A Very Belated Thank You

On a cold, foggy night in January, 1994, I arrived in New Delhi, India. I had flown all day and most of the night, and I was exhausted. But it would be several hours before I would be able to sleep. First I had to clear customs and immigration. I tried to rub the sleep from my eyes.

I found my extra-large backpack--the largest Jan Sport made--stuffed until the seams nearly split (for it would need to provide clothing and basic necessities for 4 months) rotating slowly on the baggage carousel. I made my way through the crowds of foreigners and locals-coming-home to the area where my bags would be searched. Customs was thorough. I repacked as best I could.

Time for the crazy part: Getting out of the airport. Despite the hour (3am), the cold (40 degrees) and the thick nightly mist, the exit from the airport was packed with pushing, shouting men offering their services as taxi and rickshaw drivers. I'd been warned by my professor ahead of time about this situation. "Just keep looking straight ahead," he had said. "Don't speak except to say 'no thank you,' and don't make eye contact with anyone. And hold on tight to your bags." So I did just that. I won't say it wasn't intimidating, maybe even frightening to have several dozen men try to steer you to their vehicles while shouting, "This way, Madam!" "Cheap ride from me! This way!" But my imitation of confidence must have been convincing because soon I was through the throng in once piece and heading towards my bus.

There were only half a dozen of us on the bus, including my friend and travel companion Rachelle. The driver was snoozing while he waited for the proper time to leave. Soon we were on our way. It was hard to see anything through the darkness and fog, but I caught glimpses of cement walls along the street plastered with Bollywood posters and scrawled with Hindi graffiti. A few late-night rickshaws dartied in and out of side streets. But most of the world was asleep.

We reached our hostel, the Blue Triangle YMCA, after half an hour. And despite our reconfirmed reservations, the man at the front desk seemed to have no idea that Rachelle and I were coming. He told us we would have to sort it out with the morning manager. In the meantime, he would send us to the two available beds in the hotel--those in two separate dormitory style rooms.

My room was a long rectangle, maybe 50 feet long. A row of perhaps 8 or 10 low beds flanked one wall while lockers flanked the other. At the end were a couple of sinks and a door to the toilet and shower room. The dormitory was cold. Though the curtains were drawn on some of the windows, others were bare. I could see several broken panes of glass letting in the cold, damp air.

All of the beds were filled with sleeping occupants; all but one, at the end closest to the door. It had a cushion-like mattress, no pillow, and no blankets. The porter who showed me to my room threw up his hands when I asked him for bedding. "All full" was all he would say. It was well past 4am at this point and I was just too tired to argue. So I took out a sweater from my backpack to use as a pillow and curled up on the bed to sleep.

I shivered awake for a while, too cold to sleep. I replayed the last few hours in my mind, recalling the details I had been too overwhelmed to notice--how dark all the faces had been, the lack of women at that hour, the thick smell of pollution, the strange trees, the mangy dogs roaming the roads, and men in turbans and lungis warming their hands over make-shift stoves. As I thought, occasional noises from cars or buses would make their way through the broken windows, but mostly I heard only the sounds of sleeping strangers. Eventually fatigue must have overcome me, because the next thing I knew a faint light was coming through the windows. There was movement and soft voices in the room. And I was suddenly very warm. I forced my weary eyes to blink open a few times, and I saw the sweet face of a young Japanese girl leaning over me as she placed a thick blanket on my curled up body. I think I tried to smile. But before I could squeeze out a thank you, I had relaxed into exhausted, contented sleep.

When I awoke a few hours later, it was full daytime. I got up and went to the window. The mist outside was nearly gone. Somewhere in the distance, a muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer. I turned to examine my surroundings, but the room's occupants were all gone for the day. I repacked my sweater pillow and found the day manager downstairs. Soon I was situated in the correct room two floors up with the other students from my group. We got busy exploring Delhi, visiting the temples and gurdwaras, sampling the local food, and basking in the ecstasy of dirt-cheap shopping. I never saw the group who I had shared a room with on the first night. And I never got a chance to thank the girl who took the time to cover the shivering stranger the end of the room. She is out there somewhere. And she has no idea that I still think of her with gratitude, 16 years later.

So wherever you are, Angel, thank you.


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Forever Young

Yesterday I bought my first age defying product. AGE defying. I hate that I am of an age that I have to say "age" like it's a dirty word. Maybe I should start using it to replace some of my usual cuss words. "Age it!" "You age face!" That sort of thing.

I didn't buy it because I feel old or because I'm worried that I look old. I mean I do feel old, and I am worried that I'm starting to look older too. But I mostly bought it because I wanted a cream blush and evidently they are VERY hard to come by at the old Target. So when I found a cream blush in the right color, I got it. Regenerist serum and all.

And you know what? I like it. It's a good color. Very creamy. And I think I might be looking youmger already...




What about you? Do you buy age related products? Do you find that they help at all?

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

The other day I was sitting on my bed, messing around on my computer. It was mid-morning . The kids were upstairs playing, the cat was dozing in her usual spot on my comforter. In the corner of my mind, I noticed a sound. Tippity-tap. Tap tap tap. Tap. Tippity-tap. Tap. "What is that sound?" I thought. It kind of sounded like icicles melting and dripping. Only there weren't any icicles outside my window. So I went back to typing. A few seconds later I heard it again. Tippity-tap-tap. TAP. "What IS that?" I wondered more emphatically. I looked around, tilting my head to catch the direction of the sound. Almost on cue, the cat started looking around as well. And then her eyes drifted upward, to the ceiling. That's when I noticed the crack in the ceiling above my bed. That crack that was DRIPPING WATER ONTO MY CEILING FAN!

CRAAAAP! I thought very emphatically this time. OK, I might have actually yelled it out loud. And I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter, only I was pretty sure it wasn't the dancing and prancing of little reindeer hooves.

It wasn't. I was the pouring and gushing of water onto the floor in the upstairs bathroom. And it was an inch deep! One of my lovely children had turned on the sink to play in and had wandered off, leaving it running. And it just happened (I now noticed) to be one of those rare sinks with no hole do-hickey at the back of the sink to let water out when the sink gets too full. So instead of draining out the non-existent hole do-hickey, it had drained out the top of the basin and onto my floor and through the floor onto the ceiling and through the ceiling onto my ceiling fan, and from the ceiling fan down onto my comforter.

I wasn't sure what I should do first...clean up the water or beat my children. I decided that the beatings could wait (although I did a fair amount of shrieking and ranting, just to set the right mood for what was to come) and pulled all the freshly washed and folded towels onto the floor to mop up the mess.

That done, the interrogation began. Daphne, of course, blamed it on Beck. Beck, of course, said it was him because he admits to anything you ask him, even when he wasn't around when it happened. This was one of those cases where I honestly had no idea which one of them it was. So I did the only fair thing I could come up with--I spanked them both. And though I'm not much for physical punishment, when the ruination of the house is the issue at hand, I find it helpful to punctuate your remarks in a more memorable way than the usual screaming and hair pulling (that would be my own in these lesser cases).

After all that, I realized it was nearly 11 and I still hadn't gotten dressed. So I got in the shower. And when I got out and walked into my room, the cat was staring more intently up at the ceiling. And there was a new sound. Tink, spat. Tinkity tink tink, splat splat splat. This would be the sound of a serious amount of liquid RAINING onto my comforter, my laptop, my iPhone, and my house phone, all of which were clustered under the ceiling fan where I'd left them when I ran upstairs.

Luckily, none of them were ruined. I powered them all down and let them air dry, and they all seem fine. My ceiling, however, has seen better days. And my cat has moved her mid-morning nap spot to the floor a few feet away from my bed. Just in case.

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Cockoo For Cocoa Puffs

You know that saying that you have to choose your battles? Well, I finally waved the white flag when it came to the Great Battle of the Cereal. Big Daddy wanted to buy the sugary kind, I wanted to give the kids something more nutritious. I actually threw out the Lucky Charms a couple of times because my kids would only eat the marshallows (that's what they call them). But the Corn Pops, Sugar Smacks, and Honeycombs kept coming in, and naturally they liked them better than the Dirt & Bran Twigs and Pecan Pine Cones I kept buying, so I gave in.

Personally, though, I prefer less sugary cereals. For one, those sugar cereals aren't very filling. But also, breakfast candy just isn't the same now as its 1980's counterparts. Sugar cereals used to be delicious treats on the rare occasions that we got them. But now Cookie Crisp and Peanut Butter Captain Crunch are made of a strange space materials that resemble cereal......until it gets wet. Then it blows up in to this nasty, frothy goo. EEEWWW. No thanks. But for some reason my kids still love it. I guess cause they don't know any better.

Well, this week I found a new sugary atrocity in my cabinet, care of Big Daddy: Cocoa Puffs. I couldn't remember actually ever buying these, even as a kid. But somewhere in the furthest recesses of my mind, a dark chocolaty flavor waved around like a cocoa mirage. I wondered if I actually had eaten this cereal and if it might actually be tasty, as my memory seemed to suggest.

IT WAS! Sweet heaven of chocolate breakfast, it was. My first bite almost made me drop my spoon, it was so good. It tasted like super fudgey brownie bites! FOR BREAKFAST! I quickly scarfed up a whole bowl. Then another. Then another. I guess those sugary cereals CAN be filling. All you have to do is eat three bowls.

Hmmmm.....maybe losing a battle once in a while isn't such a bad thing after all.

Last Day for 15% off!

If you were tempted to order something fun for Valentine's Day but have been sitting on the fence, let me give you a little push...

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO GET 15% OFF!

So you could wait until tomorrow or the next day or the next day to order, but then you'd have to pay more. Why do that to yourself?

Click HERE to browse my Passion Parties website, or email me if you need more personalized shopping help.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Word Up

Every once in a while I catch myself saying a common phrase, an idiom, and wondering, "Where on earth did that phrase come from?"

Today it was "called to the carpet." As in, "I hope those Wall Street idiots get called to the carpet for what they did."

The meaning behind these phrases is usually clear to me, but the origin--how we came to understand that calling someone to the carpet means making them be accountable for what they did--is what really interests me.

Maybe it interests you as well? (Or maybe you find it totally stupid and you couldn't care less, in which case feel free to skip all further posts with this title.) So I've decided to do a regular post on the origin of common idioms. Starting with...


Called To the Carpet/Called on the Carpet:

"In the days when 'carpet' retained its original sense, 'a thick fabric used to cover tables,' to have something 'on the carpet' had the same meaning that we now give to 'on the table'; that is, to have something up for discussion, for consideration. But dainty ladies found, even in the fifteenth century, that these thick fabrics also made ideal floor coverings and began to use them, first, in their bedchambers, and then in other private or formal rooms of a house. But they were for the use of the gentry.

The occasions when a servant might 'walk the carpet,' as the expression went, was when he or she was called before the mistress or master of the house for a reprimand. Though this latter expression, coined in the early nineteenth century, is still in use, it has been largely replaced, especially in America, by transferring its meaning to 'on the carpet.'"

From "2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings & Expressions from White Elephants to a Song and Dance" by Charles Earle Funk (Galahad Book, New York, 1993).

So there you have it. Feel a lot smarter and more superior to everyone else around you now, don't you? You're welcome.

A Few of My Favorite Things

There will be no end to the self-congratulatory sniggering when my mom finds out I'm blogging about this one, but here it is....

The Infamous Square Frying Pan




I think my mother was the one who first discovered the square frying pan, back when they were a very obscure item. And then she proceeded to give one to every person who got married for the next 40 years. Square frying pans don't wrap well, though, so usually she just wrapped the frying part and left the handle sticking out. This mortified us, of course. It looked so unprofessional. And we always wished, just once, we could give the bride and groom something nice, something that came in a box that you could wrap completely and tie a ribbon around (not a Christmas bow stuck to the outside).

But alas, now that I have kids I realize how incredible handy it is to have a pan that can cook 4 pancakes at once, 4 grilled cheese sandwiches at once, 8 slices of bacon at once, and six pork chops at once...all without them touching each other and sticking together or sliding towards the middle.

I'm sure all of those people who got a square frying pan at their wedding wondered what the heck they'd ever use it for. And I'm sure within a few years, all of them, like me, thanked their lucky stars a hundred times over for this super handy pan.

(Don't you hate it when your mother is right?)