Stacey's Blog

By the time this is posted on the Internet and telephone issues will have hopefully been resolved for Mono County and the surrounding areas. It was quite the cluster “you-know-what” when on Tuesday morning around 7:15 am a dairy truck managed to yank down several utility poles near Rovana Elementary School. Shortly thereafter locals in the Town of Mammoth Lakes started a barrage of telephone calls to KMMT and all I could do was to tell everyone that, “We are on it!”

I must have fielded over two dozen calls with most people asking the same questions: What happened to the phones? Why isn’t the Internet working and best of all, when will it all be fixed? Up until 11:15 am that day I had no idea what happened because the people I called were the local first responders and they were just as much in the dark as we were. When we were told that the problem would take at least a day to fix and we announced it as often as we could but other than that there wasn’t much more we could do. So why then did people continue to call and ask me when the problem would be fixed and when I told them that I didn’t know, I got an attitude from some of the locals because I didn’t give them the answer they wanted to hear?

Maybe this is a good time to remind the readers that the job of most media personnel is to report what happens. We are the middle people between and event and the public who wants to read- about or listen-to such events. We cannot fix what happens nor do we cause what happens…most of the time.

Up until Monday I was a bit oblivious about who actually listens to our local radio station. I was in shock and awe at how many folks came up to me, many of whom I did not know personally, and asked me when the Verizon problem would be fixed. At first I was civil and said that I did not know when the crews would be able to get the phones and Internet back on line but as soon as I knew then we would announce it on the radio.

Then a local crossed the line.  I don’t know who she is but I know I’ve seen her around town for years. I was standing in line “somewhere” getting “something” and she approached me like a bull in a china shop. She bombarded me with question after question about the fiber optic situation and was irritated that I didn’t have up to the minute information because as she explained, “You are the media and it is your job to know everything,” Whoa! What? At that particular moment I had had it up to here and there with questions I could not answer. I whipped out my cell phone and said, “Do you see this?  My carrier for this cell phone is Verizon Wireless. I love Verizon Wireless and know that as soon as Verizon can fix the problem they will. If my answer isn’t good enough for you I suggest you get into that car of yours, drive down to Rovana and ask the technicians yourself when they will piece together the fiber optic cables. If you do that and you have the answer, then please call me at KMMT and leave a message.” Even radio folk have their end zones.

Here’s my advice: Next time you can’t spend hours on the Internet or playing around on your Smart Phones or Blueberries, be grateful. Some things that happen in our world of technology are out of our control. Take the down time to spend time doing things that get pushed by the wayside or saved for another day because you are too busy with your technology.

I was delighted that my cell phone was out of commission for a several hours. I took the time to explore my neighborhood and found a trail that I never knew existed. I made brownies with my granddaughter and introduced her to her first bowl of lickable chocolate. We then worked off the chocolate by dancing around the living room to the Fresh Beat Band.

But whatever you do, don’t kill the messengers when we give you information you don’t want to hear. We are just the media. Not clairvoyants.

*Published in 4/27/12 edition of MammothTimes. Go to www.mammothtimes.com

It is so important to remember Parents: You were Husband and Wife before you were Mommy and Daddy!

Lean on your network of friends and family to help you out with the kids and GET AWAY from your home life

for a while…even if its just for over night.  Turn your cell phones off. Do not take your computer. Only tell the necessary

person(s) where you will be in case of an emergency but ONLY for an emergency!

Trust me on this one!

I really, really do not like getting SPAM in my email. I am constantly baffled by the things that somehow find their way to my personal email address. It all started a few years ago when I was looking for grants that give money to writers. I answered a couple of questions and then the next day I was getting ads for anything from new rates on my home loans to the miracles of penis enhancement.

What does being awarded a grant have to do with penis enhancement or the miracles of Cialis? And, hello!!?!  I’m a girl. Last time I checked girls don’t need enhancing in that area.

Zoosk and Match.com are also sending me ads. I feel very sorry for those women who are married and get SPAMMED by a dating service. I hope their husbands are not insecure and have a great sense of humor if they are looking over the shoulder of their wives as they delete their SPAM. I can hear it now.

HUSBAND: Why are you getting emails from Match.com?

WIFE: Honey, it’s just SPAM

HUSBAND: Yeah but if you never looked at a dating site then they wouldn’t be sending you dating SPAM in the first place.

WIFE: Honey, really, it’s just SPAM. I’m not looking to date anyone. I’m married to you.

HUSBAND: But what if you wanted to date someone. They are making it really easy by tempting you with dating SPAM. Do you want to date someone else?

WIFE: Do you want me to date someone else? Because if you do….

And so on, and so on.

Even though I feel getting SPAM in my email box is annoying and an invasion of my day, I never really knew what SPAM meant in terms of an acronym so I decided to look it up. Funny enough, SPAM means a lot of things. My favorite one is Stupid, Pointless, Annoying Message but it also means the following: State Police Association of Massachusetts, Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing Act, Specially Prepared American Meat, Spectral Processing and Manipulation, School of Pacific Atmospheric Monitoring, Student Peer Abstinence Movement and last but not least: Singing Produces Awesome Miracles.

Here’s the real kicker: SPAM is not an acronym for the unwanted and unsolicited email we get. It’s just called SPAM. Here is what I found on the ecommerce-web-hosting-guide website about the history of Spam: The burgeoning online community of USENET.

One day in April 1994, much to the horror of the online community, every news group on Usenet received a message advertising the services of two lawyers in an upcoming green card lottery.

Before then nobody had abused the power of the internet in such a way, and in the wake of the lawyer’s advertisements, discussions and debate was rife throughout the news groups regarding this topic.

This was indeed a new phenomenon that, although having caused huge online controversy still had no name. To solve the problem online communities coined the term spam, referring to the Monty Python skit where spam is mentioned 130 times, ending with the catch phrase I DONT LIKE SPAM!

The name stuck, and this second definition of spam now sits proudly in dictionaries word wide. Perhaps we should all send the Lawyers Canter and Siegel a tin of spam for Christmas and give them a taste of their own medicine!

What does Spam Stand for – Unsolicited commercial emails. No acronym. Just a Monty Python event.

Still, I don’t believe I’ve won a $500.00 gift card from Wal-Mart, Victoria’s Secret, J.C. Penny’s or Kmart. I don’t need Jessica to find me Christian singles in my area and I know that the pictures Tara wants to show me are not of body parts I care to see on the Internet. I will never, ever be an AT&T customer (Verizon Wireless rocks), don’t want to meet a Russian bride and if I get one more SPAM on how my womanhood is going downhill and I need help “NOW” I’m going to scream.

I especially don’t want to know how I can unwind my wrinkles.  Please! I’ve earned every wrinkle I have but that’s another column altogether.

I’m surrounded by lots and lots of twenty-something people all the time and most of the time I keep my mouth shut. However, the other day I was in line at the local grocery store and I couldn’t help but listen in on the very loud conversation going on behind me.

We were experiencing one of the crowded weekends and this group of twenty-something young, adults appeared to have come up from somewhere in southern California for a weekend of snowboarding or skiing.  One of the humans, the girl-human who was wearing a very pink headband and donning very pink, long nails took a call from her mother. I didn’t hear the mother’s end of the conversation but I sure heard the conversation from the end of the twenty-something girl.

Apparently she wasn’t too pleased with the words her mother was saying to her because when she hung up she rolled her eyes and said to her other twenty-something friends, “My mom can be such a downer. She just doesn’t get it. I think she’s been on this planet way too long already. All I asked for was some extra money for this trip so I wouldn’t have to eat noodles for a week.”  Her friends giggled. I did not. Her friends agreed that their parents sometimes don’t “get it” either.  They giggled some more. I bit my tongue.

Now, under normal circumstances I’m really, really good at being in my own head and ignoring the ignorant. I’ll grab a National Enquirer or a People Magazine and browse them while I wait my turn in line. This time I couldn’t ignore the ignorant.

Granted, I did not know the mother of this twenty-something and I did not know what she said from her end of the conversation but I’ve been around enough hard-working, caring mothers and fathers of twenty-something’s to know that it’s not the parents who, “…don’t get it.”   What is it, exactly, that we “don’t get?”

Could it be we “don’t get” that some twenty-something’s think they have a free ride when they return home from college after taking more than five years to graduate and using over one hundred thousand dollars to get a degree that might land you a job – if you were looking for a job – as a waitress?

Maybe we “don’t get” that you run out of money very fast because tattoos and nails and hair color and the most expensive phones are what you have to have to make it on this planet. Maybe we “don’t get” that it’s really not the responsibility of the parents to pay for your cigarettes or the alcohol which was in your grocery basket in the store located in the ski town which you were visiting. By the way, who is paying for your lift tickets and lodging?

Just wondering.

Oh and did you bother to tell your mother that you are going to have vodka with those noodles?

For all you responsible twenty-something’s out there who appreciate your parents and have an inkling of what it means to be accountable for your life, you have my undivided appreciation. For the rest of you, remember this: Your parents have already been your age.  You have NOT been their age. Pay attention to what they have to say, be respectful and considerate, and if your mom or dad does not have the extra twenty dollars to give you to pay for your iPhone or gas for your car or that bottle of alcohol to go with your noodles…get a job.

Then after that, about 25 years from now when you have a twenty-something living under your roof, you will hopefully, finally “get it.”

When people turn 21, most have dreams of a weekend in Las Vegas. They want to gather their friends around and pick one of them to be the designated driver for the night so the celebrating 21-year old will have a babysitter in close proximity. The 21-year old will usually ingest obscene amounts of alcohol and if he/she is lucky they survive into the next day. Most likely the “new adult” spends the next 48 hours nursing a horrendous hangover with remedies that range from more alcohol (I’ll never know why people order Bloody Mary’s after a night of binging) to drinking gallons of a liquid sports drinks or buying Alka Seltzer. Be careful however if you are in Ireland because their cure for a hangover is to bury you up to your neck in moist river sand.

When my oldest knew the moment of true adulthood was upon him, he wanted to do one thing and it didn’t have anything to do with alcohol. “Mom, I want to go skydiving.  With you.”  I would assume that his skydiving idea was something ‘out of the blue’ but I know better.  Kids remember things we tell them. In fact, sometimes they remember with such detail that its scary.

Apparently, my then-21 year old remembered the story I told him some years back about my skydiving experience when I was in college. Three friends of mine and I decided to drive up to Medford, Oregon at two in the morning and jump out of an airplane. The leader of the pack was a friend who had already experienced the thrill of falling through the sky and thought that we should have the same experience. It didn’t matter to us that it was in the middle of the night when we started north on Highway 101 from Arcata all the way to Medford.  We were young and full of spirit and adventure.

We arrived just in time for our eight o’clock class which lasted four hours. I remember toward the end of the class having to jump on the ground from about four feet up which was supposed to simulate the actual ground landing. It didn’t. My landing wasn’t, how would a professional skydiver say, “on the mark?” Cutting to the chase, I missed the target and landed in a field of thistle plants and thistle plants have sticky thorns attached to every stem. Lets just say picking me out of the thistle field was a mess.  But I loved the skydiving part of the story.

I know I left some choice pieces of that tale out of the edited version I told my little Capricorn but I’m guessing he remembered the part when I said, “It was amazing…the most ‘quiet’ I’ve ever experienced.” And he also remembered me telling him that I promised I wouldn’t go skydiving again until both kids were 18.  I was sort of hoping he’d forget that part. He didn’t.

I remember trying to come up with several reasons why I shouldn’t go skydiving that year and here was my pathetic list:

l   I’ll have to tell my mother

l   There are things on my body that flap around in the wind that didn’t when I was 20.

l   My bladder isn’t as strong as it used to be

l   I have a novel to finish

l   I can’t remember where my life insurance policy is…or if I have one

l   I’ll have to tell my mother

But a promise is a promise and I will eventually jump out of an airplane with my oldest. I think I even called the younger of the two-man swarm and asked him if he wanted to join us.

“Are you kidding me?,” Erik said emphatically. “I don’t want to see the ground coming at me that fast but I’ll be on the ground tanning, waiting for the both of you to land but I ain’t jumping out of a plane. I’m too pretty to die this young.”

It’s now 2012 and a few years after my oldest turned 21. In 2010 I watched as my husband jumped out of an airplane with his daughters for his birthday but I have yet to do the deed with my son. I suppose I should get it over with and stop with the excuses.

Speaking of excuses, he’s a dad now. Maybe he’ll want to wait until his daughter is 18. If that’s the case, then I’ll have another 15.3 months to get up the courage to jump out of a plane again.

By that time it can be a true family affair. I hope they have airplanes that can hold nine people because jumping out of an airplane with my entire family would be a dream come true.

When we adults decide to become parents and have more than one kid, the consistency of splitting things evenly between the kids is in the top-ten list of what makes a decent parent. I’m not sure when the “if-he-has-that-then-I-get-one-too” syndrome starts and I’m sure it’s different for every gang of siblings.

Maybe it starts with the older kid wanting to get fed a bottle too because his baby sister gets to be fed by mom and lie peacefully in her arms. Or maybe the right-of-equality starts when the kids are toddlers and the parent have to buy an equal amount of ice cream for each sibling.

My boys shared a room when they were little and I had to make sure that I read them each the equal amount of books before bedtime. I sometimes had to read the same book twice because if one kid got to hear the story close up then the other kid had to hear the story close up. (I finally figured out that if I had them both in one bed when reading one book, it saved time.)

Somewhere along the line they figured out what “shotgun” meant when riding in the car so if I had both boys with me on an excursion one would have to ride “shotgun” on the way there and the other would have to ride “shotgun” on the way home.

If one spent a special night with grandma then the other had to have a special night with grandma. And so on, and so on. Parents hope that the siblings-in-question eventually grow out of or start to “not care” if their brother or sister gets a bigger piece of the apple pie.  At least that’s what we hope.

Fast forward to a few days ago.  My youngest son (who is 23) had a desire to visit his family in Mammoth Lakes but there was a condition. He would come to visit on the condition that “said mother” had to make sure to bake her almost-famous chocolate chip banana bread and stuffed shells so “said son” could bring the “said entrees” back home with him.

I had no problem with that. I enjoy cooking for the kids. It’s like I’m making up for the time in their lives when I could barely pour them a bowl of cereal let alone make up my own recipes for them to devour. So when I’m asked by one of the kids (and this includes my new stepdaughters) to make something they like – and I’m not in the middle of a hot flash which would preclude me from wanting to be anywhere near an oven – I do it with love and gratitude: With love because I love my kids and with gratitude because I’m grateful that I can cook something they actually want to eat.

My youngest came and then left two days later before the heavy snowfall prevented him from trying to drive home in his two-wheel drive vehicle. Erik had to go back to his world of make-up artistry so he couldn’t afford to get stuck at mom’s house. I loaded up the freshly baked chocolate chip banana bread and the stuffed shells into the back of his Jeep, dusted of the snow from his windows and waved him goodbye as he backed out of our driveway.

Erik has specifically asked me to make the above treats so I was totally caught off-guard when I received a text message from Erik’s brother (who is 25) that read something like, “You made ‘E’ stuffed shells…wtf?” I seriously didn’t even think to take a portion of what I made Erik and save some of it for the older sibling. Oy.

That’s the thing about texting…you never really know if the person is really mad about something or not because unless they text, “LOL,” after a statement…they could be irritated. I found myself wanting to defend my actions and texted back, “Well, he asked.” I was wondering if the older sibling felt slighted because his brother got something from me that he didn’t.

Turns out that he wasn’t mad about me giving all the stuffed shells to his younger brother but he did ask me if he could come over and have some of my special baked sweet potato slices for part of his dinner.

I said, “Only if you text Erik to let him know that you got to eat them and he didn’t.”  No matter what the age, that sibling rivalry thing never really goes away. It just gets more subtle.

My husband told me that I remind him of a jukebox.  He says that he can say a few words to me and voila!  My brain somehow pulls out a song that goes along with the sentence or words he just said out loud.  Well, what does he expect?  Music has always been a part of my life.  Usually when folks refer to something that has “always” been a part of their life they really mean since they were kids or teens our young adults.  Not me.  Music has REALLY been a part of me since I was conceived.

My mother told me that when I was in her belly she would listen to the fairly new sounds of rock and roll while she was driving and when she was cleaning the house or cooking in the kitchen she would add classical music or the Latin sounds to her musical tastes.  I can picture her now: Her belly swollen with me inside, she’s fixing my dad his favorite dinner while the sounds of Bobby Darin singing, “Mack The Knife,” the Platters singing, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” or Mozart waft through the air, making their debut into my newly-forming brain.

When I was five or six we lived in Reseda and my parents had a den attached to the back of the house. They would play their 45’s or 78’s or their 8-track tapes after they thought us kids were asleep.  I remember a few nights when I would hear the music coming from the back part of the house and on the auspice of pretending that I was thirsty or had a bad dream, I wandered into the den and loitered as long as I could before I was marched back into the bedroom I shared with my younger sister.

In the late 60’s, early 70’s my mother fell in love with Sergio Mendez and Brazil ’66 and Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass. Because of that I was probably the only kid at Vanalden Elementary School in Reseda who knew all the words to “The Look Of Love,” “Scarborough Fair,” and “This Guy’s In Love With You.”

When I was about nine or 10 my folks took us camping to the Kern River and that is when I was introduced to a real jukebox. Tired of hot dogs roasting over and open fire, my mom suggested that we go to town one night to eat.  We walked into the restaurant and right next to the front door was a jukebox. I may have mentioned in a previous column that I played “I’m Henry the Eighth” and “What’s New Pussycat” over and over again until dad stopped handing out the nickels but I do remember asking for a record player when we got back home.  For my 11^th birthday I got a 45-player along with a few 45’s. I know I had an entire collection by the time I was in my teens but the ones I remember playing over and over at home were songs by Led Zeppelin and Carly Simon. The Raiders, The Rolling Stones and John Denver were also a part of my music library.

I buried a Fleetwood Mac Album in the time capsule at my high school. I sang with bands in college, promoted bands in college, and have been working in the music industry since 1984 and now I work at a radio station.  So yes, I have had music around me my entire life and because of that, I know a whole lotta songs.

So when I overheard my husband telling some friends of ours that he was married to a walking, talking and breathing jukebox, I had to chuckle. Just to prove it one of the friends said a few words and of course, I found a song that went with the words.  It just popped into my head.

There is, however, a big difference between me and a jukebox.  In order to listen to music coming from a jukebox you have to feed it money.  If I sing something out-of-the-blue I don’t have to be fed anything, you just have to throw a few words in my direction and maybe I’ll come up with a song. Another difference between me and a jukebox is that I don’t pick the songs, the songs pick me.

Maybe that comment from my husband was his way of saying that by marrying me he got more than he bargained for. Not only is he married to a walking iPod but he married into menopause and that, my dear readers, will be an entirely different column.

I remember the first time my mother referred to my ‘baby fat.’ She had picked me up from Portola Junior High School in Tarzana and we had just turned left onto the street I grew up on in Encino, California. I was telling her that I was tired of the little bulge of lower belly fat that I had been carrying around with me since I was a baby. She told me I would lose the baby fat “any time now” and because I was going through puberty my body was changing.

“You told me when I was eight that I would lose my baby fat when I was ten,” I reminded her.

“You’re just a late bloomer. You’ll appreciate it when you’re my age,” she replied.

I’m pretty sure the main reason for my moment of self-image anxiety was because it was my first year of junior high school and I probably noticed all the cute, perky popular girls who were stick thin. I don’t remember exactly what prompted me to question my baby fat back then but I’m sure it had to do with all the issues a twelve year old girl has to deal with. Braces, glasses, a face ravaged by acne…why not throw stubborn baby fat into the mix?

By the time I made it into my first year of high school my acne went away and my braces had been removed. I still wore glasses and I still had the stubborn lump of baby fat on the front, lower part of my belly. I played volleyball. I rode horses. I even tried to stop eating French fries but no matter what, the ‘baby fat’ stayed attached to my insides in the same way that crazy glue sticks to pretty much anything.

The ‘baby fat’ I had been carrying around with me much like the blanket Linus from Peanuts always carried around with him just didn’t bulge. When I look back through pictures from my last year in high school and some during my first few years of college it is obvious I carried around my ‘baby fat’ right through high school graduation and into my days tromping around the redwood trees in northern California. Eventually I conceived my first born so in addition to the “baby fat” I had lived with for 27-plus years, I got baby and I got fat.

It was almost as if the minute Alexander was more than just a figment of my imagination, all bets were off with respect to my finally reaching the point in my life when all ‘baby fat’ would finally be shed.  I had listened to my mom for years telling me I was a late bloomer and I thought 27 was just as good an age as any for the ‘baby fat” to finally dissolve and go someplace else.

Didn’t happen.

For the next three years or so I was either pregnant or nursing. During that time I not only continued to carry around the ‘baby fat’ I had been born with but added on even more baby fat as a result from having babies. Two of them. Back to back. What was I thinking?  Wait, never mind. I know what I was thinking. It went something like this: “If I ever have a kid I’m going to have another one right away so I can have them close together and then get my tubes tied and be done with it.”   That’s what I was thinking.

Fast forward to now. I’ve long since given up the idea that I will ever be one of those women who grew out of her “baby fat.”  I will never have a flat stomach like Wendy Dwyer Carter. As a matter of fact, I’m kind of glad that that little bump in my lower belly never really went away. I needed that extra roll to help me carry things. When the kids were little they fit perfectly over my little belly bulge. It acted as a ledge so I could actually carry both of them at the same time.

When I would bring home a big box of pizza the edge of the pizza box rested comfortably on my belly ledge as I carried it through the door. I could pile groceries on top of the pizza box and it wouldn’t budge because it was resting on my bulge. Anything that I needed to carry which had to be balanced on my body was a piece of cake because I had the built-in belly ledge to help me out.

And now I have the best reason of all for not wanting to get rid of the belly ledge: The Granddaughter.

My belly shelf is once again being put to good use.

It was the continuance of an unusually sunny day here in the high country.  I swear that last year this time our town had already lived with well over 300 inches of snow but not this year. This year Mother Nature really took the bull by the horns and psyched us all out. A few people were so sure that we were going to have a 1,000 inch winter. Even the local weatherman and I yammered back and forth about the snow predictions of some locals but in the end it appears that all the talk about another record breaking winter was wishful thinking. I think I can safely say by now that we are not going to have a deluge of snow in 2012. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

We are doing all we can to make the white stuff fall. Howard Sheckter is constantly asking me if I’m doing my snow dance. I keep telling him “yes” just to keep the conversation moving but honestly, by the time I get home the last thing I want to do is jump around on our property while chanting some obscure pleadings to the snow Gods.  There are only a few reasons why I’m on our deck these days. One is when I’m pacing back and forth because I’m having a hot flash and I’m trying to catch the breeze that comes through the pass and rustles our trees before heading out to Sierra Meadows. Another reason I would be running around our deck is because I’m chasing a ball with Ameilia or blowing bubbles for Ameilia.

It has been an odd weather year and many of us are trying to make the best out of the sunshine we do have. Gail Lonne and friends have put up two tennis nets at the community courts…unheard of in January. BishopMotoSports is renting out their ATV’s so at least our high country visitors can get out on the dirt roads and explore our snow-free terrain. Even Deb Searles thought about putting her deck furniture back out…including the umbrella.

The mornings have been chilly so the idea of wearing shorts and a t-shirt is out. And let’s be real…this isn’t Palm Springs or Jamaica so instead of pulling my shorts out of the summer closet in the middle of January, I decided instead to compromise and wear sandals.

I got down on my hands and knees and reached under the dresser where I stuffed all my summer shoes for the season. I found the sandals my son and daughter-in-law bought me when they went to Thailand and I slipped them on.

Something was wrong. It didn’t feel right. My feet were the same size and the sandals were comfy but c’mon…sandals in the middle of January? I should be wearing my snow boots and wrapping myself snug in neck gators and down jackets. I should be listening to my husband cursing at the snow-thrower for breaking down and I should be carrying loads of wood up the stairs to stuff into the wood burning stove. There should be warm winter soup cooking in the crockpot and I should be making myself cups of hot chocolate loaded with whipped cream for my after-dinner sweet.

It didn’t seem right to have my toes bare to the elements in the middle of January. My feet have been in winter-mode. My toes are not painted and most of my summer callouses have faded but it was warm – so warm that my feet were sweating inside my UGGS. I could no longer pretend that it was going to snow sometime in January so I clomped out of the house in my summer sandals.

I can only hope that all this faux summer behavior we are all exhibiting will somehow be a signal to the elusive snow G-d that we are ready for a dumping of the white stuff.  It’s just not fair that Alaska is getting more snow than we are this year.

Back in 2002 Carol Kaesuk Yoon wrote an article for the NY Times on why the locust has completely vanished from North America.

“Sweeping across North America, flying hordes of Rocky Mountain locusts were once an awesome and horrifying sight, huge glittering clouds of insects laying waste countless acres of crops. Throughout the 1800′s, the whirring swarms periodically ravaged farm fields from California east to Minnesota and south to Texas.

The locusts were easy to please, eating barley, buckwheat, melons, tobacco, strawberry, spruce, apple trees — even fence posts, laundry hung out to dry and each other.

When women threw blankets over their gardens, the locusts devoured the blankets then feasted on the plants. Farmers lit fires, blasted shotguns into the swarms and scoured their fields with so-called hopperdozers, large metal scoops, smeared with tar or molasses to grab as many of the offenders as possible. But it was all to no avail.”

The little buggers may have disappeared from the plains of North America but I know all too well that a very special locust population is alive and well in our household…for at least part of the year. The only thing we had to do to bring them back was the promise of homemade holiday cooking and to have a pantry and refrigerator full of food. Combine that with the seven twenty-something children that were staying with us for a week and voila! A perfect recipe for the invasion.

I was so busy cooking and enjoying the family that I didn’t really notice we had been swarmed by a family of two-legged locusts until they had already left the area. It was a day or two after the tribe had gone on to their various after-holiday adventures.  I woke up to a disturbingly quiet house and thought that since I didn’t have to go out for bagels and cream cheese or make my signature breakfast potatoes I could sit and enjoy a bowl of my favorite cereal combination with a cup of tea. I took down the bowl, got what was left of the rice milk out of the fridge and when I looked up to pull my favorite Trader Joe’s cereal off the shelf, it was gone. Not only was the box of Frosted Mini Wheat’s from TJ’s gone, the container of my homemade granola was empty. Just like the day fades in to night, the craving I had for my mixed-cereal dish also faded into oblivion. I had to regroup the taste buds.

I usually have some sort of egg thing for breakfast anyway and since my desire to eat a bowl of cereal was not an option, I went for the eggs.  Gone.  All the organic eggs that I had just purchased a few days earlier were no longer in their little, plastic, half-moon shaped holders in the door of the fridge. Just for the hell-of-it I looked at the shelf where I keep my tea. Ginger tea, gone. Pomegranate-white tea, gone. Buckwheat honey for the tea, also gone.  Blueberries, strawberries, leftover turkey…it was the same story…all of it gone, gone, gone.

The family swarm that invaded our house did not have wings and did not make an irritating chirping sound as they devoured everything in their path but they came, they ate, they left.

And I wouldn’t change anything about the swarm that filled our house for a week during the holidays except for maybe hiding my Trader Joe’s sparkling pomegranate juice next time the DNA swarm makes their way home. Some things aren’t so easy to replace here in the Eastern Sierra.