Daily Newsie

One of the sounds that always makes me think of my mother is the clicking of knitting needles. She had these wonderful long needles, shiny and chilly to the touch, that would rub together so quickly I thought they would catch fire as she wound yarn into scarves, mittens, and sweaters. One of the saddest moments we had together was the day she discovered she could no longer knit — she kept asking me to count her stitches for her at the end of each row because she couldn’t remember how many she was supposed to have. After several countings and unravelings, she put the needles away and never brought them out again.

So I think she would be proud to see this, the end result of a month of knitting lessons:

It’s supposed to be a hat, as you can see in this shot:

(That’s Bearby, for those of you who haven’t met him. He’s getting up in years but has weathered the decades fairly well except for some minor balding. Oh, and his arm almost fell off.)

It was actually Beloved’s idea to take the class, which was offered through the local Community Education office. They have all sorts of interesting courses, including a ballroom-dancing one we may take in the spring. Beloved took a Spanish class last semester, and our knitting teacher is thinking of offering another class in the winter to teach us how to make mittens.

It’s been fun, honestly. My mother taught me how to knit when I was small, but I never knew how to “cast on,” purl, or actually make anything of value. This little hat won’t fit on my head — it was made with a certain nephew’s noggin in mind — but it still felt pretty cool to knit something. My next project is a full-sized hat for a friend of mine, and with any luck it’ll be finished by the time it snows in Kentucky. That is, if it ever gets around to snowing in Kentucky. (A hearty *jab jab* to the Pennsylvanians who’ve already seen snow this fall.)

In scrounging for NaBloPoMo topics, I started probing my innermost thoughts, fears and neuroses, because, frankly, if I were to write about those, I’d run out of space before I ran out of words. I started thinking about my toilet fear, and decided to trace it back as far as I could remember, and suddenly it was clear as day why I’m terrified of toilets, creeped out by commodes, leery of the loo. So gather around, friends, for the day has come for you to hear the tale … of the toilet. *creepy whisper*

It was 1988. I was on the cusp of my seventh birthday, and my family was getting ready to move into a new house. Our old house was just fine, really — I don’t remember any issues with the toilets there. A clothes bar in the bathroom once fell out of the wall and its anchor screw gouged my leg, but that didn’t have anything to do with the toilet. Well, one time I dropped a roll of toilet paper into the downstairs toilet and my dad had to get a stick to fish it out, but the plumbing was, by and large, benign.

I was less-than-ambivalent about moving into the new house, which we rented from my uncle, for one reason and one reason only: The toilet didn’t work very well. (There was also a nest of fire ants in my closet, but I didn’t know that at the time.) The toilet was old and a sluggish flusher, and more often than not was full of discolored water because the well was broken or something. To my seven-year-old self, nothing was more terrifying than watching black water slosh around in a perpetually dirty toilet bowl, never quite making it down the drain.

But Fate wouldn’t have us move into the new place quite yet. The people moving into our old house showed up early, leaving my family no choice but to temporarily move in with my grandmother in her two-bedroom apartment. Her toilet was also sluggish, and frequently unflushable as she wasn’t hooked into the town water system. No one was, actually — I think that was before “town water.” I grew up knowing that sometimes you just couldn’t flush the toilet because, well, it wasn’t going to go anywhere until they pumped the septic tank.

Anyway, six people and one sluggish toilet do not functional plumbing make, and my uncle (a different one — this one’s a plumber) had to come over and shove a pipe snake down there. It was pretty gruesome. My delicate sensibilities were properly horrified, and things only got worse when we moved into our new home and the only toilet available was that one. My hatred of the toilet only grew stronger when I fainted off of it once, banged my head on the clawfoot tub, and woke up between the tub and the toilet — not a good place to be when you have both a little brother who can’t aim and a carpeted bathroom.

We finally did get a new toilet in that house, although you still had to be careful about the septic tank, and eventually we built our own house with more than one bathroom and toilets that functioned properly and with clear water, but I had been shaken badly enough that these new toilets weren’t going to soothe me. I still refuse to be soothed, even though I’ve spent the past few years living among toilets who know no septic tanks, who still function when the power is out, and who flush marvelously with nary a complaint. This fear has blossomed to the point that I have a mental list of the acceptable toilets around town, and will not frequent establishments with poor facilities. All the bars in town have removed the lids from the toilet tanks — don’t even get me started on toilets without tank lids — which initially frightened me until I figured out that the drunker I am, the less toilets bother me.

Ooh, now there’s a thought — I should duct-tape a flask to the plunger just in case. And here’s another thought that’s been bothering me lately: Why do they put the emergency valve down behind the toilet? If my crapper is overflowing, why would I want to stick my face down there to turn it off? Discuss.

People, I am ridiculously proud of myself today.

(Ooh, why? Why, DailyNewsie? Tell us! Tell us!)

Because, friends, this is what I made for dinner:

If you think it looks like barf in a bowl, stop reading. But if you’re intrigued, here’s the skinny on this white bean chicken chili: I got the recipe from Half-Assed Kitchen, a new-ish addition to my bookmarked blogs, and tweaked it a little to our (OK, my) tastes. No cilantro or green salsa, but plenty of fresh garlic and onions (my father will be so impressed). Instead of chopping up green peppers I threw in a can of Mexicorn, which has corn and red and green peppers, and I added a little more broth than Angie recommends. The chicken came from a leftover breast cooked in the Foreman grill and from the remains of a Kroger roasted chicken we had for dinner Friday night because I was too tired to think about cooking. I let it sit in the CrockPot for about three hours, then topped it with sour cream and avocado and served it with tortilla chips.

It was amazing. In fact, I’ve made multiple trips this evening to the CrockPot, where the leftovers are cooling before being Tupperwared, to spoon up some more of it. It seems like a pretty forgiving recipe — just chuck in whatever you feel like and it’ll all work out. An unexpected bonus is that there’s half an avocado left over, so we can make guacamole sometime this week!

I’m looking at this as my next endeavor, if only so I can stomp around the kitchen hollering, “WHERE’S THE BLOODY RISOTTO?” like Gordon Ramsay on “Hell’s Kitchen.” Good times, good times.

Why, you may ask, does DailyNewsie always wait until the last second to post and then struggle to come up with a topic when she could very well have spent the whole day thinking about it but instead played The Sims?

Because I’m lazy, children, and I made the difficult decision earlier today to let my Sim age and eventually die. I’d been keeping her alive and young with magic age potion, but I believe it’s time to let her go. So I adopted a dog — a golden-red one named Betsy, just like I used to have when I was little — and a child to help me spend my vast fortunes (seriously, I’m loaded), and now shall spend the rest of my digital life tending to them both. I also have an amazing greenhouse full of all manner of vegetables, and will soon attain my gold talent badge in gardening, which means I can talk to plants. Awesome.

Anyway, before I go off to bed because I’m old and tired all the time, I thought I’d share some of my favorite websites and ask you to do the same. I’m always looking for new content to surf, so hopefully we can share and share alike and all keep each other happy.

Fark is one of the first places I go every day to find out what’s happening around the world. User-submitted headlines are tagged with the appropriate adjective — asinine, sappy, scary, Florida — and every now and then a headline comes along that makes me snork my Diet Pepsi. The comments on each article are, more often than not, hilarious, although it’s worth reading the FArQ before venturing into that barren wasteland. I very rarely pop up on the comment boards, but I’m always lurking.

Next on the list is The Consumerist, which unfortunately has slowed down a bit thanks to the laying-off of two of their staff. Recession and all that, you know. Its tagline is “shoppers bite back,” and it’s full of handy money-saving tips, tales of customer service idiocy, and plain-language breakdowns of the bailout plan and what it means for the average Joe.

I forget how I stumbled upon Left-Handed Toons, but I’ve been reading it for quite some time now. Justin and Drew, proprietors and doodlers extraordinaire, are right-handed, yet (as the title suggests) draw with their left hands. The result is somewhat-wobbly comics about a suburban dad who turns into Instant Gator when needed, as well as random irrelevant topics. As far as ‘toons go, I also like My Life in a Cube, but its cartoonist just quit his job so it remains to be seen whether his life outside a cube is amusing.

Finally, Cake Wrecks revolves around ooh-ing and aah-ing over pictures of the amazingly horrible cakes Wreckporters find. It’s gained enough notoriety now that bakery employees are cautious of people taking pictures of their cakes because they know that someone is about to send it to Jen. The Sunday Sweets feature offers a respite from terrible cakes, and it’s pretty cool to see what some people can come up with. Another Sunday favorite is PostSecret, the longtime pet project of Frank Warren. People send in their deepest secrets on a postcard, and Frank scans them and puts them online, in books, or on display at his various shows around the nation. I have all of his books and saw him in person in Cincinnati last year, but have yet to send in a secret … mostly because I can’t keep secrets from anyone, and the one criteria is that it has to be something that no one else knows.

Your turn!

In lieu of a witty story or charming anecdote about my childhood, I direct your attention to the “I win!” tab that’s suddenly appeared between “Home” and “Meet DailyNewsie” at the top of the page. Therein reposes a blog award I received from Courtney (thankyaverymuch), which I especially appreciate because it allows me to completely mail in a post yet still avoid violating the terms of NaBloPoMo.

Enjoy this brief respite from my personal life, for I have finally located the root of my toilet fear and can’t wait to share it with you all sometime this month.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to learn how to play the pipe organ. When I discovered Bach’s fugues and heard them played on pipe organs in Europe, I cursed the fate that had me growing up in rural Pennsylvania with a gorgeous old upright piano rather than in some quaint German hamlet with an ancient stone church and sprawling pipe organ. I would stand in the aisles transfixed, staring up at the clusters of pipes with tears leaking from my eyes as some lucky soul got to coax music from the belly of the instrument. Various piano teachers over the years had organs as well but I never had one readily available for practice, and so my dream lapsed into quiet and grew dusty over time as dreams are wont to do.

But tonight I started thinking about it again. Fifteen or 16 years of piano lessons have taught me how to read music and make my fingers move where they’re supposed to go, but organs are so much more complex, with foot pedals that I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to reach with my stubby little legs. My piano teacher in college indulged me by allowing me to play a Bach fugue — which one now, I can’t recall — and I struggled through it all semester until finally she bumped me off the bench and played it herself, beautifully, so I could hear what it was supposed to sound like. (Funny enough, my Sims play the same song on their piano, and do a pretty good job of it.) One of my professors, a cellist, joked that playing Bach pieces should be followed by a hosing-down with Gatorade. Even after mangling that fugue in super-slow motion, I knew what he meant.

But if I had my druthers, I’d walk into a quiet cathedral early one morning when no one’s around, sit at the pipe organ, and play Bach’s Fugue in G-Minor (”The Great”) like this guy:

Amazing, isn’t it? I don’t know if I’ll ever learn to play the pipe organ, but I hope that when Beloved and I make it to Europe one day we can revisit some of those churches and hear someone else play those magnificent pieces. Forget the sermons, the prayers, the communions — it’s when I’m a small speck in a giant church listening to a Bach fugue that I feel closest to the infinite.

As Rue suggested last week, today the husband and I took a (very) mini-break to Nashville to relax after the stress of thesis writing/election helping/victory celebrating these past few weeks. We visited the Nashville Zoo, where I had an awesome purple sno-cone and scared myself by looking at the snakes, and almost peed ourselves laughing when a woman declared at the gibbon exhibit, “This monkey’s boring. We’re going to McDonald’s.” We didn’t follow her and her brood to the Golden Arches, but rather stopped at the Opry Mills Mall on the way home so I could get some candied apples at the Apple Barn store and so we could indulge in Great Steak & Potato Company cheesesteaks. A little NPR on the way home, some “America’s Next Top Model” on the TV tonight, and I’d say this was a pretty good day.

Now I’m so tired I could fall asleep at the computer, but first! Here are some pictures of non-boring animals (click to embiggen):

A butterfly perches on a cosmos flower at the Grassmere farm.

Find the Bengal tigers! Here’s a hint: look way up at the top.

The giraffe in the foreground was very contentedly licking the tree. Fascinating to watch, really, since their tongues are freakishly long.

“Don’t be koi,” says my husband as we come upon this pond. He’s so hilarious.

Find the cougar! Hint: he/she is on the stone bridge.

Yup, that macaw is chewing on the other one. I just like their colors.

A rhinocerous iguana lounges with its Mini-Me.

In a little while I’ll be venturing over to the mayor’s house to watch the returns come in, and I’ll probably be there for the rest of the evening. In order to keep from violating the terms of NaBloPoMo, I bring you a gift of culture — one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets, e.e. cummings. He doesn’t really do the “proper punctuation” thing, so just roll with it.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

I just spent a few hours helping the mayor with some last-minute campaign details after a very hectic day at work, and my brain is too fried to think of anything remotely intelligent to say for today’s post … so I shall regale you with the tale of the most irrelevant story ever. I promise I won’t spend too much time this month talking about the old newspaper, but the stories are so good!

It all started when I received a call from a source about a scam in my state wherein people would call someone pretending they had been selected for jury duty and try to worm information out of them. My source was willing to talk about the scam, and had someone at the courthouse willing to talk about it as well. Nothing groundbreaking, but a simple piece that would hopefully keep people from blurting out their social security numbers to any old yahoo on the phone.

Nope, said my editor. Since it hasn’t hit [our county], there’s no use telling everyone about it.

What did my illustrious leader suggest instead? A story on the hemlock woolly adelgid, a small insect that attaches itself to the underside of hemlock branches and sucks them dry. The tree dies, the adelgid hitches a ride on a passing deer, and the cycle begins again. According to the press release, the woolly adelgid hadn’t made an appearance anywhere near our county, but was hanging out in a nearby state. That’s right — it hadn’t even been seen in Kentucky. I pointed out that, by her aforementioned standards, this story was doubly useless, but she informed me that she had hemlock trees in her yard (she thought), and so therefore it was important. Did I mention she doesn’t live in our county?

Anyway, I called some nature guy and listened to him ramble on forever about this thing, then set about finding a local nature person to talk about hemlocks in our county. I called someone at a state park in a nearby county who said that the park had a small stand of hemlocks, but they were far enough away from other hemlocks that it was nearly impossible for them to get infested. And then I called the ag extension lady, who informed me that there aren’t any hemlock trees in our county, and they are few and far between in surrounding counties.

I had to do the story anyway. You know why? Because my editor was convinced she had hemlock trees in her yard. So instead of saving some poor old lady from getting scammed, I penned an informative article on the hemlock woolly-freaking-adelgid, which I’m sure absolutely no one read except maybe the nature guy.

Sharing time! What’s the most useless, ridiculous thing you’ve ever done or been forced to do by a crazy editor/boss?

I belong to a group called “Customers Suck!” on LiveJournal, which offers no end of infuriating tales about rude, demanding, baffling, and just plain crazy customers. Someone posted today about her job at the cable company and dealing with customers who were angry about sun outages, and it reminded me of my own experience with them. See, I used to work for an editor who would become obsessively convinced that random people were lying to us or keeping information from us, and would storm around the newsroom insisting that something was going on. I was assigned a complete crap story about sun outages and how they affect our local cable provider, so I called the general manager of the cable provider and wrote up a short story letting people know their reception may be affected at certain times of the year.

Oh, no. My boss was convinced that “sun outages” were code for “crappy service,” and would not leave me alone about it. Even after I called a meteorologist and found substantial sources online that explained the phenomenon, he wouldn’t leave it alone. (Yet, when I complained that the state police would not return any of my phone calls when I was the police reporter, he refused to do anything about it.) Apparently he thought our cable people should have figured out a way to outwit the sun by now. Luckily, he had a relatively short attention span and eventually retreated back into his office after I ignored him for a while.

Sadly, this incident is not isolated, especially at that newspaper. I’ve worked for three in my time as a journalist and all of them have been populated with conspiracy theorists. A degree of paranoia is healthy — after all, journalists are tasked with “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” — but creating conspiracies where none exist and ignoring the real ones seems to be a hallmark of those at the top, who have become so separated from their reporter roots that they think it’s acceptable to send reporters on wild goose chases. (At another newspaper, my editor assigned me a story after a special election measure failed: “The Special Election: What Went Wrong?” A fellow reporter looked at her and said, “Uh, no one voted for it.” At least she listened to him and took it off my budget.)

Upcoming newspaper stories include being forced to drive to a nearby community to look at a fire hydrant, writing the most irrelevant story of all time in place of a relevant story my editor rejected, and having to run out on deadline for “real people” quotes because truckers apparently aren’t real people. There’s no shortage of crazy, trust me, and it’s all much funnier now that I don’t work there anymore. Stay tuned!