Little Old Lady Driver Class

My foot is still not quite up to Little Old Lady Exercise Class. My knees are getting stronger; I can actually pedal fast enough on the exercise bike to get my heart rate up. I even walked up the ramp to the P-MAC on two occasions to go to basketball games instead of taking the elevator. “Jumping around”, in Dr. S’s words, is still not advised.

My dear hubby found me a substitute, however - Little Old Lady Driving Class. It’s not just  for little old ladies (well, neither was the exercise class). It’s actually a class sponsored by AARP for drivers 50 years old and older. Hubby found out about it when he called our insurance company to find out of his rate would go down now that he is driving fewer miles a month. It turns out it does, a bit, but what really makes a difference is this driver safety class. It saves him $40 every six months. I’m not sure yet what it saves me, but it will be something. So he signed us up.

The class took four hours (almost to the minute), and consisted of videos, lecture discussion, and a pre- and post-test. The time went by relatively quickly. Subjects covered were how minds and bodies change as we get older and how it affects driving, eight safety strategies, other road users and how to respect their road usage, knowing our roads and highways, understanding our vehicles, and judging our driving fitness and knowing when to retire from driving. 

A sobering thought: death rates from motor vehicle accidents climb dramatically once you hit age 75. For women my age, there are just over 2 deaths per thousand crashes. For 75-79 year olds, that rate climbs to 4 deaths per thousand and for 80 years old and older, almost 7 deaths per thousand. For men, those rates are even higher and climb more steeply as they age.

As we went through the material covered, I realized I hadn’t taken a driver’s test of any kind since I moved to Louisiana in 1972. I’ve kept up on changes in the law (for instance, you now have to turn on your headlights as soon as it rains enough to turn on your windshield wipers; that didn’t used to be the law until some time in the late 80’s), but some things I really just did not know, like how far you have to stop behind a stopped school bus. Usually I just hit my brakes as soon as I see the driver activating the stop signs, but one time I came up a slight hill on a four lane highway behind a stopped bus and did not know how far behind I needed to be. (Thirty feet, in Louisiana.) I did not know who has the right of way when entering a roundabout (the drivers already in the roundabout), although I’m pretty sure I would have reacted correctly when faced with the situation. And it turns out I have been taking some risks in driving on the road with big trucks: cutting in too closely when passing them and then slowing down, and hanging out in their blind spots.

At least I behave safely around railroad crossings. If a gate is down and/or the bell is clanging, even if the train is not in sight, I won’t drive around it to get across the way I have seen some drivers do. I also do not walk on railroad tracks or stand too close to them.

So the class was worth the $14, even without the insurance rate reduction. (It’s $12 for AARP members.)

After class, hubby drove us to the insurance agent’s office with our class certificates in hand. As he chattered away (distracted driver), he was reminded of something he needed to convey with a gesture that took at least one hand off the wheel. “Sweetheart,” I pointed out mildly, “Didn’t we just finish taking a driver’s safety class?”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, then proceeded on with his anecdote. Fortunately we made it to the agent’s office without causing an accident.

Because I really, really would have hated to explain that one.

Peace Offering

Truffle is a warm and friendly cat with me. He is especially warm and friendly when everything is going his way: when I feed him his treats, when he gets to snuggle on the electric blanket, when he’s sitting on the edge of my chair getting his ears scratched.

He is not warm and friendly when he has to see the vet. That’s when he turns into 13 pounds of snarling muscle. At least, I think he weighs 13 pounds. At his most recent check-up, last week, it was impossible to get him on the scale. It was impossible to take his temperature. It was just possible to give him his shots with both vets and one assistant holding him down. Dr. Kate was also able to check his heart rate while he was wrapped in a towel snarling at us. “You would think his heart would be racing, “ she said, “but it’s not.” Great, I’m the mom to Hannibal Lector cat.

So I decided that since I am retired and have time for these things, I would make the vet some homemade goodies for Christmas. The vet’s office is less than half a mile from my house, so it was no trouble to drop something off. And what could be more appropriate than homemade truffles? Made with dark chocolate and decorated with white chocolate and chopped macadamias, they would reference our black and white cat, D’Artagnan, as well. Isn’t that how cute?

I have a recipe for no-cook chocolate truffles, but I decided to try something new, specifically, the Chocolate Truffles Recipe from the Simply Recipes website. It looked easy, especially if I skipped the optional flavors and went with basic vanilla. I could roll one third of them in cocoa, one third in chopped macadamias, and drizzle one third with melted white chocolate. How easy is that? as Ina Garten would say.

I keep forgetting that Ina Garten is a professional chef, and I’m not. Still, the recipe is easy. However, it does not make as many truffles as the recipe says: I was only able to make 25 of the size shown. It’s also harder to roll the truffles into balls than it is with my no-cook version. We have a melon baller someplace in the attic that would have made the job easier, but if I went to look for it I'd be there until Easter. 

After they’re formed, the truffles have to sit in the refrigerator overnight before you can roll them in toppings. They aren’t really hard to make, just fussy.

Rolling one third of them in cocoa was easy. I was even able to round them off some more. Rolling in the macadamia nuts was harder because no matter how finely I thought I had them chopped, I’d keep finding big pieces that wouldn’t stick. Drizzling with white chocolate was where I ran into trouble. I had to guess at the proportions of cream and baking chips that would let me drizzle yet still harden as it cooled. I guessed wrong. Even worse, my attempts to drizzle a few lines over each truffle resulted in blobs rather than stripes.

Okay, they are homemade, right? We aren’t going to worry about the little stuff. I packed them into a tin and took them over to the vet’s office. “Thank you”, said Kim, the receptionist, as I suggested she might want to keep them in the refrigerator. “What are they?”

“Truffles,” I answered. A brief puzzled expression passed over her face and then she realized I meant the candy and opened the box. (After all, I’m the mom to Hannibal Lector cat.)

So I think Truffle will be welcome there for another year, but next year, I'm sticking to cookies.

Destiny

On January 9, 2012, 7:30 PM local time (1:30 AM GMT), the Louisiana State University (LSU) football team will play the University of Alabama football team in the BCS Championship Game for the national collegiate football championship and a horrendously tacky looking but much prized Waterford crystal football.

For my readers from outside the US, that’s American style football, as played at the collegiate level, not what the rest of the world calls football and we call soccer. 

LSU has won every game so far this season, for a total of 13 wins and no losses, against a brutally tough schedule. Alabama has lost one game (to LSU) and played one game fewer, since they didn’t play for the Southeastern Conference Championship. (For those outside the US, the college and university football teams are divided among regional groups called conferences. If there are 12 or more teams in a conference, the conference subdivides into divisions and the two division leaders play each other in a championship game for a slightly less tacky trophy and a banner. And bragging rights.)

In the time between now and the game, fans of each team will be talking smack, making bets both monetary and not, and making fun of the other team and its fans, mostly its fans. The real purpose of the teams is to serve as tribal totems. The teams themselves are pretty much composed of decent young men who are hoping to hone their athletic skills and go on to play professionally. The tribes of fans are pretty much composed of idiots.

Last time LSU played in the championship game, I bought John and Neal tickets on StubHub. 

So I look forward to the morning of January 10, 2012, by which time all this will have been settled, for good or ill. (Hubby and son are alumni of LSU, so “good” is defined as an LSU win and “ill” as an Alabama win.) In the meantime, I speculate, as sports events cause me to do, whether the winner of this game is predetermined or not. For some reason, I don’t wonder that about other events in life. It’s not that I think that football games fall into some special category of events that are predetermined while everything else is in free fall. It’s just that I don’t usually worry about predetermination. I don’t see any way of deciding whether events are predetermined or not, and if there is no way to know something, I prefer to use the brain space on reflecting on those problems that do have solutions. 

A year or so ago I read a discussion on Talk Rational regarding whether the omniscience of God made free will impossible. I tried to follow the arguments, but they pretty much made my eyeballs itch. I don’t know enough philosophy to know when someone is making a reasonable but difficult to follow argument and when someone is just bullshitting. I read Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, a book that can best be described as “dense”, but can't remember most of it two years later. So don’t count on me for a nuanced discussion of the problem of free will.

I’ve had reason to think over the years that I’m glad I can’t read the future. Once while reading an account of a murder trial in our local paper and realizing that the victim was a woman whose son was one of my little clients fifteen years before; once when a childhood friend who had attended my mother’s funeral died six months later of a longstanding heart condition; once when watching the Southern Yacht Club burn down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. My graduate school boyfriend had taken me to the Yacht Club with friends of his who were members and I felt grown up and sophisticated. It’s probably also just as well I couldn’t foresee that the young man, who was brilliant, was also going to develop a mental illness that cut short his promise and left him on disability.

But my not being able to predict these outcomes does not mean that they weren’t already set in motion years before I arrived on the scene. The domestic violence that led to the murder, one friend's heart disease and the other friend's mental illness, the corruption and mismanagement that led to the levees failing didn’t just happen one day. They all had deep roots. But were they unavoidable? That I don’t know.

Compared to these events, football games seem uncomplicated. There are only two possible outcomes: either Team A wins or Team B does. Of course, on the way to these outcomes, unpredictable things happen: a ball takes a funny bounce, a referee misses a call, a receiver drops a pass that hits him right in the hands. Later fans of the losing team might think “If only Eric Reid hadn’t made that interception on the goal line”, but what does that even mean? If that one event had changed, what else would have had to change? And would it have made a difference to the ultimate outcome, or would something else have gone wrong?

What I know is that on the morning of January 10, 2012, either Alabama or LSU will have the crystal ball - the crystal football. The other kind of crystal ball, no one has.

Foreign Exchange: Part 5, Mademoiselle from Armentieres

After our experience with Eric, I was willing to call it quits, but John wanted to try for a happier experience with another student. We found Laura, a young lady from France (but not Armentieres) with excellent English skills and a happy looking smile. She responded to our first email, but we didn’t hear more from her until she actually arrived. Like Eric, she flew to Baton Rouge, so we didn’t have to drive to Houston to get her. Unlike Eric, she seemed happy with the city, her room, the restaurant we took her to for dinner. “She seems like the anti-Eric," I told friends.

As it turned out, although Laura was far more polite (and not depressed), she, like Eric, arrived with the idea of finding a different family as soon as possible. To help her make friends, I introduced her to my co-worker’s two teens. Actually, I invited them to come to the water park with us, but since my co-worker had a membership, she offered to take them all. Laura had a good time.

Labor Day weekend we made plans to go to Tennessee to see John’s sister and family and do some sightseeing on the way home. At the last minute, Laura had a request. She wanted to stay home with the T family and go tailgating with them. We agreed, but realized this was a bad sign.

In the meantime, the situation at Laura’s high school was getting worse. When the influx of students from New Orleans had arrived the year before, the Baton Rouge students were sympathetic. By the time the next school year started, lines were being drawn, and fights were breaking out. A few times the police were called. I couldn’t blame Laura for feeling frightened and frustrated.

Once again the T children approached their parents about hosting our student. My co-worker was afraid it would  interfere with our relationship, but I assured her it wouldn’t. Laura wasn’t our possession or prisoner. If she would be happier somewhere else, more power to her. The T’s applied to AFS and were accepted as host parents. Laura transferred to the school in their neighborhood and said goodbye to us. I wished her well. She had an enjoyable year, from what I heard, and still keeps in touch with her host sister.

As for us, we agreed it was time to stop hosting students while we had three happy experiences and two  unsuccessful ones. We visited Anett in Hungary twice, once the summer after Eric left and once the spring we went to visit Neal in Paris. On the first trip, I had bought a necklace for Laura, a swan-shaped charm on a chain, which I gave to my youngest niece instead after Laura left.

Looking back on our experiences with our young friends, I can see some surprising similarities. Counting my son, I’ve lived with teens from four different continents and can confidently say that they all keep vampire’s hours, use their floors for storage, and think the center of the universe is a little closer to their belly buttons than it actually is. On the other hand, all of our students, including Eric, were willing to lend a hand with household chores and picked up after themselves fairly well. I did notice that they each stopped making their beds in the morning after a few weeks. I wish I’d kept a chart; I’d be willing to bet the rent money it was the same number of weeks for each of them.

We’re still in contact with Chan, Anders and Anett. Anders even convinced John to join Facebook. If I hadn’t had those three in my life, I probably would never have been to Thailand or Hungary (we still haven’t made it to Denmark), and possible not yet have been to the Grand Canyon (we went with Chan) or Hawaii (we went with Anett). 

I think about Eric from time to time and hope he is doing well and that someday he’ll return to the US under happier circumstances. Laura I’m sure is doing well.

Would I advise other people to become host parents? I think it’s wise to know what you are getting into. You can make lifelong friends, or you can find yourself with an unhappy teenager who expected something different and wants out. I’m glad we hosted students, and I’m glad we finally stopped. It was a season in my life, and I look back on it fondly.

Christmas Decorating

When I am daydreaming about Christmas treats, one of my favorite daydreams is that someday I will be able to hire a floral designer to decorate my whole house for Christmas. Since my hunch is that would cost my entire budget for my someday Australia trip, it is likely to remain just that, a daydream. In the meantime, I try to accomplish what I can can, leaving my house with that loving hands, done at home look, blended slightly with that chewed on by the cat look. Neither look makes it into the Christmas editions of my favorite magazines.

The cake recipe is from Southern Living. Usually my cakes don't look this pretty,
but the directions and pictures were easy to follow.

The dining room, Christmas 2004. 

One year I spent a small fortune on a matching wreath, swags, and wall hanging baskets for the front porch. The calico wreaths someone had given me for Christmas 25 years or so before had given up the ghost, several live plants had died in the wall hanging baskets, and I decided I could spend some money on decor that would last me another 25 years. The swags hung from the original front porch light fixtures. Then the light fixtures broke, and I couldn’t find replacements with quite the same configuration. That actually worked out well, because I put a swag on the back door and the other on the light fixture at the side door, and voila, the whole house looked cohesive. (“Cohesive” is a decorator term meaning the opposite of that mix of stuff you inherited from grandma, stole from mom, and found while dumpster diving.)

This year, hubby made a live wreath from the trimmings from our enormous Christmas tree, and complained about the wreath hanger making marks on the frame of the storm door. So now the live wreath is on the back door, the faux wreath is on the side door, and one swag is back in front.

The poor little Christmas cactus is hanging in there.

John's live wreath, with a purchased bow

The side door

If the outdoors looks cohesive, the indoors is a different story. The indoors looks like a moderate sized explosion took place in Hobby Lobby. The way things look in my head and they way they look in three dimensional space is laughably different.

There is, for instance, the tree. Thirty seven years ago, one of my little clients gave me a beautiful velvet ornament she and her mother had made for me. It was a turquoise color, that over the years faded to a seafoam green and now to a beige with a tinge of green, but the lace foil and synthetic pearls are still as good as ever and I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. It did, however, spark the idea to have a tree with all unique ornaments. Most of the ornament sets I have are themes: the old Sears Christmas Around the World ornaments, The Wizard of Oz ornaments, A Christmas Carol ornaments, nursery rhymes ornaments, but the ones that are duplicates are left over from another tree in another house. In someone else’s hands, that might have looked charming; in mine, it mostly looks mismatched. Since a lot of the ornaments are gifts, they are staying. I can actually remember each person who gave them to me, and part of the fun of decorating the tree is remembering each person and hoping they are doing well.

The bottom is empty because of the cats.

The Nutcracker tree in the back room

Then there are the collections, most of which are also gifts of mugs, candle holders, and ornaments too heavy to hang on the tree. There’s an angel collection, a snowman collection, and a Santa collection. This year, I added an impulse purchase to the Santa collection: a two and a half foot tall Native American inspired Father Christmas that the owner of the Native American shop in Cherokee, North Carolina let me buy for 20% off after I drooled over it for half an hour. When I put it on the bookcase with the rest of the Santas, they looked like the mismatched impulse purchases they are. Finally, I moved them across the room to the built in bookcase and distributed them among the shelves so they are still grouped together, but a little less dissonant. I think. The angels are on top of the first bookcase and the snowmen are on the desk.

I think he needs a sled.

Finally, there’s the mantle. The mantel sports faux greenery, cast iron stocking hangers, candlesticks, and this year, the Santa picture that I can never find the right spot for. There used to be a perfect spot for the Santa picture, on the wall that is now the home for the armoire. There is another suitable spot for Santa on the back wall, but that’s where we put the tree. So Santa is now hanging on the mantle, only a few inches too high, and hubby is tired of messing with it. I can’t blame him.

The stockings in the middle are handmade. The one on the left, my mom crocheted, and the one on the right, my MIL made for Neal.

So maybe someday I will hit the lottery, hire that floral designer, and have a house that will make you all green with envy. In the meantime, well, it’s Christmas. Isn’t that the time for loving hands, done at home?

Another "it seemed like a good idea at the time" purchase,
a souvenir of Branson, on the baking center in the kitchen

Advent

Wrapping

In packages of tinsel flimsy

Hopes that this will be the one time the children

Cease their quarrels,

And wrapping, in sturdy boxes, strapping taped protection 

Against the guilt of being miles and years way 

From a place no longer home,

And wrapping 

The hope that a small gift will arm against

The jealousy of friendship

And wrapping

The boxed reminders that the year just passed 

Is counted out in broken promises, lost hopes,

And goals as distant as Atlantis,

I remember

That in just such demon days

As winter swallowed daylight

Seekers preached

The birth of the Sun,

The birth of the Son,

The birth of the Light.

Advent,1984

I'm Not Visiting Australia Anytime Soon

As I have written before, I have a plan to see all seven continents and all fifty states before I die. Well, I have a plan to see all seven continents and all fifty states that’s contingent on my not dying in the next five years or so. I’ve been to 39 states, including Alaska and Hawaii, and six continents, so it’s not unreasonable to think I can make it, unless I get hit by the Hypothetical Evangelists’ Best Friend Bus tomorrow.

We even had a plan to see the last continent, Australia, next summer. My nephew was getting married in Hawaii, where he is stationed, and as we were making tentative plans to go, John said that as long as we were going to Hawaii, we might as well go on to Australia. (There is a reason I love the dude.)

Alas, three weeks later, the wedding was off, and the combatants, uh, former lovebirds, are no longer speaking. I did mention a few times that we could still plan a trip to Hawaii and Australia anyway, but we didn’t get any further than discussing it.

Then came the news that a friend of mine is getting married in Colorado. The wedding is at the end of next summer. We are friends because we belonged to a weight lifting email list. A smaller list of five of us spun off from the larger one, and while the larger list is no longer active, the rest of us keep in touch weekly. I’ve actually met bride to be and one other member in real life. It would mean a lot to the bride to have us all at the wedding, and fortunately, we are all able to go.

Denver is to the west of us, but not so far west that it leads you to think that once you’re there, you might as well hop on over to Oz. Colorado is right next door to Utah, one of the states I haven’t yet been to, so I’m hoping to convince John to come with me on a drive to Mountain Meadows to see the memorial to the Baker-Fancher party. Maybe I can point out Utah is closer than Australia.

Okay, so Australia isn’t going anywhere. We, however, were going somewhere last night, a party sponsored by some engineering group that John belongs to. John bumped into a former coworker, Li, and as I sat on the other side of John at the bar drinking Diet Coke and trying to make out their conversation over the live music, they talked shop. Suddenly John turned to me and said, “Li is going home to China for a visit in 2013.” As I was about to wish Li a happy journey, John added, “Do you want to go?”

“Sure, why not?” I said, since “Sure, why not?” is pretty much my standard response to all proposals of travel coming from my husband, especially in bars. “When in 2013?”

“Oh, late,” Li informs me. Okay, lots of time to pack. Our itinerary includes Beijing and some other city I couldn’t make out over the music but I have lots of time to find out picky little details. 

So how far is China from Australia, anyway? It never hurts to dream.