More red flags than May Day in Moscow

The latest yahoo I have run into is the King of the Yahoos--you can't beat this story! He said he was an internal auditor for Shell Oil (and you know how I feel about oil companies--they're Satan's henchpeople, rapists of the environment, instigators of modern wars.) He was supposedly "in London" this week auditing the London office, and since London is 6 hours ahead of Chicago time, of course his e-mails and chats showed up at "odd hours." (Like, when his wife was asleep?) His photo showed a good-looking man with dark hair and a big smile. He said he was 6'2" and made over $150K (doesn't impress me, but I'm sure that was designed to impress a fair number of gullible women.) Oh, and tragically he lost his wife and three children in an auto accident in Arkansas two years ago! This is some guy with whom I e-mailed and chatted briefly, before I shut him down for the following reasons:

1. Couldn't write very well--certainly not at the level of someone who has a high-paying, sensitive job at a major corporation. His main form of communication was repeating "lol" or "yeah" over and over. That's a big red flag!
2. Said he also owned his own oil company which bought from wholesalers and sold to others, and he apparently bought from Shell--that's conflict of interest if you're an auditor, so I think that's bullshit.
3. Wanted to know when was the last time I had sex and how many men I'd been with but didn't seem to want to know anything else about me. That's just plain icky! So I decided to change the subject and asked him about his parents. See #4.
4. When I asked him if his parents were still around, said he grew up in an orphanage...
5. When I pointed out that he sounded like a character in a book and that I didn't believe him about #4, and what else has he done? Train elephants? Played on the 1980 Miracle hockey team? He shut down and I haven't heard from him since. Which is fine with me. I deleted him from my contact lists and from my search results.
6. Couldn't Google him because he had a really common name, but apparently doesn't show up in anything related to Shell Oil either. Hint: if you want to mess with a librarian, be prepared for the fact that we will thoroughly research you...
7. I think his photo is just some random male catalog model he scanned in, some good-looking dark haired guy in a black shirt. I won't be surprised to see "him" in the next Kohl's flyer I get in the mail. Still, whoever he is, he's a good-looking guy. ;-)
8. If you're supposedly conducting something as sensitive as an internal audit for Shell, how can you be e-mailing and chatting with strangers you've met online? Wouldn't you be concentrating on your work and unable to have access to anything that might be an outside influence? Hellooooo?

That's a lot of red flags and bullshit, doncha think?

Tapas, the little dishes of Spain

Last night my Entire Family, meaning not just me and my parents, but additionally my sister and her husband, went out for dinner. We went to Emilio's Tapas Bar in Hillside. My sister and brother-in-law are in town this week--they live in Texas in a small town named Seguin, home of the World's Second Largest Cement Depiction of a Pecan. Another town nearby built a bigger cement pecan, a huge blow to Seguin's civic pride.

But I digress...going out to dinner with my parents is usually an exercise in saintly patience, as I grit my teeth through all sorts of circular conversations with my mother while my dad sits and munches things he shouldn't have because of the Heart Attack Two Years Ago. Therefore, it was such a pleasant surprise to actually sit down with everyone and have a wonderful time at a restaurant! Unheard of!

Tapas are the little dishes of Spain, as the menu helpfully described. Back in the old days in the old country, one enjoyed a glass of manzanilla, Spain's famous sherry. But one wouldn't want flies in one's manzanilla (not italicized this time because you're familiar with the word now...) so a little plate would guard the sherry. Some brilliant Spaniard decided, "Why you put plate on glass to stop flies if plate could have little food on it?" And thus tapas was born!

We had the chickpea puree with breadstick slivers, hot goat cheese in tomato sauce, dates wrapped in bacon, a mini beef tenderloin with roasted veggies, salmon crepe, potato salad made with aioli (the famous Spanish garlic mayonnaise, and for which Spain should win some sort of Nobel Prize, something...) grilled portobello mushrooms with manchego cheese, and all sorts of other little delights. It was fun to pass the little plates around and sample everything, and everyone had a Good Time, even my mother, who didn't complain about a single food item as being Too Flavorful (though it was, ironically...Mom doesn't usually like Flavors in her food.) Dad, who didnt' say much as usual, enthusiastically declared at the end of the evening, "That was fun." The biggest honor was when Mom and Dad said they would go back again, an honor usually reserved for family restaurants. So a good time was had by all!

Remember Mold-O-Rama?

Remember those wacky waxy animals you could watch being made in a space-age machine with a bubble glass top at the Brookfield Zoo? Turns out those machines are still around! I was beside myself when I went to the zoo yesterday with a friend and her two little girls and discovered that Mold-O-Rama is still in existence! A link to my childhood is preserved, and as long as Mold-O-Rama is there, I am a child at heart.

The process that creates those animals is injection molding (which I remember doing in 7th grade Industrial Arts to a less-amazing effect, though my mom still pretends to this day that she adores the napkin holder I made.) You watch the machine's molds close, and then the mold splits, and you see your blue dolphin or orange lion or white polar bear appear, and then the best part: this spatula appears to slide your mold off of the machine and into the receptacle, where you lift the little door and CAUTION! WAX MAY BE HOT! which indeed it is, but you scoop out your animal while risking third-degree burns anyway, because you're so excited to get your little dolphin into your waiting hands!

Brookfield Zoo has changed since the last time I've been there, which has to be over 20 years now. It's all Pottery Barn decorated--the Australian wombat had a tasteful terra cotta pot tipped on its side in his habitat, for example. There's all sorts of interactive crap for kids, too. Heaven forbid you should look at a real Mexican Grey Wolf when you can scoot a little metal wolf on a grooved table which flashes digitized facts as the wolf goes by so you can learn all about its habits, or you know what, let's just scoot the little metal wolf around on the table and skip that pesky, time-wasting learning part! It's funny--nobody really wants to experience things through their little naked eyes; let's look through a giraffe-shaped periscope at the giraffes, or pull down a little flap to spot a leopard instead!

My favorite animals are the Big Cats, of course, distant cousins to my adored Oskee. It was eerie to see the Big Cats doing things my Little Cat does: a snow leopard was licking a paw, the lion was bobbing his head up and down as he napped, and the tiger was pawing at the walls, bored out of his mind. Oskee does all of those things.

It was a gorgeous day outside and I thoroughly enjoyed strolling around the zoo. The world is filled with amazing creatures, whether you look at them straight on or through a little digitized display unit that kids bang around on. ;-)

Serving suggestions

On my bag of tortilla chips: Dip ideas--bean dip, sour cream, or your favorite salsa. Just dip & eat.
My question is: Has our collective IQ sunk so low that we can't figure out how to chip-n-dip? Say it isn't so, baby...

Koi meets girl

Did you know there are quite a few koi in the Elgin area? Koi is the expensive version of carp you actually want to keep alive, because they swim around in your backyard pond and help you show off for the neighbors. I was taken aback at how many people have ponds in their backyards! Today I went on the annual garden walk, traipsing through nicely-manicured lawns in search of unique and interesting ideas for my garden. What I noticed were koi. One koi, a large white one with orange spots, swam up to the edge of the pond where I was standing and stared at me for a few seconds.

Aside from the koi, I wasn't really overwhelmed by the gardens I saw, except for one that had been on the garden walk a couple of years ago. I was impressed with that one then, as well as today. It's a huge yard with lots of garden beds, and it is a riot of color! The front has purple and pink and red, created by delphinium and clematis and roses and daisies and poppies, and the shadier back has gorgeous hosta and tall trees. There's even a Japanese garden, with the raked sand, connected to the deck in the back. It's amazing, it really is!

The rest of the gardens were ok. A couple were too eatsy-neatsy for my taste. There's not a lot in bloom this time of year, which was a disadvantage. I didn't see anything new and outstanding, as mentioned before, but the old favorites such as coreopsis and hosta were doing well. Still, for the most part, people obviously worked hard at their gardens and presented lovely spots of suburban outdoorsiness. It's not like my yard is garden walk-worthy, so I do admire the efforts of others. My garden is a likely candidate for the "Gardens of Shame" walk, if there is such a thing.

Online dating profiles deconstructed

In the emotionally-debilitating exercise known as online dating, various stock phrases and cliches come up frequently. I'm not talking about the "loves long walks on the beach" kind of cliche (and why can't I insert an accent over the e? I would love to know...so if anyone out there is well-versed in the subtle art of diacriticals, show me how!) These are the phrases that make me want to tear my hair out, if not my heart:

1. Looking for a woman who "takes pride in her appearance," "takes care of herself," "likes to work out as much as I do," means "I want someone thin! Fatties need not apply." Everybody checks off "slim/slender/athletic/fit" as their Ideal Woman. Isn't that nice. Never mind that the guy is paunchy, beer-bellied, wide-hipped, puffy, or doughy himself. Y'all want "slim, sexy, vivacious!" What the hell does "vivacious" mean anyway? Someone who gushes "Awesome!!!" at everything the guy says? See also #4.
2. "Isn't into drama"--in other words, shut up about everything.
3. 5'10" is the new 5'6". 5'8" is the new 5'3". Basically most men are over-reporting their height by at least 4 inches (do we get those extra inches anywhere else?) So why are men getting all snarly about women being heavier than they say they are? I can always lose the extra weight, but you're not going to sprout up another 5 inches at the age of 42, buddy!
4. "My ideal woman would have a Great Sense of Humor!" Oh, this one does make me laugh! That means, "You should laugh at MY stupid jokes and gaze adoringly at me while I attempt to crack wise." I'm beginning to think a lot of men out there don't really want a woman with a sense of humor. That would scare them shitless.
5. "Fun-loving yet responsible." I think that means, not so fun and not so responsible.
6. Don't say you own your own home when said home is under foreclosure. Likewise, don't tell everyone you're a college graduate when you dropped out of Harper College. (And as my friend Terry pointed out, you don't drop out of community college; you just stop going.)

I could go on and on. To be honest, I'm tired of this blog entry. It's a waste of time to whine about online dating. I'm beginning to not care. Not care at all. File under W for Whatever!

Cherman enchineerink

The other day I bought two knives I've had my eye on for quite some time: the vegetable paring knife and small serrated knife by Wuesthof, which makes some of the best knives in the world. Wuesthof is located in the bucolic burg of Solingen, Germany. Well, maybe it's not bucolic--it has a steel mill--but I like to picture it as bucolic. Bucolic with great belches of toxic smoke. But I digress....

I am very fond of Wuesthof knives and I'm collecting them. For the last couple of years my sister has given me Williams&Sonoma gift cards so I can go buy knives. I have the chef's knife already. The knives are very sharp, but the best part is the balance--how the blade rocks back and forth as you speedily chop things. You will chop like a professional chef if you have a good knife! And I like my German engineering, no doubt about it! These knives are the kitchen tool equivalent of Porsche, BMW, Audi, and Mercedes.

So what do I do using my new vegetable paring knive for the first time? I nearly slice the tip of my finger off! Blood started billowing out, all over my half-chopped onion! It was like a scene from a slasher movie--I think I know how to do some low-budget special FX now...

I can't figure out how to insert umlauts either...Wusthof technically should have a u with an umlaut over it, and I've been faking it by adding an e after the u, i.e. Wuesthof. For those of you who do not know what umlauts are, they are those two little dots on top of certain vowels in Motley Crue, Haagen Dazs, etc. They add that European flare to made-up words. I'm not sure why the Germans like them, but they are kind of cool, umlauts are!

My new toy

Oooh, it's so pretty! My Garmin Nuvi 260 GPS! Now I can be sure that I am Officially Lost, because the GPS tells me so. I think it is amazing, and almost like Latin American magic realism, that the GPS knows exactly where I am now and where I am going. (Considering I don't know where I am and where I'm going, both literally and metaphorically speaking...) On the downside, it's more Soviet-style to have a satellite following you that knows exactly where you are and where you are going...

The GPS is very easy to use. The Garmin has a snotty voice telling you when to turn and intones the names of the streets. When you veer off the prescribed course, the Voice sighs (inaudibly, but you know she's sighing) and mutters, "Recalculating...recalculating..." The Voice doesn't suffer fools gladly, but suffer she must. It works with a touch screen and the menus are easy to use. The maps are colorful and bright and so pretty! Did I mention the Garmin Nuvi 260 is pretty? It really is! Pretty! Shiny! My new toy!

del.icio.us and filling

Aside from a spell of trouble trying to figure out where the dots go in "del.icio.us" (del.ic.ious.? de.lic.io.ous? Whatever...) I managed to post a bookmark to this site. If you want to gather up bookmarks on a specific topic and then also allow yourself the ability to search certain topics using tags, this is a cool little site.

But my main concern with a lot of Web 2.0 is, there's just too much out there. I'm kind of web anti-social, when it comes down to it. I don't want to know what other people are doing. I do my own thing, I communicate with friends that I know in the Real World, and that's that. I don't feel the need to reach out in cyberspace. It's very difficult for me to feign interest in web 2.0. Blogging is interesting, but I blog for myself and I don't expect anyone else to care, nor do I care about anyone else's blog. I'm not keen on sharing photographs on flickr--and how many photos of my cat do you really want to see? Seriously, you don't want me flickring.... ;-) Honestly, I am not going to be using del.icio.us very much. I'm not all that interested in what other people bookmark and how they describe their sites. I can do my own searches, thank you very much. For a library though, we can set up various subject areas and list helpful sites--that would be a perfectly fine way of making del.icio.us work for us.

How ironic that del.icio.us is hard to type...it's not really a convenient site to look up...you almost have to bookmark it into your Favorites the "old-fashioned way" first!

Author Elizabeth Berg charms, frustrates

I could've sat and listened to her for three hours," said my friend after author Elizabeth Berg wowed the audience at the 'brary last night. Indeed, Elizabeth Berg was her usual charming and witty self, bringing both tears of laughter and that self-aware kind of pain, but mostly laughter, to our eyes. About 130 die-hard Berg fans listened with rapt attention to her wryly romantic story of 50- something Agnes pursuing an old "bad boy" flame while her steadfast "boring" husband Bill waits to take her out to dinner. The story, "Returns & Exchanges," is featured in her excellent new book, The Day I Ate Everything I Wanted. Berg read practically every last sentence of that story, except for the part right before the end when the old boyfriend shows up!!!! AAAAARGH!!!!! We were all left hanging, twisting in the wind of frustration! I gotta go buy the book! I gotta go check it out at the 'brary! That's how those authors get you... ;-)

The secret to Berg's appeal and success as a writer is her ability to capture emotions in words. Think of the vast array of human emotions, and how most of them are vague and indescribable. But Berg nails them with uncanny specificity. You read her novels and you think she's ripped a page out of your diary or overheard a conversation you had with a close friend or witnessed an argument with your mother. I could gush on, but perhaps you all would like to search our catalog for her books and check them out! ;-)

Berg resonated with her audience. I have to tell you, we are all of a type. Berg, who has lived in the Chicago area the past 8 years but has lived on both coasts, remarked that Midwesterners are the best kind of people. That's what she likes best about Chicago--the people. (And the hotdogs with the works!) Her audience was primarily women "of a certain age," though I think there were 2 or 3 Token Males in the audience (who looked like they were enjoying themselves, too.) Everyone wore sensible shoes--either Clarks or Bjorns, we noted. We were all there in our capris and cardigans, clutching our signed books and bonding with our book group friends. It was all much of a muchness. ;-)

When a reader asked Elizabeth Berg how she got started in writing, Berg admitted she was "blissfully naive" and thought she would be successful right away, that it would be easier than selling Tupperware, and what did she know. She bought a batch of magazines she wanted to write for, and started submitting short pieces and articles. She did say she probably was more immediately successful than most people are. With the publication of her first book, Durable Goods, Berg made the leap into longer prose. Her last novel, Dream When You're Feeling Blue, was promoted last summer when she visited GBPL for the first time.

Oh, Elizabeth Berg now has a website and a blog! She was very excited to announce that she was so technically-advanced! You can visit her website at elizabeth-berg.net and sign up for her newsletter, which has some truly delicious memorable recipes in it. Berg's publicist Bill says he remembers the newsletters by which recipe was featured in it. So that's how memorable her recipes truly are...

If you've never read any of her books, you should! Especially if you like realistic, character-driven books with a substantial amount of observational humor. Or if that's what your life is like... Berg is a wonderful writer and her down-to-earth, unassuming manner makes you feel like she's one of your girlfriends.You can probably tell I'm a big fan...it was my pleasure and honor to introduce her at the beginning of the program, too. What a moment! I was really thrilled.

Ok, blah blah blah. Better get back to work now...