Author Archives: Kathleen Fox

How Dry I’m Not

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Kathleen Fox

It’s fast. It’s loud. It starts at the wave of a hand and stops in an instant. It goes by names like “The Xelerator.”

This is not a sports car, a motorized skateboard, a video game, or a stomach-dropping carnival ride. It’s the latest generation of an invention that for decades now has gladdened the hearts of janitors and annoyed many of the rest of us: the public restroom electric hand dryer.

The basic idea is simple enough: dry your hands with a gust of warm air instead of a paper towel. Neater, more convenient, and maybe even cheaper. The originals have been around long enough that everyone knows the routine: Push “on” button. Rub hands together under warm air. Turn hands to dry front and back. Become impatient with how long this is taking. Wipe hands on jeans. (Preferably your own; using someone else’s is poor restroom etiquette and can lead to unfortunate misunderstandings.) Leave restroom with the dryer still running and your hands still damp.

The whole process is so last century. Hence, enter the modern super-dryer: sleeker, faster, and presumably more effective. I wouldn’t know, personally, because I’ve never been able to allow one to finish drying my hands. The old ones were merely annoying. The new ones are terrifying.

First, there’s the noise. The second you get your hands close enough to turn the dryer on, it starts to scream like a jet engine revving up for takeoff. The normal instinctive reaction is to clap your hands over your ears. This stops the screaming—well, the machine’s screaming, at least—though it leaves you somewhat wet behind the ears. On the brighter side, wiping your hands on your hair does help to dry them.

If you are brave enough to leave your hands under the dryer in spite of the noise, you encounter something even more frightening. The gust of hurricane-force warm air actually makes your skin ripple. The skin on the back of your hand slides away from the blast as if it isn’t quite attached to your flesh. It looks like something out of a third-rate horror movie: “Restroom Zombies,” maybe, or “The Creature from the Black Loo.”

If you are eight years old, you may think this is the coolest thing since Grandma accidentally stuck her fingers together with superglue. If you are a few decades older than that, you may have already noticed places where your skin seems to be getting too loose for you. Having this peculiar phenomenon dramatically called to your attention by a screaming machine full of hot air is neither flattering nor appreciated.

I have to say, though, that the new hand dryers probably do conserve a great deal of energy. Oh, not because they are so efficiently designed, or so much faster, or shut off automatically. Because, after trying them once or twice, countless numbers of us will choose one of two alternative energy-saving solutions.

One: Wash hands. Dry them on jeans. Make a wide circle around hand dryer as you leave the restroom.

Two: Don’t wash hands at all. It’s a small sacrifice, after all, to save the planet. Not to mention your hearing and your serenity.

Categories: Just For Fun, Odds and Ends | Tags: | Leave a comment

Last Straws In the Bottom of the Barrel

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Kathleen Fox

Sometimes, in search of brilliant and entertaining ideas—or even just adequate and mildly readable ideas—it doesn’t matter how diligently I scrape the bottom of that barrel. There’s just not much there but a couple of fragments of rust and an old paper clip.

Or maybe I should say a few grains of flour and a couple of weevils. I assume the expression “scraping the bottom of the barrel” comes from the days when all sorts of food staples were stored and shipped in barrels, and if you were scraping the bottom you’d better hope the freight wagons would get in soon so you could replenish your supplies.

It’s an idiom best used carefully, though. I remember years ago, moving from one small South Dakota town to another, my then-husband and I were having a hard time finding a house to rent. In August, sleeping in a tent in a campground at the city park was temporarily doable (I remember watching Richard Nixon’s resignation speech on someone’s TV set there), but as a long-term housing solution it lacked appeal. We had gone from searching for a house to searching for a short-term rental apartment that would do until we found a house.

Desperation is sometimes a spur to creativity, and one day it occurred to us that the historic old hotel at one end of the main street might have apartments. We stopped in to ask. The man at the registration desk, who was on the older side of middle aged and obviously the manager if not the owner, was friendly enough in a dignified and formal way. I told him we were having a terrible time finding a place to rent and in checking at the hotel we were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Not a good idiom to use. He informed us stiffly that the hotel was “hardly the bottom of the barrel.” I scrambled to explain that I wasn’t referring to the quality of their rooms but to what we assumed to be the small likelihood that they would have apartments to rent.

Not surprisingly, they didn’t have any. Not, after I had put his back up and ruffled his feathers, that he would necessarily have told us if they had.

He wouldn’t have gotten his knickers in a twist, forcing me to backpedal and eat my words, if I hadn’t used the wrong idiom for the occasion. What I meant wasn’t “scraping the bottom of the barrel” but “grasping at straws.”

Even in today’s world, where the only exposure most of us have to a barrel is hearing news reports about the price of oil, and we have only the vaguest idea of the actual size of a barrel of crude oil, it’s easy enough to make sense of “scraping the bottom of the barrel.” But what about “grasping at straws?” We use it to mean using anything we can find, even when it’s clearly irrelevant or inadequate, but where does it come from?

I suppose it could describe skinny cows or goats out in a field during a very dry year, munching at stalks of straw because there isn’t any real grass left to eat. Or a hungry donkey or horse reaching for the last few bits of hay in an empty manger. But that isn’t quite the same as “grasping.” And, of course, grasping at straws is not the same as the last straw, that final small bit of weight that broke the back of the poor overloaded camel.

When one is grasping at the straw in the bottom of the barrel, there’s just one thing left to do. Look it up. According to the idioms section of The Free Dictionary, “grasping at straws” comes from the image of a person in danger of drowning who clutches at flimsy reeds in a futile attempt to stay above water.

Now there’s a happy and inspiring idiom for you. Because if you are going under for the second or third time, grasping at some frail reed gives you only a slim chance. Will it be enough to save you? Fat chance of that.

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

Read-Fried Potatoes

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Kathleen Fox

According to our father, one of my sisters, as a teenager, made the best fried potatoes he’d ever eaten. The secret? She would let the potatoes brown until they were just thiiiis close to burning, which meant they came out perfectly, deliciously crisp. Here’s how she—and perhaps others of us in the family, who are certainly not going to admit who I am—does it:

Peel and slice however many potatoes seems about right for the number of people you’re feeding. Go ahead, toss in one more—these will be so good, people are going to take second helpings.

Chop an onion, or two, or half of one, depending on your taste.

Heat oil in an iron skillet.

Toss the potatoes and onions into the skillet, spread them around, turn the heat down to medium.

Sit down at the kitchen table with whatever book you are currently reading. Resume reading until you begin to smell potatoes on the verge of burning. Finish paragraph, mark place in book, put it down, stir potatoes.

Repeat as needed, until chapter is finished and potatoes are brown and crisp on both sides. Salt to taste (the potatoes, not the book) and serve.

See? So simple anyone can do it. There are, however, a couple of important secrets to success.

One is careful selection of the main ingredient. Oh, don’t worry about the potatoes. Red, russet, large, small, peeled, unpeeled—it doesn’t really matter. Whatever you have on hand will work just fine.

No, what you have to choose wisely is the book. One with especially long paragraphs can be a problem. Even worse is a gripping mystery or thriller, especially if you’re near the end, and in just two or three more pages you’ll uncover the murderer or the hero will escape and succeed in saving the free world, and you just can’t put it down. Right and justice may prevail, but that’s small consolation in exchange for a skillet full of charred potatoes.

A deeply emotional story has its pitfalls, as well. Say the long-lost lovers have just been reunited, or the almost-villain has just redeemed himself with a noble self-sacrifice and is breathing his last, and you are reading as fast as you can, with a lump in your throat and a damp wad of tissues clutched in your hand. Even if you manage to come up for air and another tissue in time to keep the potatoes from burning, there’s a serious risk of them turning out soggy and oversalted as a result of overflowing tears.

The second secret is, no matter how exciting a scene you’re in the middle of, put the book down while you attend to the potatoes. Continuing to read while you stir might seem like a good idea, but like so many other methods of multi-tasking, it is less efficient than it seems. For one thing, you risk spattering hot oil all over your book or e-reader. Too many little blobs of grease on the screen, and not only is it hard to make out the words, but the device might not respond to your finger-swipes when you want to turn a page. (Please don’t ask me how I know this.) And you don’t want to be that library patron—the one who returns books splattered with yellow spots and smelling like the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant that barely passed its last inspection.

Besides, with your attention on your reading, there’s a good chance of serious stirring errors. Either you’ll miss half of the potatoes and burn the others—in which case you might just as well have sat at the table and finished the chapter. Or you’ll stir too forcefully and risk knocking the hot skillet completely off the stove. Then you’ll not only have a mess to clean up, but you might get a serious burn. Even worse, if the iron skillet falls on your foot you’ll end up with broken bones and have to be taken off to the emergency room.

If that happens, you’ll get no potatoes. Although, while you wait for the doctor, you will have plenty of time to finish your book.

Categories: Family, Food and Drink | Tags: | Leave a comment

Cleaning Off the Fridge

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Kathleen Fox

Have you refreshed your refrigerator lately? Me neither.

I don’t mean tossing outdated stuff, like that barbecue sauce with an expiration date of 1991, or the jar of strawberry jam with only one lonely dried-up fragment of fruit clinging to the bottom. Or cautiously lifting the lids of small plastic containers in case the new life forms that have colonized the leftovers inside might be hostile.

No, I’m talking about updating the outside of the fridge. Standing in the kitchen this morning waiting for the coffee to brew, my unfocused gaze rested idly on the pictures covering the top half of our refrigerator. Even in my precaffeinated state, I realized something. Those pictures are embarrassingly out of date.

Here’s part of what is frozen in time on the front of our fridge: A young father and his toddler son, open mouths aiming for the same bite of ice cream. A newborn snuggled into his mother’s arms. A six-month-old, dressed up in an oversized cowboy hat for an old-time photo, with a grin that makes him the happiest little desperado you’ve ever seen. A smiling family group, with two cute middle-school boys, two little girls with missing front teeth, and a toddler.

The ice cream-eating dad now has to compete for his chocolate-peanut butter swirl with three kids instead of one. The newborn has become a big brother who knows all his colors, can count to 20 with only a slight vagueness in the teens, and is much too busy for snuggling. The miniature desperado is now an amazing athlete who plays baseball with the focus of a future pro and does things on a skateboard that make my knees cringe just to watch. The family group has increased by two, one of whom is already in kindergarten. The little girls are now lovely young women with all their front teeth, and the two oldest boys loom over the rest of us and have astonishing deep voices.

It isn’t just the photos that are out of date, either. There’s a yellowed newspaper clipping that has decorated this fridge for close to two decades. One of the magnets is from a workplace I left in 1989. Another is from a plumber who has long since retired and ridden his Harley off into the sunset. There are two battered ones—not worth keeping for neither sentimental nor ornamental value—that I believe to be older than any of my children. A red and yellow magnet—definitely a keeper—was made by a sixth-grader who is now the mother of the two deep-voiced boys.

Yep; it’s definitely time for an update. Maybe, when I finish refreshing the outside of the fridge, I’ll even get around to checking the expiration dates on all those bottles of salad dressing and barbecue sauce.

Or maybe not. After all, those are safely hidden inside the door. It’s the outdated outside of the fridge that’s so embarrassing.

Categories: Family, Odds and Ends | 1 Comment

Second-Hand Good Judgment

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Kathleen Fox

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Anyone over the age of, say, two and a half knows this saying to be true. Some of us with a few decades more maturity might even be willing to admit it

But it’s also true that, once in a while, good judgment grows out of someone else’s bad judgment. Humans, being wise and adaptable creatures, can sometimes learn valuable lessons from watching what happens to those around us.

Here are a few second-hand pieces of good judgment I have learned:

1. Before I walk on the treadmill, I always tie my shoes in double knots. I learned this from the experience of a friend whose shoelace came untied, caught in the roller of the treadmill, and pulled her to her knees for several very painful minutes until she could loosen her shoe enough to escape. But that’s not all—while I walk on the treadmill, I always use the safety cord. The magnet on one end must be attached to the treadmill in order for it to operate. The idea is to clip the other end to your clothes, so in case you slip or trip or are the victim of your own loose shoelace, the treadmill will stop instantly when your falling body pulls the magnet loose. Any time I’m tempted to not bother with the clip, I remember what my friend’s legs looked like. You generally only see scabs that impressive on the knees of novice nine-year-old roller skaters.

2. If I need to hang a picture, change a light bulb, or reach something on a high shelf, I take time to go to downstairs and get the stepstool. Or at least I go to the dining room and get a sturdy wooden chair. Because I learned the following from one of the members of my family: even if you’re in a hurry, and you’re just going to do one quick little thing, and the only chair in the room happens to be one on wheels, it’s really, really not a good idea to stand on that chair. True, you might save a minute or two by not taking time to go get something less mobile to stand on. But that isn’t much of a benefit when you balance it against spending several hours in the emergency room waiting for the doctor to set your broken wrist.

3. If I have my cell phone in the back pocket of my jeans, and I need to answer a call of nature, I first park the phone somewhere safe like the bathroom counter. I formed this habit after another member of my family had her phone slip out of her pocket and land with an embarrassing splash in the toilet. I also learned from her experience that one possible way to dry out a phone is to seal it into a bag of uncooked rice for a day. It may or may not work but is worth a try. If nothing else, the pain of being out of communication with the wider world for 24 hours serves as a reminder to be more careful in the future.

Careful, the way I am, with my phone-protecting behavior. Okay, there was that one time. Yes, I left the phone on the counter in someone else’s house. Yes, I was traveling at the time and had to drive some 50 miles out of my way the next day to retrieve it. But at least it was dry when I got there.

Really, the whole incident was so trivial I don’t even know why I mentioned it. But if you gain any good judgment from my humbling—er, humble experience, you’re more than welcome.

Categories: Living Consciously, Odds and Ends | 1 Comment

I can do it myself, but I don’t have to like it.

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Kathleen Fox

I am not exactly a technophobe. I used to assemble computers. I was installing and configuring software when Windows 10—heck, Windows XP—was only a gleam in Bill Gates’s eye. I had a cell phone before it was obligatory. I have a smart phone now, as well as a car smart enough to answer calls on my smart phone. (I’ve never caught them at it, but I have occasionally wondered if my car and my phone have private conversations when I’m not around.)

But I still hate learning new technology. Maybe it’s my reluctance to read directions. Maybe it’s the fact that there are so many more interesting things to occupy my brain. Or maybe—don’t tell anyone, but I think this is the real reason—I’m just lazy.

And one piece of new technology I especially dislike is the self-checkout terminals at the grocery store.

There is a pattern here, I guess. I am old enough—just barely—to remember when gas stations switched to self-service pumps. I didn’t like them at first, either. I even remember, as a newlywed college student, how intimidating it was the first time I drove our battered little 1962 Nash Rambler station wagon up to the gas pump and filled it myself. It wasn’t the mechanical challenge of dealing with the nozzle or starting the pump. It was the spatial challenge: getting close enough to the pump for the nozzle to reach but staying far enough away that I didn’t hit anything.

That was a valid fear, too, given what I did to our 1969 Plymouth Satellite a decade or so later. By then filling the gas tank had long since become routine. But one day, leaving the station, I turned too short and managed to jam the side of the car against a concrete post. Presumably it was there to protect the gas pumps from drivers like me with good intentions but bad depth perception; I guess it worked. The crunched back door on the passenger’s side was an embarrassing reminder of my ineptitude until I sold the car several years later.

That little mishap aside, over the years I’ve filled gas tanks in various cars, pumped diesel fuel into pickups so big I had to balance on the running board in order to wash the middle of the windshield, and learned to appreciate the convenience of swipe-your-card-and-go fuel pumps.

Oh, and that warning about not leaving the pump while your tank is filling? There’s a reason for that. One below-zero day, waiting in the car instead of outside in the bitter wind, I didn’t notice that the frigid nozzle had failed to shut off until it had poured a couple of gallons of 87-octane down the size of my car and onto the icy concrete. Good thing I hadn’t left the car running. I guess there’s a reason they warn you about that, too.

By comparison, I suppose the potential drawbacks of scanning my own eggs and weighing my own produce at the grocery store are relatively minor. I know I’ll become nonchalant about it eventually. I might even stop muttering inappropriate words under my breath while I try to figure out whether I have “Avocados, Large” or “Avocados, Medium,” or whether to find snow peas under “S” or “P.”

Though I do think I might like the self checkout terminal better if it didn’t talk to me. The voice is pleasant enough, but by the third time she tells me, “please place your items in the bagging area,” after I’ve already done it, I just want her to leave me alone. I’ve even been tempted to run over her with my cart in order to shut her up.

She doesn’t know how lucky she is that there isn’t room in the checkout lane for a 1969 Plymouth.

Categories: Odds and Ends | Tags: | 3 Comments

The Spirit of the Christmas Letter

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Kathleen Fox

Even though I don’t receive many of them (maybe more would come in if I sent out the occasional Christmas card?), I like Christmas letters. In the hands of someone creative like my niece, the annual update is a delight. But since I’m addicted to stories, I find Christmas letters at least mildly interesting even if the sender is someone I hardly know, like the daughter-in-law of my mother’s cousin once removed.

I’ve never sent out a Christmas letter myself, which for a writer is something of an embarrassment. Maybe this is the year to try it. See what you think:

 

It’s been another above-average year at our house. We got our usual promotions and bonuses at work, enjoyed entertaining our many friends, and gave back generously to the community in our usual ways. We’re both still wearing the same size clothes as we wore in our 20’s, we never disagree or raise our voices, and our children are all outstanding in their fields.

One of the grandchildren just received an acceptance letter from Harvard—not bad for someone who is still in preschool!! His parents are excited, of course, but they think if he does well in kindergarten next year he’ll probably get offered a scholarship at Stanford, so they aren’t making any commitments quite yet.

In June I bought a quirky little painting at a garage sale for five bucks. Turns out it was an original Picasso!!! The appraiser on Antiques Roadshow valued it at three million dollars! We sold it at Sotheby’s this fall—our accountant is still figuring out the tax consequences of that little capital gain!!

Sparky won Best of Show at the Westminster dog show this year!! Not bad for a rescue pup from the animal shelter! We weren’t going to do the show circuit, but the trainer simply begged us to let Sparky compete—she said he was the closest thing to a perfect Southern Basset she had ever seen. Now he’s in great demand as a sire, which makes it a little awkward when we explain that having him neutered was one of the requirements when we adopted him. Oh, well, at least he enjoys drinking out of the silver cup with his name on it!

And finally, my blog was among the finalists for the prestigious “Five-W” (Wit and Wisdom on the World Wide Web) award this year! I was deeply touched, even though I didn’t win. The judges said even though my stories about Sparky were entertaining, I would have done better with more cute kitten videos. Maybe it’s time for another visit to the animal shelter. Just don’t let Sparky know!!

 

Wait. You don’t believe any of that? Not even the Picasso? Drat; I knew I should have said Grandma Moses instead.

Maybe this will work better:

It’s been a year pretty much like any other, with family, friends, work, play, and the usual share of ups, downs, and sidewayses. Until this fall, when a health concern in the family brought home to us that the idea of “live life to the fullest, because you never know what might happen” is a truism because it’s, well, true.

The person involved is doing well—nothing is life-threatening or even life-style threatening or in need of treatment right now. But in the process of unraveling this medical issue, for me one fact has moved from the theoretical to the actual. We are all going to die, and so are the people we love most in the world. Someday. Possibly sooner, hopefully later. We don’t necessarily get to choose when.

And in the meantime, we are very much alive. The world—in spite of the fears and wounds and resentments and even evil that we humans harbor and sometimes inflict on one another—is filled with opportunities for kindness, love, and joy. It really is important to count our blessings, appreciate our loved ones, and savor one moment at a time.

It’s almost impossible to talk about something this important without sounding like a parody of a self-help guru. Like so many other things, living in the now is hard to put into words and is best learned by practice and example. The example that inspired me this Christmas morning came from one of the small grandchildren. Ignoring his “real” gifts for the moment, he was intently focused on popping, one at a time, the little inflated sacs in a piece of bubble wrap.

Gifts, and the opportunity to savor them, come in a multitude of ways. Merry Christmas.

Categories: Living Consciously | 1 Comment

The Perils of the Lady in Red

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Kathleen Fox

Having houseguests can be a bit stressful. Even when they are quiet, unobtrusive sorts who don’t make a fuss, scatter their stuff all over the house, or criticize your cooking or housekeeping. Still, there’s always the issue of trying to be a gracious hostess without hovering. There’s a delicate balance to allowing guests to follow their own schedules and preferences while trying not to unreasonably disrupt your own.

Then there’s the issue of staying out of each other’s way in the kitchen. Courteously allowing guests to share counter space instead of swiping at them with the dishcloth. Not stepping on them while you’re cooking. Not scalding them with the teakettle. Letting them share the sink without washing them down the drain.

Oh. Sorry. I forgot to mention that the particular guests I’m talking about are ladybugs. Otherwise known as ladybird beetles. Coccinellidae, if one wants to be formal. The name comes from the Latin word for “scarlet,” which certainly fits these little red beetles with their dainty black spots. Apparently the “lady” originated in Britain and was associated with Mary the mother of Jesus, who was often shown in early paintings with a red cloak. I didn’t find any sources that speculated on whether Mother Mary would have been honored or annoyed by having insects named after her.

At least these are beneficial insects, for the most part, being primarily aphid-eaters. They seem friendly, too, though that may be due merely to the cheerful little spots.

Anyway, this time of year we are subject to random visits by ladybugs, mostly in our kitchen. I don’t know where they come from. Mostly they crawl around on the back of the counter near the window, with occasional forays up to the top of the screen.

I never deliberately squash them. Protecting them from accidents, however, is sometimes difficult. Fortunately, ladybugs seem to be tough little critters. They recover quite well from being flipped upside down, are not easily discouraged by inadvertent finger-poking, and do not drown easily even in hot water.

There was the one I tried to wipe up with the dishcloth, thinking it was an apple seed or a cracker crumb until I saw its legs. By then it was tangled in the fabric, so I spread the dishcloth out on the counter so it could extricate itself (which it eventually did) and got another cloth to finish wiping off the counters.

Every now and then one is hiding in the sink when I start to fill it with hot soapy water, and when it floats to the top with its legs flailing I fish it out with a spoon and dump it out on the counter. After a bit of gasping and wing-flapping it pulls itself together and crawls away, sadder and—I hope—a bit wiser.

Once in a while, of course, a ladybug does get squished or drowned. But it’s always accidental—I swear. Yesterday, though, I thought the ladybug perils had reached a new level. I was vigorously stirring batter for a batch of oatmeal bread, and there was a round red-brown spot. Uh-oh. I fished it out with my cooking fork and took a closer look.

Luckily, it was only an undissolved lump of brown sugar. I think.

Oatmeal bread, anyone?

Categories: Wild Things | Tags: | 4 Comments

Holiday Overachieving and Great Ideas

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Kathleen Fox

This time of year, it’s easy to feel like an underachiever. It’s not just all the ads and articles and advice about creating “perfect” Christmas gifts or Christmas wrap or Christmas cookies or Christmas dinners or Christmas decorating. It’s the people—admit it, we all know a few of them—who actually do all that stuff.

This year, as it happens, I’m doing more hands-on Christmas preparations myself than usual. Oh, we still haven’t done any decorating or put up a tree. No cookies have been or will be baked in our kitchen. Almost no shopping has been done, either.

But I am making gifts for several family members. As I often do, around the first of December I had a Great Idea for creating something handmade. Usually I consider factors like the days left till Christmas, the steps required to turn the idea into reality, and the probability that the Great Idea will result in a Not-So-Great Product, and I decide not to even try.

But this year I decided to actually carry out the Great Idea. Right now I’m in the middle of making a batch of Christmas gifts. I’m not doing it because I think I should. I’m not doing it because I think the recipients will be blown away by my creativity and overwhelmed with gratitude and keep these things forever. (Well, okay, I would like just a little bit of that. Not too much, though—it might make me think I need to do something similar next year)

I’m doing it because it’s fun. Mostly. There was that one little problem with figuring out how to make this part work, and that other little problem with getting another part to come out right. But I’m pleasantly surprised: Not only am I enjoying the process, but the reality of the almost-finished product is astonishingly close to the Great Idea as I imagined it.

And along the way, I had another Great Idea. This one deals with all the people I see as holiday overachievers. The ones who show up at a “please don’t bring anything” gathering with a little handmade gift for everyone or a batch of beautiful Christmas cookies. Or who wrap presents so beautifully that the wrapping itself is a work of art. Or who decorate every room in the house and has three color-coordinated trees in the front window.

Why should my response to any of that be a kneejerk flash of guilt, a feeling that I am a less-than-adequate human being who doesn’t quite measure up? Why should I care if someone else does a lot of elaborate holiday preparation that I don’t even care about or want to do? It has nothing to do with me, after all.

So here’s my Great Idea: Instead of feeling like an underachiever in those circumstances, I’m going to say something like, “Oh, you must have had fun creating this.”

If they did have fun, then more power to them. And the appreciation of people like me doesn’t much matter. It’s just a little bonus for them, the icing on the cookie, as it were.

If they didn’t have fun, that’s too bad, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with me, either. After all, no one forces any of us to do anything around the holidays. If stressed-out overachievers don’t like what they’re doing, they can come up with their own Great Idea and just say no.

And they shouldn’t feel guilty. Even if the rest of us miss out on some Christmas cookies.

Categories: Living Consciously | Tags: | 2 Comments

Better Living Through Technology

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Kathleen Fox

Science and technology have given us innovations like self-driving cars, the ability to peer into deep space, and 3D printers that can create everything from toys to body parts.

This is all very well and good. But why can’t some of those brilliant scientists and engineers devote a fragment of their attention to little day-to-day things? Here are a few inventions I would like to see that would make life just a tiny bit safer or more enjoyable.

A container for leftovers with a pop-up sensor to warn you when the contents have been in the fridge long enough to contain microbes that are unsafe for human consumption. The more sophisticated version might even be able to search scientific archives online and alert you that whatever is growing on that leftover lasagna might be a previously undiscovered life form.

A cup for hot chocolate with a device—maybe a little mesh insert somewhat like a tea strainer?—to keep marshmallows at the bottom of the cup. Then you could save that extra sweetness for last instead of slurping it first and leaving the rest of the cupful to taste disappointing by comparison. You’d avoid the telltale marshmallow mustache, too.

A miniature water heater for that sprayer at the dentist’s office that the hygienist uses to rinse out your mouth. Surely a couple of engineers with sensitive teeth could figure out a way to get rid of that awful jet of cold water. And while they’re at it, they could do something to warm up the air from that evil dryer nozzle.

Eyeliner and mascara applicators with extra-short handles for nearsighted people who have to get within a couple inches of the mirror to put their makeup on. As a bonus, these could be sold with little face masks to keep your breath from fogging the mirror and also avoid those pesky nose prints on the glass.

Hats for sun protection or warmth that stay on in the wind but don’t squash your hair until you resemble Donald Trump in an overcrowded elevator. Maybe something like a construction hard hat, which has an inner ring you can adjust to fit while the actual hat sits away from your head? Oh, wait—I’ve seen myself in a hard hat. Maybe this concept needs a little more work.

A fitness/diet tracker programmed not just to nag you about steps and calories but to tell you warmly, at random intervals, “You need a reward. Go sit down and have a brownie.”

Inventions like these would truly use science and technology for the betterment of humankind. Nobel committee, please take note.

Categories: Food and Drink, Living Consciously, Odds and Ends | 1 Comment

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