Nora and the Breakup

NORA DIDN'T WORK FOR ME THIS MORNING!!! (see previous post)


I guess Dewey, Oklahoma is out of her range or somethin'...but I can't begin to tell you how disappointed I am in her.

Managed to find the workshop location anyway, on my own, but it took a couple of stops at convenience stores for directions, and the 2.2 mile trip took half an hour.

So Nora and I are on the outs for right now.

If she talks to me real nice later this week and helps me get to the Tulsa airport, I'll think about giving her another chance....

;-)

Nora and the Rattle

I finished teaching a 3-day workshop in Newton, Kansas yesterday afternoon, and today I drove south from Kansas to Bartlesville, Oklahoma so I can teach another workshop for the next 3 days. Kansas was a blast, and deserves its own post, which I'll write later...But today...

I have recently fallen in love.

You know that TV commercial where the men fall in love with their GPS systems because "she" finds them golf courses and great Chinese food? Well, I'm telling you, that ad's not that far off the mark! My cell phone is my GPS navigator (through Verizon wireless...it's called VNavigator) and my nephews and I decided last week that "she" needed a name. We decided to call her Nora, but her full name is Nora K. Best (the "K" stands for "Knows".) She gets me everywhere stress free. I really can't begin to tell you what a relief it is to get into a rental car in a strange town with Nora in hand. No more panic, stress, fear or time lost being lost. I love her.

So this morning, I left my Kansas motel to head south on I-135. The sun was warm, skies blue, breeze was light...a perfect spring day, and I was immensely looking forward to the 2 and a half hour drive to Oklahoma. I hopped on the freeway and as my speed hit 60mph, I started to hear a rattle to end all rattles. By 65 it was a rattle/vibration/buzz saw...and at 70 mph (the speed limit on the freeway) it was DEAFENING. Not to mention a tad bit scary.

I'm not going to bore you with all the mental machinations I went through in trying to decide whether or not to continue on my way, or to turn around and drive up to Wichita to turn it in for a replacement rental car...

Suffice it to say that I decided to keep going south since as long as my speed was around 55, there wasn't a peep out of the car.

Here's the cool part. Driving virtually empty roads at a leisurely 55 mph on a sunny spring day with Nora at your side is like....like a......like a gift. Normally I'd be speeding along, pushing 5 miles over the limit, just because I could, all the while in a mild state of panic that my MapQuest directions aren't right, and have I already missed that turn off???

I enjoyed every minute. Lots and lots of grass and flat. Lots of lines of trees with graceful bare branches. Lots of cows. I turned off the radio and rolled down my windows and heard birds singing. Pulled the car over once to watch a huge flock of some kind of white bird way, way, way up high in the sky. At 73 mph, I'd never have even noticed them.

By mid-afternoon, with no breakfast or lunch yet, I was hungry so I pulled over in charming Caney, OK at the Snak Shack for a cheeseburger and ate it on the bench in the grass in front of the joint, right along the main drag. The hamburger patty was hand-formed - by real human (I suspect female) hands and the bun was grilled and the onion rings had never lived inside a box in any freezer. It took 10 minutes to fix and she brought it outside to me in a pure white paper bag without a hint of a cool logo or branding on it anywhere.

Half an hour later I was in Bartlesville in my hotel - safe, sound, rejuvenated and happy. Nora and her calm, confident voice got me here without a single wrong turn.

I can only hope that once I get back home to Seattle I find that my own little Ford Focus has picked up a nasty rattle of its own. It was a genuine and surprising pleasure to slow down for a change....

cow urine & fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt

Months ago, I mentioned a "cow urine" diet...

By the age of 14, I'd already been thoroughly through the diet wringer. Why I was put on so many diets so young is pretty much of a mystery to me, since I wasn't fat. Round, yes...but never so round that you'd even call me chubby. My parents are fine people, but they were pretty much nuts during much of our coming up years, and I guess, like, one of their hobbies was to try to make me thin or something.

By 1970, they'd tried the following in their fearless quest for a Twiggy daughter:

• 1961 - Changing the big meal of the day to noon, during which time I was at kindergarten.
• 1965 - Paying me a dollar for every pound I lost. I was 8 at the time. A dollar bought 20 candy bars in 1962, or two movie tickets. A dollar was sweet incentive...
• 1969 - Stillman's Diet. What every junior high kid wants to eat in front of her friends at school every day - broiled hamburger and a boiled egg. Oh yeah. THAT was fun...

Apparently none of these diets did much good. I do remember quickly losing weight on the Stillman's Diet...then gaining it all back in something like 3 and a half minutes.

So there was a fourth (but hardly the last) attempt. This one, the cow urine diet, involved Mom driving me to the local medical clinic every day for a shot of treated cow urine. It was supposed to help me shed pounds quickly. Hmmm...... Oh....and....well...just in case the pee shot didn't work, I was also simultaneously put on a rather restrictive diet. How restrictive? This restrictive: I was supposed to eat two cartons of yogurt a day. And that's it. Two cartons of yogurt! 500 calories.

Mind you, I was walking a mile to school every day and a mile back. I was 14 and a cheerleader and we practiced cheer for a couple hours every night after school, and when I wasn't walking or cheering I was playing badminton or kick ball in the church parking lot, or on my bike roaming the neighborhoods. Two cartons of yogurt a day. Ahhh....the enlightened 70's....

After 2 or 3 days of near starvation, I invented various and vital reasons to go down to the basement many, many times a day. Our basement was our pantry, and it was loaded with 10 lb. coffee cans loaded with Mom's reeeeally yummy homemade cookies. Peanut butter cookies, gingersnap cookies, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, snickerdoodles and shortbread and probably more that I've forgotten. No lie. There were never fewer than 6 giant coffee cans full of cookies downstairs. If the measure of a great mom is whether or not she stays home and bakes cookies, then my mom gets a perfect 10!

So, the cow urine diet was a bust. Two cartons of yogurt a day plus the crusts off Kim Harmon's tuna fish sandwiches at school lunch every day plus a couple dozen cookies every day pretty much negated whatever magical powers lurked inside that syringe. After a couple of weeks with no results, I remember the doctor's furrowed, accusatory brow as he actually asked me if I was cheating on the diet. If?? He had to ask if??????? I steadfastly denied it of course, probably while turning a furious red, as I was wont to do back then.

So there you go. That's my cow urine story. Not just everyone has a cow urine story. I'm rather fond of mine...