In Memoriam

We wound up this week's world heritage tour with a memorial. The setting was an Italian social club, and the memorialized was a person who was one of my favorite customers at the restaurant where I used to work. His lovely bride is an old old friend of mrguy. Such a great couple, with a son who attends Berklee. Attendees included people from all corners of my life, as I mentioned earlier.

I'm not sure how well I navigated the answers to why I was there and not mrguy. It's chemo week and his goal for yesterday was to sit upright, watch baseball and read a book. He's doing really well, otherwise. But if you're hearing me say that and I'm all cool with it and it's catching people off guard? I didn't know that so many people didn't know, so it came as an unwelcome surprise to some. I've had time to process and am happy to have every day. Really. But when the widow spoke about how she was supposed to grow old with her person and wasn't going to get to do that, I really lost it. Luckily I was in the back row, and mostly out of sight from people I work with as I bent into my kleenex and wept. 

There was a raffle in between speakers at the memorial, and I came home with a bottle of wine.

I mingled, I cried, I had to go. Met up with my new friend from the club for a beer. She is off for a few months in Norway, so this was a last visit of the season, so to speak. She had missed Scottish Night. I of course performed a full recitation of the events of the night. And then she told me about how she'd solved an irrigation issue at the local community garden. Suuuuuper interesting solution, directing rainwater into reservoirs in raised beds. The plants find what they need, reaching down into the reservoirs, and there is no evaporation because the water is underground. I wonder if we could do something similar for the island in the middle of our street. Just a thought.

A Week in June

I got back into doing the things this past week:

On Friday I saw a movie with a friend:

On Saturday my old workmates from the restaurant where we used to work 30 years ago got together for breakfast at the restaurant. The owner joined us and actually treated us, which was super sweet. We told stories and had such a great warm time. The food was delish. The restaurant is closing in a month or so and our old boss is retiring to garden and surf.

On Sunday I was able to clear out my home office, which gave me some peace of mind.

Monday was my first real day back at work after being mostly out of the office for a month or more. We got right back into it, doing 5 hours of oral history with the founder of the company. After work, a weaving class.

On Tuesday mrguy had chemo and then got a fever in the evening. We had the most pleasant ER experience you can have. There were very few people in the waiting room, we were seen within 15 minutes and got a room quickly. We are old hands at this so we each had our noise-canceling headphones. This was good, because there was a patient on a gurney in the hallway all night who talked loudly and nonstop, while being watched over by a security guard. Mrguy heard him say that he'd seen "Jim Brown and Adolf Hitler at the Warfield". The doctors found nothing wrong, but they gave him a chest xray to be sure, and also some infusions.

When you have a weaving class on Monday, everything looks like inspiration on Wednesday:

On Thursday I learned that my most persistent bucket list item will come to pass. Amazing. And at the club, we had Scottish night. I've learned that this is always the final event of the "season". Who knew? I had a great conversation with a guy from one of the visiting groups about his Titanic archive, digitizing historical collections and a little about the forklift collection. And from two other fellows I learned about their tartans. One tartan had a special color that was matched to some of his clan tartan that was dug up, somehow. It was such a beautiful red. Delish.

My brush with unfortunate masculinity came when I struck up a conversation with a young man whose hat I admired. Then I saw his sporrin, which was made from a badger. It was so beautiful. I love badgers. He said that I'd know his father if I saw someone who had an arctic fox sporrin. Once found, the father sat with me. He was a Fred Willard type, wearing both his Scottish regalia and a large quantity of oversized turquoise jewelry. It made for an interesting combo. I felt confused by our interaction because he kept gesticulating close to my boobs while we were talking -- not to grab them, but more flailing. I felt trapped, as the nice guys I met had left and Fred Willard and I were the only two left at the table. We were seated, so I ended up taking a defensive posture with my shoulder raised towards him. I just didn't want to make a scene while we were hosting this group. I also felt like this guy had been busting people's personal space for 40 years and he already knew. Eventually I just grabbed my stuff and said "I'm going upstairs, now!"

There was some beautiful bagpipery, and ceremonial haggis blessing, and the recitation of Robert Burns poetry. I have never heard so many "skoll" toasts! The Scots started on a higher pitch due to their relative youth and preponderance of tenors. Ours are a bit lower in timber. My goal is to start a "skoll" at the club some day. It's like starting The Wave. You know that SNL sketch from forever ago where someone claims that he started a particular wave? I wanna be that guy!

We had salad and haggis and soup and as the evening went on there were lots of songs of what I call the Shaggy Dog Song genre. Then the Ole and Lena jokes were offered by the Norsemen among us. It became 9:30 and the main course had not been served, and I had to work the next day. I was sitting in my preferred spot at the table, with the door to the hallway behind me. It makes me feel less claustrophobic. So I just put on my jacket, quietly picked up my purse, said farewell to Knut and slipped out the back hallway that leads from the kitchen to the entry. Escape! I'd had a great adventure, and enough for the night. I was a bit peckish when I got home.

On Friday I did 4 more hours of oral history with our company's founder. Then some research on a completely different topic, and then I found myself staring into space so I went home. I felt like I had completed things going into the weekend, and that is a fantastic sensation.

Today's excitement is a memorial for a friend. Back in the day he was one of my favorite customers from the restaurant. One of the few who treated me like he knew I was a person outside of the restaurant. His partner is a longtime friend of mrguy. The crossover is huge. He worked at a local radio station in his spare time, so there are people from there (including ms scandiwaiian), people from work, friends of mrguy...I'm a bit nervous about going to something like this without my man, but I gotta represent. Also people will be curious about mrguy if they know his situation. He's feeling gross after chemo.

After that I'm meeting a known Norwegian for a glass of wine. Whew!

Stress

Today did not meet my expectations. Let's just say that.

I was super happy doing laundry, hanging it dry, patching a duvet cover that the cat ate, and sarting to make piles of my mom's stuff in my home office so that I can, as a local sportscaster says cleanse the palate of the eye. 

This morning mrguy comes in the kitchenden and asks me to look at something really weird. There is a ton of water pooling in the primary bathroom, the vanity, the closet -- coming from who knows where. We finally figure out that it is coming from the sprinkler system. Everything probably needs to get tweaked now that we had people prune and take out a few trees. He cleaned up the water. I went back to blogging and looking at an auction.

After the baseball game, mrguy asks for my help in figuring out which sprinkler head is pointing the wrong direction. I ask him if he can try to figure it out without me and ask for help if he needs it, because my auction item is coming up soon. The closet window is open. That wasn't the direction that the water seemed to be coming from. Uh...

He starts working on the problem, and comes in with a look on his face. Water has started pouring into the closet through the open window, from a broken sprinkler head. Like a fountain. He turned off the water right away, but the aftermath was horrendous. All of my clothes were sopping wet, but there wasn't anywhere to hang them dry because I'd done all of the laundry. Duffle bags were filled as if they were buckets. My walnut jewelry box was humid. Even my clown shoes were doused.

Mrguy used every towel and every paper towel to clean up the mess. I have the dehumidifier going in the closet. My silica bags that I stash everywhere started to pop open, so I have to vacuum. It's a total shit show. I was so proud of making progress in putting my house back together post parental death, but I've really taken a few steps back today.

I usually have the reserves to laugh when life is really dumb. But the stress of it all, and mrguy doing all of this work while his treatment has him feeling poopy makes me sad.

I bid wrong and did not win my auction even though I put in a bid that was more than the winning bid. Operator error. Why does my hand smell like sandalwood. Good grief!

Sorry for my egregious mixing of tense in this entry. It's been a bit much. 

Jury Duty 2025

This was my first experience with being on a jury. It was fine, but frustrating. Prior to this, I didn't know that everything seems to take forever. And when you get in the jury room, things that you thought were obvious are not obvious to others. And that when everybody lies on the stand, you have a bunch of conflicting evidence that none of the jurors can agree on.

Here's the summary: a couple who lives together has a fight. The woman leaves and goes to her sister's place. She doesn't pick up when the man calls her, so he drives over to the sister's place. In the meantime, a friend (who is also a delivery guy) delivers a pizza to the two sisters. The man sees the two sisters and the pizza guy talking in the apartment parking lot and drives into the pizza guy's car, causing damage. He gets out of the car and says that he's caught his girlfriend (i.e. cheating). He and his girlfriend resume the fight. He wants her to come with him and talk. She says no, you always go too far. He picks her up and brings her toward his car. He puts her down. They continue arguing. She agrees to go with him. He puts her in the back seat of the car and he drives away.

They are still in a relationship, but there is a protective order that prevents them from seeing each other.

This was a bilingual case, and we were told to ignore everything but what was in English, be it the written translations of 911 calls or the interpreter on the stand. Several of the jurors understood the original language.

The defendant doesn't testify, which is his right. The alleged victim, the pizza guy and the sister all testify, along with a police officer, who is only responsible for part of the scene of the 911 call.

During the trial I thought the whole thing was a mess. I was sure that we were not going to convict. But then I flipped. And there were two days of arguing. And that conflict in the jury room, although not angry, was awful. I started to shut down. Two others and I were the holdouts for conviction on all counts. It was hard.

It's not like I *wanted* to convict the guy. But I felt like I was interpreting the evidence and the instructions the way that the court was asking us to.

We were split on three of the four counts, and not even close. We asked for help from the judge, and the judge asked us to reread a specific line of the instructions. Suuuuuper unhelpful. We're not dummies. 

We decided to see if overnight thoughts helped. They did not. I, for one, could not sleep. Also I felt trapped by my fellow jurors who sometimes followed instructions and sometimes did not, especially where translations were concerned. Or they'd tell me I wasn't allowed to consider something a certain way, but if they used the same methodology to make their own argument they didn't realize they were doing the same thing they'd disregarded when I was speaking. It started to feel unfair. I started to feel exceptionally miserable. I went into the last day of deliberation super bummed.

We turned in our votes and the judge asked us return to the jury room to deliberate further. I actually gave her angry eyes. Especially when she said that if we needed guidance, to ask. That made me so mad because that was total performative bullshit. Her help was proven to be unhelpful before.

We went back. I said swear words, and shared that this case was too complicated to be tried as a single trial, my frustration about all of the conflicting evidence, and that we couldn't even start over and decide which pieces of evidence were valid for the four counts. On these things we all agreed. The person who I disagreed with most said we had to have an open mind. I calmly explained that I'd been on her side until we started deliberating, and that was a large example of me having an open mind. One guy got super passionate and started smacking the post-it board. There were disagreements over whether, in thinking about false imprisonment regarding the man picking the woman up, you could consider anything that happened before (like that the guy had just driven into another guy's car and loudly said that he'd caught his girlfriend cheating with him). 

The whole thing went down in flames. Mistrial on three counts, except for the hit and run.

In the past six weeks I've had Covid, my mom died and I had to clean out her apartment, our beloved friends were here (that was the good part), and then my vacation was truncated by two weeks of jury duty.

It's too much, man. I want some normalcy.

The Blue Window Craze

Lately I've been thinking about blue glass. Blue window glass, specifically. In my hometown there were a number of houses that had blue glass, usually in a solarium. Not the whole house. The town's main period of growth was the 1930s to the 1950s.

I figured that our friend Paul Lukas would know. Anything that I think about he's already thought about in depth, so I asked. He didn't know it was a thing. So I sent him this photo, and then I started digging. It's so good. I haven't found anything that really explains why early 20th Century houses have blue glass, but there certainly were lots in the 1870s due, in large part, to a guy named General Pleasonton, and another guy named Dr. Ponza.

Pleasanton started the fire, so to speak, in 1876, in his address to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. The reprint of his presentation was printed on blue paper with blue ink. He attributed healing powers of all kinds to bathing in blue light. Is your pig poorly? Blue light.

One of my favorite quotes attributed to Pleasanton: "Boys with unsatisfactory legs, and girls with more tremors than are necessary or useful....and persons afflicted in a vague but objectionable way, and mysteriously described as invalid, all became suddenly healthy and strong after taking a few panes of blue glass."

Then came Seth Pancoast, later one of the founding members of Theosophy:

By 1877, blue glass was a craze. It was big in Watsonville, California.

And then eventually there were the detractors:

Poems:

And even the Blue Glass Schottische. A colleague from the forklift factory was kind enough to play it for me on the piano. Check back here later for an audio recording.

By 1889 blue glass was relegated to the trash heap with its fellow fads of the past, like crazy quilts and roller skates.

Roller skates have come back into fashion many times, as have crazy quilts. Is it time for the rebirth of the blue glass craze? Oh right. Science.

Father's Day 2025

One of my favorite sounds, back in the day, was of my dad at his typewriter. It was his weapon of choice, and I guess that might be where I get my love of writing and storytelling. Fueled by disgruntlement he would smite the keys with his index fingers, serving up nasty letters intended to make himself feel like a warrior.

He used carbon paper, and he always saved his favorite letters. I found this duplicate left in my mom's files.

Happy Father's Day

Bob Hitler

Day 2 of jury selection passed with some folks being de-selected and some folks being interviewed and no final selection of jurors being made. I am one of the few people who have not experienced the thing that is alleged to have happened, so I'm probably a prize pig.

Meanwhile, the world is just going to shit, I believe. The president is dismantling FEMA and has deployed Marines to LA without reason, after a small number of ICE protests went awry. Yes, that's serious, but the nimrods deployed without support because there is no plan. Those Marines slept on the floor without food or anything to do and the government is blanket deporting all manner of people without due process while declaring them all terrorists or rapists or whatever. 

Meanwhile, the president's lack of knowledge brought something back to light: they quasi-renamed various military bases that were previously named after Confederate soldiers *back* to the same names, after having being renamed by the Biden administration from Confederate names to neutral names, like Fort Liberty. So Fort Bragg is again Fort Bragg, but named after a different guy named Bragg. Mrguy says it's like renaming Fort Hitler after Bob Hitler. You know, not *that* Hitler.

Better Days

Today is just one of those days. After a few of those weeks. Thank goodness for friend visits (M&R are here from NY) because that's why I'm not bugged by today.

So first I had Covid. Then it was taking so long to go away. But once I got that call from my sister and my mom ended up dying the adrenaline just scared the bejabbers out of Covid. And, you know, my mom died. And I had to get my mom's apartment emptied, which was so much work.

However, we've had a week with our dear friends, and that has been super lovely. The timing could not have been better. The validation of being surrounded by loving people who have your back and think your mom was pretty shitty and have had a mom like that and came out the other side and can talk about it being better after awhile? So good.

But mrguy, who feels shitty about this, told me that I probably wouldn't get called for jury duty when I got a notice that told me to appear on the last day of our friends' visit. And for some reason I listened to him and didn't get a postponement because I am lazy. And I did get called, and I am Juror 6 and will have to spend more time at the courthouse tomorrow. But I have an out. I would be a good juror but I have reasons.

And the three oranges that I was expecting were mistakenly cut off the orange tree by the tree guys today, despite the clear instructions of mrguy. To paraphrase Elizabeth Clare Prophet, what tree has done, tree can do. Honestly, I expected those oranges not to make it to maturity but I expected deer to do it, not dudes.

Tomorrow, my last day of vacation, I report at 10:30.

June 7, 2016

A throwback from fb, 2016:

"Celebrity dreams are the best! Last night I dreamed that Chris Isaak tried to get me to wear clown shoes and bumblebee antennae on the stage. I told his roadies "I wear street shoes on the stage and clown shoes on the street!! I'm a MUSICIAN, motherfucker!!!" Please vote today, everyone."