DOOCE!

In Knoxville! Cool places in Knoxville I think she might like:

1. Tomato Head
2. Yee-Haw Industries
3. Ijams
4. Mag-Pies
5. Nama (downtown)
6. Knoxville Zoo (if with kids)
7. Carpe Librum
8. Dead End Barbecue
9. The French Market
10. Bliss

Places she must avoid:

1. Kingston Pike
2. Kingston Pike
3. Kingston Pike
4. Turkey Creek
5. Kingston Pike

HELLO TO DOOCE!

The Pleasure of Her Company

This past Saturday morning, Miss M and I prettied up a bit and proceeded to our local tea shop with my mother and aunt. There we ordered pots of tea (a berry tissane for Miss M), delicate cucumber sandwiches, thin slices of rich pound cake, and scones piped with whipped cream topped with apricot and raspberry preserves. Everything was exquisite: bite-sized and delicious. There was an absolutely tremendous baby shower underway--I've never seen so many gifts, positively heaps of them--and the little girls wore beautiful dresses, patent leather shoes, and outsized hair bows. Like eight year-old Miss M, they were wide-eyed with the wonder of being allowed to eat scones AND cake AND cookies, and they were all on their best behavior in hopes of prolonging the fantastical experience.

Although welcoming of all, it struck me that a tea shop is an intensely feminine place. It's telling that this tea shop doesn't even have a men's room--only a ladies' room and a unisex bathroom (both nicely decorated, I might add). There were very few men at the shop's tables. Our table noticed with amusement the stray men who would wander in, then become so unsettled with the tea shop's overriding femininity that they beat a hasty retreat. As it turns out, tea shops historically were a favorite meeting place of suffragists. Could there be a more perfectly civilized place for women to gather and plot the course of women and the vote? I really don't think so.

After tea, we proceeded to Southern Market, where every woman in Knoxville was handing over the contents of her wallet. The Southern Market is a labyrinth of little shops heavy on monograms, throw pillows, and embroidered towels. Miss M, a girly-girl of the highest order, loves the decorative aspect of the place and can spend hours perusing the wares until she finds a little something worth her pocket money. Did I mention the Southern Market was filled with women? Other than a plainly bewildered elderly gentleman carrying his wife's toy terrier, there didn't seem to be a man in the place.

I don't know of many public spots that are exclusively a woman's domain. But tea shops and interior decorating stores come darn close to it. Vive la femme!

Thanks, I'd Rather Not (Have That Cardiac Cath)

For any of you interested in health care, I'm going to go a little off message here at family-oriented 500Jerk and point to a New Yorker article offering one explanation why U.S. health care costs are so high. This very readable article about a small Texas border town where Medicare per capita spending is the highest in the country posits that over-utilization likely is a cause of our ever-escalating national health care costs, with "over-utilization" meaning the ordering of medically unnecessary items and services.

In a system where doctors are paid for each test and procedure ordered, and where some physicians even have hospital ownership stakes, the temptation to order additional services can be, well, financially irresistible. If, for example, a physician makes $100 every time a patient has an in-office ultrasound, patients can come to be regarded as profit centers rather than human beings whose overall health is at stake. And although you might think that a little extra health care never killed anyone, you'd be wrong. Ordering unnecessary tests and procedures isn't just affecting our national bottom line--unnecessary tests and procedures actually harm patients in the form of infections, complications, recuperation times, lost productivity, etc. Plus, on a more personal level, I know that languishing in double-booked medical offices is bad for my sanity.

I very much like the building-a-house analogy used in the article to point out how paying per test/procedure doesn't get us where we want to be:

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later?

After reading the article, you may think twice about why your physician is recommending a procedure or insists on an office visit when a three-minute telephone call could answer your question. Maybe it's for your health. But I'm sorry to say that, under the current system, it could also be that the procedure or visit benefits the physician's bottom line.

Resplendent

This maple tree shades our hammock in summer, and whenever I get the chance, I like to swing in the hammock with a kid or two and cool off. But the best part of the tree comes in fall, when its leaves flame orange, then yellow. It's visible from my bedroom window, and I spend a lot of time staring at it while brushing my teeth. So I thought I would share:



I like the word "resplendent," don't you?


A view from the aforesaid hammock.

But what's that creeping sense of unease I feel? That slightly upside down feeling in my stomach?

Oh, right. Work calls.

Better snap to it.

A Cautionary Halloween Tale

Say you've promised a trusting friend you'll bring pumpkins to carve at her house on Halloween such that she and the small children she is hosting are relying on you to produce these pumpkins. And let's just say--for the sake of argument--that you wait until 3PM on Halloween to purchase aforesaid pumpkins.

SEE WHAT CAN HAPPEN?

That's right, though you'd think grocers on Halloween would be selling pumpkins like nobody's business, there are actually no pumpkins to be had on the day itself. No matter how many stores you visit (e.g., seven) or what increasingly desperate price you're willing to pay, there will be no pumpkins available. None.

And you will be forced to stand in line for twenty minutes at an insanely crowded East Tennessee Wal-Mart--thereby confirming your worst opinions of discount shopping--to purchase the best substitute you can think of: the lowly, non-orange, completely ridiculous . . . CANTALOUPE.

In my case, as it turned out, the other children had brought their own previously purchased pumpkins to the party. THEIR parents were thinking ahead. And the 500Jerk children are good-natured and old enough to be amused with being the only children in Knoxville having to carve melons on Halloween. But I know I will never EVER live down the day they had to carve cantaloupes on Halloween.

Because carving cantaloupes on Halloween? That?

That is just LAME.

Luke

A special thing about our 22 year-old daredevil nephew--a recent Coast Guard Academy graduate and lover of planes, motorcycles, microbrews, and all physically risky endeavors--is that he has a soft spot for six year-old boys who worship the very ground he walks upon.

Despite their sixteen-year age difference, Luke generously indulges Boy Wonder's insistence on sitting beside (and on) him at all meals, plays chess and tag with him, and pokes gentle fun at Boy Wonder.

Boy Wonder, naturally, is delighted and amazed with his capable and brave big cousin. In fact, I'm pretty sure he would leave town with Luke if his parents would let him. So the fact that this weekend brings both Luke AND Halloween has Boy Wonder in a complete frenzy.

Adding a bunch of candy to this already volatile mix seems crazy, but I'm afraid that's exactly what we're going to do.