Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Author Archives: kayewer

• The Poison Field

  Posted at 7:04 pm by kayewer, on February 17, 2024

  This past week, news was released about a chemical which is present in nearly all of us (four in five Americans) and is commonly used in grain fields. The ingredient is called chlormequat. The grain in question, oat plants, apparently tend to grow tall enough that they bend, and the harvesting equipment is not made to deal with this, so the chemical is applied to stunt the growth of the stem in height and makes it thicker instead, so it doesn’t bend and eases the harvesting process.

  Since when do we alter the food instead of the tools we use on them?

  Anyway, chlormequat has been found to cause altered growth in animal embryos and affects post-natal health as well. It’s known as the first plant growth retardant, having been discovered in the late 1950s. It is forbidden to be used on crops in the US, but it is permitted to appear in imported grains from other countries which do use it.

  That way of thinking reminds me of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze in the 1980s; some Americans who had trouble finding one of the squeezable tyke figures simply went abroad to buy them, and that is exactly what our cereal suppliers have done. Some of the foods we have trusted for generations contain the building blocks of a chemical that can affect human fertility.

  Two of the big cereals concerned are General Mills’ Cheerios and Quaker Oats (Quaker is owned by Pepsi). The issue affects both regular and organic versions of the nation’s most popular oatmeal. Oh, and Cheerios has appeared in past articles about using a type of coating for their little round oats which is considered shellac. A weed killer chemical was also found in them years ago.

  Many of us embrace a healthy lifestyle and try to incorporate foods which are good for us. I have taken to eating steel cut oatmeal because it is considered the best choice. Steel cutting preserves the nutritional value of the product. After reading about this new chemical scare, I took a look online to find an alternative steel cut oat product certified to be chemical-free, and found none.

  Before that, I ate Cheerios. Never look back, they tell us.

  So it looks like our food suppliers are going to feed us whatever chemicals they want, and other than extreme limitations of what we eat (which seems useless), our choices are only as broad as what we will tolerate. I would think it would be better to figure out how to better harvest the plants the way they actually grow in nature, which means changing the harvesting tools.

  Don’t poison the mouse; build a better mousetrap.

  But who am I? Just one of the “hungry masses” cereal companies make money and profit from. I’m glad my fertile days are over, but I cringe now when I see a cereal ad and think of the future of people who think that grains are a harmless basic of existence. The field has been tainted, and the “amber waves of grain” may soon glow under black lights.

  No wonder so many people have given up on breakfast.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Tagged breakfast, cereal, cheerios, chlormequat, food, health, oats, quaker-oats

• Unmasked

  Posted at 2:07 pm by kayewer, on February 10, 2024

  I recently read an article about Pamela Anderson, the gorgeous star of Baywatch who was the dream of every male and the envy of many females. She had a shapely body, a captivating face and talent to go with it. And naturally, like most women who are public figures, she wore makeup. Lots of it.

  Recently she opted to go without makeup, appearing during Paris’ famous Fashion Week with the face she was born with. Some people were aghast.

  The same thing happened years ago when Oprah Winfrey did a show with her entire audience deciding to come clean. Some of the attendees did appear rather uncomfortable. Oprah went facial commando for magazine covers as well.

  I don’t know when we decided that our faces are not fit to be seen in public without makeup, but the trend is starting to trickle down to tween children ten years old and younger. Check out the Ulta Kids articles to see what a mess it has become, with children buying anti-aging products–which are aimed at adults more than twice their ages–and leaving samplers and actual opened and discarded products in their destructive wake.

  Even the trend on social media seems to include a makeup tutorial by any woman posting details of her personal life. I’ve watched clips with a mixture of fascination and shock as ladies talk about their cheating boyfriend or boss from Hell as they dab seemingly too-dark highlights onto their facial curves with funky shaped applicators, and turn their eyelashes into lengthy, dark broom bristles sharp enough to take out a boyfriend’s eyeball if kissing gets too close.

  My luck with makeup has been difficult. I was often too light for the lightest shade of foundation. At modeling school, my attempts at pancake application left arid desert cracks on my cheeks (again, a shade or two too dark). Add to that a lifetime of fighting severe acne, and it was nearly impossible to make my face look as if I were not trying to banish pimples under several layers of tinted grease. For most of my working life, I’ve gone facial commando except for brows and lipstick, and my face seems to be grateful for the lack of over-attention.

  Pamela Anderson is in her mid-50s now, and she looks spectacular with just her face showing. She has said that she wants to emotionally stabilize her own perceptions of who she is; having been a model for Playboy and a television icon beside such talents as David Hasselhoff (who, by the way, probably did not require much in the line of makeup on set: men nearly never do), as well as the focus of a scandal when somebody leaked and tried to capitalize on a private intimate video of her sans makeup and clothing, she deserves to be in touch with herself as the person who has a life outside what beauty perceives us to have. Katie Couric and Justine Bateman have also climbed aboard the natural face train.

  Maybe we should all do that. Are we a sculpted painting of a hollow cheekbone, or do we have souls and thoughts and feelings that work just as well without the pricey plaster on our faces? There is also the stress we place on our skin as we manipulate the stuff onto our cheeks and tug at our tendons and muscles blending in this contour and that flawless matte of skintone. That ultimately leads to wrinkles, and the makeup companies are ready for us with those anti-aging creams the tweens are going Karen over in the Ulta stores.

  Leave your face alone. Let it be the canvas of your life. Enjoy the smile wrinkles and accept when you earn those age lines.

  I see my face in the morning, and I see that my soul is intact. I have nothing to hide.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged beauty, fashion, makeup, skin-care, skincare

• And Her Shoes Were #9

  Posted at 2:14 pm by kayewer, on February 3, 2024

  Feet are possibly the most overlooked but important part of the human anatomy. Because we walk on them, play sports with them and sometimes gauge our health by them, we often are reminded to be kind to our feet when they complain to us.

  After nearly four years of working from home, many people’s feet have become accustomed to not being in shoes, and this has come back to annoy us in the form of pain when we try to jam them into shoes.

  Last summer I dealt with the consequences of too many days in slipper-shod feet when a favorite pair of sandals betrayed me on the first day of vacation. I was at the shore and needed to pick up the keys to my home for the week, but parking was already becoming difficult, and I had just found a sweet spot near the unit I was renting. No problem, I thought; I’ll walk to the realtor and get the keys.

  I started walking the twelve blocks to the offices, when the soles of my feet began to burn. I pushed through it, got my keys and walked back, but in increasingly severe pain. By the time I got my things moved in and sat down, I removed the sandal on my right foot to find an oozing blister the size of my foot pad. The sandal’s insole was darkened from the leak that had drained onto it. Other than the footwear for the beach, I didn’t pack extra shoes. After a (painful) quick stop at the local pharmacy for blister bandages, I pushed through as the discomfort subsided. I even walked the boardwalk every day. Ultimately it took two months for the wound to heal.

  As I tried to go through my supply of footwear, I was finding that every pair seemed to irritate some part of my foot. This would never do. So, off to the shoe store I went.

  Because my feet have always been wide width, I never went to an ordinary shoe store, even as a child. If I managed to find something there, it was a treat, such as when I was able to (comfortably) wear a pair of Candies (a shoe that was a must-have in the late 1970s), or when the now-defunct Payless Shoe Source managed to stock one or two pairs I could be comfortable in.

  My go-to shoe store is an old-fashioned (by today’s standards) place in which a sales associate measures your feet, has a stockroom of lengths and widths to fit a basketball player or a baby, and the shoes they stock are top quality and meant to last.

  The sales associate measured my feet and broke the news to me: I’ve gained a size.

  It’s a fact of life that as we age, we gain sizes. Some of us gain in our guts and butts, but most also gain in the tootsies. I went from an average size and non-average width to a larger in both. And I never could play basketball.

  We tried on a pair of sneakers similar to what I wore in (and which I had bought there the prior autumn). He checked my customer history and adjusted the try-on pair up a width; they fit like a glove. A painless glove for my feet. I came home with them.

  But what about everyday nice shoes that don’t look like they belong on a basketball court? I mentioned one of the popular manufacturer’s common styles, and he brought out a pair to try on. They, too, fit beautifully in the wider size, but color-wise were designed for a formal event. The style was so popular, they were not in stock, so we ordered a pair in basic everyday black.

  So now I have the burden of going through my shoes and seeing if any can be salvaged; if not, the store has a charity bin which will ensure their use by somebody in need.

  This is how things should be: when somebody buys and then donates to somebody who needs and has no funds to buy, good shoes live on comforting somebody else’s feet. Somebody with feet that have never been on a basketball court.

  My shoe collection had been a sizeable one for when I worked in an office every day, so now I will whittle it down to just what I will need as I won’t be in a building ever again before retirement. So my army of shoes will be decimated, and their replacements will be bigger and wider.

  Just like the person walking in them.

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  Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment | Tagged fashion, fitness, foot-health, footwear, shoes

• The Wonderful Criminal World

  Posted at 3:52 pm by kayewer, on January 27, 2024

  If you follow the news, you may have read about a capital punishment case which was the first of its kind. Since the death penalty is such a volatile topic, I will try to describe this plainly. Be prepared to react emotionally to what you’ll read, regardless of how you may feel about the subject.

  On March 18, 1988, two men named Kenneth Smith and John Parker were hired by a man named Billy Williams to commit a murder, and they set out to do their job. A cleric named Charles Sennett Sr. was having an affair and was desperate to collect insurance money on a policy he had taken out to settle debts, and knew that the death of his wife, Elizabeth, could be an easy ticket to obtaining the funds. Smith and Parker went to the home and stabbed Elizabeth to death, inflicting wounds to her neck and torso, and she was beaten with a metal object.

  When Sennett was questioned, he recognized one of the hitmen’s names and visibly turned red, giving himself away; shortly thereafter, he shot himself while seated in his vehicle, ending his life.

  The original hired hitman, Williams, died in prison in 2020 while serving a life sentence for his role in the crime. Parker was executed by lethal injection in June 2010. Smith was convicted and originally sentenced to death by a jury, which was overturned by appeal, then sentenced to death by a judge during the second trial.

  But the process of executing somebody has some drawbacks. Apparently physicians cannot be asked to perform the administration of intravenous lines for the purpose of execution by lethal injection (the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” figures here), so inexperienced personnel are asked to find veins to insert the entryway for the deadly concoction. The execution attempt was called off after lengthy and numerous tries for a vessel failed, and it was declared the third botched attempt at executing somebody in Alabama.

  The concept of nitrogen hypoxia was then considered as a method of execution. Similar to the gas chamber, which utilized cyanide mixed in an enclosed space, nitrogen is part of the air we breathe, but in larger concentrations will result in death by asphyxiation. The method had never been used before, but the system was created, using a sealed face mask to deliver the higher concentration of the substance.

  A cleric accompanied Smith into the death chamber, and Smith delivered a brief speech about humanity going backwards.

  What was that? This is a man who may have plunged a knife multiple times into a woman’s body and struck her with an object to end her life, and we are expected to believe that humanity has gone backwards? It was he who had gone backwards; the pastor was primed to receive a large sum of insurance money, but for a fraction of that, Smith would take a human life (the payoff for the hitmen was estimated to be one thousand dollars each). The prison system fed and clothed him, gave him room and board and opportunities for schooling and other perks. Of course, prison necessitates some survival skills to avoid being a target or becoming, to put it politely, somebody’s intimate cellmate, but our penal system treats the guilty better than we treat our innocent general public.

  There is the issue of military veterans who gave limbs, minds and eyesight for our country, who camp under bridges with far less than what inmates receive at taxpayer expense.

  There is also Elizabeth Sennett, whose life ended in a lengthy and violent way. But what news articles have focused upon is how the new method of execution may be “cruel and unusual.” Folks, we crossed that bridge when we rewarded the evildoers and punished the law-abiders. The lean in many articles about the aftermath of the successful nitrogen execution has been that Smith moved about and appeared to be in distress as he died. Elizabeth’s distress, on the other hand, has been forgotten. The method worked, and Smith has gone to a place beyond our reckoning, though he had 26 years more of life than his victim had. That doesn’t seem right.

  I don’t understand why firing squad is not considered a humane punishment. We have current, former and retired sharpshooters who can transport an inmate from living to dead in a second using one well-placed bullet. Even South Carolina has considered it as recently as 2022, because it is efficient and less likely to be botched as with other methods. No drugs are involved, no setting up IV lines, no pre-death struggles. The moment the word “Fire!” is uttered, it’s over, simply and completely.

  When we’re arguing more about cruelty and uniqueness of executing convicted felons, and less about the bodies piling up in our murder rates and the atrocities leading to them, we are losing our focus on being humane towards our own. Our goal is removing a fraction of the population to prevent them putting the citizenry in harm’s way. If there is no punishment, isn’t prison a type of reward?

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged alabama, capital-punishment, crime, death-penalty, news, nitrogen-hypoxia

• Vicious Girls

  Posted at 6:18 pm by kayewer, on January 20, 2024

  Before computers took over our world, our children were victimized by advertisements on television a few times an hour during commercial breaks, or they saw promotions and photos in magazines once a month. Usually the products were toys. Now, they are bombarded several times each minute. The advertisers and influencers putting their opinions and promoting their products are ruthless, and their targets are getting younger. So are the products, like cosmetics. Yes, cosmetics are becoming the must-have for children.

  A recent article detailed a phenemon not unlike the Stanley pink cup craze I mentioned recently (folks stood in line at 3:00 AM for the privilege of purchasing a limited edition vessel from a legacy thermal cup company). The mad crowd in this case were youngsters at ten years old.

  A product line with the questionable name Drunk Elephant (as one example) is offered at cosmetic mega-retailers Sephora and Ulta. The youngsters are visiting the stores in groups, and come armed with their parents’ credit cards and no regard for respect. They have been reported to open products, touch and then not purchase them (leaving them contaminated and unsellable, and damaged samplers), steal items other shoppers have selected out of their baskets if the item has been depleted at the sale tables, harass and assault store employees and even argue with their mothers about spending $900 for such items as retinol creams.

  Ten years old, and they suddenly woke up thinking that they need these things at any cost.

  When I was ten years old, I was happy to have a wonderful, light complexion. In a year or so, acne did a job on me (and back then there was little that helped), but never once did I consider using aging products. Those are for people who are showing signs of breaking down skin elasticity. At around the thirties or so. Not at ten years old. In fact, doctors and beauticians are chiming in about how bad for children’s health these products are. There is no research about whether the chemicals that deter skin aging interfere with the normal growth processes in pre-pubescent youngsters.

  Ten is a wonderful age; two digits at every birthday from now on, a few years of basic schooling under the belt and a world ahead. This is not the time to spread tinted grease on faces or stop a process that hasn’t even kicked into gear yet. Besides, why do ten-year-olds want to buy a third Porsche for some male executive (Tim Warner for Drunk Elephant, and who, by the way, likely doesn’t wear any of his own products) when they could buy something useful or enjoyable for themselves.

  I look at these articles from about forty-some-odd years of using products on my skin, and I realize that a ten-year-old would look at me and declare I am an ancient crone who should just curl up and die so they can glamorize themselves and forget that old people exist. These ten-year-olds feel falsely empowered without earning the years of learning that parents and grandparents are breaking their backs to instill in them. They respect nothing, not even the very products they’re scrambling with $900 to buy though they don’t need them. The destruction they leave behind in Sephora is evidence of their immaturity and callousness. If you look up “Sephora Kids,” you will see and read about the chaos.

  Just what we always wanted: ten-year-old Karens.

  Those Drunk Elephant products are, essentially, tinted science projects of blended animal and chemical elements, packaged in eye-catching containers and marketed to make you believe that they make your appearance better. The blending and swiping you do to apply the products tug on your young skin, and you may not see it today, but before you turn 30, you will notice those tugs in the form of WRINKLES, for which you really will need to either firm up with a cream or see your local cosmetic surgeon.

  I have watched influencers apply layers of foundation, blush, highlighters and contours to their faces while talking about a totally unrelated subject. This has become an element of video production, and it’s one reason why I don’t do video podcasts. I learned to apply makeup in private, not to use what isn’t needed, not to keep anything on longer than necessary and to try not to look like a cartoon or a hooker. If I have to do a tutorial while vocalizing my blog post, I would feel like the former, and I respect myself too much to do anything that would come off as the latter.

  The idea of spending $900 on stuff that soaks in or gets wiped off hours later has never entered my mind. No wonder these folks are growing into adulthood without any idea of how to budget; it’s going on their faces, and not into their college fund. Drunk Elephant appears to be focused on aging products rather than makeup, since their most popular items are masks and serums. I find great benefits from the products in the pharmacy, such as Olay and L’Oreal, to moisturize my skin after working outside or evenings after spending time in the sun at the beach.

  I wonder if these same ten-year-olds use sunscreen as religiously as Drunk Elephant anti-aging creams? Do they value youth or avoiding skin cancer more? Only time and maturity will tell.

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• Tossing My Cookies

  Posted at 7:00 pm by kayewer, on January 13, 2024

  A popular phrase attributed to several renowned chefs says that their best crafted culinary dishes are flushed down the toilet as poo tomorrow. This is a humble effort to bring the realities of food and cooking down to their basics; the right ingredients, skills and a bit of luck can bring delightful joys to your table. Food is still a basic of life functionality.

  Why, then, is there a $160 box of a dozen cookies out there?

  A place called Last Crumb is offering what they call their Platinum Collection; a dozen large cookies baked with quality ingredients and shipped individually wrapped in a huge box to your door.

  What would you do if you were porch pirated of that extravagance? Break out the Dom Perignon and get yourself wasted, I would guess.

  There is a full description of the cookies you receive; each one unique. There’s a cookie called “What’s Up, Doc?” which is carrot cake, the “Florida Man” (key lime pie), the “Sack Lunch” (PB&J), and of course, Chocolate Chip XXX (a typical cookie touted as a 2.0 upgrade).

  Milk is not included.

  The last social media post said there were 48 boxes left of this limited edition special collection. Box #49 or so went to the home of one of my workplace managers, who gave a thumbs-up to the huge baked cardiac event inducers. They didn’t mention which they tried first, but my guess is the first choice favorite, which was then thoroughly devoured, leaving them with eleven others to sort through.

  And I consider one Crumbl cookie a month a treat if I can decide on one flavor. I still consider Girl Scout cookies a wonderful purchase. I must have poor taste.

  Sure, there’s nothing wrong with a little indulgence now and again, but is the world really a better place for a $13.33 cookie? Marie Antoinette wouldn’t bat an eye, but somebody who doesn’t have a slice of bread for a PB&J, let alone the PB or J, would shake their heads.

  But I shouldn’t be on this rant anyway. Just the other day, word got out that people were standing in line at Target stores in the early morning hours to buy the Stanley Cup. I immediately thought of the hockey trophy and was confused; turns out the OG thermal products company Stanley (a corporation since 1913) had produced a pink tumbler which was in high demand; as in fistfights at the display counter and run over grandma to get there high demand.

  I haven’t been in a Target store since they don’t seem to care so much about their employees as they tolerate misbehavior from customers; two recent incidents include an employee fired for asking kids to remove their bikes–which they were openly riding indoors–for which he was beaten and suffered injuries they didn’t need to pay for since they fired him, and a suit alleging that young people were riding store-provided mobility carts at high speed and injuring shopping pedestrians.

  It seems we will do anything for a thrill. Buy a $13.33 cookie, or stand in line for a thermal mug.

  So it’s back to consumerism in all its ugliness, after about four years of a stagnant world forced into a peaceful lull.
  
  Pass me a Girl Scout Thin Mint, please.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged 160-cookie, baking, cookies, dessert, food, last-crumb, stanley-thermal-cup

• My Awards Show Has a First Name

  Posted at 2:55 pm by kayewer, on January 6, 2024

  This morning I cracked open my Sunday supplement copy of the New York Times (yes, I read an actual hard copy newspaper: three, in fact) to find the first section devoted to the biggest award of the season, the Academy Awards. Naturally I began to look, and I was disappointed but not surprised by the articles and ads begging the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) to consider certain productions for nomination.

  When the movie industry began, it seems that every motion picture was simply produced to entertain the general public. It was a baby industry learning to walk before it needed to talk, and even when “talkies” came to the theatres people were aghast at the concept of adding sound. Which is what parents have also complained about since time immemorial.

  Eventually movies found themselves being categorized into romance, drama, horror and musical and such, but still anybody who had a few coins in their pockets could enjoy a movie (and often receive a free snack). Those were the days of news reels and travelogues, when information was sent out in any way possible. The filming of events overseas were duplicated and sent to what must have been hundreds or even thousands of screening houses. A visit to the movies was an experience for everybody. Children were exposed to general grammar, and foreigners could even learn English as a second language.

  When the turnaround happened, I’m not certain, but sometime after the 1970s and the dawn of summer blockbusters, the films considered for awards began to shift from movies everybody could watch to art house productions produced by a certain class of people and which only selected people saw. The feel of the events shifted from the general public to the micro percentage of the population.

  Two of the Times’ staff–Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson–provided a comparison of who and what they considered the best films for consideration. The only films I recognized in the listings are Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon. The former was released in the summer and enjoyed the distinction of popularity with a film apparently released for the general public: Barbie. Nowhere did Barbie get a suggested best picture nomination. The latter film came out in the last half of the year. Which seems to be the norm for this new ritual: the films nobody got to see are released at the end of the year to be fresh in the minds of those who did see them, and the rest of the year be damned.

  The other films listed for a hopeful place in history have never appeared on a movie screen in my area (except perhaps one AMC with the reputation for art house fare from its past incarnations which it cannot abandon). Movies with tiles such as May December, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, The Taste of Things and Asteroid City left me scratching my head. One is based on a true story about an older woman’s affair with a tween boy. One is a documentary film in French (English subtitles) about a renowned Michelin star restaurant, so why it would be considered for Best Picture rather than Best Documentary or Foreign Film is beyond me. Another is a romantic story about food (again), this time a cook and her gourmet employer, and the last is a dramedy about UFOs.

  These are movies that most people would not see. The “general public” has become the recipients of mass market pabulum, while the few percent attend the art houses and generally have the biggest say in anything to do with awards. Barbie is meaningless as a film to be memorialized, but it is possible that its director, Greta Gerwig, may be honored for her work on the project. The exclusivity of it all takes away from what the movie industry was designed for; not just entertainment, but enlightening the general public. We no longer need newsreels in the cinema, but we do need something to stimulate our brains.

  Of course I realize that the ordinary people out there wouldn’t want to see a film with subtitles, but I would consider seeing anything if I knew it existed first. The isolated publicity behind these films are keeping them away from even the curious. That isn’t fair if they also have some money in their pockets.

  A friend asked me if I would be willing to watch the Golden Globes, which tends to be a precursor to what pictures and persons win at the Academy Awards. Sure, I said. I’ll watch.

  But I will still be scratching my head.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged academy awards, barbie, film, movie, movie reviews, movies, oscars

• Last-Minute Greeting

  Posted at 3:03 pm by kayewer, on December 30, 2023

  My mail for the past two weeks has been predictable and dull. I did get some Christmas cards, but the deliveries were mostly from catalogs. I also got notes from charities who have not figured out yet that I give from January to November and take this month off. Everybody gives in December, because it’s the month for remembering the less fortunate (if you’ve ever wondered what Boxing Day is, it’s said to be about the alms box at church, and has evolved to include other events such as department store sales). I didn’t order from any catalogs because I’m at a stage in life where I have everything I need, and it is time to start cutting back as I shift into my senior years of minimalist existence.

  I did get one rather extraordinary piece of mail. If I didn’t look at the front of it right away to see where it came from, I would have guessed it was something to be concerned about. It was square and comprised mostly of blue lined notebook paper carefully assembled with tape. When I saw the return address, I was relieved to see it was from an old neighbor of mine we’ll call Gabriella.

  Until the 80s, she lived with her mother and grandmother, brothers and sisters in a quaint house near the corner of the block. The family lived and breathed their faith above all else. They spent a lot of time doing regular activities and attending services at the large church/school complex nearby, run by a well known religious leader whose broadcasts on radio were part of the old-time tradition of strict Sunday adherence. I attended bible school and occasional events there, but the times I spent at their home were nearly always filled with messages, lessons and such thrown into every subject of conversation. Being one attuned to learning how to better regulate my life, I hope I was perceived as somebody who made a good effort. I was frowned upon for taking up ballet and reading young women’s magazines such as Glamour, but overall our relationship was good, and I did get an attendance award at the vacation bible school my final summer.

  Gabriella got married, and I was a bridesmaid. The ceremony was held at the church, of course, and the reverend himself officiated. It was the second of two weddings I attended in my lifetime, and the only one I was an active part of. I have a videotape of the event which needs transcribing onto DVD for future reference; though the announcer at the reception called me a friend of the groom instead of the bride by mistake, I still cherish that recording.

  Back to the letter. It wasn’t a long correspondence by any means. Gabriella apparently thought of me and wrote a line on the notepaper saying I was weighing heavy on her heart. No mention of Merry Christmas, how she or her family was doing, or anything. The letter was part of an envelope she could have used, which carried a tract, several pages of which were included.

  Why she went to such pains to surround a true envelope with note paper is a mystery. The few words in its contents makes me suspect that my friend is not doing as well as she could be. Normally her occasional letters would have more content and show some precision at corresponding. This is concerning. She is up there in years, like me, but younger and certainly able to nourish her body as well as her spirit unless charity has not added enough to her household. I don’t dare ask. She wouldn’t tell me, only that she has what she needs.

  My regular stationery is out of reach while I’m resorting, repairing and decluttering (I think my letterhead disappeared into a storage bin). I will reach into my piles of letter-writing materials that are still available, and send off a reply to let her know I’m thinking of her and not to worry, because I’m doing well.

  I suspect I may never see her in person again, as she lives in the far reaches of PA with her husband and as many children as divine chemistry has placed with them. I saw her firstborn son, but there have been more beyond him whom I have never met.

  I’m glad to be blessed with the ability to write physical letters when texts just won’t do the trick. She probably does not own a cell phone. If she had a phone or computer, I could at least see a picture of her. I’m not one to judge, but it would be nice to see her and at least know what the present day has brought her either way. Maybe that’s never going to happen, but she is still part of my history, and I would do anything for her within my power. Even send her some stationery.

  God bless Gabriella.

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• The Year That Was 2023

  Posted at 3:17 pm by kayewer, on December 23, 2023

  The past is a polarizing topic, as evidenced by the old sayings for and against exploring what has gone before. It can’t be changed, but it provides insight we can learn from. The successes and mistakes are tools by which we can improve our future, so I decided to look back at the blogs from the past months.

  The year began with a mini-purge which unearthed a copy of Playgirl magazine from the 70s that was not mine (and how it got into the home remains an eternal mystery). The nostalgia value alone made me keep that as my “one-in-ten rule” save from that declutter mission. During the year I was given the opportunity to have hot guy posts in my social media feed, and being a single lady, I decided to take advantage of that. I now have guys in towels, cowboys, construction hunks, wet dudes in pools, tattooed dudes who barely hold their trousers up, and all varieties of testosterone in poses for my entertainment. And I don’t need to weed out porn.

  During the year I encountered a parking lot Karen, and a domestic abuse dispute (I spoke to the cops). The bus stop for Greyhound, which I was used to for nearly two years, changed locations without any prior notification. I don’t have any bus trips scheduled for 2024 until the company decides how they are going to treat their ridership (which should improve). Also, I won’t go to New York until the Metropolitan Opera has a season which does not include environmental protestors interrupting the program (I did not post about it, but a performance of Wagner’s Tannhauser in late November was ruined by paying audience members who chose to unfurl banners and shout at the performers).

  I assembled a curio cabinet and a bookshelf, with another to be assembled soon. I may do that to ring in the New Year. I also have two other shelving units and a desk to put together. During the summer I replaced a full set of curtains and got windows installed. The sun porch is still cold, so I needed to purchase a space heater so I can use that area for office space sometime soon. The landscaping continues to thrive as I keep it watered, but winter will soon make watering impossible until spring.

  My bullet journal project was put on hold, but I still have it, and I kept a different one to track my daily life without being a whiny diary. One of my new year goals is to spend more time doing quiet crafting.

  My food delivery service says I saved hundreds of hours in cooking time, but I haven’t lost a pound. I did posts about the joys of bananas, egg salad, ginger ale and Taco Bell, along with the concept of virtual awards luncheons via Brady Bunch group meetings in the workplace (which is home).

  During the year, Great Britain gained a new monarchy, our town pulled off an LGBTQ+ event, the malls struggled to exist in an online shopping world, and people continued to make waiting one’s turn a discomforting event.

  I spent most of my time working from home and after hours without television. I turned it off during a TV-free week and didn’t turn it on again except for things I like. This meant a few Marvel, Harry Potter, fantasy and sci-fi marathons on the weekends, occasional series such as “What We Do in the Shadows,” “Shark Tank,” or anything featuring Gordon Ramsay. My Sunday evenings are spent with a friend watching Food Network. My television is from 2013, has an extended warranty and may be the third longest-lasting appliance to the fridge (in first place was a clock radio).

  Other posts have dealt with the wisdom of Socrates, the craziness of makeup tutorials as part of cheating boyfriend videos, and the occasional notes about the craft of writing from my point of view as a blogger.

  My self-improvement journey is ongoing. Some of the posts I did this year were trying on my spirit, especially when my post about a promising young woman’s loss to the world by her own hand due to bullying was actually read by her mother, who messaged me within hours of the post going live (I am doing my best to follow the pending lawsuit against the school district).

  I let my 45th high school reunion go without my presence, for complex reasons only a therapist would likely understand. I do my best not to gripe about myself in these posts, but readers may find something like an association between their daily lives and mine on occasion. My idea behind these posts has always been to discuss and try to make sense of it all. If you find something satisfying in reading what I post, my job has been done well.

  My first post of 2024 will come in two weeks, and I’m leaving next week’s post open for whatever may come over the next few days. This is the toughest week, between the hectic Christmas weekend and the curtain coming down on the old year next weekend. The year will kick off on a Tuesday with all the messiness of a concert orchestra bowing and blarping out their first notes before the conductor waves his baton and realigns them into a cohesive assembly.

  I will be blarping along with the rest of you through the end of one year and into the start of the next.

  Let’s have plenty of nice things to write about.

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• Merry Christmas Anyway

  Posted at 3:59 pm by kayewer, on December 16, 2023

  I don’t know why we wait until the end of the year to impose so many holidays on the world. December is cold and the start of the winter season, and some places get their worst weather between December and March. Blizzards with their snow and ice affect holiday travel, bring down most inflatables (poor twelve-foot Rudolph), and sometimes the snow is even the wrong consistency to build a decent snowman.

  Merry Christmas anyway.

  Malls are suffering from a problem; nobody wants to actually make the physical effort to walk in them, visit department stores or little independent pop-up shops, examine real merchandise and purchase it in real time. This is particularly tough on businesses in New Jersey (and some other places) where plastic bags have been banned, but many of the retailers have come out with nice handled paper bags (I have a bag that tucks away in a corner of my purse, and I’ll link the product manufacturer for you below if you would like to try them).

  Santa sometimes sits in the main courts of malls for ages without a single child stopping by to sit on his lap. Part of it is that parents don’t want to dress up their children, or the kids can’t be bothered. But folks, you can’t visit Santa on Amazon. Though you can also buy my favorite reusable shopping bags there.

  Merry Christmas anyway.

  We are having the same problems with factional wars in parts of the world. In fact, a group of protestors decided to hoist “Cease Fire Now” signs in my little town, outside the local Krispy Kreme this very afternoon. Somebody posted that it was an anti-Semitic protest, which seems perplexing. To add to the confusion, I saw a social media post this week from a Jewish woman who escaped a homicidal husband after being forced to submit to sexual and psychological abuse, and was encouraged to yield to some extremist tenets which degraded her as a human being. Not being familiar with the whole story behind some of these twigs on the tree of the Jewish faith, I can’t judge, but the descriptions sounded like the poor woman was not in the community as a whole as we may know it, but in a cult. Now that she is free–at the cost of her extended family and most friends who have denounced her–she went public with her story to bring some of the cruelties of sectarian life into the exposing light of knowledge.

  Happy Hanukkah, anyway, my friend.

  Many of the themed foodstuffs you find on shelves this holiday were produced in August or earlier. But then we are used to preservatives in our food here in America, which other countries ban because they know better.

  Merry Christmas anyway.

  Those folks who put out signage saying, “Keep Christ in Christmas” are not saying anything in reality, because Christmas pretty much translates to “Christ’s Holy Day.” So, Christ is in Christmas. What they mean is to keep the day of December 25 holy. Yet they still go out and buy Uncle Theodore a new shirt.

  Not everybody celebrates a December holiday on the 25th. Some have theirs earlier or later.

  Merry Christmas anyway.

  A lot of people spend December 25 alone. The estimate is that nineteen percent of Americans go solo on Christmas. Even though 88% of those surveyed said they would invite a solo person to celebrate with them, it looks like some slip through the cracks.

  Merry Christmas anyway.

  In the popular movie A Christmas Story, the holiday turkey is ruined when the neighbor’s dogs raid the kitchen and make off with the roast fresh out of the oven, so the family goes to the only place open on the holiday–the local Chinese joint–and enjoy Peking duck (hilariously beheaded by the restaurant owner after Darren McGavin’s character of the “old man” notes it seems to be smiling at him). People are bound to get stuck at airports or train or bus stations, felled by colds, flu or early arrival newborns. Time waits for nobody, and holidays are no exception. Whatever happens on December 25, the day after will come just the same and bring its own burdens and joys.

  No matter what your story is, have a Merry Christmas anyway.

  (For the shopping bags mentioned in this article, go to https://www.chicobag.com/)

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