A Chicken in Every Pothole?

The New York Times's news blog, The Lede, reports that KFC is donating money to a few American cities to fill potholes in return for stenciling the repairs with KFC logos in (temporary) chalk. I wish they'd send a crew up to Boston and fix up my neighborhood, which has some tom-turkey-sized potholes that are hard to avoid.

I can't help wondering if their mashed potatoes or their stuffing makes a better filler. But either way....

What to Do with the NEIDL?

Now that I've filled the city block–sized construction pit downtown with a Level 4 Biolab, you might be wondering how I would repurpose the existing Biolab (aka the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory) in the South End. 

That's easy. The South End, and all of Boston, would benefit enormously if the NEIDL were retrofitted with all of the authentic fixtures, bargains, discount policies, and salespeople from the original Filene's Basement. That pale imitation in Back Bay isn't fooling anybody.  I would personally crawl on my hands and knees to the South End if I had any hope of snagging another pair of bronze Ferragamo T-straps for $13.12 (all of it donated to charity).

On the ground level of the former Biolab, if there is one (I haven't crawled over there to check it out yet, for some reason), I think a Chacarero, a mom-and-pop bakery, and an Anna's Taqueria would make everyone happy. And if there's still space left over, how about a dance club and a multigenerational community center?

What to Do with that Hole Downtown

According to a story in today's Globe, Boston city planners looked the other way as a developer demolished an entire downtown city block — well before anyone bothered to check out the finances, which now aren't there to complete the project. 

In short, where we used to have Filene's we now we have a hole, and no plans for anything more.

I think I have the solution: Transfer the Level 4 Biolab there from the South End. There's already a perfectly good hole for building subterranean labs for studying Ebola and Black Death and other deadly microbes. There are hardly any residential neighbors to form committees to complain about safety concerns. It will be so convenient for scientists and technicians to leap off the Orange and Red Lines right into their basement (formerly The Basement, sob) labs. And when it's time to evacuate, what could be easier?

Feeding the Cat, Part III: "Peel Me a Shrimp"

Does that look like a sick, frail, elderly bag of bones? Does that look like a cat in the throes of inflammatory bowel disease? No more — our glamourpuss Persian, Snicky, is well again. She gained 8 ounces in recent weeks and is on track to surpass her all-time "fat" weight of 7.2 lbs. When she was at her sickest, she was down to a skeletal 5.3 lbs. At her last weigh-in, she was back up to 6.8. 

She's taking just a tiny steroid pill once a day now and chows down Fancy Feast with enthusiasm. We have stopped giving her sermons in LOL-cat language, exhorting her to chew (except for the fun of it). If she turns up her nose at her dish, it's only becaue she's behaving like an ordinary, pain-in-the-neck tortoiseshell. She's not quite back to leaping around like a madwoman, but she seems to be enjoying herself despite acting closer to her age. Once more, Snicky rules. 

And so does The Boston Cat Hospital. They are a terrific practice in Kenmore Square. We've gotten to know most of the staff over the years, in times of good feline health and bad. We rely on our vet, Dr. Laura Widman, for her wisdom, up-to-date medical knowledge, common sense, and creative problem-solving. She was especially good at handling Snicky's hard-to-diagnose disease. We trust her. 

Last fall, we didn't think Snicky would be here for her 15th birthday on April 1. But there will be cake after all. And "tubafish."

Spring Blooms at 265 Comm. Ave.

This garden on the sunny side of Commonwealth is covered with crocuses. Let's hope they don't get covered in snow. The magnolia trees are getting ready to bloom, too.

Gone With the Wind

The Royce Funds' "Annual Review and Report to Shareholders" arrived today. A picture was worth more than a thousand words this time around, but we were treated to both. The "Letter to Our Shareholders" began with a pen-and-ink homage to Edvard Munch's The Scream, transferred to Wall Street: 

In case that didn't make the point, the letter's subheads reinforce the message: "A Series of Unfortunate Events," "A Journal of the Plague Year," "The Waste Land," Cold Comfort Farm," "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me," and finally, "The Audacity of Hope."

For a minute, I was amused to realize that the Royce Funds appear to be run by liberal-arts grads who responded to the financial crisis with literary black humor. But now I'm hoping they will get out of the entertainment business and pay attention to their day job: making money. For me. Thanks to them, a significant portion of my savings vanished into down a deep, black, rabbit hole. I'm beginning to suspect that they blew some of it on lunchtime shopping at Rizzoli, Blick, Pearl Art, and The Strand.

Best of Boston Signage

Recent trips around Boston led me past two memorable examples of signage:

First, the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care construction site, made into a thing of wonder by the ironworkers' spray-painted tribute to the children getting treatment across the street at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. There were children's names posted on the Farber's windows the morning I was there, but I wasn't lucky enough see workers with cans of paint. 

I can't do justice to how extraordinary it is to see this in person. I'll just say that it feels more powerful than anything I've ever experienced in a church. The Boston Globe had an excellent feature about it last month.

On a lighter note, the General Hooker sign at the State House never seems to get old. I'm not sure where the entrance is for Crooks, Bribe-Takers, and Unindicted Felons. That would be the staff entrance, I presume.

Italy Under Glass

Whenever we travel, I bring home a small stack of colorful papers: postcards, museum admission stubs, used metro or trolley stubs, cards from restaurants and shops, and so on. It mostly free, it's richly evocative of the trip, but it's essentially useless. I can't part with it, so it gets packed into an envelope and stuck in a drawer with packets from earlier trips. I'm too lazy to do anything so time-consuming as paste things in an album.

But I've always loved the idea of a collage. So, a couple of years ago, at Christmas, I asked my husband to find me a glass-topped tray that I could use to create a collage of my travel ephemera. He gave me a handsome wooden one, perfect for the project I had in mind. But he went a step further and inserted a large color print of my best travel photograph under the glass. That was so thoughtful that I didn't have the heart to replace it with a collage.

Recently I caved. I'd found the envelopes from our two trips to Italy last year. Away went my lovely photo of Prague. Upside down on the glass, I began arranging Milanese restaurant cards, postcards and ticket stubs from Florentine museums, a Venetian street map and vaporetto passes, and anything else that was colorful and charming. We're both very happy with the result. It brings back lots of wonderful memories.

Product Plug: Burt's Bees Cuticle Cream

It strongly resembles furniture wax, but my sample-size tin of Burt's Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Creme smoothed my rough, ragged heels, which had been a disaster for years. I decided to experiment because of its thick, waxy texture; I can apply it straight from the container, without getting sticky hands. It works during the day as I wander around in boots, oblivious to its gooey magic. (I'm usually too sleepy, lazy, or forgetful to deal with skincare at night.)

Dramatic improvement appeared after about two weeks of lackadaisical application. My feet will look nice in sandals this summer. So to hell with all those foot creams and "intensive care" moisturizers that never did a thing. (That includes Body Shop Peppermint Foot Cream and Philsophy Sole Survivor — great name, worthless product). 

I may eventually get around to using this on my hands.

Today's Best Job Posting on Craigslist Boston

Let's hear it for Lexington Tutoring, an organization that understands what guitar students really want from their instructor:

• A guitar teacher with solid credentials and references located IN Metro South, Metro West or Metro North who is sufficiently adept with Microsoft Office to follow our record-keeping procedures and can commit to checking and responding to email from us before 9 AM and at least a few times later in the day. We are interested ONLY in acquiring a guitar teacher who can also provide knowledgeable, meaningful support in algebra, geometry, biology and history.

I suspect there's a very specific tutoring ruse in the works. The plan probably goes something like this: A pair of worried Lexington parents will finally agree to launch their academically challenged kid's rock-star future with lessons from a very special guitar teacher... but the new teacher will inform the kid that he can't possibly understand chords without a solid grounding in linear equalities, polyhedrons, mitosis, and the Peloponnesian War. (And in my opinion, you'll never become the next Eric Clapton without a practical knowledge of chemical reactions.)

To me, the strangest thing about this job description isn't its academic requirements. I took years of guitar lessons as a teen (after mastering the necessary math, history, and bio skills). And I live near Berklee, so I'm always seeing guitar teachers and students roaming around — and it's obvious that they're all intent on solving quadratic equations in their heads. But I simply can't believe there's a guitar teacher anywhere who would be capable of checking anything before 9 am.

Party on, Wayne.

Proustian Peanut Butter

Like many kids in the '60s and '70s, I lived on peanut butter sandwiches and Ritz crackers with peanut butter. There were three national brands: Peter Pan, Jif, and Skippy. (There were store brands, too, but my mother was skeptical.) For much of that time, the only option was creamy; crunchy came along later.

My mother's brand was Skippy. But I was a curious kid and wanted to see if we were missing anything, so we tried the others. They were horrible and I never forgot. Jif was sugary sweet and gritty. Peter Pan tasted strongly of peanuts but you could hardly get it to spread without tearing the bread. They were wrong.

"Choosy Mothers Choose Jif" was the first slogan to prove to me that advertisers lie. Learning at a tender age that the ad business was an evil conspiracy had a huge impact on my life. I became immune even to toy ads, and I remain healthily cynical about product claims to this day. (It didn't stop me from working in an ad agency, fresh from college, however. I lasted nine months.) I may owe a lot to Jif, but their peanut butter stinks.

During my hippie-granola, sprout-growing teen years, we tried Smucker's new "natural" peanut butter; I remember our startled disappointment. Who knew that a simple food like peanut butter could taste that lousy and look that gross? To me, any peanut butter without sugar and salt tastes like pulverized cardboard pellets mixed with oil. You'd have to be crazy to really, truly, in your heart-of-hearts prefer it to Skippy.

We recently switched from Skippy Reduced Fat to their Natural Creamy — and I discovered a powerful madeleine. It has the old-fashioned, non-hydrogenated, corn-syrup-free peanut butter flavor of my school years. Every time I taste it, long-lost memories return to me. During one sandwich, I suddenly recalled my ugly 4th-grade desk, before my school had a lunch room. Another sandwich had me visualizing a forgotten, once-loved lunchbox, a psychedlic-swirled, black-and-white oval model with a zipper, which was the last one I had before we switched to paper bags. My Peanuts thermos, always filled with chocolate milk, came floating into my brain unannounced the other day. And I remembered that before my mom upgraded to sandwich bags, she used cleverly folded waxed paper.

A piece of ratty, red-checked oilcloth surfaced in my memory today. I'm not even sure what it was for — maybe my 1st-grade placemat? I can now vividly recall the smell of the classrooms where we ate, not a memory I ever hoped to keep. More happily, I can recall long-lost details of the TastyCakes (and later, the Dolly Madison Goo Goos, Razzies, and Zingers) that always followed the sandwich.

If your mother had taste and made you into a Skippy eater, try their Natural Creamy. It's nothing but peanuts, sugar, salt, and palm oil. Yes, three out of four of its ingredients aren't "healthy" and it's got some saturated fat. But as we know, "healthy" peanut butter tastes like animal feed. This tastes like childhood.

Looking After Mom

The Proper Bostonian hasn't run out of things to say, she's been busy.

The PB's 80-year-old mother-in-law, a retired professor who is physically robust but has a few psychiatric problems, fell asleep at the wheel and smashed into a tree last Friday night when she was on her way home from the opera. We got the dreaded midnight phone call from the local police and raced to the ER. 

Her car was totaled, both airbags inflated, and she broke some ribs and bruised her lungs. She (and we) spent several days in Beth Israel's trauma unit. Tiny old ladies usually get serious facial and upper-chest injuries from airbags, but she was lucky. (She probably had her chin on her chest, sleeping, so the airbag hit the top of her head, not her nose.) The accident hardly upset her. She raved about Cavalleria Rusticana and wondered about the price of new cars while she was still on the stretcher in the ER. She did say she might rethink driving home late at night, which was a remarkable admission for her.

She hadn't been feeling sleepy before the accident, she said. If true, that would be unusual. She is generally terribly sleep-deprived and falls asleep everywhere: at the ballet, drinking a cup of tea, talking to a friend over dinner, opening Christmas presents. We suspect this is because she stopped going to bed at night years ago. Her bed is covered with clothing, papers, and books. She believes she is too busy to waste several hours nightly on sleep. So she stays up until 4 or 5 am hunting for some lost piece of paper or doing e-mail. She'll fall asleep in her chair for a couple of hours and when she wakes up another frantic, exhausting day begins. This has been going on for about a decade. She has special tricks for staying awake on the road: she hits her left leg repeatedly with her fist, for example.

Her family and friends are alarmed and worried by all of this, of course. She's an intelligent, attractive, cultured, chatty, energetic woman. (At least when she's rested.) We hoped that her retirement two years ago would give her time for travel, tennis, gourmet cooking, and enjoying life. Far from it. And as it turns out, there is little we can do. In recent years we've alerted her doctor; taken her to a neurologist, social workers, and several psychiatrists; and she's had a neuropsychological evaluation. Her diagnoses include low-grade mania, bipolar disorder, ADD, OCD, dementia, depression, and personality disorders. But none of it matters, because she refuses to take medication ("No DRUGS!" she says). She also refuses help from social service agencies who offer services like housecleaning and counseling. She's not mentally incompetent, so we can't take control. And we're not inclined to try to force pills down her throat even if they'd help her.

She's also a hoarder, mainly of paper. Her house is a safety and fire hazard. Most of her energy is taken up with finding lost items and dealing with a dumpster's worth of recycling; it's partly why she doesn't sleep. Papers — mostly scrap — are piled on every surface and ankle- to knee-deep all over the floors of her three-story house. Doorways and whole rooms are blocked, stairways are piled, and one often can't sit or put anything down anywhere. The kitchen counters are piled high, and papers drift near the stove burners as well as the space heaters she uses in many rooms. She hires college students to help her "file" and "organize," and all of them are extraordinarily patient and understanding, but they can't do more than try to clear a path or two, and shuffle papers from one spot to another. Mostly they keep her company, which is great; she's often lonely in that big, horrible house.

The house is dangerous, dirty, and depressing. My mother-in-law also seems to think that a refrigerator can preserve food forever. Last year, I spent an evening cleaning out parts of her fridge, and filled three trash bags before I was caught. I found items from 1993, a bulging container of half-and-half from 2002, rotting meat, erupting tomatoes, raw clams from 2006, and what appeared to be an exploded raspberry pie from long ago. (Singing folk songs from my hippie days, with lyrics I struggled to remember, kept me from throwing up. It's a useful trick if you ever face a similar task.)

She realizes her house is a mess, but she won't allow anyone to clean it up or make it safer because to her, every piece of paper, even the junk mail and blank sheets covered with footprints, are valuable. I've read everything I can find on the subject of hoarding (Buried in Treasures, among them), talked with experts (Gail Stecketee and her staff at BU), seen the Oprah segments on hoarders, met with social workers. It's common knowledge that emptying a hoarder's house causes the hoarder to go ballistic — and then get really busy filling it up again. Social workers say this house isn't bad enough to be condemned or forcibly emptied, so we are supposed to wait for her to have a serious fall or a fire. What?

Same story with driving. Apparently she'd have to hit a van full of children before they'll take away her license. She's been a menace on the road for years and has had plenty of minor, unreported accidents while dozing off or speeding in the dark. So she has a clean record and the police say it will be hard to persuade the Registry to revoke her license. Slamming headlong into a tree at 25 mph isn't sufficient. But today, as we were dealing with her car, it occurred to me to get a copy of her repair records. It revealed a long string of ruined wheels and tires, body work, and broken rearview windows. We gave it to the police and they'll pass it on to the Registry. So there's a ray of hope that we can at least get her off the road before there's another accident. But that means she'll probably need to leave her beloved home, to move somewhere closer to public transportation. Everyone tells us to find her a place where she can be looked after and take buses to tennis, shopping, Widener Library, and all her cultural events. But so far, we have no idea where this place is, or how long she could afford to live there, thanks to this rotten recession/depression. And it doesn't matter because she refuses to leave her house anyway.

So much plotting and scheming behind her back, discussing her personal problems with police, doctors, the Board of Health, and car repairmen — everyone except her — is taking a toll. Sure, we're trying to protect her (and others) and improve the quality of her life. But we feel terrible because we're taking away her independence and the lifestyle she loves. We're about to become The Enemy. It's unbearably sad. I feel we need to mourn, or mark, these upcoming losses in some ritual way, but I don't know how, except for periodic tears.

We know we're hardly the only people dealing with sad situations surrounding elderly parents. As we make calls and seek help, everyone over 40 has a similar story. It's reached epidemic proportions in my mother-in-law's classy suburb. This is fortunate for us because there's a team of experts at the Board of Health and the Council on Aging, along with exceptionally sensitive police and firemen, who have experience with hoarders and aging drivers,. They believe they'll be able to help us. I hope so. We're waiting to hear what they suggest this time around, which will involve putting the blame on the police for the license and on the Board of Health (if they can figure out how to legally clean up the house). These ploys are intended to help preserve our relationship with her. 

Who knew that dealing with parents would turn out to be even more fraught and deceptive than dealing with children? I'll keep you posted.

My Year of Upheaval

Most of the PB's life has been pleasant, quiet, and relatively happy, with few serious problems, tragedies, crimes, romantic struggles, serious illnesses, or accidents. Trouble waits to gang up on her every seven years, during one of her Years of Upheaval — and this is one of them. These aren't calendar years; they begin on her birthday, in late August. That's when deaths, divorces, layoffs, lawsuits, and other mayhem tend to occur.

The PB's previous Year of Upheaval (2001–2002) was memorable. It began with career troubles, as the dot-com where she was deliciously overpaid as a copywriter steadily went under. September 11 occurred three weeks into that Year, with all its ensuing fear, grief, anger, and economic chaos. All was dark and depressing that autumn and winter. (She knew her problems were minor compared to others. But still.) By February, her company had folded and she was collecting her very first unemployment checks. That month, she also learned that her favorite cousin and her best guy friend from college both had cancer. Her mother was hospitalized. March was spent worrying and spelling her sister in the hospital, 350 miles from home. In April, her mother died. The PB was essentially a basket case for the rest of that Year. Shortly before it ended, though, she developed the first symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, an appropriate souvenir. And landed what turned out to be her Scariest Freelance Client Ever.

The PB began her current Year of Upheaval with wary trepidation. She has spent her last 8 or 9 birthdays on vacation at the same inn in Maine. On her birthday this year, she predicted at breakfast that trouble was coming and was teased for being pessimistic. She wasn't very surprised when, later that day, her friend the innkeeper broke his leg in an isolated spot at the lake, crawled back to his car, and drove himself to two different clinics, both closed. The following afternoon, her husband suddenly fell asleep at the wheel and headed towards some trees. The PB was just alert enough herself to yell and wake him. 

By Day 3, the PB was a wreck. Her husband slipped down some wet steps by the pool, sat down to catch his breath, and lost consciousness in the most alarming way, snoring loudly with his eyes open and rolling around. Until he came to, those were the worst moments of the PB's life. (All five paramedics thought it was a seizure, so the PB felt justified.) Her husband recovered in a couple of hours; it took her nearly a week. ("You weren't there to see yourself!" she kept telling him.)

Since then, the PB has been unemployed and largely without prospects or writing gigs. In September, her home began its own Year of Upheaval. It began when 37 tons of demo wreckage was carted out of the formerly Victorian condo below hers. Since then, she's suffered through seven months of construction, with noise awkening her at 7 am every weekday. Most of the PB's walls and ceilings have big new cracks; her custom, cherry-paneled bathroom is quite out of kilter; her doors no longer open or close properly; and her entire apartment —even inside kitchen cabinets and built-in drawers — is coated in dust, no matter how often she she cleans. The construction has thoroughly wrecked the lobby, which will be renovated at the new owner's expense and to his own taste, no doubt destroying its Victorian charm. Even the doorbells have been broken since September.

It remains to be seen whether this owner will follow through on his promise to fix the damage before the construction team departs. He has the lordly, condescensing attitude of the very newly rich. He insists on paying for various, high-priced improvements that he craves and no one else wants. After he gets them ($8,000 hot water heater, $10,000 intercom system), he realizes that his neighbors will benefit from them, too. So he decides that they should pay for their share after the fact, and/or express their gratitude for his generosity. 

The PB finds this irritating. His project has been torturing her daily for months, with dirt, noise, allergy attacks from building materials, lack of heat for extended periods, and other disruptions (in addition to the damage to her home). She's just not feeling grateful, especially when he insists that she bear all this quietly, anticipating her ultimate reward — the honor of having him be her neighbor in his fab new condo. 

A week ago, the PB's mother-in-law totaled her car (see previous post). She's going to be fine, but it's still a crisis. She is going to lose her license (we hope), which means she'll probably have to move from her dangerously cluttered firetrap of a house. She doesn't want any of this, naturally, so things may get ugly. The PB will do anything to get her off the road and happily ensconced somewhere safe — even if it means that the PB and her husband let her try out their own little condo for awhile, while they rent elsewhere. (The PB also can't imagine a better gift to her neighbors than a chatty hoarder who blasts opera CDs and multiple TVs 24/7.)

The PB is also teetering on the edge of two potential lawsuits, with former building owners and a former employer. Aside from biopsies, here's nothing more anxiety-provoking to the PB than paying lawyers and going to court. She can only continue hope this Year of Upheaval brings some good upheaval, too, in the form of employment. And that everyone she loves manages to stay healthy and away from trees and lakes. She can't wait for her next birthday.

Money-Saving Tips from Morningstar

Now that the stock market has plunged to 1997 levels, Morningstar, the company from whom I get financial info and where I do our mutual fund research, has decided to tell its customers how to save money. I guess most of us have little to invest these days, so M'star offers "101 Ways to Cut Expenses." Investing right now is probably extremely wise, financial advisers tell us — although burning money in your fireplace may seem like a slightly more profitable alternative.

There are a number of very good suggestions here, along with the usual "use the library" and "stay away from Starbucks" advice we're hearing from all quarters. I particularly liked:

11. Stop buying clothes that are "dry clean only." Learn to iron. (I recently figured out that I can wash wool and cashmere sweaters in my machine, which has a "hand wash" cycle. I won't try this with woolen pants, although I'm soo tempted.)

12. Don't renew subscriptions to publications you don't have time to read. (I save up stacks of New Yorkers for reading in the hot tub on vacation in Maine. I should rethink my whole magazine addiction.)

22. Play golf less often.... (No problem. I'll skip playing golf forever.)

30. Pay cash when possible—psychologically it's harder to spend cash than using credit cards, and you'll save on interest charges. (Even though I pay my credit card in full each month, the idea of paying for stuff in cash makes me feel mild panic. So I should probably try it. But I get cash back from using my credit card — nearly $180 last year.)

44. Raise the deductible on your homeowner's and car insurance policies. (Once you get through the bureaucracy, this can save a bundle. Smart idea. But you should probably use the savings to improve your coverage.... Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.)

50. Keep track of your cost basis on investments ot save money on taxes when you sell an investment. (This also strikes fear into my heart. I don't buy and sell many mutual funds, but even so, doing this would be a huge PAIN. But they're right. I still nurture a tiny hope that Fidelity is doing it for me. If they aren't they should be.)

63. Don't get divorced. (I'm all over this one.) 

64. Quit smoking. (But if you live longer, doesn't that ultimately end up costing you more money?)

91. Track your spending. If you write it all down, you'll probably spend less. And you'll know exactly where your money goes. (Painful as this one will be, tracking expenses is a sensible and illuminating practice. Even if it's just for a month, you can see how those purchases add up. But if you do it continuously, it starts to seem sad, compulsive and weird.)

I'd like to add one more item to this list:

102. Reconsider your Morningstar subscription.  I pay for an annual subscription so I save over their monthly plan. But I think it will be a long time before I need to buy, sell, or research funds. So, sorry, M'star, you've been great, but you've also inspired me to put a hold on paying you until the economy gets back to, say, 2004 levels.