respublica

I am not going to marry Stanley J. Fleck

A paragraph I read this morning in Nora Ephron's book, "I Feel Bad About My Neck", made me laugh out loud. Maybe it was because of all the Washington DC, White House stuff going on right now, but in any event, I laughed and also admired her look back at a time when she was interning in DC.

"I"m working as a summer intern in the Kennedy White House, and I'm engaged to be married to a young lawyer named Stanley J. Fleck. Everyone I knew was engaged to be married. My fiance is visiting me in Washington, and I give him a tour of the White House, which I have a pass to roam freely. I show him the Red Room. I show him the Blue Room. I show him the beautiful portrait of Grace Coolidge. I show him the Rose Garden. At the end of the tour, he says, "No wife of mine is ever going to work at a place like this."

I'm not going to marry Stanley J. Fleck.

 

A few words about sheets

Well, maybe too many words about sheets.

I don't know about you, but when it comes to bed sheets, I'm kind of fussy. I don't care for flannel or silk or sateen or microfiber sheets. Too many of those become a wrinkled mess after washing. All of them are uncomfortable to me. When I turn over or stretch, my feet or my arms get caught in those. There is no way to avoid not putting in some effort to even turning over.

What I love are 100 percent cotton percale sheets. My favorite sheets here at home are ones I bought years ago at the Sears store in Fairview Heights. They are still in our bed sheet rotation. The thing about this type of sheet is they are crisp after ever washing and when they go on the bed it is like being in a hotel. Cool, soft, yet crisp. And, if I have the chance to dry them outdoors, they're even crisper and smell wonderful.

Whenever I go to buy new bed sheets I always look for that same material, 100 percent cotton percale. I've come close to finding some but they're never quite the same. And, the Sears store in Fairview Heights is now closed even though they probably stopped selling sheets long ago.

January the dullest month

It's gray, cold, and often wet. A miserable kind of month, that's January. We talk a lot of being bored during this month. One more day! But truly, there is always something going on around you even in January. Look! daffodils have started to pop up! How can that be? Will they survive? We find ourselves talking about this almost everyday here on campus because the daffodils are showing everywhere. (Yes they will, they do this every year)

Take a look around. Chat with people in the grocery store. Hey! the big stuffed bears are back, this time wanting to find a home on Valentine's Day.

There is always something going on around you. Don't let boredom make you miss things.

Now people are dumping mattresses

A traffic update this morning. Five mattresses were seen along one of the roads in North County. There was some thought that these may not just have fallen off a truck, but were dumped. Who knows? But the new tally now stands at:

Mattresses 10

Ladders 3

20 years ago today

On this day in history, 20 years ago, the St. Louis Rams won the Super Bowl. This was one of the most unexpected and exciting years in pro football we've experienced. Quarterback Kurt Warner spent that year earning only the NFL minimum salary...just for a bit of sports trivia.

Who did they beat? The Tennessee Titans.

Smoking compost

No, not actually smoking it like a cigar, but turning our large campus compost piles yesterday caused steam to rise like a cloud. One of our students, Alarik Morris had the job of using the bobcat to turn the piles of compost that we have on one side of the field house parking lot. All that landscape material comes from the campus during summer and fall clean up of gardens, tree trimming and leaf raking. It all adds up, but it is worth keeping because the rich, black compost we end up with works wonders on all our gardens in spring. It has to be turned over occasionally to help with the breakdown of the plant material. When it's moved, steam floats up like smoke.

It's a beautiful thing.

Reading news online getting harder

While I can appreciate the need for newspapers and other news reporting outlets to bring in revenue in order to keep operating, it is now to the point where it is almost impossible to read a news story online. More and more newspapers who link to a story on Facebook or Twitter open with the message saying we must subscribe in order to read. This is even true if you just go to their websites though the internet and not social media. What nags at me is why they even bother to link their stories online when most of us can't read them.

Frankly, if the story is good enough, important enough or interesting enough to tease with a headline online, then let the story come up. We subscribe to 3 daily papers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. As home delivery subscribers we could get the online stories to come up, but only after going through the endless form filling out and getting more user names and passwords.

We have chosen not to do this because not only is it a pain to have to fill all this out on laptops, iPhones, iPads, etc, but it won't help anyone else read the story if I were to post a link to it on this blog or on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else if they haven't subscribed. The Belleville News-Democrat is really annoying with this practice because they link stories all day that are unreadable for most. Why bother? And, that daily paper which used to be really good for local people, is now as thin as a sheet of typing paper.

I have the papers linked on the right side of this blog with the Belleville paper on top. Go to it and click any story link and you'll see you can't read it.

It's the world we live in. We'll find our news in other ways.

Tally update

Mattresses 5

Ladders 3

I saw the latest mattress lying on the edge of 40/64 just before the Skinker exit.

Girls sports, we've come a long way

I came across this photo the other day featuring the Fenger High School (Chicago) volley-ball champs from, I believe, 1951.

My first reaction was, oh man, we had to wear gym suits just like that in high school. Everyone hated them. Secondly, I was surprised that girls back then played for championships in any sport. Best guess, it was a GAA tournament or one gym class against another, not against another school.

For Illinois girls, most competition against other school didn't arrive on the scene until the early 70's. College girls were competing in the 60's but in a much more modified way than now. This I know from personal experience. What I remember is the modified basketball rules girls had to deal with. The state of Iowa girls basketball was the way it was played everywhere in gym classes. But Iowa was well ahead of the rest of us in that they had real inter-school games and even well attended state tournaments long before any other state.

Basically the basketball rules for girls (even in my gym classes) were 6 on each team, 3 of which were forwards, 3 guards. They could not cross the center line and could only dribble twice before passing or shooting. The forwards stayed on the side of the court with their basket, the guards stayed on the other side defending. However, one guard and one forward could play the whole court and they were named the roving guard and roving forward.

We've come a long way baby.

Can you find Ukraine?

News people have been all over Ukraine these days more often than not trying to play the gotcha game with political types by demanding to know if they could find that country on a map. Some political types have turned this question on irritating reporters as well. So I ask you, before looking at a map of Europe, can you visualize about where it is?

Frankly, I'm getting weary of all the cheap shots coming from everywhere aimed at everyone these days. But, here is a map of Europe and there's Ukraine. Click it to enlarge for better seeing.