that hard, had we wanted to do so.

We elected to pass on that.

The first thing we did was go to the Butterfly Exhibit, which is a good-sized room kept uncomfortably hot and humid and filled with the tamest butterflies in the midwest - the sort of butterflies that will not only land on you if you stand still long enough, but will hit you up for spare change while doing so. The whole room is a whirl of motion, some of it from the insects and the rest from the various denominations of children that flutter about the place more frantically than the butterflies do.

Needless to say this was a highlight.

As was the display of mammoth bones.

And the large plastic bug.

The European village was also quite a thing - a room roughly the size of a lecture hall crammed with huts, each hut decorated in the ethnic style of a specific European nationality from about 1850. Some have cats. You get to this village by passing through the Milwaukee Street Scene from roughly 1900 - where you lose the fifty years I don't know - but you can't get through the Milwaukee Street Scene without hitting up the Old Fashioned Candy Store, where they do indeed sell candy from the 1950s, which is another half century added in somewhere. You have to wait until you leave to eat the candy, however, since there is no candy-eating in the museum.

It's a regular vortex o' culture, indeed it is. Plus Lemonheads.

We cruised through the mummy section, gawped at the Native American displays, and stared in awe at the dinosaur battle that was lovingly recreated for our viewing pleasure by someone with a fascination for reptilian intestines. There was geography and biology, and I enjoyed looking at the 19th-century American coins as well.

If it's old and vaguely anthropological, you'll find it at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Bring the family!

All Hallows, All the Time

We need to spread out our holidays around here.

In addition to the usual holidays that happen in the last 63 days of the year - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve - we also have all four of our birthdays plus Kim and I celebrate our wedding anniversary. It does keep the rest of the year on a relatively sane schedule, but once the leaves turn it is just WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH right through to the new year.

We got our holiday season off right, though, by squeezing both Halloween and another go-round of Lauren's birthday into this weekend.

Saturday was the Official Birthday, as opposed to the party day that we celebrated last week, and Lauren was just buzzing. Seven! Lucky number seven! We had planned to go out to dinner on Sunday as a family birthday party and open family gifts then, but really how much of a chance of success did that plan have? About as much as the Phillies seem to be having, alas.

So there was a brief interlude of happy materialism on Saturday afternoon, as Lauren dove into her family's gifts. She got quite a number of things, most of which have been well played with already - she got a number of "sculptures" from different sources, for example, and has introduced them to all her other sculptures during the nighttime game she and Tabitha sometimes play before bed.

But the big hit, at least so far, was the stilts she got from Mom and Dad. All weekend long - clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, all around the house, followed shortly by CRASH, BAM, giggle, giggle, pause, clomp, clomp, clomp.

Why we have a television, I do not know.

Partied out temporarily, it was time to get back to Halloween! There were pumpkins to carve!

We let the girls do most of the carving this year, though we handled the big knives and the most stubborn part of the scraping. Carving pumpkins is fun, but every time I get started on it all I can think of is Linus Van Pelt's anguished cry when Lucy first sinks her knife into her pumpkin: "You didn't tell me you were going to kill it!"

But kill them we did. With malice aforethought and pumpkin guts aplenty, much to the joy of the hamsters, who will feast on pumpkin seeds for the rest of the year.

 

 

And then it was trick or treating time!

Since there was no Dave O visiting this year to stay home and hand out candy, Kim volunteered to do that and I took the girls out foraging.

There is something truly odd about marching up to people's houses and demanding candy, and them actually giving it. Odd, but reassuring - there is still generosity in the world. Though I have to admit our traffic was down all around this year - fewer kids stopping by our house, and fewer houses to hit on our neighborhood rounds. Some years are good years around here, with a hundred kids stopping by or more, but some years you're lucky to get half that. Usually that means bad times - the Halloween after 9/11 was rather sparse, for example, and last year during the onset of the Recent Economic Unpleasantness people were also thin on the ground. This year? Maybe the flu. Who knows. But we had a good time anyway, and the girls came back with reasonably full baskets of goodies.

And Tabitha can have the ones with peanuts in them this year, which just excited her no end.

Hang on to your hats, folks - the holiday season has arrived and the roller coaster has left the station.