Alice TV

I click the phone icon in the Skype window on my laptop and hear the funny bloopity blip noise as it makes a call. One ring, two rings, and Alice picks up.

"Hello?"

"There's no video. Are you decent?"

"Not quite."

(Panicked pause) "Are you alone?"

(Laughter) "Yes, I'm alone! I'm just not camera-ready!"

"Oh!"

The video comes up and I see my daughter hastily smoothing down the sweater that I sent her last month. She's got a job teaching English to elementary school students in South Korea. We Skype each other because it's free, fun and surprising. I make a mental note to let her do the calling from now on. It's no problem for me to answer a Skype call. I live with two teenagers, so I'm always "camera-ready."

Alice settles in on her bed with the laptop in front of her. I can see the cherry blossoms coming out from either side of her head, left over decor from a previous tenant who lived in her apartment. To her right I can see part of a tiny refrigerator with a microwave on top of it. On her left are the pictures in CD covers that I sent out in the last package. I notice that she's changed some of them out.

The biggest drawback to using Skype to communicate is that the video also contains a miniature video of me in the corner. My eyes are always drawn to pictures of myself, I guess because I find myself endlessly fascinating.

Right now I think that my nose looks too big, so I scoot back a bit from the laptop and that makes my features more proportional. Unfortunately, my face is now a tiny circle in the middle of a big rectangular space. The graphic designer in me can't live with that, so I angle the laptop cover so that my head is more toward the top of the screen. My daughter is too polite to notice me not paying attention to her while all this is going on and continues to tell me about her day.

She's recounting how she taught her fifth grade class, all boys, how to play a drinking game she learned in college, called the Five Finger Game. Each person holds up one hand and swears that they never, ever did a certain thing, usually something sexual. Anyone else who can't make the same claim has to put a finger down and take a drink.

With the fifth graders there is no drinking or talk about sex. Instead they treat it as an opportunity to punish one of their classmates by deciding in advance who is going to lose the game and then craftily asking questions that will make this happen as quickly as possible. First person: "My name is not (insert name of agreed-upon-loser-boy here)." Second through fourth persons: "I am not holding up (four, three, two, one) fingers."

Alice, being a nice person and with no previous experience of other people's children, is appalled by this ("They're so mean!") and decides to make new rules. No one can use the "I am not holding up however many fingers" gambit and the teacher (Alice) gets to go first. They agree. She holds up one hand and says, "I am not Korean." Much whining ensues and then they pull themselves together and working as a team, eliminate her forthwith from the game. She doesn't care. She got them all down one finger, mwahahaha!

It's two in the morning in Busan, South Korea. I know she's tired but she wants to talk some more and I let her. I am happy to watch and listen while she recounts her attempts to purchase shampoo with only the pictures on the labels to guide her (she doesn't speak or write Korean). She laughs, gets up to check to see if her dinner is done cooking, bounces back on the bed, peers over my shoulder when one of her brothers passes behind me and calls out to him to come and talk.

We take turns showing each other what's new since the last time we Skyped. She shows me some illustrations that she's drawing of "Bob," a cartoon character that she uses in her classes to communicate tricky vocabulary words like "thin" and "fat" and "handsome" and "ugly." I show her the dead shrubbery in the back yard that her father spray-painted gold and silver in time for Christmas.

Skyping with Alice reminds me of when she was in high school and she used to come sit on my bed late at night and tell me everything she was thinking or feeling. I would drink it all in, thinking that it wouldn't last forever and that I should enjoy her company while I could. It wasn't long after that she left for a year to go to school in France. Then she went to Senegal for six months during her junior year at college. Now she's halfway around the world. She's planning to go to France again next year.

With Skype, I hear the sound of her voice and watch the movement of her hands and enjoy the play of emotions on her face. I'm so glad I can have this, so grateful that she shares her life with me this way. It's like having my own little reality channel called Alice TV. I don't know how long it'll be on or when the next episode will be. I only know that I never get tired of watching it.

I'm posting to a different blog

Hey everyone, anyone. I've begun a new blog called Runs, Shoots and Leaves. The link is on the right here. It's more of a photo blog than anything else. I've been taking lots of pictures again and just wanted to share them. So take a look, if you like and let me know what you think.

I've been having some difficulty writing. The pictures are kind of a way of getting back to writing without actually telling myself that it's writing. It's supposed to be fun and it is, it is. I like photography. A lot. Anyway, hopefully this will help me say what I want to say without freaking out about it all the time.

The Dog's Breakfast

Oatmeal, gravy, evaporated milk,

leftover burger or meat of that ilk,

steamed green beans, seasoned with dill,

a mess of corn mush piled in a small hill

Nasty to look at, but a pleasure to eat,

the dog's breakfast is served. Bon appetit!

The Gift

I stare at the candle holder squatting on the table like a malevolent imp. Red and blue beads glare out from behind shrouds of black tar. It was supposed to be a cool-looking, hand-crafted candle holder. Instead it has turned into something nasty. It is "The Candle Holder from the Black Lagoon". I dread showing it to my son. Nick is going freak out.

This morning when I woke I walked into the workshop to see what had been created overnight. I found a jar on the workbench, covered in gray cement. Where was the grout? I wondered.

Last night before I'd gone to bed, I'd left Nick sitting on the stool, busily hot glueing glass beads onto an empty jar. It was going to be his present to his girlfriend, Melissa. Her birthday party was the next day and he was trying to pull off a hand made gift for her.

Actually, the candle holder idea was a compromise. Originally he'd wanted to make her a globe lamp mosaicked with glass beads. I'd convinced him to try something easier, since it would require having a place to plug it in and he wasn't sure how to work the cord or whether or not the base had to be cemented, too.

All of that just seemed like a lot to work out less than 48 hours before the party. A candleholder was just about possible, I figured. Nick agreed. Before I went to bed last night I had brought in a tub of white, pre-mixed, sanded grout, pointed out the instructions on the back and left him to it.

What I was looking at this morning wasn't grouted at all. It was cemented. Seriously cemented. And it was gray. What happened?

I went into the kitchen and started making coffee. Nick walked in then, looking like he hadn't slept at all.

"Nick, have you been to bed?"

"I slept for an hour."

"I saw the jar on the workbench. What happened to the grout?"

"It didn't work. It not only didn't work, it dissolved the glue that was holding the beads on the jar. So I had to clean it off and start all over again."

"I'm sorry, Nick."

"Yeah, so Dad helped me make cement and I used that instead."

"Now what?"

"Now I'm supposed to take a sponge and wipe off all the excess cement."

"I'll help you find the stuff to do that." I felt guilty about the grout. Who knew it would melt hot glue? "This is just one of those journey things, Nick," I said, trying to find a bright spot for him.

I filled a bucket with water and found a big sponge. I put some newspaper down on the kitchen table, got Nick some rubber gloves and set him to work cleaning off the cement from the beadwork.

After twenty minutes or so, still feeling guilty, I offered to take over for a while, which is when things went from bad to horrible. As I rubbed on the bottom of the candleholder, a chunk of cement fell off taking four beads with it.

"Uh oh," I said. Nick looked over at the large pile of cement on the newspaper and said, "Please tell me the beads haven't come off."

"I wish I could."

I told him to go jump in the shower while I thought about what to do next. Cementing the thing again wouldn't work because there wasn't enough time for it to set up. We could always go buy a present, except Nick was already exhausted, and a trip to the store wasn't going to help that.

I took the jar out to the yard and used a hose to clean off the rest of the cement. Most of the beads fell off in the process. There was no way we could use the same jar again. There were globs of hot glue all over it and they weren't coming off. Plus, now that the cement was gone I could see where the grout had stained the glass already. It was wrecked.

I went back into the kitchen and scrounged around the cupboards looking for another jar with a lid. No soap. And then I decided to look in the refrigerator to see if there was another jar like this one that could be used. I found a salsa jar, emptied the contents into a mason jar, then rinsed it out, dried it and waited for Nick to get out of the shower.

When he came back into the kitchen, still depressed, but clean at least, I showed him the new jar. "You'll need to re-glue the beads onto this," I said. He nodded listlessly. He'd already decided that this nightmare was never ending. Now he was just waiting for the next worst possible thing to happen.

I decided that we'd use another craft product to put around the beads. If the point was to make everything dark except where the light would shine through the glass beads then this stuff would work just as well and as a bonus I was pretty sure I could get it to dry before the party at 3:30 this afternoon.

I told Nick what I was going to do and sent him to bed. Then I got to work on the candle holder.

Propping it on its side I took Liquid Leading and started squirting it on the side facing up. It flowed into all the cracks between the beads, clinging to the glass like it was a lava flow going around rocks in the landscape. This might turn out pretty cool, I thought. Melissa was into gems and minerals, maybe this would end up being like gemstones in aggregate. Or something.

By the time I finished outlining all the pretty glass beads, I'd started to realize that the difference between this stuff and the cement was that with the cement, and the grout, for that matter, what you ended up with was a fatter looking jar, with pretty colored bumps in it. A uniform thickness all around. It looked regular and crafted and nice.

What you got with liquid leading was something that looked malformed and lumpy and evil. And there was nothing I could do to make it look any better. I briefly toyed with the idea of removing all the liquid leading again and just leaving the thing to be a glass jar with beads on it. But that would be even further away from what Nick had wanted in the first place. I just hoped he wouldn't be too disappointed when he woke up to see what had become of his gift for his girlfriend.

By two o'clock I couldn't take the suspense anymore and woke Nick from a sound sleep. He sat up in bed, nodded when I asked him if he was awake, then fell over again. A half hour later I told him what time it was and he panicked, getting dressed, running his fingers through his hair, getting dressed again. I hesitantly asked him if the candle holder was going to be okay and he looked distractedly at it and said, "What? Oh, yeah, that's fine, Mom," and went back to hunting for the perfect black tee. "Are there any of my shirts anywhere that are clean?"

We ended up putting the jar in a gift bag with a cushion of tissue paper over the top. I warned him to tell Melissa not to squeeze it for at least 24 more hours to give the stuff a chance to harden up. "Yeah, yeah," he said, and then it was time to go.

Later when the boys came back from the party, I was in bed, so I didn't get a chance to ask how the gift had been received. I had to wait until the next day. When I saw Nick at breakfast I asked him how Melissa had liked it. "Oh, she liked it." "Really? What did her mom say?" "Frances? She said it was 'interesting looking.'"

Art is a process, just like life. It's not what you end up with, it's what you learn while getting there.

Nick is lucky to have a girlfriend who likes him enough that even when she's presented with a black lump of goo masquerading as a candle holder all she sees is that he cared enough to make something especially for her. And I'm lucky to have a son who loves me enough that even when I mess up his life all he sees is that I meant well. It's a gift.

The sweet smell of spring

This past winter we had to replace the motor on the furnace. Of course it happened during the coldest winter on record in northeast Florida. After that, I decided that we should have someone come out to look over the whole system. I didn't want to be without air conditioning in the middle of the summer. So I called the number on the handy magnetic ad that was on the furnace/ac unit, and the helpful woman on the phone scheduled an inspection. Early one morning, a nice young man named Mr. Scott showed up. I pointed him to the furnace and the circuit breaker box and went back to reading my book.

Soon I can hear him whistling. It's not the tuneful whistling that a person does because they're happy and doing something that they like. It's more of a high pitched sound that drops suddenly, like Wyle E. Coyote falling down from a very high cliff onto a very hard surface. It's that piercing "Incoming!" whistle that you hear just before everyone gets blown up in war movies. It bodes.

"What's going on?" I ask and Mr. Scott shakes his head and says, "This is bad. This is very, very bad." He gestures to me. "Come over here and take a look." He pulls a metal panel back so that I can see the coils on the ac unit. They look like they're covered with something nasty, but then again, maybe this is how they always look. I find myself wishing I knew more about air conditioning.

Mr. Scott points. "Look at this. There's dog hair and all kinds of dirt. This is nasty." He shows me my old air filter. "See this? This is no good. If you can see through it, other stuff is getting through, too," he says.

At first I think that he's telling me that I need to change the filters out more often, and I start to tell him that I am very bad at remembering to replace my filters every month, but he cuts me off.

"Use these," he says, holding up a filter with a fan folded center made of opaque white material and covered with a silver metal grid. "Okay," I tell him. I'm still embarrassed that the filter he pulled out, the cheap one, is so darn dirty. It's like having the dental hygienist clean your teeth when you haven't flossed in a week.

Mr. Scott tells me he's going to have to wash the coils, "in situ", because there's no way to take that component out. The unit is too old. It will take him at least an hour and it's going to cost me $250. "Okay," I say again. I'm feeling better about him, probably because he used "in situ" in a sentence. I wonder if it's part of HVAC training, to say "in situ" when you're selling the customer an expensive scrubbing procedure. $250 doesn't seem so bad. I tell him that I'm going to take the dog for a walk and I'll be back before he's finished.

When I come back in the house an hour later, I notice that the air conditioning is on, because it's cooler inside than out. Also, it smells wonderful. Kind of fresh and flowery. I go to find Mr. Scott. "Wow, it sure smells nice in here! You know, I always thought it was my boys that made my house smell like a locker room," I tell him. He chuckles. "Maybe a little bit, but mostly it was all the dirt on those coils," he says. "Glad you're back," he adds. "There's a couple things that you should replace before I do the rest of the cleaning."

He leads me to the back of his truck and shows me some mechanical parts, explaining to me in great detail what they're for and why they're important and how they're going to cost me roughly $150 each to install.

I think for a moment about what my husband Steve will say. This whole inspection was supposed to cost only $139 and cover two visits, one in the spring and another in the fall. He's going to have a fit when he sees the final bill. Still, the house sure smells nice, now. Maybe he'll notice the nice smell and forget to ask about the cost.

Back when we bought the house, there was a room between the garage and the kitchen that we used to call the "stinky dog" room. The previous owner had bred Yorkshire Terriers for extra money and it smelled so bad that Steve had to wash it down five times from ceiling to floor with bleach before you could walk through there without holding your nose. You'd think that a smell like that would be unbearable to someone and they would have done something about it, but it's amazing what you can put up with, if it creeps up on you a little at a time.

I tell myself that Mr. Scott seems like a nice man, and he's spent over two hours here already, and my house smells truly wonderful for the first time since we moved into it. I think I'm falling in love with Mr. Scott. I'm pretty sure that if he'd told me I had to buy another AC unit I'd have pulled out my credit card for it and told him, "Okay."

Up until now, I've always assumed that the bad smell in my house was because I lived with three testosterone emitting males and a mostly dampish dog in the great swamp that is Florida. It's amazing to me that in just a few hours and for only around $700 my house smells like someone's house who maybe doesn't live with any men at all. Or dogs. Or in Florida.

Anyway, I spend the rest of the day remarking on how nice the house smells. The boys give me rolled eye looks and agree with me, just to get me out of the room. I'm already looking forward to October, when Mr. Scott will be back to check the furnace.