At my little hospital, which is the second largest employer in the region, I work with a bunch of people I like, a few I'm ambivalent about one batshit crazy woman. She's the kind of person that you pass with your eyes averted like you would a vicious dog, in case your eye contact looks like a challenge and she has to kill you. Luckily, I think she's finally had one of her psychotic breakdowns in front of enough witnesses to be offered an opportunity to seek employment elsewhere.
A couple of days ago she got lit up about something. She's the kind of person who doesn't have a little outburst and get over it, she has a little outburst and it opens a floodgate to let the madness out. So...she got pissed. Then more pissed. Finally, she was standing in the middle of the lab screaming, "FUCKING BITCH!" and throwing things. The phlebotomists ran for cover, all except one. That one got dragged around the lab by the elbow to witness the source of Batshit's insanity. Finally, after flinging the phones around, chasing the phlebots, storming out of the lab, storming back in for another round, crying hysterically, and threatening suicide...she left. And apparently clocked out so she could come back to the lab, pitch one more fit, and hit someone. That someone happened to be me.
And then she left. For real. And silence descended. And we all looked around at each other and said, "Jesus! What started that?"
So now she's gone, under suspension pending a disciplinary hearing which, please God, ought to result in termination. Although termination with a side of institutionalization is probably a better solution.
So last night was hectic, since we were short a tech, but it was a lot more relaxing, even with the extra work, than is usually is. It's easier to plan your night around extra work than a potential psychotic break.
However, we're sort of halfway expecting her to come back and kill us, so if I were you I'd plan on getting into the class-action lawsuit with the other families. There's no reason not to profit of the suffering of your friends after they're dead, is there?
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Friday, December 28, 2007
Evie's Week
I'm halfway through my nine day in a row stretch at work. Everyone in Southern Illinois has chosen this week to drop by the E.R. with sore bellies because they've all eaten so much rich food and washed it down with a river of booze.
We have three dead guys in our morgue that's designed to hold two dead guys, so one is laying on the table waiting for the funeral home to pick him up (Lab is responsible for the morgue after the pathology staff goes home at 3pm.). The one that's cooked to a crisp is, fortunately, tucked away in the cooler. He died in a fiery car crash and he's so badly burned that chunks fall off when you have to move him. There's charred dead-guy ash on the floor. I hope his family doesn't come by to look at him.
And I have a sinus infection and no possibility of taking a day off to indulge it. Oh...and it's raining. And there's still 11 more weeks of winter.
I'm a little burned out.
We have three dead guys in our morgue that's designed to hold two dead guys, so one is laying on the table waiting for the funeral home to pick him up (Lab is responsible for the morgue after the pathology staff goes home at 3pm.). The one that's cooked to a crisp is, fortunately, tucked away in the cooler. He died in a fiery car crash and he's so badly burned that chunks fall off when you have to move him. There's charred dead-guy ash on the floor. I hope his family doesn't come by to look at him.
And I have a sinus infection and no possibility of taking a day off to indulge it. Oh...and it's raining. And there's still 11 more weeks of winter.
I'm a little burned out.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Merry Christmas
'Twas the night after Christmasand all through the house
the gifts were all given
(the cat brought a mouse).
Ev in her labcoat
and I in my jammies
Have now settled down
from our pre-Christmas whammies.
'The stockings,once hung by the chimney with care
now litter the floor
spilling loot everywhere:
Candy and crayons
and movies to thrill,
Posters to paint on
and scarves for the chill.
The roast beast is devoured,the wine bottle's dry.
The dishes are washed,
and I wish I'd baked pie.
Now Carrie, now Katie,
Now Grant and the dogs,
Now Rob and the cats
are somewhere sawing logs.
The fire is blazingand the house has grown still,
so I'm taking a moment
to share some good will.
Fom us here in Nowhere
to you in Wherevever
Here's hoping you all had a day
you can treasure.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Peace and Joy and Work
I'm working tonight, on Christmas Eve. Well, okay..."working" isn't exactly the right term for it. I'm AT work, reading Gore Vidal's 1876 and watching the clock creep towards 10:30, when I can go home. We've got all the kids together except for Robbie, unfortunately. He's working at his own hospital, 2000 miles away.
Which brings me to my main point....
On my way to work today I heard a little teaser on NPR's Talk of the Nation for tomorrow's show. It'll be about which kinds of people are at work doing what kinds of jobs on Christmas. He was inviting people to call in and tell their stories. The host also said he wouldn't be at work tomorrow, but Ari Shapiro would be substituting for him since, presumably, he's not an observer of Christmas.
Unfortunately, I'll be at work on Christmas, as will my only misbegotten son. I work a three year rotation that has me work one of the "big three" winter holidays each year; Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year's. I did Thanksgiving last year, Christmas this year, and next year 'll work New Year's.
That's my favorite. I don't celebrate on New Year's Eve (there's a surprise, eh?), so I don't mind working it. If I had a choice I'd gladly work every New Year's if I could get one of the other days off.
But I don't, so tonight I'm cleaning my analyzers, reading a book, and worrying gently about Lori on her long drive to St. Louis and back to pick up her son at the airport. We all have a date to meet at home at 11 tonight for the ceremonial Throwing Out of the First Gift, which we'd done all the kid's lives to settle them down enough to sleep. All the rest of the giftage happens in the morning, per my own mother's rule: you have to stay in bed until the sun comes up. At the very weakest hint of gray sky, my brothers and I would be standing in the hallway outside my parent's bedroom asking, "Mom! Is it light enough yet? Mom?"
Merry Christmas to all of you. If you have a car wreck in Southern Illinois tomorrow tell the nurses in the ER that you have a pal in the lab, and I'll stop in to see you. Otherwise, have a nice Christmas, and save up all the good stories for the blogs on Wednesday, okay?
Which brings me to my main point....
On my way to work today I heard a little teaser on NPR's Talk of the Nation for tomorrow's show. It'll be about which kinds of people are at work doing what kinds of jobs on Christmas. He was inviting people to call in and tell their stories. The host also said he wouldn't be at work tomorrow, but Ari Shapiro would be substituting for him since, presumably, he's not an observer of Christmas.
Unfortunately, I'll be at work on Christmas, as will my only misbegotten son. I work a three year rotation that has me work one of the "big three" winter holidays each year; Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year's. I did Thanksgiving last year, Christmas this year, and next year 'll work New Year's.
That's my favorite. I don't celebrate on New Year's Eve (there's a surprise, eh?), so I don't mind working it. If I had a choice I'd gladly work every New Year's if I could get one of the other days off.
But I don't, so tonight I'm cleaning my analyzers, reading a book, and worrying gently about Lori on her long drive to St. Louis and back to pick up her son at the airport. We all have a date to meet at home at 11 tonight for the ceremonial Throwing Out of the First Gift, which we'd done all the kid's lives to settle them down enough to sleep. All the rest of the giftage happens in the morning, per my own mother's rule: you have to stay in bed until the sun comes up. At the very weakest hint of gray sky, my brothers and I would be standing in the hallway outside my parent's bedroom asking, "Mom! Is it light enough yet? Mom?"
Merry Christmas to all of you. If you have a car wreck in Southern Illinois tomorrow tell the nurses in the ER that you have a pal in the lab, and I'll stop in to see you. Otherwise, have a nice Christmas, and save up all the good stories for the blogs on Wednesday, okay?
I'll Try Again...
Either I'm not clear or none of my commenters are listening, so I'm going to try again:
The Santa myth...the story where a jolly fat man lives at the North Pole with elves and makes toys for children all over the world and distributes them in one night on a flying sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer. Remember that one?
Not the spirit of love and joy that comes with the season. Not family togetherness, midnight mass or quiet reflection. The actual Santa myth about the guy in the red suit. When does it end in your minds?
The love of family, obviously continues into adulthood and beyond. The gifts, the food, the decorating, etc. My question is when do you think it's appropriate to stop telling your children that a guy will be delivering presents down the chimneys of all good children in the world.
The Santa myth, like the shopping, has nothing to do with the purported reason for Christmas - to celebrate the birth of Christ. The Santa myth was incorporated into the Christmas story to make it more palatable to European pagans long ago. We still have the food and the gifts and the love and all that crap after the myth goes away.
My original point was this:
When your children start to become aware of the fact that the Santa story doesn't hold water...one guy, the whole earth, one night, flying sleigh, etc...do you tell them yeah, it's a myth about love and giving and stuff like that, or do you hunker down and deny, deny, deny.
And if so...when DO you 'fess up? When they're 15? 20? 50?
When is the right time to tell kids it's a myth?
The Santa myth...the story where a jolly fat man lives at the North Pole with elves and makes toys for children all over the world and distributes them in one night on a flying sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer. Remember that one?
Not the spirit of love and joy that comes with the season. Not family togetherness, midnight mass or quiet reflection. The actual Santa myth about the guy in the red suit. When does it end in your minds?
The love of family, obviously continues into adulthood and beyond. The gifts, the food, the decorating, etc. My question is when do you think it's appropriate to stop telling your children that a guy will be delivering presents down the chimneys of all good children in the world.
The Santa myth, like the shopping, has nothing to do with the purported reason for Christmas - to celebrate the birth of Christ. The Santa myth was incorporated into the Christmas story to make it more palatable to European pagans long ago. We still have the food and the gifts and the love and all that crap after the myth goes away.
My original point was this:
When your children start to become aware of the fact that the Santa story doesn't hold water...one guy, the whole earth, one night, flying sleigh, etc...do you tell them yeah, it's a myth about love and giving and stuff like that, or do you hunker down and deny, deny, deny.
And if so...when DO you 'fess up? When they're 15? 20? 50?
When is the right time to tell kids it's a myth?
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Who You callin' 'Ho'?
Today's holiday humbuggery:Since I'm not much of a Christmas person, I'm also not much of a Santa person. I never liked trying to maintain that charade for my kids, because eventually they were bound to find out and I worried that they'd wonder what else I'd been lying about. So pretty much by the time they were kindergarten age and they started questioning the Santa myth, I was telling them the truth. They still get one "Santa" present a year, but that's for the sake of tradition more than anything.
Lori and I were talking about the Santa myth. It makes me uncomfortable, like all institutionalized chicanery makes me uncomfortable. She likes it; to her it's a fun holiday tradition, with a meaningless little deception that makes the holiday more fun.
So we decided to put the question out there to you, our friends, family and the strangers who've arrived here by searching for "hot girl-on-girl action"....
How do you feel about the Santa myth? Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing to delude your children about Santa? And for how long? If you could continue to sell them the lie into their 30's and 40's would you feel justified in doing it?
Don't you think I'd make an excellent pollster? I've managed to purge my question list from anything hinting at my own personal biases and have created a completely objective measurement of who's a bad parent and who isn't.
:-)
Friday, December 21, 2007
Hardrock, Coco and Joe ... A Story So Queer!
Ray Raynor, Garfield Goose, Suzy Snowflake ... any of that sound familiar? Anyone? Feral Mom?
Thursday, December 20, 2007
The Plan
Yesterday we bought a Christmas tree, which means that today I'll have to shop for something to put under that tree. I hate to shop, so I drag my feet right up until the last minute. And now it's the last minute.
But! On the bright side (and you know...I'm all about the bright side), I have a system. I gather the information, consider it, form a strategy, and go! With any luck I can be in and out of the shopping part of town in a couple of hours and be back in my chair, with my cats, books, and red blankie before the trauma has time to fully register.
Which brings me to the question of life strategies in general. Lori and I spent several hours in discussion over the last few days about our approaches to change in our lives. I am notoriously resistant to change. I put together a system that works for me, and then I stick to it. I like to eat chicken with rice for lunch pretty much every day. I like rice, I like chicken...why eat anything else?
Lori would kill herself if she had to eat the same thing day after day.
She asked me last night what I do when confronted with something new, like a gift that I didn't expect.
Pay attention. This can change your life.
First, I leave it out on the counter or on the floor...somewhere that I can look at it and get a sense of it's potential value in my life. If it passes that level of scrutiny, I touch it. If not, it goes into the shed or the closet, where it disappears from my mind forever.
If I touch it and handle it and try it out and it shows potential, I try to use it for a while. If it doesn't work the way I want it to work, once again...the shed or the closet. Finally, if it's not better than the one I already have, then you know...shed or closet.
And through this very careful winnowing strategy I end up surrounded by the optimum things. And once I have the optimum things, there's no reason to get new things...the things I have are, by definition, better than other things.
To me, that strategy makes perfect sense. Why fill up your house and life with things you feel ambivalent about? And why have three or four things you feel ambivalent about? And finally, why give the gift of ambivalence?
We got started down this road because Lori went shopping and came home with a special reading light bulb and a new lampshade for my reading lamp. I'm not denying that I needed a new lampshade (the cats knocked over my lamp and tore the shade, and it was looking like something a homeless person picked out of a dumpster to decorate his cardboard box), but just to be on the safe side, I freaked out anyway. I didn't need a new light bulb, my old light bulb was fine. And yes, I probably needed a new lampshade, but I wanted a chance to think about that for a while before a new lampshade was thrust upon me.
Hello? Doesn't that make sense?
Lori kept telling me, "You know how weird you are, don't you? No one else in the world would be upset by replacing a broken lampshade with a new one."
But it's not the lampshade that bothered me, it's the act of spontaneously replacing something with something else without taking time to consider that change for a while first.
So I think I've managed to convince Lori that I'm not kidding...I want my things to stay the same. I don't want a "new and improved" thing, I don't want to experiment, I just want to eat chicken and rice for lunch, sit in the reading chair under my lamp with my cats, and putter around in my yard. Forever. Everyday. Until I die.
Doesn't that make sense??
What do you do with changes in your life?
But! On the bright side (and you know...I'm all about the bright side), I have a system. I gather the information, consider it, form a strategy, and go! With any luck I can be in and out of the shopping part of town in a couple of hours and be back in my chair, with my cats, books, and red blankie before the trauma has time to fully register.
Which brings me to the question of life strategies in general. Lori and I spent several hours in discussion over the last few days about our approaches to change in our lives. I am notoriously resistant to change. I put together a system that works for me, and then I stick to it. I like to eat chicken with rice for lunch pretty much every day. I like rice, I like chicken...why eat anything else?
Lori would kill herself if she had to eat the same thing day after day.
She asked me last night what I do when confronted with something new, like a gift that I didn't expect.
Pay attention. This can change your life.
First, I leave it out on the counter or on the floor...somewhere that I can look at it and get a sense of it's potential value in my life. If it passes that level of scrutiny, I touch it. If not, it goes into the shed or the closet, where it disappears from my mind forever.
If I touch it and handle it and try it out and it shows potential, I try to use it for a while. If it doesn't work the way I want it to work, once again...the shed or the closet. Finally, if it's not better than the one I already have, then you know...shed or closet.
And through this very careful winnowing strategy I end up surrounded by the optimum things. And once I have the optimum things, there's no reason to get new things...the things I have are, by definition, better than other things.
To me, that strategy makes perfect sense. Why fill up your house and life with things you feel ambivalent about? And why have three or four things you feel ambivalent about? And finally, why give the gift of ambivalence?
We got started down this road because Lori went shopping and came home with a special reading light bulb and a new lampshade for my reading lamp. I'm not denying that I needed a new lampshade (the cats knocked over my lamp and tore the shade, and it was looking like something a homeless person picked out of a dumpster to decorate his cardboard box), but just to be on the safe side, I freaked out anyway. I didn't need a new light bulb, my old light bulb was fine. And yes, I probably needed a new lampshade, but I wanted a chance to think about that for a while before a new lampshade was thrust upon me.
Hello? Doesn't that make sense?
Lori kept telling me, "You know how weird you are, don't you? No one else in the world would be upset by replacing a broken lampshade with a new one."
But it's not the lampshade that bothered me, it's the act of spontaneously replacing something with something else without taking time to consider that change for a while first.
So I think I've managed to convince Lori that I'm not kidding...I want my things to stay the same. I don't want a "new and improved" thing, I don't want to experiment, I just want to eat chicken and rice for lunch, sit in the reading chair under my lamp with my cats, and putter around in my yard. Forever. Everyday. Until I die.
Doesn't that make sense??
What do you do with changes in your life?
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
We Should Never Be Confronted With These Issues In The Midwest
Last night my Nigerian coworker Thomas brought in Christmas cookies...sort of.
Thomas is a funny guy. He's a handsome middle-aged man with a thick accent and impeccable manners. He's my go-to guy, not only for teching problems, but for etiquette issues. He's also a major clothes horse. He's got more shoes than Imelda Marcos, and I don't think I've ever seen him in the same shirt twice in the two years we've worked together. Chemene tells me that the only time she ever bumps into Thomas outside of the lab, he's at Macy's or Dillard's buying more clothes.
So...Thomas' cookies. They came in a big red tin. After the day shift had all left yesterday, Thomas called me over and said, "I brought cookies!" He was incredibly pleased with himself, and he led me to break room with a big grin on his face. Thomas pulled a chair over to the area where we hang up our coats and reached up high onto the shelf, behind the place where old unclaimed Tupperware goes to die, and pulled out a Dillard's bag. Inside the Dillard's bag was a bright red tin with writing in, I think, Chinese, Arabic, something that looked like maybe Russian, and English. The tin said Biscuits on it and Thomas set it on the table and said, "I hid them so day shift would not eat them. Have as much as you want, just leave me the tin."
So I unwrapped the plastic around it and lifted the lid. The inside of the can had the most peculiar smell. Not bad, just completely unfamiliar. The first cookie I pulled out turned out to be a sandwich cookie of two Ritz crackers with lemon cream between them. Odd, but tasty. The rest, however, were an assortment of sweetened vegetable pastes baked into various permutations with unsweetened wafery things. Even I, a dedicated cookie hound, couldn't eat them.
After my supper break Thomas asked me if I ate some of his cookies, and I said I had. He told me they were his favorites and he was lucky to have found them in Southern Illinois, and asked me if I like them. "Uhhhh...", I said. "Some of them. Some were too exotic for me."
I felt sort of guilty about that. You never know how deeply entrenched your cultural norms are until someone varied them a little. Everyone knows that Christmas cookies should be cinnamon and chocolate and powdered sugar, right?
Well, but...why?
Maybe they should be cardamom and vegetable paste and unsweetened wafers. Maybe Thomas goes home to his Nigerian wife at night and says, "I had the oddest biscuit at work today..."
Every night Thomas eats from the salad bar. I suspect deep-fried okra, deep-fried mushrooms, deep-fried country fried steak with milk gravy and the infamous three-pork Cuban Sandwich, with it's horrid hot pickles...are not his cup of tea. Well, okay...they're not my cup of tea either, but at least they're familiar. It's the hearty Midwestern food that's been feeding farmers for generations, and is now used primarily to accelerate our deaths, thus opening up the job market for the next generation. It's a much more socially palatable eugenics program than lining us up against the wall and shooting us in the head, but not much less effective.
It just occurred to me that every night Thomas eats his salad and longs for...something. Something Nigerian. Something that isn't breaded and deep-fried and served with either ketchup or gravy, or maybe both.
So...once again, my life has been turned upside-down. I was forced to confront my cookie xenophobia head on. Now for the rest of the Christmas season, every time I eat a sugar cookie shaped like a tree or a chocolate-covered pretzel, I'll have to wonder about all the Africans and Chinese and Arabs choking down peanut butter cookies with Hershey Kisses smooshed down into the middle, wishing for a vegetable-paste wafer, and I'll feel some "We Are The World" guilt for our crap-ass desserts.
Does anyone appreciate how exhausting it is to be a liberal?
Thomas is a funny guy. He's a handsome middle-aged man with a thick accent and impeccable manners. He's my go-to guy, not only for teching problems, but for etiquette issues. He's also a major clothes horse. He's got more shoes than Imelda Marcos, and I don't think I've ever seen him in the same shirt twice in the two years we've worked together. Chemene tells me that the only time she ever bumps into Thomas outside of the lab, he's at Macy's or Dillard's buying more clothes.
So...Thomas' cookies. They came in a big red tin. After the day shift had all left yesterday, Thomas called me over and said, "I brought cookies!" He was incredibly pleased with himself, and he led me to break room with a big grin on his face. Thomas pulled a chair over to the area where we hang up our coats and reached up high onto the shelf, behind the place where old unclaimed Tupperware goes to die, and pulled out a Dillard's bag. Inside the Dillard's bag was a bright red tin with writing in, I think, Chinese, Arabic, something that looked like maybe Russian, and English. The tin said Biscuits on it and Thomas set it on the table and said, "I hid them so day shift would not eat them. Have as much as you want, just leave me the tin."
So I unwrapped the plastic around it and lifted the lid. The inside of the can had the most peculiar smell. Not bad, just completely unfamiliar. The first cookie I pulled out turned out to be a sandwich cookie of two Ritz crackers with lemon cream between them. Odd, but tasty. The rest, however, were an assortment of sweetened vegetable pastes baked into various permutations with unsweetened wafery things. Even I, a dedicated cookie hound, couldn't eat them.
After my supper break Thomas asked me if I ate some of his cookies, and I said I had. He told me they were his favorites and he was lucky to have found them in Southern Illinois, and asked me if I like them. "Uhhhh...", I said. "Some of them. Some were too exotic for me."
I felt sort of guilty about that. You never know how deeply entrenched your cultural norms are until someone varied them a little. Everyone knows that Christmas cookies should be cinnamon and chocolate and powdered sugar, right?
Well, but...why?
Maybe they should be cardamom and vegetable paste and unsweetened wafers. Maybe Thomas goes home to his Nigerian wife at night and says, "I had the oddest biscuit at work today..."
Every night Thomas eats from the salad bar. I suspect deep-fried okra, deep-fried mushrooms, deep-fried country fried steak with milk gravy and the infamous three-pork Cuban Sandwich, with it's horrid hot pickles...are not his cup of tea. Well, okay...they're not my cup of tea either, but at least they're familiar. It's the hearty Midwestern food that's been feeding farmers for generations, and is now used primarily to accelerate our deaths, thus opening up the job market for the next generation. It's a much more socially palatable eugenics program than lining us up against the wall and shooting us in the head, but not much less effective.
It just occurred to me that every night Thomas eats his salad and longs for...something. Something Nigerian. Something that isn't breaded and deep-fried and served with either ketchup or gravy, or maybe both.
So...once again, my life has been turned upside-down. I was forced to confront my cookie xenophobia head on. Now for the rest of the Christmas season, every time I eat a sugar cookie shaped like a tree or a chocolate-covered pretzel, I'll have to wonder about all the Africans and Chinese and Arabs choking down peanut butter cookies with Hershey Kisses smooshed down into the middle, wishing for a vegetable-paste wafer, and I'll feel some "We Are The World" guilt for our crap-ass desserts.
Does anyone appreciate how exhausting it is to be a liberal?
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Snow Day
Since this is more snow than Southern Illinois had all last winter, I was excited enough about it to take its picture this morning. It's a good thing I did, because now that the sun is out it's melting fast. By tomorrow it will be mud again. Looks like I'm not going to be able to use this as an excuse to avoid going grocery shopping ... sigh.
This is the view from our front door this morning, since I wasn't willing to actually throw on clothes and shoes and walk outside to take pictures.
Above is the view down our hill at the pretty blue house across the road, and that little lump of stuff next to the tree is our woodpile, buried in snow. There really is wood there, but you can't see it. We had the same problem last night when we needed to bring some in to replenish the fire.
You can't tell from the picture, but this is our raised wooden deck out back. Buried on the deck is another pile of wood and Mrs. Underfoot's cat house. We made her stay inside last night until her screaming and clawing at the door finally drove us crazy at 3:30am and we let her back out. Her theme song really ought to be "Don't Fence Me In."
This is where Cuppy spends her time, rotating like a pig on a spit. She stays in bed until she hears the fireplace screen open and then she makes a beeline for the hearth.
As you can see, if it weren't for the fireplace screen Miss Cup would be IN the fireplace. She'll sit there with her face mushed up against the screen for hours.
This is the view from our front door this morning, since I wasn't willing to actually throw on clothes and shoes and walk outside to take pictures. 
Above is the view down our hill at the pretty blue house across the road, and that little lump of stuff next to the tree is our woodpile, buried in snow. There really is wood there, but you can't see it. We had the same problem last night when we needed to bring some in to replenish the fire. 
You can't tell from the picture, but this is our raised wooden deck out back. Buried on the deck is another pile of wood and Mrs. Underfoot's cat house. We made her stay inside last night until her screaming and clawing at the door finally drove us crazy at 3:30am and we let her back out. Her theme song really ought to be "Don't Fence Me In."This is where Cuppy spends her time, rotating like a pig on a spit. She stays in bed until she hears the fireplace screen open and then she makes a beeline for the hearth.
As you can see, if it weren't for the fireplace screen Miss Cup would be IN the fireplace. She'll sit there with her face mushed up against the screen for hours.
Friday, December 14, 2007
I'm shocked! SHOCKED!
As part of my lukewarm effort to gay up our blog I thought I'd comment on Jodie Foster's shocking news that she's a lesbian. Jodie Foster, lusted after by by a generation of dykes, has avoided the topic like the plague for decades, no doubt to protect...what?
What difference would it have made? I know it's not her job to be a Lesbian Pioneer (although the uniform is sort of jaunty), but I can't ever figure out what keeps women in the closet like that. It's a gay-friendly world, Mike Huckabee notwithstanding...wouldn't the last 15 years have been more pleasant for her and her partner if they hadn't spent it denying one of the most basic parts of their identities?
Anyway...Jodie is out. And all of us who have suspected all along can shout a resounding, "Well, duh!" and get back to the business of living our own out gay lives until the next earth-shattering gay revelation.
What difference would it have made? I know it's not her job to be a Lesbian Pioneer (although the uniform is sort of jaunty), but I can't ever figure out what keeps women in the closet like that. It's a gay-friendly world, Mike Huckabee notwithstanding...wouldn't the last 15 years have been more pleasant for her and her partner if they hadn't spent it denying one of the most basic parts of their identities?
Anyway...Jodie is out. And all of us who have suspected all along can shout a resounding, "Well, duh!" and get back to the business of living our own out gay lives until the next earth-shattering gay revelation.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
On the Road Again
It's alive!
The black truck is back from the shop with it's fusible link replaced. "What the hell is a fusible link??" I hear you muttering. We didn't know either, but I have the Internets (sic) at my disposal.
According to Car Care, a fusible link is "a short section of wire that has a smaller diameter than the rest of the circuit. When current flow in the circuit exceeds that of the fusible link, the wire melts and interrupts the circuit." This would account for the puff of smoke coming out from under the hood.
Fusible links are not easy to change like standard fuses. Unlike standard fuses that come in pretty pastel colors and can all be found in a tidy little plastic box, fusible links are hidden in some wiring harness somewhere near the main wiring harness -- or maybe not -- and they may or may not be tagged. So first you have to know you have a fusible link. (This won't be a problem for most of you, since they are now obsolete, but we have an affinity for engines that pre-date onboard computers.) Then you have to find and fuck around with the wiring harness, hunting for a little melted length of small diameter wire which you may or may not be able to differentiate from all the other little wires in there. Then, if you're pretty sure you've found it and you aren't afraid to start hacking away at your electrical system, you can replace it. Speaking only for myself, there's already so much wiring in a car engine that looks suspiciously like someone stuck it on as a quick fix while praying that the electrical tape would hold till they got home that I'm not at all sure I could pick out a melted wire from your standard jury-rigged wire. Car engines are, to me, a confusing mass of greasy things, wires going nowhere and everywhere, nuts and bolts that human beings can't budge and stuff that will rip your hand off if you reach in there.
But I digress. Larry, our favorite mechanic (and champion smart-ass), does know about fusible links and where to find them, so he replaced the offending wire and told us we should never drive the truck to St. Louis. Actually, he said we should never GO to St. Louis -- in any vehicle -- under any circumstances. He says it's a dangerous place and there are people who will rape and rob us. He's right, of course, but at least they give you free coffee and soda while they do it.
So the good news is that we learned another new thing about car engines, and the next time this happens we'll know to hunt around for a little melted wire. The bad news is that fusible links melt because there's a short somewhere else in your electrical system, so if it happens again we've got bigger problems than can be fixed with a pocket knife and some electrical tape.
It's still a damn good truck, and well worth the $308 we paid for it, and if you can't love the vehicle you drive then what's the point? I'm just happy Ev's got her truck back.
And now, back to our previously interrupted Christmas plans. I'm knitting scarves. Who wants one?
The black truck is back from the shop with it's fusible link replaced. "What the hell is a fusible link??" I hear you muttering. We didn't know either, but I have the Internets (sic) at my disposal.
According to Car Care, a fusible link is "a short section of wire that has a smaller diameter than the rest of the circuit. When current flow in the circuit exceeds that of the fusible link, the wire melts and interrupts the circuit." This would account for the puff of smoke coming out from under the hood.
Fusible links are not easy to change like standard fuses. Unlike standard fuses that come in pretty pastel colors and can all be found in a tidy little plastic box, fusible links are hidden in some wiring harness somewhere near the main wiring harness -- or maybe not -- and they may or may not be tagged. So first you have to know you have a fusible link. (This won't be a problem for most of you, since they are now obsolete, but we have an affinity for engines that pre-date onboard computers.) Then you have to find and fuck around with the wiring harness, hunting for a little melted length of small diameter wire which you may or may not be able to differentiate from all the other little wires in there. Then, if you're pretty sure you've found it and you aren't afraid to start hacking away at your electrical system, you can replace it. Speaking only for myself, there's already so much wiring in a car engine that looks suspiciously like someone stuck it on as a quick fix while praying that the electrical tape would hold till they got home that I'm not at all sure I could pick out a melted wire from your standard jury-rigged wire. Car engines are, to me, a confusing mass of greasy things, wires going nowhere and everywhere, nuts and bolts that human beings can't budge and stuff that will rip your hand off if you reach in there.
But I digress. Larry, our favorite mechanic (and champion smart-ass), does know about fusible links and where to find them, so he replaced the offending wire and told us we should never drive the truck to St. Louis. Actually, he said we should never GO to St. Louis -- in any vehicle -- under any circumstances. He says it's a dangerous place and there are people who will rape and rob us. He's right, of course, but at least they give you free coffee and soda while they do it.
So the good news is that we learned another new thing about car engines, and the next time this happens we'll know to hunt around for a little melted wire. The bad news is that fusible links melt because there's a short somewhere else in your electrical system, so if it happens again we've got bigger problems than can be fixed with a pocket knife and some electrical tape.
It's still a damn good truck, and well worth the $308 we paid for it, and if you can't love the vehicle you drive then what's the point? I'm just happy Ev's got her truck back.
And now, back to our previously interrupted Christmas plans. I'm knitting scarves. Who wants one?
WTF?
Urban Pedestrian? Where the hell are you? Has Ottawa fallen into the sea? Is it even near the sea?
Uh...sorry, all you Canadians. I've got my own states firmly in my head, but I can't remember yours. I think I recall that you call your states something different and carve them up into inappropriately large chunks for your children so they don't have to memorize as many capital cities and that you tend to play hockey more and baseball less. Oh...and talk funny. And wear hats. That's pretty much it though.
So, unless you're floating around in the sea on a hunk of wood singing the Titanic theme song (but please God, don't...even though, if I recall correctly, it was originally sung by an actual Canadian) I can't think of a good reason that your blog would go missing.
Phone home, U.P.
Uh...sorry, all you Canadians. I've got my own states firmly in my head, but I can't remember yours. I think I recall that you call your states something different and carve them up into inappropriately large chunks for your children so they don't have to memorize as many capital cities and that you tend to play hockey more and baseball less. Oh...and talk funny. And wear hats. That's pretty much it though.
So, unless you're floating around in the sea on a hunk of wood singing the Titanic theme song (but please God, don't...even though, if I recall correctly, it was originally sung by an actual Canadian) I can't think of a good reason that your blog would go missing.
Phone home, U.P.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Hmmmpf
I guess things are better now...the evidence of the weekend's debacle has been swept away, and life is pretty much back to normal. Now I'm pissy about my job and not my screwed up weekend anymore.
My coworker's sister died Friday night. The coworker's wife called the lab and told him, and he pretty much fell apart, as you can imagine. He spun his wheels for a little while, trying to get back on track and concentrate on his work, but he couldn't do it. Eventually he took off his lab coat and said, "I have to go home."
I felt so bad for him. He'd been trying to get vacation time to go see her for the last week and we have a "no vacation between Thanksgiving and New Year" policy, so our boss wouldn't let him go. The irony is he couldn't gt time off to see her when she was alive, but that now that she's dead he can get bereavement leave to visit her body. Small consolation.
So anyway...he was working blood bank and I was in hematology. He finally got up and left, but he was too upset to tell me where he was at, and so I tried to wade in and make sense of the mountain of half-finished work on his bench. I sorted through his notes while I struggled to stay on top of my own stuff. Some of it I successfully dealt with. Some, not so successfully. I failed miserably at some parts, but at least not at the parts that were life or death. But I still got the "you're a moron" e-mail from my boss last night.
I replied with an e-mail telling him I may indeed be a moron, but at least I'm the kind of moron who tries to work two departments when her coworker has a family emergency and walks out in the middle of his shift.
I'll be curious to see his reply.
But really, it just drives home the point that no good deed goes unpunished. Had I left the coworker's mess stacked up in blood bank until the night shift blood banker arrived and/or the E.R. and O.R. docs started freaking out, I would have been off the hook.
I'm pretty sure that's how people learn to hunker down at their jobs and cover their own asses.
Like they say:
There's no "I" in team, but there is an I in "I can't believe I got fucked over for trying to help the team."
It's been a rough couple of days.
My coworker's sister died Friday night. The coworker's wife called the lab and told him, and he pretty much fell apart, as you can imagine. He spun his wheels for a little while, trying to get back on track and concentrate on his work, but he couldn't do it. Eventually he took off his lab coat and said, "I have to go home."
I felt so bad for him. He'd been trying to get vacation time to go see her for the last week and we have a "no vacation between Thanksgiving and New Year" policy, so our boss wouldn't let him go. The irony is he couldn't gt time off to see her when she was alive, but that now that she's dead he can get bereavement leave to visit her body. Small consolation.
So anyway...he was working blood bank and I was in hematology. He finally got up and left, but he was too upset to tell me where he was at, and so I tried to wade in and make sense of the mountain of half-finished work on his bench. I sorted through his notes while I struggled to stay on top of my own stuff. Some of it I successfully dealt with. Some, not so successfully. I failed miserably at some parts, but at least not at the parts that were life or death. But I still got the "you're a moron" e-mail from my boss last night.
I replied with an e-mail telling him I may indeed be a moron, but at least I'm the kind of moron who tries to work two departments when her coworker has a family emergency and walks out in the middle of his shift.
I'll be curious to see his reply.
But really, it just drives home the point that no good deed goes unpunished. Had I left the coworker's mess stacked up in blood bank until the night shift blood banker arrived and/or the E.R. and O.R. docs started freaking out, I would have been off the hook.
I'm pretty sure that's how people learn to hunker down at their jobs and cover their own asses.
Like they say:
There's no "I" in team, but there is an I in "I can't believe I got fucked over for trying to help the team."
It's been a rough couple of days.
Monday, December 10, 2007
If I May
Allow me to tie together the previous two posts. First, the continuation of our saga, or ...
When Good Plans Go Bad
We left our heroines in the frigid cab of a $300 e-Bay pickup truck, stuck in East St. Louis on a cold, drizzly Saturday night. After numerous attempts to start the truck, hoping against hope that the engine was flooded, it became apparent that the smell of gasoline wafting around us was coming from under the truck, nowhere near the engine, and we were going to need rescued. Our only possible rescuer was Ev's ex-husband, who lives a convenient half hour from St. Louis, so we dug around in the truck for a couple of handfuls of change and trudged back across the parking lot to find a pay phone. It was now 3:00am, and since we don't carry anyones phone number with us, we called directory assistance. After spelling his name and the name of his town several times, we were rewarded with a phone number ... and no place to write it ... so Ev jotted it on the back of her left hand. (By the end of the weekend the back of her hand held at least six important phone numbers, most of them belonging to U-Haul establishments, she'd had taken to calling it her Blackberry and Rob had declared his intention to buy her a stylus to poke it with for Christmas.)
We roused Rob from sleep and he offered to come right then and get us. In hindsight that would have been our best choice, but we chose to get a room instead, and told him to meet us in the hotel lobby at 8:00am to see about getting the truck running.
That's when we were confronted by the first in what was to be a long, long line of unhelpful people offering some of the worst customer service imaginable. The desk clerk said she'd be happy to accommodate us if we could wait an hour and a half until she'd finished her 5am room audit, then IF she discovered a vacant room it would only cost us $77 for the privilege of staying there for three hours. In the meantime, they had no coffee shop or restaurant, but she was kind enough to tell us there were vending machines, but only for the use of registered guests. That was helpful.
We figured it was going to cost us another hundred bucks either way, and they offer free coffee and sodas in the casino, so we slogged back through the rain to enjoy their hospitality for a few more hours. Unfortunately, Illinois casinos have a weird practice of closing for two hours to clean, so at 6am we were driven back out into the sleet to huddle in the truck wrapped in all the jackets, gloves and scarves we had and try to sleep.
You can't sleep in a freezing truck. You can doze a little, but your feet turn to blocks of ice and the pounding rain on the metal roof keeps waking you up. Eventually, the miracle of sunrise occurred, and we waded through the puddles to the hotel lobby to await our rescue. True to form, Rob arrived exactly on time, jovial and well rested with hugs all around, ready to take on whatever challenges would present themselves. The poor man had no idea what the next eight hours would hold.
After a perfunctory attempt to get the truck running, it was decided that the truck needed to be towed home. "Not a problem!" says the ever-optimistic Rob. He was planning to come to our house on Sunday anyway, to bring Carrie a table and chairs, so he called his girlfriend and changed the plans somewhat. Now he'd need to borrow her SUV, rent a car dolly, load the truck on it, and then head to Southern Illinois. We piled into his warm, comfy car to drive 30 minutes back to where he'd just come from, spent another half hour admiring his girlfriend's house remodeling (and lusting after her meticulous tidiness) and drove off in her brand new 2007 Ford Explorer to get the car dolly. Piece of cake.
The first U-Haul we stopped at was pleased to assure us that they did, indeed, have a car dolly. Yay! However, it was presently on a one-way rental to South Carolina. Excuse me, but if your car dolly is on it's way to South Carolina without plans to return, then YOU DON'T HAVE ONE.
Rob called the regional office of U-Haul and they told him there was one in Granite City, north of St. Louis. He called Granite City. They had no car dolly. That's okay, Rob knew there was another U-Haul in Belleville, so he headed there. On our second cirle around Belleville without seeing a U-Haul I suggested that we take the pussy way out and find a phone book.
There is no U-Haul franchise in Belleville. There are U-Haul franchises in St. Louis. Rob called several of them and found one that had a car dolly on the lot, not going to South Carolina. They'd hold it for us. Forty-five minutes later we pulled into Nosser U-Haul on Gravois just in time to watch Nosser finish the process of renting it to someone else. His excuse was that "corporate" told him he had to, and that reservations made through corporate supersede reservations made by the franchise. "That's odd," I said, "because the other two times we've had equipment rented out from under us our reservations were made through corporate, paid in advance, and superseded by the jack-offs in the franchise." I don't really believe Nosser got superseded by corporate. I could tell by looking at the unbelievable filthiness of his establishment that Nosser had about as much use for corporate policy as he did for cleaning supplies. I believe he's a "buck in the hand trumps a reservation" kind of guy, and we were five minutes too late. Still, Nosser wanted to be helpful since he'd just fucked us over, so he called several other franchises in St. Louis and found us an alternative. Not a car dolly, but a car HAULER, which would bump the price up from $69 to $129, but it was now going on noon and we were getting desperate.
The car hauler was across St. Louis, but Rob was still cheerful and we were still laughing, so Yay! We found the U-Haul place, paid the ransom, signed the contract, backed the Explorer up to the car hauler and that's when the shit hit the fan for real.
Enter: The Prick. The Prick is a tight-assed Missourian about 25 years old and full of Corporate Pride under his jaunty U-Haul knit hat and Store Manager badge. He sprints across the parking lot to inform us that we can't hook that car hauler, or any other piece of equipment owned by U-Haul, to a Ford Explorer under ANY circumstances. It's a "safety issue" because Explorers tend to roll over when pulling U-Haul equipment. Rob, a professional OTR truck driver, assures The Prick that he isn't going to roll his girlfriend's new SUV. The Prick refuses on the grounds that he'll lose his crap-ass job. Ev demands to see the policy in writing. The Prick goes back to the office and sanctimoniously pounds on his computer to pull up the policy that states his position. Except that it's not a safety issue. It's a liability issue, and the issue is that Ford and U-Haul have been suing and counter-suing the pants off each other for years trying valiantly to place the blame for Explorer/U-Haul roll-overs. So, despite the fact that EVERY SINGLE VEHICLE U-haul rents is made by Ford, the Explorer is auto-non-grata and its use will not be tolerated. At the bottom of the policy is a little script for U-Haul employees to use, which goes like this:
"What can I do to overcome this issue, accommodate your needs and make your move easier?"
Ev stepped back around to the customer side of the desk and said, "I'm going to give you an opportunity to overcome this issue and accommodate my needs. What are you going to do?" The Prick was taken aback and reiterated what he couldn't do, which was rent us the frigging car hauler. I told him we couldn't sleep in the truck and we had to get it, and ourselves, home, and asked him how he would suggest we do that. He suggested a tow truck. We explained that we live 150 miles from St. Louis. The Prick came up with an accommodating offer to rent us a moving van AND a car hauler at the discounted price of $190 plus tax. I lost it. I asked him if he seriously believed that it was "safer" to put a sleep-deprived driver behind the wheel of a notoriously crappy U-Haul truck towing a car hauler 150 miles through sleet than it was to put the car hauler behind a brand new non-crappy Ford Explorer driven by a well-rested professional driver. He chose not to take the opportunity to demonstrate anything resembling common sense, and clung to the corporate policy with Prickish tenacity. We agreed to pay the increased ransom and while we were waiting for The Prick to dot all his "i's" and cross all his "t's" Ev said to me, "My real hope is that all the Ford executives pile into an Explorer and drive it as fast as they can through the front window of the U-Haul corporate office -- and everyone dies."
The Prick was offended. He told Ev she was "upsetting" him by "dissing his company" right in front of him, and that was no way to act when he was trying to help us out and giving us that spiffy discounted price. I muttered that if they didn't have a corporate-wide bad habit of giving away reserved equipment, and/or we'd been five minutes faster, we wouldn't need his god-damned discount or his crappy truck because we'd be halfway back to Southern Illinois dragging Nosser's $69 car dolly behind the Explorer. Nosser wouldn't have cared if we'd hitched the fucker to a blind three-legged mule if we got there first and had money.
The Prick was dangerously close to invoking the right to refuse service to anyone, so we shut up and signed his paperwork. A mere half hour, and three wiring harnesses later, we drove out of The Prick's lot in a 24-foot moving van that ran like shit, dragging a two-ton car hauler, and followed our now spare driver and vehicle through the narrow streets of St. Louis, across the river and back to the dead e-Bay truck. Our next problem was one of physics. It's impossible for two people to push a ton of dead pickup truck across a parking lot and then apply the amount of force necessary to overcome inertia and shove it up two narrow ramps onto a car hauler while the third one steers, especially when they're cold, wet and hungry and two of them haven't slept in 36 hours. If you add two young, beefy, well-rested casino security guards, however, you can get it done.
We drove BACK to Rob's girlfriend's house, gave her back her vehicle and regaled her with the story. Since it was already 4:00 and we had a U-Haul we decided to load it up with Carrie's table and chairs and let Rob and his girlfriend salvage what was left of their day. At this point we felt like we'd survived the ordeal, so we had a good long laugh and agreed that if we were going to have a disaster, these were exactly the people we'd want to have one with. Ev makes light of the situation and keeps going. I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Rob keeps a cool head, makes jokes and acts like there's nothing in the world he'd rather be doing. We all make suggestions and we all listen to each other. No one has to be in charge. It's like a companionable scavenger hunt and we remind each other what a great story this is going to be. Disasters just reinforce all the reasons we love the stuffing out of each other.
After we loaded up the furniture and the beer, made a few jokes about Rob being hung like a yeast, hugged everyone and got on the highway, the full impact of the past 24 hours hit us like a ton of bricks. We were starving. We were so dead dog tired we couldn't keep our eyes open. We tried to keep talking to each other to stay awake but we sounded like drunks, slurring our words and not making much sense. As hard as I tried, I caught myself over and over again, snapping awake and realizing I'd stopped answering Ev and she'd stopped talking, and looking over just in time to tell her to wake up and open her eyes. We were deadly and had no business doing this, but there was no choice but to keep going. By now it was pitch dark, still pouring rain, and it must have been at least 10:00pm. I looked at my watch and it was 5:30.
We stopped about an hour from home, desperate to wake up and get something to eat, but when our food arrived we both took a few bites, felt queasy, and pushed it around our plates too tired to eat it. Back into the truck with our take-out box.
When we got within a half hour of home we got an exhilarated second wind and spent the rest of the drive congratulating ourselves on still being alive, being such hardy and intrepid problem solvers and having such excellent taste in partners. We parked the truck at the bottom of the hill on the least mushy part of our water-logged acreage, carried the two cases of beer into Carrie's house so they wouldn't freeze and dragged our sore, cold, wet, hungry, exhausted, sorry middle-aged asses up the hill to our fireplace, our worried kids, our cats, our bathtub and our warm, comfortable bed.
And that's how it all would have ended if the whole mother-fucking assembly hadn't sunk up to its axles in the mud overnight. Which brings us to:
Fuckity Fuckety Fuck Fuck Fuck
After Ev wrote her last post this morning she called me at work to tell me she'd hit the wall. I sent her to work, finished up what I needed to get done and came home early. I called U-Haul's roadside assistance hotline and told them our tale of woe. They told me that once we pulled it into our driveway we became responsible for it, and roadside assistance wouldn't assist us. We'd have to tow it or pay to keep it until the ground dried enough to drive it out. I asked where they were located and they said, "Arizona."
"Well, let me tell you about Southern Illinois," I said. "There are no paved driveways here. There are dirt roads, and it's been raining steadily for a week, 24 hours a day, so those dirt roads are mud. We didn't need this much truck, we didn't want this much truck and we had no place to put this much truck BUT in the mud. Would you rather we'd left it on the two-lane highway in front of our house??" I gave up on the roadside assistance people and called the local U-Haul franchise, thinking that fellow Southern Illinoisans would understand the problem the Arizonans couldn't. Boy, was I wrong. The Prick in Training parroted back the corporate policy that it was our responsibility and if we chose to wait until the ground dried they'd charge us for the extra time we kept it.
Larry, our favorite mechanic, sent a tow truck to pull the U-Haul and car hauler out of the mud for free. The friendly tow truck driver had the whole mess pulled out in about 15 minutes, I drove it to Larry's shop and dropped off the Ranger, then had Katie follow me in my car to return the U-Haul to the Carbondale franchise. I wasn't on the contract and I didn't take it with me, which inconvenienced the young man behind the counter. I gave him the contract number, which I had on the note in my pocket with their roadside assistance number, and at the first hint of assholery I told him to pretend he'd found the god-damned truck in the parking lot and the key in the drop-box, and I left. On the way home I narrowly missed hitting a deer.
For boring middle-aged women who live in quiet, uneventful rural Southern Illinois we have entirely too much excitement in our lives.
When Good Plans Go Bad
We left our heroines in the frigid cab of a $300 e-Bay pickup truck, stuck in East St. Louis on a cold, drizzly Saturday night. After numerous attempts to start the truck, hoping against hope that the engine was flooded, it became apparent that the smell of gasoline wafting around us was coming from under the truck, nowhere near the engine, and we were going to need rescued. Our only possible rescuer was Ev's ex-husband, who lives a convenient half hour from St. Louis, so we dug around in the truck for a couple of handfuls of change and trudged back across the parking lot to find a pay phone. It was now 3:00am, and since we don't carry anyones phone number with us, we called directory assistance. After spelling his name and the name of his town several times, we were rewarded with a phone number ... and no place to write it ... so Ev jotted it on the back of her left hand. (By the end of the weekend the back of her hand held at least six important phone numbers, most of them belonging to U-Haul establishments, she'd had taken to calling it her Blackberry and Rob had declared his intention to buy her a stylus to poke it with for Christmas.)
We roused Rob from sleep and he offered to come right then and get us. In hindsight that would have been our best choice, but we chose to get a room instead, and told him to meet us in the hotel lobby at 8:00am to see about getting the truck running.
That's when we were confronted by the first in what was to be a long, long line of unhelpful people offering some of the worst customer service imaginable. The desk clerk said she'd be happy to accommodate us if we could wait an hour and a half until she'd finished her 5am room audit, then IF she discovered a vacant room it would only cost us $77 for the privilege of staying there for three hours. In the meantime, they had no coffee shop or restaurant, but she was kind enough to tell us there were vending machines, but only for the use of registered guests. That was helpful.
We figured it was going to cost us another hundred bucks either way, and they offer free coffee and sodas in the casino, so we slogged back through the rain to enjoy their hospitality for a few more hours. Unfortunately, Illinois casinos have a weird practice of closing for two hours to clean, so at 6am we were driven back out into the sleet to huddle in the truck wrapped in all the jackets, gloves and scarves we had and try to sleep.
You can't sleep in a freezing truck. You can doze a little, but your feet turn to blocks of ice and the pounding rain on the metal roof keeps waking you up. Eventually, the miracle of sunrise occurred, and we waded through the puddles to the hotel lobby to await our rescue. True to form, Rob arrived exactly on time, jovial and well rested with hugs all around, ready to take on whatever challenges would present themselves. The poor man had no idea what the next eight hours would hold.
After a perfunctory attempt to get the truck running, it was decided that the truck needed to be towed home. "Not a problem!" says the ever-optimistic Rob. He was planning to come to our house on Sunday anyway, to bring Carrie a table and chairs, so he called his girlfriend and changed the plans somewhat. Now he'd need to borrow her SUV, rent a car dolly, load the truck on it, and then head to Southern Illinois. We piled into his warm, comfy car to drive 30 minutes back to where he'd just come from, spent another half hour admiring his girlfriend's house remodeling (and lusting after her meticulous tidiness) and drove off in her brand new 2007 Ford Explorer to get the car dolly. Piece of cake.
The first U-Haul we stopped at was pleased to assure us that they did, indeed, have a car dolly. Yay! However, it was presently on a one-way rental to South Carolina. Excuse me, but if your car dolly is on it's way to South Carolina without plans to return, then YOU DON'T HAVE ONE.
Rob called the regional office of U-Haul and they told him there was one in Granite City, north of St. Louis. He called Granite City. They had no car dolly. That's okay, Rob knew there was another U-Haul in Belleville, so he headed there. On our second cirle around Belleville without seeing a U-Haul I suggested that we take the pussy way out and find a phone book.
There is no U-Haul franchise in Belleville. There are U-Haul franchises in St. Louis. Rob called several of them and found one that had a car dolly on the lot, not going to South Carolina. They'd hold it for us. Forty-five minutes later we pulled into Nosser U-Haul on Gravois just in time to watch Nosser finish the process of renting it to someone else. His excuse was that "corporate" told him he had to, and that reservations made through corporate supersede reservations made by the franchise. "That's odd," I said, "because the other two times we've had equipment rented out from under us our reservations were made through corporate, paid in advance, and superseded by the jack-offs in the franchise." I don't really believe Nosser got superseded by corporate. I could tell by looking at the unbelievable filthiness of his establishment that Nosser had about as much use for corporate policy as he did for cleaning supplies. I believe he's a "buck in the hand trumps a reservation" kind of guy, and we were five minutes too late. Still, Nosser wanted to be helpful since he'd just fucked us over, so he called several other franchises in St. Louis and found us an alternative. Not a car dolly, but a car HAULER, which would bump the price up from $69 to $129, but it was now going on noon and we were getting desperate.
The car hauler was across St. Louis, but Rob was still cheerful and we were still laughing, so Yay! We found the U-Haul place, paid the ransom, signed the contract, backed the Explorer up to the car hauler and that's when the shit hit the fan for real.
Enter: The Prick. The Prick is a tight-assed Missourian about 25 years old and full of Corporate Pride under his jaunty U-Haul knit hat and Store Manager badge. He sprints across the parking lot to inform us that we can't hook that car hauler, or any other piece of equipment owned by U-Haul, to a Ford Explorer under ANY circumstances. It's a "safety issue" because Explorers tend to roll over when pulling U-Haul equipment. Rob, a professional OTR truck driver, assures The Prick that he isn't going to roll his girlfriend's new SUV. The Prick refuses on the grounds that he'll lose his crap-ass job. Ev demands to see the policy in writing. The Prick goes back to the office and sanctimoniously pounds on his computer to pull up the policy that states his position. Except that it's not a safety issue. It's a liability issue, and the issue is that Ford and U-Haul have been suing and counter-suing the pants off each other for years trying valiantly to place the blame for Explorer/U-Haul roll-overs. So, despite the fact that EVERY SINGLE VEHICLE U-haul rents is made by Ford, the Explorer is auto-non-grata and its use will not be tolerated. At the bottom of the policy is a little script for U-Haul employees to use, which goes like this:
"What can I do to overcome this issue, accommodate your needs and make your move easier?"
Ev stepped back around to the customer side of the desk and said, "I'm going to give you an opportunity to overcome this issue and accommodate my needs. What are you going to do?" The Prick was taken aback and reiterated what he couldn't do, which was rent us the frigging car hauler. I told him we couldn't sleep in the truck and we had to get it, and ourselves, home, and asked him how he would suggest we do that. He suggested a tow truck. We explained that we live 150 miles from St. Louis. The Prick came up with an accommodating offer to rent us a moving van AND a car hauler at the discounted price of $190 plus tax. I lost it. I asked him if he seriously believed that it was "safer" to put a sleep-deprived driver behind the wheel of a notoriously crappy U-Haul truck towing a car hauler 150 miles through sleet than it was to put the car hauler behind a brand new non-crappy Ford Explorer driven by a well-rested professional driver. He chose not to take the opportunity to demonstrate anything resembling common sense, and clung to the corporate policy with Prickish tenacity. We agreed to pay the increased ransom and while we were waiting for The Prick to dot all his "i's" and cross all his "t's" Ev said to me, "My real hope is that all the Ford executives pile into an Explorer and drive it as fast as they can through the front window of the U-Haul corporate office -- and everyone dies."
The Prick was offended. He told Ev she was "upsetting" him by "dissing his company" right in front of him, and that was no way to act when he was trying to help us out and giving us that spiffy discounted price. I muttered that if they didn't have a corporate-wide bad habit of giving away reserved equipment, and/or we'd been five minutes faster, we wouldn't need his god-damned discount or his crappy truck because we'd be halfway back to Southern Illinois dragging Nosser's $69 car dolly behind the Explorer. Nosser wouldn't have cared if we'd hitched the fucker to a blind three-legged mule if we got there first and had money.
The Prick was dangerously close to invoking the right to refuse service to anyone, so we shut up and signed his paperwork. A mere half hour, and three wiring harnesses later, we drove out of The Prick's lot in a 24-foot moving van that ran like shit, dragging a two-ton car hauler, and followed our now spare driver and vehicle through the narrow streets of St. Louis, across the river and back to the dead e-Bay truck. Our next problem was one of physics. It's impossible for two people to push a ton of dead pickup truck across a parking lot and then apply the amount of force necessary to overcome inertia and shove it up two narrow ramps onto a car hauler while the third one steers, especially when they're cold, wet and hungry and two of them haven't slept in 36 hours. If you add two young, beefy, well-rested casino security guards, however, you can get it done.
We drove BACK to Rob's girlfriend's house, gave her back her vehicle and regaled her with the story. Since it was already 4:00 and we had a U-Haul we decided to load it up with Carrie's table and chairs and let Rob and his girlfriend salvage what was left of their day. At this point we felt like we'd survived the ordeal, so we had a good long laugh and agreed that if we were going to have a disaster, these were exactly the people we'd want to have one with. Ev makes light of the situation and keeps going. I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Rob keeps a cool head, makes jokes and acts like there's nothing in the world he'd rather be doing. We all make suggestions and we all listen to each other. No one has to be in charge. It's like a companionable scavenger hunt and we remind each other what a great story this is going to be. Disasters just reinforce all the reasons we love the stuffing out of each other.
After we loaded up the furniture and the beer, made a few jokes about Rob being hung like a yeast, hugged everyone and got on the highway, the full impact of the past 24 hours hit us like a ton of bricks. We were starving. We were so dead dog tired we couldn't keep our eyes open. We tried to keep talking to each other to stay awake but we sounded like drunks, slurring our words and not making much sense. As hard as I tried, I caught myself over and over again, snapping awake and realizing I'd stopped answering Ev and she'd stopped talking, and looking over just in time to tell her to wake up and open her eyes. We were deadly and had no business doing this, but there was no choice but to keep going. By now it was pitch dark, still pouring rain, and it must have been at least 10:00pm. I looked at my watch and it was 5:30.
We stopped about an hour from home, desperate to wake up and get something to eat, but when our food arrived we both took a few bites, felt queasy, and pushed it around our plates too tired to eat it. Back into the truck with our take-out box.
When we got within a half hour of home we got an exhilarated second wind and spent the rest of the drive congratulating ourselves on still being alive, being such hardy and intrepid problem solvers and having such excellent taste in partners. We parked the truck at the bottom of the hill on the least mushy part of our water-logged acreage, carried the two cases of beer into Carrie's house so they wouldn't freeze and dragged our sore, cold, wet, hungry, exhausted, sorry middle-aged asses up the hill to our fireplace, our worried kids, our cats, our bathtub and our warm, comfortable bed.
And that's how it all would have ended if the whole mother-fucking assembly hadn't sunk up to its axles in the mud overnight. Which brings us to:
Fuckity Fuckety Fuck Fuck Fuck
After Ev wrote her last post this morning she called me at work to tell me she'd hit the wall. I sent her to work, finished up what I needed to get done and came home early. I called U-Haul's roadside assistance hotline and told them our tale of woe. They told me that once we pulled it into our driveway we became responsible for it, and roadside assistance wouldn't assist us. We'd have to tow it or pay to keep it until the ground dried enough to drive it out. I asked where they were located and they said, "Arizona."
"Well, let me tell you about Southern Illinois," I said. "There are no paved driveways here. There are dirt roads, and it's been raining steadily for a week, 24 hours a day, so those dirt roads are mud. We didn't need this much truck, we didn't want this much truck and we had no place to put this much truck BUT in the mud. Would you rather we'd left it on the two-lane highway in front of our house??" I gave up on the roadside assistance people and called the local U-Haul franchise, thinking that fellow Southern Illinoisans would understand the problem the Arizonans couldn't. Boy, was I wrong. The Prick in Training parroted back the corporate policy that it was our responsibility and if we chose to wait until the ground dried they'd charge us for the extra time we kept it.
Larry, our favorite mechanic, sent a tow truck to pull the U-Haul and car hauler out of the mud for free. The friendly tow truck driver had the whole mess pulled out in about 15 minutes, I drove it to Larry's shop and dropped off the Ranger, then had Katie follow me in my car to return the U-Haul to the Carbondale franchise. I wasn't on the contract and I didn't take it with me, which inconvenienced the young man behind the counter. I gave him the contract number, which I had on the note in my pocket with their roadside assistance number, and at the first hint of assholery I told him to pretend he'd found the god-damned truck in the parking lot and the key in the drop-box, and I left. On the way home I narrowly missed hitting a deer.
For boring middle-aged women who live in quiet, uneventful rural Southern Illinois we have entirely too much excitement in our lives.
Fuckety Fuckety Fuck Fuck Fuck.
I think it carries a degree of urgency if you call someone and threaten to kill yourself. I wonder if it loses it's impact if you do it on your blog? I swear...one more fucking thing and I'll do it.
I'm tired. I'm cold, I'm angry, I'm hungry, I'm muddy, the cats have escaped out the back door for the second time today and I'm fighting the impulse to shoot them on the porch. If it weren't so fucking cold out there, I'd put the goddamned U-Haul in gear and stick my head under the goddamned tire. Goddamn it.
However, it would be a dramatic gesture but not a deadly one, since the fucking thing is mired in mud up to it's fucking axles.
Go ahead. Anyone. I dare you. Say one fucking thing to piss me off.
We used to have a cat that, when she got pissed off, would run around the house looking for the dog so she could beat the holy hell out of it. She wasn't necessarily mad at the dog but it felt so good to hit it and watch it scream and cower that the dog was where she'd go to resolve her anger. She was a dog-seeking missile under pressure.
U-Haul...I'm coming after you.
By the way...I'm almost positive that I now hold the record for saying "fucking bastards" the most time in a single hour. Fucking U-haul bastards and their fucking tight-assed Missouri employees. If I decide to live through this day, I'm going to to rent one of their hideously overpriced fucking trucks and drive it through the front door of the U-Fucking-Haul corporate-fucking-headquarters.
Fucking bastards.
I'm tired. I'm cold, I'm angry, I'm hungry, I'm muddy, the cats have escaped out the back door for the second time today and I'm fighting the impulse to shoot them on the porch. If it weren't so fucking cold out there, I'd put the goddamned U-Haul in gear and stick my head under the goddamned tire. Goddamn it.
However, it would be a dramatic gesture but not a deadly one, since the fucking thing is mired in mud up to it's fucking axles.
Go ahead. Anyone. I dare you. Say one fucking thing to piss me off.
We used to have a cat that, when she got pissed off, would run around the house looking for the dog so she could beat the holy hell out of it. She wasn't necessarily mad at the dog but it felt so good to hit it and watch it scream and cower that the dog was where she'd go to resolve her anger. She was a dog-seeking missile under pressure.
U-Haul...I'm coming after you.
By the way...I'm almost positive that I now hold the record for saying "fucking bastards" the most time in a single hour. Fucking U-haul bastards and their fucking tight-assed Missouri employees. If I decide to live through this day, I'm going to to rent one of their hideously overpriced fucking trucks and drive it through the front door of the U-Fucking-Haul corporate-fucking-headquarters.
Fucking bastards.
The Plan, and How Plans Can Go Awry
The Plan:
To go to St Louis Saturday for some Christmas shopping, bulk beer buying, and eating, and then spend Sunday picking out a Christmas tree and decorating it with family, friends and newly acquired beer.
The reality: 48 hours without sleep, an overnighter on the streets of East St. Louis, and an endless drive through the backroads of rural Illinoios in a driving thunderstorm, behind the wheel of a U-haul truck.
Remember us? Lori and I are 53 and 44, respectively. We're medical professionals, we're moms, we're well-educated, sedentary, not prone to impulsive behavior. So...I can't figure out why our lives are so odd and frequently look like Hunter S. Thompon Meets The Blues Brothers.
Friday night I went out drankin' with my friend Tracy. It was the first time I'd been in a bar since Lori and I were first dating, and the first time I'd been in a bar without Lori in probably 12 years or so. I had fun (Traci's a riot, even when she's mired in girlfriend troubles), but I was somewhat less than gifted and still a little drunk when Lori woke me up for our St. Louis trip Saturday morning.
It was pouring rain, freezing cold, dark, foggy, muddy...you know. Midwest. December. Christmas shopping isn't Christmas shopping without sleet. We drove the newly-repaired black truck to St Louis to better accommodate any large-ish gifts Lori might be inclined to buy me at the Woodcrafter's store. Like, say...maybe a lathe. Or some other surprise gift that I might happen to be picking out with her that we'd still take home and wrap anyway and look at longingly under the tree. Something like that, for instance.
We flawlessly navigated St. Louis for the first time ever; first to Maryland Heights, then back into the downtown part of the city for beer buying and eating at the Schlafly's brewpub. Lori had mussels, mostly so she could hold open their fishy labias, point them towards me, and exclaim about their labia-ness. I tried to distract her with big science-y conversation about convergent evolution and shellfish, but every 30 or so seconds she'd hold up another mollusk vagina for me to admire with her.
On the wall in our booth there was a framed article from a scientific journal about beer brewing, written in the 1870's. The article stated that beer's beery goodness comes from yeast excreting alcohol from it's bowels and "pissing carbon dioxide from it's enormous genitals."
Yeast genitals? Really? And someone said this in front of other people BEFORE the tenth beer of the morning?
We ate, we drank, we headed back towards Illinois, and away from Missouri, which didn't earn it's nicknames as the Tight-Ass State for nothing. Still navigating brilliantly, we found a bridge heading across the Mississippi and crossed it, then got off the highway in East St. Louis for a self-congratulatory detour to the new riverboat casino.
East St. Louis, as everyone knows, is a blighted city, most famous for declaring bankruptcy and having it's own city hall foreclosed on. It looks like Beirut after the bombings. At night, it's dark, squalid, and scary. But right on the river, in the heart of East St. Louis, sits the Casino Queen, a glowing glittery shrine to wealth and excess, lit up like a neon Christmas tree and patrolled endlessly by security guards.
We went in with our usual $100 and played the penny slots for a few hours. I think we went up as high as $160, then down to $3, then back up to $110 before we finally left at 2a.m. with about $20 in our pockets. The parking lot was freezing and sleety and we hurried to the truck. I started it up, it caught...then coughed once and died. It was, in fact, exactly the behavior that caused it to spend the last six months languishing under the maple tree in the yard before we had it's fuel pump repaired.
So now, at 2a.m., 100 miles from home, in a sleety 30 degree East St. Louis night...we were stuck.
To Be Continued...(I have to get moving on the chores before work.)
To go to St Louis Saturday for some Christmas shopping, bulk beer buying, and eating, and then spend Sunday picking out a Christmas tree and decorating it with family, friends and newly acquired beer.
The reality: 48 hours without sleep, an overnighter on the streets of East St. Louis, and an endless drive through the backroads of rural Illinoios in a driving thunderstorm, behind the wheel of a U-haul truck.
Remember us? Lori and I are 53 and 44, respectively. We're medical professionals, we're moms, we're well-educated, sedentary, not prone to impulsive behavior. So...I can't figure out why our lives are so odd and frequently look like Hunter S. Thompon Meets The Blues Brothers.
Friday night I went out drankin' with my friend Tracy. It was the first time I'd been in a bar since Lori and I were first dating, and the first time I'd been in a bar without Lori in probably 12 years or so. I had fun (Traci's a riot, even when she's mired in girlfriend troubles), but I was somewhat less than gifted and still a little drunk when Lori woke me up for our St. Louis trip Saturday morning.
It was pouring rain, freezing cold, dark, foggy, muddy...you know. Midwest. December. Christmas shopping isn't Christmas shopping without sleet. We drove the newly-repaired black truck to St Louis to better accommodate any large-ish gifts Lori might be inclined to buy me at the Woodcrafter's store. Like, say...maybe a lathe. Or some other surprise gift that I might happen to be picking out with her that we'd still take home and wrap anyway and look at longingly under the tree. Something like that, for instance.
We flawlessly navigated St. Louis for the first time ever; first to Maryland Heights, then back into the downtown part of the city for beer buying and eating at the Schlafly's brewpub. Lori had mussels, mostly so she could hold open their fishy labias, point them towards me, and exclaim about their labia-ness. I tried to distract her with big science-y conversation about convergent evolution and shellfish, but every 30 or so seconds she'd hold up another mollusk vagina for me to admire with her.
On the wall in our booth there was a framed article from a scientific journal about beer brewing, written in the 1870's. The article stated that beer's beery goodness comes from yeast excreting alcohol from it's bowels and "pissing carbon dioxide from it's enormous genitals."
Yeast genitals? Really? And someone said this in front of other people BEFORE the tenth beer of the morning?
We ate, we drank, we headed back towards Illinois, and away from Missouri, which didn't earn it's nicknames as the Tight-Ass State for nothing. Still navigating brilliantly, we found a bridge heading across the Mississippi and crossed it, then got off the highway in East St. Louis for a self-congratulatory detour to the new riverboat casino.
East St. Louis, as everyone knows, is a blighted city, most famous for declaring bankruptcy and having it's own city hall foreclosed on. It looks like Beirut after the bombings. At night, it's dark, squalid, and scary. But right on the river, in the heart of East St. Louis, sits the Casino Queen, a glowing glittery shrine to wealth and excess, lit up like a neon Christmas tree and patrolled endlessly by security guards.
We went in with our usual $100 and played the penny slots for a few hours. I think we went up as high as $160, then down to $3, then back up to $110 before we finally left at 2a.m. with about $20 in our pockets. The parking lot was freezing and sleety and we hurried to the truck. I started it up, it caught...then coughed once and died. It was, in fact, exactly the behavior that caused it to spend the last six months languishing under the maple tree in the yard before we had it's fuel pump repaired.
So now, at 2a.m., 100 miles from home, in a sleety 30 degree East St. Louis night...we were stuck.
To Be Continued...(I have to get moving on the chores before work.)
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Sweeney Todd!
This is the first movie I've been excited about in years. Tim Burton directing Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" with Johnny Depp as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street!!??!? Can you hiss "perfect" under your breath maniacally?
In case you're as familiar with the music from the stage version as I am, and you're thinking, "The only real Mrs. Lovett is Angela Lansbury! And Johnny Depp?? He's too young! Can he even sing??" check out the film's website. (And yes, he can sing. My God, can he sing!)
We never, ever go to movie theaters, and especially not jam-packed ones, but this is one film I have to see on a real theater screen, with a real theater sound system. Lucky for Ev, my son will be here for Christmas, and he'll love this as much as I will.
"It's Priest! Have a little Priest!"
"Is it good?"
"Oh, it's too good, at least!"
"Awfully fat."
"Only where it sat."
"Haven't you got Poet or something like that?"
"No, you see the trouble with Poet is, how do you know it's deceased? Try a little Priest."
I'm cackling with glee and excitement here.
The Black Truck: A Love Story
Since the unfortunate demise of the blue truck last Thursday, I've been scrambling around trying to get my automotive legs back under me. About 6 months ago I was coming home from work at 3am after a 13 hour shift, and I didn't notice that someone had knocked the rip-rap that was holding the hillside in place into the road.
Rip-rap, for you non-Midwesterners, are (is?) large rocks that varies between fist size and bowling ball size that's used to slow down erosion on muddy hillsides. Normally it's not a traffic issue, but someone had missed the curve on that particular road on that particular day and had run up into the rip-rap and knocked it loose and into the road. So when I got to that curve in the road I ran over all the rock and it beat the crap out of the underside of my little black Ford Ranger.
A couple of days later my truck died on my way home from work at 11 o'clock at night. I couldn't restart it, and about 4 quarts of oil poured out of the engine and I thought I'd blown the head gasket or something equally horrendous. And IS there a funnier phrase in the automotive lexicon that "blown a head gasket"? maybe "blown a seal", but that's it.
Anyway, the black truck was toast. So Carrie towed it home with her little truck and there it sat for the next six months, like FDR at Warm Springs, sipping scotch under a shade tree with a blanket over it's withered hood, obsessing about it's own petty woe and not even thinking about my needs. Selfish bastard.
When I wrecked the blue truck by banging a deer carcass against it, suddenly it became time to revisit the black truck and it's woes. I hadn't even looked at it since we'd unhooked the tow chain and left it under it's tree. In fact, it had been sitting there for so long that we had a steady stream of men coming to the door asking to buy it, even though it wasn't in the internationally recognized "selling position"...facing the road at the end of the driveway with a chunk of cardboard taped to the windshield. It had it's back towards the road, clearly in the "fixing position", with weeds growing up around it and cats sleeping on it's hood. Sheesh. How clueless can guys be sometimes?
Friday morning it was finally time to deal with the black truck or start schmoozing the Moped Guy for rides into town. Maybe I could offer to blow his head gasket for a lift.
The Moped Guy, by the way, is my alarm clock. When I hear Moped Guy screaming down the highway at 30 miles per hour with his throttle wide open and a half-mile long parade of cars behind him, I know I'd better be out of the shower and ready to go to work. 15 minutes later I catch Moped Guy 5 miles up the road, valiantly pretending to be oblivious to all the drivers flipping him off as the pass him. I personally like Moped Guy. I like to think he's making a statement about protecting the environment and conserving gas. Lori thinks he lost his license for a DUI and the moped is his only way to get to work now. Lori's probably right, but a girl can dream.
So...the black truck. I called Larry the mechanic. Larry should have a sign in front of his shop that says "Saving Evie's Ass For Over 20 Years." I told Larry my tale of automotive woe and he came out and towed the black truck into his shop, fixed it in a day, and charged me $85.
I love that man. If he ever needs his head gasket blown, I'll totally do it.
So now the black truck is restored to it's former (dubious) glory, I'm back on the road, and life appears to be good again. Last night we celebrated the resurrection of the beloved black truck by taking Lori's lucky $100 Christmas bonus down to the casino. It worked; we won $260 on a couple of penny slot jackpots that we'll be gloating over for years.
So thanks, Internet pals, for all the cards and flowers during our recent bereavement over the blue truck, but would it have been too much trouble to bring a casserole too?
Rip-rap, for you non-Midwesterners, are (is?) large rocks that varies between fist size and bowling ball size that's used to slow down erosion on muddy hillsides. Normally it's not a traffic issue, but someone had missed the curve on that particular road on that particular day and had run up into the rip-rap and knocked it loose and into the road. So when I got to that curve in the road I ran over all the rock and it beat the crap out of the underside of my little black Ford Ranger.
A couple of days later my truck died on my way home from work at 11 o'clock at night. I couldn't restart it, and about 4 quarts of oil poured out of the engine and I thought I'd blown the head gasket or something equally horrendous. And IS there a funnier phrase in the automotive lexicon that "blown a head gasket"? maybe "blown a seal", but that's it.
Anyway, the black truck was toast. So Carrie towed it home with her little truck and there it sat for the next six months, like FDR at Warm Springs, sipping scotch under a shade tree with a blanket over it's withered hood, obsessing about it's own petty woe and not even thinking about my needs. Selfish bastard.
When I wrecked the blue truck by banging a deer carcass against it, suddenly it became time to revisit the black truck and it's woes. I hadn't even looked at it since we'd unhooked the tow chain and left it under it's tree. In fact, it had been sitting there for so long that we had a steady stream of men coming to the door asking to buy it, even though it wasn't in the internationally recognized "selling position"...facing the road at the end of the driveway with a chunk of cardboard taped to the windshield. It had it's back towards the road, clearly in the "fixing position", with weeds growing up around it and cats sleeping on it's hood. Sheesh. How clueless can guys be sometimes?
Friday morning it was finally time to deal with the black truck or start schmoozing the Moped Guy for rides into town. Maybe I could offer to blow his head gasket for a lift.
The Moped Guy, by the way, is my alarm clock. When I hear Moped Guy screaming down the highway at 30 miles per hour with his throttle wide open and a half-mile long parade of cars behind him, I know I'd better be out of the shower and ready to go to work. 15 minutes later I catch Moped Guy 5 miles up the road, valiantly pretending to be oblivious to all the drivers flipping him off as the pass him. I personally like Moped Guy. I like to think he's making a statement about protecting the environment and conserving gas. Lori thinks he lost his license for a DUI and the moped is his only way to get to work now. Lori's probably right, but a girl can dream.
So...the black truck. I called Larry the mechanic. Larry should have a sign in front of his shop that says "Saving Evie's Ass For Over 20 Years." I told Larry my tale of automotive woe and he came out and towed the black truck into his shop, fixed it in a day, and charged me $85.
I love that man. If he ever needs his head gasket blown, I'll totally do it.
So now the black truck is restored to it's former (dubious) glory, I'm back on the road, and life appears to be good again. Last night we celebrated the resurrection of the beloved black truck by taking Lori's lucky $100 Christmas bonus down to the casino. It worked; we won $260 on a couple of penny slot jackpots that we'll be gloating over for years.
So thanks, Internet pals, for all the cards and flowers during our recent bereavement over the blue truck, but would it have been too much trouble to bring a casserole too?
Friday, November 30, 2007
Another Day, Another Truck
*sigh*
In the immortal words of the dwarf...
I am NOT Happy.
I finally finished my CAP survey at 11:00 last night with several hours to spare before it's due today. Thank freakin' God. If I never see another DVD of swimming sperm it'll be too soon. The only thing lacking from this one was a soundtrack. It was disappointingly silent. Lori suggested "Flight of the Bumblebees" as an option and then I couldn't get it out of my head as I watched.
So I headed home at 11:00 singing, oddly, The Who's "Pinball Wizard" on the drive home, and I was trying to puzzle out some of the lyrics. Remember the bridge?
"I thought I was_____, but I just handed my pinball crown to him." What??
What did Roger Daltrey think he was?
Anyway, I was driving south, concentrating on Pinball Wizard, when a deer appeared in front of my truck. I never saw it run out there. It just...was. So I stood on the brake and whipped the wheel to the left. Cleverly, the deer ran to my left also. I hit it broadside at about 45 miles per hour and it exploded in front of my eyes.
You know how time slows down in a crisis? I was standing on the brake, fishtailing towards a ditch, watching the deer's head and neck fly over the roof of my truck while the front half and the back half of the torso broke apart at the ribs, and I was thinking, "Huh! I never would have expected it to do that!"
The truck continued to spin after the impact and eventually it landed in a shallow ditch on the northbound side of the road. It was smoking like mad but still running somehow, so I turned it around and ran it back up the hill and onto the road.
It was making a godawful racket; the valved were clattering, something was dragging underneath, the radiator was steaming and hissing, there was a grinding, scraping sound coming from the engine, but hey...it was still moving. My left headlight was pointed at the treetops on the right side of the road and my right headlight was gone completely. The frame was bent, so I was pointed in a vaguely southeasterly direction while the wheels were aimed due south. But it was still moving. Yay!
I was about 15 miles from home on a dark road without too much traffic, and it would have been a long, cold walk home if it had died completely, so I slowly crept towards home. It was tricky, since neither of my headlights were actually pointed at the road, but I figured what the hell. What was I going to do, hit another deer? At that speed, it would have laughed and walked away.
After about 5 miles the heat stopped working and I noticed that the temperature gauge was pegged at the top, and the oil pressure gauge was pegged at the bottom. But it was still moving. I made it to my mom's house and thought that if I get desperate, I can wake her up. But my mom isn't good in a crisis, so I was hoping not to have to go that route. A couple more miles and I was in Cobden, which was dark, cold and empty. Even the cop who stakes out the place near the park where the Mexicans hang out and play basketball...even he was gone. The OneStop was closed, the taco stand was shuttered...Fuzzy's Bar may have been open, but since the truck was still moving, I kept going. At that point I was thinking that if I had to walk now, it would only be 7 miles home.
But the truck kept going...loudly and smokily, but still moving. Just as I pulled into my driveway, whatever had been dragging fell off and I ran it over. I'm still hoping it was a truck part and not a deer part. I parked the truck and shut it off and one last cloud of smoke belched forth. Now it's as dead as the deer, and probably just as unsightly.
So...my list of things to do today is to get the other truck going again, and put the valiant little Ranger out by the road with a "Free" sign on it's windshield. Someone will take it for parts, I'm sure.
This is precisely why I buy $400 trucks on eBay. Although this was scary and inconvenient, it was a fairly inexpensive disaster. Besides oil changes and new wiper blades, I hadn't invested a dime in that truck in the 6 months I owned it, which means that the price was roughly $75 a month, plus the cost of gas. Luckily the other truck, the one I paid $300 for, is my favorite. I'll get that one back up and running and after Christmas I'll start shopping for another crappy eBay backup truck again.
This morning my right leg hurts from ankle to hip from braking so hard, but otherwise I'm pretty okay.
But I am NOT Happy.
In the immortal words of the dwarf...
I am NOT Happy.
I finally finished my CAP survey at 11:00 last night with several hours to spare before it's due today. Thank freakin' God. If I never see another DVD of swimming sperm it'll be too soon. The only thing lacking from this one was a soundtrack. It was disappointingly silent. Lori suggested "Flight of the Bumblebees" as an option and then I couldn't get it out of my head as I watched.
So I headed home at 11:00 singing, oddly, The Who's "Pinball Wizard" on the drive home, and I was trying to puzzle out some of the lyrics. Remember the bridge?
"I thought I was_____, but I just handed my pinball crown to him." What??
What did Roger Daltrey think he was?
Anyway, I was driving south, concentrating on Pinball Wizard, when a deer appeared in front of my truck. I never saw it run out there. It just...was. So I stood on the brake and whipped the wheel to the left. Cleverly, the deer ran to my left also. I hit it broadside at about 45 miles per hour and it exploded in front of my eyes.
You know how time slows down in a crisis? I was standing on the brake, fishtailing towards a ditch, watching the deer's head and neck fly over the roof of my truck while the front half and the back half of the torso broke apart at the ribs, and I was thinking, "Huh! I never would have expected it to do that!"
The truck continued to spin after the impact and eventually it landed in a shallow ditch on the northbound side of the road. It was smoking like mad but still running somehow, so I turned it around and ran it back up the hill and onto the road.
It was making a godawful racket; the valved were clattering, something was dragging underneath, the radiator was steaming and hissing, there was a grinding, scraping sound coming from the engine, but hey...it was still moving. My left headlight was pointed at the treetops on the right side of the road and my right headlight was gone completely. The frame was bent, so I was pointed in a vaguely southeasterly direction while the wheels were aimed due south. But it was still moving. Yay!
I was about 15 miles from home on a dark road without too much traffic, and it would have been a long, cold walk home if it had died completely, so I slowly crept towards home. It was tricky, since neither of my headlights were actually pointed at the road, but I figured what the hell. What was I going to do, hit another deer? At that speed, it would have laughed and walked away.
After about 5 miles the heat stopped working and I noticed that the temperature gauge was pegged at the top, and the oil pressure gauge was pegged at the bottom. But it was still moving. I made it to my mom's house and thought that if I get desperate, I can wake her up. But my mom isn't good in a crisis, so I was hoping not to have to go that route. A couple more miles and I was in Cobden, which was dark, cold and empty. Even the cop who stakes out the place near the park where the Mexicans hang out and play basketball...even he was gone. The OneStop was closed, the taco stand was shuttered...Fuzzy's Bar may have been open, but since the truck was still moving, I kept going. At that point I was thinking that if I had to walk now, it would only be 7 miles home.
But the truck kept going...loudly and smokily, but still moving. Just as I pulled into my driveway, whatever had been dragging fell off and I ran it over. I'm still hoping it was a truck part and not a deer part. I parked the truck and shut it off and one last cloud of smoke belched forth. Now it's as dead as the deer, and probably just as unsightly.
So...my list of things to do today is to get the other truck going again, and put the valiant little Ranger out by the road with a "Free" sign on it's windshield. Someone will take it for parts, I'm sure.
This is precisely why I buy $400 trucks on eBay. Although this was scary and inconvenient, it was a fairly inexpensive disaster. Besides oil changes and new wiper blades, I hadn't invested a dime in that truck in the 6 months I owned it, which means that the price was roughly $75 a month, plus the cost of gas. Luckily the other truck, the one I paid $300 for, is my favorite. I'll get that one back up and running and after Christmas I'll start shopping for another crappy eBay backup truck again.
This morning my right leg hurts from ankle to hip from braking so hard, but otherwise I'm pretty okay.
But I am NOT Happy.
Another One Bites the Dust
On my way home from work tonight I hit a deer. The deer exploded. The truck is totalled. I've had two naprosyn and three beers and I'm stiffening up as I type.
On the bright side, I finished my survey.
The details of the story will be tomorrow's post...provided I can get out of bed. And how's your day been?
On the bright side, I finished my survey.
The details of the story will be tomorrow's post...provided I can get out of bed. And how's your day been?
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
A Project!
When my son was a little kid, I started buying Klutz Guides. His favorite was "Juggling for the Complete Klutz" and the set of beanbag juggling balls it came with. My favorite was "The Incredible Clay Book" with it's rainbow assortment of polymer clay and detailed instructions on how to make millefiore beads, buttons, jewelry ... and miniature food.
I loved it so much that I bought a lot of little tools and spent most of my evenings making tiny soda crackers, tiny fruit, tiny pies, tiny cakes, tiny veggies, tiny cookies, tiny candy ... and then storing them in a Rubbermaid container because I had nothing else to do with them. Somewhere along the way, I decided that someday I wanted to build a dollhouse to display the tiny food. That's as far as I got on that project.
I've moved several times since then, and the tiny food hasn't traveled very well, but there are still a few pieces left unsmashed, and I still get a kick out of making it, although it's significantly harder now that I need bifocals. It's also a little difficult to take a picture of!
Last year I started buying books on miniature making, and this year I've asked for a dollhouse kit and a fancy stylus Dremel tool for Christmas. When I dragged Ev to the St. Louis Miniature Museum last month she bought me a kit to build a 1/4" scale Christmas village. So, tonight I bought all the supplies needed for assembly, cut out all the pieces and sorted them into Ziplock baggies, and with any luck I'm going to turn this:
Into this:
in time for Christmas. I'll let you know how that goes. Now, where did I put those magnifying glasses??
A Rebuttal
I read Lori's post with my first cup of coffee this morning and I'm considering it. I'll cop to the blogging slump and the Christmas-hating, but not to the post-Thanksgiving depression.
Mostly I'm mentally bogged down with work stuff. I've got a huge CAP (that's College of American Pathologists to you acronym-challenged folks) proficiency survey due Friday, and several other end-of-the-year things to do, and I've been so freaking busy lately that I can't figure out when I'm going to get them done. So every night I leave work more and more anxious about how I'll get it all done in a holiday-foreshortened month.
The only bright side to that dilemma is that I have Friday off this week so come hell or high water, I'll have to finish the survey by Thursday night, and Friday it'll be out of my hands.
You know those people who thrive on stress? I'm not one of them.
So the leftover turkey is turning into soup as we speak, the chainsaw will be back from the shop Friday and new firewood will be forthcoming. The pies are gone, but I'm too fat anyway. Maybe having the pies go bad will help me stave off my heart attack for a few extra months.
But let's not forget, Gentle Internet, that winter is a time of senescence. The universe clearly wants us to do less, since it provides us with less daytime to do things. Outside it's cold and muddy and dark; it's much more fun to be sitting in a recliner in front of the fireplace with a book and a cat.
But yes, it's true that I also dread Christmas and all it's obligatory merriment. I like food and I love my family, but I hate decorating and I LOATHE pressure. And Christmas, with it's mandatory shopping requirements and suicide-generating faux-cheer, is the worst of all holidays for me. Give me a Memorial Day picnic or a Labor Day barbecue any day. Those are holidays I can get behind. Christmas makes me anxious about time and money and schedules...and being pushed into a state of anxiety by societal responsibility makes me angry.
I don't begrudge Lori her decorating and planning, I just don't have any desire to participate. I like going to pick out a tree at the tree farm, and I don't mind bringing it home and wrestling it into the tree stand. At that point my decorating needs are met and I'll be spending the rest of the month hiding from the calender.
But I'll blog more after Friday, scout's honor.
Mostly I'm mentally bogged down with work stuff. I've got a huge CAP (that's College of American Pathologists to you acronym-challenged folks) proficiency survey due Friday, and several other end-of-the-year things to do, and I've been so freaking busy lately that I can't figure out when I'm going to get them done. So every night I leave work more and more anxious about how I'll get it all done in a holiday-foreshortened month.
The only bright side to that dilemma is that I have Friday off this week so come hell or high water, I'll have to finish the survey by Thursday night, and Friday it'll be out of my hands.
You know those people who thrive on stress? I'm not one of them.
So the leftover turkey is turning into soup as we speak, the chainsaw will be back from the shop Friday and new firewood will be forthcoming. The pies are gone, but I'm too fat anyway. Maybe having the pies go bad will help me stave off my heart attack for a few extra months.
But let's not forget, Gentle Internet, that winter is a time of senescence. The universe clearly wants us to do less, since it provides us with less daytime to do things. Outside it's cold and muddy and dark; it's much more fun to be sitting in a recliner in front of the fireplace with a book and a cat.
But yes, it's true that I also dread Christmas and all it's obligatory merriment. I like food and I love my family, but I hate decorating and I LOATHE pressure. And Christmas, with it's mandatory shopping requirements and suicide-generating faux-cheer, is the worst of all holidays for me. Give me a Memorial Day picnic or a Labor Day barbecue any day. Those are holidays I can get behind. Christmas makes me anxious about time and money and schedules...and being pushed into a state of anxiety by societal responsibility makes me angry.
I don't begrudge Lori her decorating and planning, I just don't have any desire to participate. I like going to pick out a tree at the tree farm, and I don't mind bringing it home and wrestling it into the tree stand. At that point my decorating needs are met and I'll be spending the rest of the month hiding from the calender.
But I'll blog more after Friday, scout's honor.
It's Bleak, Folks
I can't help but notice that we finally blew off NaBloMe in a big way. I know I keep waiting for Ev to have some bolt of inspiration and blog something, and I suspect she might be hoping I'll pick up the ball and run with it for a few yards, but I'm afraid we're in a slump here in Nowhere, IL.
We kicked it into high gear to get through Thanksgiving, and then ... we tanked. Maybe it was the tryptophan. You see, we thought we were going to have several out-of-town guests for the holiday, so Ev roasted a 25 pound turkey. It turned out to be just us and our veggie-eating girls, so we've been working our way through that Big Bird ever since. Yesterday we finally had to throw out the remains of the pies that had begun to get moldy. No matter how much you love pie it just isn't possible for two women to eat six pies in five days when they have to spend part of every day at work.Now we're heading into our official Holiday Slump. It's cold and drizzly outside, the leaves have all fallen, the grass is crunchy with frost every morning, the dog has decided it's too fucking cold to go outside to pee, we're burning through our woodpile like (you should pardon the expression) a house afire, we need to whack down another dead tree for more fire wood but the chainsaw is in the repair shop and there are tubs of Christmas decorations in the shed taunting me. I can feel Ev psychologically holding her breath hoping against hope that this year it just won't happen. We won't hang the stockings by the chimney with care. We won't deck the halls with boughs of holly. We won't hear any Christmas music. We won't shop. We won't don our gay apparel. (Well, okay, we'll have to don our gay apparel because the only alternative would be going naked and NO ONE want's that.)
But on the upside, we're going to be visited by our missing sons this Christmas, so there's that to look forward to.
Deep in the innermost reaches of my subconscious I've been dangling "December 1st" in front of my medulla oblongata as a sort of semi-goal for putting away the Thanksgiving decorations and considering the remote possibility of starting to unpack Christmas, but I know that's the first step on the slippery slope that will plunge us into the black hole of despair that only this time of year can bring, so I'm dragging my feet.And neither of us want to blog. Sorry, but we suck in December, and for all intents and purposes, the last half of November, too.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Yeah, yeah...I'm going to hell.
And speaking of "My cats were NOT happy"...This is one of my all-time favorite jokes. :-)
I rear-ended a car this morning. I knew it was going to be a really bad day. The driver got out of the other car and I looked down and I realized he was a dwarf. He looked up at me and said “I am NOT happy!”
So I said, “Well then, which one are you?”
And that’s how the fight started.
I rear-ended a car this morning. I knew it was going to be a really bad day. The driver got out of the other car and I looked down and I realized he was a dwarf. He looked up at me and said “I am NOT happy!”
So I said, “Well then, which one are you?”
And that’s how the fight started.
LOLOL...Ha! You Asked!
CEDARFLAME said...
People from the middle of the country scare the crap out of me.
Maybe Bennie was right, if we made Turkey the national bird we would all be eating something else tomorrow.
Okay, I got to ask. How did Turkey save your cat?
21 November, 2007
Well, funny you should ask. Ha! I get to tell another story. And by request this time! :-)
Several years ago my daughter Carrie dropped by our house with her new cat. My cats were NOT happy. Muffy Puffy, our 10 year old cat, was particularly displeased. She hissed, and then ran into my bedroom to hide. Carrie and the cat stayed for a couple of hours and then went home.
Several days passed. Since I'm not an attentive cat mother (and I'm iffy on my human children too), I didn't notice that Muffy Puffy was missing. Finally, we figured out that she was gone and started searching the house for her. We found her under my bed, where she'd been hiding for the three days since Carrie had been there. She hadn't eaten, drank, or pottied in that time. When I dragged her out, the whites of her eyes were a bright golden color, as were her ears, and every other place her skin showed through her fur.
I took her to the vet and she said that Muffy Puffy was jaundiced, and that her liver had failed during the time she hid under the bed with no food or water, and she would probably die. She sent us home with special food and we made an appointment to come back in a week.
She wouldn't eat the special food. In fact, she wouldn't eat any food. Muffy Puffy, who was famously obese, got skinnier and skinnier and more and more lethargic. I kept taking her to the vet and the vet kept changing food, trying to find one she'd eat. Finally, we were force feeding her high-calorie food via a syringe, and hydrating her with IV fluids delivered with a 21 gauge needle that we'd stick in the back of her neck several times a day. For months she got sicker and sicker and we debated daily about putting her down. In the meantime, we'd try to cram a few teaspoons of food into her, and run enough IV fluids into her to keep her alive.
One day, I cooked a turkey. I don't think it was the Thanksgiving turkey...I can't remember... but while it was cooling on the counter and we were doing something else, Muffy Puffy jumped up on the counter and started eating it. This is the cat that hadn't eaten anything for months. She stood there and ate probably a pound of turkey while we watched in amazement.
And that was that. We fed her the rest of the turkey (I wouldn't let anyone else eat it...it belonged to Muffy Puffy now) and in a few weeks she was completely healed.
But she hated us for the force feeding and the IV, and as soon as she was better, she ran away and moved in with the neighbors. I used to see her sitting in their window, glaring as I walked by. Bitch.
People from the middle of the country scare the crap out of me.
Maybe Bennie was right, if we made Turkey the national bird we would all be eating something else tomorrow.
Okay, I got to ask. How did Turkey save your cat?
21 November, 2007
Well, funny you should ask. Ha! I get to tell another story. And by request this time! :-)
Several years ago my daughter Carrie dropped by our house with her new cat. My cats were NOT happy. Muffy Puffy, our 10 year old cat, was particularly displeased. She hissed, and then ran into my bedroom to hide. Carrie and the cat stayed for a couple of hours and then went home.
Several days passed. Since I'm not an attentive cat mother (and I'm iffy on my human children too), I didn't notice that Muffy Puffy was missing. Finally, we figured out that she was gone and started searching the house for her. We found her under my bed, where she'd been hiding for the three days since Carrie had been there. She hadn't eaten, drank, or pottied in that time. When I dragged her out, the whites of her eyes were a bright golden color, as were her ears, and every other place her skin showed through her fur.
I took her to the vet and she said that Muffy Puffy was jaundiced, and that her liver had failed during the time she hid under the bed with no food or water, and she would probably die. She sent us home with special food and we made an appointment to come back in a week.
She wouldn't eat the special food. In fact, she wouldn't eat any food. Muffy Puffy, who was famously obese, got skinnier and skinnier and more and more lethargic. I kept taking her to the vet and the vet kept changing food, trying to find one she'd eat. Finally, we were force feeding her high-calorie food via a syringe, and hydrating her with IV fluids delivered with a 21 gauge needle that we'd stick in the back of her neck several times a day. For months she got sicker and sicker and we debated daily about putting her down. In the meantime, we'd try to cram a few teaspoons of food into her, and run enough IV fluids into her to keep her alive.
One day, I cooked a turkey. I don't think it was the Thanksgiving turkey...I can't remember... but while it was cooling on the counter and we were doing something else, Muffy Puffy jumped up on the counter and started eating it. This is the cat that hadn't eaten anything for months. She stood there and ate probably a pound of turkey while we watched in amazement.
And that was that. We fed her the rest of the turkey (I wouldn't let anyone else eat it...it belonged to Muffy Puffy now) and in a few weeks she was completely healed.
But she hated us for the force feeding and the IV, and as soon as she was better, she ran away and moved in with the neighbors. I used to see her sitting in their window, glaring as I walked by. Bitch.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Sin Is Our Friend
I think MY sin package is much more tasteful and balanced than Kwachie's...don't you?
Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz
| Greed: | Medium | |
| Gluttony: | Medium | |
| Wrath: | Medium | |
| Sloth: | High | |
| Envy: | Very Low | |
| Lust: | Medium | |
| Pride: | Medium |
Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz
How Deadly Are Your Sins?
Looks like a couple of these will come in handy when the turkey hits the fan tomorrow ... yay gluttony and sloth!
Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz
| Greed: | Medium | |
| Gluttony: | High | |
| Wrath: | Low | |
| Sloth: | High | |
| Envy: | Very Low | |
| Lust: | Very Low | |
| Pride: | Medium |
Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
The Turkey Story
I believe it's entirely possible that now that I've been blogging for more than a year I'll be retelling last year's stories. Luckily I've been hit in the head and don't remember last year, so if you're offended, I recommend a stout thump on the side of your own head to improve your attitude.
So...The Turkey Story.
Many years ago, when my three kids were small and I was living with the Girlfriend Who's Birthday I No Longer Remember, we went to an SIU women's basketball game over the Thanksgiving break. Even though SIU had been in the NCAA championship Final Four the year before, they had pretty sparse attendance at most games. At the game during the Thanksgiving break, the crown consisted of me, my kids, the Bad Girlfriend, and Dr. Englert, my genetics professor, who never missed a game.
They had a raffle at the ticket counter...they were raffling off 5 free turkeys.
Do the math. Five of us, one genetics professor...we were a shoo in for a turkey.
We actually won all five of the turkeys. They called all of our names and we came out of the stands and lined up like there were actually people there to see us and our five turkeys and maybe cheer. Apparently Dr. Englert forgot to fill out the ticket, because it was statistically incorrect for him to not get a turkey. Maybe he's a vegetarian.
So after the game, we lugged our five turkeys out to the car, went home, and stuck them all in the deep freeze (that made a grand total of six turkeys, since we already had one for the next day's Thanksgiving meal).
This is why it's important to support women's sports. Because there may be a year's worth of meat involved.
So...The Turkey Story.
Many years ago, when my three kids were small and I was living with the Girlfriend Who's Birthday I No Longer Remember, we went to an SIU women's basketball game over the Thanksgiving break. Even though SIU had been in the NCAA championship Final Four the year before, they had pretty sparse attendance at most games. At the game during the Thanksgiving break, the crown consisted of me, my kids, the Bad Girlfriend, and Dr. Englert, my genetics professor, who never missed a game.
They had a raffle at the ticket counter...they were raffling off 5 free turkeys.
Do the math. Five of us, one genetics professor...we were a shoo in for a turkey.
We actually won all five of the turkeys. They called all of our names and we came out of the stands and lined up like there were actually people there to see us and our five turkeys and maybe cheer. Apparently Dr. Englert forgot to fill out the ticket, because it was statistically incorrect for him to not get a turkey. Maybe he's a vegetarian.
So after the game, we lugged our five turkeys out to the car, went home, and stuck them all in the deep freeze (that made a grand total of six turkeys, since we already had one for the next day's Thanksgiving meal).
This is why it's important to support women's sports. Because there may be a year's worth of meat involved.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
From Lemons...Lemonade
Well...*sigh*
Once again the NoYouDonBloOftAsYouSho has ended in failure. This time, though, I was the innocent victim of my own overzealous domesticity. I thought I'd spiff up the yard in anticipation of our Thanksgiving holiday guests, so I went out back to finish cutting up the trees that I cut down and then left laying sprawled on the ground like this week's scantily clad dead hooker on CSI Miami.
So me and my chainsaw (my chainsaw and I?) got started with our tree decimation project...and then the saw broke. So I threw it in the truck and took it to the repair guy, who agreed with me that it's a crappy design, since I've managed to break it twice already in just a couple of months.
I left the saw with him and came home , planning to at least get the weed whacking done around the jungle in back of the house. I've got a brush cutter blade that tears through stuff in no time flat...and I keep Cedar in mind when I'm using it.
So I was blissfully slicing through the weeds and Whoops!...I cleverly sliced through the phone line. And boy, was it easy! I didn't have to chop at it or anything. So...no phone, no Internet, no blog.
But I went to Carrie's, called Verizon, and got the automated yet warm voice of the service robot. She told me that a service tech would be here between "8 o'clock a.m. and 1:03 pm tomorrow."
I couldn't drag myself out of bed by 8, but at 9:30 I was parked in front of Regis and Kelly, watching out the window for the Verizon guy, and his life-sustaining Internet access. I waited...through The Price is Right (and may I add that Drew Carey sucks raw eggs as the new Bob Barker), through The Young and the Restless (Victor and Nikki should stop fighting and come together while Victoria is in her coma, don't you think?), and through The Bold and the Beautiful (Stephanie...let it go. Eric doesn't want you, he wants Donna now. Move on, Babe.).
At noon...still no Verizon guy. I watched the local news...the Franklin County animal shelter burned down and almost all the animals were killed in their cages (I cried over that), and then some municipal workers fished a kitten out of the sewer line (I cried over that, too).
12:30...no Verizon guy, but the gay guy in the wheelchair on As the World Turns and his handsome and devoted boyfriend warmed my heart. Gay and disabled! That's two, two...two minorities in one!
Finally, at 1 o'clock I got in the shower and left for work. No Internet, but I made up for the 20 year gap in my soap opera watching, so at least I felt good about that.
The Verizon man called me at work at 4. He said he's on his way. Cross your fingers, or tomorrow we'll all discover who shot Stephanie at the end of today's Bold and the Beautiful.
Once again the NoYouDonBloOftAsYouSho has ended in failure. This time, though, I was the innocent victim of my own overzealous domesticity. I thought I'd spiff up the yard in anticipation of our Thanksgiving holiday guests, so I went out back to finish cutting up the trees that I cut down and then left laying sprawled on the ground like this week's scantily clad dead hooker on CSI Miami.
So me and my chainsaw (my chainsaw and I?) got started with our tree decimation project...and then the saw broke. So I threw it in the truck and took it to the repair guy, who agreed with me that it's a crappy design, since I've managed to break it twice already in just a couple of months.
I left the saw with him and came home , planning to at least get the weed whacking done around the jungle in back of the house. I've got a brush cutter blade that tears through stuff in no time flat...and I keep Cedar in mind when I'm using it.
So I was blissfully slicing through the weeds and Whoops!...I cleverly sliced through the phone line. And boy, was it easy! I didn't have to chop at it or anything. So...no phone, no Internet, no blog.
But I went to Carrie's, called Verizon, and got the automated yet warm voice of the service robot. She told me that a service tech would be here between "8 o'clock a.m. and 1:03 pm tomorrow."
I couldn't drag myself out of bed by 8, but at 9:30 I was parked in front of Regis and Kelly, watching out the window for the Verizon guy, and his life-sustaining Internet access. I waited...through The Price is Right (and may I add that Drew Carey sucks raw eggs as the new Bob Barker), through The Young and the Restless (Victor and Nikki should stop fighting and come together while Victoria is in her coma, don't you think?), and through The Bold and the Beautiful (Stephanie...let it go. Eric doesn't want you, he wants Donna now. Move on, Babe.).
At noon...still no Verizon guy. I watched the local news...the Franklin County animal shelter burned down and almost all the animals were killed in their cages (I cried over that), and then some municipal workers fished a kitten out of the sewer line (I cried over that, too).
12:30...no Verizon guy, but the gay guy in the wheelchair on As the World Turns and his handsome and devoted boyfriend warmed my heart. Gay and disabled! That's two, two...two minorities in one!
Finally, at 1 o'clock I got in the shower and left for work. No Internet, but I made up for the 20 year gap in my soap opera watching, so at least I felt good about that.
The Verizon man called me at work at 4. He said he's on his way. Cross your fingers, or tomorrow we'll all discover who shot Stephanie at the end of today's Bold and the Beautiful.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Widgets and Buttons and Possums, Oh My!
I've been playing with the blog today when I should be cleaning the house in preparation for Thanksgiving. I added the smart-assed "Ask A Lesbian" crystal ball widget for your clicking pleasure and the nifty RSS feed button to make us appear all techno-literate and hip (do they still say hip?). I also stuck on an annoying widget that pays us a few paltry bucks if you do your Christmas book buying online.
But I got the most fun out of using the "search this blog" box! Who knew we'd written that many posts involving the word "possum"?
It appears that I've run clear out of avoidance antics now, so I'm off to the scullery.
Another Reason Any Blind Fool Could See We're All Related
This morning we have a special guest blogger...my daughter Katie. Let's give it up for Katie, shall we?
I suppose I should start with my alarm clock. It is a tiny little travel clock that I got for $4 at Walmart to take with me on trips to Tucson. It runs on one AA battery and is about the size (and weight) of an index card. It's very handy for on-the-go time telling, but rather shitty as a permanent fixture to one's bedroom. I sleep with it on the corner of my bed, because I have no bedside table and my room is too damn cold to walk across in my underwear as soon as I wake up.
So this morning my alarm went off. I had knocked it off of my bed in the night, as I sometimes do, and it landed about 6 feet away from my bed. It beeps about 5 times before it goes into SUPER BEEP MODE and is capable of waking all the dead animals in the fridge. Unfortunately, it usually takes me about 4 regular beeps to finally shake me out of my sleep, so by the time I realized it was on the floor it was already in SUPER BEEP MODE. I got up, walked across the way too cold room, turned it off, and climbed back into the covers. "Oh fuck!" I thought, "I never did that English paper!" Lying there, I went through my list.
1) I could stay home?
-No. I'm not even remotely sick. It's mom's day off. Mr. Horn will know that I skipped. Can't get away with that.
2) Make up an excuse?
-Oh please. The guy's not stupid. Anything too creative will be an obvious lie, and anything not creative enough is an excuse that I'm sure he's heard before. As tempting as "Oh no! Why isn't it showing up on my flash drive?!" is, it would never work.
3) Just accept the consequences of my irresponsibility?
-Am I crazy? I have a 91% in that class! We're on an 8 point grading scale, so that's a B+. My only B, that I could easily get to an A should I turn in a good paper, or easily never recover from, should I not turn anything in. This thing will be worth 200 points, easily.
So I rolled out of bed and shuffled over to my computer to start researching. The paper must be at least 3 pages, in MLA format, with a works cited page and no more than 10 passive verbs. It's about the religious symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was 6:05. My bus comes at 7:30. Oh yeah, and I didn't have my text book, which held my actual copy of the story.
As I typed furiously, the hopelessness of the situation was dawning on me. There was no way I could research it, formulate my ideas, type everything up, rephrase all sentences with active verbs, and then write a correctly-formatted bibliography in an hour (I still had to get ready for school). This paper needs 4 hours, at least. I could just stay home, tell my mom what happened, have her lecture me and ride my ass about it all day, then never hear the end of it for the rest of my life. The story would be told at the table this Thanksgiving, so as to shame me further, in front of guests. Nope. Not happening.As I started beating myself over the head for not having done it yesterday, like anyone with a brain would have done, I wondered where the day had gone.
No really, where had the day gone?
No.
Noooooo.
It's Sunday.
The alarm must have gotten switched on when the clock fell off of my bed.
I took it as a lesson: I really need to stop procrastinating. Waking up late the morning before something is due is pretty common for me. Usually, I set my alarm for 3am, and put in my 4 hours of work in the silence of the wee hours of morning. It's not a flawless strategy, but time is an excellent motivator for me.
So I continued researching, and began the paper. I'm done with one page, and now I'll have breakfast, and if I keep up this pace, I may be done by lunch time, and then the rest of the day I won't have to fret and put it off more.
I'll still be up at 3 doing my trig homework the morning it's due though.
I suppose I should start with my alarm clock. It is a tiny little travel clock that I got for $4 at Walmart to take with me on trips to Tucson. It runs on one AA battery and is about the size (and weight) of an index card. It's very handy for on-the-go time telling, but rather shitty as a permanent fixture to one's bedroom. I sleep with it on the corner of my bed, because I have no bedside table and my room is too damn cold to walk across in my underwear as soon as I wake up.
So this morning my alarm went off. I had knocked it off of my bed in the night, as I sometimes do, and it landed about 6 feet away from my bed. It beeps about 5 times before it goes into SUPER BEEP MODE and is capable of waking all the dead animals in the fridge. Unfortunately, it usually takes me about 4 regular beeps to finally shake me out of my sleep, so by the time I realized it was on the floor it was already in SUPER BEEP MODE. I got up, walked across the way too cold room, turned it off, and climbed back into the covers. "Oh fuck!" I thought, "I never did that English paper!" Lying there, I went through my list.
1) I could stay home?
-No. I'm not even remotely sick. It's mom's day off. Mr. Horn will know that I skipped. Can't get away with that.
2) Make up an excuse?
-Oh please. The guy's not stupid. Anything too creative will be an obvious lie, and anything not creative enough is an excuse that I'm sure he's heard before. As tempting as "Oh no! Why isn't it showing up on my flash drive?!" is, it would never work.
3) Just accept the consequences of my irresponsibility?
-Am I crazy? I have a 91% in that class! We're on an 8 point grading scale, so that's a B+. My only B, that I could easily get to an A should I turn in a good paper, or easily never recover from, should I not turn anything in. This thing will be worth 200 points, easily.
So I rolled out of bed and shuffled over to my computer to start researching. The paper must be at least 3 pages, in MLA format, with a works cited page and no more than 10 passive verbs. It's about the religious symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was 6:05. My bus comes at 7:30. Oh yeah, and I didn't have my text book, which held my actual copy of the story.
As I typed furiously, the hopelessness of the situation was dawning on me. There was no way I could research it, formulate my ideas, type everything up, rephrase all sentences with active verbs, and then write a correctly-formatted bibliography in an hour (I still had to get ready for school). This paper needs 4 hours, at least. I could just stay home, tell my mom what happened, have her lecture me and ride my ass about it all day, then never hear the end of it for the rest of my life. The story would be told at the table this Thanksgiving, so as to shame me further, in front of guests. Nope. Not happening.As I started beating myself over the head for not having done it yesterday, like anyone with a brain would have done, I wondered where the day had gone.
No really, where had the day gone?
No.
Noooooo.
It's Sunday.
The alarm must have gotten switched on when the clock fell off of my bed.
I took it as a lesson: I really need to stop procrastinating. Waking up late the morning before something is due is pretty common for me. Usually, I set my alarm for 3am, and put in my 4 hours of work in the silence of the wee hours of morning. It's not a flawless strategy, but time is an excellent motivator for me.
So I continued researching, and began the paper. I'm done with one page, and now I'll have breakfast, and if I keep up this pace, I may be done by lunch time, and then the rest of the day I won't have to fret and put it off more.
I'll still be up at 3 doing my trig homework the morning it's due though.
An Alarming Juxtaposition of Events
Last year, on October 29th, MelonKiwi...the greatest cat ever, the love of my life, my soulmate...came to live with us. A week later, the tragic story of my leg occurred. A year later, it still hurts.
Today, in a blinding flash of insight, I've come to understand: Melon has been demonically possessing my leg! I don't know why it didn't occur to me a year ago! My leg problem is clearly not from a lack of exercise, it's a lack of exorcism!
I wonder where I can get an exorcist on short notice. Do you think they charge extra around the holiday season? It seems like the casting out of demons would have a season aspect to it...
Today, in a blinding flash of insight, I've come to understand: Melon has been demonically possessing my leg! I don't know why it didn't occur to me a year ago! My leg problem is clearly not from a lack of exercise, it's a lack of exorcism!
I wonder where I can get an exorcist on short notice. Do you think they charge extra around the holiday season? It seems like the casting out of demons would have a season aspect to it...
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Grrr!
Ack! This evening we had a 17 year old kid with a fever come into our E.R.
The Doc ordered a spinal tap first, and then serum tests for:
1. HIV
2. Syphilis
3. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
4. Epstein-Barr Virus
5. Eastern and Western Equine Encephalitis
6. West Nile
7. Lyme Disease
After the spinal tap and after packaging all that esoteric stuff to send to our reference lab, the E.R. added on a rapid test for mononucleosis.
Guess who has mono? Who says defensive medicine isn't fun?
The Doc ordered a spinal tap first, and then serum tests for:
1. HIV
2. Syphilis
3. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
4. Epstein-Barr Virus
5. Eastern and Western Equine Encephalitis
6. West Nile
7. Lyme Disease
After the spinal tap and after packaging all that esoteric stuff to send to our reference lab, the E.R. added on a rapid test for mononucleosis.
Guess who has mono? Who says defensive medicine isn't fun?
There's No "I" in "Lose" (But There Is in "I Lose")
We just didn't win the "Best GLBT Blog" award. Not that we particularly deserve it, but when Lori went to check out the winner's blog, it was much gayer than ours. I think that's the problem. We're not writing a dykey enough blog. I think we ought to frame the edges with little pictures of power tools, and talk about famous gay people doing famously gay things.
I'm pretty sure we're losing dyke points by being too conventional. We ought to go out clubbing and take cruises on that dyke cruise line that I can't remember the name of. And we need drama. LOTS of drama.
However, we've already mastered the processing part. We can process like nobody's business. We can even process the process of processing. There's no emotional nuance so subtle or inconsequential that it can't benefit from a thorough analysis, followed by pie or a steak dinner. Maybe a steak dinner with pie, when the processing gets particularly hairy.
Maybe if we process our feelings about Ellen Degeneres here, on our famously GLBT blog, we'd be in the running for the best gay blog. I can see it's a cutthroat business, this gay blogging. We may have to process a strategy.
Pie, anyone?
I'm pretty sure we're losing dyke points by being too conventional. We ought to go out clubbing and take cruises on that dyke cruise line that I can't remember the name of. And we need drama. LOTS of drama.
However, we've already mastered the processing part. We can process like nobody's business. We can even process the process of processing. There's no emotional nuance so subtle or inconsequential that it can't benefit from a thorough analysis, followed by pie or a steak dinner. Maybe a steak dinner with pie, when the processing gets particularly hairy.
Maybe if we process our feelings about Ellen Degeneres here, on our famously GLBT blog, we'd be in the running for the best gay blog. I can see it's a cutthroat business, this gay blogging. We may have to process a strategy.
Pie, anyone?
A Few of Lori's Favorite Things...
There's a reason today is the day for posting our favorite things. Apparently it's also the 48th anniversary of the Broadway opening of "The Sound of Music" -- which, coincidentally, is on my long list of favorite things. I have many fond memories of the movie, not the least of which is the story about how my big sister smashed in the front bumper of my dad's brand new VW bug.
My sister had a brand new driver's license and the Catalina Theater was showing the brand new Julie Andrews movie. In order to be allowed to use our dad's car, she was forced to take me along with a couple of her real friends to see it. After the movie we piled in the bug and headed for the parking lot exit with my sister exuberantly singing "Climb Every Mountain" at the top of her lungs ... and that's when she plowed into the car stopped at the parking lot exit. We fabricated a huge whopper to tell my parents, and it was at least 20 years before we told them the truth on one of those great days you get to have with your parents when you're all grown up and can smoke and drink and confess things to them on their patio by the pool.
And so, with nostalgic memories of that evening in 1965 playing in my head, I shall proceed to wax all mushy about my other favorite things:
1. Christmas:
Exhibit A -- The Christmases of my youth - especially the year Santa brought me the book "The Littlest Angel" and I sat on my mom's lap while she read it to me and then explained, in one of the best mothering moments of her life, that Santa was not a real person, but the Spirit of Christmas and giving to those we love ... just like the Littlest Angel gave the things he loved the most to the Baby Jesus. I believe that may have set the stage for my lumping Santa and Jesus together under the heading of "great fairy tales."
Exhibit B -- Christmas trees - especially the Christmas trees of my youth. We used those big Noma lights with the red-hot bulbs and the thick, fabric-wrapped electrical cords for twenty years, and it was my dad's job to find the blown lights, change the fuses, string the lights on the tree and then cuss and move them around until they met my mom's approval. No same-colored lights together, of course. Then we took turns hanging the ornaments. My mother performed the last detail --the ritual Hanging of the Tinsel -- because it was a job no one else wanted. It was the bean picking of tree decoration and it took roughly three days to hang those thousands of strands of tinsel, starting from the inside of the tree to the tips of each branch. Equally as labor-intensive as the tinsel hanging was the tinsel retrieval from the dead tree a couple of weeks later. Because you can't just throw it away, you know ... you have to save each strand, untangled, in folded newspaper to re-use next year. Ahhh, but when it was all done and my mom's tinsel all hung there neatly and tidily reflecting my dad's lights, and we laid underneath it in our footie pajamas peering at the little lighted Christmas village under the tree, it was so worth it! I can still picture the tiny trees, little groups of snowman candles (sort of squatty from semi-melting while in storage), and Santa in his sleigh coming down a "snowy" hill covered with cotton batting and mica snow.
Exhibit C -- Christmas music - especially the traditional Christmas carols. While I enjoy "Grandma Got Runned Over By a Reindeer" as much as the next guy, it's Bing Crosby singing "Adeste Fidelis" that really does it for me. I can remember shopping in downtown Tucson when there still was a downtown Tucson. All the fancy department stores had Christmas displays in their windows (just like New York!) and elevator operators who said things like, "First Floor, ladies dresses, Second Floor, lingerie" and let you off at some mysterious non-floor called the "Mezzanine," and they played "Silver Bells" over outside loudspeakers. One of my great Christmas memories is shopping with my son when he was little. I would threaten to embarrass him if he wandered off from me, and I did it by singing "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" ... at a steadily increasing volume ... until he would run back and walk with me to shut me up. I have no shame.
Exhibit D -- The Miracle of Snow - especially snow in the desert southwest. Over the course of my life in Arizona I probably saw snow fall on Tucson a half dozen times. It would leave a light dusting of white on the tops of cactus and about 1/4 inch of flakes on the ground, and we'd call it a "snow day" and stay home from school, but it never happened at Christmas. But the year my son was born, it really snowed. He was three months old and we were driving from Phoenix to have Christmas at my parent's house in Tucson, singing along to the Christmas music on the car radio, when it started. But this time, for the first time in my life, it didn't stop. It snowed all night. On Christmas morning Tucson was blanketed with almost a foot of snow. It was piled up on our poolside lounges and the diving board. It had to be swept off the front porch. There was even enough for my ex-husband to construct a full-sized naked snow woman with nipples facing the kitchen window to greet my mom when she got up to cook Christmas dinner.
2. Thanksgiving -- especially big Thanksgivings with lots of relatives and lots of food and the playing of board games after dinner.
3. Autumn -- especially now that I live where there are visible seasons and the changing of leaves. I love the smells of Autumn, not the least of which are woodsmoke from fireplaces and the kitchen smells of baking and roasting.
4. A long hot bubble bath with a good book.
5. A movie that makes me cry in a good way. Guaranteed multiple-tissue choices include The Trip to Bountiful, The Color Purple and Seabiscuit.
6. The first bite of a perfect, juicy, medium-rare steak.
7. Thick-sliced bacon, toasted buttermilk biscuits and plum preserves for breakfast.
8. Going places in the car with Ev. I love long car trips to actual destinations with her, or short day trips out touring around aimlessly, but I'll settle for a five minute drive to WalMart. She's my favorite person to be alone with, always.
9. Our house. I love coming home, especially when Ev's been off work and there's a fire in the fireplace. I love the way our house looks, especially the antique furniture we've bought to add to the antique furniture Ev already owned. It's roomy and yet cozy -- colorful without being an assault on the senses. It sits up on a grassy hill tucked up into the trees with a broad view from the back deck.
10. Having all the clothes washed, dried, folded and put away.
11. How good the bed feels when you first crawl in at night and the sheets are cold and the pillows are fluffy.
12. Driving with the top down.
13. Hearing a song on the radio you haven't heard for a zillion years and still remembering all the words.
14. Looking through old picture albums.
15. The little coffee cup I inherited from my grandfather that came from a Southern Pacific Railroad dining car, my fraternal grandmother's glass cream and sugar bowls, the tiny cordial glass my dad used to fill with chipped ice and a tablespoonful of Kahlua so I could have a "cocktail" when the big people were having theirs and my maternal grandmother's crockery mixing bowls ... and having a place to put them all out where I can see them every day.
16. Necking with Ev.
17. A hug from my grown son now that he's all tall and lanky and I'm the little one.
18. Good lord, I almost forgot to mention chocolate!
I'll stop there, but I might want to revisit this list in the future. This morning I read Feral Mom's blog post suggesting we all list the five things that always cheer us up. My first thought was that I don't have things that always cheer me up, but I guess I do. Making this list was certainly cheery!
My sister had a brand new driver's license and the Catalina Theater was showing the brand new Julie Andrews movie. In order to be allowed to use our dad's car, she was forced to take me along with a couple of her real friends to see it. After the movie we piled in the bug and headed for the parking lot exit with my sister exuberantly singing "Climb Every Mountain" at the top of her lungs ... and that's when she plowed into the car stopped at the parking lot exit. We fabricated a huge whopper to tell my parents, and it was at least 20 years before we told them the truth on one of those great days you get to have with your parents when you're all grown up and can smoke and drink and confess things to them on their patio by the pool.
And so, with nostalgic memories of that evening in 1965 playing in my head, I shall proceed to wax all mushy about my other favorite things:
1. Christmas:
Exhibit A -- The Christmases of my youth - especially the year Santa brought me the book "The Littlest Angel" and I sat on my mom's lap while she read it to me and then explained, in one of the best mothering moments of her life, that Santa was not a real person, but the Spirit of Christmas and giving to those we love ... just like the Littlest Angel gave the things he loved the most to the Baby Jesus. I believe that may have set the stage for my lumping Santa and Jesus together under the heading of "great fairy tales."
Exhibit B -- Christmas trees - especially the Christmas trees of my youth. We used those big Noma lights with the red-hot bulbs and the thick, fabric-wrapped electrical cords for twenty years, and it was my dad's job to find the blown lights, change the fuses, string the lights on the tree and then cuss and move them around until they met my mom's approval. No same-colored lights together, of course. Then we took turns hanging the ornaments. My mother performed the last detail --the ritual Hanging of the Tinsel -- because it was a job no one else wanted. It was the bean picking of tree decoration and it took roughly three days to hang those thousands of strands of tinsel, starting from the inside of the tree to the tips of each branch. Equally as labor-intensive as the tinsel hanging was the tinsel retrieval from the dead tree a couple of weeks later. Because you can't just throw it away, you know ... you have to save each strand, untangled, in folded newspaper to re-use next year. Ahhh, but when it was all done and my mom's tinsel all hung there neatly and tidily reflecting my dad's lights, and we laid underneath it in our footie pajamas peering at the little lighted Christmas village under the tree, it was so worth it! I can still picture the tiny trees, little groups of snowman candles (sort of squatty from semi-melting while in storage), and Santa in his sleigh coming down a "snowy" hill covered with cotton batting and mica snow.
Exhibit C -- Christmas music - especially the traditional Christmas carols. While I enjoy "Grandma Got Runned Over By a Reindeer" as much as the next guy, it's Bing Crosby singing "Adeste Fidelis" that really does it for me. I can remember shopping in downtown Tucson when there still was a downtown Tucson. All the fancy department stores had Christmas displays in their windows (just like New York!) and elevator operators who said things like, "First Floor, ladies dresses, Second Floor, lingerie" and let you off at some mysterious non-floor called the "Mezzanine," and they played "Silver Bells" over outside loudspeakers. One of my great Christmas memories is shopping with my son when he was little. I would threaten to embarrass him if he wandered off from me, and I did it by singing "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" ... at a steadily increasing volume ... until he would run back and walk with me to shut me up. I have no shame.
Exhibit D -- The Miracle of Snow - especially snow in the desert southwest. Over the course of my life in Arizona I probably saw snow fall on Tucson a half dozen times. It would leave a light dusting of white on the tops of cactus and about 1/4 inch of flakes on the ground, and we'd call it a "snow day" and stay home from school, but it never happened at Christmas. But the year my son was born, it really snowed. He was three months old and we were driving from Phoenix to have Christmas at my parent's house in Tucson, singing along to the Christmas music on the car radio, when it started. But this time, for the first time in my life, it didn't stop. It snowed all night. On Christmas morning Tucson was blanketed with almost a foot of snow. It was piled up on our poolside lounges and the diving board. It had to be swept off the front porch. There was even enough for my ex-husband to construct a full-sized naked snow woman with nipples facing the kitchen window to greet my mom when she got up to cook Christmas dinner.
2. Thanksgiving -- especially big Thanksgivings with lots of relatives and lots of food and the playing of board games after dinner.
3. Autumn -- especially now that I live where there are visible seasons and the changing of leaves. I love the smells of Autumn, not the least of which are woodsmoke from fireplaces and the kitchen smells of baking and roasting.
4. A long hot bubble bath with a good book.
5. A movie that makes me cry in a good way. Guaranteed multiple-tissue choices include The Trip to Bountiful, The Color Purple and Seabiscuit.
6. The first bite of a perfect, juicy, medium-rare steak.
7. Thick-sliced bacon, toasted buttermilk biscuits and plum preserves for breakfast.
8. Going places in the car with Ev. I love long car trips to actual destinations with her, or short day trips out touring around aimlessly, but I'll settle for a five minute drive to WalMart. She's my favorite person to be alone with, always.
9. Our house. I love coming home, especially when Ev's been off work and there's a fire in the fireplace. I love the way our house looks, especially the antique furniture we've bought to add to the antique furniture Ev already owned. It's roomy and yet cozy -- colorful without being an assault on the senses. It sits up on a grassy hill tucked up into the trees with a broad view from the back deck.
10. Having all the clothes washed, dried, folded and put away.
11. How good the bed feels when you first crawl in at night and the sheets are cold and the pillows are fluffy.
12. Driving with the top down.
13. Hearing a song on the radio you haven't heard for a zillion years and still remembering all the words.
14. Looking through old picture albums.
15. The little coffee cup I inherited from my grandfather that came from a Southern Pacific Railroad dining car, my fraternal grandmother's glass cream and sugar bowls, the tiny cordial glass my dad used to fill with chipped ice and a tablespoonful of Kahlua so I could have a "cocktail" when the big people were having theirs and my maternal grandmother's crockery mixing bowls ... and having a place to put them all out where I can see them every day.
16. Necking with Ev.
17. A hug from my grown son now that he's all tall and lanky and I'm the little one.
18. Good lord, I almost forgot to mention chocolate!
I'll stop there, but I might want to revisit this list in the future. This morning I read Feral Mom's blog post suggesting we all list the five things that always cheer us up. My first thought was that I don't have things that always cheer me up, but I guess I do. Making this list was certainly cheery!
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