It's in the bag

We've been married for 43 years in December, and for most of that time, Peggy did the laundry, but by dint of some clever maneuvering, I managed to wrest away that chore from her, and now I get to do it all the time.  

I love everything about doing the wash. The very idea of taking some dirty clothes and putting them into a machine, opening the water valve, tossing in some liquid soap and pushing a button, and then coming back in exactly 35 minutes to find clothes with all the dust and dirt agitated out, and then tossing the whole wet soggy pile into the machine next door for drying (40 minutes) appeals to me terrifically.  I like it when things are supposed to take an exact amount of time and then they do it.  The washing machine never says, "Oh I need five more minutes more to get this iced-tea stain out of your polo shirt!" and the dryer does not come up with pallid excuses for still-damp handtowels.

And my little laundry secrets - using blue Dawn as a presoak for tough stains, tossing in a capful of Pine Sol to give the whole wash that piney outdoorsy scent - I got from friends online.  And so did the solution to the only problem the laundry ever gave me.

Socks were the bane of my laundry.  I wear socks and Peggy wears socks and somehow, between the two of us, we can go through 6 or 8 pairs of socks in 2 or 3 days.   And you know what happens when you put that many socks in with a pile of kitchen dishtowels, hoodies, cargo shorts, t-shirts, and undies...you get a pile of dry laundry that smells just ever so of the woods, and mismatched socks

I fought it for years.  I would have to trudge back to the machines to find the missing pink sock for Peggy or the one with the A for Alabama (mine) lying there all forlorn and missing its partner. Sometimes, the elusive sock was in the sleeve of a sweatshirt or the pocket of Peggy's robe or who knows where else?  Then, valuable time is lost while I unfold all the folded clothing and look for one stupid sock.

There's the answer up above! Sock Sacks! Got 'em from IKEA. One for Peggy's socks, one for mine...just put in your socks, zip up the sacks, and run them through the cycles.  When you're putting away the dry clothes, just take the socks out and pair them up like lettuce and tomato, or brown and serve. 

I tell you, if I had figured this out years ago, I would have saved enough time that tomorrow would be today already!

One and a million

We hear all the time of people who win the various lotteries in the state and around the nation.  Sometimes, it turns out for the best, and the winner retires at age 35 to a life of ease and servants and mansions and resorts and caviar and no more bologna sandwiches with American cheese on white bread.  Inevitably, these winners reveal that they chose the winning numbers based on a combination of their mother's birthday, the number of times they donated vital organs to complete strangers, their ID number from the years they devoted to working for a charity agency among the hopeless, the amount of times their spouse walked out on them with a traveling carnival worker, taking the kids and all the money (but leaving the bills behind), and the "lucky" number that has worked so well for them for all these years.

The TV news report always ends with, "Just whether Ronnie will play the lottery again, now that he is 457 million dollars richer, remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: He'll be buying his tickets in a much nicer neighborhood!  Reporting from Mar-A-Lago, I'm Tessie O'Hoolahan, for Toledo Tonight."

The other story, covered much less on TV news, is that the poor winner goes through his moolah like a hot knife through cold butter and is flat broke again within six months, only now he has his mother-in-law and other undesirables living in his hut, and the neighbors are complaining about the traffic from trucks coming up and down the street to repossess furniture (that lovely 18-foot BarCaLounger in Spanish Mint and the breakfront with a broken front) and electronics (a Home Edition Jumbotron and a deluxe Pong® game).  Despondent, the poor soul wishes he had never plunked down a buck to buy the cursed ticket in the first place.

And that may be why Marylanders are leaving their winnings right where they will do something good for someone by NOT claiming lotto money.  At 4:30 PM last Friday, a million bucks that someone was supposed to win went back into state coffers.  Unclaimed bucks are deposited into the lottery’s Unclaimed Prize Fund, which helps to pay for the Lottery’s second-chance contests and promotions.  

How about that?  The lottery gives second chances.  Does your boss?

The ticket in question was purchased at a Royal Farms in Dundalk, but may now be used as a bookmark for someone reading a book called "Broken Dreams, Shattered Hopes." And this Wednesday at 4:30, a ticket sold at a 7-11 in Bladensburg for the January 13 contest will similarly decrease in value, from being worth a million to being worth the same as Ubaldo Jimenez's chances at winning the Cy Young Award.

There's a thin line between love and hate. I'd love to win a lot of money and I hate to think I never will.

Sunday Rerun: Same church, different pew

Born and bred Methodist, I recognized early that part of the Method was not to be too flamboyant about the practice of religion.  Through childhood into young manhood, I sat through hundreds - thousands - of sermons, ceremonies and Sunday School lessons and never heard a raised voice, never saw a raised hand or heard any instrument besides an organ or the occasional acoustic guitar or lute for "folk services."

And none of those services ran for more than three hours, or, frankly, left me wanting more of the soul-cleansing music and words like I heard at the Baptist homegoing of our dear Deanna the other day at the Mt Sinai Baptist Church in Lansdowne, PA.

At the service, there was music, with many, many voices accompanied by, yes, an organ, but also electric guitar and bass, and drums. And this was the loud, spirit-lifting, animated singing...one of the bases of what the kids call "rock and roll," ya know?

Take away the music, and you can say the same for the preaching. This was not the "Verily, I say unto you..." sort of preaching, no sir.  This was the impassioned importuning of men leading their flock to see that their beloved Deanna has served her mission on earth and was called home.  These were the words of men who reminded us that yes, this loss is tough and it will cause pain, but not to worship the pain, to keep an eye on those better tomorrows.  The sort of funeral (that word wasn't even used on Saturday, in favor of the far more appropriate "homegoing") I am used to was all about lugubrious tones of " from dust we come and to dust we go," which is fine for as far as it goes, but it fails to celebrate what we do between those dusty days.

Deanna

No.  What we attended the other day was a celebration of the life of a woman who, in the words of Pastor Thomas, "didn't have time for bitterness."  In the year or so that we knew her, we never saw Deanna say a bad word for or about any one or any thing. 

She and her goodness are up above now, along with another friend of mine and my Mom.  This triumvirate of loss since April comes to an end now, and no service or private contemplation can change that.  I'm not a man given to grieving, believing that heaven is its own reward for believers, but the service Peggy and I attended on Saturday showed me a new way to regard death. Every church, every person, has their own way of saying farewell, but I have to say, I like this emphatic sort of service.  People were involved, singing along, calling out as they wished, getting on their feet and moving to the spirit.  

In the staid, sobersided services of my childhood, if anyone left their pew, it was assumed that they had fallen asleep and slid off. Again, not a criticism.  There are different ways of doing things. What we saw Saturday was soul-stirring.

Tender Is The Afternoon

You know how memories can get stuck in the wisdom tooth of your mind, like a raspberry seed that gets all wedged up in there and you try brushing and flossing and a toothpick, until finally you give in and go get the needlenose pliers out of the garage?

Of course.  Memories.  It's funny that some other thought will dislodge them and you're suddenly transported back...back...to 1967...

It was a long hot summer, made all the hotter because I spent five mornings a week sitting in the same high school classroom where I had sat five afternoons a week during the school year.  It was the Algebra II room, and since my Punchinello antics and general lack of attention had earned me a D in the class during the regular year, I was invited to play extra innings and take it again in summer school.  Our teacher was a goodhearted woman named Mrs Doris Saunders.  If you can imagine spending hot summer mornings with a room full of math-challenged hormone-rampant kids who weren't smart enough to avoid a summer in a brick hell, she made the best of it, gently encouraging, prodding our noggins, making us understand why we need to understand why x³ - y² = something I could care about.

A guy named Dave in the class (I guess that was his name outside the class too) drove a really boss '57 Chevy which, if he still has it, is his ticket to a cushy retirement, if he sells it.  Dave was motorvating onto the school parking lot one steamy August morning, and he was in such a hurry to get to class on time that he nearly collided head-on with a car being driven by Mrs Saunders. As he slid into his seat, he asked if she had seen him on Aigburth Rd that morning, and she replied that she thought that would be the last time she ever saw anything on Aigburth Rd.  

That was 1967, and in the summer of 1993, long since Algebra had ceased to have any meaning in my life, I was idly thumbing through a York PA newspaper when I read that Doris Saunders, a retired math teacher from Baltimore County, had been killed in a head-on auto accident in Pennsylvania.

I remember thinking about that nice lady and the irony of it all.

There's nothing ironic about the next memory that popped up the other day.  I don't even know why I had forgotten it for so long, but it took place in my junior year, in Spanish IV class. (Maybe that would be a great way to learn a foreign language...an IV drip!)  The class was assembled but the teacher had not arrived yet.  Teachers who found me heckling them from a seat in the room tended not to hurry to get there, so Mr Micozzi was waiting until the last second to walk in and get us into a lively discussion of "Don Quixote," which we were reading in Spanish, ay caramba!  

Suddenly, in a scene that sounds like something out of a Fellini movie, a guy not much older than us walked into the room. He was dressed in a jockey outfit.  I mean it...the silks, the boots, the white pants, and I can only assume that he was wearing Jockey shorts to keep his horses in their respective stalls.  He began uttering a line of gibberish, talking in English, but the words sounded like he had cut up a dictionary and was just saying random words in no particular order, without meaning.

Sort of like the 1968 version of Rush Limbaugh.

We all were shrugging and laughing it off, but suddenly he started picking on the girl sitting next to me, saying rude things, and then...And then he started throwing pennies at her.

Quixotic then as now, I stood up and attempted to dissuade Jockey Joe from throwing more coins at the young lady by pushing him into the chalkboard, and he swung back at me, and then in walked Mr Micozzi, who got to start his instructional day by refereeing a fistfight between his Bart Simpson-style student and a guy dressed like Eddie Arcaro.  I did think thought it was really unfair that the teacher crouched down with a towel around his neck, giving the guy fighting tips to knock me out.

Just kidding.  He hustled us both down to the office, just like Glenn Ford in "Blackboard Jungle," and I had to go to the court commissioner's office that afternoon to testify against the guy. It turned out that he had walked away from the local mental institution that once housed Zelda Fitzgerald, and he went back there and I went back to class, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And he didn't even send me a Christmas card, or offer a rematch.

The Saturday Picture Show, July 9, 2016

This is where the South Atlantic Ocean meets the desert of Namibia. 

A guy put this picture up to show what a merry prankster his roommate is.  Imagine opening the shower curtain to see Pee Wee!

A homemade folding knife made of two Australian pennies.

It's always nice to show a little respect for the lawn by not mashing it down with your flip flops.

Raspberry-pickin' time!  Fruits and veggies...the best part of summer!

This is Al Khazneh, a temple in the Iconic 2000-year-old city of Petra, in Jordan. The temple was carved into the red mountain rock.

Another fun part of summer - grilling kabobs!

Here's a young man with a good idea...perfect for back-to-school in a few weeks.  No one needs to know what your real eyes are doing as long as there's a picture of them wide open!

Let's do lunch

I remember seeing a sign that said "She who dies with the most fabric, wins." Meaning that the goal of life is to collect enough chintz, corduroy, cotton, denim and flannel to make Christmas pajamas for all the grandkids and still leave a big pile of swatches for your family, none of whom have any idea how to work that Singer sewing machine, and will deposit it, along with all that fabric, at the Goodwill, which will eventually have to talk a sewing machine museum into taking it, because no one sews anymore.

But at least, for those who sew, collecting fabric is fun, and a good hobby.

I think it's slightly odd that some people, who have enough money stashed away to buy Christmas pajamas for the entire universe, still get a thrill out of amassing more more more moolah moolah moolah!

I mean, this Warren Buffett guy, whose current net worth is about 63.3 Billion-with-a-B US Dollars, has yet to retire, and he certainly could scale things back a little if he wanted, maybe get a little condo down at the beach and ride to WaWa in a little golf cart to get his morning dark Colombian coffee and a donut and the paper.

But no, he keeps on working every day, and now comes news that someone who wisely chose to remain anonymous is shelling out $3,456,789 to eat lunch with Buffett.  It's for charity, a San Francisco outfit called Glide, which puts out food, health care and services for needy people - the homeless, the financially challenged, those fighting substance abuse.  So, it's for a good cause.  Over 17 years of this event, which was started by Buffett's late first wife Susan, $23.6 million has been raised.  All good.

So if your bid wins next year's Buffet With Buffett (I offer that name for free!), you will be able to bring up to seven friends to lunch at the Smith & Wollensky steak house in Manhattan. You can ask the aging zillionaire about anything EXCEPT what he plans to invest in next, which would be about the only thing anyone wants to hear about anyway.   

It's 50¢ extra if you want bleu cheese dressing.

Risk Management

Somebody help me understand why people do these things!

Climbing the side of a mountain, driving pegs into the mountain off which to hang a tent for sleeping a couple of miles in the air, hang gliding, flying a personal airplane without adequate training, jumping out of airplanes that are flying very well, drunken boating with no personal flotation device, chasing lightning storms and hurricanes and tornadoes for the purpose of taking pictures of those calamities...

And now, let's add "hiking in Arizona's Superstition Mountains when it's 111° outside" to the list.

From the news: 

GOLD CANYON, Arizona — A Phoenix man hiking in the Superstition Mountains has died from exposure to extreme heat.
Pinal County Sheriff's officials say emergency responders were called around 1:30 p.m. Saturday to the Peralta Trail in the Superstition Wilderness near Gold Canyon.
They say 25-year-old Anthony Quatela III and a male friend had been hiking since 7:30 a.m. and ran out of water.
The friend called 911 after they both started to fall ill.
Deputies say Quatela became unconscious and never recovered.
The friend was treated by firefighters for dehydration and exposure.
Sheriff Paul Babeu says the incident was one of three heat-related emergencies in a four-hour period in the Superstition Wilderness.
The National Weather Service reported temperatures as high as 111 on Saturday in metropolitan Phoenix.

I saw a young woman being interviewed outside Phoenix.  With that wide eyed innocent breathiness so common to the young, she told the reporter that "One TIME I went like HIKING when it was like very WARM and I didn't take enough WATER and it was very DANGEROUS..."

Don't look for me

These are people who go hiking for the physical and mental benefits of a good long strut in the mountains, and then they fail to take at least 1,000 gallons of water with them when they sally forth into the heated mountains of Arizona.  I would buy a used fire engine, tanks filled to the top, to take with me out there.

As sorry as I feel for the loss of Mr Quatela, and for the sorrow felt by his family and friends, I need help understanding why people do these things, putting themselves (and those who have to try to rescue and revive them, to be quite frank about it) at tremendous risk for no really good reason.

I just don't get it.

Casey Anthony is bored.

I don't know for sure if Casey Anthony killed her daughter. Neither do you, frankly speaking, but we are both entitled to believe as we wish.

You remember the case.  Caylee Anthony, two years of age and the child of Casey Anthony of Orlando, FL, died in 2008.  Her mother reported her missing (after 31 days!) in July of that year, and the little girl's body was found in December.  Charged with the child's murder, Casey said she had turned Caylee over to a nanny, and then in her trial claimed the girl drowned in the family's swimming pool, with the body being hidden by Casey's father. And Casey said she had been sexually abused by her father.

It was one of the most disturbing cases of child abuse/murder we ever saw, and people are still flabbergasted that the jury bought the stories her attorney spun in court. For whatever reason, Casey was found not guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, and aggravated manslaughter of a child, but guilty of four misdemeanor counts of providing false information to a law enforcement officer.

Mother and child

The upshot was, she spent several weeks in jail for lying to the police, after they added in the time she had been locked up awaiting trial.

Well, fast forward five years, and People magazine is out with an article saying that Casey in which we learn that Casey is bored, hanging around the house all day, surfing the interwebs, not working, not socializing, just woolgathering all the livelong day.

It makes me wonder why she didn't move far, far away (Kazakhstan is nice, this time of year) (I guess) and dye her hair red and change her name, and appearance, by law, and surgery, respectively, and do something worthwhile for someone?

What would you do if you were in her cheap shoes?

I would consider moving to another planet, or at least another continent, and changing my name and my attitude, and I think I would try working on behalf of animals, or people who can't do much on their own behalf, such as abused kids, and people fighting physical limitations.

It's never too late to turn the Wheel of Karma again.

He should have just waved the flag instead

We have a nice quiet little corner in the northeastern part of Maryland called Cecil County.  Not much happens there. Travelers going up and down the I-95 corridor usually try to keep it below 75 mph, lest they run afoul of the state troopers, but otherwise, the county is quiet and peaceful.  

137 miles away lies the resort town of Ocean City, Maryland, which used to be like Mayberry with an ocean but is now like Atlantic Las Vegas.  It's a wild town in summer, and it was there that, last week, the Cecil County State's Attorney - prosecutor Edward Rollins III - was arrested after officers responded to a report of a nude man on a hotel balcony.

Booking photo

Someone called Ocean City police and reported seeing a naked man at the Clarion Hotel. There is some dispute as to whether that man was in his room flaunting the flesh, or out on the balcony airing out his unmentionables at the time people in the next hotel over got an eyeful, but they were sufficiently ranked out so as to call 911.

Rollins's opposite number, Worcester County State's Attorney Beau Oglesby, said,  "After consultation with the Ocean City Police Department, two counts of indecent exposure and two counts of disorderly conduct have been filed. After carefully considering which course of action would be the most appropriate given the need to handle this matter with transparency balanced against the desire to shield the identities of the victims, filing a criminal information achieved both of those goals."

In other words, the guy who does my job in another county came down and got nekkid and now we have to do something about it or there'll be a big stink about it. Rollins was held and charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure. He'll be back in court for arraignment on July 20.  Should there be a trial at which he is found guilty, indecent exposure is a misdemeanor with a possibility of three years in prison and/or a $1,000 fine, and disorderly conduct is a misdemeanor with a possibility of 60 days in prison and/or a $500 fine.

Rollins's wife issued a statement saying, "While my husband and I were vacationing in Ocean City last week, a stranger watched and photographed us through the window of our 10th floor hotel room. The person who took these actions was in a separate hotel some distance from ours. During the next 24 hours, while completely in the confines of our room, our intimate movements and activities were documented and shared publicly."

In happier days

This will be an interesting case, and I wouldn't want to be the judge to decide it.  Speaking of which, Rollins has now removed his name from further consideration for the open judgeship on the Cecil County Circuit Court.

I remember a guy in court on similar charges saying he was helping to move a dresser when he accidentally dropped his drawers. Stay tuned. 

Happy Fourth of July!

Sunday Rerun: Lafayette, we are still here!

With so much information available to anyone with a smart phone, personal computer, or 14-year old around, it never fails to stun me that people are willing not to know how to pronounce a word that's new to them.

Case in point - the French frigate L'Hermione has been visiting Annapolis and Baltimore over the past few days, and some local news anchors, bubbling with pride over the visit, have not done themselves very proud saying the name of the ship in the news on the news.  Some did - hats off to Mary Bubala at Channel 13; she got it just right - but let's just say that she was almost alone in pronouncing it correctly.  

It's "lair-me-OWHN," s'il vous plaît. Not HER-ma-mone, or Her-MY-ONIE.  That's the pronunciation in English, as in Hermione Gingold, the saucy British actress, or Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter stories.  The name comes from Greek mythology. 

The boat afloat in Baltimore harbor is the 2014 replica of the one sailed by Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, Marquis de Lafayette (1757 – 1834), the French aristocrat and military officer who came to America to fight in our Revolutionary War.  We just call him "Lafayette," because saying his full name would flip out too many local news anchors.  He was one interesting cat.  Born rich, he became an officer in the French forces at the age of 13, and came to America at 19, where he was commissioned a Major General and fought in the Battle of Brandywine, right up Rte 1 in Pennsylvania.  He was wounded there, but survived, retreated with his men, and saw action in the Battle of Rhode Island, after which he returned to France to seek help for America in their just and noble cause of freedom in the New World.

He returned here in 1780 aboard the Hermione, one of five ships the French sent to help us out, along with 5,000 soldiers.  In 1781, he was in Virginia, where his forces blocked the army of General Cornwallis until American and other French troops came in time to win the Battle of Yorktown, an important victory for the American side. 

He returned to France after the American Revolution, just in time to be in the middle of the French Revolution as commander of the National Guard. And at his death in 1834, he was buried in Paris under soil from the area of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Massachusetts. For all he did for both his native France and for the nascent United States, Lafayette is regarded as "The Hero of the Two Worlds".  It was at his grave that American Colonel Charles E. Stanton said the famous line "Lafayette, we are here!" as America repaid the French by having their backs in World War I.

So for all he did, let's thank him and say the name of his ship as it should be said! L'Hermione!

The Saturday Picture Show, July 2, 2016

For all you coffee lovers...here's the roaster for your beans!

The kid behind the Queen, holding the train of her raiment...I don't know if he is one of her grandsons or some urchin who two days before was hanging around an English orphanage asking for another spoonful of porridge.  But hot a'mighty, what job he has to do!  He lets go, and it's all over!

So you buy a condo in a building where there's an abandoned elevator shaft.  And someone decided that would be a great place for the water closet.

Sea Foam!  What else is there to say?

167th in a series of really blown up pictures of everyday objects...I have tried every trick in the book.

This is true (no names) - when I worked at the A&P Supermarket, a medical professional who treated me and the entire family, and had done so for years, and who lived in a sizable mansion in the fashionable Brooklandville neighborhood, and who once treated me for free in exchange for my changing a flat tire on his aging Pontiac, would come to the store early in the morning to buy the day-old bread and dented cans of beans. Maybe that's how you get to be so doggone rich!

Fireworks in downtown Baltimore!  This time, they will be intentional. Monday, 7 PM.

When we say "snowball" in Baltimore, this is what we mean from June through September.  Crushed ice - not shaved - with simple syrups with fruit flavors, or chocolate, or egg custard, or root beer.  Or Bart Simpson, although I don't know what he tastes like.

Saturday Night at the Radio

There was a time that there was no Prairie Home Companion show on public radio on Saturday nights...but that was long ago.  I mean, Nixon was president when Garrison Keillor, who had been the morning host on Minnesota Public Radio, went to Nashville to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker.  Mr Keillor got the great idea to produce a radio show that featured music, comedy, and sweet reminiscences of smalltown events that may or may not have ever happened.

If you have heard the show, you know the appeal:  singers sing and musicians make music and there are humorous skits and then the big moment comes, when Mr Keillor delivers a monologue called The News From Lake Wobegon.  It's a great two hours, but it's coming to an end.  Mr Keillor, at 74, is headed to a well-earned retirement, and his successor will be a man who plays the mandolin, Chris Thile.  But Thile will only do 13 shows per year so we will hear 39 Keillor re-runs.  To be honest, I would rather have leftover filet mignon than a brand-fresh Big Mac.

To be even more honest, my late father was a regular listener to APHC, and I feel that when I am listening nowadays, it's something we still share.  I don't know if Dad will care for the show when Chris Thile hosts.  Thile has had some exposure on the current show, and he strikes me as lackluster, so we'll have to see.  If, during his third show, a huge gust of wind forces Thile to walk off the stage and abandon show business, we'll know why.

The final show will be broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl tomorrow, July 2.  In Baltimore, you can hear it from 6- 8 PM on 88.1 FM, WYPR. I know everything comes to an end, but I'm not ready for this end.