My mother-in-law took me to pick out a candle for my 10th anniversary. About 15 minutes away from my home, but you have never seen candles like these. While we were there we were able to see a demonstration of making Wooden Shoes. The man was very knowlegeable about the Netherlands and has visited numerous times. My mother-in-law just visited last year so they had a lot to talk about. I mentioned my ancestors were from Zierkezee and he was even able to tell me a little about that area. Right near a lake, pretty with a beach. The people in that area are very traditional and some even still where the traditional costumes.

 


"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of
their dreams."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Last night we took the night off. We went out to Pizza Hut for dinner (no dishes), took the kids to a park, then the beach. The water was almost warm. As warm as Lake Michigan can get. The beach was small and only 4 other families were there. The sand didn't have lots of rocks or sticks in it. The warmth of the sand felt soothing on my feet. When we got home the kids watched Max Keeble and my husband and I watched "A Beautiful Mind." I had seen it in the theatre with a friend, so it was interesting watching it a second time when I knew who was real and who wasn't.

 
Last night we finally decided to make our wills. I imagine lots of people procrastinate on that one. But, it could be just us. We got a lot of info on making them from Lectric Law Library.

Today was a glorious, sunny day but not boiling like most of the week. So I did some gardening with the kids and played tennis at the park with my son. I try to have a day once a month where I don't plan anything so I can catch up on all the stuff I planned but didn't do during the month. That was today. But, I didn't catch up on anything. It was a fun and relaxing day, though. One of those days I felt I really lived fully.

 
My son will be 10 this summer. He decided on the race car theme for his party. He originally picked this expensive party package out of a catalog, but I went online and found many creative, inexpensive ideas.

The invitation
Car models
Race Flags
Build a Race Car
The Racing party
The digital racing car

It should be lots of fun.

 
After work, I went downtown with DH. It was a lovely browsing trip, if a bit hot. We stopped to get fruit smoothies at Ruby's. Those really hit the spot.

I worked on the coach web site today. Browsing for ideas I came across some designs I like:
Aquent
Change your Life
Onion Skin

Tonight is the full moon. I took the kids out, but it must have been behind a building.

 
Had a good writer's meeting today. Spoke up plans, dreams, decluttering our houses.

I wrote about being late on my organizing page at Sweet Petite's. I just changed the background so now I have to redo the title which looks ridiculous with white. But, it will have to wait till tommorow since my graphics program is only letting me write with the Courier Font. Till tommorow.

 
Temper, Temper

For those of us who are annoyed too often for too little.

Sigmund Wollman's Reality Test


By Robert Fulgham

It was the summer of 1959. At a resort inn in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California, I had a job that combined being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping with the horse-wrangling at the stables. The owner-manager was Swiss, with European notions about conditions of employment. He and I did not get along. I thought he was a fascist who wanted peasant employees who knew their place. I was 22, just out of college, and pretty free with my opinions.

One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every single day. Two wieners, a mound of sauerkraut and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury, the cost of the meals was deducted from our paychecks. I was outraged.

On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job arund 11pm, and the night auditor had just come on duty. I went into the kitchen and saw a note to the chef to the effect that wieners and sauerkraut were on the employee menu for two more days.

That tore it. For lack of any better audience, I unloaded on the night auditor, Sigmund Wollman.

I declared that I had had it up to here, that I was going to get a plate of wieners and sauerkraut and wake up the owner and throw it at him. Nobody was going to make me eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week and make me pay for it and this was un-American and I didn't like wieners and sauerkraut enough to eat them one day for God's sake and the whole hotel stunk and I was packing my bags and heading for Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and wouldn't feed that stuff to pigs. Something like that.

I raved on in this way for 20 minutes. My monologue was delivered at the top of my lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk with a fly swatter, the kicking of chairs and much profanity.

As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman sat quietly on his stool, watching me with sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He had good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin, coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the night job. It gave him intellectual space, peace and quiet, and even more, he could go into the kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to -- all the wieners and sauerkraut he wished. To him, a feast. More than that, there was nobody around to tell him what to do. In Auschwitz he had dreamed of such a time. The only person he saw at work was me, the nightly disturber of his dream. Our shifts overlapped an hour. And here I was, a one-man war party at full cry.

"Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know wht's wrong with you? It's not wieners and kraut and it's not the boss and it's not the chef and it's not this job."

"So what's wrong with me?"

"Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don't know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire -- then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy."

"Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will live longer. And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night."

In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed.

Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes so hard with truth. There in that late-night darkness of a Sierra Nevada inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my butt and opened a window in my mind.

For 30 years now, in times of stress an strain, when something has me backed against the wall and I'm ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face appears in my mind and asks, "Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?"

I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference. Good night, Sig.