Internet Fail Purchases (My Yak Sweater)

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published July 21, 2025] ©2025

Now that Olof and I are retired, our sartorial style can best be described as “early orphan.”  The vast majority of our wardrobes come from either LL Bean or Lands End. 

It helps that we know what sizes are going to fit us so we rarely have to return anything.  And for Olof, so long as it’s blue, it’s going to be fine.

Let me be clear that there is nothing inherently orphan-ish about these brands which we think produce very nice and functional clothing for the price.  It’s that we wear them until they’re practically rags.  Especially one of us, who is not me.

What I eventually have to do is spirit the latest ratty sweatshirt out of Olof’s closet and pretend it is in the wash until he finally forgets about it, and is forced to wear the second rattiest sweatshirt he owns.  “Olof,” I say, “we are not poor.  I am afraid people are going to start leaving clothing donations on our front porch in the dead of night.” 

In his defense, I have been known to over-wear certain favorite garments myself but never to the degree that he does.  We both had to wear office clothes for so many years that I think we’re reveling in not having to wear anything that has recently seen an iron. 

My older granddaughter has observed that I dress like a barista from a lesser trattoria.  Hey, black and white works! It goes with everything!

But every once in a while, I go wild and crazy and order from other sites than my usual ones.  Such was the case recently when I saw what looked like a really pretty cashmere sweater on sale at a shockingly low price.  The return instructions seemed deliberately vague.  If you needed to return it, you were to contact a specific website for “further instructions.” 

That should have warned me right there.  In my defense, it looked like an American company – OK, it had a very American-sounding name – but I was puzzled as to why it was taking forever to come.

A month later a package showed up from China with all manner of foreign stickers on it.  I had a bad feeling about it.  

Now the China part wasn’t necessarily bad.  Apparently the finest cashmere comes from the soft fiber combed from the underbelly of Mongolian goats.  Such animals are not to be found in the Continental US but reside just to the north of China.   

I’m not on social media but from time to time on the internet, people will post photos of what they think they ordered and what actually showed up. 

As soon as I opened the package, I was sure it was a mistake.  It bore no resemblance in either color or style to the pretty sweater I’d ordered.

One thing was clear: this hairy garment was not cashmere.  No Mongolian goats had ever had their bellies combed in its creation.  So what hirsute creature had contributed to this apparel? Yak?  Gnu?  Yeti? 

Personally, I’m going for yak. 

There were absolutely no tags in it indicating the company that made it and definitely no label for the care of fine faux-goat fabrics of a yak-Yeti-gnu persuasion. 

Unfortunately, it photographs far better (and less hairy) than it looks in person – which, of course, is how I got suckered into buying it.  Trust me when I say that this is one ugly, shapeless garment. One can only wonder if it started out as roadkill. 

I have to say I’ve been duped on a few other China purchases, which like this one, didn’t indicate on the website that it was coming from China. 

I ordered a digital thermometer during the pandemic since there were none in existence in any pharmacy in the Continental U.S.  But Amazon seemed to think it could provide me with one.  It finally showed up from China three months later and was Centigrade-only.  Not even a conversion chart.  The battery was also dead, probably having succumbed during the slow boat trip from Asia. 

I also got duped on some bamboo compression socks.  Now, bamboo is not grown in quantity in the U.S. so you have to assume it’s probably coming from a place where bamboo IS grown, like China.  I’m sure there are a lot of legitimate and very therapeutic bamboo compression socks out there, but these weren’t among them.  Once again, they took forever to come and came in packaging that was entirely in Chinese lettering.  Even though I had ordered according to the size chart on Amazon, I don’t think these socks could have fit a five-year-old.  If I’d read the fine print on Amazon’s site, I would have seen the notation “frequently returned item.”  Um, yeah.  Not sure why Amazon is still entertaining these folks as suppliers. 

I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my yak-Yeti-gnu sweater.  I have to say that my first reaction on opening it was “Goodwill bin!”  As I suspected, the return options were basically, “it’s yours now, sweet cheeks!”  And since it wasn’t Amazon, there wasn’t really any recourse.  The yak-gnu farm in China clearly didn’t want it back, nor the vehicle that originally ran it over. 

Meanwhile, it’s time for me to spirit Olof’s favorite sweatshirt into the trash.  Even Goodwill would be insulted. 

In person, this is one ugly, hairy, shapeless sweater - and definitely NOT cashmere

Olof will wear pretty much anything, so long as it's blue.

By the time you read this, Olof's favorite sweatshirt will be on its way to the dump.

 

 

World's Most Pathetic Family Photo Album

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published July 14, 2025] ©2025

I was recently in search of a family photograph that might have included all five members of my family – my two siblings, my parents, and me.  And once more, I was having to face the fact I came from a family of deeply inept photographers. 

As much as I loved my parents and siblings, they were profoundly challenged camera people. (How did I escape this gene?) Virtually all my childhood family photos are blurry black and whites taken from waaaayyy too far away and/or totally off center.  There’s lots of sky. Mom, Dad, sibs, that thing called a viewfinder?  That’s why they call it that.

I think one of the reasons I became such a devoted documenter of my children is that my own parents took so few photos of me.  I’m trying not to take this personally. Partly, it was the era: at the time, color photos were a rarity and most people only had crummy black and white Brownie cameras that took abysmal pictures. Generally speaking, we only took pictures on special occasions, like Easter, when everyone was dressed up. 

Not, of course that you could tell.  The pictures are generally so fuzzy that I wouldn’t even swear they were our family if they weren’t in my own photo albums. 

Like many people who feel they were deprived of something in their formative years, I may have overcompensated with my own kids.  When my younger son and then-fiancée wanted to do a slide show for their wedding, I hauled some 60 albums out to the dining room table.  I swear my daughter-in-law said under her breath, “I hope this isn’t hereditary.” 

In fact, the kids had long been threatening to cremate me after my untimely death with those 60+ photo albums – an entire bookcase - that I had amassed over the years. It would be a two-fer; get rid of Mom and the albums all at once. 

A few years ago, I put together a 400-slide show of Olof and me to mark a milestone birthday.  Afterwards, there were wonderful toasts made – my younger son Henry gave a 4-hanky tribute to both of us. I gave a toast to Olof, commenting on how different this evening would have been had Olof not come into our lives. Both kids simultaneously chimed, “200 fewer slides?”

I am proud to report that during the pandemic, one of my projects was to cull my 65 albums to 32. But that’s my final offer. For me it is heartbreaking to part with a single photo. It’s like erasing history.

I think it’s appropriate to discuss the role of the family photographer which is about as unappreciated a job as there is.  Year after year, occasion after occasion, there is nothing but complaining as the (self-appointed) family archivist attempts to herd the surly assemblage into some kind of order and snap a few pics for posterity. 

Does anyone say thank you?  I think not.  Years later, of course, everyone loves looking at those pictures, pointing out hair and clothing styles, but more often than not, focusing on what’s in the background.  Remember that sofa we got from Goodwill?  Oh, look, there’s that Chevy Vega that rusted through in two years.  Wow, the trees were so much smaller.  Did that guy you were dating then ever make parole?  The family photographer basks in a few rare moments of adulation, which will evaporate in a nanosecond as soon as a camera appears.  Photography is the ultimate delayed gratification hobby.  Total abuse in real time.

I suppose if everyone who knows you well tells you have a problem, you should probably pay attention.  My first husband accused me of choosing to photograph life to the exclusion of living it.  My second husband, Olof, mid-way through our two-year work assignment in Europe several years ago, maintained that the vows in his third marriage would include capping his bride to 25 digital images per day, pro rata, as long as they both shall live.   Even my younger son refused to allow me to have a camera in my hands on his wedding day.  I kept nudging the photographer: “you’ll really want to get a shot of that,” I said.   My first grandson referred to me as “Grammy Camera.” 

Maybe it’s just as well my parents never took many pictures. I guard that tiny handful of pathetic pics carefully in one small thin album.  But I am leaving my kids with (now) 32 photo albums and some 6000 digital images, never mind hundreds of slides.  Every time they walk into my bedroom and see that bookcase with all the albums, you can see the sweat break out on their brows.  Yeah, you can put photos on CDs but honestly, you’d never look at them.  Photos are meant to be shared in albums over a cup of cocoa, or depending on your haircut in that era, several bottles of wine.  Besides in ten years, no one will be able to read the current CDs.  So maybe CDs ARE the ultimate solution:  self-expiring photo storage.

At this point, I’ve handed over the mantle of family photography to the kids although I still take a few snaps of the grandkids when they visit.  It’s sort of like my own methadone program.  I’ve sorted through the slides and picked the ones I want to keep but even I am not sure what to do with all those photos.  I really don’t want to burden the kids after my demise.  Fortunately, neither of them is as pathologically sentimental as I am and are maybe just not wanting to utter the word “dumpster” while I’m still breathing. 

 

Here is our Easter Sunday family portrait - off center,

blurry, and with a tree branch going through my mother's face

Dad took this picture of my mother at Cape May

Mom took this picture of my younger sister from waaay too far away

Mom took this off-center blurry pic of my younger sister and me

 

Olof Joins The Sighted

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published July 7, 2025] 2025

Not to disparage a man I have loved and been married to for decades, but he is truly the worst patient ever.

My husband has always had a "Do not feed the lions" approach to health care and will deny all symptoms even for an affliction he actually sought medical care for. So I'll say, "What did Doctor Death say about your esophageal paralysis?"  And he'll shrug, "It didn't come up. 

My husband has had two separate cancers, along with a heart attack exacerbated by a serious head injury when he did a face plant into the armoire en route to the floor, milliseconds after insisting, "It's just heartburn!"

So talking him into undergoing the cataract surgery that he desperately needed was a multi-year battle.

Olof is a former Air Force pilot, an occupation for which one needed perfect vision, so getting him to accept that his eyesight was failing has been difficult. It had always given me an added feeling of security over the years when we were on commercial flights knowing that Olof could probably land many large aircraft in an emergency. But after a certain point, I came to realize that this would only work if he remembered to bring his reading glasses into the cockpit. Otherwise he'd be asking the flight attendant, "Does that say "up"  or "down"?"

Right around the time that Olof turned 40, I began to notice that he was leaving 70% tips at restaurants. Olof is a generous tipper but it dawned on me that the basis of his largesse was that he could no longer read the bill. This got even worse when we lived in Sweden and many of the restaurants were so low light that I'd have to read him the menu. The waiter would arrive and inquire, "And what will your father have?"  (Olof and I are exactly the same age).

Olof was the senior engineer at his company so I was surprised some years ago to get a call from a member of his team who pleaded with me to make Olof get reading glasses. Given how technical the data was on the projects they were working on, the inability to read specifications was making meetings increasingly problematical.

Maps were probably the biggest problem of all in the pre-phone app era. When we lived in Sweden, we traveled a fair amount. Fortunately, Olof had a seeing-eye wife who wore progressive lenses so that when Olof and I got really, really lost and ended up in parts of Old Tallinn that probably even the Estonians have forgotten about, I could actually read the fine print on a map. Even though Olof was by this time the owner of reading glasses, they somehow always ended up getting left back at the hotel whenever he and I are strolling around a new city. He may have been bludgeoned into getting them, but he was never going to admit he needed them. 

But over time, the necessity for reading glasses and even computer glasses came to be a part of his life, as did not being able to find any of the 10 pairs that he owned at any given time. He didn't matter how many pairs we acquired. Three months after I sold my former car, the neighbor who bought it called me and said he had found a pair of my husband s reading glasses under the front seat. 

Fast forward into the retirement years. Olof was admitting that driving at night and in rainy conditions was getting harder. He went to renew his driver's license and the DMV eye test lady said, "I m going to pass you this time, but it's a gift."

Three years ago, I started booking him appointments along with me when I went for my own yearly eye exam. The opthalmologist said, "there is no way on God s green earth you would pass a DMV eye exam at this point. You need cataract surgery."

So you re thinking Olof said, "Yes. Of course. Sign me up."

But you would be wrong.

Given our ages, we had a number of friends who had had cataract surgery, every one of whom raved about the difference it had made and how happy they were they had done it. They could see! Colors regained their actual hues and shapes their actual dimensions. It was so easy, they said. You do one eye, then the other two weeks later. The most annoying part is a month's worth of three different daily eye drops in each eye afterwards.

But three annual eye appointments went by before Olof finally consented to the surgery. He kept telling our wonderful opthalmologist that he would "think about it  and get back to her" which is Olof-ese for "you'll never hear from me again."

I've always felt that since Olof is a grown man, I should give him the respect to allow him to make these decisions himself. Even if it meant that my life, and his, and those of everyone else on the road were in extreme danger, especially at night or in the rain, or God forbid both. 

But finally I'd had enough. I called and made him an appointment with the opthalmologist and told her Olof was ready to proceed. "Really?"  she said, genuinely surprised. "He agreed?"

And when I informed Olof of "his"  decision, I was expecting pushback. I had all my arguments ready. I had rehearsed. But before I could get two of those words out, he said "okay."

I was shocked. "What do you mean, 'okay'?"  I said, suspicious. 

"I mean, okay, I'll do it,"  he replied.

Both eyes have now been done. I kept a detailed chart on the front of fridge for the schedule of all the drops. The morning after the first surgery, he could read the newspaper with no glasses. It was a miracle. The second eye went just as well.

I'm obviously incredibly pleased and relieved. The streets of San Diego are safe again. Olof has become one of the world's foremost proponents of cataract surgery.

But could we have done this three years ago?