Stupid Cats

I came out this morning to look at the Jiffy Seed Starter, and found that I no longer have 70 seedlings - we're down by at least 10. Despite the fact that I put the seed starter on sheets of foil when I took the cover off and put it in the sunniest window in the house, the cats - and I do suspect both of them - ate all the pea vines.

I thought foil was something cats won't step on. But since I can see evidence of their footprints in the foil, I'm pretty sure that one wouldn't pass the Mythbusters test. Stupid Cats.

Guess that means the irrigation project for this weekend becomes more urgent - because I need to plant peas directly into the raised beds. And St. Patrick's day was a month ago, so I'm late.

Bother.

And more garden prep...

The gardening work is hitting pretty hard now, but we're making good progress, I think. Over the weekend, we got the second raised bed box assembled (a little experience goes a long way - the first one took us almost an hour, and the second one, about 15 minutes, I think), set in place, and finished filling both boxes with (I hope!) weed-seed free dirt/compost/peat moss. They look quite beautiful at the moment - pristine, crumbly, easy to plant out.

I took Monday off, which turned out to be a stroke of minor genius on my part. The weather was in the 80s by days end, at last, so I was able to be outside working at 9 am, not freezing for a change. Both boxes now have tidy 1' grids laid out on them in royal blue nylon cord, which we happened to have around the house after a rather disastrous attempt on my part to create roman shades out of polar fleece (royal blue) as a way to insulate the kitchen windows. It's a bit gaudy, but I figure the plants will cover it up eventually.

Last week I bought the official Square Foot Gardening book, which has some very useful information in it about plant layout and how to set up vertical supports (I think those are in our very near future). After a few calculations, it seems to me that I didn't plant out enough in my 70-cell Jiffy seed starter (even though it's full). Because my 70 seeds (and I don't think they're all going to germinate - some of them appear to have molded, and that can't be good) will only take up 37 of my 64 available square feet - and that assumes I really want 6 pumpkin vines and 6 canteloupes, both of which need 2 feet per plant.

Next on the list: irrigation. We need to set up stuff for drip, because I guarantee that we won't be in a position to stop by our beds daily this summer to hand water all however-many plants. I start out with good intentions that way, but they peter out pretty quickly. That's why the weeds got out of hand every year without fail. Anyway, I know what I want to do (thanks to the Square Foot Gardening book), and it should go pretty quickly, which is a good thing, because the peas in the Jiffy seed starter are starting to tangle up with each other, and I think it's time to get them set outside. And I'd like to get some lettuce and spinach planted while I'm at it.

Of course, it's supposed to snow again tonight. Can we be done already?

Me and Cortisol

I'm not fat, just so that's clear. According to our scale, which sends electric currents through my feet each morning to determine how much of me is fat, bone, water, and muscle, my fat percentage is absolutely normal. But it's started, in the last couple of years, to show an alarming tendency to gather around my waist, forcing me into pants with a size label that I really don't like reading.

At the same time, my job is routinely stressful, and between the upcoming elections and the economic trends, I'm not sleeping all that well. So I thought that maybe I could tackle all of it at once, and bought one of the "diet" products that is supposed to help with stress, reducing the cortisol-related fat that collects around the waist.

Started last night, so it's obviously a bit early to tell if it will do anything about weight loss, but I slept better last night - and woke up feeling refreshed, which is a first for quite a while. And you know, if that's all I ever get from it, it'll still probably be worth the money.

Garden Butt

So, about a week ago, I was in a half-doze after the alarm went off, and I thought I heard someone on the radio say that the price of flour had tripled in the last 3 months. (FWIW, that turned out not to be a dream or hallucination - it actually has). Now realize, the price of flour 3 months ago was apparently 69 cents for a 5 lb bag, and now it's slightly over $2.00, so this is not going to be an immediate crisis in my family.

But I read a lot, and not too long ago, was reading something about the effects of the Great Depression on the events leading up to WWII, and they showed a picture of 2 children with a wheelbarrow full of money, supposedly the amount needed to buy a loaf of bread in Germany during that period. Combine that mental picture with the habits born of about 10 years living in hurricane country, and, well, the result is, we're going to have a big vegetable garden this summer. That, and I rushed out and bought 2 5-lb bags of flour and shoved them in the freezer - if things get bad, maybe I can trade them for a couple of wheelbarrows full of money.

The garden will not be big in terms of acreage. We have a handy spot near the place where our gravel driveway becomes a minor parking lot. It's been the vegetable garden since our first full summer in that house, since it's the only spot in our yard where there is dirt available and the trees don't shade everything. It's 10' by 24', so our ability to go wild is constrained to something fairly manageable.

A few minor drawbacks to this spot: first, it slopes downward toward our neighbor's yard, and second, it has an apparently endless supply of weed seeds. The first problem isn't all that big a deal - the slope is pretty gentle; no need to do anything special. The weeds, on the other hand, are a major pain. Every spring, I got out the handy home tiller, fluffed up the dirt, raked out the previous year's weed stems and leaves, made tidy rows and hills, and arranged the drip irrigation, and every summer, found (conveniently) that weeds make a handy mulch - very good at keeping the mud off one's shoes while harvesting.

But I'm really sick of the weeds, and fairly sick of hauling the tiller down the drive all the time (the noise of the blades on the gravel is definitely akin to fingernails on a chalkboard). So this year, I thought we'd try another way. One which my husband insists he's been suggesting every spring for the last 8 years. I don't actually remember his insisting, but if proclaiming that he was right all along gets me a little help setting up, this was his idea a long time ago and I was just too stubborn to admit it before. We're doing raised beds this year. Two of them, each 4' by 8' by 1'(ish). Sunset magazine (http://www.sunset.com/sunset/garden/article/0,20633,1152183,00.html) has a great article with simple instructions on how to build them and useful lists of materials - and ours look very much like the picture. I'm going them one better, though - I'm going to mark them off with string in a foot-square grid and plant in each 1' square - supposedly you can cram in a lot more that way.

Add that all up, and the theme of this past weekend was "Garden Prep". Saturday morning started with Pilates (good exercise but oh, so insidious), and moved from there to weed stem removal, lumber shopping, cutting things to length, and applying stain. At that point, I had to stop so we could go to a party and drink scotch.

Usually, Pilates alone puts me in a state requiring a long nap in the afternoon, so I was a little surprised to be vertical at dinnertime. I was even more surprised to be flexible and limber and pain-free as we left the party that night. I felt good right up until I tried to roll over in bed at about 3 am on Sunday. I'm thinking I hadn't had enough scotch, personally.

But we couldn't quit - we had raised beds to build. And I have 70ish seeds sprouting in a seed-starter greenhouse thingy sitting on the wine fridge in the kitchen and they're all going to need homes. So Sunday morning found me in my painting shorts and t-shirt in the garage applying more stain (it was 41 degrees outside according to the radio). Sunday afternoon involved construction of box number 1, hauling it down the driveway to the bed, throwing weedkiller all over the original garden dirt, covering it with weird silver landscape fabric, and a spot of post-hole digging (my husband's job - I suck at post-hole digging).

My family has a term for a common ailment that strikes us as we try to clean up lawns and gardens every spring: Garden Butt. You get it by overusing your glutes while digging stuff up on hands and knees, or by repeatedly bending from a standing position while digging dandelions or something. I have Garden Butt, I'm pretty sure, but I also have garden shoulder, garden shin, garden elbow, and garden fingers, so it's a little lost in all the noise.

And we still have our second box to assemble and post-hole dig into place. We'll eat good this summer - or die trying.

Oh Lord, I think I'm getting old!

It's been 22 degrees outside all day. It was about 30 at the high yesterday. And maybe 35 the day before.

I'm sick of the cold. I want it to stop. I don't want to spend the next 3-4 months removing two layers every time I take my fleece jacket off (I think fleece was invented by the people who brought us Velcro). I hate socks and I don't want to wear them. I hate alligator skin on my shins. Wool sweaters (and that includes cashmere) itch.

You probably can't tell, but I grew up here - I used to love this time of year. Ski season, football season, school in session, the full monty. And now, I want it to be 70 again; I don't care what the calendar says.

Blecch. Old age stinks.

In which Roscoe meets Pepe-le-Pew

So we were fairly sound asleep on Sunday, around 4 am, when Anneke decided (as it turned out later) that she was cold. Anneke is a Fox Terrier mix with a very decided opinion about things that she understands, and a vocabulary of noises (not barks; she can sound like anything from a pod of whales to Chewbacca) that she uses to ensure that we pay attention to her opinions. She began to groan, or possibly whistle, and we both woke up. My husband took the expedient interpretation: she's cold, we should let her out of her kennel and into bed with us. I was sleepier - did I mention that we'd only been truly asleep since 1? - and wanted to try something that kept the bed population down to the 2 humans level.

"Let her out," I said - grunted, really. "She needs to go to the bathroom."

I was persuasive. My husband let her - and more to the point, Roscoe, our Lab-Whippet mix - outside.

And it seemed like no time had passed before he let them in - probably because none had. She really was only cold.

As they came back in the house, I thought to myself that it was the first time I had ever been able to put my finger on the exact moment a skunk attacked something outside. We get skunks in our neighborhood about every couple of weeks, and notice their presence when we wake up - but I'd never been awake at the exact moment they let loose with the scent glands before.

Right on the heels of that thought came another - this one without words. Because it appeared that someone had started burning tires in our bedroom. That woke me up fully.

And then, Roscoe jumped on the bed. And we realized what had happened.

My husband and I can now be admitted as full citizens of the 21^st century. Because we both got up immediately, and we didn't grab the dog and put him back outside, or head him into the shower, or anything even remotely practical. We headed for the laptop in the kitchen, to google the best skunk scent removal method that the internet could find.

In the meantime, Roscoe was madly wiping his muzzle on the sheets, the electric blanket, the pillows, the duvet, and the carpet in our bedroom. Letting this happen was, in retrospect, a fairly serious mistake.

As 4:30 rolls past at our house, we're washing the dog (okay, it was my husband doing the actual washing - I was more like the cheerleader and concoctor of cleaning solutions) - first with dog shampoo, then with the contents of four small cans of V-8 (which had been found in the refrigerator, so Roscoe really didn't appreciate them at all), and finally with the internet's best skunk remover - a mixture of Peroxide, baking soda, and liquid soap.

The internet knows best. By 6 am, Roscoe was the best-smelling thing in the house.

Suffice it to say that you can't pour peroxide on a lot of things, including human hair, so we didn't even try. We washed all of the removable bedding, except the down comforter (and we really should have sent that out for cleaning - but it's Fall and we need it!), sprinkled ground coffee in the carpets, lit a bunch of candles, and set bowls of apple-cider vinegar around the worst-smelling bits of the house (more handy household hints from the internet).

And it did get better.

Eventually.

Five days later, an observant visitor can sense that something funky has happened at our house, but maybe not exactly what. The bed has a decided odor of skunk when you pull the covers over your head - but it's better than the decided odor of burning tires that it had Sunday night.

Give us 6 months - and pray that Roscoe doesn't become overly curious about the strange smelly animal that attacked him. And that we remember to turn on the outside lights at night before letting either of them out.

Next time Anneke starts groaning at 4 am, she can get on the bed with us. She can have the bed.

through the air with the greatest of ease

My parents are possibly the coolest people on the planet at the moment.  It may not last, but I think my entire extended family believes this after Sunday afternoon.

 

It all started with a conversation between my sister, my sister-in-law, and me at somebody's family birthday party during the fall.  My sister has a desire (I won't comment on its sanity - well, I guess I just did, didn't I?) to jump out of an airplane someday.  And my sister-in-law has actually done so.  Anyway, we were talking about the whole subject of skydiving, and my Mom overheard us.

 

Flash forward a month or so.  My sister-in-law tells all of us that she has too much stuff and would prefer that we make charitable donations in her name for Christmas, instead of buying her something else to find room for in her house.

 

Sometime later, one of my parents' friends tells them about taking his entire family to the indoor skydiving place south of town.  And the whole thing gels all at once.

 

So, on Christmas Day, my parents sit the entire extended family down in front of a TV, and play us a DVD - their friend's family, indoor skydiving.  And present us all with gift certificates to do the same thing ourselves.

 

We went on Sunday, as a mob.  Eleven of us (out of thirteen) viewed the training video, suited up, and spent two one-minute sessions in a vertical wind tunnel, hovering various distances above the ground.  And drooling - a tolerable side-effect, but we all did it.

 

What's it like?  I wish I could describe it.  For starters, it's a lot easier than I'd have thought - once they turn the fans on, it's hard not to float.  The first task is to fall into the wind tunnel, fists beneath your chin.  Not something I'd try in just any room, but it actually felt like the right thing to do at the time.  Just lean forward and relax, and your arms open up and you're nearly in the right position without even thinking about it.

 

That's about the time you notice that your sinus cavities are filling with rushing air - it feels like you've just jumped feet-first off a high dive, actually.  But that's only a minor distraction, and on my second try, I didn't even notice it.

 

What I did notice is that I was grinning.  A lot.  I think I was even giggling on my second go - especially when the instructor did some tandem stuff that caused us to levitate into the top portion of the tunnel a couple of times.

 

I'm ready to go again - I want to learn how to float while standing and run around the walls of the tunnel like Spiderman, and dive headfirst only to pull up just in time.  Our instructor did all of these things after we were through, just to show us the possibilities.

 

Excellent Christmas gift - a George Foreman grill isn't even in the same league.

Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool

It installed yesterday when I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7.  It ran.  So far, I haven't noticed that it maliciously removed any of my software, but I'm going to keep my eyes open...

 

With all the talent at Microsoft, don't you think they could have hired someone to create an unambiguous name?

gubmuh. hab.

A week until Christmas. Seven shopping days if you run out now and buy something today. A little snow fell overnight, with more promised tonight, although it doesn't look right for it at the moment. The trees are up (Yes, that is plural. Not a typo. Our monster big artificial tree that works like an umbrella lost a limb two years ago, and I thought it would be a good idea to replace it with two smaller trees, so we could spread cheer more broadly through the house). The cards are mailed. We're down to a handful of presents to purchase, and just a little wrapping to do. All of the cosmic forces are aligning at just the right time.

And it all feels like an afterthought this year. I'm just not all that into it.

My husband is probably grateful for this. Most years, I dive into the season with enthusiasm right around Thanksgiving, and play the Christmas-music station on the radio until it drives him mad (I do mute the Christmas Shoes song, though). I drag him and the rest of the family off to events like TUBAChristmas and the Messiah sing-along, and try to organize an all-girls outing to the Nutcracker. I bake cookies that have butter as their primary ingredient. About mid-December, I start resenting the fact that we're all out spending money like idiots, buying the extra-deluxe George Foreman grill for people that received the deluxe model from us a year ago, and my attitude becomes so "bah-humbug" that Ebenezer Scrooge would weep with envy.

I usually recover right around Christmas Eve, and the Christmas Spirit stays with me until, during the Christmas Eve candlelight service, the idiot minister tries to make the Christmas story more relevant to today's audience by making one or more of the Magi a woman. I haven't got up and walked out yet, but one of these years...

So what's different? I hope it's not our upcoming cruise, because I don't want to be stuck taking a traditional winter cruise every year either. I know I should not be whining about this. I know that there are women everywhere who would gladly trade places with me and embark for the Mexican Riviera a week from Saturday. And when I can divorce it from the season, I do find myself looking forward to it - we have a mini-suite with a balcony and a bathtub and welcome-aboard champagne and maybe even bathrobes. But Christmas season is for being cold and going skiing, and finding out if I can still ice-skate backwards even a little! It's not for "learn to scuba" shore excursions and sunbathing and practicing one's Spanish ("No, gracias." "No, gracias." although I'm sure there's more to it than that.), and having "seaweed wrap rebalancing chakra treatments" at the spa.

Although, when I think about doing New Year's Eve on a ship, wearing a strapless black dress (Isaac Mizrahi - gotta love Target!!!) and bright red spike heels, that seems just about perfectly matched to the season.

Maybe that will be my big holiday for this year. Should auld acquaintance be..."

Or not.

Maybe next year.

Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation

For the record, putting your foot in a bucket of ice water really, really hurts.  Really, really, really hurts.

 

About 3 weeks ago, I was walking down the hall at the office, and my right foot felt like a joint needed popping.  So I stood up on tiptoe and put all my weight on it, hoping that would rearrange the bones or tendons or whatever was a little out of whack.  Instead, whatever it was that was slightly annoying became rather painful - I spent the rest of that day and part of the next limping around.  And on that next day, I had the fatheaded idea that wearing clogs would make my foot feel better - because they would make it less necessary to bend the foot while walking.  Totally did not work - and on the way to the bus that evening, I twisted the same ankle falling sideways off the clogs (they're the kind with the rubber soles and the backs, and the soles are about 2" high).

 

From then until very recently, I was able to walk around fairly well, but with some pain.  If I were off my foot for a while (like, for instance, driving cross-country for Thanksgiving), it felt pretty good, but reverted to painful if I had to walk any distance at all.  So once we got home after our minor holiday odyssey, I took my foot to a massage therapist to see if he could find the original issue and rub it until it went away.  And he may have actually done that - but he also thought that what I had was a ligament problem and that I should ice part of my foot, or if I couldn't stand that, alternate 5 minutes of ice with 10 minutes of heat.

 

I did try, but the painful bit was on the top of my foot, and keeping a plastic bag of ice balanced in the right place made me sit sideways - and that made my knee hurt.  So I thought I'd be clever, and I filled a large pan with water and ice, and proceeded to put my foot in it, figuring that total immersion would include the painful area.

 

Only I can't keep my foot in ice water for 5 minutes.  I think my record might be 12 seconds.  Dip foot, grit teeth, breathe heavily, cross eyes, swear under breath, remove foot.  Wait for the aching to subside and repeat.  I spent the better part of last Sunday afternoon giving this performance for my family - and they did think it was pretty funny.  After the aching wouldn't subside anymore, I gave up, and finished up the afternoon alternating between heat and not so much heat.

 

It does seem to have worked, though.  After wearing the same, very comfortable shoes every day except Friday last week, I noticed that it no longer hurts to walk.  And that the swelling has gone away, along with the bruise just forward of my anklebone.  And today, I took the RICE cure to new heights (literallly) - I encased the entire foot and ankle in a tight ski boot and made several runs at over 10,000 feet on a cold day.  Okay, so maybe I missed the Rest bit - but I nailed the other three elements.  And my foot feels just fine - especially compared with my quads, which are wondering what they did to make me be so mean to them.

 

Tylenol PM for me tonight, I think.  And I'm NOT climbing into a bathtub full of ice water.

Thomas, we are NOT buying clothing for the cat!

"and besides, that's a dog sweater"

 

Just something I overheard at Target the other night, and felt compelled to share.

...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.