Musings

Thinking Outside the Blue Jeans Gender Box: A Quest for Pants that Fit

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It happens every few years. All my jeans wear out at once – holes show up above the knees, growing larger with each washing.

It’s hard for me to find jeans that fit. This periodic quest ranks right up there with swimsuit shopping. I have narrow hips, a muscular butt, and legs shaped by regular dog walks, yoga, biking, and cross-country skiing. So when I do find some I like, I buy several pairs at a time. I am lucky to have a job with a casual dress code, so I wear jeans almost every day.

Of course, because I buy my jeans at the same time, they all start to wear out at the same time. Inevitably, when I search for “my” jeans at the store where I bought them, the store has either changed their styles or no longer carries the brand.

As I set out for jeans shopping this weekend, I realized I haven’t been truly enthused about a brand of jeans since my college days, when I inherited a pair of button-fly 501 Levis from my sister. I used to buy them regularly until the stores stopped carrying them for women. Then I switched to Lees for a bit, then other types of Levis, then Old Navy. But Old Navy kept changing their styles too often. The last time I bought jeans there, what looked okay in the store ended up having too much extra fabric in the hips, and was too tight in the calves. I tried shopping online, but that was an even bigger disaster. Besides, I hate paying extra for the shipping.

So I decided to try a new store this time – one known for local, Duluthy-type clothing made from durable fabrics like firehose canvas. You’d think that a store made for active Duluthians would work for me, right? Nope.

So I headed for the mall at the top of the hill, where selection is more plentiful. With my college jean happiness in the back of my mind, I searched the last store where I bought Levis. They no longer carried Levis in the women’s section, but they still had them in the men’s section. They even had the 501 button-fly version.

I quickly scanned the clientele in the area. All men. Would it look weird if I bought men’s jeans for myself? How would the clerks or clientele know they were for me? But I would need to try them on. I couldn’t use the men’s fitting room.

In agitation, I picked at a hangnail on my thumb. I put the jeans down and walked back to the women’s section. It wasn’t far away. Why not just bring the men’s jeans into the women’s fitting room? Dare I?

After a little internal pep talk, yes, I dared to think outside the blue jeans gender box.

Now I have two pairs of jeans I am truly enthused about. And to think, I COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THIS THE WHOLE TIME. The wasted time over the years and jeans angst makes me sort of sick. But now I know.

However, with my luck, Levis will go out of business by the time I need jeans again.

A Short Thought on the Election Results

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Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump. Image credit: Vanity Fair.

In trying to find something positive to think of regarding the U.S. presidential results, all I could come up with is, “At least Alec Baldwin’s got it made.” He can play Donald Trump for the next four years on Saturday Night Live.

That is, unless Donald Trump gets him fired . . . .

Invisible Gold Medals for Mom

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My parents in 1946, when they were married.

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My parents on their 60th wedding anniversary in 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
My mother Dorothy passed away this week. She was ninety-two. Her passing was expected and it was peaceful. But that doesn’t make it any less painful.

I was looking through some of my parents’ old papers last night and I came across a one-page tribute that my father (an avid jogger who passed away this summer) wrote for my mother for their fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration twenty years ago. It’s a fitting tribute. So this is a guest post written posthumously by my father.

I want to thank each and every one today for helping us celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary.

Dorothy is the master of ceremonies today, but this ceremony is for her, the master. In the Olympics, Carl Lewis was hoping to be the first one earning 10 gold medals. But alas, Dorothy just beat him out.

Her medals are invisible because they are coming from my heart. They are:

#1 Gold medal for best travel agent.
#2 Gold medal for best highway navigator.
#3 Gold medal for best mind reader.
#4 Gold medal for best budget maker.
#5 Gold medal for best psychiatrist.
#6 Gold medal for best homemaker.
#7 Gold medal for being a model mom.
#8 Gold medal for being my love.
#9 Gold medal for being my wife.
#10 Gold medal for putting up with me for 50 years.

(The script here says, “Tell her you love her and give her a big kiss.”)

I love you  XXXX

(Hold her hand and raise her arm.)

I recall that he really did kiss her, and then he raised her arm at the end of his speech, like they’d finished a big race together.

In the end, they both crossed the finish line of life not far from each other.

We will miss you, mom.

Just Call Me Mahatma

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By Jake Beech – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30859659.

All these years, I’ve somehow avoided taking the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. Then a potential manfriend showed me his results, so I felt obliged to take the free online test and show him mine. I was surprised to discover that I have one of the rarest personality types. No wonder why it takes a blog to explain myself to the rest of the world!

According to the test, I am an INFJ, which means I approach the world in an Introverted (we knew that already), Intuitive, Feeling, Judging manner. The description of this type says that only one percent of the population has this personality. INFJs are warm and caring, organized, highly intuitive, creative and imaginative, nurturing, and patient.

The description also goes into the weaknesses of this personality type and what INFJs look for in romantic relationships. Many of the traits described struck me as accurate and I learned some new things about myself.

The results also listed notable INFJs. Mahatma Gandhi is one of them. I think I have a new nickname!

The Soccer Meat Fundraiser that Wouldn’t Die

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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. By Flixtey (own work).

Ah dear blog readers, you may recall my plight as a reluctant inductee into a leadership role in my son’s high school soccer team booster club. The committee is made up of myself and two other soccer moms whose boys are all co-captains (tri-captains?) of the soccer team.

Why is the committee composed of just the moms and not the dads, too? Very good question. The dads came to the first meeting but disappeared quickly thereafter. My guess is they took one look at what was involved and they got out while the gettin’ was good.

Soccer season is in full swing. We’re actually on a downward slide to playoffs now. Our little committee of three has cut its teeth on several tasks. Although our styles differ drastically, we’ve been able to collect club fees from about 40 families, organize volunteers, hold a BBQ, collect raffle tickets and payments, and host a frozen meat fundraiser. We did a lot of other things, too, but they are too boring to list here.

I am proud to report that I fulfilled my non-elected political platform promise to insert reason into the activities by reducing the number of team spaghetti dinners from five to three. I mean, the boys can only eat so much spaghetti and there are plenty of other activities for which parents can volunteer. Unlike my fears in my previous post about this, my action did not incite riots or revolt. Other than that, I’ve been working as the club treasurer and raffle coordinator. It’s been kind of fun writing checks with someone else’s money.

But the frozen meat fundraiser seemed never to end. Unlike what the title of this post may imply, we are not selling meat made out of soccer players (soccer meat). It’s just frozen animal meat. But it’s a fundraiser for the soccer team.

Anyway, another soccer mom coordinated this task (thank goodness!) But people seemed unable to turn their money in on time, so their checks came to me in fits and starts over several weeks. And some people sent the wrong amounts, so we needed to ask them for more money or to issue refunds.

Thus, the fundraiser seemed to go on forever. BUT I am happy to report that I have received the last payment from a parent, so I think it’s finally all done. I had my doubts for a while.

Another thing that’s been difficult is that I was doing all this and my son wasn’t even playing soccer for half the season. A torn knee ligament required him to sit out for several weeks. It was a bummer to put in all this effort for the team when I couldn’t even watch my son play in the games.

But when my son did come back into play, he came back with a vengeance. Despite the best efforts of the other team to lame him up again, my boy scored the most beautiful soccer goal I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot). He was right in front of the net and his teammate passed him the ball at shoulder height. My son headed the goal right past the goalie and squarely into the net.

Everyone on our side of the stands stood up and cheered. Even me, the reluctant, whiney, booster club officer.

Poor Zika Babies

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It happened again tonight. Every time I see a TV news report about the Zika virus and the babies it affects with microencephaly (small brains), they are crying. Surely the babies don’t cry all the time, do they?

I suppose it’s more dramatic to show a crying baby, especially one that has been born with such a harmful defect. But in showing the crying babies in every newscast about the disease, I fear that news editors are stereotyping the babies forever in viewers’ minds as always crying.

At first I was going to rail that nobody’s produced or written a story about the quality of life these babies have, but I did a search and found that is not the case. There are balanced stories out there, but I doubt the average person will ever see them.

Poor Zika babies. They not only have brains that work differently, they will also have to overcome the stereotypes these newscasts are creating.

Shunned by the World’s Largest Rubber Duckie

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The World’s Largest Rubber Duck turns its back on me.

Duluth is hosting a Tall Ships Festival this weekend. A newcomer to the event is the “World’s Largest Rubber Duck.” I put that in quotes because equally large or larger rubber ducks exist in the world overseas. It’s just that the U.S. creator (who happens to be a Duluthian, too) of this particular duck trademarked the phrase.

Even so, I was intrigued to view this giant yellow floating bathtub toy – in part to see if it could nudge me out of my doldrums following my father’s death – but also just because it’s novel. Like others who have attended these festivals over the years, I’ve seen plenty of tall ships, but never a sci-fi movie-sized duck. Also, I needed to attend the festival for work, to deliver some keys to a co-worker who was on one of the tall ships (the Denis Sullivan).

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A crew member barks orders on the Denis Sullivan.

The duck was participating in the opening ceremony for the festival, called the Parade of Sail. For this spectacle, all of the ships sail into the Duluth-Superior Harbor through the ship canal and under Duluth’s iconic Aerial Lift Bridge.

I left in what I thought was enough time to catch the parade. But I didn’t anticipate the number of other people who also wanted to attend. I expected a lot of people, and planned my travel route to the festival via a back way, but there were not just a lot of people. There were HORDES.

After being turned away from one event parking lot because I didn’t pre-pay a parking ticket, I ended up waiting in line for 40-something minutes for another lot.

I knew I was going to miss the beginning of the parade, so enterprising me got out of line to bribe a local business to let me park in their lot. They weren’t open to my bribe (or perhaps it was not large enough!), so I got back in line, even father back.

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The chart room, below decks in the Denis Sullivan.

As I was waiting, and gazing out my car window through a fence and a tangle of tansy weed, I saw the head of a large yellow duck gliding past in the nearby harbor. I was missing the duck!

Alas, failed bribery attempt already past, there was nothing more I could do to improve my situation. I could only hope the duck would still be around once I made my way to the event grounds.

By the time I got to the parking lot entrance, the attendants were only letting cars in once other cars came out. After another 15 minutes or so, I finally got to park my car in a swampy spot and hoof it to the harbor.

The duck apparently did not like that I was late, and would not show its face to me. It was far away by this time, across the harbor at its docking site — its back turned in disapproval at my lack of strategic event attendance planning skills. Sigh.

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A crew member climbs the rigging on the Denis Sullivan as it sails under Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge. Image courtesy of Kathy Kline, Wisconsin Sea Grant.

But my spirits lifted when I ended up getting a free tour of the Denis Sullivan. I found my co-worker among the hordes and she let me aboard. The Sullivan’s home port is Milwaukee, and the ship is used for educational purposes. My co-worker had just completed a five-day sail with about a dozen Great Lakes teachers, instructing them on lake ecology and maritime history.

Enjoy the photos!

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What the duck looked like to everyone else. Image courtesy of WDSE-TV.

My Father’s Passing

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My father is inside this piece of ham radio equipment. Note: This is not a commercially available urn! It’s made from an extra piece of equipment from my father’s radio.

My dad died last week. I’ve been wrestling with whether I should write anything about it, and if so, how deep I should get into our relationship. As you can perhaps tell from the photo, I’ve opted for quirkiness over soul-bearing.

My father lived a good long life, made longer because he took care of himself. His body continued to function even when his brain didn’t work so well. He was father to four children and grandfather to six. He recently got to see his first great-grandchild, but I don’t think it really registered.

In addition to his passions for stamp collecting, coin collecting, listening to classical music, and jogging, was my father’s passion for ham radio (amateur radio). He contacted people all over the world with the radio he made by himself. My childhood home was notable in the neighborhood for the tall radio antenna in the back yard.

My father wanted to be cremated. When my family was at the cremation society office talking about details, the topic of an urn for our father’s ashes came up. One of my brothers had the idea of using a piece of our dad’s ham radio equipment as a container instead.

It might seem weird, but we all agreed immediately to this unusual container. And I’m sure my dad would approve too, if he knew.

Welcomed by a Kelso Swan: Adventures in Scotland, Part 8

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Kelso as seen from The Cobby Riverside Walk.

Three weird things happened on my trip to Kelso. The first happened before I even left the U.S., after I had already made reservations to stay at the Bellevue Guest House in Kelso. Although there are about fifteen other places to stay, I chose Bellevue because it looked nice and was the closest B&B to Floors Castle. A tingle went through me when I was visiting my parents and I looked in their scrapbook from their trip to Scotland in the late 1970s. They had saved a business card from Bellevue Guest House, where they stayed while they were visiting Kelso. (Cue the Twilight Zone music.)

The second thing was the fact that I did not get lost once on my journey from Edinburgh to Kelso. Just ask my traveling companion (who was no longer there to help navigate) — that was unusual. It was like I knew where to go. Ancestral memory, perhaps?

Actually, the drive was wonderful. The roads were wide compared to those in northeastern Scotland, and the scenery was ultra-pastoral. I sang as I drove – so happy at the ease of finding my way. By this time, I was much less terrified of driving in Scotland anyway, having a week of wrong-handed shifting and wrong-sided driving under my belt.

The third weird thing happened after I checked into Bellevue House. My host, Graham, suggested that I take an evening stroll along the River Tweed just a few blocks away. I unpacked and did just that. The riverside walk wasn’t on a boardwalk like we are used to in the U.S. The “walk” was a wide swath of mown grass along the riverbank. As I emerged from the neighborhood homes and came the river came in view, the first thing I saw was a huge white swan. It swam in the river directly across from me.

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The Kelso Welcome Swan (a mute swan).

Ach – so beautiful! We kept pace with each other for quite a while, then parted, only to meet later downriver when it was with its mate. Call me weird, but I felt like the swan was welcoming me to Kelso.

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The Kelso Abbey

I made my way along the river to the town square and the Kelso Abbey. The abbey has a graveyard, which I thought my great-great grandfather’s gravestone was in. But it was late and the gate to the abbey was locked. I’d have to come back tomorrow to look. Afterwards, I walked on the Kelso Bridge over the river and got a glimpse of Floors Castle in the murky and darkening distance.

Worn out from my long drive and walk, I retired back the Bellevue House to rest for my gravestone quest and visit to Floors Castle the next day.