Author Archives: Kathleen Fox

Ole and Lena and Paddy Went Into a Bar . . .

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

Okay, it's nitpicking and grammar nerdish of me, but I can't help it. It isn't "St. Patty's Day," people. If you must be informal, it's "St. Paddy's Day."

Since March 17 falls on a Saturday this year, I suspect the consumption of green beer may hit record levels. Which around here isn't necessarily a bad thing. We've had such a dry winter that we can use all the moisture we can get.

Despite all the celebrations in honor of his day, about the only things most of us know about St. Patrick are that his birthday was on March 17 and that he is crediting with driving all the snakes out of Ireland.

Both of these are wrong. Most of us have probably suspected the truth about the snakes, which is that, Ireland being an island and all, there were never any snakes there in the first place.

But since March 17 is St. Patrick's Day, it's logical to assume, as I did until I looked it up just now, that this was his birthday. Nope. It's actually the anniversary of his death. The day seems to be accepted by scholars, though there's some confusion about the year, which was somewhere in the late fifth or early sixth century.

He was a real person, though, a missionary and an archbishop. As a Christian, he was committed to eradicating Druidism and other beliefs that he would have considered the worship of false gods. No doubt he wouldn't appreciate his name being plastered all over the place accompanied by pictures of leprechauns. What he would think of all the green beer, of course, is another question.

I think it's great to celebrate the Irish on St. Patrick's Day, even for people who are as Norwegian and as Lutheran as Ole and Lena. There's nothing wrong with wearing green and sporting buttons that say things like, "Kiss me, I'm Irish." Maybe it even does a little to make up for the days when the more common sentiment would have been "No Irish need apply."

But the man was an archbishop, for goodness sake. (At least one can hope it was for the sake of goodness.) In his lifetime, he would have been called "Father Patrick," or maybe "Your Grace." I doubt that his parishioners ever slapped him on the back and called him "Paddy."

And even if they had, they—or at least the few of them who were literate—surely wouldn't have spelled it "Patty."

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Categories: Words for Nerds | 1 Comment

Watching the Watcher

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

The large furry creature was lurking in the dark hallway. I couldn't see it, but I knew it was there. I could hear it breathing. It was 3:07 a.m.

At times it slept; I could hear it snoring. But even then, I couldn't turn my back on it and go back to sleep myself. I could feel it out there: watchful, waiting, alert for any movement I might make. It was between me and the kitchen; between me and the telephone. There was no way I could leave the bedroom and slip past it in the dark without it catching me.

I knew this, because at 1:37 a.m., when I got up to go to the bathroom, I had nearly stepped on it.

On her, rather. Lucy. The chocolate lab of mature years and generous girth who is staying with us this week while her owner is out of town.

This is a new experience for me. I've never lived with a dog in the house before. Lucy is placid, obedient, and impeccably mannered, but even so, it's been an adjustment. She's patient, though, and so far she seems to believe I can be trained.

Parts of the routine of having a dog in the house are relatively easy to adapt to. I've learned that getting up from a chair to go to another room for just a minute means Lucy will heave herself up on her arthritic joints to follow me, so she can flop down onto the floor wherever I am. I've learned that even if you do it as noiselessly as possible, opening a bag of dog food is magical. It instantly makes a tail-wagging dog appear in the kitchen, even if a millisecond ago she was at the other end of the house. I've learned that a walk with a dog is a stop-and-go exercise. Who knew there were so many places to stop and check the P-mail?

There are even some advantages to having a dog in the house. When I mutter to myself over my keyboard, I'm not talking to myself; I'm talking to Lucy. Also, taking her along early in the morning to get the newspaper offers security against mountain lions. Not that Lucy could take on a mountain lion single-pawed, of course. But if her doggy presence wasn't enough to keep one at a distance, at least I could easily outrun her.

Still, I'm not sure I could live with a dog on a full-time basis. I could get used to the routine and the responsibility. What I can't handle is the guilt.

The long sighs she emits from time to time as she lies stretched out on the floor in my office while I'm working and paying no attention to her. Having to pull her away from a particularly entrancing smell so we can actually finish a walk the same day we started it. The long-suffering patience she shows at mealtimes—ours, not hers—when she sits at a polite distance, pretending not to watch every trip our forks make from our plates to our mouths. And especially, the sad, reproachful look we get when we leave the house, shutting her up in the utility room and telling her she has to stay.

Not to mention the vigil she keeps in the hallway at night, sleeping with one eye open, too obedient to come into the bedroom but ready to spring—or at least to lumber—to her feet the second she hears us get up.

I'm doing my best to manage the guilt, though. If Lucy wants to guard the hallway all night, I can't stop her. But I don't need to stay awake watching the watchdog. From now on, I'm sleeping with the door shut.

Categories: Wild Things | 4 Comments

A Better Mousetrap

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

"Utah man’s shot at mouse hits roommate."

As a newspaper headline, this one certainly did its job of catching my attention. It wasn't immediately clear, however, whether the victim was the roommate of the man or the mouse. Finding out that and other details required reading the whole article.

Apparently this man spotted a mouse in the pantry of his apartment. His reflexes possibly being faster than his thought processes, he hauled out his gun and shot at the critter. The article didn't specify what type of firearm, but surely anything bigger than a .22 pistol would have been serious overkill.

Not surprisingly—mice are small targets, not to mention quick—he missed. The bullet went on through the wall into the adjoining bathroom, where it hit the man's roommate. In the best tradition of old Western movies, it was a shoulder wound.

The shooter was 27, old enough that one might think his brain would have matured into a certain minimal level of common sense. When he spotted the mouse, then, why didn't he do what any reasonably functional adult would do and simply set a mousetrap?

Well, maybe he didn't own one. Maybe he couldn't find one. Maybe, like so many of us, he had a couple of mousetraps somewhere, probably in the kitchen junk drawer. Amid the clear tape, masking tape, duct tape, scissors, screwdrivers, pliers, odd nails and screws, matchbooks, string, paper clips, rubber bands, bag clips, broken refrigerator magnets, pencil stubs, and nonworking pens, a couple of insignificant mousetraps could easily get lost.

Or maybe he was out of peanut butter to use for bait.

It's also possible that the "small, empty balloons and burnt tin foil" the cops found in the wastebasket had something to do with his decision. To me those items sound like evidence of a children's birthday party where somebody left the potatoes on the grill too long. Since the man was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia, however, apparently in the world of law enforcement they are evidence of a different sort of activity.

At least the story had a happy ending for somebody. With one roommate hauled off to the hospital and the other to jail, the mouse could enjoy undisturbed occupancy of the pantry. With plenty of space and plenty of food, it may have even decided to sublet to a couple of roommates. Slower ones, preferably.

After all, if the shooter got his gun back when he was released on bail and came home, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have more than one furry little target to share the risk.

Categories: Wild Things | 2 Comments

Hope Sprouts Eternal

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

Siberian permafrost. It's sort of like the huge old chest-type freezer in your grandmother's utility room. It's so big and so full of ancient stuff that every once in a while, digging through the layers, you find a frozen treasure that's been buried so long no one knew it was there.

In Siberia, those frozen finds occasionally include intact woolly mammoths from the last Ice Age. Several have been found in such good shape that they could have been cooked and eaten, except that doing so would be serious scientific sacrilege.

Around 30,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, Siberia was one of the areas that was not covered by glaciers. That's why so many mammoths lived there, along with fearsome predators like huge short-faced bears and giant saber-toothed cats.

Not to mention less fearsome ground squirrels. These little critters buried caches of seeds underground for the winter. Every so often, someone discovers one of these caches.

Some scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences got excited about trying to get some of these seeds to sprout. First they tried it the old-fashioned way—simply planting some. Nothing happened. Then they got serious about it. They took tissue from some immature fruit, found intact reproductive cells in it, and cultured those cells in some sort of goop that was mostly sugar. The cells grew into seedlings, which grew into plants that eventually bloomed and produced viable seeds of their own.

The plants are an older incarnation of a current Siberian flower called narrow-leafed campion, or Silene stenophylla if you want to be formal. They have white flowers with five long petals. If you saw one in your yard, you'd probably consider it a weed. It's pretty ordinary looking for being 30,000 years old.

As a haphazard amateur gardener, I found this story both inspiring and discouraging. In my kitchen right now, spread out on a tray with a thin covering of potting soil overlaid with paper towels, are a couple of dozen tomato seeds. They've been sitting there for two weeks now. I've kept them damp. I've kept them warm. I've even talked to them—though it's possible that, "Sprout, damn you, you dried-up little spaghetti sauce wannabes!" isn't working as motivation.

So far, nothing. Not a single sprout. Heck, I can't even see the seeds in there.

I've been trying to persuade myself that this isn't my fault. After all, the seeds are from last year. The expiration date on their packets was October of 2011. They must be too old to sprout.

That theory was working just fine, thank you, until I heard about the 30,000-year-old Siberian flower. Now, the truth has become painfully clear. An extinct Siberian ground squirrel has a greener thumb than I do.

Or maybe I just need to be patient. Maybe these seeds will sprout after all, if I just give them another 30,000 years to mature.

Categories: Wild Things | Tags: , , , , | 3 Comments

Second Thoughts on a Third Tuesday

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

If the second Wednesday of a given month occurs one week, then the third Tuesday of that same month will obviously fall on the following week. That's simple logic and common sense. It's also the pattern that helps us keep track of the monthly meetings of two organizations we belong to.

We dutifully went to the every-second-Wednesday meeting last week. This week, then, we headed off for the every-third-Tuesday meeting. It always starts with a potluck, so we had prepared an appealing green salad in generous proportions. I followed my usual potluck habit of taking something conspicuously healthful while secretly hoping a lot of other people would bring desserts.

We left the house in good time, since the meeting was way over on the other side of town. In addition to all those theoretical desserts, we were looking forward to the program. It sounded interesting, based on the description on the reminder postcard we had received a few days earlier.

When we got to the building, it was dark. No cars out front. No lights on inside. No people anywhere. Okay, it was Valentine's Day, which is probably second only to Mother's Day in the number of people who go out to eat, so the turnout may have been light. Still, at least the speaker and the president should have been there.

That was when we figured out that the third Tuesday of a given month doesn't always fall in the week after the second Wednesday. Logical patterns are all very well, but sometimes it pays to look at the calendar. Since the first Wednesday this month was February 1, the third Tuesday won't be till the 21st.

Funny, when we got home and took a closer look at it, that was exactly the date on the reminder postcard.

The same date, probably, that we'll finally finish eating all that salad.

Categories: Just For Fun | Leave a comment

Striking It Rich

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

Maybe it was the vastness of the endless, level Llano Estacado, the "staked plains." Maybe it was the whiff of gushing prosperity coming from all of the pump jacks along the road, bringing oil to the surface with every solemn nod of their mechanical heads. Or maybe it was driving past the very fields where my partner's great-grandfather planted the first cotton crop in this arid land.

Taken altogether, west Texas is a landscape that fosters risk. At least that's the best explanation I could find for our unusual behavior.

At a convenience store on the edge of Lamesa, Texas, we bought a lottery ticket. The maximum payoff that week was somewhere in the neighborhood of 137 million dollars, give or take ten million or so.

As we drove west, past mile after mile of oil wells, we speculated a bit on what we might do with that much money. How much would we reasonably need to put away to take care of ourselves for the rest of our lives? How much would or should we give to our family members without ruining their lives? How could we make wise choices about the charities we would support?

It was an enjoyable conversation, mostly because we weren't taking it very seriously. We did, however, agree that all those millions would give us tremendous opportunities for doing good. It's amazing all the things one can easily accomplish with a pile of imaginary wealth.

It didn't occur to us that one good immediate use for some of the money would be to replace our aging furnace. Which may be just as well. When we finally remembered to check our numbers online a few days later, we hadn't come close to winning even a consolation prize of a mere few hundred thousand.

For now, all our deserving family members and all those worthwhile charities will just have to get by without the benefit of our imaginary winnings. Maybe someday they'll get another chance, if we get wild and reckless enough to buy another lottery ticket. Or we could decide instead to make our fortunes with one of those Texas oil wells.

In the meantime, the furnace still needs replaced. I guess we'll just have to come down to earth and take care of it with real money.

Categories: Conscious Finance | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

Mispronouncing History

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

El Dorado. The city of gold. Like so many other explorers, we came close but just missed it.

The name actually translates as "the golden one." According to early Spanish writings, it came from a ritual among a South American Indian tribe where a chief covered in gold dust made offerings of gold objects to the gods.

This got the wealth-seeking Spanish conquistadores all excited, of course, and eventually "el dorado" came to be associated with any lost or rumored place of fabulous wealth. The Spanish never quite found it in South America, which didn't stop Coronado from trekking across a good portion of the American Southwest after it. He made it to central Kansas without finding any cities of gold.

Too bad he didn't have a chance to stop at his local AAA office and pick up a map, because there it was, plain as day. El Dorado, right there on Highways 54 and 77. Even with the map, though, we didn't quite reach it. We just saw the sign as we breezed past at 65 miles an hour, traveling in luxury Coronado could scarcely have imagined.

Of course, Coronado did have the disadvantage of being consistently misled by local people who kept telling him the city of gold was just a little farther down the road. They were smart enough to encourage the demanding and militant Spaniards to move along and become somebody else's problem.

In a way, the locals are still misleading travelers. Not with any inhospitable intent, I'm sure. But we might have had trouble finding El Dorado had we relied on the waitress in Wichita who mentioned it. According to her, it was "El Do-RAY-do."

This regional pronunciation shouldn't really have come as a surprise. The previous day we had breakfasted in Beatrice, Nebraska, which everyone in the state knows is "Be-AH-trice" rather than the conventional "BEE-a-tris" or the pretentious Italianate "Bey-a-TRAY-chay."

Later in our trip we encountered Chickasha, Oklahoma, which an unaware northern traveler might assume to be pronounced "Chick-a-shaw," had she not been informed by someone more familiar with the region that it was "Chick-a-shay." Come to think of it, given the spelling, that makes more sense anyway.

We also spent a day in Lamesa, Texas, presumably named for the "mesa" or flat tableland on which it's located. Nevertheless, it's pronounced "La-mee-sa" with fine disregard for the original Spanish that would have it "La-may-sa."

In the end, the joke was on Coronado, who trekked across this country without ever knowing that it was indeed full of gold. It was just black gold rather than yellow, the kind that's now being taken out of the ground by hundreds of pump jacks.

It is interesting to speculate on how history may have been different had the Spanish made it far enough north to discover gold in the Black Hills. If they had, the capitol of South Dakota might be pronounced "Cor-a-nay-do" instead of "Peer."

Categories: Travel, Words for Nerds | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Driving Across Flyover Country

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

Traveling from the western end of South Dakota to the eastern end of Nebraska requires a long day's drive across a lot of prairie. After a few hours, it's the kind of trip that can make you start to reconsider the price of airline tickets.

I've made a lot of trips across this land, most of them driving, but a few in a small plane as well. It's fascinating to see the subtle beauty of the land from the air, whether it's the open spaces of West River ranch land or the patchwork fields of East River farm land. That beauty is easy to miss if you're traveling in a jet at 30,000-something feet. I suppose it's understandable that this part of the world is so easily dismissed as "flyover country."

A lot of people were flying over it too. Driving south in the late afternoon, we watched a sky filled with contrails, clear evidence of the amount of east-west traffic. At one point we saw two jets going east and two others going west on what looked almost like collision courses. They sped past each other, two of them crossing each other's trails to temporarily mark the spot with an X. A short time later, a single nonconformist bisected their fading paths from north to south.

As the sun set, a third of the vast prairie sky glowed with orange, violet, and turquoise, giving us an evolving light show for half an hour. More contrails stitched rows of white and deep purple across the layers of high, streaky clouds.

None of the travelers in the jets tracking so temporarily through the sky could have seen us so far below. They wouldn't have noticed, either, the new motel being built in the tiny town of Dallas that a recent article at SmartMoney.com dismissed as a place "two hours from the nearest major airport" where you can't even "get a decent bite to eat." They wouldn't have seen that the new motel was right beside a thriving steakhouse. Nor would they have seen the giant towers of the grain elevator that makes Dallas so important to the local farm economy.

They wouldn't have seen the birds, either. A long-dead cottonwood tree beside a stock dam provided the perfect perch for a bald eagle to pose in a stately manner befitting its status as our national symbol. A lake bed filled with dried grass and milo stubble must have been a prime hunting ground, because half a dozen hawks and golden eagles were circling it.

A rooster pheasant erupted out of the grass as we drove by. He must have seen the predators in their lunchtime holding pattern, because he dived back into the cover even faster than he had started out. He wasn't going to become someone's meal this day. He knew the dangers of living in flyover country.

Categories: Living Consciously | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Just Follow the Cookie

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

Well, it's certainly a relief to have that figured out. My path is now clear. The choices are laid out before me in an orderly fashion. The rest of my life is going to be a piece of cake—chocolate, presumably.

More accurately, it's going to be a fortune cookie.

Ordinarily, I don't pay a lot of attention to fortune cookies. They're fodder for a moment's amusement, a moment's thought, or an entertaining after-dinner conversation. Once in a while, though, a fortune comes along that makes more of an impact.

Like the one that stated enigmatically, "You will receive all the wealth that you deserve." That's been several years ago, and the millions have yet to start rolling in. Apparently the fortune isn't coming true. Oh, wait a minute. Maybe it is.

My most memorable fortune came years ago, when my boss had ordered lunch for all of us from the Chinese restaurant down the street. The slip of paper in my cookie informed me, "You will soon receive a promotion."

The next week, after a disagreement with that same boss over how to handle an employee problem, I got fired. Somewhere in my old files, I probably still have my copy of the "resignation" letter she asked me to write—with the fortune cookie taped to it.

Actually, losing that job did turn out to be a promotion, just in a different way. I've been self-employed ever since. And if my current boss ever tries to fire me, I'll show her. I'll just quit.

The fortune that is going to change my life, though, came with my cashew chicken the other day. It read, "When the moment comes, take the last one from the left."

Wow. Imagine the time and effort this could save. Just look how much it simplifies every decision. Which sweater to choose off the clearance rack. Which book to take off the library shelf. Which guy to accept out of the hordes of eager two-steppers lined up to ask me to dance. Which brownie to take off the plate. (If you take the last one from the left, then the next one in line becomes the new last one on the left, so you take that one, too, and then the next one in line—you see where this could go?)

There is still a bit of room for creativity, as well. For example, take the salad bar at one restaurant we go to. If you approach it from one direction, the last item on the left is the ham and bean soup. From the other side, it's the bread pudding. If you sidle up to it at an angle, though, and stand in just the right spot with your back half turned, the last item on the left—at least the last one you can see—is the chocolate mousse.

Perspective is so important.

It feels as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. From now on, no more worrying about making decisions. No more time-consuming consideration of pros and cons. No more thinking. Just follow the fortune cookie. The last one from the left, and bingo. It's the right—er, correct—choice.

Now, all I have to worry about is knowing "when the moment comes."

Categories: Food and Drink, Just For Fun | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Machine Gun Kelly Goes to the Library

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Kathleen Fox

I was about 9 or 10 years old. My school (not my class, the whole school—all five of us, and that included the teacher) were on a field trip. One of our stops was the Tripp County Library.

The library was on the second or third floor of the county courthouse. In my memory, getting to the library meant going past the sheriff's office and the jail, though I may be wrong about the jail part.

Anyway, the courthouse was and is a traditional three-story stone building occupying its own city block, with lawn on either side. On this particular visit, the teacher parked at one end of the block. Eager to show off my scrawny fourth-grade muscles, I offered to carry the box of library books. After a few steps, I realized the box was heavier than I had expected. Pride wouldn't let me change my mind about carrying it, so my next best choice was to take the shortest possible route to the front door. Instead of following the sidewalk, I made a wobbly beeline diagonally across the grass.

As I approached the grand front entrance of the courthouse, I noticed two things. One was a girl about my own age, standing on the steps. The second was a sign that read "Keep Off The Grass."

I staggered up the steps with my box of books, and the girl informed me, "You're not supposed to walk on the grass."

Too embarrassed to admit I hadn't seen any sign until it was too late, I told her, "I know."

"So how come you did?"

"Because it was shorter."

She looked shocked. I went on past her, trying to look as if such deliberate disregard for the rules was second nature to me. Between the box of books getting heavier by the moment, and my uncomfortable awareness of the proximity of the library to the sheriff's office, achieving an air of nonchalance wasn't easy.

Fortunately, by then the rest of the group had caught up with me. I gladly relinquished my burden—at least the physical part of it—to let one of the older kids carry the books. All the way up the flights of marble steps, though, I worried about what that other girl must think of me. In her eyes, I was sure, I must seem like a reckless lawbreaker who had, willfully and with malice aforethought, walked across the grass in defiance of the forces of law and order.

Yet letting her believe in my evil nature seemed better, if only slightly, than the other available choice—admitting I hadn't see the sign and I had made a mistake. Better to be thought crooked than clueless.

Perfectionism? Yes, I've heard of it. Why would you ask?

Categories: Remembering When | Tags: , , | 3 Comments

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