Odds and Ends

Scenario One: You are standing by the table. Your phone is lying on the table. The phone rings. You reach over, pick it up, and answer it.

Scenario Two: You are standing by the table. Your brand-new smart phone is lying on the table. You hear an unfamiliar fragment of music. You hear it again. You hear it a third time and finally figure out that it’s coming from your phone. You pick up the phone. On the screen are two icon images of telephone receivers, one in green and one in red. Being not exactly dumb, even if you’re not as smart as a smart phone, you deduce that the green icon probably means “answer.” You tap the icon. The phone keeps ringing. You poke the icon. Nothing. You swipe at the icon. The ringing gets louder. You keep swatting at the image, with no result. Finally the music stops. You put the phone down, gently, so as not to scramble its smart little brain. The way you might if, for example, you threw it against the wall or slammed it to the floor and stomped on it.

A few seconds later, the plain, dumb landline phone made a plain, dumb telephone-ringing noise. I picked it up and answered it. My partner, two states away, was calling on his own semi-smart phone while he was out for a walk in a small town in southern Colorado. Truly, the wonders and convenience of modern mobile technology are amazing. The only bad part is learning how to use them.

When I told him about my new phone that was apparently too smart to talk to the likes of me, he described an experiment he had heard about. Apparently several four- and five-year-olds were taken to a room equipped with an assortment of electronic gadgets like laptop computers, ereaders, music players, and cell phones. The kids were given no instructions, just allowed to play with the stuff. Within a few hours, they had figured everything out. They were playing games, taking pictures, playing music and videos, and making phone calls—no doubt to buy stuff from Amazon or order pizza from Mongolia.

I did not find this inspiring.

At least, not at first. Then I gave it some more thought. To little kids, a piece of new technology is just another toy. They don’t worry about minor details like having to pay for it if they break it, or whether they might mistakenly delete all their friends’ phone numbers, or what it might cost if they accidently place a call to Siberia, or whether they might embarrass themselves by inadvertently sending rude text messages to their bosses. They just play. They try something; if it doesn’t work, they try something else. They tap icons and swipe screen symbols and mess around until, accidentally or on purpose, they figure out how to make the thing work.

It seemed like an approach worth trying. It worked, too. Once I started playing, I easily figured out how to send text messages, make calls, and use the camera. And it only took me a day and a half of experimenting (well, plus asking my daughter) to learn how to answer the damned thing.

The phone is no help, either. I don’t care how “intuitive” its designers may think it is. It doesn’t provide answers; it just sits there in sleek, superior silence and insists that I figure things out for myself. I’m trying to think of this as an opportunity to learn, not just technology, but important inner qualities. Like persistence. And patience. I’m trying to see the phone as a sort of spiritual guru. Like Yoda, only with a ring tone.

So far, I’m not feeling particularly enlightened. I have realized, though, that technology companies are missing a great opportunity. When I bought the phone, the salesman at Verizon did his best to sell me a whole line of extras, from carrying cases to extended warranties. I declined most of them.

There’s one extra, though, I probably would buy. What they really need to offer with their smart phones is a couple of hours with a smart five-year-old.

A few observations at the end of a busy week:

A carpenter who shows up when he says he will, finishes on time, charges reasonable rates, and is a craftsman who takes pride in his work is a gift from God.

Painting a room is a meditative, stay-in-the-moment activity that, done in moderation, is satisfying to the soul. Painting the insides of kitchen cupboards is an activity that is a pain in the neck—not to mention the back, the wrists, and the knees. The only meditation involved is contemplating just why the original builders ever thought a kitchen needed so many cupboards.

Could it be considered overkill to spend half an hour scraping and peeling 40-year-old contact paper off the bottom of a shelf no one can even see, instead of merely painting over it? (In this case, no. The stuff was ragged, had bubbled loose in places, and had collected several decades worth of crud along the edges. It was gross.)

When old wallpaper has been painted over three or four times, don’t expect one more layer to hide the seams.

They may call a paint color “Peach Sunrise.” The little rectangle of it on the color sample sheet may look like very pale gold tinged with rose. Its darker cousin on the same sample sheet may match the copper trim in the kitchen perfectly. But after you spend three hours applying it to your kitchen walls, painting carefully around cupboards and doorways and the brand new countertops, and after it dries, it turns out to be—there is no other way to put this—pink.

After finishing the painting last night and taking my aching muscles to bed early, I woke up at 2:00 a.m. after my sleep was disturbed by a horrible thought. Did I subconsciously pick the Peach Sunrise color out of hidden guilt over getting rid of the old built-in oven? The original oven installed when the house was built in the 1950’s. The very same oven which was still the manufacturer’s original pink. Was it heartless of me to throw it out, instead of helping it apply for Social Security and taking tender care of it in its old age? After all, as a woman of a certain age myself, I could have been more sympathetic to the fluctuations of its temperature and the unreliability of its thermostat. Maybe my subconscious mind chose a pinkish color for the walls in homage to a poor old appliance that had been discarded without a second thought.

Nah. I feel no guilt, subconscious or otherwise. Our kitchen has new countertops and realigned cupboard doors. The place that housed the old cooktop with its two remaining working burners is now a lighted countertop area perfect for kneading bread. The space where the old pink oven lived is a well- crafted cabinet. The new stove not only has five burners that actually work, but it boasts a convection oven. The freshly painted cupboard interiors gleam as they wait for their rearranged contents. Even the Peach Sunrise walls, in the morning light, look more peach than pink.

It’s all so appealing, I just might have to cook something.

Buying Christmas gifts for out-of-town family members means shopping, wrapping, packing, and shipping. What's the biggest obstacle in this whole process?

Not deciding what to get for people, though admittedly that has its challenges. At least it can be done while seated comfortably in my chair with a notebook and a pen.

Not even the actual shopping, even though I tend to panic in crowds, I hate spending money, and I run out of patience and energy after about 30 minutes in the average mall. As long as I have a plan and a list, I can manage the shopping if I limit myself to short expeditions, remember to breathe, and eat enough chocolate.

Not the wrapping, either. Wrapping gifts after the shopping is finished is a little like cleaning pheasants after a successful hunt. It's kind of messy, and the process itself isn't a lot of fun, but there's the satisfaction of seeing the spoils of the hunt collected in one place.

Come to think of it, "spoils" isn't a bad description of the results of my gift wrapping. In part it seems silly to spend a lot of time and energy creating beautiful packages just so people can rip them open. In part I'm simply elegance-challenged. People who love me have learned by now that the odd lumpy packages with the torn corners and the crooked tape are from me. People who love me seem to open those packages with enthusiasm anyway.

The biggest challenge in getting gifts ready to ship is finding cardboard boxes. Even if you save boxes over the year just for this purpose, and even if you can remember where you stored them, they aren't going to be the right size.

Solving this problem means a trip to the park. Rapid City has a recycling pickup point there, where we take our glass, plastic, metal, newspapers, and cardboard. My primary source for shipping boxes is the big container for the cardboard. It's about the size of a medium truck box. A series of openings, about two feet wide by three feet high, line the top half of the container on either side.

If you're lucky, the container is more than half empty when you're taking boxes to recycle and more than half full when you're looking for boxes to recycle. Yesterday, I wasn't lucky. Reaching any boxes was going to involve leaning into the container at a dangerous angle, reaching as far as possible, being grateful to have gorilla arms, and hoping not to fall in.

Another woman had opened an access panel on her side of the container just as I looked in on my side. I asked her, "What size boxes do you have?" Unfortunately, hers were long and skinny, not at all what I needed.

I went back to leaning and reaching.
She grinned at me. "Go ahead, hop in," she said. "Do you need some help?"

About that time, I was able to get my fingers on the corner of a box that looked about the right size. Under it was another one that would also do. So I didn't need her help, which may have been just as well. Relying on the kindness of a stranger to get out of a steel recycling container might not have been wise.

But I thanked her anyway, truly grateful both for her offer and for the fact that I didn't need it. We went our separate ways, having each done our small parts in the great circle of recycling and added to the holiday spirit by wishing each other Merry Christmas.

There's nothing like a little dumpster-diving to put the "green" in the Christmas season.

The fishing fly was startling to strangers.

It had spent years hooked into the front screen door in a strategic spot, looking like a fuzzy insect a bit the worse for wear which had happened to land there just in time to look you in the eye as you stepped up to the door. It served as a conversation starter for numerous political campaigners, missionaries, door-to-door solicitors, and first-time visitors.

The screen door was so old it was made entirely out of wood. It was so old it could be slammed instead of shutting with the dignified whoosh of modern doors equipped with hydraulic closers.
It was also old enough so that replacing the torn screen would have been a project. Old enough so that wrapping the screen with plastic wasn't enough to keep out winter drafts.

Old enough, finally, to need replaced. We went and bought a shiny new combination screen and storm door with insulation, thermal window panes, and the latest and greatest thing—a "disappearing screen" that rolls up into the top.

A door that, supposedly, would be easy to hang. Just line it up, drill a few holes, put in a few screws, install the latch and closer, and adjust the handy little extender at the bottom to make it fit well. The step-by-step directions, complete with drawings, were in real English and quite clear.

Even the part in the beginning that read, "The door opening must be perfectly square."

This house was built in the 1950's. It was moved to this site after Rapid City's disastrous flood in 1970. It was well-built to begin with, but at this stage in its life, nothing about it is perfectly square. The door was surprisingly close, actually, with only about a quarter of an inch difference from the top to the bottom. Then there was the small matter of the top of the door frame being out of plumb, as if it were leaning back slightly toward the inside of the house. Probably to keep warm, since the screen door wasn't doing much to keep out the drafts.

Still, all those little imprecisions didn't seem to be that big a problem. We forged ahead in blissful ignorance.

Even with a scientist partner who is the kind of person who measures twice and cuts once, hanging the door turned into more of a project than either the salesman or the instructions had implied. Directions were read and reread. Holes were drilled. Shims were used. Adjustments were made.

We started early in the afternoon. By the time darkness fell, the door was hung, all right. Think "horse thief" rather than "construction" and you'd get the general idea.
It wasn't straight from top to bottom. It didn't line up from side to side. It didn't align against the frame. These minor details were discouraging. The $100 the store would have charged for installation was starting to seem like a bargain.

On the positive side, however, no swearing or throwing of tools had taken place. And I had discovered my true talent when it comes to carpentry—holding the flashlight.

The next step was not printed in the directions, but it was clear nevertheless. Obviously, the only thing to do was temporarily abandon the project and go have dinner.

The next day, we consulted a friend who has tools, skills, and genuine carpentry experience. He looked at our handiwork. He very courteously made no disparaging comments. He analyzed. He made suggestions. He adjusted here. He shimmed there.

And now we have a fully installed new storm door. It has a latch. It has a closer. It lines up quite nicely. It keeps out the drafts.

The only thing missing is the fly. You just can't leave a fuzzy object an inch long hooked to a disappearing screen.

The missionaries and solicitors are going to be so disappointed.