Haute Couture for the Wee Ones

We’ve talked before about the totally inappropriate catalogs that have appeared in my mailbox: perhaps you remember the up-scale athletic outfits or the pricey ersatz Tyrolean haberdashery. Who could forget the sausage casings?

Right now I am looking at another catalog. It is much more up my alley–children’s clothing—but I won’t be buying anything, partly because it is way too expensive. I keep it beside my sewing machine to get ideas for sewing for my grandchildren. That’s probably illegal, so I won’t name the catalog. Their little girls’ dresses are adorable and I have been blessed with four granddaughters, so I can start getting busy for summer. But there is also the matter of eleven grandsons. Cute seersucker rompers don’t do it for nine-year-olds, so I was thumbing through the pages looking for inspiration when I came across these:


In my opinion “white gabardine” and “boys 2-4T” are not words that should ever appear in the same sentence. And when you throw in “dry clean”, I wonder what planet these designers come from. I love my grandsons, and Easter is coming and the Eton Suit (sizes 4-7, zip fly, $106.00) is really lovely, but . . .

It also comes in ivory.

My Name is Nohbdy

“ Mother, father, and friends, everyone calls me Nohbdy.” In Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey, that’s how Odysseus responds to Polyphemus’ question: “Tell me, how are you called?”

Clever answer, Odysseus, and one which stood you in great stead as you escaped from that dangerous island. But while the answer Odysseus gave was tricky, the question was straightforward. Not so the question of nomenclature facing those who sign on to the various parts of the Internet. Questions pop up on the screen requesting “default name”, “admin name”, “user name”, “display name” or “account name.” Once in a while they take pity on you and explain what the name means and what it will be used for. The unwary find their names appearing where they hoped for anonymity—and vice versa.

Whether to use a real name or a pseudonym is a problem that plagues forum contributors and bloggers. On the whole, the younger writers who are employed or want to be employed hide their identities. No employer or prospective in-law wants to read exactly what the object of their interest got up to on Saturday night. Heather B. Armstrong single-handedly introduced a whole new word into the English language when her employer found her blog and fired her. My heart went out to the guy begging for help on the Blogger Help Group. He had published a Blog under his real name using the “new” Blogger and his employer demanded that he remove the identifying features (or else.) He couldn’t figure out how to do it.

It’s the older bloggers who cheerfully write under their own names. Just take a look at the writers from the 1930’s who contribute to the ageless project. What have we got to lose? Our pensions?

If a blogger wants his friends to find him, he has to forgo anonymity. Odysseus instinctively knew what we find easy to understand today. Googling “nohbdy” doesn’t yield good results.

The Gospel According to Sudoku

What is it with the clergy and Doonesbury? If you scroll down Septuagent’s entries for February you will find several posts including Doonesbury strips. A couple of weeks ago I heard a homily based on another strip in the Iraq war series where the Iraqi soldier tells his American military partner he cannot capture a Sunni suspect alive, because he is sworn to vengeance for the killing of one of his family members. “What? When did this happen?” asks the American. The reply: “1387.” I don’t have to tell you the moral of that homily.

I was struck lately by a message from a recent hobby if mine: Sudoku. I had never tried one—I‘m a crossword puzzle gal—until my sister in law was here from England this summer. She got me hooked. I am dreadful at them, but I find them strangely calming, even in the face of my inability to solve anything more than a simple puzzle. Logic was never a strong point of mine, and even more disturbing are the incidents where I find the right place for a number and put it in the wrong column. The ophthalmologist tells me there is nothing wrong with my eyes, so it must be plain carelessness.

When we were in Chicago, Ernie’s sister saw me wrestling with a puzzle and I tried to explain them to her. She’s a good bridge player and was soon using her thinking-ahead skills on a puzzle. At one point it was obvious she had made an error and her solution was to go back and erase the last number she had entered. I explained it wouldn’t work. I don’t think she believed me.

Last week I was working on a puzzle and realized that something had gone irretrievably wrong. When I am stuck, I usually don’t look at the solutions to the puzzle, but this time I did. What was amazing was that I must have made a mistake right at the beginning. I had managed to get half way through with just about every number in the wrong place and, in spite of the compounding of errors, it had all worked, until suddenly I came to a grinding halt.

Tangled web, indeed. Figure out the message there.

Not my Idea of a Cruise

I read an Associated Press article yesterday on the precautions taken by astronauts to deal with the onset of severe paranoia or psychosis in space. “What would happen,” asks the writer, “if an astronaut came unglued in space and, say, destroyed the ship’s oxygen system or tried to open the hatch and kill all aboard?” He went on to say that nothing of the sort has ever happened, but by one of those quirks of co-incidence or synchronicity, I had just finished a book in which a participant’s mental instability came close to jeopardizing an expedition.

The author of the book, John Haslett, would be the first to admit that, because there was a shortage of volunteers to join his crew of four who were intending to follow the route of the ancient Manteño across five thousand miles of open ocean on a balsa wood raft (imagine that), he allowed an unknown German to join the expedition in spite of his misgivings. Haslett was swayed by Frederick’s claim that he had “lived in the jungle”, though I don’t quite see the transferable skills. Look at the size of the raft and imagine the nightmare of sailing for days on end on a few square feet of balsa with a psychotic companion. This photo shows the second boat used by the expedition: the first landed up on a beach in Panama, partly due to Frederick’s antics.

It’s an aspect of adventure I had never thought of. Haslett tells the story of the US Navy’s expeditionary team in the Antarctic that had to build a padded cell and lock up one of their members. In 1929, Admiral Byrd took only two coffins with him to the Antarctic, but twelve straightjackets.

The book covers two separate expeditions, three or four boats and a varied crew of extraordinary men. Also a great deal of seawater. It is a great piece of escapist literature, especially when you are thinking that a bit of snow and ice amount to intolerable conditions.They didn’t make it to Hawaii, but something tells me they will try again.

A Postscript to my Organization Post

When said I was “pretty organized”, I deliberately excluded socks and photos. (There’s “Tupperware” too, but with the exception of the woman called Maud, who glues her cows together and appears to have a cheese fetish, no-one keeps plastic containers organized.)

I can explain the problem with socks. When I go to work on my dresser, I start with the big drawers and by the time I have sorted out underwear and sweaters I am too tired to deal with the little drawers where the socks reside. I keep vowing I will start with them. Maybe next time . . .

As for photographs, I’m working on it. For about the tenth time, I admit. I have to admit that there is one form of photo organization that I just don’t get—and that’s scrap books. The goopy, gimmicky kind where you spend $10 on stickers, paper, punches and embellishments to jazz up one small photo. Having said that, I admit I can see something most attractive in the work of Ali Edwards. Her archives are lovely and her site is also worth a visit for her posts on her autistic son and on her husband who has just been elected to the Oregon State legislature. Even she would admit there is something intriguing about a pursuit which in theory organizes photos, while requiring the perpetrator to buy (and organize) so many supplies with which to organize them.

Just wondering.

A Welcome Visitor

This little guy keeps appearing in our back yard. I don't think he's the first robin of spring: can he have been hanging around all winter? My ignorance of ornithology is showing. I can see he is a fat little guy and seems to have weathered the winter better than most of us.

The Need to Organize

When we were in Chicago we visited The Container Store. It’s Ernie’s favorite store: Al’s too. Al indoctrinated us by taking us to the store near the Clarendon Metro station. He’s done a good job with keeping his stuff organized and it paid off when he found out that his Honda was part of a class action suit. By being able to put his hands on all the necessary paper work, he has made himself eligible to recoup $5,000 worth of repair bills. Ernie has not been quite so successful. Although he has bought containers for “stuff” and then containers to organize the containers, he’s not quite got the whole thing mastered.

I have no business being critical. I’m pretty organized, but after living through a friend’s nightmare as she attempted to assemble all her treasures in a meaningful way in preparation for her move to a retirement community, I decided to spend some time thinning, organizing, labeling and reviewing my current “system. “ Because appliances have a habit of breaking down, I have been religious about keeping files with the instruction booklets and assorted literature. There were too many for one file so I divided them into “Small Appliances” and “Large Appliances.” But there were still too many, so I moved on to “Mid-Sized Appliances.” But how to classify things? Is a garage door opener a “Mid-Sized Appliance” or a “Small Appliance?” What about an electric fan?


So it isn’t so much doing the job as deciding how to classify things that’s the problem. Right now I am working on bookmarks on this computer. I had at one time made a fine—but significant—distinction between “journals” and “blogs” and had labeled folders accordingly. But then people like Eliza and John switched from their previous format to blogs. Should I leave the link where I was used to it and let the redirect take me where I wanted to go, erase the journal link and use a new one in the blog folder, keep both? You don’t really care, do you? Another computer related problem is my ability to add tags to blog entries under the new Blogger (known to Blogger users as the “bad” Blogger as opposed to the old “good” Blogger.) I’m not sure if I will ever use them: some bloggers are adding 10 or more to each post. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Of course, some things are really easy. By my sewing machine I have containers marked “Tape” and “Buttons” and “Zippers” and I have a fine old time labeling them with a splendid hand-held label maker Andrew and Marcie gave me a couple of Christmases ago. There is always the question of whether I should use different colored labels for different categories . . .


But the Container Store hasn’t given up on me. I’m on their mailing list now and they sent me a catalog with this stunning illustration. This is a garage. A garage, folks! It is cleaner and neater than any closet in my house. Cleaner and neater than any room in my house.

Maybe I need help. Organizers Anonymous. I’d like to think Organization with a capital “O” is a fad. But apparently it is not. I ran across an article citing the work of anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who advocated neotony, the idea that human beings are built to grow and develop their childhood traits rather than minimize them. He cites 26 of these traits. They include joyfulness, a sense of humor, curiosity, the need to know, the need to learn—and, surprise, surprise, the need to organize.

Of course, we must not forget the most esoteric of all organizational schemes, feng shui. Did you see what that’s being used for these days?