Moving Day

Just wanted you all to know that I've moved this blog to WordPress. My other blog is there, so it's just easier to have them both at the same place.

Here's the link: My New Blog

I'd like to say there's a shiny new posting awaiting there for your reading pleasure, but nothing has struck me funny in the last couple of days, so I'm afraid it's just the same old stuff that's on this blog.

But hope springs eternal...

I did put up a nifty banner photo that my very own husband took. So there is that to look at.

Hope to see you there!

Top Ten Reasons I Love Being A Piano Teacher at home

10) I never have to study up ahead of time -- been teaching the same songs for 20 years now.
9) Even though the songs are the same, no lesson is ever the same as any other lesson
8) Apart from teaching a child to read, there's nothing like watching a young brain start to understand written music
7) It's very easy to curry favor with my clients (bribe them with candy at the end of the lesson)
6) I can tell the same jokes over and over and still get a laugh.
5) I get gifts from students on Valentine's Day and Christmas
4) I get to shop for stickers and fun pencils and write them off as a business expense.
3) Things my students say provide me with a never-ending source of Facebook statuses.
2) Can't beat the commute.

And the Number One Reason I Love Teaching Piano:

1) The day I heard a student had said to her mother, "I like the new teacher. She doesn't yell at me."

Of Uncle Frank, Turtles and Cow Catchers

True Confessions:  There are times that I find myself thinking, at every traffic light, "Why do people take so LONG to move forward when the light turns green?" I mean, seriously, are people not clear on the concept that green means go?  Perhaps other people don't sit with hands at 10 and 2, fingers twitching, gazing fixedly at the traffic light for that blessed moment when it changes so they can jam their foot down on the accelerator, like some strange cross between Speed Racer and Uncle Frank in "One Crazy Summer."



But it still seems there has to be a happy medium between driving like Uncle Frank and driving like the turtles in "Hoodwinked."



Now, I understand that we all get caught unawares changing a CD or reading a text message or daydreaming once in a while.  We're all human, after all.  But that's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about people with reflexes slower than molasses in January.  And not just one of these people, here or there.  I'm talking about the inevitable LINE of slow people one gets stuck behind during the one commute in which one is in a hurry, having been unavoidably detained from an important appointment.

I have a friend who would call this rant "The Excitement Plan."  He says quite wisely that you live a lot longer if you refuse to get excited over things like this. It's better to sit back, raise your hands and smile.  People are people, and no one has yet come up with a plan to fix that.  He's probably right.

Then again, he doesn't live in L.A.

Tonight I found myself musing that just once in my life, I would like to drive a monster truck, perhaps with a cow-catcher mounted on the front, so that when I get stuck behind a long line of people who aren't clear on the concept that green means go, I can just give them all a little nudge.  I'm sure it's just some encouragement they need.  Just a little nudge forward... all nine of them.  Just a little friendly tap on the bumper to say, "Hey guys, the light's green.  How about we all go now?"  Really, just once would do it.  I think I could be patient for the rest of my life after that.

Lunch With Emily

Emily is a charming young woman, if I do say so myself, since I raised her.  She is amazingly talented in art and music, a loving sister who pinch-hits as Mom when I'm sick, loves to read British literature and has a knack for communicating with those who, due to various circumstances, disabilities or conditions, have a hard time communicating with anyone else. At 15 years old, she possesses poise and a propensity for comedy far beyond her years.

Well, okay, she possesses a propensity for comedy.  The poise comes and goes.

Take, for example, yesterday's lunchtime conversation.  Her part of it was delivered entirely in a fairly accurate British accent.

"I'm going to talk like this all afternoon.  I'll tell people my name is Rose.  Rose Capps.  From England.  I'll say I lived in...um.... Yale!"

At this point her friend, Amanda and I are doing our best not to spit out our sodas, turning red in the face and shaking uncontrollably with suppressed laughter.

Emily is still excited about her role.   "That's good, right?  Oh, wait, is Yale a town in England?  Or is it a college?  Or a kind of cheese? It sounds like a kind of cheese, actually."

That sets us off all over again, but I finally manage to swallow my soda and gasp, "Emily, Yale is a university... (I pause for dramatic effect)... in AMERICA!"

Now it's her turn to go red in the face and struggle with keeping her soda in her mouth.

Eventually she calms down and says, "All right then, what town were you born in?"  She figures it will be safe if she just sticks to her mothers' roots.

It's important that she get an accurate backstory prepared ahead of time, you see, because of the Halloween Debacle of 2009.  She pulled the accent thing that night, speaking loudly to Amanda with it while walking around our neighborhood dressed as a girl from the 70s.  It would have been okay, but she got cocky and kept it going even when she knocked on doors, and sure enough, at one house the lady squealed, "Oh!  You're English? So is my husband!  Nigel, come here and meet the English girl."  She then had to keep the accent going through an entire conversation with Nigel, and of course he asked her where she was from.  She grabbed the first location name she could think of in a split-second and told him "Cotswood."  It wasn't until she got home and related the story that I explained that the "Cotswolds" is a REGION of England, not a town.  Which probably explains why Nigel was looking at her funny.

So this time, being a year and a half older and that much wiser, she knows an accurate backstory is mandatory.  So she borrows mine.

"I was born in Stanwell," I reply.  I can't say the name of that town without pronouncing it the British way.  It's one of the few pieces of my original accent that are hardwired into my brain.

"Stanwell," she practices, rolling it around on her tongue.  "Stanwell."  Amanda and I take another bite of food, exchanging a patient yet meaningful glance (we do this a lot around Emily, especially when she gets fanciful like this).

"Right, I've got it.  My name is Rose Capps, and I'm from Stanford."

I almost choked on my broccoli beef.

"What?" she asks impatiently.

"Stanford is a university," I sigh, and then Amanda and I say in chorus, "IN AMERICA!"

She decides to stay American for the rest of the afternoon.

10 Ways You Know It’s Monday

1. You get tired of waiting in bed for your husband to bring you your coffee, and then realize he’s not going to because he’s at work.

2. You realize after your 8 year old eats his cereal that he got the bowl out of the dishwasher… which wasn’t actually run the night before.

3. Having off-loaded 3 out of 4 kids at a friend’s house, you look forward to a quiet afternoon free from squabbling and fistfights… until your remaining child somehow manages to punch herself in the face.

4. Figuring you have a good 45 minutes before your first music student arrives, you sit down and relax for a few minutes before tackling the dog-hair-ridden floor and disgusting guest bathroom, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door, at which point you remember you changed the time of the first lesson.

5. Your parental control software blocks your access to your own website.

6. You go to make a cup of tea to calm your nerves, but discover the tea-kettle is empty. You go to refill the kettle from the pitcher of Arrowhead water, only to discover the pitcher is empty. You go to fill the pitcher from the giant, slippery, 5-gallon bottle of Arrowhead water, congratulating yourself on not dropping it, only to realize after it starts pouring that you hadn’t quite lined it up with the pitcher and that you are, in actuality, simply making a rapidly growing puddle of water on the kitchen floor.

7. You realize that the keys you misplaced a week ago aren’t under the dresser, where you had assumed they fell but never got around to picking up, and that you now have no idea where they are or when the last time was that you had them.

8. You finally get your tea made, go to put sugar in it, and discover that the sugar bowl is empty. You go to refill the sugar bowl and discover that the sugar canister is also empty. You pull out potatoes, onions and other bottom-shelf pantry necessities and contort yourself in order to get sugar out of the giant, "emergency" container of sugar which is stored at the back, only to stand up and notice a new bag of sugar sitting in a prominent place on the eye-level pantry shelf.

9. You try to write a list of ten items but can only come up with 9.

10. You go to post your lame 9-item “10 Reasons” list on your blog, only to discover that you have lost all connection to the Internet.

10 Ways You Know You Have Reached Middle-Age

1. It’s your birthday and you have to do the math to remind yourself how old you’re turning.

2. You are having dinner out for your birthday at a restaurant chosen for two reasons: they have a kid-friendly menu and you have a coupon.

3. You take a little trip to the beach on the way to dinner and get all excited when the star of one of your favorite TV shows jogs by... and then realize it went off the air 21 years ago.

4. You already know what you are going to order before you get to the restaurant and it has the word “Yankee” in the name and involves red meat.

5. You realize halfway to the restaurant that you left the coupon at home.

6. The waiter looks very, very young. You want to order wine but feel you would have to check his I.D. first.

7. Your daughter gives you a birthday card with a heartfelt paragraph detailing her love and admiration for you, but rather than feeling warm and fuzzy, you’re miffed because she wrote so small you have to don your reading glasses.

8. During dinner you find yourself reminiscing about how stylin’ you all used to be wearing your neon-colored crazy-patterned baggy pants.

9. When you count up your birthday cash you have to first resist the temptation to pay a bill with it and then look up your wishlist on Amazon.com so that you can remember what it was you wanted to buy with it.

10. You finish off the evening with a nice warm cup of non-caffeinated beverage and consider personally answering every single birthday wish on your Facebook wall, but then realize that would mean you’d have to stay up past 10 p.m.

Dingy Middle-Aged Women, Unite!

I have come to the conclusion that today is Dingy Middle-Aged Women’s Day. (That's Ding-y, as in air-headed, not Dingey, as in drab. Although drab Middle-Aged Women could be a topic for another blog entry, if I really get stuck). Come to think of it, based on my personal experience, it may actually be Dingy Middle-Aged Women’s WEEK. I started in on my own dinginess on Wednesday, when I tried to make tea by putting not a teabag, but a spoonful of sugar into the teapot. Then later I attempted to warm a plate of food by putting it in the fridge. I did at least discover my error with the plate of food unaided – the absence of the keypad on the fridge door was a dead giveaway.

Now, I was blaming my dinginess this week on the fact that my right ear is still clogged from the cold I had last year. It’s already a proven fact that I can’t see well when I can’t hear. After today’s events, however, I am beginning to wonder if this is not some kind of national honor week for dinginess, and that perhaps I lost the memo.

Case in point: driving down Sepulveda Blvd. in Manhattan Beach today, I saw four middle-aged women in dresses and heels, trying to cross the street. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but they were jaywalking, and had apparently forgotten everything they had learned about that skill in their teens. So instead of running across half the street and standing on the concrete median while traffic cleared on the other side, they tottered across half the street in their heels, laughing and chatting with each other, then stood, I kid you not, in the LEFT LANE of traffic, watching the traffic on the other side of the median. In an attempt to hurry things up (one supposes), they took turns bending at the waist now and then to peer up the street at the traffic, looking for a gap. However, not once did any of them look at the oncoming traffic on the side they were standing.

Eventually three of them did remember the “stand on the median” concept, but one of them saw no need to even move closer to it, and stood happily in the middle of the left lane, laughing and fixing her gaze on the traffic on the other side, while traffic on her side came barreling toward her and eventually stopped a few feet away from her. When the women did finally cross the other half of the street, they crossed not as a group, but as a line of stragglers, hesitant and wobbling on their high heels and giggling in embarrassment the entire way. This resulted in traffic having to slam to a halt on that side of the road as well.

Half a block up the road, I sat waiting for the light to change, shaking my head, tempted to judge but being honest enough with myself to realize that the only thing stopping me from finding myself in a similar predicament, in my current state of mind, was the fact that I don’t wear heels much any more. Just then another middle-aged woman crossed in front of my car. She was in the crosswalk, wearing sensible clothing, so I was about to heave a sigh of relief that it wasn’t an epidemic of dinginess. Then I noticed that she was talking on her cell phone. She had an earpiece in her ear, the kind that has a microphone built into the wire that connects it to the phone, so that the mic automatically sits in the middle of your chest, close enough to pick up your voice. The mouthpiece on the phone shuts off when you plug one of these earpieces in. Apparently no one had ever explained the mic to her, though, because she was holding her phone up to her mouth and shouting into it.

So there it is. Undeniable proof that this is Dingy Middle-Aged Woman’s Week. It may have something to do with the arrival of Mother’s Day. Perhaps if we all act pathetic enough this week, our families will take pity and realize that they need to plan something special for Mother’s Day without our help.

And maybe the earth will spin in the opposite direction for a day, too. Just as likely.