Strange Bet Fellows

Let me start by telling you that the title of this post is not a typo or an auto-complete. Today I’m blogging about betting. I got the idea from some news items in the New York Times shortly before the vote by the Brits on whether or not to leave the European Union. Apparently there was a lot of action betting on Brexit: Will they stay or will they go? The odds favored staying, so those who bet against that must have made quite a few pounds. My immediate reaction was: “Jeeze Louise. People will bet on anything.”

The same issue reported that Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy has decided to skip the Olympics in Rio for fear of contracting the Zika virus. Barely a week earlier, NBC reporter Samantha Guthrie announced that she’s preggers and will be covering the event from New York.

Conflating these stories (as I often do), I wondered: What else will bookies be taking bets on this summer? Will it be which athlete will be next to skip the Olympics? Rather than Google this idea, I moved on mentally to what every day things one could bet on. It didn’t take long to turn up plenty of strange bet fellows in my own life. Some of these are health related.

For instance: How many points will my blood pressure have increased at my next checkup, now that I’ve put on quite a few pounds? And: How long will it take for me to lose the ten pounds I desperately need to peel off? (And the next ten that really should go away, too…)

Here’s one that I doubt many of you have to worry about. How many golf balls will hit our condo this season? Last year I collected 48 of them, but they didn’t all hit the house. Some just landed on the grass and in the bushes. But when they hit, it scares the (expletive deleted) out of us.

You could place bets on how many more weeks Jagdish will be taking the train up and back to Providence for four days at a time. It was supposed to be just for a month or two. That was in March. I don’t think either of us realized how much he missed holding court in his “ashram.” And how much his customers missed him. That’s OK. I have the cats to keep me company now.

Speaking of cats, what are the odds on whether I try to sneak a third one into our condo? We’re only allowed to have two, even though they never go outside and together they weigh less than most dogs. Apparently, people here are OK with having some poor little senior feline caged at the rescue facility for the last years of its life. Even when a good home is waiting. Note to self: Stop looking at the Protectors of Animals website. You fall in love with all the new ones and feel terrible for those that have been there for months.

Oh, here’s one I like. How many more months of practice will it take before the band Elaine plays with is ready to perform in public? We’re not talking about getting paid to play. There’s a convalescent home waiting for us to entertain for free. But not until we’re more polished.

You may have noticed that, despite starting this blog with betting on Brexit, I’ve assiduously avoided any bets that involve presidential politics. I doubt we’d get any agreement on the odds. And even if we did, they’d probably change weekly in any case.

I’m sure I can think of many more issues that could have odds applied and bets taken. But you get the idea. Feel free to do a similar drill on your own life. You’d be surprised what strange bet fellows are waiting out there.

Condo Commandments

Around the time I retired, I posted some retirement commandments. One list was Zoroastrian (thou shalts); the other was non-Zoroastrian (shalt nots). Now that I’ve been in our new home for almost two years, I decided to put together some commandments for living in a condo community. These are a mixture of shalts and shalt nots.

1.     Thou shalt not have more than two household pets. If thou hath a third pet upon arrival and cannot abide a Sophie’s Choice situation, the third shall be kept well hidden in the basement or in a second floor bedroom. A schnauzer in a gingham dress still counts as a pet. The total weight of thy pets shall not exceed forty pounds. This does not include cute clothing or winter booties.

2.     Thy car shalt be a Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac or Jaguar. Or maybe a Lexus, if it’s thy second vehicle. Otherwise, thou shalt not leave thy car parked in thy driveway. Having a place to hide Hondas and Toyotas is why God invented attached garages.

3.     For women, thou shalt not wear low-rise jeans in public, even when just walking down to the mail station. Regardless of attire, if thy mailbox is in the bottom tier, thou shalt bend at thy knees. For men, unless thou haveth a six-pack, thou shalt not wear Sans-a-belt pants with just a polo shirt. A sports jacket is not optional attire for thee.

4.     Thou shalt learn to appreciate Happy Hour and drink cocktails such as Mimosas, Mojitos, Cosmopolitans, Caipirinhas and Negronis. Black Russians and Fuzzy Navels are not acceptable cocktails. If thou cannot abide hard liquor, thou shalt drink only craft beers and rosé wines.

5.     If thou planeth to wear open toed sandals, thou shalt get regular pedicures and shalt paint thy toenails at least once every two weeks.

6.     Thou shalt not place pink flamingoes or garden gnomes on thy front lawn. All home décor shall be purchased at West Elm, Wayfair or Crate and Barrel. Exemptions for items from IKEA or Home Goods require prior Board approval.

7.     Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s Weber. If thy condo came with a grill, thou shalt learn how to use if before the end of thy second year of residence. If there was no grill, thou shalt buy a Weber even if thou doth not plan on using it.

8.     If thy condo did not come with a central vacuum system, thou shalt purchase (and use) a Miele vacuum. Not a Shark; not a Dyson; no Hoovers or Kenmores. If thy condo has a central vac, thou shalt use it at least twice a year; six times if thou hath cats.

9.     Thou shalt carefully observe the recycling schedule. Regular trash goes out every Monday; blue recycling bins go out every other one. Thou shalt put no bins at the curb before 4 pm Monday and shalt retrieve them no later than noon the next day.

10. Thou shalt not practice thy saxophone after 9 pm. Thou shalt close thy windows during practice if thy neighbor has guests.

If you live in a condo community, Lord help you if you don’t follow these commandments.

My Love-Hate Affair with Texting

When I had my dumb flip-phone, I hated texting. I almost never sent texts. If someone texted me, I was likely to not discover the message until days after it was sent. Even if I saw it the same day, I’d usually respond via a phone call. To me texting was an evil tool, invented by service providers to extract more money out of you. Part of my distaste no doubt came from the fact that on the dumb phones, there was no keyboard as such. If I needed the letter C, for instance, I had to tap the A key three times, and so on.

A few months ago, I was forced to upgrade to an iPhone to improve my reception. My flip-phone frequently dropped calls mid-conversation, but it was too dumb to connect to the Wi-Fi in our condo. I’m learning to use some of the features that my new phone affords.

For example, I entered most of my regular contacts into it and set specific ringtones for certain groups. Calls coming from my immediate family, all dog lovers, bark for my attention. The Protectors of Animals folks quack for me. My husband has his own alert, called Sherwood Forest. It sounds a bit like herald trumpets to me, so I tell everyone it’s my lord and master calling.

It seems that the people who live in our condo community are fond of texting in lieu of calling. I’m gradually becoming accustomed to checking for messages at least once a day. To my surprise, I’ve discovered that texting can actually be more convenient than calling. For one thing, I can control the amount of time expended on the exchange.

The iPhone has a keyboard, but it’s easy to make mistakes with it. I have small hands, but apparently I have fat fingertips. I frequently get the letter one over from the one I want and have to use the backup “key” to correct it.

I used to wonder how folks making jokes about the auto-complete (not the auto-correct) could possibly have been the victims of such seemingly random substitutions by their “smart” phones. That was until I noticed that my iPhone has a bar above the message area that provides suggested completions for words I’m typing. As I key in more letters, the suggestions change, presumably getting more refined.

There’s probably some algorithm for words used most often by frequent texters. The iPhone gives you three choices it deems most common, supposedly based on the letters keyed thus far. Clearly their frequent texters have a different vocabulary than I do. I’m usually down to my last letter before the word I’m keying in shows up in the choices, if at all. That makes the auto-complete feature a distraction for me. It also causes me to send some messages as strange as the ones I used to scoff at.

Here’s another thing I don’t like about the iPhone texting setup. The “send” button is on the upper right. That’s where the correction button is on the dialing keyboard. More than once I meant to correct something in an incomplete message, but sent it instead, generating a “Huh?” reply from the recipient. To which I texted back: “Premature ejaculation.”

One use I’ve discovered for texting that has led to my nascent love affair with it came to me a few days ago. I was in a meeting that seemed like it would drag on forever. The committee chair got up and slipped out quietly. His presence had been an especially calming factor for me. I texted him after a few minutes, asking if he was coming back. (He was not.) We then exchanged several messages, a welcome distraction for me.

I bought a texting stick at one of those dollar stores. It’s useful for keying in longer messages. I keep it on a table in our family room, so I didn’t have it with me in that meeting. I can see that the texting stick is going to be like my reading glasses. I’ll stash one in every room and in my purse and in my briefcase. That won’t fix all of the things I find annoying about texting, but it will help. I just have to accept that this is going to be a love-hate affair. I can live with that.

At A Loss for Words

I’ve been blogging weekly for almost six years now and I’ve had a monthly newspaper column for five. Lately I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to come up with ideas for my essays. Last night I had a strange thought (not unusual when I’ve had a late dinner of pizza). What if I’ve simply run out of words? What if we’re born with a limited supply, and once we’ve used them all up, “that’s all she wrote,” as the saying goes. I’m not talking about the size of ones vocabulary; I mean just plain words we’ve ever used.

This might not be as crazy as it seems at first blush. Women are born with a limited amount of eggs in their ovaries. Once they’ve all made their monthly trip down a fallopian tube, the cupboard is bare. There are some theories that we have only so many brain cells and that in time, they’re toast. This of course depends a lot on heredity, nutrition, exercise and (according to AARP) doing sudokus and crossword puzzles. And regularly reading Retirement Sparks.

What if my word quota is running out already? I’m only in my seventies; I expect to live into my nineties. Will I be unable to communicate by the time I’m eighty? Is it just my ability to draw on the written word that is faltering, or will my spoken words dry up eventually as well? (Some who know me personally are probably thinking: “If only…”) If I find myself searching for a word, maybe it won’t be that the pathway to where the word is stored is clogged. Maybe the word will simply be gone—used up.

If I start writing shorter blog posts, will that conserve words so I can keep writing longer? Maybe I’m just in dry spell and need to collect more ideas for posts. Once I begin writing, things usually flow quite nicely. It’s getting started that’s difficult. I used to come up with topics from the morning talk shows, but they’ve been uninspiring lately. I probably need to get out more.

It looks like it’s time for a two-pronged approach. I’m keeping today’s post close to 400 words (I usually write 600 – 800) and setting off in search of inspiration. Connecticut is no doubt brimming with things I can write about; I just need to find them. But now that I have two cats, I’m worried that once I'm out I’ll be tempted to spend more money on toys. The world can be so cruel.