Baggin’ the bag — or not

Now that it’s spring, it’s time to change my purse. I usually do that around Easter, but it’s been such a cool spring that I haven’t really thought about putting away the basic black bag and bringing out something lighter and springier.

I was never one to coordinate my purse with my shoes. It takes too much effort to haul all that stuff out of one bag and transfer it to another. Which is partly why I am still carrying around my winter purse.

So unless I’m going somewhere special and a huge stuffed bag would make a rude fashion comment, I just stick with two purses a year. Large, roomy compartmentalized bags that hold everything but the kitchen sink, but could accommodate the sink if I wanted it.

Since I’ve been contemplating changing my purse one of these days soon, I’ve wondered about purses as both a fashion and a social statement. I’ve noticed that the First Lady Michelle Obama is never seen carrying a purse. Queen Elizabeth of England lugs around a handbag that makes people wonder what a queen keeps in her purse.

I’ve heard that the queen uses her purse to signal the attendants who travel with her. If her purse is dangling from her wrist, it supposedly means “this person is a bore, get me out of here.” It could be empty for all we know, but she uses it to talk to her staff. You don’t see the queen with a cell phone up to her ear; just her purse at either her wrist or her elbow.

Mrs. Obama seems to be capable of ditching a bore without shifting her purse. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t carry one. Since fashion seems to follow first ladies, I hope this doesn’t signal the end of purses. And I also wonder what she does instead of carrying a purse.

When she gets up from a chair how does she stop herself from reaching down and slinging her purse over her shoulder? Where does she stash her lipstick and tissues? Is there a female Secret Service agent assigned to her to carry around her credit cards, cash and keys? If she loses an earring, where does she tuck the remaining one? And where is her cell phone?

What does she do with her hands when she’s bored and has nothing to shift from one arm to another? If she finds a dime on the sidewalk, where does she drop it? Surely she doesn’t just leave it there.

Recently Mrs. Obama met Queen Elizabeth and made the news when the first lady hugged the queen against royal protocol. I wonder what the queen did with her purse then.

Diet What?

Sometimes in the mornings I stop and get a cup of coffee before heading off to work; it holds me over until I can get a pot started once I get there.

Other days I get my caffeine from a diet cola; depends on my mood and the weather. At the vending machine where I get the soda there’s a button customers can push to add a blast of vanilla or cherry flavoring. It’s a nice touch, and now and then it brings back memories of my misspent youth.

Wa-a-a-ay back in the day, before e-mail, microwaves and cell phones — even back before diet soda was marketed as much as it is today — it was an after-school treat to walk up to a local hangout and get a Coke to drink before catching the school bus home. Sometimes we’d get a cherry Coke. But my favorite was a chocolate Coke. A chocolate Coke is pretty much a Coke with a squirt or two of Hershey’s syrup in it. It tastes better than it sounds. I think they’re pretty darned good.

I suppose in some places it’s possible still to get a chocolate Coke, but I don’t know because I’ve been drinking diet sodas for so long now that regular sodas taste too sweet so I don’t drink Cokes. I know it’s been possible to buy bottled and canned cherry Cokes, lime and vanilla Cokes, even cherry and vanilla Dr Peppers, which also offered a chocolate-cherry Dr Pepper for a limited time a few years back. But Coke and Pepsi have apparently never considered adding chocolate to their offerings. They really should.

If they did I wonder if they’d consider adding chocolate to their diet colas. I’ve seen lime, cherry and lemon in diet sodas, so why not chocolate?

Apparently, some folks can’t comprehend that. There’s a certain national hamburger chain that indicates on its drive-through menu board, that customers can add cherry, lemon, vanilla or chocolate flavorings to their drinks. I won’t give the chain any free advertising, but it uses a black and white checkerboard as part of its décor. So one day while I was ordering lunch at the drive through the thought occurred to me: “chocolate diet Coke. Gotta have one.”

So I ordered one. Silence. Then “Uh, we can’t do that.”

Me: Why not?

Clueless kid at the mic: “We don’t do those.”

Me: Yes you do. It says so right here on the menu board.

Believe it or not, this kid had to ask his manager if he could make a chocolate diet Coke. Apparently the manager reminded him that as a customer, I am right and I got my chocolate diet Coke.

Maybe it was the notion of diet and chocolate that threw the kid off his bearings. Some folks think the two don’t belong together. They’re wrong. Maybe he thought it was against corporate policy to do something original. Or maybe he was just too young to appreciate the adventure of adding chocolate to any kind of Coke. Doesn’t matter. I had totally flummoxed the poor thing.

And it was so much fun I came back a few weeks later and did it again!

TV Without Pity – or Guilt?

My television died over the weekend.

I knew it was going to happen sometime. It’s an old set and had served me well, but the picture was getting wavy and I knew that was probably a sign that I’ll be shopping for a new one.

Saturday I fell asleep in front of it, and when I woke up the screen was blank, which sometimes happens with a satellite dish. But this time it didn’t respond to the usual resuscitation the remote control brings.

I thought maybe it’s that stupid time change, and all the stations go blank to account for the so-called extra hour. Nope. It was DOEC (Dead On Entertainment Center).

What amazed me was how much I miss it. Although I’m hooked on Desperate Housewives and I keep up with local news, there isn’t much commercial television I like. I love PBS and I do like the cable stations. But I’m not one of those people who are hooked on TV. Not me!

I was not prepared for the feeling I had of being totally disoriented without the boob tube blaring. When I’m getting ready for work in the morning I can tell time without looking at the clock because I know what time it is by what’s emanating from the idiot box. I eat lunch with the local news, and by the time I’m ready for dinner, I’m flipping channels because, contrary to the title of the program, everybody does not love Raymond.

I say that I keep it on for “white noise,” but Sunday I got my white noise from the radio and it didn’t quite seem right. Am I hooked on TV? Oh surely not!

So I went on line looking for signs of TV addiction and to see if I need a 12-step program. What I found instead was a site called (with apologies to the late Gene Pitney), TV Without Pity. It’s a web/blog site that gives synopses of the goings on of recently-aired programs. I could feel my shoulders relaxing and my breathing slow down as I clicked on Desperate Housewives. Once I was caught up with the goings on at Wisteria Lane, I looked at other offerings. Dirty Sexy Money? That show was cancelled, but I liked it and missed the last few episodes. I can find out how that ended!

As I perused the site I could see that I’d be back to visit it. There’s a page on it that gives rundowns of shows long gone; I can revisit some old memories.


Oh, no. I’m not hooked on TV. Or the Internet. Or any other way to waste time. Is it TV Without Pity; or TV Without Guilt? I’ll figure that out once I get a new TV and things get back to normal.

Just another dumb government thing

Just a few more days left, and then we trade sensible standard time for daylight saving time. What a dumb thing to do.

Only Congress could show that it has a firm grasp of the obvious and mandate that clocks move forward an hour at a time when days are getting longer anyway.

Daylight saving time did indeed come from the government but it started during World War I supposedly to save energy costs. After the war was over the country went back to normal time and stayed there until World War II, for the same reason.

Did someone start World War III and forget to mention it? Why are we springing forward again? The time ain’t broke; don’t fix it. But we are talking about Congress here.....

DST is being pushed on the country because someone believes it saves energy. Studies have shown that having Indiana switch to DST would cost households in that state about $8.6 million in electricity bills each year. The reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during DST was offset by higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings. Just where is that savings, again?

It used to be that daylight saving time ended before Halloween, so it was moved up to accommodate candy-begging children who should be at home doing their homework, not out looking for a sugar high and contemplating vandalism if they don’t get the candy they want.

Some contend that auto accidents are reduced when DST is in effect. Maybe that means it’s lighter out and drivers can more easily see their cell phones to send text messages and aren’t so inclined to cause an accident.

Not that I’m condoning this, just throwing it out for consideration — patrons of bars that stay open past 2 a.m. lose an hour of drinking time and get really cranky. You know how mean some drunks can get.

Passenger trains have to stand still on the tracks for an hour to adjust their schedules for the time change.

Time change makes no difference for farmers; cows need to be milked at the same time each day, and chickens need to be fed. Chickens, cows and other livestock don’t care about saving daylight; they have their own schedules. And they make more sense.

This is just a little something to think about when you’re resetting all your clocks, the VCR, telephones, cell phones, automatic sprinkler timers, computer monitors, and the automatic coffee maker. And when the alarm goes off and you sleepily — and grumpily — realize that although the clock says it’s 7 a.m., it’s really 6 a.m., and you’d rather be sleeping that extra hour. You can, and you probably will, go to sleep an hour earlier at night, but then what would be the point of messing around with the time in the first place?

Brought to you by the same government that brought you those interesting bailout situations we’re all paying for.

Duck liver and what?

While sitting in the dentist’s waiting room recently, I picked up a food magazine. One of those gourmet publications where the food is unpronounceable, unrecognizable, and most likely inedible — but expensive.

I glanced at one article about a noted chef — famous in New York anyway, I never heard of him. The writer described some dishes the chef was known for. If I had to live on stuff that he served in his oh, so expensive eatery I’d probably starve. There was one that was made up of duck liver, kidney and tripe, or some such thing.

It sounded like cat food to me. I’m not sure my feline-Americans would eat it. They like fried chicken; I got smart cats.

Such pretentious offerings, and prices, make me think how funny it would be to find out that this glamorous chef, when his shift ended and he hung up his tocque, would slip home and make sure no one was following him. He’d ease inside his own kitchen, hungry from a hard day’s labor of serving people with too much money and too little sense inedible food, and make himself a fried bologna sandwich.

I think all snooty chefs and other foodies should develop a taste for a fried bologna sandwich. It’s so simple in its elegance. Or so elegant in its simplicity. It would keep them humble and grounded.

A slice or two of bologna — you can use the turkey bologna or low fat bologna if you want to, but why? — laid in a skillet and heated until it chars just a little on one side. Then flip it over and repeat the process. A swipe of mustard on a slice of white bread, the hot fried bologna another slice of bread — it doesn’t get much better than that.

Except for maybe a tomato sandwich: sliced fresh tomato from the garden (forget the hothouse plastic tomatoes with no taste; wait for the real thing), and a glob of mayo on white bread sturdy enough to handle the tomato juice and the mayo without falling apart in your hand. Sheer bliss.

Two simple sandwiches, two large slices of heaven. Pity no one offers them up in upscale restaurants or writes about them in food magazines.

Maybe if they were called “Bolognese fricassee en croute” or “tomato en pane” no one would figure out that they’re eating real food for a change.

Gotta be better than the cat food that chef makes with duck liver and kidney.

It's a key point

Who would have thought that moving could make one philosophical? That it could cause one to ponder human nature?

I can tell you first hand moving makes one sore as well as philosophical. My mind keeps telling me I’m 30 and invincible; my body tells me the truth.

I moved Saturday. Sunday I started the process of unpacking. Being fairly organized I knew where to find the important things: my meds, deodorant, cat food (heaven forbid I can’t find THAT), makeup (ditto), and all things that make me presentable to the world.

Then I started in on the first box I came across and began putting things away. I found a few things that caused me to stop and think. Then I put them away.

They were the first items to go into the junk drawer in the kitchen of my new home.

I’m convinced everyone has a junk drawer — that important area in the kitchen where you throw old keys, matchbooks, odds and ends that may come in handy someday and will become essential only if you ever throw them away. I’ve had as many as three junk drawers going at a time.

Of course, when I was packing to move I cleaned out the former junk drawer. I’m waiting for the precise moment — and I know it will come — when I will need something that I tossed rather than moved and will wish I had it back.

Except for two keys on a ring. I’ve had them forever. I forgot what they unlock. But I keep them because, who knows? I might need them someday.

What is it about keys that we can’t just throw them out? Really all they’re good for is cluttering up junk drawers. Along with the instruction manual to my Swiffer Wet-Jet, which I already know how to use. It’s not rocket science; it mops floors. But I may need that manual someday. You just never know. I’ll keep it right there with those keys.......

I’ll bet anything Martha Stewart has a junk drawer. I’ll bet there are keys in it too.

After all is said and done, then what?

It’s common speculation; at the end of the world all that will be left alive are roaches.

Not a pleasant thought, but it does describe well how resilient the little critters are. They’ve been around since prehistoric times, they defy annihilation attempts on our part, and after civilization ends, they’ll probably still be around.

From a philosophical standpoint, it also illustrates that the more annoying and the least desirable something is, the more likely it is to outlive everything around it.

A conservation agent recently speculated that coyotes will be living among the roaches at the end of the world. No one especially likes them, they’re annoying and unpleasant, so they’ll thrive. Bunnies and fawns should be so lucky.

Let’s take this a step or two further. Houseflies are a given. They’re right up there with the roaches. Any critter that can hold still until just inches away from a fast-approaching telephone book and then fly away unscathed will be around long after humans are gone. A small percentage of flies may end up as a frog’s lunch, but the majority have nothing to worry about.

There’s little in life that’s less irritating than a pre-programmed recorded sales call. I predict that they too will survive the end of time as we know it. An earthquake tremor will activate the device that dials numbers at random; connection will be made. At that fateful instant, a rock will fall on an abandoned cell phone hitting the “answer” button, and then will be heard, “You have been chosen.....”

Or, if a telephone connection is made and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

After all of humanity is but a memory, my guess is that on every empty road there will be at least one abandoned shoe. I’ve always wondered where all those abandoned shoes come from. You never see designer pumps on the road; just sneakers and flip-flops, and only one, never a pair. Who rides in a car with their feet hanging out the window? What happened to the other shoe; should we wait for it to drop too? Once I was waiting for a light to change, I heard a noise, and there in front of me on the street was a flip-flop that hadn’t been there before. Did it fall from the sky? I didn’t see it fall. How did it get there?

Perhaps we should find comfort that when we’ve all gone on to a better place, life’s irritants — large and small — will remain here. Bugs, flies, coyotes, telemarketers, old shoes, loud TV commercials — for them, this is as good as it gets.