Surefire way to get that book

Einstein and Lady Liberty 
on top of a Worm Bin.  
This photo has nothing to do with this post,
but everything to do with the world in 2025.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no surer way to receive a book on hold than to download a truckload of “available now” library kindle books.

This is probably not of interest to anyone, but it is healing to me to write something, and I can’t bear to compose another letter to my #$&*# Senators right now.  I am avoiding that right now, for my mental health.

Here are the titles of the six books I downloaded (at my son’s apartment) last week while waiting for 

a) one of the seven books I had on hold, and  

b) the electricity at our house to be turned back on.  

• Knock, Knock, You’re Dead! By M.C. Beaton (A Hamish Macbeth Short Story).  2016.

• Death of a Liar, by M.C. Beaton   (Hamish Macbeth Mysteries Book 30). 2015.

• Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village, by Maureen Johnson, Illustrated by Jay Cooper. 2021.

• Look for Me There, by Luke Russert. 2023.

• The Thrifty Guide to Ancient Rome, by Jonathan W. Stokes (middle-grade). 2018.

• Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais.  1564.

In desperation I first downloaded the two M.C. Beatons, but haven’t started reading either.  Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village showed up in my search, and that seemed important, AND it is ultra short.  

Then I looked for travel memoirs and found Look for Me There which promises to be good – it’s the author’s memoir about his father, journalist Tim Russert.  I am missing my parents a great deal these days, so I think I will appreciate this book.  Also showing up in my search for travel memoirs was The Thrifty Guide to Ancient Rome, for kids.  Ancient Rome was a cruel and gruesome place.  I am not in the mood for it.  I made it to page 37 (of 127 total pages) before abandoning it.

Gargantua and Pantagruel - I actually wanted to read Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac. But the library only has it on kindle in (!!) Spanish.  (It was originally written in French).  Thinking of Balzac made me think of The Music Man and the line “Chaucer!  Rabelais!  Balzac” in the song “Pick-a-little, Talk-a-little.”  And I landed on Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. I may have read portions of it in college.  Although it is supposed to be bawdy and satirical, something we need right now, it is unlikely I will read any of the 1,041 pages.  

And then, OF COURSE, one day later, one of my books on hold arrived.  How to Age Disgracefully, by Clare Pooley (2024).  I am less than thrilled with it so far, but it is quite funny in places and the characters are growing on me.

Office Space

Last Monday I leased office space for four hours at a rate of $350 per hour, and got my car fixed for free.  That’s how I like to look at it.

It all started last Saturday, when the Common Household Husband made the mistake of riding in my car. 

When I ride in his car, the conversation usually goes like this:

Me:  Your car is making a strange noise.

Husband:  Oh.  Let me turn up the radio. 

(He proceeds to ignore the noise for months until the axle breaks.  True story.  And let me tell you, when the car axle breaks, the car does not move.)

But when it’s MY car, this is the conversation:

Husband:    Your car is making a strange noise.

Me:   Oh?

Husband:  Yeah.  It’s much louder than it should be.

Me: It’s always that loud.

Husband:  And the floor is vibrating. 

Me:  It’s a moving vehicle.  Of course the floor is vibrating.

Husband:  You’d better take it in to be looked at.

I made an appointment with the dealer, with the nebulous symptom of “excess road noise,” to which the appointment-maker-person said, “How old are your tires?”

Monday afternoon I showed up at the dealer’s service area, walked toward the receptionist, and was immediately confronted with not one, but two Very Large Dogs (plus a person I presumed was their owner).  I panicked and walked into a different area, approaching a person whom I knew was not the receptionist.  I said, “I have an appointment to have my car looked at.”  The person said, “You want to go over there,” and pointed toward the dogs.  I said that I would wait until Those Dogs left, and why on earth would anyone bring their dogs to a car dealer?

Eventually the dogs entered the waiting area, so I carefully sidled over to the receptionist.  Soon I was standing before Service Advisor Mike.  I sheepishly said, “My car is louder than usual.” 

I bet if my husband were taking in the car, he would have said, “My wife says the car is louder than usual.” 

Mike, who was young enough to be my son, smiled congenially and promised expert mechanicsmanship.    He invited me to take a seat in the waiting area.  I said, “No way.  Not until those Two Very Large Dogs leave.  I can’t believe people bring dogs to the car repair place!”  Mike said, “Actually, a lot of people bring their dogs here.  But if you go past that area, and turn left, you will find an alcove with a table. You could wait there, far away from the dogs.” 

And so I did.  The alcove turned out to be blissfully quiet, with a table I had all to myself.  I got out my computer and started working on crop economics.  After a while Mike appeared. His mechaniscmanship was indeed thorough, as he found not one but four things wrong with the car.  Three of them were dire, as in, the engine will fall out, or the engine will have a nuclear meltdown, or the wheel will seize up.  All the suggested repairs came with dramatic prices.

I called the Common Household Husband, who told me to shop around for a better price. It is not easy to get a car repair quote over the phone, but after 45 minutes, I managed to get some information. Much to my surprise, for two of the repairs, the dealer’s price was competitive.  So I told Service Advisor Mike to do those two repairs, and I happily settled in to my new quiet, dogless office space to try and earn back a fraction of the car repair expenses. Several hours later I left with a new timing belt, water pump, wheel bearing, and some other car parts that sound made-up to deceive common housewives, like “tensioner” and “yaw rate sensor.”

I have decided in the future to follow my husband’s practice.  If I hear a strange noise in the car, I am just going to turn up the radio.

I am looking forward to getting a smaller car,
but we still need this large one for several more years,
for transporting college students and their stuff.
I also included this photo to remind us that
short-sleeve weather has occurred in our lifetime.

Hanging over my head

1040, FAFSA, CSS, Oh my!

I am a whopping 2 weeks late on filling out the FAFSA to submit to my son’s college choices.  I was fooled into complacency by the deadline for Oldest Daughter’s college – the deadline is much later for an enrolled student than for a first-time applicant.  My other excuse is that we had a few things going on in February, like, a memorial service, a women’s retreat, a cold, Lent, perimenopause, and dinner to prepare. 

Somehow there is always dinner to prepare.  My husband, having seen one article in the newspaper, has suddenly decided that I should cook according to the “Mediterranean diet.”  This idea makes me peevish.  My ancestors were Scottish and German.  Therefore, tonight we are having tofu with chick pea curry.  I don’t know no Mediterranean cooking, unless frozen cheese ravioli with Ragu sauce counts.  

Plus in my line of business February is acreage prediction season, which I hate, as it is an impossibility, using my traditional statistical methods, to predict crop plantings with much accuracy.  The USDA does it by taking a survey, so maybe I should do the same.  How about if all of my readers who are farmers just report to me how much stuff you are going to plant this spring?  We’ll all sing “Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow” while you make your calculations.

My one crowning achievement in February was getting my aunt’s tax information off to her accountant.  Too bad I am my own accountant for our taxes.

My inclination is to stick random numbers into the college aid forms, press SUBMIT and just see what happens.  Other than that, I plan to spend the rest of the day waiting for February to be over. 

How about you?  What are you waiting for today?  Are you making any calculations?  What’s going to grow in your plot of land this spring?

Help, Thanks, Wow

Next week is going to be a very tough week for the Common Household.   This isn’t an easy post to write, and no fun to read, either.

My father went to the hospital Tuesday with an infection, and the outcome is not good.  Today he entered hospice care. I’ve had a steely resolve about hospice care being the right thing for him, for quite some time now.  Why, now that the time has come, has my steeliness dissolved?  I still know it’s the right decision, but I am not feeling like steel at all.

In the coming week, my husband will be traveling to go to his uncle’s funeral.  Another sadness, and I can’t go with him.  One unnerving thing about his trip is that he has booked a room at a hotel which costs $54 a night.  I am under the perhaps snobbish impression that if one stays at a hotel at that low price, one will get caught in drug-raid crossfire or will be overtaken by vicious molds.  (This is what comes of watching Downton Abbey every day of the week.)  On several counts, I’ll be very relieved when he returns. 

I was going to go to see my parents today, but last night Youngest Daughter had a fever.  It looks like it is just a bad cold – the fever is gone, and for that I am quite grateful.  But I am here, and not there where I could have been some help to my Mom.  Who knows, though – maybe I am meant to be here at home.

I will try to carry on this week, helping my kids go on with their normal lives, but with a layer of prayer underlying everything.  Anne Lamott says that the three main modes of prayer are Help, Thanks, and Wow.  I will be using all three prayers liberally this coming week.  (I’ve said Help a lot already, and I'm saying Thanks and Wow today for the support and love I’m receiving from friends.)  And I’ll probably be doing a lot of crying, laughing, singing, and baking. Anything to get through it.

Update:  My dad passed away peacefully, in the presence of my Mom and my brother, late in the evening on January 19.

I will have more to say later

There is more to say about the Common Household Easter celebration.  But it will have to wait.  For those who make their money from forecasting crops (I am one), this is a very busy time of year.  The impossible task of determining how much land will be planted to corn, soybeans and wheat falls to me.  I have been working almost non-stop.  This is a good thing.

It is also Common Household birthday season, which begins in late April and ends in late June.  Tomorrow evening twelve or more teenagers will attend a cake decorating party at our house.  This celebration was postponed (from April) until after the birthday girl’s AP tests were over.  So tomorrow morning there will be a flurry of cleaning.  Perhaps some decorating.  And much ordering of pizza and drinking of soda.   This is a good thing.

The dear Common Household Husband’s birthday is on Sunday.  We will probably go to a baseball game.  We hardly ever go to a baseball game.  This is a good thing.

Many of you asked this past week how my parents are.  I am happy and grateful to report that their health is improving. My mother is cleared to drive again, and has started to dive back into her activities.  My father is slowly recovering from his root canal.   This is a good thing.

Many good things, little time to think or write.  Soon, soon.

Earthday Cake, made by Youngest Daughter.

Happy belated Earth Day!  

Waiting for a Miracle

I am wondering what it was like in the Olden Days.  My children think that the Olden Days were the 1960s, way back before there were cell phones or cable TV.

But I am thinking back to when there were no phones at all, and people communicated across long distances by asking someone to carry a letter personally.  Or they just showed up.  It would have been impossible to call ahead to ask if you could visit.  It must have seemed like a miracle when, for instance, your favorite nephew who lived three states away showed up at your doorstep, and luckily just at harvest time. Or the unmarried daughter you had to leave behind in, say, Cleveland, while you went out west to Colorado, showed up one day with her husband and 2-year-old child.

I don’t want to overdo it here, but when my son returns home from the Jamboree after being incommunicado for a full ten days (7 days so far, 3 to go), I will view it as a miracle.  Before he left, in my foolishness, I told him I was not expecting a phone call from him, but it would be nice if he did call once or twice.  Since he’s a teenage boy, he heard the first part, but not the rest.

All I know is, my son is somewhere in this crowd of 70,000 people.  Can you spot him?  He’s wearing a scout uniform with a white cap.

If you see him, be sure to tell him that I am sitting in the dark with no one to talk to, waiting for him to call.  You don’t have to sob when you tell him that.  

Maybe that makes me the first Presbyterian Jewish mother. 

I’m not fearful for his safety, but I just want to know what he's been doing; if he’s having fun, if he got to try the robotics stuff, and if he changed his socks yet. 

And yet, if I could talk to him, this is the way the conversation would go:

What have you been doing?! 

- Stuff.

Are you having fun?!

-Idunno.

Did you get to try the robotics stuff?!

-Maybe.

Did you change your socks yet?!

- Mom.

Even when he gets home, if we get any more information than that, it will be a miracle.  I am eagerly awaiting that miracle. 

They also serve who only stand and wait

Today a man collapsed during the church service. It was during the sermon. There was a small commotion from the back of the sanctuary, a cry for a nurse. Someone said “Call 9-1-1.” By the time I turned my cell phone on someone else was already calling. A good thing – I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep my cool. As she was talking to 9-1-1, I realized that the church building is a long way from the street entrance, and that someone should go down to the street to direct the ambulance. As the minister was directing us to begin praying, I just left the sanctuary. I went out in the rain, down by the street, and waited. Just as well. I have no medical expertise to offer, I can pray on my own, and somehow I just wanted to be by myself. These are times when the prayer is just “Oh, God. Oh, God. Please heal, comfort, send peace.” After a few minutes a second person came out of the sanctuary to wait for the ambulance, too, but he waited further down at the other entrance.

When you are waiting for an ambulance to come revive someone who has collapsed, 10 minutes is a long time to wait. Finally the ambulance arrived, and was directed to the sanctuary by the other waiting person. I started back up the hill. As I ascended, I noticed a squirrel and a crow, just standing there, looking toward the sanctuary. It was as if they too wanted to know what was happening.

When I got back inside the sanctuary the congregation was singing. “Great is thy faithfulness... All I have needed thy hand hath provided...” The man was being wheeled out on the gurney, waving to us. I was thankful to see that he had regained consciousness. Someone went with his wife to take her to the hospital. We resumed our worship service, although the minister declared that the sermon did not need to be preached that day, as we had already lived out our faith in those moments.