Category Archives: Uncategorized

How to stop the beep

Posted on January 24, 2012 | 7 comments

How to Stop the Beep

When you’re home, and you hear a sporadic beep, assume the smoke detector’s battery is dead. Poke around the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet where you keep miscellaneous junk for a 9-volt battery (they are square). Take the opportunity to gather the rechargeable batteries that have fallen out of the old margarine tub marked, rechargeable batteries, and put them back in. Snap the cover on securely.

Drag the small stool that your daughter used to use to brush her teeth, but hasn’t needed for years, out of the corner of the hallway where it’s been because you can’t bear to part with it, and put it under the smoke detector. Step up. Slide the indented piece of plastic out until right before you will break it if you keep going. Use your middle finger, the only one that still has a long enough fingernail to do the job, to pry the dead battery out of its socket.

The old battery and the new battery are identical. Do not forget which hand the old battery is in. On second thought, step off the stool and put the old battery on top of the bookcase in the hallway. Step back up on the stool. I neglected to tell you to note the position of the battery before you took it out, my bad, so crane your neck to see how it goes in. Try to force the battery into place.

The battery is not going to go in. You will need to go down to the basement to get an old chair to stand on so you can see how to put it in correctly. While you are standing on the chair, with the new battery in your hand, you will hear the beep again. It is not coming from the smoke detector.

Put the new battery, which is still in your hand, back in the file drawer. Do not stop to rewind the extension cords you find there. Return the chair to the basement. Leave the old battery where it is, retreat to your office, and shut the door.

***

How to Stop the Beep was written for an assignment to create a “How To” story. I hope you liked it.

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Have you seen Downton Abbey?

Posted on January 17, 2012 | 9 comments

When I was younger, if I asked someone if they’d seen a particular show on television and they replied, “Oh, we don’t watch much television,” or worse, “We don’t own a television,” I felt the sting. When my daughter was born, my husband and I were determined to set a good example by keeping our television viewing to a minimum. I stopped watching the morning news shows and we didn’t turn on the television until after she had gone to bed. That worked for many years, before the world discovered DVRs and my daughter was old enough to stay up later than me.

These days, I’m not as apologetic about my viewing habits. I look forward to relaxing in front of the television with my tailored list of must see TV, made possible by the miracle of Tivo. My daughter encourages me to turn on the television, a shared experience implicit in her suggestion, but then she opens her laptop and abandons me, emotionally if not physically. If I say, “You’re not watching!” she admits that she doesn’t like the show I’m watching. It turns out that she doesn’t like most of the shows I watch, and while I would be happy enough to watch the ones she likes, I’m rarely invited. Besides, she usually watches them on her computer, on Hulu, while I’m watching programs on Tivo.

My husband used to watch TV with me. Now he may sit in the same room, but he is rarely watching the television. Instead he is glued to his iPhone. If I chafe at the lack of companionship and ask what he’s doing, he’s likely to tell me that he’s “Reading the Times.” He might as well say he doesn’t watch television. Reading The New York Times is what intellectuals do while the rest of us are watching Hell on Wheels, or The Walking Dead (both, I might add, on AMC, the network that brought us Mad Men and Breaking Bad, shows that are darlings of the critics).

Frankly, I don’t care if they watch with me or not. The problem is that if they’re not going to watch with me, then turning on the television becomes an overtly anti-social act. It signals that I don’t feel like having a conversation (hold on, my husband is staring at his iPhone; he doesn’t want to talk to me anyway) and my daughter will have to put in her earbuds (oh, who are we kidding, they were in anyway).

Maybe when I turn on the television I’m actually broadcasting my loneliness.

There are still occasions when we come together as a family in front of the TV. For instance, we all watch Downton Abbey. Sure there is a little texting on my daughter’s part, and my husband glances at his phone once in a while, but by and large we share the experience. And the best part is that it is on PBS, which is the station that people who don’t watch much television watch when they’re watching television.

Have you seen Downton Abbey?

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It’s your birthday! Don’t just sit there!

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 8 comments

My gift-giving history has some people wondering if I’m trying to kill my husband. For his thirtieth birthday I gave him a ride in a hot air balloon. When he turned forty I arranged for him to go sky-diving. Last year I sent him up in a bi-plane. You know, the kind of old-fashioned plane that has no ceiling and the pilot sits behind you. The kind where, theoretically, the pilot could flip the plane upside down and the only thing between you and disaster would be the worn leather straps crossed over your chest.

There were some sharp intakes of breath when the family heard about the hot air balloon ride, but most thought floating over the countryside sounded romantic. They were much more nervous about the idea of sky diving and one aunt made it very clear that she thought I was being downright irresponsible. Despite her fears, he made it up, and down, in one piece.

In any case, I am most emphatically not trying to kill my husband. He likes to be up in the air, and I like to give experiential gifts, particularly for significant birthdays that end in zero, that leave him with memories. Dementia aside, memories last forever. Tangible things go in and out of vogue; they break, wither or fade; or are too expensive to contemplate in the first place.

(If you read my blog regularly, you may be getting tired of reading about presents, but this is a big year for significant birthdays in my family, and they’ve been on my mind a lot lately. I promise, after this, no more gift posts.)

My sister told me flat out that she wasn’t interested in jumping out of a plane ─ I wasn’t even going to suggest it! ─ and my sister-in-law suggested I curb my Fear Factor urges for her husband’s upcoming birthday. Apparently I’ve developed somewhat of a reputation for giving gifts that leave people feeling that they’re living on the edge. And maybe I do, but isn’t it more memorable if your heart rate goes up a bit?

I can provide earthbound experiences as well; a trip to a day spa; a B&B in Maine. I’m dying to give someone the opportunity to swim with a Beluga whale at the Mystic Aquarium. What an experience that would be! Who wouldn’t love that?

As it happens, one of the upcoming honorees is a homebody who wants nothing more than to let the significant birthday slide by unobserved, no hot air balloons, no field trips, no Beluga whales. I’ve been pondering this problem for a while now and have concluded that in this particular case, the best way to remember a significant birthday might be to pretend it never happened. But there is a helicopter tour of Newport that looks awfully inviting…

This post is dedicated to Paul. Happy Birthday

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Why wait for the New Year?

Posted on January 3, 2012 | 10 comments

It’s not easy to come up with an idea for a blog post every week so it’s hard to resist the temptation to take advantage of a subject as obvious as the New Year. I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions so I can’t ramble on about that, however, I received a phone call at the end of the year that got me thinking. It was from a high school friend who had had a tough year, following a series of tough years. Despite everything he’s been through, his sense of humor was still sharp and acerbic and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. As we were winding down, he told me that he’d gotten his license to sell financial services and would I be interested in some life insurance?

I’m not very good at keeping my thoughts inside my head where they won’t get me into trouble, but this time I prevailed; conflicting emotional responses battled it out and called it a draw. My first reaction was irritation; so, we’re not old friends catching up? The next was sympathetic; I knew how difficult things had been and I appreciated his need to do whatever he could to keep body and soul together. While I kept all that to myself, I did allow as how I did not need insurance.

When we hung up, I thought about how lucky I was compared to my friend, and how tenuous it, writ large, all is. You can live responsibly, take care of yourself and your family, help friends and neighbors, but there are still so many things that are out of our control that even the best laid plans can come to naught in the end.

In the past year, two friends have had to give up their homes due to the recession-driven mortgage crisis (or was it the mortgage crisis that caused the recession?). These were good, responsible people, not ne’er do wells trying to beat the system.

Other friends lost parents and siblings and other loved ones this past year. I often rail against the birth/death system. It seems like such a bad plan to me. And the older I get, the worse a plan it seems. PBS did a two-part documentary on Woody Allen recently. Someone asked him if his relationship with death had gotten any better as he got older. His answer boiled down to no. Why do people think his preoccupation with death is strange? To me, it’s one of his most endearing qualities. I’m a little freer to concentrate on other things knowing that he’s worrying about death enough for the rest of us.

Years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. I haven’t actually read it, but I’ve always loved the title. He wrote it partly as a response to his son’s death at fourteen from an incurable disease. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that reading it will be a New Year’s Resolution, but I will add it to my list of things to do.

I will, however, resolve to try to remember that even when we don’t know it, bad things are happening to people so we should hold everyone in kind regard. I’m going to try to do that ─ every day ─ because it doesn’t seem like something that should be reserved for the New Year, does it?

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Military spouses are troopers

Posted on December 20, 2011 | 1 comment

I’ve been a single mom for over a week now, and let me tell you, this is not a state I would be happy in permanently. And it’s not like I’m dealing with diapers and night feedings, my kid is a teenager! I can’t even imagine how much more difficult it would be if she were small and utterly dependent on me.

My husband went to California on business and then took some time to visit with his sister and her family. I was all for it. I wanted him to have a break, particularly since his company was paying for the airfare. Everyone deserves a break from their normal lives once in a while. Most people call that a vacation, but when you’re taking your family with you it’s not the same kind of break.

I was okay for the first week. It was kind of like a stay-cation for me and my daughter. We didn’t really do anything we wouldn’t normally do, but we could have, and that meant something. There were, however, a few downsides that I hadn’t anticipated. The biggest was meal preparation. And by meal preparation, I mean cleaning up after meals.

I don’t like to cook, but that’s one of my jobs anyway. The problem is I know how to multi-task; most women do – men don’t. (Look it up if you don’t believe me.) That means I can do other things and still get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour. If dinner were left up to Andrew, we’d eat, but not until after I’d lost my patience and maybe stomped off to bed. The reason I don’t mutiny about cooking is that Andrew typically cleans up, by which I mean he washes pots and pans, the stuff that requires a bit of muscle to get clean. This week, I’ve been cooking and cleaning up.

The other thing I’ve been soloing on is being my daughter’s chauffer. This is what Saturday looked like: I took her to the mall first thing to shop for a dress she doesn’t need until January, but just had to look at during the worst time to visit the mall, the week before Christmas. Then she needed to get to the movie theater to meet friends, the theater that’s not accessible by bus, and I had to pick her up when it was over. She couldn’t wait for someone else to drive her home because there was very little time to eat dinner before we had to leave again to get her to an indoor soccer game, a twenty-minute drive from home. After all that is it any wonder I insisted we stop for ice cream on the way home? It wasn’t for her, it was for me. I wanted recompense for all my hard work.

My husband will be reading this blog while he’s away. I am not writing it so that he’ll feel guilty. Really, truly, I am not. I’m writing it to say, next time you see a veteran from our most recent war, or any of them, stop them and tell them how happy you are to see them home safe, and how, for the sake of their spouse, it wasn’t a moment too soon.

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The art of branding (products, not cows)

Posted on December 13, 2011 | 3 comments

There was an article in the New Yorker (October 3, 2011) called Famous Names, by John Colapinto. It’s about how the importance of branding has evolved and how naming fads (my word, not his) have changed over time. On a simple level, branding is the practice of naming a company or a product ─ anything really. You can even have a personal brand, something no one should be without. The brand name is the spearhead for marketing. It can increase perceived value in the marketplace. Colapinto said, “The ideal contemporary name works across languages, on search engines, and on Twitter and Facebook, all while displaying the ingenuity necessary to stand out…”

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page here, I offer you two successful branding examples; Kleenex and Xerox. When someone’s nose is running, they are as likely to say, “Can you hand me a Kleenex?” as they are to ask for a tissue. Similarly, if you need to photocopy something, you’re as likely to say, “I’ve got to Xerox this,” as you are to “copy it.”

The art of branding is rarely part of a company’s core competency, so when it is time to brand a new widget some may choose to pay big bucks to branding consultants. Sometimes they pay many thousands of dollars to hire a firm and then ignore their input. You see, branding, like so many things a marketing person deals with, is highly subjective. Branding is about making up names, a game the whole company can play. And if it’s a game the whole company can play, the boss usually wins. (To fully appreciate where I’m coming from, you may want to reread my post, Writers Get No Respect.)

I’ve named a few products in my time, or tried to anyway. Once, after spending many weeks working with a cross-functional team, we reached consensus on a name for a new product. With great excitement we presented the name to the president of the company. He nodded and smiled and seemed pleased with our recommendation. We left the meeting sure we had our name. The president then visited each member of the team and expressed his displeasure with the name we’d chosen ─ and presented one he preferred. Guess which name won in the end?

Another time, at a different company, management insisted that I hire a branding firm. Their process was not unlike the one I used myself, but they facilitated the brainstorming and charged for the basic trademark research that our in-house counsel could have done. After the list of possible names was whittled down to a few strong contenders, the consulting firm asked us, without irony, if we would consider one more: Blazuli. I am not making this up.

The company had created this name at some point and remained convinced that it would be good for some product, some time, if only they could get a company to take a chance. I rejected Blazuli and ultimately management rejected all the other options that our twenty-five thousand dollar investment unearthed. The boss had a better idea.

I honestly do not remember which product this story supports, but I do remember Blazuli. Maybe we should have used it. It sounds contemporary. It doesn’t appear to mean anything in Spanish, Macedonian, or Azerbaijani. A Google search turns up next to no hits from anything vaguely competitive, and according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office it hasn’t been trademarked. And best of all, it’s easy to remember. I’ll race you to the trademark office.

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Avoid the last minute gift scramble

Posted on December 6, 2011 | 9 comments

Last week I allowed myself the luxury of a small rant about having a Christmas birthday. It seems fitting to follow that up with a related rant about birthday presents, and gift giving in general. I have observed that if you have a winter birthday, people tend to give gifts aligned with the season; gloves, hats, scarves and other items designed to make winter bearable. Those things are useful, no doubt about it, but if you’d rather be lying on a beach in the Bahamas, winter weather-related gifts won’t warm the cockles of your heart.

Summer birthday gifts can include bathing suits, sunglasses, and flimsy shirts. All wonderful, I’m sure, unless you’re dreaming of your favorite season, winter! How many people born in June do you think get skis for their birthday? I’m guessing very few. If you had a summer birthday and lived for winter, I imagine birthdays could feel like lost opportunities to you. But for those of you with summer birthdays, all is not lost! If you’re one of the 93% of Americans who celebrate Christmas and you’re seasonally disappointed on your birthday, all you need to do is make your desires known and then sit tight for half a year.

Gareth Cook, a Boston Globe columnist, recently wrote an article called The Perfect Gift. He said that a scholar at the Harvard Business School, Francesca Gino, reports that people appreciate gifts that they’ve requested more than those that you give without consulting beforehand. For me, this is terrible news. According to the article, “Gino has published a detailed scientific paper, complete with tables and footnotes, describing her findings,” and I believe every word of it sight unseen. But it doesn’t apply to me. I don’t want you to ask me what I want. I want you to know me well enough to know what will make me happy.

I’m always making little notes to myself about what might make a good gift for someone. When I hear you say, “Gosh, I’d really like to have a widget someday,” I write it down so I won’t forget. I want to give you something you want, but I want to surprise you, too. That means I have to be attentive to you all year round. That sounds like a tall order, but it isn’t. It simply means that I listen when you talk. Then I can reflect back on the conversations we’ve had over the year and extract clues and hints about your heart’s desires. If I’m lucky, I have a stated desire or two written on a piece of paper somewhere.

If you are an adherent of Ms. Gino’s, you may think you’re honoring me by asking what I want for my birthday, but I want to be surprised. I believe it’s the thought that counts. I’d like you to think about me. Have you been listening to me over the course of the year?  The greatest gift I could get would be for you to say, “I remember you saying that…” If I thought you listened to me, I wouldn’t care what was in the box.

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Ho, Ho, Harrumph

Posted on November 29, 2011 | 11 comments

Have you heard this one before? Her birthday is on Christmas, and she’s Jewish!

Since the season is upon us, I thought I’d share a little rant about what a drag a Christmas birthday can be. In case you haven’t guessed, I know from experience. Yup, I’m what the world refers to as a Christmas baby. Whenever I need to supply my birth date, the response is, “Oh, a Christmas baby!” Then, with barely a pause, the person will add, “You must get screwed on presents.” (Really, they say, “You must get gypped,” but that is not politically correct, and I wouldn’t want to offend anyone, especially not in a post that is partly about my taking offense.)

“I’m Jewish,” I used to say huffily. “I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“But,” they would always say, eager to help, “you don’t have to be Christian to celebrate Christmas,” (which, by the way, is not something a Jew would ever say).

I’ve reached the age where I’m no longer offended. Nowadays, after the expected reaction, I’m likely to mumble something like, “Oh yeah,” or, “You bet,” so we can move on gracefully.

What I haven’t outgrown is how lonely I can feel on my birthday, even though my husband goes out of his way to try to make the day special for me. The problem is that he can’t make the rest of the world not celebrate Christmas. Stores aren’t open, most restaurants are closed. I understand; people want to be with their families. But it is a little sad that on my special day, everyone else is otherwise occupied.

My little family usually spends the evening of my birthday with my parents and my sister’s family. They come over for dinner and we order Chinese food. My mother brings my favorite cake from the Royal Pastry Shop in Lexington. (The cake part is nothing special, but the frosting is to die for, creamy with a slightly crusty layer on the top. It’s pure sugar, delicious.) There was one year, when I was around ten, that we didn’t get back from a ski trip on time for my mother to pick up the cake from the bakery before it closed for the holiday. There was no joy in mudville that year.

And I don’t recall ever having a birthday party as a child. My little friends were busy eating their figgy pudding and breaking their new toys. To be fair, I don’t recall my siblings having birthday parties either so maybe the day on which I was born had nothing to do with it, but it sure didn’t help.

At the risk of sounding ungrateful, my final complaint has to do with presents. I hate it when someone gives me a present and says, “This is for your birthday and Christmas.” It makes it painfully clear that if I did celebrate Christmas, when it came to getting presents I’d be screwed.

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Kids are 24/7

Posted on November 22, 2011 | 5 comments

One day, when I was in first or second grade, I walked home from school by myself, which was not all that unusual an occurrence back in the day. My memory may not be entirely accurate, I read a study recently saying that they rarely are, but I feel like it was later than the normal release time because the sidewalk was empty, and there were no other kids around. We didn’t live far from the school, maybe it was a ten minute walk for an adult, but I remember thinking that day that I would never be able to make it home. And then I saw my mother’s car approaching. And then I watched my mother’s car drive past. She didn’t see me jumping up and down and frantically waving, and she didn’t hear me yelling for her to stop.

I doubt that scenario could play out today. We gave our daughter her first cell phone when she went to middle school. It was the idea of her crossing a very busy street without a crossing guard that pushed us over the edge. Maybe we thought if she got hit by a car she could call us. That was five years ago, and we had held out longer than most. Today, I’m betting most kids in elementary school have their own phones before they hit first grade.

With the phone came a couple of rules; she was to call us when she left school, and call us again when she got home. We were both working, and we wanted to know that she had gotten home safely. She didn’t mind keeping in touch that way. As a matter of fact, she called a lot more than we asked her to. For instance, if we were supposed to pick her up somewhere, she would call us before we had left to remind us. Then she would call to ask if we had left yet, and she might even call to ask if we were almost there. There was no way we were going to drive past her on the sidewalk.

For the first year that my daughter had her phone, I wondered why we were the only people she ever called. I was worried that she didn’t have any friends to call. It took us a while to figure out that kids don’t actually talk on the phone. They text. Once we sprang for a texting plan, it turned out she had lots of friends.

Working parents love texting. They can communicate with their child while they’re in a meeting. It only takes a second to tap “no” and hit send, and it doesn’t interrupt the meeting the way a phone call would.

Kids love texting, too. Our daughter texts my husband when she has a question, needs information, wants to know why I’m not answering my phone, or is just plain bored. And therein lies the rub; not only can we stay in touch with our children, we can not get away from them.

I am not saying that my mother saw me that fateful day and chose to ignore me. Really, I am not saying that. Nor am I saying that there are days when I wish I could ignore my child. If, however, my mother did see me that day, and chose not to stop, well, I can almost see how it could happen. That’s all I’m saying.

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iPhone for twelve

Posted on November 15, 2011 | 7 comments

My husband has an iPhone. He’s on his third or fourth. He got his first one the day they went on sale in the summer of 2007. Or rather, I got his first one the day they went on sale. It involved getting up early in the morning and waiting in line all day, but that’s a story for another time. When he upgraded to a newer iPhone he tried hard to convince me to use the one he was retiring. I resisted. I had a phone. I still have it; a little flip phone that sports a Cingular logo. It does what I need it to do, make and receive phone calls.

This past summer, in yet another attempt to encourage me to embrace the iPhone lifestyle, Andrew set up one of his decommissioned iPhones to receive my email. I began to see the light. As long as I am in the vicinity of WiFi I can use my iPhone to do everything iPhone users can do – except make phone calls.

After I learned to obsessively check my decommissioned iPhone for email, I started to explore the games that Andrew had left behind. Some of them were variations of ones I had been playing elsewhere. Regular readers of this blog will remember my not-so-dirty little secret: I was a closet Webkinz fan, in it for the games. I have now graduated to a much smaller screen, with more than four primary colors.

I’ve even learned to download my own games. One addition to my gaming repertoire is Words with Friends. It’s just like Scrabble, without the threat of trademark infringement. You play a word, choose send, and now it’s your opponent’s turn. This game differs from the traditional face-to-face board game in a couple of disconcerting ways. If you play a set of letters that turn out not to be a word, you are invited to recall them and try again. No penalty. Perhaps even more egregious is that if you can’t make a word from your letters, you can play any old combination, without having a clue what you’re spelling. If it turns out to be a legitimate word, your score goes up, and it’s your opponent’s turn. There is no need to bluff, and there is no one to challenge you if you are bluffing. This is Scrabble for morons. And I love it.

Here is one of my new words: Qi. I have no idea what it means, but it comes in very handy in Words with Friends, especially if you can play it on a triple letter, or triple word spot.

Recently, I’ve begun using a free texting app. The first time I texted my daughter she replied, “Who’s this?” Once we’d ironed that out, I began to appreciate how convenient texting her could be in certain situations, like when she didn’t want to be overheard talking to her mother on the phone. Technically I can text on my little flip phone, but it takes much longer since, for instance, to type the letter ‘c’ you have to tap the number 2 key three times. I may be reaching my own personal tipping point regarding my iPhone turned iTouch. That costly data plan is still a deterrent, though. I’ll think about it for a little while longer and when I decide I’ll call you. Or maybe I’ll text instead.

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