Goodbye to the Zipmobile

It's (almost) official.

I'm cutting the cord.

I'm selling Precocious Daughter's car.

Cute li'l guy.

She moved to the Big Apple two and a half years ago - sans car, of course. No one drives in New York outside of a Seinfeld episode. But all that time I've kept her little zipmobile so that she had a vehicle to use when she came home to visit. And, to a lesser extent, just in the case the Big Apple chewed her up and spit her out and she wanted/needed to come home. 

Not that I would ever tell her that. Over the past 25 years I've done my best to shield her from her mother's worst neuroses. With mixed results, but hey, I tried.

If you know, you know.

But finally I'm convinced that she is home, and home is not here in Texas. And I'm tired of paying for insurance, registration, maintenance, tires, etc. on a vehicle that gets driven once a week, and then only because I don't want it to sit in the garage and calcify. 

So I'm selling it. And it's actually working out well, because I have a co-worker who is looking for an inexpensive, reliable used car for his daughter. I'm giving him a good price, because I'm not looking to profit. In the past I've been the beneficiary of used cars from good, kind people who genuinely wanted to help me when I needed it. I'm happy to pay that forward. 

When the sale goes through, I'll have a little money in my pocket, and PDaughter will have a little money in her pocket, and I'll only have one car to worry about again. 

I'll be a one-car family, and a family of one.

Other than Tacocat, of course. 

Which gives me the opportunity to end with this gif:

Resume Tips That Might Actually Work

 Let me start by saying I'm not looking for a job.

I'm content where I am. Even if I were less than content, I loathe the job-hunting process with the heat of twelve hundred supernovas. And at this stage of my career, when my job starts getting me down I think about my bank account (comfy-ish), my retirement savings (ouchy-ish), and my personal motto ("suck it up, buttercup") and simply hunker down to endure the next round of bullshit.

Of all the things in life that don't love me back,
my job is the least of my worries.

I sympathize with job seekers, though. My own Precocious Daughter is one of them. She's smart, talented, educated, and hard working, but she's currently underemployed and shooting out resumes like a damn t-shirt cannon, with limited success. And when she's finally successful, what will she have? A fucking job. As reward-to-effort ratios go, landing a fucking job is right up there with spending $30 at a carnival booth to win an inflatable clown hammer.

You can't even beat your enemies senseless
with this damn thing.

Nonetheless, a job is a pretty necessary thing to have for most of us, and a resume is the way most of us get our foot in the door with the companies that are handing out said jobs. That's why so much advice geared toward employment-seekers centers around crafting a solid resume. 

Judging by the resumes I read, either as part of my own job or from frequenting subreddits devoted to resume writing, approximately 98% of that advice is routinely misunderstood and/or ignored. There are some seriously weak CVs floating around out there.

For instance, I saw a resume today where the job-seeker, in the very first sentence of their summary, referred to themselves as "seasoned, dedicated, and resourceful." Three words in (not counting the conjunction), and two of them were weasel words. That's not a ratio that will land you a job, Clyde. Here's why:

First of all, "seasoned" sounds like an attempt to find a fancier, cooler word than "experienced." But it's not. To the resume reader/algorithm, it comes across as either a euphemism for "I learned to type during the Carter administration" or a weird allusion to rubbing oil and salt into a cast iron frying pan. Neither is going to award you any points, and may in fact get you stereotyped as a little old lady/man who's preoccupied with cooking blogs. 

On to "dedicated." "Dedicated" says nothing. Literally nothing. I can almost guarantee that no hiring manager will ever want to know if you're "dedicated." They want to know if you'll put up with a daily onslaught of bullshit from the multiple competing layers of management you'll be reporting to. That takes the opposite of dedication - it requires not giving a rat's scaly-tailed ass about anything but keeping your boss off your back. So don't use a word that implies you care, because the screening algorithm doesn't.

Then there's "resourceful." This is actually a very good word to use on a resume. It implies certain useful and desirable skills. It's a deceptively inoffensive word that can mean anything from "I will keep a detailed inventory of where the bodies are buried and deploy it as needed" to "My advanced Google Fu will make you look like you know what the fuck you're doing instead of the obvious truth." Your straightest path to success is to establish yourself as the person who gets shit done. Note: This is separate and distinct from being the person who actually does shit themselves. Strive to be the former without being the latter. That's a person who brings value to the organization. And that's why "resourceful" is an ace resume word. Highly recommended.

In that same vein, here are some other more powerful substitutes to excite the algorithm and make your resume stand out from those of your weasel-worded competitors.

Weak: Utilized

Strong: Smashed

Weak: Leveraged

Strong: Lightly blackmailed

Weak: Supported

Strong: Continually saved the ass of

Weak: Optimized

Strong: Un-fucked

Weak: Discretion

Strong: Screaming silently

Weak: Tact

Strong: Screaming silently

Weak: Facilitated

Strong: Slapped sense into

Weak: Contributor

Strong: Shit-shoveler first class

Weak: Learned

Strong: Tempered in fire

Weak: Provided

Strong: Handled like a fucking boss

Go ahead. Introduce some of these words into your next resume. See if you don't have prospective employers lining up to offer you a life of stress and limited recognition. 

But if all else fails, type all the weasel words in white 4pt text into the bottom of your resume before you upload it. The algorithm gods will be pleased.

Fancy Feasts Come in All Sizes

 Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

Guys, if you've made it this far, 
you're probably safe.

I'm not making turkey this year. Or stuffing. Or mashed potatoes. Or cranberry sauce. In short, not making a traditional turkey dinner at all.

It's just Precocious Daughter and me tomorrow. And we don't want to mess with all that just for the two of us. Well, there's Tacocat, but I don't think he's ever seen a Thanksgiving dinner before, so we'll just toss him a few extra treats and tell him that's it, that's the holiday. 

Don't anybody show him this, though.

Instead we're making a couple of family-favorite dishes together that are delicious, nostalgic, and hard to screw up. And don't create a lot of dirty dishes, which is just extra-thankful. 

But I have a co-worker...I'll call her Edith, because with all affection and kindness, she's kind of a dingbat.

Look it up, children.

Like me, Edith is also planning a quiet Thanksgiving with just her, her spouse, and a pet or two. Unlike me, Edith is going pilgrim-shit crazy over Thanksgiving dinner.

Candied whole cranberries. Roasted sweet potato medallions. Probably something made with phyllo dough. Hoo-boy, nothing jacks up your effort-to-results ratio like making shit out of phyllo dough.

Don't get me wrong, I love phyllo and phyllo-centric dishes. But if I'm going there, I need there to be a house full of people to congratulate me on the lighter-than-air delicacies I've created. PDaughter is totally worth the effort, but her GenZ default enthusiastic reaction of two head bobs and a "Yeah, nice" does not provide my USRDA of validation.

I slaved over sheets of premade frozen phyllo
and all I get is a goddamn thumbs up emoji?

Also on Edith's Thanksgiving Day menu: A salad that has more than three ingredients, rolls that didn't emerge from a cardboard tube that was smacked against the kitchen counter, and an appetizer involving foreign cheese and artisanal shaved prosciutto. And I'll bet her stuffing has sausage and hand-scraped thyme in it.

No hate to any of this food. It all sounds pretty delicious to me. (Except for stuffing with sausage in it - why does that mess seem to have gone viral this year and how can we stop it in 2025 and/or perpetuity?) Yet in almost exactly the same way that I wouldn't hire Timothée Chalamet to scour my bathtub in a g-string and not livestream it to all my friends, I can't be arsed to put all this work into a feast that only two people will ever see.  Never mind the fact that my refrigerator wouldn't hold a fraction of the leftovers generated by this meal. If I can't shovel it into Rubbermaid containers and send it home with six different people, it's going to get fed to the neighborhood raccoons. 

And I don't even mean throwing it in the dumpster for the trash pandas to raid - I'm talking about heaping paper plates with food and sailing them, Frisbee-style, off my balcony to their little waiting paws.

Ermahgerd, charcooteries!

So, while I wish Edith all the best and an enjoyable high-end Thanksgiving meal, PDaughter and I will be happily eating peasant food and treating Tacocat to a can of Fancy Feast turkey-flavored slop in gravy. I think we'll all be happy.

And to all my Drunkards I wish a happy, healthy Thanksgiving that is just the right size and shape to hold your gratitude. Internet hugs and sweet little raccoon kisses.

My Coat of Many Cookies

A long time ago, in a marriage far, far away, my mother-in-law gifted me a black London Fog trench coat. It did not come with three raccoons pretending to be a person, but it was still really nice.

You can get this awesome pin
from strikegently.co, and honestly
you should. (Not a paid endorsement.)

I don't know exactly how long I've had this coat. Twenty years, at least. Possibly 25. I don't remember if I got it before or after Precocious Daughter was born. 

(As an aside: PDaughter turns 25 today. I've made the conscious decision not to devote an entire post to it, mostly because she's a whole-ass adult and entitled to more privacy than I afforded her when she was under my roof and easy blog fodder. Suffice to say she was a sassy 10-year-old when I first introduced her here, and now she's halfway through her 20s. Yes, I feel old, thanks for asking.)

Anyway, if you've ever owned a London Fog trench coat, you know that they last forever. They're well-made, well-wearing, and don't ever go out of style. 

Exhibit A.

What they can't do, however, is physically increase in size as their owner, well, gets older and fatter. My trench coat, which was a bit large on me when I first got it, no longer closes comfortably over my various middle-aged body parts. And so, several months ago I embarked on a search to replace my beloved trench.

I had two criteria for a new coat - just two: It had to have a hood, and it had to have a removable liner. And I guess there was an unspoken third criterion: It couldn't cost the equivalent of a car payment. I don't have a car payment right now, and I'm not about to spend that kind of money on something that doesn't even have cupholders.

This has been a surprisingly difficult quest. It's taken months. I just couldn't find a trench coat that met my (I thought) pretty basic requirements. I was reminded of an old Sesame Street skit where a lady is shopping for a blue furry coat. First the salesperson shows her a coat that's furry but not blue, then one that's blue but not furry. Just as she's about to give up, along comes Cookie Monster, who of course is furry and blue. Delighted, she ends up wearing him out of the store, and yeah, that's actually pretty damn weird, isn't it?

Well, the other night I finally found my Cookie Monster. I took the drastic step of going to the mall (which was a pretty sad experience, a topic for another post) and combing through the coat racks at various brick-and-mortar stores. And at last, there it was: Lining, removable. Hood, present and also removable. Brand: London Fog (which wasn't a requirement, but still a score). Color: Classic Columbo tan. Buttons: All able to close without making muffled groaning sounds.

The price was...OK, it was more than I was hoping to spend. On the other hand, when I amortized it over the next 20 years, it was almost ridiculously affordable. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So I finally have a sweet new three-season coat (ain't nobody wearing a coat in Texas in July, and it doesn't rain anyway). It only took six months and a pile of my disposable income to find it. But it's almost perfect. If only it came with cookies...

A Post with Teeth in It

Today's post is inspired by my friend and fellow blogger Allie Cat.

The other day on her IRL Facebook page, she mentioned in passing that she was given her wisdom teeth when she had them removed. You know, as a souvenir.

Take some home for your friends.

Sidebar: I am also in possession of my wisdom teeth. They're in the back of my mouth. My body also contains my tonsils, appendix, and other original equipment. I didn't come into this world with much, but I plan on leaving with all of it intact.

Anyhoo, Allie Cat's post got me thinking about teeth. Specifically, Precocious Daughter's teeth. More specifically, the fact that I have a box of her baby teeth. And it got me wondering: Is that weird?

I don't have all of them. Apparently we human types lose about 20 baby teeth en route to the 32 grownup choppers we all end up with. I have eight of PDaughter's (and yes, I had to pull out the box o' teeth to count them). This means that at some point I made a conscious decision to start keeping the teeth the Tooth Fairy retrieved from under her pillow. 

We're very close.

Why did I decide to start hoarding baby teeth instead of chucking them after trading them for a dollar? Why do I do anything?

Confidentially, PDaughter had terrible baby teeth. She got her father's teeth. I mean not literally, that would be grosser than keeping them in a box. Just dental health-wise. One of the baby teeth I kept has a silver crown on it. I vaguely remember that she somehow cracked a molar when she was a wee thing. Obviously there was no point in putting a fancy porcelain crown on a tooth that was destined to be ejected from her head, so the dentist gave her a pirate tooth. Come to think of it, it might be that I decided to save that particularly shiny specimen when it fell out and just collected them from that point forward.

Anyway, unlike Allie Cat, PDaughter was not given her wisdom teeth to keep when she had them out. But I do have several videos of her coming down from the laughing gas, which are an even better and far more hilarious keepsake. And less weird than a box of baby teeth.

But let's be clear. I'm keeping the box of teeth. Bite me.

Let's Just Give This Nonsense Another Try

 Happy 2023!

In keeping with the situation, I'm sure.

Drunkards, I haven't posted here in almost a year and a half, and I'm really, really sorry about that. Surely I'm more sorry I haven't written a post than you are that you haven't read a post. I get that. 

But because I should care more about whether I'm writing than about who might possibly read my words, I need to get back at it. And here in the year of our arbitrary timekeeping mechanism 2023, I'm going to try.

To start off, just a brief anecdote. 

My Precocious Daughter, who was in, I think, the fourth grade when I started this blog, graduated from high school third in her class and is now a graduate student in a Very Large City. I'm so freaking proud of her, you guys, and I miss having her around. She's been home for the holidays, which has been wonderful. (More on me being an empty nester in a future post.)

Lol, the eggs have long since fled this nest, though.

When she got here, shortly before Christmas, she still had one final paper to write, which she banged out over a couple of days, with all the frenzied energy of a graduate student who has left their final paper to the very last moment. Although I never went to grad school, I remember the energy required to make those deadlines as an undergrad. I remember actually having that energy. Wild.

Anyway, although PDaughter is working on a degree in High-Tech Whizbang Stuff (the actual name in the catalog, I believe), she also is taking film classes, being a film junkie of the highest order. Her final paper was in this area. She let me read it when it was finished.

Damn.

My kid can write.

Like, she's a better writer than I am.

The paper was a review of a movie I feel confident few of you have seen, by a director I feel confident few of you are familiar with, in the context of a critical framework I feel few of you have considered. I'm not being condescending to any of you amazing readers, I'm just saying that this paper was...niche. But PDaughter nailed it, and it was interesting and informative even to me, who felt pretty much in over her head while reading it.

I am delighted that my kid is a talented writer. I'm also fucking mortified that I've allowed age and stress and discouragement and alcohol to turn me away from the one thing in my life that I've ever been good at. 

Other than composing for the theremin.
Wait, that wasn't me.

So I'm going to give this blogging thing another shot. Please be patient if I start off slowly. There might even be a few Best Of posts while I figure out if I'm capable of reconnecting to my writerly self.

Oh, and there may be poetry. It's the only thing I've written on a semi-regular basis over the last 18 months. (The one I've linked to is much older than that, however.)

And monkeys. Because I still love monkeys.

And I love all of you. Let's do this.

Intern-al Fortitude

 Here's a story from real life.

We have a big crop of interns at my office this summer. This is actually the first company I've ever worked for that has an intern program, and it's substantial. Every year our HR department recruits heavily from colleges in and around Texas. They vet these kids almost as stringently as regular hires and pay them well. As a result, many of them end up doing multiple internship stints with us while they're in school and joining the company full-time when they graduate.

Allow me a middle-aged lady moment: Every year these damn kids get younger and younger.

Coming soon: This.

I mean, this is objectively true. Earlier this year, I onboarded our first recently graduated full-time hire who was born the same year as my Precocious Daughter (who is a college senior but a late-month baby). Within a year some of our new hires are guaranteed to be younger than she is. And these college interns obviously are even more embryonic than that.

OK, so they're not getting younger. The gap in our ages is widening because I'm getting older. There, I said it. Shut up.

Anyway, we have a bunch of interns roaming around the office this summer, and to me they're mostly indistinguishable white boys of medium height with brown hair. Half the time I have to literally stop and check myself before I speak to them to make sure I'm calling them by the right name. I have the same issue with our African-American interns. We only have one female intern this year, so to amuse itself my brain gets her confused with all the other young women on the team she's assigned to.

How God created Gen Z, probably.

Again, this is not a "they all look alike" thing. This is a "they all look alike to me because my aging brain increasingly classifies people not by race or ethnicity but by whether they're old enough to remember when MTV played music videos" thing.

MTV, by the way, turned 40 last weekend and I didn't write about it because everyone else was writing about it and also it's depressing as shit.

And really it's just time to move on. 
Sorry, 1980s.

As I said, the best of these kids will leave us next week with job offers in hand, or with invitations to return as interns if they're not seniors. Some will accept, some will decline or say they'd like to think about it. If you haven't heard, the labor market is tighter than a Kardashian's forehead right now, and all the leverage is on the candidates' side, especially in my industry. As my boss likes to point out, today's young adults were in grade school the last time we had a major recession. They think having a plethora of opportunities is the norm. They'll inevitably find out differently, but for now they're riding high on feeling wanted and needed.

I give you the next generation, marching
confidently into the workforce.

I'm not usually privy to which interns are being tendered job offers until after the fact. My job begins when they show up for their first day of work. So I was a little surprised when my boss gave me a heads-up that the company had taken the unusual step of explicitly telling one of the interns that he was not being offered a job. Because this kid - we'll call him Ian - had taken the news badly, and my boss wanted me to keep an eye on him for the duration of his tenure with us.

Ian is a nice guy. All of the interns are nice, good people, or at least do a convincing job of acting that way to leave a positive impression. That's kind of a no-brainer. But Ian is a chronic Mansplainer Junior Grade. He compulsively inserts himself into every conversation to drop knowledge on whatever the subject is, usually conversations he's not even a part of. It's not done with any particular malice or arrogance, he's just reflexively young and stupid, which is why he's only a junior grade.

My interactions with Ian are all on a personal level, because we don't do the same job. So I can easily figuratively pat him on the head and ignore his interjections. But apparently he's taken the same know-it-all approach to his work. That hasn't gone over well with the older and more experienced team members who have done their best to mentor and coach him this summer. I guess "mansplainer" is a misnomer - there aren't even any women on his team. He talks this way to everybody.

If Ian were a New Yorker cartoon.

And when the hiring powers-that-be went looking for input on how the interns were performing, his team didn't hold back. It wasn't that Ian was chronically blunt and tactless. It wasn't that he didn't listen to instructions. It wasn't that he always claimed to know a better way of doing things than anybody had ever thought of. It was that he was the complete package of insufferability, and no one wanted to work with him.

Now my boss is, let's say, not a passive person. He is proactive and straightforward in a way I will never be, which is why he probably makes more each quarter than I make in a year. He earns it. So he didn't simply take the words of Ian's team under advisement and quietly strike him off the job-offer list. He sat Ian down and told him exactly why he wasn't being asked to return after graduation. It was the kindest possible thing my boss could have done. But I'm cringing down to my last non-confrontational neuron just thinking of that conversation.

Not many people know I was the model
for this emoji.

Ian, as I said, didn't take it well. My boss gave him honest, specific critiques of his work style, and Ian flat-out refused to accept them. He - talk about cringey behavior - he called HR demanding to know the real reason he wasn't being offered a job. HR called my boss and said, basically, "WTF with this kid?" So my boss sat him down again and explained how things were. Same conversation, same reaction. That's when my boss asked me to keep an eye on Ian. Not that he thought the kid was going to go postal or anything (although today, who knows?), but it would be in keeping with Ian's personality to badger every member of his team into revealing who ratted him out. Of course, "who" was everyone and "ratted him out" was reporting the obvious when asked. But you couldn't tell him that.

We don't need that kind of energy at work, especially not from a twenty-something bigmouth with no self-awareness.

This.

So I've been observing. Ian did in fact seem somewhat mollified. He was quiet and kept to himself. This lasted about a day. Then, his self-imposed period of reflection apparently completed to his satisfaction, he went right back to internsplaining to everyone around him. And as soon as he did, he seemed much happier. That is dedication to your limitations right there.

I hope that in a year, or five years, or even further down the road, Ian will look back and realize that, as humiliating as it was at the time, his rejection was the best thing that could have happened to him. That it made him more humble and mature and helped him find his ultimate path. I wouldn't place a bet on it, however. 

There's no real moral to this story, or advice, or even a clever ending. You guys should be used to that by now. I just wanted to share a tale of observing a mediocre white man in his larval stage. They apparently are nowhere near extinction.

Harry Potter and the Craft-Beer Family Reunion

 You guys, I got to enjoy a pretty amazing night out this week.

Turns out I like enjoying stuff.

Well, we finally had a meet-up this week, and just in time, as it looks like the Delta variant and the large numbers of vaccine-resistant morons may be tag-teaming to put us all back in isolation. Never has a single virus so accurately identified the lowest common denominator of an entire society. Well done, SARS-CoV-2. If only you hadn't taken so many good and wise people while you were at it.

No, it's right in front of us.

I've missed my family soooo much. Other than my Precocious Daughter, I hadn't seen any of my relatives in person since before the pandemic roared to life in early 2020. I spent over a year having to encounter potentially infectious total strangers in grocery stores and at work - OK, my co-workers technically aren't strangers, but I don't know what any of these people do outside the office, and for all I know they bathe in Covid juice every day - but out of an abundance of caution I declined to expose my loved ones to any of my secondary contacts.

But I digress.

A group of six of us (seven, if you count my niece's very good doggo who is in training to be a service dog) grabbed a bite to eat and then went to a local craft beer place. Not my usual scene at all, but it had the advantage of having a huge outdoor seating area. It was quite crowded - even in non-pandemic times, I would have been twitchy at the sheer number of people jammed together, because people, ugh. Fortunately, we grabbed a table in the farthest backest corner of the place. The nearest people were eight feet away, and the majority of the crowd was considerably farther than that beyond an empty grassy area. Other than the bit where we had to weave through the sea of humanity to get to that table, I felt quite comfortable in our remote spot.

I didn't have anything to drink, because beer is not my thing. I did have a sip of what the others were having, and let me tell you - creamsicle-flavored beer is not a thing that should exist, in my opinion. Sometimes, when I wonder if I have a drinking problem, I remember the episode of "Family Ties" in which a young Tom Hanks portrays an alcoholic by chugging a bottle of vanilla extract to satisfy his craving for sweet, sweet, booze, and now I can honestly say that if I were crawling across the desert sands dying of thirst while simultaneously in the throes of the DTs, I would pass on creamsicle-flavored beer, so no I don't think I have a drinking problem, thank you very much.

This run-on sentence is brought to you by all kinds of 
questionable choices.

Anyway, we all sat and talked and had a great time being together. We also very much enjoyed the fact that we happened to be there on "Harry Potter Trivia Night." We actually had walked over to this particular watering hole because we'd heard they were doing trivia, and we thought that it might be fun to wander over and maybe participate in a few rounds, even though none of us are exactly Potterheads.

Uh, no.

This was serious business. This was a highly organized, team-based tournament of very competitive nerds. In fact, we learned that the Harry Potter trivia was the sole reason for the large crowd, and on a typical Thursday night there would have been only a small fraction of the people in attendance. So instead of being casual participants, we got to be spectators at a vastly entertaining spectacle.

This was not "What was the name of Harry's owl?"-level trivia. Oh, no. I am not kidding when I say that one of the questions required one to know that in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry's personal prophecy orb was located in exactly the 97th row of shelves in the Hall of Prophecy. I could have gone happily to my grave not knowing that bit of information, and I'll probably forget it long before I do, but there were people here who knew it and were deadly serious about knowing it.

On a good day I can name upwards of three Weasleys.

Now, such a dedicated bunch of half-drunk wizarding fanatics deserves an exceptional master of ceremonies. And the lady running the trivia tournament was that and more. Imagine Roz from Monsters, Inc., only spouting Harry Potter trivia and berating teams for their choice of names ("'Snapes on a Plane' is not nearly as clever as you think it is!'"). The best part is that she seemed to truly consider her role a sacred responsibility and was not having an enjoyable time at all. At one point I realized I probably sound a lot like her when I'm trying to run a lunch meeting at work. It was glorious.

At the end of the night (early, because most of us had to go to work in the morning) we all promised to get together again in August. I hope it happens. PDaughter starts her senior year of college in August, and my nephew starts a new job, and we might all be wearing masks and washing our groceries again by then anyway. But I'm hopeful, because I really love my family.

Maybe next time there will be a few more Muggles at the bar.

Let It Slide

 I was going to rant about how I'm currently in Twitter jail. For a whole week. I could have appealed it, because it's completely bogus and I've discovered that Twitter frequently suspends people for completely bogus reasons.

Not Margie Four-toes, however. 
She should be suspended frequently - preferably from a flagpole
by  her freakish feet..

But honestly, it's nice to have a break from the Twittersphere. Most of the time I have to restrain myself from saying totally inappropriate things over there, so a few days of not even having the option is good for me. (Again, what got me booted was not inappropriate, unless you have a problem with the phrase "choke on a bag of d*cks.")

Still, I was going to go on a tear here about the humorous injustice of it all, poor me, etc. 

But then I saw this blog post from my friend-I've-never-met ChrisW. And I decided to share a much gentler story instead. 

If clicking on links to support other people's writing isn't your thing (which it should be *stares meaningfully*), Chris' post is about playgrounds. That's all. Just a short history and a couple of anecdotes about kids' playgrounds. His writing is always charming, and today's words were no exception. 

I love playgrounds - the kind with swings and slides and jungle gyms. My elementary school in Milwaukee had a playground that consisted of a large expanse of blacktop. It had a painted-on baseball diamond with a chain-link backstop in one corner, a small basketball court (with a hoop that perpetually lacked a net) in another, and various other painted-on features like four-squares and hopscotches and a hundred-yard running track. The only real playground equipment was behind the school, actually a couple of hundred feet off school property. And yes, we kids were allowed to traipse over there, unsupervised, to play on the swings et. al. during lunch. Such were the 70s.

And of course, it had one of these wonderful nightmares.

When Precocious Daughter was small, one of my greatest joys was taking her to the park near our house, which had an amazing playground. Multiple slides, huge climbing structures, those spring-mounted animals that you ride/bounce on, swings for days. All much better built and safer than the sharp metal death traps of my childhood. And there I was, a woman in my 30s, with carte blanche to play on all of it in the name of being a good mom. I was in heaven. 

Most parents indulge their kids with trips to the playground. After several years those roles definitely reversed. I'm sure PDaughter eventually recognized that she was being used as an excuse for me to climb on the jungle gym a couple of times a week. As always, she indulged me.

Not gonna lie, I miss the playground. I'm sure I'm not the only adult, whose children are grown but haven't yet produced children of their own, who wishes they had a reason - an excuse - to frequent the local playground without looking like a creep. In fact, I'm positive. And here's how I know.

There's a park about a block from where I currently live. It's just a small square of grass and trees, formed by the haphazard intersection of streets in a residential neighborhood. It's got a tennis court (that doubles as a basketball half-court by virtue of having a hoop erected at one end), a couple of benches, a picnic table or two, a swingset, and a small play structure to climb on.

Because this part of the neighborhood is built on a slope, the eastern edge of the park sits at the bottom of a small hill. The town thoughtfully built a stairway into the hill that descends from the street on that side to the playground below. It's not more than a dozen or so steps, but it saves (grown-up) people from having to either walk around or stutter-step down the slope.

But that's not all there is. Because someone - some city planner with a sense of humor or a big heart, or probably both - also built a slide into the side of the hill, smack-dab in the center of the concrete steps.

It's just a broad, flat piece of shiny metal set flush into the earth. If you're walking by, it might take you a moment to realize that it's meant to be an alternative approach to taking the stairs, if you're so inclined. Then you see that yes, you can park your butt on the top of the hill, give yourself a little scootch, and slide your way down to the playground.

The local park. The top of the slide is in the center 
of the picture.

I've lived a short walk from this park for almost six years. Needless to say, I've never used those stairs. 

Why walk when you can slide?

Thanks to the anonymous architect of that slide, who realized that adults might want to play - to look silly but not creepy. And to ChrisW, who gave me something to write about other than faux internet-based outrage.

Faith in humanity restored. For today.

Are We Doing Things Again?

Just a short post today, Drunkards. Because something very unusual has happened. 

I'm overbooked today.

Unfortunately, none of it involves madly typing at my computer, which would mean I was spending my Saturday writing. But I'm never not going to use the "cat typing" gif if I can possibly shoehorn it into a post.

I used to be a relatively busy person. Now and again I'll see a Facebook memory where I talk about what a busy day I was planning to have/was having/had. Facebook has become a cesspool of trolls and grumpy acquaintances offering indistinguishable bad takes on silly topics, and I mostly stay away from it these days. But at its best it was a useful chronicle of the 2010s, which were a decade of me being a mom, a wife, a homeowner, a person with some vague notions of having a "career" rather than a job, even a social life. 

Lol, nope, never that. But in retrospect, I had a typical suburban schedule of school activities and DIY projects at home and keeping up with friends and family. I was - not all the time but much of the time - busy.

Gradually my life has slowed down and my world has gotten smaller. It started when I got divorced, which lopped off an entire half a family's worth of social responsibilities (no regerts). It continued with Precocious Daughter graduating from high school and the end of being Marching Band Mom, Karate Mom, etc. Then, of course, the pandemic hit, and even for a homebody like me, normal life became truncated and isolated for a while. 

I'm not going to say that life has picked up where it left off yet, at least not for me. Things like going to the movies, attending concerts, etc. are probably still weeks if not months in my future. I'm not 100% sure they're safe, and I'm 200% sure it's going to take my hermit brain more time to be comfortable around that many people again. Your mileage may vary. I wasn't a fan of crowds or a social butterfly before COVID hit, so while I missed those things when they were taken away, I also adapted very easily to staying home and doing nothing.

Happy little potato, that's me.

Still, there are signs that the old modes of living are returning, for better or for worse. And so today I actually have a - oh, what's that word? - a schedule. Ugh. And it starts with me having to be somewhere at 10:00 a.m. on a freaking Saturday. For a work-related event, of all things. That involves being outside in the Texas heat and humidity and pretending to enjoy myself. I'm sweating on multiple levels just thinking about it.

Then I'm meeting a friend to help him pick out curtains. In an honest-to-glob store. Stores selling things other than toilet paper and lunchmeat still exist in 2021, I'm told. If I'm lucky, I'll have time to go home and shower in between these events. Or not. This excursion may turn out to be a future post if it goes entertainingly enough. Stay tuned. 

Afterwards I have to get home in time to clean up myself and my apartment for Drummer Boy, who is coming over around 5:00. Probably I should stop at the grocery store, too. Drummer Boy likes fresh half-and-half for his coffee on Sunday morning. 

Now, that last part is by far the best part of today's schedule and is what will sustain me through the rest of it. But it still involves managing my time on a scale I haven't had to deal with in more than a year. My normal Saturday schedule in the pandemic era involves clicking "yes" when the TV asks me if I'm still watching, which is so judgmental, if you ask me. You'd think the TV would be happy to be of service. Everybody's a critic.

Anyway. That's my Saturday, which may not sound terribly hectic but is a lot for someone like me who thought we had all agreed to stay home and never interact again. Now I have to shave my legs and everything. 

Do I even have that many tea lights? Do I have to do my nails first? Can my leg actually assume that position? Look, this is getting complicated, so I'll leave you here. 

Whatever your Saturday looks like, Drunkards, make it a good one. 

A Place for My Money, A Place for My Time

Here's a little story about principal and interest, and the economy of time.

Chapter I: The Past 

The company I work for IRL used to offer a traditional benefit of paid vacation and sick days. An employee of less than five years' tenure (like me) would accrue 10 vacation days and six sick days per annum. Sick days were "use it or lose it," but vacation days rolled over to the next year if you didn't use them all. If you left the company, any unused vacation would be paid out to you in cash. Pretty standard stuff in the U.S.

If you stuck around the company for a few decades, you would eventually accrue something like six weeks of vacation a year, most of which you were probably too "indispensable" at work to use. (In other words, if you hopped on a conference call while you were "on vacation," that day magically became work time instead of vacation time. Tenure has its perks.) And under this system, there was no upper limit to the amount of vacation time you could accrue. And so the company routinely saw people retire after 20 or 30 years of service with literally months of unused vacation hours saved up, which they received in a lump sum on their last day. That time was paid out at their most recent pay rate, by the way, even if they'd accrued it when their salary was considerably lower. Quite a tidy payout.

For readers outside the U.S.: Yes, I know this model is inconceivable to you. Yes, our paid time off is pathetic compared to what your country provides. Yes, I know your government mandates a certain level of paid time off and doesn't leave it up to the whims of individual companies. I have the internet. Thank you for your concern.

Chapter II: Accounting

Fun Fact - Accrued vacation time is considered a financial liability. It's a debt on the company books. Large companies (and at least one bloated former POTUS) may routinely operate from a position of indebtedness, leveraging it in ways I don't really understand nor care to, because business is stupid. But to a smaller, privately held company like my employer, that kind of debt may not be useful or attractive, and there are also tax implications that again I don't give a flip about but they do.

The upshot is that as my company grew, its liabilities grew. And as it has always prided itself on cultivating long-term employees, it had to find a way to manage a potential debt of millions of dollars of unpaid vacation time.   

Therefore, a policy change was made.

Chapter III: The Present

Last year my company went to a PTO system. Instead of accruing a little annual sick time that expired and a little vacation time that didn't, we now get a "bucket" of time off that can be used to cover vacation, illness, doctor's appointments, bugging out early on Friday, etc. For me, that amount is currently 160 hours, or four weeks a year. 

It's twice as much time as I was getting under the old system, which basically means twice as much time that I rarely get to use because every hour of vacation means an hour of playing catchup when I return. Being indispensable has its downside. Unfortunately, the days of stockpiling months of time (or salary) are now gone. Under the new system, only 120 hours of unused PTO roll over from year to year. No matter how long we work there, no one will ever accrue more than three weeks of paid time off. So much for saving up time for a three-month backpacking tour of Europe. And for younger employees, so much for an extended paid maternity or paternity leave. 

Like most American companies, when my employers say "benefit," it means there's a benefit to them. 

On the other hand, if I end up with more than 120 hours of PTO at the end of the year, the excess time doesn't just go away. I get it in cash, just like the old system, except I don't have to leave the company to earn the payout, and it's never going to be a windfall of months' worth of salary. Fair enough.

Or, in my case, more than fair, if I play my cards right.

Chapter IV: The Goal

This past week I reached an important milestone at my place of employment: I achieved a stockpile of 120 hours of PTO. I started accruing time mid-2020, when the new system began. There wasn't enough calendar time to reach 120 hours, so it all rolled over. I've also taken a couple of random days off in 2021. Now, with just over six months left in the year, I've reached the point where every hour of earned PTO represents a potential cash payout.

In other words, those 120 accrued hours are now principal, and they're simply earning interest until the end of 2021.

I'll accrue another 80 hours of PTO between now and December. If I don't take any more time off, I'll get it back in cash at the end of the year. That's assuming I don't need to take sick days, of course, which I can't totally control. But I'm more than willing to forego any voluntary time off for the rest of this year. Even if I end up being sick for a full week at some point, that still leaves me a payout of 40 hours to look forward to. And I'll go into next year with the same 120 PTO hours in the vault.

I don't plan on touching my 120 hours of principal. Ever.

Chapter V: The Future

Starting in 2022, I'll earn 160 hours of PTO over and above my banked time. That means I can take a full two weeks off and still get a cash payout of two weeks' salary at the end of the year. After I've been with the company for five years, I'll get an extra week of PTO, which means either an extra week of time or an extra week of pay every year. I'm guessing I'll choose the money most years, and here's why.

You guys, barring a lottery win, I plan to retire in 14 years. I'm in nest-feathering mode. I'm not planning any long vacations or sabbaticals, because my focus is on trying to make up for the years when I was married and wasn't able to save. Five years ago I exited my marriage without a dime to my name. Right now my net worth just scrapes six figures. That's not very much for where I am in my lifespan. I don't expect to live to a ripe old age, but I would like to have a few years of comfortable retirement with my darling Drummer Boy and a little nest egg to leave to Precocious Daughter.

Thanks to my employer's PTO policy, and my admitted lack of a life, I can give myself a 4% bonus every year provided I stay healthy and employed. I can invest it and make even more. I can't dwell on where I'd be now if I'd been able to do this in my 30s instead of in my 50s. This is all about the path I'm on, not the ditch I've had to crawl out of.

Epilogue

There's every chance that my plan won't pan out the way I've envisioned it. The economy could tank, my employers could change their policy to close the loophole I'm counting on, or the trickster god could throw any number of flies into my ointment. That's life. 

But hell, I'm going for it while I can.

Five Years (What a Surprise)

 This Monday marks five years since my divorce was final. 

And now this song will be in my head all day, of course. There are worse fates.

(It's been five years since we lost David Bowie, too. Wow, 2016 really did suck, didn't it?)

To prepare for writing about this milestone, I've spent the last hour or so re-reading old posts from the days, months, and actually years leading up to it. If you don't know or have forgotten, three and a half years elapsed between the time my ex and I separated and the day the divorce decree was signed. I'd love to say it was because our extensive empire of assets, holdings, and bank vaults filled with money took time to be equitably split. But no. It was mostly because even the smallest of worlds can become vast and treacherous when you're navigating toward the exit.

Anyway, those posts are all archived under the "Divorce" tag on the right side of the page if you want to peruse them. I get that reading about somebody else's divorce may not be the most compelling thing in the world - especially if, as in my case, there aren't a lot of publicly available juicy details - but as for me, I'm damn glad those chronicles exist. I had forgotten, deliberately or otherwise, a lot of the stuff I'd written down. Re-living some of those moments has been instructive and emotional. 

On the whole, this is a happy anniversary for me. Of all the bass-ackward things I've done in my life, the most significant was becoming an old married lady without ever having been a young single lady.

It's nearly impossible to Google "single lady"
without getting a picture of Beyonce, so here's
a random picture of a snake in a combat helmet
instead. (RIP, Gandalf the White)

Over the last five years, I've done a lot of things I feel I should have done much earlier in life, like figuring out my own taste in decorating (which turns out to involve a lot of skeletons), putting myself on a budget and learning how to save, motivating myself (and taking responsibility when I don't), and just generally being comfortable in my own skin. I'm not saying I've been wildly successful in each of  these endeavors. But as I cruise through my fifties, I've finally put in the work that I probably should have done in my twenties. 

I'm like Thornton Melon, but again, not wealthy.

Of course, my biggest and best accomplishment - and the reason I would never, ever, actually go back in time and change any of the things I think I've done wrong - is my Precocious Daughter. She'll be a senior in college this Fall, and while I worry constantly that I've screwed up her life in a thousand ways as collateral damage of my own screwups, I'm so proud of the person she's become. I'm not sure she'll ever know how much she helped me through the dark days of the divorce, by being strong and happy and inspiring but also by needing me to be there for her. Like most parents, when I stop to think of all the ways I've failed her I go a little crazy. But then I see what she's become in spite of that, which really is a mark of successful parenting that a lot of us don't embrace as much as we should. 

Any kid who never looked at their parents and thought, "Nah, I don't want to go there" probably didn't turn out as well as they might appear to be from the outside.

Never forget that in the Brady Bunch universe,
Marcia growing up to have a drinking problem
is canon.

This is not the post I meant to write today. I meant it to be funnier, and sillier, and have more advice on how to be a happily divorced person in a world that in many ways really only wants to hear about being happy in a traditional marriage. Oh, well. I'm no stranger to things not going the way I planned them to be. Obviously.

(On that note, here's a post I wrote when I was married about another writer's [ridiculous] definition of a good vs. a bad marriage. It's pretty hilarious, and I recommend all my happily married friends feel free to ignore its advice.)

Maybe I'll write the funny, silly post later. Or maybe I'll spend the rest of the day hanging out with the Siamese Kitten and looking for new skeletons to add to my decor.

Whatever you do today, Drunkards, do it happily. 

Discuss

 As of this week, I'm fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Technically, I'm still in the "two weeks before the vaccine is fully effective" phase. But I've been jabbed twice.

My side effects were minimal. A sore arm both times. That's all. I feel fortunate.

Precocious Daughter also got her second jab this week. That makes me happy. Coincidentally, she finished up her junior year of college on the same day she got the shot, and I now have confidence that she'll be able to enjoy a mostly normal senior year. The last fifteen months or so have been tough on her, far more so than on me. In fact, the biggest hardship I've suffered as a result of the pandemic has been watching her struggle and not being able to provide much help.

As an aside, when I started writing this little blog PDaughter was just starting fourth grade, and now she's about to be a senior in college. I can't process that right now, other than to marvel at how much she's changed while I've merely transitioned from early middle-age to somewhat later middle-age.

Anyway, I'm not really writing about any of those things today. I'm just putting them down here so I can deal with them later.

In fact, I'm not really writing about anything today. I'm just making a list of things I might write about later. I'm giving myself permission to do that, because my concentration isn't great this morning. Maybe that's a side effect of the vaccine, after all. 

So here are some ideas I might flesh out later. Comments are welcome.

1. I bought some temporary wallpaper a couple of months ago in hopes of creating an accent wall in my apartment. I've been hesitant to put it up because it will likely be a comedy of errors. That could result in an entertaining post and a really crappy-looking accent wall. Is it worth it? Discuss.

2. I got a small raise at my IRL job this week. I earmarked most of it to increasing my 401(k) contribution. My life is just that dull. Also, this might allow me to retire nearly a month earlier than I originally planned. FML.

3. Last week I commented on one of Maureen McCormick's tweets, and she liked and replied to it. Marcia Brady, you guys. I plotzed. Also, the tweet I replied to featured one of the best gifs I've ever seen:

4. Have you seen those commercials featuring people who were born in 1996, saying that that was the last year comprehensive Internet regulations were passed? Those people are 25 years old and have never known life without the Internet. Meanwhile, 1996 was the year I established my first personal email account and created my first online presence, which eventually morphed into this very virtual rag you're reading now. For the record, I support updating those regulations, and also I am old.

5. Also, on the topic of adding to my apartment decor, I'd like to add to my collection of decorative bones. My last addition was a monkey skeleton (fake, but realistic). What should I get? Discuss.

6. My balcony-garden spinach is growing like gangbusters, thanks to a combination of sunny days and seasonal rainstorms. I'm still not posting pictures because I don't want to jinx it. But if I ever get to harvest any of it, I'll write 1,000 words on the joys of a really fine spinach salad.

7. Last but not least: I've achieved six months without drinking, but at the same time my sugar cravings have returned after a seven-year hiatus. I'm wondering if I should swap vices. Discuss.

And here's a random picture so my link will be more interesting:

(Photo by Oleg Doroshenko)

The Camembert Necessities

One morning, a four-ounce round of Camembert cheese mysteriously appeared in my refrigerator.

Hopefully, this doesn't turn out be the opening line of a cheese-based horror story.

Cheese Part 3: The Cheesening.

In fact, this just happened. I went into the fridge to make coffee this morning, and there it was.

Sidebar: Do you keep ground coffee in the refrigerator? I do, but I'm not sure it's a good idea. Coffee snobs says you shouldn't, but coffee snobs also say coffee beans picked out of the dung of a mongoose are worth $300 a pound, so fuck those guys. My coffee is in a sealed metal container, not absorbing the flavors or smells of my leftovers or anything. Although pepperoni pizza-infused coffee could be amazing. 

But I digress.

So there's this little package of Camembert cheese on the middle shelf of my fridge. I immediately assumed Drummer Boy had brought it, because he arrived last night bearing his usual complement of groceries. The man is congenitally unable to spend a weekend at my place without bringing 12 days' worth of food. He must have been a Jewish grandmother in a previous life. I take more of a just-in-time approach to food inventory, while he's more of a Doomsday prepper if Doomsday involved all the world's discounted holiday candy needing to be saved from destruction.

Me, I'd want to save all the brightly colored
goo in jars.

But to my surprise, Drummer Boy has disavowed all knowledge of the small round of Camembert. He said he assumed I had bought it. I recently discarded a carton of eggs that had been wasting away in the fridge since Thanksgiving, yet he thinks I'm stocking up on specialty French cheeses. What can I say, he completes me.

My only clue as to the origin of the Mystery Cheese is that it has an expiration date of the end of this month. According to the Internet of Cheese, Camembert has a shelf life of four to eight weeks. I assume the higher the quality, the shorter the life expectancy. This is not a high-quality Camembert, you guys. I'm no turophile (this is a thing), but I'm guessing the finest specimens of Camembert de Normandie don't come in a cardboard box with a "serving suggestion" photo on the front. Anyway, the expiration date suggests that this little fromage entered my home sometime in the last two months. 

That's actually...not a helpful clue at all. Did you know that we're in the middle of a pandemic? You may have heard about it. It consumed the entirety of 2020, like a dude in a cheap alien costume from a bad 50s sci-fi movie. 

Coronavirus, not wearing an approved mask
or practicing social distancing.

And despite hopeful signs, it's been held over into 2021. That means my hermitlike existence, already approaching legendary status, has only solidified while I wait for the helpful effects of mass vaccination, widespread acquired immunity, and the deaths of stupid people to take hold. In other words, if I didn't bring the cheese into my home, and Drummer Boy didn't bring it, that just doesn't leave a large pool of people who have actually visited me in the recent past.

The most likely suspect is Precocious Daughter, who comes over on a semi-regular basis and actually stayed with me for a week back in March. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any circumstance under which she'd surreptitiously leave a four-ounce Camembert cheese in my refrigerator. On the other hand, it never occurred to me that my only offspring might ask her best friend to tattoo Johnny Depp on her leg, so life is full of surprises. 

I'm happy to report this is not that tattoo.

Getting back to the mystery cheese: What exactly does one do with Camembert? I've never actually eaten it. Referring again to the Internet of Cheese, apparently it works well on a charcuterie board, which is reason enough to ignore that option. No one needs another fancy name for serving random food on a cutting board, ma'am. It's freaking cheese and crackers and whatever was on sale in the deli case. If any food concept was dreamed up to provide a lazy option for the office Secret Santa gift exchange, it's the charcuterie board.

But apparently Camembert can be baked, au naturel or wrapped in puff pastry. It gets gooey like Brie when warm, so it can also be added to fondue. I miss fondue. I have a vintage 70s fondue set that belonged to my grandmother - it's decorated with little mushrooms and everything. I would love to have a fondue night, but four ounces of Camembert hardly seems like enough to make a decent pot of cheese sauce, plus I'd have to buy all the other ingredients. It should come as no surprise that your faithful scribe, who isn't in the habit of buying Camembert cheese, also doesn't keep gruyere, gourmet mustard, or dry sherry on hand. I'd have to get rid of some of my pork and beans supply to make room for such staples. And, you know, priorities.

Remember when we ate communal food
and didn't worry about catching
anything worse than mild cooties?

I suspect that Monsieur Camembert's destiny is to be warmed up and served with crackers. I definitely plan to eat it, despite its mystery origins - I ain't scared of no cheese. If a friendly spirit left it for me, I don't want to be rude. If an unfriendly spirit left it, I don't want to show weakness. That's how they get you.

If I grow a third eye or start to speak in tongues after consuming it, I'll let you know. As the saying goes, what doesn't kill us gives us content. 

Recipe ideas and first-aid tips are welcome.