It Starts with Befuddlement

 My daughter Alix and son-in-law Adam recently discovered a slowly leaking pipe. It had flooded their kitchen, essentially destroying it from the inside out. Hearing about their disaster caused a set of awful memories to resurface for me.

Over the last 10 years, Michael and I have experienced three floods inside our house. Yes, that’s three and yes, inside floods, not nature-caused floods. “How could this have happened?” you might ask. Short answer: in 2015, a faulty toilet in our bathroom overflowed while we were taking my mother to dinner on Valentine’s Day; in 2019, the infamous Texas freeze, as in “when Hell freezes over” struck and 6 of our copper pipes froze and split; and, in 2023, the valve on a pipe in our guest bathroom cracked and spewed water while we slept.

 Most people never get to experience an event like this, so I thought I would walk you through the experience. Flood discovery, I have found, follows a script. The initial squelching step into unexpected water is the WTF? moment of befuddlement. The experience is so unique (at least the first time) that you can’t comprehend it. This is quickly followed by the “oh sh*t” moment of panic, when comprehension kicks in and you realize there’s water where water should never be.

 Remember the old Marlon Brando movie A Street Car Named Desire? There’s a scene where he bellows in desperation, “Hey, Stella! Stella!” This Stella moment is the next step in the flood experience. You yell frantically for your spouse so they can share this astonishing moment with you.

 Once the shouting is over, reality sets in and the second moment of panic arrives. How do you stop the water? Where is the water even coming from? Do you need to shut down the whole system or just a local pipe? Where is the shut-off valve for the house? Where would that local pipe shut-off even be?

 When your partner joins you, you have the opportunity to re-experience the WTF? and “Oh sh*t” moments through their eyes as they take in the scene in shocked disbelief. However, instead of becoming an occasion of solidarity, it becomes the “Do something!” moment where your spouse expects you to fix it. This is similar to being the person who finds the dog pooh, the hairball, or the child covered in peanut butter. You found it, you own it.

 While you are attending to water shut off, you get to give your partner their own personal hell. “Call the insurance company!” Now they can have a moment of panic. Who do I call? What’s the phone number? Where did I put the policy? Who did we even buy insurance from this year?

 It will seem like forever, but before long the water will stop flowing and the insurance carrier will be alerted. If they’re good, they’ll have a remediation team on the way within hours, even if it’s the middle of the night. If you aren’t lucky this way, it may be a few frustrating days before a remediation company shows up. We’ve had it happen both ways.

 Meanwhile, you will spend frantic hours picking up the God-awful number of items that are on your floor, in the water or threatened by it. You will struggle to remember what this stuff is and why the hell it’s on the floor in the first place. Don’t even try; just pick it up as quickly as you can. Many wet items can be salvaged. Sadly, others can’t be. It’s amazing how quickly water can erase years of living.

 There are moments of grief and loss coming, but don’t get ahead of yourself. You have to stay focused on rescuing whatever you can and working with the remediation company on an action plan, because once the loss part hits you, you will likely be too depressed to do anything except the bare minimum.

 When I spoke to Alix after they discovered their flood, she expressed the very same stages of disaster coping that I experienced. I think this process is universal and applies to all kinds of disasters, but I can’t prove it. I was happy, though, that I could tell her about the end of the flood disaster cycle, something she won’t see for several months I’d guess.

 When it’s all over, you do not have a return to normal. No, you have brand-new stuff. The walls are rebuilt and repainted. The flooring is new and spiffy. The cupboards that you have banged around for 10 or 15 years are new and have features that put the old ones to shame, like pull-out shelves. Damaged furniture is replaced.

 You have had a significant remodeling job done and your insurance company footed most of the bill. Yes, the deductible is a bear, but it’s not as much money as a new kitchen or living room or bedroom or take-your-pick would have been. There, doesn’t that make you feel better? Not yet? Give it time, happier days are just around the corner.

 

 

The Season of Dread

 It is the season of dread for anyone who has to send gifts to another city for the holidays. Not only do you have to decide on the gifts you want to give, wrap those gifts and package them up, but you have to relinquish them to the not-so-tender ministrations of the US Postal Service or another carrier to get them to their destination. And those mailing or shipping services cost an arm and a leg these days.

 Over the years, I have mailed Christmas gifts to people in Minnesota, North Dakota, California, New York, Oregon, Missouri, Arizona, and Texas. Probably some other places that escape me at the moment. I have sent a LOT of packages into the void. Most of them have arrived, but it isn’t guaranteed.

 A package of gifts for my granddaughter Heaven, who was three at the time, was waylaid at a post office 60 or so miles from her small Texas town. Because of holiday closures, she got her Christmas gifts on January 3^rd. It’s heartbreaking to try to explain to a toddler that the presents really are coming … someday.

 A package to my friend in Minneapolis got misplaced by USPS one year. She received the package weeks after Christmas. This occurred before package tracking became a thing, and neither of us knew what had happened. Plenty of frustration over that, although the package eventually arrived.

 Another package, sent to my brother, made so many circuits around the country that by the time he received the box of candy, it was a huge, misshapen lump of chocolate in the corner of the manila envelope. The box it started out in had been beaten to a flat pulp as it was thrown from truck to truck, sack to sack.

 A greeting card with a gift card inside, sent to a granddaughter in Oregon, disappeared completely, the generous gift spent by a postal thief. I stopped sending gift cards after that, deciding that no one would know if I slipped a check inside a card. Just the other day, I heard on the news that I shouldn’t do that either – bad actors were stealing them for check washing scams. I guess we’re down to electronic payment apps now.

 Amazon (and other online ordering) became the apparent answer to these holiday mailing and shipping woes. Yes, the relatives on the receiving end would have to do the gift wrapping for us, but the gifts would get there quickly for the most part and free for people like me with Prime accounts. Yay, maybe.

 Last Friday, my Brooklyn granddaughter turned 12. After several conversations with her and with her parents, we identified two gifts that she’s really like that fit our budget. Six days before her birthday, I ordered them from Amazon and happily learned they would be delivered in three days, plenty of time for the parents to get them wrapped before the big day.

 I got an email telling me that the package was out for delivery on the appointed day. But it never arrived. Although Amazon’s tracking persisted in telling me the package was out for delivery for days after the specified date, my order record online said simply, “Your delivery is running late.” It still says that a week later, while the billing information claims the order is complete.

The annual ordeal may be different, but it isn’t gone. Now it is the dread of trying to get help for an online purchase from a system so unresponsive and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to solve anything. You can’t connect with a person right away ever. I embarked today on a quest to locate my granddaughter’s birthday presents by asking the Amazon AI for help.

 Here are the opening words of every single response the AI made to me today: “I understand your concern…” “I understand your frustration…” “I completely understand your urgency…” I understand your concern…” “I understand your concern…” “I understand your frustration…”  “I understand you’re looking for more information…”  Its answer to every one of my questions ended with some version of “Would you like me to process a refund?”

 After seven “nos” from me to the refund, and many additional questions from me trying to elicit useful information, the chatbot finally said the magic words “Looks like we need to get more help.”

Segue to the human agent.  

 I won’t bore you with the list of unhelpful, nonsensical, or redundant words the agent subjected me to after we connected. I suspect English is not their native language. The agent finally assured me that the estimated delivery will be tomorrow. Okay, phew. Tomorrow is great. Before I ended the chat session, the agent gave me this final sentiment: “Thank you for your patience and understanding. If the item will not showed tomorrow, please contact us back so that we can check our availbale [sic] options in here.”

 Yes, it is the season of dread for gift givers—because no matter how we send them, the gifts always carry a little gamble.

Ciao

The Decision that Never Goes Away

Over the last 49 years, Michael and I have had to ask ourselves some very difficult questions.

       ·       Should we get married? (Obviously, yes.)

·       Should we accept the transfer and relocate the family? Should we do that again? And again? And again? (Phew, we finally landed in Houston and stuck!)

·       Can we afford this house? This car? This vacation? (No, but we mostly bought them anyway.)

·       Are we doing everything we can/should do to raise happy, healthy kids? (They seem to have turned out okay.)

·       Should we adopt a child in our middle age? (No, but we did anyway.)

·       Will we survive this crisis? And this one? And this one? Etc, etc, etc. (We did, but never without collateral damage.)

·       Will our retirement savings last through our old age? (Hopeful, but remains to be seen.)

 I’m not saying we’re special. Everyone faces difficult questions, often many, in the course of their lives. But of all the questions we’ve faced, none has been as persistent—or as maddening—as the one that greets us every evening: what’s for dinner? It is the most fraught question in our relationship and we have to face it down every day.

 In a recent Progressive Insurance commercial, Mara—the perennially grumpy insurance agent—terrifies graduates by reminding them that they can look forward to deciding “…what’s for dinner every night for the rest of your lives.” Kudos to the copywriter who came up with that line: they hit the jackpot!

 Now, some of you are thinking to yourselves, why don’t they make a weekly meal plan, then they’d know what’s for dinner  every night. That has occurred to us periodically and we’ve even occasionally tried it for a few weeks at a time. But ultimately, that only compounds the problem. Asking “What are we going to have for dinner for the next seven days?” is more than seven times more difficult than facing tonight’s meal.

 We have tried to find a permanent solution, with no success. One can tiptoe into it: do you have any thoughts about dinner? Or: how hungry are you? One can boldly go: what do you want for dinner? One can sidestep: what do we have for dinner?

 Occasionally, one of us makes the sacrifice and offers an idea. That usually means offering to cook as well and usually results from a personal craving or burst of energy that may flag before the meal comes to fruition. Too bad, offer accepted, you’re on the hook.

 The impasse that results when neither of us has any idea what to make or the gumption to make it, usually resolves in a free-for-all. Then you’re on your own to scrounge through the fridge, pantry, and/or freezer for sustenance. I mean, there’s usually cheese, eggs, bread, and the odd can of soup in the house.

 It may also lead to a fast food run. If we’re feeling momentarily flush, it might mean going to a restaurant. The beauty of eating in a restaurant is that there will likely be left-overs, which assures a future meal. Unless someone sneaks into the fridge at midnight.

 I haven’t mentioned breakfast or lunch. We gave up on those years ago and they are strictly free-for-all meals at our house unless we have houseguests. Long ago, when we were responsible for feeding children, I know that we did this better. The kids did get regular meals and there was pre-planning because, duh, working parents. You couldn’t wing it without potential disaster, peanut butter sandwiches and cereal excepted. Back then, dinner was a duty. Now it’s a negotiation.

 So if you’re still wondering what’s for dinner tonight—join the club. We’ll be asking again tomorrow.

 

  

Succulent Thanksgiving Memories

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, I find myself less focused on the turkey and more on the way traditions shift—how the table shrinks, the menu changes, but the essence of gathering remains. My Thanksgiving memories are as succulent as a roasted turkey, gleaming brown and crisp on a platter in the middle of a laden table.

 My childhood recollections have taken on a Norman Rockwell patina, which is particularly apt since I grew up in the 50s and 60s when his hometown-America paintings graced the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. Our big family (seven kids) filled up the table even when we didn’t have company, which we often did.

 With a 20-year difference between the oldest and youngest of us, meals were always loud and boisterous, but holidays had an extra frisson of expectation and anticipation. I remember oddities, like my sister Janet in her highchair with a tiny glass of wine. My parents always poured wine for everyone at the table on holidays – even for toddlers!

 Before I graduated into adulthood, defined as responsible for making a whole Thanksgiving dinner, I joined others for what we learned to call Friendsgiving, but back then simply called a potluck. Many of those potlucks in the 70s had elements of hippie culture, noticeably marijuana in the dressing or the brownies. It was pot luck for sure!

 Eventually, my turn to produce the whole dinner came around and I threw myself into it, eager to prove that I could live up to those remembered childhood meals. Turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and green bean casserole. (And just why are green beans the veggie of Thanksgiving? They are not my favorite, but they’re ubiquitous!) Okay, confession, I have never made a green bean casserole, I always let someone bring it to share, but I will eat it. The French fried onions and mushroom soup suck me in.

 I loved to show off my cooking, but most especially, I loved to bake. Those main course items may be in my wheelhouse, but I’d rather be baking. I am really good at making pie crust, which I do the old fashioned way, the way my mother taught me, with two dinner knives cutting across each other through the flour and shortening until it becomes precisely pea-sized, then sprinkling on a little water and transforming it into flaky perfection.

 Another trick my mother taught me: always make extra pie dough that you can roll out onto a cookie sheet. Smear it with butter and sprinkle liberally with sugar and cinnamon. Bake and you will shortly have one of life’s exquisite pleasures. Sometimes I sprinkle on chopped pecans. Last year I made a quick and easy date spread and slathered that on before baking. OMG, good!

 I always bake pumpkin pies and, because Alix doesn’t like pumpkin, French apple pies, which have a crumble topping instead of a top crust. (My apple peeler-corer-slicer is probably the best investment I ever made with Pampered Chef!) In my heyday, I made two of each, but there aren’t enough of us to eat that many nowadays.

 In the past, we hosted big Thanksgiving dinners for friends and family, the more the merrier, but things change. For the last few years, we’ve joined old friends for dinner at the Red Lion Pub, a notable Thanksgiving provisioner in Houston. The food has been delicious and plentiful—there’s always enough for leftovers— but it comes to the table ready to eat. There’s no golden-breasted turkey to admire and the pie is an added cost. Oh well, I’ll always have my homemade pies to enjoy.

 This year we are joining Alix and Adam at his mother’s house. Carol has graciously hosted before. We have six adult children plus a couple of their spouses and a handful of grandkids between us, but the most we can muster in Houston on an average Thanksgiving is six people total. It’s still a family dinner, but not like my memories.

 Whether at a crowded table or a quiet pub, the heart of Thanksgiving is the same: finding joy in what is, not just what was.

 I hope you get a Thanksgiving that gives you joy!

 Tschṻβ (Tschuss)

Stepping and Christmas. What a Weekend!

 Many of my weekly posts are reflections on activities or experiences I have had in the previous week. This week, two activities are vying for attention, and I decided to write about both of them. It’s a Saturday night/Sunday afternoon special report.

 Saturday night we attended a performance of Step Afrika!, a 30-year-old Washington, D.C. dance company that specializes in step dancing. I hadn’t ever heard of stepping before I saw it and, to be honest, I thought we were seeing a company of dancers from an African nation. We were not.

 Wikipedia describes stepping as “a form of percussive dance in African-American culture that uses the performer’s entire body as an instrument to produce complex rhythms and sounds through a mixture of footsteps, spoken word, and hand claps.” Step Afrika! also added drums, flute and saxophone, and singing to the mix.

 We are dance aficionados. We have season tickets to the Houston Ballet, attend four or five dance programs a year that, like this one, are brought to town by Performing Arts Houston, and attend many small company or pre-professional company programs in Houston and the surrounding area. Trips this year have included Sam Houston State University in Huntsville and AIMED Dance in Beaumont.

 That is to say, we know dancing. And we have never seen dancing like the movement swirling before our eyes on Saturday night. They presented an all-encompassing visual display—feet moving faster than the eye could follow, legs repositioning in ways the brain couldn’t decipher, hands clapping rhythms that beat right into our bodies.

 It was a “Wait, what!?” kind of experience that made both halves of the evening flash by as though we were there for minutes, not hours. The performers engaged the audience throughout the program, mostly with invitations to clap, and call-and-response exchanges.

 Black audience members outnumbered white ones significantly, and, as in Black churches, people joined right in with shouts of encouragement and joy as the performance unfolded. I was shouting and clapping myself before long. What a night!

 This brings us to Sunday afternoon. The Houston Ballet sponsors a huge Christmas fair every year called the Nutcracker Market. When I say huge, I mean enormous. It brings in $6 million dollars over four days to support dance education for the Ballet.

 I have never attended, primarily because I’m too cheap to buy a $20 ticket and the $25 parking at the venue—which is part of Houston’s football stadium—is very difficult. However, the Ballet included two free tickets in our subscription package this year. I have been excited about going since April and had a long-standing arrangement to go with my daughter Alix.

 That all changed when I broke my foot. There was no way I could manage getting around on my knee walker in that vast space with those vast crowds. I sadly decided to give the tickets away, but Alix intervened. I still have the old wheelchair from my non-walking days of illness. She offered to do the driving and the wheeling for our adventure. I offered to cover the parking and incidentals. Ta-da! We had a plan.

 Parking was horrible. It took 40 minutes to drive to the venue and another 40 minutes to find a space. Using my handicapped placard, we managed to weave our way through numerous parking lots on secret routes that the attendants whispered to us. We eventually ended up right at the front door of the Nutcracker Market. How about that!?

 Inside we found a riot of Christmas paraphernalia, gifts and treats of all magnitudes, costumed visitors that included families in matching Christmas jammies, friends in matching nutcracker outfits, and every sort of red and green design you can imagine on shirts and leggings. We drank in a delightful visual feast.

 I love Christmas and have a really extensive collection of Santas and other seasonal knick-knacks that I love to put out every year, but I do not need another one! I steadfastly refused to buy anything that required a place to put it. That left food.

 Alix and I sampled every single offering we could find, and I eventually left with Mexican vanilla popcorn, Wisconsin baked cheese, sugar-free (mostly) saltwater taffy, a giant cashew turtle (for Michael), and one gift for a friend. I went way over budget because I didn’t plan to buy anything. Silly me.

 On the way out, I bought us both a large soda for the road. That cost $19!! I can get pretty incensed over the abuse of customers at convention-type venues. Just did it at the Quilt Festival, too. Highway robbery, but we needed the drinks. Alix and I breezed out of the parking lot and made it home in good time.

 Stepping and Christmas. It was a wonderful weekend! I wish you could have been there.

Tschüß (Tschüss)

Finding My Inner Cobbler

 

Several months ago, my quilt guild announced a class coming up in November on making quilted sneakers. My brain exploded! Making Quilted Sneakers!! I HAVE to do that. I already loved handmade and custom-made shoes. In fact, I own two pairs. The idea of walking around in the world in fabulous sneakers (yes, mine would be fabulous!) that I made myself just rocked. I signed up on the spot.

 A prodigious amount of work had to be completed before the actual class, and I undertook it with relish. First challenge, acquire the shoe kit. The kits are not readily available, but Tandy Leather sells them, so I went to the local shop. The shoe is sized in four ways: American men, European men, European women, and finally American women.

 Because of the sizing, all the American woman shoes are half-sizes, so my size 10s were going to have to settled for 10½s. And I would have to wait several weeks for the order to arrive at my local store or pay an exorbitant sum for shipping. Spoiled by Amazon Prime, I waited.

 When I opened the box, I found the inner and outer soles, three different patterns for the uppers, and very basic instructions. The patterns included a high-cut, mid-cut, and low-cut silhouette for the uppers. If I made a quilted fabric, I wanted as much of it as possible to show, so I went right for the high-cut pattern.

 Now, to design and construct the quilted fabric. I spent a lot of time thinking about what parts of the quilt would show on the sneakers. It would have to be a small pattern, meaning that I would have to sew even smaller pieces of fabric together to create the look I wanted. After lots of quilt bingeing, I decided to make a pinwheel design.

 Each pinwheel consisted of a square made from eight pieces of fabric sewn together. I needed to make 25 pinwheels to have a large enough quilt. And—this is tricky—I needed the two shoes to be mirror images of each other as much as possible. Planning the layout required contemplation and, ultimately, a little help from my friendly Copilot AI to do calculations.

 I had raided my fabric stash and discovered forgotten riches: an ombre charm pack in coordinated jewel tone colors. (A charm pack, for non-quilters, is a selection of precut five-inch squares. Ombre simply means that the colors graduate from light to dark.) Copilot told me didn't have quite enough, but with a little more searching, I found extra pieces that blended in.

 Each square had to be cut into four 2½” pieces, matched to 2½” white pieces and sewn back together into 5” squares that now looked like pinwheels. It took some time, but the final product pleased me. Quilting is kind of magical even when you know what’s behind the curtain!

 

Before I sewed all those pinwheels together, I looked at my pattern and figured out how the fabric would actually fit on the shoes and plotted, as best I could, the optimum layout for the project. It should have been straightforward, but it never seems to be. I ripped out a lot of seams and turned a lot of squares around before I got everything in the right place. But, finally, success!

 The actual class took place last Wednesday. Me and my handy-dandy knee scooter showed up with Michael schlepping my sewing machine and a large tote bag of paraphernalia. The classroom space was cramped and I was oversized, but friendly classmates helped me make it work. Crafting the shoes took patience and attention to detail. There were do-overs aplenty. Hand sewing through the layers of quilted fabric and the rubber soles took tremendous strength and concentration. My right thumb tip is still numb 5 days later!

 In the course of that day, I only managed to finish one shoe, but I had the foresight to create a LEFT shoe. Since my right foot is encased in a boot for the foreseeable future, that's all I need. I left the class a very happy camper!

Tschüß (Tschüss)

P.S. I would not recommend trying this without a qualified teacher. There are some extremely tricky parts and other parts that are not intuitive at all.

 

Broken

Today has not been a regular Monday, so I am behind on writing my blog post. I spent the day dealing with an orthopedic doctor about my broken foot and with buying equipment to help me get around. For those who may not have seen my Facebook post yesterday, I had a run-in with the door of my dishwasher Saturday night. Tried to walk around the open door to throw something in the trash and caught my shoe on the corner. That somehow flipped me over and I landed on my fanny and my right foot. The dishwasher was uninjured.

 I knew immediately that something was broken, but stayed in denial until the pain got too bad. Then I dragged Michael out of bed to take me to the ER. They took x-rays and diagnosed a broken bone in my 5^th metatarsal. After putting me in a temporary cast and giving me pain medicine (yay!), they sent me home.

 As it turns out, I do not have a broken bone in my foot. No, I have two broken bones. One of them is fairly minor, the other more serious. Here’s how the doctor put it as he pointed to my x-rays, “If you were a professional athlete, they’d ignore this one and immediately do surgery on this one. But since you aren’t, you can just take the time needed to heal naturally.”

 And how much time is that? A long time, as it happens. Could be months. For now, I can’t put weight on the foot. And, since it’s my right foot, I can’t drive. If I’m lucky, for a month, but it could be two. This is terrible news for Michael, who is now my designated driver, because I have lots of activities and appointments and lunch dates. For his sake, I’ll have to trim them down. And there are things I want to do on days he can’t drive me, so that will be disappointing. It looks like my quilting bee is off the calendar for the duration because they meet on Michael’s day to lunch with the boys.

 Geting around from Saturday night until today was awful. They gave me crutches at the hospital, but I couldn’t manage them and fell again before I gave up trying. I tried to use my cane and then my old walker, which Michael kindly climbed into the attic to retrieve. You know, with only one working foot, you have to hop. To hop, you have to have quad and shoulder strength. I am sadly lacking in both.

 The next option was to unearth my old wheelchair from the garage and set it up, which took a lot of WD-40. It’s about 25 years old, so very heavy and unwieldy compared to modern wheelchairs. It worked though; I could thankfully sit and move myself around. But it doesn’t fit through any doorways, so my bedroom and both bathrooms required me to get around by hopping on one leg. I did not know my bedroom was so big until I faced hopping across it to the bathroom door!

 The doctor put me in a walking boot (but told me not to walk in it!) and suggested a knee scooter. My sister Janet used one for a long time while healing a serious foot injury, so I knew what they were. The local Walgreens had one in stock, and so this afternoon, I finally got wheels that work. Thank goodness!

 The knee scooter is not perfect. It turns like a tractor-trailer rig and requires maneuvering to back up, so getting around in tight spaces, like the bathroom or hallway, is tricky. (It made me think of my dad backing campers into the driveway: always an ordeal.) But it is doable. I’m back in control and absolutely chuffed about it. I have a big class on Wednesday that I thought I might have to miss, but now I can attend. That adventure should be next week’s blog and I’m expecting it to be a doozy.  

 For now, I’m fairly exhausted by all the commotion and my shoulders are aching—not to mention my foot—so I’m going to go to bed early. What a weekend!! Here’s to a better month ahead.

 Tschüß (Tschüss)