When Home Ownership Is Over Rated

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published October 27, 2025] 2025

When you own a 1947 house that still has most of its original cast iron pipes, there is nothing that puts more fear in your heart than plumbing catastrophes.

Our pipes have been photographed more often than most super models. The technology for this is actually pretty cool. The plumbing catastrophe guys thread a camera 130 feet through our pipes starting from our back cleanout access (and more on that anon) to the street, resulting in a movie, with audio, that they can then Airdrop onto your Smart phone for future viewing pleasure.

I will say that this video would be the perfect way to dispense with dinner guests who might be overstaying their welcome. "Hey,"  you mention to the diner who doesn't seem inclined to depart your table even though everyone else left an hour ago, "wanna see some really cool video of our sewer line?"

Fortunately, this is only the third major plumbing catastrophe we've had in the decades we've lived here. But all three have been epic.

Of course, for years, we had a plumber on speed dial when our older son, Rory, used to have a predilection for flushing toys - rocket parts were a specialty - down the toilet and watching with fascination the ensuring flood. There is nothing more disconcerting than seeing rolls of toilet paper bobbing down the hallway.

Our first major plumbing disaster occurred on January 7, 1981 at 7 a.m. when, through no fault of ours, a mainline sewer block in front of our home caused the entire neighborhoods'  sewage to detour through our home for more than two hours before the city emergency crews could clear it. After Proposition 13 passed in 1978, one of the line items that disappeared from the city's budget was routine maintenance of sewer lines resulting in far too many situations such as ours.

I was home alone with my two-year-old and eight-month-old baby (my then-husband was, of course, off playing tennis) when I heard a loud rumbling followed by the whole house shaking before geysers of sewage exploded from every sink, toilet, shower and drain in the house. They could truly make a horror movie out of this. I have photos taken for insurance purposes but are not printable because, as my then-editor pointed out, they are completely disgusting. Remediation took months, and we won't even go into the Gamma Globulin shots and finding toilet paper in our home in colors we had never used. (Toilet paper used to come in decorator colors to match your decor.)

So that this could never happen again, we paid a lot of money to install cleanouts and overflow valves both in front of the house, and in the crawl space under the house in the back.

Suffice to say that sewer line maintenance came back into the city budget due to significant claims like ours. But this has not all been good news. In fact, I have written several previous columns detailing episodes when both our immediate neighbors along with fellow La Jollans posting on local social media reported that the city's overzealous sewer maintenance crews have blasted raw sewage into their bathrooms. Our neighbors across the street actually had sewage on their bathroom ceiling. Ironically, the city had been attempting to forcefully eradicate another neighbor s subterranean roach problem but maybe got a little overzealous on the velocity. 

It's the people closest to the manhole covers where the crews are working that are most vulnerable to this. Adding to a long list of quirks to our home, aside from the phantom streetlight that neither the city nor SD G&E will acknowledge, and an address that even Uber can t find, is that we have not one but two manhole covers on either side of our property. Unfortunately, there are a lot of electrical conduits in them and if water gets down there, they short out, and sometimes actually even explode. Seriously, there should have been disclosures when we bought this place.

We had fortunately managed to avoid any city sewer maintenance blasts into our home until September of 2024 when our hallway shower was suddenly filled with raw sewage that also managed to rupture the cast iron pipes underneath it. I have written about this before as well, and my now-editor also declined to publish those pictures citing "readers eating breakfast."

I was sort of hoping that God wouldn't consider us candidates for plumbing crises again so soon (we're good people!) But this past summer, I was noticing that azaleas that I thought were long gone (they take a lot of water so we decided to let them crump) were suddenly flourishing. They are not on a sprinkler line and it has hardly rained. Meanwhile, the almost-impossible-to-kill philodendrons which had always flourished in that location, slowly died. And of course, this was all taking place right next to our front porch in the most prominent location possible.

Denial is a wonderful thing. I was enjoying the renaissance of the pretty azaleas until I had a sudden realization at 3 a.m. one morning when one's denial mechanism is at its weakness that the azaleas were flourishing because they had a water source.

Two months, seven different companies, and a meteoric rise in my knowledge of plumbing later, we discovered a broken/cracked 1947 cast iron sewer pipe right near our front porch which is (a) two feet underground (b) under brick (c) crisscrossed by landscaping pipes (d) requiring the removal of dense (but largely dead) landscaping with lots of roots (e) running right under our main incoming water line which (f) had to be expensively mapped and flagged before anything could be remediated.  It couldn't be in a worse location. 

We were cautioned that whoever tried to fix this pipe would have to be really really careful not to sever our main water line which would be a sudden crisis, a massive water bill, and leaving us without water. 

Estimates just to fix this line were up to $12,000, no guarantees about any main water line severing, and didn't include the $2,000 in diagnostics and line mapping we had already spent, nor re-landscaping and re-bricking afterwards. 

Home ownership can be really over-rated.

But we finally decided to go with a non-digging option, called an "epoxy patch liner" that would be threaded through the existing pipe through those clean outs we had installed back in 1981.

The azaleas will be the acid test. Please, please don t grow back.

Epoxy liner patch gets ready to be threaded into sewer line

                Blue flags map the location of our main incoming water line so it isn't severed

September, 2024: City sewer maintenance crews accidentally blasted raw sewage into our shower and broke pipes in the process 

Why It Takes Four Women 80 Emails To Set A Lunch Date

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published October 13, 2025] 2025

I've spent considerable time over the years pondering the mysteries of the universe, but the one I truly can't solve is why it takes four women eighty emails to find a mutually-agreed upon date for lunch.

Of course, that also applies to movie groups, book clubs, bridge dates, and pretty much any activity where more than three women are attempting to congregate.

I know there are digital applications where everyone can post her available dates. But it doesn't matter. By the time everyone does, someone is already not available. How is it that we can be this busy?

A friend belongs to a theoretically-weekly bridge foursome that only ends up meeting about ten times a year. Hoping to improve that, they enacted policy about requiring a replacement to be provided should one not be able to attend. That lasted until four subs showed up to play.

Now, I've never belonged to a bridge club (can't count cards to save my life) but I have belonged to a number of movie groups. One that I belonged to had eight members. Deciding on a movie was complicated enough, so to keep the logistics down, we decided we would always meet on the second Thursday of the month. We saw lots of movies over time but the one date on which we never saw one was the second Thursday of the month. Because as soon as the long-suffering movie group organizer sent out a query as to what we wanted to see, someone invariably responded that she wouldn't be available on that night but would be available on these nights. And then we were off and running. Eighty emails to find a new date would have been optimistic.

The organizer of that group, who valiantly hung in there for years and for whom I have nothing but admiration, is now rumored to be in a home for the organizationally frustrated, sipping umbrella drinks on a bucolic lawn and being tended by white-coated professionals.

Because even when we finally agreed upon a new date (which curiously always seemed to be a Monday even though we'd all decided earlier that we shouldn't meet on Mondays since it was a bad day for everyone), we had to pick a movie. (A corollary of the Eighty Emails To Find a Date Rule seems to be Forty Emails to Agree on Anything Else.) Now, these were women who liked movies (and hence why they joined such a group) and some of them belonged to film societies as well. So we couldn't see any of the film society picks, or anything that was being reserved to see with a husband, or even that anyone had already seen with someone else. One of our members would only see "important"  movies, defined as being well reviewed by the New York Times film critic and thus having socially-redeeming value. I myself am a "fluffy" movie person (think rom-coms) but movie groups are not generally fluffy movie crowds. In fact, we did not see movies; we saw "films."    The end result was that our selections were often three-hour black-and-white graphically-violent war dramas in Hungarian with subtitles depicting (way too successfully, in my view) the misery of the human condition. But no one had already seen it. (I think that statement may apply globally.) I spent many of these with my jacket over my head. However, I totally adored the other women in the group and we always had dinner afterwards, often with enough wine to blot out memories of the movie which usually caused me screaming nightmares for weeks.

I would also mention that the person who threw out the first volley about changing the date usually cancelled at the last minute. And don't even ask how many emails it was to decide where to go to dinner.

But getting back to my topic (and somewhere back there, I think I had one): what is it that we re all doing that scheduling anything is so impossible? For most of my friends, our car pool days are over, but we seem to have filled that time with endless other activities which is going to be a whole separate column. I have to say that one of my favorite excuses for being unavailable for lunch came from a long-time extremely dear friend who had volunteered to make the communion wafers for church, a full day affair. (Well, at least that way you know they didn't from China.) Even her son said, So Mom, is holycommunionwafers.com out of the question? That one gets a pass for pure originality.

But otherwise, I'm kind of hoping that the pendulum can swing the other way on this frantic over-scheduling of our lives. Because this eighty emails thing? We have better things to do with our time. (Don't we?)

 

Dooming Your Own College Application

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published October 6, 2025]  2025

Watching my friends'  grandchildren wrestle with the college application process, I am reminded of my own saga of applying to - and being rejected by - Brown University. It turns out the school requires you to be able to locate the state of Rhode Island.

My older granddaughter, a high school sophomore in Los Angeles, is already pondering colleges, and given that she has spent considerable time in the Northeast with the other grandparents, definitely has Brown on her radar. But she fears that I have sabotaged her chances. I have assured her that they don't keep application records that far back but she is not convinced.

If legacies were a guarantee of admission, I would have been a shoo-in at Brown. My father's family was from Rhode Island and Brown was almost like the local community college. You could go to Brown and still be home for Sunday dinner. It s a small state.

I should mention that Brown (all male) and its associated women's college, Pembroke, merged in 1971 making Brown a co-ed school. My parents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. My grandparents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. All the aunts and uncles had gone to Brown or Pembroke. My brother, a year older, was already at Brown.

My mother's Ohio family, definitely not wealthy, were all educators. My great-grandmother graduated from college. My grandmother had a Ph.D. in zoology. My mother snagged a full scholarship to Pembroke where she met my father in an Honors Shakespeare class at Brown.

Everyone hoped I'd go there too. I frankly had no interest. Fortunately for me, I was a long shot anyway.

I've covered in previous columns my uncontested career as the family idiot. I was the blond sheep in a family of brown-eyed brunette geniuses. My younger son is fortunate to have inherited the lightning-fast mind of my siblings, and fortunately much better social skills.

Speaking with my brother (whom I love dearly) he has observed that if he were in elementary school now, he'd be diagnosed with Aspergers. No argument from me! (Only Aspergers?) I was more recently contemplating how many bottles of Tylenol my mother might have consumed during her pregnancy with him until I realized Tylenol hadn't been invented yet. 

I was always deemed to "not test well."   The illusion was that this poorly-designed IQ test simply failed to capture what was my obvious intellect. Looking back, I think that I was simply not very good at much of what it was testing and that my scores were an accurate reflection of that. In fact, when I was applying to graduate schools, I screened for any requirements for tests that required heavy abstract abilities. The GREs I could study for, but if a test gave me a series of numbers or geometric figures and asked what the next one in the series would be, my only answer was ever beats me!

Because I "didn't test well,"  I was by seventh grade in a track of kids headed for a less competitive state colleges or possibly vocational school. My siblings, of course, were in the top track, already headed for the Ivies.

I did have one superpower, which I have to this day. I am pathologically persistent. You will never outlast me. My grades were always better than my siblings'. I try harder.

I was also fortunate to have a mother who early on recognized my love of writing and encouraged it in every way. I still remember her advice: Write what you know. Write from your heart. Find your own voice. I feel so grateful to her to this day.

She always praised - never critiqued - anything I wrote. She wanted writing to be only joy. But in hopes of subtly encouraging the better stuff ("better"  being very relative), she'd ask if she could buy her favorites for a nickel. (After she died, I found a folder of these early purchases.  She was one optimistic woman.) 

Writing has been a life-long coping mechanism for me. No matter how bad things ever get, I m always thinking, "how will I write about this?"

So by the time I was applying to colleges, including Brown, I was a legitimate candidate in many ways:   top 10% of my class, editor of the school paper and president of the school's service group. Wrote a great essay. But my SATs in the high 500s were most definitely not Ivy League level.

One thing I've learned over the years is how many different types of intelligence there are. My first husband, for example, was born with homing pigeon instincts. He could find a place he'd only been to once twenty-five years ago.

Neither my second husband, Olof, nor I possess this skill. We are both directionally disabled. As my younger son, Henry, used to lament as we ferried him around to soccer games all over the county, "if there's a 50% chance of turning in the right direction, you guys will get it wrong 90% of the time."   Sadly, he was correct.

Back when I was applying to colleges, a personal interview was required for the most competitive colleges. For reasons not clear to me now, my parents allowed me, a 16-year-old, to make the four-hour drive from Pleasantville, New York, to Providence, Rhode Island for my interview at Brown. Afterwards, I would spend the weekend visiting my grandparents in the area.

The only directional support at the time was a road map. Off I went, allowing plenty of time. I listened to the radio and sang along.

After I'd been driving for a while, I kept thinking I ought to be there by now so I pulled into a gas station in Seekonk, Massachusetts and explained to the nice guy at the pump that I was trying to get to Brown University in Providence and I seemed to be lost.

He inquired what direction I had come from. "The I-95 from New York,"  I replied.

"Sweetheart,"  he exclaimed, "you drove all the way through the state of Rhode Island and right through downtown Providence!"

He got me turned around and I did find Providence, and Brown, but I was two hours late for my interview. I regaled the admissions director with my hilarious story about not being able to find Rhode Island.

Brown rejected me. My grandmother, a substantial contributor, never gave them another dime. I was so relieved.

Had I subconsciously sabotaged my interview? Maybe. My directional disabilities probably didn't help. Or then, maybe they did. I ended up at the school I had really wanted to go to. 

Still, my granddaughter is convinced they have records of this somewhere and that her own application will be doomed. That somewhere in their computer even after all these years, it will say, "grandmother couldn't find Rhode Island."

 

 My mother outside her dorm 

 

Would Paleo Guy Have Preferred Pizza?

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 29, 2025.  2025

It has really only been in the most recent history that humans - well, first world humans anyway - have had the luxury of deciding what they want to eat.  This has lead to endless debate and virtually no agreement on what constitutes a healthy food regimen.  I know a number of people, for example, who follow the the Paleo diet, basically limiting themselves to what was available to our earliest ancestors.

Now, I am in no way bashing the Paleo diet except to comment that a life without ice cream or pasta seems like a cruel way to live. But when you read about what those guys were actually eating back in the early Stone Age, you gotta wonder whether they would have killed for a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of Jiffy.

I was imagining Stone Age family life back in the Paleolithic era where people allegedly lived in caves, but most didn't simply because there weren't all that many caves.  Also, there was a lot of competition for cave real estate from wild creatures.  I whine about rodents but Paleo Mom had to call Hyena-Be-Gone if she wanted to get rid of household pests.

In that era, dinner was basically whatever you could hunt or gather.  Eat it or starve.  I imagine that starving probably sometimes felt like the better option. But then, those people didn't throw their genes forward.

Now "gather' has such a nice idyllic sound to it.  When I imagine it, it is never raining.  Paleo Mom (women were the gatherers), a couple of squabbling kids in tow, meanders the local terrain picking berries, digging for tubers, and trying to create a balanced meal that would satisfy the minimum daily requirements for iron, folate, and at least a smattering of the B vitamins.  Unless, of course, it was winter, in which case she wasn't picking much of anything.  It all depended on where you lived, obviously, but in colder climates, more likely a lot of edible roots and tree bark  Yum-mo!

Again, depending on where you lived, you could be finding fruit, nuts, insects, small lizards, and a selection of various sized mammals.  The option of getting food that was "out of season" was 35,000 years out.

The "hunting" part is under some debate. One likes to imagine Paleo Dad loping across the savannah in hot pursuit of a wooly mammoth.  Of course, he had to drag it back home once he slew it, or at least the meaty parts. In my fantasies, the Paleo kids are sitting around the fire when Dad gets home, and instead of greeting him with delight that he has brought home dinner (and that he himself wasn't the dinner of assorted predators), they whine, "Wooly mammoth AGAIN?  That's all we ate LAST week!"  

But no, I'm guessing that didn't happen much.  Paleo Mom, meanwhile, wanted to know, "Does this wolf pelt make me look fat?"

While the Mighty Hunter image sounds kind of romantic, it's been theorized that those Paleo folks didn't necessarily always kill their own food.  Some anthropologists maintain it was likely that they scavenged meat, fat, and organs from carcasses that larger animals had killed or from animals that had died of natural causes.  Sort of like an early deli.  "Look, Thag! The snout is still here!  Lunch!"  By this theory, Paleo dieters should probably be eating roadkill.

It's always fun to superimpose our lives onto those of our antecedents, especially if trying to replicate their diet. So I'm thinking about Paleo Mom saying to Paleo Dad, "The Groksteins are coming for dinner on Saturday.  I'm thinking bison or ground sloth, with a side of grasshoppers and fly larvae.  Do not even THINK of bringing home any carcasses.  Fresh kill only!"

And Paleo Dad grumbles but goes and picks up his spear.  No point in telling her that ground sloths are already extinct and the last bison he saw was twenty miles away

So I guess it's kind of hard to know how healthy the Paleo diet really was for the people who actually ate it.  Definitely a lot of protein in those insects.  But a lot of risk in eating a rotting carcass that has sat in the sun a day too long.  Maybe that's why Paleo Guy was usually dead by thirty.

Letting my always-perverse imagination run free, I like to speculate what Paleo Guy would think if he could see into the future world of us trying to emulate his diet (minus the lizards and beetles and fly larvae).  Would he say, "That pepperoni pizza you're eschewing in my name? I would have eaten it in a heartbeat." Unfortunately, home delivery didn't start until the Mesolithic.  Would it baffle him why anyone would restrict their diet if they could eat anything they wanted?  Would be puzzle why anyone would eat tofu if they had another choice?  Much to ponder. 

 

 

Geography: The Subject That Fell Off The U.S. Curriculum

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published September 15, 2025]  ©2025

A while back, I hired an amiable local kid to help me move some boxes, explaining that my husband was in Saudi Arabia.

My teen helper’s brow puckered for a moment before he inquired, “Is that near Fresno?”

My husband and I remember geography as a regular part of our grade school education.  We had to fill in blank maps of the United States with the state names, and to be able to recite all the state capitals.  World geography figured in pretty predominantly as well, especially as part of the required social studies segment, Current Events.  It seemed pertinent to know where those Current Events were actually occurring. 

At some point, it seems that geography ceased to be taught in the U.S,  When Olof and I were relocated by his company to Stockholm for two years, I stopped by a La Jolla shipping office and queried the sweet young thing at the counter about shipping rates to Sweden.

“Is that like a country?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s very much like a country.” 

American’s lack of geographical knowledge in general, and Sweden’s location in particular, became apparent to us over and over in our Scandinavian sojourn.   At a last-minute medical appointment before leaving for Stockholm, the physician’s assistant departed the room with a cheery, “Well, enjoy the Alps!”

Meanwhile, a younger friend asked me to bring her back a box of “those great chocolates.”  Even when I suggested she might be confusing Sweden with Switzerland, it was followed by a look of, “There’s a difference?” And then: “So you’ll bring the chocolates?” 

The Swedes are only too ruefully aware of this tendency of Americans to confuse Sweden with Switzerland.  In fact, when we were living there, there was an entire humorous billboard campaign with slogans translating to “Do you see the world as the world sees you?” showing Sweden on a map where Switzerland is actually located.  Other billboards facetiously showed polar bears roaming the streets of Stockholm. 

Even though geography seems to have dropped off American curricula, we were always impressed at how well-versed Europeans were on world geography.  I remember sitting with several American friends in a Stockholm café having fika (a coffee tradition beloved by the Swedes).  We were trying to remember the capital of Michigan which somehow was related to our conversation.  A Swedish guy at the next table overheard our conversation and supplied, “Lansing.” 

There must have been a least some minimal geography instruction in more recent times as my older son remembers being taught the mnemonic Not So Fast to help remember the order of Norway, Sweden and Finland on a map. Now geography seems to be Not So Much.

By pure luck, my younger son was blessed with two years of concentrated geography courtesy of a third and fourth grade teacher who began each day with a student giving a three-minute presentation, including maps, of a city, country, or region of their choosing anywhere in the world.  By his second year with this teacher, Henry, then nine, struggled to find an area that hadn’t been done before. 

“How about Abu Dhabi?” I said, since Olof had just been there.

“Mom,” said Henry with barely disguised annoyance, “Abu Dhabi has been done THREE TIMES.”

Inspired by this teacher, I had acquired a Map of the World shower curtain for the kids’ bathroom.  They might never look at a globe but they had to take a bath.

Several years later, Henry and I were watching a quiz show and the clue was “island nation in the Indian Ocean beginning with “M”.  Mom had to ponder that, but without missing a beat, Henry said, “Madagascar, Mauritius, or Maldives.”  Adding, “Malta is in the Mediterranean.” 

“You actually remember that from fourth grade?”  I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I mostly remember that from yesterday from the shower curtain.” 

We are now on at least the 10^th successor of that first one.  As an atlas, it tends to run at least a few years behind but the manufacturer has gradually updated it:  Bombay has morphed into Mumbai, and all the “stans” are duly indicated.  We have long embraced Geography Through Bathing.

At one point, a decorator who was doing a faux finish wall treatment of the bathroom for me grumbled that the curtain was unforgivably tacky and why had I bothered to upgrade the bathroom if I were going to keep it? 

We’re keeping it because at my British nephew’s wedding to a young lady from an American southwestern state, the groom’s exasperated uncle ditched his prepared toast for a lecture on “Where is England?” and “What is the U.K.?” to a bewildered-looking group of the bride’s guests. In his week in this country prior to the wedding, the uncle had fielded such questions, “Is England near Thailand?” (because they both end in “land.”)  And “is England different from New England?” 

But getting back to the kid who asked about Arabia’s proximity to Fresno:  

“Actually,” I said, “it’s closer to Omaha.”

This shower curtain has taught a lot of geography to my kids

This Swedish billboard campaign illustrated how confused foreigners are about Sweden's location

 

 

What Should Legally Be Allowed On A Pizza

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 8, 2025] 2025

I'm pondering how it is even possible that in sixteen years and 570 columns, I've never written an entire one about pizza. More specifically, what should legally be allowed on top of one.

I'm from the Northeast where people actually know how to make pizza. You'd think that given how many easterners have migrated west in search of better weather that they would have brought pizza-making skills with them. But this is not true.

It's always an issue every Christmas when the extended family, including my daughter-in-law's Connecticut parents, congregate at my younger son's home in L.A. for the holidays. In combining traditions of both families, the Christmas Eve menu is pizza, which is how my daughter-in-law's family always did it.

I am sure Los Angeles has actual pizza. But the stuff that's delivered - some eight boxes - is nothing I would recognize. My daughter-in-law's mother and I always peek into the boxes hoping in vain that this year something with red sauce and nitrates will appear. But it never does. We both shake our heads and mutter, "Surely they have real pizza in this town?"

What does show up are pizzas with white sauces and vegetables that in my view should be legally enjoined from topping a pizza. These include broccoli (especially), kale, and large portobello mushrooms. I would almost (please note I said almost ) eat a ham and pineapple pizza than these.

I've never quite understood the appeal of a ham and pineapple pizza yet there are obviously persons who eat them. I worry about these people.

Of course, one could always remove the broccoli and kale and portobello mushrooms from the top but we fear that underneath is simply a gluten-free crust. Or god forbid, cauliflower. The desecration of pizza seems to have no limits.

Now, in full disclosure, I should mention that one of my husband Olof's and my many compatibilities is our fondness for anchovy pizza. It is becoming harder and harder to find at pizzerias, likely pushed out by all those cauliflower-crusted broccoli abominations.

People will not let you have anchovies on just your side of a pizza, insisting it contaminates theirs. And in truth, they are correct. So if you want an anchovy pizza, you have to marry someone who also likes it. It's its own love language. 

Every year on our June wedding anniversary, we order an anchovy pizza to be delivered to our front yard, where we sit and enjoy the sunset and excessive sodium intake. At our age, we're not really supposed to ingest an entire years salt allotment in one sitting. But we do.

Our kids rudely refer to our love of an anchovy pie as a "bait"  pizza. But then, they're the kind of people who put kale on theirs. Both of them. I sometimes lie awake at night wondering where I went wrong. Well, other than raising them in California.

When I was growing up on the east coast, anchovies were a not-uncommon ingredient in restaurant food, especially Italian. Their popularity does not seem to have survived the crossing of the Mississippi.

When you order a Caesar salad here, the anchovies are optional. Um, excuse me, but they are NOT optional. It's what makes it a Caesar salad. When the waitress asks if you want anchovies, she is shocked if you say yes. She asks you a second time because she has already written no on her order pad.

I should also mention that when we lived in Sweden, we experienced a cultural variation of fish pizza that surprised even us. We ordered a crayfish pizza one night and got a pizza with an actual entire crayfish, beady eyes and all, on top of it. We like to think it was already dead.

It is a testament to how much pizza has evolved (some would say devolved) that a few years ago, one of the airlines that we use notified both my husband Olof and me that we would have to strengthen our passwords on our mileage accounts and select new security questions.

Olof and I hate security questions. For virtually all of our accounts financial, travel, etc. we try to have security questions that we would both know the answer to. City where we were married (La Jolla) is always a good choice, although this is actually both of our second marriages so even that one has potential for confusion. We always go for Olof s first pet. City where you were born has at least a 50% chance of being correct. We never use grandmother s maiden name since neither of us can remember our own much less the other person's.

But with this new system, the airline offered fifteen security questions of which we were required to pick five and select answers from a pull-down menu. It goes without saying that if either of us, but especially Olof, has to prove identity to this airline with the answer to any of these questions, he'd have to take the bus back from Chicago.

There was not one single question of the fifteen that we would both know the answer to. That is because the airline outsourced this project to pod people from a parallel galaxy who have not visited Earth in any recent time-space continuum.

To be accurate, there WAS one question that I knew we'd both know the answer to without a single doubt: What is your favorite pizza topping? Woo-hoo! Anchovies! But were anchovies one of the options? Nope! A Middle-Eastern spice called Za'atar was an option, as was mashed potatoes. On a pizza? Even something called "giardiniera"  which sounds like an intestinal disease you get from camping. But no anchovies.

But back to Christmas. Fortunately Christmas Eve dinner ends with another tradition from my daughter-in-law's family: sinfully chocolatey brownies oozing with homemade hot fudge and topped with peppermint ice cream. I've never taken heroin but this is how I'm guessing heroin makes people feel. Your endorphins are in overdrive. And you forget all about that nasty pizza that you have been slowly feeding to Teddy and Tizzy (the dogs). They seem to like it, but normally all they get is kibble. I rest my case.

Crayfish pizza in Stockholm

 

 

Unleashing Your Kids On The World With Basic Skills

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published September 1, 2025] ©2025

Lots of La Jolla’s recent grads will be starting college soon.  I remember this era well, and scrambling to educate my sons on some of the basic life skills that I was negligent in teaching them.  Like laundry, for example.

Fortunately, in the years since they graduated, more and more high schools have instituted courses on Basic Life Skills for seniors before they are unleashed onto the world.  If I were to compile a curriculum, here’s some topics I’d be sure to include:

(1) Basic credit card math. Absolutely top topic.  Let’s say you rack up $1,000 in charges on your 15% annual interest credit card buying In-N-Out Burgers and concert tickets before your parents confiscate the card. If you make only a minimum monthly payment of $15 until it’s paid off, how much would you end up paying back?  (Answer: about $2,200. And it would take you at least five years.)  

(2) Student loan debt. Borrowing $100,000 doesn’t mean you’re going to (only) pay back $100,000.  Depending on the interest rate and payment schedule, it may outlive you. 

(3) Apartment leases: How to read them. Important word here: read. Yes, you really need to (read it). Including the fine print. Especially the fine print. 

(4) Laundry skills 101. Your mom always did your laundry, so how hard can it be? Separating lights from darks isn’t just a plot by washing machine manufacturers to make you run more loads. Clothes have something called “labels” in them recommending washing - and drying - temperatures. If you do not wish your favorite shirt to be reduced to munchkin size, pay attention. Also, when they say “dry clean only,” they really mean it.

(5) Laundry skills 210: Dryers. If you have access to one that isn’t in a laundromat there is something called a “lint filter” that needs to be regularly cleaned. The alternative is burning down the house. Easier just to clean the lint filter.

(6) Roommate math: Basic. You and three friends decide to get an apartment together that costs $3,000 a month to get out from under the thumbs of your annoying parents. (Free-dom! Free-dom!) What is your share of the rent when (a) one of them loses his job at Burger King and can’t pay (b) another one decides it’s cheaper to live at home despite the annoying parents, and (c) they’re both, like, “Sorry, dude”?

(7) Roommate math: Advanced. Developing the skills to avoid deadbeat roommates: priceless.

(8) Survey of world religions. There are lots of different religious beliefs in the world, and a lot of sincere people practicing them. Misinformation about them leads to a lot of confusion. Also wars.

(9) Internet Education. Just because you read it on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact, there is a high likelihood it is NOT true. Apply a critical filter to everything you read. (Yes, you actually have one even if you’ve never used it.) Do NOT forward anything that says “Send this to everyone you know!”

(10) Scam avoidance. It’s not just old people who fall for these. That “free” ringtone you signed up for?  It’s now a hefty (and hidden) fee on your phone bill. On-line ads for cheap iPhones or luxury goods? Sorry kids, if it sounds too good to be true, it really is. Always.

(11) Payday Loans (a.k.a. “Selling your soul to the devil.”). Do not EVER EVER EVER set foot into these places. They are just a truly bad deal.   See “usurious.”

(12) Tax Returns. The federal EZ form is really that. You can do it. Yes, you really can! It’s one page!  It’s tempting to go to one of those places that will do it for you and even advance you your refund, but be assured that they’re going to take a hefty chunk of your refund in the process.

 (13) Automobile purchasing: Caveat Emptor. That’s Latin for “Do not believe a word they say,” (technically “buyer beware”), especially if it is a used car. No, it didn’t really belong to a little old lady who only drove it to church.

(14) Dishwashers. You should be so lucky to have one but they come pretty standard in rental apartments these days. Tempted to economize by using liquid dishwashing soap instead of the stuff made for dishwashers? Seriously bad idea. Ask my younger son.  Everybody has to do it once but be prepared to find yourself standing in your kitchen knee deep in bubbles.

(15) Survival cooking skills. It’s really expensive to eat out for every meal, even fast-food meals. It’s even more expensive to get that food delivered by the now-ubiquitous food delivery services.  When I was in graduate school, we had something called “Po’ Boy Tomato Soup.” (Recipe: pour hot tap water over the contents of six McDonald’s ketchup packets. Stir.  And yes it’s as gross as it sounds.) Learning to make five basic meals that do not involve Top Ramen noodles isn’t hard. Stay on the outside aisles of the supermarket when you shop and you’ll be fine.

And now…congratulations! Let the next chapter of your life begin!