Words Of Wisdom From Olof

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published June 22, 2026] 2026

I may be the alleged writer in the family but many people don't know that the real talent in the family is Olof. Despite being a nuclear-physics-trained engineer and former Air Force pilot, Olof has always been a fabulous letter writer. It was, in fact, how we kept in touch for 23 years from the time we spent our senior year in high school in Brazil as exchange students (how we met) until serendipity (and both of our divorces) brought us back together decades later.

One of my regrets is that I don't have many of his letters to me during those two-plus decades. Of course, we were either writing by hand on lined paper or right off the typewriter, always unedited. Both of us liked to find the humor in mundane and often not funny at the time events that were happening in our lives that day. For example, the saga of my first husband's and my attempt to save $125 by acid washing our pool ourselves. (The burn scars are mostly healed.) Olof regularly regaled me with Air Force moments gone awry. My column is basically letters to a wider audience.

But in the decades we've been together since our divorces, I fortunately saved favorite documents of Olof s creation, including all the contracts he had for Nintendo game loans (at interest!) with my younger son, Henry. (Neither my ex nor I thought Henry was a good credit risk.) Henry, even at eight, was clear that this money would be paid back, and his allowance never had to be garnished (a term of the contract) a single time. Not surprisingly, Henry wrote his essay for MBA programs on learning business ethics from Olof.

Over the years, I've jotted down favorite Olof-isms. On being asked on Thursday mornings if he was likely to be working that weekend, he'd reply, "Probably. Thursday is Crisis Discovery Day."  After rescuing a project threatening to implode, he'd note, "I think we got the shiny side back up."   Pulling into the driveway after an excursion, he was fond of cheerily announcing, "Cheated death again!" 

On his aggregate of four years in Saudi Arabia, the ever-optimistic Olof opined: "It's only a desert if you think of it that way.  I prefer to think of it as a very large beach, with surf breaking on both sides."

When asked how he was able to successfully fix an item that had been considered irretrievably broken, he is likely to smile and reply, "just a mindless application of force."

Always asked for technical support from family and friends, he often can't help adding personal commentary. Explaining a new mouse to my sister some years ago, he wrote: "This is an optical, versus mechanical, mouse. Optical mice have no balls. Comparisons to the Democratic leadership in Congress are gratuitous."

Describing something as really inconsequential, he will reference the testicular attributes of rodents: "It's mouse nuts when you look at it."

I had twelve really lean (destitute?) years between marriages. Commenting on both my housekeeping skills and the kids'  assessment that they'd grown up poor, Olof couldn't help opining to my son Henry, "You didn't grow up in poverty. But you did grow up in squalor."

He's now adored by the five grandchildren whom he affectionately referred to in their early years alternately as "the plague carriers"  and "the destroyers of peace."  In play with our grandsons who had named themselves after various superheroes, Olof dubbed himself Hummingbird Man.

From time to time I get to see his messages in cards we send to the kids. On Henry's birthday one year, Olof noted: "Henry -   It's not hard to get older. It's getting wiser that's hard. With three kids, a busy wife and a demanding job, you've gotten lots of opportunities. Enjoy them. Love, Olof."

Responding to Bastille Day birthday wishes on his July 14 birthday, he noted: "Thanks for the good wishes.  So far my barricades have withstood the assault of time better than those of Louis XVI. But time is the great equalizer."

He was experimenting with cooking one year while I took an evening class. When I returned one night, there was a note taped on the stove hood pointing to a pan below:

"Inga - See what you think about this. Good news: If you don't like it, I can't really remember what I put in it. Bad news: If you do like it - see above."

He recently responded to one of a college roommates with his time-tested "Three-Step Retiree Program :

1. Does it appear that there is some activity upcoming?
2. Could that activity be construed as work?
3. If yes to both of the above: Pay someone else to do it.

So thanks, Olof. You are truly this household's ray of sunshine. And fortunately you don't want to write a column of your own.

 

Ordering The Kale Salad - Hold The Kale

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published June 15, 2026] 2026 

As I've said before: forget military service. Everyone should be required to work two years in retail. Especially food service. Having been a waitress during summers in my college years, I have nothing but compassion and empathy for people in the wait staff industry.

Most people I know are genuinely kind to servers. But I do have a few lunch mates who routinely test servers will to live. It's not malicious. They simply insist that wait staff are there to make you happy.

I fear those poor servers go home and drink.

Most people will remember the now-classic ordering scene in the deli in When Harry Met Sally where Harry orders a "number three"  and Sally goes into a laborious order for a chef salad (dressing on the side) and a hilariously (if you're not the server) convoluted order for apple pie a la mode.

I was recently at a group birthday lunch with a friend who has to modify every single thing she orders. When the server came to take our order, this woman requested "the kale salad without the kale."

The look on the server's face ("I have definitely been in this job too long") said it all. Did this lady just want a bowl of salad dressing?

Now, one would think that my friend might want to just order a different salad from the menu. The Caesar, for example. But no. She liked (most of) the other ingredients in the salad (carrots, Brussels sprouts, orange, cilantro, avocado, cashews) but wasn't a fan of kale. Or the soy vinaigrette dressing either. So she queried if they could make the kale salad with some other type of greens. And a different dressing. And no cashews.

The server gamely worked with her on this, finally getting my friend to agree to romaine, but noting this would have to be confirmed with the chef. There was then a discussion of alternate dressings, finally electing a vinaigrette with red wine vinegar, no soy. Cashew-adjacent nut choices were reviewed.

My lunchmate also ordered an entree (multiple substitutes there too) so when the salad arrived, she wasn't hungry for it and asked for a box to take it to go.

You almost can't tip enough.

Interestingly, you rarely (never?) see men doing this.

I was re-living my waitress days with a local waiter acquaintance who says that there is nothing he hates more than a group of 6-8 women coming in together, especially for dinner.

Why, he begs to know, can't women just order their own meal? But no, he fumes, everybody has to share a salad and an entree with someone else. And that someone is invariably at the other end of the table.

Negotiations are prolonged and interminable. His imitation is brutal:

Waiter (fifth trip over, teeth clenched in forced smile): "Have we decided yet, ladies?"

Women: "Yes, I think we're ready. Muffy and Babs are going to split an order of ravioli but Babs wants the lemon cream sauce on hers and Muffy wants the marinara. Oops, that's the other way around. They also want to split a house salad, one with balsamic vinaigrette on the side, and the other tossed with the honey mustard, if that s not too much trouble. ZsuZsu and Topper are going to split the goat cheese pizza but hold the red onion on one half, and a small house salad with no feta, and no tomatoes unless they're organic. Bitsy and I will have the Greek sampler plate but since she doesn't like falafel, could you put her falafel on my plate, and my lamb kabob on hers? If there's only one of something, just cut it in half. (Smiles.) We don't want to make this complicated."

Several minutes later: "Is it too late to change the ravioli to linguine?"

Several minutes after that: "Bitsy has just reminded us to confirm with your chef that none of your food products come from China."

The food comes. No one can remember what they ordered.

It's even worse, he says, if the restaurant serves anything even remotely ethnic.

"Whats in it?"   [Answer: the ingredients listed on the menu.]

"Is it spicy?" [Well, yeah. It s supposed to be spicy.]

"Can you make it not spicy?"   [What s your definition of 'not spicy'? And if you don't like spicy, order the ravioli!] 

And don t even get him started on the wine. It doesn't matter that every time they come in he tells them that there are approximately five glasses in a bottle. They still have to ask how many glasses in a bottle. And then first round negotiations begin: who wants red and who wants white followed by an extensive cost analysis of ordering a bottle of red plus three glasses of white versus a bottle of each. Preferences for Pinot Grigio vs. Chardonnay, Cabernet vs. Merlot are tallied. The waiter s recommendations on the wine list will be solicited, he says, but universally ignored.

But the coup de grace is the check. This, he maintains, makes everything before it look like a day at the Shores. It's when the waiter decides it's really time to go back and get his B.A. Or a gun license. The cell phone calculators come out. Who had what, or more specifically, half of what, must be ascertained before figuring in tax and tip. Two people have invariably realized they have no cash and want to either write a check for their portion or put just their part on a credit card. If guys were there, my waiter acquaintance maintains, they'd divide the check by eight. No calculators would be seen. They would never hand you eight credit cards. And then ask you to put a different amount on each. 

As far as he's concerned, a 70% tip from these women would be reasonable. But still not enough. What he really wants is a table full of guys.

Inga in her waitress uniform in Beach Haven, New Jersey

Unbelievably, This Is My 600th Column

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published June 8, 2026] 2026

Astonishingly - including and especially to me - this is my 600^th "Let Inga Tell You"  column in the La Jolla Light.

As I like to say, the first 250 were the easiest.

Even I had to leaf through four huge binders of clip sheets (also known as low-tech archiving) to see what I'd written all those columns about over the last 17 years.

When I started this column in 2009, I honestly didn't think I'd have enough material for three months since I was now retired and had, as my sons affectionately noted, "no life."

Inga actually started in 2005 as a blog that I was writing in Stockholm while we lived there on a multi-year work assignment. Hoping to embrace our Swedish experience, we dubbed ourselves Inga and Olof on our first day there. What I didn't realize at the time - but have had plenty of time to rue since - is that Inga is a common Swedish porn star name. And let me tell you, those guys from Riga don't let up. They're always so disappointed that I'm not a pole dancer with a power rack.

After a truly idyllic Swedish life during which we never owned a car, we were barely back to the U.S. when a white Mercedes slammed into us at 85 mph on I-5 putting me in the hospital. I was truly missing writing my Sweden blog which had gotten fairly popular (by my standards, anyway). Once home and recovering, I started sending out articles to newspapers and magazines hoping to freelance. The editor at the La Jolla Light at the time kept returning my submissions saying she loved the writing but that guest commentaries could be no more than 300 words. 300 words? For me that's barely warming up.

But I did finally manage to submit a 300-word guest commentary with the catchy and very descriptive title: "Vons Parking Lot: Scariest place in America."   For reasons that I have never understood about editors - and it has plagued me over and over - the Light ran the commentary but changed the title to something yawningly boring. Why, why, why do they do this? Another example: I submitted a water-rationing piece to the San Diego Union-Tribune some years back with some creative ideas about conserving water entitled "Thinking outside the hose."   They did indeed run it, but once again, with an utter snorer of a title. (Fortunately my current editor writes way better headlines than I do so I just have to indicate the topic and let him have at it.)

Despite the abysmal title of my Vons parking lot piece, so many people responded to the paper agreeing with the sentiment that the editor asked if I'd like to write a regular column for them. I loved the idea but couldn't imagine what I'd actually write about since my main focus at the time was trying to be able to chew on the right side of my mouth again. (My head and the car's side window had made an excellent illustration of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.) So I suggested we give it a trial run of three months. But I also didn't want to show my face or use my real name as I planned to write about my kids (who grew up here) and my husband who would definitely not want to be easily identified. I had already been writing under Inga for quite a while at that point, so we decided to keep the name. Meanwhile they shot a photo of me wrapped up on a hat, sunglasses and scarf that are not mine and make me look like a terrorist. 

People have often asked me what my writing training was. The answer is: letter writing. As in thousands upon thousands of letters over my life time. There didn't used to be internet or email (ja, really), and long-distance phone calls were a dollar a minute. In fact, my only formal writing training was Freshman Composition in college which was the lowest grade of my college career. The professor hated everything I wrote, adorning pretty much every assignment on the top with "Ha ha. You think you re so funny. C+."

Which leads me to the second most common question I get: Do I ever get writer s block? (I think some people have been hoping I would get writer's block.) And the answer is nope, I just always pretend I'm writing a letter to someone. It goes without saying that I would not normally be writing newsy letters to people about trash fees and parking debacles so those are frankly a lot less fun.

But back to the point of this column (you can see why a word limit of 300 would be cruel and inhuman): what have I written 600 columns about?

Well, certainly a lot of whining about technology. I'm definitely past my sell-by date where electronics are concerned. I've written about password hell, about security questions that don't apply to me, about appliances I can't work, cell phones I can't work, computers I can't work, and remotes I can't work.

I've written quite a few columns about our beloved dogs, Winston, then Lily, and how devastated we've been - and still are - about their loss.

Less adored creatures that have found themselves in my column are crows, hawks, rats (lots of rats), raccoons, possums, mallards, coyotes, and crickets. Actually, I really like the crickets.

Health has been a pretty common topic too, especially aging, Covid, colonoscopies and contending with constantly changing health advice from the "experts."  On a more personal level I've written about childhood polio, my chocolate addiction, my weight (see "chocolate addiction"), and finding clothes for a body shaped like a T-rex (really, but not a fault of the chocolate).

I've written lots about my (second) husband Olof, an engineer and former Air Force pilot, who took up both cookie baking and sour dough bread as retirement gigs both of which he attacks with spreadsheets and flow charts. When he was recovering from his 2018 heart attack and brain injury, I officially declared him the "Worst Patient on the Face of the Earth." I definitely felt I was eating those "better or worse" vows. I wrote a whole column about how he still suspects I married him for his talents with a sewer augur.

The column I wrote entitled "Why it takes four women 80 emails to set a lunch date"  has had more reprint requests - even from a paper in South Africa - than any column I've written. I guess it's a universal problem.

The city has given me vast amounts of material, including the year-plus it took me to get my street light fixed, never mind the trash fees debacle, sidewalk repair stupidity, new trash bins, SBs 9 and 10, Turquoise Tower, and endless amounts of new parking idiocy (daylighting law, Balboa Park meters). Since I don t have any confidence that our mayor and City Council (whom, by the way, I voted for) are going to start making any good decisions any time soon, I'm confident in pretty much limitless material going forward.

I mined plenty of material about being a divorced, working perennially-destitute mom for 12 years between husbands. I developed what I called the Single Woman Home Repair School which heavily utilized hair scrunchies and duct tape as go-to tools of repair.

I've covered my efforts to master such baffling foreign languages as "spoken coffee" and "modern light bulb."  I haven't been very successful at either.

I did a hugely fun series testing all manner of internet hacks and gadgets. Even I decided to pass on the re-usable toilet paper.

My neighbors kindly consented to let me use all manner of stories about both themselves and their families. One neighbor let me regale my readers with the saga of the raccoons who took up residence under her house and were ultimately evicted by Trapper Dan the Raccoon Man who lured them out with Kentucky Fried Chicken and loud Mariachi music. It is this kind of information that needs to be shared with a larger population, and I was grateful to be the one to do it. 

The kids and then grandkids have had a lot of play too. I wrote about Olof and I suffering from bladder envy when we realized the grandkids could go 12 hours without going to the bathroom at night. When the grandtots were small, there would not be a single electronic in our home still working after they left. Even my Cal Tech-educated husband couldn't get the remotes working again.

I've written about my Catholic-Protestant-Jewish family, my dual-political-party marriage, and the hoarder gene that seems to have fortunately escaped me (but none of my siblings or cousins). I've covered picky dinner guests and annoying house guests including and especially people who take phone calls at the table. (Not at my table you don't.)

And somehow, that's all added up to 600 columns. Frankly, I don't write nearly as well as I used to. All that chardonnay does catch up with you after a point. (Lots and lots of points.) But as long as the paper continues in print and they want me to fill up space, I'm all in. Writing this column has truly fed my soul, never mind given me an outlet for all manner of grief and grievances, whining and winnings.

And now, on to column number 601.