Eating before bed

This morning I told myself, as I have occasionally on other mornings, that I need to stop eating before I go to bed. How else do you explain dreaming about being chased through a large, unknown building by a giant anaconda?

Joe and my sister were also in this dream with me, but they were not being chased by a giant anaconda. They probably did something more sensible before going to bed, such as read a quiet, uneventful book. My sister did have the presence of mind to ask, as I flew past her, what my blood type was, as if that would make any difference if the snake attacked me. But it was thoughtful of her to inquire. No doubt she also wanted to ask if she could have my collection of antiques if the anaconda caught up with me.

Through a combination of luck, fast legs, and my wily intellect, I managed to escape from the snake. But when I woke up I was still in flight mode, and I did a thorough check under the bed, in the closet, in the shower -- evil things are always lurking in showers, at least in the movies -- just to make sure.

Then again, maybe these wild dreams don't have anything to do with what I eat before I go to sleep. Getting out of bed in the morning is something I've never submitted to easily, and it's a fight I engage in every day. Usually, more time in bed wins. I'm beginning to suspect that maybe this is the Lord's way of getting my heinie out of bed and doing something productive. He knows I hate snakes. I wouldn't be surprised if He used a giant anaconda to scare me into getting up.

Adventures in Band-Aids

Because I had nothing better to do one day last week, I sliced through two of my fingernails with a serrated knife. Okay, I was actually supposed to be cutting a loaf of bread, but the fingers on my left hand -- apparently tiring of always having to play a supportive role while those on the right hand get to have all the fun -- got too close to the action.

So now I am waiting for the damaged nails to grow out, which is like waiting for lettuce to grow. In the meantime, I am becoming better acquainted with Band-Aids than ever before. I am not impressed. They do not stay where I put them. They are always coming off at the most inconvenient times, such as when making dinner or hunting through boxes of shoes at Kohl's. In exasperation I went to the store to find a better alternative.

There were sport Band-Aids, waterproof Band-Aids, sport AND waterproof Band-Aids. And then I saw them: 2X Band-Aids that use the same material as duct tape! Band-Aids that "stay on until you want them to come off." Yes! That's what I needed!

I have worn these things for one day. What the box really means by "the Band-Aids stay on until you want them to come off" is "until the Band-Aids have become a vital part of your circulatory system and must be surgically removed." There really is no need to have more than one per box, because you can't get the first one off to put another one on.

I expect that I will live out my days with eight normal fingernails and two stubs ending in flesh-colored duct tape. It will be interesting to see whether the new nail growth will be able to push through the Band-Aid, since I can't get it off. Or, I could attempt to cut bread again and hope that the Band-Aid gets in the way.

Thanksgiving oops

This was expected to be a goof-free Thanksgiving for me. All I had to do was show up at my family's with pumpkin bread, something I have been making since the Pilgrims had their first feast. There would be no turkey to accidentally roast with the giblets still inside. No lumpy mashed potatoes. No lumpy gravy.

I hadn't counted on the cranberry sauce.

It's tough to imagine how one could mess up cranberry sauce, especially when it is canned. But that is exactly what I did.

I was handed a can opener, two cans of cranberry sauce, and a bowl. I applied them to one another, in the order given, but found that the cranberry sauce was dead set against exiting the can. I therefore searched for a spoon to give it some encouragement. My encouraging ministrations were interrupted by a blood-curdling scream, which, had it occurred in the days of the Pilgrims, would surely have put an end to Thanksgiving then and there. The can was yanked out of my hands. A menacing male family member, The Protector of Cranberry Sauce, turned almost as dark as the sauce and began hastily stuffing it back inside the can, as if I had unleashed something malevolent and Armageddon would soon follow. He glared at the spoon in my hand as if it were a creature of evil.

"Bottom!" he finally managed to blurt out. "You're supposed to open the bottom! Then you slice it!"

This did nothing to illuminate the problem for me, and I turned a confused look on The Protector of Cranberry Sauce.

He looked around wildly for the can opener, turned the second can upside down -- apparently, it was too late to do whatever he wanted to do to the first one -- and stared at it. I stared, also.

"Well," he said. "I guess this bottom doesn't open."

Slowly he deflated. He began to explain, dejectedly, that the idea with canned cranberry sauce was to open both ends -- why, I never did fully understand -- and plop the sauce out into the bowl all in one piece. Then it is sliced.

This seemed very primitive to me. "That's not cranberry sauce," I said. "That's cranberry blob."

The Protector moaned. "Didn't you ever have cranberry sauce?"

No. No, I hadn't. It was the one Thanksgiving food that I studiously avoided, on the basis that it contained no recognizable ingredients.

Resigning himself to the ruin of the cranberry sauce this year, he handed the can back to me and, with a little sigh of regret, instructed me to carry on as I had been.

I didn't have the heart to tell him the Pilgrims never ate canned cranberry sauce.

Post-Thanksgiving

Well, I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. As you've no doubt noticed, urgent matters have kept me away from the blog for several days. I was one of the estimated 147 million people who were busy stimulating the economy post-Thanksgiving (this included 47 million babies and 10 million purse dogs). Never let it be said that I shirk my civil duties!

I also hope you all had a chance to ponder the real reason we celebrate Thanksgiving, which is, of course, to finally get around to cleaning your house. The big question is, if you are hosting the dinner, do you clean before your guests come, or after?

Let me know your thoughts on that weighty issue, and I'll be back tomorrow in regular blog form.

The origins of my ironing

Yesterday I examined the little matter of recalcitrant shirts upon the ironing board. Thinking about my (lack of) ironing skills, I conclude that it is my 10th-grade consumer ed. teacher's fault that they are not better developed. I have forgotten this teacher's name now, but it was something haughty, like Ms. Pisani, or Ms. Pirani, or maybe even Ms. Piranha. In her class, which was filled with an astonishing number of males given the subject matter, we learned important self-sufficiency tasks like balancing a checkbook, planning meals, and ironing shirts. I think we secretly hoped we would also learn how to become millionaires who could hire people to do these things for us, but that never appeared on the course outline.

I evidently looked, to the teacher, as if I had been born knowing how to iron, for she never called on me to demonstrate my skill at ironing in front of the class. This embarrassing procedure she saved for the males in the class, whom she probably assumed did not know an iron from a toaster. Judging from their practice sessions, she was not far off.

The truth was that I myself did not easily distinguish an iron from a toaster, either. I had never been made to iron at home. This probably had something to do with the fact that I was the youngest and therefore, as my siblings are fond of saying, extremely spoiled. I personally did not see what the fuss about ironing was; what did it matter if one's clothes looked as if they'd been trampled by wild boars?

But if I got away with not learning how to iron at home, I did not think I would get off so easily at school. My goal during the ironing unit was to make sure that no one -- no one -- learned of my ignorance of this basic survival skill. Though I knew I should probably pay attention to how it was done, and therefore actually learn something, I was also desperate to avoid being found out. Pretending to doodle, and feigning as much boredom and disinterest as I could muster (which wasn't hard, given my age and the subject matter), I surreptitiously took notes as the teacher instructed some poor boy in the art of subjugating a wrinkled shirt: "Always begin at the neckline. No, not the sleeves! The sleeves we save for last. Now, pull the garment taut with one hand, and firmly -- don't wrestle it as if it were an alligator! -- guide the iron up toward the neck...."

Somehow I made it through Ironing Instruction without ever being called upon to actually pick up an iron. Everything I learned about ironing was acquired through mere observation, which could very well account for my inadequacies.

Or, we could blame it on those ornery shirts.

The behavior of shirts

I recently came to the agonizing yet liberating decision to have Joe's shirts sent out for cleaning and pressing. Did I do this because we have an excess of funds and can't think of anything more interesting to spend them on? No. Did I do this because I am lazy? Partly. But mainly, I did it because dress shirts exhibit supremely frustrating behaviors when I am trying to iron them. Let me illustrate.

First, there is mortal animosity between my iron and a dress shirt. For its part, the iron shows this animosity by hissing at the shirt -- or at me, as the agent of its maneuvering -- and the shirt responds by stubbornly refusing to give up any of its wrinkles. Or, in another of its favorite tricks, the shirt yields up one wrinkle, only to form another in some other part when I am not looking. When I get all the way around the shirt, it looks like I have not even started. Shirts frequently exit my ironing process with more wrinkles than when they entered it.

Further, all the parts of a shirt do not stay on the board at one time. A sleeve, or the neckline, or the hem is going to be dragging on the floor at any given moment; almost always it is a part that I have just ironed. This not only tends to restore any wrinkles I may, by sheer luck, have removed, it also tends to make the shirt dirty again.

The sleeves, in particular, are ornery to the extreme. I always start on the back of a sleeve, with the expectation that any mistakes (and there will be mistakes) can be ironed out on the front, where it really matters. But the sleeve simply refuses to lie flat. I stretch and press and smooth it out, only to find when I turn it over that there is an enormous new crease cutting diagonally across the sleeve. If I try to iron out that crease, a new one is inevitably created on the back of the sleeve. At this point I generally give up altogether.

So at the end of a long, arduous ironing process, with a hot iron hissing at me in unexpected bursts, I am rewarded with a dirty, wrinkled shirt -- which is precisely what I had before I washed and ironed the shirt. So the idea of ironing is what, exactly? To make me certifiably crazy? Multiply these frustrations by about 12 shirts -- I usually put the task off as long as I possibly can, until the only thing Joe has left to wear to work is his pajamas -- and you will understand that I have come perilously close to insanity.

The situation is helped none by using wrinkle-free shirts. Upon entering our home, such shirts are immediately corrupted by the non-wrinkle-free shirts, with the result that any shirts that are "Guaranteed to Not Wrinkle!" are certain to be just the opposite.

I confided my dilemma and solution for it to a family member, who declared that she has always sent her husband's shirts out, stating most emphatically that "I wouldn't know what to do with them." Incidentally, this is also basically Joe's argument for why he does not iron his shirts.

After two years of wrestling with misbehaving shirts, I have come to the conclusion that I don't know what to do with them, either. What they need, I decided, is Boot Camp. And the dry cleaning lady is just the one to run it. If anyone can subdue those wrinkle-prone shirts, it is her. One look from her and they won't even think of wrinkling. They will stand at attention, as crisp as if they'd been starched. I'm hoping that someday, after they've been in Boot Camp long enough, all I will have to do is just threaten to send them back there, and they'll shape up.

Art the lazy way

My recent painting project brought to mind pleasant memories from my college art class, which I begged to get out of due to zero talent -- I was never in demand on Pictionary teams -- but to no avail. This was a course for teachers, and no matter that I was specializing in preschool special education, I needed to study the great masters of art! I have always believed a course in refrigerator art would have been more relevant, but no one asked my opinion, and no one offered such a course.

After we had studied several different art styles and the artists who exemplified them, we were given an assignment to produce some original works in these different styles. We did what college students do when faced with a challenging, thought-provoking assignment such as this: We looked for the easy way out.

We found that easy way out in the artist Jackson Pollack. If you know as much about art as I did back then (and still do), you might not be familiar with Mr. Pollack. His paintings consisted of brightly colored paint plopped and flicked onto enormously large canvases in random fashion. (The refrigerators of preschool parents are filled with mini-Jackson Pollack type paintings. Little do they realize that with just a bit of encouragement, their darling children could become starving artists!)

Compared with the great masters of other styles we had studied, such as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Seurat, Mr. Clean, etc., we all thought Jackson Pollack was a bit lazy. This was something we admired enormously and were eager to emulate, at least artwise, and especially for this assignment. How hard could it be to flick paint on paper? This could even be fun!

Our hopes for an easy grade, however, were dashed almost immediately when the instructor informed us that under no circumstances would a Pollack style be accepted. The whole aspect that set Pollack apart -- other than his apparent laziness -- was the enormous scale on which he worked. It would be impossible, the instructor explained, for us to imitate it. Flicking paint onto a 14" x 17" canvas -- or even a 24" x 48" -- just wasn't the same.

Privately, we thought this wasn't such an obstacle, a there were plenty of buildings on campus that could use some sprucing up. They were big, just what we needed. No sooner had we thought it, though, than the instructor warned, "And no graffiti!" in his most solemn tones. No doubt some class before us had already thought of this solution, tried it, and failed, making things harder for the rest of us.

We briefly considered painting our living rooms in the Jackson Pollack style, but we couldn't get past the problem of how to bring the finished product to class. Anyway, I wouldn't recommend painting your living room in this style. For one thing, all the furniture would end up Pollack-looking, too, no mater how well you covered it.

I have long forgotten what I ended up doing for that assignment. But the class left me with one overarching impression about art: The Pollack family must have had one enormous refrigerator.