Drama Queen

Charlotte is that girl from high school who always had some traumatic thing going on in her life and always seemed to be in the spotlight because of her woes.

We're still so short on gas that cable news channels are showing our long-lines and friends are calling me from all over the country asking if it's as bad as it looks on TV. Yes, it's that bad.

And while Charlotte was the 2nd largest banking center in the country (NYC is #1) when I moved here 9 months ago, it's not anymore because Wachovia was sold today. This is very, very big - and possibly devastating - news for this town.

I've had enough of all this drama.

My one-track mind

All through choir practice, Sacrament meeting, children's singing time, my disastrous attempt to teach two rambunctious six-year-olds the value of "always telling the truth," a two-hour open house I had to help host for work . . . this was the only thing on my mind:



Red and yellow cherry tomatoes and a sweet bell pepper sauteed with garlic until they fell apart. A handful of fresh basil and parsley from my little herb garden that refuses to die no matter how much I neglect it. A few frozen shrimp and a couple of Trader Joe's turkey meatballs cut into pieces. Served steaming hot over whole wheat pasta.

I'm a shoot-from-the-hip, never-follow-the-recipe-to-a-T kinda cook. So when I nail something, it's special. And eventhough I was beyond starving and my judgement was clearly clouded, today's experiment was out of the park!

(P.S. Don't let the picture fool you. It tasted way better than it looks! I either need a better camera or, more likely, better camera skills.)

Exhaling

This is today, as seen from my patio. You probably can't tell how soggy and overcast it is from the photo. But it's peaceful. And it finally stopped raining. So this morning I set out with my tennis shoes and ipod to shake a long week of work, dominated by politics and gas pump panic.

The telephone poles and tree trunks are a soggy, black/brown from all the rain, their droopy leaves dripping puddles at their feet. Soon I was lost in a maze of side streets.

I listened to a podcast of music nerds riffing on their favorite new songs for Fall. Everything from Bob Dylan to bossa nova. It took me back to some really great times with my own music-nerd friends in my parents' RV, dissecting the best performances of a summer music festival over a dinner of Twizzlers and Doritos.

Yes, it's glum today. But the week's darkness has lifted.

Music bonus - here are a few tracks I enjoyed from the podcast:

• Furr, from the new Blitzen Trapper album
• Palmyra, from the new Jolie Holland album.
• Everything on the new TV on the Radio album.

A very literate loo

This is the bathroom at my neighborhood public library. The idea is pure genius. But even more cool is that someone wrote the Greek alphabet. Talk about smart graffiti.

Running on Empty

There is no gas in Charlotte.

Something about oil companies having a monopoly on the market and dragging their feet to get back online after Hurricane Ike. Gas stations in much of the southeast are not getting their full shipments and people are starting to panic. Mix the two and you get a lot of empty pumps.

I actually have enough in my tank for another 100 miles and I passed up two chances to fill up early in the day because the authorities are telling everyone to be patient and only take what they need. My altruistic side won out.

They say more is on the way and tomorrow things should be better. Or by the weekend, for sure. But that means trusting the oil companies (hah, right) and the Governor who swears he's been talking to the oil companies (course he's in Raleigh where they have plenty of gas).

Trust schmust. When I got home tonight, a friend called desperate because she's on E . We went out with my gas can and drove for probably 30 minutes before I had to finally call it quits out of fear I'd run out of gas, too. Not a single station had anything - regular, premium, super. Nada. Nothing. Just one gas station after another with pumps tied up in plastic shopping bags to signal "No gas here. Move on please."

Altruism be damned. This is capitalism. I bet everyone's topping off their tanks the minute they find a pump with some petrol. And after my failed quest tonight, I'm doing the same thing tomorrow, first open pump I see.

Perfect 10!

Luke was my first nephew, so I like to think we have a special bond. He used to come spend the night at my house and we'd go to the dinosaur park and the planetarium and watch Toy Story and drink chocolate milk. When his little brother came along, we were the three amigos.

I can't believe Luke is 10.

Or that my younger sis is old enough to have a 10 year old son.

Or what that says about me, since I'm older than her.

At any rate, Luke is an amazing kid who throws a mean football, reads on almost a college level and has an incredibly sensitive side that makes it hard to get mad at him. And those eyelashes that go on forever and ever. . . I worry sometimes that someone will kidnap him just so they can sell his eyelashes as transplants for rich, vain women.

I couldn't have asked for a better nephew to cut my aunthood teeth on. These days I'm the rockin'est aunt on the block and I owe it all to my man Luke.

Happy 10th!

Relax Kids

At our weekly, company-wide staff meeting this morning the Boss did something great. He spent ten minutes right off the bat reassuring us that with a little long-term perspective you can see all this crazy, run-for-the-woods-Wall-Street's-up-in-flames-and-we're-next!!!! furor for the momentary hurdle that it is. It will pass, just like the dot-com implosion in 2001 and Black Monday in 1987. He assured us our jobs are secure and the company on solid footing, ready to weather the storm. "We just have to get back to basics and keep moving forward."

He called it his "Geezer speech" because it's the way old folks talk to youngsters who get whipped up about something they've never experienced before. Some might find it annoying.

I love it. It's the same speech my Dad, the therapist, used all through my adolescence when I worked myself into a dither over the tiniest anxieties.

Today I realized that without noticing, I actually had been working myself up over this economic thing, too . . . fantasizing about how it might doom my 401K, my newly-purchased condo, my career. Dad used to call that horribilizing. Don't look it up, because I don't think it's a real word. But you get the idea.

If they gave out medals in horribilizing, I'd beat your mother and your grandmother and your neurotic sister-in-law and every worrywart in the universe.

I am the gold medal queen of horribilizing.

P.S. If this comes as any surprise to you, it's probably because you knew me when I was taking my anxiety meds more regularly. Thank goodness for modern medicine!

Knock on wood. . .

I'm feeling much better today, which is 3 days ahead of schedule for my typical head cold.

Chalk it up to two really good night's rest and some mild Charlotte weather. Or maybe it's some kind of magic Obama power, since I spent the entire afternoon/evening covering his rally.

I've seen the man's words work people into a frenzy the likes of which I only ever imagined in old time tent revivals. Perhaps he also has the power to heal. . .

Bad Karma

Hands-down the most beautiful weekend of the year and I'm holed up at home fighting my third cold in nine months. This is a record for a lucky girl who rarely gets sick. Something about this southern climate is messing with my constitution.

I've got the doors and windows open letting in all the perfectly cool, non-humid air. Hopefully the cold-medicine-fog will lift enough for me to take a walk soon. It'd be a shame to waste such a lovely day. Especially since I have to work most of tomorrow - darn political candidates keep coming to town on Sunday. Seriously not cool.

Jack Turns 83

My Grandpa Jack is now the exact age of the golf game he seems to be playing a lot lately. I'm not sure which is more impressive - the golf or the getting to 83 in such style and class!

There's one image of Grandpa Jack that will stay forever with me. It's after dinner in their SoCal condo and Grandma's cleaning the last of the dishes. The grandkids are sprawled on the leather couches in the den watching TV. My parents, aunts and uncles are on the patio chatting. And Grandpa's at his electric organ in a corner of the living room, sipping an after-dinner drink as he wanders through his favorite jazz standards. One hand works the melody. The other hits an occasional chord. He's humming beneath his breath and chuckling outloud when he comes to a passage he particularly loves.

It goes on like this for an hour or so. Each of us in our separate place. Jack's music setting the tone, tying us all together.

Happy Birthday Grandpa!

Finally

I'm not gonna lie. There were a few weeks this summer I was ready to throw in the towel and beat it out of this hot humid place. Everyone kept saying it wasn't nearly as bad as last summer with "20 straight days of 100+ heat and all the rest."

But the few we had, multiplied by the endless humidity, had me sitting home in front of the fan, A/C blasting, yearning for just a little bit of that dry desert air. I don't care if it's 100 degrees, as long as it's dry.

Part of the problem is that I've been going stir-crazy. Normally I love to walk when the sun starts to set, jog in the mornings, ride my bike around the neighborhood on weekends, hike, wander around and just be outside. But I haven't spent more than an hour a week - on average - outside all summer because it's just so uncomfortable. And if it's not the heat/humidity, it's the bugs.

ARGH!

But finally this week - today and yesterday - the weather gods have given me a break. It's 72 outside with 62 percent humidity. On the Weather Channel website under the temperature it says in parentheses (feels like 72) which is a BIG DEAL. Because normally the humidity makes it feel 20 degrees hotter. So hooray for the arrival of Fall.

I slept with the window open last night and even turned off the ceiling fan for the FIRST TIME IN FOUR MONTHS.

And the best part is I used a flat-iron on my hair this morning and tonight it's actually still straight rather than Q-tip unruly.

Of Aliens and Thank Yous

There's a certain fill-in-the-blank quality to thank you notes that makes the thought count more than what's actually said. I try to be original when I write them, but I rarely succeed.


Dear (name here),

Thank you for the (gift/date/treat/visit/letter). It means so much to me and made my (birthday/anniversary/departure) so much more memorable.

I treasure your (friendship/love) and hope it last many more (days/weeks/years).

Thanks again.

Best/Sincerely/Love,
Me

Like I said, it's the thought that counts. But this week I received the most amazing thank you note from my six-year-old nephew and realized I've been going about writing thank you notes all wrong.



Notice that he squeezes in a "Thanks." But the card is all about the alien with a killer disease and the poisonous satellite. It captures his wild imagination so perfectly that I can hear his high-pitched voice, see his impish grin and feel his bony arms around my waist.

Why do we bother with such boring "The gift you sent made my day" schmaltz when our thank you notes have the potential to be a little piece of ourselves?

Next time you want to say thanks, why not send a whimsical doodle, an original rhyme, a newspaper clipping that amuses you or a leaf from the tree you love to sit under?

Home from D.C.

This picture is all I have to show for the 90 minutes I spent site-seeing during my quick training trip to D.C. I trotted down to the national mall, took a short cut back through the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, listened to a jazz singer do one tune at a street fair and had a bratwurst with kraut from the Gorden Biersch booth there. Then off to the airport for a 56 minute flight home to Charlotte.

A word about coming home: If the flight attendant hadn't just announced that we'd touched down in Charlotte, I would never have known. Absolutely nothing looked familiar coming out of the gangway into the airport. I momentarily panicked, thinking I'd taken the wrong plane. All the way through the airport I searched for something familiar - a shop, a piece of art, a turn in the hallway - to jog my sense of place. I couldn't even picture what the baggage claim curb would look like or the parking lot where I'd left my car. It wasn't until the parking shuttle came out of the terminal and I spotted the downtown Charlotte skyline that I was certain I really was home.

In fairness, I've only actually flown into the Charlotte airport three times, so maybe that's why it's so foreign to me after all these months.

But it does make me wonder how "at home" I really am here - or how well I'm doing with this whole transition. I will say I've been intensely homesick for the dry Utah air, the Rocky Mountains and my family these last few weeks.

Getting off that plane today, the airport didn't seem right to me because it wasn't Salt Lake City. It wasn't home.

Flashback

It's 6:30 a.m. and I'm working on a deadline in my D.C. hotel room. There are pigeons nesting just outside my window - the blinds are down but I can hear them cooing. The sound triggered one of those intense flashbacks that last just a second but conjure the exact place, time and state of mind you were in at another time.

Junior year in high school. My favorite teacher - Ms. Cooper, AP Biology - had just come into possession of two doves and a large cage. We were going to study them, I think, but I'm not sure how. This was not anatomy class, so no dissecting was in store for the birds. The trouble was it was just before Christmas break and someone needed to take them home for the two weeks we'd be out of school.

I volunteered because I adored Ms. Cooper and have a strong need to be helpful. I did not volunteer because I like animals or wanted pets. I never have liked or wanted pets. But I ended up with these two doves that cooed incessantly and scrabbled their feed all over the place make a disaster of feather and seeds in the corner of my room. I took good care of them, as I remember. Even tried to hold them on occasion. If there are doves that like to cuddle, these weren't of that variety. After the break, I brought them back to Ms. Cooper and never gave the birds another thought. No emotional bonds had grown between us.

I wasn't interested in having pets. I was interested in being the teacher's pet.

An Even Smaller World Than I Like to Believe

It's disorienting to get on a plane and be in D.C. barely an hour later. It should take much longer in my Utah-bred mind. I keep forgetting that I practically live on the East Coast (except for the times my MountainWest friends and family forget the time difference and call me after bedtime.)

From the plane, I raced straight to the metro and into the heart of D.C. where I stumbled (darn laptop's too heavy!) into the first Indian restaurant I saw. I've missed the easy access to great ethnic food and the rumble of city life I used to love in S.F. SLC had great international cuisine, too. Charlotte has a few good Indian/Thai/Sushi/Vietnamese/Lebanese restaurants, but they take some digging - and harder yet - convincing friends to come along. Down South if it ain't bbq, people just aren't that interested.

So my luggage and I are sitting across from each other at a table for two in this cute little Indian place and I'm inhaling basmatic rice and chicken curry when I hear the unmistakable chatter of Mormonism.

"On my mission we were allowed to listen to P.G. soundtracks."
"We could only listen to MoTab!"
"I can't believe I've been home for 8 years."

Less than an hour in D.C. and I'm sitting two tables away from a foursome of Mormon singles. Unbelievable.

More Proof I May Be Heartless

I’m waiting in the Charlotte airport for my flight to D.C. and it occurs to me this is an inauspicious day to fly. I was actually on a runway in Salt Lake when the 9-11 attacks happened seven years ago. My plane never made it off the ground and launched me on a never-to-be-repeated adventure to California by Greyhound bus.

I need to confess: I’ve been dodging heart and mind-wrenching 9-11 anniversary stories all day, switching channels to the classical music station mid-way through seemingly non-stop commemorating and memorializing. I understand why the media’s doing it. Poignant anniversaries are the easiest news angle in the world. I just don’t agree with it.

I go out of my way to not make a big deal of the yearly arrival of painful moments like a major breakup or a the day a loved-one fell sick. Or worse.

I think we should celebrate birth dates, not death dates. Beginnings, not endings.

Ta Da!

Nearly settled-in and ready for prime time! Hope my questionable camera skills don't make you dizzy.

Melrose Place Redux

At this moment there are several dozen attractive young single people partying just outside my patio. Some live in the building. Many don't. There is pizza and lots of beer and some kind of drinking game that entails aiming a ping pong ball at a row of cups full of beer on the other end of the table. If the ball lands in the cup, your opponent has to drink it. I'm not sure how you win, because for at least an hour the same guy has been playing against a rotating cast of attractive blondes. He looks like Ryan Gosling.

Two of my neighbors are throwing this party - they invited me multiple times this afternoon, so I made a valiant efforts. Met a few very nice people, but couldn't really muster the energy to wander around for long, introducing myself to attractive stranger after stranger and trying desperately to remember their names.

The girl upstairs who's co-hosting the shindig has been renting here for 3 years. Remember how I said this is a big complex full of single people and their dogs? My assessment was accurate. Her exact words:

"This is Melrose Place."

What did I tell you?

Lotto Losers

At 5 p.m. today someone in North Carolina let the clock run out on a winning lottery ticket worth $200,000. I'm nauseous at the thought. And even if tomorrow this person finds the ticket wadded up in an old purse or washed into the pocket of the pair of jeans he/she wore back in March when the ticket was purchased, it'll be too late. It's worthless now. All that unclaimed money went back into other people's prizes and the state's education fund.

It could be me. I don't buy lottery tickets because I'd rather spend my small bills on candy and thrift store clothes. But I always miss the expiration date on those coupons I get with my grocery receipt. I have thousands of miles devaluing in my frequent flier account because I can't be bothered to claim them. Sometimes I wake up in a sweat thinking about the money languishing in a couple of 401Ks investments that made sense when I had those jobs eight years ago but don't in today's market.

I hate to think what other treasures I'm missing out on because I can't be bothered to check forgotten pockets in my life.

Melrose Place

Part of me wants to believe that at 34, I'm too old to be living in a very large apartment complex populated entirely by single people and their dogs.

Just to be clear, I have nothing against single people. And their dogs are fine, as long as they don't lick me, poop on my patio or swim in the pool. It's just that I'm not much of a neighborly person and having all of these people living so close to me - and in identical living quarters - feels a tad claustrophobic.

Every morning my neighbors come out of their same-as-mine apartments in various states of ready-for-work, dogs on leashes, coffee cups in hand and amble up and down the sidewalk giving Fido/Spot/Bruiser a last chance to pee before he's locked inside for the day. I spy on them from my window, making up stories about what they do for work (based on what they're wearing and how they walk), how long they've lived here and which neighbor they 're in love with.

The first thing my neighbor told me when I bumped into her with my arms full of boxes on moving day was that it was a pity I'd missed the neighborhood summer party two weeks back.

It was a toga party.

I'm 10 years out of college, 10 years into a career, owning my second home/condo and I've landed in Melrose Place. Heaven help me.

Finding a Stud

I would have preferred to find it on my own, but there were dozens of logical places it could have been at Home Depot. I finally gave in and asked for help, but that's where the tricky part came in. . . I couldn't bring myself to tell the guy in the orange apron that I needed a STUDFINDER. It wasn't so much the asking, as it was the anticipation that he might come back with some wisecrack that would make me blush and feel like an idiot.

"Look no further baby, I'm standing right here."
"A studfinder? Oh, I can get you a studfinder."
"You having trouble finding a stud? Can't imagine that."

By the time I mumbled my request to the guy, I'd come up with so many possible cracks he might make, I couldn't even say the word STUDFINDER.

"Yeah, uh, I need to find one of those machines that help you find a 2x4 in a wall so you can hang stuff."

I'm such a chicken. If it even occurred to him to make a wisecrack, he didn't show it. Just led me right to the aisle with multiple STUDFINDERS from which to choose. Notice the slightly more sophisticated name of the one I got. Had I known I could ask for a STUDSENSOR I probably wouldn't have been so embarrassed!

This is why I needed it.


My bicycle is now conveniently - and space-savingly - hung from the ceiling of my storage room. And I only made two holes into studless drywall before finally hitting 2x4 jackpot. Turns out the StudSensor doesn't just find a stud and point to it. There are some skills required - skills I didn't quite master right off the bat.

Success in the end. Can't wait for the next project that requires locating a stud! (Go ahead, make that joke. I know it's killing you. . . the one about the single girl and her studfinder practically writes itself.)