Lift Up Your Hearts!

When my father, an avid Elderhosteler, discovered a course with lots of outdoor activities indended for grandparents and their grandchildren, he promptly invited his oldest grandchild to accompany him to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The year was 1990.

On their way, they stopped briefly to visit my father's cousin Sylvia, who lived in the Seattle area. I'd known that Sylvia was a remarkable woman, a world traveller who at the time of their visit had justreturned from trekking in Nepal—at nearly seventy years of age. Re-reading Dad's Elderhostel report, I realized something else remarkable that I'd missed before:

Sylvia seems very happy. She is very interested in acting and when I last saw her she was quite dejected as she had just been rejected for a part in "Harvey" because she was too old. She is now doing more acting in films, is a member of the Screen Actor's Guild, and was going to Portland tomorrow for a second audition for a minor part in a film.

A quick look at imdb.com reveals that the actress Sylvia Langdon played a townsperson in Season 1 (1990), Episode 5 of the TV series, Northern Exposure ("Russian Flu"). Was that our Cousin Sylvia? I think the odds are pretty good. The probability that I will have the opportunity to watch that show is very low, but if I do, I'll be scanning the townspeople for a familiar face.

Here's another fun video from Charles Cornell, the guy who brought us an amusing look at the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Lord of the Rings soundtracks. Here, he takes a look at the music theory hidden in Happy Birthday.

You may have guessed by now that I love engineers.  I am not one myself; my degree is in mathematics.  But tell me, what would engineering be without math?  I rest my case.

Engineering and mathematics are strong in both my heredity and my environment.  Therefore I laughed harder at this Don McMillan comedy routine than I have in quite a whle.  If you are an engineer, or know an engineer, you may, too.

If you're not an engineer and don't want to sit through 25 minutes of jokes you might not understand, but you would like to understand better the engineers in your life, here's the important graphic from the section that starts at 4:50.

My father may have been an engineer himself, but as I read through his journals I run repeatedly into comments expressing frustration about how hard it was to read my emotions.  As he said after my first experience of a fireworks show, on my 7th birthday:  "As usual, she gave little indication of how she was impressed."  Perhaps I'm more engineer than I thought.

Anyway, I hope that made some of you smile, thinking about yourself and the engineers around you.  (Thanks to ND for finding this.)

You think Minnesota has problems?  You should see what's going on here in Florida.

Back in 1992, Hurricane Andrew brought to Florida a massive wave of illegal immigrants.  No, not people.  Iguanas.  The green iguana is an invasive species that has been devastating South Florida's flora and fauna ever since. Plus, what other state includes a "Falling Iguanas Warning" in its weather forecasts?  In cold weather, the heavy, cold-blooded beasts go comatose and start falling out of trees, and woe to person, pet, or car standing in their way.

Sunday and Monday, the State has lifted their prohibition on transporting live iguanas, hoping people will join in a massive effort to round up the reptiles up for deportation while they are less capable of resisting.

Officials say the order allows people to remove green iguanas from private property with landowner permission, or from commission-managed lands in South and Southwest Florida, and deliver them directly to designated FWC offices.

Not that this is something you casually pick up off your neighbor's lawn and throw into the back of your pickup truck.

They said iguanas must be placed in a sealed, escape-proof cloth bag and then secured inside a locked container labeled “prohibited reptiles.” Bags must remain closed until transferred to FWC [Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission] staff. FWC also advises wearing protective gloves, long sleeves and pants when handling iguanas. Collected animals should be transported immediately to reduce the risk of escape.

Florida and Minnesota may be far apart both geographically and politically, but this weekend I believe the Sunshine State would be happy to join the North Star State in an anti-ICE protest.  I can't remember when we had our last hard freeze.  We did once go camping with the Indian Princesses when the temperatures hit the mid-20's—but I think that was some 30 years ago.

Christmas 2025 has come and gone, but I'm not waiting 11 months to share this fun peek at things you might not know about "A Charlie Brown Christmas." I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

As you might guess, I'm one of the dinosaurs who remembers waiting eagerly for the one and only time slot of the year we could watch this show. Only in my case, it didn't matter whether Snoopy's doghouse was red or blue—not on our black and white television set.

'Way back in the 1980's, my family enjoyed spending time with good friends who owned a summer camp on a lake in Vermont. The following is a story from the year my father made the mistake of being part of camp-opening at the beginning of the season. Names have been abbreviated to protect the innocent and the guilty. I hope you find that this tale of minor summertime woe brings you a little bit of cheer this Christmas season, if only because it didn't happen to you. It's funny how we often find misfortune to be humorous as long as it's sufficiently distant in time and space. But don't feel bad about that. Dad would have laughed—that's why he wrote it the way he did.

Friday, 5 June 1987

I was the first to arrive. I expected D. around 9 or 9:30, A. and J. around 2-3 a.m., and E. even later. What I found in the cabin did not leave me overjoyed. When the camp had been "winterized" the refrigerator had been unplugged and the doors propped open as they should have been, but what they failed to do was remove what appeared to have been some popsicles and something that had been wrapped in aluminum foil and was about the size of a pan of brownies. Whatever it was, it had long ago spoiled and left a very unpleasant odor in the kitchen and a mess in the freezer compartment. At this point I went out and bought some sponges for cleanup and some bottled water as the water system had yet to be made operable. When I returned, I set about cleaning up. In addition to the mess in the freezer, the refrigerator was full of what I at first thought were mouse droppings, but which I later concluded were egg cases as they were too uniform and shiny to be droppings. They may also have been seeds that were stored there by some creature for future use. The refrigerator door contained a shelf with depressions for holding a dozen eggs and each depression held at least a half dozen of these seeds or whatever. Anyway, with sponges and ammonia I cleaned up everything but the smell. Out of all this I came to two conclusions: 1) Next time I won't be the first to arrive, and 2) when the guys go up this fall to close up the camp, J. should go to take care of the details that the guys tend to forget. As you will see later, this latter conclusion was reinforced during the weekend.

About 9 o'clock I got a call from E. saying that D. was leaving Middletown about 8 o'clock which meant he would not arrive until around midnight. I had held off having dinner until D. arrived, but I now decided that D. would have eaten by the time he arrived and it was time for me to find some dinner. I went to the Checkmate restaurant and found they were closed to the point that they would sell only ice cream. While I was wondering what I would find open at that hour of the night, I concluded that there was no reason I couldn't fix my own dinner. So I went into Fairhaven and to the Grand Union where I bought the ingredients for a fried egg sandwich and then returned to camp where I fixed just that.

D. arrived around midnight. He snacked a little and we went to bed about 1 a.m. J. and A. arrived around 2:30.

Saturday, 6 June 1987

E. arrived about 6:30 and with that we all got up. A., D., and E. got the water system working after a little problem getting the pump primed. But when they turned on the water to the house, a large spray emerged from an elbow in the cold water line to the bathtub in the main bathroom. Clearly they had not opened the faucets when they drained the system. So while the pump-installers went to play golf, J. and I tackled the elbow problem. Naturally the elbow was old and nothing like it has been made in years. The people at Gilmore's Hardware threw up their hands, but at Tru-Value they put together a combination that would do the job. Having finished this repair, we turned on the water, only to find a stream pouring out from under the house. A soldered joint in the copper tubing to the wash basin in the small bathroom had come apart and that is where the water was coming from. J. and I went back to Tru-Value and bought a torch, solder, and flux and made the repair. This would not have been difficult except that we were working with a clearance of only about six inches between the house and the ground, and not only was the working space cramped, but I also made a reasonable effort to avoid setting the house on fire. So now we turned on the water again and all was well until I ran water into the wash basin. Now water gushed out of the basin drain pipe which was broken near where the copper joint had come apart. Since there was no leak except when the basin was used, the solution this time was to pass a law that the basin would not be used until repairs had been made.

Now we could open the line to the water heater so we could wash dishes in hot water. I opened the valve, and was showered from the water pouring out of two big cracks in the copper line into the heater. So once again we went to Tru-Value where we bought some couplings and a length of tubing. I cut out the bad section and soldered a new piece in its place. Now we could turn on the water again, and this time water sprayed from an elbow on the bathtub in the small bathroom. By now it was nearly closing time for Tru-Value and besides, we didn't dare go in that store again today. So we went to a hardware store in Fairhaven, but they did not have exactly what we needed to put together a substitute elbow, so we returned to camp and resorted to heating our water on the stove.

In the meantime, E., A., and D. had not only gotten the water pump running, but had played 27 holes of golf, and put the dock into the cold Vermont lake on a chilly and windy day. So we had a light supper of hot dogs before everyone fell asleep, woke up, went to bed, and fell asleep again.

Sunday 7 June 1987

We were slower getting up this morning than yesterday. I got up about 8 o'clock and J. and D. followed at decent intervals. Even E. did not sleep as late as A.. The first trip out was to Tru-Value (where else?) for the needed elbow, which I installed, and we soon had hot water. I consider hot water one of the most luxurious necessities for the good life at a camp, or anywhere else.

Fun fact: Here's part of an AI-generated answer to a question involving the Body Mass Index.

Question: If I could figure out how to measure my height in square meters (or inches), would the BMI result look better, or worse?

A modern song based on a 19th-century French novel played in the style of Irish music on a hammered dulcimer! Unfortunately, it's a YouTube Short, and I see no way to embed it here, as I do with their regular videos. But you can add a little brightness to your day if you click on this link.

Although I don't agree completely with the practice, I'm more inclined to keep teens away from alcoholic beverages than from vegetable spiralizers. But here's a funny story about that.

A friend was at the grocery store, and decided she'd like a little wine with dinner. So she picked out a good one, and set the bottle in her cart. At check-out, she was asked to prove that she was older than 21. Now this friend looks quite young for her age, but she is older than I am, and I've seen more than seven decades. As the lady said in the spiralizer story, When did the world go completely mad? If the cashier can't tell at a glance that I'm not 20 years old, I don't want her counting my change. And if the store thinks she's incapable of such a determination, how is it they trust her to make any decisions at all?

I don't know why my friend didn't have her driver's license with her at the time, but she didn't, and reluctantly decided to forgo her dinnertime libation. But here's where the story gets interesting.

As many of us do in such situations, it wasn't until after she was done shopping that she thought of what she should have said. Because she was not alone in the store.

Hang on a second. My grandson will buy it for me.

Then again, she probably wouldn't have wanted to get him in trouble for buying alcohol for seniors.

I'd never heard of the Church Dog books nor the church that they're associated with, but family is family, and our choir family is so proud of the young daughter of two of our singers. Our director knows a lot that's going on in the Central Florida music, church, and theatrical scenes; he recommended that she audition for the Church Dog music video that's just been released—and she won the solo part! I don't think her parents would mind my mentioning her by name, but I'm not taking any chances. If she becomes famous, I'll link to this in an "I knew her when" post.  

It's not exactly my kind of music, but she's my kind of kid.

People in our family will understand how much I like this car (photo found on Facebook).

Copilot is sure the license plate is from the state of Washington; Gemini is equally certain it is from Colorado. Intrigued, I found a better image online, which makes it clear that it's actually from Illinois.

I didn't play a lot with dolls as a child, nor with trucks either. I had both, and enjoyed both, along with sundry other toys: blocks, Tinker Toys, laboratory equipment, tools, toy guns, childhood games, stuffed animals, a (real) bow and arrow set, a hula hoop, a baton for twirling—normal childhood stuff. I was eclectic in my tastes with no overwhelming preference for anything, except I suppose for reading books, climbing trees, and exploring in the woods. So, as I said, I didn't play much with dolls.  But the dolls I did have were babies or young children, and they were simple, the better to encourage imaginative play.

So my heart skipped a beat when I saw what one Australian mother has done to "rescue" old, worn-out dolls of the more recent type. I never liked Barbie dolls, certainly not the Bratz and other strange-looking creatures that passed for dolls when our daughters were young. This woman brings beauty from ashes.

This seven-minute video will warm your heart. Not only watching twisted ugliness turned normal, but especially listening to little girls with much more heart and common sense than the jaded, angry toy manufacturers.

This is another post I've pulled up from my long backlog. I wrote it in 2015, when the story was new, but for some reason it languished for more than 10 years! I don't know why; the post was complete and I still love the story.

The inevitable question is, "Where are they now?" What has happened since that bright beginning? Tree Change Dolls has an Etsy site, which appears to concentrate on helping others revive their own dolls, but occasionally offers some of her own creations, which she announces on her Facebook site.

As with any good thing, there are detractors, such as the doll collectors who think she is ruining the dolls, some of which are collectable and worth money in their original form. (Though probably not when found worn-out and broken.) More disturbing are those who say they hate the Tree-Change dolls because they promote the idea of natural beauty instead of heavily made-up and sexualized children's dolls. (That's the impression I got; I didn't spend much time in that unhappy land to find out more.)

"Where does the name come from?" is the other question that intrigued me. Google Search brought up this AI answer:

A tree change is a move from an urban or city environment to a more peaceful, nature-focused rural or regional area, often inland, to embrace a simpler and healthier lifestyle. Unlike a sea change, which involves moving to a coastal area, a tree change focuses on reconnecting with the natural landscape, such as rolling hills, mountains, or countryside, to escape the pressures and fast pace of city living. 

Well, that fits, but it struck a discordant note for me because that's not what "sea change" means. Here's the interesting story of the term, from Merriam-Webster:

In The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s final play, sea change refers to a change brought about by the sea: the sprite Ariel, who aims to make Ferdinand believe that his father the king has perished in a shipwreck, sings within earshot of the prince, “Full fathom five thy father lies...; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / into something rich and strange.” This is the original, now-archaic meaning of sea change. Today the term is used for a distinctive change or transformation. Long after sea change gained this figurative meaning, however, writers continued to allude to Shakespeare’s literal one; Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, and P.G. Wodehouse all used the term as an object of the verb suffer, but now a sea change is just as likely to be undergone or experienced.

So, a sea change is a transformation, but not specifically moving to the seaside to escape city life. However, "sea change" and "tree change" are apparently used in that way in Australia (at least on the one real estate site I checked), so the name of these dolls that have moved to a simpler, happier life makes perfect sense.

Tom Lehrer didn't quite make it to his 100th birthday, and I'm sure he could have written a song about that.

I discovered him when I was in junior high school, and his album That Was the Year That Was is one of the few records I owned before marriage.  I can't say as my parents approved of all of the songs—in retrospect I can see why—but they generally put up with my adolescent idiosyncracies.

Here's a great obituary for Lehrer from The Economist, cleverly interwoven with lines from his multitudinous satirical songs.  You can read it for free, but you have to jump through a bunch of hoops that may or may not be worth the trouble.  You need to enter, not just the usual name and e-mail address, but also your profession and industry.  Worse, you have to fit your life into their limited boxes, which has never been easy for me.  "Retired" and "Homemaker" are not options.  On the other hand, writing homeschool reports has made me pretty good at stuffing whatever it was we were doing into conventional terminology.

His childhood had been a breeze of maths and music, with a preference for Broadway shows. He entered Harvard at 15 and graduated at 18, the sort of student who brought books of logical puzzles to dinner in hall, and, on the piano in his room, liked to play Rachmaninov with his left hand in one key and his right a semitone lower, making his friends grimace. He seemed bound for a glittering mathematical career, but then the songs erupted, written for friends but spreading by word of mouth, until he was famous. He wrote each one in a trice and performed, increasingly, in night clubs. By contrast his PhD, on the concept of the mode, vaguely occupied him for 15 years before he abandoned it.

Oh fame! Oh accolades! He had toured the world and packed out Carnegie Hall. Yes, they really panted to see a clean-cut Harvard graduate in horn-rimmed glasses pounding at a piano and singing: sometimes stern, sometimes morose, but often joyose, as he twisted in the knife. [Is that a typo for joyous, or a deliberate portmanteau of joyous and morose?]

When he suddenly stopped, and the output dropped, he was presumed dead. No, Tom Lehrer replied. Just having fun commuting between the coasts, teaching maths for a quarter of the year, ie the winter, at the University of California in sunny Santa Cruz, and spending the rest of the time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, being lazy. Never having to shovel snow; never having to see snow. And, being said to be dead, avoiding junk mail.

I wonder how he managed the last.  We're still getting junk mail for Porter's father, who has been actually dead for six years.

Did he ever have hopes of extending the frontier of scientific knowledge? Noooooo, unless you counted his Gilbert & Sullivan setting of the entire periodic table. He would rather retract it, if anything. He still taught maths, along with musical theatre, and that was his career. He had never wanted attention from people applauding his singing in the dark. His solitary, strictly private life made him happy; to fame he was indifferent. In 2020 he told everyone they could help themselves to his song rights. As for him, he returned to his puzzle books, as if he had never strayed.

Requiescat in pace, Tom Lehrer. Thanks for all the fun.

If your day is in need of a laugh, or at least an ironic smile, try some Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. It's lighthearted humor with a serious point. Here are two examples, from which you can get to many more. Warning: they're addictive.

Streisand Effect, Sesame Labeling, Golden Goals

Printed Guns, Scratch and Sniff, Jakarta Traffic

Here's how to know when television has been too much a part of your life:

You read the headline, "1,000 Troops Who Identify as Transgender Being Discharged," and your first reaction is,

"Where was Donald Trump when Max Klinger needed him?"