My House Smells Like Lemon Pledge

Well, it did this morning, anyway. Now it smells more like the lentil soup I’ve been cooking, but when I woke up this morning around eight or so, my husband was wandering around with a dust cloth and spray can in his hand, dusting. Dusting is nominally my job, but I only get around to it every three months or so, because I hate it. I hate all forms of housework except cooking and laundry. I don’t exactly like laundry, but I find it inoffensive.

John is the kind of person who has to be busy. I’m the kind of person who thinks sloth is a hobby. Since he retired, John has repaired everything in the house he could find that needs repairing, repainted the living room, after swearing for years that he couldn’t move the armoire to paint behind it, repainted the bathroom and the mudroom, changed out several light fixtures, cleaned out the storage shed next to the carport, practically rebuilt the pergola, and polished the headlights on my car with a kit he got from Auto Zone. He also does all the yard work (frequently at 6:30 in the morning) and almost all of the housework.

What I’ve done since I’ve retired is played a bunch of computer games and bought a bunch of clothes.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I started a regular exercise program, which led to my breaking my foot and not being able to do much of anything for months thereafter. I decluttered 4 bags and 4 boxes of stuff for a fundraising drive back in February and have since gotten rid of 4 more boxes, including a skirt I could now fit into again and wish I had back. I’ve been writing blog posts several times a week. And I do batch cooking of soup, chili, and spaghetti sauce a few times a month so we have easy fix meals in the freezer.

Just yesterday I did our first big grocery shopping in over a month. After recovering from sticker shock at the check out counter, I came home to find John mopping floors.  Grocery shopping wasn’t the end of it. I made a marinade for the chicken breasts. I marinated them overnight and then wrapped them and put them in the freezer. I did the same with some skirt steak and store bought marinade. I was feeling very virtuous until I woke up to the smell of make-believe lemon.

I had planned to make the lentil soup anyway, but not first thing in the morning. I found it hard to sit around reading the paper with John spraying his way through the house, so instead of having the soup for dinner, we had it for lunch. Dinner is going to be the steak sandwiches that I originally planned for lunch, dressed up with Gorgonzola butter and roasted red peppers. And maybe onion rings.

Hubby is getting a lot of mileage out of one can of Lemon Pledge.

A Streetcar Named Depressing

We have season tickets to our local Little Theater performances, as I may have mentioned before. This year, the second performance is of A Streetcar Named Desire, a show I had no desire to see. I read the play when I was in high school, and have seen snippets of the movie on TV, although I have never wanted to watch it all the way through. I can’t imagine why not: domestic violence, rape, slut shaming, stigmatizing of mental illness, what’s not to like.

John wanted to see it, so I went along. “There is not one likable character in the entire play,”  I grumbled, “And the general theme seems to be ‘Eat or be eaten’. Not that I want to bias you or anything.” (Later he was to comment, “The doctor seemed nice at the end”.)

Back when I lived in New Orleans, I tried to work out the streetcar route Blanche Dubois took to get to her sister’s house, although by then all but one streetcar had been replaced by buses. As I’m sure many a tourist has found out, it can’t be done. Tennessee Williams selected the real New Orleans street names for their symbolic value, not the accuracy of their transit routes. So our play arrives already loaded with three streetcars’ worth of symbolism. That makes it hard for our characters to function as real people. 

It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the characters. I really do. Blanche’s story is heartbreaking. Stanley finds himself paying for the extended visit of a woman who has said she finds him subhuman, and who he believes may have cheated his wife out of a small fortune. Stella is putting up with their feuds while pregnant through a New Orleans summer. I can sympathize, I just don’t like any of them. 

I remember discussing the play with some friends back in high school. Somehow the question was raised of whether you would rather be a Stanley or a Blanche. I am ashamed to say that I did not know back then to point out that those aren’t one’s only choices in life. The play’s ambiguous treatment of violence leaves me wondering whether Williams knew those aren’t the only choices, either. Williams gives a chillingly accurate depiction of domestic violence in Stan and Stella’s marriage, right down to the way everyone except Blanche shrugs it off with, “They’ll be okay. They’re crazy about each other.” Blanche’s sexual activity is presented as far more shocking and deserving of censure than is Stanley’s willingness to use his fists on his pregnant wife. 

Shrinking

Since I broke my foot I have lost around 12 or 13 pounds. I haven’t been on what I call a “real diet”. I’ve just cut down on portion sizes and cut out sweets and fatty snacks. I’ve actually added more nuts, fruit, and yogurt to my diet after seeing the study on foods that are associated with gaining and losing weight long term in adults. 

I’ve also been gradually increasing my exercise, but I did have a set back one week when my right foot started hurting. I was afraid I may have broken it, but right around the time I was getting ready to call for an appointment with my foot doctor, it stopped hurting. I’m doing one day a week bike riding and one day walking with a friend at the mall and am about ready to add some light weight training. 

So I have been shrinking. I now have five pairs of jeans I can wear: the two new ones I bought plus three I had outgrown. More importantly for my budget, I can now fit into a misses size 16 again instead of a woman’s size 16, a change that not only expands my selection of clothing but also saves me around $5-$10 per item of clothing in the places where I shop. The corduroy 14 wale pants I just bought would have cost $5 more in plus sizes. A pair of ponte knit trousers costs $10 more for plus sizes. A cashmere cardigan costs an extra $20. 

I suppose the rationale for the price difference is that plus sizes use more fabric, but  that doesn’t explain it once you start looking at numbers. A misses size 18 is actually slightly larger than a woman’s (plus) size 16, but costs less. Tall sized pants use more fabric than petite sizes, but don’t cost more. The size difference between a misses size 2 and a misses size 18 is the same as the difference between the misses size 18 and the plus size 24, but the size 2 doesn’t cost any less. 

Besides, the price difference doesn’t hold for men’s clothing. A pair of Land’s End men’s chinos costs the same price whether you buy a waist size 30 or a waist size 46. That 16 inch range is about the same as the difference between a Misses size 12 and a Woman’s size 26 in women’s chino pants, but the woman’s size 26 will cost you $5 more ($10 for some styles). It’s true that a men’s cashmere sweater in Tall sizes costs $20 more than the same sweater in regular length men’s sizes, but it’s strange that men pay a price penalty for being tall whereas women pay a price penalty for being wide.  When you consider that some research shows that height correlates with higher income, there’s a least a possibility that taller men can afford the extra cost. For what Precious Ramotswe would call “traditionally sized women”, that explanation doesn’t work.

So it’s not fair that my reduced size is saving me money, but I’m not sure I could drum up interest in an “Occupy the Garment District” movement. Although if I did, I’d at least have a few things to wear.

Walkin' After Midnight

I go out walkin' 

After midnight 

Out in the moonlight 

Just like we used to do

I'm always walkin' 

After midnight 

searching for you.

                          (Alan Block and Donn Hecht)

I have a bad habit of anthropomorphizing my cats. I hold whole conversations with them (both parts) and attribute to them all sorts of knowledge and common sense. Then when they go ahead and act like cats, I’m frustrated.

When I first got Truffle, I had to sign an agreement that he would remain an indoor cat. Truffle, however, never put his paw print to the page and when he saw Poppy going in and out, he decided to follow. I tried to keep him in, but he could slither pretty fast. So my compromise was to make sure he was in at night before I went to bed. For a few weeks that meant I was searching the neighborhood until the wee hours, but he finally started coming in on his own by ten, most of the time. Every three months or so, he’d stay out until 2 AM, but mostly he was in by what I jokingly referred to as his curfew.

Then we got D’Artagnan. D’Artagnan is a young cat and still loves to play, and his favorite form of play is wrestling with Truffle. Truffle will put up with D’Artagnan for a while, before smacking him one or chomping on him, but he’s also spending more time outdoors. Over the last week or so, Truffle has been staying out late (and probably smoking nip with his deadbeat friends).

One night he didn’t come in at all. John woke up at five and went out looking for him with the flashlight. A few minutes after John gave up, Truffle appeared at the window. Mama was not happy with him.

That night, D’Artagnan decided to go outside, too. We got D’Artagnan in, but Truffle was still outside. Around midnight, I slipped outside to look for Truffle. I walked around our half of the block and didn’t see him, but a few minutes after I came in, Truffle again was at the window.

So the next night, I tried again, this time around ten. Sure enough, about two minutes after I returned, Truffle was there.

“This is easy”, I thought. (Always a bad thing to do. With Truffle, nothing is easy.) The next night Truffle came in early on his own, but D’Artagnan was still out. I was in my office playing a computer game when I heard John calling D’Artagnan. “I need to go tell him to shut Truffle in the back when he opens the door”, I thought, only too late. D’Artagnan was in, but Truffle was back out. So I put on my shoes and went walking. Truffle came up to me and headed home with me. Problem is, when I got to the door, he hared off in another direction.

I finally got him in at 2 in the morning, after two more walks. If this keeps up, I’ll at least get my exercise. I had a calm, reflective talk with my husband on the subject of being more careful with the cat.

Last night, Truffle was in by 9. He’s mama’s good baby. He knows when his curfew is.

Foreign Exchange: Part Two, Anders and the Technology Revolution

I don’t think I mentioned in writing about my first student, Chan, that it was during her stay with us that we finally got cable TV. Chan liked to watch movies, so my husband rented a few each week, and finally decided it would be cheaper just to get cable and a movie channel. I don’t think it was, but it was more convenient. Besides, mama finally discovered Home and Garden channel, and hubby’s life hasn’t been the same since.

Our second foreign exchange student, Anders, brought another technological change to our lives: high speed internet access. We had been making do with dial-up service and two phone lines, one for the house and one for the internet. I did actually have a wireless router so I could use the internet with my laptop, but John’s modem was plugged into the extra phone line the old fashioned way.

When Anders arrived, he brought his laptop with him. He quickly discovered that if the second phone line was in use, he could always plug into the first one. People started complaining they couldn’t get us on the phone. Since we already had cable TV and a wireless router, getting a cable modem seemed like the next logical step.

Naturally, these changes led to good-natured grousing on the part of my son, Neal. “I never had cable and high speed internet when I was in high school.” I just looked at him and asked, “How are your friends doing paying back their college loans?” He got the point.

Anders is from Denmark, and spoke almost perfect English. Months into the school year, his fellow students still thought he came from somewhere in the Northern Midwest. He was also far ahead of his fellow students academically. Since he had already been informed he was going to have to repeat his junior year when he got home anyway, he took a lot of elective subjects like photography and coasted through most of his core subjects. He was sort of Neal’s Danish twin, come to think of it.

We got an interesting view of life in a US high school as seen from a European student. There was a stretch of a week or so when someone set off a fire alarm every day. Anders spoke about it like a visiting anthropologist studying the quaint customs of a long lost tribe.

Anders liked cooking more than our other students and could be relied on to start dinner if asked. He really liked making salads, and would cut ingredients three different ways to make designs in the salad bowl. Best of all, he was 6’1 and able to reach all the little household gadgets I couldn’t. 

Anders also had some quirks. He decorated his room with some of our Christmas lights strung under his bed, and didn’t take them down until he was ready to leave. We had a large bulletin board in that room for students to use to post pictures of home and new friends and to keep up with assignments. Before he left, Anders arranged all the thumbtacks to spell “AFS”.

Anders had some older siblings, but was the last child left at home and thus used to hanging out with parents. Whereas Chan usually had weekend plans with friends and left us with a lot of free time, Anders was happy to tag along with us to dinners, movies and the occasional party. He did play soccer with a community group and his high school team, but that didn’t seem to lead to friends to hang out with. He apparently kept up a lot with friends at home over the internet. 

He did get a job as an extra in a movie second semester. That led to a lot of ferrying him around on John’s part. AFS students are not allowed to drive while they are in the US, and most of ours didn’t have a license at home yet, anyway.

It was while Anders was still with us that we went to Thailand to visit Chan. We had wanted to wait until August when I had a two week break, but she was starting college then and it would have been inconvenient. I got my boss to add four days to my Easter break and that gave us two weeks. It meant pulling Anders out of school, but school was easy for him anyway.

We were going to pay Anders’ way to Thailand, since it was our idea to go and we felt that it would be unfair to expect him to come up with the money, but his dad insisted on paying us for his airfare. We also checked with US Immigration to make sure he could leave the country and come back in, and were assured he could.

Anders and Chan got along well right away. It was funny to hear them speaking English to each other. While we were there we met one of Chan’s mother’s friends who told us that her daughter had a foreign exchange student in her class that year. “Does the student speak Thai?” I asked. No, she replied, they just speak to her  in English.

We were lucky to be in Thailand for Songkran, the Water Festival. Chan’s father’s family lived in Chang Mai and that’s where we went to celebrate the festival. We had fun tossing water on passers-by with plastic buckets and getting doused ourselves.

When we got back to the US, we discovered that what we had been told about Anders being able to get back in easily with his student visa was untrue. After a half hour or so of discussions, he was issued a standard 90 day tourist visa that more than covered the time he had left before he was due to leave at the end of June. We learned our lesson about taking students out of the country.

We still haven’t visited Anders in Denmark. He is one of my Facebook friends and we keep up a lot that way. Maybe now that Neal is living in London we can get up to Denmark on our next visit.

(Part One of my experiences as a host mom is here.  Part Three is here.)

Foreign Exchange: Part One, Chan

Other people’s husbands, when they have mid-life crises, buy themselves motorcycles. Some of them buy fancy sports cars. Of course, some of them dump their wives for a newer model. So maybe I shouldn’t complain about my husband’s substitute for a motorcycle: foreign exchange students.

I had just become used to our nicely empty nest, especially the part where I could run around the house in my underwear, when my husband first broached the idea of getting a foreign exchange student. I was not enthusiastic. I wasn’t even sure that agencies would place foreign exchange students in homes where there weren’t other children. It turns out they will.

We decided to look for a student through the American Field Service. AFS started out as an ambulance service during World War I. After the war, a group of AFS members decided to explore ways to foster world peace, and they came up with the idea of sending high school students to live in homes in a foreign country for a school year. High school students. World peace. It was a simpler time back then.

Our first foreign exchange student was a girl from Thailand. Chan was outgoing and friendly, important qualities in a student who was going to have to make friends in school on her own with no host sibling to help. Her ideas of high school in the US, however, had been formed by watching Bring it On. Tara High School was a shock to her system: not only in that it did not conform to her movie driven ideas of life in the US, but also in that it was very different from high school in Thailand. After her first day at school, Chan came home to ask me if it is common in the US for 16 year olds to have babies. I told her that it does happen, but that most people don’t think it’s a good idea. In Thailand, she told me, people her age did not even have boyfriends and girlfriends. Just holding hands with a boy was considered seriously intimate.

On the other hand, Chan was accepting of other aspects of sexuality. She showed me pictures of her friends (before we had the no boyfriends/girlfriends talk) and I asked her if one boy was the girl next to him’s boyfriend. “Him? No, he’s gay,” she said, as if she were saying, “He’s left handed.” 

Chan also had some dietary requirements. As a Buddhist, she did not eat beef. She also did not eat vegetables, not for religious reasons, but because (she claimed) she couldn’t digest them. She found our eating different foods at breakfast from what we ate at other meals puzzling, although she quickly came to love bacon.  We learned how to cook fried rice for breakfast, and it was a breakfast favorite of ours for years afterward.

I Need More Jewelry

As I mentioned, I am in the process of writing a will. I have a will questionnaire to fill out, which one would think would make it easy, but I still have decisions to make. One question asks about making special provisions for “family heirlooms, jewelry or other items of special value to be distributed to friends or relatives”. I do have a few items of real jewelry, and since I don’t have a daughter, I want to leave them to my nieces.

Since the items are of unequal value, I decided to rank them in order of value and leave them to the oldest first and on down the line. My wedding and engagement rings are going to my son, though, for him to treasure as a remembrance, give to his future wife or daughter, or sell at the nearest flea market. Leaving those aside, I have four other pieces of real jewelry: a diamond and sapphire ring, a string of pearls, a gold charm shaped like an elephant’s head, and a gold heart with four diamond chips. I have four nieces: my older brother’s two daughters, my younger brother’s daughter, and my sister’s daughter. So it works out nicely.

Except that my husband has a niece, and I have spent more time with her in the last twenty years than with my own nieces. I’ve already sort of given her a family heirloom, a locket that had belonged to my MIL that no one else seemed to have noticed or claimed at MIL’s death so it fell to me. But that’s not like leaving her something of mine.

Then there are my nephews. I have five of them, and it seems unfair to leave them out, but the point of leaving the jewelry to my nieces is that the jewelry is something with a high replacement value and low resale value, so it makes more sense to give it to people who might wear it than to lump it in with more liquid assets. I don’t have any “items of special value” that would be of interest to my nephews.

There’s also the small ivory carving of a mastodon that my husband gave me for the birthday we spent in Alaska. I want to leave that my former foreign exchange student from Thailand, because  the elephant (the mastodon’s modern relative) is the symbol of Thailand, and because it’s small enough to pack and ship easily. I have two other former foreign exchange students and no similar trinkets suitable for them. Not that it’s likely that they are going to come to the reading of my will.

One would think these decisions wouldn’t cause such angst for me. By the time these objects get passed around, I’m going to be dead and beyond caring. It’s just that I’ve seen how families react to wills. Wills are read when people are grieving and emotional and hanging out with those favorite targets for sibling rivalry, siblings. Decisions that were made on a practical basis, like, “I’ll just start with the oldest and work my way down” or, “M is going to inherit her mom’s opera length strand of 9mm pearls anyway so she doesn’t need my trinkets” get looked at as judgements of worth. 

I have a whole new appreciation for the vineyard owner in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. “It’s my money [stuff]. I can spend [leave] it however I want. If people want to be whiny ingrates, that’s their lookout.” Except that I know how people behave. I especially know how people in my family behave. It’s not fair to light a match and pretend nothing’s going to catch fire.

So the obvious solution is that I need more jewelry. A gold bangle that I can leave to M. A really nice cameo brooch to leave to our other female foreign exchange student. A sapphire and diamond necklace that, once I’m gone,  can be broken up into individual gemstones and divided up among my nephews, John’s nephews, my son and our male foreign exchange student so they can make manly cufflinks or pinkie rings.

I tried to explain this to John. His response was, “Wait, what?”

He has no concept of family values.