The dividers and doors of the stalls in the ladies’ room are shiny black metal, inside and out.  Which means that anyone in there has a full frontal view of herself sitting on the toilet.

I would prefer they had spared me that.

Something that luscious deserves to be used in a special recipe, and I decided to try my grandmother’s Buttermilk Pralines.  I had written the recipe directly from her dictation, and had never tried it in all these years.  So I stood at the stove stirring the foamy sugar and buttermilk and two full cups of very expensive pecan meat mixture until it reached the required soft-ball stage, then dropped it by spoonfuls on the waxed paper.

After half an hour, when the candy had cooled and was still shiny and gooey and showed no sign of setting up, I knew something was wrong.  Blame it on the heat, on the humidity, on my lack of cooking skills; there was to be no edible candy from that batch.

Surely the two full cups of very expensive pecan meats are salvageable, I thought.  The sugar mixture coating them is water-soluble and I just need to wash it off.  I tore as much of the waxed paper away as I could, dumped the rest of the mess in a colander, plugged the sink and ran it full of water, and set the colander in the sink.

The waxed paper was the first thing to come loose.  It floated to the top.  And after some time and some swishing, the buttermilk and sugar mixture let go and settled to the bottom of the sink.

Apparently nut meats absorb water, because my two full cups of very expensive pecan meats were more than a little soggy.  Not to worry, I thought, a little heat should take care of that.  I spread my two full cups of very expensive pecan meats in a single layer in a pan and put them in the oven on low heat.

In my refrigerator is a plastic container of two full cups of very expensive, toasted, soggy pecan meats.  I don’t think they’re good for anything, but I can’t bring myself to throw them away.

After all, they were very expensive.

No, I didn’t misplace it; I know exactly where I lost it.  I had gone to a public place to eat lunch and do some shopping.  I had my arms full with a coat and a purse and a library book and a shopping list and reusable shopping bags.  I sat for a while eating my lunch and reading, then I went shopping.  When I got home and unloaded everything from my car, the book just wasn’t there.  I called the public place to see if some kind person had turned it in.  No luck.

A day or two before the book was due, I went to the library and ‘fessed up.  Since no kind person had turned the book in there, either, I paid for it.

That was several months ago, so I assume someone out there has, free of charge, a mildly interesting mystery novel with heavy-duty binding.  I can only hope that person has enjoyed it, maybe shared it with friends.  It would break my heart to know that he or she just threw it away.

A few weeks ago I turned off 21^st Street onto the entrance ramp to I-470.  There was a book lying there.  Even from a moving car, I could tell it had library binding.  There’s a little pull-off right there and traffic was light, so I stopped.  I walked back and picked up the book.

No, it was not THAT book.  We’re talking coincidences here, not miracles.  But it was a book from our local library.

On the way home that evening, I went by the Fairlawn Plaza library book drop, fully intending to return the book to the library that way.  But the Bookmobile was there, so I was able to hand the book to a real person.  I had the satisfaction of telling her my story, and she gave me a nice verbal pat on the back for my kindness. 

So, you out there.  You whose kid threw the library book out the car window onto the entrance ramp when traffic was too heavy for you to stop.  Yeah, you.

You’re welcome.

For several months now, we have been paying an additional 0.5% (total: 7.95%), and neither I nor anyone I know has ever seen the streets in worse shape. Interestingly, there are a number of road construction projects underway, but precious little repair.

I was inspired to write this piece of literature by the evasive actions required to maintain some semblance of alignment in the front of my car.

The Topeka Pothole Hoedown

Well, swing that steering wheel off to the right.
If you fall in that hole you’ll be out of sight.
If you fall in that hole you will never be found,
And your tires will never again be round.
You will never again see the light of day,
Oh, Yippy Ky-Yo and-a (Stomp!) Ky-Yay!

Well, slam on the brakes and go real slow.
You don’t wanna speed through that big ol’ hole.
It’ll rattle your doors and pop your hood,
And won’t do your axles no darn good.
If my car had wings it’d fly away,
Oh, Yippy Ky-Yo and-a (Stomp!) Ky-Yay!

Oh, swing that steering wheel off to the left.
Ya think the tax increase mighta been theft?
They raised our taxes to fix the roads.
But whatever happened to all that dough?
We may never know, but what the hey.
Oh, Yippy Ky-Yo and-a (Stomp!) Ky-Yay!

This is the way Christmas shopping used to be:

First you went out shopping at the local stores. Sometimes you knew what you wanted to buy, and sometimes you went out there counting on divine intervention. Once you had purchased the gifts, you took them home to wrap. It was a bonus if they came already boxed; but many gifts, notably clothes and toys, arrived home scrunched up in the bottom of a shopping bag. Most basements featured a pile of boxes suitable for gifts because they were clean, presentable, and didn’t smell bad. None of them, of course, was the right size or shape for the just-purchased gifts, but you could usually find some that were pretty close.

Then it was time to wrap the gifts. You got out the wrapping paper, ribbon, cellophane tape, and gift tags. The dining table had to be cleared, because there were invariably some big packages. And no matter how you planned and cut, there were always several pieces of wrapping paper left over too small to wrap anything and too big to throw away. I always wrapped them back around the roll they had come from, confident that next year I would have a tiny package just exactly the right size for that 4-by-6-inch piece of paper.

Once the gifts were wrapped, some of them had to be mailed. Back to the basement you went, to the other pile of boxes – the mailing boxes. It was a sure bet that not one of them was the right size and shape for what you wanted to mail, so you had a choice – you could either pick one way too big and stuff the extra space with newspaper, or you could cut one down to the right size. Either way, the USPS expected you to show up with your package wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with string. The brown paper and string were in the basement somewhere over there with the mailing boxes.

All this had to be done by December 10 to ensure safe arrival by Christmas.

This is the way Christmas shopping is now:

Go to the website, pull up recipient’s wish list, choose something in your price range, click on it, choose to have it gift wrapped, enter recipient’s address and your credit card number, click “submit.” You can do that as late as December 23 if you’re willing to pay a lot for shipping.

It’s the easiest thing in the world, and the recipient gets what he or she wants.

So why do I feel so guilty?

I am NOT overweight!

I have been using a shampoo that claims it will provide “more body.” Now, when I rinse my hair in the shower, the shampoo flows down all over me, and I am convinced that it is just living up to its advertised promise.

No, really. When I was a young woman, I always washed my hair over the sink and the shampoo never touched anything but my head. And I didn’t have anywhere near this much body.

This is not my fault! Blame the shampoo industry!

Let us not forget that this is the home of The Whopper.

For those who don’t recognize him, the central figure here is Topeka’s pride and joy, Fred Phelps.

In Topeka, numbered streets — at least the ones south of 12th Street – run due east and west.  And so it was that, at 7:10 this evening, I was standing in the middle of 23rd Street making darn sure the sun was doing what it’s supposed to do on this day, which is to set smack dab over the middle of the west end of my street. *

Sure enough.

I find something magical about the absolute predictability of our little solar system.  People who know about that stuff can predict eclipses centuries in advance, for cryin’ out loud.  I have no idea how that’s done, but I am doing my small part by checking up on the sun every March and every September.

And if I ever go out there and the cosmos isn’t doing what I expected, I plan to write my Congressperson and see if they can’t make a law to fix that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Lest any of you are concerned, 23rd Street is residential, with little traffic at that time of day.  And I gave up a long, long time ago being concerned about what people think of me.