Oops!

Oops. A word I expect from Britney Spears. A word that harks back to a song like nails on a chalkboard when it’s stuck in your head. A word I do not expect to come from the bullhorn of a major airline.

Earlier this week I received word from US Airways that they had gifted my account with 1,000 frequent flyer miles. Okay. Nice gesture.

This morning I awoke to find the following e-mail in my box with the subject line, you guessed it,

OOPS!

“Earlier this week, we inadvertently delivered an email message to many of our Dividend Miles members' email accounts. Unfortunately, one of those accounts was yours. Worse, this email incorrectly stated that we posted 1,000 Dividend Miles into your account. This was not accurate and the email message was sent in error. 

We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you and appreciate your understanding.”

My action was to immediately unsubscribe from their mail. Next it was to write this blog. Now it is to make a mental note not to book my next trip to Austin through Charlotte on US Airways.

Bad, US Air! Very, very bad! I am not sure who deserves to be terminated more, the employee that accidentally gifted the miles or the PR person who must have consulted a teenybopper when crafting the unprofessional Grinch Who Stole Christmas e.

Maybe the company plans to streamline operations lingo so that whenever we think of US Airways, we think of the word oops:

“Oops! We lost your bag.”
“Oops! Your flight has been canceled.”
“This is your captain speaking--oops!”


Oops!
…You think I’m in love
That I’m sent from above…
I’m not that innocent.

“Oops, I Did It Again”
--Max Martin

Our House

Back in 1982 Jelly Helm taught me how to make lists in AP Biology at Trinity High School. Not lists of phyla, more like lists of reasons Ms. Herp’s hair was green or reasons it was going to be a great day. Somewhere along the way I think Jelly taught Dave Letterman how to make funny lists, and now everybody is doing it.

Without further ado, here are the Top 10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Move to Carrboro and Buy My House:


1.) You’re a Duke fan and the proximity to UNC would make you sprout Blue Devil horns.

2.) A town with a free transit system is too green for you.

3.) The neighborhood gang is too rough and tumble.

4.) The laughter emanating from Dirty South Improv would make you too joyful.

5.) The local independent music scene would be lost on you.

6.) The tennis bums at Chapel Hill Tennis Club and the canoes at University Lake might tempt you to quit your day job.

7.) Your mother-in-law in Topeka, Kansas, needs you there for dinner every Sunday night.

8.) You plan to home school and don’t need great public schools like Carrboro High School.

9.) You like box stores and the Carrboro Farmer’s Market would insult your sensibilities.

10.) The four seasons and fair weather would destroy all the pleasure of complaining about the weather.

What, you still want to buy my house? Okay, here is the link to the listing.


I remember way back then when everything was true and when/We would have such a very good time such a fine time/ Such a happy time/ And I remember how we’d play simply waste the day away/ Then we’d say nothing would come between us two dreamers
“Our House” by Madness

The Accidental Pilgrim

It’s April, whence the prologue of The Canterbury Tales (CT) sprang, and at the beginning of my trip to Pennsylvania, I considered myself more a traveler than a pilgrim. Enter unexpected magic.

Take this version of The Canterbury Tales, left as offering in a house in Pennsylvania that I trudged through as a potential buyer. I won’t be buying the sweet house, but have a look in case you would. The dear seller left this book among others on the dining table with a note, “Please, take one.” I immediately thought of my friend Susan because I seem to recall how much pleasure she derived from the Tales. Having packed hastily for my trip, I failed to add a book to my suitcase, and so I indulgently claimed this one for my own.

The night I opened the book and began to read these words, the timing was perfect:

Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, I don’t often stay in a hostelrye, and now I realize my folly. At small inns there’s the pleasure of making the acquaintance of fellow travelers. Upon our arrival in Pennsylvania, we entered the Franklin & Marshall guest quarters and were greeted by a New Yorker, recumbent on a sofa, watching an NCAA game. He later shared that his family was giving a lecture on campus about the movie Defiance, which was based on his father’s story.

The next morning, when the person behind door number two rose, we learned that he had slept the whole previous afternoon because he had just arrived from Egypt. He was visiting the college for a high school academic advising office.

The greatest object of curiosity for me in the guest quarters was in the manager’s office—a Fender. I hadn’t brought a guitar with me, and though I was twitching to pick it up, I’ll never touch another man’s guitar without his permission. The morning I left the house, as I exited the door, who should share the doorstep with me but the manager. Our eyes locked as we did the dance of my walking forward while he waited for me to step past him. I saw a kindred spirit in this fellow guitar player. “Did you see how he looked at me?” I asked my husband as I took my place in the passenger seat. He told me he always notices.

The next day at an open house at a day school, the headmaster chatted with me about his hometown in Carolina, his university days at UNC, and his tip for the trip: Visit Wilbur Chocolates.

When we headed home at the end of the week, we averted interstate traffic by finding a road less traveled—29 South. Of all the pilgrimages I’ve ever wanted to take, it is to return to the Virginia home of my family, the Blankenbakers, originally known as the Blankenbuchers. To my astonishment, this trip down 29 South was that very pilgrimage. Our car passed through the county of Madison where the family settled in 1742, past the birthplace of the Revolutionary War soldier Nicholas Blankenbaker (likely a member of the Culpeper Minute Men Battalion), past many roads named Hebron this or Hebron that (the Hebron Register was the source of my genealogical study a couple decades back at the Filson Club in Louisville) and past the town of Nicholas’s muster, Culpeper. Finally 29 South became NC86, and then Old Fayetteville Road, which enters my neighborhood and changes names until it is my street. All these eight years in Carolina I have lived on a direct route to my ancestral homeland in Virginia without ever knowing.

My first week back from this accidental pilgramage, I accompanied my son to his art show. His class exhibited masks, and I took a shining to one and just may make it my new Facebook profile pic because spring has got a hold on me this April. Like the small fowls making melody in the prologue of the CT, I find myself at night with open eye, yet not sleeping as they somehow manage to do, because I’m down with a bad case of pollen fever.

But if this spring finds you “longen” to “goon on pilgramages,” I wish you pleasant company and magic along your way. Upon your return, offer up your acoustic memory, pilgrim.

Super Cake

Some things a Super Bowl hostess can’t control. Take the year I served wings and Janet served breast.

If Super Bowl XLV has you stepping outside your comfort zone to serve guests on a gluten-free diet, this cake won’t give you any unwanted surprises. Most of the legwork will be shopping for ingredients you might not keep in the cupboard. This three flour cake crosses the goal line like an old flourless favorite of mine that used to be served at a restaurant in Crescent Hill.

The source of the recipe is a book my husband gave me a couple of Decembers ago.

I have made minor modifications to the recipe.

Yogurt Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a tube pan with butter before dusting the pan with rice flour.

In a medium bowl, combine the three flours to make a total of 2 cups. The flour combination will be about
1 1/3 cup white rice flour
½ cup potato flour
¼ cup minus 1 Tablespoon of tapioca flour

To this mixture add
1 tsp. xanthum gum
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. powder egg replacer
¼ tsp. salt

In a mixing bowl, beat 1 stick of butter with ½ cup Ghirardelli cocoa and 1 and 1/3 cup of sugar on medium speed. To this mixture add 1 cup of boiling water and stir.

In a small bowl, beat one egg and two egg whites. Add to the mixing bowl and beat on low speed to avoid splashing over the sides of the bowl.

Add flour mixture to the mixing bowl. Beat on low to combine.

Add ½ cup nonfat plain yogurt and 2 tsp. of GF vanilla to the mixture. Stir.

The batter will look springy and does not pour. Transfer the batter to the tube pan with a spatula.

Bake for 50 minutes on 350.

Cool for 10 min. before removing the cake from the pan.

Dust with confectioners’ sugar.

Guess what I had for breakfast this morning? Blame it on this acoustic memory of Bill Cosby!

“Eggs, eggs are in chocolate cake, and milk, oh goody--that’s nutrition!”
-Bill Cosby

Calling All Linemen

If there’s an ice storm in your future, there could be a lineman there, too. I’ve fallen under the spell of a Jimmy Webb song about a lineman, made famous by Glen Campbell. “Wichita Lineman” may be the song of the week if the Weather Channel knows what they’re predicting about an ice storm, and if Webb was referring to Wichita, Kansas.

The lines that seem the most relevant to the forecast go like this:

I know I need a small vacation/
But it don’t look like rain/
And if it snows that stretch down south/
Won’t ever stand the strain.

Little did I know until this week that I was already a Jimmy Webb fan back in my preschool days when my record collection included the 5th Dimension.

Other Jimmy Webb songs include “Up, Up and Away,” "MacArthur Park" and “Highwayman.” Here's to all the great lines by Jimmy!

I hear you singing through the wire/
I can hear you through the whine.
Jimmy Webb, "Wichita Lineman"

Some Answers and a Bigger Question

Here are the answers to yesterday’s tagline quiz:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Godzilla

Erin Brockovich

Meet the Parents

And now here is a question: How come a root problem is often overlooked while the consequent, lesser problems get full attention?

Let me tell you a story. Several years ago at my daughter’s high school, there was a violent attack. I was scheduled to speak on tobacco prevention at the school that afternoon, and that morning my daughter sent me an e that read: “Mom, don’t come to school—too much violence.”

I didn’t read her e before leaving home that day. When I got to the school, the halls had been secured and the knife had been confiscated by the authorities. People told me what (they thought) happened.

I didn’t find out what really happened until several days later, in the evening, in the school gymnasium during an address by the principal that I had requested he give. The district superintendent was present as were many concerned students and parents.

It turns out that there was a student attending the school who had severe psychological illness. His illness was manifesting in many ways, including alignment with Nazism. The white student had been picking on black students for weeks. The black students couldn’t take it anymore.

Prior to the outbreak of violence on campus, the administration of the school, not recognizing the student’s mental illness, went to the trouble of hiring a mediator to come to the school to fix the poor race relations. The mentally healthy students were forced to sit in a room for several hours a day with the mentally unbalanced student to try patch up their differences.

Only after violence erupted at the school, did administrators look back on the situation and say, “We didn’t know what we were dealing with.” I can still hear those words as plain as day.

Mental illness goes unrecognized all the time. Awareness of mental illness is lacking. Until we address this problem, violent acts like the one at my daughter’s school and the one at the Safeway in Tucson will continue.

It is growing increasingly difficult for me to bite my tongue when every day, a new spin is given to the Tucson shootings—the need for concealed weapon permits, the consequences of political hate rhetoric and anything else you want to mention. The moral of the story should be let’s do more to spread awareness of the symptoms of mental illness and to make the general public aware of how to report mental illness.

What's My (Tag)line?

It’s time for the Golden Globes, and in 1962, “What’s My Line” won an award for the best television show. If you don’t remember it, no worries, it’s not the Ambien amnesia setting in; the show stopped airing in 1967.

The panelists had to guess the contestant’s line of work (hence line) through a series of questions. You might enjoy this clip of Frank Lloyd Wright on the show.

Yesterday I played a different kind of What’s My Line. I tried to finalize a tagline of sorts for my novel manuscript. A tagline is a marketing slogan, often used for movies. And while I do have a treatment for a screenplay on file with WGA, this month I’m writing query letters to agents, and I need to succinctly capture the plot of my novel manuscript in a sentence.

Despite posting on Facebook that my resolution for this year is to drive to the beach the first day it’s 70 degrees in Wilmington, a more serious endeavor is working on my novel manuscript every day. It’s amazing how inspiration flows in effortlessly when you commit to fifteen or thirty minutes of imposed concentration a day. And I really prefer moments of inspiration to hours of fretful consternation.

Yesterday my inspiration came to me over lunch. Since I’m reading The Herald-Sun while my neighbor is away for the weekend, I peeked at the newspaper TV listings for the first time in a long time.

Have you ever paid attention to the taglines of movies in the TV listings?

Try these and see if you can name the movie:

"A youth learns that his father is the Greek god Poseidon."

"A giant mutant lizard wreaks havoc in New York."

"A woman probes a power company cover-up over poisoned water."

"A man spends a disastrous weekend with his lover’s family."

I’ll post the names of the movies tomorrow on the blog.

Reading taglines really energized me yesterday. First, I was able to pick up my index card grocery list for Whole Foods and write a sentence about my story: A song takes a woman back to the man she loves. Next, I was able to frame my life past and future by considering what a writer would say the tagline of my life is.

If you’re looking for inspiration on the heels of your resolutions this January, think like a marketing executive and pen your own tagline. Try writing one for your past and go ahead and acknowledge a weakness if you must. But when you write one for your future, write yourself out of your current conflict.

May all your taglines come true!

She's making movies on location/ She don't know what it means/ And the music make her want to be the story/ And the story was whatever was the song--what it was
"Skateaway" Mark Knopfler