Aileen Jeffries

First, let it be said that I hardly ever win anything. This may, just possibly, be due to the fact that I don’t enter many contests. The odds are rarely good and the prizes not worth the taxes. But, a couple of weeks ago, an opportunity fell into my lap that seemed tailor-made for me. The prize? Two minutes to spend $2,000 on bluefly.com.

For me, this is like Christmas. Competitive Christmas. My mornings begin with perusing the sales on sites like Rue La La and Ideeli. I spend all day camped out in front of a computer, ostensibly earning a living but in reality perfecting my clicking and typing skills, preparing for this very moment. I was born for this.

I had about a week to prepare. The contest was set to place this morning at a local radio station, 103.3 KKCW. This introduced a host of maddening unknowns – the operating system, browser, Internet connection speed, etc. I also wanted to maximize my allotted $2,000 – I could just get one item close to that price but that would ruin the fun and wouldn’t be as enjoyable as getting many less expensive items. But, every item added to the cart cost me time; time to find the item on the site, to select size and color, to add to the cart. Precious seconds. I hit upon a strategy, to search by keyword. Searching for “Odessa” leads straight to a gorgeous pair of Due Farina boots and is far faster than browsing to the boots through categories.

Throughout the week, I trained in a series of heats – refining my list of items and keywords. This morning, I arose early to confirm nothing I wanted had been sold out.

The guys at the station running the contest were laid-back and friendly and not nearly as giddy as I. Clearly, they do not spend their free time hunting online for the perfect jersey knit dress to transition into early spring. They took pictures and tried gamely to turn the mundane process of e-commerce into an exciting radio segment. I had trained for distractions and someone (in my mind dressed as drill sergeant or my 7th grade gym teacher) unplugging the Ethernet cable at the 2:00:00 minute mark but of course the reality was far less dramatic.

In the end, I can fairly assess that I made the most of it. The final total came to $2,002.47 (the overage I happily paid). A handbag for my friend who told me about the contest, three pairs of boots, two jackets, two dresses, a sweater, a pair of earrings, tights and some frilly unmentionables. Now, to wait in eager anticipation for my loot to arrive!

I do not pine for olden days. This is by far the best time and place to be alive in human history. To defend this stance, I need only mention a handful of inventions: anesthesia, birth control, democracy, the Internet.

Simply put, there was no “Golden Era” of anything. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements. If a particular population had it good during a decade of yore (consider white men in the 1950’s or, oh, ever), it was at the expense of someone else.

That said, not everything about history is terrible. There are exactly three things I’d like to revive and incorporate into my otherwise contented, modern existence.

1. Wallpaper.

2. Desserts made with gelatin. Even in our modern times, gelatin is derived from the collagen inside animals’ skin and bones. There’s something satisfyingly thrifty about making food with scraps. My favorite is panna cotta topped with cherries. Made with cream, yogurt, almond extract, and honey. And domestic animal by-products.

3. Silhouette portraits. Popular before photography, I imagine the process originally involved a flickering candle as the only light source and tracing the shadow on a barn door or traveling circus tent with a lump of charcoal from the campfire.

Digital cameras, electricity and Photoshop make silhouette portraiture easier these days. Squirming, unruly subjects – in my case a toddler – add just enough challenge to keep it interesting.

There are seven types of E. Coli, I’ve learned. The kind that can kill people lives in meat (well, more specifically feces-contaminated meat) and there’s even a beneficial strain.

The waterborne type isn’t usually deadly. Which is good, because I drank ever-so-much of it the week before Thanksgiving. I was
attempting to rehydrate after an evening o’ food poisoning. Turns out West Portland’s always-delicious tap water was tainted. With POO.

On the plus side, I lost about 4 pounds. And it wasn’t even that bad, nothing like actual food poisoning. There must be a way to market this.

In my, shall I say, unusual childhood, we had a huge garden that was the source of most of our food. Row upon row of peas, sugar beets, carrots and squash.

Farming on the Canadian Shield is never easy – the soil is poor and shallow and in no month is it guaranteed not to snow. But while I spent hours and hours of my youth weeding and taking out rocks and digging up potatoes, the worry and responsibility of growing enough food to make it through the winter rested on the squarely shoulders of my parents, not mine. Which is how it should be when you’re six.

Now that I finally have the space and time (this is debatable) to grow my own garden, the stakes are considerably lower. I live just a few blocks from a weekly farmers market. I’m married to someone who distrusts food that doesn’t come wrapped tightly in cellophane and considers iceberg lettuce to be a vegetable (it isn’t, of course, it’s crunchy, pale-green water). We’re so far off from being successful survivalists, we don’t even have a root cellar.
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