Author: Bev

Our “overflow refrigerator, housed in the garage, is on the blink.  For years, it has tried to tell us that it doesn’t like the temperature extremes of that less than temperate space, freezing liquids in the winter and panting its way through the harsh summer heat in a pseudo-defrost.

The plight of the less-than-optimal functioning of that extra refrigerator is neither here nor there as to the focus of this piece.  Yet, when I pondered the existence of an extra appliance for storage, it got me to thinking about the contrast between wealth and want.

I wondered if this particular abundance, which I rather feel is not a rarity in this country, is usual to many Americans.  Then I mused that since the old children’s rhyme, held in my memory, Jack Sprat, originating in my ancestral home in Europe, is not peculiar to America, but to a dream of plenty, everywhere.

In the biblical book of Genesis, Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows and seven skinny cows, as the cyclical phenomenon of plenty versus famine.  It was a prophecy, predicting seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine, which counseled a sort of savings plan, involving storage during the good times, to waylay the potential for lack during the lean times.

We’ve all heard about the concept of “feast or famine,” if not lived it.  So, extra storage just seems a prudent thing to do, right?

Then comes along Luke, chapter twelve in the Bible, which warns against the tempting hoarding habit associated with the storage patterns of some people, otherwise known as “rich fools.”  The gist of this parable is that the accumulation of material things, indicated by building ever-bigger barns in which to store your stuff, is a foolish distortion of your values.  Instead, we should consider sharing our abundance and considering our mortality.

“Jack Sprat could eat no fat.  His wife could eat no lean.  And so betwixt them both, you see.  They licked the platter clean.”  This made me wonder about the connotations and evolution of the word’s fat, and lean.

I think that fat, in medieval times, was equated with wealth.  Flashing through my memory banks are images of king-like, jolly, Santa Claus impersonators, dressed in furry purple robes imbibing on an overflow of drink and gouging themselves with handfuls of big, fat drumsticks, while boisterously pontificating on some topic or another.

Then there are Raphael’s (Raffaello Santi’s) five-hundred-year-old images of fat little cherubs painted on repeat on many a castle ceiling.  Those chubby, extraordinarily white, nearly opaque, angels often direct our gaze to the dreamy heavens and indicate prosperity and plenty.

Skinny, in those times, meant poverty or lack.  There were no extra refrigerators for the people scraping by in the cold, dirty and dark streets of many a lightless city.  Think Tiny Tim in Scrooge.

Today’s understanding of fat and lean couldn’t be more contrary to those images of old.  Unless you’re plumping up your derriere with a goal toward the ultimate physique for twerking, plump is not the modern go-to concept for the display of wealth.  That’s reserved for the lean mean body-conscious and tan-skinned among us.

Fat in more contemporary times has been rendered by an excess of relatively cheap carb-loaded foods ingested by multitudes of working-class folks.  Meanwhile the rich and famous frequent restaurants featuring humongous white plates with two overly pampered shrimps in the lonely middle, atop a small pond of thick, colored paste, and decorated with a pseudo edible sprig of some herb or flower.  That’s dinner.

Many of us probably have known both fat and lean times.  It’s probably akin to the grandparently line that “I walked five miles in the snow to school,” that our early days, were lean times.  We struggled to make ends meet.  We lived on pasta from a box, and we got fat.

Today, fat is sadly and frequently equated with unattractiveness and laziness.  Unless you spell it “phat.”

Phat is a throwback term coined in the African American vernacular, used particularly in music and fashion.  It takes us right back to the chubby cherubs and fat kings of abundance, excellence, privilege and admiration.

So, whether you’re Jack Sprat or his wife, it’s fat and lean together, that enable you to rise to your best life.  Can you really appreciate the fat in life if you haven’t lived through a little bit of lean?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wake up and smell the coffee y’all.  Then, take some time to smell the roses.

Odor, fragrance, aroma; each elicit an emotion, sometimes a big emotion.  The word “odor,” itself connotes something repellent and negative, whereas the word, “fragrance,” makes you smile and want.

Smells are funny things, figuratively, but sometimes literally.  Are you of the age that you recall the image of the French cartoon skunk, Pepe Le Pew, from Looney Tunes?

When I was growing up, I vividly remember that my parents were away somewhere and we three girls were home, when a skunk got under our sun-porch and lit up the entire place with its defensive stink.  I recall some tomato juice and maybe one of the many dogs we had over the years.

Smells bring back memories.  What aromas trigger you?

For most people, food aromas are probably the most triggering.  If you smell it either you want it or you repulsively do not.  Cabbage, onions, garlic, and spoiled or rotted foods tend to elicit the negative in a sizeable number of people.

Bakeries nearly universally draw people into their perfumery.  Realtors traditionally suggested that sellers bake a batch of cookies before showing a house.  Why?  Because prospective buyers feel like “this could be our home.”  Nothing triggers wanting, more than the smell of freshly baked bread, pastry, pie, cake, cookies and more.

…Unless it’s perfume from its many sources.  Flowers are not only a delight to the sight, but many of them also either smell good or we think they do.  Whether certain flowers have a poignant smell or not, we instinctively go for the nose test.

“It smells like rain,” people say.  It’s surely not rain itself, but the reaction of rain on earth, dirt, or soil, that births that unmistakable smell of rain.  However, damp also has a not so pleasant smell, i.e. wet dog or wet cat, mildew and the “basement” smell.

The beach and the swimming pools chlorine smell is a distinct summer smell.  If you live rurally, freshly cut grass or hay gives most people a sort of boost of freshness, “ah-achoo” and gesundheit to you.

I’m thankful that all my senses are intact and fully operational.  There was that bout of COVID-caused phantosmia, where I frequently smelled non-existent meat, which has flown the coup by now.

If I were to lose my senses of taste, hearing, smell, sight, or touch, I would hope I would develop grace to adapt, but I’m not so sure.  I truly feel compassion toward people who live without the beauty of any one of their senses.  I’m sorry, folks.

Seals and Crofts 1972 song, “Summer Breeze,” confirms in a pleasant way, that smells are firmly linked with memories.  It could be said that we smell with our minds.  “Summer breeze makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”

What if I couldn’t smell jasmine, gardenia, honeysuckle, sweet peas, lavender or lilac?  It’s not ideal, but in a pinch, we could describe the smell, with another smell.  The candle industry has capitalized on our ability to describe a scent via simile.

When something is described as “like” something else, not something that stands entirely on its own, our language calls it a simile, a word that literally translates as “like.”  It is a fact that most of our smell words are linked to their source, i.e. “it smells like apple pie.”

Of course, our perceptions of aromas vary widely from individual to individual.  This is because we’ve had different experiences with the same scent, and the context in which we detect different odors is key to our response to that smell.

The sense of smell is a potent emotional trigger.  For example, to some of us, certain flower scents remind us of “funeral flowers,” and elicit a sort of generalized sadness or dread.  But to others, those same scents remind them of “bathroom spray,” and might just make them giggle.

On occasion, my husband’s coffee clearly smells like skunk.  I’m not kidding.  And he doesn’t even partake in civet coffee or cat poop coffee, made from the treasured exotic beans which pass through the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet and are collected from their feces!

Burn some coffee grounds people, it even scares away mosquitoes.  Just saying.

When smell is an odor, we try to get rid of it, thus the concept of DE-ODORANT, “odor eaters,” and highly commercial fragrance masks such as aerosol sprays, oils, perfume, candles, and such.  Why do you suppose that the smell of money is usually described as a stench?

Our perception of the smell of money as good or bad is probably about as varied among people as our perception of smell itself.  Good to you, may be bad to me, etc.

Take manure, for example.  The occasional manure smell is a part of our rural Pennsylvania aromascape.  It is lovingly spread atop many farm fields to enrich the soil and produce all that farm basket, farm-to-table food everybody loves.  I’ll wager a bet that even AOC, the “cow-hater,” has eaten some fancy “farm-to-table, organic” food, which wasn’t produced without some stench involved.

Christ himself has been described as an aroma.  And certain fragrances are said to be pleasing to God.  What’s your smell simile?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listen up all of you “hotter than a jalapeno’s armpit,” hotties out there, is it hot enough for ya?  In my opinion, it’s “hotter than blue blazes” and “forty dammits.”

I love the southern description of extremely hot conditions, “It’s so dang hot that I just saw a hound dog chasing a rabbit – and they were both walking.”  Can you picture it?

“I’m wilting,” I exclaimed in a slow drawn-out pant!  Or better yet, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, “I’m melt-ing.”   Are you “sweating bullets?”

You know there’s hot, and there’s freaking hot, as I’m freaking out that it’s so hot.  There’s “hot tin roof” hot, and so hot on our deck that our cat skims across it at lightning speed to avoid hurting his tender toe beans.  PSA, a rug has promptly been installed.

It’s hot “like an oven.”  If you believe in the existence of hell or not, it feels perhaps like as hot as….

We’re sizzling like bacon with a side of fried eggs cooked up on our car hood.  A quart of sunscreen is the only thing between us and becoming human pork rinds.

We’re having a hard time keeping our prayers focused between beseeching God to please stop the rain long enough for us to mow our overgrown green growth, and to give us grace to pay the upcoming air conditioning bill.  Solar power, or mower gas, pick your power, or your poison.  This summer it seems to be one or the other.

Yep, it’s that time of year.  Even here in the Northeast, we can expect temperatures to rise into the nineties at least a few days each summer.

However, each year we act like it’s a new development that it gets hot in June, July and August.  Nowadays we can blame it on global warming.  I’m not sure what they blamed it on back in the olden days, whenever that was, in the past.

Maybe they blamed the summer heat on the writers of the Farmer’s Almanac, with its fifty percent accuracy, which is a smidge better than our trusty neighborhood groundhog.  Many of us modern people, however, tend to put our trust for weather predictions in the weather app on our phones.

But it turns out that those apps can only be trusted generally, not literally.  So, I’ve learned to trust weather predictions, generally.  For example, “it’s gonna be really hot next week,” or “it’s probably going to rain at least a little bit every day for over a week,” suffice for my predictive understanding of the upcoming weather.

One would think that “hot, is hot.”  But apparently “hot” is not the same to everybody.  Generally, most people would agree that ninety-degree heat is “hot.”

However, even though most of us agree that the weather in the nineties is hot, “some like it hot.”  That’s the point on which we differ.  Paris Hilton, in the early 2000s, popularized the phrase, “that’s hot,” which she shared on the front of a t-shirt, while the back said, “and you’re not.”

Some of us, in summer, are prone to wear the t-shirt, saying on the front, “it’s too hot.”  I’m sure, however, as we walk away, a bunch of you summer-lovers guarantee that the back of our t-shirt says, “no, it’s not.”

Oh, my goodness, sweat surely evaporates from your body more quickly than it escapes mine.  Sweat likes to kick off its shoes and dwell on top of my arms, not to mention the God-forsaken nether-regions of the body which I will not mention.

And does the hot-loving population like to sweat?  Please explain what’s fun about a heat-headache?

When we lived in the Southwest, we experienced heat without the notable humidity which characterizes the heat in the East.  The temperatures in Pennsylvania and New Mexico during the time of our tenure between the two locales were nearly identical.  But what a difference the humidity made.  It was discernibly hot in New Mexico, but it wasn’t miserable like the same temperature offered in Pennsylvania.  Humidity makes a difference.

The word, “hot” has for several centuries referred not only to temperature, but to intensity, as in our current cute expression, “he’s coming in hot;” as well as passion and sexual attraction, e.g., “she’s hot.”  Paris Hilton may have enhanced the connotation of hot as something “cool,” trendy, and desirable such as Jessica Simpson’s “I don’t know what it is, but I want it” fame.

How can “hot,” be “cool?”  Both, I think, are relatives, dwelling squarely in the eye of the beholder.  Cool and hot are not the same for all of us.  Hot is personal and general, not literal nor universal.

Hot is one of those things that is left up in the air for interpretation.  We must agree to disagree as to what is hot and what is not.

It has been helpful to me over the years when exercising, to visualize my heart muscle strengthening with each step or movement.  Equally, every time I complete a jigsaw puzzle or hidden object, or matching game, I envision my brain sparking like an old-fashioned sparkler.

Although our brains are not made up of muscle tissue, it’s not amiss to think of the brain as improving its function from “exercising” it.  Like how our muscles grow with exercise, our minds grow healthier by learning new things and making new connections.  The big word associated with this process is “neuroplasticity.”

Just like we stretch our muscles before and after we use them strenuously, we stretch our minds when we’re challenged with new or difficult experiences or intellectual material.  A song lyric that expresses neuroplasticity from a favorite of mine by Brandon Lake, “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” is that “faith isn’t proven like gold until it’s been through the fire.”  We don’t grow mentally or emotionally until we’ve been challenged.

Challenges to our brains, while sometimes feeling overwhelming, just like that peak moment in brisk exercise, on the brink of feeling overcome, lead to a sharper mind, as the near breakdown at that moment in exercise, leads to a stronger body and greater resolve.   The 1979 Michael Jackson hit song, “don’t stop til you get enough” comes immediately to mind.

Keep stretching your mind.  It’s worth it.

Part of the fun in working a challenging word or number or object puzzle is finding patterns.  Pattern recognition is why we retrace our steps when trying to find our keys or that missing sock?  Not that the latter is a particularly fun puzzle.

You’re looking for a familiar pattern.  Almost everything we do involves recognizing a pattern.  We constantly try to replicate how we achieved success the last time; how did I find that document that I needed to complete that job?

In our jobs, in our hobbies, even in our relationships, we rely on finding patterns to thrive.  Our brains get a little bit of a thrill when we recognize a pattern.  “I know that!”

Drivers recognize road, street, and traffic patterns as well as buildings, parks, and other structures, to arrive at the best time to their destination.  Carpenters do math formulas and geometry in their heads or from pencil on wood, to achieve the physical outcome of a building project.

When we do the laundry, we’re working on “patternicity,” the fancy word for sorting objects or thoughts into patterns.  Sorting dry ingredients from wet ones and extra add-ons to a recipe, is patternicity.

Sometimes in our quest for life satisfaction and happiness we conclude that there is a certain meaning in patterns that we’ve observed when that pattern may just be random.  Our interpretations of patterns may become misleading life choices.

I think that most people want to find the cause behind every effect.  Thus, the nonsensical “everything has a reason” placation we tell ourselves.  Random is real too.

Sometimes finding patterns leads to formulating life strategies and conclusions about things that shouldn’t be understood as “guidance,” but rather thought-provoking one-off.  “I thought that meant…” isn’t definitive.

Equally important to our quality of life and our longevity are daily physical, spiritual, and mental exercise.  We’ve got to keep spiritually, mentally and physically active to thrive on this earth.  “Pattern play” might be a fun way to pump up your daily life and health while enjoying said life.

So, the next time someone accusatorially asks you, “what are you doing with your head in a book?”  You can answer “exercising… my brain.”  Or, if you get a sideways look when you get caught playing a game or completing a puzzle on your phone, you can retort, “what? I’m getting my brain exercise.”

I have a love-hate relationship with food.  Food is decidedly my frenemy.

A portmanteau, “frenemy” is the combination of two words, friend and enemy.  Yep, that’s me and food.

Now, this is an obvious problem.  Unlike other addict able substances such as alcohol or drugs, even pica, food is a necessity, and we must consume it to survive and thrive.

One just can’t stop eating if everything in you wants to eat too much.  All or nothing cannot be your eating plan.  This is regrettable for the over-eater.

I’ve often felt that I’d be cool with eating moderately if it were not for that dastardly thing called flavor.  It’s the taste of food that gets me every time.  I can’t get enough of certain flavors.

If the food doesn’t taste good, I easily push away the plate.  So, I’m not too far gone in that I don’t eat anything that doesn’t appeal to my taste buds, just to eat.

Okay, from here on in I want to advise you, the reader, to “do you.”  We all have different tastes, and, in this writing, I refer to my tastes which will undoubtedly make you occasionally cringe in disagreement.  So, “you do you.”

Some people are put out with certain food textures.  For example, creamy foods like mayonnaise or ice cream make certain folks want to hurl.

I’m somewhat divided on the creamy texture.  Don’t get mayo anywhere near me as an unadulterated condiment, e.g. on a sandwich.  That’s just flat out awful, in my opinion.   However, I don’t mind tuna or chicken or egg salad if it goes lightly on the mayo; and pasta or potato salads are okay, again if mayo is used sparingly.

Once many years ago at Ag Days in State College, I had the unexpected pleasure of partaking in the creamiest ice cream that I’d ever eaten before or since.   And I and my family went back to a beach-side gelato booth in Finale Ligure Italy for seconds of the surely smoothest strawberry gelato (gelato alla fregola) ever made.

That said, creamy textured food doesn’t generally feel satisfying to me.  I don’t feel full or finished with creamy textured food.  I guess something more substantial, with a heftier feeling in your mouth is required for the “I’m done” pronouncement.

Creamy cheeses don’t work for me either.  Brie and its compatriots are frankly icky.  I require dry cheese such as Asiago, Dubliner, or Parmesan and the like.  Even cream cheese, which I like in baked goods, can go too far when melted in a casserole, “bluck!”

Now, smoothness is a similar texture to creamy, but I associate smooth with luscious olive or avocado oil which I slather freely on any and every salad I make and, in every stir-fry, concocted in our kitchen.  Smooth as silk cake frosting, Greek yogurt, and pretty much anything chocolate are dreamy additions to the delicious smooth food category approved in our household.

Hot drinks are also smooth and potentially delectable.  I think most soups, if you exclude the popular chunky varieties, fit into a smooth and satisfying category of food.  I wonder if they are satisfying more because of the warmth, they exude than their smooth texture, though.

When smooth transitions to slimy you’ve lost me.  Okra, escargot (the fancy name for snails), and oysters are on my “no-go” list.  And probably mussel too, although they bridge the firm chewy category.

For the most part I’m good with chewy if it doesn’t go over the precipice of rubbery, e.g., squid or octopus or even some clams.   But for some reason I can take the chew of shrimp.  Why does seafood dominate this food category?

I like the ultimate chewy food, jerky.  There’s a store in the strip district of Pittsburgh, PA, that sells just jerky.  Oh yeah, mama.  One must have sturdy teeth to handle meat jerky.  But what a satisfying mouth experience it is to chew and savor the flavorful marinating juices and chew some more until the final swallow on just one piece of jerky.  That’s all it takes.

Why does the crunchy food category equate to snack food?  One is sort of hard pressed to satisfy a crunch craving without opening a bag of something kept in the pantry or snack cupboard.  The crunch of a carrot or apple isn’t the same as the crunch of a pretzel, a cracker, or any sort of chip.

My husband and I even prefer our protein cooked to a bit of a crisp if possible.  I think the Brits call chips, “crisps.”  If crispy is a food texture, I want it.

Other than texture, we all have our preferences for food flavors.  The principal flavors are sweet, savory, sour, bitter, salty and umami.

Yeah, I didn’t know what umami was either until a few years back when I watched a lot of food shows on television and learned a thing or two.  “Umami” is Japanese and literally means, “pleasant savory taste,” equating to something rich, brothy savory and satisfying in the mouth.  Umami is that element that clinches a meal.  It satisfies so that you don’t get up from the table needing something else.

Therefore, I think that umami is my favorite flavor profile.  There is nothing worse for an over-eater or flavor fan than to have eaten a meal that wasn’t satisfying.  Ones feels literally that you “wasted calories.”  Why bother?

I’m good with all the other flavors, probably apart from bitter.  I’m no food scientist and there are likely bitter bits included in food that my rudimentary palate doesn’t discern.  But when I do taste bitter, I’m unhappy so there’s that.

As to food color, muddy, moussey, brown isn’t a bad thing.  I like most brown foods and do not find them unappealing.  The low carb, multigrain surge in food fads has trained me to avoid white foods. Green is good but blue is just odd, for food, except the blueberry.  It’s cheerful to have a dash of red on your plate and black equates with burnt unless we’re talking about black beans which are yummy umami morsels.

So, there you have it.  We all have food likes and dislikes.  Food is everybody’s frenemy.  Just like human friends and enemies, food is a powerful catalyst for community, involvement, engagement and camaraderie.  Pick a food, any food, and Bon Appetit.

 

 

 

 

 

Admittedly, this title is a tad misleading.  However, it is apropos considering my blog is titled “deep thoughts on random stuff.”

So, “get a room” in this case is based on some thoughts a bit deeper emotionally than the usual meaning of begging someone to please cease their public displays of affection.  Rooms in dreams and in song lyrics are often more than just rooms in architecture or design.

Various rooms, as they appear in dreams, represent parts of the self, one’s personality or subconscious.  For example, a living room might allude to your public self, the bathroom is probably your secret self, and the bedroom, your private self.

I recently wrote a column entitled, “Lifelong Learning.”  As it turns out, that must be a theme circulating inside my head in that I dreamt about having a different kind of desk in every room in my house.

As dream theory would have it, I must then be emotionally hard at work on my various aspects of self, private, public, and secret.  Presumably the goal is achieving peace, contentment, satisfaction, even happiness in all those areas.

I’m recently preoccupied with the Pharrell song, “Happy.”  I’ve been stuck in rewind on the line, “happy…clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.”

You’re welcome.  Did I plant a song line in your repeat loop?  It’s kind of like that Cher line, “do you believe in love after love!”  Again, you’re welcome.

Back to “Happy,” I engaged a bit in revelry envisioning Pharrell’s room without a roof.  It was fun, and made me happy, if you will.

My room started out commensurate with the “It’s a small world,” attraction as it was at Disney World in the mid-70s when I first saw it as a young adult.  I remember looking up from a moving seat to a chock-full roofless room of mostly white, sparkly, magical stuff with the “small world” song stuck on repeat.

Walt Disney, innovator in animation said, “if you can dream it, you can do it.”  So, my desk in every room encourages me that my thinking cap is intact and operative in every area of my life.

What does your roofless room look like?  I imagine my neighbor’s roofless room of happiness closely resembles his museum-like “hunting” room.  I’ve never seen anything else like it.

But we don’t have to have an actual room in which to enter a happy place.  We need only our imagination.

I’ve always loved the thought that books can take you anywhere in the world, even to other worlds.  And one of my all-time favorite books is Anne of Green Gables, where heroine Anne Shirley uses her vivid imagination to “see what she can be.”

In 2012, tennis great, Billie Jean King said, “you have to see it to be it.”  It seems a bit corny, but it speaks of the power of vision.

Vision is such a gift.  If you can envision a room without a roof, if you can enter a happy place in your imagination, I believe it’s possible to be happy from your head to your toes, even if it’s only for a blessed moment before you must come back down to earth.

Oh, that we could all be visionaries.  I wonder sometimes if we inhabitants of this planet have allowed our minds to become so glued to the floor that we can’t imagine anything other than the garbage that is fed to us from various media outlets or the multitudinous negative people who pass in and out of our lives, concretely or virtually.

If you were to imagine yourself as a room, what room would that be?  How is it furnished?  What are the colors which dominate the room?

Is your room enclosed with four walls, a ceiling and a floor?  Or is your room outdoors?  Are you a traditional room, a custom room, or a far-out room?

Are the dimensions of your room strictly measured and inside the box?  Or would a carpenter have fits accommodating your vision of your room?

Do me a favor and at least let your room be one without a roof.  Let the sky be your limit.

 

 

 

After having broken another fingernail clear down to the quick, I said to myself, I need to use more tools and less brute strength.  Humans are higher animals after all.  And I think part of that definition is that we know how to use tools, and we have opposable thumbs.

My life is simple in some respects.  For example, if I can do the job with my hands I will do so without the assistance of any gadgets or tools.

However, I couldn’t bake as happily sans gadgets.  One of my favorites is parchment paper which saves me a massive amount of time in clean-up, and that two-tablespoon cookie scoop is a must have gadget for nine out of ten tasks in my kitchen.

My unused blender has been in its place in one of those high kitchen cabinets above the microwave, behind a bunch of flower vases, forever.  I finally donated it and replaced it with the juicer, oft used to support my fresh lemon juice habit.  The juicer had been hidden behind useful but too much clutter in the pantry closet.  It was a win-win tradeoff.

These are some of the gadgets in my life.  Oh, and I broke down and got another electric can opener after mine died a few years ago and we’ve since been using an ancient hand crank one in addition to a heftier new one.  The arthritis in my hand makes those things of little help except as “honey-do” tasks which make me feel needy.

By some definitions, these utilitarian small appliances aren’t gadgets because they’re practical and not novelty enough.  Some definitions of gadget strictly describe a more fanciful contrivance that is considered an ingenious novelty.

Popular lists of commonly used gadgets include some devices which we use all the time in our business and personal life around here.  Isn’t an iPhone or android cell phone considered a normal appendage for most people?  Also, few people choose not to own a television, sound system for music, computers and accompanying printers.

Our gadgets consist mainly of either kitchen helpers or outdoor maintenance tools.  I really don’t think of these as gadgets.  For example, the rake is ideal for gathering piles of leaves, pine cones and yard debris.  However, after I’ve raked these things into a pile, my use of the rake is finished.  I then pick up the piles with my arms and glove-clad hands until every pine needle and leaf are gathered for disposal.  My husband always says, “why don’t you use the fork to pick those up?” a question he knows I will dismiss with my usual manual way of doing it.

A mini, battery-powered chainsaw is an indispensable gadget used for trimming the multitudinous small branches which span our property.  Years ago, a kind neighbor offered his to us when we were completing the task by more manual means and since then we complete that task no other way.

In the kitchen, I try to open jars with those handy little rubber gadgets, running hot water over the lid, or with targeted banging onto a hard surface to unseal the lid from its jarred contents.  If these attempts fail, I honestly move the task to the “honey-do” list.  My particular honey bought a couple of jar-opening gadgets, probably to reduce his list.  Only one of them works for me, but only on small bottles or jars, and I prefer the rubber thingy anyway.  The second one made its way to the donation pile as neither of us could find it of any use.

I guess I’ll conclude where I began, with my fingernails.  To save them, I had purchased and was given a couple of gadgets to peel off sticky labels, tape, etc.  I do use these helpers on occasion, but I’m still prone to start any job with my trusty fingernails.

You see, from this gal’s point of view, a woman who was never a girly girl nor a tomboy, I’ve prided myself on the nice appearance of my hands and feet.  However, over the years as years would have it, my feet have grown bunions, and my toenails injured repeatedly have become a bit of a mess.

With age, my hands have grown ever so slightly deformed from arthritis and my fingernails are somewhat more difficult to maintain, but they remain sort of pretty.  So, when I break a fingernail, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s a true assault on my self-esteem.  “There goes the one thing that isn’t affected by weight fluctuations!”

I know all about the glue remedy and that I can have a professional make them pretty with the aid of prosthetics, but they wouldn’t truly be mine.  Maybe I see my own pretty fingernails as an achievement, dumb as that sounds.

So, I use gadgets when I need them, but I prefer using my two gloved hands.  It’s as simple as that.

I think I can supply a metaphor, or is it a simile, for this preference.  Even though I suffer from seasonal allergies, I refuse to stop walking outdoors all year round.  The sneezing, itchy eyes, coughing, and overall stuffed up head is worth it to walk outdoors with nature all over me.  The broken fingernails are worth the freedom of just working with my hand’s sans all the available gadgets which could make the job “easier.”