We're working up a strategic plan around here and doing some reorganizing of job descriptions.
It all reminds me a little of Hansel and Gretel. In that story, the parents can't wait for attrition to reduce their costs, so they give their kids the big heave-ho.
We're not gonna do that!
In the current iteration of our plan, my husband's job description emphasizes "job search activities." "Making money" has been added to my job description. I started proofreading this week. It was pretty fun, and I am working for a magazine I'd read anyway, except now I go more slowly, hold a red pencil, and get to mark up the margins.
My sister, who used to be an editor at Cambridge Press, is on call if I get in over my head. And my Uncle Bob, who is now an angel hovering around me as I do the work he did for fun at the end of his life, is coming to mind a lot. He used to call me to talk about the books he was proofing or make fun of the publishing industry.
"There are three words that begin with H that no writer should ever use," he once called to say.
"What are they, Uncle Bob?"
"Hermeneutic, haptic, and heuristic. All that's just hogwash."
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Dearly Departed
That car down there done died. It needed a new engine for $4,500 and we said nay.
After much anxiety and soul-searching and careful deliberation and reading of consumer guides and a visit to a new car dealer, we rushed to a used car lot and impulsively bought a 2003 Ford Focus. We couldn't stand to give Enterprise Rent-a-Car another dollar.
The new car looks a lot like the old one and so far, it runs.
After much anxiety and soul-searching and careful deliberation and reading of consumer guides and a visit to a new car dealer, we rushed to a used car lot and impulsively bought a 2003 Ford Focus. We couldn't stand to give Enterprise Rent-a-Car another dollar.
The new car looks a lot like the old one and so far, it runs.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Better World Travel Club to the Rescue
"We work for cars," a friend recently said. Meet our boss, a Volvo V70 that gets us everywhere we can't walk to and often makes us wish we lived near a ZipCar agent.
Yesterday was our second breakdown in a few months, and as I write we are getting a tow to the Volvo dealership in Wappingers Falls, making good use of the 100-mile free tow feature that comes with our membership in Better World Travel Club.
I want to testify that Better World works just as well as AAA, because so few people I talk to even know about it. A travel club that gives roadside emergency assistance to cars AND bicycles, advocates high emissions standards, facilitates eco-friendly travel and puts out an energy-smart e-newsletter, plus auto insurance that offsets your first ton of carbon for free? Yup! Better World also keeps a "triple-A watch" to remind you why you decided to leave the "Arrogant, Anti-environmental, Archaic" auto insurance giant in the ditch.
I don't know what to do with this high-maintenance car. We have talked about a hybrid but in reality, we feel that junking a car is a pretty giant energy consumption right there, so we are doing the best we can to hang on to this one, offset its emissions, and get the best mileage we can out of it. We like the Volvo safety record—my entire family walked away uninjured from an accident in our last Volvo, which was totalled.
A while back I wrote to Volvo to ask them if they are working on hybrid technology or other ecotech and a VP wrote back to say, basically, "No." It was weird and discouraging, considering that the company has a reputation for being, and selling to, the enlightened.
Yesterday was our second breakdown in a few months, and as I write we are getting a tow to the Volvo dealership in Wappingers Falls, making good use of the 100-mile free tow feature that comes with our membership in Better World Travel Club.
I want to testify that Better World works just as well as AAA, because so few people I talk to even know about it. A travel club that gives roadside emergency assistance to cars AND bicycles, advocates high emissions standards, facilitates eco-friendly travel and puts out an energy-smart e-newsletter, plus auto insurance that offsets your first ton of carbon for free? Yup! Better World also keeps a "triple-A watch" to remind you why you decided to leave the "Arrogant, Anti-environmental, Archaic" auto insurance giant in the ditch.
I don't know what to do with this high-maintenance car. We have talked about a hybrid but in reality, we feel that junking a car is a pretty giant energy consumption right there, so we are doing the best we can to hang on to this one, offset its emissions, and get the best mileage we can out of it. We like the Volvo safety record—my entire family walked away uninjured from an accident in our last Volvo, which was totalled.
A while back I wrote to Volvo to ask them if they are working on hybrid technology or other ecotech and a VP wrote back to say, basically, "No." It was weird and discouraging, considering that the company has a reputation for being, and selling to, the enlightened.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
Feast or Famine
Living in a jobless yet wealthy family is kind of strange. When I was in my 20s and lost a job, which happened plenty, I ran out and got temp work. The money came in immediately and I continued living paycheck to paycheck. Now, if my husband loses a job, we sell stock to live until he gets another job. He takes his time and waits for the right thing—last time the wait lasted three years. My point here is, we are jobless but not destitute, we need to tighten our belts right now but how tight? Who knows? Feast and famine at the same time.
With that mental backdrop I and my family drove up to Hudson, NY yesterday to see an HDTV rebroadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's current production (in English when we would have preferred the German) of Hansel and Gretel.
The opera's themes of starvation and scarcity, gluttony and waste, nourishment versus malnutrition, devouring and even a crumbling social order are introduced by painted curtains that rise over each act, depicting an empty plate, a blood-smeared plate, and a smashed plate. The parents' abandonment of their children plays out in their hunger and need.
The design was aiming at a kitchen somewhere between the Depression and World War II, we guessed, and the story resonated well with both periods. In the first act, the mother, having banished Hansel and Gretel to the haunted wood, eats food miraculously brought home by her husband—sausages and sauerkraut—in the most outrageous of several more instances of eating while singing (surely one of the great taboos of the operatic art), tucking food into some corner of her mouth so that when husband Peter tells her that the haunted wood’s witch eats children, she runs to the sink and vomits real food! (The sinks alone fascinated me: Hansel breaks a milk jug in the family sink, then his mother vomits there, in Act II, a magical sink in a forest-room soaks dream dishes in frothy suds and the Dew Fairy dries them).
In the haunted wood, the children fall asleep with help from the Sandman and dream, not of guardian angels but of guardian chefs who lay a table with the only proper nourishment we see in this show—a balanced meal of many colors, clearly not over-cooked, and a tureen of consommé served by a dapper fish. One of the guardian chefs was my brother, but since they wear identical fat suits and masks, I was unable to spot him. Act II is full of lullabies and gorgeous music, and I liked the fanciful staging, Hansel and Gretel pickpocketing their strawberries from tree-figures in suits with branches for heads.
In Act III this production let the very real themes of this story rip, and I, my husband and our ten- and eight-year-old boy and girl were left unsettled by it. The witch's kitchen, the third and last of the opera, is oversized and metallic, reminiscent of a slaughterhouse, which indeed it is. The witch trusses up Hansel like a goose and then, using a funnel and hose, force-feeds him pastries that she has pulverized to paste in a blender, a mockery of the inhumane techniques used to prepare foie gras—the cannibalism of the story extended to suggest that to eat animals is to eat our own kind. (Lapsed vegan talking.)
After the brother and sister gleefully lock the witch in the oven (where we watch her burn) they dance, and Gretel nonchalantly smears a chocolate Hitler mustache under the nose of Hansel, who ends the opera by taking a big bite out of the broiled witch’s leg. If nobody in my family liked Act III, it may be because it so successfully elicited our horror and disgust, no-doubt thanks to close-up views of the stage action. All in all I think I would prefer this menacing version to the beirgarden aesthetic that seems to prevail in productions of Hansel and Gretel. A rich, even (necessarily) nauseating treatment of a dense and resonant fairy tale.
PS: Do we LOVE the HDTV Met broadcast program? YES! The venue we attended, Time and Space Limited, has been doing great avant-garde and community work for decades. They can use the full houses this is bringing in, and anyone who can't afford to visit the Met in person certainly deserves a cheaper way to enjoy opera. Bravo, Met.
With that mental backdrop I and my family drove up to Hudson, NY yesterday to see an HDTV rebroadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's current production (in English when we would have preferred the German) of Hansel and Gretel.
The opera's themes of starvation and scarcity, gluttony and waste, nourishment versus malnutrition, devouring and even a crumbling social order are introduced by painted curtains that rise over each act, depicting an empty plate, a blood-smeared plate, and a smashed plate. The parents' abandonment of their children plays out in their hunger and need.
The design was aiming at a kitchen somewhere between the Depression and World War II, we guessed, and the story resonated well with both periods. In the first act, the mother, having banished Hansel and Gretel to the haunted wood, eats food miraculously brought home by her husband—sausages and sauerkraut—in the most outrageous of several more instances of eating while singing (surely one of the great taboos of the operatic art), tucking food into some corner of her mouth so that when husband Peter tells her that the haunted wood’s witch eats children, she runs to the sink and vomits real food! (The sinks alone fascinated me: Hansel breaks a milk jug in the family sink, then his mother vomits there, in Act II, a magical sink in a forest-room soaks dream dishes in frothy suds and the Dew Fairy dries them).
In the haunted wood, the children fall asleep with help from the Sandman and dream, not of guardian angels but of guardian chefs who lay a table with the only proper nourishment we see in this show—a balanced meal of many colors, clearly not over-cooked, and a tureen of consommé served by a dapper fish. One of the guardian chefs was my brother, but since they wear identical fat suits and masks, I was unable to spot him. Act II is full of lullabies and gorgeous music, and I liked the fanciful staging, Hansel and Gretel pickpocketing their strawberries from tree-figures in suits with branches for heads.
In Act III this production let the very real themes of this story rip, and I, my husband and our ten- and eight-year-old boy and girl were left unsettled by it. The witch's kitchen, the third and last of the opera, is oversized and metallic, reminiscent of a slaughterhouse, which indeed it is. The witch trusses up Hansel like a goose and then, using a funnel and hose, force-feeds him pastries that she has pulverized to paste in a blender, a mockery of the inhumane techniques used to prepare foie gras—the cannibalism of the story extended to suggest that to eat animals is to eat our own kind. (Lapsed vegan talking.)
After the brother and sister gleefully lock the witch in the oven (where we watch her burn) they dance, and Gretel nonchalantly smears a chocolate Hitler mustache under the nose of Hansel, who ends the opera by taking a big bite out of the broiled witch’s leg. If nobody in my family liked Act III, it may be because it so successfully elicited our horror and disgust, no-doubt thanks to close-up views of the stage action. All in all I think I would prefer this menacing version to the beirgarden aesthetic that seems to prevail in productions of Hansel and Gretel. A rich, even (necessarily) nauseating treatment of a dense and resonant fairy tale.
PS: Do we LOVE the HDTV Met broadcast program? YES! The venue we attended, Time and Space Limited, has been doing great avant-garde and community work for decades. They can use the full houses this is bringing in, and anyone who can't afford to visit the Met in person certainly deserves a cheaper way to enjoy opera. Bravo, Met.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Axed! Canned! Sacked! Jazzed! A Red Eft Kit
The mild-mannered developer of the house was humming along in a garden full of bugs yesterday when BLIP!—his connection to his virtual work world vanished! The phone then rang and he was told that his betters were faced with some "tough decisions."
As a certain six-year-old we know would say, "Flying Fatso Happy New Year!"
Scary legal documents that subsequently arrived by FedEx prevent me from offering further details, but suffice it to say, my hubbie has been liberated from the digital dungeon where he has done his best to make better for these last two years.
One doesn't know whether to feel exhilarated or anxious, and maybe there's no difference between them.
Thoughts fly.
Refuse to work for The Man ever again!
Unjob!
Cancel that Netflix sub!
Sell gas giant and find shotgun shack-like dwelling!
Continue as usual and assume answers are in transit!
Leap and the net will appear! Do what you love and the millions will follow!
Start a green business! But don't work all the time!
Run out and apply at needy Barnes & Noble and Starbucks, pronto!
Shop WalMart!
No! Mustn't do that! Keep buying organic-expensive-local-quality! No! Stop shopping, eat snow!
So. Thoughts fly and cliches follow.
I searched on "what to do when you lose your job." Everyone agrees to these preliminaries:
1. Don't panic.
2. Find out when COBRA starts.
3. File for unemployment.
I try never to say this, but DUH! How about...
Red Eft's What to Do When You're Axed, Canned or Sacked: Get Jazzed!
1. Pull out a giant piece of paper and doodle what you would most like to do with your brief time left on Earth, now that this phase of your wage slavery has ended. Include anything and everything, moneymaking or not.
2. Celebrate. You no longer work for people who don't appreciate you. A celebration needn't be expensive to be boisterous. It's OK to cry at a celebration. OK to throw a plate at a wall. Just remember you don't want to be spending money right now replacing broken plates.
3. Order (through your neighborhood independent bookseller) Making a Living While Making a Difference: The Expanded Guide to Creating Careers with a Conscience. The third edition, just out from New Society Publishers and printed on 100% recycled paper, was written by our tenant, Melissa Everett, director of Sustainable Hudson Valley. It even mentions the aforementioned mild-mannered but SACKED developer very briefly, near the beginning. Buy this book for yourself, for friends and enemies. Buy it by the bushel so we can raise Melissa's rent and retire early!
4. Look at it this way:
Actually, no. Maybe you'll look at it however you look at it, moment by moment. You might like to ignore condescending people who tell you how to look at it ("could be a good thing," "hey be thankful you had a job at all, ever," etc.). Being fired may suck. Losing your job may turn out to be the greatest gain of your life. Your moods may swing from speechless astonishment to logorrheic excitement. We who've been here, that is to say, AXED, support you in your ambivalence. We won't say "hey, you could be dead, or terminal, or blah blah blah."
5. Remember that only by refusing to do the wrong thing can you find the right thing. Save space for the right things and CAN what does not serve.
As a certain six-year-old we know would say, "Flying Fatso Happy New Year!"
Scary legal documents that subsequently arrived by FedEx prevent me from offering further details, but suffice it to say, my hubbie has been liberated from the digital dungeon where he has done his best to make better for these last two years.
One doesn't know whether to feel exhilarated or anxious, and maybe there's no difference between them.
Thoughts fly.
Refuse to work for The Man ever again!
Unjob!
Cancel that Netflix sub!
Sell gas giant and find shotgun shack-like dwelling!
Continue as usual and assume answers are in transit!
Leap and the net will appear! Do what you love and the millions will follow!
Start a green business! But don't work all the time!
Run out and apply at needy Barnes & Noble and Starbucks, pronto!
Shop WalMart!
No! Mustn't do that! Keep buying organic-expensive-local-quality! No! Stop shopping, eat snow!
So. Thoughts fly and cliches follow.
I searched on "what to do when you lose your job." Everyone agrees to these preliminaries:
1. Don't panic.
2. Find out when COBRA starts.
3. File for unemployment.
I try never to say this, but DUH! How about...
Red Eft's What to Do When You're Axed, Canned or Sacked: Get Jazzed!
1. Pull out a giant piece of paper and doodle what you would most like to do with your brief time left on Earth, now that this phase of your wage slavery has ended. Include anything and everything, moneymaking or not.
2. Celebrate. You no longer work for people who don't appreciate you. A celebration needn't be expensive to be boisterous. It's OK to cry at a celebration. OK to throw a plate at a wall. Just remember you don't want to be spending money right now replacing broken plates.
3. Order (through your neighborhood independent bookseller) Making a Living While Making a Difference: The Expanded Guide to Creating Careers with a Conscience. The third edition, just out from New Society Publishers and printed on 100% recycled paper, was written by our tenant, Melissa Everett, director of Sustainable Hudson Valley. It even mentions the aforementioned mild-mannered but SACKED developer very briefly, near the beginning. Buy this book for yourself, for friends and enemies. Buy it by the bushel so we can raise Melissa's rent and retire early!
4. Look at it this way:
Actually, no. Maybe you'll look at it however you look at it, moment by moment. You might like to ignore condescending people who tell you how to look at it ("could be a good thing," "hey be thankful you had a job at all, ever," etc.). Being fired may suck. Losing your job may turn out to be the greatest gain of your life. Your moods may swing from speechless astonishment to logorrheic excitement. We who've been here, that is to say, AXED, support you in your ambivalence. We won't say "hey, you could be dead, or terminal, or blah blah blah."
5. Remember that only by refusing to do the wrong thing can you find the right thing. Save space for the right things and CAN what does not serve.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Stage Dog
I'm in a production of The Cherry Orchard, and my character, Charlotta, is supposed to have a little dog, but the director is wary of working with animals, and who can blame him? So I'm using a puppet.
I am mighty envious of my brother, a staff actor at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, who just finished a stint in War and Peace as Tsar Alexander, pictured here with his delightfully well-mannered, highly trained fellow cast member, Jumpin' Jack Flash, a Maltese.
I am mighty envious of my brother, a staff actor at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, who just finished a stint in War and Peace as Tsar Alexander, pictured here with his delightfully well-mannered, highly trained fellow cast member, Jumpin' Jack Flash, a Maltese.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Great Snow Vacation with Kids—Lake Placid & Burlington
We just got back from 11 lucky days of snow and fun in Lake Placid, New York and Willison (near Burlington), Vermont.
Highlights for us (though there are tons more things to do in these places):
LAKE PLACID
Family-owned Maple Leaf Inn—right in town, had a room with a kitchenette, reasonably priced (children under 10 stay free with parent). We could walk to the outdoor Olympic speed skating oval, which had public hours in the afternoon and at night—with a bonfire and holiday lights, the skating oval is not to be missed! I love skating while it's snowing!
The sleigh ride at the White Face Club with draft horses, jingle bells and plenty of blankets was most serene. If you've never had a sleigh ride, put it on your list of things to try.
Christmas dinner at Jimmy's on Main Street, overlooking Mirror Lake, was notable for its low-key atmosphere and reasonable price (try feeding a family of four a Christmas dinner at one of the fancier places for under $100). (If you're looking for hotels, a friend of mine stayed at The Golden Arrow and really liked that.)
For Cross-Country skiing, we loved Cascade Cross-Country Ski Center. Beautiful groomed trails, kid-friendly, nice people, spacious wooden lodge with big fire, veggie chili and Glögg—a sweet, hot wine beverage—and a brown-bag table for those who bring their own lunch. Here we are on one of their tree-filled trails:
The trip over to Vermont, on a car ferry across Lake Champlain, afforded spectacular mountain views, but on the way back—whoa!—white caps, water washing across the deck, a rocking ferry, spray freezing on our windshield so we couldn't see where we were going, yikes, I'm too much of a landlubber for that!
WILLISTON, VERMONT
Not far outside Burlington we found this family vacation jewel: The Catamount Outdoor Family Center. Jim and Lucy McCullough converted their 500-acre farm to a year-round haven for mountain bikers & hikers, skiers, sledders and snowshoers. The green B&B, which is attached to the ski center, was originally built by the first governor of Vermont, and the house is full of character and history. Jim and Lucy wisely made their center a non-profit so it will be around for future generations, and it's a rich resource to their community, with kids programs, local high school ski team training, night skiing on two lit trails and a sledding hill that will give you quite a chiropractic adjustment on a cold day.
We loved it there and hope to return for biking. Jim and Lucy have the right livelihood thing down pat, and they make a mean baked oatmeal, the recipe for which they readily share:
Amish Baked Oatmeal
3 cups oatmeal
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 scant tsp salt
2 beaten eggs
1 cup butter or olive oil or some other oil
1 cup milk
Mix, put in baking dish or ramikins (that's how we had it—YUM).
Bake 30 minutes, 350 degrees farenheit.
Can't recommend Catamount highly enough for family fun!
Highlights for us (though there are tons more things to do in these places):
LAKE PLACID
Family-owned Maple Leaf Inn—right in town, had a room with a kitchenette, reasonably priced (children under 10 stay free with parent). We could walk to the outdoor Olympic speed skating oval, which had public hours in the afternoon and at night—with a bonfire and holiday lights, the skating oval is not to be missed! I love skating while it's snowing!
The sleigh ride at the White Face Club with draft horses, jingle bells and plenty of blankets was most serene. If you've never had a sleigh ride, put it on your list of things to try.
Christmas dinner at Jimmy's on Main Street, overlooking Mirror Lake, was notable for its low-key atmosphere and reasonable price (try feeding a family of four a Christmas dinner at one of the fancier places for under $100). (If you're looking for hotels, a friend of mine stayed at The Golden Arrow and really liked that.)
For Cross-Country skiing, we loved Cascade Cross-Country Ski Center. Beautiful groomed trails, kid-friendly, nice people, spacious wooden lodge with big fire, veggie chili and Glögg—a sweet, hot wine beverage—and a brown-bag table for those who bring their own lunch. Here we are on one of their tree-filled trails:
The trip over to Vermont, on a car ferry across Lake Champlain, afforded spectacular mountain views, but on the way back—whoa!—white caps, water washing across the deck, a rocking ferry, spray freezing on our windshield so we couldn't see where we were going, yikes, I'm too much of a landlubber for that!
WILLISTON, VERMONT
Not far outside Burlington we found this family vacation jewel: The Catamount Outdoor Family Center. Jim and Lucy McCullough converted their 500-acre farm to a year-round haven for mountain bikers & hikers, skiers, sledders and snowshoers. The green B&B, which is attached to the ski center, was originally built by the first governor of Vermont, and the house is full of character and history. Jim and Lucy wisely made their center a non-profit so it will be around for future generations, and it's a rich resource to their community, with kids programs, local high school ski team training, night skiing on two lit trails and a sledding hill that will give you quite a chiropractic adjustment on a cold day.
We loved it there and hope to return for biking. Jim and Lucy have the right livelihood thing down pat, and they make a mean baked oatmeal, the recipe for which they readily share:
Amish Baked Oatmeal
3 cups oatmeal
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 scant tsp salt
2 beaten eggs
1 cup butter or olive oil or some other oil
1 cup milk
Mix, put in baking dish or ramikins (that's how we had it—YUM).
Bake 30 minutes, 350 degrees farenheit.
Can't recommend Catamount highly enough for family fun!
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