Turkey Day is on the Way!

November has started. We have three paychecks left until Christmas, four until the credit card bills for Christmas arrive. We are officially in Holiday Mode. Here is your check list from now until Thanksgiving:

1. First order of business, check how many loyalty points you have at your grocery store to ascertain whether or not you qualify for the free turkey.
2. Watch cooking shows for new Thanksgiving recipes, you have to write them down or print them from the website; either way a hard copy has to go into the Thanksgiving section of your cookbook.
3. Start making a list of ingredients to shop for. Also, start a Christmas/Chanukah gift list.
4. Try to recall where you put the decorations. You took great care to put them where you could find them easily this year, so think hard - where would you have put boxes so they were out of the way, but easy to access.
5. Finish your ingredients list and plan to shop the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, like everyone else.
6. By now, you’ve cleaned out two closets and found the items you couldn’t locate for Fourth of July, so make sure to isolate those items in a marked box and store them in a safe place where they’ll be out of the way, but easy for access next July.
7. Plan your off-island shopping trip. You can authorize yourself to buy at least one new kitchen machine, like a new crockpot with the new SMA (Save My Ass) feature that lists restaurants that deliver in your area if you screw up the potroast. It also allows you to program in friend’s numbers; your crockpot will call your friend and tell her to get there quick with anything you can put on the table that will save your face. Crockpot bonding is a high level of female bonding.
8. Give it up, you’re never going to find the box with the Harvest / Thanksgiving decorations and they are too old anyway. Best to add new decorations to your off-Island shopping list. You’ll find the Thanksgiving decorations box when you’re looking for the Easter box next Spring.
9. It’s now a week before Thanksgiving and it’s time to go off-Island and overspend. You will return exhausted, but triumphant. This will finally be the Thanksgiving you’ve dreamed of because you planned ahead and did everything right according to Oprah AND Dr. Phil. You may take off one day to charge up for the big push.
10. It’s five days before Thanksgiving and you realize you don’t have all the ingredients your new recipes call for, you need Cream of Tartar, fresh mint, red pepper flakes and several other littles. However, you didn’t put the new recipes in your cookbook right away and now you can’t find them. If you can’t find the recipes, why buy anymore of the expensive ingredients?
11. Cleaning the house took two days, so it’s now two days before Turkey Day. You found the old Thanksgiving decorations under your stack of winter sweaters, in an easily accessible place, in a box marked, “THANKSGIVING DECOR”. No wonder you couldn’t find them.
12. You’ve given up on the new recipes, which your husband wasn’t going to like anyway. You content yourself with new decorations and at least you scored a new crockpot, or mixer, so the season wasn’t lost.
13. The Wednesday before T-Day, you prepare and cook all you can ahead of time. Tomorrow you will put on a wonderful, traditional spread. You and your girlfriends and the kids and grandkids, will sit around the table and enjoy eating and conversation. The men will be where they always are on Thanksgiving.
14. Resolve to remember next November not to get all excited about putting on a great spread for you husband and expect him to shower you with compliments. Realize that even if you stuffed the bird with caviar, the men were just going to pile everything on a plate and drag it to the living room to watch that G-damed football game anyway.

Flipping the Bird

I was cleaning my kitchen one morning and since it was nice out and probably one of the few warm mornings we have left this year, I opened the window for the fresh air. It was very quite outside, I didn’t hear any birds singing. I think most of them have already packed and started south for the winter. I sat down with a cup of coffee and popped in one of my favorite quiet time CDs called Birdworks. It’s a CD of bird calls recorded on Shelter Island by a local naturalist named Tom Damiani. It plays and then identifies bird calls. But the real treasure for me is that the first twenty minutes is just a recording of local bird and forest sounds. It’s very peaceful and serene, like an auditory Valium.

Suddenly a wren appeared on my windowsill. I’m assuming it was a wren because it looked like a small robin, but it was too big to be a finch. So, it was either a wren or a runt robin. It flew in the kitchen and called out. I realized it was responding to the bird calls on the CD.

Now I was in a real dilemma. I wanted the bird to fly out, but I didn’t want to scare it. So, I remained still as I thought out my options. I could move my hand and click off the CD player, but the loud click would surely scare the bird and although he might fly out the window, he might fly deeper into the house. If that happened, I’d have to scare him half to death trying to flush him out the window by flapping a pillow case. While I was debating to move or not to move, he flew over my head and into the laundry room. He was now perched on a box of Tide and I was between him and the window.

I decided he probably couldn’t see my hand from his perch and so I moved my hand slowly and at least managed to slowly turn down the CD volume. I had a good theory; if he no longer heard bird calls in the house, he would conclude that he was alone and fly out the window to join his friends. It was a good plan.

It was a good plan until I nearly had the volume all the way down and he began chirping. Sounded like normal bird chirping to me. Didn’t sound like he was calling anyone to inform them that he’d found a really warm place to stay for the winter, until another wren came through the window and landed on the sink faucet. At this point I froze in place trying to get my left brain and right brain to rub together inside my skull until there was a spark to get my neurons firing and a brilliant solution would present itself. It really would have helped if Bird One had not flown into my air space until I had finished my first cup of coffee.

Bird One on the Tide box and Bird Two on the faucet by the open window, began a conversation. My bird speak is rusty, but Bird Two was doing fairly well, he convinced Bird One to fly onto the top of the curtain next to the table where I sat and in direct line with the open window. But then Bird One then flew back to the laundry room and Bird Two followed to see what was the big deal about folded and unfolded towels. At that moment I got the mental image of bird droppings on my towels and decided, the heck with this, I’m gonna grab a broom and shush them out even if it means they have little bird heart attacks.

But just at that moment Bird Two flew back to the faucet and Bird One followed a few seconds later. The final debate ensued on my faucet and Bird Two pecked Bird One, making it very clear who wore the flight feathers in that family and they hopped to the windowsill. There was a bit more conversation, it sounded like an argument over directions, something that we can all recognize regardless of species, and off they went. I closed the window and taped a warning over my Birdworks CD, “Do Not Play Near Open Windows”, because one never know who’s going to land on one’s faucet, do one?

Farewell Steve Jobs....

Oct 7 , 2011 


The Icons of the Icons

Farewell to Steve Jobs, the great mind behind Apple. I have owned Macs since 1984 starting with the MacPlus. I’ve had jobs where I’ve had to work on Windows computers and there is just no comparison from my experience. I will miss Steve at the helm of Apple. There was so much more left for him to invent beside the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. I hacked into Apple and found a few other things that Steve had planned....

There was the iGarage, a robotic device that would have allowed you to remotely clean, organize and rearrange your garage from your iPhone app.

There was the iTeen. A micro chip you shot into your child’s neck. It has a gps chip and a recording unit so you know where the little creep is and what they’re saying about you. The upgrade came with a tiny shock button that allowed you to program a brain zap whenever your kid broke a rule.

There was the iHusband. A tiny microchip that you could drop in your husband’s coffee that would make it’s way to his brain and lodge in one of the many unoccupied zones of his mind, like where the sensitivity or patience program would have been if it hadn’t been destroyed by testosterone. The iHusband has a gps unit, a recorder and a program to monitor unauthorized zipper deployment.

There was the iShopper, a hand held device that alerted you to all the sales locations of the items you programmed in. iShopper kept accurate records of the balances on all your credit cards so you knew which one you could use that day. It also featured a hologram projection of a disabled parking hangtag that it could project onto your rearview mirror so you could use a handicapped parking spaces. Hook the iShopper up to it’s optional miniprinter and you can print your own receipts in the car in case your husband accuses you of spending too much.....”Look, honey, I hit a great sale!”

The iParty, a hand held party locator. You can scan a neighborhood, the iParty tells you what the celebration is for, who’s throwing it, and the proper attire. With this information, you can crash any party you like.

The iHip. An iPhone app for men over 50 who are trying to score a trophy girlfriend. It translate anything the young miss is saying. It lists all the currents groups, who’s in, who’s out, plus it translates youthful patois into everyday language. For example, “My bad” is an acceptable replacement for “I’m sorry.”

And the iHampton. This is a very advanced iPhone app that allows you to track anyone on the east end, including Shelter Island. You just program in the name of the person you want to track, the request is uploaded to the satellite in space that is stationed directly over the Hamptons and it sends you can icon that represents that person. You can figure out the icons for yourself, or purchase Apples really expensive; Guide to the Icons of the Icons.
For example; two bells without clappers is the icon for Paul Simon (what are the Sounds of Silence?), a perfectly folded napkin - would be Martha Stewart, an outline of Korea with a martini over it - would be Alan Alda, a hat and a pipe would be......if you fail to guess this correctly, you may never read this paper again.

Raccoons in the Moonlight

Fall is here and soon the food in the woods will get scarce, the animals will start getting creative in their foraging techniques. Raccoons in particular, those cutsie, little critters. We start off loving them. They’re so cute with their little masked faces and their little articulate hands. But then, slowly, they reveal their vile nature...

The first year you live here, matter of fact, the first week (actually the first day now that I recall it) you learn to put the lid on tight on your garbage cans because the raccoons here can pop a garbage can lid like the flic of a bic. The second week you’re here, you are putting bungee cords over the lids, getting your hands caught under these cords and grinding your knuckles against the lid to free your now crippled little hands. The raccoons are slightly less cute now.

By the end of the first month, you are using bungee cords and cinder blocks on top of the lids. You’re getting a complete bicep workout wrangling these cinder blocks. After you add cinder blocks, you feel comfortable that the problem is solved - how can they lift a cinder block? That confidence lasts till morning when you find the garbage can on its side, cracked cinder block next to it, with the lid - still with the bungee cord - pushed onto the side of the can and the contents all over the yard. And though you don’t verbalize it, because you are an animal lover, you think quietly to yourself, “I’m gonna kill these little bastards.”

At this juncture, you consult with someone who has lived on the Island longer than you, and they tell you to build a little shed for your garbage cans and so you do. At the three month mark, your garbage cans have their own little house, there’s a wooden latch, surely your garbage is safe now. But noooo. Why? Because you underestimated the fine dexterity of those cute little hands. They can and have worked out how to open a flip latch or slide latch, and they pass the information onto their young to insure food supplies for the future. You become convinced that raccoons are the spawn of Satan. An infestation of raccoons must be a sign of the Apocolypse. One of the four horseman is probably riding a big raccoon.

By the sixth month you’re here, you are determined to win this battle. You buy big cat poop from the pet store. Zoos sell lion and tiger poop to pet stores and it is alleged to be very effective at driving off animals like deer and raccoons. One whiff of predator poop and poof! They’re gone. Now you padlock the latch. Surely they can’t open a combination lock or pick a key lock. You surround the shed with predator poop and your neighbors complain about some awful smell coming from your property...

Now you learn that raccoons are very strong and can tear corners off of plywood and wiggle into your shed. By month eight you’re sitting on the porch guarding your garbage with a BB gun.

Ultimately, we accept defeat and put our garbage in big town bags and keep it in the trunks of our cars. On Star is developing a special scanner just for Shelter Island that alerts the car owner of trunk invasion and turns on an electric grid to fry the intruder. Cook ‘em, Dano.