At last, a picture

At last, a picture on my blog. This is my daughter, Kayti, age 9, and her friend Finn, age 5, on that trampoline it took us six years to put up. Soon we'll have to take it down, because we live in the frozen North and outdoor equipment doesn't fare well in winter weather.
Well, it looks like this coming weekend will be the Time of the Great Rooster Slaughter. I'll kind of miss hearing 11 roosters crowing in chorus between 4 and 7 a.m. I did record them, and will try to upload it, but please, I just put up my first picture! Bear with me!
Why is it I think of a million things to say on my blog when I'm out walking, and then when I sit in front of the computer my head is completely devoid of anything resembling ideas? Must be all the Scrabble playing.

The Deb Zone: A Separate Reality

Rex, my husband, made up the title for this blog entry. He said he wanted to write something on the subject, but he'll never get around to it, so I borrowed it.

You may have heard my dulcet voice last Sunday on NPR's Weekend Edition. The show's producers called me after I posted on their Soapbox blog about what kind of life I'll be facing in a couple of weeks when my severance pay from the newspaper runs out. In short order, they had me a) scheduled for a phone interview with Sunday host Liane Hansen and b) losing sleep thanks to my fear of sounding like a nincompoop on national radio.

After the interview, which took place at MPBN's studios in Portland, I was so horrified at the things I'd said that I didn't sleep for ANOTHER two nights, thinking about the clever responses I failed to make. For example, Ms. Hansen asked me if I had ever thought that at age 55 I'd be in this position, i.e., jobless, reduced to living in the cellar to keep warm and serving meals concocted from a pet or two. My on-air answer meandered around how Rex and I are unconventional and I've done a lot of jobs and blah blah blah ... the point being, I'm no stranger to belt-tightening. Which is an okay answer, but what I should have said was: "No way! I never thought I'd be lucky enough to have a farm, a husband, a daughter, and lots of animals! I expected to be living on income from bottle returns and picking my lunch out of a dumpster!" Which some people may take as facetious but it is the absolute truth!

Before I go, a funny observation by Kayti:

She'd picked up my trombone and tried to blow a note. I showed her how, and said, "It's kind of hard." She said, "I can't understand why you'd work so hard to play something that doesn't sound that good anyway."

Maybe it's time to play her some J.J. Johnson.

My very best to all of you,

LOVE, Debbi

The Hits Parade

So much posting, so little interest.

One of the things I hated about my former employer, the Portland Press Herald, turning Web-crazy was that the editors who switched to online journalism became so hooked on hit numbers. Every day my email would contain self-congratulatory messages about how many hits the damn site was getting. Half the hits (or possibly more) probably involved people either posting mean comments or people checking for mean comments and hotly protesting them.

You want a reason to especially dislike the human race, check what people say in reaction to political blogs. I've stumbled across a few, purely by naive accident, thinking someone might have something intelligent to say, and I've been blown away by the vituperation.

So do I care if my blog gets hits? Well, first of all, it appears that I have no way of checking. I used to have a tool called "Analytics" that let me track the number of hits, what search engines sent them, and what keywords were used. That seems to have disappeared in the most recent round of site "improvements." Second of all, I find myself not really caring. It's fun to write. And I've never really cared about being popular.

Good thing, huh?????

Options Narrowing

In a way, it's great to age. There's so much stuff you can't do anymore, the upside being that you can't berate yourself for not doing them. One of my sisters finds herself unable to vacuum because of the arthritis in her back. Do you think that bothers her? No, indeed! She lounges around eating bonbons while dust kitties collect under her counters. I myself can no longer bend to empty the cat litterbox. Bummer!

Some things, however, are tough to bid goodbye to. Trampoline jumping, for example.

We bought this trampoline at a yard sale five years ago, and every summer I'd say, THIS is the summer we're putting the trampoline up. Well, the years went by, the trampoline parts lay around in boxes or in less intelligent storage places, like the yard, and I got older and fatter and sorer.

It finally happened, though, and yesterday the trampoline rose like the phoenix as my husband and I dodged wasps and slapped mosquitoes and got really hot and sweaty, not in a good way.

At last, it was ready for the test. After five long years, so was I, and up I climbed.

Maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me, but the experience was not like I remembered from high school. When my feet left the trampoline surface, my skin and its underlying material (a.k.a. "blubber") seemed to leave a split second later. I could almost hear parts of my body faintly crying, "Hey, wait for me!" like a kid following her big brother. When I came down, my outsides -- two items of which in particular are quite substantial -- were still on the way up. It's like two of me were rising and falling in a slightly unsynchronized fashion.

As if this weren't enough, I think the bouncing affected my sinuses. Even 24 hours later, my face hurts and my eyeballs feel like they've been put in a blender on high.

So which comes first: getting in shape -- including strengthening my eye muscles and undergoing breast reduction surgery -- to be able to bounce on the trampoline, or bouncing on the trampoline to get in shape?

I don‘t really care, because frankly, it makes me ill now just to think about bouncing. I've got better things to do, anyway, like figuring out where to build the shuffleboard court.

Dog Days

The last of our pups will be going to her new home in Bethlehem, N.H., at the end of this week. Today is Kayti's first day of fourth grade. And Rex is finishing up his task of shortening the Quonset hut so we are in compliance with setback rules.

It's been kind of a busy summer here at my little farm. We hatched a bunch of chicks, birthed and nurtured five shih tzu puppies, grew a huge pumpkin vine and a dizzyingly tall group of electric blue morning glories, and watched much of our garden succumb to sogginess maintained by daily downpours.

More than once this summer I literally fled from the house at 10 p.m. or later to take a walk. I was starved for time alone. Much as I dreaded getting back into the routine of rousting Kayti for school, now that she's back, the six hours of silence is more than golden. It's platinum. It's uranium.

I've started volunteering for a free health clinic, mainly to keep myself in touch with how much I don't want to work for anyone else. We're having a little trouble with my training, though. For three consecutive Tuesdays, the training has been postponed because of car trouble, trainer's unavailability, and trainer's forgetting to come in.

I was there alone this last time, and not knowing what to do or how to do it, I passed the time discovering through an online questionnaire that physically, I am actually 2.5 years older than my chronological age.

This, believe it or not, was good news. I've been complaining for years that I feel like I'm 80 years old. So discovering that I'm more than 20 years younger than that gives me kind of a new lease on life.

As usual, it was tough answering questions about my life. One of the questions, for example, gave me the choice of "happily married" or "unhappily married." I checked off "happily married," only because I have a handy kind of guy at my beck and call. That makes me happy. So although Rex drives me insane much of the time, I'm glad I've got him.

But does that throw off the results? I don't know, and I won't know unless they add a third choice: "tolerably married."

Gummint Work

A lot of people diss New Jersey, but I lived there for 9 months back in the '70s and found the place not only pretty in places but endlessly fascinating. This may have more to do with my age at the time. I was 21, a graduate of Foxcroft Academy in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, and a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono. I'd led a rather sheltered existence, although if you'd asked me at the time I would have disagreed.

New Jersey is where I was assigned my first full-time job, an ostensibly temporary position taking claims at the Social Security Administration. When the government called me in Dover-Foxcroft and asked me if I would be willing to go, I said yes, hung up, and hugged myself nervously, repeating to myself, "New Jersey! New Jersey!" in a mixture of disbelief and horror.

Not only was I headed for New Jersey, a land of crime and scary people with unexplained scars and rude drivers and bad air, but for Newark, N.J., which I was sure was the very worst New Jersey had to offer. In retrospect, I am amazed that my father let me go.

So it was that in late August, 1974, I packed my VW squareback with everything I thought I'd need (naively omitting the pepper spray) and tooled south. Uncle Sam put me up in the Mayflower Hotel in Jersey City for my two weeks of training. I can still remember the smell of carpet cleaner that permeated everything, including the elevator, in that hotel. A fellow trainee, a red-haired New York Irishman named John Regan, was quartered a couple floors up, and I recall visiting him in his room and being astonished when he broke out in song. I'd been raised to shut up. These non-Mainers were an odd bunch!

I was prepared to find myself among seedy, down-at-the-heels characters who were desperate for a job. Not that I thought of myself that way. I thought I was slumming, being from the clean, righteous state of Maine. My classmates included a firecracker named Liz; John the singing Irishman; Tim Hecht the funny Manhattanite who yearned for St. Petersburg; Rick Mills who at 35 seemed impossibly old; and a lady whose last name was Maldonado. I forget her first name. Our instructors were the impeccably dressed, worldy Ellen and some guy whose name I also forget.

Training was unbelievably boring. Filling out paperwork has never been my strong suit, and here I was embarking on a career of filling it out for other people. I was planning my escape almost as soon as I arrived. I rented a room in the upstairs of a private home in Belleville, N.J., but never had a phone installed because I wasn't expecting to stay. I ended up staying for five long, lonely months. A phone might have helped.

I worked in the Newark office for a few months, then somebody decided I was a great prospect for a permanent job. Since training would get me out of actual work, I jumped at the opportunity. Soon I was commuting to Jersey City, learning that unlike in Maine, in New Jersey, it doesn't take a big accident to back traffic up for miles. All it takes is a traffic light.

My next posting was Bridgeton, N.J. It was so much nicer than Newark. Spring was springing, I found an apartment to share, my workmates were fun and southern Jersey was bursting with tomatoes and confusingly numbered county roads. I went bicycling with some friends and out on a nearly deserted road a fat guy riding a bike in the opposite direction crashed into me head-on. He had the entire world to ride in, but chose to collide with me. Damn, that hurt. New Jersey! There are crazies everywhere you look!

One of my biking companions that day was a co-worker named Alan Cannizzaro.

Alan was my junior by a few months. He liked to say he was the baby of the office. A few adjectives I would apply to Alan: direct, smart, funny and loyal (to his girlfriend, darn it). He didn't seem to mind being employed by the Social Security Administration.

In fact, apparently he embraced it. Where I lasted three short months in Bridgeton before quitting in May of 1975, Alan Cannizzaro soldiered on. I did a search of his name online and found a court ruling involving Alan in his role as a union representative.

His shop, Local 2369 of the American Federation of Government Employees, filed suit against the Department of Human Services and the SSA, charging that "on or about May 1, 1983, respondent's Area V Director, Arne Tornquist, made a derogatory anti-union remark in a telephone conversation to a union representative (Alan) who was preparing to represent a grievant in a hearing before said Area Director."

Here's the story, according to the court documents:

On May 1, 1985, Alan H. Cannizzaro was employed as a claims representative at the Bridgeton, N.J., branch, of the SSA. He was the on-site representative for Bridgeton branch as well as second vice-president of the Union herein. His duties included handling grievances on behalf of employees, attendance at arbitration hearings, and filing unfair labor practice charges.

On May 1, 1985, Cannizzaro went to the Toms River, N.J., branch to investigate a charge brought against an employee there.

When he arrived at the Toms River office he was met by the operations supervisor, a man named Lynch, who asked why Cannizzaro was there. The latter explained his mission, and said that he was on official time signed by his supervisor. Lynch telephoned Tornquist, the area director, to see if he had OK'd Cannizzaro's trip. Tornquist told Lynch that he did not sanction official time for Cannizzaro's visit,
and then told Lynch to put Cannizzaro on the phone.

Alan told the director he had an approved SSA-75 form which was signed by his supervisor. Tornquist said the trip should have been sanctioned by the hearing official before the supervisor could approve it. Cannizzaro, who was upset at the confrontation, said he didn't give a sh--, he would do as he pleased. Tornquist asked Cannizzaro if he considered himself real big in the union now, then told Cannizzaro that he was just a little "union sh--."

Cannizzaro replied he didn't appreciate being called such a name, and he then called the area director a "fat f---."

Tornquist asked Cannizzaro if he intended to file an unfair labor practice against the director. Cannizzaro said he probably would, to which Tornquist replied that he should go ahead and do so, noting that Cannizzaro had not made one stick yet. Cannizzaro stated he could leave Toms River and return at a later date but it would just be a waste of time and money. Tornquist called Cannizzaro a waste to the agency and said he interfered with its mission. But he told Cannizzaro he should stay there and "do what you have to do -- meet with the employee and leave nice and early."

I don't know about you, but I wonder if I could ever call one of my supervisors (back when I had a job) a "fat f---" to his or her face? I think we'd all enjoy doing something like that.

There's gotta be more to this story, though. So Alan, if you googled yourself and are just finishing reading this, fill us in! Did you and Tornquist duke it out? Did you have his head on a platter? And what about Naomi?

Here We Go Again

I see I've written nothing since May 21. There's a good reason for that. Somewhere. I just can't think of it right now.

At last, the long-errant dog-walkers' questionnaire has been returned. Actually, I had to go pick it up, and even then, Mary was hiding in her cellar filling it out when I arrived. But who am I to complain? She walked my dogs twice while I was away. This woman can shred my stupid questionnaire and feed it to llamas, I'm that grateful to her.

Sadly, I've not yet had time to code the results and run them through my computer so as to obtain an analysis of significant deviations. Or insignificant ones. So I'm afraid the waiting must continue for those of you who give a you-know-what.

Our Stick Farm universe seems to have reached the outer limit of its expansion, in terms of number of creatures harbored, and is starting its shrink cycle. First to go was our buff cochin hen, whose body I discovered in the horse corral with her head squashed in. I can't say for sure, but it looks like a horse stepped on her.

The second casualty was one of our two guinea fowl. I found him lying in front of my wagon without a scratch on him, still warm, apparently with a broken neck. I surmise he flew into something -- possibly the wagon -- and killed himself, kamikaze style. His friend, also a boy, was hanging around the body. The friend was upset. He looked like he couldn't understand why his buddy didn't get up and run around like he used to.

I was sad about that until a few days later, when this remaining guinea apparently decided I had something to do with his friend's death and started stalking and attacking me. It only took one gash on the side of my leg and that guinea was posted in the "free" section of craigslist. He was gone a couple days later, which is how long it took me to catch him. I wonder how he's doing, but I'm thinking maybe I really don't want to know! Can somebody sue me for giving them a vicious guinea hen?

We're down to one horse -- Kimi -- on the farm. Mellie left to take up residence with nicer people, a nicer companion horse and much, much nicer fields. Socks is free-leased to a woman in Standish. I tried to talk her out of taking him, but she was quite sure he was the horse for her. I'm very curious to see how he does as an only horse. Kimi seems content to have our place all to herself. She's getting a lot more human attention and does not have to watch her back (literally) all the time. It's so peaceful around here, it's almost boring!

Meanwhile, I'm trying to sell one adult shih tzu and soon I'll be trying to sell our five new shih tzu puppies, born on the Fourth of July. Once that is accomplished, I am OUT of the dog breeding business.

NEXT POST: The Story of Alan Cannizzaro

See you then!

Debbi
(NOT Kayti)