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Always on the look-out for work-saving tips, I ask Gladys why she puts ice and white vinegar in the coffee carafes. She’s on duty behind the counter at the Petroleum Building Café near the corner of Flower and Olympic. It's October, 1971.

Vinegar cuts the oily scum and the ice sorta scours the coffee stains, she tells me. I sure as heck can’t get these puppies (looking at her hands) down their necks. It ain’t perfect honey, but hey, it’s better than tasting soap in your coffee. Ya know what I mean? 

Yeah, I know what you mean. Gladys. Thanks.

She hands me the white paper bag full of an order of paper wrapped corn beef and pastrami sandwiches our receptionist has phoned in. I hand her a $20, say, Keep the change, Gladys. She smiles and salutes. I cross Flower Street to Bowes Advertising Agency thinking about the coffee and buttermilk donut I buy from a bakery truck that comes every morning to our parking lot behind the one-story building. I’m addicted to those crispy on the outside, chewy and tender on the inside buttermilk donuts. Crispy - not like potato chip crispy - but like good sourdough bread - satisfying-to-the-molars kind of crispy. I’m not a coffee connoisseur I take it with cream and sugar and get so buzzed from the overdose of carbs and caffeine that eventually I figure out that’s what’s causing my hypoglycemia and go cold turkey on the donut and coffee every morning. It works.

At the Bowes Company, I'm a creative book keeper. By that I do not mean I’m creative with the books. I’m barely clever enough to make the production billing and production payments come out even – let alone juggle the books to anyone’s advantage. I get creative (and it’s appreciated – even if they still ignore me) in the ways I ask the goddamn artists for their goddamn time-sheets. I create clever riddles, cartoons, puppet-show skits even with pleading heroines and artistic villains made out of the little pleated paper cups with pipe-cleaner arms.  The dolls look a lot like Carl Moore the bearded and dapper but sullen and aloof head of the art department. Are artists always late, rude and inconsiderate? Or is it just our artists? Is that what creativity does to people? Or is it deadlines and trying to squeeze their creativity in under the wire that makes them grumpy? My creative pleas are fun to concoct - even though the time sheets DO have a deadline to be on my desk in order for the clients to be billed.

In a few months I’m going to meet my husband at a January 2, 1972 open house at the home of the woman who found me this job. Having decided on our second date to get married, he and I will have lunch time picnics on the grassy and lady-bug laced fallow grounds where the future Los Angeles Convention Center will be built in the mid-seventies. By the following November, I will quit working at the Bowes Company and go back to school to earn my BA in Child Development before going on to develop children in 1976 and 1980. Is developing children a little like developing a case of measles? I think it may be. Only you never stop itching with love, passion, and warmth. Not even with vinegar and ice baths.

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RE: Some Healthier Ways to Discourage Ants...

1. Boric acid, like diatomaceous earth, dries them out when they walk over it. 
2. I had success with regular table salt dissolved in boiling water that I used to wipe down the kitchen counters where they seemed to be coming in. All GONE! They haven’t returned! In the past, I discovered in Los Angeles’ big rain storms when “the ants go marching two by two, hoorah, hoorah… the little one stops to tie her shoe, and they all go marching down to the ground to get out of the rain, boom boom boom” that using 
3. garlic powder, 4. cinnamon,        5. boric acid, and 6. tansy leaves worked well as long as I held them all in place with Black Flag. Hah! Big Fat -0- for that one!

Please use natural repellants, folks. 

Floods and fires show us what a toxic soup we create with chemicals and heavy duty pesticides. 

Water and fire are great equalizers, eh? Our affluent effluence during Katrina, and last year’s floods made me think a lot about what kind of toxic cocktail we’re concocting that affects all of us no matter our wealth and health or lack thereof. 

Last October’s fires in Napa and Sonoma put some pretty putrid plastics into the air. Tom Lehrer’s song “Pollution” warned us that we could die just by “drinking the water and breathing the air!”

7. A friend in Echo Park used to put out a box of Winchell’s donuts on the front stoop when an invasion of ants threatened. She invited them to dine out there. Worked for her! And for the ants!