Preparations are done. We’re almost on our way with sweet and mashed potatos and stuffing in tow. My sister-in-law and her family don’t do sweets. When they come here they bring a casserole of mashed potatos mixed with stuffing. It’s not Thanksgiving dinner for them without that. Unfortunately, our going there means bringing three dishes to make it Thanksgiving dinner for our family. Thanksgiving is such a food holiday that you kind of have to have your favorites.

That’s not the end of it. My sister-in-law is such a good baker that bringing desserts is usually a coals to New Castle kind of thing, but I’m bringing sugar-free chocolate pudding pie for my diabetic husband. That and the tofu turkey with the wheat gluten gravy for my vegetarian sister and we’re good to go. They’re never going to ask us to come again. I can see that coming.

My mother is getting dressed. She’s asked us where we’re going every half hour on the hour for about two weeks now. I think she’s got it now. Just takes a while. She’s focused on getting dressed now. Her outfit will be wasted on us, I’m afraid. We do our holildays in jeans, mostly. She just never noticed.

We’ve had a talk about avoiding too much political/religious discussion. Or at least not starting it. And not getting overly passionate if it does come up. No yelling. I made the rule. I think they suspect I don’t actually have that authority though. I think that’s everything. There’s nothing I can do about the fact that my sister will bring a book and fill conversational lulls by reading it. OK..over the river and through the traffic we go.

Played hooky this afternoon. My sister and I were extended invitations to the gypsy run-through of Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, at the Schoenfeld Theater on Broadway. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Broadway show - actually on Broadway, that is. I’m so glad I got to see this one.

What an experience it was. The gypsy run-through is a pre-preview, where the audience is made up largely of Broadway people. There are plenty of luminaries. Rosie O’Donnell, Liza Minelli and Hughie Lewis were there and those are just the ones I noticed. But a lot of the audience is made up of young Broadway dancers - the gypsies. This particular show is for them, about them and their lives and stars a woman who is a legend to them all. The outpouring of love, to and from the stage made it an extra emotional event, but I can’t imagine that it won’t touch all its audiences. Chita Rivera was touching, funny and still dancing in her early 70’s - and with 63 screws in her ankle as a result of being hit by a cab, no less. She carries the whole show on her shoulders, looks great, and doesn’t give out any diva vibes whatever. The friend who took us says that everyone who’s worked with her says she’s wonderful. Not everyone in that business gets those kinds of reviews from their peers. By a longshot.

The show is not just entertaining. It’s informative, too. Chita talks - and sings and dances - about her co-stars, the various choreographers she’s worked with, as well as giving very personal glimpses into her own life.

In the show, she maintains that “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” That formula has certainly agreed with her. See the show if you can. Besides being fun, it’s just a really nice experience. It would be unthinkable if this show wasn’t a hit. A full description of the show can be found at Chita Rivera’s website. The show officially opens on December 11th.

Blogging will probably be pretty spotty for the next few weeks. The season has begun. There are two trips into the city this week alone, houseguests next weekend and that doesn’t include work or Thanksgiving Day. Then there’ll be the rush to get ready for Christmas. My daughter is helping, though, because she has organizational skills. I don’t know where she got them. She’s like Marilyn Munster - the normal one. It really helps to have people with different skills and abilities in the family. She came downstairs this morning to discuss gifts and shopping.

We have a number of birthdays surrounding the holidays. In fact it’s kind of non-stop from this week through early February. Make that late mid to late February starting this time around. That’s when our grandson is supposed to make his appearance. In a half hour’s time she had plans for gift giving and shopping organized for most of those occasions, including for extended family. She made a chart. I know that sounds obnoxious, but we really need that kind of help.

In an effort to be as efficient as my daughter, I thought that my husband and I could get one thing out of the way. We’ve been invited to an extra event right in the middle of it all. Now, my husband greets root canal with a great deal more equanimity than he does even the most low key socializing. The holidays are pretty stressful for him. An extra thing - with a somewhat different group of people - I knew how he was going to feel about that. But it’s something that we sort of have to go to. Or at least it’s something that means a lot to someone we care about. So, I suggested that we have the fight now.

The pattern we follow is that he agrees to go to things like this when I tell him about them. Sometimes he makes a face, sometimes there’s a deep sigh, sometime he says it sounds like fun. That varies but the day of the event is always the same. He’ll get pensive. He’ll try not to be grumpy, but some grouchiness will show through. I always bite and ask him what the matter is, even though I know perfectly well what it is. Then he says he doesn’t feel well. I ask about that. He says he doesn’t think he can go to whatever it is. Then it’s on. We go around for a while. We’re both upset and in the end, we go. We often have a pretty good time.

He agreed to have the fight today instead of in a couple of weeks. He tried to get into it and showed self-knowlege I didn’t know he had. He said all the same stupid stuff he says when it’s spontaneous. I ran through my roster of reactions. We kind of rushed through the script a little but we other things to do today. This is one of the great advantages to a long marriage. You know your conversations and fights by heart can get them out of the way quickly. You can even do them by yourself if your partner isn’t available. I have a lot of arguments with him that he doesn’t ever even know about. The sad thing is that I don’t always win, even when I’m having the fight by myself. My husband is stubborn, even in absentia.

I’ve been trying to plot a new design for the band’s site. I’m not coming up with anything. Or rather, I’ve come up with half a dozen things that I lay out and really think I’m onto something - for about a day. Then I hate it. In search of inspiration I must have looked at about a zillion music related sites. That got to be hard work after a while.

Of course, a couple of things don’t help. I’m not really a designer at all for one. I’ve got some art background, but no design training, which is a different deal altogether. I started doing this when it was more of a homebaked type of thing. There was no Flash and if you had music on the site it was a .wav file that lasted a few seconds, or a midi file, which sounded really bad. Hell…I think tables were new. Most people who put websites together weren’t trained in design then. It’s a different deal now. It’s been redesigned before, several times, in fact. But that was before they started giving me creative input.

Of course, the band itself is not much help. The creative input I get from them is vague at best. They decided they need a redesign in honor of their new logo and I can see that. I asked what they’d like. What I had in mind was being pointed toward sites they like and an idea of what kind of look they think best represents them now. You know..sleek and sophisticated, earthy, funky or what. The only one who had an answer said, “Round!”. It seems he doesn’t like right angles. The music doesn’t have right angles, you see.

On the upside, I did come up with a favicon for them. It’s my first favicon. Of course they never asked for one and I’m not at all sure they know what a favicon is, so I’m not sure that counts as progress.

I’ve been addressing invitations. Since they’re shower invitations I don’t actually know most of the people on the list. I just have assorted lists of names and addresses contributed by friends and in-laws of the showeree. Never has the inadequacy of our system been more clear to me.

In the distant past, we looked at the hodgepodge of feminine courtesty titles and it wasn’t good. And it was sexist. Men were all simply “Mr.” unless they used a professional title such as “Dr.” Things are more complicated in countries with an aristocracy, but so far in the U.S. the only aristocracy is wealth. Women’s titles, however, were indicators of marital status. “Miss” indicated the lack of a husband and “Mrs.” indicated that the woman in question was the property of one. So “Ms.” was coined to address that issue. Unfortunately it carried heavy political baggage and wasn’t universally adopted. Also, we don’t adapt to change when there’s still time to do it in an orderly fashion. After all, we’re still not using the metric system in the U.S.A. We prefer to wait until things have gotten totally out of hand. “Ms.” has become the title of choice for women who identify themselves as feminists and divorced women.

So, looking at this list of all female names, I have no idea about the marital status of a lot of them. And even if I did, it wouldn’t really help. When you address someone as “Mrs.”, you’re supposed to follow that with her husband’s name, not hers. “Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald” is wrong. You’d need to write, “Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald”. But I don’t know her husband’s name, nor do I know if she’s the only Mrs. Fitzgerald in her household. She might live with mother-in-law or daughter-in-law. That’s one of the things “Ms.” should be perfect for, but frankly, it pisses some people off. Some married women prefer to be called Mrs. And when I answer the phone at work a surprising number of women identify themselves as “Miss”. There are more types of marital status than there used to be, too. There are the old standbys of married and single. Divorced has been around in large numbers long enough to be a classic now. But there’s also “married but keeping own name” and “divorced and returned to own name” and you have to know which it is to get it right. So, my mail is just going to Zelda Fitzgerald. No Mrs., Miss or Ms.

Thinking all this over made me realize why I’ve started to dislike sending holiday cards. Addressing them has gotten too complicated, too. You used to be safe just knowing the marital status of the recipient and whether there were other people in the household. A card could go to “Mr and Mrs Scott Fitzgerald” and family, for instance. If you weren’t sure about how “Mr. and Mrs.” would be received, “The Fitzgerald Family” was a reasonable cop out. Now you have situations like my own daughter’s family. She was divorced, reverted to her own name, remarried and kept it and her daughter who is a product of the first marriage, has her father’s last name. That’s three for three. One last name for each person in the household. I’m not sure about the dogs. Not every family includes a married couple either. I haven’t figured a solution to this one, other than not sending cards on purpose instead of just as a result of procrastination.

The Ageless Project is on BloggerBuzz. BloggerBuzz quotes from the AP article by Carla Johnson. Congratulations to The Ageless Project for getting some well deserved attention.

I’ve had to work at various workstations for the past few weeks. Omigod, what people do to their computers! Our entire tech staff at work - for three sites - consists of one woman who also has to function as office manager at our location since cutbacks earlier this year. She must be tearing her hair out. There’s no way she has the time or the technical resources to completely monitor what people download onto their computers. Considering that, she keeps the virus count fairly low and it’s a miracle.

The first of the computers I “borrowed” has something pop up each day offering free photos from Webshots. Why in the world would you want that to happen? If you want the photos, I’d figure you’d go get them. I’m not saying that Webshots doesn’t give away nice stuff. I’m sure they do. That’s not the point. Do you really want to be nagged about it when you’re busy composing a report - or checking out Ebay on company time?

That was nothing, though. That computer is in pretty good shape. If you open a web browser on most of them, you get about half the screen because the top half is taken up with various toolbars, some of which have been installed without the user understanding what happened. I’m not talking about a Google toolbar, or even Yahoo. More often there were both of those plus obscure ones that are pretty redundant if you have one, let alone, both of the former installed. The last one had the toolbars and all kinds of windows popping up, no doubt because of some kind of malware that’s found its way onto the computer. Maybe she ran into something like the adware served by Ethernet Media, until it was shut down by the courts. Apparently it offered an “upgrade” to your browser and instead installed adware on it, as explained by Blog Herald.

Another announced a long list of virii, dating back months, when I logged on. Its usual user had never bothered to either notify anyone or to remove them herself.

And these people wonder why their machines are running slowly. Of course, it’s a mystery to me why management doesn’t just ask people to use a browser other than Internet Explorer. What the attachment to it is, I’ll never know. When there’s such a simple solution to something, it’s hard to understand not using it. When my sister’s computer got itself some kind of unasked for “feature” that was rendering the computer fairly uselss, after spending some time getting rid of it, I downloaded Netscape for her. I thought Firefox would confuse her. She was computer-phobic, but it’s getting a little better. She was able to use Netscape easily and has had no problems with the computer since then.

I wouldn’t go as far as putting Explorer Destoyer on a site of my own. That seems a bit extreme and kind of rude. But I’d sure like to see someone take steps to curtail the abuse of innocent computers.

I’ve been thinking about Ronni Bennett’s post on TGB about Baby Boomers. I posted a smartass oneliner there, but it inspired some retrospective musing that won’t fit in a comment.

Baby boomers are anything but a monolithic generation. Being born in 1946 doesn’t give you anything generational in common with someone born in 1964. I was born in 1949 and my daughter was born in 1969. That makes the late boomers pretty much my kid’s contemporaries. The way I see it, we may fall into a demographic boom together, but people born at opposite extremes of the Baby Boom really don’t have much else in common in terms of their ages.

I did feel an identification with my more specific age group, I guess. It’s mostly gone now, as we’ve stopped being a generation as much as just a lot of people and a demographic problem. There were moments when I was proud to be part of it. And moments when I wasn’t. Most of the youth culture that happened during the most explosive years of the Baby Boom was Ronni’s generation’s fault anyway. It’s true, as Ronni says, that the media attention was focused on us, but the more thoughtful pieces explored influences.

Being born in 1949 makes me kind of an early boomer. We had our own issues. For one thing, there was a decided dirth of older siblings in our lives. Most of my friends were the oldest in their families. Of the few who weren’t, all were younger by just a year or so than the oldest. This held true even when we moved out to the suburbs where the families were a lot bigger than what I’d known in New York City. So teenagers were an exotic species to us. They had a tremendous mystique, since we so rarely saw them from the more intimate (and jaded) perspective of immediate family. I remember seeing what, in retrospect, were probably pimply, awkward fourteen year olds who’d come to the playground once in a while and fool around on the swings. The girls wore men’s shirts, sizes too big and dungarees rolled up to the calf. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t have looked more glamorous to me.

We were little kids when Elvis showed up on Ed Sullivan, but we knew something was happening there. The Wild Ones, James Dean, the Beatniks. Oh, we were no part of any of it, but we were aware of it and it was all simmering in our brains, under out Davy Crockett coonskin caps. (OK, I never actually got a Davy Crockett cap, but I’m over it now. Really. It hardly bothers me at all. ) The distance, the fact that none of that ever entered our homes made it all the more desirable. It was those older teenagers about whom the term “Juvenile Deliquency” was termed. We even liked that, in moderation. Rebellion was clearly cool. Coolness became the thing we aspired to most of all.

Our icons were not of our generation. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez - all too old to be boomers. Even Jimi Hendrix was born in 1942. The Grateful Dead and the very underground but influential New York band, The Fugs, were products of the Beat sensibility.

Flower children were what you got when you took the the Beat Generation, the Civil Rights movement, the Ban the Bomb politicos, added the draft and an unpopular war and mixed liberally with electrified music and then had Timothy Leary bake it until crisp. But it all came from ideas and influences of an older generation.

Rock and roll was embraced by the generation of teens that preceded boomers and it and they prevailed against all the dire predictions of what it would lead to. It did take the boomers to make a lot of those predictions come true, but it was Ronni’s generation that provided the inspiration, the material and the soundtrack.

Jude is the first one I know to post about Christmas. I’m fully engaged in not getting a jump on the season once again.

The first thing I’m not doing is the cards. Jude is justifably annoyed by the early birds who send out their cards before anyone else. You won’t find me doing that. I’ve refined my method for holiday cards. I used to go out and buy them early and then put off addressing them until I was sending them out too late to be received by Christmas. No more. Now I have a lot of partial boxes of cards that have accumulated over the years and what I do is when I get a card from someone, depending on my guilt level when it arrives, I sometimes dig one out and send out a reciprocal card. It doesn’t sound like a method, but it is. If anyone is considering taking me off their list, I’m for it, so this way, I’m absolutely sure that I won’t interfere with that.

There’s the giving and receiving. I have no idea what to get anyone in my life. When Joey (my prospective grandson) arrives there will be one person I can shop for easily. That’ll last until he gets particular and it becomes impossible to keep track of what he’s already got and what he doesn’t. My granddaughter will be twelve going on 23 right after Christmas. Anything I get her will be wrong. I thought my perennially broke son would want cash, but he said he was so behind that nothing we gave him could possibly make a difference so he’d rather have some cool stuff. No indication as to what cool stuff he’s interested in.

As to the older adults in our family - none of us has room for anything. The place is full. We don’t have much closet space. We need to use up all the old stuff for a couple of years before we get anything new. What we really need is new kitchens and bathrooms, but those won’t be in Santa’s bag. My in-laws will send us cash gifts and we will respond with gift cerficates of approximately equal value. Similar pointless transactions will occur with other members of the family. The fact is, no one wants or needs anything that anyone else can afford, but there’s still the desire to have some shiny packages to open, so we keep doing it.

Then there are the work gifts. That’s a bit of torture. No matter how carefully you try to figure it out, someone that you didn’t get something for is going to give you a gift. And you’re going to embarass someone by giving them one when they didn’t get you anything. It’s a rule. Actually, most people at work give me gifts because it’s a tradition there to gift the receptionist. The first year I was there, that was fun. The next year, it was kind of enough is enough. I still have two or three sets of spa stuff that I haven’t opened.

In the US of A, however, we have to get through Thanksgiving before we can get to Christmas. Thanksgiving is a less stressful holiday because it’s just about food. But there’s still the fact that you can’t spend it with everyone at once. We used to have it here most years, but we gave up our dining room when everyone moved in and frankly, I don’t think I’m up to it this year anyway. My daughter has taken over a lot of our holidays, which is wonderful, but this year she and her husband are spending Thankgiving with his relatives. We’ll go to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s house. It sounds like a simple solution, but it won’t be. My mother isn’t going to be able to remember what we’re doing. She’ll start making conflicting plans with other, almost equally confused, relatives. All kinds of awkwardness will result. I can see it coming and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

Now I have to admit that last year the holidays were wonderful by and large. It was the first year my daughter and her family were living upstairs from us and we were together, but not squished together like the year before. I just don’t think it’s going to go as smoothly this year.

Weekends need to last about…oh…a week would be good. I never get anywhere near what I want to accomplished. This weekend was worse than usual in that regard. I was tired. I still get tired sometimes, although the periods of feeling normal are getting longer. Of course, goofing off still includes laundry, shopping, cooking. I washed a couple of windows, too. Still, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. For one thing I have to write and address a bunch of shower invitations. I just can’t seem to make myself do it. I should be running out to party stores and picking up all the little touches. I don’t actually know where they keep the party stores, but I hear that they exist from people at work.

Tuesday is Election Day. It’s a “floating holiday” where I work, meaning we’re not closed but you can take it off as long as each unit has coverage. If you don’t, then you get another day sometime before the end of the year.I’d love to take it, but I need every day I can get for various medical appointments.

One day next week I have to get up extra a couple of hours early and go for monthly bloodtests. That, I do before work. They open at 7 am. That kind of makes me tired, too. It’s a fasting test, they take a lot of vials of blood and there’s the getting up at some ungodly hour to make it worse. I was thinking how getting your blood tested had changed in the last decade. It used to be that if a doctor wanted your blood, someone in his office took it and sent it off to the lab. Now everyone shows up before the lab opens and stands in line outside. Then there’s a considerable wait in the crowded waiting room before you get taken. It occurred to me that if you’d described this scene in the fifties, people would have assumed that it was yet another deficiency in the Soviet system. Now it’s the way fully insured Americans do things.