Sandi Kahn Shelton

Have you met Google Talk?

I have to admit: I’m on it all the time, whether I want to be or not. It’s the main way I write my novel AND talk to my kids all at the same time. Sort of like major multi-tasking.

I’m getting used to having the little screen pop up in the corner of my novel, and I can dash over to it and type a few lines, and then go right back to my book without ever having to click out of anything.

But the other day I was there, typing away to Allie, when suddenly my computer started to sound like a phone ringing.

I jumped back.

And then there was Allie’s voice, COMING OUT OF MY COMPUTER. She was saying, “Hello?” and she sounded as baffled as I was.

“How is it that we’re talking to each other instead of typing?” I said.

She didn’t know. Except that it turned out that her baby, Miles, was sitting on her lap, and then he leaned over and pressed a button on the computer, and suddenly we understood what that little “Call” box was referring to.

YOU CAN ACTUALLY CALL THE PERSON YOU’RE TYPING TO.

We felt a little ridiculous when we realized that this had been available to us all along–times when we foolishly used the telephone to communicate, for instance.

“The BABY figured this out?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Get used to it. Children always know more about modern technology than their parents do.”

“But, Mom,” she said, “he’s not even eleven months old.”

They learn fast these days.

P.S. I tried to tell my friend Alice about this amazing happening.

“Allie’s voice came out of your computer?” she said.

“Yes, after the sound of a ringing phone. Allie’s computer had called my computer, don’t you see, and then we could talk to each other.”

“How did the computer CALL another computer?”

“Well, who knows? There’s a button you click on.”

“No,” she said. “No. That didn’t happen, and it’s not true, and I can’t hear about it anymore.”

“Well…” I said.

She took a sip of her wine. “But I’ll tell you another amazing thing,” she said. “My son was visiting over the weekend, and he used his CELL PHONE to check his email! Did you know people could do that??”

Yes, I said. I’ve heard of that.

During my morning drive-by through the Internet, I discovered that scientists have at last turned their attention to figuring out how it is that strings go about getting themselves tangled in knots.

You know. How is it that you can put a silver chain in a jewelry box, close the door, and return in two days to find it wildly entwined with every other object in there?

At this moment, as I’m typing, I am watching the cord of my iPod, which is lying innocently on the couch next to me, in a nice straight line. I know, however, that when I leave the room to go make a cup of tea, it will begin to wriggle itself into a knot–and by the time I wake up in the morning and need it to come along with me to the gym, it will be in a hopeless tangle. That happens every single day.

Apparently scientists are as fed up with this nonsense from inanimate objects as the rest of us. They finally decided to get to the bottom of it. How the hell can a thing knot itself up into a thousand tangles without humans even being in the room?

So they watched and waited and snuck up on strings, and discovered that these little rascals are using MOTION to do it. And as one scientist noted, it takes surprisingly little motion to encourage a string to start the little dance that weaves it in and out of another available string.

Okay, so he didn’t say the word ‘dance.’ Scientists aren’t ready yet to admit that objects are dancing while we’re not looking. But they did say, “A highly flexible string placed in a very large container will have a higher probability of becoming knotted than a stiff one that’s confined in a smaller container,” which I think surely means that the highly flexible string is certainly flexing itself around and around. Without, supposedly, a life force to guide it.

I’m hoping that next they intend to go start watching socks.

It is obviously time to blog again.

I have to keep blogging, you see, or else I will forget how, the way I neglected to watch television for a while and then discovered I had forgotten why we have so many remotes and what purpose they all serve. This is a modern problem for which there does not seem to be any solution. Apparently TV sets require NUMEROUS sets of remotes, and hardly ever do you find buttons on them for the things you really, really need, like: TURN OFF. TURN ON. LOUDER. SOFTER. PLAY DVD. STOP DVD.

There. Six choices. Why does this require two remotes, each with 150 inscrutably worded buttons?

Here are what the buttons on my main remote say: REC LINK. PROG CHECK. ANGLE. 3D-PHONIC. TOP MENU. MENU. MONITOR.

What, I would like to ask, does any of this mean? 

You see, engineers of America? This is why I and most of my friends are unable to watch movies unless our children are at home. Press the wrong button, and the whole thing stops working.

We at least need a button that says: UNDO EFFECTS OF BUTTON YOU JUST PUSHED. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I thought I was the only one who couldn’t work the TV set, until I talked to my friend Karen. She has a fancy TV, the kind that has picture-in-picture, which is handy for when you are waiting for the Weather Channel to get around to telling you what the forecast is in your area, and you want to watch something else while you wait. Which is what Karen was doing: watching a regular show, with the Weather Channel on in a little tiny screen in the bottom of her TV.

Let me just say that I would never be able to do something this risky, so when Karen was telling me this story, I was already in awe of her and wanted to nominate her for some kind of technology award.

So there she was, watching, and then the moment came when she wanted the Weather Channel to be on the big screen and the other show to be on the little screen, and so she pressed a button on one of her remotes…and poof! The big screen turned into a fuzzy mass of black stuff, and the Weather Channel stayed where it was…tiny and unhearable.

Then she did what anyone would do: she pressed each and every button on all her remotes, trying to find the one that would work.

I had to laugh when she was telling me this. I have been in this situation before–madly, insanely pressing all buttons on the remotes, including the secret, unmarked button that translates as: BLOW UP THIS TV SET AND MAKE SURE IT NEVER GIVES ME A PICTURE AGAIN.

It is when you have pressed every single button for the third time and nothing has happened that you see there is only one thing left to do: you hurl all the remotes across the room, and then go and kick them. Sometimes crying is necessary.

In my circle of friends, it is widely known that if you were able to restrain yourself from throwing the remotes AT the televsion set, you deserve a special award.

Well, it is now nearly a whole week before American Idol comes back on, and all we have are our memories and blogs to read, detailing what everyone thought about Gina having to go–and the wacky Sanjaya not even being in the bottom three this time. My very favorite blog about American Idol is Television without Pity, which tells me every single thing that happened on the show, just as if it were being dictated by my hilarious friend Deb. It does a lot of other shows, too, not just American Idol, but since I don’t watch those kinds of shows where you need your full mind and attention (like “Lost”–I don’t have ANY IDEA what that’s all about and won’t let anybody tell me), I don’t need to read recaps of those shows.  I save a lot of time that way.

Which brings me to the dirty bathtub.

I have been meaning to write a post about this for some time, because I have been going around telling people this, and each one I tell says, “Why don’t you write this in your blog?” (I think there are now people who would rather read a paragraph by me than actually talk to me, which is a discussion for perhaps another day.) 

But–here is my news: THERE IS A WAY TO CLEAN YOUR BATHTUB WITHOUT, YOU KNOW, HAVING TO CLEAN YOUR BATHTUB.

This has been kept a secret from all of us, or many of us, at least. It’s called Method Daily Shower, and it is sold at Target in a large clear bottle. And the liquid inside it is clear, too. It just SCREAMS,  ”I am only a bottle of water, and if you pay $2.99 on your hard-earned dollars, you will be so mad at yourself.”

But then you take it home and spray it in your shower–and all the gunk that collects in there just melts away! All the brown mildew colonies that have become so familiar to you that you’ve practically given them names–Edna and Pete and Ralph. They all just ooze right out of there, along with the blue streaks that people with wells (and hard water) get in their tile grout.

The best part is: you spray it on right when you get out of the shower, when the wall and tub is still wet, and then you leave the house without looking back, and the next time you go in there, Edna and Pete and Ralph are gone, along with all of their offspring, and the place is just sparkling clean.

I have to tell you about the smell. It’s got a name. It’s called “ylang ylang” scent, which is code for something, but I don’t know what. It’s not a smell I ever smelled before. Not like horrible cleaning chemicals, not even like that terrible grape-smelling stuff they scour public restrooms with. It’s kind of light and almost-but-not-quite pleasant-in-a-no-nonsense-herbal kind of way, although once your shower is clean, you love it so much you think you might want to start dabbing a little ylang-ylang around your ears.

Every now and then, I’ve noticed, it’s necessary to talk to Computer People on the telephone, and that is when you notice what a different breed of human you are from folks who are actually gainfully employed in the technology industry.

Today, for instance, I discovered that my Internet connection just kept flickering on and off. I would attempt to send someone an email, the the computer would just say: NO.

I would try again and it would say okay. Then, in the middle of sending, it would change its mind and stop again.

Now. I could have taken this as a sign from the gods that I am supposed to be continuing my actual work (e.g., the novel) which does not by any stretch of the imagination require the services of the Internet or email.

But instead–I don’t know why–I decided it might be fun to get to the bottom of the whole problem. After only a few presses of the phone buttons, #1 for English and #2 for Real Live Human Being, there I was with a person who wanted to know my phone number and whether I had a Mac or PC.

“PC,” I said. This was easy.

“Do you have a routmodreguehsjgfhtk or a modem?”

“A…modem? I don’t really know what that other thing is. But it’s wireless, if that helps.”

“Ohhhhhkay then. Go the main menu and press the buthgusfhrejheejrhr and tell me which of the boxes has a check that says rhfkthecktskrksl.”

I stared at the screen. “All the boxes are unchecked.”

Deep sigh. “Well, go theskrrpotkshfk.”

“I, uh, don’t know what  you’re asking me to do. Could you say it again?”

“Go theskrrpotkshfk.”

I feel the hysteria rising in me. I am afraid I will soon start laughing out loud.

“Miss, WILL YOU TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER IMMEDIATELY?”

I turned it off, fearing the worst. It took forever, as it always does. I apologized. “I had a lot of programs running, sorry,” I said.

“That’s fine.”

“Do you spend your whole day waiting for people’s computers to turn off and then back on?”

“Miss, some days I do.”

We wait and wait. My computer at last turns off.

He says, “Okay, go stand by the router.”

“Okay.” The router is in the other room. At least I think it’s the router. It’s something that every now and then Comcast likes me to go and pull all the wires out of the wall, wait for 30 silent seconds, and then plug it all back in again. It’s our usual little dance together.

I say, “I am now going to my router.,” and he YELLS at me, actually yells.

‘DON’T GO TO THE ROUTER! I AM GOING TO THEDKSKRROUTER AT MY END!”

And then comes seven minutes of the most unearthly noise I have ever heard. Kind of a low-grade hissing andf buzzing and screaming.

I wait. I brush the dog. I make a pot of tea. I wonder if I could put this guy on hold and call  my mom. Then I start to wonder if this is the sound of the dial tone in India, perhaps, and that he has gone away.

Then, when I am just about to give up, the noise stops and he says, mysteriously, “Okay. You go have a nice dayfhfhshjtltr. Thank you for calling.”

And…well, the Internet worked!

Okay, this has to be quick because it’s about 20 degrees in this house while I’m typing this, and my fingers are going to stop moving soon. The furnace thinks it is time for everybody to be in bed and so it has given up heating the house anymore. I would think that maybe it’s broken, except that things happened today that let me know that we’re not in that life anymore. Our luck has officially changed.

Yesterday I wrote about our well giving up, and my many troubles and phone calls and the pitiful begging I did, trying to find someone to help, but only hearing person after person tell me it was: (a) going to be more expensive to fix than the war in Iraq, (b) probably impossible to dig into the frozen ground, and (c) nobody would ever be able to find the well anyway, since the “site map” we had been given by the town looked as if it had been drawn on the back of a cocktail napkin by a couple of drunks after last call.

Naturally I woke up today feeling dread.

But then the optimistic man with the backhoe came over, walked the property, shook his head over the fact that there were no visible outward clues of where a well might be, and then said, “Well, I’ll need to get a dowser. See you later!”

I believe my exact words were, “Oh. My. God.”

If you google the word “dowser,” you will see nothing good. Dowsing–also known as “water witching,” has been discredited since the 3rd century, I believe. People through the centuries have been jailed for dowsing. My friend Nancy said her crazy Tennesee relatives used to do it with sticks from the blooming fruit trees–and no one ever figured out how.

So I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. I pictured my entire one-acre yard being turned into a compost heap, frankly.

But, sure enough, an hour later, he was back with a couple who got out of their truck, walked around the property holding some weird sticks–and one minute later, they were back in the truck, and I was running out to the driveway to see what had taken place.

“What do you mean? She found the well,” the backhoe man said, pointing to a woman who looked a little bit like she had walked over from some mountain community early this morning. She just nodded.

“So I’ll be back to dig up the yard in a bit,” he said.

I had to leave home to go do an interview for a story, but when I got back a few hours later–there was a big hole in the yard, and by God, there was a well in that hole! I was stunned.

It’s not where you’d think a person would put a well either. For one thing, it’s about four inches from an addition that was put on this house before we moved in. And it’s huge. And far away from the pipe that leads to the well pump.

No one in their right mind could have anticipated the well would be there.

So tomorrow, other men will come and pull out whatever has gone bad in this well and put in a newer, shinier whatever-it-is, and this time tomorrow, I will be all new and shiny myself. Clean, even.

I woke up this morning with one of those Today Is the First Day of the Rest of My Life feelings.

You know the kind I mean. The type of day when you’re going to steer your little cable car right back on the track of where it’s supposed to be heading. Start eating vegetables and whole grains again instead of Doritos. Scrub the bathroom, get the receipts together for the taxes, pretend the internet hasn’t been invented yet. Be the kind of writer who is On Schedule once again.

After some deliberation, I decided to start with a bath, which turned out to be a huge misstep. Because it was while I was rinsing my hair that I heard a horrible rattling noise from the depths of the house, where the gremlins live, and then realized there was no more water coming out of the tap.

This is scary when you have a well. Especially a well that you don’t understand or know the exact location of or have ever thought about for longer than two seconds on any given day. I will spare you the madcap details of the day, except to say that at various times it involved a plumber, a guy from a well pump company, a trip to the town hall to look for a site map that might indicate where the well could possibly be located on the property, many phone conversations with friends who have had wells go bad…and lots and lots of talk about the 8 to 10 inches of permafrost that is located on top of our well, wherever it might be located.

And trips to the store for bottled water.

The whole day I felt like any minute someone was going to say something to me like, “Ohhhh! I know what this is! This is because you hit the little red button when you should have hit the little green button! Now all you have to do is just go back and re-hit the button, and your well is going to be fine again!”

Never mind that there are no red and green buttons, and no magic tricks to try. People just kept saying things to me that involved the words  “bad foot valve” and “thousands of dollars” and “too bad the ground is so hard.”

The good news–the only reason that I am not right now lying on the floor banging my fists and crying–is that tomorrow morning at 8 a.m., an optimistic man with his own personal backhoe is coming to our house. He is perhaps a lunatic, but he believes that he can dig up the hard ground, find the top of the well, and that we can get the thing open and replace the foot valve, whatever that is…and go on to have a happy life, for mere thousands of dollars.

It’s only money.

As my friend Sandy (who once spent months searching for her well with a shovel) said today, “So, which is it? Would you rather have money or running water?”

Right about now, getting ready to brush my teeth in a paper cup and with nearly every dish in my house dirty, I’d go for some water.

I’d also like the heater to stop making that VROOOOOMING noise that it’s making when it turns on or off. I just know it’s heard from the well that we’re in free-for-all season.

And next…well, I’d really like 2007 to improve itself. Show some real effort here. We’re exhausted with all this stuff.

These days, life and fashion being what they are, all of us are being made to feel horrible about our harmless little rolls of fat.

You can hardly thumb through a magazine without seeing that your personal body is grossly  out of style–even if you wear a size zero. Size zero is the new size ten, as someone recently pointed out.

Dieting being difficult, and exercise getting to be more of a drag than ever before, Hewlett Packard has come to our rescue, thank God. They have developed a camera that takes away 10 of your ugliest pounds so that you can at least feel good about yourself when you look at yourself in a photograph. Never mind how the camera knows exactly which pounds to take away–just go there and watch the slimming effect at work, and you know you’ll never have to diet again.

Who cares if you’re really a little chubby? Take a picture of yourself and post that on your mirror instead, and you’ll feel great.

I think if this really catches on, I think we’ll see photographs of the future doing a lot more for us than they currently do. Hewlett Packard should work on a camera that can erase all those tired frown lines, of course, and maybe upgrade our clothing and dust our furniture. And with a little bit more effort, it could modernize our kitchens and improve our family members’ posture, perhaps give us newer cars. I’m waiting for the camera that knows how to correct unfortunate haircuts and even out hair color disasters. 

In fact, I think the Hewlett Packard camera could revolutionize life as we know it. Feeling dissatisfied with yourself or how many chins you have? Forget it. Just head back to the couch, get more chips, and if anybody complains, show them your photo. You’re fine just the way you are.

(And thank you, Heather, for letting me know about this.)

I think I may have reached an important milestone in working through my personal grief over my deceased computer.

My deceased computer, I might add, that is ONLY TWO YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS OLD and should not have died because nothing bad ever happened to it, unlike the time I killed another laptop computer by forgetting to zip its case, and so when I got up after writing for eight hours one afternoon and picked up the handle of the case, with more than a little bit of force (brought about by drinking many, many cups of very strong tea during those eight hours of writing), and the laptop went zinging across the floor of the coffee shop where I was writing, bouncing three or four times on the tile floor, with the battery hitting the wall—–and yes, that computer was dead, too, and had just demolished the entire manuscript of a book I was writing, but at least that time I understood why.

This time, there was just the Blue Screen of Death and an awful grinding noise, something like a death rattle.

Yes. It is true that it is still dead. I just went downstairs to my desk and turned it on for one last time, just to see, you know, if there was any way it might let me get a couple of old documents off of it, you see. If there could be some kind of electronic miracle, perhaps a tear in the fabric of the universe. Maybe I could get the essay I wrote about my sister after she died. Maybe some of my stories I wrote in the last two years for the newspaper I work for. Some of the letters my friend Diane wrote in emails to me, because she does write the funniest emails in the world.

I clicked the ON button, and it came merrily on, churning itself up to life.

It said:  ”SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Drive.”

Then it had the nerve to say:

“Please back up the contents of the hard drive and run”

I had to stare at this, blinking, for a moment. Back up the hard drive and run?!

This computer is kidding itself if it thinks we can still back up the hard drive.

Anyway, this is a catharsis moment for me. Tomorrow, having given up on it, I shall take the damn thing to Best Buy, where it is still under warranty, and they will wipe the hard drive clean, and return it to me, a brand spanking new computer that will not remember anything about its past.

In the meantime, I have actually done something tonight that I have meant to do since I started this blog: I have posted some actual PAGES. If you look on the right-hand column, you will see that I have typed in some columns I wrote a while back. They are from my book, “You Might As Well Laugh,” and I typed them in because–well, because my kids told me I should. They said blogs can get boring without more to look at!

Who knew?

I was all set to have myself the kind of writerly day that would make up for so many indiscretions–and there have been many. Hot baths that took so long they ended up using two entire hot water tanks full of water. Unplanned trips to the movies “to remind myself how plot rhythms are supposed to work.” Even the small, virtuous, innocent task of wiping off the kitchen counters that so easily turned into scrubbing the sink, recalking the tiles, and taking the bottom of the refrigerator apart to get every last dust bunny and dog hair and Lego out from underneath it–because, let’s face it, how can a person concentrate on writing a novel when there is dog hair underneath the refrigerator? Such a thing is laughably impossible.

Today was going to make up for all that.

I woke up feeling productive. It was raining outside, which is good, because then I wouldn’t imagine that I should go out for a short round of Healthful Exercise and end up walking five miles to the water, then needing to have a glass of iced tea as a reward, and then, because a person can’t walk five miles alone, sitting and talking to my friends downtown while I waited for my heart rate to stabilize, and then, as long as I’m downtown, I might as well pop into the bookstore just to see if they still have copies of my other books, and also check out what other books I might need to read to give me, you know, inspiration that books can get written…

None of that. Home all day.

At 9:30 a.m., I turned on the computer, only to be met with a screen that said I’d had this new computer for 14 days, and wouldn’t I like to create the Backup Recovery Disks now, so that when horrible things start to go wrong with it (and we all know they will, even the computer screen admitted as much), I will have something to fall back on, unlike when my last computer died, and I was left with nothing?

That sounded like a very nice idea, I thought…but no thank you, I have this novel to write…

Do you want to LOSE your novel when the next crash comes?

No.

It said: Okay then. Turn around three times, arrange 18 CDs in a row on the countertop, throw some salt over your left shoulder, salute, and count from 100 to 1–and prepare yourself to run back to the computer approximately every 10-20 minutes for the rest of the day, when you will be required either to put in a new disk, or to hear the bad news about how your last disk was inferior.

I called my son and whined. “Do I have to do this?”

He said I did. He is a Computer Genius, and he is very organized and mature, and he reminded me how much I lost on my old computer crash, and wouldn’t it have been swell, really really swell, to have Backup Recovery Disks on hand then? He thought it would only take an hour or two–and just think of how glad I would be, he said.

I am all for things that will make me glad later, although nine times out of ten, I will tend to vote for things that make me glad Right Now, which this did not. But I went anyway to the hardware store and bought the CDs required for this massive, very-good-for-me backup project, and then I came home and started feeding them to the computer at the proper intervals. I wasn’t sure if the computer was up to doing this hard job and working on my novel at the same time, and I didn’t want to risk its imploding on me prematurely by asking too much of its CPUs and hard drive.

And anyway, once you embark on one virtuous project, it’s difficult to know just how to stop, so I set to work cleaning and buffing all our scratched-up music CDs with toothpaste and a cotton pad.

 Yes, I know how weird this sounds. But I learned it from reading Real Simple magazine, whose editors make a habit of trying to clean things with any weird substance they can think of and then urging the rest of us to do the same. And they are always right! They are geniuses, these editors. Kool-aid can clean a dishwasher–but only lemon Kool-Aid. DO NOT TRY THIS WITH LIME KOOL-AID. Mayonnaise can get rid of those annoying adhesives. Vases dirty? Try throwing some eggshells inside them! Emery boards can get rid of stains! Chalk can keep your silver from tarnishing!

And it turns out that they were right! Scratched and battered CDs can be actually healed by placing a little dot of toothpaste (not gel kind, for God’s sake, the editors haven’t okayed the gel kind yet!) onto a cotton pad and then buffing the scratches of CD with it. I tried this first, just a desperate experiment with my Jack Johnson CD that I love, which was a total wreck, skipped all over the place–and now it plays beautifully, and so then I had to repair all the other misused CDs as well. (We have a lot of misused CDs because I cannot be trusted to put them back in their cases when I am done with them, and I let them ride around on the floor of the car, or I squeeze them in places with other CDs so they grind together. My children are always scolding me for this.) 

Six. Hours. Went. By.

I spent the entire time running back and forth to the computer and its incredible hunger for its required 18 CDs (and its judgmental barking: “This CD is inferior! Find another!”)–back to the kitchen sink, where I was making all the music in our house minty-fresh and tartar-free.

When the computer finally decided it had saved itself from potential sudden death, I got back on it and wrote three pages of my novel–which is all I really ask of myself in one day.

But it did seem, long ago this morning, as I was lying in bed thinking how productive this day could be, that I would be–oh, twenty pages farther along than I am right now. If you’d asked, though, if I expected to have such sweet-smelling, non-skipping CDs, I’d have had to say no, impossible.

One has to take one’s victories as they come, I suppose.