Random Thoughts – Linda M. Au

What time is it? Wait…what DAY is it?

Despite what happened last weekend to most of us here in the U.S., this is not a Daylight Saving post.

Sure, I’m a little fuzzy on what time it is lately, or even what day of the week (or month) it is, but I can’t blame that on Daylight Saving Time, or on spring, or on a Kardashian, much though I would love to shift the blame to any of those.

I blame the fuzziness on having transitioned completely into my true nature: as a night owl.

Due to a perfect storm of events, I’ve had almost no outside responsibilities for the past few weeks (and very few inside ones, either), and it’s starting to show.

Things started out well, and I was living like a normal person. On the first day, I put a large Perdue chicken in the Crock Pot, and after enjoying that first dinner of roast chicken and mashed potatoes, I used the rest of the chicken to make a big pot of homemade chicken noodle soup. I was pretty proud of myself for how responsibly domestic I was being.

Then I bought the first order of Chinese food.

Next came the box of Cap’n Crunch, closely followed by a few Oreos and some Combos (FYI: the pretzel/cheddar cheese ones are the best). All that stuff went so well with binge-watching episodes of Breaking Bad for the umpteenth time.

Once I was nibbling through the second batch of Chinese food a week later—followed by the mint chocolate chip ice cream that had somehow made its way into my Instacart order—I realized I was checking my phone for not just the time, but also the date and the day of the week. Just to be sure.

By this point I was staying up working till 4:00 a.m. most nights. And that’s the part of this situation I’m okay with. I may need to rein in my eating choices (okay, yes, I do need to rein in my eating choices), but my sleep schedule is starting to feel like it should have been like this all along.

This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve known I was a night owl since my teen years. It’s always been difficult to get to school on time or to hold down a typical nine-to-five job. I literally feel queasy when I’m forced to be up, showered, and out in the world in the morning. If you’re a morning person, imagine having to get up around 2 a.m. each day to start your day. That’s how I feel every morning until nearly noon.

For the past decade or two, I’ve been blessed with a freelance schedule, doing all my work from home. I arrange doctor appointments for the afternoon. I don’t agree to meetings with anyone before 2 p.m. I’ve even taught my parents not to stop by or call me until well past 11 a.m., although that took some effort. They’re retired and are required by law to be home before 3 p.m. so they can have dinner at 4 and be in bed by dark. At least that’s what I’ve heard.

On the days when I have to get up at 6 a.m. (a few hours after I’ve crawled into bed) to cook the hubby breakfast before he goes to work, I wave goodbye when he leaves and head back to bed until I get somewhere near seven hours of sleep.

But this freeform sleep/eat schedule will be ending soon. Some of my daily responsibilities will kick back in. I’ll go back to arranging most of my eating and some of my sleep to align with the people around me.

Until then, I’m enjoying letting my body decide when it wants to be awake or asleep, rather than letting society decide for me…

…until I need to go to the bank or the post office, or anywhere else that closes before sundown.

A virtual board game!

What do you get when you cross the board game Clue with a Zoom meeting, a bunch of actors, a bunch of puzzles, and a bunch of strangers?

A whole bunch of fun for a Friday night.

It’s called The Secret Library.

I hesitate to post a review because I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for anyone who decides to give it a try. I found out about the Secret Library through an ad on Facebook and purchased two event tickets—one for myself and one for my son and his wife for their anniversary. Chris, Courtney, and I have a long history of playing board games together—including the aforementioned Clue—but we’ve missed out on a lot of gaming sessions this year. Years ago I played Clue with all four of my kids, and we each used a spiralbound notebook to take notes. Chris’s notes were the scariest because of his insane level of detail… and he always won, so we stopped playing after a while because the rest of us had learned our lesson.

Chris could have used a spreadsheet with details like this!

Anyway, this Secret Library, this virtual live-action board game seemed like the perfect substitute in these weird times. So, at 8:00 tonight, we all went in, each from our own house. The game allows a bunch of people on one screen/ticket, but I paid for two screens because Chris and I live 50 miles apart.

Kudos to the bunch of writers and actors who pulled this event together. (There are a bunch more time slots available in the upcoming weeks… and I gotta stop using the word “bunch” or you’ll think I’m bananas. And yes, I did that on purpose just now. I have no social life to speak of.) The writers and actors had to find a way to make their story interactive, interesting, and difficult without being vexing, especially since they’d have no idea what sort of people would be showing up on their screens.

You know, people like my son, who’s a web coder and knows his stuff. And also people like me, who couldn’t get her microphone to work properly for half the game, which was a source of amusement to some of the actors. (I caught a lot of ribbing from the Gardener, in particular.) Honest, I’m not a tech idiot. I’m a geek wannabe—I’ve been online since 1987, pre-Windows—but my microphone just wouldn’t cooperate. No, seriously. Quit laughing.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the Secret Library. Here’s an instructional screenshot we got not long before the game began:

The whole experience was a delightful and clever use of the technology available to us, at a time when actors can’t perform live and stage writers can’t get their work performed anywhere. Factoring in the fact that this is a relatively new use of these forms of tech, I applaud everyone involved for thinking outside the box to provide more than 90 minutes of fun, distracting entertainment. If you buy a ticket, and read the materials provided, and show up early to test your tech (which I totally did—honest! It wasn’t my fault!), you’ll quickly move beyond the tech and find yourself immersed in the story and the ongoing interaction with everyone around you, both actors and fellow participants.

Now that someone’s starting to test the boundaries of how to use interactive tech and webcams, I look forward to more such stories from creative minds like these guys. I hope I can find more experiences like this in the near future.

If you’re curious about the Secret Library and want to know more, try the link, or contact me at linda@lindaau.com. They gave us a discount code we can pass along to our friends, even the ones who tease me about my inability to get my microphone to work for the first hour.

Honestly, it wasn’t my fault. I tried a bunch of things to fix it. A bunch…

The power of storytelling

My two-year-old grandson, affectionately known as King Arthur, came to stay with us this past weekend. He’s at that fun age where he can finally communicate his wants and needs verbally (instead of simply grunting or pointing), and in most cases I can now figure out what he’s saying.

The “toy bomb” detonated within five minutes of his showing up. I’m still not sure why I purchased a set of a bajillion wooden blocks and a set of a gazillion pieces of plastic food, but they were all dumped out and spread across the living room floor as soon as the weekend started. Walking around the house for the next two days was like walking through a minefield.

But King Arthur has always been a cheerful, delightful kid, so I spent a lot of time down on the floor with him playing with those blocks and all that plastic food (which looks better than most of my actual cooking). When my back and my knees announced that enough was enough, I quietly hoisted myself up and watched him continue to play from the safety and comfort of the couch or my little recliner.

What struck me this past weekend was that even a two-year-old with limited vocabulary and verbal skills is drawn to telling stories. I caught him recreating The Three Little Pigs, with the toy basket and the block basket as “houses” he blew over as the Big Bad Wolf. The story starts about halfway into this minute:

He also told himself completely unique stories, with characters he moved around, anthropomorphic trucks and trains, and lots of smashing and crashes along the way (with proper toddler sound effects).

At the time I didn’t think much of this, but I’ve been marveling at it all week since he left. If you’re a fiction writer who wonders if storytelling has any relevance anymore—in this world of anger, divisiveness, disease, and turmoil—let me assure you: YES, YOUR STORIES MATTER. And they’re NECESSARY.

How do I know this now? Because one of the first things a child learns as they come into language skills is HOW TO TELL A STORY. I realized this weekend that a lot of what a two-year-old does when left to his own devices is to tell himself stories. Not just ones he’s heard, such as The Three Little Pigs, but ones he makes up himself.

Let that sink in. This is a human being who has only been in the world for two years. He’s had to learn how to feed himself, how to move himself around, how to help Mommy and Daddy dress him and change him, how to understand and also speak words and sentences (thereby learning how to understand ideas). He’s had to learn the physics of almost every move he makes. He’s had to learn EVERYTHING.

And yet, within two years of his arrival in Life, he’s already spending a good amount of time making up fictional stories.

Nobody told him to do this. Nobody coached him that this might be a good use of his playtime. He decided on his own to sit in my living room and tell himself stories.

I’m convinced that stories are built into our DNA, that we need them. And frankly, if there was ever a year and a time when we need the comfort of storytelling, THIS is it.

So, tell your stories. You’ve probably been doing it since you were a toddler. And right about now, we could all use a few good stories to get us through.

Stay safe, my friends!

On a scale of 1 to 10…

We currently have three bathroom scales. In a related factoid, we have two bathrooms. Doing the math, you can see that we have a scale and a half for each bathroom. But since cutting one of the scales down the middle isn’t going to tell us we weigh any less, we’ve just decided to keep one scale (the old-fashioned mechanical one) in the half bath and then the other two (both digital) in the main upstairs bathroom.

The trouble with all three scales is that they work properly. You’d think we could have found at least one that would fib a little.

I bought a fairly basic digital scale two years ago, and I still don’t like it. Apparently I underestimated the power of a number I could fudge on because I was looking at a little metal needle that twitched back and forth as I stood on the mechanical scale. Now my weight is shown not only in actual numbers, but numbers with a decimal point. That’s just rude and unnecessary.

To make matters worse, apparently that wasn’t enough information for my husband, the engineer. A few weeks ago a newer, sleek, black digital scale showed up on the bathroom floor, right next to my already too-accurate white one. It’s from a company called Wyze... and it has an app.

Because, you know, it’s not bad enough you have to look at that digital number as you stand there naked and afraid each morning. Now you have to carry that number around with you on your smartphone. All day. Every day.

I haven’t stepped on that new scale yet, because I envision Wayne’s phone app stats being thrown off by someone about half his size standing on it. (“Wait, how did I lose that much weight just since this morning?”) Although… it seems as if the scale can accommodate more than one user, according to the photos that accompany the product’s Amazon page:

“Are you Chris? Because you weigh a LOT more than Chris! Just sayin’.”
“Are you Chris? If you’re not Chris, get the hell off my scale!”
“Are you Chris? Might wanna cut down on the Twinkies, Chris.”

And that “unlimited guest sharing” thing is just weird. What guest is gonna want you to carry around on your smartphone how much they weighed while they were visiting you?

I can’t even.

Then there’s this:

Heart rate tracking. Hmm. Pretty sure if I stand on that thing, my heart rate is gonna be clear off the charts. But whatever. Moving on…

But wait! There’s more!

Look at all the OTHER stuff this Wyze scale can tell you about yourself!

Honestly, that’s pretty much a list of all the stuff I don’t want to know about myself. I’d be more interested if it could tell me how nice I am, or how funny this blog post is, or how to sell a million copies of my latest book. I certainly don’t need to know my “visceral fat” number. And is that measured as a percentage or a flat number or some other way, like with a pie chart? Mmm, pie.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

At any rate, this scale seems to fill a deep inner need of my engineer husband: the need to have more numbers in his life. I can’t imagine needing most of those numbers… ever. When I stand on my own little digital scale, I’m already bombarded with a number higher than I can typically count without falling asleep. Add on the fact that my husband might then have access to all my numbers, and well, yeah… that ain’t happenin’.

I don’t care how sleek and shiny and beautiful that scale is, or how tempting phone apps can be. I’m never gonna Wyze up.

Fear… and Loathing Fear

**The 9mm Taurus … a girl’s best friend**

I conquered a fear this past weekend. For me this is no small feat.

Despite having been raised in a household where my dad hunted regularly (we ate all sorts of game while I was growing up, from pheasants and rabbits to venison and fish), and despite being married to another hunter and gun enthusiast (there are two AK-47s in our house), I had never really touched a gun until Saturday evening. On purpose. Those things scare the crap outta me, and I was grateful that they were always locked up safe and sound, and away from me.

But it felt irresponsible to live in a house with guns and to have no idea how to use one. So, I signed up for a Pistol 101 class (not to be confused with Impressionist Painters 101 or English Literature 101).

This was a class for the total beginner, someone completely unfamiliar with guns. (I’m not sure, but I think the description said, “For the total gun-idiot who doesn’t even know which end to point where.”) That was definitely me. I registered, paid the deposit, and waited for the big day to arrive. Which it did.

We were given a list of things to do, things to bring, things to wear. I brought my husband’s 9mm Taurus pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, ear protection and goggles, and the balance of the class fee in probably-COVID-covered cash.

That day I wore a pretty flowered T-shirt, jeans, my tartan Chuck Taylors and my “Weird Al” socks, and the only ballcap I could find: an old Christian Writers Guild cap I bought many years ago. I must’ve looked like a total idiot. (You know, more than usual.)

With a little prayer and some deep, cleansing breaths, I walked into the class alone and, six hours later, walked out alive. (Let’s face it: in a class with 13 other total noobs brandishing weapons they didn’t understand, it wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility that one of us would yell “Oops!” at precisely the wrong moment.)

But the instructors and range safety officers were astounding and I never once felt unsafe. Not for a moment. And I pretty much walk around feeling nervous and unsafe all the time, even at home.

I came home a wiser person, and a less fearful one. Because knowledge is power. (Except for calculus and electrical engineering. For someone like me, that kind of knowledge is pointless.)

Conquering my many fears in recent years has become a challenge… mostly because my fears are legion: dentistry, rats, bats, spiders, public speaking, airplanes (well, being IN airplanes—I don’t mind when someone ELSE gets in an airplane), childbirth, and guns…

So many fears. So little time.

Over the years, some of these fears have been conquered out of necessity:

Dentistry: I found a loophole to conquer this fear: avoid going to the dentist as much as possible. No attendance, no fear.

Rats: I have friends and relatives who’ve had rats as pets, so I’ve learned to just be grateful that none of the untamed ones live in or near my house. (We have squirrels and moles and possums and groundhogs nearby instead.)

Bats: Two bats invaded our house weeks after we moved into it in 2012, so I simply embarrassed myself by shrieking and wearing a hoodie tied securely under my chin for three days till they figured out how to fly out the front door.

Spiders: This 140-year-old house has housed its share of spiders, and if I see one in the bedroom, I sleep in the guest room for a month or two until it has either moved on or died of old age.

Public Speaking: I haven’t conquered this one quite yet, but I can speak in public when I must… or when I get paid for it… or when people find me funny enough to buy a couple of my books after I shut up.

Airplanes: I beg my doctor to prescribe me exactly two Ativan pills before I go on vacations that include airline flights: one to get on the plane to get there, and one to get on the plane to come home. The Ativan just barely does the job, though: I still think we’re going to crash and die, but I just don’t care.

Childbirth: I had four 9-pound-plus babies at home (because I have a secondary fear: hospitals), so that fear fell by the wayside decades ago, back when I was too young and foolish to know better. Good thing you don’t really know how big the baby is until it’s over. And good thing they were all born before I was 33, because I’d never put myself through that now. (And not just because someone stole my uterus in 2014.)

So, the last big fear left on my list was GUNS. Hence the Pistol 101 class.

I can honestly say I’ve moved from a nearly panicky fear of seeing the guns outside their natural habitat (the gun cabinet) to a non-fearful, healthy respect for them (like I have for people who can ride unicycles or who do spring cleaning).

Next, I’m going to take my body-shot target from the class (20 out of 20! fear me!) and make it into a lovely wreath so I can hang it on the front door.

That ought to put the fear right where I want it.

TL;DR: An interview

So, while you looked away for a moment or were ordering more cute masks on Etsy, I did this fun interview with L.K. Hunsaker, of the West PA Book Festival.

Have a quick read—you know, if you didn’t already fall asleep reading the About page here on my site…

CLICKETY-CLICK HERE!

And don’t forget to nab your FREE copy of Lawn Girl while you’re here! (See the book cover link on the right of this page.)

“Alexa, do stuff…”

If you don’t own an Amazon Alexa device yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. That’s an obvious statement, isn’t it? Of course you don’t. You don’t own one.

Or maybe you DO know what you’re missing, and you don’t miss it. Some days I can’t blame you.

We’ve all heard the Tales Beyond the Echo Dot! stories of Alexa laughing maniacally for no reason, or mishearing something you said and asking you to repeat it fourteen times, or ordering twelve dozen packages of Oreo Double-Stufs without your consent. (Okay, in my case, that WAS with my consent, but let’s just skip over that minor detail.)

Some of you purposely don’t own these devices because you’re afraid she’s listening to you 24/7, taking notes on your conversations and reporting them to Homeland Security. (Okay, she IS, but let’s just skip over that minor detail.)

You’re perfectly safe, though. Seriously. Quit laughing. Amazon even has this graphic on the pages of their Echo/Alexa products.

I don’t know how the copywriter got through this description without giggling.

Seriously. Quit laughing.

Here at our house, we currently own five Alexa devices: one tall Echo and four Echo Dots. They’re scattered at strategic points around the house (just don’t ask me why we have one in the bathroom), so she can hear us every time we cough or breathe or think. Wait, no… I mean, so we can get the information we need without having to walk across half the square footage of our large Victorian house. Yeah, that’s what I meant.

Plus, they were on sale.

When you buy one of these smart-alec devices—I mean, smart devices—you envision yourself doing all the cool things they suggest:

“Alexa, what’s the square root of pi?”

“Alexa, translate this phrase from Swahili into Olde English…”

“Alexa, teach me how to install a carburetor in a 1972 Chevette.”

You get the idea. Until the box shows up, you can dream of the things you’ll do together once she arrives…

But then the box shows up.
And reality sets in.
You’re never going to do any of that stuff.

If you’re me, though, you’ll do at least ONE thing: check the weather. I ask about the weather every single day. Sometimes two or three times in the same day. In fact, asking about the weather comprises about 99% of my interaction with Alexa. The irony is that I never go outside. I just want to know what it would be like out there if I did.

Another 1/2% of my interaction is made up of setting alarms (for waking up at ungodly hours) and timers (for cooking food that I just should have given up on long ago).

That last 1/2% of my interaction with dear ol’ Alexa is made of stuff like this:

“What is a bindle?”

“How much is a first-class postage stamp?”

“What’s the humidity?” (Technically, this is a subset of the weather question, but I ask it separately so it counts here.)

“Play notifications.” (These are notifications of packages Amazon delivered three hours earlier and that I’ve already unpacked and started using.)

“Play music on XYZ station.” (This rarely works on the first try because I haven’t enabled the right skill yet or added on the right music app or whatever. I then give up and default to, “Play ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic,” after which she plays the same five or six songs from the 1980s that I know by heart.)

Oops, I forgot that an Amazon Echo is like playing Simon Says. None of those would work because I forgot to put “Alexa” in the beginning. Because, you know, if you don’t, she totally isn’t listening to you.

If you’re new to the Alexa experience, here are some fun things to try:

“Alexa, tell me a Chuck Norris joke.” (This one really works.)

“Alexa, where the heck is my husband?” (Spoiler alert: The answer is, “Home Depot… He’s always at Home Depot. Stop asking.”)

“Alexa, why can’t I lose weight?” (Cue the maniacal laughter I mentioned earlier.)

“Alexa, does this dress make me look fat?” (If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll remain silent. My husband could learn a trick or two from her.)

“Alexa, what should I do for a headache?” (Her answer is usually, “Let me read you a chapter from ‘Brain Surgery for Dummies.’ The Kindle edition is only $2.99. Would you like to order it?”)

—

If you’ve been playing along with our home game, you already know that my husband is an electrical engineer. So, he doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about the weather or how much a stamp costs. He uses his Echo Dot to configure (and endlessly reconfigure) our smart-home devices… mainly light bulbs, which he groups into categories with names I can never remember. So, when I want the living room lamp to come on, all I have to do is say: “Alexa, turn on the living room lamp.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device by that name.”

Maybe I got the syntax wrong. “Alexa, turn on the lamp in the living room.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device by that name.”

Maybe I got one word wrong. “Alexa, turn on the living room light.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see a device…”

“ALEXA, just turn on ANY LAMP IN A 50-FOOT RADIUS OF MY VOICE!”

“I’m sorry, Dave, but…”

“Alexa, I swear, I’m going to throttle Jeff Bezos with my bare hands, smash your little plastic face in with a ball peen hammer, and go buy a Google Assistant!“

Suddenly, every light in the house comes on…

“Alexa, go screw yourself.”

“I’m sorry, but you haven’t enabled that skill yet.”

Today I taught my parents… (Part 4)

Last time on “Today I Taught My Parents,” we saw Linda teach her mom how to use a webcam.

This week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” Linda shows her parents that she can carry a jar safely.

After months of nothing more than emails, phone calls, and random Facebook messages (my parents still have a flip phone, so you won’t see a post with me teaching them how to text anytime soon), I finally got to SEE my parents—live and in person!— about a week ago. We defied the Supreme Highness Governor Wolf’s orders when my parents invited me to pick up some takeout and join them for lunch.

They’d wanted to come to my house since the restaurant is closer to me (“It takes twenty minutes to get to our house—the food will be cold!”), but I reminded them that my husband works with hundreds of other snot-nosed math brains at the nuclear power plant, making our house a sort of ground-zero for germs. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but you get the point. My parents did too. We wisely opted for their house.)

Of course, when I picked up the takeout order, the food was already waiting for me packed up in a bag. That added five minutes to the ticking clock of food-warmth. Then the cashier rang up the wrong order and had to wait for a manager to zero it out on the cash register so she could start all over and ring it up again. That added another ten minutes. I’d be lucky if this food was even lukewarm by the time I got it out of the restaurant to my car.

I took the shortcut to my parents’ house, up the long and winding Wildwood Road. One lane in each direction. No passing zone. Guess who was in front of me? Some woman driving about ten miles an hour with her blinker on the whole time. After four or five miles of this, I was convinced she was headed to my parents’ house too. But she wasn’t gonna get any of our food, no matter HOW cold it got!

After finally arriving and pretending to hug each other—and reheating my parents’ cold French fries in the microwave (“I told you the food would be cold!”)—we settled in for a yummy and fun lunch and gab-fest that lasted three hours.

As I was getting ready to leave, my mom foisted upon me a quart-sized mason jar of homemade spaghetti sauce concocted by my daughter. They loved her sauce (and so do I!), but it was a tad spicy for their delicate, retired, old-person insides. So they wanted to donate their remaining jar to me. I was glad to take it off their hands. (What else would a devoted daughter do, right?)

But then I caught my mother wrapping the jar in about twelve plastic Walmart bags and stuffing it into an Amazon box.

Here’s a picture of the jar, with salt-and-pepper shakers for scale:

[SPOILER ALERT: This picture was taken after I got home.]

“Mom, what’s with the package?”

“It’s the sauce. So it doesn’t break.”

“Mom, I live a few miles away. I think it’ll make it. Besides, with the pandemic, I have my own collection of Amazon boxes in every size.”

“Well, just to be on the safe side…”

“And, with the pandemic, I can’t use my reusable grocery bags, so I have my own collection of plastic Walmart bags too.”

“Well, just to be on the safe side…”

“I’m pretty sure I can carry one quart-sized jar to the car and then into my house without breaking anything.”

“Just. To. Be. On. The…”

“…Safe side. Yes, I know. Please unwrap it.”

She blinked at me. Twice. It was now officially a standoff.

“Mom, I just turned fifty-nine. I realize I’m not QUITE a grown-up yet, but give me the benefit of the doubt here.”

She stared at me and didn’t move. So, I walked to the counter, took the overwrapped jar out of the Amazon box, and started peeling off the layers of plastic Walmart bags like I was peeling an onion. And just when it started to feel hopeless, I saw glass and, through the glass, spaghetti sauce. Eureka!

I physically hugged each of my parents (like the rebel I am) and headed out to my car.

Score: Linda, 1; Mom, ZILCH. I had won.

Or had I?

While standing my ground against my mom, my dad had been outside putting several empty mason jars into my car to give back to my daughter. I didn’t think much of this gesture until I got home and took out the bag of empty jars.

Each one was wrapped in a half dozen plastic Walmart bags and had several more stuffed down inside them.

Just to be on the safe side.

Today I taught my parents… (Part 3)

Last time on “Today I Taught My Parents,” we saw Linda teach her mom how to order food online.

This week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” Linda shows her parents how to use a webcam.

I’m sure that, back in April 1960, my parents weren’t standing next to that cake thinking, “Gosh, we can’t wait to celebrate sixty years together in 2020 during a global pandemic by looking at family and friends through a big screen, many miles away from us.” I’m reasonably certain that wasn’t their thought at all that day.

If it were me, I would have been thinking, “Mmmm, CAKE!”

But let’s not use me as a yardstick … for anything. Instead of a Big Party, I got to help them celebrate the only way we could last month: through a webcam.

My parents both use desktop computers, not laptops, so of course they didn’t own a webcam. That would have been too easy. And, by the time I got the bright idea to order them a webcam online and have it delivered to their house, every webcam within a 5,000-mile radius had been snapped up, along with a million shares of Zoom stock.

I own a few ancient laptops with webcams, but I typically use a dedicated webcam and microphone on my desktop computer when I need to attend a virtual meeting. Back around 2010, I’d gotten a crappy blue plastic webcam for free with rewards points from entering a bajillion code combinations from the bottle caps of many Diet Cokes. MANY Diet Cokes. Let me tell you, it took a LOT of Diet Coke, imbibed by both me and my husband, to get that free crappy blue plastic webcam.

It has a built-in crappy microphone and a built-in crappy suction cup on the bottom. (I’d say the suction cup sucks, but that would be paying it a compliment. It does NOT suck. Hence the problem. The thing tends to skitter across your desk if the cord isn’t positioned just right.)

But, it served me well for nearly a decade, considering the price I’d paid. (It was worth at least twice what I paid for it!) And anyone who uses technology knows how long a decade is. Most electronic equipment needs carbon dating after about five years.

The Big Problem presented itself when the Big Party I had been planning for my parents to celebrate their 60th anniversary ground to a halt. I thought I’d been pretty good at predicting the various obstacles we might encounter trying to pull off a surprise party for my parents: airline flights and schedules for family to the east of us, work schedules for all the grown grandkids here, traffic issues getting those same grandkids to my house from 50 miles away, nap schedules for their great-grandson (and, let’s face it, for me too), food choices for so many of us on different diets…

But I had somehow neglected to add “global pandemic and worldwide shutdown” to my list of possible roadblocks. Now what? No in-person face-to-face party. After 60 years of surviving each other, my parents now had to survive COVID-19 and a complete lockdown, with nobody to entertain them but each other. If they hadn’t killed each other in the past 60 years, this just might do it.

But what to do about that Big Party? In typical noble, altruistic fashion, I gave my parents that free crappy blue plastic webcam. Because that’s how I roll. I’m nothing if not self-sacrificing.

But even that simple gesture turned into a Big Production. I wiped down the free crappy blue plastic webcam with sanitizing wipes, put everything in a small cardboard box (because I’ve got an entire collection of a dozen of every size box Amazon makes), and delivered the box to my parents’ garage (while waving at them through their kitchen window). I felt like an honorary member of the bomb squad. (Should I cut the blue wire or the red wire?)

They let the box sit in their garage for two days before touching it.

A few days later, we did a test run of the webcam and microphone, using Facebook’s video chat feature inside Messenger. I chose that over Zoom because my mom was already familiar with Facebook Messenger. I didn’t relish the thought of trying to walk her through setting up Zoom from scratch over the phone. This was the same woman who used to call me for impromptu tech support by announcing, “It won’t let me! The thingy is blinking!”

With Facebook Messenger, all I had to do was hit the little blue video camera icon in the upper right of a group message—and all she had to do was answer the incoming video call.

You know, once the camera was plugged in, and the microphone was plugged in.

What could go wrong? Well, what greeted me first were my mom’s neck and one of her hands, and a lot of loud crackling noise as she fiddled with the webcam and the microphone, trying to find good spots for them on her desk. And then both my parents tried to find spots for two chairs close enough to the camera for me to see and hear them. And for them to see the computer monitor that would soon be filled with loving faces wishing them a happy 60th.

The Big Day for the Big Party arrived. I’d divided the groups of people who wanted to cyber-attend into two time slots. For one thing, Facebook Messenger video chat accepts only eight cameras at a time. For another thing, I still had those pesky schedules to contend with.

I started a group message with the first time-slot folks, and then I “called” everyone. One by one, to my delight, folks popped up on my screen.

But where were my parents?

They were still in the two-person Messenger chat I’d set up with my mom. I typed in our two-person chat window: “Hey, I’m setting up our ‘party’ with a few folks…. We’re setting up now and I’ll add you once we’re ‘live.'”

Then I added, “I added you to our small group. You’ll get the video ring thing in a second.”

Suddenly I heard a loud phone-ringing noise and realized that, in another browser window, my mom was “calling” me in our two-person Messenger chat window.

Brrrrring… bbbrrrrrringgggg… Boy, that noise got annoying really fast.

I kept apologizing to the friends and family waiting for my parents in the group video chat… and kept hearing that bbbrrrrrrrinnngggg from the two-person chat window.

My parents tried to call me a total of five times before they figured out their error. I think my all-caps response of “GO TO THE GROUP MEETING NOT THIS ONE” probably helped nudge them in the right direction.

Of course, once they actually got to the group chat, they were greeted with friends, a nephew, a kid (okay, that was me), and some grandkids and their significant others. They were wearing their matching T-shirts, which said, “I Survived 60 Years!” They seemed delighted with the turnout, and we had a one-hour online party with them both.

And later that day, a second wave of kids, grandkids, friends, and a great-grandkid swept in for a second virtual party.

And, aside from the usual glitches with cameras, microphones, cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, background noise, and technophobia, it went surprisingly well.

It was the best we could do for them, given the restrictions. We’re planning a Real Party sometime in the fall. Of this year. We hope. Unless the murder hornets and a sharknado show up. Can’t rule out any possibility these days.

And, because my upgraded webcam finally arrived from Amazon a few weeks ago, I’m gonna let my parents keep that free crappy blue plastic webcam… because that’s what a noble, self-sacrificing daughter would do, right?

I still haven’t been able to give my parents a true happy-anniversary hug yet, more than a month later, but you can bet I’ll be the first one in their driveway when our state relaxes some restrictions.

You know, after I shower in hand sanitizer and sit in their garage for two days.

Today I taught my parents… (Part 2)

Last week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” we watched Linda teach her dad how to use a fast-food drive-thru.

This week on “Today I Taught My Parents,” Linda helps her mother navigate ordering food online through a restaurant’s website.

**Linda’s mother looks nothing like this.**

Every phone conversation with my mother over the past umpteen years has started like this: “I know you’re busy. Do you have a few minutes?”

I fall for this tactic every time. It’s a good thing that she’s cute. And that she’s my mother.

The other day she called to ask about working her way through ordering Chinese food online. They typically call their favorite Chinese restaurant on the phone to place an order, and then my dad drives there to pick it up. But, for some reason, the restaurant wasn’t answering their phone.

So, my mom, desperate for some General Tso’s chicken or pepper steak or maybe just fortune cookies, ventured online to place an order. This is where the phone call came in.

Mom: Hi, honey. I know you’re busy. Do you have a few minutes?
Me: Sure. [Apparently I enjoy lying to my own mother.] Whassup?
Mom: I’m trying to order food online from China House.
Me: Wait, speak up. I could have sworn you said you’re ordering food online.
Mom: I am. But it keeps asking me to create a profile.
Me: Are you missing a step or something? You shouldn’t need to create a profile. Just skip that part.
Mom: I can’t. It won’t let me go any further. When I finish and click Save, it just goes back to the profile page.
Me: This is happening on China House’s website?
Mom: No. I’m on a site called chinesemenu.com and…
Me: So you’re not on a site just for China House? Hang on a second…

My mom starts mumbling something else, but I’ve missed it because now I’m opening up a browser window and going to chinesemenu.com myself, just to be sure she’s not giving her credit card information to some Nigerian prince. Sure enough, it’s legit.

But she’s right about the profile page thing, which kinda freaks me out because I was 99% sure she was misunderstanding things or was on a page rerouting to the site of that Nigerian prince. Sure enough, creating a profile and saving it just takes me back to the same page I was just on.

Until I see something in the upper right corner of the screen.

Me: Mom? Are you still on the profile page?
Mom: [dripping with sarcasm] Where else would I be? I’ve been stuck on this friggin’ page for an hour now.
Me: Click on the words “chinesemenu.com” in the upper right corner of your screen.
Mom: What?
Me: Click… on… the… words…
Mom: I heard ya. I heard ya. I’m not deaf. I’m just old. And cranky.

She’s not wrong. On all counts.

Mom: That worked. Thanks!

Click.

I go back to my work. A few minutes later, the phone rings.

Mom: Hi, honey. I know you’re busy. Do you have a few more minutes?
Me: Sure. Why not? What happened now?
Mom: Well, I got through the entire order, but…
Me: [trying to sound helpful and not embittered and ready for therapy] Yes?
Mom: I got to the end where…
Me: Wait, what? the end of what?
Mom: The order! I got to the end and…
Me: Sorry. I’m on the site again, trying to walk through a fake order just to see what you’re seeing.
Mom: What? Why would you do something like that? Are you having Chinese food too?

I wisely decide not to explain this to her. After all, I may have initially said I’m not busy, but I’m not THAT not-busy.

At this point, I find China House on my screen again and walk my way through their menu, fake-ordering lo mein and moo shoo pork and making myself really hungry for Chinese food. Everything is fine till I get to the end.

Me: Mom, how did you input your credit card information?
Mom: What?
Me: Your credit card information. Where did you input that? I don’t see any options to pay for this order.
Mom: Oh, I didn’t. I clicked on Cash at Pickup.

This confuses me, because it seems so much more complex than simply placing an order over the phone—especially for my mom. Then I remember that she told me China House wasn’t answering their phone.

Me: So then, what’s the problem?
Mom: What do I do next?
Me: [looking at the screen with my fake order on it] Click where it says Place Order.
Mom: And then what will happen?
Me: Your computer will explode into a million tiny plastic shards, and time will move in reverse until you’re back in high school. Is that okay?
Mom: Don’t get cute with me. I taught you how to use a toilet.

She has a point. Even if it took me longer than most kids to get the hang of it, especially at night. But I digress.

Me: I assume it’ll place your order with China House. It might give you some indication of when you should go pick it up. Then, um, Dad can go pick it up, I guess.
Mom: [cheerily] Okay! Thanks!

Click.

I go back to my work… again. A few minutes later, the phone rings. I don’t even need to check the caller ID.

Me: Mom? What now?
Mom: Your father just called from downtown. They’re closed.

I feel awful for them both. They’ve been stuck in the house for weeks, like the rest of us, and they look forward to their outings.

Knowing my dad, though, he probably just stopped at the Wendy’s drive-thru on his way back home. You know, now that he’s an expert.