F IS FOR FOWL IS FAIR

     Remember this scene from The Producers? "He likes boids. Doity, disgusting boids." Well, I'm here to say that not all boids are doity and disgusting.  This wasn't what I was planning to post about for F, but I thought you'd want to see a fair fowl that was casually occupying a front yard across the street from my (definitely non-rural) house one day last week:

     And a different view of the same guy:

     He might have been doity, but he was far from disgusting.  I'd go with "majestic," in fact.  Which is why it was so weird that when I was standing in the street, taking pictures of him, the neighbor in the adjoining yard opened her window to tell me that she'd called Animal Control, but they'd come and "not done anything."  Not done anything like what?  Like shoot him, for God's sake?  He was just standing there, preening.  I replied to the neighbor, "Well, I think he's cool."  Her response?  "Well, I don't want him in my yard."  Window slammed shut.
     As my mother used to say: it takes all kinds.  And that definitely includes Fools.

HERE'S THE DOLLHOUSE

     Voila: the basement dollhouse.  It isn't much, but it's home.

     How's that?  More creepy than you imagined, or less?

E IS FOR EMAIL

  

      Email has changed my life. For someone like me who's always had a pretty severe phone phobia, email makes it possible to stay in touch with people at arm's length. There's no tension, no trying to read verbal cues to assess how welcome or unwelcome my overture is.  If someone doesn't want to hear from me, all he has to do is not respond.  Of course, email has its own anxiety-producing elements (Was it sent? Was it received? Did I get an answer and delete it by mistake?), but those are nothing compared to phone trauma.  Plus, email is accomplished via WRITING.  Writing, I can do.  I can take my time, editing as I go, until I'm satisfied with my message before I send it out into the ether.  Written communication makes me feel so much safer than the oral kind.
     But here's something I never would have suspected: everybody likes email.  Evidently, there are a lot of people besides me who, for whatever reason, don't want to talk on the phone unless they have to.  Who knew?  Not everyone is addicted to real-time conversation across distances.  In fact, most of us seem to agree that email is a boon to humankind.
     So I have a modest proposal: would establishing a National Email Day be out of line? Please weigh in with your opinion!  But don't call me - and I won't call you.  (LOL!!)  (yeah, I text too)
 

DUNNO WHAT D IS FOR

     My plan was to do "D IS FOR DOLLHOUSES," and to take a few pictures of the dollhouse in my basement before I left yesterday morning to drive to Vermont with my friend Michele for a mini-writing retreat.  My husband built that dollhouse from a kit for my daughter, and after she stopped playing with it years ago it moved to a tabletop in our basement.  But I'm mostly the one who arranged the furniture and household belongings in it, and from the beginning I played with it more than she did.  And still, when I go down to the basement to do laundry, I'll stop to admire it, do a little rearranging, imagine what it would be like to live there...
   But I forgot to take that photo before I left, which kind of defeats my whole plan, because why bother posting pictures of dollhouses and their miniature contents from Google images when you can just look those up yourself, if you're so inclined? 
     So I'm left D-less.  And I've been trying to come up with viable alternative Ds, and instead all I can think of are things like: D is for draconian laws... dental floss... Darwinian evolution... demo cars... desolate landscapes...  Diet Coke.  D is for debonair denunciations; dainty Dobermans; dolorous dance parties.  D is for decrepit doughnuts, demented dentists, and dissatisfied dominatrixes.  D is for... well, I dunno what D is for.  It's all too daunting, too demoralizing, too devastating for me.  And so I dare to desist.  But -

 

     I thought that first, you might want to see a glimpse of my darling dogs....

 

 

p.s.  Seriously, though.  I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but Doctors Without Borders is one of the most inspirational groups I know of.  I'm a Field Partner, which means I make small but regular monthly donations to them, and I urge you to do the same if you can.  These are people who will go anywhere in the world, no matter how dangerous, to try to save lives.  In my opinion, they are the faces of true heroism.

C IS FOR CROSSWORDS

     I feel that I've gotten through the first two letters of the alphabet while more or less concealing my inner geek.  I mean, Art Deco is just a design style, and what kind of monster doesn't love baby animals?  But tonight, for C, my mask is ripped off.  Hello, my name is Susan, and I'm a crossword puzzle fiend.
     Wait.  It gets worse.  For several years in the late 1980s, I periodically attended all-day crossword puzzle competitions somewhere on Long Island.  Yes, that would involve completing crossword, after crossword, after crossword.  All day.  The one who finished each puzzle first, with no errors, won a prize of some sort.  I didn't pay too much attention to the prizes, because I never won any.  I was somewhere in the middle of the pack, I'd say.  The winners (usually from among the same three or four people) were pretty scary.  They would finish puzzles faster than it seemed humanly possible to even read all the clues.  Will Shortz, who is now the New York Times puzzle editor, was always there,  involved in some leadership role.  This was my idea of a good time.
     Oh, and I also composed a few puzzles, too.  This is not an easy task for a novice.  In case you've never noticed, puzzles must be symmetrical - left to right, top to bottom.  And if you want to compose a NY Times Sunday puzzle, it also has to have a theme, and to preferably contain some puns.  I don't like to think about how many hours it used to take for me to compose a puzzle.  I didn't mind at the time, because (1) I didn't have any kids, (2) I was Queen of the Geeks, and (3) I was delusional enough to think it was fun. But now... now comes the shame.
     Fast forward a lot of years.  The Sunday Times puzzle is the only one I do on a regular basis, almost always over the phone with my son.  I've blogged about our doing the puzzle together during the post-college year he lived at home, but now we live hours apart and so we have a weekly phone session, which I so love.
     But I do the acrostic too, okay?  Wanna make something of it?  But alas, the acrostic only appears in the Sunday Magazine Section biweekly, so I have to wait two whole weeks in between my acrostic fixes.  Sometimes I work myself up thinking that someday, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon will retire from acrostic-making, and then what will become of my life?  I shudder to think.
     Leave a comment, please, if you love crosswords.  Make me feel that there are others like me who manage to live relatively normal lives.  I'd be very grateful.

B IS FOR... BABY ANIMALS

   Yeah, beneath this tough-guy persona lurks a heart of mush, and I'm not too proud to admit that baby animals are among my all-time Favorite Things.

     I mean, seriously.  And what about

 ?

     Hello?

     Not to mention:

  


And this one is for Miz B:

     I rest my case.

A TO Z CHALLENGE KICKOFF: ART DECO

                                                   

 

 

    This month I'm going to blog my way through the alphabet around the theme of  My Favorite Things, and I really love Art Deco.  Not that I'm an expert or anything - I just take great pleasure in the lines of it, the stylishness, the swoop and the flair. This, for instance, is my bedroom set:

 

 

 

 

     (If you're my friend, you won't notice the crap all over everything - you'll just see the furniture.)When I was giving my friend Ann a tour of our new house 17 years ago, she stopped dead when she got to the bedroom.  In a tone of pure horror, she gasped, "My grandparents had furniture like this!"  Well, Ann, then your grandparents had excellent taste, that's all I can say.  I don't know any kind of design model that moves me the way Art Deco does.  And yes, Ann, that includes your beloved Danish Modern.  So maybe we haven't managed to improve on the 1930's.  This stuff has character.  It has class.  Like Fred and Ginger.  Or like my dinnerware:

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Or maybe you'd just rather swoon at the feet of Erte, The Master Himself:

 

 

     Or you can just not like any of it, I guess.  You're allowed.  I'm dedicating this A to Z Challenge to MY favorite things, not yours.  No offense.  Give me another try tomorrow!