Hacks And Gadgets, Part 2: Some Weird Stuff Out There

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 31, 2025]  2025 

In Part 1 of this series, I explored some of the mysteries of internet hacks that seem to show up on my Instagram account even though I have never posted and follow exactly 1.25 people. But it has opened up a whole new world for me.

I cannot help but observe in all these hacks that logic is sometimes in short supply. For example, dumping out an entire liter of soda (shown on the video) so you can use the bottle makes no sense to me.

Another cleaning recipe calls for Expired beer? Who has that? Not my house! Should you let a bottle of beer go flat just to use in a hack that could probably be purchased at the hardware store for less than the cost of the beer? Other cleaning hacks required fresh (unbrewed) coffee grounds, or lots of toothpaste, or tons of aluminum foil, or Cascade dishwasher cubes. Hard to imagine cost savings using any of those.

Some of these hack videos go by a warp speed. It's a puzzle, trying to connect a tomato, drain cleaner, and aluminum foil into the same hack. Is this a test? Is it one hack or ten?

A lot of these hacks will start with: "my grandmother taught me this"  or "a plumber taught me this."   Frankly, grandma was an idiot, and you ought to fire the plumber. Some examples:

Learned this from a plumber: Wrap aluminum foil around a faucet then squirt Meyers soap on top and turn on the faucet. What exactly does this do? The soap is on top of the aluminum foil.

Learned this from my dad. He s a genius! Rubbing a sanding block over a $100 bill. Verify its authenticity? I'd be afraid of shredding it and the bank not being willing to let me trade it in for another one.

Always do this before travel: Wrap car and house keeps (including fobs) in aluminum foil and put in freezer. (Can this be good for the electronics in the key fobs?)

Most people don't know this trick: Put a can of (unopened) garbanzo beans in the dishwasher. (Is she then running it?) Absolutely no idea what this is supposed to do for either the garbanzo beans, the dishes, or the dishwasher itself. Does whatever it is still work if the beans are canellini?

Then there's a whole class of hacks that to me just seem, well, flat-out weird. Some examples:

Cut a tomato in half horizontally. Insert gold jewelry between the two halves of the tomato to polish/clean it. Hopefully you can sneak the tomato halves into your kids sandwiches afterwards so as not waste the tomatoes.

Get rid of musty odors on clothes by spraying them with vodka. They used a men's suit jacket as an example. Yup, definitely need to go to work reeking of vodka. Sure hope those European alcohol tariffs don't go into effect because this could be an expensive hack!

Dumping something blue (what?) in the toilet then sticking your bare muddy foot in the toilet and flushing for an "instantly clean foot."   Doubt this really works unless you have one of those old toilets that actually power flushes. And how did you even get into the bathroom without tracking mud all over? And eww.

Rubbing raw egg whites on leather boots to clean and shine them. (How does this not end up with boots smelling like rotten eggs?)

Take an avocado pit from an avocado and cut it into pieces. (Machete required?) Put it in a jar with Coca-Cola, wait 24 hours, then rub the avocado pieces with some of the Coke in the jar on stiff muscles and joints. Try not to attract ants. OK, that last part was mine.

One hack I tried that did not work as well as I hoped was to put a wooden spoon over a pot to keep it from boiling over. It boiled over.

The hack I am always looking for is the one that purports to remove hard water build-up on glass shower doors. Even though Olof and I are religious about squeegee-ing the doors after every shower, hard water has built up that has defied every commercial cleaning product on the market, never mind epic amounts of elbow grease. Even an Amazon product called Shower Door Cleaner didn't touch it.

But ever an optimist, I have mixed up every concoction the Instagram hackers have touted. It worked so well on their shower doors. Maybe they don't live in a place with hard water like we do. Or it's had less time to build up. At this point, the only conclusion we can come to is that we'll just have to replace the shower doors. But they'll likely just end up looking the same again. Fortunately, by then we'll be dead and whoever ends up with our tiny built-by-the-lowest-bidder-after-the-war-with-all-non-standard-parts-cottage will raze it and build a McMansion on the lot with hopefully a soft water system.

Stay tuned next time for Part 3: Amazing and horrifying gadgets.

In spite of the wooden spoon, the pot boiled over.

 

Hacks and Gadgets: A Whole New World: Part 1

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published March 24, 2025] 2025

I'm not on any social media except for an account on Instagram so that I can follow 1.25 family members (one who posts all the time, and another who posts rarely). I've never posted myself.

So, I'm puzzled as to why Instagram is constantly sending me videos of recipes, products, and particularly, hacks.

Now, everyone loves a good hack. They used to be called household hints and were generally found in a newspaper column by a mother and daughter duo named Heloise. (They were both named Heloise.) I think they're dead.

It was my experience that the Heloises'  hints only worked about 70% for me. Maybe they had a different brand of oil on their driveway than I did that would respond better to eradication with kitty litter. (Maybe it was my brand of kitty litter?) Maybe their kids were less sloppy eaters. But even though they promised that with their hint that the stain will be gone, it somehow never was.

But the Instagram version has actual videos. The one thing I can conclude with all the Instagram hacks is that there is nothing that cannot be cleaned with a combination of baking soda, white vinegar, blue dish detergent and toothpaste, often all four at once. Coca-Cola is another frequent cleaning product which makes me wary about what it might be doing to the lining of my stomach, if it is that good at melting baked-on grease off one's stove vent.

Having now been sucked into endless Instagram feeds of household hacks, I've been able to make several observations.

Some, of course, do work, even for me. But in the spirit of the Heloise columns, never as well as they work on the Instagram video.

A number of these hacks require serious power tools, never mind sharp objects like knives to cut off the tops (or bottoms) of plastic water bottles. I would be more likely to sever a digit in the process, making my hospital co-pay for surgical re-attachment waaaay more than whatever I was saving with the hack.

Some of these are ridiculously time consuming, measuring and mixing big batches of frankly suspect cleaning products. For example: Squeeze juice from three oranges and do something else with the juice. Take the peels and grind them up in blender with water and two tablespoons salt. Strain. Pour the strained liquid in a dispenser bottle with one tablespoon baking soda. Use it to clean the toilet bowl. Or buy Ty-D-Bol?

A good number of them use so many products you already have in your home that you could buy this solution's twin on Amazon for a lot less.

The preponderance feminine hygiene product hacks deserves a section all its own.

If I could add two provisos to this category of hacks, they would be "discretion"  and "aesthetics."   Maybe also "judgment."  Also, "WTF"??? It's one thing to infuse a panty liner with some essential oil and tack it mostly out of sight on the back of your toilet base. Ditto for using a panty liner as an emergency bandaid on your heel (minus the essential oil).

Taping panty liners to the bottom of your kitchen mop as a substitute for Swiffer pads, as several videos suggested, could work in a pinch.

I'm fairly dubious, however, about panty liners soaked with Pine Sol and stuck inside lamp shades (presumably meant to be emitting Eau de Cheap Mountain Cabin?)

I'm marginally OK with a scented panty liner stuck inside the lid of your kitchen trash bin, as one hack suggests, but worried about putting them as room fresheners on the top of blades of ceiling fans. I'd be afraid they'd fly off in inopportune (would there be opportune?) moments. Who'd want to get hit in the face with a Pine Sol-soaked maxi pad?

Some of these hygiene product hacks truly crossed the line. Like taking an extra-long panty liner and sticking it to the driver's seat back of your car. Is it supposed to absorb sweat? Regardless, it just looks wrong. So wrong. A puzzled observer of this hack could only speculate how this product got from Point A (where you'd expect it) to Point B? Should they leave a note on your windshield? This is definitely not a hack for anyone who does car pools or is in real estate. Or wants to continue in either.

But the absolutely worst one was the video of three tampons, their little strings tied neatly together, swimming in a fry pan of ground beef to soak up grease. I can't un-see this. This might be one hack you don't want to use if you want anyone, including and especially your husband, to ever eat at your house again.

Next week, in Part 2, I'll elicit readers'  help in trying to figure out what, exactly, a lot of Instagram hacks actually do. Someone posts a video with no sound or explanation which ends with the poster doing a thumbs up. Like it's supposed to be obvious. Seriously, it's keeping me up at night.

For example, there s a frequent hack that shows someone putting Scotch tape over the keypad of one's microwave, then peeling it off. No idea what this does.

Or: melting a bunch of (expensive) dishwasher pods in a fry pan. (Why?????)

Or: Taping a large cabbage leaf to the knee with adhesive tape. Medicinal? Or just because you can?

Or: Taking a plastic supermarket veggie bag, adding small balls of wadded-up aluminum foil along with coins (quarters, it looks like), filling the bag with water, tying it closed, and hanging it outside on the porch. What does this do? Clean the coins? Ward off evil spirits?

I'm already thanking you in advance!

 

 

Dealing With The Contagion Deniers

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 17, 2025] ©2025

We’re all familiar with the common fibs people tell – “It’s in the mail,” “I only had one,” and “No, I haven’t had Botox, I’m just really relaxed.”  But this time of year, the one that really gets me is “I’m not contagious.”   The speaker invariably has a hacking cough reminiscent of Greta Garbo dying of consumption in the last scenes of Camille.  (Since not many people will get this reference, Camille was a 1936 movie about a beautiful Parisian courtesan who dies a very dramatic premature death of tuberculosis which wouldn’t even be a movie plot today because of antibiotics. 

Let me say up front that I am hardly a germaphobe.   (One look at my house would convince you.)  But some of the worst illnesses I’ve ever caught have been from people who “weren’t contagious.”  Fortunately, neither Olof nor I get sick all that often but when we do, we tend to get afflictions that take up residence in our obviously weak lungs and refuse to be evicted. So we do our best to avoid them.

There are no lack of virulent organisms floating around this time of year, including the ever-present Covid.  Everything you touch is a source of some pathogen (including and especially the keypad at your local pharmacy) but other than washing your hands a lot and getting flu and Covid shots (we’ve now had seven), you just have to hope your immune system is up to the challenge.  But why dare it by inviting plague into your house? 

Several weeks ago, some friends we hadn’t seen in a long time arrived for dinner, the husband recently returned from a trip through what I call the Ebola airline hubs in Europe (Heathrow anyone?) where the world’s grodiest germs have a chance to mix and match.  The first thing I noticed was that this guy was exhibiting the Green Snot Sign.  There are few microbes I hate more than green snot microbes which from my personal experience are pernicious and have a door knob life span of decades.  Further, the Manual of Mom Medicine, paragraph six, article two, clearly states that yellow snot is your standard basic cold but green snot requires antibiotics. If you’ve ever had a toddler in nursery school or day care, you know this well.

As if on cue, our guest croaked from his severely laryngitic throat that he had started antibiotics approximately five seconds before so not to worry, he was “not contagious.” 

I immediately considered letting our guest eat alone out on our uncovered patio in the rain where his illness might progress to pneumonia to which he would hopefully succumb before I had to let him back in.  Olof, a frequent international business traveler before he retired, would come back from those same airports with some seriously nasty stuff. (Green snot from an Ebola airport probably IS Ebola.)   But I was overruled by my kinder gentler Other Half, who thinks it’s not polite to be mean to people one has invited over even if they are attempting to kill us. 

Our guest not only coughed and sneezed pretty much non-stop but kept repeating, probably in response to my cringing looks every time he blew Snot Verde across my dinner table, that his doctor told him that once he started taking antibiotics he wasn’t contagious.  He said they’d thought of cancelling but didn’t want to disappoint us.

Please.  Disappoint us.

Let me just say I have no medical background whatsoever, other than having been previously married to a physician, including the medical school years, which makes me among the most medically dangerous people on the planet.  But I would still like to officially challenge every law of contagion ever put out there.  According to the Dr. Inga School of Unsubstantiated Medical Facts, if you are even remotely sick, you are contagious.  So when you say “my doctor says I’m not contagious” (like I believe you, or him, or her), I think it’s only fair to ask for his or her number because I think they ought to be willing to treat me for free when I get sick from you.  I’d also like affidavits of non-contagability, lab results not more than two hours old indicating the absence of a single shedding rhinovirus, recent articles from The New England Journal citing conclusive evidence that contagiousness can even be quantified, and a Hazmat suit for the guest (and maybe even the host) to wear.  Let no one say I am unreasonable. 

But meanwhile, while the flu/Covid season lasts, I’m hoping you’ll give me a head(cold)s up.  My aging immune system thanks you.

 

 

 

Languages I Don't Speak, Part 3: Light Bulb Edition

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published March 3, 2025] 2025

This is Part 3 in my series of Languages I Do Not Speak: Light bulb edition. I mentioned the light bulb issue in a previous column about my other language barriers (Spoken Coffee, Remotes, Grandchildren, iPhones, etc.) but they merit a column all their own.

It used to be that light bulbs for home use came in three denominations: 60, 75, and 100. They all used the same base, and you knew how much light you'd get with each of them 

Now it's as if they suddenly switched us to metric. (And don't even think it.)

Even bringing the box that held the former bulbs to the hardware store with me, I need human assistance to find the same ones. I have enough techno-stress in my life without light bulb anxiety.

A while back, we had some Edison light bulbs strung on our property to add additional lighting in an otherwise dark area. As always, I bought a few extra bulbs for replacement. But now, alas, those bulbs have been used up and I was tasked with finding some of the same size, brightness, and base. This has taken hours upon hours of my time. If the bulb isn't exactly the same as the others on the string both in size and light emission, it looks really odd. I think I have looked at least a hundred Edison bulbs on every site that sells light bulbs, including Amazon.

Since I didn't have the box, I got out my magnifying glass and was able to determine that the teeny-weeny numbers on the base of the bulbs read: 120v 60H 0.01 0.9. 

Optimistically, I tried to Google that combination and came up with ... nothing.

It turns out that with LED bulbs, watts don't mean much. They pretty much belong to an ancient dialect called "incandescent". It all lumens now. 

Unfortunately, like many people in my age group, I do not speak lumen; I speak watt. You need to translate watts into lumens if you are buying an LED bulb.

And then, there s a whole new language of bulb bases. I was searching for bulb with an A19 base but all I could find anywhere were LED bulbs with E26 bases.

We will not even go into light bulb bases. You don t have enough time and I don t have enough column space.

But the short answer is that almost all A19 bulbs are E26. This means that if you have an A19 bulb at your house, it definitely has an E26 base. However, you can't say its the other way around. That's because bulbs with E26 bases come in all different shapes and sizes, not just A19.

Are you still reading? If so, I'm impressed. (And worried.)

So I did eventually find some bulbs that would work and carefully noted everything it says on the box which is: LED String Light 70 lumens. Clear. 11-watt replacement (replaces an 11-watt incandescent bulb) S14 - Soft White - 2700K - 1 Watt - Standard base.

Oh, you wanted dimmable? That's a whole other variable.

As if lumens weren't bad enough, now you're getting into Kelvins which refer to color temperature. Warm white bulbs have between 2,700-3,000 Ks (Kelvins) white the soft whites are more in the 3,500 K range, and the cool whites in the 5,000 K range. As I understand it (and I really don t), higher K numbers are not brighter, merely whiter but in higher numbers will eventually start to look bluer (just to make you really crazy).

We have an entire huge drawer of specialty light bulbs for all the different indoor and outdoor light fixtures in our home, all personally labeled so that we could ever figure out what fixture they belonged to. 

When we remodeled our kitchen back in 1999, I had them put in under-the-cabinet lights and eight can lights in an 11x11 space, plus seven more can lights in our small adjoining dining space. Honestly, turn them all on at once and it looks like a nuclear blast. Having spent decades in a kitchen with a single 100-watt light bulb, I wasn't taking any chances.

But as those 15 incandescent can lights have burnt out, they've been replaced with LED bulbs which don't match the light on the previous ones at all. Ultimately, they will all match but in the interim, it's a very weird look.

And now my wonderful desk light is starting to flicker. Except it doesn't even have a bulb. At least not one that mere mortals could access. It's in a "head " I queried the company who makes it on their customer support line yes, you have to replace the whole head ($298) or the whole lamp. But a light that flickers while you're working is a light that is tempting one to rip it out of its base and throw it in the pool.

And then, to add insult to electrical injury, my long-time beloved halogen standing reading light next to my reading chair finally crumped. My requirements for a replacement fixture were simple: it had to have an actual changeable light bulb. This bulb also had to be something standard that you could get at Meanley's, or even on-line without searching through hundreds of light bulbs as I did for my Edison lights.

Annoyingly, most of the standing reading lamps I looked at had heads just like my desk lamp that was giving me problems. Fool me once. 

Checking the tag on the reading lamp that seem to fit my criteria, it said no more than 60 watts but that's only if it's an incandescent bulb. Apparently for an LED bulb, you can use any wattage you want in it. (Disclaimer: if your house burns down, this was what I was told by the lighting store person. So sue HER.)

Just to clarify, a 60-watt incandescent bulb is a 7-9 watt LED bulb and is 730-800 lumens. Did you ever want to know all this? I sure didn't. But now, alas, I do.

 

 

 

Trying To Embrace Beef Tallow As A Health Food

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published February 24, 2025] 2025

They've flipped the script on us again.

If I didn't have a character limit, this column would be 10,000 words and titled Totally absolutely never going to believe anything medical science says again and this time I really mean it!

I'm just tired of embracing whatever comestibles and supplements that are being currently touting only to have them announce a decade later that that stuff will kill you.

In 1973, Woody Allen presciently released the movie Sleeper about a health food store owner whose body was accidentally cryogenically frozen and who wakes up 200 years later in 2173 to find that the real health foods are tobacco and red meat. The doctors who unfreeze him are dismayed to learn that he consumed the likes of wheat germ and organic honey. "What?" they exclaim. "No deep fat, no steak, no cream pies, no hot fudge?"  subsequently observing that "these were thought to be unhealthy [in 1973] - precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

Guess what, folks. It s 2173. We just got there 148 years early.

If you've been alive for a while, you've endured flipflops between the health benefits (or lack thereof) of margarine vs. butter, eggs, shrimp, carbs, saturated fats vs polyunsaturated fats vs monounsaturated fats etc.

But for most of my life, saturated fats were always the bad guy. I put extra virgin olive oil on my salads, and if I fried anything, it was with a heart-healthy canola oil. Eggs were limited to two a week, and shrimp to, like, never. When I think about all the guilt I felt eating even the smallest amount of butter - which by the way tastes so much better than margarine - I feel pure dietary rage.

So I was frankly astonished a decade ago with the sudden popularity of coconut oil. I started seeing it more and more frequently as an ingredient in recipes, and even Dr. Oz was flogging it as a health food that allegedly fights illness-causing viruses and bacteria, aids in thyroid and blood sugar control, improves digestion, and improbably as it sounds to me, increases the good HDL cholesterol despite its 12 grams of saturated fat per tablespoon. Surely even a bacon cheeseburger dipped in a hot fudge sundae can't have 12 grams of saturated fat per bite?

I've never had a primary care doctor who didn't caution that artery-clogging saturated fat puts you on the fast track to counting worms. Still, since a whole display case of coconut oil had magically appeared in my local supermarket, and Dr. Oz said it was OK, I decided to add a jar to my basket. But I only got five steps before the chest pains started and I put it back. It's like Mao waking up one morning and exhorting the Chinese to embrace democracy. I just didn't think I had enough life expectancy left to embrace coconut oil as a health food.

But it has just gotten a whole lot worse. Now our new Secretary of Health and Human Services is telling us to jettison all those formerly-healthy seed oils (canola, corn, sunflower, safflower, etc.) and substitute beef tallow. Wasn't it considered a huge breakthrough for public health when all the fast-food restaurants were persuaded to dump beef tallow for polyunsaturated oils? We could order the large fries and think of it as a vegetable.

Beef tallow, by the way, is the fat that surrounds a cow's kidney. Yum-mo! It can be used as an ingredient in cosmetics as well as in cooking and in products like soap and biodiesel. I'm not sure any of these things is exactly whetting my appetite or making me want to slather it on my body.

In a post that seems eerily right out of the Woody Allen movie, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote on social media several months ago: 'Did you know that McDonald's used to use beef tallow to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of seed oils in 1990? This switch was made because saturated animal fats were thought to be unhealthy, but we have since discovered that seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic.'

Sorry folks, I have been so indoctrinated in my life against beef tallow (and coconut oil) that there is no way I am ingesting either. I'd probably end up dying from a reverse placebo effect: in my heart (literally and figuratively), I believe it will kill me.

But it's gotten even worse than that. Now alcohol is under attack. As in any alcohol at all. What happened to all those heart-healthy polyphenols in red wine that help protect the lining of blood vessels in the heart? The tide has turned and it's about to put Happy Hour under water.

Indulging in alcohol in moderation was once considered harmless, and, as noted above, possibly healthy, and may have well been why my kids survived to adulthood. That divorced working mom gig was a bear. I'm definitely glad they didn't come up with this anti-alcohol news while I was in college as it would definitely have impacted my college experience. The night finals were over we were going to go out for iced tea?

But now alcohol is toxic. Any amount. I'm increasingly glad I'm old.

So what are we weary health-oriented consumers to think?

As a senior citizen, here's my conclusion: Eat whatever you want because it'll come back into favor again sooner or later. I promise. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you've got to die of something.

So bring on the Krispy Kremes (which, by the way, are cooked in seed oils.) And thank you, Woody.

 

 

 

 

Two Many Languages

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published February 17, 2025] 2025

There are just too many foreign languages these days and I'm really having trouble keeping up.

Recently, for example, I wrote a whole column about not speaking coffee. It truly is a linguistic entity all its own and it s a huge social disadvantage to live in a place with so many good coffee houses and not be fluent. Or even be able to get by.

Of course, the main reason I haven t learned it is that I don't drink coffee so I've never frequented coffee places enough to really master spoken Coffee. When I do go, the menu scares the daylights out of me. The milk options alone are terrifying. I think that if you factored all the possible combinations and permutations of coffee drinks, the number would be in the bazillions.

But the problem with spoken Coffee is that it is a language with an unbelievable number of dialects. For example, there's the Frappuccino-Macchiato dialect from the Sucrose region of Italy. Only serious linguists and/or pre-diabetics really understand it.

But that's only the beginning.

I no longer speak light bulb either. The dialect I learned involved standard screw-in light fixtures in denominations of 15, 60, 75, or 100 watts. Now the lightbulb section at the hardware store has become so daunting that even bringing the empty box from the last bulbs doesn't help. Waaaayyy too many options in lighting levels I don t begin to understand.

I definitely do not speak remote. It's so easy to press the wrong button and mess up your TV beyond belief. The problem is: which wrong button was it? And you don't dare press any more buttons in case you mess it up even more. In my defense, remotes truly can be rendered irreparable as we learned when they were inadvertently left within the reach of our then-toddler grandchildren. Even my husband who has a degree in reactor physics from Cal Tech was unable to restore them to functionality.

And while we're on the subject of grandchildren, that's another language I'm struggling to master: grandchild. My first clue that we had a language barrier was when I showed them the phone nook in my 1947 house, a feature of the era. They wanted to know, "but where did you plug in the charger?" More recently I told them I was going to tape a show. They looked at me, puzzled. "So what do you mean, tape?"  The idea that something called a video tape would be involved in one's media viewing was too hilarious for them to contemplate. Why would one use that if you could just stream it (a term I have only recently begun to understand.)

Overall, I just don't speak technology in its many, constantly proliferating dialects. You learn one and there s an upgrade and you re back at square one. Just when you've mastered version 15.2.3, version 15.2.4 comes out and renders you illiterate, and you re thinking, OK, time for the ice floe. I think about the ice floe more than is probably healthy.

The irony is, I actually like languages. I've studied six besides English (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish) and was once fluent in one of them (Portuguese) after a year living with a non-English speaking family and going to a Brazilian high school. I love the idea of being able to communicate with someone in a different language. Understanding at least the rudiments of another language gives you a lot of insight into how the people of that culture view the world.

One of the aspects that especially fascinates me about foreign languages is what other cultures have words for. When we lived in Sweden and visited the Sami (Lapplander) area above the Arctic Circle, I was interested to learn that the Sami language, not surprisingly, has hundreds of words for ice and snow, and at least a thousand for reindeer, not only in size, color and shape of the animals but their behavior as well. We're talking serious specifics here. There's an actual word for a bull reindeer with a single whopper-sized testicle (busat). I guess if you re walking behind them for a few hundred miles on the otherwise-sceneryless tundra, you'd have plenty of opportunity to notice. And, of course, create a name for it. Entertainment is where you find it.

Our reindeer-adjacent vocabulary is pretty much confined to caribou, moose, Rudolph, Dancer, Dasher, Comet, Prancer, Vixen, Cupid, and Blitzen. The Sami would be appalled at our lack of imagination.

At one point a few years ago, however, while trolling for column material, I decided to try to look up the difference between all the baffling types of topographical depressions we have in the U.S.: vale, dale, dell, glen, glade, basin, hollow, trough, ravine, gorge, canyon, hollow, gulch, coulee, gully, arroyo, etc. etc. Maybe not as many terms as the Sami have for ice and snow, or certainly reindeer. They just don't need them. But we apparently do.

So these kinds of languages I can still embrace. But needing a whole specialized language for food stuffs and lighting fixtures and phones is more mental bandwidth than I have. Or ever want to.

 

 

Fires And More Fires

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published February 3, 2025] 2025

The recent fires in Los Angeles became especially personal when our younger son, daughter-in-law, three grandchildren and two dogs were forced to evacuate their home, their neighborhood surviving thanks to the incredible efforts of fire fighters. Prior to their evacuation, our son had sent us videos of tanker planes dropping red fire retardant overhead. Waaaay (waaaay) too close.

An unexpected bonus of the evacuation, however, was a shopping excursion with my 15-year-old granddaughter for a belated birthday gift. At a boutique in downtown La Jolla, the young sales woman overhead us talking about the fires and the family's evacuation.

"So,"  queried the young sales woman, "what was the first thing you took?"

My granddaughter didn't hesitate. "The Dyson."

The young salesgirl nodded. "That's what I would have taken too."

I was puzzled. "The vacuum cleaner?"  I said.

They both looked at me like I was from another planet.

For those of us who are truly are from a different generational planet, a Dyson (same company as the vacs) is the Lamborghini of hair dryers, and it was my granddaughter's most coveted Christmas gift only two weeks earlier. Not gonna let that go up in flames! Definitely not an item you'd find on the hair care aisle at CVS where I bought my hair dryer.

I queried my hair stylist on this and she reported that the one she was using on me at that very moment was, in fact, a Dyson. (They come in different price ranges, from "really expensive"  to "even more expensive.") Among other features, they're apparently very light weight, quiet, and dry hair much more quickly and with less damage. Definitely worth the money for a hair stylist, or a 15-year-old with lots of beautiful long hair.

Over a beverage at Peets, my granddaughter gave me her fire zone code so that I could keep up with the status of the fire in her neighborhood. Apparently all the kids know the fire zone codes of their friends. I guess this is a reality if you live in Southern California. And now I even know mine! And have Watch Duty and Genasys installed on my phone.

Feeling utterly helpless about the whole fire situation with my son's house, I was motivated to bring out my collection of rosary beads (gifts from my Catholic grandparents) both generic and saint-specific which I only press into service in cases of dire emergency. Catholic saints have been an integral part of my Judeo-Catholic-Protestant family. (I brought my menorah up to LA in December since Christmas Day was also the first night of Hannukah.) If it looks like a saint can help, well, I'm all for it.

Some years ago, as I agonized about a family member's impending cancer surgery, a Catholic co-worker mentioned that in her hometown, when one needed divine assistance, one would hang rosary beads on the clothesline and invoke the saints' help. I wasn't sure why a clothesline but who was I to argue how saints like to work? The surgery went better than could possibly be expected.

So presumably, if saints can do health, they can do houses? As I've done before, I had to sub in my orange tree since we're zoned against clothes lines. The lawn maintenance guys who were just arriving looked at me a little nervously. But they did adhere to my admonitions to please watch the leaf blowers!

My son's house is still standing. And OK, I'm willing to give the heroic fire fighters the credit. But sometimes you need all the help you can get.

The recent Gilman fire here in La Jolla in some ways afforded the community the gift of a trial run of a much-worse fire. A+++++ for the fire fighters. F minus (add 5 minuses) for traffic control. It seemed clear after this event that La Jolla's evacuation plan is "Die in place."  (Select one: (a) house (b) car.) Telling people to evacuate with no plan or even actual route to leave seems pretty futile. Given La Jolla's significant elderly population (of which we are two), the Pacific Palisades exhortation to L.A. people who were stuck in their vehicles to "run for your life" is not going to be very workable. We're not sure we'd even try to get out of La Jolla in any direction in our car. 

Olof and I have been pondering our own escape plan. Not to give too many details, but it involves life jackets. And preferably low tide and daylight. And if luck were shining upon us, a leftover panga boat.

Now here's an idea. What if the panga boat guys were alerted when there was a fire here? If they thought there was money smuggling people in, imagine what they could make taking people out. This could usher in a new mutually-beneficial era of international relations. I'm just thinking outside the box. And if I had a wildfire right behind me, there is no box I wouldn't be willing to think outside of.

Of course, in any urban area such as La Jolla that already has major traffic issues under the best of circumstances, one has to ask the deeply worrisome question: is there realistically any way to evacuate people? Even if you could get them out to I-5 (and good luck with that), the freeway would be gridlocked as well.

But it would nice to at least have an actual community plan for which the default is not being cremated in your car. I am (really really) hoping recent events will inspire one.

 

Inga Explains Aging To A 27-Year-Old

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 27, 2025] ©2025

Sometimes you have to wonder if the generations will truly ever be able to understand each other.  As one who writes a lot of letters (and saves them), I recently had occasion to revisit a communication of some years ago from my younger son, Henry, who was 27 at the time. He wrote:

Dear Mom - I truly don’t understand the backwards logic of the elderly.  Your recent comment to me that you are “too old for near-death experiences” (i.e. things that scare you) is paradoxical to me.  Since you are already old [his opinion, anyway], it seems to me that you should be more willing to risk death since you have less to lose?  I, on the other hand, have forty to fifty great years ahead of me, so I shouldn’t ever risk death.  If I were really old, I would be in a rush to try to get in as many things as I could since time is running out.  Go figure. 

Dear Henry:

Go figure indeed.  You do raise some intriguing questions.  But I think the simple answer as to why old people are not willing to risk death is that we are not, unlike a core group of people your age (but fortunately not you), judgment-challenged idiots.  Your mother was definitely one in her earlier years.  While we ossifying oldies remember well the sense of invulnerability that characterizes youth, the reason we are still here is that we have recovered from it.  Or at least lived to tell about it.  Olof, as you know, was an Air Force pilot in his younger years and did some very high-risk flying.  When asked why he didn’t remain a pilot, he likes to quote the saying, “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.” 

I must also take issue with your suggestion that we in the senectitude set have “less to lose.” I’d like to live long enough so that my currently-infant grandchildren could pick me out of a lineup.  (Well, hopefully not literally, but that all depends on how Social Security holds up.)  Never having them know me and remember me would be a lot to lose indeed. 

As for you kids, when Olof and I were on work assignment in Europe in 2005-2006, I concluded that the key to a loving relationship between a mother and her adult sons was 7,000 miles.   I’ve worked hard since then to continue the close bond I have with you and Rory, and enjoy basking in the warm glow of my efforts, a plan which would be seriously thwarted by my untimely death.  

I also cannot imagine being separated from the much-adored Olof.  And not just because it would irk the hell out of me to crump and have Olof – and my estate – succumb to the charms of a twenty-two-year-old pole dancer.

 As for “rushing to get as many things in as I could,” I am rushed out. I spent my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s rushing. If I haven’t gone there and done that, I’m either not interested, or will rent the video. 

I know you think it’s a little early for me to be hanging around smelling the roses.  But I’m just happy that most of my senses and a quorum of my body parts are still in operation.  In the last issue of my college alumni news, it seemed like everyone had had a knee replacement.  Except for the ones who had a double knee replacement. 

While your mother is hardly a financial genius, she does recognize that when one has a shorter term to invest, the return has to be better.  So I’m fairly picky about what I want to invest my time in.  It had better be really fun.  And not involve the 405, O’Hare, or anything made with Jell-O.  I don’t want to have my life be a to-do list, a bucket list, or in fact, ANY kind of list.

At your age, I wanted the 19 countries in 21 days see-it-all, do-it-all trip.  I now aspire to the Italian philosophy of l’arte di far niente – the art of doing nothing.  And preferably, as slowly as possible. 

Love,

Mom

 

Why Is Something Always Broken?

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published January 20, 2025] c. 2025

Is it my imagination or do I spend waaay more of my waking hours trying to fix stuff than I did three decades ago?

Nope, it s not my imagination. There's just so many more things to break than there used to be. And by "break", I mean all the glitchy things that one's stable of smart electronics and appliances and cars seem to be programmed to annoy us with on a daily basis.

Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself, "so what's going to thwart me today?"   I seem to be dealing with multiple things in need of annoying attention at any given time. It s like a continuous game of modern-life whack-a-mole.

I don't remember that it used to be that way.

Obviously, my appliances used to be waaaaay simpler. I think longingly of the stoves I had in my early marriage that had exactly two dials: one that read Off-Bake-Broil. (The preheat button consisted of waiting 15 minutes which it turns out is incredibly easy to do.) The other dial had temperature settings. Pretty much the only thing that could go wrong with it was the bake igniter in the bottom which appliance guys routinely kept on their trucks. They came, it got fixed, and they went away.

Now when one teeny-weeny component out of the five zillion teeny weeny components on the electronic panel of my gee-whiz stove decides to go south, the whole panel fails, resulting in a month-long wait (with no working stove) while the $500 replacement panel comes in. I just don't think this is progress.

Every single day, it seems, I seem to be researching how to fix some issue or other that will crop up with malicious frequency on my iPhone. It just sucks up so much mental bandwidth which frankly is getting in ever shorter supply.

For example, all of a sudden the phone screen got really dark. Why? Not so dark that you couldn't read it at all but really annoyingly dark so you could only read the screen in bright light. So I had to Google it and see what the solution was to restore it to normal brightness. I deeply resent the time 

As for upgrading to the next version of IOS, I would rather sign up for a root canal. Nothing that worked before will work the same. It's a guaranteed time suck.

When I ask my husband for electronic help (he has an Android phone), he will inquire patiently, "So what did you do just before this problem happened?"   Like I actually did anything. I NEVER TOUCHED IT! I snarl back. IT JUST DID IT ALL ON ITS OWN! Smart phones are malevolent creatures that go wonky when you so much as breathe on them. I remember when the working of a phone required in its entirety: picking up the receiver.

I am hoping that my 2005 Corolla lasts as long as I do because the thought of figuring out how a new car works is too depressing to even contemplate. I know I'd be trapped inside the thing and be unable to figure out how to get out of it, or even in it, never mind drive it. There s only so many times the fire department will be willing to come and extricate me from it.

We noticed that our new-ish refrigerator now has filters that are supposed to be replaced every six months. It's been a year. We're not sure what happens if you don't do it, because we have no idea HOW to do it. Appliances (and electronics) no longer come with nice easy to read manuals. We're even puzzled why refrigerators even need filters since every refrigerator we've ever had before didn't have one. But we've agreed that if the inside of the refrigerator suddenly starts smelling like a dead rodent, we will probably have to figure this out. But we'll be annoyed as shit about it.

Some of our outside Edison bulbs have gone out. I have spent hours looking at more than a hundred Edison bulbs on line and none of them are the same. Lightbulbs are definitely going to be an upcoming column.

Every time I get the remote messed up, I ponder the days when the most you had to do with a TV set was wiggle the rabbit ear antennas on the top. I was even able to embrace the subsequent rooftop antenna which I knew how to turn to either San Diego or L.A. to increase my viewing options. The worst that could happen was a windstorm blew it down.

Instead, it seems that at least once a week, I am rebooting my cable box when something glitchy mysteriously makes the TV malfunction. It's kind of amazing how often that fixes it but why do all these glitches even happen in the first place? Inquiring minds want to know. Actually, they don't want to know. They just want the stupid cable box to work in the first place.

I mean, how many streaming shows can anyone watch in one lifetime anyway?

I guess this is truly the pitfall of all the smart devices and fancy cars and wowie-zowie appliances. But if one thing is abundantly clear: the more parts, the more things to break. Digital definitely has a downside.

Every day, I personally thank all the stuff that is actually working including and especially my ever-more-decrepit body. It's probably pretty amazing that as much stuff in both me and my home are working on any given day as there are. I try not to even contemplate all the possibilities for equipment failure, both me and the electronics.

It would be waaaay too scary.

 

Being Shaped Like a T-Rex (BRI Replaces BMI)

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 6, 2025] ©2025

Good health news always seems in short supply as you get older.  So I was willing to take it as a win when my primary care doctor commented a while back, “Well, at least you’ve aged out of early-onset dementia!”

If it’s New Years, every magazine cover will be featuring articles about diets.  So it seems a particularly appropriate time to redefine one’s fat. I was intrigued to read an article recently that the dreaded BMI (Body Mass Index) that has declared me a porker for some years now is being replaced by a new index called the Body Roundness Index (BRI). 

Criticisms about the BMI maintain that it was developed on data only from men, most of them white, and doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex, and gender diversity.  Even Olympic athletes can be classified as borderline obese using its metrics.  The BMI can apparently not differentiate body fat from muscle mass. 

But this new BRI focuses on body roundness with the roundest bodies having the highest risk of dying from cancer, heart disease and other afflictions. 

I was greatly encouraged at the thought of dumping the dreaded BMI which always seems to be staring me in the face whenever I go onto my doctor’s web portal.  That BMI number is like being greeted with “Welcome, Chubs!  And how is our adiposely-amplified self today?”

But after reading more, this roundness thing gave me pause. 

This is because I have a really oddly constructed body. Back when my mother was pregnant with me, women could drink and smoke as much as they wanted.  And probably did.  I can only assume she was hitting the cocktails pretty hard at certain points of my development.

For example, I recently saw a beautiful choker necklace in a catalog and knew I had to have it.  But when it arrived, I discovered that the model had one thing I didn’t have: a neck.  This part of me isn’t really a weight issue so much as anatomy.  Unlike the swan-throated model, my head seems to sit directly on my shoulders making choker wearing problematical at best. 

As it turns out, I’m also missing a waist.  Of course, I make up for it by having multiples of other parts, like chins.  And thighs. 

I also have really short arms for my height. Anything that otherwise fits me is going to have a sleeve length that makes me look like an orangutan.  I could always solve the sleeve thing by ordering a petite size, but I wouldn’t be able to take a deep breath in a garment that is cutting off circulation to my internal organs.

Women’s clothes are measured on fit models who are assumed to have standard parts.  They are not designed for those of us with three thighs and no waist and little T-Rexy arms. Which I think we’ll all agree is good news.  But it makes acquiring apparel a significant problem.

If there is one downside of being overweight, other than the potential of an early death, it would be clothes shopping. I would chat it up with the personal shopper at Nordstrom who would inform me that they usually only order one size 16 in any particular style and those are so in demand that she immediately pulls them for her regular customers.  Now, I’m not in retail, but if I had a size that was instantly selling out, I’d order, well, more. But I’d be missing the point. Once you get past a certain size, department stores don’t want you waddling around in there among the osteoporotic svelte. 

Chunker departments, where they even exist, are invariably hidden in a corner of the third floor which you can spot from fifty yards: racks of nasty brown, navy, and black polyester slacks, and skirts with hideous floral prints in colors not found in nature. We chunkies just hate wearing this stuff – a point that I routinely note in the feedback box at Nordstrom Oinker. (It’s actually Nordstrom Encore, but if you say it fast it comes out sounding like Oinker, which, in fact, I am convinced is the subliminal meaning in that choice of word. What, after all, does “encore” have to do with fat people?)

I wasn’t always fat.  Prior to my divorce many many years ago, I always wore a size 4, which in today’s deflationary size market is probably a 2, or even a 0. (Personally, I think size 0 is what you should be after you’ve been dead a while.) Afterwards, I packed on 40 pounds eating the Post-Divorce Mrs. Fields Cookie and Chardonnay Depression Diet. Alas, I’ve been heifering, er, hovering around a size 16 ever since.

With no little trepidation, I decided to calculate my BRI.  I feared my lack of a waist could skew my score given that the BRI is designed to be a “calculation of combining height and waist circumference measurements to evaluate the ‘roundness’ of the human body.” Did I need to be abused by yet another metric when I’m already pretty clear what the answer is using more low-tech methods? (It’s called a ‘mirror’.) 

The BMI categorizes me as “Overweight.” (The category above that is a brutal “Obese” followed by an even more soul-crushing “Extremely Obese.”) As it turns out, the BRI is kinder.  It concluded I have “above average body roundness, with a waist circumference larger than most people.”  So a nicer way of saying, “Sorry, sweet pea.  But you’re fat.”  It politely suggests that I “consider consulting a doctor or nutritionist to develop an appropriate health improvement plan.” 

Or maybe I can just do as I always do on January 1 and put “Lose weight!” at the top of my resolutions list and then lose the list.  Works for me!

Meanwhile, sometimes I think this T-Rex’s body looks waaaay too familiar…