Toothbrush ablutions

Settling into life with two young girls has been little trouble.  Bed time happens with fair regularity.  Chores have been divvied out and get done.  Mothers of the regular age may be stunned to learn these two take care of the kitchen after supper AND sweep the floor.  Just get up and do it.  Janice is in charge of her kitchen and I don’t intend to look into her methods.

Laura’s room is so tidy and organized that some familial OCD genes may be popping out.  Emily’s room bears testament to teen age occupation, however, so there’s hope for Laura. 

When they changed last July from house guests to house kids we scrambled a little to get them up to snuff.  They can recite the number of past due vaccinations they were stuck with, I know, and we made sure there was enough underwear in the drawers, clean socks, new sneakers, stuff like that.

I did play office tag with their dentist before I was able to nail down an appointment earlier this month.  I met Dr. Bob, and he came right to the point.  Dental hygiene was in short supply in those two little mouths.  We knew our final evening admonition, “Brush your teeth,” probably was not well followed, and we were too right.

All teeth got a good cleaning, and Dr. Bob called in grandma and explained his findings.  A far better job must be done on both accounts.  Proper tooth brushing had been demonstrated and was required morning and night.  Dr. Bob told them their attention would become a good habit in less than a week.

Ah, good intentions.  They can leave like the morning dew.  Over the last couple weeks the old people in the house prodded and prompted, but young people evaded us as effectively as they evaded tooth brushing where they used to live.  As grandma parted with three hundred dollars to spring them from Dr. Bob’s office, and that was only for annual x-rays and semi-annual cleaning, grandma was not pleased.

After we all were seated and ready to eat recently, I opened the discussion again.

“There is a shortage of tooth brushing happening, as we all know.  We also know it’s a good habit waiting to be developed.  So, here’s how we’re going to do it.  You two will brush morning and night.  Before you go to school you will breathe toothpaste breath and dental rinse breath on the adult of the morning.  Before you go to bed you will breathe toothpaste breath and dental rinse breath on me. If you fail to do this one morning or evening between now and October 31^st, there will be no trick or treating.”

Emily grinned, and Laura’s eyes grew round.  But now they both smell like tooth paste at bed time, and I’m sure they will sail on through and past Halloween.  Going for the habit.  And the candy.  Both of them laugh so hard about breathing on grandma, who tells them they smell better than Dewars on the rocks, that I told them I would write a blog about them and toothpaste.  And I have.  Emily will read it, as she is one of my fans.

Two housekeeping notes:  Thank you to everyone for reading and commenting.  I enjoy your thoughts more than you will ever know.  I am going to Wisconsin for a week and probably will have dogs and cats and friends to talk about when I come back.

An A for a B

Yesterday’s story of a grade was not typical.  Here’s an offsetting story of my journey to a BS in Accounting.

I have always been fortunate.  Things work out for the best, on the whole.  I have one great example to prove this.

I went back to school for an accounting degree and added a new dimension to a complicated life.  In many ways life seemed roaring at me and I was going against the current.  My brother died one fall, my father the next winter.  I was in a new job, I needed to succeed, and I needed to add that BS in Accounting to my credentials.  I crammed all the courses into a very short time, two summers and one regular year of night classes, as I recall.

The absolute most hands down difficult course I took was Business Math.  It outdid even Statistics.  It was six weeks of Saturdays, eight a.m. to noon, in an elementary school, seated at a desk where my knees touched the underside of the writing surface.  The men in the class just sat on top of the desks and balanced their notebooks on their knees.

The first class covered resolving business models using algebra.  And I needed this to graduate?!  What was I going to do?  I last used algebra in the ninth grade. When the teacher galloped past proportions, which I still remembered, at about nine a.m., I knew I was a goner.  I kept turning the pages and taking notes, but I knew I would be found out the next Saturday when class would begin with an exam of the material covered the previous Saturday.

I went home that first Saturday and immediately called my best friend, Carol.  I needed to see Frank, the engineer.  Perhaps there was hope.  Nothing in that book frightened Frank.  For five Saturday afternoons he patiently explained what I was doing and how to solve the problems.  We’re talking matrices here, long before anyone made a movie.  I literally did a core dump for the exam each Saturday morning and moved on to the next phase of Business Math.  Calculus.  No problem.  A little trig.  Frank would explain it later.

The final Saturday morning would be the final exam.  In spite of Frank’s assurances I doubted I could reproduce the results of the previous Saturday mornings when I had only transferred a week’s worth of memorizing to a test paper.  I knew come that last Saturday I could hit all the wrong notes and expose myself for the math fraud I actually felt like.

Friday afternoon at work my phone rang.  It was my mom, who had my kids for the summer.  Shelly had jumped off the neighbor’s roof and broke her arm.  She was in the hospital; the compound fracture could not be set until Saturday, under general anesthesia.  Sometime that evening, going down to see Shelly and then resolving all the hospital details I remembered my exam the next morning. 

I cannot even remember how I tracked down that Business Math teacher in another county, after business hours, but I did.  I got him on the phone, explained I would be at the hospital at the scheduled exam time, and could we possibly find a time for me to have a make-up exam.

There was a very long pause.  Then he said if I were willing to trade my A for a B, he would waive the final exam.  And that’s how I passed Business Math.

Grade inflation

Many years ago I went back to school to become an accountant and earn more money. I needed to feed two children, keep them housed and clothed.  Mastering a profession seemed sensible, so I went back to the halls of ivy.  Actually, a beautiful little undergraduate college, Lake Erie College in Painesville. 

This was in the late seventies, I was in my mid thirties and an anomaly.   I convinced the administration to give me a degree based only on taking core courses.  I already had undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and didn’t have time to sit their requirements too! Toward June, after I had completed the accounting requirements I received a cap and gown order form in the mail.  I wrote back to mail me the degree and the dean was so surprised he called me.  I explained I’d been through the ceremony before and couldn’t see taking a day off work.  “Oh,” he said, and mailed it.

I took evening classes, summer classes, weekend classes, and this yielded an interesting assortment of teachers.  Summer professors especially might be from other schools, taking on a part time assignment. I remember a macro economics prof as if it were yesterday.

Very short, very stocky, from Boston.  He looked like a fisherman.  He dressed like a fisherman.  Dark khaki pants, a motley blue fisherman style pullover sweater, a rib knit stocking cap he never took off, heavy boots.  In my mind’s eye I associate a red bandana with him, too; pocket or neck, I don’t remember.  There were no “r’s” in his words and he compensated with attitude.  Instead of the usual desk chair at the front of the room he sat on a high stool beside the desk and lectured.

His was a six week summer course and he immediately assigned an essay to be completed and turned in at the end as our final grade.  He gave some general requirements; I knew exactly what I would write about and started my research.  The year was 1977, the country was suffering a gasoline crisis due to the Arab oil embargo.    Conserving and recycling already were hot subjects and I thought it was time to put one of my pet ideas on paper.

The idea was people should be able to ride bicycles safely, to work, to shop, for recreation.  I wanted bicycle roads built using abandoned rail ways, and extended into city centers.  I located rail lines that could be used. I calculated oil savings that would put OPEC right out of business, in addition to making us a healthy nation.  It was a very good paper and I was quite proud of it.

The dour little professor returned our papers the last night of class.  Mine was on top and had a very large C+ scrawled across the front page in red ink.  He held it high for all the room to see.  He went on, “Grade inflation is epidemic in American colleges and universities.  I am taking a stand against it.  In any college, including Boston University, where I teach, this paper would be graded A+.  Twenty years ago this paper would have received a C for average.  I am very generous in giving it a C+.” 

He walked about putting papers on desks.  Each subsequent grade was lower than mine.  The bastard.

Where I cribbed the cartoon

We know every thought in this cats' head

Want!

Please.

Bring me the damn leaf!

She's teachable.

E-Z Pass Go

Wickipedia

We have a great system of highways available to us here in Northeastern Ohio. Back in the days I travelled to art shows to make a living we were eight hours from most big cities east of the Mississippi.  Friends in upstate New York would speak enviously of some shows we travelled to.  “Man, I wish we could do that one.  But it takes two days to get there.”  It does, if you live in New York State. Or Maryland.  Or Virginia.

Tolls on toll roads were never fun, however.  Once I left home with only Tom and Jan’s purple velvet Seven Crown bag of euchre change and a credit card between myself and Philadelphia at the other end of the Pennsylvania turnpike.

Somewhere in the ‘90’s the New York Thruway began E-Z Pass.  A transponder on the windshield talked to a receiver in the booth and deducted the toll from a prepaid account.  It seemed such a good idea, but I just didn’t get around to it.  The Tappan Zee brought me to my knees.  One Friday afternoon there was one E-Z Pass lane, all the rest were cash.  On Sunday evening there was one cash lane off the island, all the rest were E-Z Pass.  When I arrived at the George Washington, another toll bridge, at midnight, and still seven hours from home I knew the next thing I would do.  Get an E-Z Pass.

E-Z Pass is brilliant.  Slow down approaching the toll booth, the gate is down, the red light says STOP.  Roll slowly through the lane, the gate goes up, the green light announces E Z PASS GO and zing, you are through and gone ahead of all those fools who don’t have E-Z Pass.  Simple things kept us smiling.

E-Z Pass spread.  Reaching for the change in the ash tray one day, and seeing a new gate on the Garden State Parkway:  E-Z Pass.  Yes!  Then E-Z Pass got us through Pennsylvania all the way from the Ohio line to Breezewood.  A few months later and E-Z Pass took us all the way to Philadelphia.  I came home once on the West Virginia turnpike and found E-Z Pass had come over the weekend; I could slip through another gate, E-Z PASS GO.  It worked on all the toll bridges in New York State.  It worked in Massachusetts. Big change in a few short years.

After I retired I turned in my transponder. I travelled west to visit Ann in Wisconsin, and those toll booths on the Tri-State in Illinois were like a trip back to the dark ages.  Then one day, I-Pass.  For anyone who still had an E-Z Pass transponder, no more toll booths.  As I didn’t, I ordered my own I-Pass.  In their redesign of the Tri-State Tollway in Illinois those civil engineers gave those of us with transponders up by the rear view mirror half a dozen lanes and blue lights looking down, able to read our signal at fifty five miles an hour.  Cough.  Cough.  I subscribe to keeping up with the traffic, slightly over seventy for most of us.  I can log onto my account and read my history at will.  Those blue lights have never missed me going by.

When Indiana added E-Z Pass they called it I-Zoom.  Actually a joke, but what can be expected from a privatized toll road.  It’s a lane and gate system, but it works and gets me through Indiana.  So, the dots are connected from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, from West Virginia to Illinois.  But, wait…

What about Ohio?  It was years behind.  In fact, for some time the Ohio Turnpike commissioners felt they could conquer twenty years of E-Z Pass history with a little card called Ready Pay.  Stop at the booth and insert your Ready Pay card. Unbelievable.  My transponder actually cut half an hour or more from my trip to Wisconsin to visit Ann, but to visit Linda, less than sixty miles away, I still carried loose change in my ash tray.

I only used the ash tray for change, but it did collect road dust, and the occasional coffee spill.  On one return trip from Linda’s I had only the exact toll and it did require prying some pennies up from the bottom of the ashtray.  I tilted the toll into the outstretched hand and took my foot off the brake.

“I can’t take this money.  It’s dirty.”

I held out my hand and the money rolled back.  I took my foot off the brake again and rolled a few inches.

“You haven’t paid your toll.”

I tilted the change back into her hand.  She opened the gate. 

I like to think I helped expedite E-Z Pass on the Ohio Turnpike.  Ohio now issues transponders and we can E-Z Pass Go through any toll booth.  The Ohio Turnpike charges those with an Ohio issued transponder forty cents per month for the privilege.   My sister didn’t believe that until she saw it on her monthly credit card statement for her transponder.  I suggested she turn it in and get one from New York, or Illinois.  She probably won’t.