If the temperature drops and the heat inexplicably does not come on, one of the first things to check is if a child has been playing with the emergency shut-off switch “to see what it does” and has left it in the off position. I am so glad we DID think of that (credit: Paul) because I would have been QUITE EMBARRASSED if we’d called a service company to find out what was wrong with our furnace and it was $160 for them to flip that switch back on.

********

I was at Target the other day and they were putting up the Christmas stuff—and what to my wondering eyes did appear but OMG INITIAL ORNAMENTS. The Harvey Lewis ones, silver cursive initials with little rhinestone accents. They didn’t have them last year (and maybe not the year before, either? I can’t remember now), and I read somewhere they they’d been discontinued, and we were missing ONE ornament because I was being all picky/questy/relaxed about finding each one on clearance. So I had all these eBay searches set up, but the initial I needed hardly ever showed up, and when it did it had RED rhinestones instead of CLEAR, or else the seller KNEW people were frantic and so set a price of $20 when the ornaments sold at $6-7 full price.

ANYWAY. I stood there stunned for a minute, then put the initial I needed into my cart, full-price and so glad to pay it.

Now that I am not religious, it feels to me as if EVERYONE is religious. EVERYONE. But when I was religious, it felt like it was a rare and special thing to find someone else who was, too. It’s like chicken/beef recipes: when I have two pounds of chicken about to turn on me, it seems like all the yummy recipes are made with beef; when I want to try Edward on some red meat, all the yummy-sounding recipes are chicken.

I’d like to do a poll to get an idea of what the actual percentages are. Has your heart already started pounding with all the scientific/statistical problems inherent in this experiment? But I don’t care much about the population at large: I’m more interested in the percentages of the population I hang around with. And I’m not going to worry about the integrity of non-verified, voluntary-response data collection, or whatever. So we won’t try to apply the poll results to The World or anything—it’s more like a party game.

Here is another huge issue to contend with: what “religious” means. I use the word religious deliberately, even though when I was religious I was fond of saying I was NOT religious “and neither was Jesus,” or whatevs. But we need a word that includes ALL the religions, and “religious” IS IN FACT the word used for that. I understand if it makes you flinch a little, and alternate suggestions are welcome though unlikely to be used: a word that means religious but isn’t “religious” is something that religions would have figured out by now if it existed, I think. And I’m not using “spiritual,” because that one makes me flinch even more, and also I’d say it’s LESS accurate than “religious.”

So does this make sense so far? In this situation we are using “religious” in its nice, loose, no-flinching-required, “we need a good loose category-describing word here and I don’t think we have a word better than this one” sense. “Well, I believe in God and Heaven but I don’t really belong to a PARTICULAR religion” or “I’m a [name used for a member of a certain religion], but I’m not RELIGIOUS” are invalid statements for our purposes. We ALL would prefer to use a word that didn’t have some of the connotations of the word “religious,” but this is what we’ve got.

There is a huge, HUGE spectrum for what “religious” includes, especially when we are trying to cover more than one religion, and I am going to break that down into very rough categories which, as the editor of our local paper says about editing letters, never makes anybody happy. NONE OF US will be happy with these categories. NONE OF US, including me. We are just all going to have to choose the one that BEST represents us, and resist the temptation to say, “Well, I can’t vote because none of these categories describes the EXACT set of feelings/attitudes I have, which I will now list for you in multiple, detailed paragraphs.” [Though you MAY do the multiple, detailed paragraphs on their own, if that would be fun.] EVERYONE belongs to a Religion of One, and there is no poll for that. Instead we are looking for APPROXIMATE CLUMPS.

The category descriptions are merely samples to give you the gist of what I’m looking for—I wanted something that would be more helpful than just “A Little Religious” or “Strongly Religious,” since one person’s “strongly” might be another person’s “medium-low.” I’ll list a number of attributes for each level that MAY OR MAY NOT APPLY to a particular member of that level. You may VERY WELL find that you belong right in between two categories, or that you are a mix of two or three; in that case, pick the one that feels MOST like you. (If they are exactly equal, flip a coin.) Or you may find that you belong to one category for the most part, but one single descriptive point for that category is completely wrong; that’s okay, go ahead and choose it if it’s the category that suits you best OVERALL. This is not a poll to reveal the exact location on the spectrum of any one individual, so these “had to pick one that wasn’t quite right” answers (i.e., the answer of EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO VOTES) should average out overall to show us a group picture.

You may guess from my examples that I was brought up Christian. I tried to make the categories inclusive of religions in general, but I think the Christian thing will still end up seeping through, since that’s the only one I’m familiar with. I thought about trying to give examples from other religions, but it seemed like that was the sort of thing that could misfire and/or cause additional confusion. You may have to modify language, therefore, to get the GIST of the category: if I’ve said “deity” but you believe in a group of deities, or if I said “pray” but you’d use a different word for a different-but-similar type of activity, that still works for these categories. I have confidence that this is something we can manage.

Also, I left out crazy people. That is, I think that many of the people in the extreme categories are people using religion to justify stuff that has nothing to do with religion, to the appalled horror of other people in that religion. So I didn’t make a category for them. If you are a crazy person, you can choose whatever category you feel best describes you.

Let’s start at one end of the spectrum and work down:

1. Not Religious. This doesn’t require you to go around being ACTIVELY NON-RELIGIOUS all the time (though that’s an option). You don’t have to have a Darwin fish on the back of your car (but you can). Maybe you feel a little dismay when you find out someone with Friend Potential is religious, or maybe you don’t care. Maybe you scoff at religion, or maybe you don’t. Maybe you allow for the possibility of one of the many religions being true, or maybe you don’t. But you would not say, “Well, God has a plan for us all” or say that people who die go to heaven. You would circle “none” on the part of the hospital form about religious affiliation.

2. A Little Religious. You don’t go to church, or maybe you go for the Christmas Eve service. You are comfortable with religious-type words/songs, and you might say “God has a plan for us” or refer to people as looking down on us from heaven, but you might not know if there’s an actual god or actual heaven, or be investigating it further. You’re okay with a lot of different religions, as long as they don’t get pushy with you. You don’t necessarily think any one religion is “right.” Your own religious life might mix-and-match quite a bit, or you might try different things sometimes. You’re okay with word substitution: you’d be fine with saying/hearing “God, or Allah, or The Universe, or whatever you believe in.” You pray sometimes, but mostly in the “Please let him be okay” type way. If you found out all the religions were untrue and this was all there was, you might be disappointed but you would be fine.

3. Medium-Low Religious. You belong to a church: it’s an excellent way to meet people and participate in the community, and a good solid foundation for your kids. You like it and you like participating in it and it gives you a good feeling to do so, and you think of it as the sort of activity that makes people better overall. You’d prefer a political candidate to be the same religion as you, but you wouldn’t necessarily make that the deciding factor or anything. You don’t get into intense theological arguments with other people, and you don’t object if people belong to other religions than yours. If you found out your religion was untrue, you’d be upset for awhile but you’d be okay in the long run—and you might think an organization LIKE religion should keep going for the other benefits of it.

4. Medium-High Religious. You belong to a church, and you participate regularly (or you don’t right now but really feel you should as soon as it’s possible). You teach your children the stories belonging to your religion; you pay attention to their religious education, and think it’s important that they get it. You would be upset/worried if they didn’t grow up as believers. You pray fairly regularly and/or think you should do it more. You accept your religion’s structure for how things work: there is an actual supernatural world with actual real supernatural entities in it; there is a heaven and/or a hell and/or other supernatural location where humans go after death. If there is a difficult issue to figure out where you stand on it, you’d take your religion into account while deciding. If you had to make a short list of words describing who you were, your religious affiliation would be in there for sure. You feel your religion is the right one, though other religions may come close. If you found out your religion was untrue, it would be intensely upsetting and you would have to completely restructure your life and beliefs around this new information.

5. Strongly Religious. Everything in life is seen through the filter of religion. It is absolutely true, and of ultimate importance. It is pretty horrifying to imagine your children losing the faith, because it matters in an eternal way. The supernatural elements described by your religion are just as real (or more real) than the reality of the Earth and the humans and animals and so forth. There is an actual deity who actually exists, and there is no question about that (though feeling occasional doubt can be considered normal because of our failings as humans and because of attacks on our faith). Other religions have it wrong to varying degrees. If someone you love disagrees with your interpretation of a religious issue, it can be a very big deal. If you found out your religion was untrue—well, it’s too upsetting to consider that hypothetical.

Okay! Let’s just TRY this. Remember that none of the categories are going to describe you exactly. And it’s anonymous, so you don’t have to worry that you “ought to” choose a different category. As much as is possible with something like this, choose the one that actually best describes your actual level of religion.

[yop_poll id=”4″]

If you are subscribed to receive new posts/comments by email, you might right now be getting hundreds or thousands of emails from me.

1. I am extremely sorry.

2. I don’t know what the hell, but I’m having Paul look into it right this second even though he’s at work.

3. He is extremely upset and riled about it, if that’s any comfort. (It was to me.) We are saying “HOLY CRAP” and “WHAT THE HELL” back and forth to each other.

4. I can’t believe how unpleasant a situation this is, and I am extremely sorry it is happening to you.

Follow-up: Looks like it was an issue with another plug-in interacting poorly with the email subscription plug-in, and not with hackers or anything. Also looks like it’s over, and we’ve deleted the plug-in.

I finally added an actual printable thing for the fridge to the Fall Back (Standard Time) Printout to Avoid the Endless Discussions About Whether It’s Earlier or Later Right Now post:

Fall Back Fridge Printout

Today I went shopping with my mom and Elizabeth, and here was what I said, in order:

5 minutes into the store: “It makes me nervous to let her go off by herself like that—but I think it’s good for her, AND for me.”

6 minutes into the store: “I hope she can FIND us when she’s done trying those chairs.”

7 minutes into the store: “She probably went to the toy section.”

7.5 minutes into the store: “Okay, let’s just go look in the toy section, just to set my mind at ease.”

8 minutes into the store: “Okay, now I am getting anxious.”

8.1 minutes into the store: “Okay, how about if we split up and you go that way and I go this way.”

I walked my entire part of the long main store aisle, and what I was thinking was how incredibly, incredibly stupid I was going to feel if I let Elizabeth go off on her own “because it’s good for her AND for me” and she got taken by some horrible person and I never found out what happened to her and/or did find out what happened to her. Oh, I’ll be SO GLAD I worked on her independence and my anxiety THEN, won’t I? SO GLAD. SO WORTH IT. Why have I been “working on” my “issues” with worrying that one of my children will be taken, when ACTUAL CHILDREN ARE ACTUALLY TAKEN EVERY DAY BY ACTUAL BAD PEOPLE, AND THOSE CHILDREN BELONG TO ACTUAL PEOPLE JUST LIKE ME, WHO IN THOSE SITUATIONS HAVE EXPERIENCES EXACTLY LIKE THIS ONE AND THE CHILD IS NOT FOUND? WHY HAVE I BEEN “WORKING ON THAT”???? HAVE I ACTUALLY EVER USED A WORD LIKE “STATISTICALLY” IN THIS CONTEXT?????

I kept looking behind me to see if my mom had found her, and the answer kept being no. I started thinking about what the next step would be. Alerting the store? Calling 911? Running out into the parking lot? If I’d updated my Facebook status at that moment, I would have been searching for the “feeling dazed horror” option.

I got to the far wall, and I turned around and started walking back. Here was my greatest fear, and what I was increasingly sure I would see: that I would see my mom walking back towards me from the opposite far wall, by herself. I saw nothing. I kept walking. And then I saw my mom, walking toward me without Elizabeth, and then I saw that no, she was with Elizabeth, and that’s when I started crying. Elizabeth was embarrassed and I think a little mad at me, saying that she ALWAYS goes off to look by herself. GOD MOM STOP BEING SO EMBARRASSING. Statistically it was very unlikely it would have ended any other way.

I’m continuing to play Candy Crush, and to retroactively understand all the remarks people were making about it on Twitter, and all the remarks Paul was making about it in our living room. For example: chocolate. Paul kept saying chocolate was evil, EVIL, and I thought sure, it was probably challenging but didn’t require that kind of language in front of the children. Well, I repent, Paul. I repent of my judgey feelings. The children need to KNOW how evil chocolate is. They need to LEARN, while they’re still young.

One of my favorite things now is when I accidentally trigger one of those avalanches of clattering and as a result knock out a chocolate section completely. ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS. That is, I look at the world and I consider all its vast and varied wonders—and after carefully considering all those wonders, one of my FAVORITE THINGS is a thing that happens accidentally on Candy Crush sometimes.

My aunt just left after one of her usual fun visits at my parents’ house, and my mom and I always feel a little wan after she leaves because it seems like now there’s No More Fun. So today after moping around the house for awhile I emailed my mom and asked did she want to go out to lunch and to Goodwill to look for things for Elizabeth’s Halloween costume, and she said YES and we were OUT THE DOOR.

Elizabeth wants to be the White Witch of Narnia. I did an image search so I know that in the movie the White Witch has, like, beaded ballgowns, long fur capes, dreadlocks, and icicles sticking out of the top of her head. We haven’t seen the movie, so I asked Elizabeth what she thought the White Witch looked like, and Elizabeth thought she probably wore all white, so we’re going with that version. We have a pretty good start on it already because she has a white fake-fur coat, white tights, and silver shoes. She also has a white skirt, but it’s a short cotton-knit playskirt—not very White Witchy. My hope was that I could find something cheap at Goodwill, AND I DID:

What a ridiculous picture. There is no way to tell what’s going on here. I will have to describe it for you, as if there were no picture at all. On the left is a women’s size 7 ankle-length Jessica McClintock white shimmery/satiny skirt, or possibly a very fancy half-slip for under a wedding dress, way prettier that it looks in this frankly terrible and useless photo. I’m not sure yet how I’ll pin it—maybe I’ll fold/roll it so it’s still a skirt, or more likely I’ll pin on some shoulder straps so she can wear it as a dress, but WHATEVER, it’s exactly what I was hoping to find. It was $4.99, but then it turned out all the stuff on the Halloween racks was 50% off AND I have a 10%-off-every-purchase Goodwill card (it costs $10 and you can use it for a year, so if you spend more than $100/year it’s worth it—and if not, it’s a nice donation to Goodwill), so it was $2.25. TWO TWENTY-FIVE FOR THE REALIZATION OF MY DREAMS.

I was not really thinking when I took this photo, apparently, because I have the Goodwill stuff interspersed with the craft store stuff, so next there’s a white feather boa from Michaels, looking as if it’s part of the skirt, which gives the whole thing a racy look. (Plus, the hanging-loops are still on the skirt/slip and they’re flopping out looking like shoulder straps, and the skirt is folded over a bit creating a false bustline as if it’s a dress DID NO ONE THINK THIS OUT?) I’m not sure how she’ll wear that boa, but probably just around her shoulders. Or maybe I’ll pin it to the bottom of the skirt? or drape it around and around her neck? I don’t know, but I had a 40%-off-one-item coupon so it was $2.99. Probably unnecessary, but fun to buy.

Next is a package of plain white cardboard crowns, also from Michaels. I was all, “Hm, too bad they only have these colorful crowns and they seem too small, I wish they had something plain white and adjustable, oh well giving up and moving on,” and my mom was all, “Wait, like this exact thing hanging right here?” I think there are six of them in the pack. $2.99. Maybe we’ll decorate one with sparkles and/or glitter glue, or maybe it’s best to leave it white, I’m not sure.

On top of the crowns is a 2-pack of fake pearl bracelets from Goodwill, $.88. Again, probably-unnecessary-but-fun.

And last is a shawl-thing, triangular with impressive silky fringe, also from Goodwill. The fabric is champagne, but I think it’ll work because it’s so shot-through with silver that the overall effect is silvery/shimmery/fancy. It has a border of black and silver beads. 50% off, then another 10% off, so it was $.90.

I’m very pleased. I think this is going to work nicely. She can borrow a pair of my faux pearl earrings, too.

Oh! Oh, and then ALSO at Goodwill, I found a Lands’ End girls’ raincoat, a LONG one, like for SERIOUS RAIN, just exactly the sort of raincoat I would have loved to find for her this past summer for camp. I looked at the tag and it was $10, so I was going to pass it up (it’s in her size RIGHT NOW, so she’d only get one year’s use out of it and it might not even rain), but then I saw the tag was the color of the day so it was 50% off! And then another 10% off with my card! So it was $4.50. WELL OKAY THEN.

It does not look very long in this picture because I’m holding it funny and as you can see I was employing the “Are you going to make it look like it belongs on Etsy or are you going to get the job done quickly and easily?” method of photography, but it’s about knee length. The outside is a very sturdy- and waterproof-feeling hot pink, and the inside is a nice-feeling bright yellow canvas. I’d be surprised if it had ever been worn. I’ll bet someone else bought it for camp and then it didn’t rain.

One of the kids asked me this morning how long until Christmas. First I said something irritable (he asked right in the busy part of the morning routine, and it is NOT EVEN HALLOWEEN YET), but then a few minutes I relented, sighed, did the math…and huh, it’s two months from today. So when I was at Target later, I started something I should have started last month, which was my “buy a gift card every time I go to Target to spread out the financial impact” plan. They didn’t have the holiday ones by the registers yet (sometimes they have them earlier over by the greeting cards, but I forgot to check), but they had this nice vaguely-holidayish one so I got that.

I also bought this cute little fox thing in the dollar section:

It says it’s a candy dish, but it’s more the right size to put on the bureau for, like, a few small pairs of earrings or a couple of hair elastics. Or it would be good near the sink if you take your rings off to do dishes.

Incidentally, that post I just linked to above for the gift card plan also mentions The Girl My Boyfriend Cheated On Me with in High School. There is an update on her, which is that now she’s one of Elizabeth’s Girl Scout leaders. Imagine my surprise. And hers. She seems like a perfectly nice woman; I wonder if things will ever decrease in awkwardness enough for us to make eye contact?

This morning I am in an uproar over THIS:

Perhaps you have not immediately joined my uproar. Perhaps you are nodding as if you know what I’m talking about, but hoping it will be made clear soon because so far it’s not coming to you. Never mind: I didn’t notice until I opened the box. I will assist:

I bought this chocolate, which was the same price I usually pay, and brought it home to find that it is now HALF AS MUCH in the box. There used to be eight individually-wrapped 1-ounce squares, and I don’t mind if they want to stop individually wrapping them, though I do wish they wouldn’t act like it’s an improvement that I have to break the pieces myself now. But HALF the chocolate? HALF???

I am familiar with the concept of making packages smaller. Ice cream is in 1.5-quart containers now instead of half-gallon. I notice soda is trying to pull the same deal with 1.5-liter bottles. Jif peanut butter went around crowing that THEY were still 18 ounces while Skippy had reduced to 16 ounces—but now Jif is 16 ounces too (and not mentioning it, I notice). Manufacturers say it’s “so they won’t have to raise the price,” but since they go right ahead and raise prices ALSO I’m not going with that one. Plus, reducing the size IS IN FACT RAISING THE PRICE.

I suppose what they’re saying is they think customers will be too stupid to notice a size reduction but would complain about a price increase. Since I just bought a HALF-WEIGHT box of chocolate without noticing the decrease I guess it’s hard to argue with that. On the other hand, I DID NOTICE when I got home. And while a price increase makes me sigh about inflation and how much better things used to be in my day, a size reduction makes me feel CHEATED and TRICKED and WRONGED.

Also, this has a DRAMATIC IMPACT on two of my favorite recipes. My brownie recipe used to use 5/8ths of a box of Baker’s, and now uses ONE AND A QUARTER boxes. My fudge recipe used to use 1/2 a box, and now uses a WHOLE BOX. If I mess up a batch of fudge, and I do that fairly regularly, I am out a WHOLE BOX of chocolate. This pretty much means I’m not making fudge anymore, and I know Baker’s is a big company but I think there’ll be a meeting about why their sales have dipped so dramatically in my town.

I took a month to get around to buying an Instead Softcup, and then another month to get up the nerve to try it. Now I have tried it, I’m done trying it, and I’m ready to give a report.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I’d like to start by praising the instructions. Here’s how they start:

“Remember the first few times you used tampons or wore contact lenses? Well, reusable Softcup also takes a little time to learn to use correctly and comfortably. At first, it may seem awkward to either insert or remove reusable Softcup…that’s OK, most women experience that.”

I found that tremendously encouraging and heartening.

I bought the reusable version (each one can be rinsed and reused for the length of one period), but there’s also a disposable version. Since they have to be changed at least every 12 hours, I figured the 2-pack of reusables would last two full periods, but the 14-pack of disposables would last at most 7 days—and more likely less than 5 days. It’s approximately the same price per box, so that makes the reusables a much better deal—especially because even with a disposable I imagine you’d still need to rinse it out and not just drop it in the trash as-is, lest the family freak out.

My own personal situation, for comparison going into this, is that I’ve had only c-sections and I don’t like the feeling of tampons. I usually use reusable cloth pads, and it was a little hurdle to get used to rinsing those out but now I don’t mind it.

So. Putting the Softcup in. You sit down on the toilet to do this. You pinch the round Softcup edge so it looks like a number 8. Then you slide it in flat and level like a cookie sheet into the oven. You heard me. Cookie sheet. You don’t insert it UP and IN like a tampon, you insert it ACROSS and DOWN like…nothing else, ever. This made no sense to me until I tried it, but now I want to look again at the anatomical drawings in the gynecologist’s office.

For a few minutes after I put it in, I felt a slight crampy feeling, which worried me—but that feeling went away, and then I didn’t feel anything. I was triumphant: NOW I had a tampon-like thing that was NOT A TAMPON!

Alas: within a couple of hours, I’d justified the prudent use of a back-up pad. I was a little discouraged, because the cup was nowhere near full and it had been nowhere near 12 hours, but I thought I probably just hadn’t done it right somehow, so I rinsed it (slight hurdle, but okay—I could get used to that, as with rinsing pads) and tried it again. The same thing happened again.

That’s when I gave up. Not because of the leaking per se, though that was discouraging, but because of something I haven’t discussed yet: removal. I don’t know what I was imagining, but I guess something…tidier. And maybe I would have gotten used to it and started doing a better job at it, and maybe I had it in wrong which would explain both the leaking and the messy removal, and maybe the leaking was the only reason the removal was messy—but sometimes you just find your own personal line, and I’d found mine.

Not only was removal quite an unpleasant feeling to both my hand and my Interior Regions, but also to my psyche: you have to REACH IN and FIND and then GRIP and PULL. And the circle is NO LONGER PINCHED NARROW as it was for insertion, and it is SURPRISINGLY STURDY PLASTIC. And then there I was, sitting, with one hand bloodied and holding something that needed immediate rinsing before reinserting, and I still needed to clean myself up as well. Goodness, what to do? Wipe with one hand while holding the other hand aloft, trying not to spill; then stand, go to the sink, rinse out the Softcup, wash hands; then go back, sit down, wipe again, put the Softcup back in? What a complicated mess! And impossible to do in, say, a work/public restroom. Luckily I was at home, but it was quite a procedure even so.

So my review sounds very negative, doesn’t it? I tried it, I didn’t like it, I’m not going to use it. BUT! I think it’s like cloth pads: some people might try them and say “UG, they feel like DIAPERS, I HATE them! And I’m not willing to RINSE and LAUNDER them, what a complicated mess!!” Whereas I find them cozy and I don’t mind the fuss. So it’s just a matter of finding the tool that works for your tolerances. And my experience with the Softcup told me that it wasn’t right for me (though I’m saving the second one that came in the box, just in case I feel like trying again later), but it also told me that it seemed to have good potential for a different sort of person: it seemed well made, and the instructions were very good, and overall it seemed GOOD. Just not for ME. (Probably. Maybe later.)