We figure that the weight of junk mail received here in Oregon in a couple of weeks is roughly equal to the amount of junk mail we received during our entire year in Turkey. In Turkey we did get quite a number of pieces, but most of them were just fliers advertising pizza places and such, low weight, low volume, and not even mail really, just little quarter sheets stuck into our mailbox by enterprising local hustlers. In the United States, of course, we have systems(!) and organization(!) and it is illegal for anyone other than an official post office employee to put anything in your mailbox! The result is a huge quantity of useless junk, all officially put there. Yuck! What this country needs is a way to charge the senders of junk mail for the cost of recycling plus a penalty for pain and suffering. Is anyone in either party working on this?      

 

And what’s going on with hangers? When we left the US, all clothes hangers, as far as we knew, were normal sized, like the one on the lower left below.

 

 

But now these giant ones have appeared in closets throughout our home. Where did they come from? What do they mean? Did our house sitters have a family of giants staying with them? Or is it just that hanger manufacturers have finally noticed that Americans are way bigger than they used to be? We don’t know, but we don’t like it. The new hangers don’t fit in our old closets. Oh, yes, I know. If we were proper Americans, we’d buy a new house with bigger closets…enormous closets…closets big enough to entertain in…bright, airy rooms with skylights and chandeliers…closets with big doors so you could put your extra cars in there…closets bigger than our current house…closets we could be PROUD of…otherwise we’re just going to have to keep on being MISERABLE.

 

A few days ago, the teaching staff had its first general meeting with the new INTO Center Director. Alas and alack! Would that I had been able to take pictures of this event! The facial expressions were priceless. (Note to self: Is there any way to discreetly question security about whether surveillance camera tapes exist? Reply to self: Don’t. Even. Think.) There were twenty or more teachers there—not a single instructor chose to pass this one up! Two smallish conference tables were pushed together to make one larger one and people sat around that, with a few more on the fringes against the walls. As always when the whole staff gathers, the Morray Conference Room felt a little overcrowded.

 

Most of the teachers were quiet, just listening to the information presented. A few people chose to ask questions, some general, some pointed, and in the latter stages one real nubby question was finally addressed, if not exactly resolved. I glanced around the room a couple of times and it seemed that almost every teacher had the same facial expression: serious, professional and…sour, with occasional undertones of dismay, polite hostility, or nervous approval. Now many of the staff are middle aged and as we know the default expression of most middle-aged Americans is grouchy and put upon, so that’s part of it. But it was still pretty funny. It looked like we were discussing just how many of our toenails would have to be pulled out--but we were determined to be civil about it. I suspect that in Spain the meeting would have been quite a bit livelier, in Turkey the new boss would have been more authoritarian, in Japan there would have been more smiling and no questions at all, and in Yemen the meeting would have happened in an entirely different place and time. But, no, this was Oregon. Holy Moley, what a place!

 

The first known use of the interjection Holy Moley was in a Captain Marvel comic book published in 1941, written by Bill Parker and Otto Binder, drawn by C.C. Beck. Don’t know where I picked it up.