It's Sporadically Sunny in Pittsburgh

My husband asked me in January when I was going to write my annual “snow blog.” I guess it’s true that I usually write at least one blog a year complaining about the snow, in addition to my annual post about how I drove myself to the hospital in a snowstorm to give birth.  But there was no need this year.

We had a Mild Winter.  With apologies to my friends and family who welcome the snow for a number of reasons, this made me very, very happy.  There were only a handful of significant snowfalls, and most of those took place on Friday nights.  This allowed us to plan to stay home on Saturday and ride out the storm in just the way I like, that is to say under an afghan with some hot beverage in the comfort of my own home.  It was all pretty civilized.

I helped the situation along by buying a salt spreader to go along with my “snow blower,” which is more of an electric shovel than an actual blower, and really only works when the snow is less than five inches, making it good for one of the two big weekday snowfalls this season.

Now I hate snow so much that it is my policy never to complain about any other kind of inclement weather.  It doesn’t matter what it is.  Extreme temperatures, crazy winds, rain, whatever, bring it on.  Just don’t make me drive in the snow.  This is a good thing because I live in the greater metropolitan Pittsburgh area where we enjoy all the different seasons, sometimes all in the same day.

I have to say though that the weather has been particularly wacky this year, even by Pittsburgh standards. We had 60 degree temperatures in January (and I wasn’t complaining).  We had a stretch of days in March where the temperatures were in the 70’s (and I certainly wasn’t complaining). 

Sometimes the temperatures would drop into the 30’s overnight and soar into the 70’s during the day.  There were days when the sun and the rain took turns coming out, and occasionally overlapped so that it was sunny and rainy simultaneously.  There were many days that I watched the wind blow rain, leaves and other objects sideways past my window at work. One day I swear a small house from Kansas flew by. But I wasn’t complaining.

However, last Sunday, on April 22 (Earth Day, appropriately enough) I heard the weather forecast for the next day.  They were calling for 4 to 6 inches of snow in Western Pennsylvania in LATE April.  Seriously, even after enjoying a mild winter, I never want to see that much snow in late April.  I was in a very, very bad mood even thinking about it.

When the next day came, the westernmost part of the state where I live “dodged the bullet” and didn’t get any snow, but our nearby neighbors just east did get just what they forecast.  I was relieved and grateful for us, and sorry for them.

Some people complained that there wasn’t snow because they were eagerly anticipating a big snowstorm in April.  Others complained about the weather forecast being wrong.  But not me.

The Tuna Cheddar Quest

For the past 10 months, with the exception of a handful of major holidays, I have weighed, measured, and assessed the nutritional information of every morsel of food and beverage that I have consumed.  I have tracked this information using a variety of different criteria, alternately counting Weight Watchers points, calories, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and protein.


When eating out, I find it helpful to go onto a restaurant's website to choose my meal ahead of time.  When I was planning my visit to my local family restaurant chain known for its reasonable prices and friendly cookies on Easter Monday I discovered that I could have the Tuna Cheddar Melt, which was listed on the website as a "NEW" item.  

I have obviously always enjoyed food (or I wouldn’t be in this predicament to begin with), but when you watch every bite, the food you do eat (or plan to eat) takes on a new special kind of import.  I cannot even begin to tell you how eagerly I was anticipating enjoying this tuna melt - my mouth was watering thinking about it.  I thought about it all day long.

My waiter let the air out of my balloon when he informed me that the Tuna Cheddar Melt was no longer available because it was actually a Lenten Special and Lent was now over.  I was despondent.  I was one of those tiresome customers who requested the nutritional information pamphlet so I could choose an alternative meal, none of which had any appeal to me in place of the Tuna Cheddar Melt I had wanted so badly.

Later at home, the thought occurred to me that I may never be able to have a Tuna Cheddar Melt from this restaurant again.  My blood ran cold.  Someday before I die, I want to enjoy this sandwich again.  Would that be an item for my bucket list? 

Remember the olden days when you wrote letters of complaint to businesses?  You would read it over in the light of day, and then decide whether you actually wanted to send it or not.  Well, nowadays, it is all much more immediate.  You can fill out the feedback section on the restaurant website and then hit the “send” button before having a chance to think it over.

Here is the feedback I sent to the restaurant:

1)  If a menu item is available for a limited time, the menu item should be removed from your website the MILLISECOND that it is no longer available to the customer.  Otherwise you are advertising a product that isn't really available, setting yourselves up for disgruntled customers (like I was yesterday).

2)  If you are planning to offer a dish for a limited time only, you might want to think twice about advertising it as "NEW."  This implies that it is an item that will continue to be offered.  Perhaps you could replace that with something like "LENTEN SPECIAL" and maybe even state that it is for a limited time only (e.g. "*Only available through April 6th!").

3)  Finally, I remember a time when Tuna Cheddar Melts were a regular menu item at your restaurant, and the store manager verified that this was true, and that it was actually a pretty popular item.  May I respectfully suggest that you reestablish the Tuna Cheddar Melt as a regular menu item?  How hard could this be?  I assume that you have everything on hand for the sandwich already except for the tuna, and how inconvenient could it be to stock some canned fish in the store?  It doesn't go bad.

I am still waiting for my reply.  Maybe they didn't take me seriously when I told them that their restaurant would be the place for my smiles again when I am able to order a Tuna Cheddar Melt from their menu.

Yes You Can-Can

We were just finishing up a perfect little getaway in Niagara Falls.  We stayed in a beautiful bed and breakfast, and our hostess Marie could not have been more gracious.  Marie was Italian and made the most expansive and delicious breakfasts I have ever had at a B & B.  Just as you were thinking that you couldn’t eat another bite of the scrumptious pancakes, fruit, bacon and pastries she so lovingly provided, she would stick her head out of the kitchen and announce, “Don’t worry!  There’s more!”  She would then emerge with a platter of the most perfect omelets ever made.  And you would find room for an omelet.

So it was Friday afternoon, and I was fat and happy and using my debit card to settle up the bill with Marie.  She punched in the amount on her hand held credit card machine.  When she saw the receipt, she gasped and went a deadly shade of pale.  “Oh, no!”  she proclaimed, “I accidentally hit an extra 0.”  I looked at our receipt.  What should have been a charge for $336 was now a charge for $3360, which was more than the amount we had in our checking account.  Marie immediately called her banker, who informed her that, unfortunately, she was not authorized to make a refund of that large an amount.  It seems that in Canada they can hold your money hostage for someone else’s error.

Our account was overdrawn late on a Friday and we had nothing but a Canadian $20 in our pockets, which wouldn’t even be enough to fill up the gas tank for the drive back to Pittsburgh.  Marie was hyperventilating now.  I tried to calm Marie to keep her from having a full-blown nervous breakdown while my husband took control of dealing with the bankers.

First, he talked to Marie’s Canadian banker, telling him that he needed to authorize an immediate refund so that we had access to our own money so we could get home.

 

“I can’t do that, sir,” replied the banker.

“Yes, you can,” explained my husband, “When you say you can’t, you mean you won’t or it is against your policy, or is it not your procedure.  Let me talk to your supervisor.”

My husband called our bank back in the States and explained the situation.  Our banker couldn’t have been nicer.  She immediately cancelled the charge, took away the overdraft fee, and told my husband that we would have access to the money in our account in two business days, which should have been Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week. 

Marie was in tears. She couldn’t offer us another night’s stay as all her rooms were booked – there was no room at the Inn.  She offered to lend us $100 to get home.

But my husband wasn’t finished with the bankers yet.  He told our banker that we needed immediate access to our money so we could get home.

“I can’t do that, sir,” replied the banker.

“Yes, you can,” explained my husband, “When you say you can’t, you mean you won’t or it is against your policy, or is it not your procedure.  Let me talk to your supervisor.”

In a stunning example of international detente, my husband put the two bankers on the phone together and told them to work it out.  In about 10 minutes they accomplished the impossible – they arranged it so the original transaction never happened.  Marie started breathing normally and I breathed a sigh of relief too.

As for my husband, he had never been more attractive to me then he was at that moment.

Pass(ing)over into Easter

When it comes to observing religious holidays, I am about as far from “traditional” as you can get.  If you doubt me, let me tell you about Easter dinner this year.  My father, my husband and I celebrated the holiday at Ichiban Japanese Steakhouse very happily eating various combinations of seafood and chicken.  Enough said.

As a kid, I loved Easter.  It was the most important religious holiday in Catholicism, and even as a child I understood its significance.  I loved dressing up in my new Easter dress and hat with my mother and sisters (yes, we wore our Easter bonnets) for church on Easter Sunday.  And any holiday involving jelly beans and baskets of chocolate candy couldn’t be all bad.
  

However, the primary reason I liked Easter so much is that it meant that Lent was – finally!- over.  Lent was six weeks of penance.  You had to give up something you liked, and we were taught that you weren’t supposed to have any fun at all during Lent.  I was bitter about this because my birthday always  fell in Lent and I wanted to have fun on my birthday.  Easter meant the end of that excruciating period, and also coincided with the beginning of the Spring season.  Ah, yes, a most welcome holiday, all the way around.

The revelation that some Christian churches have re-named Easter “Resurrection Sunday” was surprising and disturbing to me.   Wasn’t Easter always the Sunday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus?  Why did they feel it was necessary to do this?

I suspected that perhaps this had something to do with the origin of the name, and I realized that I had absolutely no idea what that might be. My crackerjack internet research revealed that the name “Easter” may have been derived from Eostre, a Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility.  http://www.history.com/topics/history-of-easter  So, was that the problem?  That “Easter” may have had less-than-Christian origins?  Even though this most Christian of all holidays has been signified by this name for centuries, and even though a lot of us, I suspect, were unaware of the name’s origins.

For me, "Easter" will always evoke this holiday - the Resurrection, the rebirth, Spring arriving, and all my childhood memories.

 

As always, my husband and I celebrated this holiday season in a most interfaith way.  We kicked things off a week ago by attending Pittsburgh Musical Theatre’s fine professional production of “Jesus Christ Superstar,”  a rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice commemorating the events leading up to and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

On Friday and Saturday, we attended Passover Seders, which as you may or may not know, involve wine consumption.  At the first one the words the Apostles sang in “The Last Supper” portion of Jesus Christ Superstar came to mind:

Look at all my trials and tribulations
Sinking in a gentle pool of wine
What’s that in the bread it’s gone to my head
Till this evening is this morning life is fine.

At first this seemed incongruous, but then I realized that it was appropriate and historically accurately as the Last Supper WAS a Passover Seder.  The events leading up to Easter took place during Passover, so what better way to prepare for Easter than to attend a Passover Seder or two? 

Sure, when the day itself arrived, I ate hibachi shrimp, but I did it on Easter, not Resurrection Sunday.  

Changing Faces

What were those Facebook pranksters up to now?  They are always changing things, but this seemed pretty major.  Suddenly some of my Friend’s Profiles had turned into Timelines.  It was a complete re-design of the profile pages – much bigger, lots more visual categories and wall posts on two sides of a timeline.

I hated it.  I long ago realized that change is inevitable, and not always a bad thing, but I found this to be really disconcerting.  Rumor had it that while changing over to the Timeline was optional for the moment, that sooner or later we would all have it, like it or not.  I decided to wait until I was forced to change.

Some people took the impending change pretty hard.  The hand-wringing, the angst, and the pathos filled my News Feed.

How dare FB do such a thing, they wanted to know.  One Friend of a Friend actually said that this is not the Facebook he signed up for; this isn’t what we, the people of Facebook, want!  There was some talk of petitions, and one suggestion that if enough of us rose up and refused to accept it, that Facebook would have no choice but to abandon the Timeline.

Well, not exactly.  Facebook is free.   Therefore, they can literally do whatever they want to the layout, and we have absolutely no say in it.   Some Friends threatened to leave Facebook for good if they “went through with it.”  You have absolutely no obligation to use Facebook if it displeases you in some way, so leave if you hate it.

Some folks were apoplectic that people would now be able to look at their history of posts on Facebook.  They felt that it was an invasion of their privacy.  People could always see your history on your profile; now they can just find 2007 more easily.   Honestly, just check out your privacy settings – you can completely control who sees any of the information you post on Facebook.

   

The fact is that Timeline contains the same information, with all the same privacy settings available as the Profile.  The only thing that is different about the Timeline is the design.  So everyone can just relax, and turn their attention to the real problems in their lives.

As time went on, FB further proved it was a dictatorship, not a democracy.  They started to use some questionable tactics to trick people into changing to Timeline.  They would invite you to “try” it, and once you did, you couldn’t change back.

The Facebook Gods were more forceful in my case.  One day Timeline was there when I went into my Profile, but it was only visible to me, not anyone else.  They explained that I could accept it and design it my way or by March 31^st they would post it anyway.  These were kind of gangster tactics, if you ask me, but effective.  I reluctantly looked it over, made a few changes, and then published it.

By the end of the day, I pretty much loved Timeline.  Who said an old dog can’t learn new tricks?