Computer Hell, Life as an Assassin and Country Lunches

I love computers when they work the way they’re supposed to but then for some reason known only to the gods of software and routers, everything changes. My printer wouldn’t talk to my computer and I had e-Bay labels I’d have to print the next day. No problem, I thought. It’s happened before and I breathed down the neck of a young tech guy wearing a black leather vest full of pockets that I lusted after---the vest not the guy---as I wrote down the steps he took to get my printer back online. And I used those directions a couple of times since without a hitch. This time, however, when I followed the steps---deleting the printer and then adding it back on---it didn’t work. 

Long story still sort of long, I discovered my wireless printer wouldn’t work from my backup computer either and Detective Nervous Wretch put two and two together and decided I was dealing with a Wi-Fi issue. Yup, the cell phone also had that explanation point next to the Wi-Fi icon---but wait! My Kindle was still connecting to Wi-Fi and was working! Why? I checked the settings thinking maybe I was piggy backing off someone else’s unsecured Wi-Fi. Nope. I spent way too much time trying to troubleshoot this and that. Found directions that involved turning off everything but the nightlight in the garage in an effort to reboot the whole kitten caboodle. I didn’t have the guts to do it before my e-Bay closings in case I couldn’t get my internet connected again. So there I was on Sunday night after my auctions closed, writing addresses out long-hand so I could get stuff to the post office in the morning. My plan was to enter the tracking numbers at e-Bay, plus write this blog entry and schedule it, before trying the whole reboot thing. If it failed I’d call Sexy Vest back to the house. If no blog appears on Saturday you'll know I'm curled up in a fetal ball wondering why I couldn't have been born in the era when long-distance communication required going down to the telegraph office to watch a guy tape my messages out in Morse code.

Stink bugs: Every fall they come to the south side of my house to embed themselves into the vinyl siding to winter over. Some years I’ve vacuumed them up with a little insect spray so they’d die before finding a way to walk back down the vacuum hose to make a winter resort out of my closet. For a few years I sprayed them with soapy water using a hose attached to a garden sprayer. The soap makes it impossible for them to fly, they die and then I have messy windows to clean. This year Mr. Google showed me how to make a cute little stink bug collector out of a pop bottle. So every evening when they park their slow-moving butts on my house, I’m on sentry duty every fifteen minutes, walking my deck looking for bugs to nudge into my trap. But it took them too long to die and I hated that. They’re only doing what Mother Nature tells them to do and for that they have to die slow? Does that seem fair? This morning I put a little soapy water in the bottle---duh---hoping they’d drown and they did but not before they had panic attacks before finally falling victim to my assassination attempts. Made me wonder if fires, floods and hurricanes aren’t God’s pop bottle trap…and that random thought makes me sound like a rabid, street corner preacher. “Repent your sins! The end is near!” I really do feel like a Supreme Being to my stink bugs. It's not fun to have the power of life or death over so many living things.

Monday was my third Mondays Lunch with my Gathering Girls pals. We carpooled to a near-by village like so many other specks on the Michigan map, that was founded in the mid-1800s on an old Indian trail next to a river. They built a mill, a blacksmith shop and a few other buildings and most are still standing today. One of those buildings was a pub back in its day and is still a pub that serves food and that's where we ate. Their menu says they are an Irish pub with a polish owner and I had a corn beef and sauerkraut sandwich on rye that was wonderful, especially paired with sweet potato fries.

There were six of us around the table and as usual we had lively conversations that went from bucket list activities like going on zip lines and hot air balloon rides to serious topics like human trafficking. One woman had been to a lecture about the sex trade recently where she learned that according to the expert who spoke, we average 400 girls (and boys) who get caught up in the trafficking trade every year…in just our town! Of course, we came up with solutions that ranged from teaching young teens not to be naïve thus easy pry to castrating the guys who’d buy them. I don’t know if the business men at the next table were listening and cringing when it was mentioned using a dull Bowie knife to do the task, but I was proud that I didn’t suggest cooking those balls and adding them to Purina Swine and Pig Feed. Vengeful thoughts might be fun but should never be expressed in public...Oops! ©

Stink bug trap photos from Pinterest.

cut

reverse top inside lower part of the bottle

tape

add a little soapy water

A gentle nudge and a shake causes the slow moving bugs to fall down the slippery slop of the bottle.

Books, Lectures and other Fancy Schmancy Junk

What happens when you put an archives librarian together with a retired professor to give a lecture on the Myth of Biddle City? You get a well-research topic told in such a way that it was hard to follow and somewhat boring for anyone except those with a connection to our state’s capital city---Lansing, Michigan. At least that was the consensus of myself and two of my seatmates at the Life Learning Lecture series down at the senior hall. I’ve been going to these lectures for six years and this is only the second one that didn’t live up to the hype. But the cookies were good, the crowd was friendly and the price of admission was free so I’m not mourning the afternoon not spent at home playing with my toes. I hate to say this, being in the same age bracket as the professor but even with a microphone her voice had that old person, wavy and shaky quality that made her hard to understand. My voice is starting to do that, too. I think I’m saying stuff clearly but syllables here and there don’t come out. Vocal chords dry up and get too stringy for normal vibrations. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Growing older sucks. If aliens from outer space came down, snatched a septuagenarian off the streets to use to decode our language they would have a big surprise when the next person they snatched is young and has a well-modulated and strong voice. But I disagree. 

As a Michigander, I did find it interesting that when our state capital ended up in Lansing in 1847 the place only had nineteen houses and no roads. (The provisional capital was in Detroit but it was deemed to be too close to foreign soil to stay there.) A year later with the help of investment capitalists an entire town sprung up and they were paying a $6 bounty for killing wolves within the city limits. And when they had conventions in the early 1850s, the records show they averaged 5-6 ‘soiled doves’ locked up in their jail each year. The men who bought their favorites, of course, were not mentioned and presumably roamed as free as the four-legged wolves. 

The next day was my monthly book club. I was a bad, disinterested participant because half way through the book I quit reading. The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore is a true story of two black boys who grew up in the same, drug infested neighborhood but one ended up serving a life sentence and the other became a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran and worked at the White House. When the latter Wes heard about his “name twin” he got curious and started visiting him in prison. They became friends and the bottom line message of the story is that by the grace of God their life paths could have easily gone the way the other person’s did. My reasons for not finishing the book were twofold: 1) The download of Bob Woodward’s book, Fear, came on my Kindle, distracting me, and 2) The book club selection was confusing as the story transitioned back and forth between being told in the first and third person. I blame the publisher for that more than the author. Those transitions needed clear cut visual queues in the way it was printed. No one in club gave the book a high rating.

It’s been a busy week. Our Sculpture Park also had a lecture, this one titled: Contemporary Disability Sculpture. I had no idea what to expect even after reading the description of the show: “This exhibition emphasizes the relationship between disability and the fundamental human experiences of change and embodiment.” Who writes that double talk? Over 600 people usually attend these quarterly lectures and they draw people in from all over the country to hear a panel of critically acclaimed artists talk about their work. They also serve fancy schmancy desserts and you get to hob-knob with a bunch of creative types and eavesdrop while mingling with the crowd after the lecture when the exhibit is unveiled. Walking around trying to figure out why corporate leaders are willing to pay thousands of dollars to own some of that stuff, is fun. What makes a giant blob of orange string more arty-farty than, say, the world's largest ball of twine in Kansas? The curators of our Sculpture Park are too contemporary for my tastes. If I had my way the place would be filled with Michelangelo’s naked men and armless Venus de Milo-like marble statues.

Have I ever mentioned that I spent a semester in college carving marble? Back in those days our marble slabs came from monument companies who’d occasionally misspell a decease’s name on a tombstone. I managed to get all the writing off the stone and I got a set of B cup breasts rough-cut into the headless piece before the semester ended but it was far from finished. For some reason the professor took pity on me and gave me an ‘A’ anyway. To this day, I see a granite countertop and I think, “What a waste!” I'm just sayin' beware if you ever invite me over to see your new countertops because I still have my stone chisels and mallet. ©

Photo from the sculpture exhibit.

Art Shows and Cleaning Girls

I died and went to Cleaning Girl Heaven. The one I had---the girl who gave a baby up in an open adoption and ended up regretting her decision---started taking Fridays off and she wanted me to change my cleaning day to Saturdays. I didn’t want to do that because there are too many art fairs, fall festivals and kids’ birthday parties scheduled on my upcoming Saturdays. After her boss and I tried to work out another day and time when we’d both be free at the same time, we gave up and decided it was time for me to try someone new. I felt bad because my old cleaner is such a sympathetic figure with a basket full of issues, one of which is she’s an OCD cleaning machine who, if she’d been a dog groomer, would have found a way to scrub the spots off a Dalmatian. 

The new girl came this week, a college kid in a grad program down at the art institution. My heart be still! She wants to be an art professor and already she’s got the demeanor and look of a professor. A tall, willow-thin blonde with a wide smile that makes you want to smile back. We talked painting styles, artists and mediums as she worked, and she’s the first cleaning person I’ve had in the five years since I’ve been using the service who actually appreciates my favorite room in the house---the library. She had a reverence for my art, philosophy and women’s history books. I don’t have my cleaners clean in my art room but I showed it to her and she gave me some technical advice with a painting that I’ve been struggling to finish. She said I’m only six brush strokes away from accomplishing what I need to do. That sure made my day because I’ve been weighing the idea of doing the entire face over. Her cleaning job was not as thorough as my other girl's and I probably won’t have her for long because after graduation she’ll be moving on, but in the meantime I’ll have something to look forward to besides having a clean house on the first Friday of every month. By the way, I always buy my house fresh flowers to celebrate the occasion. A clean house and fresh flowers go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Saturday I went to an annual Art in the Park show with one goal in mind: Don’t buy anything. Not even a greeting card which I have a ‘thing’ for doing when I like an artist. You can always find room for another greeting card, right? I rarely send those cards to anyone. I hoard them and enjoy them whenever I’m looking for something to use for the purpose cards were invented. So many charities send me packets of greeting cards that my stash seems to grow like mushrooms in the dark. I have a chest of six drawers (one foot square drawers) where I keep gift wrapping supplies and greeting cards and recently I downsized the cards in that chest to pass on to one of my Gathering Girls pals. She’ll pass them on to another friend of hers who does prison ministry work and that woman hands out packets of pre-stamped greeting cards to the prisoners for them to use. The woman has been visiting prisons for decades and wouldn’t you like to know the back story on how she got started doing that. I wish I was self-less enough to send those prisoners cards from my ‘good’ stash---they might enjoy hanging some beautiful mini-art pieces in their cells---but I’m not there yet. If reincarnation is real, in my next go-around I want to think more like Mother Theresa and less like---well, like me. 

The weather for the art show was perfect. The temperature was in the high 60s and a breeze was coming off the near-by river where ducks and white swans were looking for their lunch and Canadian geese were resting on their way up north. The signs of fall approaching were all around me and the bright sun was doing a great job of showing off the pieces of artists working in stained glass.

I’ve gone completely nuts about wind chimes this summer---Ya, I’m one of those annoying neighbors, some would say, who loves the pinging tones and tinkling sounds of glass, metal and sea shells striking one another in the wind. In my defense my neighbors aren’t close enough to hear them. At the art show, I fell in love with a four foot long copper and stained glass wind chime that was probably too heavy to make a peep unless a hurricane is one the way. I admired the heck out of it, complimented the artist, lied and told her my (non-existent) condo doesn’t allow wind chimes "otherwise I’d adopt that beautiful piece." And then I walked away. Aren’t you proud of me? I am. Well, except for the lying part. Mother Theresa, I doubt, ever lied just to make an excuse for not buying something so beautiful that it takes your breath away. I just wish the artist had sold greeting card depictions of her work. After all, I recently created extra space in my card drawers and it would have been easy to hide the evidence of breaking my goal about not buying anything that day. ©