Category: Life

4 Comments on The Cat’s Mother, the Stoner’s Dog: More Conversations With “Huh?”

June 24, 2010

8:44 pm

Glasgow, Miscellany

“He” and “she” in Glasgow simply do not dwell; who sayeth “She” might call the kitty’s mother just as well…

This is “the cat.”

Apparently the cat is a “she.”

Oh, let us explain: It was one of those surreal work conversations D. often has, when his boss is tense. (D’s boss was tense this time because D. was leaving the office, and will be letting T. hide behind him in D.C. for a week — and his boss really hates it when D. leaves because D. makes Said Boss look good, and Said Boss is rendered clueless without him. :cough:) Standing at his administrative assistant’s desk, D’s boss asked for the nth time, “Do we have your contact numbers?” D. nodded to the administrative assistant and said, “Yes, she has them.”

To which the secretary sputtered, “She? She’s the cat’s mother!”

At which point the needle skittered across the record and everything stopped. “What?!” D. asked.

“She is the cat’s mother,” the woman repeated impatiently.

D. shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Not getting it.”

D’s boss then took great pride in explaining to him that saying “he” or “she” is rude and that D. shouldn’t use those words.

Sadly, neither Boss nor Admin could tell him how the cat fit in there, or why.

“It’s just not done here,” was the best answer he got.

Okay, let’s take a brief detour. Many students in the Olden Days of American Education learned little rhyming phrases like, “I before E, except after C, or when sounding an A as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh,'” and, I discovered recently, many of them were not told what the heck that meant. (It’s also an anCIEnt, unsCIEntific, ineffiCIEnt, insuffiCIEnt and defiCIEnt rule, to which there are at least a hundred or more exceptions.) To your adult mind now, the spelling rule is kind of self-explanatory, but imagine you learned this when you were nine, okay? Not a lot of clue at that point for some. Now, let’s jump to Glasgow’s citizens, at the same age. Apparently, they were scolded — by their elders — about referring to their parents as “he” or “she” instead of as Mother Dear and Father Dearest. “She” is such a careless phrase, when referencing the woman who birthed you. Why, you could be calling the cat, with that “she!”

(Actually? NOT REALLY. Especially not if the person to whom you refer is IN THE CONVERSATION RIGHT WITH YOU, but WHATEVER.)

Said Boss and Admin have carried from childhood the rule about not using “he” and “she” without knowing when that usage is rude, and now simply eschew all pronouns, apparently. It’s kind of funny, but kind of bizarre as well.

Perhaps the admin simply “disna have a Scooby.”

Are you feeling the need to say, “What?!” here? D. did. On his business trip down to Southampton this week, D’s coworker was grumping about the client, and claimed that they didn’t have a scooby. After a bit of questioning, the coworker decoded. Scooby is a short for Scooby Doo, the supremely stupid and annoying semi-talking dog from that horrific 60’s/70’s cartoon. A Scooby is Glasgow’s version of the Cockney rhyming slang. Scooby Doo… is a clue. So, the boss doesn’t have a clue.

So, now we have a cat, and a stoner’s dog.

Yeah, we’re feeling the lack of a scooby at this point, too.

Well, we’re off. Next dispatch will be from our hotel in balmy (95°F/35°C) downtown Washington D.C., which should be interesting. Stay tuned.

Added John Innes

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June 12, 2010

9:19 pm

Life

We swung by the Roots & Fruits on Byers Rd., we picked up a bag of compost. Though it took us awhile to figure it out, compost is potting soil in these auld isles, and we were glad to find even a small bag outside of a home and garden store — potting stuff isn’t something you can just pick up at your local Raley’s out in front.

We only looked at it closely after we purchased it, though, and when we saw the name, we did a double take. With Added John Innes?! What? Surely that doesn’t mean…

No, no, no. No weirdly composting Englishman has been added to our plants. (Not that we know, anyway.) John Innes, however, was a real person — a nineteenth century philanthropist who did charitable works and donated his lands, at his death, to create a public park and an horticultural institute. Thus, the John Innes name goes on — no longer in the form of a man, but in the form of the loam-based composts (with added peat, sand, and fertilizer) which bear his name.

We still think they could have explained that on the bag…

Shameless Self Promotion

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June 10, 2010

10:02 pm

Life

Pssst.

The Hunger Mountain Journal is a print and online journal of the arts produced by the Vermont College of Fine Arts — in which T. has just been published. Check it out online.

Her piece for Flipside is part of an ongoing discussion in young adult literature circles — at issue: *teens of color on book covers. Should there be more representation of teens of color? Should book covers for appearance-conscious teens be ethnicity neutral? Does everyone always judge a book by its cover –? What does seeing a nonwhite person on a book say to a teen from the dominant culture? What does it say to nonwhite teens?

T. looked at the issue from one angle, while young adult author Mitali Perkins looked at it from another angle. Who’s right? Or is this really an issue of right vs. wrong? Even if you’ve never even thought about this before — and admittedly, not a whole lot of people do — please read both sides and join the discussion! (ALSO: bonus T.-created book cover, using the top of her niece’s head will also entertain!)

*FYI: this question came up in the publishing world recently over something called in Twitter circles “#coverfail.” The publisher, Bloomsbury USA put a Caucasian model on the cover of a book written by a Caucasian Australian woman… about an African American girl. Color everyone confused, there. Readers quietly rioted — and then rioted LOUDLY. The UK Guardian actually published a piece about it, as the furor was so focused and intent that it was heard ’round the world. After some truly appalling excuses and faux apologies, the publishing company quietly reissued the book with a new cover. This made some people feel powerful, because they made a giant company listen, and part with money. And now more ~~people~~ writers are talking about the issue than ever before.

Happy Thursday.

Confectionary Conflicts

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June 8, 2010

8:17 am

Glasgow

Probably the tales you hear from fellow residents are the best gauge of any city. Those anecdotes add heft and weight to one’s own suppositions, and sometimes provide startling conclusions to stories you’d already made up about the place where you live…

We have frequently mused over the fact that the ice cream trucks drive around here ALL year ’round, and generally at eight or nine at night, come winter — which to us was just mighty strange. Our friend K. said Glaswegian friends of hers mentioned that winter ice cream trucks were likely selling Bovril – the salty meat broth that’s been selling since the 1870’s — and smokes. Being snarky and living in a sort of borderline neighborhood at the time, we assumed that it was smokes they were selling, all right, just possibly a different variation of herb. Turns out, while we were being sarcastic, we were more right than we knew. Back in the 80’s, Glasgow indeed had ice cream vans selling drugs — which led to madness and mayhem. Glasgow had … Ice Cream Wars.

We have The War on Drugs in the U.S., which necessitates beagles sniffing our luggage in the SF airport; in Glasgow, they had a gelato garda mockingly called the Special Chimes Unit (instead of Special Crimes Unit) which consisted of the Strathclyde Police in patrol cars, following all the tinny-music-playing ice cream trucks around town, trying to catch them in the act of selling drugs and fencing stolen goods (and protecting them from rival ice cream vendors, who happened to be carrying shotguns).

That must have been a bottom-of-the-barrel assignment. Rookie: “What’s my job today, Chief?” Chief: “Well, go out to the squad car, roll down the window, and …listen…”

People actually laughed about this, at first. There were reports of the usual nonsense people get up to during drug wars, but most of it was vehicular-related – windshield bashing and van raids, and ramming and cursing and screaming and fistfights in the street, much of which is all in a day’s work in parts of Glasgow. And then in 1984 a young man was killed – along with four other members of his family, in a house fire allegedly set by rival ice cream men.

People in the city were incensed, of course, and screamed for justice. The police, under pressure, rounded up a whole bunch of people. The story concluded in 2004 – after twenty years of trials and accusations and protests and hunger strikes – in their zeal to arrest, the police picked up at least a couple who continued to insist on their innocence. You can read all the details in the BBC archives, if you’re of a mind to…

…but as time moves on, most people want to forget such ugly things about their city. Which is why, this afternoon, when an ice cream truck playing Yankee Doodle went ’round our crescent, people followed it, blowing their horns until it pulled over. Parked, it was mobbed by the kids who’d abandoned their games in the park. No police, and no frowning faces around the ice cream truck.

Just a little sugar on a muggy afternoon.

Data Protection Woes

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June 7, 2010

4:05 pm

Glasgow

Twice, today, I’ve had the UK Data Protection Act quoted at me, to my disadvantage. I generally like the idea of data protection, but frequently find myself at a disadvantage because of it. Why should this be the case?

The first time today was on the phone with British Airlines. As it turns out, they’re having a “strike action,” so have canceled some flights and booked passengers onto other flights. Without making it clear to the passengers that this had been done. I found this out by checking the flight status of our guests, only to find out that their flight out of London, Heathrow had been canceled. So, I telephoned B.A. to ask whether they’d been booked onto another flight, or what would happen. B.A. informed me that they could not discuss this with me, as I was not the person on the flight, and that our guests would have been informed if their flight had been canceled, implying that our guests simply neglected to inform us of their flight plans. That would be rather silly, as we’re to meet them at the airport.

If the person at B.A. had been willing to speak with me, I could have booked them a flight out of London, Gatwick. Instead, our guests are trapped at Heathrow until 8 p.m. – a layover of nearly 7 hours. They found out when they arrived at Heathrow, at which point they telephone me and told me that the oh so helpful B.A. people couldn’t get them on an earlier flight from Gatwick. Oh, the service.

The second unfortunate use of the Data Protection Act was in speaking with the Royal (pain in the backside) Mail.

A few weeks go, I ordered a pair of wired keyboards, US key layout, to replace our wireless keyboards, one of which has given up the ghost, the other of which misses the occasional keypress (truly annoying, when you type in excess of 100 words per minute, as we both do). So where are these keyboards? Well, Royal (can’t find our house) Mail claims to have delivered them on the 2nd. Right. Sure. The fact that T. is home writing most every day, as am I?

The first person to speak with me insisted that there was nothing she could do for me – that I’d have to contact the person who shipped the package, and they could initiate a search for the item. To tell me anything about the package before it had been delivered would be a violation of the Data Protection Act. HUH? Apparently, the intended recipient of a package can’t ask the shipping company about why the package has not shown up! That would have to be done by the person who shipped the package. Otherwise … their … data … wouldn’t be … protected?! Right. Even though the Royal (can’t find our street) Mail claims to have delivered it. To us.

The second person (yes – I called back, having realized I was speaking with someone of less than stellar mental capacity) told me that, no, what the “delivered 02-June” status actually meant was that they’d taken the package out that day. They should have delivered it. But, for whatever reason, they didn’t … and that, “this was a disciplinary matter, and I need you to take down this case number.” Huh?

Ignoring the second person (but I sure hope that they get our package to us – and teach the postmen the difference between Court, Street, Lane, Terrace, and Crescent, all of which are within one block of each other in this mad city), the first person believed in the magic of citing the Data Protection Act. It works wonders, apparently. She got quite sniffy when I was not rocked back in awe by her invocation of Law.

Any port in a storm, I suppose: if you need an excuse for customer disservice, you can claim that you’re doing it for somebody’s data protection. Somehow I don’t think that either of these uses were what was intended.

-D

Clouds. Rain. Strikes. And Guests, Of Course.

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June 7, 2010

12:00 pm

Life

First, please take a moment to ooh and ahhh with us over the Wardrobe of Enchantment. It was alleged to take five hours to construct, but since we opened the box and unloaded it one day, took another day to separate all the bits and pieces of hinges and bolts into organized piles (and then stare at them), and finally D. put it all together a third day, we cannot speak to the subject of build time. We can, however, say that the directions were, in the words of others, “absolute rubbish,” and it astounds us constantly that people who make flat-packed furniture directions know nothing about scale, but never mind. It’s DONE, done, done. And just in time.

It’s weird. You can love people a lot, and spend six weeks inhabiting their house (which, we might add, has FIVE bathrooms to our one) and still be very, very, very nervous when they say they’d like to come stay with you.

You don’t want to hear about how many times we’ve dusted, vacuumed, swept and gritted our teeth over the fact that Leslie downstairs is having her bathroom torn out and the door to the building is propped open — letting in the dust from another building project up the road, not to mention the plaster dust and general gak from the remodel here. There are a group of five guys trooping in and out, as well as building-rattling thumps, occasional snatches of loud singing (I’ve got a feelin’ — woo-hoo — tha tonight’s gonna be a good night… — now, add Scottish accent and exaggerated lounge lizard style), slamming doors, electric saws, and clouds of cigarette smoke. (We’ve made a point of letting the guys know we’re in the building, and they’ve courteously toned down that smoking/slamming thing. Mostly.)

Aside from the drifting dirt, yesterday it got really overcast — after several warmish days where you could peep over the hedge and see the whole neighborhood out in the park. The Met Office reported that there would be partial sun for the week, so we didn’t worry. T. then thought to check a forecast that has a 50/50 chance of being correct (which means not the Met Office) and got online again an hour later.

(Okay: let’s just be blunt. T. is paranoid, and has a little OCD, and was trying to negotiate with the weather gods by way of checking multiple forecasts. It’s kind of like gambling — somehow the more places you look, the better your odds of getting what you want.) Well, Murphy’s Law or some such was obviously in effect …and the newly updated forecast showed rain every single day this week.

Sure enough, the heavens opened this morning.

Well, never mind — as a Seattle-ite once told us, if you wait for dry weather, you’ll never go anywhere. That’s doubly true in Scotland. Our guests were well-warned to bring caps and windbreakers, so we’re sure they’re well prepared (although rumor has it that one of them packed shorts, because “that’s what you wear on vacation.” Um, to Tahiti, maybe, not so much here, if you’re from a warmer climate… Oh, well, he’ll figure it out, and it’s really not actually cold – just wet. And breezy). We’ve altered our castle viewing plans only the tiniest bit, and made sure we know the location of every pub and tea shop along the way, just in case we need to duck indoors and get out of the wet.

Other than waiting for the Danish-style pastry to bake, re-potting the plants (What? You don’t re-pot your plants when you have guests arriving?) and making a quick trip to the chiropractor to get adjusted for the week (Nothing to do with our guests – or the futon. Honest.), we figured we were ready at about noon. Our guests were due to arrive on a 1:35 flight, and it was going to be a quick nip out to the doctor, and on to the airport.

We reckoned without British Airways, who has, in fact, canceled the London to Glasgow leg of their flight, and has given them a seven hour layover in London. SEVEN HOURS! They’re now arriving at 10 p.m., and will have been on the “road” for twenty hours. And although they can always take advantage of being in London and shop, still — it’s SEVEN HOURS. You could take a train from Victoria Station and get here faster than that.

We checked with the airline to ask what on earth was going on, and found out that there’s a strike.

And here we were concerned with volcanoes. If there’s a strike, surely now things are back to business as usual around here. We’ll expect the Royal Mail to follow suit shortly.

::sigh::

The thing about guests is that they force you to do all the things you were going to do, but put off, thinking, “when I get around to it.” It feels strange to be in our flat when, for once, everything is …done. But! We’re ready for anything, now.

Mostly.

June 7, in retrospect

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June 7, 2010

7:25 am

June 7, 2009 found us back in Glasgow, wondering why we’d only bought a single book of postcards from the Castello del Buonconsiglio, in Trento (on June 3). Such a fabulous castle, and we only bought a single book of postcards (which we still have, being greedy that way). Rather than send the postcards out and lose them, we planned to photograph them and turn them into our own postcards (via Moo.com). We still haven’t done so. Perhaps it’s time to make some postcards again?

When we first came to Glasgow we sent out postcard after postcard, trying to stay in touch with people back home. We’ve stopped, though, for some reason. Probably because we’ve run out of postcards, for one thing, but … somehow, it just doesn’t seem necessary: we connect with people via email and skype, and have somewhat adapted to living away from home. I miss the postcards, though, if only because they’re such a personal thing – they’re a reaching out in a very tangible way to someone far off, saying that they’re important enough to compose something in ink, on paper.

Expect a postcard, people. Moo.com will be sending us a package soon, and then we’ll be dangerous.

-D

June 5, in retrospect

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June 5, 2010

7:49 am

In 2000, we were beginning our second summer in Santa Rosa. We’d not really gardened the first summer (we had a pool – we swam a lot). This summer, though, we began to garden in earnest, renting the big rototiller, having soil amendment brought in by the truckload, and … growing things. Santa Rosa was truly home: we stayed in that house for close on 4 years, and only moved out because the landlord was an idiot and divorced his wife, so had to move back in (the jerk). Just when we’d gotten the soil right, too!

In 2003, we were still living in the same house, in Santa Rosa, and I was getting ready to graduate from USF with my first Master’s degree. USF was a truly fabulous school. I’m glad to hear that they’re incorporating their “professional studies” back into the business school, rather than having it as its own college: it being “professional studies” meant that I couldn’t get into a PhD program, so had to go after a second master’s degree, one which was “academic” rather than “professional.” A word of warning to anybody out there who thinks they can do a degree in the evenings, or online, or what have you: that degree may be a stopping point in your education, because “academia” doesn’t see those kinds of degrees as being proper degrees. They’re just learning a skill. They may as well be tradesmen certifications.

Ahh, 2008. We’d been away for 9 months, and were very eager to get back to California (we’d forgotten the heat). We saved £50 on our tickets by flying through Minneapolis. It wasn’t worth it, as we had to wait an extra three or four hours because of the rain in Minneapolis (they won’t let anybody out onto the runway if there’s been a lightning strike within the past half-hour … and we saw several huge strikes). A couple we talked to (waiting at the same gate) were off to a Neurology conference. Their luggage was abandoned upon the tarmacadam, just outside of the paltry shelter offered by the jet’s wing. They were wearing very casual clothes for their travel, and doubted that they’d be able to do any better, as their luggage was not waterproof. Gotta love mass transportation.

And, again, more pictures from the Dolomites, from 2009. We stopped on the way down the mountain (oh, the mountain) to take a few pictures of the local graveyard. There were some marvelous headstones (yes, we’re strange like that). We spent the day in Bolzano, just wandering around, enjoying the place. I think we may have gone to coffee there, and been confounded by the idea of putting a credit card into the garage exit-machine. We don’t drive, in Glasgow, and … well, let’s just say that Europe is mad for automatic things. In California? Well, they’d have an attendant. In Bolzano, you just put your card into the little pillar and it charges you. No need for a person to sit around, and all that’s required is that you understand the system.

So many of our travel experiences have been about learning the way that locals do things. I wonder: what do people find strange and intimidating about the USA? So many of the things that we’re accustomed to seem to change from country to country, I wonder what it’s like for others. Do they understand the “exit” sign, rather than seeing the “little green man” everywhere? Are they confused at having to actually interact with a person to get out of a parking garage?

-D

June 4, in retrospect

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June 4, 2010

7:41 am

Once upon a time, in 2007, we were the kind of people who gardened. Boy, those were the days… we broke up the monotony of rainy winter mornings, having a good Sunday morning sit-down with a seed catalog and a cup of tea. Every year we got a kick out of planting something we hadn’t before — gorgeous yellow and brown pollen-less sunflowers, amaranth, garbanzo beans, and this one particular year, birdhouse gourds.

They were wildly successful… to the point where we were machete-hacking the vines back. They took over EVERYTHING! And they were a gorgeous, strong vine… and the sap just REEKED. It was horrible — they got their revenge for being cut back. We finally stopped trying to cut them back and simply re-routed them and strung them up — and stopped watering them. They dried out in late October, and we picked the gourds, most of which were slightly discolored by sun and dirt, and heavy. Thanks to the usual last blisteringly hot dog days of summer, a few weeks of curing them on the back porch was all it took to dry them out. They were hollow — still weird smelling — and ready for the next step.

D.’s power tools, which he sold before we moved, were quite handy for the finishing process. Gourds aren’t the lovely smooth things they appear to be in their final incarnation — they have warty exteriors, and they took a wire brush, two grades of sandpaper, and a lot of time to get them smooth and ready to be painted. We had a great time making posh birdhouses, though. The only drawback to these beautiful things is that they are fragile; a windstorm utterly destroyed one of them (the green one – the purple one is still with us) just a few weeks after it was made.

Like Buddhist sand sculptures, things you make out of natural materials are transient; someday we’ll again plant gourds (far, far, FAR away from everything else) and try again.

Did you know American pumpernickel bread has cocoa or coffee in it? We didn’t, either, until this bread recipe. We made it the German way… with rye and caraway, and a sourdough starter. It was dense and sourish, and probably genuine, but didn’t find as many fans among our bread tasters as it could have had.

2008, and we’d just moved into our tidy little church flat. We had more pillows than we knew what to do with, and ended up piling them on the guest bed. I think we piled them on the couch first to count them.

We were truly prepared to love that flat and stay there forever — even with its cramped, weirdly laid out kitchen, its dim lighting, privacy-free loft bedrooms – and with the hourly vibrating growl of the city lightrail going under the house, (which started at 5:30 a.m.). It was charmingly imperfect, and it was close to the library — what more could we want?

A lot more, it turns out. We probably stayed so long simply because it was a church. Someday, perhaps we’ll find a sanctuary in which to live without obnoxious neighbors in the basement…

Hard to believe that this time last summer we were zipping through the Italian countryside, scaring roosters (actually, more like being STALKED by roosters; that dude had spurs and looked like he wasn’t afraid to use them), stopping in random towns and riding trams up mountainsides to discover tucked-away restaurants and wonderful views, and carefully deciphering Italian signs to buy candy (and still managing to come away with some TRULY NASTY stuff). The marzipan “rock” candy was a particular favorite.

And this year, June 4 – we have guests coming soon, dental appointments (aargh!), and T’s last Little has moved beyond junior high and is now a rising freshman. Congratulations, JC!

-T

June 2, In Retrospect

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June 2, 2010

7:17 am