Fear and Guilt as a marketing strategy

Pop-up ads and border ads are how the Internet is funded, no doubt about it.

The ad that caught my eye this morning had a huddled figure in a gray landscape with the caption:

If you died today, who would take care of your family?

Which got me thinking -- not in the way the marketers intended.

If I died today, my family would be fine. Seriously. I have insurance that would cover the burial expenses and take care of some counseling, if needed. All my children are grown and have busy lives of their own. The small income I have is not in any way relied on for managing our household.

So, the fear and guilt the ad is meant to inspire so that I would run out and buy more or better life insurance fails miserably in my case.

However, the ad *did* make me feel something-- uncomfortable, sad.

If I died tomorrow, it seems, it would make no difference at all.

Yesterday, Oprah announced that she will be ending her TV show in about a year and a half, and it was MAJOR NEWS.

My life? not so much.

unseen Powers and how we depend on Them

It is all around us. Invisible, yet powerful. It permeates our lives, although we think of it seldom.

It times of deepest darkness, we cry out for it.

Electricity.

Ah, yes.

So, on Monday, my dh (dear husband) and I were watching TV (television) when we heard a chirping. We heard it a few times.

WHAT was that noise?

It was the smoke detector. But why?

DH turned on the hall light to check. The hall light came on, but dimly. Then it got brighter again.

Hmm....

DH went and checked the circuit breaker box and toggled some switches. Still the occasional fades of power on certain switches.

Odd.

So we went to bed. I read for a while before turning off my bed-lamp-- which would occasionally dim to night-light levels, then after a bit return to read-lamp levels.

Odd.

So, we were already determined we might have to bring in more electronically-minded folk than we-- and then we got up to:

NO WATER.

Our water pump was NOT working. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Feh!

We splashed water on our faces from our filtered-water cache, and rinsed our tooth-brushes with mouthwash. We went to spend the day at work and then we went to a hotel!! with an appointment the next day with an electrician. This was Tuesday night, planning to meet with the electrician on Wednesday.

The electrician arrived on Wednesday. After the embarrassing ordeal of walking through our cluttered basement to the circuit breaker box, the electrician came up with the good news-bad news results.

The good news: the house did not burn down, although it could have from the shorts in the box.

The bad news: due to water coming in to the circuit breaker box, we needed to replace the entire box.

The more bad news: this could not be done till the following day.

The more more bad news (from me): I must throw out the contents of our refrigerator.

I waited for DH to come home from the board meeting he had to attend that night. I thought he would be home about 7:00 or 7:30 pm and we would go out to dine and then perhaps book another hotel (no water means no shower and perhaps even more critical NO FLUSHING OF TOILETS!).

DH's board meeting ran until past 9:00 pm. He was wiped out. So, I fixed him a drink, then we went out to eat (and washed up at the restaurant in the bathroom!) and came home to sleep.

The next day, Thursday, the electrician returned and all is now repaired.

I don't know how much this all ended up costing; however, hot showers and flushing toilets: priceless!

What I did today... and yesterday...

Yesterday I emptied my refrigerator. Because I live in Michigan, I could put all my refrigerator items in the garage because we only had a high today of 40 degrees.

I unplugged the refrigerator and propped the doors open.

I threw away *sigh* a bunch of food, as the fridge had not been fridging very well.

That was yesterday. Today I finished cleaning the thawed and melted refrigerator. I cleaned the floor underneath it (OMG WAS THAT GROSS). I plugged the fridge back in and put a refrigerator thermometer in it.

It has been about 12 hours. The temperature has now gotten down to.. 50.

There may be a refrigerator shopping spree in the future. The near future.

dream houses

Another house dream.

This one in some senses was almost like a flea market, big open rooms that didn't really belong to me but where I had a right (more or less) to keep my things.

Sort of like the unfinished room in a business that lets us keep our theater troupe's stuff there.

Any way, I had stuff on a table -- Dickens style jackets, and other junkie stuff. Someone-- two women, gossipy-- came by and put their stuff on my table. Some of their stuff was a boom-box sized and looking device that was playing some movie that they were watching. I said, this is the table where I have my stuff, they said, well we are putting our stuff here too.

They started moving the table-- now it had wheels-- toward their space, some other place. I said, well how will I know where my stuff is?

And they shrugged, kept wheeling and watching their movie.

So I followed and scooped up all my stuff and put it on a wooden chair that had a high, two-post back. I looked for someplace to store it.

There was an already over-flowing storage space that seemed to be in a basement. I put my chair full of stuff in a corner as I went exploring for more space.

There was a wall with audition-type notices-- you put up your headshot and people would come by and pick you. But most of the head shots looked like comic strip characters. I thought about it but realized my schedule was still not flexible enough.

Somewhere in the dream were Lavinia and my mother. Don't recall now where they fit in.

And at some point in my dream I poked my head into the attic, and I saw that there was a large gap in the window frame held open with insulation. The window in the attic was big like my dining room window.

I came back down and told others we should take out the insulation that was prying open the window frame and caulk up the gap. I said I just knew it would make a big difference in energy costs.

They just shrugged and weren't interested.

Then it started storming. I called it hail, but it looked like gobs of fluffy snow thrown at the windows.

Not the attic windows, though. I had come back down.

Note: in real life, I don't think I have ever poked my head into our attic even to look.

the failure of excellence

I was raised with the expectation that excellence would be rewarded.

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door."

I understood this to mean that if you do something well, if you excel, you will succeed. Many anecdotes, comments, proverbs all reinforced this idea.

So, I have been laid off my teaching job.

I am an excellent teacher. I know this from student comments, student evaluation scores, and from seeing my students go on and continue to succeed.

So why wasn't this enough?

You can say it's the economy (it is), you can say it is the ridiculous tenure system (it is), but I still feel betrayed.

the house of my dreams

I dreamed a house dream last night.

Over the years, I have dreamed a lot of house dreams. When I was younger, I dreamed of tornadoes. However, in the past 20 years or so I have dreamed a lot of house dreams.

It is mostly the interior of the house. This time, it seemed it was the house I had lived in when we lived in Brighton. But it was different of course. It was even bigger. There were verandahs, on the second floor as well as the first. Hardwood floors on the verandahs, and rails all around. There was something about moving-- moving away, and then by the end we were moving back in. It was happy to move back in, but lots of cleaning to do, and re-establishing chairs around the table, putting furniture where it should go.

Waiting for people to leave... the people who had lived there before? Then I turned to my daughter with satisfaction, we can settle in now.

There were display cases-- with almost diorama displays. Outside on the upstairs verandah there was a display case that had large "normal size" chairs in different shapes, and then in front china/porcelain figures set up as if dancing at a ball. I knew that it was an old setting and I would need to put in my own.

The change in the duplex was that the house was now an open design, and there was a washing machine in the kitchen.

Dream analysis says that to dream of a house is the dream of the Self.

Of course, dream analysis pretty much says EVERY dream is of the Self.

According to one source, a balcony (say, the upper veranda) refers to the desire to be noticed, to gain prestige and recognition. A porch meaning your social self.

Seeing the floor refers to support. Fences (railings?) represent obstacles.

Moving and updating... the obvious, right?

My dreams have always been fairly transparent.

a great year for bugs

In addition to swine flu and assorted germie-type bugs, it has been a spectacular year for insects.

It has been cool and wet almost all summer here in Michigan. Apparently, this is great not only for mosquitoes and gnats, but also for ants and wasps and hornets.


All except the paper wasps. They don't like the wet.

As I am busy cleaning the basement, there are flies that have appeared buzzing, big-bellied and BIG over night. The mosquitoes are horrid and have contributed to cutting walks shorter. There are enormous ant hills all over our property-- we only mow around the house, and now we are almost surrounded by ants.

AND... also almost overnight, we spotted a hornet's nest that is about TWICE THE SIZE OF YOUR HEAD on the east side of our house under the eaves at the peak.

I don't care how swelled your head is, it is twice the size. At least!

I spotted it as I was driving away one day and described it to my dh (Dear Husband). He said, maybe we can take care of it... I said, NO! We have to call an exterminator. When I showed it to him, he agreed. It's huge, no lie. One day it wasn't there, and it seems like the next day it was THERE, absolutely huge.


So we called the exterminator. He came out and was doing his thing outside the house. I noticed he was at the front of the house (north side) with his ladder for a bit. When I mentioned it to my dh, he thought it odd too, and he called just to make sure the guy did check the east side. Sure enough, he did check the east side and sprayed the hornet nest and was planning on coming back a few days later -- when the hornets were all dead-- to take down the nest. BUT, he said, I noticed that you had some yellow jackets nesting around one of the corners of the front of your house. I will need to get into the house to take care of that one.

So, we said okay. He came back a couple days later and went and looked in our little pantry in the basement that is right beneath our little foyer. He called my dh down to look at what he had found.

A GIANT YELLOW JACKET NEST! Almost as big as the hornet's nest outside. The guy
said that the species of yellow jackets don't make much bigger nests than that one. He said the hornet nest was the biggest he'd seen this season for that species too. He suited up and sprayed and dusted the nest and he will be back next week to take out both nests.

WHOA.

Once the fumes were gone, I took some pictures.


The white card in the picture with the yellow jacket nest in the pantry is a 3 X 5 index card.

The guy said we were fortunate that the yellow jackets nested in the corner of the pantry. If they had nested in the attic, that size of a nest meant that they would have gotten into and chewed up the dry wall.