Catching Fire

There is nothing quite so frightening as fire. I found that out for myself last week when my house caught fire. It was the middle of the night when an electrical outlet shorted out. Fortunately I happened to be awake and saw the flare from the arc and heard the pop. I got out of bed and rushed to put out the fire by dabbing it out with a kitchen towel.

It was only then that I called 911 to get the fire department. They came and made sure that the fire was completely out. It had been small enough so that I was able to stay in my home -- with no electricity. I was shaking from the adrenalin rush and was unable to sleep, even after the hour it took me to get the cat inside.

When morning dawned I was faced with finding an electrician. Naturally, when one came I found out that my home needed a complete rewiring so that the 57 year old wiring wouldn't keep trying to burn my house down. To do this in the standard way would mean having to remodel the entire interior of my home. There was no way to afford that,so I went with the less expensive total rewiring option and now have shiny metal cords running through the house along ceilings and walls. It isn't the prettiest way to do things, but oddly, it is already beginning to feel like this was the way it has always been.

It was one of the scariest things that ever happened to me -- and yet amid all of this there are so many blessings. I am blessed that it was a small fire. I am blessed that I was awake when it happened. I am blessed that I was able to put the fire out quickly. I am blessed that the fire didn't spread. I am blessed that the electrician was able to come and do the work right away. I am blessed that a wonderful angel came forward to pay the bill -- and that others also offered help. I am blessed that the cat is fine and that I only suffered a bruise on one foot from tripping over something. I am blessed that I didn't lose any of the food in the fridge . . . It goes on. . .

Being fortunate isn't about never having bad things happen in your life. It is how you view them in the aftermath. It is how you handle the event. Shit does happen to everybody in varying degrees.

I have chosen to re-frame everything in my life in terms of love and gratitude, with a strong side of prayer. If someone is rude to me I try to remember that beyond me their world could be falling apart. If someone cuts me off in traffic I try to remember that they could be rushing to the side of a loved one (or a bucket of chicken). Then I thank God that being cut off did not result in an accident.

So, basically, strange and crazy as it sounds. I am thankful that my house caught fire. You just have to hear the reasons before you decide I need a straight jacket. Or a padded cell. I'll be visiting my therapist tomorrow, so I've got that part covered.

Hoarding -- A Personal Confession

Hi, my name is Laurie, and I am a hoarder.

Okay, not as bad as those people you see on television shows like Hoarders and Hoarding Buried Alive. There is only the one cat and she does her business only in her litter box or outside. I take care of mice and the occasional fly promptly. The electricity and plumbing work. The furnace is a bit dodgy, but that is new and in the works.

I am a third generation hoarder. My grandmother kept just about everything, especially after having raised her children during the depression. With her, however, she was able to keep everything neatly filed and organized so it never became the out-of-control mess. When she passed away my mother kept an odd assortment of her mother's hoard to bring home and add to her hoard.

My mother was approaching the level of the television show, but did not quite make it there. The saddest part of her hoarding for me was that I eventually had to distance myself from her and her home as she began to blame me for the mess in her home. If I brought fast food to her home to eat while I was there helping her with the computer or what not, she would begin cleaning this up before I was done eating -- in the middle of a horrendous mess that was far more in need of cleaning than a couple of taco wrappers and sauce packets.

A couple of times a friend and I tried to clean the house for her. The first time was when she had gone off to Georgia for a family reunion. We hauled out so much trash that I had to arrange to use the trash and recycling receptacles of her neighbors. We cleared out more than a dozen years of junk mail and
 old calendars.And that was just the beginning. Of course, the cleaning did not last.

Another time Mum was disappearing for several hours every Saturday for an art class and we used that time to clean house again -- this time as her Christmas and birthday presents. Again, it didn't last.

Several years ago Mum had to move out of her mobile home and into an apartment as a part of getting subsidized housing. More people were on hand to help this time. Mum tried to help, but much like the people on the television shows, she wanted to go through absolutely everything and throw away nothing. No matter what we said, she couldn't understand that the entire hoard from a large two-bedroom mobile home was not going to fit into a small two-bedroom apartment. Finally we got enough to the apartment for her to go stay there while we finished up the mobile home. So we moved her and told her to stay there.

After more than a month of moving and cleaning it was just impossible to get it all done. Fortunately the mobile home was slated to be hauled away and discarded. So we ended up just throwing trash into several big piles as we searched for what needed to move and tossed the rest. Even then we weren't able to get everything moved. Most of the books had to be left behind.

Mum busted my chops for so long over what hadn't gotten moved that I finally told her off. I pointed out that we had spent WEEKS moving what we could and that within that God-awful mess it was impossible to find everything. A large number of us had shut down our lives for those weeks to do this just for her and instead of any gratitude all we were getting was complaining. She was also damn lucky that I had lost my job at just the right time to allow me to do this for her or she would have lost the apartment and the subsidy.

She was much kinder after that, but no less a hoarder. After the move she had an elder care helper come in and help her with things like housework. I charged the woman with helping keep down the hoarding. She did as I asked and kept Mum from picking up broken toys from the grounds of the apartment building and bringing them home.

Last year Mum passed away and I was still faced with a mountain of crap that had come with her. Toward the last few months of her life she finally understood when I called her a hoarder and what a hoarder was. I told her in the light that I was also one, as is a good friend of ours.

As I was packing up her things to be tossed, given away, or kept I was constantly amazed at many things that I found. When the friends and family who had come to help me get the apartment cleaned out heard me swear they knew I had run across something baffling. I gave all of them whatever I wanted as long as it wasn't something I needed to keep or sell.

Being a hoarder myself I knew that I needed to be strong. I was fairly ruthless in getting rid of stuff. Every now and then someone would say "Oh, you want to keep that!" I would emphatically decline. If they asked me if I was sure then I offered it to them. They would decline and I would respond with "If you don't want it, why would I?"

I still kept too much. Much of it is sitting on my patio and inside my car. I am loathe to bring it inside until I have a proper place for it. Much of it will still be given away or sold. I have just been waiting for winter to wain enough to allow me to really get at things. Murphy's Law being what it is we have had 47 inches of snow in April and another foot in May so far.

From the inside, hoarding is a complicated and difficult thing. I can get easily confused and baffled on what to get rid of and what to keep, not to mention what to do with the things I choose to keep. I will get to the end of an evening and only then realize that the dishes went undone, in spite of the intention to do them. It becomes easier to leave everything rather than trying to deal with them -- much like difficult emotions that I haven't dealt with. Having learned to hang on to everything doesn't help.

So I have to work at it every day. My daily to-do list includes such obvious things as "collect trash" to make sure it all makes it in the bin, and "wash dishes" to help me remember. Things will still get away from me. The house still smell of the litter box, though I can't smell it any more. The important thing is that I am aware and keep trying.

The one thing I keep reminding myself is that if it lost in the mess and I have forgotten I had it, I don't need it. If something is lost in the mess and I bought three more because I couldn't find it then I need to find a proper place for that item. There is a fear of lack involved. A terror that when I am truly in need I will not have what I need. It is not really about the stuff. It is about feeling unsupported emotionally so I try to manufacture what appears to be support.

With Mum gone I will also not end up with so much stuff. She was constantly buying me stuff I "needed." This is how I ended up with far more sheets, towels, socks, undies, pots, pans, dishes, and books than I needed. A friend once suggested that I get rid of it all. I replied that I would but then she would just buy it all for me again.

My last bout of unemployment became my mission to downsize while I searched for a new job. I figure that I threw out at least a ton of old crap. I gave away 75 bags and boxes to charity. And still I have too much.

So my struggle continues.

Comedy -- Writing Funny

Historically the jester was the only one in the court who could make fun of the king. He was able to do this by hiding it within the jest. By making it funny and couching it in just the right phrase it becomes fairly painless. That doesn't mean that the jester never missed the mark and got sent to the dungeon, but for the most part he got away with murder.

These days comedians like Jay Leno, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart point out the idiocies and absurdities of the moneyed and powerful elite. These guys are at the top of their game because they are so capable of hitting their target accurately. They strip bare the absurdities and juxtapositions down to the bare truth that we really knew was there all along. We laugh because we are surprised that they will say it. We laugh because we understand. We laugh because they are right.

They are funny instead of venomous because they back it up with love. Love? Yes. They aren't spewing angrily about any of these issues. They love the very absurdity they witness all around them. On some level they love the people that perpetrate the absurdities. It is about teasing with the truth.

 The first time I wrote something funny I was not at all aware that I was being funny. I was writing my annual Christmas letter and was relating the story of how I had been charged by a buck while raking leaves that fall. I found out that I had been funny when my cousin later told me that she had nearly died laughing over my tale.

So how do you make your writing funny? I had to go back and look at the story I had told.

First of all you need to go beneath the surface. It isn't enough to say I was terrified. I had to explain how terrified I was in pretty specific terms -- and very human terms. I need to be showing you the part of me that you can identify with. So when I realize that this enormous buck is running across the street and lowering his head at me there were all sorts of things running through my head in the space of a few seconds. I was measuring the distance from me to the front door. Nope. I would be a bunch of little Laurie kabobs on his antlers before I could reach shelter. Could I defend myself? The wooden rake in my hand seemed so tiny compared to him and those antlers that I may as well trying to defend myself with a toothpick.

Second, it is HOW you say things. I didn't just say that I imagined being gored by the antlers. I added to the imagery with an off-beat comment about Laurie kabobs. It made light of a serious situation without dismissing how serious it was. Another part of the story was that he had been tracking a doe that had come running through the neighborhood just seconds before he had shown up. She had dashed between two homes before he came along so she was nowhere in sight. All he saw was me instead and I was not his type and that really ticked him off. Describing the eight point buck as a horny beast allowed me to employ a double entendre.

I was also able to be a bit self-effacing by adding that this was the sort of reaction I got from males -- now apparently of any species.

Third part is how you write. Short, zippy sentences keep the story moving quickly. Take little time describing the scene. How you tell the story should take care of that. I was raking leaves in my yard. That should conjure most of the setting -- grass, autumn, dry leaves crunching, a cool day. It is hard to be funny when you get too verbose. On the other hand, if I had been writing this into a romance I would have gone into the details to set a mood whereupon Ryan Reynolds (or George Clooney for my age group) could sweep in and rescue me from certain impalement. In my version, if either man had shown up, he would have caught his designer sweater in the branches of the wild plum tree and I would accidentally stab him in the eye with the rake.

Ultimately Bucky caught the scent of his lady love again and the valiant ungulate swain took off on her trail again. My knees gave way and I sat down where I was and tried to get my lungs working again. Now that I was safe again I was able to wish them well on their honeymoon.

My second comedy outing was trying to write a funny poem for a contest. I was wracking my brain for what was funny. The answer came to me in the bathroom (a.k.a., the thinking room) when I looked at myself in the mirror. Ah, yes, the bad hair day. So off I went describing how difficult my hair could be, including the fact that it seems to be deserting me. I was stumped for an ending though. I finally remembered a former coworker who used to threaten to shave her head every time she got stressed. Aha! My ending appeared out of the mists of time. I ended up winning third place for my first foray into humorous poetry:

Bad Hair Day (Attitude to Match)

(c) 1996 by Laurie Kay Olson

I have that hair, you know the kind,

It won't settle down and make up its mind.

It flies, it lumps, it bumps, it swirls,

It won't like flat, and it won't go in curls.

I'm getting to work late again this week,

But I hate to go out with hair that's not sleek.

I brush it, I spray it, I comb it and then -

Just one little sneeze and it's hopeless again.

I know that I'm lucky to have hair at all,

I don't have to shop for it down at the mall.

Be that as it may, I just want to yell!

Sometimes I think I'm in follicle hell!

I'm getting so mad, I'm in a huge snit -

I'll just shave my head and be done with it!

 This success led me to apply to write a humor column for the Colorado Daily Newspaper. For samples of my column, click here. The column on sports even garnered me my first piece of fan mail.

I find writing humor and comedy extremely rewarding. I love making people laugh. I love laughing at myself.

Humor is the best medicine and the doctor is IN(sane).

L -- Laurie's Loves

There are things in my life that I truly love and am passionate about. Most people do. Those who say they don't are probably in denial. So here are some of the things I love in life:

My hometown of Boulder, Colorado, is a beautiful city nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It is a place of great beauty and great diversity. Thoughts and ideas flow fairly freely here. It was once a Mecca for hippies as well as the intellectual elite. It has been home to the likes of Allan Ginsberg and Jello Biafra, and Rick Reilly among

others (I went to school with the latter two). I remember sitting on the playground in grade school, looking up at the Flatirons and wonder how I got so lucky as to have been born into this place.


My cat, Naomi, the current darling of my life. is a quirky and lovable little character. When she came to live with me seven years ago she was an unhappy soul. Whoever had owned her before had played with her too hard and teased her too much. On top of that she had been declawed, leaving her feeling even more vulnerable to such attentions. When I first brought her home she would attack me on a daily basis. Just setting my hand down too close to her would set her

off. You might think that without claws she couldn't do much damage, but she was able to bite of blood with great effect. Most people would give up on such an animal, but when I brought her home it was for good. I kept working with her, making sure that all of my approaches to her were consistent. I resisted any impulses to tease her, even very gently, because I knew she would not take it well. She is now a happy cat, rarely attacks unless I forget myself and touch her belly, likes being pet. We love each other like crazy.

My home and garden. I have a tiny mobile home with a large garden. I live in what is probably the lowest cost place in Boulder. It is tiny, but it is all mine. I love having no other roommate than the cat. I

have lived here for more than 30 years and have slowly built out a sizable garden. People often stop when they see me out there to tell them how much they like my garden. One of my neighbors insists that I am raising fairies here. I don't know about that, but I love having my own supply of strawberries and raspberries each summer, as well as whatever veggies I choose to raise. If I don't spend enough time out there I can count on Naomi to come to the door to beg me to come outside with her.

My car is so old that she is almost a classic but she is just wonderful. Her name is Zsazsa. I adopted her almost 14 years ago after her predecessor committed suicide by throwing itself on a Mustang. That car had no real personality and Zsazsa has tons of it.  I'm just glad that this Zsazsa never even tried to slap a police officer.

I love all the old friends I have been able to reconnect with because of Facebook. They are a wonderful group. Some of us even get together in person once in a while. A couple of these wonderful ladies even came and helped me clean out my mother's apartment last year after she passed away. I love that during that difficult time they helped me keep my laughter.


I love writing. By now people are really getting to know that about me. I decided to become a writer when I was about seven years old. One of my poems was published in the PTA newsletter back then. So I have been working toward that goal ever since. It has never been easy, but it has always been rewarding. I have written just about everything, from magazine fillers to newsletters, and print news articles to professional blogs. My first book is in the process of being edited for publication.

The hardest thing of all in my life has been learning to love myself. I come from a family that was more critical than loving and accepting. It has taken a long time to build up enough self-esteem to feel worthy of having accomplishments such as a home, garden, cat, car, and career. I spent a lot of years convinced I was a failure in ANYTHING, no matter how small, went wrong. Learning to really believe that shit happens and we just have to deal with it as best we can and turn it into fertilizer at the first opportunity. Several people in my life and on my last job were instrumental on helping me get here.


I also love those who come about to read my words. Thank you for your patronage. Without you I would still be a writer, but missing the joy that comes with being able to share what I love with others. Bless you all.