Archives March 2025

I rarely read beyond the headlines, because in most cases, the headline is enough.

For instance, I ran across this headline while scrolling my news feed.

MAN FOUND WITH LIVE TURTLE IN HIS PANTS BY TSA AT A NEW JERSEY AIRPORT

In this case, the headline is not enough. I, however, read no further, because I imagined the rest. First of all, a dead turtle would be even stranger. Who on earth wants to carry around any sort of dead animal, especially in your pants? A live turtle, though. Different.

So I had the following thoughts about this:

• Maybe this turtle was a support animal. Truly, there have been stranger ones. Honest to God, I was on a flight in which a woman brought a chicken on board. Maybe she was planning to kill and eat it later; I didn’t ask. But they let her do it, and these days, I bet this was her support chicken.
• Had this man been gone a long time, and he wanted to bring his kids back a present from his trip? My dad used to bring me gifts when he traveled. I got a xylophone once. It may have never entered his mind to put a turtle in his pants.
• But why hide the turtle? Oh yeah. I remember reading somewhere that you can get salmonella from turtles. Maybe this man thought that TSA knew this and would confiscate the turtle if he held it up for inspection. The lady with the chicken did this before bird flu was a threat, and she let everybody see her chicken. But turtles have always posed a salmonella threat, so I guess hiding turtles makes sense.
• But what would happen to the turtle when the man took his seat on the plane? Would he squash it to death? Or would he take it out of his pants and show it to his seat mate? Would the seat mate scream?
• Was the turtle stressed? If so, would this turtle pee or poop all over the man? Or worse, do this in the man’s pants?
• Was the man stealing the turtle for some reason? Was this a valuable turtle? Was the man planning to sell the turtle for big bucks when he landed? Who was the buyer? Is there a black market for turtles?
• I did look at the picture of the turtle (not the photo above-that one is a free stock photo). I am no turtle expert, but the turtle from the man’s pants looked like an average turtle to me. Nothing special, no colorful markings, no bumps or knobs on its shell. Maybe it was an endangered turtle. Maybe this man snatched it from a zoo or turtle conservation place?
• As I said, I didn’t read the article, and so I don’t know where the turtle is now. I am not even sure it survived. But I am hopeful that it is lolling in a nice aquarium somewhere, just enjoying the humidity.

Don’t ask me about the headline about a Cheeto shaped like a beloved Pokemon character that was auctioned off for $87,840 dollars. That is a story for another day.

My daughter and my darling grandkids are here. They are leaving today after a whirlwind of activities. I have eaten more pizza in six days than I have in a year. I have walked all over Dayton. Drank a lot of Coke. All of this seems to have produced vivid dreams in which I am besieged by men, all wanting to have *ahem* “relations” with me.

On Monday, Robert Redford (who has not aged well) approached me at a party, looking like the above. I was drinking something chic, like a Cosmo, when he leaned over and asked me to meet him later, in order to discuss filmmaking, which I apparently knew something about. Inhaling his masculine scent of what romance novelists call musk mixed with hints of leather, I demurred.

We went to La Comedia to see Jersey Boys, and it was a terrific show, and the dinner was quite good, especially the mashed potatoes. I went home after and Googled Frankie Valli, and he was very handsome  in that half lidded, Sylvester Stallone way. That night I dreamed that Frankie Valli was taller than I, and that he wanted to slow dance with me. Before things heated up, I had to get up to pee. I went back to sleep and the dream shifted to me being able to do yoga. Go figure.

I often dream of being able to wear strapless gowns. I have never worn strapless anything, due to fatty armpits. In this particular dream, I was at one of those Hollywood parties, and it was black tie. My gown was black with sparkly things all over it, and I had on four inch heels. Reacher was there. He walked over to me, biceps hard as rocks. He touched my lower back with just the slightest pressure, and things got steamy, but I nixed any shenanigans, because under my gown I had on Spanx. I would have been mortified for Alan Ritchson to see them, because they were the longline version. And beneath the Spanx, my strapless bra was white and front closing. End scene.

We also went with the kids to see bull riding at the Nutter Center. There was enough testosterone among those riders to service the entire female population of Chicago, at least. So naturally, I dreamed that I looked good in chaps and a cowboy hat, I was in my thirties, and two of the riders looked me straight in the eye before mounting their bulls. The symbolism.

I used to dream of being single, and men like John Cusack, Idris Elba, and Pierce Brosnan populated my dreams on nights I had injested spicy foods, or in Idris’ case, binged the entire first season of Luther in one day. Funny thing about dreams–they never get to the good parts. Activities dissolve as soon as the action starts, and then the dream shifts, and I find myself suddenly back in my regular life, still young, but married and pushing my now 42 year old daughter in a stroller. Apparently, even in my dreams I can’t let myself be free and wild enough to go through with anything.

I need to smack my superego in the face.

Lots of young people think that if a person is over the age of 60, that person is dementia adjacent. This is not true. Every human on the planet forgets things. Even 10 year olds forget things.

I have an oven that has the “self cleaning” function. I like that function. It makes housekeeping a lot easier. However, using the self cleaning function

• heats up the kitchen, so you have to clean your oven in wintertime
• uses up a lot of energy

Thus, I don’t clean my oven often. As a matter of fact, we have lived in this apartment for five years, and I have cleaned the oven once. But my daughter and our grandchildren are coming next week, so I am doing massive spring cleaning. My husband wonders why having a clean oven is necessary, because who on earth notices the inside of an oven, but I am on a mission to get this place in shape.

So. Night before last, after dinner, I locked the oven door and set it for self clean. The digital dashboard on the stove said that oven cleaning would take 4 hours. I hit start. This was at 8:15.

At 12:15, just as I was dozing off, after doing some late night furniture rearranging and moving various home accessories around for better impact, an intermittent beeping started.

I crossed my fingers that it was just a car in the parking lot, or something out in the hallway, and it would stop shortly. It didn’t. “I bet this is how they torture political prisoners,” I thought.

It went on for more than 5 minutes, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. So I got up and wandered around, looking for the beep’s origin. It didn’t seem to be in the hall, nor was it coming from the parking lot. I knew this was serious. I figured other tenants were probably upset at the sound and wanted it stopped.

So I went into the tv room, as not to bother my husband (who can sleep through a five alarm fire, so I was being polite for no reason), and I called the emergency service number, and a man who was obviously asleep moments before answered his pager.

I attempted to explain to him the annoying beeping, and as I talked to him, I walked into my living room. The living room is “open plan” with the kitchen. As I was telling the sleepy man what was going on, the beeping seemed louder, and I looked over at the stove.

I had forgotten that the stove beeps to announce to you that the oven is now CLEAN, and you should push the button to shut off the beeping. I pushed that button, the beeping stopped, and I proceeded to  try to apologize to the service man, but something happened to our connection, and we were cut off…

He and the rest of the service team at our building I am sure had a “good laugh” at the stupid, probably demented woman on the fifth floor. I AM NOT THAT SORT OF WOMAN. Would you remember that the oven beeps when it is done self cleaning, if you had only done it once in 5 years? Of course not.

So I had to put in another service request, not an emergency one, of course. In this one, where there is a box that you fill in to describe what you need fixed, I wrote:

I want to apologize for waking up one of your service team members last night at 12:15. My daughter from California is coming, and I wanted to make sure that our apartment is clean, and so for the second time of our tenure, I set the oven to “self clean” mode at 8:15 last night. Since I had only done this once before, I had forgotten the fact that the oven makes a “beeping” sound when the clean cycle is finished. I hadn’t discovered this until I was already on the phone with the service person to report a mysterious beeping that was keeping me awake. I am sure I woke him up with my call. I disabled the beeping myself. I told the service man not to bother coming over. But in the middle of my conversation with him, our call was somehow disconnected. I hope he got right back to sleep. I am so sorry for waking him up for nothing.

This apology sounds totally sane, right?