405. Pick a card. Any card.

Posted on May 2, 2021 by Octo-woman

Last night, I took an unplanned trip down Memory Lane. It was quite a ride!

Every day, I’ve been heroically facing the next shelf, drawer, or cupboard that has to be decluttered, before my son Matthew and I make our big move to Enumclaw, Washington to daughter and son-in-law Susy and Curt’s farm. We plan to take up life grazing amongst their small herd of miniature donkeys. (They can’t vote, of course, but we’re pretty sure they must be Democrats. Otherwise, they’d be elephants.)

The drawer I chose to deal with last night was bulging with every greeting card I’ve received since 2005 when my husband Gene died. Was never sure why I hung onto them, though I finally figured it out last night. They contain a lot of comfort, they do!

In 1970, when our son Mark died, I had discovered an oddball hack when it comes to grief. When somebody sends you those beautiful sympathy cards and Mass cards, spare yourself the pain of reading them. To really appreciate them, put them in a drawer and wait for ten years. Then read them. That’s what I did when both Mark, and then again later when Gene died. Both times, thanks to my earlier cowardice, on finally reading them, I was rewarded – and enveloped in – the gentle, comforting support that was their original intention. And then I could finally let them go.

The experience with the sympathy cards may be why I started saving the happy greeting cards in 2005. Only this time when they came, I did read them, giggled over them, and was genuinely warmed by them. Then without even thinking about it, I stuck each one in the dresser drawer and forgot all about them. Till last night.

If you were one of the senders of those greeting cards, thank you for your affection, humor, and the time you took to choose the perfect card and write the tender or goof-ball message it contained. To say I enjoyed the experience of re-reading them would be a miserable understatement. Let’s just say I was loving every minute of it! You certainly cared to send the very best!

Lots of our old standby tools have quietly disappeared since technology and the internet took over the world, and most of it won’t be missed. Pretty soon, stuff like road maps, ironing our clothes, encyclopedias, Yellow Pages, recipe books – will be as quaint as buggy whips. Some of it might be missed, though. Such as those old-fashioned paper greeting cards. It may be that the convention of sending those sunny, wholesome messages via US Mail will be the next remnant of our past lives.

I still remember when yesterday’s greeting cards like the ones below cost 5 cents each and we paid 3 cents to mail each one.

  • 5 cents
  • 5 cents

Sadly, the paper greeting card business is declining big-time. The big Papyrus greeting card company went bankrupt last year and closed all 254 of its stores. Hallmark closed 16 stores last year. And – ouchie! – if we lose Hallmark, we’ll also lose the great Hallmark Masterpiece Theater on TV.

It’s not that we’re not sending greeting cards though. Seven billion or so were sold last year. Only today, many are digitally created and we fire them off to their recipients via the internet. Or if they are on paper, we can get the computer to snail mail them out for us. Alexa can even choose and mail one for us.

And forget the flowery, sentimental compositions of yore. Here’s a few popular Mom’s Day digital “cards” currently featured on Amazon.com for next weekend’s holiday. The sentiment’s there, but the verbiage isn’t what you’d call “old-fashioned”.

In case you aren’t completely captivated with the charm of these greetings, you may be comparing them to the near-perfect messages kids always manage to create on their crayoned homemade greetings. On real paper. We can only hope that, thanks to all those heroic elementary school teachers, Mother’s Day greeting “cards” will never become obsolete. Like these, for instance . . .

  • You are a special mother because you say I love you and I say I love you more and you say impossible.
  • To Mom. I love you so much. I really love you no matter what. You are a UFO or what. I will be your son no matter what. And, Mama, when I ask for a laptop, you have to trust me. OK?

  • Thank you, Mom for being wonderful, caring, and for not making your meatloaf anymore.
  • Happy Mother’s Day! I hope you have a great mother’s today. We were going to make you pancakes but Melanie didn’t know how to, so we were going to make eggs but there’s no bacon. Well, happy Mother’s Day.

There’s one more category of greeting cards that’s important to me and everybody in our family. These cards were never kept in the dresser drawer with the others, but in their own protected storage. My sister Joan concocted extraordinary three-dimensional cards that are unlike any I’ve ever seen anywhere. Here are photos of the fronts of a few of them, but one-dimensional pictures don’t do them justice. You have to FEEL them and handle them, and when you do, you’ll sense the artistry, painstaking attention to detail, and the affection she lavished on each creation. Those cards are in a category all their own, and they will never be discarded by any of us in the family. I hope they will still be available to touch, feel, and enjoy two hundred years from now.



My little trip down Memory Lane certainly captivated me. It makes me think that however we do it, communicating with each other – whether it’s with a paper greeting card, a digital one, an email, a letter, a visit, a phone call, or via smoke signals – is a two-way gift we each have a share in.

I suppose you may be wondering what I finally did with decluttering the contents of that dresser drawer after I finished re-reading all those cards. When it came time to trash them, I tried, but I couldn’t do it. They didn’t belong in the recycling bin. The internet came to the rescue though. There’s places that want those little treasures. They use parts of the cards in some places like schools, prisons, or rest homes for crafts or to repurpose as new cards and then re-sell. So the front cover of each card sent to me since 2005 is now on its way to:

St. Jude’s Ranch for Children
100 St. Jude Street
Boulder City, Nevada 89005

Someday maybe you’ll stumble across a card you sent that’ll be up for sale once again. If so, buy it! It’ll be a two-time winner, for sure.

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404. I think I can. I think I can.

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Octo-woman

And it could. The little Ingenuity helicopter actually did it this week! It took flight on Mars. And then, just to show off, it did it again —- 183 million miles away from where we’re watching it.

Ingenuity helicopter

The copter’s first flight lasted 40 seconds, and it traveled up 10 feet. On the second flight, it flew over 51 seconds, hovered at 16 feet, executed a lateral turn, and then made another tidy landing. Each of its next planned flights will test how high, fast and far it can travel in the low gravity and thin air of the eerie Martian world, so that, eventually, man won’t have to boldly go where no man has gone before without getting it checked out first.

Perseverance rover

All the time the small 4 pound Ingenuity is at work, it’s constantly feeding and receiving a colossal stream of information to and from the NASA/JPL engineers on earth. Not directly though. The copter needs the Perseverance rover for that.

See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo

Ingenuity’s relationship with the rover is the same as Star Wars’ Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio. In spite of the impressive cyber-intelligence of Artoo-Detoo, it didn’t know how to communicate with humans and other creatures, and had to use See-Threepio as its transmitter. It’s exactly the same for Ingenuity who streams and receives all its information to and from Perseverance — who is hanging on every word to and from those intensely interested astro-engineers and physicists on Earth.

I just can’t get over it. We’ve just watched powered controlled flight on another planet! And that isn’t even all that went on this week on Mars.

According to BBC News, “All told, it’s been a stunning week for the NASA space agency, which also successfully demonstrated how you could make oxygen (O₂) from Mars’ carbon dioxide (CO₂) atmosphere.

“An O2 generator device called Moxie was able to generate 5g of O₂ – an amount of gas sufficient for an astronaut on the Red Planet to breathe for 10 minutes. 

“Nasa’s thinking is that future human missions would take scaled-up versions of Moxie with them to Mars rather than try to carry from Earth all the oxygen needed to sustain them.”

Unbelievable, but true. A machine that can generate oxygen from carbon dioxide. I could use one of those when I’m wearing my Covid masks, or the next time I get trapped in my overcrowded closet.

Here’s the video Perseverance recorded of Ingenuity’s second flight.

Just in case you’re less than impressed with the copter’s spectacular performance, consider this: Ingenuity’s first flight was 40 seconds long and rose up into 10 feet of the Martian atmosphere before it carefully landed itself back on the surface. Compare that to 1903 when two high school dropouts, named Wilbur and Orville Wright, stunned the world when Orville piloted their crazy new-fangled gasoline-powered flying machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — and stayed aloft for 12 seconds. We can watch it here….

What the Wright boys lacked in formal education was more than compensated for by their extraordinary technical skill and sophisticated approach to solving problems in mechanical design – kind of like MacGyver — or the wizards at NASA/JPL.

Orville Wright
Wilbur Wright

These guys also thought they could. And they did.

The similarities in the event at Kitty Hawk and on the Mars’s flights isn’t lost on the scientists. That’s why the airfield Perseverance so carefully selected, swept, and staged for Ingenuity’s flights, has been named The Wright Brothers Airfield on Mars. Kinda chokes me up! (But then again, I guess you have to remember that I’m easily moved. I cry at supermarket openings.)

The truth is though that we are truly sharing together a spectacular moment in history. This is it, guys. This is what all those Star Trek episodes prepared us for…. Space. The final frontier.

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403. You’re never fully dressed without a smile.

Posted on April 18, 2021 by Octo-woman

Decluttering for our big move to Enumclaw, Washington, I am right now facing my closet, wondering where to start. Thanks to my sister Joan, though, it’s not as formidable as it otherwise would be.

Staring at the closet’s contents, I was thinking that instead of plowing into the task, this might be an appropriate time to reveal my fashion styling tips with you. (Don’t snicker!) There are three of them. The first two tips I stole from my sister, but the third one is all my own and I’m sure you’ll never stop thanking me for it.

TIP #1: ONLY BUY BLACK PANTS, NOT COLORED PANTS.

According to Joan, this has several advantages. You don’t have to worry about which color it’ll coordinate with; the black hides more of those pesky bulges and hip dimensions; and the exact same pair will look just as fine while checking out the rutabagas at the supermarket as at Prince Phillip’s funeral this weekend (just kidding – they forgot to invite me).

In keeping with my lifelong motto that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, I have gradually acquired 9 pairs of black pants. My sister Joan would be proud of me. The old white, gray and beige ones I used to wear were abandoned, but they’re still gathering dust in the closet awaiting their transfer to the decluttering bin.

Reebok shoes Princess style

Another advantage of only wearing black pants, as I gradually discovered, is that I now only need two pairs of shoes, but not because I have four feet. Both pair are black Reebok sneakers Princess style size 8. Along with the black pants, I wear one pair for “everyday”, and one pair for “good”.


Now, you may think you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing sneakers, say, for example, to your granddaughter’s wedding, or to receive an Oscar at the Academy Awards, but trust me, you’ll love it, and you might be the only woman there who doesn’t have sore feet. Besides, black Reebok sneakers Princess style almost don’t look like sneakers. If only they didn’t say “REEBOK” in those fetching gray letters on the back! Just wear your pants a little on the long side, and maybe nobody’ll notice. Especially if you’re 89 years old – most likely, nobody was expecting you to show up in stilettos. Just remember to dig out the “good” pair, not the pair you were mucking about in the compost heap.

TIP #2: ALWAYS WEAR SWEATSHIRTS

According to my sister, sweatshirts should be the foundation of all wardrobes. They’re comfy, economical, and along with fig leaves and diapers, may be the world’s oldest, most useful and dependable garments.

The Russell Athletic Company claims to have invented sweatshirts in 1920, but I have serious doubts about that. I’m fairly sure my sister Joan did it. Joan may have been the only resident of Sun City West, Arizona, who wore a sweatshirt every day of the year. The desert temperature, notwithstanding, Joan really set the fashion standard amongst her fellow denizens of the sand.

But, she didn’t wear just ANY sweatshirt, oh no! To my “crafty” sister, every sweatshirt was a styling statement! Sadly, I haven’t unlocked her secret techniques for how to do it, but her sweatshirts didn’t look anything even remotely like mine do. I get mine at Jiffyshirts.com in the fall sale when they’re $6.95 each and, tragically, they look just a little bit like they cost $6.95 each. If Joan was only here, though, it’d be another story. This is how HERS looked:

And that explains why, at present, my closet is bulging with about 12 sweatshirts. Unlike Joan’s, they’re unadorned, and while some of them belong in the paint rag bin, I still wear them everyday, one-at-a-time, of course.

TIP #3: BEWARE OF PURCHASING CLOTHING WORN BY CRANKY MODELS!

This is my own, carefully researched tried-and-true fashion tip: When garment-shopping, carefully observe the model wearing it. If she looks cantankerous, you probably can’t afford to buy what she’s wearing.

Cranky models having a grim day at work wearing their unaffordable sweatshirts

While it may be only because she hasn’t had anything to eat for several days, the look on each model’s face probably means that the gig she’s working is for a high-fashion couture agency, and not Jiffyshirts.com. And the degree of distaste on her face is in direct correlation to either the price of the garment, or to the degree of discomfort she has in walking around in it – like, maybe, it still has straight pins in the seams.

Crabby model in her $550.00 sweatshirt
Happy model in her $9.29 sweatshirt


To prove my theory, consider this. On the left, here’s a happy Jiffyshirts.com model showing off a comfy sweatshirt priced under $10. And to her right is another model from another store showing a sweatshirt priced at $550.

Or how about the ladies pictured below? Each of these shirts costs up to $420. Maybe they’re just having a bad day.

The gray one is $130, the yellow is $240, and the white one is $420.
Erica in real life

One thing you can count on from the world of high fashion is that price of the garment will determine how sullen the model is expected to be in order to sell it. To demonstrate this, here is a photo of one of my granddaughters who’s done a lot of modeling. Her name is Erica, but you could normally think of her as Little Miss Sunshine. Here she is in real life, having a cupcake! Please notice that smile! It’s due to good genes and her dentist dad Eric. However . . . .

Here she is at work, where, it seems, if you’re wearing something expensive, smiles are ‘frowned’ upon!

In a Lembas shirt priced at $478
from the Kahini Collection

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So, the next time you’re checking out those fashion magazine, just remember this. . . if the model looks grumpy, be prepared to face the price tag with caution. You have ventured into the high-fashion marketplace, where you’re never fully dressed without a frown!

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525. My Social Security card

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Octo-woman

Most of us warehouse a whole collection of cards: credit cards, debit card, driver’s license, membership cards, ID cards, business cards, insurance cards, business cards. Among the ones contained in my own stash, I have two big favorites. My social security card and my public library card.

Both of them are a bit tattered and dog-eared, but until I win the big Mega-Ball lottery, they’re my idea of a couple of wildly valuable assets.

When I was born in 1931, Social Security didn’t exist, but it was introduced four years later. At that time, because of the Great Depression, many elderly people were living in destitution. If it weren’t for family, my Grandma ‘Lizzie’ and Grandpa ‘Knute’ would have been among them.

This is from a poster used to support the enactment of Social Security.

By the time I graduated from high school, 3 million people were enrolled in the Social Security program. When any enrollee reached 65 years old, he was eligible to retire and collect $26 per month as income for the rest of his life.

The first benefits were paid out in 1937, and they’ve continued ever since. For most of our communities, it was a monumental economic relief.

Not all jobs were covered by Social Security. Excluded were agricultural jobs, domestic help, and healthcare jobs. I worked at a hospital for over 5 years from when I was 14 to 19 years old, part-time during the school year, and full-time during the summers, but hospital employees weren’t covered during any of those years.

There weren’t any child labor laws then, and most of the kids I knew also worked. Many of the girls were baby-sitters or mother’s helpers, or carried bedpans for the nurses, and most of the boys had paper routes or worked as box-boys. I also had a paper route as my first ‘job’. By age 14, though, I was employed as an elevator operator at Mercy Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa till I was a high school junior, then as an information clerk, and in senior year and first two years of college was a registrar. None of those jobs were covered by Social Security or any other fringe benefits, but I didn’t know anybody who didn’t feel lucky if they had a job in any category. And we had no acquaintance with what “fringe benefits” were.

If you know someone whose childhood and teen-age years were spent during those post-Depression years, you probably know a person who has an intense work ethic – shaped by the insecurities we grew up with, and the rock-solid belief that things were going to get better if we all worked hard.

My social security card was first issued to me in 1950 in Washington, D.C. As a student in Washington D.C., I had applied for part-time work as an usher at the Sesquicentennial Amphitheater in Rock Creek Park. The outdoor production was to honor the 150th anniversary of the United States of America. Because it was a government-financed production, I was required to apply for Social Security.

And yes, I was required to take the famous “Loyalty Oath” of that era, designed to demonstrate to supporters of Sen. Joseph McCarthy that I wasn’t an evil Communist spy, and that I could safely usher to their seats the guests of the sesquicentennial celebration of the United States without cleverly extracting from them all of their Top Secret Information.

I loved the job, and I’m still proud to have worked, however humbly, for such a monumental celebration.

I wish you could have watched it with me in that incredible setting in Washington D.C

So that was my first introduction to the world of Social Security. Many years of other employment continued to contribute to my account. Because if those contributions, now, until I die, Social Security is providing me with income and Medicare health benefits to help support the rest of my life. I hope it will always be available for you, too.

And then, there’s my public library card . . . . . Anybody who has one, me included, is a very wealthy person! And the more we use it, the richer we get! But more about that, – another day.

Have a good week!


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402. Whatever happened to Memory Lane?

Posted on April 11, 2021 by Octo-woman

I really need a personal OS memory upgrade. Someday it will be illegal for people my age to write blobs like this one due to the danger of inflicting readers with the same stories circulating over and over again like a front-loading washing machine.

As an example of repeating myself, I don’t intentionally mean to brag. I hope you’ll be kind enough to tell me if I’ve already told you the story – no matter how momentous – of the time when I won the St. Patrick’s School 10th Grade Essay Contest for “How I Failed at Victory Gardening during World War II”. I wouldn’t want to bore you with my endless achievements, at least not repeatedly.

Yes, I fully admit it. I’m having a hard time remembering stuff, and on top of that, I’m having a hard time remembering stuff.

The day the techno-wizards ask for volunteers for the first memory chip to implant in a human brain, my hand will shoot up….

SILICON VALLEY BRAIN SURGEON: Do we have any volunteers for this beta test of our first 1 gigabyte memory implant into the human brain which will revolutionize your ability to remember where you left your glasses?

ME, (heroically): I’ll do it, Doc. Enough with the Cheetos. I need a memory chip, and you can skip the dip. I’m your man!

SILICON VALLEY BRAIN SURGEON: Well, Er… fine, but you look like you might be a woman. Studies have shown that women already tend to retain memory – especially of weight gain, Costco vs. Walmart price comparisons, celery recipes, petty insults and grudges, and how old they aren’t. Are you a woman?

ME: Oh, yeah, I forgot. Well, like I said, I need a memory chip.

It may not be an aging problem entirely though. It may run in the family. At least my brother Leo always thought so. Leo was a perfect example of the stereotypical absent-minded professor. Leo could certainly remember that he had a car, but not where he left it. I tend to be sensitive to this problem since on more than one occasion, I have been known to drive the car to work, and at the end of the day, to casually walk home.

Leo was bent on making sure all of us were well equipped with his “memory tips”. My little niece Chris, for instance, was likely the only child in her grade school who could rattle off the names of all the U.S. Presidents. Backwards or forwards. Valuable stuff like that. Sure to help with career-building in later life, especially when the recruiter wants to know, “Well, which John Adams WAS it?”

Even today my shaky memory can still pull up a trick or two from Leo: it’s handy to have the mnemonic “HOMES” help me recall the names of the Great Lakes, even if I can never remember what the “S” stands for, where any of them are, or why I would want to remember them.

I can still eke out of my memory cells that “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” can help me remember the nine planets. That is . . . .

DEMOTED!
  • My: Mercury
  • Very: Venus
  • Excellent: Earth
  • Mother: Mars
  • Just: Jupiter
  • Served: Saturn
  • Us: Uranus
  • Nine: Neptune
  • Pizzas: Pluto

Leo would be happy to know that even after pitiful Pluto got all that notoriety for masquerading as a planet, I will always continue to faithfully remember it as the ninth one, and that’s all there is to it! I have heard a rumor recently that a new mnemonic to help remember the eight planets is now “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles”, but don’t concentrate too hard on memorizing it in case there’s breaking news that Earth or Jupiter has also been downgraded.

Thanks to my intrepid brother, I can still remember the value of pi (3.1415926). All I had to do was count up the number of letters in each word of “May I have a large container of coffee?” I can’t TELL you the number of times I’ve needed to know that this week!

To this day, though, I still use some of Leo’s advice for applying mnemonics to help me recall my bank account password. It’s something along the lines of

M$iny$,sde?!


If you follow along with with the first letter of each word or meaning of the special characters, it translates exactly to – “My money is not your money, so don’t even ask!” Leo would be proud of me. Thanks to his mnemonic principles, it’s unforgettable, right? It’s uncrackable. But don’t tell anybody about it. Unless I call you to remind me of what it is again . . .

You too may find that as you get older you’re going to need some of Leo’s help. You may hear yourself in conversations like this:

YOU: My memory is getting bad.
NOT YOU: How bad is it?
YOU: How bad is what?

All this is to explain why I hope to have the first human brain getting a memory cell implanted. While I’m waiting though, I’m still counting on Leo’s tips to see me through. And I think they are! In spite of my current habit of going out in the garage, for instance, and then forgetting why I went out in the garage, this hopeful incident happened. A while ago, I went into another room and then actually remembered why I went in there. So okay, it was the bathroom, but still . . . .

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401. Pass or Fail Words

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Octo-woman

I first started using computers in 1968. At that time, the only password I ever heard of was “Open sesame”, but not knowing the whereabouts of any caves, treasure-filled or otherwise, I never had occasion to use it. In other words, passwords weren’t in high demand. Keeping the computer from crashing to its knees was our feverish priority.

Not today. Today, passwords rule us. With cruelty and malice aforethought. Today, you can forget about creating a password as magical as “Open sesame”, because . . .

Locked out!
  1. The password needs to be 12 or more characters long.
  2. The upper and lower case letters are acceptable, but the errant space is a no-no.
  3. At least one numeral is required and if more are entered, they may NOT be duplicated or consecutive.
  4. One or more special characters are mandatory, but may or may not be repeated, and the choice of which are selectable cleverly varies from website to website.
  5. If you have EVER used the same password on that website before, you will be arrested and jailed, so don’t even think about it.
  6. The password must be changed every 90 days – or however long it took to finally memorize it.

If I wasn’t so ladylike, I would refer to them as “pisswords”.

“Failwords” will have to do. Today, any humble computer with halfway decent horsepower and a little Boolean algebra can unravel a 12 character password in seven minutes or less. You just have to cling to the forlorn hope that your personal bank account isn’t one of those chosen for that unexpected spending spree of your next month’s rent money.

Recently, my operating system has been giving me threatening messages that 43 of the passwords carefully stored in my iCloud Keychain may have been “compromised”. All 43 are for the exact same password. It’s one I was successfully using for at least 10 years starting about 1990. Family members, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers I shared it with found it to be just as effective and easy to remember as I did! Yay! But, sadly, the ax has fallen! I am currently plodding through all 43 websites, wondering when I ever visited them, and either severing my acquaintance with the site, or changing the password to something endearing, like “koqtav47-Wodvik-2pyt$de”.


Please don’t tell me this has never happened to you: you very carefully enter your password as you think you remember it, but you’re not sure it’s correct because you can’t see it, so you try one more time and then get locked out.

But all is not lost, because your friendly computer is ready to forgive you. Sort of. “Forgot your password?”, it asks. If you say “Yes”, it won’t tell you what it is – no way. But it will email you a secret message that says something like “This airhead has forgotten her password again, so to punish her, we won’t tell her what it is. She has to click here to start over, sign in again and dream up a brand new password. Heh-heh!” Tragically, however, you may never see this message because it will possibly be sent to an email account you also forgot the password to.

My thumb

I cling to the hope that, soon, our unfriendly password disease will be once-and-for-all mercifully stomped out and replaced with the more humane thumbprints, eye scans, or facial recognition. Or – dare we hope – as soon as they can speed up DNA analysis, maybe we can just spit on the computer and get instant access. (I actually spit on it a lot, anyway.)

If you haven’t had enough yet, here’s one solution you might consider:

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400. Decluttering Solutions

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Octo-woman

When it comes to decluttering the written word, nobody mastered it better than Ogden Nash. Consider the conciseness of his shortest ode:

Poem on the Antiquity of Fleas

Adam
   Had‘em.

Succinct and uncluttered. Streamlined and pristine. Hopefully excluding the fleas, the style of that little masterpiece exactly describes the contents of every one of my closets, cupboards, shelves and drawers. In my dreams, that is.

Son Matthew and I are getting ready to move all our belongings from 4,000 sq.ft. to 1500 sq.ft. It’s called downsizing. Also known as decluttering hell.

Where did all this stuff come from??? Considering that I came into this world uncluttered and bare naked, how did I happen to acquire all these “collections”.

My hero, Jack Reacher of the Lee Child novels, survives nicely with only the clothes on his back, his ATM card, and a folding toothbrush. With Jack as my model, why did I think I needed 11 sweaters which I haven’t worn since I discovered comfy fat-concealing sweatshirts (machine-washable in hot water), 6 pairs of shoes which don’t fit and may have been in style during World War II, and several Dress-for-Success suits to show off my dynamic executive style while scrubbing out the toilets.

I have no idea what else I’ll find in the closets, but if you don’t hear from me in the near future, send out a search party. I’ll be in there somewhere under the mountain of old clothes, laundry, hangars, hat boxes, garment bags full of unpleasant surprises, and other treasures designated for the dump. And don’t let them haul me away with it.

It’s best not to mention the rest of the house: the bulging kitchen cupboards, the garage, the garden shed, the shelves of family photo albums, the cupboard of sewing supplies, baskets and boxes of yarn skeins, stacks of National Geographic magazines, and, of course, my fabric collection. All home sewers have a fabric stash and I am no exception. We really enjoy buying fabric for all those glorious creations we’re going to create some day. The challenge among home seamstresses is that “She who dies with the most fabric, wins.”

But I am not cowed, no, indeed. I have decided to view the task ahead as an opportunity! I am going to minimalize! I’m going to be decisive. I intend to shed our home of its useless objects, its extraneous and space-hogging clutter. Every crook and cranny will be streamlined, impeccable in its purity and simplicity. I’m going to get started on it any day now. Maybe next week.

But first, I better sit down and have some coffee. And study the situation.

After several minutes of intense systems analysis, I have decided there are really only four ways to deal with this challenge.

A. DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE CLUTTER.
Get rid of the junk, judiciously, of course. Yes, dump the 2 year “archive” of old AARP magazines, that raggedy collection of untried recipes, and those tatty old underpants, but it’s okay to hang on to your birth certificate, your Last Will and Testament, and your uncashed Costco Rewards Certificate. Or . . .

B. DON’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT THE CLUTTER.
Save it. After you’re gone, maybe your loved ones can address it. Think of the awe and respect you’ll receive posthumously for “Aww. Look at this! Look how Grandma didn’t have room to save all the worn-out sweatshirts her daughter Susy hand painted for Grandpa, so she just cut out and saved the fronts!” And their cleanup efforts may be well-motivated by their lack of desire to see their mother’s photo exposed in the Seattle Times featuring her out-of-control hoarding disorder. Or . . .

C. TREASURE THE CLUTTER INSTEAD OF DEMEANING IT. Think about it. One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. Be proud of your “collectibles”.

Neotoma cinerea

Apparently to some, clutter is actually quite desirable. Take this little guy, for instance. He’s a Neotoma cinerea, but he’s better known as a bushy-tailed packrat. His respectable full-time job is collecting clutter. And since he’s a petty thief, some of it may belong to you, especially if it’s something shiny like coins, spoons, your heirloom watch, or your car keys. Also included in his collecting will be nuts, acorns, plant matter, other animals’ feces, small bones, and other delicious treasures. Once he gets home with his current haul, he proudly piles it up on a huge mound of clutter called a “midden”, and then he carefully preserves it for future generations by urinating all over it.

But here’s the lesson to be learned from the packrat. To zoologists and paleobotanists, our little visitor is a big hero! Thanks to all that urine, the middens are considered reliable “time capsules” of natural life of fauna and vegetation, centuries and millennia after they were constructed. So there’s that! Or . . .

D. MODEL THE CLUTTER BEHAVIOR OF VERY SMART PEOPLE.
The next time you pick up your iPhone, you need to consider its birthplace. In Steve Job’s office. Which is pictured below.

Steve Jobs in his office

And here’s Albert Einstein’s office where, amidst the confusion, his equation E = mc2 saw the light of day:

Albert Einstein’s office

The office below is where Sigmund Freud messed with the ids and egos of his patients:

Sigmund Freud’s office

Ernest Hemingway was famous for his uncluttered, straightforward prose, but here he is busy at work in his office. His clutter was neatly organized but there was so much of it crowding his workspace that that might explain why he did most of his writing standing up at his typewriter.

Ernest Hemingway in his office


Now consider what we’ve just learned. We should emulate smart people. Some of them are very messy. Ergo, if we want to be smart . . . Are you getting this? Is it giving you that “spark of joy?”

As for me, I’m still pondering which solution to follow, even though I know full well what I have to do. There’s no way to cram 4,000 sq. ft. of stuff Into 1,500 sq. ft. unless we don’t move along with it. Or unless I learn the Herculean compression hack my niece Nay-Ray knows. One time she, her husband, and four small children traveled to Sun City West to visit her parents. And they brought with them one suitcase. As far as I know, they weren’t practicing nudism.

But now, I guess it’s time to face my demons, and face the task ahead, to rise to the challenge! And I’m going to very soon. Probably tomorrow. Or the day after.

I’m trying to compose a little poem in order to buy a little more time. I’m still working on it – I want it to be Hemingway-like in its uncluttered brevity. It’s dedicated to my family who may be wondering about the delay.

Ode to Procrastination

Utter clutter
   Flusters Muther.
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399. H E L P Desk!

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Octo-woman

You’re ready to upload the report you’ve been sweating over for 3 weeks just in time for its nearly overdue deadline! Relieved, you gratefully hit the Enter key. And on the next screen, you see . . .

An error has occurred while sending data over the network

In the olden days, you would then turn to the manual’s Error section for step-by-step instruction on how to fix the problem. But there are no manuals today. There is only Google. And the Help Desk, also known as Customer Assistance, or the Agency for Lost Causes and Forlorn Hope.

Just because you’ve completely forgotten your identity, your sanity, your purse in the ladies’ room, or your need to retain your employment, is no excuse to be bothering those nice folks at the Help Desk in Bombay, India. They’re working day and night to solve more critical problems such as why your cable company’s service crashed, and when is the next scheduled English as a Second Language class. (Actually, there is no Help Desk in the world which communicates in actual English, computer-speak being the only accepted lingo.)

The usual advice that any Help Desk is going to give you is:

  1. Restart the computer and log on again.
  2. If that doesn’t cure the problem, they’ll transfer you to another department.

Not that the Help Desk techies have it easy. The internet is rife with their tales of woe in dealing with knotheads. The following is supposed to be a true story:


Tech Support: “OK, Bob, let’s press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now, type the letter “P” to bring up the Program manager.

Customer: “I don’t have a “P”.
Tech Support: “On your keyboard, Bob.”
Customer: “What?”
Tech Support: “‘P’ on your keyboard, Bob.”
Customer: “I’m not going to DO that!”

Or, here’s another one:

Tech Support: “I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop.”
Customer: “OK.”
Tech Support: “Did you get a pop-up menu?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech Support: “OK. Right click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech Support: OK, Sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?”
Customer: “Sure, you told me to write ‘click’ and I wrote ‘click’.”

Mark Milner

The reason I’m bringing all this up is that my nephew-in-law Mark Milner is currently appearing in a really inventive online play produced by the Mask and Mirror Community Theatre in Portland, WA. It’s called Help Desk. There’s no fee to watch it, but hurry! Tonight’s (3/21/21) the last night it’ll be featured.

The script is creative and the acting is professionally delivered by actors who are having fun with it. It’s a full length play and it’s only appearing this weekend. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! If you don’t have time to watch all of it, the segment Mark appears is in Act One and begins at 15:57. Yea, Mark! Here’s the URL to access it:
https://www.maskandmirror.com/


And as an interesting footnote, here’s a contribution to this week’s Help Desk subject by my daughter Judy. Recorded 31 years ago, it gave us just a taste of what was to come!
https://youtu.be/_riPm7cmXKY

Finally, if I’m ever on life support, don’t bother calling the Help Desk. Just unplug me. Then plug me back in, see if that works.

The “real” Help Desk

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398. If it wasn’t for whiskey . . .

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Octo-woman

It’s been said that if it wasn’t for whiskey, the Irish would rule the world!

I was named for St. Patrick. I was baptized and had my Confirmation at St. Patrick’s. I attended Kindergarten through 10th grade at St. Patrick’s school. My favorite basketball team was the Shamrocks at St. Patrick’s. I have been known to eat my way under the table on corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and soda bread, and I have been known, now and then, to visit an Irish pub. Are you sensing a theme here?

Speaking of potatoes… Did you know that before the Great Potato Famine in Ireland in 1845, the average Irish working man, living in poverty, subsisted on 10 to 14 pounds of potatoes per day topped off with a little skim milk? They were Lumper potatoes – tasteless and waterlogged, but nutritionists today say that that diet – as monotonous as it was, was enough to sustain life. Until…. sadly, the Lumper spud was the perfect candidate for the blight that decimated the entire crop. Over a million and a half starving Irish migrated to the U.S. during the famine, and among them were some of my relatives.

I’m actually only 25% Irish, but I grew up in a kind of Catholic ghetto amongst all the Gormans, Fitzpatricks, Mackeys, Duffys, Ushers, Cunninghams, O’Sheas, Murphys, Maloneys, and even an Irish setter. In that neighborhood, you were either Irish, or you better put up your dukes and fight! I think I became a full-blooded born-again Celt as a defense mechanism.

There’s two Irish customs I had the good sense to avoid. Knitting Celtic knots, and Irish step dancing. Either activity could drive one to the whiskey jug, the nearest emergency room, or the funny farm. (Actually, granddaughter Natalie broke her foot; and doing a jig once sent my niece Leanne to E.R. with a torn Achilles’ tendon that took two months to mend!)

I still don’t know how it happened, but somehow Celtic dance, with its complex reels, jigs, and hornpipes, managed to become a major activity in my demented family. At one point, a mob of my grandchildren and one daughter were actively performing and competing in Irish events in Washington state. Cheering them on in our usual feverish fashion were many family members – chauffeuring the dancers to classes, rehearsals, shows, and competitions, repairing costumes, packing lunches, scheduling events, rolling up hair in curlers, shaking out the wigs, running the hair dryer, and realizing – as the clock ticks on- that it isn’t whiskey that’s keeping you from ruling the world! It’s Irish step dancing!


Personally, I loved every minute of it. Nine of my grandchildren performed together as the Celtic Cousins. This was one of their shows. It’s 28 minutes long. If you’ve got the time, put your feet up, have a glass of green beer, enjoy the show, clap your hands, stamp your feet, and have a HAPPY SAINT PATRICK’S DAY!

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397. Perseverance rover meets the Martians

Posted on March 7, 2021 by Octo-woman

I was awed when viewing the drop-dead perfection of the landing of the Perseverance rover on the planet Mars recently. But disappointed in the days since. Once again, the Martians have failed to show up and greet their guests! Where are their manners?

The nearly 3 million mile journey of Perseverance took six months after its launch from Florida. Its arrival on Mars with the little Ingenuity helicopter strapped to its belly was downright majestic. Exactly on schedule. For the first time, the NASA engineers gave autonomy to the car-sized rover and let it decide for itself, during the minutes of descent, the safest spot to land on. And it landed less than a car-length from the spot that was originally designated. Whoopee! Bullseye!

Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter

Shockingly, in spite of this gala occasion, no red carpet was rolled out on the Orange-Red Planet!

First, though, just to recap the event, the landing site is on the Jezero Crater which was once a lake the size of Lake Tahoe. The yearlong mission of the rover is to explore a 12 mile area in order to:

  • (1) figure out if humans can inhabit any part of the planet, in case someone’s willing to try.
    (2) collect rock samples storing them in a sterile tube till 2031 by which time maybe USPS or Amazon Prime can deliver them to scientists on Earth. The contract is out now for the space delivery vehicle.
  • (3) test how to produce oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-dominant air of Mars.
  • (4) carry out planned experiments using 7 scientific instruments, and documenting them with 23 video cameras, 2 microphones, and 12 million algorithms.
  • (5) test whether the Ingenuity helicopter can survive the 100 degrees below zero nighttime temperatures in order to make controlled air flights, and, if so, to provide reconnaissance for the rover’s travels.
  • (6) determine whether ancient microbial life ever existed in the former lake.
Buck Rogers

Now, I don’t know about microbial life, but as anyone who grew up reading Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic books can tell you, there certainly IS life on Mars. And on other planets and galaxies, too, including some that NASA hasn’t even discovered yet. Such as the planet Mongo, for instance, ruled over by the evil emperor Ming the Merciless. Or Draconia, home of Kang the Cruel. (Aliens seem to have as much difficulty with their heads-of-state as we do).

Of course, we may not enjoy meeting some of the interplanetary life-forms. Some of them may have bad habits. My daughter Judy – a fervent Star Trekker in her youth – once complained to me in disgust that “Klingons fart in air locks!”

As far as the Martians are concerned, I hope for the best. By now, they must be getting used to our antics on their homeland. Perseverance is the fifth rover arriving to explore it. I was hoping two of the rovers would be having a meet-up but no such luck. The lonesome Curiosity has been working hard by itself for the past 9 years on the Gale Crater, but it’s 2,300 miles from the Jezero Crater and too far for either rover to travel. You’d think some helpful locals would step in with a tow truck and a helping hand or other tentacled appendage, but nobody has yet.

A Perseverance photo of the Mars landscape

Every morning, I scurry to my iPad to see how Perseverance and Ingenuity are doing. So far, they’ve been there 19 sols. (A Martian sol is the equivalent of a 24 hour day on Earth plus 37 minutes.) So far, of all the thousands of images the rover is streaming to NASA’s nearby MRO orbiter to transfer to Earth, I haven’t spotted a single Martian yet. Unless his body is entirely composed of rocks. There are a whole lot of rocks there. Many rocks. And they don’t look especially friendly.

Of course, we can’t expect the natives to look exactly like they did in the cartoons. For one thing, the comic book authors didn’t have access to today’s science. They thought all Martians were green, but they’re not. Martians don’t have access to chlorophyll, and thanks to Kermit the frog, it’s a well-accepted fact that it’s not easy being green. The Martians are, in fact, blue. And shivering. And covered in bluish goose pimples. You may not find facts like these in Wikipedia, but as you well know, you can always count on my impeccable logic to find answers to questions about which you have no interest whatsoever.

Let’s put it this way – it’s chilly on Mars. Mars is 50 percent farther from the sun than Earth is. Both the Jezero and Gale Craters are near the equator and during the summer, the daytime temperatures can be as balmy as 70 degrees F. But every night comes the big freeze down to 180 degrees or so below zero. One electric blanket isn’t going to be enough.

I’m pretty worried about Ingenuity. It’s easy for Perseverance. All the rover has to do is hunker down at night and recharge its solar batteries. But what’s a tiny four pound helicopter to do – shaking all night in those teensy-weensy boots and with its bare-naked propeller blades caked in ice! The very least one of the Martians can do is invite the little guy into their underground home to warm up by a toasty fire. I’m checking it out every morning but, so far, no such hospitality has been extended.

Flash Gordon

It’s not that the Martians are bashful. They’re probably just confused by these early invaders to their planet. They were expecting some blond white guy – such as Flash Gordon – in his tight jeans and T shirt (spandex wasn’t invented yet) armed with his ineffectual little ray gun. Instead, the creature who shows up has six wheels, a 100 lb. robotic arm for digging holes in the ground, appendages wielding video cameras, microphones, and an array of scary looking scientific instruments of possible torture. Accompanying him is a very intelligent four pound helicopter drone whose objective, assuming it can survive the nightly Arctic blast, is to spy on every pebble, microbe, and creature within a 26 mile radius.

A formerly green Martian family

Looking at it that way, I can understand why the Martian citizenry is in hiding. They may be embroiled in heated meetings discussing how to revise their immigration policies in order to prevent all this riff-raff from moving in and taking away their jobs, raping their females, and stealing all their rocks. Or they’re busy making posters that say “Eyrrrcnoooxys, Gz Hmyx!!!” which in Martian, means, “Earthlings, Go Home!!!”

We’re in real trouble if the Martians have access to the internet. Not only will they learn that both Perseverance and Ingenuity are possibly contaminating their neighborhood with the Earth’s Covid virus, but worse yet, they’ll figure out that if they let us in, they may be forced to live on reservations and have to operate gambling casinos just to make ends meet. The Evil Aliens have landed. And they’re us!

I hope NASA/JPL geniuses forgive me for all my fake news about the Martians. I can’t help myself, being the deranged science fiction junkie that I am. Come to think of it, though, NASA is too! I just learned today, that they’ve named the rover’s landing site “The Olivia Butler Site” in honor of the science fiction writer by that name. And Curiosity’s site was named for Ray Bradbury.


I have to confess that I found the landing and installation of the rover to be the most thrilling event that’s happened since we began slogging through these long, bleak, dreary pandemic months. I love everything about it, even – I can’t believe I’m saying this – its price tag ($2.7 billion.) Its value isn’t just in what we’ll learn about Mars and our own planet, but in what such events do to our spirit. We can temporarily forget our bungling, our inhumanity to one another, our own seemingly hopeless ineptitude, and gloriously realize that human beings can also achieve the impossible.

The first 3 rovers – Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity have all completed their mission on Mars. For all we know, they may still be in some stage of “life” but they’ve lost the ability to communicate with Earth. Curiosity is still exploring and sending data back to earth.

Now added to its siblings, Perseverance is at the commencement of its work. It’s a terrifyingly “smart”machine! An engineer described the rover as “being able to walk, talk and chew gum at the same time”. The Perseverance’s assignment is currently planned to be completed in one Mars year which is 668 sols (687 Earth days) but like the other rovers, it will probably continue productive work for years beyond that.

Taking its first drive

Perseverance took its first drive this week, taking 33 minutes to travel a little over 6 meters (7 yds.) Once it’s fully set loose, it should hot rod it for at least 21 feet per day (kind of similar to normal rush hour traffic in L.A.) During each day’s travel, every inch under, around and over it, will be sniffed, tasted, tested, observed, studied, and the nature of all these ingredients will be reported back to the astro-scientists on Earth. It’ll be slow, but it’ll be going where no robot has gone before!

Alex Mather

All five of the rovers were named in essay contests by American school children. Perseverance was named by a 7th grader named Alex Mather from Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia. This is what he wrote in his essay:

Curiosity. InSight. Spirit. Opportunity. If you think about it, all of these names of past Mars rovers are qualities we possess as humans. We are always curious, and seek opportunity. We have the spirit and insight to explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But, if rovers are to be the qualities of us as a race, we missed the most important thing. Perseverance. We as humans evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation, no matter how harsh. We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up. The human race will always persevere into the future.

The kid nailed it. Dare to do mighty things, Alex! And please be nice to the Martians. They can’t help being shy. Some Mars Bars might help break the ice!

Perseverance photo of the Martian landscape

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