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In a previous post, I talked about how people using search engines like Google might end up at my page, even if the words they’re searching for were not used together in one of my posts. For example, if I wrote one post about opera, and another post about deep-fat frying, someone searching for “deep-fat fried opera” might be directed to my blog.
As someone who uses search engines a lot — I love looking stuff up and learning about, well, almost anything — I’m fascinated by the terms other people search out on the internet. And believe me, “deep-fat fried opera” is not that far out there, search term wise.
So what terms have brought web surfers to Oats in the last few days? Well, as always, “Mississippi porn” is a popular search term. I’m also getting hits from “day of the dead” searches because of my leather jacket posts, and, given the many times I’ve written about my Quaker parrot, Zeke, “quaker poop” isn’t that surprising (as long as the searcher really is thinking about birds, and not religious sects or breakfast foods). “Dead husky” I find a bit disturbing. But my favorite search term this time around is “underpant bulges”. I have no idea what I may have written about to show up on such a search, and I really hope it’s not the universe trying to tell me to cut out the Peanut Butter M&Ms.
Got up at a decent time this morning (7:30 — hey, it’s summer) and walked the dogs, fed everyone, downed my a.m. Diet Pepsi, etc. About 10-ish, felt like I had never really woken up. So I took a 1.5 hour nap.* A nap — in the morning! I love summer vacation.
And now I’m going to have yet another Pepsi and then make the lining for a friend’s felted purse (yes, Robin, finally). I leave you with something that made me giggle. I can’t credit it, as it seems to be a random bit of web-floatage, but here you go:
The British are feeling the pinch in relation to the recent terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow and have raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” Londoners have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great fire of 1666.
*I want it understood that this in no way negates the possibility of an afternoon nap.
Susan over at Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good sent out a general meme tag to list 8 things one’s blog readers* might not know about one. And I’m going to consider myself tagged because in the ideas-for-blog-entries department, I got nothing right now.
Item the first: I’m terrified — as in, jump around ineffectively and flap my hands and scream like a train whistle — of centipedes. And millipedes (like I can tell the difference). Even the tiny ones that look like little, mobile false eyelashes. I am not, for the record, particularly scared of spiders or snakes or bugs in general, and right now my side yard is host to 3 0r 4 nests of huge cicada-killer wasps and I think they’re pretty and interesting. But nothing — NOTHING — needs to have more than 8 legs and I don’t know what the heck God was thinking.
#2) I love to fill out forms. If it has little boxes to check and circles to color and tiny lines to fill with even tinier writing, let me at it. Magazine or internet quizzes, questionnaires, claim forms, warranty cards, catalogue order sheets — heck, I fill out forms I have no intention of ever sending in. And I don’t mean I fill them out with joke information; no, I answer each question carefully and correctly. Maybe it’s an offshoot of my love for crossword puzzles, except I did the form thing long before I started doing crosswords, so it’s probably the other way around. Perhaps I’m just a tiny bit obsessive. Oh, and I can’t stand to watch someone else fill out a form for me/for us — I gotta be in charge.
Three — When I was a child, from age 7 to around age 12, I was positive I’d grow up to be a paleontologist, specializing in, of course, dinosaurs. I could reel off names of species and eras and in the sixth grade I persuaded my teacher to let me tape butcher paper around the back walls of the classroom (like, 12 feet of paper) and spend study hall hours drawing and describing the best known dinosaurs of the Jurassic, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods. And let me be clear — this was in the mid-1970’s, before dinosaur-alia was everywhere and the few books I could find said they were slow, grey, dumb, etc. But they were still darn cool, as far as I was concerned.***
IV. I like to sing in the car. Loudly, whacking the steering wheel in some approximation of the beat. And sometimes head-bang a little.
Fifthly: In high school, I had an eating disorder, getting down to 100 lbs. less than I weigh now. I was so skinny, I stopped menstruating for a year and got dizzy most afternoons. I thought my lower stomach was still fat, but looking at a few old photos, I can see that hey, that bulge was made by my intestines and you could have hung coffee mugs from my hip bones.
Anyone who knows me now knows I’ve managed to get past that phase of my life!
6>. I cannot make pancakes, no matter what recipe I follow, what mix I use, what advice I’m given by well-meaning makers of fluffy, yummy pancakes. What I can make are circular, doughy objects that will absorb butter and syrup and sit in your stomach like rocks. After one of my pancakes, you don’t need to (and won’t want to) eat for the rest of the day. My French toast, however, rocks.
Seven: I think Sam Elliot and Frank Langella will be sexy until the day they die, and possibly for a few days thereafter.
VIII= I’m only revealing this to round off the required eight items. I don’t want to hear anything about it, from anyone, ever. Even typing this pains me more than I can express.
In high school, I collected unicorns.
*Right now, my blog readers are limited to my family and friends, because apparently my new WordPress blog won’t show up in search engine queries for several weeks, or maybe forever. So some readers may find they do know all 8 things (assuming I can think of eight things). If you 1) knew all 8 things before reading this and 2) are either related to me by blood or marriage (or former marriage) or knew me in Reno or Bowling Green, speak up and I’ll send you some kind of prize.**
**Disclaimer: it may not be a prize anyone in their right mind would want…..
***In college, I took a survey class in fossil geology and learned that most paleontologists study bivalves (clams) and other bottom-of-the-sea creatures. We talked about dinosaurs for about 1 week at the end of a 15-week semester. I was so disappointed.
The doldrums have hit — hot weather, days of picking away at this project or that task, thinking of the new semester, and on and on and on. So nothing new to report. In the next week or so, I should 1) finish refinishing my possibly-teak outdoor furniture and 2) line a felted bag I made for my friend Robin, who just got her shiny new Ph.D. and a shiny new assistant professor job to go with it. So maybe there will be pics of wood chairs and a felt bag in the near future. Can you contain your excitement?
In other news, the West is on fire as anyone awake must know, with fires burning in and around Reno suburbs. The fires and smoke and worry and pain for local families and firefighters are things I definitely don’t miss about Reno. Of course, I haven’t had to sit in the basement during a tornado yet (let me be clear — this IS NOT a challenge to fate); that kind of scare might make an honest brush fire seem more inviting.
That’s all I got. As I said, the doldrums.
I lost my pictures in the blog move — who knew that cyberspace could be as rough as a burly, surly, under-tipped moving man?
I’m going to re-link the vacation pictures in the next few days, but the others will just have to stay lost. Gives me a lovely, legitimate opportunity to post more cute pet pictures!
Well, a brand new blog host, anyway. I’ve transferred the blog to WordPress because my Typepad bill is coming due. Don’t get me wrong, Typepad gives a lot of value for $50 a year. But I can’t justify spending that when WordPress does a good job and is free, especially since I suspend the blog from time to time as school & grading take over my life. Gee, I’m cheap and thinking ahead — who’d have guessed?
What’s been going on at Oats since my company left on 7/4? Well, first, lots of sleeping and napping. Second, lots of kitty and bird petting and reassurances of love despite my vacationary defection with the dogs.* Third, daily thoughts that I should mow the lawn that are followed closely by “nah” and the naps mentioned above. Fourth, sanding and refinishing of the teak** chairs I bought for $5 each at local thrift shop. Fifth, a few around-town bike rides. Sixth, reading a friend’s EXCELLENT novel manuscript. Seventh, pretending that the fall semester is not starting in 6 short weeks.
I’ve also been doing some nonfiction reading: Mary Rose O’Reilly’s The Peaceable Classroom, which is focused on English lit and composition teaching and is inspiring, and Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America, a history of, yeah, the title says it all. Let me tell you, American Quakers have been a schism-happy bunch of folks, especially compared with British Quakers. Anyway, it’s the second book that leads to my little rant:
The book cites a Quaker historian as saying that Quakers should give up peace activism other than praying for peace because the government [war policies] always win anyway and “enormous expenditures of Quaker energy in peace activism . . . have had little impact and have never stopped a war” (165).
Okay. First, while we hope to be effective in our testimonies, when has Christianity ever been about immediate success? Christ’s crucifixion looks an awful lot like failure taken out of context of the resulting sea change in the hearts and minds of believers — and, given the selfishness and violence so often performed in the name of that crucifixion, an awful lot like failure at many points throughout history up to and including today. But we still see and hope and work for the good news.
Second, peace activism is as much about reaching individual people who witness the activism and planting a seed in their minds as it is about success with the current issue, and who’s to say we won’t reach a tipping point in the future, as we did with women’s suffrage and civil rights, both long, long campaigns that started and were maintained by (apparently) useless acts that could have no real effect on the government?
Third, what about the inherent nobility of doing what’s right, even when we know it’s doomed to failure? That leads us back to Christ’s crucifixion, of course. But even more so, Western Culture has long glorified doing what has been perceived as brave or right in the face of certain failure when fighting wars — look at the Children’s Crusade or Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or “glorious Gallipoli” (and there are many more examples, both real and fictional). When will we glorify doing what’s right when it’s to prevent deaths, rather than throwing lives into battle?
I’d appreciate others’ comments/ideas on either side of this issue. Perhaps I feel especially strongly about this because embracing the Peace Testimony has been one of the most radical changes I’ve undergone in my Quaker path, having grown up in a WWII family,*** having been pro-death penalty in some cases in my younger years, and just having grown up in the individualistic, gun-worshiping West.
*Of course, the cats would have forgiven my departure if I’d left the dogs somewhere in Wyoming….
**in tung oiling this wood and seeing its natural color, I’m wondering if it’s not kapurwood rather than teak. Kapurwood is another Indonesian hardwood and sort of the “poor man’s teak” in the same way that Reno is the poor man’s Las Vegas — you’re still gonna spend a lot of money.
***And I still honor my father’s service and my mother’s sacrifices to that service. They were doing what they thought was right and good at the time, and I’m not sure it wasn’t right and good; the Holocaust makes WWII an especially complex peace debate, I feel.
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According to Jimmy Buffet,
You need a holiday
take a holiday
find a place to find yourself
take your life down off that shelf
quit acting so blase
While the lyrics do sound better set to some vaguely Jamaican music and accompanied by umbrella drinks, the man has got a point. So on Monday, June 25,* I sent Zeke parrot to be boarded, said goodbye to the cats, packed the dogs in the car, and headed out to cross South Dakota in one day and then press on to Bozeman, MT the next. Here’s a pic of Ricky enjoying the 60 mph wind outside Storm Lake before he realized he’d be trapped in a car for two days with me singing my collected Jimmy Buffet and Johnny Cash albums (click to embiggen):
Our destination, Bozeman, was selected as the site of a family quasi-reunion because it was roughly midway between me in Storm Lake and my brother in Portland. I was the only family member who had been there before and remembered it as a neat college town, so I was relieved when the family enjoyed our stay.
Crossing South Dakota on I90 is an experience in desperate tourism, as roughly a dozen attractions, several of them centered around Mt. Rushmore, are advertised via billboards at what seems like 10 foot intervals: see Mt Rushmore, see this cave, see that cave, WALL DRUG, Pioneer Auto museum, 1880 Town, see this cave, see that cave, Corn Palace, WALL DRUG, Reptile Gardens, WALL DRUG and on and on and on. I couldn’t stop at anything long enough to sightsee, since I had the dogs in the car and temperatures in the Badlands**** topped 105 degrees.
The badlands were beautiful to my desert-longing eye, though, and the Black Hills around Spearfish, where we stayed the first night, were lovely. But it was the next day, about 45 minutes into Wyoming, that I felt I was once again in the West. Three iconic symbols welcomed me back: 1) sagebrush; 2) prong horned antelope (although it’s been so long since I’ve seen one, my first thought was “what’s wrong with that poor donkey?”) and 3) a place name incorporating the words “dead horse.” As Johnny Cash crooned just about then, “This is my land, these are my people.”
Well, back to Bozeman. Here’s a gallery of the reunionites, taken at an excellent Italian restaurant:
Clockwise from left to right, that’s me (sporting more gray hair than my older brother…hmmm…Grecian Formula?), BIL Leroy and sis Linda, from Kansas, nephew David (who joined us from Calgary), bro Henry and SIL Jan, and nephew Michael, also from Kansas.
Good food (and for many, beer) was definitely one theme of the trip. Here we are enjoying burgers, polish sausage, and, ordered by Jan, a truly obscene and rather frightening foot long hot dog:
I gave Linda my old digital camera, which she received in much the same way ancient peoples received fire, with fascination and fear. We don’t know if she’ll ever figure out how to download pictures and attach them to emails; she may institute a cargo cult and try to replicate my computer desk to call back and appease the digital gods.
Here also is a rare pic of BIL Leroy, a Kansas farmboy born and bred and highly suspicious of food that does not combine meat, potatoes, gravy, and white bread, eating at a fabulous taqueria we found.*****
Bozeman is darn nifty place. About 100 feet from the taqueria was a great little yarn shop, Stix. Here’s a pic of SIL Jan making one of several purchases (we went back every. single. day) and another pic of the shop. Yarn addicts will see why we loved it. The third pic is of the Argosy scarf that I bought some Noro Silk Garden yarn to make.
The next day, Jan bought some more yarn and started the same scarf, after finishing a purse she bought supplies for and began knitting on day one! We love Jan because she’s kind and smart and funny and somehow misguided enough to put up with our brother and it’s a good thing she’s so darn likable because she’s the kind of person who does everything well: knitting, check; stained glass, check; basket weaving, check; raising a nifty son as a working mom, check; cooking, check; cross stitch, check; riding a bad-ass cruising motorcycle, check; gardening, check; making little filled chocolates with patterned tops, check — and more that she’s probably keeping from us because Schaechterle women have tender egos. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she dons a spandex outfit and cape at night and roams Beaverton, Oregon, fighting crime.
And speaking of knitting, which we were somewhere in that last paragraph, sis Linda recently retired from teaching elementary school for, well, forever, and Jan and I got her started knitting. Now, I know that when I began knitting a few years ago, Linda rolled her eyes at how much it consumed me, both the doing of it and the collecting of yarn and patterns. Ha Ha Ha! (that’s me having the last laugh) — in less than 1 week, Linda started a scarf, started and finished a dishcloth, bought more yarn and needles and pattern books than she probably wants to discuss with her husband, and knitted so much we didn’t have time for the traditional family game of slaughter-Inez-at-Scrabble.
Phew, Back to Bozeman. You gotta love a town that features a revolving, anatomically correct horse above the Army-Navy shop,
and a town that’s so dog friendly. We saw dogs everywhere downtown, and many shops put out water and treats for them. Here’s Henry visiting with a bloodhound. First I’ve ever seen — you just can’t imagine the excess of jiggling skin these guys have (the dog. Well, and Henry a little bit):
I didn’t take the dogs downtown (although they got about 4 walks a day) because Ricky is leash aggressive to many other dogs and Violet would stop to visit every. single. person. (and dog). Here’s a pic of Ricky in the motel, contemplating life as trucker in thrall to the siren song of the open road:
So that and much more was our vacation/reunion. The guys fished while we knitted. We went to the Museum of the Rockies to see the dinosaurs and the traveling King Tut exhibit. After three days of family-izing, we all hit the road. Here are Jan and Henry, sans their leathers, posing by their bikes:*******
And now vacation is over and I have to start thinking about the coming semester — in a week or so. For now, I need to refinish my patio furniture, finish a few craft projects, and nap. I love summer.
*Coincidentally, sis Carol’s 49th birthday. She wasn’t on our trip, but she was in Ireland at the time, so we don’t feel too sorry for her, though we did miss her**
**Had we played Scrabble, we would not have missed her, but rather reveled in her big-bunch-of-points-and-on-a-triple-word-score absence***
***Sis Diane and her husband couldn’t make it either, and were sorely missed, especially since we knew they weren’t having a better time in Ireland. Our goal is to try this again in two or three years, perhaps in Reno.
****What an understated name. More accurate would be HotterthanfreakinMosesinafryingpanlands.
*****Leroy is a wonderful guy. He spent two days in Storm Lake working around my new house, restoring electricity to an outside outlet and repairing the teak outdoor furniture I recently bought at a thrift shop******
******$30 for three pieces of teak furniture! Refinishing it is my next step
*******Henry’s bike is a Harley. Jan’s is a Suzuki, a fact that Henry will quickly point out should anyone dare to refer to Jan’s bike as a Harley. He also wears Harley clothes and even Harley jewelry. See why we love Jan for putting up with him?
