Author Archives: Pamela

Conspiracy Theories
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an offhand remark about toothpaste and received an anonymous comment about toothpaste conspiracies. Since I love conspiracy theories and hadn’t heard about this one I sat down and popped a few queries into my favorite search engine and was sadly disappointed.

I did see a lot of talk about how much sugar is added to major brand toothpastes and since this sounded odd to me I pulled up MajorBrandOfToothpaste.com to see what ingredients are in toothpaste. The site is ugly and giant and about four columns with line after line of informational links which turned out to be a giant exercise in clicking. There was nothing about ingredients. The search tool sucked.

At first I thought maybe it was a trade secret but aren’t the ingredients on the box when you buy it?

During the course of this adventure in time-wasting a box popped up asking if I’d be interested in participating in a survey. “Of course,” I said because I was anxious for the opportunity to tell someone how worthless I thought this website was.

Thirty-seven questions. (37!) For toothpaste. And you couldn’t skip any questions. And some of the questions were like, “MajorBrandofToothpaste.com Has the Most Up-to-date Information on Oral Care” and there was no box to answer, “How the Hell Should I Know?”

Since my question wasn’t answered I decided to try CompetitorBrandofToothpaste.Com and they also had an ugly website with things I had to wait to load, a sucky search tool, couldn’t answer my question AND a survey. The first page said 1 of 12 so I skipped it.

Yesterday after dinner Bob said he wanted to show me something but he didn’t want to tell me what it was because it would be a cool surprise. And we would have to get in the car and drive somewhere.

We drove over to the college and saw this. He was right.

Today was so productive I even cleaned my oven. I would take pictures but I didn’t do such a great job. It looks a lot better but it’s not museum ready.

I know I said I’d already taken pictures of all the tulips but then I noticed these out back. I don’t normally buy such weird looking flowers and these, while a pretty color, look like they fell into the garbage disposal. I don’t know what to think.

This has been a super busy, but not terrible, week. But now I have about 10 trillion things to catch up on and I’ve made a list which means that there is little doubt tomorrow will be a bitter disappointment. Oh, and I have 1,150 words to do tonight to make my monthly goal.

I’d really like to finish this draft of a story I’m working on. I need to exercise. I put on my jeans earlier this week and could barely zip them. Yikes. I’ve almost completely ignored cooking lately so I’d like to make something decent to eat. But also healthy due to the shrinking jeans problem. I’ve got more yard things to get going. I started reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union which I keep referring to as The Yiddish Policeman’s Ball. I like it so far and can’t wait to dig in. Too many things. And a new Asimov’s arrived which means I’m now three issues behind.

We’ll see how I do.

I don’t know how they sleep at night with all those dandelions in the yard.

It took until late Saturday afternoon for my digestion to return to normal. Too much rich dairy. Sometimes I miss the iron-clad innards of my youth.

My last comment about motel doom: there was one point during the middle of the whole thing where I looked at Bob and said, “You know this is going to be really funny later.”

Every time we were in the room together yesterday we would start cracking up.

In case you’re wondering, the worst hotel room we’ve ever been in was in Frankfurt which was another time we didn’t plan for a room in advance and just wung it. I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned.

The story at the link doesn’t do it justice. The room wasn’t ready when we arrived so we had to leave our luggage and come back after dinner. When we returned they took us through some sort of storage yard to this horrible dinky room which was probably a converted garage or shed. It was dark and raining sideways so we didn’t want to leave. I don’t remember it being stinky. The TV was broken and the bed was like two pieces of plywood set up on bricks (slight exaggeration). We shared the wall with some sort of belly dancing place so it was noisy. There was a table with a glass top and if you touched it, it slid off.

Bob went to take a shower and it was one of those handheld showerhead dealies that you can either hold or hook to the wall. Bob got the water going and then shimmied into the tiny shower stall and when he put the showerhead up the hook broke and the showerhead fell and since the room was so tiny it actually fell out the bathroom door and onto the glass tabletop which fell down and there was a spray of water in the middle of the room.

That actually was funny at the time. But only to me.

Update: here’s Bob’s review of Leonard Cohen.

One part of the Motel Doom story that I forgot to mention is that when we got home we clutched each other like we’d just survived a grenade attack.

I saw four bald eagles today. FOUR. One at Burnt Bridge Creek and three on the Willamette.

These are the last of the tulips in my yard that you haven’t seen before. My neighbor has some pretty orange ones. I keep saying I’m not going to buy any more bulbs but when I say that, I lie. Where’s the catalog?

Do you ever drive by some ancient, ridiculous-looking old car and think to yourself: at one point someone was really excited about that car. They got a loan and drove it off the lot all shiny and new. And showed it off to their friends.

I saw an ancient brown Celica with flapping plastic serving as the back window. When I was in high school I had a boyfriend with a brown Celica that was polished and waxed about three times a week. (He and his Dad were nuts when it came to car care.) It was hard to imagine that junker was once a pretty car.