Zoonoses Day

Posted on July 6, 2025 by arwenbicknell

It’s such a cute word, isn’t it? Zoonoses. It looks like it means the velvety sniffy part of a lion, or the wet and friendly snuffly part of a horse looking for carrots or sugar.

Alas, no. It’s a cuddly word for a horrific concept: the infectious diseases that can pass between animals and humans. Rabies. Tularemia. COVID-19. They can be bacterial, viral, or parasitic. These diseases are survivalists: they can transmit in all kinds of ways—direct contact, food, water, air.

If it helps, the word is not pronounced “Zoo Noses,” it’s pronounced “zoh-wanna-sees,” which reduces the adorableness by a huge margin in my book. Part of the scariness of these diseases is that the risk factor for them can be pretty high even if you’re just walking around living your everyday life. You don’t have to get divebombed by a confused bat or attacked by a flock of mean and angry geese. All you have to do is pet a dog, or eat something prepared by someone who cleaned their cat’s litterbox and failed to wash their hands vigorously enough.

However, like so many things, zoonoses are not necessarily indicative of End Times. Ringworm, scabies—they’re gross, but they’re not fatal. You might not even know if you get toxoplasmosis from that cat litter person if your symptoms are mild (and they often are).

Her’s another no-duh observation: The big risk with zoonoses is when new ones pop up. The close relations between humans and animals means that they spread fast and mutate often, and it’s hard to fight a fast-moving enemy when you don’t know anything about it—including whether it’s going to kill you at all, slowly, or otherwise. Add in the time it takes experts to figure out there’s a problem that needs addressing (think Ebola), and you get epidemics.

On the plus side, it might take too long, but antidotes usually are found eventually. Rabies is highly treatable, unless you’re Old Yeller. AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Lyme disease used to be a big deal; when my kid got it in the mid-2000s, the doctor got all excited, took a photo of “the biggest bullseye I’ve ever seen!” and flagged down a bunch of her colleagues to “hey, come get a load of this!” (Trust me, this is a pretty effective way to make you feel like the World’s Worst Parent.) Then she wrote a prescription for amoxicillin and sent us home to have big mother-son battles about taking pills without barfing them up or hiding them in the sofa cushions.

So, yeah. Pet your cat’s adorable nose. Then go wash your paws.   

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Hop a Park Day

Posted on July 5, 2025 by arwenbicknell

The town I live in now has two parks! I could do this! But it would probably take less than an hour to explore them both thoroughly (including the time needed to walk from one to the other).

My son’s favorite version of park-hopping involves the Disney complex at Orlando. He’s got a point; I highly recommend laying out the extra bucks for this feature.

But the most influential experience along these lines in my life happened one summer day in 2013 in Prince William County, Virginia. The county used to have a parkhopper thing where you got a stamp every time you visited a park, so on that nice Saturday, we made a plan to visit as many as we could before the sun went down. I think we made it to four. The kid’s favorite was a place that had mini-golf, batting cages, and a swimming hole.

My favorite was Brentsville Courthouse, where the poor kid was bored out of his mind. We looked at an 1874 church and a one-room schoolhouse built in 1928. We poked our heads into the newly restored 1822 courthouse and took a nice stroll around the grounds. As we were leaving, the site manager pointed out the jail, which was undergoing renovations and was the big focus of fund-raising that week. We were literally steps from our car when he told us this wild story about a commonwealth attorney who got shot IN a jail cell while incarcerated for running off with the teenage daughter of the richest guy in town. It really was like, “Here’s this great story! Thanks for coming! Bye!” The hubs was like, “that’s a hell of a story. Is there a book?” I googled furiously. There was not.

And that is how I came to write my first book, which was published three years later. It really is a wild tale. You should buy a copy and read all about it if you haven’t already!

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Alice in Wonderland Day

Posted on July 4, 2025 by arwenbicknell

You know how one of those “getting to know you” things that people do is ask about your favorite movie/band/book/whatever? I kind of hate that, because whenever I’m put on the spot, it’s like my brain just goes into a fugue state, paralyzed by indecision. I’m hard-pressed to remember what a book IS, much less try to figure out which one is my favorite—even my favorite for that particular day, much less of all time.

My default answer for favorite book tends to be The Great Gatsby, simply because that was the first “grownup” book I read and understood and was able to appreciate how every single word mattered. My default answer for favorite movie tends to be A Christmas Story because those scenes of Midwestern winters on the school playground really resonate, and the Old Man had more than a little in common with how I perceived my grandfather.

But in terms of longevity, Alice in Wonderland has ‘em both beat, on the page and on the screen. (And I’m talking the 1951 Disney cartoon, not that terrifying Tim Burton thing or any of the other 80 or so options.)

I have adored Alice since I was around four. Someone gave me a simplified version of the story in a pop-up book that I pretty much loved to death. Among other things, it had a pull-tab that changed the white roses to red, and it had another pull-tab that moved a flamingo’s neck and rolled the hedgehog/ball. I scoured the internet looking for this book, but all I can find is a 2003 version that clearly took a bunch of those elements and embellished them.

I think I was seven when I read the full Alice books the first time, and I felt I had found my literary twin. I liked the Oz books, but Dorothy was too sweet for me. I liked the Little House books, but Laura’s problems were too real to be funny. Alice, on the other hand—she wasn’t a goody two shoes, she was a smart aleck. She tried to be nice, but she didn’t always succeed. She was often impatient, intermittently bewildered, and occasionally lonely—all of which really hit home for this only child. Alice was where I turned when I was (often) sent to my room, when I woke up from nightmares, when I was on the outs with my classmates. I memorized The Walrus and the Carpenter and Jabberwocky.

It was a trauma of my childhood that the damn Alice ride at Disneyland was closed for repairs every single time we went until right before we moved to Illinois, my VERY LAST CHANCE, PRACTICALLY ON OUR WAY OUT OF TOWN. I was hopeful when we moved to Florida that I’d get to see it again, but there is no Alice ride at Disney World, and I had to wait until I went back to California for college to ride it a second time in my life. I have to believe it is only a matter of time before they kill Alice like they did Mr. Toad, but I’m glad it’s still there for now, although I suspect it has been upgraded into something unrecognizable, much like the Pirates of the Caribbean.

I was in junior high when I finally saw the movie. It was not —could not be—as enchanting as the book, but it might be my favorite Disney cartoon that does not involve dogs.

Alice came back as a totem when I went to college. Once again in a world I found exasperating, confusing, and lonely, that book lived in my purse for an entire semester. I still have friends from those days who send me Alice gear for birthdays.

My grandfather, who scoffed at all things child-related, spent 23 years calling me a mental midget for loving Alice as much as I did. Then he finally broke down and read it—presumably because it was that or a copy of Cosmopolitan in a dentist’s waiting room or something like that. He actually called me long-distance. Did he apologize? No, of course not. Instead, he went on for 15 minutes about how clever it was and how the word play was top rate and how much he liked Alice’s attitude. Did I say “I told you so?” No. I just thought, “we’re all mad here,” and told him I was happy he liked it.

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Air Conditioning Appreciation Day

Posted on July 3, 2025 by arwenbicknell

There’s a line in the movie Dogma: “No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater—than central air.” Ain’t it the truth?

I think I am of the last generation that didn’t take air conditioning for granted. I know my kid has no idea what it’s like to live without it. I have unpleasantly vivid memories of having heat rash for 3 days every time I visited my grandparents. When I was 12, my mom was still opening all the windows at night and then closing them up tight and pulling the curtains at sunup to keep the house cooler.

There was a brief interim when I lived in Florida where air conditioning was a given—and it was lovely. We moved to Florida from Illinois in February, and I remember throwing off my winter coat in southern Georgia and feeling liberated by the wonderful weather. I remember an equal pleasure starting in June the same year every time I would walk into a building from a mere ten minutes in the swampy outdoors and have that blast of blessedly dry, blessedly cool air hit me in the face.

My freshman year of college, my dorm at USC was not air conditioned, so I had a box fan in my window. But my room was directly above the dining hall, so it alternately blew in cool air and smoke from the grill. I spent a lot of time that year craving burgers, and in May when I moved out I spent 2 hours taking that fan apart and scrubbing it from greasy black back to white. I honestly can’t remember if my subsequent California housing had air conditioning. I assume it did, but I also know I preferred leaving the windows open as much as possible. The next time I remember having air conditioning was when I moved back to Florida in 1998. This time it was from California and in May, so the warm weather was not the joy it had been the first time around, and air hitting me in the face like a wet rag was an unpleasant welcome home. At that point, the air conditioning in my rented house was a necessity not only for me, but for my two dogs and cat.

And I’ve gotten progressively wimpier with every house I have lived in since then. Guess what? Zero regrets. Climate control is civilization!

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Disco Day

Posted on July 2, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I was too young to go to discos and dance to Chic and the like. (By the time I was of age, dance venues were called clubs, and I hewed to New Wave.)

I’ve talked before about Mrs. Sturgis, my fifth-grade teacher (I’m getting a lot of mileage out of her on this blog, which is weird since she was far from my favorite teacher) and how she really pushed music in our class. The thing I haven’t mentioned about her music education style was how she handled contemporary stuff. A lot of my grade-school teachers reserved a chunk of Friday afternoon to play records as a sort of “survived another week” reward, but Mrs. Sturgis was the only one who made us all get up and do jazzercise steps to both KC and the Sunshine Band masterpieces: Boogie Shoes AND Get Down Tonight. I’m pretty sure she also had a routine for Funky Town, but I have blocked that out.

My parents, on the other hand, considered disco to be on a par with nighttime soap operas, comic books, and other pop culture junk food—they were way more Koko Taylor than Gloria Gaynor. They’d punch the car radio buttons like they were trying to shove the entire component out of the dashboard when a disco song would come on. So all disco appreciation at home took place on headphones or in my bedroom. When a friend got me K-Tel’s Full Tilt, I liked the SOS Band as much as I liked Blondie and Devo. My parents rolled their eyes and closed my door.

In high school, I dated a guy whose musical spectrum was much broader than my own, and he traced Nile Rodgers from Duran Duran back to Chic. And thus my delight in disco blossomed. Cheryl Lynn, Alicia Bridges, Kool and the Gang—all of it.

The only aspect of disco that I never cottoned to was the Bee Gees. Maybe it’s their voices; maybe it’s all the jokes and parodies associated with them, I don’t know. But somehow that’s one aspect of disco that leaves me cringing in a fair approximation of my parents’ reaction.

This disappoints my husband, who came of age during disco but has seen maybe two mirror balls in person in his entire life and never wore dagger collars or bell-bottoms, as far as I know. Somehow the only things he DID get out of disco were the two things I avoid: the Bee Gees and the John Travolta movies.

But that’s OK, because we can come together for Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, which ranks pretty high on both our favorite movie lists and one I always recommend as a must see to friends.

A movie (but not that movie, although I know he saw it as a wee sprog) was also my kid’s first disco influence. (He insists his entrée to disco was Daft Punk’s Discovery, but I take issue with this since that wasn’t from the disco era—that makes it a gateway, at best.) I count his first actual influence as the soundtrack to The Martian, which I also highly recommend.

All that said, however, I think the Surf Punks probably wrote the all-time best disco song ever. Listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBf1RA2LNs

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Second Half of the Year Day

Posted on July 1, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Here we are, halfway through 2025! How are all y’all doing on your January resolutions?

I started late on the daily writing/social media thing, but I’ve been faithful since January 24. I don’t know if it’s working to boost an audience, but I’ve definitely got a backlog of content.

I finished the first draft of my novel. Now I’m just waiting for a bunch of beta readers to send me critiques. I’m hoping I’ll be ready to pitch it to agents in August. I haven’t had the heart to set a calendar for how long I’ll field rejections; I guess six months might be reasonable? I’ve forgotten the average time it take for an agent to blow off a pitch, so I’ll be playing that by ear.

I am very inconsistent on my golf game. But that is an improvement over consistently bad, so I’ll take it.

I have not practiced my cake baking as much as I’d hoped, so I haven’t improved that skill as much as I would have liked to. Despite a lack of cake, I have not lost the weight I hoped to. But I haven’t gained any back, which is nice. I’ll work harder on that for the next six months; just in time to pig out for the holidays!

Since I’ve had a lot of these resolutions for literally years, I’m not going to say I’ll be ready for a slew of new ones in December, but hey, worth a shot, right?

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Meteor Watch Day

Posted on June 30, 2025 by arwenbicknell

This is another one of those days that seems like it was stupidly timed. There are meteor showers, but none of the famous ones—why not wait 60 days and do it in August when the Perseids show up? I dug a little further, and apparently it is History Stuff: June 30 is the anniversary of the Tunguska Event, a big ol’ meteor explosion that flattened a chunk of Siberia in 1908.

I’ve only seen one really spectacular meteor shower. It was in 1998, when I lived in Florida, and I went out to the beach at midnight to see it—just me and a bunch of other night owls crowding the parking lot. It was truly amazing, like a leisurely and quiet fireworks show with something to see every second. It was supposed to last three nights, but when I went out the second night with my then-boyfriend, it was a relative bust, more like looking for fireflies in late summer. There were a few, but it wasn’t worth sitting outside in the heat long enough to see very many.

Hope triumphs over experience, however, and I keep dragging my family out well past bedtime on nights that the news tells me it’s gonna be great. I think my kid has decided they are a myth. We all trooped out to our front step one frosty night in Virginia bundled in blankets and sleeping bags, and although we had a nice time gabbing, we didn’t see much of anything. That’s pretty much been the drill every time. Given that it’s Monday, I’m not sure I’ll be trying tonight, but never say never!

Did you ever wonder why the sage advice is always to go out looking when respectable, sane people have been asleep for hours? When I was a kid, l assumed it wasn’t just scientists having a laugh at my expense or that the meteors were jerks that wanted to leave me sleep-deprived, but I did assume it was similar to why people died in alphabetical order in the obituaries—not that there were MORE meteors to see at that hour, just that’s when it’s darkest outside and you can see them best. But my rocket scientist grandfather set me straight. It’s because after midnight, wherever you are on Earth is facing the direction of Earth’s orbit, which means the meteors are coming at you head-on instead of some other angle. He said it’s similar to how it’s easier to see a baseball that’s thrown at your face from dead ahead of you than it is to see one thrown at your ear from the side or over your shoulder from behind. (My mom barked a laugh when I happened to tell her his explanation and then shared a story about he taught her how to catch by sticking her in front of a garage door so that if she missed the ball it ricocheted into her from behind and felt none too pleasant. “And yeah, it’s f’n impossible to see the one that hits you in the tailbone,” was her wry conclusion to that tale.)

Fortunately, the odds are pretty slim that a meteor will hit you in the back of the knee or anywhere else. Most burn up in the atmosphere, as I reckon we all learned in grade school. According to NASA, the most frequent events are smallish objects hitting the ground with extremely localized damage, and this happens every 10–20 years. So you’re probably fine.

But maybe go out and look for them tonight anyway!

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Waffle Iron Day

Posted on June 29, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I like waffles. I am a fan of Waffle House, less so a fan of Huddle House.

But at home, we lean toward pancakes, for practical purposes. It has always been thus.

I think my great-grandfather was the first one who got frustrated and chucked a waffle iron through the kitchen window.  This sounds extreme until you consider that the kitchen in that house was pretty small, and my grandmother routinely threw pans into the yard as an interim measure to make room on the counter for everything else she needed to do to get dinner on the table. She used the door, though. Then she’d go out and get them, wash them, and put them away.

The waffle iron stayed in the yard til my grandfather was instructed to throw it on the scrap heap as a useless piece of junk.

Several years later, my grandfather followed in his dad’s footsteps and chucked another one. My grandmother, who had fought with the waffle iron for years, was slightly gratified by this action since my grandfather had come into the project insisting that she was just doing it wrong.

My parents were not dummies. I don’t think they ever owned a waffle iron.

When I got married, I put one down on our registry list on a whim. A good friend of mine at the time bought it for us, opining that “every good marriage needs some room to waffle.”

To my surprise, that waffle iron worked very well. Maybe it was because it was a Belgian waffle iron, or maybe anti-stick technology had improved, but it was rare that we’d get half a waffle out and half stuck to the machine. More often, we would overfill it and watch batter pour out the sides while cooking, which made a devil of a mess to clean up, so we still preferred pancakes for prep work. But the iron itself was dandy until it fell off a counter and broke.

We didn’t bother to replace it for a long time. Then a Christmas or so ago, I got the hubs a new one. It did not go through the window, but I think that might have been because our kitchen doesn’t have windows. There was definitely a lot of grousing and huffing on the first few outings. But he says he’s figured out how to bend it to his will, so I think we are safe.

But we still don’t have them very often.

I’ve read about how you can utilize a waffle iron for other dishes—chicken, brownies, quesadillas. I’ve never tried any of that. One video I saw involved eggs and tater tots, which looked really good but I’m leery of trying to get egg unstuck, so I will probably never try it.

Anyone out there used their waffle iron in a new and unusual way? Maybe to fry their hair in the 1980s?

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Insurance Awareness Day

Posted on June 28, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Are there really people out there who are intimately aware of their insurance? Aside from those who work in the industry, I mean?

I think I’d consider myself vaguely aware of my insurance. I know who my providers are. I know my health copay. I know when my premiums are due. I have a pretty good idea of what we’ll get if any of our three cars are in a smashup, and I have a pretty good idea of how much nursing home I can do before I have to sit in front of an open window. I don’t know the payouts on my home insurance, but I know where to find them. I don’t know what the loopholes are. I’m pretty sure flooding is not covered, but I don’t know if that includes “the washing machine exploded and we need new drywall.”

I have a couple friends who have worked in insurance, and it sounds to me like the only thing worse than dealing with insurance from the outside is having to deal with it as your job. I am told it’s like most customer service things—people run the gamut from “here’s what I need, here’s all my info, spit spot, get it done,” to “What state are you in, ma’am?” “Cleveland.” And the claims can be messy. I heard a good one about a woman who ran herself over with her own car. I feel like I would be too embarrassed to admit that even to get money, but I guess she had to because she needed hospitalization—so maybe this isn’t as funny as it might be otherwise … but still. Watch what you’re doing, folks, or you’ll end up in my blog!

So I guess this day is for people like me to go and find out more about what they’re in store for if the worst occurs.

I don’t think I’ll be reporting back on this. (I suspect if I had to, the report would be that I suck at follow-through and didn’t do it.) But I encourage you all to go check your catastrophe plans!

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Helen Keller Day

Posted on June 27, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Today is also Sunglasses Day. This is the basis for a tasteless joke that I don’t have to make now because you already have the punchline in your heads.

When I was in my 20s, one of my editor bosses confessed to the room once that his recurring nightmare was that he’d sit up in bed and find Helen Keller in his room trying to kill him. I can’t tell you how hard I laughed at the idea that this able-bodied guy with all five of his senses intact wouldn’t be able to outmaneuver a deaf and blind woman—especially one who had been dead for 25 years.

I’m pretty irreverent about Helen Keller. I fully acknowledge that I do not fully appreciate what she overcame—not because I’m a jerk but because I literally cannot conceive what it was like. Having managed to stay alive for five decades and change means that I have stumbled through dark rooms on occasion and can sort of imagine being blind. As I get older, I am certainly more familiar with what it’s like to be deaf. But my imagination founders when it comes to conjuring up the feeling of being both, of not knowing how to send or receive messages, of being utterly reliant on someone else for so many things—not getting hit by a car, finding a towel to dry your hands.

I mean, that’s why babies cry, right? Because they can’t just get up and grab a snack; and they can’t say “Hey, ma, get me some grub.” They use the only means they have to get their point across that Something Needs Doing. Imagine being six years old and the same level of powerless.

I’ve talked before about how I read a TON of biographies when I was growing up. When I found a person I was interested in, I would read multiple books about that person. So I did read multiple books about Helen Keller, and I learned a lot about her. She gets a bum rap these days in a lot of ways that are deserved and not deserved. Her family owned slaves before the Civil War. She was a Socialist, she co-founded the ACLU. She spouted some popular opinions of her time about eugenics. History only teaches about her childhood, which has led to society infantilizing other disabled adults. Blah blah. Only some of this has to do with the person she was and what she accomplished.

But she wasn’t actually my person of interest. Anne Sullivan was. I guess maybe we don’t like her now either because her writing reflects a casual racism by today’s standards, despite the fact that one of the first things this Massachusetts native did on meeting Helen Keller’s family in Alabama was argue with them about slavery. But what that woman accomplished is really difficult to overstate. She didn’t have a plush background—her parents were immigrants; Anne got trachoma and was basically blind from the age of 5; her mom died when she was 8; and when she was 10, her dad bailed on the family. Her younger sister went to live with an aunt, Anne and her brother went to live in the poorhouse which pretty much doubled as a nuthouse. Anne’s brother only lasted a few months before he died of TB. The poorhouse was not a nice place—in 1875 it was investigated for reports of not only sex abuse but also cannibalism. A guy on the investigator team ran a school for the blind, which Anne heard about and after five years, a bunch of failed eye operations, and a lot of begging, that investigator finally got her into the blind school.

Growing up like that, school was a lot more for her than just learning to read and write. She had to learn how to function in society and not like an animal in constant mortal danger. Again, I can’t really imagine what that must have been like, so I get a little glib. But lots of good came out of that school for her: She finally got some eye operations that helped her see a little better, she graduated valedictorian, and —maybe most notably—she was friends with another student who was blind and deaf and gave Anne experience with the manual alphabet.

After graduation, she was recommended to the Kellers, mostly to be a governess and keep Helen out of trouble. The family didn’t seem to expect much—they didn’t want to educate the kid; they just wanted to keep her from smashing up the furniture when she wanted a piece of cake. But once things clicked and the two sides connected, it was hard for them to keep up. Anne pushed and eventually got the family to send Helen to the Massachusetts school that Anne had graduated from. That ended badly when what appears to have been inadvertent plagiarism (forgiven even by the original author) by 11-year-old Helen blew up into a national incident.

Nonetheless, Helen and Anne stuck it out. Helen graduated from Radcliffe, became a writer and speaker, and lived a truly amazing life for someone for whom the original expectation was only to be a docile invalid. Anne hung in there for something like 50 years; she and Helen were still a team when Anne died—living a truly amazing life for someone whose dad ditched her in a loony bin at the age of 10.

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