...like Home for the Holidays

We spent Thanksgiving with my husband's family this year. Two day drive there, two days hanging out overeating, two day drive back. Gotta love it. Now that I've been to the massage therapist to get my neck back to normal, it seems in retrospect to have been an interesting visit. And I did not kiss my desk when I got to work last Monday, I just said that I had.

I really like most of my in-laws, and generally look forward to spending time with them. All but one of them, that is. I refer to her as the Sister-In-Law from Hell. Although we are cordial to one another, she is generally able to put me completely off balance within 5 minutes of any encounter. I wish I could put my finger on why - it's actually a subject I end up spending way too much time thinking about (it's a long trip back from my mother-in-law's house, and we don't fly, and one has to do something to make Kansas go by quickly).

Here's an example of our interaction. A few years ago, we missed a train connection in Chicago and had to spend Christmas Eve there. Since it was a holiday, we decided to skip the Amtrak vouchers for the Quality Inn and stay at the Palmer House hotel instead, to make the stop more of an occasion than an annoyance. (It worked, too - we had such a good time that we're planning an on-purpose trip to Chicago one of these days. What a cool city!) When we arrived at our final destination, a day late, we were raving to all present about the Palmer House and how wonderful it was and how much we'd liked staying there overnight.

"Oh yes," she said dismissively. "It's really cheap; that's why they hold a lot of conferences there."

Now, I don't know if you've ever set foot in the lobby of the Palmer House, but if you have, you may understand why my first reaction to it was not "Wow! This is really cheap!" Try "omigod-will-you-look-at-that-ceiling!". But I digress. The net effect of her response was to shut us up completely on the subject. Maybe she intended to do that, or maybe she just has the social instincts of one of those glow-in-the-dark sea creatures that live in the Marianas Trench.

We spend family occasions where she is present in a sort of weird competition - one in which we never agreed to participate, and to which we don't know the rules. Anything we have done, anything we are doing, anything we are tentatively planning to do, she or her family has done better-faster-smarter-first. She once arrived before we did at an out of town event where both families had reservations at the same hotel. Not content with checking herself in, she checked us in, inspected our room, adjusted the air conditioning, pronounced everything satisfactory, and when we arrived told us step by step what she had done.

I also get the impression that she makes assumptions about my opinions on various things, and then caters to those assumed opinions. Her assumptions are invariably wrong, but they leave me feeling kind of inadequate because I'm not maintaining the high standard to which she is catering. Again, an example is germane: Quite a while back, she offered to take our daughter on a camping trip. Which was fine with me, although, as I recall, the trip never materialized. But while making the offer, she was incredibly anxious to assure me that the adults on the trip would not be drinking while any children present were awake.

O-kay.

I'm fairly sure that, up to that point, we had never discussed whether I cared if my daughter saw adults imbibing adult beverages - in fact, the two of us had probably had a glass of wine in my daughter's presence before that conversation. And to the best of my knowledge, she and her husband are responsible adults, so I wasn't exactly anticipating some sort of drunken orgy on the trip at all. So where did that come from? Did she normally drink to excess on camping trips? Did she think that I normally did? The whole conversation left me feeling like maybe I was a bad mother for NOT worrying about drunken orgies in my daughter's presence. Once again, I was rendered speechless - I couldn't figure out how to tell her that I wasn't concerned about such a thing without making myself sound uncaring or making her sound overly anal.

My husband thinks that I intimidate her. God knows why - I'm just an average working stiff with a husband and a kid. It's probably fairly obvious that I'm a bit stressed in her presence, so maybe she picks up on that. And I guess all those fullstops in the conversation come off as a bit peculiar (is "buh-buh-buh" an intimidating thing to say? That's as much as I can manage sometimes).

This Thanksgiving, we really didn't see much of her, but she was in her usual form. I made the incautious statement at dinner that I intended to be buried in my Mini Cooper. Oops. Now the whole family knows that she and her husband just finished looking at a used Mini Cooper, that was in just simply pristine conditon - it was obvious that the owner had taken very good care of it and it was only two years old, after all - but that they just couldn't quite bring themselves to spend $20K on a vehicle without ridding themselves of one of the two they already had.

What do you say in response to that? In my case, I think it was something like, "pass the pie".

It's good to be home.

Oh, The Weather Outside...

It's raining snow today.  I don't know how else to describe it - and the storm started last night with lightning and thunder, so it seems pretty consistent.  The "flakes" (drops?) are coming in, wet and sloppy, at about a 45-degree angle.  The first day I'm really regretting having taken the bus; the fronts of my pantlegs were soaked walking to the office from the bus station, and my hair - well, maybe that's a subject best left alone.  I haven't looked in a mirror yet, and am hoping to postpone the big reveal as long as I possibly can.

 

The radio was predicting a blizzard yesterday, and it appears for once that they got it right.  In town, it's not so bad, but I think the major interstates are closing down a few miles out in all directions.  My husband got back yesterday from Tennessee, and just in time, it appears.  I think his plans for the day involve firelogs and afghans and naps - the dogs were rather boisterous overnight and neither of us got much sleep. 

 

This is the third snowstorm we've had in October and we still have a week of it left.  But with any luck, the snow we've had so far will count enough that it will be reasonably nice on Halloween.  My daughter, whose birthday that is, would be very grateful to celebrate a birthday without long underwear or frostbite warnings.  I'm glad to say that she made it safely to school; considerate soul, she called both home and my office to let us know that she'd arrived.  Days like this, I'm not as thrilled that she has her driver's license, although on days like this, I'm very thrilled that we spent a small fortune on defensive driving school.

 

Needless to say, the California Zephyr is late.  It's coming in over the northeastern plains, through the towns where all the schools are closed for the day.  It'll be interesting to see how badly something like this delays it.  Apart from the missed deadlines, as long as the heaters are working, I think it might be nice to be chugging across the frozen landscape in a blizzard, able to watch it and knowing that I'd get there eventually.

 

Work is very quiet so far; everything outside is moving very slowly, so I imagine the day will not really get going for another couple of hours.  Even in a stationary building, it's pretty cozy to sit in the warmth of central heating and watch it come down - until I start thinking about the commute home...

A-hooey, a-hooey

Bloody frustrating week so far, and it’s not even halfway done.  Work has been nothing but firefighting (although I think we’re about 85% contained at last), home has been a lot of choppy, unplanned last-minute errands punctuated by sleepless nights for various reasons (in which the family pets figure large), and no matter what my intellect and reason tell me I should be eating, I’ve been heading for the Twix bars.  Just not good all around.

 

My office of the moment is a well-lit cube up against the windows, and I have a sort of mixed-bag view.  I can watch construction on some new condo buildings with all-glass exterior walls (during daylight, at least, you can’t see in from where I sit, but at night?  Do they cater to exhibitionists, do you think?).  I can see some of the Front Range and watch weather fronts come in over the northwest bits.  I can watch coal trains pull into a siding, and I directly overlook the Amtrak platform at Union Station.  Every morning at some point (it’s not always on time), the California Zephyr makes a stop here enroute from Chicago to the Bay Area.  It backs in and stops for about ½ hour as the passengers get out and stretch their legs, new ones get on and old ones leave, and the window washers clean the windows for a better view of the scenery to come.  Eventually, the conductors close the doors, the whistle blows, and it slowly pulls out.

 

Every morning, if I’m anywhere near my desk for all of this, I stop and watch.  And every morning, the temptation is strong to grab my stuff and jump on board.  It wouldn’t be for very long – overnight to California, a short stop there, and then overnight back – they’d hardly even miss me. 

 

So far, I’ve resisted the temptation, but this week, I don’t know. 

Turtles from now on

We have four furry animals living at our house - that I know of, at least.  Two dogs and two cats.  And during the daylight hours, I love them all - they're each a little quirky, entertaining, and generally fond of the people in my family.

 

It's at night that they all become slightly possessed, or something.  I do manage to sleep through some of it, so I haven't been able to track down the cause.  First, the dogs.  As I said, we have two of them: Anneke and Roscoe.  Anneke is a 3-1/2 year old Jack-Russell-and-something.  She's starting to settle down and behave like a grown up most of the time, but at night, she really likes to sleep with the people, no matter how comfortable a dog bed we contrive.  And the house is starting to fill up with dog beds that don't quite meet with her approval, I might add.  Anyway, not only does she like to sleep with the people, she prefers to be under the covers.  Part of the night, that is.  She gets cold (she is a short-haired dog) and dives in, sleeps for a couple of hours, gets too hot, and emerges.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I might add that on the too-cold cycle, she generally noses me in the back to raise the blankets enou gh for her to crawl under.  It's effective; her nose is very cold.

 

Roscoe is not quite 2.  In many dogs, that would be an adult age.  In a Lab-Whippet mix, it appears to be the equivalent of a toddler.  And across most of the night, he's actually well-behaved.  He likes the dog beds, and will curl up in them until about 4 am most nights.  After 4, however, he starts to wander the house.  He rises, shakes his head (flap-flap-flap-flap), and trots out of the bedroom door toward the kitchen (click-click-click-click-click).  According to my daughter, he shows up at her closed door and scratches to be let in.  She's been resisting this lately, so eventually he gives up and heads back to our end of the house (click-click-click-click) and jumps on the bed.  He's up and he wants to play.  Cute, really, all but for the timing.  And his aim - the jumps inevitably land on some organ inadequately protected by my skeleton.

 

So much for the dogs.  The cats really are a little less obtrusive at night, although they pack a wallop when they concentrate on it.  Muffin, who is a long-haired gray cat, spends the nights jumping up on our headboard from my side of the bed, sitting there for an indeterminate period, then jumping down on my husband's side.  Normally I can sleep through this.  Occasionally, though, she does one of two things: launches her jump from my actual face, rather than from the mattress; or falls off, nearly always onto me.  Not good - she generally draws blood in either case.

 

Two, our second cat (hence the name), is an old lady, and was feral for a while before deciding on the soft life and moving in with a friend who couldn't keep her.  She appears to retain a fond memory of the taste of field mouse.  Caught one in the house the other day (our house is about 50 years old and our yard is just uphill from a farm field).  Left it in the hallway near the kitchen, where on Saturday morning, I encountered it with a bare foot.

 

It's at moments like these that I would gladly trade them all for a pet rock.

Lasik and Surrealism

(this is a test, but maybe I'll keep it)

 

I think it might be time to get my eyes checked.  I had Lasik about 6 years ago, and while my vision is still immeasurably better than before I had it, I am starting to suspect that it might not be quite as perfect as I need it to be.

 

A couple of examples, both from my commute home yesterday afternoon.  First, I was standing at the bus stop when a woman pulled up and parked a Subaru station-wagon-like thing where the bus normally arrives. (No, this isn't quite a Mr. Magoo story; I did NOT get on the station wagon expecting to get home).  As I watched her, she took an object of some sort from her carseated toddler in the back of the station wagon, messed with it a bit, and handed it back.  I'm sure it wasn't really a latex glove full of bees, but that's what it looked like to me.  I mean, that would violate all the principles of good parenting - the child might break the glove and choke on it, and bees are sharp objects - at least at one end.

 

She eventually pulled out and my bus arrived and I got on.  I was settling my stuff on the seat and glanced over the shoulder of the woman in the seat ahead of me to see what she was reading.  The title on the top of the open page said "The Sextons of Cavendish," and my initial reaction was that I would enjoy reading it myself - it sounded Victorian, possibly with clergy involved - something Trollope would have written.  Then she moved a bit and I caught a glimpse of the front cover, and I could read the title (in much larger type): "The Sex-lives of Cannibals".

 

I think I'll give the eye doctor a call - if this keeps up, I'm going to get myself in trouble.

Omigod, she's not dead after all!

Don't even start - I know it's been forever, give or take. Nothing like a job with no internet connectivity to slow down the creative juices. Well, that's all done with now - I started missing my cellphone, of all things, and went back to the business world. Phew! Not that I have time to blog these days - no more working from home, and I've turned to the dark side - gave up coding and became a manager. And I actually really like it. Chemical brain imbalance, no doubt.

So, in the last year and a half, we acquired a second dog, and the daughter turned 16 and began driving herself to her extra-curricular activities. Oh, Lord, is that all that happened in that time? I don't think it can be true, but nothing else comes to mind.

I painted the master bedroom blue a while back - well, most of it. Ever try to move a king-sized bed? And the roller handle just wasn't quite long enough to reach all the way behind the headboard. Which would be fine, except that the headboard is a sort of arch connected to the bedframe by spindles. In other words, the lack of blue is sadly visible on that wall. One of these days, we'll get a crew of volunteers, and move the bed long enough to finish the job. Although by then, we'll probably be trying out a different wall color. I'm not exactly overfond of the blue.

Dull post, I know, but I'll try to make it a little more interesting next time - and it won't be another 17 months before that happens.

Summer's End at Last

A fairly quiet Wednesday morning. We had some snow on Halloween night which is almost all melted now. There’s a kind of tradition about Halloween around here; it is invariably really nasty out in one way or another – some years achingly cold, others snowy. This year it rained throughout the standard trick-or-treating hours, so we only had four groups at our door, and then turned to snow after enough rain was on the ground to freeze and make the Monday morning commute a bit challenging for people recovering from a sugar buzz. Of course, I don’t have to do anything during the Monday morning commute these days, because I work from home.

By the way, that may not last much longer. I had two second interviews scheduled during this week, and one of them looks like a fairly sure thing, if I can stand to extend my 2-second commute to as much as 45-minutes each way. Something to make me stop and think, that’s certain. The other prospect isn’t quite as nasty a drive, and it’s the job I want more, but the interview isn’t until tomorrow, so I can’t say for sure if it will work out.

But until I find a new job, I get to do my work in the comfortable armchair with a view of the front lawn. I moved the chair last week, after finding the sun had shifted so far south that it was making my screen impossible to read for nearly the entire day. Now that I face towards the window, instead of away from it, I get to watch the squirrels. I had no idea we had so many of them, and they were very busy at something yesterday. At least part of their business involved eating our decrepit jack-o-lanterns, which the snow prevented us from taking down immediately after Halloween was over. They’re still out there today – if the squirrels can get some benefit from them, I see no reason to deprive them of a big beta-carotene boost on the cusp of winter.

The daughter’s birthday went quite well. Her “friends party” on Friday ended up being a Mexican dinner and trip to the local Six Flags for their haunted house and rides. She did lose her cellphone privileges for a week by not answering our calls when her father and I were trying to tell her that we were tired and wanted them to leave so we could go home to sleep, but that didn’t put too much of a damper on the evening. On Saturday, we had the family over. She and her cousins (all quite a bit younger than she is) went to a Halloween carnival at the local rec center, then we all went out to eat at a local ‘50’s theme diner. Everyone was under an oath of secrecy about the reason for our visit – they make birthday victims do the twist in front of everyone there. All of her girl cousins then spent the night at our house, and she had the fun on the actual birthday of watching her father and I rake leaves all morning, which is normally her job. I’m sure it was good for us, although it didn’t feel like it at the time. Seventeen bags of leaves - we have a lot of trees.

I guess now that we’ve had actual snow in the suburbs, there’s no sense pretending it’s still summer, although I fully expect my husband to make at least a couple of appearances in shorts before he finally gives in for the year. The deluge of Christmas catalogs has begun, and I’m starting to get some ideas for presents for the family. Our dinner menu has definitely shifted focus from meat-on-the-grill to comfort food involving use of the oven or crock pot. I’m even manfully resisting the urge to do a craft project with a Christmas theme. Although “resisting” isn’t an accurate description when I gathered up all of this year’s pinecones from under the Ponderosas in the yard on Saturday, with the idea of making a wreath of them.

So, how many shopping days until Christmas?

One thing off my never-ending list

Monday after a busy weekend.

I don't really want to be back working, but at least I can look back with satisfaction at having actually accomplished something. The shed is painted at last! Winter can come and blast it with snow, and it will withstand the onslaught. Plus, it looks amazing, and every time I pass a window that looks onto the back yard, I stop and enjoy the view.

We didn't originally plan to paint it a different color from our current house color, but I couldn't find the paint chip that matched the house - we had a bit of reconstruction to do on the screen-porch a year ago, and we managed to come pretty close on the paint color then, even though the current housepaint may be 20-some years old (one "benefit" of aluminum siding is that paint lasts far longer than your fondness for its color). Given that it appeared to be lost, I had to choose between trying to re-do the match (possibly ending up with a third paint color that didn't quite match either the original or the reconstructed bit) or using the shed to test out a new color. We decided to do the latter, and I'm quite pleased with the results.

It's absolutely amazing how different a paint color can appear depending on its surroundings. On the paint chip, the color we ended up with looks like a yellowish olive green, and fairly dark. In the can, it's even more yellow and kind of brown - possibly because the can is sitting on the lawn, which is still unseasonably green. If I'd first seen it in the can, and had to make my judgement on that basis alone, there is no way that color would have made it onto a wall anywhere I might have to look at it - it's actually pretty ugly. But put it on a wall, surrounded with white trim and in the sunlight, and it's a lovely dark sage green. Go figure.

I admire like crazy those designers who can pick paint colors based on paint chips. When I do it that way, I end up with results I can't quite stand to live with, so I've given that up. The only way to be sure is to buy the smallest possible quantity of paint in any colors I'm considering, and to slap them up in big patches on the wall(s) to be painted. At one time, our dining room had a rather patchwork effect going, as I was trying to find a good wall color there. And in that case, too, we ended up with a color I would never have considered originally. Weird.

The shed had three different paint colors on it while we were trying to figure things out. The first one was a color I'd seen in an interior room several years ago at a Parade of Homes house, and liked so much I'd done some research to find out what it was. Internally, it reads as a medium sage green (although in the can, it looks like damp concrete). Externally, it was a perfect match for the gray color used as primer on the siding you buy at Home Depot. I had a terrible time figuring out whether or not I had painted all of the section I was testing it on. So that was a non-starter. Our second choice was one shade darker on the same paint chip thingie, and it seemed like it should have been perfect, but it was bland on the wall. At least I could tell if I'd painted something or not.

By the time we'd definitively rejected the first two shades, I'd managed to lose the paint chip. And the company that makes that specific paint is open at hours most inconvenient to a homeowner who works - I think the only time I find them open when I can get there is on a Saturday morning. Fortunately for us, Home Depot can match their colors - as long as I can remember their names. Which I couldn't in this case. That's where having an architect for a brother-in-law is incredibly handy. He has one of those cool wheels that holds every paint chip offered by the company that's never open. So I called him and in the course of about 15 minutes, he was able to give me the name and formula number. Armed with that information, I went and had a quart mixed up, and that one was the winner.

Before snow flies, I think we'll end up painting the whole garage that the shed is attached to, even if it makes us look a bit mismatched for the winter. My husband thought we should keep going, painting an occasional section of the house as the weather permits, but I'd rather stop once we have a single entire building done than have the house look part-finished for months on end. But no matter what we end up doing, the parts of the shed that were raw wood and siding last week are painted today, and the view from the kitchen is quite gratifying.

A Visit to the Orthodontist, Compounded by Homemaking Magazines

What is it with orthodontists? Don't they realize they're a service industry?

My daughter had an appointment with the orthodontist this morning, at 9:00 am. Note that school starts at 7:35 am. The obvious conclusion is that if she has an orthodontist appointment, she can't be in school. It also means that if she has an orthodontist appointment, someone has to take her there, and that someone cannot be at work during that time. In fact, that someone's current employer thinks that orthodontist appointments should be counted as "vacation" which is rare and precious, as opposed to "sick leave" which never gets fully used. This does not please me. So I guess my overall attitude toward the office there wasn't exactly positive going in.

I spent her "15 minute" appointment (for which we left our house at 8:30 am) reading through Better Homes and Gardens and becoming rapidly discontented with my life. Why can't I live on a well-kept picturesque fruit farm somewhere surrounded by cherubic blonde two year olds dressed in perfect little printed corduroy dresses and willing to help muck the stables in them without getting a single stain? Why don't my thrift store finds look quaint and decorative, instead of just rusted? Why can't I work part time for an investment firm and still be able to afford a charming retro townhouse in San Francisco? Why do I never cook anything that could be described as a coulis? They had a recipe in there for "pecorino shortbread" - some sort of appetizer base thingie made with Romano cheese (or Parmesan, if you must). I can't even envision the lifestyle that includes pecorino shortbread more than once - and that one time, it would have been prepared and served by a professional caterer hired by a distant acquaintance.

So I wasn't really ready to be cooperative when they finally released the kid from the torture chamber and told me that her next appointment (to get the stupid things off at long last) would take 1 hour and had to be in the morning. And that it would be followed closely by a retainer-fitting, lasting 15 minutes, but that they didn't have anything late enough in the afternoon to keep me from having to cut out from work early to get her there.

I didn't break anything, not even the pen I dropped in disgust. I didn't even raise my voice. But I embarrassed my daughter, and disconcerted the lady behind the desk who was making the appointments - enough to make her say "Ma'am" in a shocked and annoyed voice. I bet she only works there part time, and is somehow able to afford to live on a cute and tidy ranch up in the mountains somewhere, surrounded by her charming cherubic blond two-year old twins, who feed the llamas every morning without being asked. Those would be the llamas who set the breakfast table each day and decorate it with sprays of seasonal flowers or berries grown right there on the ranch.

After I dropped the daughter at school and came back home in order to get back to work (never mind that I'm sitting here with all this work opportunity and using it to blog), it was 10:15. Nearly two hours spent for her "15 minute" appointment. She missed 2-1/2 hours of school because I was weak and allowed myself to be persuaded that she didn't have to go in before the appointment. My bad there. On the other hand, if I'd sent her to school first, the entire morning would have been lost in retrieving her beforehand - my lost time would have exceeded the 2-1/2 hour point.

I don't know. Maybe I'm asking too much. But wouldn't it be a really great thing if people whose primary clientele has to be somewhere every weekday during the 8-5 timeframe, accordingly set up their own schedules so as to minimize that overlap? Why can't the orthodontist (substitute your favorite inconvenient professional here) have office hours from 10-6 or noon-8 or on (gasp!) Saturdays, so that their clients don't have to miss school (and the parents of those clients miss work) in order to get their teeth straightened? I mean, I find myself pulling all-nighters for my (expletive deleted) clients more often than I'd care to contemplate, despite the fact that they ordinarily want my services during the daylight hours. Can't the orthodontist make a little effort here?

And they need to dump all of the "our life is way better than yours" magazines from the waiting room. I might have been okay if it hadn't been for that.

Minor Bird Rescue

I don't know if it's just that I'm home and working in the den these days, or if there's something sinister going on, but we've had two or three birds nail the big den window within the last week or so. Maybe it's time to get it cleaned so that it's more reflective - or maybe we should splash mud all over it so that it's more obviously a solid surface. I don't know which would be more likely to deter a bird from trying to join us in the house.

The latest victim of our attack window was a female (I think) robin. Hearing the thump, I saw her fall into the Jupiter's Beard below the window, and went out to see if she was okay. Apparently she wasn't - at that moment, anyway - since she let me pick her up. My daughter's home from school today (Fall Mini-Break, whatever that is), so I had her grab the dog to keep her from investigating too. I don't think her motives and mine would have been the same, somehow.

We put the bird into a shoebox lined with old towels (apparently, that's a no-no, because birds' toes can get tangled in terrycloth loops; it's amazing what you can learn on the internet. You should use old t-shirts should you ever have a similar need.) and left her outside, where I could check on her through the window. Despite being stunned, she was breathing really hard, and we could tell she didn't really want us around. I called the vet, who gave me a number to an urban wildlife rescue place, whose phone message told me to call a third number if I needed help with an injured bird. The number for injured birds informed me that their season was "over" (someone forgot to tell the birds), so I got on the Web.

What did we ever do for useful information before Google, anyway? I typed in "injured robin", and although I did find a few sites for Robin Hood legends, I found one that dealt specifically with my problem - what to do for a bird that tries and fails to fly through a plate glass window. Apart from the terrycloth towel faux pas, we had apparently done pretty much the right thing. And when I went out to replace the towels with an old t-shirt, the bird stood up and flew off. I'm glad she's okay.

Friday - At Last!

Lord, how I thought this week would never end! Fall is starting to set in with a vengeance, and it's so dark in the mornings that the stars (that's plural - I could still identify constellations easily) were out quite brilliantly when I went out to get the paper today. I'm a morning person, but when 6:00 am looks just like 1:00 am to an unbiased observer, it's too dark to get up. Doesn't Daylight Savings end soon? I just checked my planner, and it's not listed in either October or November. Either the government's decided we should just stick with Daylight Savings Time this year, or the folks at Franklin-Covey don't have a hard time getting up on winter mornings in the dark, so they don't think anyone else does. Certainly hope it's the latter.

We spent a Christmas week in Seattle a few years back, surprising my husband's oldest daughter, who lives up there with her mom. I'd been up that way a couple of times and never really understood why it has a reputation for yucky weather and general outdoor unpleasantness before that trip. I get it now. During December, the sun rises in Seattle (in Standard Time, mind you) after 10:00 am - and is pretty well set by 3:30 pm! How do they get any work done there? We spent the entire vacation sleeping - no mean feat when we shared the room with my mother-in-law, who was on blood thinners, and consequently needed the room's temperature set around 90 the entire trip (one night, I was so hot I spent about an hour in the bathroom with the door shut, just breathing cold air through an open window).

It's been a rough week on fronts other than morning darkness, though. For starters, I spent one morning having fun at the dentist's (see below). My teeth don't hurt much anymore. Then I had a last-minute job interview and am still sweating the results from one I did last week, for a job I really want. Combined with the fact that I really don't want my current job, the whole job hunting thing is very stressful. Based on my anecdotal experience, the economy appears to be picking up around here. In the past two weeks, I've had two interviews, both unsolicited by me, and a call about another. If nothing else, the odds seem to be improving.

It was really sunny this morning, but about noon, the clouds rolled in and now it looks like it's seriously considering snow. Smells a bit like it too. Around here, because of the wind patterns and the location of the stockyards, impending snow smells faintly of cow manure. Well, I'm ready for it - bought a box of firelogs a while back, and we still have some on hand. Brought the impatiens plants in off the screen porch last night. I don't know if they'll survive the winter indoors or not, but it's worth a try - they grew huge out there this summer, thanks to the drip irrigation that we put in. Nothing like three minutes of water daily to help a tropical annual flourish.

Anyway, the weekend beckons, without much in the way of plans to take the place of doing hardly anything. A little puttering, a little housework, a little shopping. One of our nieces is coming to spend the night Saturday, and we might go to a corn maze or something. A "to do" list full of little stuff.

Sounds good to me.

Ow!

About the middle of last week, I started to notice that one of my lower molars had become both temperature and pressure sensitive - it sort of ached when I drank cold water or hot tea or ate anything hard and crunchy. Not much, but enough to make me reconsider using that side of my mouth for those things. And I thought it would be a good idea to see the dentist.

My appointment was this morning, and she found a crack running across the top of the tooth, under a filling, that was the likely culprit. I'm not sure I realized when I set up the appointment just what that might mean. It meant a crown. Before I left the dentist's office, some percentage of my tooth had been ground away and I'd had my mouth filled with gooey modeling compound no fewer than 5 times.

The dentist tells me that bottom molars are a little slow to react to anesthesia. We had a lot of time to discuss how slow they are - I think I must have been sitting there for an hour before I couldn't feel her squirting water on the cracked tooth. I lost count of the syringes of Zylocaine (or whatever it was) she emptied into my jaw.

It's starting to wear off now, and I'm wondering if I did the right thing. Because now my tooth hurts just by existing, and the hinge of my jaw aches from being open so long. And I have a sort of feeling that a headache is looming as well.

This is where the whole "working from home" thing starts to lose its glamour, I think. If I decide to bag it for the remainder of the afternoon, I remain at risk of people calling me here with stupid work-related questions that are hard to answer when my mouth works properly, let alone when I can't articulate some words without screaming - which also hurts. Not their fault or anything, since I told them where to find me.

In two weeks, I'll be getting the permanent crown, as well as a night guard to keep me from gritting my teeth in that area. I'm 100% sure that's what caused the problem in the first place, so I hope it will help.

It's all stress-related. I also hope to make an appointment with my daughter's acupuncturist (she's subject to migraines, and acupuncture is supposed to be one of the ways to make them go away permanently), because it's supposed to be good for stress-related things. Like insomnia. Insomnia is how I know that I grit my teeth, because I wake up at 3:00 am daily and find that they're tightly clenched together.

Something better start working quickly, because I don't want to do this again anytime soon.

Satanic Queen of the Freshmen

So the daughter has been participating in the school play for the past month as a member of the stage crew. I'm cool with that; it's the first extracurricular activity she's really been enthusiastic about, and it's something I did in high school and adored. She's been staying after school for ever-longer periods as the date of the play approaches, requiring a parent to fetch her - and the school is not exactly in our neighborhood. More like a half-hour drive on the freeways. But it's cool, like I said, because she's getting involved, and it gives us some leverage to exert if her grades start slipping.

Well, yesterday in the car, she's telling me all about the events of the day, and she tells me that she and fellow stage crew members are going to make their own crew t-shirts. Black with long sleeves and brown lettering so that they can wear them while shifting scenery, and complete with nicknames for everyone. Her nickname?

"Satanic Queen of the Freshmen"

Great.

I mean, it's not like I was praying that she'd go through her adult life as "Muffy" or anything like that, but this really is taking things to the opposite extreme. She swears to me that the "Satanic" part only refers to the fact that her birthday is on Halloween (I'll expand on that below), and that the "Queen of the Freshmen" alludes to her take-charge nature and lack of proper awe for upperclassmen. It's a euphemism for "bossy". She takes after her father, I swear.

The best part of a nickname like that is that, being as long as it is, it probably won't last more than a couple of weeks. And that's when swimming starts, so she'll be able to exchange it for something more...aquatic. Or something.

So, about the whole Halloween birthday thing, as promised. First, it really is her birthday - I was there and I remember. Anyway, a while back, my husband was out in our garage doing something, and he was suddenly besieged by a bunch of little boys who live a couple of houses down the cul-de-sac from us (I told you this was suburbia). What with one thing and another, the talk turned to holidays, and he let slip that our daughter's favorite holiday was Halloween, because it was also her birthday.

"That's the Devil's Day," said one of the boys. "She must be bad, if her birthday's on the Devil's Day."

Yeah. Gimme that prime-time religion.

These kids' parents are home-schooling them so that they can have a say in whom they associate with. I would think that turning them loose saying things like that would do most of their work for them.

It follows as a matter of course that we're turning the front of our yard into a vision of Hell this year - as much as I can stand to drive by, anyway (I don't like scary movies). Just to make sure I don't have to listen to that stuff very often.

Did I mention that the stage crew T-shirts are going to have cockroach pictures on them, because that's how the play's director refers to the crew?

How feminine.

Homework (the joys of telecommuting)

About a week ago, it suddenly dawned on me that my client in New York would not be particularly discommoded if I were sitting in a comfortable armchair with my feet up during the workday, keeping the dog company, rather than sitting bolt upright in a desk chair in an office, keeping nobody but myself company. No dress code (shoot, if I wanted, I could work in jammies - aren't all bloggers clad in jammies?), and I can get odds and ends of house-related stuff done in the times I used to spend standing dumbstruck before the office candy machine. Suddenly, Saturday doesn't have to mean "Laundry Day"! I might even manage to get dinner made in the little snippets of time not spent driving to or from work. This is pretty damn cool!

There are days that I'm not the world's biggest fan of modern technology (perhaps I know too much about how it's held together with chewing gum behind all the smoke and mirrors, or perhaps my work with it has been an instrument of torture for too long), but this isn't one of them. I have a broadband Internet connection and a portable phone that comes equipped with both a speakerphone option and a mute button, and apart from the phone number used to talk to me directly (which, frankly, doesn't happen all that often), nobody can tell that I'm not in an office building. They can't hear the fire crackling in the background, or even the washing machine running. A couple of days ago, though, they did hear the dog. She tends to get a bit excited by people wandering through our front yard, and she often mistakes the neighbors' yard, where they are building a mother-in-law suite and have construction people about, for our yard.

Another advantage to working from home is that the office, quite frankly, is pretty depressing these days. I'm an old-timer with my employer, and have lived through about 3 years of layoffs and dwindling contracts. Another of my friends is leaving this Thursday - the client opted not to renew him for another 6 months and there's nothing else to do that doesn't involve extensive travel, so he is being "separated" (I guess that sounds kinder and gentler than "severed", especially given the times we live in) and sent on his way with a generous severance package. Being at home, I don't see all the empty offices where my friends used to sit (for that matter, I don't see my own office, which used to belong to a very close friend and mentor before she was found to be redundant and expensive last spring). At home, I'm surrounded by my stuff and a bunch of friendly furry animals, and no ghosts at all. Much pleasanter.

Lunch is a better thing when working at home, too - it's way too much trouble to cook myself a double cheeseburger or quarter-pounder with anything at all, but that was the no-effort option when I worked at the office. I can make myself a sandwich or some soup and not worry about where to throw away the knife to avoid food smells or who used the microwave last and what that green stuff on the ceiling of it is. At home, I know what the green stuff is. I put it there myself.

All in all, this seems to be a good deal. Guess I ought to consider rescuing my desk plant one of these days.

Food Confusion

Could someone please tell me what I should eat?

The low-fat diet, with all its green-labeled food products, surfaced about the time my daughter was born, and I got on board enthusiastically. What could be a better way to lose that "baby" fat than by eating SnackWells fat-free fudge marshmallow cookies? The food industry was amazing - fat-free cookies, fat-free popcorn, reduced-fat crackers, reduced fat cheese (which was really nasty - rubbery and tasteless), reduced fat hot dogs, reduced fat salad dressing (another disgusting product) - with all these "substitute foods," we'd soon have to start eating butter by the spoonful to keep from wasting away, right?

Never mind that I didn't manage to lose the baby fat. Never mind that I gained an additional 20 pounds over the next 7 years by choosing low fat alternatives to products I normally bought. "The fat you eat is the fat you wear", said the experts, and I believed it.

At that 20-pound point, I signed up to racewalk in the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta, and through training for the race and assiduously recording the calories and fat grams of every bite I ate for 5 months, I lost every one of those 20 pounds. And I kept them off (within about a 5 pound window) for over 3 years. I also finished the race - I've got the shirt to prove it.

But they're back. They started creeping on with the advent of the new millenium, as I watched my friends and co-workers get layoff notices, and as I continued to convince myself that I was lucky to remain employed. I'm a stress eater, and all the massage therapy and exercise and meditation on earth couldn't dispell the stress I was under.

About that same time, people around me began to eat "low carb". Suddenly, we were bombarded by messages like "bacon good, potatoes bad". I really didn't buy into the basis of the low carb craze at all - vegetables, which are all carbs, are good for you. It is a bad idea to eat in such a way that vegetables are banned. But as if in a backlash against the low-fat era, "comfort food" became trendy at the same time. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes showed up on the menu at upscale restaurants - and they were wonderful.

My husband and I did try the South Beach diet for a while - we stuck to the very restrictive Phase 1 for about a week before we couldn't stand it anymore. Eating nothing but protein and a restricted list of vegetables at every meal and snack was kind of nauseating. Two days in, I never wanted to eat another egg again. But I did manage to lose 6 pounds, and I think my husband lost even more than that. Once we added the fruits and veggies permitted in Phase 2, the weight loss stopped dead. So we didn't stick with it for long, and eventually, the 6 pounds returned.

So, how about this idea? I think we'll just stay away from restaurants for a while. We'll do a revolutionary thing and eat at home each night (it's a working mother thing - when I get home after a hard day with the client and my husband asks what's for dinner, the only way I keep from killing him is to suggest that we go somewhere that sells food). Yeah, it'll take a little planning and maybe some extra work, but I'm betting that if we switch from the portions that restaurants offer to the ones that recipes give, we'll lose weight, even through the upcoming holiday seasons and all the requisite candy and cookies. I'm not going to get worked up about carbs or protein or fat or "net" anything; I'm just going to cook things that sound good. We will even eat food that starts out in a box with the word "Helper" on the outside (although in our house, it will be "Bison Helper").

I'll let you know how it goes.

And if you don't like the weather...

Wait 5 minutes - or wait a day or so, in this case. 90 last week, mid-40's yesterday, with snow in the mountains and rain in town. Dry this morning but cloudy (long enough for the roofers to finish shingling the shed!!!) and about 20 minutes ago it started thundering. It's absolutely pouring now (for here anyway - this ain't the Deep South, where a rainstorm closely resembles the inside of a quality car wash) and hailing a bit - first hail we've had here at the house all year, I think.

I have to leave to pick up the daughter from her school stage crew work pretty soon. I hope the hail stops by then.

On the other hand, if it stops the tomatoes, or at least slows them down, I'm all for it - we've been picking upwards of 10 per day recently. Good thing the dog is fond of tomatoes.

Other thoughts on weather - hurricanes, particularly

Now that we've hit Mid-September, it's in the 90's - go figure. I don't know how long it will last, but it's somewhat nice to have some summer weather, even belatedly. Besides, we have a shed to finish building before snow flies in our back yard.

You can probably guess that I don't live anywhere near Florida - and thank God for that! Frankly, watching coverage of hurricanes Bonnie, Charlie, Florence, and Ivan over the past few weeks has caused some flashbacks for me. My husband and I were living in Charleston when Hugo hit in September of 1989, and it was no fun at all.

I was 8 months pregnant at the time, and my husband was in the Navy. His duty during a hurricane warning was to go to work. Mine was to avoid giving birth during the storm in the next-door neighbor's bathtub. So, when I woke up on the morning of the 22nd (I think that's the day it hit) and heard that a school just down the road was to be our neighborhood's evacuation center, it occurred to me that it might make some sense to pack up the family pets and get out of Dodge. My husband thought so too - he preferred not to be distracted in the midst of dealing with all that weather by wondering if I were in labor somewhere.

The dog and cat and I took off for my brother-in-law's house just outside of Atlanta. Despite their lack of general amity, and despite the drive taking something like 7 hours, they sat side-by-side on the back seat of the car without making a sound the entire way. I suspect that they were extremely relieved to be leaving the area.

Well, we got a little rain out of Hugo in Atlanta, but not much else. I stayed up to watch what coverage I could find on TV, but it pretty much stopped when the power went out. From then until my husband found a working phone (late the next morning), I had no information at all. I heard later about the winds that basically broke the Charleston Port Services anemometer, and about the building being moved off its foundation by the wind (that was the event that caused my husband to grab a support pole so tightly that he bent his wedding ring into a 'D' shape), and all the other fun and games. I couldn't even go home for about 3 days, because I-26 was impassable.

A few pointers for those living in hurricane territory:

• Install your roof shingles with nails, not staples. Staples create a lovely line of weakened spots on the shingle, and act like the perforations in paper towels when the wind blows hard enough.
• Avoid ridge vents on your roof. They tear out in one single piece, leaving a rather large opening for the rain to come in.
• Blown-in insulation in the attic is infinitely more of a pain to clean up once it crashes through the ceiling of a bedroom than the kind in a roll would have been. We lost two bedroom ceilings after the rain came through the ridge vent opening and soaked the blown-in insulation.
• Sugar-sap pine trees have long tap roots, and in enough wind, just bend right over without being uprooted. This is of no use to a homeowner, because they can still poke holes in the roof without uprooting.
• You can cook nearly anything on a propane grill. As we emptied out the neighborhood freezers in the week and a half we were without power, we ate really well. Venison, red beans and rice, spaghetti, shrimp, all sorts of great stuff.
• A generator is not really intended to power anything that produces electric heat. Hair dryers and irons brought it to its knees every time.
• Cash comes in extremely handy in the first days after the storm. It's amazing how much is available for sale, but if there's no power or phones, they can't get approval for your credit card purchases, and the ATMs don't work.

To this day, our pantry is generally over-full of canned and dry goods. We just can't seem to shake that hurricane mentality.

For what it's worth, our daughter wasn't born for another month and a half - which allowed us to get the house back into livable condition just in time. The day we left for the hospital, I spent several hours taping and mudding one of those bedroom ceilings. It's amazing what you can do when you have to.

Winter in August (darn near)

About 1:00 am today, it started raining - loud enough to wake me up. Although I imagine I was a bit attuned to the sound last night, having left my car outside (usually it lives in the garage, but my husband has started work on a shed he is building as a garage annex, and I thought it might be uninhabitable) and not wanting to have it hailed on. It's still raining, 12 hours later. Probably a fairly normal occurrence in many parts of the country; almost unheard of here. I'm not sure I like it much.

On August 27th, at 1:30 pm local time, it is 50 degrees out according to the handy Desktop Weather thingie from weather.com. I had the heat on in my car at lunch. I saw people at work today wearing coats. In August! Something has gone sadly awry. It's supposed to snow at the Continental Divide this afternoon/evening. In August!

The whole summer here has been cooler and wetter than usual - good for ending our drought, but unsettling. I bought some Halloween-themed decorations at the local Ross-Dress-For-Less this past week, and was a little startled to realize that we really couldn't use them for another 2 months. I've begun planning for the autumn and winter holidays already - what to eat on Thanksgiving, Christmas present lists, stuff like that. Normally, I'm not moved to do any of that planning until it really is Fall (which doesn't occur for another month, almost - not that you could tell...). I keep thinking that I've forgotten to stock up on fake fire logs (the ones made out of sawdust and paraffin) - until I look at the calendar.

I am still wearing sandals to work, sans socks. Part of the reason behind that is that I have large feet (10-1/2, which is not officially a size that women's shoes come in), and my lovely Birkenstocks are much more comfortable than anything else I own, and part of it is because my employer has instituted a new dress code requiring that we abstain from denim except on Fridays and Birkenstocks are my way of subtly protesting. But I may have to abandon my protest sooner than I planned, if it continues to be this cold.

Good sleeping weather, though. We swapped the quilt for the duvet about a week ago. That had a little to do with one of the cats (I won't go into details), but it's been cold enough that the duvet's down filling feels mighty good at night.

The only thing that is really worrying me is, what's it going to be like when Winter really does come? Maybe I'd better get those logs now after all...

School

Wow - I just realized that school starts in 12 days. How did that happen? Didn't the summer really just get started? Last time I looked, I was still reveling in having the sun rise before I do, and all of a sudden, we're out buying school supplies and school clothes.

The latter of which is finally getting a bit easier, thank heaven. For the past few years, since my daughter stopped accepting the wardrobe I chose for her at face value, buying clothes has been an occasion to be dreaded. My desire to dress her decently conflicted violently with her desire to fit in with how all her friends dressed (which, in my perhaps too often and too forcibly stated opinion, was like miniature prostitutes). Worse yet, it was very hard to find anything I considered "decent" in the stores. Our compromise has been the standard jeans-and-logo-t-shirt uniform. Not optimum, since it involves paying to advertise something, but better than all that exposed skin.

This year, the weekly fashion section has been running articles praising the return of the preppy look - interviews with Lily Pulitzer, and pictures of teenagers in polo shirts with the collars up. My joy was unrestrained - looking like her friends will now involve looking somewhat like she's in transit between the golf course and the tennis courts, and I can deal with that. Never mind that her polo shirts button to the navel and require a coordinated camisole under them in order to preserve decency. Both her father and I were able to shop for clothes with her this summer, without a single shouting match - how cool is that? Freaked her out no end, too, as we were going through the racks with enthusiasm, offering to buy her various garments.

I think I missed out on the school supply shopping trip this year, and that might be all for the best. I'm fairly sure that I inherited the "school supply" gene from both parents, and the sight of tidy stacks of notebooks and boxes of unsharpened pencils and the like starts my heart beating a bit faster. When I was in school, I'd buy my supplies the moment they showed up in the stores, and reorganize them on my desk each day until I actually had to use them. My husband has the school supply gene too, but he isn't quite as susceptible as I am, so it's generally slightly cheaper if he participates in that sort of shopping. In me, the gene leads to spending like a drunken sailor on not only school supplies, but office supplies of any sort, hardware, kitchen gadgets, craft stuff, and sewing notions. You should see my collection of multicolored 4x6 index cards, and the tiny pens that are worn on the second finger rather like a ring (The idea is that you can keep them on your finger when typing, and that they'll be right there handy should you need to write something down on paper. They don't really work, but they're pretty cool, nonetheless.)

In case it isn't obvious, I really loved school. I've been out of college 21 years (yeouch! has it really been THAT long?), and I still miss it. At the beginning of each school year, I would plunge into my homework with enthusiasm, although I regret to say the enthusiasm didn't always make it through the year. I wish I could spend large parts of my days now just absorbing knowledge. That might account for my willingness to watch The History Channel at nearly any hour (which my daughter deplores, I might add). Occasionally, I'll run across the scent of dying weeds on an early fall morning and it transports me directly to the middle of the walk to school, and I could nearly weep. It probably doesn't help that my current office is only about 500 yards from my old elementary school, and within walking distance of two childhood homes and two other schools I attended; the drive to work each morning is a parade of nostalgia.

Well, gosh - time flies (my daughter could say "tempus fugit", since she's been taking Latin, which is the "cool" foreign language at her school, but she probably wouldn't). Wish I'd been having more fun this summer.

Does anyone else get all misty-eyed remembering the smell of freshly-produced, still-damp dittos?

Garden Redux

So we're starting to get the zucchini invasion under control, primarily through strict discipline in visiting it regularly and nipping the new fruits in the bud (literally). But the tomatoes are threatening to open a second front any second, and with our wet weather this summer, they have the resources for it.

We planted only 6 tomato plants this year, and we pushed the last frost date boundary a bit when we planted them, without using wall-o-waters, too. By rights, we should have been punished with stunted plants struggling just to stay alive, not to speak of producing fruit. Instead, our tomato plants resemble an impenetrable equatorial jungle. They're as tall as I am (and I'm NOT short), and have grown so much horizontally that they're intertwined. They'd make a great hedge.

Now, if I remember correctly, the productive gardener is supposed to pinch off bits of tomato plants to force them to flower and set fruit. Fail to pinch, and you only get a few tomatoes, or so I've read. We haven't touched these plants, except to move them out of the way while we were picking zucchini. So, of course, they're overburdened with fruit - go figure. The individual tomatoes are packed so tightly that picking one ripe one has dislodged some of the green ones. They look like grapes in there.

My daughter dealt with the sudden abundance of sugar snap peas for us - over the course of about two weeks, she ate all of them as snacks. I'm counting on her to do her part when the cherry tomatoes start ripening. The rest of them we can peel, pulverize in the blender, and freeze for use in spaghetti sauce and soup this winter, so at least they won't go to waste. And tomatoes are far more popular than zucchini - we can probably offer them to neighbors openly, instead of leaving them on the front step in the dark of night.

As for the zucchini, we dealt with some of the larger ones by shredding and freezing them in two-cup batches, so we can have zucchini bread during the winter. Well, maybe - I don't know how well zucchini freezes. I'll post an update after we thaw some out the first time.