Monthly Archives: February 2011

Making the Lady Look Good

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Kathleen Fox

A cold, snowy Saturday night. Dinnertime. Decision time. Did we want to settle in for the evening with our respective murder mysteries or go to the dance?

Dancing won—just barely. After we finished eating and did the dishes, we had 45 minutes before leaving the house at the agreed-upon time of 7:25. We went off in our separate ways to get ready.

His preparation (phase one):
1. Sit down in the recliner with his book.

My preparation:
1. Meditate for some moments in front of the open closet door to decide what to wear. Choose a denim skirt, purple tee shirt, and black corduroy jacket.
2. Heat iron and press shirt.
3. Take off jeans and sweater, put on pantyhose, skirt, tee shirt, and jacket.
4. Decide purple shirt is too dark. Select pink lacy tee shirt instead. Take off freshly-ironed purple shirt and toss it onto the bed. Put on pink shirt. Put jacket back on.
5. Decide texture of corduroy jacket clashes with texture of lacy shirt. Take off corduroy jacket and toss it onto the bed. Put on black blazer instead.
6. Select necklace and put it on. It's too long for neckline of pink shirt. Replace it with a different one. It's too large and doesn't look right against lacy shirt. Replace it with third necklace. Like Baby Bear's chair, it's just right. Add matching earrings.
7. Get out curling iron and turn it on to heat.
8. Touch up eyeliner and apply eye shadow and mascara.
9. Curl hair.
10. Put on dancing shoes and buckle them.
11. Check mirror. Pass self-inspection. Check clock. It's 7:23.
12. Put on coat, get purse.

Total time to prepare to leave the house: 44 minutes.

Meanwhile, back at the recliner, he has been contentedly reading for 43½ minutes. He moves on to phase two of his preparation:
1. Put bookmark in book, set book aside.
2. Get up from chair.
3. Put on coat.

Total time to prepare to leave the house (not counting reading several chapters): one minute and a half.

LeRoy Olesen, a long-time local dance instructor who is personally responsible for helping hundreds of couples master the foxtrot and the waltz, frequently reminds the men in his classes: "Your job is to make the lady look good."

It's only fair for the gentleman to have that responsibility when the couple is out on the floor. The lady, after all, puts in all her effort toward looking good before they leave the house.

Categories: Just For Fun | Tags: dance instructor, dancing, foxtrot, waltz | 1 Comment

All the News That’s Fit to Print

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Kathleen Fox

Last fall we visited the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo. A few of the exhibits got a bit technical on the engineering details of rocketry and were, if you'll pardon the expression, somewhat over my head.

But many of the exhibits were fascinating. One that particularly caught my attention was a replica of Sputnik. About the size of a beach ball, with antennae poking out in various directions, it was a surprisingly tiny and simple device to have such an important place in world history. As I looked up at it, I realized, "I remember reading about this in the Weekly Reader."

Well, maybe I didn't actually read a whole lot about it. When Sputnik beeped its way into history in October of 1957, I was six. The Weekly Reader probably didn't have a lot of in-depth text in its first-grade edition. I do, however, clearly remember seeing a picture of Sputnik on the front page.

The Weekly Reader was a student newspaper that showed up every week at our five-pupil rural school. It had a different edition for each grade, which in our case meant a different edition for each student. I don't remember whether we had any formal lessons based on the Weekly Reader, but I definitely read every one of my issues and probably my older sister's copy as well.

I learned about the Russians sending the dog Laika into space and worried about whether it was able to get back to Earth. I read about space pioneers Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard. Learning that John Glenn, orbiting the Earth, saw more than one sunrise and sunset in just a few hours gave me my first real understanding of how our orbit around the sun gave us our days and nights.

Reading about the election of John Kennedy, I pondered how odd it seemed to say "President Kennedy" when the only President I remembered in my whole nine years of life was Eisenhower. I'm sure the Weekly Reader had full coverage of President Kennedy's assassination three years later, but I don't remember it that well. By then I had other sources of news, having begun reading more than just the comics in the Sioux City Journal.

Years later, when my own kids were in school, at least one of them was also a Weekly Reader fan. In about fourth grade, my son kept each issue carefully organized in a three-ring binder.

The Weekly Reader, I was glad to discover, is still alive and well. It's in full color now, but it still has weekly editions for each grade level. Best of all, it still comes out in print. It does, of course, have a website with videos and interactive online lessons—not to mention a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Its mission of delivering the news to kids is still the same; only the methods of delivering the news have changed.

And no doubt they will continue to change. I can imagine one of my grandkids, many years from now, talking to one of his or her grandkids about it. "I remember getting the Weekly Reader when it was still printed on paper. Back then, in the days of the old Internet, computers were so primitive we had to type in commands on something called a "keyboard." And remember that funny little device called a "mouse" that you saw in the technology museum? I actually used one of those. Everything was so slow, that sometimes we didn't get the news until hours or even a whole day after it happened."

The Weekly Reader. Its technology will change; it might even become the Daily Reader. But I hope it stays in business for a long, long time.

Categories: Remembering When | Tags: Alan Shepard, Eisenhower, John Glenn, John Kennedy, Kennedy assassination, Sioux City Journal, Weekly Reader, Yuri Gagarin | 1 Comment

The Wrestlers and the Resurrected Raccoon

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Kathleen Fox

Why would you put a dead raccoon into the luggage compartment of the bus in the first place? The brief item in our local paper didn't explain, but inquiring minds would like to know.

True, the passengers on this particular bus were high school boys, which may be all the answer inquiring minds need. I could understand their interest—purely scientific, undoubtedly—in a dead critter. What I didn't understand was how the raccoon ended up stashed with the luggage. To me this implied a certain amount of official collaboration, since presumably only the coach or the bus driver could open the storage compartment.

The person who shares my morning newspaper suggested I might be underestimating the ability of a group of teenaged boys both to sneak a dead critter past their adult supervisors and to surreptitiously open the electronic latch to the luggage compartment door. Having been a teenaged boy himself, he ought to know. He claimed he wouldn't have put a dead critter on a bus himself, but would have abetted such a project.

Not satisfied with this explanation, I did further research. (Yes, I know. Certain people have occasionally implied I don't have enough to do.)

I found that the raccoon caper was sanctioned, however unwisely, by at least one adult. Furthermore, it involved raccoon-bashing as well as raccoon-stashing. On a Friday evening, the high school wrestling team from Carrington, North Dakota, was on a bus headed for a regional tournament in Grafton. They spotted a raccoon and the coach stopped the bus. Several wrestlers got off, hit the raccoon with a pail, picked it up, and stuck it in the baggage compartment under the bus.

Presumably, this whole operation seemed like a good idea at the time.

But apparently a pail (plastic, do you suppose?) isn't a very effective murder weapon. The next morning, when somebody opened the compartment, the "dead" raccoon hopped out and trotted away.

The poor critter must have been confused. First it had been knocked unconscious with a pail and shoved into a cold metal compartment among luggage filled with wrestler's uniforms and socks (freshly laundered, one can only hope). Then it escaped, only to find itself in a strange place miles from home.

Maybe its near-death experience has led to a spiritual awakening, and it will spend the rest of its life ministering to homeless critters in the parks and alleys of Grafton. Or maybe it will sell its story ("Captured by aliens and left for dead in subzero weather!") to the National Inquirer and retire to a cozy home well out of sight of the highway.

Meanwhile, back at the bus, the wrestlers and their coach were having an awakening of their own. Because some of the boys had handled a wild animal and therefore might have been exposed to rabies, the whole team was deemed a health risk and barred from the tournament.

As far as I know, none of the wrestlers have come down with any mysterious diseases. But there's a rumor that several of them have developed an unusual urge to wash all their food before they eat it.

Categories: Just For Fun, Wild Things | Tags: captured by aliens, Carrington, Grafton, high school wrestling, National Inquirer, North Dakota, raccoon | Leave a comment

A Blessing of a Different Kind

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Kathleen Fox

One of my friends, who grew up a long way south of South Dakota, maintains that people here speak with a South Dakota accent. He claims that when he first moved here more than 30 years ago he could hear the accent, but by now, having adopted it himself, he doesn't notice it any more.

Well, duh. Of course he doesn't notice it. That's because we don't have an accent. Everybody (well, at least everybody from this part of the country) knows that. People from Georgia have accents. People from North Carolina do. People from Oklahoma. Even transplanted Texans like my friend have accents.

One of the regional idioms my friend finds amusing is "kind of different." It's a classic piece of understatement, perhaps arising from the German, Norwegian, and Swedish roots so many of us have. It's a useful shorthand for describing anyone who is, well, different.

"He's kind of different" can cover those who commit fashion blunders like wearing their jeans tucked into their cowboy boots. It can describe social nonconformists with six lip piercings. It can condemn serious misbehavior like not paying your property taxes or bullying your wife. It can poke holes in grand ideas like a belief that raising ostriches in South Dakota is a great way to get rich quick. It can even stretch to cover cases of genuine mental disturbance—the guy who sees jet trails as evidence of the government's plot to control the weather comes to mind.

Southerners accomplish a similar purpose with a different phrase (said with an accent, of course): "Bless her heart."

True, sometimes this is said with love and means exactly what it says. As in, "Bless her heart, she's going through a hard time these days."

But there's also a more nuanced version. "He must be proud of the tops of those cowboy boots, bless his heart." Or, "Bless her heart, with all those piercings I hope she never tries to drink out of a straw." "Or, "He really believes in those ostriches, bless his heart."

Even if their origins and accents may be different, these phrases have one thing in common. They are both delicately non-judgmental ways of expressing a strong judgment without actually having to say anything rude. Presumably, the ultimate graceful put-down would be to transcend geographic and linguistic boundaries and combine the two expressions. "Yep, she's kind of different—bless her heart."

Categories: Words for Nerds | 2 Comments