The Llama That Went A-Wool

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published April 3, 2014] © 2014 

Every year on my sister’s birthday, I make a donation to Bat World Sanctuary in her name, and on mine, she contributes to Heifer International. 

While our choices of beneficence may suggest not-too-subtle metaphorical underpinnings, these are actually two of our favorite charities.

Our aunt was a biologist who was one of the world's foremost authorities on Myotis Lucifigus (the North American Little Brown Bat) and taught us how harmless bats are and how useful to the environment.  And Heifer International gives livestock (ducks, lambs, pigs, cows etc.) to third world families and teaches them how to care for the animals and increase the flock for a sustainable source of food. 

For my most recent birthday, I was genuinely touched to learn that a llama had been donated to a family in the high Andes on my behalf.  The sale of the wool would help pay for food, education, and medicines for the recipient family.  The donation announcement included a note from my sister: “I hope this is also a corrective emotional experience.” 

Boy, my sister really knows how to hurt a person.  The Llama Incident has been on my conscience for decades and she knows it.  But let me say in my defense that every new bride makes mistakes.  Is there a bride out there who has not left the bag of innards in the turkey?  Who has not confused a bulb for a clove of garlic and ended up with a beef stew that could wipe out New Jersey? 

But I’ll admit that my desecrating the llama was probably a little more unusual.  I was a young bride, still in college. Inexperienced in the ways of the world, and specifically, wool cleaning.

Of course, it wasn’t a whole llama, just the skin of one, which my parents had received as a gift and which I persuaded them to lend me for my tiny newlywed apartment.  Naturally, a white long-haired llama skin gets pretty dirty after a while, so the next time I called home, I asked my mother if it might be washable.  Dry-cleaning on a student budget was out of the question.  She said she thought it was. 

Now, afterwards, Mom insisted that what she meant by “washable” was that I might put the llama skin ever so carefully into a bathtub full of cold water with the teeniest drop of Woolite and poke it very gently from time to time with my index finger.

Mom said she NEVER meant that I should take it down to the basement laundry room and throw it in the Jumbomatic Super-Washer with a whole load of underwear.  (Even I knew better than to mix whites and darks.)

Well, imagine my utter dismay when I went down to get my laundry and found that the backing on the skin had somehow disintegrated (I only used warm!) and I had a whole washer load of wet, hairy llama with all of our dainties hopelessly (and I do mean hopelessly) entangled within. 

I was miserable.  The waste!  Not only had I ruined this beautiful skin but this meant that the donor llama had died in vain.  Not to mention, it wasn’t even my llama.  What was I going to tell the folks, I agonized, as I stood there tearfully hacking the matted (but so clean!) mass from its death grip on the agitator with a meat cleaver (wedding gift).  Finally succeeding, there was nothing to do but put the big hairy ball in the dryer.  All of our underwear was in there somewhere. 

It was truly weeks before we could extricate all the laundry from the tightly tangled mass of hair, which we kept conveniently piled on top of our dresser.  My last task before bed at night was to delicately, painstakingly, extricate a set of undergarments for the next day from the llama with a pair of nail scissors. 

Friends would ask us, “What’s that big hairy thing on your dresser?”  (It was a small one-bedroom apartment and you needed to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom.)  And to his credit, my then-husband would put his arm around me protectively and say, “It’s a llama with underwear in it.” 

Unfortunately for me, it became a favorite family story: The Time Inga Ran the Llama Through the Washer and Ended Up with a Hair Ball the Size of Connecticut.

So I was truly grateful to my sister for what was some long overdue llama therapy.  I couldn’t bring back the first llama but I could bring food and warmth and income to a family far away who probably knew better than to wash animal skins in an automatic washer, not that they likely had one anyway.

I feel better already.

The Pinewood Princess

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 20, 2014] © 2014 

Single mothers working at clerical jobs don’t have a lot of status in a place like La Jolla (OK, anywhere) but for a few years, there were two weeks a year where I owned this place.  I had the official scale for the annual Cub Scout Pinewood Derby.

For those of you who never had a Cub Scout, the Pinewood Derby in March is the biggest event of the year.  There’s a lot of fancy stuff you can get on-line now, but when I was running the local Cub Scout program, there were only standard issue Pinewood Derby car kits containing a five ounce block of pine in a car-ish shape, and some plastic wheels and axles.  It was your job to turn it into a mean aerodynamic racing machine.  Keeping the finished product as close to the five ounce weight limit as you could get it was alleged to make the car go faster.  Hence the importance of the scale. 

It didn’t matter what other scale you had access to:  the Post Office, the U.S. Mint, the “jewelry” scales at head shops in Pacific Beach (probably the most accurate scales in America).  Our Pack scale was the only one that counted. 

The cars were raced on a gravity track several at a time until the fastest car was determined which went on to the regional competition.  La Jolla is nothing if not a competitive community.  It’s actually meant as a supervised project simply because tools are often involved but the adult supervision line could get pretty blurred.   In fact, someone commented to me at one point that the Pinewood Derby is actually a competition for adults who must be accompanied by a 7-10 year old child.

Now, of course, you can search the internet for tips on how to make your car go faster but back then, there was only Inga-net for parents who needed help.  Fortunately, my now-husband, Olof, helped me create Auntie Inga’s Aerodynamic Hints.  I came across a copy of this document recently and even I am fairly dazzled that any document attached to my name contained understandable instructions about drag, surface drag, departure vortices and (I’m totally dazzled with this one), smooth laminar flow.  The whole idea, of course, was that if you wanted your car to go faster, you needed to reduce drag/resistance which could be accomplished by cutting your little block into a more aerodynamic shape, sanding it with increasingly fine sandpaper, painting it with enamel paint and getting the wobble out of the wheels.

It was probably not surprising that some of the work would be outsourced.  I would regularly get calls at work from secretaries who had been tasked with prep work on their bosses’ child’s Pinewood Derby vehicle and would inquire, “So just how many times do I have to sand this thing?”  More than a few had sanded the little plastic wheels into oblivion and were inquiring about replacements.  Before I left for work, I put out carefully labeled envelopes of parts, or even whole new car kits for kids and dads who had gotten a little carried away with a jig saw. 

Always feeling bad for the kids who were eliminated early on, a fellow Mom, Linda, and I decided that we would make this the kinder, gentler Cub Scouts, probably exactly the sentiment that founder Baden Powell created scouting to combat.  Every year, we got a local pawn shop in Pacific Beach to donate a lot of scout-appropriate stuff to us which we spread out on a big table, so that as soon as a kid lost, he could go over and pick out something.  Some of the donations, like a guitar and some camp stoves, almost made it worth throwing the race. 

We softened the blow of losing even further with 20 boxes of Girl Scout cookies (early cross-merchandising) and six gallons of lemonade, but Linda and I also decided to award every kid a ribbon of some kind on the grounds that even the kids who had never seen their car before the night of the race should go away with something.  To this end, Linda and I spent an entire evening making 77 ribbons for the “aesthetic judging”.  (Sorry, Baden.) 

As we rapidly discovered, there is only so much you can say about a five ounce block of pine.  We sat there with a thesaurus and some brochures from cars I’d looked at recently.  Problem is, brochures that described cars I could afford at the time more often had descriptors like “peppy considering its 1.2 liter engine” and “Voted least bad in its class by Car and Driver.” An appropriate ribbon category would have been Kid Most Covered in Graphite.  

But back to the scale.  For two weeks a year before the Pinewood Derby, a steady stream of Dads and kids streamed through my house to use the official scale.  During the day, I would return calls to some of these Dads during my lunch hour.  A snippy secretary would cooly inform me that Mr. Jones was in conference all afternoon and would not be able to take my call.  But as soon as I mentioned the word Pinewood Derby, she’d cut me off with a frantic, “DON’T HANG UP!  HE’S ACROSS THE STREET HAVING LUNCH.  HE ASKED ME TO COME GET HIM RIGHT AWAY IF YOU CALLED!”  I’ve never had so much power in my life.  (Or since.) From low-class single mom to Pinewood Princess.  Everybody took my call.  I had the scale.  I had parts.  The day after the Derby, of course, my Cinderella life was abruptly over.

But fyi, if you need them, I’ve still got some boxes of extra axels around someplace.

 

*Encountering The 70's

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 13, 2014] © 2014 

You never hear the term anymore, but when my former husband and I first moved here in the 1970’s, encounter groups were in full swing. 

For those who may have arrived in Southern California later, encounter groups were generally weekend or week-long unstructured group meetings of eight to 12 people plus a leader/facilitator with the alleged intent of increasing emotional expressiveness and communication, and promoting personal growth. 

Brochures abounded promising the opportunity to explore one’s sexuality, improve marital relationships, stop smoking/drinking/eating, explore one’s sexuality, unclog one’s arrested development and explore one’s sexuality.  Overcoming sexual hang-ups was very popular then. 

There were nude encounter groups and even marathon encounter groups in which the participants would meet continuously for 24 hours on the theory that a lack of sleep would break down defenses and allow the real you to emerge.  Apparently, the real you often ended up naked, exploring his or her sexuality.

Curious to experience the encounter group phenomenon that was so different from our former far-less-explored East Coast lives, and frankly, clueless as to what we were getting into, we signed up for a week-long series of workshops at an idyllic but isolated setting that featured only organic vegetarian food grown on site without harming bugs. If nothing else, I thought this would be a good opportunity to withdraw from what had become a dismaying over-indulgence in Mounds Bars.  There wasn’t a cube of white sugar for 50 miles.

The first thing we discovered was that the encounter movement had its own dialect.  On Day One, the group facilitator sat us on the floor in a circle and told us that while things would get “heavy,” we were there to “nourish” ourselves.  It made me think of lunch, preferably a burger which I was already missing. 

We went around the circle to introduce ourselves.  Most of our group claimed to be there to “release some old tapes.”  It took me a few minutes to catch on that this had nothing to do with the music industry. 

We were obviously in a group with some seriously experienced encounterees.  They wanted to get right to it.

“We’ve been here ten f-ing minutes already,” grumped the guy to my right, “and nobody has said anything deep.”

“I can relate to that,” said the girl next to him.  She turned to my ex.  “I feel close to you.”

“Thank you,” said Ex politely. 

“You’re grateful to Sarah because she feels close to you,” reiterated the leader for no reason I could figure out. 

The group quickly zoned in on my ex and me, clearly the weakest members of the herd.  “Was that your parent or your child speaking?  I mean, what’s your script?” queried another girl.

“Um, do I need a script?” said Ex.

“You’re wondering if you need a script,” observed the leader who did not appear to be much of an original thinker.

“I hear where you’re coming from,” said another guy to Ex.  “And I really feel your pain.  But hey, man, you’re here to self-actualize.”

Ex:  “Um, I’m not sure—

“Put your hesitation on the hot seat and talk to it,” suggested the guy next to me.  “Look, I’ve been in a bad place myself.  It’s a bummer.  Just let it all hang out.  Beat your fists on the cushion.  Scream.  But stay in the here and now.”

Meanwhile, a girl across the circle gave me a huge smile. “I want to experience you,” she said.

“Bathroom break!” I said.

I don’t remember too much about the other workshops that week, except for one about choice.  The premise was that everything that happens in life is our own choice.  If you’re sad because someone was mean to you, you chose to be sad.  “You have to agree to it!” the two group facilitators kept admonishing us. 

Sick people choose to be sick.  Kids who parents divorce choose for their parents to divorce.  Poor people choose to be poor.  I whispered to my ex, did we actually choose to pay money for this?  I just couldn’t bring myself to blame all poor people for being poor. If one were to do a “Where are they now?”, I’m guessing these guys are running the Tea Party. 

The choice workshop was definitely my least favorite.  But then, by that time I had been without both Mounds Bars and cheeseburgers for a week and was getting surly.  Besides, our room had black widow spiders which are not my favorite but which the facilitators insisted had just as much right to live as I did.  I chose to squash them. 

When we got home, both my ex and I agreed that it had been an intense, thought-provoking, provocative, sometimes enlightening week full of more arachnids and naked people than we had ever seen at one time.   Meanwhile, all the daisies in our garden had succumbed in particularly hot weather.  “Well,” shrugged my husband, “I guess the daisies didn’t choose to live.”

The Great Morgani Leaves The Sidewalk

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 6, 2014] © 2014 

It would probably surprise many people who know me (or then, maybe it wouldn’t) that one of the highlights of my life was waltzing to the Dr. Zhivago movie’s Lara’s Theme with a homeless guy on the sidewalk in downtown Santa Cruz serenaded by a space-alien-costumed accordion player named The Great Morgani.  The homeless guy had asked me to dance and it would have been rude to decline.  Plus, the opportunity to embarrass your two college-age sons? Oh, yeah.

Going downtown to see The Great Morgani had become part of our ritual during my husband’s and my frequent trips to Santa Cruz over the years.  Part of the draw was just to see what over-the-top spandex ensemble Morgani AND his accordion would be wearing that week (only a picture can do them justice) but also because he stood out as a unique character even among Santa Cruz’s eclectic community.  Believe me, that’s saying something.

When we had first gone to look at UC Santa Cruz for Rory, it wasn’t an altogether successful trip.  While Rory has always been a free thinker, Santa Cruz seemed a few sigmas on the side of weird even to him.  We couldn’t help but notice the “no tie-dyeing in sinks” signs in the co-ed dorm bathroom.  Finding a downtown Santa Cruz café for lunch, the cashier pointedly informed me that they did not serve Coca-Cola (liquid rat poison, she said) and when I grabbed a bunch of napkins for our messy grilled organic veggie sandwiches, a voice from the line behind me announced, “Do you REALLY need all those?”  I turned to my husband Olof and whispered, “Not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” 

Further, lifelong San Diego resident Rory, despite being enamored of the idyllic campus nestled among the redwoods, wasn’t sure he could “live in a cold climate.”  (He’s never lived it down from his actual-cold-climate-originating parents.) 

But ultimately, he decided that this was the place for him, met and married his wife there, went to graduate school there, and lives there to this day as a clinical social worker.  Our trips to that area of the state increased even more when his younger brother, Henri, attended UC Santa Cruz’s cosmic opposite some 45 miles up the Peninsula as both an undergraduate and graduate student. 

As close as my sons are, they found each other’s campuses flat-out creepy and made a point of avoiding setting foot on the other’s collegiate turf.  Rory found that the uber-competitive, rarefied academic environment at Henri’s campus gave him diarrhea while the athletic Henri couldn’t conceive of a student body’s intentional irreverence at naming their sport teams the Banana Slugs after the ultra-slimy yellow banana-shaped denizens of local redwood trees.  (“Go Slugs!”)

Like many of their downtown Santa Cruz neighbors, Rory and his family now raise chickens for the fresh eggs in their backyard, while Henri and his family live in Westwood which is zoned against them.  It’s amazing how one’s college choice sets a tone for the rest of one’s life.
 

As a teenager, Rory’s favorite sport, aside from Scuba at which he became an instructor, was pinging his divorced parents.  So it probably wasn’t too surprising that when his talented pianist/doctor father tried to get him to embrace a musical instrument, Rory took up the accordion.  And that was how Rory met The Great Morgani several years later when he arrived as a freshman at Santa Cruz.  Morgani, Rory learned, had been a stockbroker who one day threw in the towel, er, portfolio, and became an accordion-playing street performer.  Rory was awed that this could be a career option.

With both sons in the Bay area for a number of years, Santa Cruz became a popular meeting place for the family, and The Great Morgani a must-do of weekend visits.  So I was distraught to learn recently that after 17 years as being of one of Santa Cruz’s best loved institutions, new city rules barring performing in close proximity to buildings caught him in their net.  The idea of going to Santa Cruz and not being able to go see The Great Morgani, well, what’s the point?  OK, grandchildren. Still, it just won’t be the same. 

 

Thanks for the memories, Great One. And I’ll always think of Lara’s Theme as “our song.”

 

 

 

When Science Is Fiction

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published February 20, 2014] © 2014 

Both my husband and I enjoy reading science fiction although Olof’s preferred focus is outer space while mine involves health and beauty tips from women’s magazines which are especially bountiful this time of year.  I love this stuff.  The sheer creativity!  The total illogic!  The charming lunacy! And above all, the exclamation points!  All of the advice in these magazines is, of course, attributed vaguely to “science,” research,” or “experts.”  After culling dozens of “tips” from the January glossies, here are some of my favorites:

Bring the beach home.  Ocean air is pumped with negative ions which may amp up blood oxygenation leaving you calmer and happier.  Create instant ocean air by investing in an ionic purifier and running it for 90 minutes before you wake up.  As someone who has lived 262 steps from the Pacific Ocean for decades, I can only imagine what a crabby nut job I’d be if I hadn’t been sucking up ions all this time.  In fact, why aren’t all La Jollans, cocooned in ionic bliss as we are, deliriously happy?  Are those scheming pinnipeds and crafty cormorants siphoning it all off before it gets to us?  With every negative ion in me, I believe this needs to be investigated.

Exercise tip:  Making photocopies at work?  Do squats in front of the machine.  I am so trying to imagine this at my former workplace which was 90% male and where the photocopier was in the main hallway.  I’m not sure but I think H.R. had a specific policy against flashing the co-workers.

We recommend Sephora’s compact with 16 eye shadows made with antioxidant-packed cocoa.  So, are you supposed to eat them?

Write yourself a peppy note.  Nurture your inner optimist by scribbling a sentence or two about your favorite moment (or hour) of the week on a kitchen chalkboard, e.g “Girls night out + doubled over with laughter + lobster mac n’ cheese = a memorable dinner.  Must do it again soon!”  OK, so how are the kids going to feel when they pass by the chalk board where Mom has written, “Did Dad in the laundry room on top of the washer during spin cycle!  Gave each other massages with fabric softener!  MUCH better than Viagra!”

Eat garbanzo beans to fight gray hair.  These beans, also known as chickpeas, provide tons of protein along with the trace mineral manganese.  It’s known to prevent changing pigmentation, a.k.a. gray hair!  So how many truckloads would you have to eat per day to fire your colorist?  Maybe stop by CVS and pick up some manganese instead?

Eat cilantro to prevent hair loss:  It works as a purifying agent to rid the body of toxic metals which can stop nutrients from getting to your scalp, resulting in hair loss.  OK, so why isn’t every guy in America downing cilantro shakes?

Eat lentils for hair growth.  They’re an ideal source of iron, which is so important for full, lustrous locks!  This is especially key if you have thin hair!  Hmm, maybe that should be a cilantro-lentil shake.

A good excuse to eat chocolate:  People who do so have less belly fat.  [Inga begs to differ.]  Researchers think antioxidant-rich dark chocolate may curb cortisol, a hormone that triggers abs flab. Snack on two squares a day.  OK.  How big are the squares?

Train your fat.  Workouts don’t just help you ditch extra weight – they can also teach your fat to behave better.  …Studies suggest that 12 weeks of vigorous aerobic exercise can make a type of white fat – the kind under your skin that you can pinch – act more like healthier brown fat.  The difference?  Brown fat doesn’t just sit still:  It burns energy to produce heat, which results in better blood sugar control and a healthier body composition.  I predict the next diet craze will be “What Color Is My Fat?”  You read it here.

But I’m not an unreasonable person.  I’m willing to cut “science” and “research” and “experts” a lot of slack if they happen to conclude something I want to hear.  The Dec-Jan AARP Magazine, for example, reported that drinking two cups of hot cocoa a day for 30 days significantly improved (yes, they did say significantly) memory in older adults.  Cocoa “boosted blood flow to the brain, particularly in those whose flow was impaired.”  I would definitely put myself in the impaired flow category so do I get to drink three?  And if I wanted to make a late bid for Mensa, ten?  It didn’t say what this did to the waistline of the memory impaired, but what’s the point of being svelte if you’re senile?

So my plan for 2014 is to sit in my negative-ion-rich front yard chugging cocoa, eating eye shadow, and penning peppy notes.  All, of course, in the name of science.

 

A Grim Fairy Tale

[Let Inga Tell You, La Jolla Light, published February 13, 2014] © 2014 

I was recently reading a fairy tale to my tiny grandchildren:

Once upon a time, sweeties, in a land closer than you think, there lived magic flying machines called commercial airplanes who made it their business to take the people from one end of the kingdom to the other so they could see new places, or visit their family, or do work.  The commercial airline people loved their jobs, and wanted to make all the people who flew with them happy. 

If your airplane left late, the airline people felt so bad about it that they insisted on serving free champagne for the entire flight.  If your flight was late or cancelled, you could run over to a different company of airline people and they were deliriously happy to take your ticket.  No change fees, no hassle, and plenty of seats.   In fact, you could often have an empty seat next to you.  Yes, darlings, really. 

But then a great big ogre called deregulation lumbered into the land.  At first the kingdom’s inhabitants didn’t realize it was an ogre because it was wearing sheep’s clothing.  OK, maybe grandma is mixing metaphors here.   But the ogre was offering sheep, er, cheap seats.  Who could argue with that?  The kingdom dwellers thought it would be just the same as before, only cheaper.  They totally forgot the old adage, there is no free lunch.  They couldn’t have fathomed how literally true that would be. 

When prices were set before the big ogre came, the way the airline people could compete was by providing service, like fluffy pillows, full meals, and actually being really nice to the passengers.  But now that the prices were not set, the airline people competed only by fares.  When fuel costs went up, the airline people flew fewer and fewer flights with teenier and teenier seats and less and less legroom.  The 6’3” business flier kingdom dwellers, like your grandpa Olof, suddenly found themselves sitting with their knees around their necks.  No, you’re absolutely right; it isn’t very comfy.  The kingdom dwellers were astonished to find that those fluffy pillows were now inflatables and cost $8, a “sandwich” consisting of two thick slices of stale bread and a thin sliver of turkey cost $10, and the airline people, who used to be so nice, had been replaced by graduates of the Evil Troll Travel School. They thought nothing of leaving the kingdom dwellers sitting on the tarmac for nine hours without food, water, or working bathrooms.  This became known as the Prisoner of War Model of airline travel.

Even though there were far fewer airplanes flying, the airline people began cancelling lots of flights, often citing “weather.”  Global warming aside, there suddenly appeared to be a lot more weather than there used to be.  Your grandpa Olof got Marriott Gold status on Houston alone.  But ever since the ogre arrived, all the airplanes were full so that if your airplane got cancelled due to “weather,” or its imaginary twin, “mechanical problems,” there were no seats for three days unless you camped at the airline gate with your bags and did something called “standby.”  And good luck with that.

Of course, it would make sense to go non-stop so you wouldn’t have to spend three days in Houston but the airline people also implemented the “hub and spoke” model not coincidentally styled after a torture device popular in the Middle Ages.  

But the airline people did do one nice thing:  they prohibited smoking on airplanes, replacing it with the constant ping of iPad games.  Sort of like water dripping from a faucet except you can’t put a bucket under it.  And even worse, the evil troll airline people, feeling that they were not punishing  the kingdom dwellers enough, are considering allowing cell phone use on airplanes.  Even the sky marshall folks will not be able to keep up with the on-board homicides if they do, as kingdom dwellers, forced to listen to bored passengers’ banal droning for six straight hours, will finally snap and beat them to death with a tray table that was not in its full upright and locked position.  The TSA people will respond by removing tray tables from airplanes on the grounds that they could be used for terrorist purposes. 

The experience has become so miserable - and ironically, not all that cheap - that lots of kingdom dwellers don’t fly anymore except under something called duress.  Some of them are kingdom dwellers who remember when the airplane trip – yes, in coach! - was part of the fun of getting there, and where their now-mandatorially unlocked baggage wasn’t free shopping for baggage handlers, peanuts weren’t considered a meal, and water wasn’t a deadly weapon.  I know, sweeties, it’s hard to imagine.

My little granddaughter shuddered.  “Didn’t mommy tell you not to read us scary stories right before bed?”
 

**There's More Cookin' Than The Food

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published Feb. 6, 2014] © 2014 

My husband is having an emotional affair.  There, I’ve said it. 

Actually, if we’re being perfectly honest, it’s THREE emotional affairs and they’re all with cooking show honeys. I will refer to them as the Southern Sweetie, the Pioneer Person, and the Italian Temptress.   

It all started when Olof had minor surgery in 2012 that went really wrong. For a month, he lay in bed sipping his liquid diet and incongruously watching the Food Channel.  I guess it was eating by proxy. 

You’d think that would all have changed once he could eat actual food again.  But I know for a fact he’s still cruising cooking shows. Other people try to sneak a look at someone’s cellphone or email but I’m trying to get a peek at Olof’s DVR.  Which I would if I could figure out how to use it.

Of the three, the one that really worries me is the Southern Sweetie.  After walking in on the show some twenty times, I was dismayed to learn that the total number of episodes in the series had been…six.  There’s not a whole lot of deleting going on here, a classic sign of food porn addiction.  But I soon discovered that the problem wasn’t a fixation on the food.

Inga: “I didn’t realize you liked Southern cooking.”

Olof (transfixed to the screen):  “Is she cooking?”

No, Olof is completely infatuated with this young hottie’s 100-watt smile, her big blue eyes, her blond hair, and her southern accent that is thicker than the maple syrup she uses in her pumpkin scones. 

Every time she says “mah” (my), Olof falls deeper under her spell.  When she starts creatin’ a casserole, or “buildin’ mah bourbon pecahn pah,” Olof’s eyes go completely out of focus.  When she looks right into the camera, flashes that killer smile, and says (hopefully of the pah) “it’s super moist,” Olof has gone to another dimension.

The premise of the six shows is that in each episode, she’s teaching some clueless codger who has never even boiled water how to make a “romanic” meal for some lady love.  She is all encouragement as she coos at the codger with her drop-dead smile, “You could be a little more vig-rus with yer whiskin’.”  Olof would love to be a little more vig-rus with HIS whiskin’, believe me. 

It’s total culinary seduction.  No guy fails with her.  Cook “cun-try haym n’ pataytas” with her and everything will be unicorns and rainbows.  It will be like the first time you had sex.  Only better.  The girl will be happy too. 

She may have her blond hair in a demure pony tail at the nape of her neck but I’m sure Olof is fantasizing that the second that camera is off, the pony tail comes out, the blond hair cascades down the back, and she and the codger are locked in a hot embrace over the curried cauliflower florets.  If this show returns, I guarantee you Olof will be first in line for the codger casting call. 

As for the Pioneer Person, I’m sorry to say that as attractive and appealing as we both find her, what Olof is really lusting after is the cheddar.  I swear she must have a skip loader backing up to her house every Monday with 500-pound palettes of cheese and butter, i.e. all the stuff our primary care doctor, Dr. No, won’t let us have.  I get that she is feeding ranch hands in addition to her own family but a typical recipe starts with a roux of flour and six sticks of butter, followed by whole milk or cream, and a couple buckets of shredded cheddar all melted into a decadently gooey sauce that is poured over a vat of pasta and served alongside individual two-pound steaks.  Given that this is a cattle ranch, you kind of suspect that you saw the steak in a different form in a previous scene. 

As for the Italian Temptress, even I agree she is drop-dead gorgeous and has a radiant smile.  (Olof is a sucker for smiles.)  She’s also suspiciously thin. This isn’t the saturated fat fest of the Pioneer Person but it isn’t exactly diet food either.  I’m guessing that off-camera, she spends seven hours a day on a Stairmaster interspersed with kale cleanses.  It’s the only explanation.   Fortunately for me, she doesn’t have time for Olof with all that Stairmastering.  Besides, she’s got a husband who may or may not be Italian.  You don’t mess with those guys unless you want to end up as an ingredient in a tray of Party Perfect Lasagna. 

I just want to make clear to all three of them, especially the Southern Fried Vixen:  you can’t have my codger!  And as for Olof, I’d like to point out that I have a nice smile too.  Olof?  Olof?