Bright Lights, Home Security

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published June 28, 2012]  © 2012

I think the worst part of being a single parent was the sobering thought that if I wasn’t murdered on any given night, it was only because nobody felt like it.

Of course, the feminist in me rebelled against such an attitude of fear.  I did all the standard things:    a Neighborhood Watch Program, good locks, a self-defense course for women, and even an answering machine message purportedly recorded by our Rottweiler.

Part of the reason I felt so vulnerable was that in my first year of single post-divorce parenthood, the kids and I were victims of two major crimes (well, three if you count the orthodontist).  The house was robbed while I was at work and every piece of jewelry I owned was taken.  Five months later, my purse was stolen and the perps attempted to access both my bank accounts and my home.  Neither the kids nor I felt safe anymore. 

The kids lobbied for a 9 mm Glock but I was terrified they’d blow my head off by mistake, or that in our current nervous state, we’d panic and waste the mailman.  My younger son’s allergies to animal dander precluded an actual dog. 

Ultimately I settled on the Single Woman Home Alarm System which consisted of leaving the house ablaze with lights hoping it would look like there were at least forty people in residence.   Probably for what my electric bill was over those twelve years, I might have been able to put an alarm system in.

But really, we couldn’t have afforded one.  Not the cost of the alarm system itself, which would have been a bargain compared to all those $100 fines from the San Diego gendarmes for responding to false alarms.  In fact, I think my older son, in retaliation for being a latch key kid, would have regularly set it off just for the entertainment value.  As my second husband, Olof,  always said, “Rory looks for excitement.  And finds it.”  In fact, I can see it now (and could certainly see it then):  Rory sets off the alarm and when the alarm company calls, Rory tells them he is being held captive by masked intruders.   The thrill of all those sirens!  The SWAT team!  Officers with guns drawn!  The Channel 39 news cam!  Social Services visiting Mom! 

Rory and an alarm system were an incompatible combination.  But for the record, the Bomb Squad incident really wasn’t his fault.

I never did find a solution that made me feel very secure but I did ultimately remarry.  Olof feels compelled to point out that his presence is the merest illusion of safety and did I really think he could defend me against a knife-wielding intruder?  But upon seeing the look on my face, he hastily added that he would, of course, breathe his last breath trying.  (Correct answer.)

The reason the issue of security has come up again is that there has been a rash of really brazen burglaries in our neighborhood lately, a map of which shows our thus-far untouched house right in the epicenter.   So we’ve obviously been cased – and rejected.  (A teeny part of me feels offended.)   Sounds like they know I have a 2007 computer and a pre-paid cell phone that doesn’t even have a camera.  They’ve obviously determined that the pickings are better elsewhere.  Is this, in fact, the key to burglar-proofing your house: ancient electronics?  $40 in loose cash?  Jewelry that was already pre-stolen? 

But the creepy part is:  how do they know?

A close friend says that the answer is that our house just doesn’t look like there’s anything of real value inside.  “What are they going to take?” she says.  “Your VCR?”

Neighbors have become extra vigilant in letting each other know when they’re out of town, as evidenced by this recent missive from the neighbor across the street:  “So if a moving van pulls up to the house, if they start with the garage, don't call the police until they've finished in there.”  There’s nothing like a little crime humor to take the edge off communal anxiety.

Still, the kinds of crimes that have been occurring here really scare the daylights out of me and have brought all the security issues back, even though the now-adult kids complain the place is locked up tighter than Fort Knox.  All of a sudden, I find myself leaving all the lights on again when we go out which annoys Olof beyond belief.  He just doesn’t understand the Single Woman Alarm System mentality at all. 

As we returned from a recent evening out and pulled up to the house, Olof suddenly exclaimed, “Oh my god!”

“What?  What?”  I said, panicked.

“Someone left one of the lights off!”

How Not to Buy a House in La Jolla

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published June 14, 2012]  © 2012

Let this be a cautionary tale about how not to buy a house in La Jolla.  Or anywhere, really. 

We arrived in San Diego in June of 1973 for my physician ex-husband to do his required two years of Berry Plan military duty.  Right out of medical school four years earlier, and weeks after we had married, he’d been offered the opportunity to “volunteer” two years to the military after he finished his specialty training or go to Vietnam as a general medical officer the next week.  Took us up to four seconds to decide.

Having tons of medical school loans and no actual cash, we were thrilled to learn when we arrived that we were entitled to a 100% VA home loan.  That happiness was short lived when we discovered that no realtor or bank in La Jolla (our target area; we were no dopes) would work with VA loan customers.  This was partly because the VA didn’t tend to appraise the value of the land, which in La Jolla is pretty much everything.  But just when we were finally going to look elsewhere, we saw an ad in the Sunday paper for a for-sale-by-owner home, a total fixer, and immediately signed a full price contract on it. 

Despite the crushing recession going on at the time, it was a real estate boom era.  In fact, the owners made a whopping 40% on the place in the just two years they’d owned it.  They probably couldn’t believe that these idiots (that would be us) were actually willing to pay that amount for a house with a dead lawn, green shag carpet, hard water stalactites hanging from the faucets and a master bedroom entrance through the kitchen. (Definitely lacked feng shui.)  Who cared?  We were New Yorkers; it had a palm tree and a pool.  We could have happily overlooked plutonium deposits for the palm tree alone.

Miraculously, the VA appraised the house for the full asking price so we could get our 100% financing which was pretty amazing because 100% of everyone else said, “You’re paying WHAT for that dump?  You’ll NEVER get your money out of it!” (I should note that our collective parents were among those people.)

The appraisal was the last nice thing we had to say about the VA, an institution which quickly made both us and the owners homicidal.  Within days, the owners tried to get out of the contract and take one of the over-the-asking-price cash offers that had subsequently come in.  Among the VA’s many requirements was that the house have a driveway which this one did not because of the garage conversion years before. So here’s the first rule I always tell prospective home owners:  Never put in a driveway on a house you don’t own.  But penniless and in love (the pool!), my ex and I spent several weekends digging a driveway on someone else’s house then having concrete poured.  (Nearly four decades later, just looking at that driveway makes my back hurt.) 

The owners kept telling us that if this deal fell through – which it was in danger of doing pretty much daily – they weren’t going to reimburse us for all the VA-required improvements we seemed to be adding to their home on a tragically regular basis.  At one point, for example, the VA said they couldn’t approve the loan because the underside of the eaves weren’t painted.  We spent an entire weekend on ladders while the owners were having a pool party.  One guest tried to hire us to paint his house not realizing our true roles.  (He commented that not only did we do good work but our English was excellent.)

But ultimately, two long, trying, expensive months later, the closing date came around.  We showed up with our $700 cashiers check for closing costs only to have the evil troll bank folks suddenly flip us for $1,700.   The owners had made it clear that not one more extension was going to be granted.    This was a serious crisis.  We’d barely been able to come up with the $700 since all of our spare cash had been going to improve a house that it now looked like we were never going to own.  But one of the advantages of being a doctor is that banks will lend you $1,000 pretty much on the spot.  It was finally really going to be ours!

Er, not.  It was now one p.m. on closing day and the VA loan guy suddenly realizes that the roof certification statement says “the roof should last five years” instead of “the roof WILL last five years.”  All of which was immaterial since the roof had seen its last good day at least a decade earlier judging by the rain damage on the living room wall.  We immediately called the roofer whose wife said he was out in Alpine.  We jumped in our car and actually located the guy and got him to change “should” to “will” and were back at the bank by 4:00 for Closing (Take 3).  We (and the bank) finally owned the place in all its decrepit over-priced glory.

But let me be clear:  no one should ever ever do this.  Of course, I got to buy this house again ten years later when my ex and I divorced.  But by that time, there was no way I was letting that driveway go to someone else. 

The Inexplicable Mindset of Men

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published May 31, 2012] © 2012

My expat friend Julia had to go out of town for several weeks on a family emergency and was surprised to return and find a veritable mountain of laundry waiting for her.  She’d expected laundry, of course, but commented that she had never realized that her husband Fred owned so many clothes.   Turned out that when she left, he hadn’t.  But as he ran out of clean clothes, he just kept buying more.  Weeks of more.

I laughed at this story because it’s just such a guy thing to do.  I emailed back that I thought this topic would make a great column about The Inexplicable Mindset of Men and did I have her permission to include this incident?

The response was instantaneous, even from the eight hour time difference in Paris:

“Do me a favor.  Make Fred the focus.”

Well, I would, except that Fred just has so much company.  My former husband, who had a penchant for losing things, had a similar philosophy to clothing.  Why stress about where your bathing trunks are?  Just buy twelve pairs.  I might have been more impressed by this strategy had he ever been able to find any of them. 

I put all of this under the heading of Useless Guy Tricks. The useless refers to the guy, not the tricks.

It is well documented that the sexes are doomed not to understand each other.  But as one who has lived in a male-centric household all her adult life (two husbands, two sons, male dog), weird behaviors of the male of the species has always been a topic of keen interest, if total bafflement, to me.   In some cases, one can only conclude that a wife is so much cheaper than a conservator. 

Interestingly, my second husband, Olof, has surprisingly few Useless Guy Behaviors, possibly the result of having been single for so long after his first marriage.  But like all men, he is indelibly afflicted with guy-gene-pool-embedded  Passive-Dependent Blindness:  you know, where a person of the male persuasion is standing in front of an open refrigerator with the mayonnaise dead center at eye level and says, “Do we have any mayonnaise?” 

Analogous to that is the universal male phenomenon of Ineffective Circular Search Behavior.  When men lose things, they will look in three places.  If they don’t find it, they will continue to look in those same three places in an endless pathetic futile loop.  I can only assume this is something that developed in the cave dwelling area and became hopelessly locked into male genes.  The cave wife would watch her guy circling the cave in increasing frustration looking for his club before she would step in and ask the question that became indelibly embedded in ours: “Well, where did you last see it?”  He grumbles, “How would I know?  If I knew that, I’d be able to find it!”

As she suspected, he left it outside the cave after he slew the mastodon.  (Can he ever put anything away after he finishes using it?)   She retrieves it.  But does she get thanks? Not a chance.

We recently watched our friend Jeff do the twenty-first century version of this when he was searching for a DVD he wanted to lend us.  After his third loop, his wife, Annie, went to have what she called “an Annie look” and came back with it immediately.  Annie did a quick review of the first three places Jeff had looked and found it.  A corollary of Ineffective Circular Search Behavior is that just because the husband didn’t find it there doesn’t mean it wasn’t there all along (see “mayonnaise”, above). 

But as my friend Julia discovered, go away for a few weeks and leave most men on their own, and they quickly revert back to useless guy behaviors.  Must be something in the Y (Why???????) chromosome.  They revert to eating from the Basic Four Guy Food Groups (deli takeout, pizza delivery, Mrs. Stouffers, and grilled burgers).  Despite being captains of industry, their global stewardship skills suddenly fail to extend to the operation of a washing machine that requires setting a dial to Wash and pushing a button marked Start.  The dishwasher’s operation equally becomes a subject of such complexity that its interior descends into a level of green fuzziness capable of generating new strains of penicillin.  Wife comes home to a house that looks like a refugee camp.  Which in a sense it was. 

So, Fred, you’re on warning.  Next time Julia heads out of town, you’d better up your game.  Because now the world is watching. 

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Underpants

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published May 17, 2012] © 2012


With the summer travel season upon us, a person’s thoughts just naturally turn to…underwear.

 My many friends who travel a lot have been lamenting for some time that they just can’t seem to resolve the underwear problem, especially if they’re going to be staying at a different place every night.  You wash out your dainties but depending on the climate, they never quite dry before you have to pack them up and move on.  My friend Gina says she toured Scotland and Ireland for seventeen days with a plastic baggie of clean but soggy unmentionables that were never truly dry until she got home and put them in her dryer. 

 The nightly washing ritual has a number of other downsides, not the least of which is having one’s undies draped all over one’s hotel bath, particularly if you’re staying in the $1,000 a night Scottish castle-cum-golf resort.  It just looks so, well, low class.  And might explain why those Scots don’t wear anything under their kilts.  They could just never get it to dry in that damp climate either.

 The main issue, of course, is that underwear just takes up so much room in your suitcase.  Room you’d rather have for souvenirs.  So several of my friends, including Gina, have been test driving other solutions including disposable underwear specifically meant for traveling.  Wear it once and toss it. 

Apparently, it is much more comfortable than one might imagine for cheap underwear, and thus begs the question as to why one would ever buy expensive underwear if the cheap disposable stuff is just as comfy.  But ours is not to reason why.  Another friend says that she has tried saving up all her old ratty underwear to bring with her to just throw away each night.  Yet another says she hits up the Dollar Store and buys a three-pack for $1.00.

 But here’s the problem:  while the plan is excellent, the execution has turned out to be less so.  At the moment of truth, they can’t quite bear to throw perfectly good underwear away.  Or even serviceable if elastically-challenged lingerie.  It just seems so wasteful. 

 The ratty underwear solution is even more problematic.  You’ve left a nice tip for the maid at the pricey French chateau so do you really want her to find your shabby dainties in the trash?  One can almost hear her mumbling under her breath, Merci, mais il vaut mieux peut-etre que vous gardiez votre argent pour vous offrir du linge moins fatigués.  (“Thanks, but maybe you should keep the money and buy yourself some new underwear.”)   The French can be so sarcastic.

 On a more fundamental basis, wearing ratty underwear also goes against everything that is holey, er holy.  Didn’t your mother always exhort you to wear good underwear in case you were in an accident?  Do you really want to end up in the Cap Ferrat Urgent Care in tattered u-trou?

Yet another friend says she is planning to solve the problem by buying the super-lightweight travel underwear that is guaranteed to dry within hours even in Indian monsoons.  The problem is, it is seriously expensive:  $20-$30 a pair, with men’s T-shirts running nearly $40.  Of course, if it truly dries that fast, you wouldn’t need very many pairs.  But if that monsoon thing was a bit of advertising hyperbole, you could be spending your trip feeling like a human terrarium. 

Stories of depending on a hotel laundry service are legion and usually involve sagas of a three week trip with one’s clean underwear doggedly following two days behind.  My husband, who travels a lot on business, knows well the perils of depending on a hotel laundry, especially in out-of-the-way places.  Olof tells the story of traveling to Indonesia and after a certain period of time, needing to get his laundry done.  His underwear had obviously enjoyed the pampered life of a U.S. washing machine but when he got it back from his Yogyakarta hotel, it was clear that it had undergone a far more vigorous manner of washing.  Best case, it had been beaten with rocks.  More likely, it had been subjected to a local cleansing method involving stampeding water buffalo.  Suffice to say, it was full of holes.  On the rest of his travels in Asia, he didn’t dare send his underwear out again, not only out of the sheer embarrassment that a “rich American” would have such shredded skivvies, but his wholehearted conviction that it would never survive a second experience.

 Weighing all the options, there’s really only one obvious conclusion.   If you really want to travel light, you’re just going to have to go commando.

*Remodeling Our Estate Plan

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published, May 3, 2012] © 2012

You know you’re getting older when you catch your adult kids walking around with a tape measure envisioning the remodel after you’re dead.  Actually, in our younger son’s case, he’s sort of hoping for the remodel before we’re dead.  “You could really do something with this place,” he enthuses hopefully when he and his wife and the kids and dog are down for the weekend.  He envisions at minimum a second story master suite angled to maximize what would be an unobstructable ocean view, a wrap-around front porch for waving to the neighbors in our family-friendly neighborhood, and reconverting the ill-considered 1955 garage remodel back into a garage (amen to that).   We’re very clear that his fantasies include a remodel to his specifications on our dime.

We couldn’t agree more that this tiny house on a prime lot could be a morphed into a really fantastic place.  It’s had a lot of interior upgrades over time but it is still the original 1947 footprint.  Its 1600 square feet (including the converted garage) felt enormous when my ex and I bought it in 1973, much smaller when we added two kids, positively palatial when the kids departed, and now totally sardine-ish when both kids and families show up.  We think it will make a wonderful remodel for someone.  But we’re not those someones. 

I’ll confess that a part of me has always regretted that the timing was never right for that view remodel (divorce, college bills etc.).  As we’ve explained to the kids, the house, the cars, and their educations are finally paid for.  Definitely not looking for more debt, except at tax time when we realize our deduction-less tax burden singlehandedly supports several branches of state and federal government.

We’ve told our younger son that we think all of his remodel ideas are wonderful and that we will be happily looking down (or up) on them when the time comes.  He actually owns his own house in L.A. so it’s not like he and his family don’t have a nice roof over their heads.  But I think if you grow up in La Jolla, you never lose the draw to this place. 

Of course, the other way you know you’re getting old besides the kids standing on the roof with a sketch pad is you have to set up those nagging Living Will instructions.  (It’s  pretty much all down hill once you wake up on your 50^th birthday and find both an AARP card and an appointment for a routine colonoscopy in the mail.)  But one does have to decide at some point who will make decisions for one’s health care once neither you nor your spouse are able to.  Did we want to appoint our older son, the clinical social worker who runs programs for the homeless and has done hospice care?  Or should we go for the younger son who has an MBA?

In our fantasies, the social worker kid is sitting by our bedside adjusting our blankets and patiently listening to our endless repetitious stories as he quietly strokes our hands.  The MBA kid, we envision, is parked on the other side, iPod ear buds cranked up to 120 decibels to drown out the annoying stories, comforting us with one hand, and calculating the negative cash flow of long term care on his Blackberry with the other.  Next thing we know, Pffft! Someone accidentally trips over the plug and we’re buried in the back yard.

 For the record, the MBA kid does not find this story funny at all, insisting that a business degree would hardly prevent him from making compassionate decisions about our care.  And besides, he points out, there’s barely enough room in the back yard to park the two of us without disrupting the entire irrigation system.  And where’s the economy in THAT? 

Actually, said my husband, Olof, the tripping over the plug part, intentionally or not, didn’t sound half bad. Put us out of our misery.  Besides, for all we know, it was the social worker kid, driven cumulatively mad after the 500^th repetition of the infamous dead possum incident, whose foot suddenly intersected with the power cord.  And if it came right down to it, burying us in the back yard (despite being massively illegal) actually sounds kind of charming given our fondness for the place.  But one request:  when you do the remodel, can we have a spot with a view?

**Please Don't Send Anything to Everyone You Know

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published April 19, 2012] © 2012

Last week, an otherwise-intelligent acquaintance from La Jolla sent me (and about a hundred other of his closest friends) an email entitled “REFUSE NEW COINS!”  The all-caps subject line is usually a good tip off that it’s either an urban legend or some mass hysteria among the wingnut set, which was only confirmed by the three-inch-high exhortation to “SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!!”  That always seals the diagnosis for me.

In this particular screed, “true Americans” (Strike 3) were implored not to accept the “new” dollar coins that were intentionally missing the words “In God We Trust”.  In doing so, the email rants on, “Together we can force them out of circulation!” 

Actually, that won’t be necessary.  They’re already out of circulation since they constituted some 50,000 incorrectly imprinted coins out of a batch of three million that the U.S. Mint struck in early 2007, and instantly became collectibles.  I ascertained this in approximately three seconds by typing the words “US coins without in god we trust” into my browser and getting pages of articles about the error – and the ongoing annoyance of the U.S. Mint plagued by the dingdongs who have persisted in circulating this story over the past five years. 

It’s just so easy to check this stuff.  So why don’t more thinking people do it?  The election hasn’t even started to get as ugly as it’s going to but every day, both sides throw out quotes allegedly made by the other side which range from gross distortions to patent lies.  When Rick Santorum, for example, quoted President Obama as saying that everyone should go to college (and calling him a “snob”), it was easy to type in “Obama speech on higher education” and instantly get both the text of Obama’s speech AND the actual video which not surprisingly showed he didn’t say that at all. 

But both parties are equally guilty of this.   At this point, politicians seem to be confident that they are preaching to a nation of sheep – and I say that with apologies to ovines everywhere. 

As for internet rumors, there are a number of easy ways to check their validity (snopes.com, for example).   Still, I’ve received so many disheartening internet rants – political and otherwise – from people whose intelligence I would hardly impugn but who seem inexorably committed to believe – and pass on - whatever shows up in their in-baskets.  It just baffles me.  Is curiosity dead? 

In the coming months especially, it just seems like the entire nation needs to get a Ph.D. in skepticism.  If the first four months of this election year have been any indication, the next six are going to be a bottomless slough of disingenuous, invidious, dissembling, specious, obfuscating, fallacious perfidy and prevarication.   On top of that, I think there’s going to be a lot of lying.              

We don’t have to believe any of it.  We can fact-check it ourselves.  So the next time someone sends you an urgent internet message exhorting you to spread the word that Medicare regulations now require doctors to ask if you keep guns in your home, that KFC can’t use the word “chicken” anymore since those paper buckets actually contain mutant bio-engineered organisms, that Bill Gates will send you $1,000 for forwarding a specific email to 1,000 people, that al-Qaida plans to blow up Fashion Valley Shopping Center on a certain date,  or if someone sends you a loony screed mis-attributed to a famous person or the “secret” recipe for Mrs. Fields Cookies or wacky health tips alleged to have come from the Mayo Clinic – all emails that have ended up my in-box – PLEASE DON’T FORWARD IT.

But in the meantime, SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!!

An Ode to Olof

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published April 5, 2012] © 2012

My adult sons would disagree with me on many points but I think the one issue they wouldn’t dispute is that the best thing that ever happened to the three of us was my second husband, Olof.  This is not to discredit their  dad who has been a hugely active and loving participant in their lives (and with whom Olof has miraculously managed not to compete).   As for Mom, parenthood fortunately seems to be dissipating the kids’ litany of complaints regarding my performance. (For their complete list, email me specifying alphabetical or chronological.)  In my defense, I was a single working parent for twelve years from the time they were three and five.  Let me tell you:  it’s a tough gig.

Considering what a bad rep stepparents have, it is a paean to both Olof and to my ex’s second wife that the kids occasionally mused aloud that their ideal parents would be their two stepparents.  If only they could get rid of Mom and Dad!

This might suggest that the stepparents were pushovers.  Not so.  In fact, neither of them tolerated any grief from the kids and yet were adored.  It was a lesson that Mom and Dad, too busy competing with each other for children’s time and affection during those years, should have learned from. 

Olof (who commuted down from the Bay area for eight years before we married when the when the kids were in high school) would step off the plane on Friday nights carrying a single red rose for me.  On the way home one night, eight-year-old Henri’s voice piped up from the back seat.  “Mom, why does Olof only bring you one rose?  Why doesn’t he bring you a whole bunch?”  I turned to Henri and said, “Because sometimes less is more.”  Years later, at sixteen, when Henri first had a girlfriend, I happened to talk to her mother who said, “You have raised the most romantic young man!  Every time he comes to pick up my daughter, he brings her a single red rose.”  “Wow!” I said.  “What a great idea!”

Olof always managed to cut to the core of any issue with the kids.  I remember him clarifying the definition of manners to them as grade schoolers by explaining that “anything you do that feels natural is unmannerly.”  This they could understand.

He introduced a lexicon of Air Force and engineering jargon to the household, from “Tango Uniform” (it’s seriously broken), Z.B. (zero balance, meaning we were out of something), and the acquisition of new skills in terms of “capability.”  (One became “times table-capable,”  “laundry-capable,” “left turn-capable” etc.)  Every time we pulled into the driveway, Olof lead a chorus of “Cheated death again!”

When the kids were in college, Olof explained that our investment in their education meant that they needed to be prepared to support themselves when they were done, even if it meant double shifts flipping burgers.  (Having spent college summers cleaning toilets at the US Steel plant in Pittsburg, CA (union wages) and roofing in the East Bay’s brutal 100-degree heat, Olof was fairly impervious to complaints about labor.)  But as always, he gave financial emancipation a positive spin:  “Gentlemen,” he said (he always referred to them as gentlemen even when they were ten), “pay your own way and you’re free!  You’re out from under our thumbs forever!”  It was a concept greatly appealing to young men of their ages.    Neither of them has ever asked for a dime since the day they graduated.  Both now support families.

Mom and Dad were hardly crooks but Olof is truly the most honest and ethical man I have ever known.  Not a religious man, he just always does what he feels in his heart to be right, down to obeying traffic laws (annoyingly, he’s never had a single citation), pointing out errors in our favor on restaurant checks, and not so much as taking a pencil from the office.  (After I had to go to traffic school for a rolling stop, he affectionately referred to me as “the felon.”)   When Henri applied to MBA programs, he answered an essay question about how he’d handle ethical situations in his future business life by citing the incomparable benefit of Olof as a role model.   

In an era when stepparents get such bad press, I think it’s important to call out one who for twenty-five years has been revered by the stepees.   Olof, of course, would demur, insisting he simply treats them with respect (and love) and is treated with respect (and love) back. What I still can’t figure out is how he makes it look so easy.