TV ads, what are they thinking?

I’ve been seeing some crazy ads on TV lately. There is one where this guy is going on and on about how rugged his new SUV is and how it can get him where he wants to go. They show him, with his SUV, on the very top a mountain and he’s standing on the edge of the drop off getting ready to sky down the mountain. Dude! He drove up alone and is now leaving his brand new SUV on top of a mountain covered in snow!! I’m not sure this is the demographic the auto sellers really want appeal to, they are too stupid to live long enough to pay off the loan.

Also there is this ad for Oreos with Donald Trump and his double. Who thought this was a good idea? The Donald is not the most attractive guy, or personable for that matter. Who thought having him hawk Oreos was appetizing? And, one Donald wasn’t enough, they had to double him? Yuck!! He must have bought the Oreo brand. That is the only explanation that makes sense. Crazy!

And the toilet paper commercials with the bears in the woods. They are talking about how their toilet paper doesn’t leave paper behind, and you can use less of it to get the job done. Hummm, do bears really worry about this? Is this a topic on which I would consider a bear an expert, or even knowledge? Wouldn’t any kind of paper get stuck in all that fur? What are they doing with all that used toilet paper? Doesn’t seem environmentally friendly.

Ear rings as self defense

Ear rings aren’t just a nice fashion accessory; they are a defense mechanism for some of us. I know, you’re asking how could I possibly defend myself using an ear ring. Is Rhetta fixing to break loose with some weird, SEAL inspired self defense tips? You could be asking yourself just what kind of ear rings I’ve been wearing? Maybe some of those fighting stars all the ninjas use? And how do I keep from having them cut up my neck and ears while I wear them? That’s me Super Ninja Girl!

Actually, in this instance I’m talking about emotional defense. As an example I give you the experience of a good friend. She went to get her hair cut and the stylist got a little carried away cutting her hair way shorter than usual, and shorter than my friend was comfortable with. She’s a tough cowgirl and decided there was nothing she could do about it; after all it wasn’t like all that hair could be re-attached. I know there are hair extensions, but like I said my friend is a down-to-earth sort of person with a real life, not into self torture or being overly self indulgence. She knew it would grow out soon enough, so she sucked it up and went about her life.

Well…..about a week later she join our little group for one of our Ladies Nights and was a little fluster. She’d had a pass thrown at her, and it wasn’t by an eligible bachelor, it was by another woman. This was a first for her. Of course, the first question we all asked her was, “Were you wearing your ear rings?” She had to admit that she had forgotten them that day. Until her hair grew out, she made it a point to carry an extra pair of ear rings in her purse and keep a pair in her desk at work.

Oddly enough I just heard a very similar story from a co-worker today. She has a new and very short hair cut she did not intend to get. She voiced concerns about unwanted attention if she forgot her ear rings.

So, ear rings are important for emotional self-defense, or at least the belief that we are safe. Because, as we all know lesbians never wear ear rings. LOL

Boring naked people

I was listening to the OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) the other day and they were discussing a new law that has been adopted by the City of Ashland that prohibits nudity in open public areas. Blah, blah, blah, blah…. We needed this law because we’ve had three strange instances over the past two years involving nude people. And the other side… We should have the right to be nude anytime and any place we want, it’s part of our freedom of speech, and our right to protest.

Now I could only take about 10 minutes of this before I was bored to tears. It’s really just one bunch of people over reacting to a few odd incidents, and another bunch of people that just want to run around naked. I mean really, how irrelevant dose your life have to be that you’re willing to devote this much energy to this topic?

Why would anyone think that going naked to protest something will get them taken serious? I’ve only heard of one time where it really made an impact and that was over 200 years ago. Young women were commonly stripped and publicly flogged for fairly minor offenses, while men and older women were either not punished, or if they were it never involved public nudity. A woman of a certain age and several friends committed infractions they knew would get a younger woman stripped and flogged. They insisted that they be treated the same as the younger women. The stripping stopped for all women. Basically she was pointing out that nude women being flogged was more about titillation for the male population than punishment.

There will always be crackpots who feel they need more attention and will decide to commit outrageous acts to get it. For some this will mean riding a bike around town in a hemp g-string, riding the bus pantless, or walking around in their birthday suit. Why someone chooses to get attention this way is a mystery, but I guess it’s less harmful than some other things people do.

Back home if we saw someone walking around naked we would have assumed that someone’s very slow relative had gotten loose and needed help getting home. If we saw a large number of naked people, we would assume that there was a short bus somewhere close missing it’s riders and they needed help finding their way back.

Middle aged?

I visited a blog site where an interesting question was posed, in essence it was about what do middle aged people want to be called. Hummmm. Very good question! Everyone seemed to agree that middle aged wasn’t quite getting it. Middle of what? Life? We are more the between age, like between birth and death, parenthood and grandparenthood, angst ridden and grumpy, clueless and know-it-all, taunt & perky and wrinkled & sagging. I’m not sure I’d like to be called between aged any better then middle aged. So, what’s the answer?

I’ve really been thinking about this, I think I might have come up with some better options, or at least different suggestions:

The Revered Ones: Who doesn’t want to be revered? Hey, we’ve put in the time and learned a lot. I figure later we could be called The Most Revered Ones. I think both levels should have to be addressed with our title, making me Revered Rhetta Drennan and later Most Revered Rhetta Drennan. There would be harsh penalties for failure to address us properly. The title would also come with extensive special privileges, like whacking idiots in the back of the head when they prove their status.

Interesting Individuals: Let’s face it young people just aren’t as interesting as they think they are. I mean what have they done? We on the other hand have lived long enough to do things, learn things and to have overcome things. We know more than what is between the covers of People magazine, and on Extra TV. Speak of between the covers, we know quite a bit more about that too.

And my favorite, the Spicy Set! I’m not sure this would apply equally to men and woman, since I don’t think men are as spicy in “middle age” as women. Women seem to really hit their stride at this time and gain a whole new level of appreciation for themselves and embrace their freedom. Where we used to hold our tongue for fear of saying the wrong thing, or hurting someone’s feelings, now we’re laying it all out there and daring everyone to deal with it. We’re finally free of kids, and in many cases husband, and we’re going out to do the things we want to do. We’re eating spicy food, drinking adult beverages on a week nights, and being loud and rowdy. At the same time we’re volunteering our time and skills, and nurturing our grandchildren. We ROCK!

Bottom line…. There are so many better descriptions than “middle aged.”

Getting ready to grow

I’m so excited, I have ordered my first ever seed catalogues!! Last year I put in my first ever real garden. It was a lot of work, but I really enjoyed it. I learned that I really don’t know much about gardening, but I didn’t let that stand in my way. Danna and I went to the garden shops and garden sections of stores and bought starters and seeds. We built some raised beds, and got to work. We planted corn, tomatoes, two kinds of peppers, garlic, two kinds of onions, green beans, peas, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, basil, three kinds of lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, and pumpkin.

We have varying degrees of success. A couple of our seeds turned out to be something other than marked on the packages. For instance our corn did well but it was not sweet corn, and not worth eating. Our red bell peppers were just plain ole green ones, and our spinach was actually basil. Likewise our cucumber starts where not all English Cucumber, but they were all cucumbers. On the plus side, our Giant Pumpkins were massive. I donated the largest to the local elementary school where the kids made guesses on how much it weighed. A neighbor girl won with a guess that was just one pound short to the 97 pound total.

This year I’m hoping to do better with seed choices and starts. I want to find a really good pickling cucumber for this area. I put up about 20 quarts of pickles and that wasn’t near enough. I only put up a couple of quarts of tomatoes which was really pitiful! I learned that peas and beans need more light, and I really want to get the right corn seed this year!!

In an effort to do better I have ordered catalogues from two places within the Willamette Valley hoping to find seeds to meet my needs. I just can’t wait for them to show up in my mailbox. Everyday I check my box hoping to find them, but so far no show. I feel like Ralphy looking for his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring. (Christmas Story reference) I have my graph paper and pencils all lined up and ready to go. I’ve got my plan for expanding the garden another 10 feet by 3 feet. I’ve been exploring new trellis options, and I’ve got my tools primed and ready to go. I’m also going over my Northwest Gardener handbook.

Stay tuned for the growing.

Cell phones, clocks and Alzheimer's

I’m having a bit of a love hate thing going on right now with cell phones. In the past the hate thing was typically reserved for my former service provider, Sprint. (Don’t even get me started on what a horrible, no good, rotten company they are. I could go on for ever!) Today my issues are related to four things:

My phone is showing the wrong time. It’s off by about 8 minutes. It’s slow. Now I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the clock on my phone, in fact I spend very little because I can’t see it without putting my glasses on. (It’s hell getting older!) Most of the time I refer to clocks on the wall or across the room that I can see without glasses. Here’s my problem, when I need to set one of these other clocks, I’ve been setting them by my phone. This morning, when the person on the radio mentioned the time I happen to be looking at my alarm clock, set to my phone’s clock, and realized why I have been running late for the past week.

Now, I had to reset the time on my phone. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to do it and could never figure it out. So, of course today I was even later getting to work. Apparently I can set the alarm for the clock on my phone, but not the clock itself. Technology, don’t you just love it!

Periodically, like every 3-4 months the ability of my phone to receive email just goes away. You have to reset it. I’m assuming this is some kind of security function, and I’ve asked to have it remove. Apparently they can’t. Now, most people don’t have a problem resetting their email function. It is a very simple thing to do that really takes only a few seconds. They are smart enough to remember how to do this for themselves. Not me. I’m still going in every time to ask one of the very nice people in the AT&T store to reset mine. I should be able to do this! I feel so defeated!

Just about everyone I work with on a construction project has a cell phone. So, why is it that every time I absolutely need to talk to one of them right away, I can’t get them? Of course this is the same thing that happens when I need to talk to individuals not related at all to work. It’s like a universal constant, if it’s imperative that you talk to someone right away, there is no way in hell you can get a hold of them. Why is that?

As frustrating as these things are I still love my Blackberry and I’m still glad that the people I work with are generally accessible. I think cell phones are great. I even read this morning that a scientific study has shown that cell phone use by Alzheimer’s prone mice cut the occurrence of that disease by 68%. I have no idea who the mice were calling, if their phone kept better time than mine, or if they could reset their email functions, but I’m feeling a lot better about my mental health in old age.

Men, women and exceptions

My girly peeps and I were together the other night and we got to talking about men. I must admit this is a common subject for us. We usually talk about how we don’t understand them, or how we do, or how different they are from women. There are sub-sets of these conversations, like: grumpy old men, real hot men, what-were-we-thinking men, and so on.

That night we were discussing how different men are from women, and they really are. Years ago I watch a show where they took groups of people and ran them all through the same tests. There were clear differences between the sexes. For instance, men really are very good at navigating and women can multi-take like crazy. What was really interesting about this study is that even thought there were very clear skills that men general did much better than women, and that women did much better than men, every person was an exception to the rule in at least one area.

Think about it for a minute. Science has proven that we’re all exceptional. That’s pretty cool. It’s something our family and friends are always telling us, but we don’t really believe them. Now, science has proven it. Of course science may not mean it in the same way as family and friends.

During our conversation, Danna cited a saying she had hear, “Men are like waffles and women are like spaghetti.” I laughed. I’d never heard this and could not figure out any logic to this statement. Then she explained. Men are like waffle because they have little compartments for everything. They need to leave one compartment and go to another to deal with that issue. Women are like spaghetti because everything is mixed up and tangled with everything else. It’s so true, except for the exceptions. :-)

Winter rant and finger prints

This will be my winter rant, hopefully not to be repeated again until next year, in hopefully a different and even more entertaining form.

The Pacific Northwest has a particularly dreary form of winter. The world is encased in a thousand shades of damp grey. At times it’s like your looking out the window at the ghost of the world, not quite the real thing. When the fog settles with an icy bite, it will feel like the world is collapsing in on you.

As if the grey and wet aren’t enough, let’s add a little light deprivation into the mix. Our days are short, really short. I get to work in the dark and go home in the dark. It’s like living on a vampire’s schedule, and we’re not talking a sexy hip vampire lifestyle! This is more the old grandma vampire lifestyle. We’re all cranky and likely to bite!

We’re more than a little desperate for some sun. Of course when it comes we will all be blinded by the light, just like mole people. It’s a wonder any of us can see at all moving between two extremes: sun all summer and no sun all winter. In the summer we have sunglasses, and this part of the country buys more of them than anywhere else. But, I’m thinking what we need are glasses that block out the gloom in the winter. Where are the really useful scientific breakthroughs when you need them?

Another thing that needs developing are finger print readers for computers. How lame is it that we are all trying to remember so damn many logins and passwords? What we need to be using are finger prints. We all have them, and it’s not like we’re going to forget them anywhere. You either have the right finger print or you don’t.

Question: I you your finger across the pad, will a finger print reader still read your fingerprint? Do you have to wait for it to heal? Will a new scar foil the system? Just asking!