Googling May Cure Boredom

Last week I got an email message from a woman named Gail whom I'd never heard of.  She had been sitting at her computer and must have been bored, she said, because on a whim she Googled the name of her great-grandmother, Ludmila Pinkas.  Gail knew nothing about her except her name and so was completely blown away to find there was information about Ludmila out on the Internet, including a relatively comprehensive family tree.  My name and email address were attached to it because Ludmila Pinkas was my great-grandmother too.

So my second cousin Gail and I have been corresponding back and forth.  I have supplied her with additional information about her grandmother, who was the sister of my grandmother.  And she has cleared up some confusion I had about her grandfather.

During the first 25 years of my genealogical searchings, the shortest branches on my family tree were on my father's Bohemian side.  I knew the names of my father's parents, and I knew his maternal grandparents' names, and that was it.  Then in 2004 I was able to engage the services of an amateur researcher in the Czech Republic (who charged a dirt-cheap $5 an hour, compared with professional genealogists who get between $50 and $400 an hour).  Now I have the names and dates of my Bohemian ancestors going back five and six generations.

And so does Cousin Gail. 

You can't take it with you

This was a day for standing in lines.  There was a long line at the bank and a short but slow line at the farm stand where I stopped to get corn and a medium line at the pharmacy pick-up window.

I got two refills, and since I don't usually run out of these two at the same time, when the clerk rang up the cost at $85, I was slightly startled.  But, I'm required to have these -- they are heart-attack-survivor drugs.

Still, I am a senior citizen on social security, the famous fixed income, and I was thinking how much I would rather spend the 85 bucks on something else.  But then I realized I couldn't spend it on anything if I was dead, so I shut up.

The Help

The hired girl came today.  She is 13 years old and comes once a week for an hour to do our bidding, mostly to fetch and carry.  We pay her $20 whether she stays the full hour or not.  Some weeks we have less for her to do.

She gathers trash from all over the house, hauls the baskets of clean laundry up from the basement, distributes toilet paper to both bathrooms, helps change beds.  Sometimes we straighten up a cabinet or break down cardboard boxes in the garage.  She's willing to do anything, so sometimes I give her a pair of scissors and have her cut off that plastic that holds soda bottles together.  Stuff like that. 

Having a hired girl makes me feel a little bit like a 19th-century farm wife. Of course, if that were the case, she'd live in and be at my beck and call 24/7.  She would be an orphan, of course, and Irish, and probably real stupid.  I would be able to abuse her verbally and even beat her when I thought she deserved it or whenever I was just in a mood to take my discontent out on somebody else.  And if I were a 19th-century farm wife, I'm sure my level of discontent would be enough to kill her.

Just the other month

I was just reading something I wrote the other day which contained the phrase, "the other day."  That's one of those English idioms that is generally understood although it doesn't make a lot of sense.  But that's pretty much what an idiom is, I guess.

Taken literally -- not advisable with idioms but something I absolutely love to do anyway -- that would mean there are actually only four available days:  yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the other day.  Well, no -- I'm wrong.  We do also have the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.

So, when exactly was the other day?

There are some lively debates on the Internet about it.  It appears to be universally agreed that the other day was a recent day, but there are those who wish actually to assign a specific number of days to it, three days being particularly popular among them.

That could work according to our collection of available days -- yesterday is one day ago, and the day before yesterday is two days ago, so the other day could be three days ago.  But what about four or five days ago?  And if we get to six days ago, we are treading dangerously close to last week.

I begin to wonder if there is an etymological link between idiom and idiot.

This could be catching

On NPR this morning, I heard about a concept called "psychological contagion," which I find rather fascinating.  What that is, basically, is our way of thinking that things which have come into contact with each other become connected; in fact, even ineluctably linked.

An example they used was the way you might feel about your grandmother's ring and an exact copy of it.  Most people would like grandmother's ring better simply because she had actually worn it.  That explains why the round blue glass dish I bought at an antique store, which is exactly the same as one my mother used to have, doesn't mean as much to me as the square blue glass dish of hers that I still have.

The story in which they brought this concept up was actually about people's aversion to drinking water that has been recycled from sewage.  People cannot separate the two ideas, even though, as one researcher pointed out, all water has been pooped in by something or somebody at one time or another.

But I understand it.  There were times when I'd be standing at the drinking fountain at work filling my water bottle, and I would hear a toilet flush in one of the nearby restrooms.  No matter how the logical and intellectual side of my brain told me to ignore it, somewhere down deep there was a squeamish little shiver. 

B, L and HGT for supper

Yes, summer is here.

We welcomed it with sweet corn from the farm stand, and tonight we'll be saying hello to BLTs made with our own home-grown Ts.  Tomorrow or the next day the pickled horseshoe baloney I'm about to make will be ready to eat.

My mother would put together a meal of sweet corn, pickled horseshoe baloney, and sliced tomatoes several times a summer, especially on days when she deemed it too hot to cook.  Those suppers were generally consumed on the picnic table in the back yard in the shade of the big, beautiful sugar maple tree.

My father built that picnic table and its two benches out of two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and what seemed like several hundred bolts.  Very sturdy it was, but there was the problem of his having painted it white.  After the first attempted use of it on a sunny summer afternoon, it got repainted gray.  Good thinking, Dad.

Maybe there's hope yet

I just did something I rarely do.  I made good use of free time.

Someone I used to know was so spontaneous that if she had a free hour, she'd go to the beach.  Who goes to the beach when they only have an hour to spare?  Well, she did.  I always wished I could be like that.  Today I almost was.

I have an appointment today at 1:00.  I must leave by 12:30 to get there on time.

At 11:45 I was showered and dressed and all ready to go.  Normally I would have spent the next 45 minutes reading a book or playing stupid computer games, waiting for it to be time to go.  Instead, I washed the dishes, which took about 15 minutes.  I even had time left over to write this.

Maybe spontaneity will become a permanent part of me yet.

Garbage Day

Household refuse removal occurs on Wednesdays in our town.  The individuals who are responsible for removing said refuse are known to me collectively or individually as "the garbage," as in, "The garbage comes today."

I mean no disrespect to the persons who earn an honest living in refuse removal, those gentlemen who dump the items from my 40-gallon bin into the back of their truck and then drop my 40-gallon bin halfway between the street and the public sidewalk right in the middle of the driveway where it blocks entrance thereto and requires any person who wishes to drive a car into said driveway to stop in the street, alight from their vehicle and move the offending bin to one side, all the while enduring curses and honked horns as other motorists wait impatiently or, worse, do not wait but recklessly flirt with potential fatalities by attempting to go around the obstructing automobile in the face of on-coming traffic.

Maybe The Garbage isn't such a bad way to refer to those guys after all.

N E I (the opposite of T M I)

I just opened a package of frozen fish fillets (ocean perch) which is going to be our supper tonight.  I am thawing them out even as I write.

There was a small notch at the edge of the plastic bag they came in with a notation to "Tear here."  I believe if you go back in time and blogs you will find my thoughts on the prospect of somebody inventing a package that says "To open tear here" that would actually open if I tore there.  I had to use scissors on this one.

Each fillet comes wrapped in its own plastic, so I dumped the lot into a sink full of cold water.  Before tossing the outer "tear here" bag, I thought I'd check the back to see if there was any useful information.  It says in order to thaw the fish more quickly than over night in the refrigerator (which never thaws anything over night), I was to submerge them in cold water.  Ha!  Way ahead of 'em on that one.

I also found the following:

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS:  Cook from frozen or thawed. 
Remove all packaging.  Grease or cooking spray the pan, or aluminum foil if grilling.  Season as desired.  Cook until fish flakes easily with a fork.

Cook from frozen or thawed?  Who writes this stuff?

Remove all packaging?  You mean, don't cook the plastic?  And when did "cooking spray" become a verb?  If you put the fish on aluminum foil on the grill, you are not grilling, you are frying.  And I think the final message should be changed to "Cook until it's done."  That would finish it off nicely.

Okay, I did finally notice a tiny box underneath this paragraph that says

Preheat 425F
Frozen: 13 minutes
Thawed:  9-11 minutes

So, they do give you enough to go on after all, assuming you are adequately perceptive. 

But why would it take exactly 13 minutes if the fish is frozen, but if it's thawed, the cooking time could vary by as much as two minutes?  Huh?  Answer me that.

There will be squished baby yellow potatoes to go with, though.  Yum.

Pick me! Pick me!

I guess there are people who always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up and then they became whatever it was.  I never thought I'd end up doing what I ended up doing.

When I was about three I wanted to become a pin boy in a bowling alley, which I thought was a way cool thing to be.  By the time I might have been old enough to be considered for such a position, however, they had invented the automatic pin spotter which made pin boys obsolete.

Other ambitions I recall were to become a fireman, a teacher, a soldier, a scientist, or a concert pianist.  But I was really inspired by the ten o'clock news on WBBM-TV (channel 2) in Chicago.  When it first started in the mid-1950's it was fifteen minutes, but they later expanded it to half an hour.  It featured Fahey Flynn reading the news and P. J. Hoff with the weather.

This guy was not a weatherman.  This was way before it occurred to television stations how authoritative it would make them look if they had a trained meteorologist do the weather.  Some stations had a weather girl (isn't that how Oprah got her start?) and WBBM had P. J. Hoff, who was a cartoonist.  He drew happy suns and angry clouds and giant raindrops on a big paper weather map with what looked like a Magic Marker with a one-inch tip.

When it was time to report the current conditions, they would show a drawing of a man in an office sitting behind a big desk looking out the window.  He was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk and his hands behind his head.  Hoff called this dude the "Vice President in Charge of Looking Out the Window."

If ever there was a job I aspired to, it was that.

Is it too late for flash cards?

When I was in the fourth grade I was supposed to memorize the multiplication tables, but I never bothered.  Some I know pretty good, some I can come up with if I think about it hard enough, and some are a lost cause -- fours, sixes, sevens, and eights are especially hard for me.

I get around it by adding things up.  For example, if I need to multiply 7 x 6, I would multiply 7 times 3 (21) and add 21 to 21 to get 42.

The other day I was figuring how many tablespoons there are in a pound of butter.  There are 8 tablespoons per stick, and 4 sticks.  I couldn't remember how much 8 x 4 is, but I do know 8 x 8 is 64, and half of 8 is 4, so 8 x 4 would be half of 64, which is 32.  Did you get that?

Nines are easy -- you just multiply by ten and subtract, as in 6 x 9:  6 times 10 is 60, so 6 times 9 would be 60 minus 6, or 54.

The really nasty bugaboo is 8 x 6.  I was taught, back there in the fourth grade, that 8 x 6 (or, conversely, 6 x 8) is equal to the number of stars in the flag.  So 6 x 8 must be 50.  Somehow that never seems to turn out exactly right.