Is this Mentschlekhkeyt?

Smoky-voiced cat lady caregivers
Kvetching about people
Kvelling about pets

Cupcakes: WTF?

Okay, I'm going to spoil a few minutes of my lovely Saturday morning (first honest to goodness warm sunny day of the year) and open the cranky gates. It's not so much dislike as honest puzzlement.

What's up with cupcakes? I just don't get it. There are so many things that are nicer than cupcakes. They're not actively bad; they're just aggressively over-promoted. A few quick Google searches reveal the wrongness:

• Results 1 - 10 of about 8,780,000 for cupcakes
• Results 1 - 10 of about 5,730,000 for apple pie
  
• Results 1 - 10 of about 1,310,000 for creme brulée
  
• Results 1 - 10 of about 1,050,000 for chocolate mousse.
• Results 1 - 10 of about 657,000 for chocolate fondue.
• Results 1 - 10 of about 307,000 for Baked Alaska.
• Results 1 - 10 of about 170,000 for Bûche de Noël
  
• Results 1 - 10 of about 99,200 for French silk pie.

Ditto vampires. I missed this whole bit: Buffy, Anne Rice, and now True Blood. I read Dracula as a teenager and I was very nervous going into our basement for weeks afterward. Is that nice?

Bringing the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. All I can say is: É a vez de Rio!

Reality TV of any stripe. Real Housewives Dancing with your Big Brother to American Idol on Tempatation Island. One exception: I dig Deadliest Catch. (Maybe this is the reason why.) And if you've never seen any of the Up documentaries (7 Up, 21 Up...), they're interesting.

Miracle Whip. Give me the Hellman's every time.

Web design and stuff

As our workgroup deals with comments on a look-and-feel redesign, we get a number of requests for making navigation elements smaller or even eliminating them, allowing for much longer page titles, and expanding the number of items we allow in the "quick finder" table at the top of some pages.

It's making me think that in Web design, as in real life (as in Weight Watchers, for that matter!):

If you keep looking for more room to cram your stuff,
have you considered that maybe you have too much stuff?

:^p

Irks in progress

Reading twenty-two words today, I was reminded of a favorite irk: the obligatory right turn on red. You know, when you're stopped at a red light, and you're in the lane that lets you go forward or turn right. And the person behind you is agitatedly laying on the horn to make you turn right, dammit, because you don't have to wait for the light to change. Except that you aren't turning right because you intend to go straight, and if they would stop that racket they might be able to think for a moment and realize why you are still blocking their way. Now which of those choice words from Abraham's list is most fitting for the situation?

I'm tired... so tired *

I'm a little loath to admit this, especially with the likes of Eolai out there, but I detest filling bicycle tires.

I like to ride my bicycle, but every spring I delay later the day when I must fill the bicycle tires.

It doesn't help that our garage is beginning to look like the home for stray two-wheelers. I keep trying to fulfill my Jessica Fletcher fantasy and get a marvelous heavy old sheep dog of a bike (ladies' style, of course) to ride around town. To the train station, or to the farmers' market (same thing in our town). This means I have three sets of hungry tires to feed once the snow melts. One has gone lame (=needs new tires), but the other two are just fine.

We do have two very functional bicycle pumps. But one of them attaches in a funny way, and I always waste ages pumping away while a gentle hissing sound reminds me that none of this effort is actually putting air into the tires. My hands get bruised, my back gets sore, and I get maybe six pounds of pressure registering. (I do have a very nice tire gauge.)

So my preferred solution is to walk the bike to the nearest filling station (Does anyone still call them that? You know, a gas station.) and use the compressed air hose. I'm offended by the ones that expect me to put quarters in a machine to get air, so I seek out places that give away air for free. There's one about half a mile from the house. I trundle my lovely heavy bicycle over there, and that's when I'm forced to admit that I am also no good with a compressed air hose. I press down and, like a baby refusing to nurse, the tire just gets flatter and flatter as I fish for the nozzle sunk deep in the rim. Then I get into a rhythm: aha! it's latched on! here comes the air! whoops, no, now it's just releasing it all again, yes! got it now! no, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, wow that's fast, it'll be really firm, last all summer long... BANG!! Ears ringing, I look around , hoping no one's been watching me. I trudge home with my crippled paleolithic bike and wonder if I could just get solid tires like I had when I was a little kid.

* lyric reference from Blazing Saddles

Why I wear earplugs at work

I keep a pair of squishy foam earplugs at work. They have some fantastic industrial rating, and when I wear them, I can't even hear my keyboard as I type. Clearly, I'm not working with a jackhammer or a high-powered blender. So why do I wear them, in my pleasant office setting?

Because I work about ten feet away from someone, who, like Nature, abhors a (conversational) vacuum and so fills it all day long with talk.

I try to remind myself that he does a good job, that I'm glad he's here, that he's a pleasant, dedicated worker. If I were shipwrecked alone on a desert island, I'm sure I'd grow to miss his constant chatter. But it might take a few years.

I try to just concentrate on my work, and sometimes that's enough. But sometimes I just can't shut him out.

"Would a brown bear really kill a grizzly bear? Don't they know they're cousins? They shouldn't do that! I don't think I like Nature."

"Did you ever hear of a fan tax? I know this guy who's one of the last clothing manufacturers in the city, and they came to him one day and said, 'you know, we noticed you have a fan up in the back of your shop, and there's a new fan tax.' And a ladder tax, too. Can you imagine that?..."

"Wow. I put (unintelligible) in my shoes and now they're stretched out."

"They're coming to our house today to put in new cable TV. HD TV, something to do with high definition, supposed to be a sharper picture..."

"I got a new phone. The old one was really big, and it didn't get good reception anymore and..."

All this in the space of four minutes before I inserted the earplugs. Sweet Lord in Heaven! Can you not give it a rest?

This is when he's got down time. Otherwise he's answering the phone, routing calls to the appropriate people. Sometimes the appropriate people would be a state government agency, or maybe a mental health hotline. He's got Bob Newhart syndrome. Like the comedian in his early days, he doesn't just answer the phone; he repeats everything the caller says. "You say you've got a terrible problem? You say you're concerned for your life? Your, uh, yes, neighbor lives downstairs and she's... trying to poison you by using dryer sheets in the laundry? And you want us to come out and test your apartment? And arrest your neighbor?"

It just drives me wild sometimes. There's no partition between this gentleman and me, so nothing to diminish the sound. He's fairly quiet when he's by himself, though he does like to go around to people's cubicles and strike up conversation with them if the phones are slow. Once his colleague arrives in late morning, he's got a tidal wave of suppressed chatter that needs to come out.

But I see an end in sight. In a few more weeks, we're to move desks, and I should have enough seniority to choose a desk well out of earshot of the Babbling Brook.

I feel guilty even writing about it, because I know he means no harm. But I can't hear myself think when I have to hear someone else think, too.

"Will that be fine?"

Having an Andy Rooney moment here. Have you ever had someone (usually a stranger, maybe a restaurant hostess) request something of you, and end the request with: "Will that be fine?"

I'm not sure when this started, but it always rubs me very much the wrong way, and I have to fight the desire to give them a sharp retort. It just seems so presumptuous.

"I know you've purchased a seat in the extended legroom section of this flight, but I'd like to switch places with you so I could sit near my fiancé. My seat is back by the toilets in between two parents who'll be holding their infant twins on their laps during this flight. Will that be fine?"

"Would you mind?" is surely a better way to phrase this. Even "would it be okay" or "would it be all right".

It will definitely not be fine.

Why should I love spring?

I don't think I've ever read a sour word about spring. Why not?

We build it up with such expectations: love, new beginnings, or at least a definitive change from dull winter weather. We treat it like some young starlet and expect so much of it. But it's like any other adolescent: moody, flighty, and flat out disappointing sometimes. Spring is the eighth-grader of the seasons.

When I think of spring, I think of:

• sitting in a grade school classroom and looking out that big bank of windows at the rainy world like some inverse aquarium


• the college trips to Florida I never took with my friends because my parents said how much they wanted me home. So I would come home, and stay at home while my parents worked, and I had no car, and the only places I could walk to were McDonald's or car repair shops. And the weather stank. (I'm sure there were better parts than that, but this is what I remember.)


• flowers that come up and trees that bud out and birds that migrate early and late freezes that come and give them all what for

and also:

• 45-degree days (that's about 7 for you Celsioids) that made us run around outside in shorts and shirtsleeves and sundresses


• a discernible stirring of interest among lads and lasses


• lambs - Easter lambs! - it never dawned on me till I visited l'Ile d'Ouessant at Easter and saw new-minted lambs that yes, this is why lambs are associated with Easter/Passover/spring in general. (How would that be to have all your flock's birthdays in the same month? Imagine the strain of gift-giving!)
  

With bells on

What does anyone have against bells? Why, in every possible application, are real bells being replaced by electronic sounds?

We hang onto an early touch-tone phone because when it rings, it actually rings, with the lovely warm sound of a brass bell. It does not bleat, it does not warble, and I've never had the urge to dash it against the wall.

Our doorbell is schizophrenic. A hideous little buzzer sounds in the basement, but upstairs, in the dining room, is a grand old clock with four tubular bells, which doubles as the doorbell. It's resonant, grand, and makes me eager to see who or what has turned up on the doorstep--even Jehovah's Witnesses.

The kitchen timer is a beeper now, and so are the microwave and the alarm clock. Oddly, the toaster oven is a tinkly old-fashioned "ding". The carillon at the train station is a recording of a carillon. Hmph!

Oddest to me is the warning signal at the train crossing near our station. It's truly important to give people a clear, audible warning not to cross the tracks when a train is approaching. It's not a mechanical bell, though. It's a recording of a train warning bell. There are two ways you can tell. First, it sometimes cuts off in mid "ding" when the crossing gates go up. And second, on wet, squelchy days like today, it starts out on a low tone and then rises in pitch, like a tape being sped up, or a phonograph record being started from a standstill. It makes a warped, bilious sound. Do honest clanging train bells really fail so much that they needed to be replaced with fake ones?