Author Archives: kzmclain

Thursday Thoughts

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I Can’t Find It Anywhere
One of the very many things I love about my Apple Watch is the function that allows me to easily find my phone. I seriously bet I use that function three or four times a day. The other day, I hit the button and heard the phone ding not far from where I was standing. I looked around the area for my phone, to no avail. I kept hitting the button and the phone kept binking. I walked from room to room, and I kept hearing the phone make its cheerful sound: Here I am! It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that no matter where I went, the phone always sounded close. Yes, friends, my phone was in my back pocket. I felt like the old people looking for their glasses that were sitting on top of their head.

And I’m Still Hungry
Bill and I recently went to the Original Pancake House for breakfast. We rarely go because it is always really busy, so when we do, Bill often orders his favorite thing: the apple pancake. It’s what he ordered that day…..

Do you think he had enough to eat?

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Yesterday I went to the Hobby Lobby that’s a few miles south of my house. An old Hobby Lobby had closed down and moved into new gigantic space about a year ago. I had not yet visited that new store. I had a single purchase in mind: a size K crochet hook with a fat wooden handle that is comfortable for use by my fat arthritic fingers. The store was bursting with Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations, which surprised me not in the least. In fact, I purchased a few little items for Christmas presents.

Winter is Coming
And speaking of looking a lot like Christmas, tomorrow we are supposed to get our first snowfall. One never knows exactly what that means: a few flurries or 10 inches.The weather people are saying up to three inches in Denver. Since we are leaving very early Friday morning for Vermont, we decided to spend the night near the airport so that we aren’t dealing with icy and/or snowy roads early on Friday. It will actually be warmer in Vermont on Thursday than here, where the high is supposed to reach only 30 degrees. Brrr.

Ciao.

My Password is XrPP4&uKeb$04

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When I was growing up, my parents owned a small business, a bakery in our Nebraska town of then-about-10,000 people. Things were very different in the 1950s and 1960s in small-town Nebraska than they probably are today. People weren’t terribly worried about locking the doors to their houses. And as for cars? I don’t remember ever locking a car door. There was probably some violent crime, but not enough to make our parents worry about us walking around the town after dark.

As I’m writing these words, I’m recalling an exception to this feel-free-to-walk-anywhere-in-the-dark mentality: When I was in high school, I walked over one night to a friend’s house. She lived about four or five blocks from our house. As usual, I took the short-cut, popping through the hedge in her backyard to make a bee-line to her back door. Except this night there was a man lurking in the bushes, startling me. He didn’t say a word, nor did I, and he didn’t do me a bit of harm, but it shook me up plenty.

Anyhoo, there was one bit of crime that I do recall. Every so often, we would get a call at the bakery from a neighboring business, warning us that there was a “quick-change artist” in town. The businesses had developed a way to warn others about these con men and/or women, that is, via a telephone chain. When we got the call, it was our duty to call the next business on the list to warn them of the bad guy in town. Mom would carefully explain to her staff (which included her three daughters) that these con artists were masterful at confusing cashiers and making off with excess change as a result. But you’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to confuse the Gloor’s Bakery crew. I don’t think we ever got slammed.

I was going down this Memory Lane yesterday, because I opened up my email and saw that there were items in my Spam Folder. Fifteen items to be precise. When I opened up to see what was happening, I saw that one of my passwords had been compromised, and all sorts of chaos was ensuing. The good news is that the password that had been compromised was one that I used many years ago, and now did not. But I spent the afternoon yesterday changing the very few websites for which I still used this password, thanking the good Lord that none of those websites were very important. Anyone who wants access to the Magnificat Catholic website can have at it. God forgive them.

Passwords, my friends, are the bane of my existence. If I make them too complicated, I will never remember them. So I keep a record, understanding the inherent risks in that action. If they are too simple, like the password that was compromised, bad guys can get access to my life.

Sigh. It seemed so simple when all you had to do was worry about a quick change artist. Now cashiers don’t even have the slightest idea how to make change at all!

It’s Puzzling

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Sometime around the middle of July, I was shopping — at all places — at Ace Hardware. I think that Bill had sent me to the hardware store with specific instructions — maybe even a note — with exactly what he wanted me to buy. At any rate, in the course of looking for whatever it was I was looking for, I realized that ACE HARDWARE SOLD SPRINGBOK PUZZLES.

I dare say that most any puzzler will tell you that Springbok puzzles are the best. (By the way, I have no idea if people who put together puzzles are called  puzzlers, but that’s what I’m calling us because it sounds really cool, sort of like a spy.) They are mostly available at Hallmark stores, their own website, or Amazon. I have never seen them sold at a hardware store. But heck, if True Value Hardware in Estes Park can sell women’s underwear, then Ace Hardware in southeast Denver can sell Springbok puzzles.

I had been thinking that I needed to begin doing things that kept my mind sharp, but instead, found myself binge watching Downton Abbey. But Jen gave me a puzzle that she had worked on with her grands during their recent visit in July, and I had enjoyed putting it together. So, I made the quick decision right there in the Ace Hardware store that putting together puzzles was a brain challenge. The thing is, Bill and I had gone through a period a couple of years ago where we were working on lots of puzzles. But the puzzles went from providing hours of fun to making me want to sweep all of the pieces onto the floor in frustration.

As I pondered the situation (undoubtedly blocking the aisle for people desperately needing the necessary equipment to stop a toilet from overflowing), I realized that the frustration came from the number of pieces in the puzzle. Our earlier puzzles had all been 1,000 pieces — apparently the most popular puzzle size. Quite frankly, 1,000-piece puzzles make me want to kill myself. There is no place to go with the 950 pieces not being worked on at the time. The answer was simple: 500 pieces!

As I perused the 500-piece puzzles, I quickly realized that all of the really cool puzzles were 1,000 pieces. Most of the 500-piece puzzles were of trains. That’s when I realized another thing about myself: I need to have a reasonable connection to the picture in the puzzle in order to enjoy it. Food: yes. Trains: no.

So, I dug around amongst the train puzzles and finally found a puzzle featuring a variety of birds. While not my first choice, I connect with birds in a way that I don’t with trains. They, after all, are pretty and chirp in a most agreeable manner.

Thus, my puzzling summer began.

While I pride myself on not having an addictive personality, I have realized that addictions come in many forms. Here are the puzzles I have purchased since July 19, 2019…..

That, my friends, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 worth of puzzles. Think of the number of bowls of soup for homeless men and women that would finance. By the way, you might notice that the top box is only 300 pieces. It turns out that one of the very few things Kaiya and Mylee inherited from me is a love for puzzles. Mylee in particular has spent a lot of time helping me with my 500-piece puzzles, so I bought her an even simpler one, which she and Kaiya and Bill and I put together in a few hours one Saturday…..

The unfortunate truth is that the best puzzles come with 1,000 pieces. It is more difficult to find interesting 500-piece puzzles, but I’ll keep my eye open until such time as I am without fear and ready to face 1,000 pieces…..

Bill helped me with this one. He spent some time telling me which of the treats he has eaten in the past. Like last week.

My name is Kris, and I’m a puzzle addict.

Life Lessons

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Saturday late morning, I got the hankering for a juicy hamburger.  Bad Daddy’s seemed to be calling my name. As you might imagine, it didn’t take a lot of coaxing to get Bill to agree to a burger for lunch. A big, bad Bad Daddy’s burger. As I contemplated my burger, the idea of a few of the grands coming along with us appealed to me. So I texted Jll and asked if anyone in their neck of the woods would like to join Bill and me for lunch.

Well, they are a Bad Daddy’s family, and within a minute, I had a text back telling me that Dagny and Maggie Faith would LOVE to join us. But there was a caveat. Jll said she wanted to teach them a life lesson, so she wanted them to pay for lunch.

Well, if it didn’t take a lot of coaxing to get Bill to join me for lunch, it took even less coaxing to get me to agree to let those two girls handle the finances. I’m all for life lessons! And Dagny had, after all, just recently earned over $400 in honey sales.

A bit later we picked them up and drove to the nearby restaurant. I decided that since they were paying, they could take over all of the restaurant-related duties. So when the hostess asked how many, I looked for the girls to answer.

Four, said 11-year-old Maggie. The hostess asked if a booth would be okay. Yes, said 13-year-old Dagny. We were led to a booth.

We soon learned that while they would be paying for lunch, it wasn’t their own money they had to spend. Their mother just wanted them to learn how to handle all of the duties when it came to paying for food at a restaurant. That made me feel a tad less guilty. Dagny had the money tucked into her phone case, which she had tucked into her back pocket.

After perusing the menu, we all ordered our burgers and sides — homemade tater tots for Dagny, homemade potato chips for me, and French fries for Maggie and her papa. As we awaited the delivery of the food, we talked about all sorts of things, including Maggie’s upcoming trip to visit her Aunt Julie in Montana, school activities, and gossip about their sister Adelaide. This is a reminder to all that when you’re not there to defend yourself, you WILL get talked about by your siblings. It still happens to us, even though we are adults.

At the end of the meal, the server began handing the meal ticket to Bill. Nope, we told her. The girls are paying for the meal today. So if you get stiffed by the tip, don’t blame us, I told our surprised server.

Maggie and Dagny glanced at the check, and began doing the necessary math in their heads for the tip……

Sixty divided by two, move the decimal point, carry the one….

First you have to move the decimal point, Maggie said. (I didn’t necessarily understand the need to move the decimal point to figure the tip, but hey! maybe it’s the new math.) Snippity snap, before we knew it, they had paid the bill and left a generous tip. I tried to explain that you tip based on the kind of service you get, but since it was their mom’s money, she would have gotten 20 percent even if she had dumped the burgers on their heads. Heck! They even rounded up. As it happens, she was a very good server and deserved every penny they gave her.

It was fun being part of the life lesson with two of our favorite life lesson students….

Are you sure you’re figuring it out correctly?

Saturday Smile: Open Your Mouth and Say Ahhh

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My sister Jen flew to Phoenix yesterday morning to spend a week with her daughter Maggie and her family. Unexpectedly, there was a nurse as part of the airport welcoming team…..

Flying is tough these days, and you just never know when you will need medical attention upon arrival. Generally, however, they wear shoes, but apparently Nurse Lilly doesn’t feel the need.

Have a great weekend.

 

Friday Book Whimsy: The Secrets We Kept

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Between the end of World War II and President Ronald Reagan’s stern warning to the Soviet Union —  Mr. Gorbochev, tear down this wall — was a period of fear of communism and secrets about weapons and rocket ships and likely a lot of misunderstanding, not only by the people in power, but by the common folk like you and me. This frightening environment was no more obvious than in the 1950s, when the so-called Red Scare was at its most pronounced.

The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott, is the story of plain ol’ ordinary women who by both chance and circumstance became spies. Or, if not spies, at least secret-keepers. After all, while the men in power dictated the memos, they were the ones who typed them.

But another thing that transpired in the early 1950s was that a man named Boris Pasternak finished the novel on which he had been working for many years. It was called  Dr. Zhivago. And it was the bane of the Soviet Unions leadership’s existence. They would do almost anything to prevent this so-called subversive propaganda from being released.

It is this scenario which resulted in Irina — a quiet, nondescript woman whose mother came from Russia, and Sally — a beautiful if disarming and strong-willed woman, being pulled from the clerical pool to assist in secretly bringing this novel to the United States to be published.

At the same time, Pasterak’s long-time mistress Olga, the model for Lara in Dr. Zhivago, fights her own battle to help with the cause, including many long years in a Soviet prison.

The Secrets We Kept  is a novel of espionage, but it is also a novel of 1950s sexism, love, friendship, and the power of the written word. Based on a true story, the author’s descriptions of this time in our history, and the role the book played, is powerful. I loved the book.

Here is a link to the book.

 

 

Thursday Thoughts

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Don’t Push It
Last Thursday, I posted a photo of Bill showing our granddaughter Dagny how to repair the broken wheel on our lawnmower. Unfortunately, as is often the case, it wasn’t as easy to fix as Bill expected. He has been awaiting the arrival of the necessary parts. In the meantime, he went to our shed and, to my surprise, pulled out a manual push mower that I didn’t know he had, and still don’t know why he had it. He actually took a couple of rounds in our back yard before he gave up. He decided a third of an acre was a bit far to push a manual mower….

No Soup For You
Yesterday morning, shortly after Bill got up and came downstairs, I told him I wanted to make soup for dinner. I asked him what kind of soup sounded good to him. There’s nothing Bill likes better than having me begin bombarding him with questions before he’s even had his first cup of coffee. Wouldn’t you love picking out soup flavors when you haven’t even gotten the sleep out of the corner of your eyes? But, bless his heart, he thought for a minute, and then said, “Vegetable beef.” It was a chilly day, and my mom’s vegetable beef soup actually sounded very good. It’s made with beef shanks instead of stew meat, making it particularly savory and yummy. My first spoonful brought my mother to my kitchen table…..

Chip Off the Block
The other day, Bill’s brother David sent me a photo that he had received from one of their cousins. I’m not sure where this was taken, or where Bill and his brother David were when the photo was taken; off to college, maybe. Anyway, what struck me — once again — was the resemblance of Bill to his father. Both very handsome men…..

L-R: Bill’s brother Bruce, his sister Kathy, his father, his brother-in-law Charlie, and his mother. Neither Bill nor I can quite figure out the child; perhaps Charlie and Kathy’s firstborn, Missy.

A Chill in the Air
Though I doubt we have seen the last of warm temperatures, yesterday and today have been quite cool. In fact, yesterday morning I turned on our furnace for the first time. It won’t be long before I quit complaining about the heat and start complaining about the cold!

Ciao.

I Spy

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I was born at the tail end of 1953. Throughout my life, I sort of forgot how close my birth was to the end of World War II. Not even 10 years between the end of the war and the birth of this blogger. I can remember things that happened eight years ago — 2011 — like they happened yesterday. That must have been the way my dad and mom felt. My dad, in particular, served in the United States Navy at the end of the war, and his marriage and birth of my sister transpired only a couple of years later. Those days must have felt like yesterday to him, also.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve read a couple of novels that take place in the 1950s, during the Cold War, and they got me to thinking about my childhood in the 1950s. I do remember the Cold War. I will admit that I have no memory of atomic bomb drills in school, but I certainly remember praying for the conversion of the people of the Soviet Union. Perhaps in a Catholic school, conversion took precedence over what were likely completely useless duck-and-cover drills.

I have only a fleeting memory of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the subsequent so-called Cuban Missile Crisis a year later. My sister Bec, who is five years older, remembers both events clearly, as well as the tension and fear in the room as they watched the television and prayed. Being only 8 years old at the time, I was probably way more interested in playing with my Tiny Tears doll in the bedroom I shared with my sisters, clueless as to how quickly and enormously my life could have changed. While my dad was not a fan of President John F. Kennedy, I think that he supported the tough stand he took against Castro and Khrushchev.

Both of the books that I read —  The Chelsea Girls  by Fiona Davis and more recently The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott (which I will review on Friday) dealt at least in part with the espionage angle of the Cold War. Again, I was a mere urchin when Sen. McCarthy was holding his Senate hearings and everyone was worried that their neighbors might be Commies. But the decades between the presidency of Ike and President Reagan’s order: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,  are etched clearly in my mind. There were stories almost daily in the news, especially during the 1960s. But more than that, at least as it related to my pre-teen and teenage self, the books and the movies that dealt with spies and espionage and government secrets were plentiful.

So plentiful, in fact, that when the Berlin Wall did come down and the Soviet Union crumbled, authors and movie-makers didn’t quite know what to do. Who should be the villain now? How could you have secret agents and secret double agents when there was nobody on whom to spy? September 11, 2001, provided an enemy for a while, but Americans never had the appetite to make Iranians or Iraqis or Afghans evil in their entirety in the way they could with the Soviets.

My take-away from these two books that I read was that the idea of spying on the Communists for the United States government sounds really cool. I’m pretty sure I could have played the part of a nondescript woman who carries secret documents in her ordinary J.C. Penneys handbag and discreetly and successfully drops them in the potted palm to be picked up by another spy. I would have had a little pearl-handled pistol and a cyanide pill in my billfold.

Alas, instead I am a gray-haired nana who has nothing but a little bottle of water and breath mints in my purse.

Murder Most Foul-er

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This post originally appeared October 1, 2019.

A day or two after I blogged about my television binge watching habits, and in particular, how I was leisurely watching Midsommer Murders because there were 19 seasons on Netflix, Netflix announced that the program would be removed from their network October 1. At that point I was on about Season 9.

Yikes.

So I commenced to sitting down and watching episode after episode of the program. For the entire month of September, every afternoon and into the evening, I was parked in front of the television, watching Inspector Tom Barnaby, and then when he retired, his cousin Inspector John Barnaby. I watched the parade of sergeants that helped the Chief Inspector(s) solve the murders, all the while wondering how a small community like Midsommer could withstand the loss of four or five people each episode. I dreamed about Midsommer. I began talking with a British accent. I couldn’t stop craving bangers and mash. I would get into the passenger seat of my car, looking for the steering wheel.

Finally, Sunday I felt I simply couldn’t watch another episode. I was at the end of Season 17, and realized that I couldn’t eat another fish or chip. But I’m not a quitter, and I wanted to find out who would replace DSI Nelson. I wondered if the Barnabys would get another dog to replace Sykes. Would little Baby Betty Barnaby finally sleep through the night? So, I compromised. I began watching the first and last episodes of the remaining seasons. The first episodes would let me know if there was a new Detective Sergeant whose name and personality I would have to learn. The last episode would provide any surprises for the next season.

In my blog post about binging, I mentioned that the murders that took place in Midsommer were quite cozy. Maybe a thump on the head or a poison slipped into a cup of tea. But as the television years progressed, I realized that the murders were becoming more and more violent. Brutal, really. It went from a bump on a head with a cricket bat to being run over with an army tank or killed by bites from dozens of poisonous snakes. Really yucky stuff. Nevertheless, I powered on.

But watching the increase in sheer horror as the episodes progressed got me to thinking about our appetite for gore. In 1997, when the first Midsommer murder took place, we could handle a cup of tea laced with strychnine as a murder weapon. By 2019, we were lapping up murders committed by shoving a sharpened stick through into one ear and out the other.

Perhaps it’s because the outside world is getting more and more horrific, but it apparently takes darker plots and more violent murders to get us to pay attention. The same is true of sex scenes, even on television and sometimes even in programs that are in the 7 o’clock time slot. Often when Bill and I are watching one of the programs we like, a scene will make me uncomfortable. That’s when I will turn to Bill and say, “My, we’ve come a long way since Rob and Laura Petrie slept in separate beds.”

I know I sound like my grandmother, but it still seems to me that we are sacrificing clever plot lines and characters and dialogue and replacing it with sex and violence.

By the way, even though Chief Inspector Barnaby and Detective Sergeant Whoever-It-Might-Be face grislier murders, they still do it without a gun in sight. Just sayin’…..

Blessed are the Poor

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The other day I had lunch with my daughter-in-law Jll. As we were driving to the restaurant (well, actually she was driving, I was a passenger without even one of those car seats with the little steering wheels that passed as a child safety seat in the mid-20th century), we drove by a man standing at the intersection holding a sign asking for money and God Bless You. The light was green, so we didn’t have one of those internal guilt trips where you think you should give money or should you? Because they might use it to buy drugs or booze. And is that a cigarette they’re smoking because if they can afford cigarettes, they don’t need my Abraham Lincoln.

“I used to carry bags with little containers of shampoo and soap and bottles of water that I would hand to homeless people,” she told me. “I haven’t done that for a while.”

I thought that was very clever and told her so. She admitted that while most were grateful, a few were not because what they really wanted was cash to buy the aforementioned drugs or booze.

Given that conversation, it was an interesting coincidence that this weekend’s Gospel from Luke told the story that Jesus related to the Pharisees about the poor man who was starving and covered with sores and the rich man who dressed in rich garments and ate delicious food. Knowing Jesus’ teachings, it comes as no surprise that the poor man died and went to heaven while the rich man died and went to “the netherworld.” The rich man begged for Lazarus’ help and was told that he had the goods when he was living, but it was now Lazarus who lives in glory.

The moral of the story, of course, isn’t that rich people can’t get to heaven. Of course they can. Instead, Jesus was reminding the Pharisees, and now us, that it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor. What matters is that you’re generous.

There was a priest, now deceased, who was well-known in the Archdiocese of Denver for being generous to the poor and homeless. He was asked on occasion why he so freely gave money to the homeless when they often spent it unwisely. He responded that it wasn’t up to him to say how they should spend the money he gave. Jesus simply asks us to be generous, not to be judge and jury. We aren’t generous for them; we are generous for ourselves.

I take for granted how lucky I am. I know this because I find myself griping that my steak has too much gristle or I can’t believe I had to eat chicken two nights in a row. As they say: First World problems. I mean to be generous, I really do. I have said for ages now that I want to carry dollar bills in my car and when I have the opportunity, I want to hand one or two to that woman standing with the sign at the intersection, even if she’s talking on an iPhone 11. As Fr. Woody said, it’s not up to us to judge. It’s up to us to be generous. I’m going to the bank tomorrow and get some dollar bills.

Hold me to it.