I have an enormous U-shaped desk in my office. It is far too fancy for me, but it is what they thought I needed when we moved to our new building in July.
I am a messy person who knows where any and all the documents are in the piles on my desk. Please don’t make me clean up. It ruins my organizational strategy. The larger my desk, the more and bigger the paper piles on it.
In one corner of my desk I have the collection of figures you see in the header photo. I got the Freud bobble head from my son. The red puppet I got in Bremen Schnoor district. He reminds me of Tyll Ulenspiegel. The vampire tomtens I got from my daughter. I have no idea where the Viking came from. I have no idea what people think about them, or what they think about me when they see them. I sort of wish people would ask.
What did or does your work desk look like? How did you make your desk reflect you who you are?
Ash Wednesday service at our church is typically very well attended, many folks going who only go to church a couple of times a year. In accordance with Covid protocols, there is only a live stream of the service with no attendees. What, oh what about the imposition of ashes?
Our pastors are traveling around town today at various venues applying ashes to foreheads and reminding us we are dust and to to dust we shall return. I told our pastors they were no different than Door Dash delivery persons this year. They laughed, and regretted the cold weather. A high school buddy of mine, Mary Jo, now senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Fargo, is smudging people in their cars as they drive up into the church parking lot.
Mardi Gras was a bust in New Orleans this year, but I admire those who decorated their homes to emulate parade floats. I like the idea of Mardi Gras lights instead Christmas lights. Husband says we would have a demon cat with horns, along with trees, flowers, and vegetable plants in our driveway.
How did your family acknowledge Lent? Ever been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras? How would you decorate your house as a float?
My sister and I were blessed with two Christmases each year. Our mother was fanatical about the one that happened in December, so our Christmas celebrations were always over the top. Our other Christmas was a day in March when our father returned from the New York Toy Fair. Each years he took a train to New York while lugging huge boxes of samples of stuffed toys his company recently developed. On the last day of the fair, all the company reps dashed around swapping their samples for the samples of other toy makers. Daddy would come home lugging three storage cases filled with whatever he had been able to grab at the fair’s end. So wild was that last day exchange that even he didn’t know what he had been able to bag.
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We were lucky in other ways. Kids growing up in the 30s and 40s didn’t get many toys because of the Depression and the War. Then the nation was rocked by the great Baby Boom. It suddenly became profitable to sell toys in America. Suddenly homes had television sets, a new way to market toys to all those kids. Boys in the 50s were likely to play with cap guns and cowboy garb, while girls were expected to play with dolls. And then there were all the new toys that might appeal to boys or girls: Etch-A-Sketch, Slinky, kaleidoscopes, board games, View Master, card games, Mr. Potato Head, the nose flute and so many more.
My Teddy
Then, as now, toys frequently broke or went missing, so I have no memories of many. And yet I have a persistent emotional attachment to a few childhood toys. I dearly loved an old teddy bear. Although many cap guns came and went, some breaking almost the first time I used them, I owned one that made me supremely proud. I’ll talk about it a bit later. My luck with some toys went the other way. Getting an Erector set proved to me that I lacked the discipline required to create the impressive structures some boys assembled. A science kit pretty much showed me I was not meant to be a scientist.
How about you? What toys did you treasure when younger? Which of them claimed a permanent place in your heart?
Well, we have had non-stop national drama for the past four years, and I am so looking forward to a respite. I was imagining the other day what political figures I would cast in plays by Shakespeare, imagining who on the national scene would make a good Lear, Lady Macbeth, or Beatrice. The possibilities are endless and amusing, so go to it, Baboons!
What roles would you cast current national or international political figures in plays, movies, musicals, or operas? Don’t limit yourself to Shakespeare. What are your favorite political dramas or comedies?
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. He was born on this date in 1809. (So was Charles Darwin. What a year!) We only started to celebrate Presidents’ Day in 1971, when Washington ‘s and Lincoln’s birthdays were lumped together on the third Monday of February after Congress passed a law in 1968 to encourage more three day weekends. To capitalize on Presidents’ Day on Monday, I am taking today off and am thus giving myself a four day weekend.
I have determined that the only way I am going to make it through the next three and a half years of work is to take more time off. I have a sad history of reluctance to taking vacation or sick leave. Right now I have accrued 750 hours of sick leave and 200 hours of vacation time. It shouldn’t be a problem to take the odd day off now and then. I don’t quite understand my reluctance to stay home. Lutheran guilt? I identify too closely with The Little Engine That Could? Who knows? I only know that I am a more cheerful and productive person after a day off.
I love three day weekends, although it seems like work tends to pile up when Monday is a holiday. Tuesday through Friday seem exhausting on those weeks. Husband wants Juneteenth declared a holiday. That would be great, I think.
What new Monday holidays would you like to see declared? What are your memories of Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays when you were in elementary school?
My agency moved to a new building this summer. We have adjusted to the new space, and have worked on getting basic things like heating and cooling adjusted. One new feature of our building is the electronic security.
All the waiting rooms in the new building are separated from the offices by doors that can only be opened electronically by staff who have special fobs that allow entry into the labyrinth of offices beyond them. Sometimes the electronic doors work. Sometimes they don’t. They refuse to open for about 30 minutes each day. The doors that won’t open vary. It is intermittent. It happens daily. No one can figure it out. When it happens, we have to take circuitous routes through other doors so we can get to our offices.
One consistent problem is static. Because of all the locked doors and their metal openers, we employees get repetitive shocks every time we walk down the carpeted halls and touch the metal door mechanisms to open them. The shocks are painful. I suppose the low humidity in the building accounts for this, but it sure is annoying. I have to ground my body by touching the wooden door, and the then touching the metal opener. Sometimes I am in a hurry and I forget. Then I get a shock. It is tiresome.
Tell about some “interesting ” work environments you have had.
The wind chill advisory is scheduled to expire today at 11:00 am. It is still only going to be in the single digits the rest of the week, though, so no big warming trend.
I thought this would be a good day for jokes about the cold. I will start:
Two friends meet on the street “It sure was cold this morning.” “How cold was it?” I’m not sure, but I saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets!”
I am ashamed to admit it. This weekend I bought a box of Grapenuts when I didn’t need it. I was hoarding. It is all the fault of a recent news story that the Post company was having a hard time keeping up with demand for Grapenuts. People are apparently snarfing them down at an increased rate due to staying home so much. There is only one manufacturing plant for the cereal. It seems to require specialized manufacturing equipment on which the the Post company has a patent. There have apparently been Grape nut shortages across the country, and people are upset.
I don’t eat much cold cereal, but Grapenuts with milk and some golden raisins or currants are a big comfort food for me. I shudder at the lurid colors of the cereals I ate as a child at the urging of commercials on Saturday morning.
What were your favorite cereals as a child? What would you hoard if you thought there might be a shortage?
It is supposed to get bitterly cold here this weekend. Husband and I bought all the groceries we imagined needing for Saturday and Sunday on Friday night, and plan to hunker down, going out only on Sunday morning when we have to sing in the church choir. If there were more of us we would stay home, but a six voice choir can’t function with two missing members.
We have all been isolated for the last ten months, but there is something strangely satisfying being at home because of the weather. Snow days are wonderful, in my memory. It is when my mother made waffles from scratch.
What are some of your favorite snow day or bad weather day memories? How do you like to “Hunker down”?
Husband’s parents both grew up in eastern Ohio on the the border with Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He grew up eating far different foods than I did.
Husband loves mush, especially cornmeal mush and grits. His mother served it to him for breakfast. He doesn’t object if Cream of Wheat, Cream of Rice, or Maltomeal are on the menu, either. I can sometimes eat polenta, but the others are a real challenge. I think it is a texture issue on my part.
Last weekend, Husband made Scrapple, a Pennsylvania favorite, and his ultimate treat, since it combines cornmeal mush with pork. He used Julia Child’s recipe ( Who would have imagined she had a Scrapple recipe??) It is sort of yellowish brown. You can see it in the header photo. After it was baked and cooled, he sprinkled slices of it with cornmeal, fried them, and ate them with blueberry syrup. I just stay out of the kitchen when he gets it out. It is too weird for me.
What is the oddest food you have ever been served? What do you eat that others won’t eat? What food have you come to like that you never imagined you would?
