Rules of Conduct For Teachers (from a 1915 school bulletin for a one-room school house near Winneconne, WI)

1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.

2. You are not to keep company with men. (This is closely tied to number 1 – don’t think you’re going to “keep company” just because you can’t marry! Here, see this burka? Put it on.)

3. You must be home between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless attending a school function (Who checked? “OK, ma, I’m goin’ to bed just as soon as I drive by the school marm’s house and make sure she’s in bed. Just gonna peek in that there window.”)

4. You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores. (Taverns? Yeah, OK, it is Wisconsin, but if we catch you lingering after finishing your cone… your ass is ours.)

5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have the permission of the chairman of the board. (Dear Chairman of the Board: I was thinking of picking apples on Sunday outside the city limits… is this OK?)

6. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man unless he is your father or brother. (Don’t EVER let us catch you with an uncle, cousin or your grandpa. We know all about your grandpa.)

7. You may not smoke cigarettes. (Pipes, OK, everyone enjoys a good pipe by the fire now and then.)

8. You may not dress in bright colors. (Think Calvin Klein, not Chico’s)

9. You must under no circumstances dye your hair. (Hair dye is for the wicked!)

10. You must wear at least 2 petticoats. (Who checked? “Hey, Phyllis, you’re looking a little deflated today… are you only wearing one petticoat?”)

11. Your dresses must not be shorter than two inches above your ankles. (”We’re just getting comfortable with all this ankle skin, we’re not ready for more!”)

12. To keep the schoolroom neat and clean you must: sweep the floor at least once daily; scrub the floor at least once a week with hot, soapy water; clean the blackboards at least once a day; and start the fire at 7 a.m. so the room will be warm by 8 a.m. (Pass out from exhaustion at 10:30 a.m.)

If our dog, Freja, can’t make it all day without, uh, pooping (due to upset stomach) in the house she always poops in the bathroom right next to the toilet. So… I guess she understands what goes on in there? And I guess she’s doing her best to be considerate?

An older gentleman called our office and said, “Hi, I’m putting together a movie idea for Robert DeNiro. I don’t know him but I know he’s friends with that Scorsese guy but I don’t know that guy’s first name or how you spell his last name.” “Uh, that would be Martin S-c-o-r-s-e-s-e.” “Right! Thanks so much!”

A college-aged student sent a form letter to our office asking us to pay his way through college. For an extra bit of class, he hand-wrote the salutation because a mail merge proved to be too much for him to master. In the letter he did promise to keep us updated through the years with what he was up to.

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When my parents came for the yard sale last week, they had a van-load of stuff my sister and I had been storing at their house for years. And years. I believe they were overjoyed to be getting rid of it. We had a fairly successful sale, although we didn’t move as many toys as we would have liked. Now I’m left with some odds and ends that I’ve been trying to deal with. One box is just papers and letters and such from grade school onward. I haven’t seen the stuff in this box for 20 years so I’m going to assume I don’t need most of it.

My plan is to take all the old papers, letters, etc. and make a paper-based diorama out of them of a ship at sea battling a Kraken. I thought that might look cool. So there is my winter project;  what I’ll be doing on all those snowy nights come January.

This morning I was down in the basement to feed Chief Jones (he has to eat down there so that Mistress Freja doesn’t gobble down all his food) and there was the box, waiting to be sorted. I plucked a coloring book off the top of the pile. It’s a book called “Write Your Own Story Coloring Book.” Kind of literal in the titling. Inside, each spread is a picture to color and then the other side is titled and has lines for writing a short story about the pic. The characters are the same on every page – Penny, Mark and a clown named Koko.

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This should probably go on one of those “Overheard in Mpls” sites.

Yesterday, as my co-worker Andrea was walking out of the building, a bunch of gals from a marketing firm down the hall were leaving at the same time. One of them said to the others:

“You know, the only reason Crystal is celibate is because she’s afraid someone is going to steal her creativity through her vagina.”

That’s it, I’m giving up running and turning this into my regular workout routine:

Between this and drinking 8 glasses of water a day, I’m going to be a force to be reckoned with.

“going to bed shitheads”

Or, perhaps more appropriately, who lives on your messed up, dysfunctional block?

I really thought things would get better on my block after Mini-Van Carnie Con Carne Carnival moved away, seemingly in the middle of the night. They lived in the house directly across from us but in two years we had been unable to determine exactly who lived there, such were the comings and goings. Sometimes there were four children, sometimes eight. Adults and kids in mini-vans pulled up and loaded or unloaded at all hours of the day. The absolute low point came two summers ago, when some carnie friends who had been to visit before showed up in their white school bus, which proceeded to die on our block. So the carnies moved in! Hooray and fun for all!

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While shopping online for an ottoman for my front porch, Google suggested I look at World Market. So I headed over to their website and was hit with this message:

World Market’s Eat Pray Love Shop Has Arrived!

There are Italy/India/Indonesia-themed bamboo shades. There is a Roman Bistro set. The Eat Pray Love Block Print Paisley Tunic is modeled by a woman who could be… if you squint… Elizabeth Gilbert.

If you don’t know what Eat Pray Love is -  if you’ve been living on a remote island, meditating, or maybe if you’re a man – it’s a memoir written by Elizabeth Gilbert. For reasons unknown, probably even to the author herself, this book became the Harry Potter for women in a certain age demographic. Maybe those in their late 20s through 40s. The book describes the journey Gilbert made from Italy to India to Indonesia after a rough divorce. Yes, she was trying to “find herself.” And she succeeded. And she found the man of her dreams in the process. It’s a completely romantic book. It’s very cool that it happened to her but for the rest of us it probably serves the purpose of escapist fantasy.

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I went on vacation and I forgot to post this before I “left”:

Not Shallow Will Be Back Soon

Which is too bad because I think that would have been inspiring to a lot of people out there. But now vacation is over and it’s more like:

Har, har, har!

A photo from the now possibly-never-to-be- released feature film The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster, in which Mel Gibson plays, “a guy who walks around with a puppet of a beaver on his hand and treats it like a living creature.”

Hmmm… how oddly fitting. Box office poison or box office gold?