Renovation Dilemma

We are so close. And yet, of course, so far. I have made so many decisions. I have chosen doorknobs and light fixtures and towel racks and finishes for the floor (satin, in case you're interested). The last hurdle was the sink. Not the kitchen sink, though I wish for the sake of poetic justice that it was. The bathroom sink, and technically not the sink, which I picked out months ago (it's square--I love that it's square), but the vanity.

Our contractor, whom I still love, but whom I'd like to have out of my life, has a friend who sells vanities. A plain white vanity, with drawers, is all I wanted. So he showed me the picture of the vanity, and I wasn't so crazy about the doors, but the last thing I want to do is go out and find a vanity, so I said fine. Then the vanity got delivered, yesterday, and we went up to look at it this morning.

It's fine. Sturdy. Lots of well-built drawers. A big cabinet below the sink. A completely innocuous white. And then there's the doors. Remember what a modernist I am? Well, we actually abandoned the modernism on the fixtures, which are kind of old-fashionedy, but I quite fell in love with them, so I thought, fine, no modernism in the bathroom, or, rather, a nice eclecticism in the bathroom, what with the square sink and tub (OK, the tub's a rectangle, but the point is that it is not rounded), and the marbley tiles, and the old-fashionedy fixtures. Which is the rationale I went with for accepting the vanity. The doors have, oh I do not know how to describe them, the doors have ridges on them--ridges just like the doors on the bottom floor of the house, which I tried to replicate, but couldn't exactly, for the attic, old-fashionedy, almost slightly fussy ridges. So I tried to get ridges for the doors to rooms, but now I'm having problems with them on doors to drawers and cabinets?

The thing is, really, I just don't care anymore. I love the doorknobs, I love the paint, I love my skylights and the tiles. Do I need to love the vanity? Do I need to love it enough that I would go find another one that I love more? Would I be able to find one that I loved more? Can one even love a vanity? I suppose if one can love doorknobs, one can love a vanity. But the time for loving doorknobs was August; now it is October, and my boots and all the hats and scarves and winter coats are still over at Grownup E's. I think love is not the answer; I think we must just finish this damn project. And yet, I am waffling. No, I won't waffle. I will go on, I must go on. The vanity will stay. Right?

[Just thought everyone needed to remember how truly superficial I am, despite the occasional dive into deep waters.]

Open Season on Moms

It's breast cancer time again. Last week one of the moms in my outer circle was diagnosed. She's more than an acquaintance, less than a friend, someone I'll cook dinner for but won't visit in the hospital. Still, it reverberates in our community--her son is in M's class; my good friend L is her good friend--and most of all it is terrible for them.

Yesterday a mom in City died after ten years of breast cancer. I don't know her, never even heard of her till yesterday when she died, but she was the oldest friend of someone I work with, who told me, and then it turns out that my old friend T is her rabbi, which means she must know R and R, and she lives on R and E's street, and her kids go to school with A's kids, and it feels like I must have come this close to knowing her.

But the closeness of unknown ties doesn't matter. What matters is the story that makes me cry every time I think about it: her 12-year-old daughter's bat mitzvah was supposed to be this Saturday, but she didn't think she would make it, and she could no longer leave the house, so they had it at home last Saturday. I saw pictures--of the beautiful, dressed-up daughter holding the torah, of her standing by her daughter, gaunt, hatted, beaming with with love and joy. She died yesterday morning. They have cancelled tomorrow's bat mitzvah events. The funeral is Sunday.

Tomorrow M will go to J's bat mitzvah. It's a morning service. I'll go with her, because I like J's mother C (and I'm so grateful to her for not inviting us all to the party!). I'll watch C on the bima, beaming with love and joy. In the evening, M will go with A to J's fancy hotel party, her first bat mitzvah party on her own. A's mom, L, will drive them there; I will pick them up.

We are all--mothers, daughters--so incredibly lucky to have what we have.

You know, the clothes look good

and she looks good in them. (Can anyone out there tell I'm having a lazy day at work? And I deserve it, as you would agree if you looked at my datebook and to-do list for the last two weeks!)

My Favorite Recent Anti-Obama Insanities

To: Senator Obama or any of your supporters:

Why have you not provided the following info?

Why is the media giving you a "free pass" on this?

1. Occidental College records — Not released

2. Columbia College records — Not released

3. Columbia Thesis paper — ‘Not available’

4. Harvard College records — Not released

5. Selective Service Registration — Not released

6. Medical records — Not released

7. Illinois State Senate schedule — Not available

8. Your Illinois State Senate records — Not available

9. Law practice client list — Not released

10. Certified Copy of original Birth certificate — Not released

11. Embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth — Not released

12. Record of your baptism — Not available [link]

Uh, you think maybe he wasn't born alive?

[Commenter #1:]If Senator Obama has addressed the anti Christ accusations, I would be greatly interested to hear what he had to say. Have any articles/ quotes?

[Commenter #2]: Senator Obama will never address any accusations he is the Anti-Christ anymore than he would address being the messiah, Easter Bunny, or Santa Clause. Can you imagine the news headlines if a guy named Hussein started to talk about whether or not he was the Anti-Christ? I can, and they would be the lead ins on every news show and the headline on ever newspaper and John McCain would instantly rise at least 10 points in the polls because lending that kind of legitimacy to such a ridiculous notion would be the worst job of campaigning in presidental election history.

I don't think you have any information to say that Obama is the Anti-Christ. I'm not sure what you would identify in Senator Obama that you associate with the Anti-Christ and I really don't know what else to say about this. I'm kinda floored. [link]

Yeah, I'm not sure the Anti-Christ accusation has a lot of traction beyond...well, let's just call it the base...

Found

S and I are in our mid-forties, which means that a lot of our friends started having sex in the late 70s and early 80s.

S and I have a lot of gay friends.

You can probably guess where this is going.

We lost our first friend to AIDS in the summer of 1982 (yes, we knew each other back then). We lost our most recent last month (if you count HIV-positive person with probably AIDS-related illness).

S has lived a lot of places and had a lot of friends, but he's not so good at keeping in touch. So one of the sad assumptions of our life is that a lot of our old friends are dead.

S also has a pretty ordinary name, so he's kind of hard to find, unless you think to google me, with my unusual name, which, luckily, a lot of his old friends do. In fact, though, I am the #1 hit for my name, but S is #3 for his, if you google the variation he uses. And it's pretty obvious that it's him, if you know anything about his last 20 years or so, plus there's a picture.

Yesterday, the dearest old friend whom we'd long assumed was dead--given his history, and his apparent absence from the Internet--walked into S's restaurant, thanks to google. I haven't seen him yet, but he's coming to dinner tonight. S says he's exactly the same. Which includes alive.

We are really really happy.

Today's Sarah Palin

Were they TRYING to make her sound like an idiot? I mean, People publishes interviews all the time, and I've never seen them transcribe verbatim like this. I bet the campaign staff is livid.

Then again, maybe not, because the main thing Fashiongate makes me think is that this campaign has run completely off the track. I mean, obviously she needed clothes, but if she couldn't afford them herself (see: Cindy McCain), surely they could have found some rich Republican clotheshorse (see above) to take her shopping out of the goodness of her heart. But using RNC funds? And reimbursements? How could they not have seen the bad publicity coming?

Notes and Queries

Once again, I hate my new haircut, but nobody else has noticed it.

Haven't turned the heat on yet. 62 is fine; 56 is not.

Am eager to see Rachel Getting Married and Happy-Go-Lucky, because I'm kind of girlie and indie like that, but I fear my next big-screen experience will be High School Musical 3.

The first season of 30 Rock didn't do it for me, but, yeah, the second is pretty funny.

Doorknobs. Must get doorknobs.

Does anyone besides me do a double-take whenever they see the new Macy's ad campaign because it looks just like Target?

Does anyone besides me think that Sarah Palin's SNL performance was quintessential Sarah Palin: looked cute and did nothing?

But Becca, Why Aren't You Blogging About the Red Sox?

1. Because it is too gruesome for words.

2. Because really it's a miracle that they even got this far.

3. Because I have this crazy zero-sum magical-thinking hope kind of thing going that says if the Red Sox lose...well, I'm not going to go there...

4. Because, honestly, I'm not madly in love with this team. I mean, I still love the Red Sox per se. And Dustin Pedroia, Mike Lowell, Youk, Ellsbury, Varitek, Lester, Papelbon, even Dice-K, yeah, yeah, I love them too, but who are these other guys? And you know, even though he had to go, well, the dreadlocked one's absence is...an absence (though I sure hope he ends up in the same position we do, whichever position that may be).

5. Because, fundamentally, I am realizing, I do not have the temperament of a true fan. I have seen the Red Sox win twice in my lifetime, it was good, and I don't need them to win every year. Then again, another 86 would not be OK...

Man, Those Are Some Serious Specifics

What Obama is going to do about the economy.

You know what you've really been wanting to do

is create a Sarah Palin Potatohead! [link from M, of course]

We're In the NY Times

Usually I become enraged when the NY Times tries to profile "ordinary people" with their Bugaboos and private schools. And if I were the woman at the beginning of this article, I would be enraged by today's attempt. But, I have to say, this time they captured S's and my reality, even to the emails and phone calls (yesterday I opened the final September statement--statements that, like the guy in the article, I used to not open for weeks--and texted S the sum total of our losses, as of September 30, which means I don't even want to think about today).

I think I'll go be happy about gay marriage in Connecticut, the Red Sox, the Phillies, and the beautiful weather, at least for a few hours...

An Allegory of the Mortgage Crisis: In Which I Know I Am At Fault But Am Nevertheless Irate

We've been getting bills from the pediatrician.

We never get bills from the pediatrician. We go to the pediatrician, pay whatever fee our current insurance mandates, and that's that. So I don't worry too much about going to the pediatrician. Rash that would be better off checked out? Pediatrician. Fever in its fourth day? Pediatrician. Green stuff coming out of nose for going on two weeks? Pediatrician. Am I a crazy outlier? I think not.

But then we started getting the bills. The first bill I kind of understood, and I thought it was the doctor's fault. During E's first bout of impetigo, when we finally went the oral antibiotic route, she got a rash. We've got a lot of minor antibiotic issues in this family, so I gave the doctor a call. It was Sunday and I wasn't too worried. She'd taken the antibiotic for eight of the ten days, and the impetigo was cleared up, so I knew I was going to stop the medicine, and I figured if the rash got worse, I could take her in on Monday, but I just thought I should check in. The doctor on call (not our beloved doctor) said it sounded like she was having a reaction, and did I want to bring her in to the office, since he was there. I thought what the hell, we went in, nothing much happened, and the next day the rash started clearing up.

End of story, I thought, until we got the bill with the weekend charge that I had no idea existed. Well, it turns out that all doctors charge for weekend visits, as the billing person at the pediatrician's office informed me this morning when I finally called, two bills later. I got a little annoyed, but felt a little stupid when she told me that nobody had ever complained about a weekend charge before. I did point out that I had had no intention of bringing her in until he suggested it, but, OK, it's only 50 bucks.

But then we started looking at the bill more closely, because now it was up to about $260, which was a lot more than the weekend charge. There were charges for the second impetigo visit, which was on a weekday, and for the impetigo culture. Well, it turns out that we now have a $1,500 deductible which apparently includes routine office visits and tests. Wow.

How did this happen? When I started consulting and lost my work health insurance, we bought our own health insurance: Plan Mediocre. It was about $700/month with a big catastrophic deductible, but the copay for doctor's visits was $25, I think, and, being relatively healthy, the only time we noticed that Plan Mediocre was not great was a $250 emergency room charge when M was at camp which ended up being taken care of by the camp insurance.

Then, sometime around June, we got a letter saying that our insurance was being discontinued as of July 1 and, if we didn't sign up for a different plan, they would automatically switch us to Plan Suck. THIS IS WHERE IT'S MY FAULT. I should have looked into Plan Suck. I should have researched plans, like I did when we signed up for Plan Mediocre. Only, I didn't really have time, and all of a sudden it was July 1, and I assumed Plan Suck must be basically comparable to Plan Mediocre, even if it was about $75 more a month, and basically I trusted in the machine.

Well, not so fast, sucker, because now we've got Plan Suck which, let's face it, SUCKS. And I am irate. But what can I do? I didn't read the fine print, and now I'm not making an appointment to have E's eyes checked. This month at least.

Because this story actually ends happily. Due to various legal and financial issues, S's work is finally providing health insurance to its employees! So as of maybe this month but definitely next month (S is the conduit here, so everything's a little hazy at this point), we will once again be regularly insured Americans, and our premium will be less than half what we've been paying! Apparently this is good health insurance, real health insurance, not Suck health insurance for people who are stupid and loserly enough not to have jobs with health insurance like regular good Americans. But I've told S that he has to bring home home the binder so I can read every single word of that fine print.

So you want to blame people for their bad mortgage decisions? Fine, go ahead. As someone who always thought balloon-rate mortgages were insane (because, being lazy and hating to make major purchases, we buy houses to live in), I've had that urge myself. But you know, sometimes that fine print is hard to read. And then you're screwed.

And the idea that giving everyone some money to buy their own health insurance will solve the problem? I think not.

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

About every 36 hours, S and I revisit the question of whether to stay in the market (and I realize that having the question to ask is a marker of huge privilege).

This morning, I brought it up because JA pulled out yesterday, mid-afternoon (thanks, Facebook). S pointed out that JA is single, self-employed, heading out of her mid-50s, and probably a lot deeper into the stock market than we are, so it makes sense for her to cut her losses. We decided, as we do each time, that our only option is to suck it up and wait.

I mean, obviously it's not our only option, but given our relative financial stability on the day-to-day front, and the fact that the stocks are for retirement which is a long way away, we choose to wait for the unknown, rather than take the known losses. Then again, I said to S this morning that retirement may not be an option--he's going to be flipping burgers from his wheelchair, while I'm hobbling about on my walker, doing what I do.

It's scary watching that plunging line, even if it still feels kind of abstract, albeit abstractly insane. And, like I said, scary.

I'm preparing the girls for 62 degrees this winter and we've started shopping weekly at the discount supermarket. But this weekend we are buying tights, because winter is coming and, damnit, we NEED tights.

Post-Yom Kippur

Plowing through my overflowing inbox, after taking an all-family computer break in the name of atonement, I found a ridiculous email from someone at work. I went so far as to hit the forward button, type the names of two other co-workers into the "To:" box, and write half a snarky comment--and then I stopped myself, deleted my email, and went back to my inbox.

The benefits of atoning--or at least of spending the day thinking about how to be a better person, inspired by good services, including Ne'ila, which M and I attended, me for the second time in my life, her for the first (her first full fast, too), and which, even though it extended the fast for an hour, was truly beautiful and inspiring. The afternoon walk at the cemetery with the girls and my mom was also most excellent--even, or maybe especially, visiting L's grave, though also the general beauty of it all (it's a beautiful cemetery).

Really, I am ready to be a better person--or at least to keep trying. And so far, so good...

On the Campaign Trail

In 1984 I was the volunteer coordinator for the Mondale campaign in a congressional district in a small East Coast state.  For weeks before the election, I spent 15 hours a day in the campaign office, living off Dunkin Donuts, and going home only to drop into my bed for a few hours before getting up to do it again.  Surrounded by true believers--campaign staff and volunteers--I really thought Mondale was going to win.  I know, crazy, but there I was, working so hard, and there were so many of us working so hard, and it seemed inconceivable to me (at that young age) that our effort wouldn't pay off.

It was a different era, of course.  Sure, we had phone banks and GOTV and precinct captains and targeted precincts and drivers to get little old ladies to the polls.  But there was no internet, so no frantically checking Fivethirtyeight and RealClearPolitics dozens of times a day to keep up with the latest polls.  There were a lot fewer polls, too.  We got our information from our campaign director's daily phone calls with Washington, and I'm sure they were spinning it to keep us from jumping ship.

I wonder, then, if those local organizers for the McCain campaign really think he's going to win, if they believe they know something nobody else does, and that there's no way their hard work can be for nought. 

(Some good things came out of that campaign: that's where I met B, and we've been friends ever since, and that's where I learned most of what I know about campaigns, which has come in handy every time I've walked into an understaffed campaign office.  And we did win our district, though of course that had as much to do with demographics as with our hard work, though I like to think our hard work helped.)

Best Debate Live Blogging Ever

Even if it is from a conservative.

Baseball and Politics

It's beginning to feel a little like October 2004 around here. But I will say, for the record, hands down, no question, and the hell with the Sons of Sam Horn, that I will be absolutely satisfied, indeed, quite ecstatic, with the opposite outcome (though, of course, all dreams coming true would work too) (and, for the record, I would have been fine with it in 2004 too).

Developmental Reading

E didn't read much over the summer. Between playing outside on the one hand, and the lure of screens on the other, reading kind of fell off the menu. But she'd also hit a kind of reading plateau. She'd exhausted her favorite American Girl books, and she would finish the first-grade-girlish sorts of books she leaned toward--Cobble Street Cousins, Fairytopia--in less than an hour, which was neither satisfying in the moment nor conducive to long-term reading commitments. In fact, I actually considered pitching a series of high-reading-level, young-content books somewhere, thinking it might make my fortune, like the low-reading-level, high-school-content books currently being marketed with a great deal of success, but then I realized that the market was probably a lot smaller...

And then we went camping. Lots of playing outside, but no screens, which left plenty of time to read. I'd pushed her to bring some books, just before we left, and she grabbed, probably at my suggestion, a few of M's Abby Hayes books. Oh, Abby, fifth-grade favorite of second-grade girls. M discovered Abby in second grade, which is probably why I seem never to have blogged about her (i.e. it was PB--pre-blogging). Abby's mom is a high-powered lawyer, her dad is a stay-at-home dad/computer consultant who cooks a lot, her older twin sisters are a genius and a star athlete, her younger brother excels at robots and computers, and she's just a normal girl who loves to write. In other words, Abby is a feminist mom's girl-book dream, and E totally fell for it.

When we got home from camping, she read a bunch more Abby Hayes (in random order, unlike M, who is a stickler for chronology). I don't know if Abby was an entrypoint into M's bookshelves--certainly she had combed said shelves before and found nothing--but all of a sudden, E has once again become a reading machine, and she has made a significant leap, without any encouragement on our part.

After Abby, she read Dancing Shoes, and the first Mallory Towers book--and that made me feel quite warm and sentimental inside, because I know exactly when M started reading Mallory Towers: when we were in London, when she was exactly as old as E is now, practically to the month, and of course I adored Mallory Towers as a girl, though I think I was a little older (my old copies were packed away in my dad's basement, so the girls read M's British new editions, but the old ones are back in my bookcase).

Now she is reading National Velvet, in the 1930s edition from my childhood (which was perhaps from my mother's childhood? I'm quite sure my copy of Roller Skates was my mom's--ooh, I bet E is going to love that one!). National Velvet is a bit of a challenge--tonight we discussed dialect, Hiawatha, who Malvolia is (up to that point she's referred to as Mally), and how back then they had dinner and supper instead of lunch and dinner (that was from her: "Mommy, does this book take place when they used to have dinner and supper instead of lunch and dinner?"). And she's only up to page 25 or so. But, clearly, she's sticking with it.

I'm not sure there's an analytic payoff to this post. I can't explain why E is suddenly reading again--well, yes I can: she's reading again because she's found books she wants to read which are, to my joy, but also as I might have predicted, books her sister read at the same age, many of which I read as well. So the leap she has made is cognitive, not reading-based: she can now appreciate books that are more complex and focus on older, real girls. This, I think, is the leap that will ensure she stays a reader, not that I was worried. Mainly, though, I'm very pleased.

As for M, her most recent developmental leap has nothing to do with reading, unless you count the cookbook: yesterday she made her first tarte tatin (but it looked nicer than that one).

Norman Mailer's Letters

I am tempted to go mad Jenny on you all and just quote paragraph after paragraph from Norman Mailer's letters, as excerpted in this week's New Yorker. I can't remember when I last garnered such enormous enjoyment from reading anything. I'm not much of a Mailer fan, not in a negative or positive way, he just hasn't been someone I've had much of a desire to read, though of course I was always fully aware of him culturally. But these letters show such bombastic brilliance (which I can imagine would occasionally but far from always translate into literary brilliance), such cultural insight, such vast knowledge, such a social network, such energy--really I was completely dazzled, and smiling the whole time I read.

Today's Boot Question

Do I wait till the contractors are done, when we will go over to Grownup E's house to pick up the truckload (literally) of stuff we have stored there, which will include, in some box or suitcase, somewhere, all my boots?

Or do I go over to Grownup E's house this weekend and paw through our truckload of stuff to find the box or suitcase which holds all my boots?

(Bonus points if you come up with the obvious third way which I am working hard to resist...)