wideeyedfunk

Category: Life

Always so surprising.

  • A vexing loss in the spousal competition.

    I’m not saying that the WideEyedSpouse and I compete against each other. That would be a gross exaggeration. However, it is nice to get a win every now and again, to be better at something, like say, concocting the best dill pickle or power shifting in the powerful Mach 5 (the demon on wheels, my Mini Cooper S). Of course the decision as to who is better at any given event is subject to in-house debate. Data proofs and examples are required during the win-lose negotiations. We may query the dogs for their perspective. The judges, Spouse and I, are not impartial. It has happened that I determined myself the winner regardless of the Spouse’s contrary findings. It’s all in good fun. Mostly.

    Yesterday an external judge gave the Spouse a win that will haunt me for decades.

    This is from before we had our own gear. Even then there were hints that I was going to not win.
    This is from before we had our own gear. Even then there were hints that I was going to not win.

    We have had exactly the same number of Olympic recurve-style archery lessons. Six. At them, we stand side by side at the range and are coached as we shoot. We have almost exactly the same gear, except for our differences in size and strength.

    Until yesterday I believed that neither of us was winning at the archery skills affinity contest yet. This took a certain amount of self-delusion because I could clearly see that the Spouse’s arrows were more often in the bullseye. Mine are little wider ranging. But still, belief is powerful.

    Evidently after you loose an arrow you are supposed to maintain your posture while allowing the bow fall as it will. I was told it is like following through in golf or bowling, neither of which is in my skillset. It seems that after I loose the arrow and I immediately collapse my arms and back, entirely ruining the shot. Coach corrected me several times, using a variety of phases: “Keep that arm up. Where’s that arrow? Watch that bow. Stay in position. Follow it through.” Then she uttered the words that, to be fair, I may have deserved.

    “Watch your Spouse,” she said, “he’ll show you how it’s done.” Silence fell across the range. The Spouse, poised to shoot, froze. His eyes wandered over to me and I could his see him trying to stop the spread of him smarmy smirk. I glared at the side of his head. I tried to bore a hole into it, far enough to give him a tiny memory lobotomy with my laser eyes.

    I failed.

    For years I will hear “watch me, I’ll show you how it’s done,” irritating in its own right, and an eternally vexing reminder of my failure to win on that day.  Can you hear my teeth grinding?

  • Saturday morning along some Buffalo roadways.

    HamishGrillHamish the Corgi supervised the assembly of the new Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker last night. Miss Tibbit broke the packing material down into pieces small enough to fit into the recycling bin. They waited at home today while their WideEyedHumans drove out to Adventures in Heat in the suburbs for hardwood charcoal and some black cherry and apple wood chunks.

    The world between the house and the shop teemed with life. Two security guards in Buffalo Central Library lamented the arrest of a regular patron. He was caught with 20 grains or grams of something.  That’ll get him 20 years in prison, one guard said.

    A Princess (her license plate told us so) in an elderly Nissan Altima hocked a wad of gum into the shrubs in the Tim Horton’s Coffee drive through. Across the street jets lifted off at the airport, taking people somewhere else. For once, on this rainy Saturday morning, I didn’t feel the wanderlust.

    A few miles down the road, a Dad opened the rear door of a limousine and helped his daughter bride into a tiny white church. We rolled passed the intersection where an 18 year old on a motorcycle blasted himself to a 100 mile an hour oblivion on the front of a BMW last Wednesday. I expected it to look different there now, but it didn’t.

    A senior citizen hauling her groceries in a rolling bin stopped for a smoke break in an empty bank parking lot. Brindled and shaking, a tiny dog stared at me from the next car over when we arrived at the bbq shop.

    On the way home we stopped at Fairy Cakes Cupcakery for a couple of treats: orange-chocolate and oatmeal cookie cupcakes. The WideEyedSpouse has a birthday tomorrow. Two delicately oversized giraffes living at the Buffalo Zoo peered over their oversized wrought iron fence at passing events. I saw their long eyelashes blinking at the world and wondered what they thought about. Did they want a cupcake?

    Just now I stood in the garden, contemplating on mulching even though the maple hasn’t released its helicoptering seed pods yet. It is raining a bit and Miss Tibbit and Hamish asked if we might instead nap in front of public television. Sure, I told them, let’s go in.

    The world will have to get by without me watching it for a little while. I hope I don’t miss anything.

  • I would pick you to be on my zombie apocalypse team.

    In 1976, I went to full time school for the first time. I know this because I counted back on my fingers, there’s no memory of it. 1976 recollections are solely and exclusively about being on the Junior Every Women’s Club float in the Bicentennial Parade. There was a cooler filled with soda tucked behind a prop on the float. And I had unrestricted access.

    From 1976 to 1988, I was subjected to team oriented sports games: dodgeball, kickball, softball, basketball, tag, kick the can, volleyball, baseball, an occasional wretched tag-football, maybe a soccer, badminton, or tennis here and there.

    During the ritualized team picking, I watched the sky, heard the birds, found interesting rocks, wondered why some kids’ shoes got grass-stained and some did not, felt the texture of the weedy athletic fields under my legs as I patiently sat, observed the knobby knees of the other kids clustered in the pick-me corral, and now that I think about, made a start on the WideEyedLife.

    Friends, I was last picked every time, and least played in the games. It was wonderful. Protected from the game by my team mates, I had time to pursue my own concerns in the outfield, on the bench, along the sidelines. I was responsible to no one, rarely sweaty, and free. Just, free.

    Two days ago I lost my freedom.

    “I’m thinking of getting a job in the corporate world,” I told two of the graduate students, we were talking about the passion of research versus practical income. “Being research faculty is great, but I really need to think about a secure retirement plan.” So young and still immortal they looked at me, all wide eyed, “What will you do?” one asked, clearly making contingency plans of her own.

    “It is going to have to be writing or project management,” I told them, “It isn’t easy to translate a specialization in theories about prehistoric maritime Arctic foragers into jobs in the Outside.” There was a small silence as well all took a moment to feel sorry for folks on the Outside.

    “Yeah,” one young woman nodded, “But I would pick you to be on my zombie apocalypse team.”

    I reeled backwayd, stunned.

    Friends, I had nearly four decades of freedom. I could not have predicted this threat. I would never have suspected that my years of field research in remote wilderness areas, decades of studying how people get by on the land and sea, and self-inculcation of small group dynamics theory would make me a tactically sound team pick for anything.

    I guess the zombie apocalypse changes everything.

  • Generational Transmogrification: I am turning into my Grandma.

    Earlier this week, I lounged on the sofa with a crackly plastic wrapped novel from the library, feet propped on the footstool, glass of iced tea to hand. My reading glasses were propped on the end of my nose. With my right hand I played the page turning game: flip flip flip past the corner of each page yet to be read – can I flip through all of the pages before I finish reading the page I am on? It is an annoying, compulsive habit I’ve had as long as I remember.

    On my lap sat a bowl of popcorn. On the floor next to me a started but recently abandoned knitting project. The few completed rows of my new sweater looked good nestled next to the big ball of yarn in the bowl.

    Then I had déjà vu. Except it wasn’t déjà vu, it was memory, long-buried, unsought. I had been a part this scene before and not because I spend part of every day lounging and reading. I stopped my page flipping, my popcorn munching and held myself completely still while I waited for it to bubble up.

    It was Grandma Funk. The hairs on the back of my neck felt all tingly. I was Grandma Funk or at least acting an awful lot like her. I remember her letting me iron the sheets and her silk scarves while she lounged on the bed in her room, reading. I played on the rug on the floor near her while she sat reading on the loveseat in the TV room. I remember Grandma flip-flip-flipping the pages of her book with one finger, eating a snack, reading with a lumpy half-knitted thing abandoned nearby.

    Grandma Funk c. 1934. One year out of college, one year into marriage to an earlier WideEyedFunk.
    Grandma Funk c. 1934 with the 1932 Chevrolet Deluxe Roadster. She was one year out of college, one year into marriage to an earlier WideEyedFunk. As a side note, you might want to consider the long history of car fever in the WideEyedFamily.

    I realized I was wearing her jewelry, a solid silver cuff etched with wildflowers I haven’t taken off for 15 years or more. I was wearing one of her silk scarves. When the scarves came to me after she died, they still smelled of her Emeraude perfume. I didn’t wash them for years, left them in the box they were packed in so I could sniff my childhood every now and again.

    Grandma Funk died when I was a kid, maybe I was 10 years old. I didn’t know her really at all. Now that I am turning into her, now that I have worn her jewelry and scarves for decades, I sort of wonder if we would have been friends. We might have had things to talk about. We might have had adventures that were more exciting than trips to the park where she read while I chased and was chased by the giant geese. Although that did raise my kiddie heart rate a bit.

    I think I am turning into my Grandma Funk. I’m sort of ok with it.

  • The lunch that wasn’t.

    I sat in the feeble 1970s conference room chair at the lab table in the front of the room yesterday late morning. I was managing the start of six lab projects involving data from Alaska to Western New York, spanning the past 3,000 years. Different student research groups and I trotted from lab to museum to department office to other lab to other lab – up and down steps, across streets, through countless locked doors.

    And I was starving. Empty bellied, weird head buzzing weakness, tunnel-visioned hungry.

    The WideEyedSpouse was home from work and I sent him an email, saying I wished I were there. He replied: “I wish you were home too. Then you could have some of my fried egg, fried ham and cheese sandwich!” – kindly attaching a picture.Full

    I leaned in close to the laptop. I could feel the crusty toast, taste the salty ham. I think I drooled on the keyboard. Bing, another email from the WideEyedSpouse –  “All gone,” it said, with an image attached.

    Empty

    I wept.

     

  • Budget Sequestration Made Me Eat Cheap Peanut Butter.

    The WideEyedHousehold must make decisions about financial sequestering by prioritizing categories of expenditure. Just as our Senate is divided in debates about preferential priorities, so we are. Just as our nation must make difficult choices, so we must. “Compromise” in the WideEyedHousehold results in unpalatable solutions, as it does in our nation.

    As you may know, I dreamed of an exotic winter break far from snowy Buffalo. Last week during spring break, we ate lunch at the Ikea just outside of Toronto for our international vacation. The basic parameters of an exotic, international locale with regional cuisine were met. They were met stupendously if the rumors about horsemeat in the Ikea meatballs are true. How intrepid of us to eat the little meat balls all unknowing, even with an unconcerned panache.

    As you may know, the WideEyedSpouse likes beer. I like to eat. He feels that beer sort of is food. I feel that food is food. The Spouse prefers good beer. I prefer organic, limited ingredient, small batch peanut butter. Our preferential priorities battled at Wegman’s. The beer lobby won. I still got the peanut butter, but at radically reduced funding. Evidently the beer drinker’s lobby in the WideEyedSenate is far more powerful than the peanut butter eater’s lobby.

    I fear for the next battle. I mean “compromise”.

  • Australian Shiraz grapes make my teeth purple.

    Italian Sangiovese grapes do not.

    WineGlass

    I’ll let you wonder about the testing program that was necessary to come to this conclusion.

    Perhaps you should take a moment to cast your mind over the many other red wines that may, or may not, turn my teeth purple.  I’ll test those too if you insist.

    I also suggest that you think about the kind of week a person might be having to make such testing seem like a Good Idea.

    Wine1

  • My school bag smelled like the 1970s. Heh?

    It was entirely accidental.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I have been streaming the old Julia Childs off of the PBS website. They are rasty and sketchy and black and white. And in them, Julia wastes nothing. She made a French onion soup and tossed in the butts of the onions. I was aghast. I thought those were for the worm bin.

    Another time she made a French tart crust. Pie crust to you and me, but she used a different technique, evidently a French one. What really caught my eye and stayed with me all through the week and into my errand run to Target, was her masterful use and reuse of waxed paper.

    She made the crust dough and then wrapped it in waxed paper to chill in the fridge before rolling it out. Apparently this gives the gluten some time to relax. Whatever. Because it was t.v. and none of us had then or have now the time to sit around and chat with Julia over coffee while we waited for the dough to chill (unfortunate), she grabbed an already prepared and chilled dough mass out of the fridge.

    It was half-ass wrapped in the wrinkliest mess of waxed paper I’ve even seen. Even Julia looked unnerved by it. She patted the mass once or twice as if that would smooth out the situation. That wax paper sheet looked like it had been wrapping pie dough lumps for a decade. And I thought, yeah, waxed paper.

    So I bought some.

    Sandwich1And I made a pbj to take to school for lunch and wrapped it in the waxed paper like a little present. Ends folded in on themselves all tidy like, clean creases. That pbj became a sandwich packet with dignity.

    The waxed paper sandwich packet sat in my bag all morning during lab. The students diligently studied fish bones all around me and I prepared my lecture on bird bones while wafts of 1970s sandwich reek crossed my nose for hours.

    Sandwich2At first I didn’t know why it was comforting or why I thought it was 1970s sandwich reek. I just kept sniffing near my bag and smiling. I clackety clacked away on my laptop and in a rush of odd recognition, I remembered that when I was a kid the WideEyedMom packed our school sandwiches in waxed paper bags. The bags had a little gusset and were just big enough to fold over the bread slices twice. The waxy pbj aroma wafted out of my kiddie lift up desk all morning, taunting me with lunch and recess ideas every time I went for a pencil.

    My school bag reeked of the 1970s. And it was wonderful.

  • The tiresome collision of skeletons and snow.

    Skeleton1Outside the lab window, above the human skeletons dangling from their cranial hooks, I could see the wind howling snow across the small Fimbulwintered quad. It looked horrible. I put my chin in my hand and gazed into the whirling wretched iciness and thought about a beach. A long, wide beach with nice medium sized waves and only a few other people around. The sun glared off the water and I could almost feel the heat. I sighed and imagined settling my shoulders deeper into the hot sand. It was great. I smiled.

    I heard a faint, wah, wah, wah sound off to my right so I turned my head, idly wondering what it was.

    Oh. It was one of the grad students in the lab. He was describing his research project to me. To get my input. Which I really wanted to give because I like that part of my job.

    I tuned back in, sighing to myself.

    I’m tired of winter.

    Temperature at posting: 16 degrees F, light snow, wind ~15mph.

  • Snowfall and sunshine, with tubercular hacking.

    The sunlight glowed through yesterday morning’s snowfall so that the dogs and I were surrounded by whirling and sparkling crystals on morning walkies. Miss Tibbit, the useless little black dog, pranced down the side walk in her bouncing happy stride. Hamish the Corgi sniffed, raced to the next interesting spot, and sniffed again. The world was bright and full of opportunities – a snow storm in the sunshine? Anything seemed possible.

    Across the street a car door creaked open and the dogs and I listened to a tubercular hacking emerging from the ancient sedan. Miss Tibbit stopped to look and Hamish glanced over from his position against some unfortunate shrubbery.

    The hacking head leaned out of the car and drooled a liquidy mess onto the street. Awesome, I said to the dogs. Miss Tibbit strained against the leash, deeply interested. Let’s go check it out, she said to Hamish who walked up next to her. Ok, Hamish said as he stepped off the curb.

    In the brilliant shine of a sunlit snowfall I fought the dogs down the block away from this fresh excitement. Their noses pointed high to cop sniffs and their little feet struggled in the snow and ice against my pull on their leashes. The possibilities of yesterday’s sparkling morning were broader, and a little less cheery than I hoped. I looked up and sighed into the snowing falling from the blue sky while the dogs breathed deeply of another interesting spot.