Just For Fun

Walking is great for the mind and the body. Its combination of physical exercise and contemplation is a wonderful aid to serenity.

Except for the dogs.

I know, I know, dogs who bark at pedestrians are just doing what dogs are supposed to do, guarding home and hearth from suspicious strangers. But protective intentions or not, after a while enough gets to be enough.

There are two Shelties down the street from us. No matter that we walk past their yard nearly every day and they should have figured out by now that we’re harmless. They still have yipping conniptions every time we go by. They dash back and forth along the fence, jumping up and down, shoving each other out of the way in order to claim first rights of abuse, and shrieking threats to our lives and insults to our ancestors. Obviously, these two ladies don’t have enough to do. We’ve seriously considered trying to sneak a few sheep into their yard some dark night.

In New Mexico, where we’re visiting right now, it isn’t Shelties, it’s Chihuahuas. They seem to be popular here, perhaps because it’s closer to their place of origin or they’re suited to the warmer climate. Or maybe it’s just because they get so many miles per ounce of dog food. It can’t be because they’re cheap. An ad in the local paper this week advertised Chihuahua puppies for $150 to $300 each. That’s a lot of money, especially figured by the pound.

Whatever the reason, plenty of these bug-eyed little yippers live here. We’ll be out for our daily walk, minding our own business like the health-minded good citizens we are, and every few blocks another pint-sized property protector dashes out of its yard. In a frantic falsetto, it threatens to tear us limb from limb—at least below the ankles.

Usually a few sharp words are enough to send them scurrying for home. But one day we encountered a little dog who seemed determined to chase us all the way home. After half a block or so, besides being fed up with his yapping, I started to worry that the obnoxious little guy would run us out of his neighborhood so far he’d get lost. I turned on him, stamped my foot a couple of times, and shouted. He turned tail and ran.

We continued our walk in peace—for a few minutes. Before we’d reached the next corner, there was a new outbreak of shrill barking behind us. There was our original pursuer, back in full yip. And right behind him was a second Chihuahua—slightly bigger, a little bit louder, and a whole lot scruffier. If he had been a couple of feet taller, he surely would have been named “Brutus.” My foot-stamping hadn’t scared Junior off; it had merely sent him after backup.

I suppose we should be grateful to be run after and barked at by guard dogs whose only threat is to our eardrums. Still, there’s something a bit insulting about it. Apparently we’re so harmless that Chihuahuas are enough to take care of the likes of us; the Rottweilers and pit bulls have more important things to do.

As I was out walking this morning, I glanced up to see a Chihuahua coming at me from across the street. It wasn’t barking yet, but it was pelting toward me as fast as its four-inch legs could carry it, a look of determination on its brow. I braced myself. It came nearer, and nearer—and ran right on by. Apparently it was late for an urgent appointment somewhere behind me.

Embarrassment is being barked at and chased by a dog no higher than your ankles. True humiliation, though, is being ignored by one.

As a kid, the only carnival rides I would venture on were the Ferris wheel and the carousel. Of course, at the little street carnivals that came to town for the Fourth of July and Labor Day, there weren’t a lot of rides besides those two classics. Still, even then I didn’t see the appeal in trusting myself to metal constructions designed to drop paying passengers with bone-jarring force, whip them from side to side, or spin them in nausea-inducing circles.

Today, in a bigger town at a bigger fair, the carnival rides are a lot more sophisticated. So am I, perhaps, but in some ways I haven’t changed. I’m perfectly happy to let more adventurous souls try the rides. I’d rather stay on the pavement, secured there by the cotton candy on the bottoms of my shoes, and watch the little kids ride the carousel.

From across the midway, the carousel was an exciting shimmer of gleaming animals and golden lights. On closer inspection, the mirrors were tarnished and the gilt paint needed some touching up. The animals—an ostrich, a rooster, a cat, and a tusked boar mixed in among the horses—were just a little too small, a little too skinny, a little too mass-produced.

The little kids riding them didn’t seem to care. The littlest one, probably not a year old yet, had trouble keeping her diaper-padded bottom in the saddle and would have slipped off the side had she not been held on safely by his mother’s arm around her chubby middle. She seemed cheerful enough, if a bit confused by the whole procedure.

Another little boy, about three, was riding by himself and not too sure he liked the idea. He came by the first time with a determined expression and a two-fisted grip on the pole. On the second revolution, he still had a firm hold, but had relaxed enough to smile at his dad as he went by. The third time around, he had decided this was fun, giving his family a big wave and a look-at-me grin. In a couple of years, he’ll probably be wanting to go on rides with names like “Cyclone” and “X-Treme Force.”

The Ferris wheel was sparsely inhabited, mostly by nostalgic older riders. I had no desire to join them. When I look at carnival rides now, I tend to check the girders for missing bolts while my mind considers uncomfortable questions like, “What kind of insurance do they have?” and, “Who maintains these things?”

Once in my life, however, I did go on a real Ferris wheel. The “Riesenrad” in Vienna is one of several in the world built in the late 1890’s. It’s the only one still in use, though it has been rebuilt after being burned during World War II. The wheel is hung with enclosed cars that look like miniature boxcars with windows. Riding it means standing in the car with perhaps a dozen other people, holding onto the railing and looking through the glass at the historic city waay down below.

As we rose majestically to the top of the wheel, one of the friends I was traveling with asked me, “Are you afraid of heights?”

“Oh, not really,” I said.

“I just wondered, because your knuckles are white and I didn’t think you were breathing.”

Of course I wasn’t breathing. We were 200 feet up in the air.

Maybe it was the chance to ride a piece of history. Maybe it was the excitement of foreign travel. White knuckles notwithstanding, I never once thought about insurance or maintenance while I was riding the century-old Riesenrad. Logical or not, I’d go on it again. Now that was a Ferris wheel.

On my walk the other morning, I came upon a flock of turkeys, two hens and about 10 half-grown poults, hanging out in the middle of the road. Yes, turkeys cross the road as much as chickens do. It just takes them longer to figure out why they need to. Plus they tend to wait until they see a car coming, so they can dash out in front of it. This apparently is the turkey version of playing chicken.

A gray tiger-striped cat, slinking along in its best “I am a fearsome beast of prey” crouch, was stalking the birds. The tip of its tail was flicking back and forth with the intensity of a fourteen-year-old trying to dry her nail polish before her next cell phone call.

The cat executed a flanking maneuver, slipping around behind the turkeys to herd them toward the ditch. Instead of fleeing, the turkeys milled in a circle in the road. They trotted back and forth, uttering anxious little clucks and all but wringing their wings in distress.

Each of the two hens easily outweighed the cat by several pounds. Even the young ones probably matched it in size. If even a couple of the birds had made a dash at the cat, which was neither foolish nor starving, it would have been out of there.

Apparently, though, working together to deter a potential predator isn’t an idea likely to occur to a turkey. They continued their trotting and wing-wringing until a bigger threat in the form of a pickup came over the hill. Then they scattered, some running for the weeds, others launching themselves a few feet into the air like overloaded cargo planes. The cat streaked back to its own front yard, tail lashing in irritation.

As I continued my walk, I wondered how the turkeys would have reacted to a mountain lion. Maybe they recognized “cat,” perhaps through scent, without the ability to distinguish between “small cat = minor nuisance” and “big cat = scram or you’re lunch.” Or maybe not. Had the stalking feline been a mountain lion, they might have skipped the worrying and been gone before it got close enough to pounce.

Either way, inquiring minds would like to know. Sort of. Scientific research is all very well, but on-site explorations have their pitfalls. My curiosity isn’t strong enough to make me want to observe a turkey/mountain lion encounter first hand. I might learn that the turkeys could recognize a real predator in time to protect themselves, but the knowledge might not offer me any satisfaction. Because if the turkeys all fled, the next best item on the lion’s menu would be me.

It isn’t true that I dislike chickens. I do like them—grilled, roasted, fried, in salad, and in soup. I just don’t fully appreciate chickens in their pre-butchered state.

This perhaps unreasonable attitude stems, like many prejudices, from childhood experience. Being sent every day to persuade uncooperative and hostile hens to abandon their fresh-laid eggs can have a traumatic impact on an innocent little girl, even when she arms herself with a stout stick. As a result, I wouldn’t ordinarily cross the road to look at a chicken.

But last week we went to the fair, and my fair-going companion wanted to check out the chickens. When he was small, he helped raise a few bantams. Either their small size made them less intimidating than the chickens I remember, or someone else gathered their eggs, or his chickens all died before he had a chance to learn their true character. For whatever reason, he had more positive poultry-related childhood memories than I did. So we ventured into the poultry exhibit.

Just inside the door was posted a list of chicken classes. This came as a surprise to me. As far as I’m concerned, chickens have no class. As we walked (warily, on my part) between the rows of wire cages, however, it did become clear that chickens come in more varieties than I would ever have imagined.

There were arrogant roosters in bright reds and bronzes. Bright-eyed hens in gleaming browns and blacks. Tiny but proud bantams. Fancy-dress chickens with fluffy feathers between their toes. One otherwise ordinary white rooster was the most enormous chicken I had ever seen, big enough for a month of Sunday dinners. There were even “naked-necked” chickens, just what their name implies, bearing an unsettling resemblance to the turkey buzzard.

There were chickens which, instead of combs, had crests of stiff feathers on their heads. The crests quivered with every peck and bob of their heads, sticking up as if their hairdressers had been heavy-handed with the styling gel. One cage held four of these crested critters, in mottled gray and white. They looked like a rock band who had spent a lot of time too close to their own amplifiers.

Then there were the “frizzled” chickens. Their feathers were oddly crimped, as if they had poked a toe into an electrical outlet. Or maybe they had narrowly survived an attack by a coyote. Or else they had all been to a cut-rate hairdresser and gotten really bad perms.

Even as a non-fan of the chicken, this experience gave me an opportunity to see these unique birds in a new way. True, they came in different colors and sizes, with varieties of feathers and combed or uncombed heads. Still, they were more alike than different, with their proud plumage and their bright eyes and their little chicken hearts. It made me stop and think about how much they all had in common.

Particularly the fact that they probably all taste just like chicken.

Gluing carpet to a hardwood floor is a crime. An appropriate punishment would be forcing the perpetrator to pull up the carpet, then sand the floor by hand, with a two-inch sanding block, in 100-degree weather, with rap music playing at a volume just low enough not to violate the Geneva Conventions.

I reached this conclusion as a result of my latest home-improvement project, redoing the guest room. It was too dark, with its blue walls and its 30-year-old variegated dark brown carpet. Under that was a 35-year-old variegated light brown carpet. Under both layers of carpet was a hardwood floor.

I’ve been wanting to uncover that floor for a long time. Last week, I decided the time had come.

The first step, of course, was to clear everything out of the room, including the solid oak antique dresser, the seven shelves crammed with books, and the surprising hodgepodge of stuff that always manages to accumulate in a guest room. Umpty-eleven trips and a lot of shoving later, the room was empty.

It was time to start pulling up carpet. The first layer was easy. It was at the second layer that we made the Awful Discovery. Any home-improvement project has to have at least one Awful Discovery. It’s required by section Q, subsection H, sub-subsection W, of the Do-It-Yourself Regulation Manual. In this case, the Awful Discovery was finding out that the carpet had been glued down.

Snarling and muttering about the taste, ancestry, and criminal intent of anyone who would glue carpet over a hardwood floor was beside the point. It was too late to back out. We pulled up the carpet, leaving about half of the original backing stuck to the floor. We scraped that up with wide plastic scrapers, which wasn’t actually as dreadful a process as it sounds.

The next step was scrubbing off the remaining bits of tattered gray gunk with a wire brush. This provided great exercise for the triceps and abs, but resulted in considerable wear and tear on the hands and the knees. Being that close to the floor also gave me a chance to see that it was covered with two layers of glue. Someone had glued carpet over hardwood, not once, but twice.

Okay, I had to admit there were extenuating circumstances that reduced the second offense from a felony to a misdemeanor. This house had an inch or so of water in it during the 1972 Rapid City flood. The first water-ruined carpet must have been replaced when the house was moved to its current location after the flood.

We learned two things through hands-on experimentation. A: the adhesive remover we bought at the home-improvement store didn’t work on either type of glue. B: sanding through the glue with our small sanders would be possible but would probably take a month of 10-hour days.

It was time to start calling professionals. The two or three who even bothered to return my phone calls wouldn’t even be able to give me an estimate for at least six weeks. Finally, one wonderfully agreeable man said he could take a look at the floor that same afternoon.

His verdict? Damage from the flood had left gaps between the boards, plus black bacterial stains that probably went too deep to be sanded out. Refinishing the floor would mean a higher-than-average cost and a lower-than-average result. He didn’t recommend it.

Three days later, the room is bright and fresh with its new coat (three coats, actually) of paint and its new carpet. But I’d still like to get my hands on the home-decorating felon who first glued carpet to the hardwood floor.

Was it something I said?

Last week I wrote about the over-abundance of bunnies this year. The Rapid City Journal wrote about them as well, after one of our city council members (councilpersons? councilpeople?) commented on cottontail crowding at a council meeting.

A couple of days later, the cottontails were gone. No adolescent bunnies playing in the driveway or sneaking into the garage. No little nose-twitching, bright-eyed statues beside the road when I went for a walk. Not so much as a glimpse of a white tail vanishing into the grass.

What happened? Maybe they got out their leather vests and went to the Rally (on their Harley softails, of course). Maybe they came down with some fast-acting lagomorphic disease and expired. Maybe they all hopped down the bunny trail to a family reunion. Maybe the neighborhood foxes had a family reunion and invited the bunnies to be guests of honor for the main course. Maybe they’re all holed up somewhere producing the next generation of bunnies.

Or maybe they didn’t care for what I wrote, and didn’t care to be discussed in the newspaper, so they all cancelled their subscriptions to the paper and their links to my blog, and they’ve left the neighborhood in protest. Everybody’s a critic.

On the other hand, this opens up some possibilities. The other critters we have to excess in Rapid City (besides deer, mountain lions, and—this week, anyway—Hogs) are geese.

We went for a walk the other evening in Canyon Lake Park. The hundreds (no, that’s not an exaggeration; I wish it were) of geese and ducks who have made the lake their home have turned the place into a disgusting mess. If any kids are naïve enough to play ball or Frisbee on the grass, the resulting green smears on their clothes aren’t going to be grass stains. You can’t even enjoy the beauty of the lake, because you’re too busy watching where you walk. Doing the “goose step” anywhere near the lake doesn’t mean marching like Hitler’s storm troops. It means tip-toeing, skipping, and side-stepping your way along the sidewalk in order to avoid the excess of excrement that is turning a beautiful park into a foul fowl habitat.

Maybe, if I write something nasty about the geese, they’ll all get mad and leave. At least it’s worth a try.

Friends will help you move. Good friends will bring pickups to help you move. Really good friends will go dumpster-diving for boxes to help you move.

One of my friends just sold her house out in the country and bought a house in town. The rest of us knew what this meant—it was time to show up and help. Several of us in this group have been friends long enough to have helped each other move more than once. By now, we know just how it’s done.

We’re all getting a little older, however. Since maturity brings wisdom—not to mention an increase in back problems and a decrease in the need to impress anyone with feats of strength—we know our own limits. We tend not to volunteer any more for projects like moving upright oak pianos or hauling sleeper sofas up out of basements.

Even with movers to do the heavy things, though, moving is still a lot of work. There’s all the smaller stuff—dishes, clothes, lighter furniture, books (hanging out with intelligent people means you get to help move a lot of books), plants (this particular friend has lots and lots of plants), and all the miscellaneous stuff that you realize, come moving day, that you should probably have gotten rid of decades ago.

In order to pack all that stuff, of course, you need boxes. It’s not so easy to get those from stores any more. Most of their boxes are flattened and fed into the compactor for recycling faster than you can say, “Um, I’m moving, and could I get a few boxes?”

Hence the dumpster diving. The city has big recycling bins at a nearby park, including one for cardboard. It’s a great place to get rid of boxes, and it’s an even better place to get boxes. Recycling is recycling, after all.

So another friend and I went in search of boxes. We flopped open a couple of the heavy steel doors that line both sides of the bin and started hauling out boxes. Once we had all the good-sized ones we could reach, we still didn’t have enough. There were more, in perfect sizes, flattened and stacked on the floor of the bin, but they were just out of reach.

What if one of us climbed inside? Getting in wouldn’t be so bad, but getting out might be a problem. Okay, what if one of us balanced on the edge of the door and leaned waaay inside, and the other one held onto her feet? Well, maybe not.

What we really needed was a tool. And we found the perfect one in my car, a sturdy piece of plastic about two feet long that was just right to drag the boxes close enough so we could grab them. Which just goes to show that people who say there’s no need to have your ice scraper/snow brush in your car in July don’t know what they’re talking about.

On moving day, eight or nine people showed up with one big truck and four pickups. We descended on the house like a colony of box-toting ants, and in a surprisingly short time everything was loaded, hauled, and unloaded at the new house.

We all sat around amid the stacks of boxes in the proud homeowner’s new living room and munched our way through three or four pizzas. Then we headed home, feeling good about having helped and feeling even better that it wasn’t our job to unpack and put away all that stuff.

At least, once she’s done, she knows just where to recycle all those empty boxes.

Go ahead. Spend your vacation time this year at home or close to home. With the high price of gas, leading to higher prices for practically everything else, it’s probably a great idea.

But whether you visit all the attractions within a 50-mile radius or just hang out in your own back yard, please, please, pretty please, don’t call it a “Staycation.”

My suspicion is that scheduling a Staycation is an attempt to make it sound more like a high-minded choice and less like an economic necessity. God forbid, after all, that the neighbors should suspect you can’t afford a trip to Disney World. Or even that you might decide you don’t really want to go to Disney World—or Paris, or Hawaii, or the Grand Canyon, or spend a week with your in-laws.

My second suspicion is that the whole concept of the Staycation was created by somebody, somewhere, for the primary purpose of selling something to other somebodies. Just do an Internet search for the word, and you’ll find a whole mini-industry around it. “Staycation Sales” of grills, croquet sets, and plastic wading pools at your local discount store. Articles with tips for taking a successful Staycation. Advice on Staycation basics like unplugging the phone, pampering yourself, skipping household chores, and not checking your work email more than twice a day. 

As a buzzword, “Staycation” has an annoyance rating of at least 11 on a 10-point scale. In part this is because of its combination of pretentiousness and cuteness. But even worse is the whole create-a-fad, follow-the-crowd idea behind it.

What’s wrong with just saying, “We’re staying home this year,” and leaving it at that? Why can’t we do something as simple as choosing not to go away on vacation without institutionalizing the concept into a Movement?

Right this minute, someone is probably busy creating an organization for people who chose to take their vacations at home. I can just see the slogans on the tee-shirts. “We survived a family Staycation.” “What happens in the back yard stays in the back yard.” “My family did a Staycation and I had to tie-dye this stupid tee-shirt.”

The shirts would be made (in China, of course) exclusively for this association, The Society to Implement Local Leisure Yourself—otherwise known as SILLY.

Scrabble® turned 60 this year.

My mother’s Scrabble game isn’t quite as old as that, but it’s been around a long time. The board is a bit battered around the edges but still readable. The tiles, now kept in a handmade denim bag that she made, are all still there. The original box is still holding together, with a little help from a rubber band.

My Scrabble game is much newer and much fancier. The Deluxe version, it was a Christmas gift from my stepson a few years ago. Its board has plastic dividers between the letter spaces, and it comes complete with its own turntable. (My mother just sets hers on the lazy Susan that usually sits in the middle of the kitchen table.)

Old or new set, plain or deluxe, however, the game itself is still the same. It hasn’t really changed since it was invented during the Great Depression by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect. He originally called it “Lexico,” then decided on “Criss-Cross Words.” It wasn’t until 1948 that Mr. Butts and his partner, James Brunot, trademarked the name Scrabble and began manufacturing games in quantity.

According to Merriam-Webster, one meaning for the word “scrabble” is to “scrawl or scribble.” Another is “to scratch, claw, or grope about clumsily or frantically.” I’m not sure which meaning the inventors had in mind. I do know that if you draw seven vowels—or seven consonants, for that matter—“groping about frantically” is a pretty good description of your play for the rest of the game.

My family, readers and crossword puzzle fans that we are, includes several dedicated Scrabble players. Dedicated, anyway, by our standards, which are not exactly those of hard-core tournament Scrabble players.

According to the official Scrabble website, if you want to improve your scores, the first thing you should do is memorize a list of 96 two-letter words. Serious tournament players do this as a matter of course. Apparently they also spend their free time going through dictionaries and memorizing new words, particularly ones containing the high-scoring letters such as q, z, x, k, and j. Not wanting to clutter their brains with non-essentials, they don’t bother about the definitions of those words.

This is where my family parts ways with serious Scrabble players. According to our rules, if you can’t define it, it isn’t a word. We scorn the very idea of memorizing a list of obscure two-letter constructions that don’t even seem like real words, at least in English. Where’s the fun in that?

One family member, who shall remain anonymous, started playing Scrabble online a couple of years ago, and she did memorize that infamous list of two-letter words. After that, playing with her was no fun at all. It was a matter of principle; the fact that she consistently beat us had nothing to do with it.

Truly, though, we play Scrabble because we enjoy words. Yes, we’re competitive and we want to win. But if we have to choose between making a really cool word and playing a drab word that will get us more points, we’re as likely to choose the former as the latter. If we can put that really cool word on a double word score, of course, so much the better.

And I must admit that, just once before I die, I’d like to play “quartzite” on a triple word score.

For the last few weeks, we’ve seen in abundance two phenomena that are usually scarce in western South Dakota—presidential candidates and rain.

Candidates generally tend to ignore us. As a state with a small population and a late primary, we’ve almost always been in the “also participating” category. The results of our votes amble in long after the race has been decided and the reporters have all packed up and gone home.

As for moisture, we’ve been in a cycle of drought for the last several years—summers with little rain and winters with almost no snow. A friend of mine who teaches fourth grade said last winter that some of the kids in her class didn’t even know how to play in the snow; they’d never had the opportunity.

This spring, though, things have been different. May started out with a snowstorm that had us measuring totals in feet instead of inches. Then it started raining. By the time the month was over, it had set a new all-time record for moisture—nearly ten inches. It had been so long since we’d seen saturated fields and bank-full creeks, we didn’t know how to act. But, oh, my goodness, we were grateful for the moisture.

In between thunderstorms, we started getting visits from presidential candidates. It had been so long (if, indeed, it’s ever happened at all) since our primary mattered to anyone except ourselves, we didn’t know how to act. But, oh, my goodness, we were grateful for the recognition.

The rainstorms kept coming, and coming, and coming. The candidates kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back. The two phenomena began showing uncanny similarities. Both tended to show up unexpectedly. Both were accompanied by a lot of noise and commotion. Both tended to disrupt the normal course of things, cause some inconvenience, and offer ample promises for future abundance. Candidates’ smiles carried some of the same brilliance as the flashes of lightning—and could disappear almost as fast upon discovering a potential supporter was a registered independent and therefore ineligible to vote in the primary.

By the time May turned into June, both the rain and the candidates were beginning to feel like just a little too much of a good thing. We started looking forward to those rare days of sunshine and those rare days without a candidate’s picture on the front page. I thought I might have to go to the farm supply store and buy a pair of tall rubber boots. What with one thing and another, it was getting awfully deep around here.

But by now, the primary is over. The candidates are gone. We’ve had our moment in the sun—figuratively speaking, at least—and we can relax back into obscurity.

It is still raining, though. Maybe I should have bought those rubber boots.