Waitress from Mensa

The food (Ad)vendture

2012-02-01T06:17:00.000-08:00

Remember the good old days, when fat was the food villain? Or coffee (good in small quantities, though), carbs (the South Beach food imposter diet), salt, pickled foods, aged cheese? And let's not forget tuna, pork, beef (for a multitude of problems), chicken, eggs, any nonfarm-raised fish? Anything with preservatives? And then there was the spinach scare.

And, of course, there's high fructose corn syrup, responsible for the backlash of soft drinks touting their throwback to the very special...real sugar, which was the evil white powder of the 1970s which returned for a repeat performance in the late 1990s. And the artificial sweeteners: cyclamates, saccarhine, aspartame. There's the reverse chirality sugar now that wreaks havoc on some digestive systems. And on the good side is stevia.

Now it's gluten, a protein found in wheat and some other grains, that many people are allergic to. Carbs, the staple of my diet during my avid cycling days, cause weight gain. What? No more bagels and pasta?

In my opinion, the concurrent problems of obesity and malnutrition are: processed foods, soft drinks, and the computer replacing active playtime (adult and children).

Cell phones: boon and bane

2012-01-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

Cell phones: Yeah, I know, they are a necessary evil. A few years ago, it seemed so surprising that normal, mortgage-paying 8-to-5ers would every give up the safety net of the landline and go wireless, but now wireless has become the norm. My young neighbor remarked, after watching me use the landline, "Do you have a regular [cell] phone?"

I still maintain my landline and DSL, but for seven years, I had a bare-bones prepay phone as a matter of necessity: you know, one pre-buys a finite number of "minutes" and airtime. Not a smartphone. But it fulfilled my limited needs: got great reception, the minutes were relatively inexpensive when bought in bulk, it sent and received text messages. I use my iPod Touch for data and apps.

But for a few months, I had no bars, no reception. Incoming calls were routed directly to voicemail, or sometimes, lost altogether. Text messages failed. This is not good. If I go incommunicado, I want it to be on my own terms.

Frustration converged with opportunity, and on a whim, I turned into the first cell phone vendor I passed on the main drag: a shop catering mostly the Spanish-speaking community.

The phone and plan I ended up with was exactly what I wanted. How often does an impulsive decision work out for the best? Once the owner understood that I did not want or need an unlimited plan for a fixed amount per month, he found a prepay per minute plan (Total Call Mobile) and a Sanyo Katana phone. the ultimate cost per minute is less than that of the previous phone, the plan does not require purchasing airtime in addition to minutes, the Katana phone (for which he discounted the price) is packed with features that I'm still learning about, the contacts database is more user-friendly, the screen is easy to read, and never has the phone been out of service.

These hallowed halls

2012-01-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

I earn part of my daily bread as a graduate academic advisor in the College of Engineering. In other words, the students under my watch are all earning master of science or doctorate degrees in engineering. By definition then, they are organized, directed, analytical, methodical, intelligent, persistent.

One student's experience, though, encapsulates the essence of why I love advising. An admittedly lackadaisical American undergraduate in chemical engineering, he found himself at the point of singular dissatisfaction with his job in the oil service industry. He quit that lucrative job to return for an MS, with an idea of specializing in energy-generating materials, earning an MS without benefit of an assistantship. More gregarious than the typical engineering student, he shared with me his ideas and disappointments and hopes. I offered suggestions and contacts, but mostly listened.

He took the initiative to study internationally at the acknowledged world-leading university in his particular field of energy materials.

After successfully completing the physics course well acknowledged to be the most difficult in our curriculum, and also holding his own in the ad hoc study group, the student admitted to me, proudly and almost incredulously, "Maybe I am capable of doing graduate-level engineering coursework." He entered the program with trepidation and bravado and probably a some fear, but persevered and overcame, proving his engineering proficiency and resourcefulness, mostly to himself.

The is the reason I love advising.

He is the only MS student, to my knowledge, to be offered a position with a famous semiconductor manufacturer and developer.

The primary and caucus system explained

2012-01-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

Any questions, view C.G.P. Gray's primary primer.

When you've digested that, give a listen to How the Electoral College Works.

Just for fun, it's Coffee: The Greatest Addition Ever.

And before spring forward Sunday: Daylight Savings Time Explained.

Sardonic (maybe unintentionally so), entertaining, and educational.

Overwhelmed

2012-01-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

I am overwhelmed.

I still don't have a kitchen. I made do with three slow cookers, a rice cooker, a propane-fired camping stove, and a coffee maker. I wash dishes in a large plastic storage box. The refrigerator is in my outbuilding.

Robisel, a fine craftman and hard worker, built a tin-roofed dog house, finished the crown molding in my house, did some touch-up painting, repaired flawlessly two large holes in my drywall, and laid and secured the cement backer board for my tile floor. He is a Renaissance man; I'm fortunate to have him working for me.

I rescued a hound dog and her six pups. Now, the two remaining pups; the mom dog, Paloma; and my orginal dog, Oliver, are under my care. I am seeking a home for Brutus, the large white male hound-mix pup, who will be neutered and trained in a month or so.

My electrical panel lost one leg of the two 120V in parallel (no 240V), so no hot water for more than two weeks. A local electrical company installed a new panel the next day, but it will be expensive. Fortunately, a kind ex-boyfriend, an electrician, diagnosed it for me.

At work, a very large, critically important report is due this week. I worked on it all (my boss, also) all Christmas break while my brethern were mostly off on their holiday.

This week and next week are also some of the busiest of the semester for a graduate advisor, as school starts the third week of January.

I also have a large editing job to finish, but between illness and all these other things, I have not finished it. I haven't even billed my clients for for work I've already done.

I have not even had time to acknowledge the birthdays of my nieces and nephews. I'm always running and never getting anywhere.

I am president of the Friends of the Brazos Valley Farmers' Market. I don't want to let these people down. The vendors are very appreciative. In fact, I can't remember any volunteer or service position in which the people involved were this appreciative. The volunteer coordinator quit; other volunteers tell me they can count on me for small jobs, then leave me in the lurch, so that I'm scrambling to put out a newsletter (and having to learn the software) at the very last minute. I've been staffing the booth five hours (from set-up to tear-down) almost every Saturday for months. A while ago, just trying to make pleasant conversation wtih another sometime volunteer, I asked if she would like to staff the booth for maybe a two-hour stint every once in a while.

"No," she huffed. "I have better things to do with my Saturdays."(This is after my staffing the booth for months.) It hurt then. It still stings now. I also have important things to do, but I honor my commitments. And I don't making stinging comments about those who honor theirs. But everyone else at the farmers' market is salt of the earth, and I'm glad to be a part of it.

(Another volunteer has since stepped up for a two-hour stint the first Saturday of the month. Thanks, Michaela.)

I have not been to the gym in more than 18 months; before, it was five or six times per week. I no longer have time to commute to work by bicycle. For the past 25 years, I have commuted to work by bicycle, but even this short 20-minute commute does not seem to work into my schedule.

Except for my father's funeral last December, I have not been able to take any vacation time at all, except for one glorious Friday in June for a quick weekend trip to Galveston with a girlfriend. Taking more than one day in succession has been verboten the entire 2011.

Remembering how uncannily insightful the rudimentary Eliza AI diagnostic program seemed been a generation ago, one lunch break I tried a mini-counseling session with an on-line Eliza, but the "doctor" was not picking up on my vibe.

In the blink of an eye

2011-11-25T16:01:00.000-08:00

My alma mater, Northern Arizona University, offered an alumni database CD a while ago. I support my school, and although I was not particularly interested in the CD, I ordered one. It took a few months, but I finally started expIoring it. I was surprised to see that a buddy, Jay, with whom I’d lost touch after graduation, had moved to his family’s ancestral hometown in Missouri. On a whim, I called.

What a conversation! But not with him, but rather with his amazing daughter. Had I a daughter, I would hope for a daughter like her. She was articulate, worldly, literate, confident. She lives in New York City and works as a teacher the New York Public School System in Harlem. In Harlem! She had read all the feminist authors of my generation: Adrienne Rich, Anaïs Nin, Betty Friedan. She was strong and analytical. Truly, I was impressed beyond measure away by this self-possessed woman. We spoke for more than two hours. She sent a family photo. (Jay had not changed a bit.)
She seemed to romanticize those early 1980s college days, just as I remember romanticizing my Aunt Rosalie’s college experience in hours poring over her yearbooks. (On the streets of New York, as a child, I once recognized one of classmates from her yearbook photo.) I mentioned the motorcycle and and old light-green station wagon. He still had that car!

In college, Jay was what would now be called a geek, a nebbish: a skinny computer science major wearing clothes a bit too large, riding around on a motorcycle. But oh, that motorcycle! The only time in my life I’d traveled 90 mph on a wheeled vehicle was as a passenger on that motorcycle. He hailed from a small town in southern Arizona, raised with his ne’er-do-well sister by his widowed Mom. The love of his life was a Thai exchange student at his high school.

One summer Jay and I (along with his sister) were housemates while he and I worked as summer interns. We remained buddies through four years of college.

Fast forward. Jay had married that Thai exchange student, and they were the parents of that amazing daughter and a son! I was so happy for him that his dream of marrying the love his life had come true. But then, sadness. They were in California, their daughter said, visiting Jay’s best friend, she probably for the last time together. She had late-stage cancer and did not have long to live.

In the blink of an eye.

Author Debra Ginsberg

2011-11-15T05:22:00.000-08:00

When I started this blog in 2003 as an outlet for my observations about waiting tables, a friend, Penny Banks Currie mentioned a book found onthe staff-recommended table at Borders bookstore in Austin, and was further approved by the "fun and unconventional" cafe workers there: Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, by Debra Ginsberg.

Ginsberg's nontraditional family moved from New York, where her father had worked as a waiter, to California, where the family established a pizza parlor. Her father determined that the entire family would become vegetarian. Ginsberg herself took a series of jobs waiting tables—in a upscale country club, in an Indian restaurant, in a beachside diner, in a fine dining establishment—and described each with a delicious combination of a technical writer's precision and dispassionate observation.

Debra Ginsberg has written several other memoirs and some juicy fiction—

About My Sisters: a recounting of the journeys and triumphs of her unique family and the closeness of the four sisters. One sister is a professional violinist.
Raising Blaze: The tribulations and insights about raising an autistic son.
Blind Submission: The protagonist works for a book agent, and gives a stark insight into the not-so-straightforward world of book publishing.
The Grift: A peek into the world of fortune-telling and its theatre, and, ironically, how real psychic ability ruins the career of a California fortune-teller.
The Neighbors are Watching: A pregnant teen-ager shows up on the doorstep of her father, disrupting the shaky order of their neat California neighborhood.

Ginsberg's writing glints with a sardonic edge and an marvelous precision of execution: entertaining and crisp and accurate. Not quite edgy, but not cozy either.

Everyone has had the experience of first hearing someone's voice, forming an mind's-eye image that turned out to be true to life upon meeting that person. Although Ginsberg and I have never met, her Tarty Queen gallery videos reveal her demeanor to be as I imagined in my mind's eye from her author's "voice." She is also an accomplished and creative baker.

Ginsberg's life and mine have some common elements. We spent the early parts of our lives in New York, where we enjoyed time at resorts in the Catskill Mountains; we are writers (although she is a published book author, and I've just published just a few magazine articles and spent most of my working life as a technical writer); and we both worked at National Park concessions (she, at Yellowstone NP, hated it; I, at Grand Canyon and Olympic NP, loved it). And, of course, we had both had waited tables.

Through her website, several years ago, I ventured a short communication to this accomplished writer. Debra Ginsberg responded immediately. Ginsberg was kind and more candid than I expected a published author to be. At that time, with just two (just two!) books published, she was seeking to expand her writing base. And she has!

Any book by Debra Ginsberg: highly recommended.

Friends of the Brazos Valley Farmers' Market

2011-11-13T08:02:00.000-08:00

The idea-generator and mini force of nature Lita has turned over the reigns of the Friends of the Brazos Valley Farmers' Market to me. So far, so good. My goal is to set the Friends on a stable but upward course, and continue to support the vendors and to raise awareness of this wonderful market in the Bryan/College Station community.

The actual market vendors pursue their goals through the efforts of a parallel organization. The groups work hand and hand, with many common members. The Friends group organizes special events, promote the market at workplaces and community bulletin boards, donate produce to the local food bank, and even prepare baskets of produce to introduce local chefs to possibilities of the market.

A strong core group of volunteers and a dedicated student intern form the core of the Friends. One volunteer, dedicated to community service, is married to a professional musician. Using her contacts, she arranges for live music. A dedicated intern with a strong social conscience and fierce work ethic provides support, continuity, and a wonderful flair. The vendors are engaging, hard-working, likable, friendly people. I have learned so much from them.

Now, in addition to setting up, staffing for four hours most Saturdays, then tearing down and stowing the information booth, I'm writing a newsletter, helping with the 2012 calendar a bit, vetting mailing lists, dealing with grant reimbursements, balancing a checking account, and soon will be figuring a system for annual dues payment, recruiting business members, and worrying about finding booth volunteers.

A friend in Arizona, my hiking companion from 25 years ago with whom I recently reconnected, has also carved a niche as indispensable volunteer at her market.
For me, volunteering for the market a labor of love, of course, but often I wish I were, if not retired, working part time. With only 10 hours of sunlight per day, I don't see the sun between 7:30 a.m. Monday to 7:30 a.m Saturday. I can understand why some people suffer from seasonal affective disorder, with the oddly appropriate acronym SAD. Staffing the information booth, though, give me four hours of glorious sunlight.

Lifelong blacksmith and market manager Harvey Wise at the anvil.

Local farmer David Elsik with one of his "wearable produce" trademark gourds.

Local musician Joey McGee framed by custom tie-dyed t-shirts from the info booth.

Market manager (and blacksmith) Harvey Wise, Millican Farms owner Tonya Miller, and Tonya's dad. Tonya has returned to California and will be much missed by the market.

Community Potluck

2011-11-13T07:09:00.000-08:00

Every Saturday at 5:00 p.m. and every Sunday at 1:00 p.m., a loosely organized group headed by community activist Dan Kiniry meets at at a pavlilion Neal Park, west of downtown Bryan for a community potluck. Everyone is welcome. Those who can cook or bring something to share, all the better. Those who are hungry or down on their luck are welcome. Most everyone comes for spiritual or social succor and sharing.

Much of the food seems to be donated by local restaurants and bakeries. Dishes and utensils are washed each week by a volunteer. Before each meal, the group holds hands in a large circle where announcements are shared, from the need for toiletries at the house of a volunteer who helps the homeless to campaign to save from demolition the historically Black Carter Elementary School.

Sometimes there is a volleyball game. On cold days, some people lay in a large fire in the grill. At initial inspection, it seems to be a motley crew: homeless folks, community-minded college students, church-group members, laborers, farmers' market volunteers, and other citizens.

But, to quote Dan Kiniry: "We are all brothers."

Contra dancing Independence Day celebration

2011-11-12T18:05:00.000-08:00

To celebrate Independence Day, our Brazos County contra dance group started off the evening of dancing with a potluck supper. Actually, it was originally meant to be a cookout, but the county-wide burn ban precluded that. Fine with me! I'm all about potlucks, and I volunteered to organize this one. Organizing, for this group entailed sending out two e-mails and arriving a big early to set up tables. Oh, yeah: that's the type of simplicity I could get accustomed to. Only four parties responded prior to the even, but, as is usual, we had a cornucopia of dishes, from King Ranch Casserole, to fresh salads, to sublime desserts, as well as hamburgers and hot dogs from the oven. No grilling due to a burn ban in drought-stricken Texas.

The band, Jalapeno Honey, really got into the patriotic spirit with their red, white, and blue banners unfurled from their music stands. A gentleman playing the pennywhistle even sat in with the band! The musician who writes the arrangements even worked in a Sousa march or two.

This dashing fellow in Scots regalia has frequented our dances of late.

Treasure on road's edge

2011-07-11T18:57:00.000-07:00

In the past six months, I have found the two cell phones in locations about 100 feet apart on the side of the road as I was bicycling to work.
The first phone was an iPhone in December. I first saw the magenta rubber case, then the phone itself. (A length of purple nylon tulle netting in the vicinity caught my eye.) I charged it up using my iTouch cable, and found the owner via the Facebook app. The young mother was grateful to get the phone back, and I was happy to help.

Today, about 100 feet south of the first phone, I found a Samsung T-Mobile flip phone whose owner was obviously Spanish-speaking. I called one of the most frequently called numbers, which turned out to the be owner's wife. The three recent semesters of non-credit Spanish came in useful when we made the exchange at a fast food restaurant close to my office. She and her husband both worked at IHOP. Apparently he had left the phone on the roof of his car when he drove to work.

Following is a short list of items I've fond while cycling over the years:

combination adjustable wrench/pliers
Leatherman tool
wood-handled screw driver
Stanley tape measure
wire stripper
lots of towels
wallet empty of money but with ID (after a diligent search, unable to find owner)
two driver licenses (both returned to owners)
briefcase and contents strewn over bushes (returned to owner)

Update 22 September 2011. Found a third cell phone, a Samsung flip phone, which the owner had no interest in retrieving, in a honky-tonk parking lot and about 100 feet from cell phone number 2. This phone belonged to an undergraduate student majoring in business. I texted one of his correspondents that his phone had been found, but instead of picking it up, he cancelled his phone service. If he had brought the AC adapter, I could donate it to the women's shelter.

My nephew, Max, will represent the United States at the International Six Days Enduro in Finland

2011-07-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

Max Gerston, my 20-year-old nephew from Scottsdale, Arizona, a pro enduro motorcycle racer, was chosen to represent the United States at the International Six Days Enduro, the premier race in the world, in Finland this August.

Enduro racing takes place on an offroad course with obstacles. And what obstacles! Six-foot-diameter culverts, enormous tractor tires embedded in the earth, concrete walls, rock formations! For long distance, he rides atop, longitudinally, a concrete culvert. He also somehow scales culverts crosswise, seemingly traveling vertically. And don't get me started on Max navigating rock formations.

View a professionally edited video of Max pushing his motorcycle to the limits of the laws of physics.

You can purchase a custom-designed shirt (designed by my sister, Laura Goldfarb of Goldfish Creates) on Max's website. A fundraister at Speed World in the Phoenix, Arizona, area, attracted 400 supporters.

Max is a true gentleman, soft-spoken and respectful, and a very hard-working young man. My sister-in-law, Erin, and brother, Marshall, are tremendously hard-working people. Marshall retrofitted a van to transport Max to his events. Marshall also races motorcycles.

The Wedding Royal

2011-05-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

Two irreconcilable thoughts.

First, the British Monarchy (all monarchies, actually) is a ridiculous, anachronistic holdover from feudal days that has held the British Isles in its thrall for centuries. Why do the otherwise reasonable Brits continue to support--and supplicate to--these aristocrats? What is the fascination?

On the other hand, I totally understand the fascination. I watched the nuptials of Kate and Williams with rapt attention, rewatched on the internet, then pored over almost every still photo I could find. With bated breath, I watched as Kate emerged from her Rolls to reveal "the dress," and sat entranced as maid of honor Pippa Middleton and, presumably, the dress designer, Sarah Burton, fussed over the train. Oh, lovely, elegant, modest, classic, contemporary. Stunning lacy jacket with a becoming high collar and V-neck.

(Trivia point: the conservatively dressed woman in the blue hat in the passenger seat of the Kate's limousine was Scotland Yard detective.)

My East Coast intellectual aunt years ago asked an English classmate during their undergraduate days why the British continue supporting the medieval notion of a royal family. This otherwise reasonable woman sniffed, as Rosalie recounted, "We British love our Royals."

I cried at the thought of Diana, Princess of Wales and the pride would have felt seeing both her sons in uniform at the head of the aisle in Westminster Abbey. I so wished she could have been there.

And the hats. The HATS! OMG, THE HATS! Involuntarily, I burst out with, "You've got to be kidding" at the cartoonish protuberance on Princess Beatrice's head, or rather, forehead. It looked like a prop from a surreal production of Alice in Wonderland. Princess Eugenie's hat: also a fashion misstep, looking like a sinking ship carrying a load of grapes and with a feather in place of a flag. (They are the daughters of Fergie, a.k.a.Sarah Ferguson, a.k.a Duchess of York, and Prince Andrew. Incidentally, the are fifth and sixth in line to the British throne.) And what about the Beetlejuice number worn by the pregnant Victoria Beckham, a.k.a Posh Spice? (And those spiky platform shoes are downright dangerous to a woman five months' pregnant.) Barbara Walters helpfully pointed out that the wedding invitations required ladies to wear hats, but let's be reasonable. Wheres is the storied British reserve?

My prediction: come Fall 2011, hats, the more outlandish, the better, will be the next must-have fashion accessory here on this side of the pond. I can't wait!

Good and loyal friends

2011-01-17T19:03:00.000-08:00

As a counterpoint to the previous pitiful post, I will talk about five good friends.

One was a friend from college; we played ice hockey together. A nurse, she moved to a distant state, married, had a child. but we have kept in touch for years. With prescient timing, she sent a gift with the note "... to a great friend!" This came immediately after Entomologist determined I would never have a long-term friend. Maybe I have not been the best friend I could have been to her, but I am striving.

Nurse is is not a "talker." Sometimes when I want to learn the latest, I get the buzz from her husband. Nurse epitomizes the phrase: "Still waters run deep." I treasure her friendship. Her life on an even keel, she is takes things in stride.

The other two friends are about the same age and both with the most popular first name of for girls born in the middle 1970s.

J1 the first person to befriend me in Bryan/College Station. She makes me nuts sometimes, but she unfailingly invites me to her rocking Halloween parties. She overlooked a bout of unsociability at one of those parties. She forgives my foibles. She is always supportive, always seems happy to see me, always friendly, always upbeat. We were somewhat in the same line of work, and I am thrilled that she has succeeded in making this job her own and become a statewide leader, all while pursuing a masters degree.

J2 and I worked together, or rather, we both worked for the same guy, and odd man with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports trivia. She is now the busy, conscientious mother of four, but we still have a great rapport. I hope she feels as refreshed by our in-person and telephone visits as I do. She is cheerful, upbeat, can-do and loves to share her knowledge to help other Moms. She works part-time as a freelance web designer, even when she moved far fro the community whose website she maintained.

Photographer and I were acquaintances in our southern Arizona town, but not close friends. We became closer with frequent phone calls full of advice and recounting of experiences, mostly of the outdoor adventure variety, after I moved to Texas. He is droll, exuberant, and an excellent father figure, despite having no children of his own. When he learned I could not afford a mammogram a year after completion of breast cancer treatment, when I was uninsured, he sent me a check with instructions to make an appointment immediately.

Founding Mother (so called because she founded a chapter of our alumni association in our town) is possessed of a true sixth sense: she is an empath, and has predicted events to the effet of averting disaster. Founding Mother is, without question, the most intuitive person to come into my life.

Founding Mother nominated me for an alumni award, which I won. I was and remain so touched.

I remember with embarrassment a day she asked me to lunch. I forgot about the appointment (very out of character for me), and went to lunch with a co-worker. It was not until I saw her sitting in the restaurant did I remember our date. She was totally forgiving. Even 15 years after moving away, she invited me to her daughter's wedding in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Friendship is a two-way street

2011-01-17T12:35:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, I asked my mysterious European-born maternal grandfather what he did at shul (synagogue). He said he counted his blessings.

It's a lesson I endeavor to apply to my life. Despite the content of this post, I still spend time every evening counting my blessings.

My mind is not in a very good place on the friendship scale. Of late, several friends--or women I thought were friends--revealed themselves to be manipulators who availed themselves to my good nature, helpfulness, compassion, then cut me loose when my utility to them had run its course. In short, they used me.

Artiste/Cleric declared, almost self-righteously, that she was using me. She needed to vent (same almost-verbatim rant on four separate occasions), and I was "available" one time and more or less a captive audience the other three times. I listened with care and compassion--all four times--despite the fact that I had pressing tasks and a limited amount of time. Now that I've served my purpose, Artiste/Cleric has no further use for me. She said she had no intention of ever pursuing a friendship. For others in our community service organization, she spoke of books; to me, rants and venting. And I was glad to listen. She told me I should be happy to have served a purpose. Happy to have served a purpose! I'm not happy, however, to be used and discarded.

Entomologist, from a previous post, summoned me for multiple vent sessions, under the guise of inviting me for a hike. She asked if I wanted to meet her in a nature area south of town in 15 minutes, although she was aware the trailhead was at least a 20-minute drive from my house. Ostensibly, I was to drop what I was doing and hightail it on down there. Both times I had just returned from a long bicycle ride. Not only was I coated in sweat and salt from evaporated sweat, but I was wearing bicycle garb and shoes, so had to at least change clothes, fill up a water bottle, and find a hat. A quick shower would have been nice. Both times I said I could meet in 45 minutes. But you know: a friend in need is a friend indeed, or so I thought. I was delighted at first to have found a hiking partner, not so much when every hike was an unrelenting rant about her work and personal life. I was not permitted so much as a word. Of course, she had no interest in reciprocating when my life hit a rough patch.

Entomologist once told me her family was going to spend a week at a beach house. Stupid me! I actually thought she was inviting me for a day or two! Nope. My task was to 50 miles round-trip daily for a week to caretake her one-acre vegetable garden, six cats, dog, fish, ornamental plants, plus feed the squirrels and birds. The second and third year, Entomologist just assumed I would be caretaking and summonmed me to each year to pick up the key and receive my instructions.

Yes, once again, a friend in need.

(I know; I know, several people have told me I was on a fool's errand, and if were stupid enough to accept this task then I deserved the consequences.)

It's in my nature to be a good, loyal friend, to be supportive when people are in need. Why do these seemingly good people treat me as a utility rather than as a friend?

Café closed (but blog continues)

2010-12-29T08:39:00.000-08:00

The small café that inspired this blog, sadly, has closed after about 10 years of operation. Sadly. The trough of the economic downturn has reached our fair burg, forcing the owners to call it quits. The presence of a huge state university created shielding economic bubble, but finally the center on could not hold. The place attracted a business lunch crowd, but not so much dinner

The 50-year old stand-alone brick building with two large front windows on either side of the door, started as a beer joint/domino hall, and is owned by the descendents of the original proprietor. The dining room walls were chockfull with fishing artifacts: hooks, poles, a framed display of knots, nets, reels, oil paintings, pulleys. Neon beer signs provided a warm glow. The used wooden chairs and tables had been sanded and refinished to a gloss.

The kitchen was all stainless steel appliances, food prep areas, shelves, and sinks. This restaurant routinely scored 100s on health department inspections. The chef was meticulous about food safety and cleanliness.

Although the menu was roadhouse fare—chicken-fried steak, catfish, ribeye steaks, hamburgers, BLTs—the menu contained some surprises: crawfish etouffé and occasionally, seafood gumbo. For special occasions, such as Valentine’s Day, the chef (grandson of the original owner) would whip up sublime entreés, such as fish in a white wine sauce. Everything was prepared from scratch: even the onion rings were meticulously cut buy hand and dipped in a house-prepared batter.

The chef/owner routinely employed waitstaff from a substance-abuse halfway house. All those I worked with were outstanding, smart, efficient, and hard-workers. It was a great place to work and, to my thinking, a cultural icon.

Whither blog?

2010-12-29T08:13:00.000-08:00

A tacit rule of the blogosphere is that one should post regularly. But my work hours prevent much activity on weekday evenings, and my quotidian ramblings don’t strike me as compelling reading. But I love the idea of a blog, and I love having this outlet, so I will continue.

When I started this blog, the intent was an outlet for amusing anecdotes from waiting tables at a small, independent roadhouse-type café. The café, its customers, and my fellow employees provided a wealth of material: addressing as “Hon” the former president of the enormous and famous state university in this fair city, appreciation of the hell-like atmosphere under which cooks work, the stage-whispered comments about a collegiate locker room from a well-respected community member, and admiration for the hard-working recovering substance abusers who served and cooked.

Later the reconstruction of my house from the ground up provided good material and photos. That project is on hold at the moment, to be resumed December 27. And there was the occasional completed craft project photo, home-crafted whittled crochet hook, farmers’ market.

I notice photos of dinner and restaurant reviews are popular, but I rarely dine out. I did post a review of a particularly bizarre experience at what had been my favorite restaurant, Square One Bistro, on Tripadvisor. The restaurant recently reinvented itself and, I hope, with an improved outlook. I joined a warm and welcoming Book and Dinner Club Meetup, affording me the opportunity to try new restaurants while enjoying good conversation. Stay tuned.

Community Potluck

2010-12-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

The Venn diagram of organizations functionally overlapped with the Brazos Valley Farmers’ Market is a type of paradigm-shifting, progressive, socially responsive roadmap of the Brazos Valley.
One Friend of the Brazos Valley Farmers’ Market is active in the Association for Social Entrepreneurship. A member of this group informed me of the twice-weekly community. Every Saturday and 5:00 p.m. and Sunday at 1:00 p.m., this group hosts a potluck open to all at Neal Recreation Center.
One market day, customers could purchase vouchers for food that was donated to that weekend’s potluck after the close of market. Great idea, and a carload of gorgeous greens were delivered.
For two weekends now, I have prepared a dish to share: large crockpot of beans and greens and other vegetables and yesterday, a vegetarian lasagne with a picante kick to share for the Sunday midday meal. About 50 persons played soccer or warmed themselves around a wood fire on the grill. Others set up the table. Some of the folks appeared to be homeless or down on their luck. Others appeared to be nice, socially conscious college students. One young man had a comprehensive knowledge of the warming “quotient” of various fabrics (polyester, silk, wool) gained from “field study” while homeless. Admirably, he is now a college student.
The group—adults and children alike—took hands in a large circle. One regular member gave thanks for the meal we were about to enjoy, followed by introductions around the circle. The man to my right tenderly gripped my hand and that of his right neighbor, the entire time, even as he said the prayer of thanks.
I am a huge fan of potlucks. After another session of warming myself by the fire, I got in line. There was chicken and all manner of vegetables, salads, breads, lots of Christmas goodies. Iced tea.
After I found a seat, I noticed some of the college student-looking folks were not eating. Should I have abstained? No, a few were partaking. One college student said some more fortunate people make a distinction and consider themselves to be serving those left fortunate. But it was all good. I can hardly wait to return.

Multibeans1 1-lb package mixed beans, with kidney beans removed and replaced with mayocoba beans
many types of peppers, including a jalapeno or three, diced
1 can stewed tomatoes
1 bunch collards
1 bunch beet greens
3 or 4 bay leaves (laurel)
1 teaspoon basil
chile powder
pepper
kosher salt
Soak beans overnight. Discard soaking liquid.
Four or five hours before the event, sauté diced onions and peppers. Rinse greens, stack, roll up, and cut into strips. Throw everything into a 6-quart slow cooker with about twice the volume of water as vegetables. Cook on high four hours. (Important note: if it is necessary to add more water, add boiling water. Adding cool water will cause beans to harden.) Discard bay leaves (choking hazard).

Good-bye and Godspeed, Daddy

2010-12-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

My father passed away December 11, 2010, almost a decade after being diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and was laid to rest with military honors at the National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona in Cave Creek. The service was a celebration of life rather than a funeral: a 21-gun salute and solemn prayer provided by the Disabled American Veterans, the presentation of the flag to my Mom by a Marine contingent, the mourner's kaddish by our neighbor and good friend of almost 40 years. Mom and each of us four children read an anecdote or two (to some knowing laughter). The ceremony ended with a bittersweet and utterly lovely rendition of Sunrise, Sunset by a professional singer, a friend of the younger of two brothers.

Dad on a photography outing.

He was an electrical engineer, avid hobbyist photographer, outdoor adventurer (camping, hiking, whitewater rafting, sailing), tennis player, husband, father of four and grandfather of seven. He had served in the Marines and always identified with The Few, The Proud. In 1970, he determined Arizona was the place to raise a family, so my parents left everything and everyone they knew on Long Island, New York, and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona.

I credit my father with with my love the the outdoors, of classical music, and more recently, of dogs.

His public and private personas were different. During my Thanksgiving visit, I learned of a side of my father I never knew. Throughout our lives, we had a contentious relationship. I learned recently, that he had a large cadre of loyal friends from his photography and outdoor adventure interests, as well as his dog-walking friends. The telephone never stopped ringing with calls for him, and there was a constant stream of visitors.

We made peace at the end. I wish it had come sooner, but that one conversation I will always treasure.

Found on a commute

2010-12-08T16:04:00.000-08:00

Moving down the road at 12 mph, I’ve found all manner of items—

Leatherman precision multipurpose tool and leather pouch
wood-handled screwdriver
crescent wrench/pliers combo
lots of towels (chain cleaners)
wallet with money but not ID removed (tried for months without success to find owner)
all manner of clothing.

Yesterday, on a slightly different route on my daily commute to the office, I spied a piece of purple netting. In a hurry, I decided not to stop. Then I saw a discarded flexible cell phone protector. About 10 feet away, on a grassy swale beside the road, was an iPhone. I stopped, picked the three items up, and continued to work. I can use the 1.5 yards of netting on a sewing project I have in mind.

I charged up the iPhone using the sync cable from my iTouch, figured out the name of the owner via Facebook, and sent her a message. Very grateful, this young mother picked up her telephone, and gave me a small poinsettia and a cool bookmark of copper wire and a stone as a token of appreciation.

A Washington, D.C., commuter found a pannier belonging to another cyclist. A few years ago, I read a blog limited to items other cyclists had found along the way.

A shellacking

2010-11-12T16:03:00.000-08:00

The pendulum, folks! As a body politic, we need to achieve some type of equilibrium.

Remember two and a half years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, when the country was made aware of the evildoers–of Wall Street—the rampant greed, the neutered Security and Exchange Commission (courtesy Bush '41), the cratering of the real estate market, the demise of Bear Stearns? Even hard-core Republicans saw the error of the ways of their aging, alcoholic, dirty joke-telling, slacker frat-boy good ol' boy W ('43) and the holier-than-thou right wingers and we voted in droves for the Democrats.

Now, two years later, and the pendulum swings the other way, to the lunatic, hateful Tea Partiers.

We need to become more stabilized and less polarized. Where are the Adalai Stevensons, Lyndon Johnsons, Sam Rayburns, Shirley Chisolms, Robert Byrds, Hubert Humphreys, and Harry Trumans of today?

It was a sad November 3 to wake up and find the politically savvy Linda Chavez-Thompson, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and force who rose from migrant laborer to executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO lost to the wealthy, dissipated, and elite David Dewhurst for Texas lieutenant governor, the real power center in Texas.

Maybe it was a good thing the public was not aware of components of every deal, but at least our elected
officials worked together for what they thought was the good of the country.

Hey, Tea Partiers! It's not about ideology, it's about the welfare of the country.

Update: at the November 13 Brazos Valley Farmers' Market, a retired judge and I struck up a conversation. I had taken him for a rock-ribbed conservative East Texas Republican, but–surprise!–he is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a delegate to the National Democratic Convention that nominated Bill Clinton and the son of a old-time Texas state representative. He added Mike Mansfield and even the conciliatory Barry Goldwater to my list of willing-to-negotiate politicians.

Courteous Mass

2010-11-07T08:11:00.000-08:00

Finally, my work schedule allowed me to participate in Courteous Mass in Bryan/College Station. With grassroots groups countrywide, as I understand it, Courteous Mass is a bicycle party with the mission of raising awareness of bicyclists rights to the road.

Usually, cleanup detail following Friday afternoon seminars keep me from busy long past the Courteous Mass departure time, but no seminar was scheduled last Friday.

The crew of about 30 was motley, a good thing. In evidence were the expected fixed gear bicycles, but also a number of casual cyclists on all kinds of bicycles. Not one person attired in bicycling gear. One fixed-gear enthusiast on a bicycle painted in circus-like colors with large lime-green handgrips fwarmed up/amused himself with a bit of trick riding, including riding backward (doable on a fixed-gear machine), bumping into a fixed object to rear up on the front wheel, and pulling a wheelie and spinning around on the rear wheel. I was impressed and entertained.

I was reminded how much I missed riding with a group. It is so great that someone—a colleague, actually— has taken the reins not only to organize this group, but to lobby for cyclists' right to the road in the Brazos Valley.

Other bicycles: mountain bikes, conventional road bikes, pastel-colored beach cruisers, and my Downtube folding bicycle with its 20-inch wheels.

The group gathers in the Northgate area Texas A&M University and rides to the downtown Bryan to join in the monthly First Friday celebration. Just prior to departure, the organizer (or main motivational force) asked everyone to sign a waiver of liability (standard practice at every bicycle event) and described the route. The route would actually ride about a half-mile in the left lane on Texas Ave., a road forbidden to cycling. Okay, this is interesting. One cyclist carried the music, loud enough to energize without annoying motorists.

I volunteered to bring up the rear. Within 50 feet of the starting point, I knew the slowest cyclist would present problems. A female, probably an inexperienced cyclist, would not or could not go faster than about 5 miles per hour, despite my verbal and her companion's physical (push forward) encouragement. Although the group pace was slow, she seemed to want to get caught by traffic light, and allowed the group to pull ahead. I stayed with them, but apparently they decided to give it up at the next intersection. I tried to catch up to the group further on in the ride, but they were too far ahead.

No problem; my house is on the route. And after months of anticipation, finally I was a part of Courteous Mass. I will definitely return next month.

Bright lights, big city

2010-10-29T19:32:00.000-07:00

Houston, Texas. George. R. Brown Convention Center.

In October, I staffed the booth of the engineering program for which I am coordinator, along with several magnificent graduate students and even a postdoc. Our job was to raise awareness of this great program among promising engineering undergraduates and, as importantly, among the cognescenti and industrial players of this discipline.

For someone who spends 98 percent of her working week in a small office facing a computer, it was a heady—and somewhat exhausting—experience. The students who visited the booth were directed, articulate, intelligent, and confident. Made a few good contacts that I will pursue judiciously One surprise coincidence and another reminder that the world is truly a small place was a Native American student now in her last undergraduate year of engineering at a college in the Midwest. It turns out that my junior-year college roommate was one of her elementary school teachers in northeast Arizona. .

The layout and "swag" of other booths was interesting. Among the promotional item: small levels, pens, lip balm, letter opener/screen cleaners, desks of cards. Our booth gave out imprinted pads and pens, along with our literature. We attracted people with a big bowl of candy.

The booth backdrop was three 7 x 3-foot retractable posters which roll up into a package the size of a quiver of arrows. the posters are held open by a three-part elastic-corded pole in back (like a tent pole).

Monday evening was an alumni reception attended by one of the Deans of Engineering. It was wonderful seeing several graduated students again. So proud of the way they have made their way in the world.

About a quarter of the expo floor was devoted to a materials camp. Houston schoolchildren of all ages came to see materials science in action, including a shape memory alloy engine of Nitinol. Every child came away with a pair of safety glasses, which they found all kinds of ways to wear as they left the hall: atop the head, backwards on the head, folded with earpiece hooked over the front of the shirt, on the forehead. Many even left with their safety glasses firmly in place.

Many of us stayed at an adjacent hotel. Maybe I'm an unsophisticated rube, but when one is paying $189/night (and that's the discounted rate), ethernet and wi-fi in the room should be free. And the fitness center should not charge a sawbuck (that's $10) to grind away on their meager treadmills. Heck, the fleabag down the road from me advertises free wi-fi. Campgrounds have free wi-fi, for goodness sake. Yes, the rooms were gorgeously appointed; the down comforter and pillows, the Crabtree and Evelyn sundries in the bathroom, but the ethernet cable just say their mocking me. I sensed that room ethernet was not free when every available seat in the opulent lobby was filled with engineers tapping away at their laptops. The contiguous convention center, though, provided great wi-fi. It was an eerie Tuesday evening sitting alone in the cavernous three city blog-long George R. Brown Convention Center using their wi-fi to catch up on e-mail.

But, it is so good to be home!

Fiestas Patrias

2010-09-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

September 18 and 19, Fiesta Patrias (Patriotic Celebration) brought a festive attitude to downtown Bryan, Texas.

First the parade featuring—

many vaqueros on horseback, the women dressed in colorful skirts riding sidesaddle
many political entries, considering Election Day is less than 60 days away
among the political entries, Chet Edwards (Dem.), US Representative from District 17, walking beside his car wearing a Texas flag-style shirt
Chet Edwards' opponent in this contentious race, Bill Flores, rode in a convertible wearing a neckbrace
a middle school marching band...riding on flatbed trailer instead of marching
a trick reata roper and a small version of same
one tiny child on a tiny miniature horse
one tiny Smart Car representing an insurance agent
several low-riders with impressive hydraulic systems, including one that lifted up the right front wheel and drove that way.

After the parade, the booths galore.

The Brazos County Health Department was out in force. I saw at least three health inspectors.

Yummy tostada, custom-made vegetarian for me. And the elote! Fresh roasted corn on the cob, brushed with mayonnaise and covered with chili powder. The best corn I've ever tasted. Chile is a wonderful spice.

A Fiestas Patrias princess resplendent in a dress of my favorite color.

US Rep. Chet Edwards (Dem.), 17th Congressional District.

Colorful folklorico attire

Barbacoa on a spit with pineapple!

The paletera vendors, of course.

Two-wheel deal

2010-08-25T18:34:00.000-07:00

For about 30 years, I've been a bicycle commuter to work. I started bicycling to work on a used three-speed Columbia with internal hub. I'll never forget the sense of freedom and uniqueness from tooling around Sierra Vista, Arizona, one summer during college on that heavy steed. Somehow, I barely remember the five-mile uphill daily commute.

When I settled in Sierra Vista after college, I resumed bicyling—in my business clothes—to my first job as a technical writer, less than two miles away. Of that commute, I recall seeing mesmerizing color combinations created by lights reflecting from anodized aluminum slats in chain-link fences. I never did figure out where that turquoise color came from.

In my mid-twenties, I became an avid cyclist, and bought a series of go-fast bicycles and carry-stuff bicycles, including an old, used Motebecane touring bike, of the latter type. I never appreciated the jewelry fitting-like lugs, cut precisely in a stylized M.

Not my Motobecane Grand Touring bicycle, but an identical model.

Next, from the LBS came a Schwinn Voyageur. I commuted to work many years on the Voyageur, and took at least one wonderful tour: a perimeter ride of the Gila Wilderness. Despite the fact that these Voyageurs enjoy a loyal following due to their intricate fittings, the Voyageur just never felt "right," so when one of the doyennes of Tucson's Greater Arizona Bicycling Association advertised to sell her Miyata 1000LT tourer, I was right on that. A true touring machine with strong 36-spoke triple-cross wheels, relaxed geometry, bar-end shifters, nice triple chainring, long wheelbase, and lots of braze-ons. The handling of the bicycle improved with weight, especially with front panniers.

The commute was 8 to 10 miles round-trip, and I often headed out on the roller-coaster road to Fort Huachuca's West Gate after work. Eventually an entire cadre of my colleagues bicycled in, even a "non-bikie" woman named Charla who rode a harder morning than any of us: a 20-mile unrelenting uphill from the river to our building in the foothills.

Sometime during this, I also completed two El Tour de Tucson 109-milers in high style, along with 5,000 other cycling enthusiasts, on the go-fast Schwinn Super Sport road bike, as well as a few many centuries and double metric centuries.

I also owned a mountain bike, but my bicycle-handling skills were just a few degrees north of my intrepidness: not my cup of tea, although I loved riding the dirt roads in southern Arizona's San Rafael Valley.

After seven years of commuting to and working in the same place, I put all my worldly goods in storage, found a temporary foster home for my lovely cat, and flew to San Diego with my Miyata and panniers, bicycling east to the Atlantic Ocean: seeing America at 12 miles per hour, solo and self-contained.

For years at Texas A&M University, I commuted to work on the Miyata with panniers or my go-fast Demarais of the gorgeous pink Imron paint job.

Still I'm a bicycle commuter, a short 2.25-mile ride each way to Texas A&M University, but I enjoy even this short-and-not-scenic commute. I park my Downtube folding bike in the bike rack and change upstairs. After more than two decades, this packing/commuting/refreshing/changing thing is routine and second nature.

My Downtube folding bicycle: love it!

On September 3, I'm looking forward to participating in Courteous Mass, a takeoff on the urban Critical Mass bicycle demonstrations to raise awareness of the impact of cycling. Ifound a small note about the event taped to my handlebars. The group will meet behind a popular college watering hole and ride en masse the 4 miles to downtown Bryan's First Friday event. I'm so excited.

Commencement summer 2010: Head 'em up, move 'em out

2010-08-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

For the fourth or fifth time, I served as a graduation marshal, this time at the summer 2010 commencement ceremonies at Texas A&M University. The marshal's charge is to line up graduates-to-be (College of Engineering masters' graduates, in my case) in alphabetical order in a staging area prior to their marching out to the arena floor.

The term "like herding cats" comes to mind. The excitement level is high, as to be expected, and, of course, students want to group together with their friends, not necessarily with others of different majors and whose last names are not close alphabetically. Engineers, of course, would know the difference between a line and a curve, although achieving that formation is easier in theory than practice.

Amidst the chaos of reading off names and adjusting MS hoods and tassels, I spotted a man standing arms akimbo, feet spread, a smile on his face, standing against the wall. Where was my co-marshal, I wondered? The undergraduate marshal, seeing my quandary, stepped in to help me. About 5 minutes before the showtime, this man stepped forward. He was the other engineering masters marshal! Why wasn't he helping line up the 100-plus grads? I as much as ordered him to check the order of the master of science line, while I rechecked master of engineering. He saw what needed to be done, he saw I was struggling, but he stood back. And this man is a lecturer, a quasi-faculty member.

At 8:58 a.m., commencement ceremony was to start 9:00 a.m., a master in computer science student arrived, gown over one arm, hood over the other, and mortarboard in hand. Her major had filed down the staircase several moments earlier, and might even already be on the arena floor. And she still had to don her regalia! The staircase down to the area floor was packed with grads, so I strongly advised her to push her way down past those in formation and find her place among students of her major, and don her regalia before walking on the arena floor.

Anyhow, as usual, the filing-out of grads was the ever the bittersweet moment, but no waterworks from me this time. None of my MS advisee-graduates walked this time, and the Ph.D.s staged in a different room. Later the sole summer Ph.D. graduate came to my office, in regalia, for photos. Okay, I might have shed a tear or three. The kids will be okay, but me? Not so much. Vaya con Dios, students.

Buescher State Park

2010-08-10T17:21:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, I did not feel I was having a good time until I was footsore or tush-sore, sunburned, achy, cramping of muscle, reaching 90% of cardio max, encrusted with salt from my own dried sweat on a trail with a backpack or on a bicycle, with or without panniers.

Now, not so much. Last weekend I camped at Buescher State Park outside Smithville, Texas, and was perfectly content to sit under the trees, knitting and reading, then take a 2.5-mile hike. Granted temperatures were in the upper 90s, and I look forward to hiking the entire 7-plus-mile loop someday, but last weekend, rest was on the agenda.

I have to admit to a large twinge of nostalgia seeing the fit road bicyclists start up the 12-mile roller coaster road to neighbor park Bastrop, part of the famed MS 150 route. I hope that my recreational cycling days are not over. I have my cycling chops, having cycled upwards of 25 century rides, many multi-day self-contained tours, one solo, self-contained cross-country tour, and even some mountain bike excursions.

The Slow-Cooker

2010-08-04T19:46:00.000-07:00

For my college graduation 30 years ago, my Grandma Anne gave me this Rival Crockpot, avocado green. She passed away more than 10 years ago, but I thought of her every time I cooked in this wonder. Thanks, Grandma.

Thirty years, rusted out at the bottom, but still cooking up a storm! This appliance has cooked up faux bouef bourguignon, all manners of stews, hunter chicken galore, and beans: pinto, garbanzo, black-eyed peas, Anasazi, navy, lentils, frijoles negros, 15-bean soup. Thirty years of coming home to a house with an enticing smell and a yummy dinner.

When I first opened the box all those years ago, I studied with interest the small recipe booklet that came with it, especially the part about baking in the Crockpot! I ordered by mail the gold-colored aluminum baking insert and tried all types of brown quickbreads a one-pound coffee can. The cylindrical breads baked up wonderfully moist.

This Crockpot also cooked up two batches of award-winning chili: first at a company competition in Sierra Vista, Arizona. The second batch crowned me Chili Champion of the Texas Agriculture Program! Imagine: me, a Brooklyn (New York!)-born girl becoming chili champ of those most Texan of Aggies: the Agricultural Program at Texas A&M University!

Great slow-cooker websites

Crock-Pot, the original slow cooker
A Crock Cook
A Year of Slow Cooking, the most inspirational and entertaining, not to mention intrepid, of all. You can make quiche and candy and peanut butter cupcakes. Who knew.

Now though, meat is not on my menu, so I acquired two vegetarian slow-cooker cookbooks, which open up all types of possibilities.

(In case you are wondering, the "table" under the crockpot was the door to my bathroom. Now, supported by two sawhorses, it is my outdoor table while my house is in makeover mode.)

Soon after I drafted this post, twice the Crockpot gave me a big shock when I touched its metal skin. Although it still heats wonderfully, I'm afraid the "stew is cooked" for this wonderful appliance.

Ranger...well, not danger

2010-07-26T18:24:00.000-07:00

This past weekend marked my first camping trip of the summer, just a three-dayer to a state park in Texas Hill Country: river, limestone bluffs, trees, a tent, a campstove. Life is good. We took a 2.5-hour nature hike which interwove history, flora, fauna, agriculture, rangeland ecology, and even natural dyes and medicinals. The best interpretative nature walk in memory.

Along the trail on the excellent interpretative nature walk given by the volunteer Friends group. Algae are responsible for the gorgeous aqua color of Hill Country rivers, we learned.

We also took time to splash in a shallow bend in the river, with a beach crowded with all manner of canopies and umbrellas. It was a nest of activity, yet relaxing.

My friend, Karen, is a seasonal worker in the park, and Saturday evening we enjoyed a wonderful visit over salmon fish tacos, with sauteed peppers and onions, and a salad of cucumbers, avocado, and apples, possibly my best outdoor-cooked meal ever. We reminisced and caught up past dark.

The state park was very strict on the rules. Even a law-and-order type like me was a bit surprised, but happy with the calm in the long run.

A respite in the nature hike.

Sunday morning, my camping companion and I took a short hike. On the return trip, we spied a large, stern ranger walking resolutely down the camping area loop. We bid him a respectful, but brief, good morning and veered off the trail toward our campsite to avoid encountering such a forbidding presence. This park was home to no-nonsense rangers enforcing stout rules, and I did not want to run afoul of them.

Then he called out my name! Oh, no, what have I done? Our tent is within the 16 x 16 tent pad, no alcoholic beverages were consumed (or even possessed), the campsite and entry fees are paid for for both of us (by far the highest campsite fee I've ever paid), we've been quiet as church mice, we left a donation for the Friends group leading the nature hike, and we hung our food bags the raccoon-proof pole overnight.

Meekly we approach. Not to worry, though. The ranger, second-in-command at this state park, and his now-wife were my next-door neighbors during their undergraduate days. True to form, he was a serious young man even as a young student. Now he and his family live in a residence within the park, and he has the tough job of keeping order at a large state park with not only hiking trails, campsites, and interpretive areas, but river frontage for swimming, kayaking, and tubing. He saw my name on the roster, recognized the address, and took time to seek me out at my campsite. That was nice, and unexpected. All in all, a great weekend.

Contra dancing

2010-07-06T17:38:00.000-07:00

Contra dancing originated in New England in the 1800s as a type of speed-dating: a fair and equitable way for people to meet each other. This dance has nothing to do with Central American dissidents; rather, the name refers the starting position of the dance, with men and women in parallel lines opposite (contra) each other.

A whimsical definition from What is Contra Dance:

"Contra dance is a form of dance that thrusts a different person of the opposite sex into your arms every 30 seconds or so. Actually, this is only true sometimes. It might be more prudent, but less whimsical, to say that contra dance is one of the few dance forms where by the end of the evening you are likely to have danced with everyone."

From the same website

"A contra dance is like an amusement park ride we make for ourselves." --Unknown

Youth now connect with contra, catching the attention of NPR's All Things Considered.

A good example from youtube

Bryan/College Station has a wonderful contra dance group. Most often, live music is provided by the fabulous ensemble, Jalapeño Honey, and sometimes by another group called Contradiction. Many people come just to enjoy the music. Sometimes a member or two of the nationally renowned Marian Anderson String Quartet sits in with the band. The magical part of contra dancing, aside from the music, is the clever way in the dance progresses, allowing each person to dance with every other dancer of either gender. From above, I imagine it would look like a combination kaleidoscope and bicycle chain.

You'd need weapons for that!

2010-07-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

The huge state university at which I work as a graduate academic advisor holds commencement ceremonies three times per year. For the past two or three years, several of my colleagues and I have served as graduation marshals for the College of Engineering.

Years ago, before I became an academic advisor, my neighbor, a buff black man with shaved head and huge biceps [read: intimidating] told me he was going to be a graduation marshall. In my then-ignorance I asked, "Do you help the parents find their seats?"

He: "No! You'd need weapons for that! I help the graduates line up."

Oh! Hah!

Marshals line up graduates in alphabetical order. And properly drape them in their MS hoods, find safety pins for tassels, wish them luck.

In the staging area, a basketball practice gym, marshals have only 45 minutes to get this unruly mass of more than 400 robed graduates in alphabetical order by academic degree (and, for undergraduates, major) and push them out the door. It seems as if the signs behind which they stand are randomly placed, but the head of one line follows seamlessly the tail of the next, at the direction of the hard-working people from Office of the Registrar.

The advisor from Department of Aerospace Engineering high-fives every aero undergraduate as they file onto the area floor. Ah, sweet youth!

One moment the noisy room filled with black regalia and laughing, joking, talking, hugging soon-to-be graduates. Within moments, the room is empty, leaving a vacuum and a surreal quiet. Some of the Ph.D. graduates are students I have known and advised for as long a five years. Although I'm thrilled they are about to embark on the next phase of their lives, it is bittersweet for me to see them go.

Good luck all. Vaya con Dios.

Texas State Democratic Convention

2010-06-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

Just wrapped up a weekend of acting as a delegate from Brazos County, Senate District 5, to the Texas State Democratic Convention. The take-home message: the Democratic Party is is the party of persons with both heart and mind, as summarized in two t-shirt messages--

t-shirt: "I am a Democrat. End of discussion. See back of shirt." The back of the shirt listed public programs from Social Security through Family Medical and Leave Act, and just about every compassionate social program between.
t-shirt: "I think; therefore I am a Democrat:

Although the process of democracy is cumbersome, my faith in the positive outcome is renewed. The conference brought me to tears so many times: when military veterans among the delegates were recognized, service by service, by the Corpus Christi Veteran Band.

Chamber Music Institute

2010-06-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

Summers mean the start of the wonderful Marian Anderson String Quartet Chamber Music Institute, a summer camp for string and piano musicians of all ages and abilities. Individual students and chamber groups are coached by the members of this world-class quartet. But since it is a music camp there is contra dancing with live music, a performance by a local jazz trio, a master class, cultural potluck dinner with talent show, theatre workshop, and, of course, a Texas-style barbeque. Historically, students' ages have ranged from 7 to better than 70, all held togehte with the glue of a love of classical music.

The City of Bryan is truly fortunate that The Marian Anderson String Quartet has chosen to make this city their home. They have been quartet or ensemble in residence at the City College of New York and four other universities before starting a eight-year-long artist-in-residence program at Texas A&M University.

Not only does the quartet undertake a demanding touring schedule, but they have made outreach to the community a great priority. The quartet performs in public locally at least eight times per year, and they hvae works tirelessly through the Sisyphian task of building the Chamber Music Institute from the ground up. The First Methodist Church allows the CMI to use its lovely facilities, including two commercial-grade kitchens and multiple practice rooms.

Although anyof the musicians could have made a successful career playing in a major symphony orchestra--for instance, the cellist played with the New York Philharmonic--they instead chose to devote their talents to bringing their music to small communities and people who might not have the opportunity every to hear live chamber music.

The Marian Anderson String Quartet is the gem in the crown of Bryan, Texas,

White on white

2010-06-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

The drywall is finished. A big milestone passed. The house is wonderfully insulated. I'm ready to start painting. The drywall floating and sanding took much longer than I expected. Leandro and Robisel did a great job, but I need a break from the...activity.

Leandro and Robisel after a long day sanding drywall compound.

Leandro, the great and powerful.

I moved my bed into my bedroom temporarily. Note to self: sleeping in a minimalist room is restful. No clutter. No furniture to dust. No baskets of yarn--and I do love yarn--to trip over or get tangled in.

My living room now.

Lots of room to park my commuting bicycle in the empty living room.

Bryan/College Station received 4.5 inches of rain this past week. In Texas, we don't complain about rain until it floods, but for someone whose virtual kitchen is outdoors, wow! that was a lot of rain. Still and all, I'm really enjoying this outdoor kitchen, which has given me some ideas about fixing up some permanent outdoor kitchen when the interior is more or less complete.

My 35-year-old Svea 123 backpacking stove became, well, balky in a fiery way a few weeks ago. (Maybe because I used automotive gasoline instead of white gas?) This stove has given me many years of great service. I've carried it literally thousands of miles, first in a backpack, then in bicycle panniers. I expect with a good cleaning, the stove will continue to offer good service in the backcountry. But it is not practical for "regular" cooking. Anyone who has worked to achieve the perfect gas pressure in the Svea by lighting a pool of fuel in the small well around the burner knows what I'm talking about. Lighting the Svea was art and science born of years of experience. And, any Svea user knows the jet engine-like noise during cooking and the blissful silence when cooking was done. My new two-burner propane car-camping stove is sinfully easy to light. Turn the knob and strike a match. And cook, silently.

Drywall, almost 3,000 pounds total

2010-06-10T06:34:00.000-07:00

Who knew?

The drywall (sometimes called by its trade name, Sheetrock) in a 900-square-foot house, would weigh 3,000 pounds. More or less.

The great and powerful Leandro single-handedly tore out, by hand, all drywall from my house, save one wall, and piled it up in the right-of-way. Disposal of construction material is the responsibility of the homeowner.

When I realized my four-cylinder quarter-ton Nissan was not up to the job of hauling a trailer beefy enough to carry even part of this load, I hired the big guns, G&M Haulers, two entrepreneurial Aggies who founded a business specializing in moving Texas A&M University college students between apartment complexes.

Hauling construction debris? Not so much.

Being accommodating businessmen, as well as good sports, though, Joe and Jose showed up on on the dot of 7:00 a.m. pulling an immaculate shiny black 16-foot enclosed trailer with their dualie (I refuse to spell it dually, the Texas preference) pickup truck. For any Yankees reading this post, a dualie (or dually, but to me, the -ly ending implies an adverb rather than a noun) refers to a larger pickup truck with dual rear wheels on each end of the axle.

Four of us shoved, racked, scooped, and swept drywall debris into the trailer. We then drove to the county landfill, weighed in, and were directed to "road" carved into the side of mountain of landfill debris. At the pinnacle of landfill mountain was an orange-vested man directing traffic, so busy was this place.

The scene at the top of the mountain was surreal. Enormous earth-moving equipment with wheels 8 feet in diameter driven by grim-faced men pushed garbage around. Trash clung heavily to the huge wheels. I recognized red net grapefruit bags and green twine and plastic garbage bags. As the four of us hauled and swept and carried, two legitimate city garbage trucks backed up on either side of us and dumped their loads. Just another day at the office for them.

Circling overhead and alighting--sometimes atop the heavy equipment and sometimes on retaining fences were members of a committee--what a terrific collective noun!--of about 50 vultures.

Business as usual at the county landfill.

But that was only the first wave of drywall.

For the second load a few weeks later, I took the drywall to the largest indoor recycling center in Texas, Brazos Valley Recycling, about 6 miles west of my home, and about four miles west of Texas A&M University. What an operation! An enormous set of corrugated metal green buildings not visible from the highway. Although I had driven past the road hundreds of times, I had no idea it was there. Adjacent to the recycling facility, a dozer operator had carved an epic canyon over the years by removing fill dirt and top soil. To my Southwestern sensibilities, the canyon had very much the look of the reddish steep-walled formations in northern Arizona or southern Utah.

The owner of the recycling facility offered to give me a tour! Oh, YEAH! The business recycles construction materials; all manner of wood, and all color-separated for use as mulch; even the handy 5-gallon plastic buckets, all crushed and baled; and broken concrete. Now that's some recycling I can get behind! I was as excited as a kid at Six Flags!

In case you are wondering, gypsum--one of two components in drywall, the other being paper--is used to harden and make impervious the beds of cattle tanks (ponds holding for cattle to drink). Gypsum is also good for lawns.

A visitor from a bicycle event 25 years ago.

2010-05-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

A few months back, a woman with whom I share a mutual friend called to ask if she could leave her truck in my driveway while she was on a birding trip hiatus en route from her job in Big Bend National Park to a new job in Guadalupe River State Park. Of course!

Karen arrived in the thick of the drywall installation.

No water.

And even if there was water, no bathroom fixtures. No indoor plumbing.

House covered in drywall compound dust.

One functional jury-rigged light in the house.

She would have to sleep in the tiny wooden trailer.

No problem.

(Thank goodness she's a camping enthusiast.)

As we got to talking, I realized we had both been among a group of about nine or ten people who drove, 25 years ago, from Tucson to Mexicali, Baja California, to join 5,000 other bicyclists in riding 120 miles southward to San Felipe: the Mexicali–San Felipe ride sponsored by Monday International. A wonderful trip built on youthful enthusiasm, calloused bottoms, and strong quadriceps muscles. Great memories: a spectacular crash and road rash when I fell asleep on my bicycle and touched the wheel ahead in the paceline, a stop for roadside tacos at almost every house and stand on the return trip, a rural resort with delicious swimming pool the day after the ride, driving out on a concrete fishing pier to purchase diesel fuel for the return trip.

From an inauspicious start to a very satisfying conclusion. As it happened, the sag (support and gear, I think) driver I had engaged cancelled the morning we were supposed to leave. Determined to go and ride, instead of being pressed into rotating sag service, I decided to ask the first person I saw that morning in the ladies room: Anna, a coworker I hardly knew.

"Anna, would you like to take off an hour or two early to drive, late into the night and early morning, a rental car filled with five unknown persons, their gear, and bicycles through the barrens of the western Arizona and southeastern California and across the border? And the next day, would you then drive alone in the car with our gear, competing for space with 5,000 bicyclists and other sag vehicles and regular traffic on the narrow road south on the Baja California peninsula for 120 miles? And, of course, you'll be sharing a motel room with all the other females on the trip. Then we'll spend an extra play day in San Felipe. We'll pay for your lodging, but that's all. How 'bout it?"

After 10 seconds of thought, trooper that she was, Anna agreed. After lunch, she returned to work packed and carrying maps of Arizona and the Baja Peninsula and ready to go. Anna was an expert driver. And she spoke Spanish, so she alone takes credit for asking directions and finding our first nights' lodging when we were hopelessly lost. She was the angel of the event. The memory of it all still makes me smile.

Thanks, Anna. Thanks, Karen.

Deconstruction

2010-04-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

The foundation levelers have completed their task, leaving a plywood subfloor, a sump pump at the lowest point under my house, and a whole new demolition/reconstruction chapter in the life of my World War II-vintage house.

I knew some drywall and ceiling panels would have to be replaced. I did not realize only one wall of drywall would be spared. A very hard-working and conscientious worker, Jose, set upon tearing out everything else, including kitchen cabinets, stove hood, and most ceiling lights.

This pile of debris, not to be confused with the pile of debris of the previous post, is largely drywall and kitchen cabinets...from a 900-square-foot house.

More discarded drywall. I feel guilty sending so much solid waste to the landfill, especially today: Earth Day.

It was almost freaky seeing my house without its walls.

Surprise! No insulation in the south, west, and east walls.

Matilda, the cat, dispassionately surveys the scene. Vapor barrier on south wall was another surprise, this one good.

I sleep in this cozy teardrop trailer.

Foundation leveling: pier-and-beam

2010-04-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

It's actually happening! My little pier-and-beam house is being leveled, a pretty major undertaking for this type of house, as I mentioned in house ache about 18 months ago. Over the years, the beams supporting the floor have deteriorated and perhaps the concrete piers shifted. Not only were there telltale cracks in the ceiling, but also a perceptible grade in walking front to back, and uneven floors in the kitchen and study.

My original idea was to salvage the gorgeous 60-year-old red oak floor, but after two workers pried off a few slats, I realized such as not to be. Mickey, a friend with a similar house, pried off and salvages his boards, but many of mine were too delicate.

A big surprise was the absence of a plywood subfloor. The hardwood was laid directly on the beams. Another big surprise was the 4- to 6-inches of standing water under the house after this rainy spring.

Anchor Foundation Repair, though, got after it. Within two minutes of arrival, they were pumping out water and sawing out boards.

I arrived home to find my living room like this. A large, powerful fan (yellow cylinder) dried out the spongy ground. The next day, the crew threw in pounds of lime to hasten the drying process. (Note still-intact dining room floor.)

Kitchen, with cabinets torn out.

The pile of rubble composed of what was the floor and some kitchen cabinets.

Some of the lumber to be used to rebuild the floor support.

Cats explore the new playground.

Some concrete bases to support piers.

Office theory

2010-03-20T17:07:00.000-07:00

A few observations about office dynamics.

A nonfunctional or bad worker is a net negative, not a net zero, but a negative, a drain on office energy and efficiency and morale and spirit. Almost anyone who has worked in an office situation knows this routine. The nonfunctional person—slacker, malevolent, incompentent, attitude-negative, or simply cluless—is a pebble in the gearbox. We all know the person at whose desk the workflow grinds to a halt, and the unending frustration of trying to either induce the slacker to act or else racking one's brain to try to find a way around the roadblock. The consistent rude response to any question. Not only must the efficient people do their difficult jobs, but they are forced to expend time and energy on the frustrating task of devising workarounds to move work past this inert—or worse—roadblock.

The #2 person almost always does more work than the #1 person. This observation comes from a capable and innovative water systems chief engineer (the #2 person) who was much busier than his attention-seeking (and to my mind, clueless) water system manager. In any organizations, large and small, public and private, such is the case. The hard-working, compliant, behind-the-scenes person makes it happen, while the boss enjoys the accolades and marvels at his/her own efficiency.

It's not how capable you are, but rather how you present yourself. Persons blessed with a strong, self-confident, seemingly knowledgeable presence (the "baffle them with bulls--t" type) will always trump the competent nebbish-like grind. Knowing your business, is not nearly as important, appearing to be capable and in charge. Case in point: the business assistant for a user laboratory had a confident, easy-to-get-along-with demeanor, but had raised slacking to an art form. She arrives for work every day a half-hour late, and left for home 1.5 hours early. (Ostensibly, she worked through lunch, but according to my Aggie math, even with a working lunch, that is still 7 hours.) Said business assistant did not even know how to open Excel. Unbeknownst to her supervisor, I gave her a few basic pointers in the use of Microsoft Excel. Later, her supervisor exclaimed to me how impressed she was when this employee wowed her with the versatility of Excel. Diplomacy kept me from revealing the size theworker's tiny skill set and the fact that even that much was due to my instruction.

On the backs of others. The corollary to the self-confident slacker is that the fact that the more these people shirk and allow the workload to fall on others, the more efficient they appear to their supervisors. You know the type: the person who lets everything slide, confident in the knowledge that some conscientious grind will swoop in at the last minute and frantically get it all done, while the slacker soaks up the props.

Would you care for some freshly grated bizarre experience on your pasta?

2010-02-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

Last night, a dear friend and I celebrated my birthday with dinner at my favorite restaurant, a downtown bistro with a trendy-funky decor, with the plaster randomly removed from the walls to reveal original brick. The bistro-esque blackboard listing specials was gone. New ownership, I'd heard.

The waitstaff were all wearing double-breasted chef’s coats. A unique touch. Or maybe a touch that portends something odd. As a former waitress, I'm not unaware of the meager interpersonal skills of cooks.

All previous visits to this place have proved outstanding dining experiences. This place is my first recommendation to tourists and to visitors to my academic department. The service is attentive and the contemporary cuisine outstanding.

Last night, not so much.

After we were seated, an apparently agitated waiter (or perhaps a repurposed cook) appeared and asked for our drink order and if we would like an appetizer. We both ordered coffee and demurred on the appetizer.

The menu had changed; many of my favorite dishes were gone. Prices had, understandably, all notched up at least a dollar or two, but no longer was the crisp dinner salad with house-made viniagrette included in the price of the entrée. Effectively, prices had increased $5 or $6 per patron.

The pasta dishes, which on previous experiences were write-home-able, this evening were far off the mediocre mark. My entree was described to be rich with sautéed roma tomatoes and with grated parmesan cheese. Instead, two cold, raw, unripe quarters of beefsteak tomatoes were plopped atop a paltry portion of basil-spiked angelhair. No freshly grated parmesan cheese was offered. My date's order was described in the menu as an alfredo penne dish with sautéed mushrooms, spinach, and chicken. A generous man, he gave me one of two tiny slivers of mushroom on the plate and ate the other. I could not discern any spinach.

Appearing again, the waiter “apologized” brutishly, “Sorry I could not serve you bread with your meal. We are out of bread. Really sorry that that happened. Your meal is supposed to be served with bread, but we can't serve any."

The bistro’s signature bread, he explained is just now (at 7:30 p.m.) being kneaded.

I asked if the bread would then have to go through a rising and a baking. The baking, he explained, would take seven minutes in a convection oven. I asked, mainly just weigh in with a reply and maybe alleviate some of his stress, “If we linger a bit, perhaps we might have some bread.”

Several times throughout the meal, although we were still actively engaged in dining, fork in midair, he asked to remove our plates, twice reaching out to grasp my date's plate. Finally, the pungent bread finally arrived, and we both nibbled a slice with the last of our coffee. Four minutes later, he gallumphed up and asked if he could remove the still-warm bread.

Then things got bizarre. What, you thought it was already bizarre?

We asked for the check. And waited.

The waiter stomped up and apologized in his agitated manner that their computer system was down and could we wait until it was back up and running for the check. Okay, we’ll linger a bit more. (Having some experience with the computerized ordering and check-generating software at my previous job, I thought about offering my assistance.)

And waited some more.

A young man who appeared to be a manager or maitre d’ or at least someone wearing street clothes instead of a chef’s coat materialized with a handful of other people’s credit cards. He made the same apologies. My friend offered to pay with cash with handwritten tab, and he agreed.

At about this time, a professional-looking couple in their 40s, who had arrived after us, got up to leave. Somehow, I sensed they had not paid. I even noted which way they walked out in case someone had to chase them down. No theatrics ensued, so I forgot about it.

A young couple who arrived after us left.

The manager walked by us four or five more times, ignoring our signal for the check.

I stood and climbed into my coat and wool scarf; my date, returning from the men’s room, into his heavy jacket.

Nothing.

We estimated the amount of the check, left the cash, and got out of there.

Bizarre. I would like to know the story behind the story on this one.

Sweet with the sour

2010-02-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

Just an observation: the small anomaly, the contrast, makes life so much more interesting:

Chefs know that the taste of chile or coffee enhances that of chocolate. The flavor of fruit (or strawberry ice cream) is made sublime with a sprinkle of chile power, or even better, Tajin fruit seasoning (salsa en polvo),

Displayed at my former hair salon was a studio photo of the owner's then four-year-old grandson, respendent in a dazzling white suit...in stocking feet and sporting devil-may-care grin. His Mom was initially disappointed to have forgotten his shoes for the shoot, but the surprise of the stocking feet made the picture lively and highlights the personality of this all-boy little boy.

In the LBS (local bicycle shop), Sun 'n Spokes, in my former home town, Sierra Vista, Arizona, was a photos of female cyclist on her wedding day, posting, in her wedding gown and veil, with her mountain bike and iridescent shades.

The flower girl at the wedding in which I was maid of honor, walked delicately down the aisle, pelting friends and family with her rose petals. Long after the perfection of the wedding is forgotten, that impish flower girl will be remembered.

Of course, there are the living-large contrasts, such as the team in the Freeze Your Fanny organized bicycle event, each man wearing large sunglasses and enormous rainbow-hued wigs.

In the lurch

2010-02-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

I'm grousing today.

What is it with certain of my gal pals who stand me up at the last minute?

Entomologist and I were good friends, and I was always there for her: to listen for long hours when she needed a shoulder to cry on at a moment's notice, to drive 50 miles round-trip after work daily for a week every summer to look after her animals and gardens, to help her with her professional papers, to be there at distant funerals (although I had started a new job that week at was trying to make a good impression as a dependable worker) and at family celebrations.

But I was and am a good an loyal friend. She was going through a rough patch. She needed me. Later, she needed my professional editing advice. She apparently did not trust her neighbors to look after her house. She needed moral support. That what friends are for, and I was happy to be there. She visited me in the hospital after my breast surgery, indeed. Unfortunately, Entomologist was bitingly dismissive and downright mean when the tables were turned and I needed a shoulder a few years later.

Whenever we set a date for lunch, and I could almost guarantee that she would cancel five minutes before the appointed time. Sometimes I had turned down another tempting invitation because we already had a commitment. She would invite to meet for coffee, but never commit to a time until an hour beforehand. She said I had no sympathy for how busy her life is! Busy! Ahem, I am also busy. I invited her to a concert, purchasing advance tickets when she responded in the positive. When I arrived to pick her up for the concert (about a 45-minute drive away), she declined to go. Hello!!! Could you have given me a little notice? Now I'm stuck with this second ticket and shlep alone to yet another concert.

Entomologist once asked me if I would like to go with her for a weekend hiking trip in a lovely state park in Texas Hill Country. What a lovely invitation! I so looked forward to going. So I was so hurt and surprised when, a few weeks later, she eagerly showed me the photos of her weekend-long trip to that park, oblivious to the fact that she had, once again, blown me off. I was polite and cordial, but inside, not happy.

Agriculturist three times stood me up. I know, I know, once it happens, shame on you; twice it happens, shame on me. Agriculturist seemed so apologetic the first time, so I agreed to a second date, and a third. Agriculturist felt that because I had not called to comfirm as the date drew near, that we did not have a firm date. My take: when two parties agree on a date/time/place, it is a tacit commitment, somewhat of a pact, for lack of a better word. If one party cannot honor their commitment, it is incumbent upon that one to cancel. Ahead of time.

Almost-Professor often asked me to lunch. My office was a floor above hers, so I stopped at her office and off we went. Well, not quite. No doubt professors are busy people, as I was, working 65- to 70-hour weeks at this time. Lunch out was a real treat. Almost-Professor would invariably keep me waiting. A while. A long while. But I did not want to be perceived as impatient or as a bitch, so I waited. Okay, finally we were off. She never, once, not ever once, introduced me when a colleague of hers would greet her in a restaurant or outdoors en route somewhere. In one particularly flagrant case, she engaged in a lengthy "shop" discussion with an Italian exchange graduate student while were were en route somewhere outdoors. (The student,with Continental flair, scooted over on his Vespa to talk with us.) The student periodically smiled at me, and we exchanged nods, but never did Almost-Professor feel it incumbent upon herself to introduce us. Finally, as Almost-Professor wrapped it up and prepared to leave, I extended my hand and introduced myself, to vigorous two-handed shaking by the graduate student.

Almost-Professor, no joke, several times floated the name of a (distasteful) male colleague as a possible romantic interest for me, then immediately dismissed him (before I had a chance to firmly decline), saying, "He would not like you, [Waitress]. You don't have enough letters after your name."

These are all women of a certain age: all 35 or better, some in their 50s, so it's not the irresponsibility of youth.

Yes, I realize when one disregards a commitment with another, it is a reflection on her, not me, but I cannot help being hurt. I forgive (not forget) and give people the benefit of the doubt, but yeah, maybe I'm casting myself as a victim. But why does this happen?

Sierra Vista Chicken Casserole recipe

2010-01-18T20:15:00.000-08:00

This recipe is my own variation of King Ranch Casserole, named after Sierra Vista, Arizona, the lovely city in which I lived for 15 years.
Sierra Vista Chicken Casserole
1 to 1.5 pounds chicken thighs
¼ C apricot or peach preserves
½ C picante sauce
1 large onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 C pineapple juice
juice of one lemon
½ C white wine
½ cup soy sauce
½ cup black olives
1 can corn kernels
¾ cup Anaheim peppers, diced
2 C shredded cheddar cheese, reserving some for topping, most inside casserole
2 C tortilla chips, crushed, reserving some for topping, most inside casserole
½ pound cooked pasta
Chili powder, salt, and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350°. Brown chicken in a large pot. Mix preserves and picante; spread over chicken. Roast chicken in oven until done, about 45 minutes.

While chicken is roasting, saute onion and garlic in same pot. Mix pineapple juice, lemon juice, soy sauce and white wine. Turn heat to high and deglaze pot with juice mixture. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and cook on very low heat until liquid is reduced to about half by evaporation. (Slow cooker alternative: Place chicken, pineapple juice, and soy sauce in slow cooker until done: 8 hours on low or 4 hours on high). Drain liquid into sauce pan and simmer on low heat to reduce liquid by evaporation to less than 1 cup. Remove chicken from bone and set aside. (Make chicken stock from bones for use in another recipe.)

Mix black olives, corn kernels, and chiles, and Anaheim peppers, and chile powder, salt, and pepper. In a large buttered casserole dish, twice layer pasta, chicken, corn mixture, cheese. Pour liquid reduction over cassrole, top with crushed tortilla chips and more cheddar. Cover with aluminum foil. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, removing foil last 10 minutes.

One degree and 25 years of separation

2009-12-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

Heather of Simple-Green-Frugal, the impresaria of the Brazos County Farmers' Market and locavore extraordinaire, visited her blogosphere compadre Chile Chews in Tucson, Arizona, en route from Texas to Aptos, California, for holiday break. Heather also visited another kindred spirit, Beany, in San Diego.

Talk about coincidences! Via Heather's blog, Chile told me that we were southeastern Arizona hiking companions 25 or so years ago. After exchanging e-mail addresses, we are now enjoying the process of getting reacquainted. Chile and I walked the trails in the Huachuca Mountains and at least once enjoyed a wonderful backpacking trip in the Chiricahua Mountains, birders' paradises both. Good times. When did we get to be women of a certain age? She's now living an enviable low-impact, vegan, frugal lifestyle in Tucson. There is much to emulate and learn from Chile's blog. On the issue of self-propelled transportation, we are exactly in sync. And as for diet, well, I intend to strive for a healthier one.

Out of the hallowed halls and into the world

2009-12-23T08:29:00.000-08:00

Nine of the graduate students for whom I am administratively responsible graduated with doctorates this month. These are intelligent, analytical, persistent, no-nonsense types: they need to be so to earn a doctorate in engineering.

I am so proud of them. For all, their graduate career was characterized by challenges overcome, unfairness absorbed, frustrations dealt with. There were difficult, and sometimes unreasonable, advisors. The culture shock. The oppressive volume of paperwork. The red tape. The seemingly conflicting rules. The late nights. The papers published.

But when they walked across that stage and allowed themselves to be hooded, I was bursting with pride. I could sense what it must be like to be a proud mother. And they should have been also.

The majority were international students, excelling in very difficult courses taught in a language other than their native tongue, but also overcoming the cultural differences, the homesickness, the multiple demands on their time, financial constraints. Imagine being dropped in Beijing, Istanbul, Seoul, Hyderabad, or Taipei and negotiating the demands of graduate school, as well as dealing with cultural differences.

There were a few nontraditional students, sometimes battered by life, but finally taking control, committing, then pushing them through graduate schools.

Variously, I was in loco parentis, sometimes a coach, sometimes a dispenser of tough love, sometimes an advocate, sometimes a shoulder to cry on, and always a bulwark against the juggernaut and bureaucracy that is this enormous state university.

Last Saturday, I volunteered to serve as a graduation marshal, lining up masters students in alphabetical order. They seemed to leave a vacuum in their wake as they silently and quickly filed out of the gym-cum-staging area en route to the arena floor in their regalia.

Go forth!

Streamline moderne, late-era art deco

2009-11-26T09:26:00.000-08:00

Art deco from Bryan and Vernon, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Streamline art moderne is my favorite. A few more example of art deco architecture in downtown Bryan, Texas.

Print shop office, Bryan Avenue, Downtown Bryan, Texas

Streamline art moderne: La Fonda Hotel, Vernon, Texas, with wide-radius curves, long horizontal elements, and glass block. Love it!

Service station, Bryan, Texas

Law office, Bryan, Texas

S&S Auction house, downtown Bryan, Texas

Faux art deco, highway sign, Cline's Corner, New Mexico

Faux art deco, Route 66 Casino Roadrunner cafe, west of Albuquerque. Interestingly, I sat at the counter next to a friendly trucker of the shaved head/Van Dyke beard/sunglass variety. Going against stereotypes, I enjoyed a trucker's breakfast of Indian fry bread, green chiles, eggs, and beans with coffee. Meanwhile, he tucked into a camper's breakfast of oatmeal, dried cranberries, and coffee.

Updated December 6, 2009.

Fabulous collection of streamline modern architecture.

Wonderful collection of streamline moderne design.

Recalibration

2009-11-18T05:05:00.000-08:00

I consider myself a Liberal progressive, even more so since the "L" word morphed into an epithet, courtesy Rush, his dittoheads, and their AM radio talk show host brethren.

But two similar events, one before the Will Rogers' watershed age of 40, one after, instigated some self-assessment. In my early twenties, I worked as a daily newspaper reporter for a substandard salary as a daily newspaper (which involves a seven days/week work regimen, late night meetings, early morning deadlines) in a medium-sized town, ferreting out red-banded produce and subsisting on a pasta-heavy diet out of necessity. Once, in the grocery checkout line, a woman leaned over me to ask the cashier if she could buy lobster with food stamps. Lobster! I looked at my cart filled with blue boxes of mac and cheese, black-spotted bananas, and store-brand oatmeal…and had a recalibratory moment.

Fast-forward to today. I still live modestly and work hard. I have a demanding job running an engineering program at a big university, and I often work late at night at my technical editing consulting business. Sometimes I come home so drained it's all I can do to feed my animals and fall into bed. I bicycle to work, mostly brown bag it for lunch: still frugal after all these years. Luxuries are few to nonexistent. My only vacation in years was the road trip to Arizona for a wedding.

Into the rental house next door moves a couple. She told me she does not work, just "sits at home and gets fat." And smokes. Cigarettes are an expensive habit. This couple apparently have not paid their utility bills for several months, although it appears that he works. Their gas was cut off. On one of the few days I drove to work (as I have to carry in seminar refreshments), before I even shut the door of truck, she was out her door and halfway up my driveway, asking for a handout, lit cigarette in hand. I had been working until 1 a.m. that morning on a technical paper, worked a hard 10-hour day at the office. In addition, the day before, I had overhead her, without provocation, speaking about me to a neighbor using words prevalent in Rap lyrics.

I refused to give her money, both out of exhaustion and hurt feelings. I referred her to restaurant within close walking distance—my former employer—which was looking for waitstaff. She, with no intention of following up, whipped out her cell phone and demanded their number. When I said that she would have to apply in person, she again demanded their number, with no intention of ever following up. From where does she get this sense of entitlement?

Is it rebellion against societal slugs that turns otherwise rational people into vituperative Conservatives?

Comments?

TextEnglish

2009-10-27T06:11:00.000-07:00

Following are three actual e-mail messages from a prospective student inquiring about the graduate engineering program I coordinate. He seems not to realize that e-mail is now considered a virtual means of formal business communication, and that textese is denigrated. It is probably a good idea to write to impress from the outset, especially regarding a graduate program that so highly values publication in refereed journals.

Dear sir/madam,
I was directed towards u by mr. [name of female staff person]. I m highly interested to pursue my masters from [university name].....i want to specialize in welding as i already have a bachlors. So i wud like to know how it wud be possible to take up this course at yr end??

[he failed to sign his message]

As he was referred by an undergraduate advisor, I inferred he was already on campus. Response to my request that he telephone:

Sir i wud have loved to obeyed u but alas i m from [country whose language of instruction is English]. moreover that sound lag on the telephone is something i m very uncomfortable with.

It would be the best for me if u cud explain my chances in the mail. i hope i m clear to wat i meant.

[again neglected to sign e-mail message]

Response to my e-mail in which I corrected his written English and used "(Ms.)" before my name in my e-mail signature to hint at my gender. Note the allusion to shakespeare (sic):

Respected sir/madam,

I am extremely sorry for my dismal electronic mail which supposedly had innumerable errors as pointed out by you. Thank you for correcting me. This is the first time I have been told the correct way to email to a course advisor.

I am aware that I am not perfect in english language so I used , by my highest regards to him, shakespeare's freedom of expression.
Secondly i would like to direct your attention to the fact that in [his native country], we do not have any one language of instruction in schools [not true] as we believe language is no bar for education but is only a medium for education. I have been studied in a medium other than english but still my GRE verbal marks(560) are about your requirement for giving toefl.
Lastly, in attention to your doubts regarding my cognizance in achieving bachelors, i have a grade point of 3.97 (university gold medalist, Prime Minister's scholar awardee) and my majors is not in english but in machines.

However, as my tradition goes, i would still be deeply apologetic for my informal letter content.

My Highest Regards,
Mr. [his full name, which could not be discerned from his e-mail address]

Rock work

2009-10-18T19:25:00.001-07:00

My favorite architectural feature, aside from the wonderful streamline art deco, is freeform rockwork:

Rock work mosaic on building housing an auto repair shop in Vernon, Texas.

Note embedded wagon wheel, among other artifacts.

Corner detail, Vernon, Texas.

Oakdale Park campground, Glen Rose, Texas

Flagstaff, Arizona. Don't forget Winona

2009-09-11T15:30:00.000-07:00

If you ever plan to motor west
Travel my way, take the highway that's the best
Get your kicks on Route 66
Bobby Troup, songwriter

At about the same time that I received an invitation to the Flagstaff, Arizona, wedding of a friend's daughter, I rented the Pixar movie, Cars. Three separate waves of nostalgia converged: to see friends from Sierra Vista, Arizona, a lovely town from which I moved in 1995; to visit Flagstaff, where I went to college; and to take a road trip duplicating some Route 66 (actually, I-40).

Motor allusions
Cars! so many visual vehicular allusions:

the mountains in the distance behind Flo's Drive-in resemble Amarillo's Cadillac Ranch, with its Caddys buried nose first in the earth at a 45-degree angle. See those tailfins?

the supports of Flo's V8 drive-in are connecting rods and pistons, and canopy is a valve cover.

Serving lugnuts, coolant, grease, Flo's Drive-In building itself is an air filter.

the window panes of the Radiator Springs courthouse resemble a piston and connecting rod.

Streamline moderne art deco: I'm crazy about it. The Pixar creators, assisted by consultant and Mother Road expert Michael Wallis, reproduce, or at least allude to, actual Route 66 art deco buildings, such as Ramone's body shop (patterned after the U-Drop Inn, Shamrock, Texas and Doc Hudson's repair shop, with its curved walls and round windows.

For my own Route 66 quest, I packed up my camping gear, tent, and finest suit (for the wedding) and headed northwest. From Bryan, Texas, to the first Route 66 intercept in Amarillo, Texas, was a 500-mile drive, punctuated by an overnight stay in the ultra-maintained and inviting Rockin' A RV Park in Vernon, Texas, with one of the more incongruous sights on this trip: a yurt. It was a relief to find an RV park that welcomed tents with two large grassy areas, each campsite with electrical outlet and water. Nice, very nice, so much so taht I drove late into the night on the return trip to stay there again. On the return stay, I met a group of New Zealand exchange farm workers, all here on a temporary work visa, helping to harvest the Texas and Oklahoma cotton crop. Every year, Canada and New Zealand have an agreement to exchange a maximum of 5000 farm workers. These young men were on a visa that allowed them to work in the United States.

The yurt at Rockin' A RV Park and campground.

Amarillo

Pumped gas at Jesus Christ is Lord gas station and truck fleet, photographed because it reminded me of the Jesus is Lord Used Tire business in Barbara Kingsolver's wonderful novel The Bean Trees.

East and west of Amarillo, the miles and miles of wind turbines resemble an army of aliens, with their seemingly delicate blades turning slowing in the wind. Hard to believe they are each 30-stories tall.

One of many hundreds of wind turbines, this one in Tumacacori, New Mexico. The wind turbine farms stretched for longer than 10 miles along bluffs and hills on either side of I40/US66 west of Amarillo.

Enjoyed picnic lunch of avocado, cucumber and multigrain chips, the spectacular view (not done justice in these photos), and glorious crisp weather at the Painted Cliffs at the New Mexico/Arizona border highway rest stop at the Arizona/New Mexico border.

On to Santa Rosa, New Mexico, the worst campground experiences in 40-plus years of camping, the Bates Motel of campgrounds. The owner was truculent, the waitress rude, the food in the little cafe terrible, neither the wifi not the commodes worked, the tent camping area was a scrubby piece of land without even a sole picnic table.

Mortimer: hound changed my life

2009-08-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

Mortimer

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. Anatole France

I did not want a dog, but with a chance meeting, Mortimer came into my life and, for six years taught me, by example, unconditional love, living in the moment, relishing a good meal, showing affection enthusiastically and without reservation, stating one's preferences, indulging in a good nap, and most of all, the art of being gentle.

On a frigid January 1, 2003, en route to visit a Houston museum, I spied a pathetic dog walking painfully along Texas Highway 6 south of College Station. I had no idea what type of dog he was, only that he looked skinny, sick, sad and almost hairless. Doubling back, I saw him again, stopped, and, quite easily loaded him into the cab of my truck. He sat on the seat with his head hung low, looking out the back window. His skin itched terribly and he was missing most of his hair.

Mortimer!

Back home, I fed and watered him, gave him a bath, and set up an appointment with my wonderful veterinarian, Dr. Katherine Wheeler. That evening, in my workshop, he found and climbed in a box that had shipped a computer. By that action, he taught me that cardboard boxes are where he found some shelter from the icy cold. I fixed up a nice warm dog nest until he was comfortable sleeping inside my house.

For many a veterinary visit, Dr. Wheeler warned me, "We have a long way to go with this dog." He had about every worm a dog could have, including heartworm. He had a nasty skin infection that made him itch and flake all over. He was worth every cent of that veterinary care.

But gradually with the combination of good veterinary care and TLC, Mortimer became himself: a comical, fun-loving, baying, sniffing, squirrel-chasing, headstrong, and most of all, gentle, hound. A Treeing Walker Coonhound, to be exact.

He loved eating, walking, and sniffing. I never had to worry about his disposition around children. Although he was probably abused, and most certainly neglected, he was as gentle as could be. He communicated with me, sometimes by actions, sometimes by body language, sometimes by baying, his need for affection. He loved people. He sidled up to other people for affection, leaning against them. He tolerated other dogs. He was afraid of thunder, and sought comfort during thunderstorms at night.

In 2003, Dr. Wheeler estimated his age at 12; he would therefore have been 18 at the time of his death, July 11, 2009. The life expectancy of a Walker Coonhound is 12 years. He lived 150% of his expected lifespan. In those six short years, Mortimer brought me such joy, comfort, and stability. I laughed at his antics, he listened to my problems. He clearly conveyed his joy at simple things: a walk, his dinner, some dog bisquits, a squirrel sighting, the new bed I sewed for him. After a wretched day at work, a few moments of mutual affection dissipated all my stress. Mortimer was my stress-reliever. Mortimer would lean against the legs of anyone who petted him.

The world is a better place for Mortimer having lived in it. Which is about the best thing one could say about a living thing.

Mortimer the day I picked him up from the side of the highway, January 1, 2003.

Checking out squirrels, circa 2005.

The full-body lean!

Mortimer, Oakdale Park Campground, Glen Rose, Texas, May 2009.

Cooper appreciating Mortimer's characteristic hound-dog bay prior to a walk in Hensel Park.

Last walk with Cooper, July 2009.

Rest in peace, my forever friend! I miss you so.

Independence Day

2009-07-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

Talk about a traditional Independence Day celebration! Independence Day eve was a Brazos Bombers college summer league baseball game. With a sandwich-eating contest. With an amazing fireworks display. Spiral rockets are the new thing in pyrotechnics. The next morning, I bicycled to the Brazos Heritage Society's annual fete in Heritage Park, Bryan. First was a kid's parade, with a young Statue of Liberty leading decorated bicycles and wagons in a circuit around the park. The most enjoyable diversion was a wonderful classic car show sponsored by the Studebaker Club.

Studebaker celebrating the rocket

1950s Studebaker

Isetta

Classic country and gospel in the gazebo on a 100-degree day.

Then home to assemble a grill for a cookout.

My favorite part is the hardware blister pack labeled front and back with the letter designators of each nut, bolt, and washer. No more stapled plastic bags with mystery bolts.

Oh dear, the predrilled holes are an inch narrower than the handle bolts. Customer service will send the proper handle.

Done, sans handle.

That evening was cookout followed by a contra dance. Contra dancing is a speed-dating mixed with square dancing. It's a traditional dance, with dos-i-dos, allemandes, etc., with each person progressively dancing with every other person of opposite gender in the set. All with a caller and life band. After dancing, time out for watching morefireworks. Great fun.

Nominated for Kreativ Blogger Award

2009-06-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

Fellow blogger Her Artichoke Heart made my day by honoring me with a Kreativ Blogger nomination.

Seven things about me—

Born in Brooklyn, NY.

Was a cat person, now a cat and dog person

Commuting to work via bicycle now for 25 years

Enjoy knitting; use the Continental method, as taught by my mom.

Bicycled across seven US states and one Mexican state.

Enjoy puns.

Can bicep curl 40 pounds, three sets of 10 reps each.

My must-read blogs—

Now in Buenos Aires
A Texas expatriate and former colleague in water conservation discovering a new life retirement in Buenos Aires.

¿What do I do all day?
Observations on the adventure of living in Mérida, Mexico, as told by an American expatriate.

Laughing Purple Goldfish Designs
Amazing Australian knitter, crocheter and crafter who repurposes and recycles yarn and other craft materials, all meticulously documented in photos and instructions.

Simple-Green-Frugal
Recipes, references to local businesses, and general tips on living in a smaller environmental footprint in the Brazos Valley.

Empire State Building
My favorite building: photos from every angle at all times of day and night.

The Sentence Sleuth
Grammarian extraordinaire Bonnie Trenga, a sometime writer of Grammar Girl episodes, posts quizzes that sometimes stump me, as well as grammar lessons rich with examples, all with a sense of humor. Ms. Trenga is the author of The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier.

Loving Living Small
Advice and ideas for living in style in spaces >1000 square feet.

Rules of this award—

Thank the person who nominated you for this award.

Copy the logo and place it on your blog.

Link to the person who nominated you for this award.

Name seven things about yourself that people might find interesting

Nominate seven Kreativ Bloggers.

Post links to the seven blogs you nominate.

Leave a comment on each of the blogs, letting them know they have been nominated.

Necessity is the mother of invention

2009-06-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the wonderful Lauging Purple Goldfish Designs blog, I tried carving a crochet hook from a twig, big enough to comfortably recycle worn-out clothing into a crocheted rag rug.

Can you find the camouflaged crochet hook?

A bit out of focus, and still needing some refinements.

Brazos Valley Farmers' Market: cornucopia in a parking lot

2009-06-26T15:47:00.000-07:00

Each Saturday morning, local producers of vegetables, fruits, preserves, plants, soaps, and crafts congregate the health department parking lot for the Brazos Valley Farmers' Market.

Corn, squash, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, beans just hours from the field

Speciality soaps

Locally grown plants

Free-range eggs

Preserves and cannned goods, including salsa; candied squash; chow chow; green grape and jalapeño jam

This chef prepares traditional and nontraditional preserves.

Handmade soaps with heavenly aroma, including lavender, lavender-peppermint, and grandma's kitchen.

Tomatoes, peppers, squash, carrots, eggplant, onions.

Jalapeños, banana peppers, tomatoes, watermelon.

Become a locavore!

Blogs of interest:
Brazos Valley Farmers' Market
Friends of the Brazos Valley Farmers' Market
Simple-Green-Frugal
Brazos Grows
Brazos Locavores

Another great play on words

2009-06-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

She: "Do you think of me merely as a sex object?"
He: "No, I think of you also as a conversation piece."

Camping

2009-05-28T16:34:00.000-07:00

5.9.2009

Camping!

I traveled to Glen Rose, Texas, for the Lonestar Dulcimer Festival. Wonderful dulcimer, mandolin, fiddle, music for three days in a tree-shaded park. An incomprehensible amount of planning goes into a three-day music festival with workshops, arts and crafts fair, contests, old-fashioned square dance, but it all comes off as relaxed...and so relaxing. The amazing Dana Hamilton, champion dulcimer player, is master of ceremonies, performs with the Sweet Song String Band, sits in with other musicians AND serves as square dance caller. How does he do it all? I loved every minute of it.

I also loved the campground, an old-timey private campground with a gorgeous, enormous pool bordered by intricate rockwork. The pool, OakdalePlunge, was dug in 1925 by mules! The young mother of the family camping next to me said her grandparents honeymooned at Oakdale Park in the 1950s, and spending time in the campground is a three-generation family tradition.

The Oakdale Plunge

For rent are cabins, most constructed with intricate mosaics of native limestone. I assume many were build during the Depression, when many public works projects showing such attention to detail were also built.

Intricate rockwork everywhere

My camping equipment is still in the ultralight backpacking and bicycle mode. I use a tiny brass gasoline-fueled Svea 123 stove and a 2.3-pound Sierra Designs Clip Flashlight tent. Such a tent is necessary for self-contained trekking, but not comfortable for car camping. I had such a great time, I ordered a large Coleman tent upon return home that Sunday evening.

Mortimer at his ease

The Monday after the festival, the veterinarian delivered some bad news about my gentle 18-year-old coonhound, Mortimer. He has a brain tumor. At that moment, pampering Mortimer became my uppermost priority. I planned to return to Oakdale Park with Mortimer and the new tent.

5.16.2009

We drove the 150 miles to Glen Rose again the very next Saturday, and spent a wonderful weekend as the only tent campers in Oakdale. Mortimer immediately adopted the tent as his den.

Mortimer adopted the tent as his den

We climbed on the rocks in Big Rocks State Park, walked along the road, and just relaxed at the tent campground, which we had to ourselves, as other tent campers had been chased away by Saturday’s rain. As a coonhound, he has a keen sense of smell, and just loves tracking the path of animals through the brush, although he now has some trouble walking.

Oakdale Park, absent its rows of RV behemoths, hearkens back to a simpler time, when leisure was more about relaxation and nature and less about high-tech activities. The playground equipment includes a child-driven carousel, an old red FarmsAll tractor, and a collection of enormous half-buried rubber tires. There is a building dedicated to carving, an old-style amphitheatre, an enclosed meeting room, and several screened in ramadas.

Salsa (dancing) spice of life

2009-05-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

Salsa, merengue, bachata: my new new-found Latin loves.

Through the virtual word-of-mouth of Facebook, I learned a student in my engineering program, Angel, was taking salsa lessons. Joining this group, with its cadre of international graduate student students and outstanding instructor, a competitive salsa dancer, has recharged my energy in life.

Amazingly, the instructor, out of the goodness of his heart, donates both his instruction and the use of his danceroom to the group. (Janet Evanovich fans: the instructor is a Ranger look-alike.) The group throws occasional Friday night dance parties. The dancing of the advanced students is variously like poetry in motion or, in one case, like catalytic reaction. So exciting and inspiring.

At first I was self-conscious being the oldest student in the class, but found that as I've relaxed, I've become a [slightly] better dancer. For instance, following the man's lead is much easier when relaxed.

I've always admired--an envied--good dancers of every type. Although I am neither a natural dancer nor a particularly coordinated person, I'm thrilled at this entre into the world of Latin dancing.

Miguel and Jan

Miguel and Angel

JC (instructor) and Anita

Wedding follies and foibles

2009-04-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

Despite the best fretted-over plans, something always goes awry at a wedding: the mistakes are what makes the wedding memorable.

This past weekend my dear friend and her fiance were married in a lovely garden chapel in central Texas. It wedding sufficiently simple and well planned to be enjoyed even by the wedding party and families of the bride and groom.

The afternoon, the two precious and very quiet five-year-old flower girls broke away from racing the snails found in the gardens outside the chapel to participate in the rehearsal. With empty baskets, one mimicked the motions of gracefully tossing petals on the aisle. All set.

Fast-forward to the wedding. As maid of honor, I walked down the aisle first, followed by the ring bearer, who executed his right-angle turn toward the best man with military precision.

From my vantage point at the head of the aisle, I watched as one flower girl vigorously and conscientously pelted unsuspecting guests on her side of the aisle with fistfuls of petals, catching most of the guests by surprise. It makes me smile every time I think about it, and ten years from today, the flower girl with the powerful backhand will be what I remember.

Print Journalism RIP

2009-04-05T18:33:00.000-07:00

My college major was journalism. I was set on becoming a newspaper reporter long before Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men shunted hordes of college freshman, who would otherwise have become accountants and English teachers, into journalism schools.

One offhand statement by one of my professors at Northern Arizona University, either Dr. Bert Bostrom or Dr. Dal Herring, stuck with me first for its absurdity, and later for its staggeringly accurate prescience.

One of these professors said that in a few years, we would read our newspapers on a monitor in our home, printing out the articles that interested us. It would be this mysterious force, this new ways of reading the news, not television newcasts, that would sound the death knell for newspapers.

The time was the late 70s. No internet, no personal computers at the time. I could not even conceive of such a thing.

Fast forward to 2009. The revered Seattle Post-Intelligencer is shutting down the presses after 143 years of publishing; it will publish only an on-line edition.

The equally respected Detroit Free Press is cutting back to only three days of home delivery.

Even the venerable New York Times laid off 100 staff persons last week.

Media pundit Marshall McLuhan said, "People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath."

I understand why it is necessary, and, of course, the wastefulness of natural resources on so many levels of the home-delivered paper, but still I'm sad to see the decline of this institution of the fourth estate.

To mangle quotations from Winston Churchill and FDR: "The only thing we have to fear is change itself."

The Gym: Intense and purpose

2009-03-28T18:21:00.001-07:00

Attribution for the title of this post goes to a gym in downtown Bisbee, Arizona, whose name is perhaps the best-ever play on words: The Intense and Purpose Gym.

Seldom does anything live up to its sales pitch.

Gold's Gym, however, is a welcome exception. About a decade ago, Gold's Gym established an outpost in Bryan, Texas, about a half-mile from my house. Ten or twelve years ago, Gold's offered a very attractive annual membership for charter members. Being a bit wary of the Venice, California, Muscle Beach reputation, I hesitated. Although I was in fairly good condition from cycling, and I had been a regular at gym in another state, I was wary of the meat market atmosphere at some gyms.

Could a middle-aged, overweight, unfashionable female feel comfortable in such a place? I was skeptical. But when two co-workers 10 years my senior joined, I overcame my shyness and joined. It's been fabulous.

The muscle-bound young man punctuated his pitch full of superlatives about the gym with references to his own impressive weight-training routine, both of which I discounted. He glossed over the group exercise classes and gave short shrift to the weight-training machines, both of which are the mainstays of my fitness program.

With a black/white/gray color scheme, the gym opened a few weeks later with what seemed at the time a wondrous variety of machines and a palette of group exercise classes. I loved it. The classes were expertly taught by professional, motivated instructors. Everything started on time. Although I was an experienced cyclist, the beginning group cycling class was, well more than a challenge, but eventually I worked my way into condition.

I progressed on weight training and saw immediate results. I loved the choreographed step aerobics classes.

Eventually, a sparkling gym was built in College Station, about four miles away. The Bryan gym was demolished and a gym rivaling its College Station sister was built its place, with a rubberized floor, an block-long avenue of aerobic exercise machines, four times the number of weight-training machines of the original, an airy aerobics room, and, of course, the free weights.

Starbuck's' CEO Howard Schultz talks about a "third place" other than work and home. For me, that is the gym, almost every morning.

Doing the pornographers' bidding

2009-03-20T12:34:00.000-07:00

The title of this post either turns one off or captures the attention, right?

In 2004, while I was helping his mom with her computer, the son of a work acquaintance copied my credit card numbers and, I realized later, stole a check from my checkbook from my purse.

An on-line vendor of high-end athletic equipment called that evening to verify that I had indeed placed an order for several hundred dollars' worth of high-end basketball apparel when they noted a discrepancy between shipping and billing addresses. Thank goodness. I realize in a flash what had happened and cancelled my credit cards.

A few days later, several charges for membership to Internet pornography sites showed up on my checking account.

I knew, of course, it was the work of this person, as the house was filled with basketball memorabilia, and my friend's computer was choked with pornography, which would pop up randomly while we worked.

I reported the theft to the police. I called the third-party company who billed for the pornographers. The police were magnificent; the billing company in Austin, Texas, was abysmal, to put it charitably.

After confiscating the computer, a police technician determined through electronic forensic tests that the transaction times and amounts matched those in my checking account.

The first billing company customer service rep, Stacia, helpfully agreed to credit my accounts, and I should see the credit "in four to ten days." (That uncertain time frame should have been my first hint of trouble brewing.) Of course, the charges were remained, so again, I called and this time spoke to a less helpful customer "service" representative.

She insisted, with some hostility, that I was to seek recourse from the perpetrator, although she was aware that the transactions were under investigation by two separate police departments (my city and that to which the goods were to be shipped). The interaction finished with: "I know Stacia, and I know she would never say anything like that." She punctuated her accusation of me as a liar by hanging up.

This was a time of my life in which $90 would have made the difference between making it to the end of the month or bouncing a check. I bought nothing except the very minimum amount of food, and all produce was red-banded. Even a cup of coffee from a convenience market was deemed an unnecessary luxury. I walked or bicycled everywhere. Of course, I was unable to afford Tamoxifen (even from Canada) to treat the breast cancer I was diagnosed with two years before. It was a very lean and scary time.

I sent a certified letter with all the facts to the president of the company. No response.

In a desperate attempt to get out of the nonproductive customer service loop, I called the sales director, and was directed to a self-described "more seasoned" customer service rep.

And she was. She listened patiently while I explained the situation, said that the hostile rep had been dealt with properly, and credited my account. If there was an art to customer service, she was good at it. She knew how to "handle" difficult customers. She could have credited my account, and I could have remained angry; however, but her manner was professional and courteous and I was mollified.

This occurred in a time of vigorous economy. I asked, "Why is someone with your professionalism and excellent customer service skills doing the bidding of an Internet pornographers?" The question was rhetorical, meant as a compliment, and she understood.

In time, the man, who was on probation at the time of this episode, was brought to justice, and was forced by the court to make retribution.

The saga has a coda. Four years after the resolution of this problem, this gem of a B2B company again billed my checking account for the cost of the same Internet pornography. Yet another certified letter to the president went ignored. Another good customer service rep credited my account, but was unable to explain why, four years after the fact, my account was even on their books, much less being dunned for an illegitimate charge. Better Business Bureau contacted the company, but eventually reported the case as being resolved.

Bicycle commuting

2009-03-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

In the early 80s, I started making the 1.5-mile one-way commute to work on an 30-year-old internal-hub three-speed bicycle wearing no helmet, and in my regular dress clothes and shoes.

A few years later, I fell in with the cycling crowd and upgraded to a very nice Motobecane touring machine, adding racks an panniers to carry my dress clothes and grooming items. I took a job eight (uphill) miles from home and looked forward to my daily commute. I appended some steep, short hill climbs to my evening commute, and changed to a more scenic 10-mile morning commute. Of course, by then I was wearing purpose-built bicycle clothing and shoes. Many of my co-workers commuted by bicycle, including a "non-bikie" woman who rode an unrelenting uphill for 1.5 hours to get to work on a relatively heavy bicycle. Kept my 10-mile commute in perspective.

At that point in my life, I traveled almost everywhere by bicycle: grocery shopping, visiting friends, trips to the coffee and yarn shops, and, of course trips to the gym.

Now I live about 2.5 miles from work, and ride a downtube folding bicycle to work. My idea was to fold the bicycle, slip it into its carry bag, and hide it in my closet instead of leaving my trusted steed to the tender mercies of the bike rack. That did not work out, but I still love commuting by bicycle, made even more sweet by the fact that commuting is the only type of riding I do.

Bicycle commuting is easier than most people think. It is easy to carry clothing and personal items in a backpack. Although commuters may need to find an alternative to their usual main arterial route to work, making the trip by bicycle sometimes take less time. For me, the 2.5-mile commute takes me right to the door of my building, saving me the 7-minute trek from my parking lot. The total time in door-to-door commute is equal. Of course, I need to arrive a bit early to clean up, change, apply make-up, and undo the effects of helmet hair, but it is all worth it.

Bicycle touring

2009-03-07T11:42:00.001-08:00

I remember waking up on a 7th or 8th birthday morning as a to a white and blue one-speed coaster brake bicycle. It became my magic carpet.

But once I learned that one could combine backpacking with bicycling, I knew self-contained bicycle touring was for me. I just knew it. I loved the efficiency that that the mode of transportation becomes the recreation becomes the the journey. I loved the self-contained-ness of it. It was all so compact and adventurous.

Often, I rode organized century or metric century (100- or 62-milers, respectively) and commuted to work by bicycle. But I longed to just follow my front wheel and explore America at 12 miles per hour. In my 20s, I fell in with a recreational bicycle group in Sierra Vista, Arizona, and just loved it. Small breakout groups took two- and three-day tours, some self-contained, some sagged. (SAG = support and gear).

Eventually, longer self-contained tours were on the itinerary; first were short tours to desert campgrounds in southeast Arizona. Loved it! Next was a multi-state trip from New Orleans to Cocoa Beach, Florida, with two guys I met via the Companions Wanted column in Adventure Cycling. Although my front wheel experienced and unknown mechanical failure, dealing me into a face plant on the pavement, one broken and three loose teeth (yes, eating was a problem after that), a hole in my upper lip, an 200-watt shiner, and some face road rash, I soldiered on. My one companion and I (the other abandoned the trip) crossed the Florida peninsula in one eyes-to-the-road day.

A tour through northern Sonora, Mexico, followed with beer truck drivers at a warehouse walking en masse to give us standing ovation for ascending and descending a mountain pass. Mexican drivers are fabulously polite on the road, even the truck drivers.

Of course, all of this culminated in a solo, self-contained cross-country tour, roughly following the Southern Tier maps from Adventure Cycling. I loved almost every minute, and found following my front wheel an amazingly liberating and enlightening experience. I camped in campgrounds mostly, met all types of people, sampled most types of food, although shied away from meat, except for a boudin in Cajun country. This country looks a lot different from the perspective of 12 miles per hour versus 70. Other person's tour experiences can be read at the most excellent site, Crazy Guy on a Bike. Much later, I published an essay in the Houston Chronicle on one night memorable for its subtlety and connection.

Now my cycling is mostly limited to bicycle commuting to work, covered in my next post.

DHL shipping service as an economic indicator

2009-01-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

DHL, the shipping company.

For reasons I can’t explain, the cheerful yellow DHL delivery trucks driving up and down University Drive seemed to signify a bustling economy and a beacon of constancy. DHL was an integral part of the “global village,” as those trucks seemingly delivered to even the remotest outpost. In German, DHL is (or maybe was) the Deutscheposte contractor, essentially the hired gun of the federal postal service.

(I never stopped marveling that packages from Wuhan or X’ian China, were delivered in three days by DHL, while a package to Seattle took a week (and then some) via first class mail US Postal Service.)

Battered by high fuel prices and then by the recession, DHL has essentially ceased domestic operations in the United States. The drop boxes are gone from the academic buildings. No longer can I count on looking out my office window and be almost guaranteed to see a yellow van driving purposefully to its next stop. Last week in my neighborhood, I glimpsed a characteristic sunny-looking van without the red DHL logo or characteristc markings. It was only when I drew close and saw the yellow-and-red jacketed driver that I could verify it was DHL.

It turns out the yellow DHL trucks were actually the yellow miners' canaries of the economy.

Snow in the Brazos Valley

2008-12-12T10:17:00.000-08:00

Very early the previous morning of December 10, 2008, the Brazos Valley was blanketed by a sleet storm. Then, that afteroon, snow, in big accumulations of flakes, fell on the Brazos Valley—and even upon Houston, Texas. Most students at Texas A&M University had never seen snow on the campus. Many snowmen lived for a day, until temperatures in the 60s took their toll. Cars (see photo) drove around with miniature snowman mascots.

In photo at right: my friend, the bride-to-be (right), and me, at 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, with the Civil Engineering–TTI, H.R. Bright, and Engineering-Physics Buidings in the background at Texas A&M University.

Students—even graduate students—frolicked in the snow.

From grime to glam: Brazos Valley Decorative Center

2008-12-07T18:29:00.000-08:00

Brazos Valley Decorative Center, south view

A midcentury building at the corner of 29 St. and Main in downtown Bryan for years housed a grimy tractor dealership. Nothing wrong with tractors; the building just seemed utilitarian rather than remarkable. Remarkably, though, it was designed by Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design and the designer responsible for the Shell Oil Co. logo, a Greyhound bus fleet logo, NASA spacecraft interiors, the U.S. Mail eagle logo, and the Studebaker car.

Ambrose Furniture Works saw the potential in the building and, with the help of a Downtown Improvement Grant, turned the building into the Brazos Valley Decorative Center. The interior is a sumptuous feast of fabric, color, and texture. The service bays are converted to rental space for other design-focused businesses.

"Originally an International Harvester Service Center designed by Loewy’s firm and built around 1947, the building is being renovated and due to open in mid-July. This time, it will not provide space to service and sell tractors; instead the building will pay homage to its creator as a place for design. Ambrose Furniture Works has developed the Brazos Valley Decorative Center to house their establishment as well as provide space for other design vendors to create a comprehensive home décor center for local interior designers and do-it-yourselfers alike." (aboutTown Press, July 1, 2008)

“It is an excellent example of post-war modern design. It has high bays, a large footprint, and parking.” said Randall Spradley of Astin Partners, one of the business entities taking a leading role in downtown, quoted in abouTown Press.

Brazos Valley Decoratve Center, north view

Downtown Bryan, Texas, Art Deco

2008-12-07T13:05:00.000-08:00

A decade ago, historic downtown Bryan, Texas, was a pastiche of excellent locally owned restaurants, an intriguing international import shop, an unfinished furniture store, several thrift shops, a homeless mission, but, more notably, a number of abandoned main-street style storefronts, some roofless, some boarded-up, others without even the dignity of plywood covering the gaping windows.

Today, downtown Bryan is a destination, a vibrant city center, with a monthly Friday evening gallery tour and live music attracting throngs of citizens and tourists. The import shot relocated to a gorgeous storefront, several new, and some upscale, restaurants have opened, there's a massage therapy studio, and a scattering of antique shops sitting cozily beside some very high-tech neighbors.

A bit longer than a decade ago, the City of Bryan procured a community block grant to refurbish the Hotel LaSalle, which converted from a derelict hulk into a charming inn.

A group of citizens worked hard to transform the old firehouse into the Children's Museum of the Brazos Valley. Old Bryan Marketplace hosted a tea room along with an Texas-eclectic antiques collection.

(The concrete reliefs are art deco details are from the First State Bank and Trust Building, downtown Bryan, Texas.)

I am crazy about art deco, and downtown Bryan offers some great examples. The tallest building in downtown and the most flamboyantly art deco is Varisco Building. Bottomland cotton farmer Biaggio Varisco, an Italian immigrant, so loved his adopted home that he changed his first name to Brazos, after the county and its river (Brazos de Dios). In some essential way, the Varisco Building resembles the Empire State Building in this photo taken at Empire State Building: 5th Avenue & 28th Street.

The Varisco Building now houses a Tier IV data center, offering data storage and disaster recovery services to corporations, mainly in the Houston area. Fibertown grew out of the location of a fiber trunk routed through downtown Bryan. Fibertown offers bandwidth management, "an advanced data center with backup power, a high-speed managed network, high-capability services, and high-security biometric and RF building controls." (aboutTown Press, October 2007). The Fibertown "campus" has expanded five historic downtown buildings.

Main Street, downtown Bryan, looking north, with the Varisco Building in the distance.

Humor in the office break room

2008-11-28T06:37:00.000-08:00

Full disclosure: these two humorous exchanges took place several years ago in the break room of the Department of Agricultural Engineering.

First, four women co-workers chatting over lunch stopped their girltalk when a Middle Eastern graduate student entered to heat up his lunch.

I joked, "Adil, you are brave to come into the kitchen with all girls in here."

Another co-worker: "He's hungry!"

Adil, known for both his sense humor and his limited English proficiency, came right back with, "A hungry man is a brave man."

Of great concern to these agricultural engineers was nonpoint source pollution, or contaminants contained in runoff. (Point source pollution refers more to a outlet pipe from a factory, for instance. A Pakistani engineer who specialized in runoff from dairy feed lots mentioned that his brother was a proctologist.

"You see, we both deal with waste disposal."

A graduate student [now himself a professor]: "Yeah, but he is more into point source."

Clase de español

2008-11-14T18:03:00.000-08:00

From mid-September to mid-October, I studied Spanish with an eclectic mix of classmates and a super-energetic instructor, Antonio Caraballo, in a non-credit course offered by the cultural outreach program of Texas A&M University's business college.

It was great fun, and I'm looking forward to the follow-on course. Our instructor, a native of Puerto Rico, was the epitome of an engaged instructor. Dodging an oversize podium while running back and forth to the whiteboard, acknowledging comments or questions with, "How interesting," then turning each into a mini-lesson.

No question, it seemed, was off-limits. When we were learning pronouns and noun genders, one unabashed undergraduate asked, "Is there a way to say 'girly-man'?"

Without missing a beat, our maestro darted around the hulking podium, whiteboard marker at the ready, "Yes, it is 'el ella,' the he-she," in the same enthusiastic, yet rational, instructional style as when someone asked about the syntax of direct objects.

The nonhomogenous mix of classmates enhanced the entire experience: two Turks, one Indian MBA student, several American undergraduates, a former college athlete, several writers and editors.

Our final exam—this was, after all, a non-credit fun course—was ordering dinner in Spanish at a Mexican restaurant, Los Cazadores. It was fun, dinner was excellent, the company entertaining. Los Cazadores is now my favorite Mexican restaurant ever.

Idiomatic expressions and the Chinese engineer

2008-11-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

I am the coordinator of a graduate engineering program. The majority of students are international students, all of whom speak have high English proficiency. Occasionally, though, the odd idiomatic phrase trips them up.

Part of my job is organizing each semester's seminar series, in which experts are brought in to talk about their research in a classroom setting. The last slide of most presentations is usually acknowledgment of the presenter's colleagues. The most recent presenter, an age 50+ New Yorker, titled his slide listing those names in a more casual than usual manner: "I get by with a little help from my friends."

A Chinese student, probably younger than age 30, asked me the meaning of that phrase. Simple enough, right?

So I started, "Remember the Beatles?" He looked puzzled, but nodded. He was probably thinking, "What the heck would the Beatles have to do with electromigration and integrated circuit design?" But he was a good sport.

"They sang a song called 'With a Little Help from my Friends." I sang some of the lyrics. (From the Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band album of 1967.)

Ooookay, but I still have not explained the concept.

"'To get by' means to just barely . . . just pass with the minimum requirements. " I said, digging myself into a deeper hole. "The phrase means his friends help him make his way through life. The speaker was making a casual reference in his ackowledgments.

Such a simple sentence, but it requires a knowledge of the tone of an entire era; perhaps the meaning cannot be conveyed across both two generations, a cultural barrier, and an ocean.

Bore: someone who deprives you of solitude without offering companionship

2008-11-01T11:01:00.001-07:00

A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without offering companionship. (Oscar Wilde)

Several years ago, I published an essay in the Houston Chronicle's Texas magazine, a vignette of my night in Langtry, Texas, on my cross-country bicycle trip. Several people wrote me as a result, and one, a Houston CPA, asked me to dinner when he visited my city on business.

We met for dinner—me coming directly from work, him from a client's office—we agreed upon an Asian restaurant near the university whose parking is all in a metered lot. I warned him to bring some change.

He arrived a little late, seemingly surprised and annoyed, he said "All I can find are metered spaces, and I don't have any change."

I offered him some quarters, saying "I thought I mentioned the metered spaces."

He said, "You probably did; I was not listening," and refused my offer. He also said he pretty much ignored the [detailed and accurate] directions I sent via e-mail.

He turned down my offer of change and instead left and let me sit in the restaurant alone for 20 minutes while he found an unmetered spot. I thought of leaving after 15 minutes, but instead tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.

So, both my e-mail and my friendly advice on the telephone call were both ignored, and he makes me wait alone in a restaurant for 20 minutes while he seeks out a free parking space?

And he "talks long." We did not exit the restaurant until 9:30 p.m., although we met right after work. Maybe he is lonely. Despite its long length, I felt the conversation never "took off," and certainly there was no chemistry. Then it turns out his big hobby is having his photo taken with celebrities. I thought this was a bit odd. He said he graduated to this as asking for autographs was too juvenile. Ahem!

Fast-forward to last week. He again announces, via e-mail, that he will be in town to audit the same clients, and invites me to dinner. And although I don't have many dates, yet another 2.5-hour dinner listening to this man is not in the cards.

House ache

2008-10-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

My house is ill. It needs the attention of a number of specialists. And time and a lot of money. In fact, a minimum of half the original cost of the house itself.

It is a World War II-era pier-and-beam frame structure with an interesting facade of faux-limestone formed from concrete. It's a shotgun house with hardwood floors and ceiling fans and a cute built-in triangular corner china hutch. There is a one-car garage and a large separate outbuilding for storage, laundry, and workshop. A yard with my vegetable garden and patio. Easy bicycling and even walking distance from my job. Conveniently located. Good neighbors. Quiet neighborhood.

The foundation is sagging. The entire floor, including the 60-year-old hardwood floors (they cannot be salvaged), will be sawn out and removed down to the earth, and new joists inserted underneath. A subfloor will be laid. After that, another specialist or perhaps three will lay the actual floor: new hardwood, or tile, or whatever else I might find. Then new window frames, maybe a roof, and definitely a fence. The rooms I painted might need to be repainted.

To add to the upheaval, I will have to pack up everything and actually move out of my house. All of the occurs during the hectic academic year, not in summer. I plan to move most of my stuff into my garage, and just take the necessities to a temporary apartment.

My boss, who apparently thinks that my time 24/7 belongs to my job (even balking at signing an external employment request for my four hours per week of freelance editing on weekends)
has not responded to my e-mail asking for approval of some vacation time to take care of this business, and just weekends do not give me enough time.

Of course, things could be worse. I live within my means, my mortgage payment is tiny, and I'm in no danger of losing my house. My heart goes out to people foreclosed out of their homes due to bad information from greedy mortgage companies. Still, without the home equity loan necessary to fund this work, the mortgage on my little house would have been retired in a bit more than a year.

Debra Ginsberg, author and former waitress

2008-09-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

During my waitress days, a friend brought to my attention Debra Ginsberg's book Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress. It was on the staff-recommended table at Borders and was further recommended by the "fun and unconventional" cafe workers there. Although Debra Ginsberg had much more extensive experience--and therefore memoir-able anecdotes--waiting tables than did I, her tales resonated just enough that I felt the typical "oh, yeah" connection that any two people in the same line of work implicitly feel. But there are other commonalities: we share the same religion and birth city and are about the same age, and we had both worked at National Park concessions during youthful summers. The only difference: I loved it being in the National Parks; Debra Ginsberg, did not, for reasons described in the book.

Books by Debra Ginsberg
Debra Ginsberg has published four books since then, and at least one article in a national women's magazine. I've fallen behind on reading, just recently purchasing, then relishing the giddy anticipation of the dish of Blind Submission, the story of an aide to a high-powered, ethics-challenging literary agent. I'm really looking forward to the memoirs Raising Blaze, about raising her autistic child as a single mother and About My Sisters , of the bonds between the sisters within an unconventional family. The most recent book is The Grift about a pseudo-psychic whose life is complicated by the attainment of genuine psychic powers and the chance of romance from a past client in a past life.

Debra Ginsberg and a fan
After marveling at convergences in our histories, in 2005, I took a deep breath and wrote an e-mail. Ms. Ginsberg replied with a long and eloquent response, not as published author to fan, but, more as peer to peer. She spoke a bit of the life of a writer and author, but also about the similarities between all women of our generation.

Ms. Ginsberg said my e-mail made her day, as did hers mine, several-fold.

Debra Ginsberg, best wishes for your continued success.

Deep in the Heart of Excess

2008-09-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

In 1974, Marcia Seligson published a treatise on nuptials entitled The Eternal Bliss Machine: The American Way of Wedding. Appropriately, the chapter on a Dallas wedding was called "Deep in the Heart of Excess." The conspicuous consumption, gluttony, frenzied attention to the minutest of detail was surreal.

In my weddings-to-remember history, one reception that stands out was the wedding of two co-workers, just acquaintances, at a rather run-down swim-and-tennis club in Las Vegas. Everyone from the company piled into vehicles for the 7-hour drive from southeast Arizona to Las Vegas for the festivities. Although the annual cost of the day-to-day wardrobe and grooming supplies of the high-maintenance bride seemed to rival the GDP of a small country, the wedding was decidedly casual.

The invitations advised packing swimsuits and athletic clothing. This was a departure! The low-key ceremony took place poolside, with the couple standing at the large 6' mark painted on pool tiles. Minutes after the big kiss, the groom announced, "Let's play," and play we did.

We rushed into the locker room, changed into athletic clothing and hit the tennis courts, volleyball sand, and basketball courts. Some people swam, others danced. There must have been a buffet-type dinner, but it's lost to memory. What I do remember was FUN! Lots of hard-hit balls from the baseline in tennis, kids running around, a lively beach volleyball game, the de rigeur event of a boss (and probably the groom, as well) being thrown into the pool, classic rock music. How fun was that! Now that was a wedding to remember!

A dear friend is now planning a small, intimate wedding for Spring at the Antique Rose Emporium. Today we visited a bridal fair in College Station, Texas. The preponderance of options for the bride-to-be was overwhelming. A myriad of photographers (and videographers), florists, bridal dress shops (with the requisite ugly bridesmaids dresses), bakers, caterers, wedding invitation printers, event planners of all stripes and sentiments, estheticians, a harpist, chocolatiers, and even a clinical psychologist promoting a new State of Texas-approved prenuptial counseling option...and venues-venues-venues! I am amazed these twin cities of just over 120,000 population can support this many gazebos, pavilions, chapels, tents, halls, rooms, country clubs, and B&Bs.

Even my friend and bride-to-be, taking her cues from a book about planning a small wedding, seemed entranced. A chemist, even her logical scientific sensibilities seem overwhelmed by the blitz of options for even a small wedding.

Of course, who isn't impressed by the pageantry of an elaborate wedding? But I think back to that long-ago play day, in its ease and fun, and wonder when the pendulum might shift back to a simpler time and the extinction of the bridezilla. Maybe tough economic times will bring the simpler affair back into vogue.

Word (processing) nerd

2008-08-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

On to electronic word processing hints and tips. My thesis clients know this one. There is never a need to put more than one contiguous space in a Microsoft Word document. Any questions? Leave them in the comments; I will reply.

A couple of other word processing tips. You are the master of your fate on the following:

Precisely setting the vertical space after a paragraph. There are other options besides two carriage returns. (Handy when trying to fit a transmittal letter on one page.)

You can change the character, size and display of bulleted text. You don't need to accept the blobby round default. I like to use a small square in a one typeface size smaller than the rest of the text. For fun, you can use a character from the symbol set, webdings, wingdings, or even choose a picture.

You can also control the alignment of the wrapped lines of text. Don't insert a hard return and tab each line. Use a hanging indent.

Set tabs precisely where you want them. Clear the extraneous intervening tabs. If you want text to appear at 4 inches from the margin, set a tab at 4 inches, and clear the others. Don't merely tab-tab-tab until finally arriving exhausted and disheveled in the proximity of the desired point.

Likewise, set precise page breaks; do not insert hard returns ad nauseum until the software forces a soft page break. If you end up deleting or inserting something above, your page breaks can shift.

If you are aligning text with tabs, such the in the educational preparation in a curriculum vitae (CV), a clean way to keep, say, degree, university, and major neatly together is to create a table, adjust the column widths to your purposes, enter the data, then make the table invisible by hiding grid lines. You might also have to set borders to none (Format->Borders and shading->none.) Adjust the padding, if desired, using Table->Properties->Cell->Options. I almost always use zero.

Among others, there are decimal and right align tabs. Decimal tabs align the decimal point in a column of numbers. (Never use a left tab, then attempt to align decimal points with multiple spaces.)
If you want to right align numbers, such as the page numbers in a table of contents, use right tabs, and, as always, clear extraneous tabs.

In technical papers, I keep the figures and their captions together by creating an invisible (see above) 1X2 (1-column, 2-row) table, and place the figure in the top cell, the caption in the bottom cell, setting cell margins to preference (Table->Properties->Cell->Options).

The Grammar Stickler

2008-08-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

When it comes to written technical communication, after 25 years' work as a technical editor, I'm a stickler for punctuation, usage, grammar, expression of units of measure, logical organization.

Not so strict am I on spoken communication; in fact, the regionalisms which make other editors cringe I find delightful and amusing. A favorite East Texas quirk is the use of the present, instead of past, tense. (He run a V-8 Ford. They come south from Tennessee in 1930.)

And I never adhere to the stilted-sounding, "He is taller than I [am]." I've even been known to use a preposition to end a sentence with in colloquial spoken English.

Grammar Girl, what do you think of all this?

But, logically, English really needs a second-person plural pronoun to correlate with vous in French, and Ustedes in Spanish. Okay, OED, Texas has solved the problem. I'm talking about y'all. So much more elegant than the Brooklyn you guys, or the misguided youse guys, so much more efficient that you people. What do Midwesterners use? I'd like to know, ubetcha.

Another word to add to the lexicon: ain't. We say I am not. For the contraction, we say I'm not, not I amn't. And inverted for the interrogative, it becomes Aren't I?

Solution: I propose ain't as the contraction for am not. The machine stenography language used by court reporters has a code for ain't. Ain't it logical that written English should follow suit?

A couple of very common errors. In my experience, the most commonly misspelled word is accommodation. Notice that the root is the same as that of commode.

Imply/infer: Infer is not a fancy way of saying imply. The speaker implies; the listener infers.

Compose/comprise: A whole comprises (not is comprised of) its parts. Parts compose the whole.

Fewer/less: If an amount is quantifiable, a smaller amount is denoted as fewer, not less. For instance. "He has enjoyed fewer than 25 lattes in this Starbucks." If the amount is more bulk-y in nature, less is fine: There's less whip on this specialty drink today than last week."

Continual/continuous: Continual has more of a recurring connotation, while continuous means uninterrupted.

Decimate literally means to reduce by one-tenth, not to obliterate, but "its English meaning has been intended to include the destruction of any large proportion of a group." [Webster's II New College Dictionary]

Segueing into spelling out of numbers. In ordinary text, according to the venerable Chicago Manual of Style, numbers one through ninety-nine are spelled out, as well as any number followed by "hundred, thousand, million, etc."

On the other hand, in technical text, depending on the style of the journal, usually numbers 10 and below are spelled out when not denoting units of measure. Units of measure are always spelled out. Beginning a sentence with a number above 10? Recast the sentence to avoid the problem entirely in technical writing.

Engineers and physicists know this one. If a unit of measure is less than one, a zero precedes the decimal point (0.3 kilometers), but not if the unit is never expressed as other than a fraction, such as some statistical terms. The reason for the zero: to take the place of an integer (and maybe to assure readers that the integer was not unintentionally omitted.)

Hyphen, en-dash, em-dash: A hyphen, simply puts, makes one word out of two (high-flying acrobat). An en-dash (alt+numpad 0150)usually expresses an time interval (serving as president from 2000–2005). An em-dash (alt+numpad 0151), which has no spaces before or after, usually serves to set off a parenthetical: His Colonial-era farmhouse—built as a munitions depot—was in need of repair. It can also introduce a bulleted list, serving a similiar function to that of a colon.

Years of experience and months of pregnancy or anything that is a measure of something is expressed as a possessive: eight months' pregnant; 15 years' experience. (Note that these are plural possessives.)

Any editors out there have other observations to share? I would love to compile and include in a future entry.

Next time, some word processing tips.

Knitting with wit

2008-06-21T19:01:00.000-07:00

Knitting.

It's cool again. Like bicycling, knitting has become associated with celebrity, and it is cool. Madonna's apron pattern is famous. Vanna White has an eponymous line of yarn, part of the profits of which go to charity. June 14 was Worldwide Knit in Public Day. In cities, knitters fan out at night to wrap public trees with small knitted scarves.

Since age 4, I have been a knitter. My mother taught me to knit using what I now know to be the Continental method. I like this method better than the English method, because both hands are equally involved in the process.

I find the repetitive nature of knitting soothing. On the other hand, my pulse rate quickens at the sight of multiple skeins of yarn in yarn shop. I love being able to create something unique. I like the fact that knitting is portable. (I even carried my knitting on my cross-country bicycle trip.)

A yarn shop in my town, Bryan, Texas, has a Friday evening "stitch and bitch" social time with no rules, no dues, just fun.

I taught myself to make socks, and for the past few months, socks are all that has come off my needles. Size is not usually a problem, as most women's feet fall into a small range; I can adjust gauge for a sock weight to bulky yarn; and they are just fun and a little challenging. Also, the bulky ones are practical for cooler days.

There is something so soothing about the repetitive motions of knitting and so satifying about the feel of the yarn, needles, and finished product.

Bicycle commuting

2008-06-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

For years, long before it was cool, during the time a young Lance Armstrong was first attempting triathlons in north central Texas, before Greg Lemond won even his first Tour de France, in fact, during the last days of Eddy Merckx's professional career, I have loved bicycles and bicycling. I especially like to commute to and from work by bicycle because it fulfills two goals: exercise and environmental responsibility. I started riding an internal-hub three-speed to my summer job while a college student in the late 1970s. (I still have that bicycle and use it for grocery shopping.)

My coworkers at my first "professional" job probably thought of me as that "girl on the bicycle," but were too polite to say so aloud. Similarly, a motorcycle-riding female computer scientist was defined as "the woman who rides a motorcycle."

With the higher profile and popularity of the Tour de France and bicycling's entry in the Summer Olympics in the 1980s, bicycling became more mainstream. Finally, I was, well, maybe quasi cool.

Then, a new Army general and avid cyclist came to lead the military base adjacent to the town. Bicycling became cool, very cool, and trendy, and chic and the "it" thing to do. Especially for gung-ho young military officers. I continued to draft behind the virtual peleton of cycling popularity, commuting to work (20 miles round trip at an average 12 mph), participating in recreational rides. The fun and convivial local bicycle club called itself the "ride to eat" club, with rides punctuated midway by a breakfast stop.

It's interesting to observe the viral spread of cycling popularity. At this point, I was a full-fledged bikie, but a woman from work, encouraged by another dyed-in-the-wool cyclist, amazed me by riding about 20 miles daily of unrelenting uphill from her home by the river to our work site on the flank of a mountain. Without a go-fast bicycle, without purpose-built cycling clothing, and perhaps without a clue that she was peforming an amazing physical feat on a daily basis.

While upgrading through a series of light road bikes, I joined group rides, large benefit rides, and organized a recreational bicycling club in my town. Gingerly, I started riding a mountain bike. A heavy-duty touring bike took me on several multiday tours and eventually a solo, self-contained cross-country trip.

Okay, now I'm in a different state, different atmosphere, different age. I have cut back to bicycle commuting and one organized ride per year. I find the recreational club in this town somewhat daunting. I still hold out hope for another cross-country expedition, maybe north to south this time.

Working 101

2008-05-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

Last month, the man who took a chance on a neophyte wannabe technical writer 28 years ago in Sierra Vista, Arizona, swung by the southeast Texas area with his wife in their recreational vehicle. Richard and Margie are full-time RVers, having sold their homestead and equestrian ranch in favor of criss-crossing the country in an RV towing a wood-carving shop, working at bed-and-breakfast one season, spending the summer at their secluded acreage the next.

Me, circa 1986 (left) in my badge photo. Richard today, in his RV (right).

They looked the same, truly. Richard, prematurely gray even back then, now white-haired, but with the same jovial sense of humor, same good heart. Margie, a horse wrangler, looking fit and trim and relaxed.

Reflecting about the three years I worked for Richard reminded me of the Mark Twain quotation: "When I was 16, I was shocked at how little my father knew; when I was 22, I was amazed how much he had learned in six years." At 22, I'm certain I was a difficult, opinionated, undiplomatic, awkward, unpoised recent college graduate. Like Twain's 16-year-old self, I thought perhaps not that I knew it all, but certainly more than the people I worked with. In retrospect, I would not have wanted to work for myself. I thought I knew a lot; I really knew nothing. I had no idea the difficulty of managing a technical writing section. Richard not only put up with a lot of stress induced by me—and several other of my motley bunch of coworkers—but, to his credit, held no hard feelings.

Thanks to the start Richard gave me more than a quarter-century ago, I've made all or part of my living as a technical writer since then. But even more important, after years in the graduate school of hard knocks, I view Richard's instruction in Working 101 as one of the best fundamental courses I have taken.

Original recipe for blackened tilapia Tajin

2008-05-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

Tajin Fruit Seasoning, salsa en polvo. Powdered salsa. A seasoning for all seasons. It is intended to be sprinkled on fruit, but its piquant flavor is has much more potential.

As unlikely as it sounds, try--just try!--Tajin fruit seasoning sprinkled on strawberry ice cream. A synergistically phenomenal contrast of flavors.

Now, an original recipe from the kitchen of Waitress from Mensa:

Blackened Tilapia Tajin

4 tilapia fillets
3/4 cup flour
3 tablespoons Tajin fruit seasoning
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
pinch nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
enough oil for pan frying

Toss flour, Tajin fruit seasoning, Italian seasoning, nutmeg, salt, and pepper with a fork.

Dredge tilapia fillets, both sides, in flour mixture. Fry in hot oil in a skillet, both sides, until fish flakes easily with fork.

Lime + chile: The taste will explode on your tongue; not hot, just flavorful.

Breakin' up is a big to-do

2008-05-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend, a wiry electrian (pun unintended), ended our our four-year relationship to pursue the fourth love of his life more than two years ago. (The first three partners did not work out.) Never could I have imagined that this decent, kind, forgiving, intelligent, analytical, and truthful man would treat me with such callousness. In that stationary moment, he became a stranger to me, full of lies and deceit and meanness. It was a messy thing, and he did not handle it well. Maybe I did not either.

Ultimately it is for the best, but my fundamental trust in my own perception of people is irreparably shaken.

Eventually, as one does, I came to terms with it, and moved on. In retrospect, it all makes sense now, but, of course, while in the relationship, in the moment, the signs are invisible.

Although marriage was never in the cards for us (in other words, in my tongue-in-cheek description, the relationship was not terminal, as in terminating in a marriage), he was the best and most respected of any beau in my 33 years of adult singlehood.

At this age, I feel relieved of the burden of worrying about marriage, or the fact that I've never been married. This is what it is. While in my earlier 30s, a dear friend said, "You might just be one of those people destined never to marry." Back then, I held out hope, but now I'm more "que sera" about it. (Thanks, Doris Day.)

Whenever I meet a lifelong bachelor of a certain age, though, I wonder what is wrong with him. But it does not occur to me that other people might be, understandably, raising the same questions about me. And are they right to wonder?

Even Jerry Seinfeld, before he was married, likened the idea of marriage to someone choosing a car, but with the imprimatur that you have to drive this one car for the rest of your life. Seinfeld is now married—to a possibly plagiarizing cookbook author—with whom he has three children. Of marriage, and alluding to the high divorce rate, someone wrote something to the effect that marriage was the triumph of hope prevailing over all rational thought and experience. We still do it, though.

The New

2007-07-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

From the aunt

Carbon is the new smog. Brown is the new black. Tea is the new coffee. Kia is the new Hyundai. Geek is the new nerd. Fair market is the new free market. Cozumel is the new Acapulco. Asheville, N.C., is the new Fremont, Wash. Rap is the new rock. Local is the new global. Skateboards are the new in-line skates. (Note: In-line skates were the new skateboards two decades ago.) Green is the new eco. Eco-tourism is the new archeological dig vacation. All-inclusive resort is the new ocean cruise. Platinum is the new gold. Titanium is the new aluminum. Hemp the new cotton. Hormone-free is the new organic. Friends-with-benefits is the new significant other. Gmail is the new Yahoo mail. Flash drives are the new CDs. Orlando Blum is the new Richard Gere. Lindsay Lohan is the new Liza Minelli. Interdisciplinary is the new ivory tower. Drums are the new primal scream therapy. Anne Hathaway is the new Sandra Bullock. Crocs are the new jellies. China is the new Japan. Outsourcing is the new contracting. Bariatric surgery is the new lipsuction. Text messaging is the new IM. Starbucks is the new indoor mall.

From the niece

YouTube is the new TV, three-quarter pants on men are the new baggy jeans (that is my prediction! mark my words--it is coming)."Grey's Anatomy" is the new "ER," Bratz are the new Barbies, iPods/Zunes are the new CD players, emo is the new goth, computers are the new books, Dane Cook is the new Jerry Seinfeld, MySpace is the new (mall, hangout, chat room, idk?), abbreviations are the new slang.

Out of context

2006-12-07T06:44:00.000-08:00

Everyone has probably had the experience of making eye contact with an acquaintance, only to have that person quickly avert his or her gaze to avoid having to make social contact. Then both tacitly adopt the conceit that we did not really see each other.

Waitresses are people too. We do not evaporate up the fry hood after each shift. We shop for groceries, we walk our dogs, we stop in for coffee, we go to plays and concerts, we meet friends, we enjoy our hobbies.

Maybe I am particularly sensitive to this avoidance gesture, but I find it degrading, perhaps because it is weighted with presumptions of the (lack of) esteem in which service persons are held.

Once, while shopping for household items, I encountered a regular customer who previously had chatted me up virtually every evening for weeks after he was relocated to this town. Our eyes locked for a second as we pushed our carts. I smiled with an upbeat hello. He effected the avoidance move. He was with his wife (who had just moved here).

I expected him to, at a minimum, do the head bob of recognition. Optimal would be to introduce me to his wife. Instead, he pretended he did not see me.

Me, somewhat loudly: "Are you pretending you don't know me?" I was miffed. More than miffed.

I extended my hand and introduced myself to his wife, who was gracious.

At the cafe, this man had shared every manner of detail about his life: his bariatric surgery, his years of truck driving, his service as a volunteer firefighter, the series of events leading to his ownership of a lakeside vacation home, infinitestimal details of his new job at an oil company dispatch yard. Very friendly.

The man liked to talk. Definitely did not like to listen, ignoring me when I had the temerity to even offer a small comment here and there on the subject of his life. Outside the confines of cafe, when I could not function as the receptacle of his verbal outflow, apparently he did not feel any need to acknowledge me.

Of course, it's a reflection on him, not on me. But I'm still annoyed.

The thin veneer

2006-11-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

The cafe staff is composed almost exclusively people recovering from substance abuse. A rehab halfway house in our city furnished a steady stream of good workers. When one waitress came to the end of her stint at the rehab house, the boss asked her spread the word that a successor was needed. These folks were reliable, hard-working, and intelligent. Their stories of a tough life contrasted with my relatively sheltered life.

I found their resilience and resourcefulness humbling. It was a lesson in humility. I felt guilty about ever complaining about my lot in life.

Despite the fact that waiting tables has traditionally been the employment bastion of the uneducated, make no mistake, a good waitress possesses the skill set to be a corporate vice president. Given advantages early on in life, the career trajectory is limitless for a person with the interpersonal skills, multitasking abilities, and sheer physical rigor to wait tables, assuming they start from a position of strength.

A lot of unfulfilled potential. A lot. Sadly. These are people I respected.

Life, as with chemistry, where one ends up depends so much on where one starts, to paraphrase Barbara Ehrenreich, an experiential journalist (and cell biologist) who wrote about trying to get by on low-wage jobs in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Making it in America.

For my food service friends, life is a struggle: with finances, with the demons that beset them, with their families, against society's perception.

Years before, I visited with a homeless young man at the beach in San Diego. He had owned a successful business cleaning boat hulls in San Diego Harbor. Through a series of mishaps and beset by a drinking problem, he lost his business, tumbled through the tiers of desperation, until he found himself at the lowest rung of society: homeless, penniless, and out of options. How tenuous is our grasp on affluence and normalcy! The veneer is frighteningly thin.

A tale of two citizens

2006-11-22T10:34:00.000-08:00

Until recently, the wealthiest man in town dropped in for lunch every day. He ordered the identical lunch every day. His regular employee companion ordered that same lunch. Every day. Once a different (perhaps unindoctrinated) minion ordered something different. We never saw that employee again. Coincidence? Who knows?

The businessman was a gentleman. Always left a big tip, treated the waitstaff with courtesy, forgave of the foibles and gaffes of a new waitress. Sometimes he brought family in the evenings. Whatever his reputation in business dealings, he was consistently kind to us.

Once, two months after I had moved back into a professional career, I encountered him and that same employee companion on a commuter flight. I greeted them both with a wink and a good morning, calling them by name. The businessman's greeting was genuinely charming and even effusive. His employee companion, whom I had served an equal number of times, asked, "Who is she?" The boss explained.

As one of the cooks noted, "He takes notice of the people around him."

Class act.

In contrast, a member of the board of regents of a huge state university system occasionally dined with two college-age nephews.

It was apparent that the three felt as if they were to the manor born. Never did they make eye contact; their manner was inconsiderate and brutish. I once served the young relatives their iced teas first, and before I could even place the second glass on the table, the man barked, "Where's my beer?"

Then he proceeded to entertain the young men (by design), another customer across the room and me (by accident of being within earshot) about how a woman, whom he named, "was a mess," and once "groped him under the table" at a formal banquet. Then he segued to regaling us in graphic detail and with heavy use of the vernacular of the configuration of a college football player's genitals, which he had apparently viewed in the team's locker room after a game.

Apparently this man gives his own spin to an F. Scott Fitzgerald observation, "The very rich are different from you and me." And apparently are bound by a very different set of rules.

Hon: The Waitress Prerogative

2006-11-21T06:47:00.000-08:00

The unique nature of waitress:customer relationship allows—requires, even—the waitress to, well, take a certain liberty when addressing customers.

Hon.
Not honey.

Despite the apparent disparity of our stations in life, waitresses have an assumed familiarity with customers.

So I found myself asking the former president of a large, well known university and his distinguished-looking guest: "Care for some more coffee, hon?"

Taking all kinds of liberties. It's expected.

Pepsi v. Coke: and the winner is...Dr Pepper

2006-11-21T06:26:00.000-08:00

Here's an exchange I've had several dozen times.

Me: "What would you like to drink?"
Customer: "Coke."
Me: "Pepsi okay?"
Customer: "Dr Pepper."

I don't get it!

Okay, I'll admit I grew up in a different part of the country (north of the Mason-Dixon line), and the difference between Pepsi and Coke is negligible to me. Sure, in a side-by-side test, I can taste the sweeter Coke (but prefer Pepsi). But to have such loyalty to a soda? They are almost indistinguishable. Dr Pepper is the outlier.

Now, I can understand loyalty to a regional soda, such as Nehi or Royal Crown or even the old cream sodas, but Pepsi and Coke are international megabrands. An entire movie set in the Kalahari Desert, The Gods Must be Crazy, was built around an old-fashioned Coke bottle. Coca-Cola delivery trucks rumble through the deepest jungles of central America. Siberians know what Coke is. I've seen the logo in Hindi and Arabic.

Brand loyalty is a testament to the marketing skills of these two giants. Taking it one step lower: how is it that perfectly intelligent adults are willing—desperate even in some cases—to go to great inconvenience to pay outrageous prices for water with corn syrup, flavoring, and carbonation? And to claim slavish loyalty to "their" beverage?

Again, I don't get it.

Multitasking and working cooperatively with others

2006-11-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

From the job postings at the local university, it became apparent to me that the school valued staff members with the "ability to multi-task and work cooperatively with others."

If that boilerplate is true, the human resources department should consider passing out applications at all the coffee shops in town. Never have I multitasked nor worked as cooperatively with others—under such pressure—as while waiting tables during a busy lunch.

Waiting tables is a heck of a lot more skilled than unskilled labor, contrary to popular belief. Of my former office-working brethren, I'd reckon that a mere 10% could successfully wait tables through a rush.

Every table is in a different phase of the meal: drinks, salad, entree, check back, refills, dessert, check, change. To the clientele I present a facade that is variously friendly, wise-cracking, flirtatious, unflappable, indulgent, efficient, witty, respectful...but always attentive. The ability to continually juggle the various stages of the meal for several tables, while greeting people, dealing with cooks, punching in orders on the touchscreen, carrying heavy plates, appearing cheerful and chipper...it's not for the timid. On top of that, we are expected to remember the nuances of every regular customer's order: no cucumbers on the salad, French dressing, dry hamburger, no ice in the drink.

To make things even more complicated, entrees are placed in the window with no documentation as to which waitress, or even table, they go to. We just sort it out.

And we make it look easy.

It's not.

And then there is the interface with the cooks, who turn out a prodigious quantity of good food quickly, working—as former waitress and memoirist Debra Ginsberg wrote in her fine book, Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress — "literally in the fire," but who can't help but vent at the nearest thing: animate or inanimate.

But I like it: the fast pace, the friendly customers, the jokes of the other waitresses, the satisfaction afterward.

Things have changed in 25 years since I last hoisted a tray. Touchscreen is way now. And no keyboard. Through this one touchscreen orders are logged, clock-ins and -outs entered, employee meals ordered, checks printed, cash transactions accounted for, credit cards swiped. It's the brains of the operation.

If the touchscreen goes out of calibration, the operation grinds to a halt.

Once more or less getting the hang of things and understanding the rhythm of waiting tables, the waitress can view her job as a sociological study.

Why do they call it "waiting" if I'm always moving?

2006-11-20T14:38:00.000-08:00

Life sometimes leads one along a path more circuitous and rangy than that planned during one's salad days: the road not taken having made all the difference.

But I'm a planner, I did everything right—got a B.S., worked hard at my career, continued my education, served in my professional organization, maintained my professional network—still I ended up on this alternative path. But it's been fun and even enlightening.

Life, of course, is a journey, not a destination.

I lost my regular job in a series of follies precipitated by a change in management and my inability to keep quiet in the face of unethical dealings, unfairness, and a toxic office situation that tore my self-esteem to shreds. I became self-employed, actually a lifelong dream, but needed first to supplement my income and also to break up the isolation of a one-person consultancy with out-of-town clients.

And, yes, I'm a former Mensa member. Which means not so much that I'm smart, but that I "outsmart" standardized tests.

A neighborhood cafe posted a help wanted sign, so I created a resume listing my experience 25 years ago waiting tables during my undergraduate years at a national park concession restaurant and then at a Holiday Inn, took a deep breath, and applied. They hired me on the spot.

Let the fun begin!