Technical difficulty

Loyal readers, I am having WIFI issues while on the road. Hope to be posting soon. Thanks for your patience and support. 

Regifting at another level

I had to shake off my food coma and waddle to the keyboard to work on this post.
It has been a decadent five days of feasting. We polished off the leftovers tonight.
The weekend guests have returned to their respective zip codes. 
Table clothes have been laundered and folded and put away.
I figured tonight would be as good a night as ever to catch up and blog.
I figured if I started typing I would stay out of the kitchen and stop eating.
So in order to procrastinate just a little bit longer, I turned to my December issue of O The Oprah Magazine and was sad to find that it was too late for me to enter to win "The 12-day Give O-Way." I had been meaning to enter. I had even marked the necessary icons scattered throughout the magazine. You had to go on line for 12 days and register the icons for a chance to win. 
It would have been a chance to do some of my holiday shopping without shopping.
If I had been one of the 12 lucky winners, who actually entered the contest before the 11/25/13 deadline, I would have given almost everything away. 
For years Oprah was bigger than Santa Claus in adult circles by giving away her "Favorite Things'' to lucky TV audiences. And a lot of those items wound up on EBay quicker than the UPS trucks delivering them could back out of the recipients' driveways.
Pretty ungrateful and nervy if you ask me. And every year when this gifting and selling would take place it really bothered me.
If I had been more focused and entered this contest I would have given away or auctioned off for charity most of the 60 items on the list.
My sister was definitely getting the UGG boots. My husband would have been the recipient of the PerfecTemp Cordless Electric Kettle. I would let the children wrestle over the Beats headphones and the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch. 
I would have kept the lounge gown by UrbanMuuMuu. 
I would wear it while writing this blog.
Okay, I just looked into ordering it in orchid, using the OPRAH code to save 20 percent on a ridiculously priced gift to myself. Happy birthday to me. The fact it was made in the USA makes it even more tempting.
Have I mentioned Oprah and I, and one of my dearest friends who lives in New York, share the same birth date?
The rest of the "Favorite Things," after also spoiling a few wonderful friends with gifts, I would auction on EBay for charities. 
As always most of the stuff on the O List is soooo-O not on my list of favorite things. My favorite things start with family and friends and then there is chocolate, purses and Molly the yellow lab that lives up the block. But never truffle products, unless they are chocolate truffles.
I wanted to win to avoid shopping. Unlike the 141 million shoppers who got involved in the Gray Thursday/Black Friday crazy, I went to and watched movies. The "Hunger Games" on the family room PC until 1 a.m. and HG No. 2: Catching Fire on IMAX in the theater. Both with my visiting college-aged son. Priceless!
According to figures released by Walmart, 2.8 million towels were sold during the big shopping weekend. And 2 million televisions and 1.9 million dolls were whisked away from the big box retailer.
None of these items were on the Oprah list. A fight over towels at a Walmart in Arkansas also made the news.
According to USA Today, the National Retail Federation reported shoppers spent a lackluster $57 billion going into Cyber Monday shopping. That was down from $59.1 billion last year.
The average shopper dropped between $400-500. If Mrs. Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, is reading this she should skip the next sentence. Oprah is sending her a $500 Thomas Keller Black Truffle Risotto gift box that was on the the "Favorite Things" list. A whole page was devoted to truffle products.
Oprah is not your average shopper.
Neither am I. I have 30 minutes to see if the UrbanMuuMuu lounge gown becomes a Cyber Monday special.

Giving more thanks for pie

I can't spend a lot of time on this particular post because I am prepping for Hanukkah (first candle tomorrow night, for those of you keeping track) and Thanksgiving, Thursday at our house.
For the first time in years Thanksgiving will be at our home. Our children and our siblings will be under one roof (weather and airport permitting) and around the table debating whether jellied or whole cranberry sauce is better, for the first time in a very long time.
I am looking forward to hosting and having leftovers.
There will be three kinds of pie, marshmallows on the sweet potato casserole and leftovers.
The past few years we have gone to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. 
Moving the holiday here is bitter sweet for me. 
My mom -- the main attraction for our annual Thanksgiving journey -- passed away in February. 
So this Thanksgiving, even with its pie and leftovers, will be different.
Our family has been blessed while living in Chicagoland, and before in Orlando, to celebrate many other holidays with our extended families. Transplants like ourselves and natives, who extended dining room tables to make room for more, have adopted us for many holidays, but Philadelphia was the Thanksgiving destination.

Whenever there is a pie on the table, it seems to be a conversation starter. About a year ago a friend of ours told us the story of Beth Howard, a woman he knew from his web production days, who has taken pie to a whole new level. She proclaimed pie had healing qualities. 
He had experienced it firsthand when he shared making one of her apple pies from scratch with his daughter as they worked the dough and worked out an emotional crisis.
I immediately "Googled" Howard and have since run my fingers through her book "Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Pie."
My friend met Howard, author, blogger and pie baker, when she was a very successful web producer. She later quit that lucrative gig in early 2000 to pursue pie. Eventually, she wound up watching A-list celebrities as well as pedestrian pie lovers enjoy her wares in LA, while baking for a restaurant there.
Howard, who now lives in THE American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, is a celebrity. When not throwing Pie Parties and baking and selling pie at the Gothic House's seasonal Pitchfork Pie Stand (closed for the season), she has continued writing and been healing others thru pie.
A year ago, while the country was reeling from the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, Howard packed up her pie plates and took a team of volunteer pie makers and servers from Iowa, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Georgia to help the people of Newtown, Conn., deal with their grief with fruit pies.
Her act of kindness and healing was featured on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360. Howard -- who has another book coming out in April, also returned to Connecticut in March to teach pie baking and spoke on her life experiences at a public library.
Sadly, Howard experienced firsthand how "pie does help heal." 
She threw herself even deeper into the pie promotion biz in 2009, after her husband of six years died unexpectedly from a ruptured aorta.
My husband and I loaded up the grocery cart at Costco earlier today with pumpkin and pecan offerings. We heard a Costco employee claim the company expected to move 1 million pies today.
During our last two Thanksgivings in Philadelphia we introduced the rest of the clan to the Costco pies. It was an easy offering for a table that sometimes sported turkeys our cousins raised and de-feathered for dining at my aunt's house.
Truthfully I have not had better than the warehouse market's pumpkin pies -- why bake?
But I am going to make an apple pie for Thursday. I am going to make Beth Howard's basic apple pie recipe.
And I am going to think of my mom as I count our blessings and I am baking.
You can never have too much pie. 

Take the money, please.

Why do banks make it so difficult to deposit money?
At some banks, if you have a particularly restrictive college savings/checking account that is not attached to your parents' mortgage, a bank will charge you a fee to deposit money with the assistance of a human-pulse-toting-teller.
Seriously.
If you want to deposit Aunt Harriet's birthday cash with a human you may incur a $6 fee to  deposit money into your account.
You can take a photo with your smart phone of Aunt Harriet's check, if she mails you one. That image can be directly deposited into your account.
Aunt Harriet can electronically transfer money to you or her favorite babysitter if she has set that up on her smart phone.
But don't try and deposit the cash she and Uncle Joe handed you on the last visit to Philadelphia, by involving another human.
I am the first to admit that I am technologically challenged.
Last week, in an attempt to stay warm inside the car on a blustery suburban Chicago day, I attempted to help my daughter (IT Gal) deposit her tip money thru the drive-up ATM. My daughter, who is making money as a very good waitress at a wonderful breakfast place, while plotting her next life move, wanted to make a deposit.
I told her we could do it thru the ATM, since I had become accustomed to making deposits for her brother without the aid of a human teller.
So much for my being so savvy. Before I knew it, the ATM was spitting her hard-earned dollars back at us.
My daughter, as my witness.
First the finicky machine kicked back excess bills because we didn't heed the 30-bill max warning. Then it got even more picky and kicked back a wad of cash because it didn't want to digest a grotty $1 bill someone left her for bringing out their breakfast with a cheerful attitude.
When did it become so difficult to deposit money into the bank?
She wound up having to get out of the car to complete the deposit when I inadvertently cancelled a third transaction attempt after begging the machine for more time.
A quick glance in the rear view mirror and I saw about seven or eight cars stacked up behind us. It was then that I yielded to her pressure and parked the car and allowed her to go into the bank and hand the money to a human-pulse-toting-teller.
Of course there was only one of them working behind the counter in the giant branch. Another was handling all the cars stacked up in the drive-thru lanes. Another was behind a desk, just in case someone came in to deposit something in a safe deposit box or try to open an account.
Maybe this is just a payback for once making fun of the fact there was braille on the drive-up ATM to aid visually impaired patrons when they attempted to use the machines.
I remember pitching the observation to a columnist friend, while working at a newspaper in Florida. After making light of the situation in his column, but also educating anyone else who had ever noticed the bumps on the drive-thru ATM keypad, he received a barrage of mail and phone calls.
The folks who need those bumps were not amused. The machines, which are plated and produced the same as the walk-up ATMs, are standard issue.
He left the paper soon after. I hope not because of this topic.
I will resist adding anything else on the subject of drive-up ATMs that have braille on them.
When they put in the automated postage machines in our post office branch, and eliminated three of the walk-up counter spaces, they thought they were going to be able to streamline mailing packages and letters. 
The last time I went in to mail a letter for more than a traditional stamp they had a full-time postal employee trying to assist folks, standing in line for one of the two remaining human-pulse-carting-clerks, with the new machines. 
After 30 minutes in line for a clerk, I posted a letter for a dollar and change. When the clerk told me I could have saved time and done the transaction myself on one of the machines, I mentioned the new machines did not take cash and I didn't like to charge anything on a plastic card for under a certain amount. I was also helping to save her job. 
Call me a dinosaur. I don't like to scan and bag my own groceries.
I do like to have people help me when I don't have the exact postage.
And I do still like the idea of putting money in the bank.

If it looks like a pizza...

It is not my personality to get into the middle of an argument.
I am a firm believer that minimally there are three sides to every story.
I know this might not sit well with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and The Daily Show TV Sage Jon Stewart. 
Earlier this week their bantering over which city has the tallest skyscraper literally spiraled out of control. 
Accessories will make the Second City's beloved Sears Tower número due (just can't call it the Willis Tower, and I am a transplant here). The beloved Freedom Tower aka One World Trade Center's antennae, which dots the "I" on a 1,776-foot building, will put it 325 feet above our tourist attraction, making it the country's tallest. 
And despite Mayor Rahm's dictate that "if it looks like an antenna, acts like an antenna, then guess what?", One World, with its measly 104 floors, will be and is taller.  
The mayor's comments only fueled Stewart, who opened up the deep dish battle. He was critical of the food source Chicagoans worship. He even made the mistake of comparing it to the New York slice of life, the kind of pizza you fold in the palm of your hand and stretch the cheese with each bite as hot oil drops down your wrist. 

This was the only pizza I knew until I moved to Chicago. 
And I am a Native Philadelphian. I left the Philadelphia-New York area in in 1979 and continued a quest for "good" New York pizza while living in Clearwater, Mount Dora, Cocoa Beach, Orlando and now Buffalo Grove.  Believe me,  when this family finds good hand-tossed NY pizza it remains loyal. NY pizza is not to be confused with Chicago thin crust. 
So I understand the passion both rarely opinionated men have for one over the other. Pizza that is. 
Mayor Rahm sent Stewart and staff deep dish pizzas -- including ones with symbolic anchovies atop -- as a "piece" offering. 

That is one thing Chicago has figured out. You can ship deep dish almost anywhere in the world. And one of our favorite Chicago chains does that to support the troops on a regular basis. 
Never, and I mean NEVER try to mail, let alone, transport a hand tossed pizza to another zip code unless you hand carry it or your husband figures out a way to carry it on an airplane to cure a suburban Chicago family's withdrawal symptoms on his way back from a business trip.

Apparently Mayor Rahm Tweeted (although there are Social Media Experts making careers out of doing this) "No hard feelings?" to Stewart and his Twitter followers and a physical note allegedly from him accompanying the deep dish buffet said: "Jon, Deep Dish With Dead Fish, Love Rahm."

The symbolic anchovies - something I would not even eat on a hand-tossed pie - go back to Mayor Rahm's days as director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (1988), when he sent dead fish to a pollster. I think he has mellowed since becoming a mayor.

When people ask Philadelphians if we prefer cheesesteak icons Pat's or Geno's, we will of course have hometown favorites: Jim's (me) and Pudge's (husband). One thing we know is that we don't eat Philly cheesesteaks outside of the Delaware Valley. Not even if the vendor says they imported hoagie rolls and the meat from the City of Brotherly Love.

My family doesn't ever compare a cheesesteak to an Italian beef sandwich -- another Chicago delicacy. 

One is not better. They, like the pizzas we are arguing about, are just different.

 

Bullying is not acceptable on any level

The women that I drink coffee with at Starbucks on Monday mornings, while solving world affairs, said they would  boycott watching the Miami Dolphins-Tampa Bay Buccaneers Monday Night Football Game.
I agreed to go along, because I had this blogging deadline and I agreed with them that the National Football League had to put its house in order.
Two of the Dolphins' offensive linemen are under the microscope for not being able to get along*. The actions of one, allegedly caused the other to quit the team. Yep, this is professional football I am blogging about.
Alleged bullying -- death threats and racial slurs -- has divided the rest of the Dolphins roster and the coaches were grappling with what needed to be done. I would bet more players and coaches were more upset that what happened in the locker room did not stay in the locker room.
Richie Incognito, an alleged troublemaker who had already been released by another NFL team, was suspended for conduct detrimental to the Dolphins. Jonathan Martin, who is taking a lot of crap for breaking the "Bro Code" the "Blue Wall," etc.,  left his professional football team two weeks ago after making allegations of relentless harassment. Incognito's being named a "team leader" might have been the final straw for Martin.
The off the field antics -- including more than 1,000 text messages and recorded messages between the two players -- have overshadowed the pass protection and offensive line issues that are really plaguing the Dolphins this season. Seriously, someone needs to take their phones away.
Going into the game Miami was 4-4. The Bucs, 0-8, were another story. Neither team needed this distraction.
The NFL, which is doing its own investigation, is taking its hits in the media as reporters take a break from reporting on the on-going concussion issue. 
NFL players are expensive. The egos are enormous. Locker rooms filled with 300-pound guys are crowded. The locker rooms can be pressure cookers, especially if a team is not winning.
Generally teams police their own behavior. At least that seems to be the consensus from other players around the league weighing in on the topic.
*News flash: Not all teammates get along. And this testosterone-fueled bullying thing did not just start. Hazing has also been part of the culture.
We coffee drinkers and most educated people I know are in agreement that there is nothing funny about bullying.
This topic has made it difficult for me to write a blog and keep my pledge to provide at least one laugh per read to my loyal readers. I won't count the 12 followers I have on Twitter.
Bullying is an issue the NFL, the Dolphins and the two players who have set the sports world on its ear this month need to sort out. The NFL which wasn't exactly quick to put the kibosh on towel snapping and verbal abuse in its locker rooms when women reporters were trying to gain access and do their jobs in the 70s and 80s and 90s is now saying it won't tolerate bullying in the locker room because a locker room is a workplace. 
On a personal level, I have been on both sides of the bullying issue. As a first-grader at Philadelphia's Pennypacker Elementary School I was reprimanded for pushing and punching an older boy on a walk one morning to school. The third-grader made fun of my mentally challenged brother. I don't remember tripping him and how he got a bloody nose, but I vividly remember the principal rolling up his sleeves and leaning across his giant desk as the "victim" and I sat shaking in our shoes.
I may be confusing this reprimand with the time I "illegally'' picked flowers on the way to school for a teacher, either way the boy never called my brother the "R" word again. He also didn't walk on the same side of the street to and from school.
The principal told me to keep my hands to myself, after the fight and after picking flowers. 
One of my children was bullied by a classmate, who would spit on my child's lunch in elementary school. At dinner each night I would remind my child to use words not actions to resolve the situation. 
After a few weeks of tossed lunches, I called the teacher, who rearranged the lunch table so the bully could spit on someone else's lunches.
The NFL should set an example for the rest of the world. Bullying is not acceptable and the bully's behavior is what needs to be changed.

Wanted, continuity editors

Does it drive any of you crazy when you are watching an NCIS episode on your HD TV and you spot the mountains in the background of a street scene that is supposed to be taking place on the streets of Washington, DC?
Even staring into Mark Harmon's piercing blue eyes won't distract me from scenic details.

Do any of you get distracted by the palm tree that towers over the house the suburban Philadelphia (PA) family on The Goldbergs resides in? They make sure the older son is wearing a Flyers jersey, but they don't notice the shrubbery when the family steps outside.
I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, so I am always trying to find trip ups in that show. They are spot on in a lot of their details, even up to the wallpaper in the kitchen that was actually in one of my friend's houses.

Maybe it's just me. 
When watching a movie I get distracted by the water level in a glass not matching up in the next scene, a character's hair length changing depending on the filming sequence, actresses who never perspire in chase scenes, etc.

After moving to Cocoa Beach in the 80s it drove me crazy there were no mountains. Having grown up watching I Dream Of Jeannie, I thought I would be familiar with the terrain. I don't think I missed an episode of the sitcom which starred Barbara Eden as a 2,000-looking-great-for-her-age-old genie and Larry Hagman, her handsome astronaut, whom she eventually marries.
Nope, no mountains. I lived in Cocoa Beach for nearly two years and only met one astronaut. Met a lot of surfers, but that is a whole other story, or two, or three.
And the Atlantic Ocean beach the bottle she lived in from 1965-70 washed up on, was on a different side of the country if you pay close attention.
I lived on Cocoa Beach when the Ron Jon Surf Shop didn't have a neon glow to it. Shuttle launches and Patrick Air Force Base's "routine military operations offshore" rattled the sliding doors of the condo I was renting and rolled me out of bed.
It is not just me! I just Googled "TV continuity mistakes" and saw there are countless movie and television errors documented  -- most referring to Star Trek and the Golden Girls -- by amateur sleuths like myself. 
Recently I overheard some people talking about the details in the film Gravity. They acted like they had been on a space station. Listening to them pick the movie apart bugged me a little as they tried to destroy the illusion. I was too distracted by seeing George Clooney in IMAX 3D to notice the "plot flaws."
Sure, being a blogger is almost as easy as being an armchair quarterback. Unlike print media and film, you can go in and fix your mistakes -- when they are pointed out to you.
That is one part of the process I am enjoying.
I always thought that being a continuity editor would be a good career path for me. Working as a reporter and editor for newspapers is where I really honed my fact-checking skills.
I always seem to know where the missing sock is in my laundry, I replace the toilet paper before the cardboard roll is completely empty and from wherever I am sitting in the house, I can pretty much direct the other people in my house to find what they can't locate. 
Details, details, details.