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Friday, February 4, 2005
Fat, Useless Toys
I HAVE GOT TO VISIT THE TOY STORE!!! Have you seen the new Inaction Heroes? Out of shape loser adult dolls? Is that for real? I saw a commercial and wanted to rush right out and buy. The mom makes her adult son ride in the shopping cart so he doesn't get kidnapped. Pull the string and Mom says six different guilt-inducing things. Tell me this wasn't just a bit of comedy.
Thursday, February 3, 2005
You've Got To Have A Dream
Here's a problem; how, if at all, might one go about getting all the people to move from the apartments across the street, and then getting those apartments torn down? Surely I have not spent a lifetime crafting answers and solutions only to be foiled at the last by that shabby pile of yellow brick, crack heads, prostitutes, child molesters, welfare frauds, and burglers. I need workable ideas. Anything. I'm not getting anywhere.
One day a Jehovah's Witness came along wanting to chew my ear. I told him that before I'd listen to him, he'd have to go over there and convert at least one adult in each of the twelve apartments. No, he has made no progress. As a matter of fact, he looked across the street, scratched his head, and said, "Not me." Some kind of chicken missionary he turned out to be.
Then I thought of setting up a web cam in my office window and recording the video feed every night until I got enough evidence for the police to finally and forever bust that dump. First, of course, I would have to get the necessary hardware and set up a wireless network reaching the upstairs front. Given the pace at which I adopt new technology, this is never going to happen.
OK. Then completely screwball ideas. For example, I remember at one time spending quite a while reading web sites re. homemade propulsion devices. There are many varieties of hand-tooled potato launcher and catapult. I wondered if, should I spend time collecting roadkilled small animals and trapping rats, it might be feasable to launch dead animals onto the roofs over there, onto the porches, between the buildings...and just keep it up until the smell drove everyone away. Aha. Now you begin to recoil in horror. You say to yourself, "This Doubledog is crazy. She's going, sooner or later, to become a resident of the loony bin." Well, hey. I just thought of it. I didn't do it...chiefly because I couldn't think of a way to do it without being caught sometime in midlaunch, a dead rat hurling across the street from a spot on my porch...and me trying to cough up a sensible explanation for what would be completely idiotic to anyone not really fed to the teeth with the wretched Cracke Arms.
Another wacko idea was the incentive program I imagined. I thought, "What if I made up a lovely, official-looking bit of mail and sent a copy to each apartment...proclaiming March to be 38th Street Home Improvement Month on behalf of a nonexistent neighborhood do-good society. I could announce prizes for the best-maintained residences of various sorts on this street...a house category, an apartment category...with prizes to be window boxes of flowers or something. The idea was that if those freaks were competing with one another re. whose frontage was the best maintained, they might experience a corresponding improvement in behavior. Yes, I know. Crazy idea. I didn't do it. In order for that idea to have a hope, the intended letter recipients would have to be able to read...something I seriously doubt is true.
So there you have the cream of my cogitations..all of it crazy. I need some sound thinking of the sort that would lead to the desired result. No, don't e-mail me brightly, "Why don't you buy those places, evict the tenants, and demolish the buildings yourself?" Someone bought one of the buildings just before Christmas, got rid of half the tenants, repaired and refurbished...and now has even worse tenants than those who were turfed out. Apparently there is some ordinance in effect which will keep The Cracke Arms badly occupied in perpetuity...something to the effect that once a landlord qualifies a place for low-income tenantry, he is not able to pick and choose new customers, must take whoever is at the top of the waiting list at the welfare office. Also, the landlord may not evict except for egregious offenses scrupulously documented over a long period of time. AND it is nearly impossible to get all the tenants out at one time, so given that a landlord would have to maintain the building for at least one crackhead, he'd no doubt feel he owed himself the rental from all available units.
In the paper the other day was an article about some minister who made a practice years ago of doing a daily walk through a terrible neighborhood. As he went, he made the sign of the cross and prayed for each house and it's residents...every single day. Now, it seems, that's a great place to live. Very nice. Given how long it took for his idea to work, though, I would not survive to see results should I set out to pray 38th Street into submission. I don't know what to do. Officially stumped, here.
Plow the North Forty
In the case of my home, that north 40 would be feet, not acres. However, it IS time to get out and plow. How do I know? Because I have a deep, irrepressible need to go outside and dig up the dirt and then plant seeds. I just got an e-mail from Gurney Seed Co. that my five little seed packets are on the way. Yay! Lettuce, cucumber, purple beans, squash and tomatoes. Seems there's a type of tomato which is tough. You can just plant the seeds as though they were beans, and the tomato plants grow right there in fairly cool weather, producing tomatoes within 57 days. The question is, "Within 57 days of what?" Planting the seeds? The first blossom? I don't care. Now about that plowing...I do have an extremely old, frail spade. Must get out and give it a try. If the handle breaks, I'll just trot down to the hardware store and buy a newer version and press on. There's something about the quality of light outside which makes me itch to plant stuff.
You know, my backyard is a pretty sheltered spot. Just after Christmas I noticed new growth in the middle of the yard, went out to inspect and it's Dieffenbachia(sp?(. No kidding. There's another patch of it volunteering by the garage. Imagine a tropical house plant like that growing wild in my backward. Someone must have tossed out a houseplant which just went ahead and naturalized. It's lush and green and thriving, has been unaffected by a couple of cold snaps. So I decided that a yard hospitable to Dieffenbachia(sp?) should be reasonably kind to vegetables. Time to plant the garden. This year I want to be the first person on 38th Street with homegrown tomatoes.
Last summer I warmly admired a yard in the 100 block of 38th Street. Bean vines ran riot over the picket fence. A couple of days ago I was stuck in a slow line at the ghetto grocery checkout. The old lady in front of me told me that the house with the bean vines also has a huge garden out back. As a matter of fact, hoping to be able to avoid use of pesticides to control bugs, those homeowners got a few chickens to run loose in the yard. All was going great when some complainer called the city to whine about a rooster waking him up. Wouldn't you know it? In a neighborhood with prostitutes, crack dealers, child molesters, and burglers as far as the eye can see, some dummy went to the authorities about a few chickens. This is a place where it's easy to be bad and hard to act normal. Can you believe it? Call the police about chickens doing nothing worse than staying in their yard eating the bugs in the garden.
Tuesday, February 1, 2005
Give Eggs A Rest
Most of my computer time occurs as I eat breakfast, so breakfast is the topic today and I say, why eggs all the time? Not that eggs are bad. My favorite breakfast is a pat of butter, eggs, cheese, and hot salsa scrambled together in a fry pan. Today, though, I woke up thinking, "Fish." Chronically a victim of special offers at the ghetto grocery, I bought a huge sack of 130 frozen fish sticks during the first week of Lent. That was the day I left my glasses at home and accidentally bought horseradish sauce instead of tartar sauce for all those fish sticks. My next trip to the store was an afternoon at Walmart with Lydia and the kids. I got the tartar sauce that time, but forgot and left the jar in the back of Lydia's Honda Odyssey.
By the way, interrupting here and speaking of Walmart, I probably never would go there by myself; it's just too enormous. Toiling along from what must surely be weather system to weather system and time zone to time zone, soon my only goal is to get out and it's still this week. I'm old and a lot of hiking wears me out so Walmart is not really for me. On the other hand, it is a cheap source for little luxuries like lavendar soaps, lavendar bath salts, and lavendar-scented house cleaning products. Also, I got an excellent palm tree there for just $6.00, yes, a real and quite big palm tree, the kind that can tolerate Norfolk winters. What a deal. Oh, and Walmart was the only place around here with a Nintendo DS game thing available...Benny's birthday party.
Back to breakfast...eventually the tartar sauce arrived home and I realized that unless I intended to throw away a lot of fish sticks, I'd better start using them. I made a little tiny dent in the supply just now. What else do I like for breakfast? Well, I like the Heidi breakfast...cheese melted onto toast. Another good one is cold, left-over spaghetti. Cold, left-over pizza is probably my second favorite. Peanut butter on toast is good, too. Baked beans on toast is good, but it leaves a partial can of leftovers sitting forever in the fridge. Sausage gravy on fresh hot biscuits is just way too good and therefore probably qualifies as a sin.
What do I NOT like? Cereal. Blecch. All packaged cereal has a peculiar aftertaste. How about good old oatmeal? I may never again feel that desperate for the good old days. Oatmeal is best when cooked like this; first simmer raisins in a bit of water until the raisins plump. Then add water, oatmeal, butter, salt, and cook until the oatmeal is thick but not too lumpy. Add brown sugar and cold milk. Yes, that is good stuff, but it takes too long and requires more than one step.
Whatever I eat for breakfast needs fresh-brewed coffee to wash it all down. That's what I'm going to make right now.
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Yesterday's yellow apartment report...
someone over there stole a little child's training wheels bike. It has been kicked around on the sidewalk for a few weeks. On Saturday a man threw it into the yard of the green house across the way, the one being rehabbed. I have several times thought, "I should call the police to tell them about that bike because no doubt parents of the child from whom it was stolen would have reported their loss. If the police know where the bike is, they could notify the owner." Course I never call the police about anything.
Yesterday evening I saw the big police van pull up in front of the green house and thought, "Oh, good. They've noticed that bike and are going to pick it up." Nope. Five policemen and a drug-sniffer dog got out of the van and sheltered in the bushes just before the yellow apartments. It was a miserably chilly, rainy evening. The policemen shivered and rubbed their arms. Finally the rest of their contingent arrived. They spread out, covered every inch of ground around the apartments and also went through the hallways from back to front. They went over and over and over the area. After about half an hour, they gave up and left without making an arrest. Even the dog looked disappointed. Residents watching from their balcony porches laughed and jeered.
About a Seven on the 38th Street Scale
Hey. I'm up and typing at a quarter til 2 A.M. because the yellow brick crack apartments just erupted a little while ago and woke me up. All of a sudden every adult member of the crack fraternity over there was outside baying at the top of their lungs, just an inexplicable gobbledegook of sound out of which the only thing I could understand was "F---your ass!!!" yelled repeatedly at the small army of policemen who poured out of the seven police cars in the street. I went upstairs to my office where I watched in comfort as the drama unfolded. They managed to wrestle one drug dude into one of the police cars and he was screaming, "HELP!!!!" so loudly I would not have believed a human voice could produce so much noise. Meanwhile all the porches were jumping with yelling, screaming bozos. Out front about 10 male residents were trying to provoke the cops into fighting them, jumping up into the cops' faces and screaming more of the, "F--- your ass!!!" I couldn't tell what it was all about.
Then finally a thin white woman who looked like her clothes had been torn up got out of one of the police cars, hobbling, and trying to hold her clothes around her, she came over and started pointing out people. Although I would not have thought it possible, the noise went up about two hundred percent. Incredible noise. Amazing, astonishing noise. The police put another dude in one of the cars and helped the white woman into another police car. One resident was screaming to the two in custody, "Don't say anything. Don't tell them anything. Keep your mouth shut. I'm callin' yo' lawyer."
Then the police left and the baying multitude roared gleefully and chased them down the street shaking their fists.
There's nothing between those freaks and me but two lanes of pavement. Sometimes, like just now, that doesn't seem like much of a fence.
The police are very, very experienced in dealing with the denizens of that hell hole. When they come to arrest someone, they come in strength...tonight it was seven cars. I think it would be horribly stressful to do that kind of work.
Monday, January 31, 2005
A Good Day To Wear Gloves In Iraq
Had I been a potential voter in Iraq yesterday, I would have waited until my neighbor got home and tried Clorox on that purple finger before I, myself, would consider going to the polls. Obviously to me, there are going to be a lot of finger amputations done by the insurgents. It will be a blood bath. Goons will roam the streets , and anyone with a purple finger is going to lose that digit. That's one thought re. yesterday's election. Here's another one: not able to speak Arabic, I have no idea, but I wondered, watching all the celebration, what those people thought you get for voting. I suspect that they'd been lied to. They were acting more like someone who has just seen the Prize Patrol approach the front door, giant check and balloons in hand...than people who had merely registered their little insignificant opinion on paper. Those folks were just way too happy to fit the facts as reported. Journalists kept chirping away re. how courageous the Iraqi people are. Maybe, but I don't think so. They looked more misinformed than brave. Sobbing for joy, dancing for joy, singing for joy, shooting off guns for joy, u-ulating for joy...HHHHMMmmmm. Somewhere down the line we're going to find that all those people thought if you vote, you get to move to America, marry Britney Spears, and live in Hollywood. The reason I think they were promised something they aren't going to get is that here in America where we know precisely what voting is and is not, we all have to be guilted into going and doing it, "Oh," groan, whine, "Alright, alright, I'm GOING! But I don't have to LIKE IT!!"
God Is Always Good
Yes, God IS always good. I heard some television preacher say that recently and he's right. OK, your life is a train wreck, but mine is not. My life is one excellent surprise after another. Here's the latest in an unbroken series of incidents I am able to offer in proof of the goodness of God. Last week I decided to from now on walk to the ghetto grocery store when I need things...not ride in my nice car...WALK. You see, I'm supposed to do some form of exercise to keep myself from dropping over dead and walking is the least likely to kill me of all possible workouts.
Alright last week I ran into a problem and suddenly there was someone who helped me out. It was amazing. I still look back on that episode and say to myself, "That was just unbelievable." It did happen, though.
OK. That was then and this is Monday of a new week. I got out of bed today thinking about the fact that Wednesday will roll around and Benny will report for "cooking class" and WHAT WILL I MAKE WITH HIM? All morning I was a bit worried about this. I don't ever want beloved Benny to show up expecting to cook and ...OOPS... I have no idea what to do. So anyway, I decided at about 10:20 A.M. to walk to the ghetto grocery to see what they have that is easy to do bakingwise.
By 10:30 I was outside on the sidewalk with the collapseable shopping cart behind me headed for the Colley Shopping Center. The sky was blue, the sun was brilliant and I felt able to encircle the globe.
I toiled along counting steps. In the Sunday paper a fitness researcher posited that if you want to walk for exercise, you may as well not bother to call it work if it adds up to less than 10,000 steps. All the way to the ghetto grocery? Not work? Oh my gracious, goodness. WORK!!!?(*&^^%%$$##@@! Right then. I counted and pulled the cart behind me.
Ahhh, yes. Into each life some unpredictable unpleasantness must fall. I got all the way to the ghetto grocery, stopping to blow my nose 4 times, wishing each passerby a happy hello. Counting every single step. It was only 1,500 steps. That would only be 3,000 on the round trip...not 10,000.
Whatever. I found and bought several baking mixes...caramel surprise....cherry cobbler...I think Benny will like those. Then I paid at the cash register. A dear little old lady in front of me asked the bagger, "Would you walk out to my car with me? I would feel safer that way." He replied, "Oh, yes, indeed. You have every right to feel frightened." Uh-huh. I went through the check out and left the store pulling my own shopping cart behind me. I walked all the way to my corner at 38th street.
Here is where the goodness of God came into play. I crossed 38th Street and waited at the light. Then I had to cross Colley Avenue in order to get home. I watched and waited at the light until I was sure it was OK to cross, started into the street, approached the oncoming traffic side of the street. Suddenly the truck waiting at the light blasted on it's horn. I gasped and pulled up. The driver dived across his front seat, threw himself against the door on the far side, screamed out the door at ...oh, my goodness a car was coming up the outside lane and racing into the intersection. The truck driver somehow had managed to throw his vehicle into park and dashed out the passenger side of his cab in front of this oncoming car. How he did this I have no idea. Quite an athletic feat for a middle aged person. Truck driver motioned me across the rest of the street much as a traffic policeman would have done. As I turned to thank him, he waved and jumped back into his truck, and then drove away at the change of light.
Well. I'm certainly not worth two miracles in a row. However, it looks as though that is what I have kindly received at the hands of a God who is always good.
This is a dangerous place. The little old lady at the store who wanted to be guarded out to her car, she was right. In addition to criminals, I have twice been protected from those who might have hurt me because of their crazy driving. Maybe God thinks I should walk to the store even if the trip only adds up to 3,000 steps.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Things That Go Bump in the Night
If suddenly in the night you awaken because of a crashing, bashing, thumping noise...and you just groan and go back to sleep...that means you need to go to bed earlier for a few days.
This morning, coming down to make coffee, I saw that a very large picture/frame had fallen off the wall and crashed down the stairs. Hm... Yes, I remember waking up briefly about 1:00 A.M., hearing a big kaboom. At the time I thought, "Sounds like the front door got smashed in and thugs are pounding up the stairs to beat me to death so I won't identify them to the police for stealing all the fabric out of the workroom." That was what I thought just before I went back to sleep, without getting up to see what had made the noise. Yeah. All the fabric in the workroom, gotta be just about an irresistible target for burglers. Any halfway sensible criminal out there going by on the sidewalk has to think, looking up at this house, "OOOOOH! Must be a lot of fabric in there somewhere." Anyway, it wasn't a fabric burgler. It was a beautiful picture of Lydia at about Benny's present age. Boom! Crash! Thump, thump, thump!!
And I didn't even get up to look.
Biscuit Stars
Should you wish to whomp together a quick treat irresistible to all ages, try this: Open a refrigerated tube of crescent roll dough. Unroll the dough and spread it onto a cookie sheet. Using a cookie cutter, cut out stars. Pull the extra dough up from around your stars and squish it out flat on another cookie sheet. Use your hand for this. Don't bother washing your hand...this is all going into a hot oven. Cut more stars. Squish extra dough out on one more sheet and cut a few more stars before discarding the last fragments of dough. Open a sack of chocolate chips and place a chip at center and each point of each star. Bake stars for 10 minutes at 350 degrees. This is what Benny and I did yesterday morning. Benny awarded himself two chocolate chips for each chip he situated onto a dough star. When I protested, he said, "But I'm vewy, vewy hungwy fow chocolate chips." Oh, well, then....as long as he was vewy hungwy. The baked stars were crunchy and delicious. Benny had eight of them. It's nice to know that adequate nutrition is his parents' problem. At my house he can eat anything he darn well pleases. I was a bit concerned that Benny might be completely insane from sugar overdose, but no. We did a counting by tens chart re. that 350 degrees. Then he wrote about the temperatures of the oven, the house, and the outdoors...and illustrated his prose. Seemed sane to me. Chocolate. It's one of the major food groups.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
"Granmaw, Heah, Wif' Me, Bruvuh"
The other day a news guy said, "This is it, folks. We're over the worst. From now on, you can expect at least 50 degrees plus each day as the high. Norfolk has had its winter."
Right away I began to cheer up. That very day I did more moving-in jobs than I have done all the previous three months of my sojourn in this domicile. I worked myself to the bone...well, no. I'm still fat as a pig, but I did work long and hard.
Today was another hard, but happy day. I was awake shortly after 5:00 A.M., making coffee, drinking it, and then toiling like a person getting paid to do what needed to be done. For one thing, the Christmas tree was still here. Lydia took it apart for me yesterday, but all those enormously heavy sections littered the living room floor. Then there was the matter of all the toys on the floor dating from yesterday when Sadie and Benny were here. Finally the foyer floor was dirty from tracked-in whatnot yesterday. After drinking that coffee, I tore into the tidying tasks. By 9:00 A.M. the floor was cleared and clean and the vacuum had run yet another marathon. I folded laundry and took it upstairs. The Christmas tree sat in its two boxes out on the porch. I mopped all the tile. Sweaty and tired, I took a bath.
Then, to my great joy, Lydia pulled into the driveway and dropped off Benny. This was our weekly cooking class day. We made double fudge brownies.
Benny had to read aloud the recipe. He had to lay out the utensils we would need. He set the temp on the oven, measured and stirred ingredients, poured the goop into the pan, carried the pan to the oven, washed the utensils, and...while those brownies baked...played Spyro: A Dragon's Tail on his Nintendo Gamecube in my dining room.
Exactly as the brownies came out of the oven, Lydia and baby Sadie pulled back into the driveway...they had been at Sadie's baby music class. Sadie was so sleepy that she went right up to her bed in the back bedroom. Lydia and Benny had lunch and began to make invitations to Benny's Birthday party coming up in February. One thing lead to another and we all had a good time. It was about 2:15 P.M. when they had to go home for Sadie's afternoon nap.
Now I was tired. I laid myself down on the sofa and thought about going to sleep. Then I had a good idea.
I thought, "It's warm outside. I haven't grocery-shopped for a couple of weeks. Why don't I go to the ghetto grocery like everyone else...on foot?"
To cut a long story short, I dug the collapsable shopping cart out of the laundry room, set off and dragged that cart 14 blocks to the store. On the way I several times wondered if I was about to pass out on the sidewalk from lack of oxygen, but I made it. At the store I took my time and looked up fresh vegetables, etc. I had to stand in two lines because of a problem with one of the check out machines. Eventually I emerged from the store with a full cart and began to toil my way home. Going back was harder because I felt seriously tired.
At last, at last.... I was within two blocks of home when I ran into a sidewalk block. Some people at the red brick apartments had pulled up and over the sidewalk with an old wrecked truck. There was a scant foot between the truck and the street. A young man came out of one of the apartments and got into the truck. He saw me and did not turn on the truck, but just bared his teeth at me as though he were a dog. I was by now so very tired.... I begged, "Could you please move your truck just a few inches so that I might have a better chance of getting by you without going out into the street with all this stuff I'm dragging?" He yelled, "NO!!!!!" He glared at me as though I personally were responsible for the fact that he lives in a tiny wretched slum apartment. I begged again, "Oh, please..." At this point, an old man, very very drunk roared out of the downstairs apartment, "Get out in the street, yo'all ho. Yo ole, bitch. Get out they and die yo'all whi' bitch."
I measured the available space between the truck and the street and realized that in rush hour traffic I would indeed be forced into the street with an unwieldy cart of groceries. I was so tired, I was light-headed and wondered if I might fall over and pass out right there.
Suddenly I heard a deep, ultra-resonant voice, "She wif me! Granmaw wif me, bruvuh, and don' you fo'get it."
The meany and the drunk did what I believe qualified as shit-eating grins and backed into their dwelling places without any more granmaw abuse. I looked back. If I had not been so dead tired, I might have been afraid. The guy was enormous, way over six feet and built like a tank. He strode over to me, lowered his voice and said kindly, "Now you com'on granmaw. Ah gonna get yu'all home. Whey is it?"
He did get me home. At the next light, traffic stood still as he stepped out with a massive arm up. I was able to take my time crossing. Once at my house, I said to him, "You are such a nice young fellow to do this for me." Says he, "Jes' remembah, You got one mo' granbaby now." He smiled and flashed an acre of bright white teeth.
Another day on 38th Street.
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