Category Archives: Homefront

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The Germ of an Idea

Wuhan seemed deserted, abandoned—
All hidden behind closed doors—
Surveilled and quarantined, while
Holding the attention of the world.

Yet, as we held our collective breath,
Our vain hopes for containment went
Unfulfilled, as the virus spread to
Regions, and then countries, beyond.

Did we really think this tiny crown,
As it stowed away on hands, in coughs,
Might obey our commands to halt—
Not to cross our border?

How naïve, or perhaps ’twas willful ignorance.
And now, while we should be concerned, there’s
No need for panic, no time for casual racism.
Disease spread can be slowed, even prevented,
Simply by following the advice herein.

©Rebecca Bigelow, March 6, 2020

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A Bit of Doggerel

It’s Valentine’s Day—at least for a few more minutes. If the checkout line at the grocery store yesterday is any indication, lots of people got stuffed animals and big pink cards covered in glitter (lots of glitter) in my town today. I tend to prefer a more low-key day (because I am too frugal to see much point in buying a card for eight bucks that will be looked at once!), so my day was perfect for me: No grand gestures, just dinner with my husband and son and a chance to Skype with my daughter who is away at the moment. Spending that kind of time with loved ones is definitely my idea of a successful holiday. Whether you celebrated romantically with a partner, as part of a family gathering, with a friend or two, or just enjoyed alone time, I hope your day was as perfect for you as mine was for me.

Although my Valentine’s Day was lovely, there have been some irritants in the last couple of weeks. What better way to slay those dragons than with a bit of fluff and fun? I think I’ll call this collection Poems from Cranky People. Writing them made me feel better. I can guarantee these little bits of verse will not end up on a card you can buy at the grocery (not in pink, not at any price, and they are definitely glitter free), but perhaps they’ll make you smile.  Enjoy the last few minutes of the holiday!

Foreshadowing by Rebecca Bigelow

Each February we pretend
That some rodent can portend
The duration of our wintry state.
But I wish it would prognosticate
Something of more import.
So if, in fact, we must resort
To using a groundhog named Phil
To predict the future, then he should spill
Whether we will suffer, over our objections,
At least six more months of politics and elections.

Lightning Bugs by Rebecca Bigelow

A light glows briefly in the dark.
And like the mating call of a firefly,
Another answers it.
And soon the lights are twinkling.
Everywhere.
Some flashes last mere milliseconds.
But some can be measured
In moonlights and cups of cocoa.
And I wonder why
It is so important
To check your damn phone
In the theatre.

 

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One Day at a Time

780px-Chapel_Hill_Sundial_Carmichael

How long is a day? Generally speaking, we say a day is twenty-four hours. Scientifically speaking, a day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. When is a day not a day? Apparently when shipping companies are involved.

I recently placed an order with a large Internet company. Let’s call them Yangtze. And I have their annual subscription shipping service. Let’s call that Fibonacci. With Fibonacci you get free two-day shipping on in-stock items. I adore Fibonacci, and I often shop with Yangtze because of the convenience of having my purchases show up at my door in a brown box with the distinctive tape on it that says 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 . . .

Last week, I placed an order for two mundane items: breakfast cookies (Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk, yum) and a new case for my cell phone. The old one had finally fallen apart, and duct tape was no longer working to hold it together (even duct tape has its limits). The Yangtze interface said that my items were in stock. I put them in my basket and checked out. The shipping information said I would receive my package on Wednesday. The items had said they were eligible for two-day shipping, so I thought that was weird. By my count, they would arrive on Tuesday. But I figured I’d ask Yangtze Customer Care (YCC) about it after I placed the order. It wasn’t a big deal; I didn’t need the breakfast cookies, and the cell phone case and I could limp along for another day. It was just a curiosity thing—after all that’s what this blog is about. I finished checking out and immediately opened a chat window with YCC.

Full disclosure: I’m a night owl. I placed my Yangtze order at 1:45 a.m. on Friday (the hours between Thursday night and the Friday business day). So at 1:50, I asked my YCC person to explain why my package was going to take until Wednesday to arrive. Our (very polite) conversation went something like this (edited for length/punctuation):

YCC: You need to place an order before the cutoff time to receive the order with two day shipping. As the carriers won’t be working on Saturdays and Sundays, it takes time for the package to be delivered.

Me: But even taking that into account, there is Friday and Monday, so it should arrive Tuesday at the latest, not Wednesday.

YCC: The cutoff time is over so if you place the order now, the two day shipping will be considered from Monday, i.e., Monday and Tuesday, so you will be receiving the order by Wednesday.

Me: So basically, even though we are only 2 hours into Friday, with an entire business day left, you don’t count it?

YCC: You need to place the order before Thursday to get the two day shipping by Saturday.

I explain again that I wasn’t expecting Saturday delivery, nor was I counting the weekend in my reckoning of two business days. But if they count Saturday for regular delivery, then shouldn’t my package arrive on Monday? I didn’t even want to ask that!

Me: But there is still plenty of Friday left.

In fact, for those keeping track, there were still more than seven hours before the start of the business day on Friday.

YCC: If the carriers would have been available we would have happily shipped the packages for you. Carriers won’t be working on Saturdays and Sundays.

We went around like an Abbott and Costello routine a few more times, and she offered to pass my feedback along to the higher ups, which I agreed to, but ultimately we ended the chat because we weren’t getting anywhere. And I was still getting my stuff on Wednesday.

When the chat transcript was emailed to me, I noticed that the chat was time-stamped in Pacific Standard Time. It was still Thursday where she was while we were chatting. I briefly wondered when my package would have arrived if she had placed the order, but it made my head hurt.

Then, the next morning (but time-stamped 2:55 a.m.!), I received an email from Yangtze. It informed me if I wanted to order that late and still wanted my package to arrive on Saturday, I’d have to pay for shipping. Otherwise to get Saturday delivery, I’d have to order before the cutoff time on Thursday to get it delivered for two-day on Saturday.

So at least two people at Yangtze agree Saturdays count for two-day Fibonacci delivery if you order before Friday, but Saturdays don’t count if you order on Friday. And Fridays don’t count either if you order on one. It’s a good thing Fibonacci two-day shipping only is valid in the United States. I think Fibonacci shipping across the International Dateline would open a rift in the space-time continuum. Perhaps it is my fault. My whole life I’ve probably been wrong for counting the 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds of Friday in my week. Although, frankly if we have to not count a day, I’d prefer to give up Monday. I think most people would agree with me on this.

And just when I’d resigned myself to Yangtze’s fuzzy math on day counting, my package arrived.

On Tuesday.

Text: ©Rebecca Bigelow; Photo: Public Domain

An Update (2/14/16): A couple of weeks later, I placed another mundane order on a Thursday night, but this time it was a couple hours before midnight instead of after. That package arrived on Monday. I believe I will build a Time Machine in the garage (assuming I can ever get work space in there), because that will be easier to figure out than Yangtze’s shipping policies.

Further Reading/Viewing:

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The Tchotchke Two-Step

Open_cardboard_box_husky

At our house we have a semi-annual ritual dance known as the Box and Bin Shuffle. Its start date is not tied to the calendar, nor is it tied to a moon cycle. Instead it occurs when my husband hears these magic words uttered: Chance of accumulating snow. This year, the call came late—in deepest, darkest January—but we both recognized his call to arms when the Weather Channel announced the threat of four inches of the white stuff last weekend: Time to get the cars in the garage.

Now most reasonable people consider the garage to be a place to park one’s car(s) on a full-time basis. After all, this is definition one in any major dictionary. Most reasonable people are not married to my husband, however. We cannot always park cars in the garage because my husband suffers from an affliction known as “I might need that”-itis. In other words, he is a pack rat. After nearly 30 years of marriage, I finally have him on the road to recovery; so the inside of our house is no longer cluttered with stuff, but the garage is one of his last holdouts.

Our garage is where old computers go to die. There are jars of bits and bobs that might come in handy—someday—and boxes of old games and toys from when the kids were small. No one needs or wants to play the Sponge Bob memory game now. My husband even admits we do not need these things; so in the warm months, he pulls them out to sort them. It is excruciating to watch him decide what to keep, what to throw away, and what to donate. We disagree. Sometimes vehemently. To the point that I have now abdicated all responsibility for the garage. Why? I like staying married to him.

This last summer, our very organized daughter (a gene that clearly comes from my side of the family) helped him sort through everything. She placed like items in boxes and labeled them all. There were several trips to Goodwill and headway was made. But then August rolled around and she had to leave for band camp and other college things—although I thought seriously about asking her to take a gap year to finish the job. So, the boxes stayed pretty much where they were through the fall and into early winter. And my car sat on the driveway. Until the battle cry came once again: Snow.

And so he stood in the garage and said he would move things so I could get my car in there. I said, “Some of this stuff could just go back to the shed.” After all we were done mowing the lawn for now, and the kids had moved all their stuff back to college, so we didn’t need the empty camp trunks and such. My husband looked sheepish. “There’s no room.” Now I was gobsmacked. How is there no room in the shed when a bunch of this stuff had obviously come from there? Never mind. I didn’t want to know. Evidently, the pack rat recovery program is a work in progress.

So, he shuffled boxes to one side. Stacked bins on top of one another. “It’s all still labeled from this summer,” he said. “It’ll be easy to sort out next spring.” I didn’t say a word. In the past, I’ve threatened to donate the lot, but he says we can’t just do that. Some of it is important.

And the thing is, some of it is. It doesn’t help that we are at that life stage where our parents’ things are filtering their way to us. “It needs to stay in the family,” my mother says, playing on my sense of tradition and family history. “We knew you liked that stuff,” my sister-in-law said, handing over several boxes of papers from my husband’s side of the family. She was ostensibly here for a visit, but based on the number of boxes she pulled out of her trunk, I suspect she really just wanted her own garage cleared out.

And it’s true I do like this stuff. I like old birth certificates and family pictures. It’s fun to see my husband’s old report cards. I am just not sure I need his siblings’ old report cards or his unlabeled family pictures. Is that Great Grandma Sadie or some random former friend? Who knows! Someday, I may get to put these items in the recycling, but it is a process to get my husband to that point. I tried to instill the “if you haven’t used it or thought of it in two years, you don’t need it” rule. He upped it to five. Or maybe ten in certain cases. Oh, who am I kidding? We still have baby-proofing items in the attic. The kids are turning 21 this year.

And so, here we are. The threatened accumulating snow last weekend never materialized, but it is only a matter of time. He took a few more boxes to Goodwill this week. Baby steps. And I can, in fact, get my car in the garage now.

His still sits on the driveway.

 

Text: © 2016 Rebecca Bigelow;
Photo: Public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Resources:

The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Decluttering Your Home. The website is for a dumpster rental place, but they actually have a lot of great advice for people who want to organize and declutter. If you live with your own pack rat, your mileage may vary.