Yesterday.
We have this shallow rectangular basket that we keep on top of the refrigerator. I tossed it up there when I moved in, and shortly thereafter it became the Key Basket. For keys. Boat keys, trailer keys, bus keys. Extra car keys. Mexico condo keys. You know. Keys. I myself have yet to reach the boat, trailer, or bus driving echelon of my personal mobility pilgrimage, and
my hook keeps me fairly well organized besides, so I don't have much call for Key Basket. Imagine my surprise, then, when I went looking for an extra house key only to find fourteen separate vehicle insurance cards (2000 - 2008), a current check from the Arizona Department of Revenue made out to Randy's mother (who passed away roughly twenty-five years ago), a twenty dollar bill, and a dirty butter knife.
The in-house clutter thugs continue to thrive-- and right under my stuffy nose. My inner clutter beat cop is very discouraged.
Also on the subject of surprise: I bought three hundred different bars of soap before our Christmas party, mostly because I panicked and couldn't think of anything else to buy, and partly because I thought if I had six crates of gourmet soap lying around, people would subliminally think my house was ridiculously clean.
This bar looks fairly innocuous, right? Randy unwrapped it for the front bathroom yesterday. It's nice. It's oblong. It smells like clean things. Nothing overly remarkable. And then I went to wash my hands and it was like washing my hands with a globe. I didn't realize my soap dish was the size of a NASA satellite receiver, but there you go. It might not even be soap-- it might just be a giant sweet smelling egg that lathers. I'm afraid to use it too much, lest I walk into the bathroom one day and find a baby dinosaur in the sink. And unless baby dinosaurs eat bars of soap or insurance cards, that's going to be a problem.
Eat Your Heart Out. (Literally, though.)
Sock Zombies got a mention on Boing Boing last night, and just in time for Valentine's Day.
If you don't know anybody who needs a
zombie with heart horns, you don't know anybody good.
Yesterday Randy came home with a vanity mirror for our bathroom. I had seen one somewhere and mentioned in passing that it looked like a handy get-up-close solution, so when he happened to find one at Costco that matched our bathroom fixtures, he bought it. Very sweet, this man.
I took it out of the box and the plastic, plugged it in, and hey! Sure enough! There I am!
Wave!Then this morning I flipped the mirror around.
To the 10x magnification side.
Have you ever looked in a mirror that magnified your shit back at you times
ten? I guess I had
not. I guess I'd managed to get through thirty-one years of my life without ever succumbing to this specific brand of self-flagellation. It was like staring down the barrel of a shotgun only to find the devil at the end, smiling. Holding out a pair of brand new tweezers. And a lit match.
I don't even know what happened next. It's possible I blacked out. But now it's roughly two hours later and I need like three different eyebrow pencils and a skin graft.
I wonder if she does scorpions.
I've found a few things on Etsy recently that I think everyone should know about.
First, these fantastic rainbow crayons:
No big surprise that the
creator is a kindergarten art teacher. When I was younger, my friends and I tried in vain to create something cool like this by melting all of our crayons together in a pot. Yeah, that's not how you do it, apparently. It's a good way to get in big trouble, though. And to not have any crayons.
Also, these adorable goldfish baby slippers:
I bought a pair of these from
piddies for Randy's three-month-old granddaughter, and somehow they're even cuter in person. Expertly made, man. I'm tempted to ask if she could make me a pair in a size eight-and-a-half, but that might just scare people. Giant goldfish feet and all. That's probably no good.
And last but not least, allow me to introduce...
A squid cradling Chewbacca tenderly in its tentacles. With braces. And taped glasses. And I think that might be squid acne. Give me one good reason you don't need this, people. ONE GOOD REASON.
We have these two enormous Mulberry trees in our backyard, and once a year this landscape guy, Big Joe-- who's obviously about 4' 11"-- comes to the door and wants to trim them back. He usually shows up about five in the morning, which is super convenient, and he does this thing where he rings the doorbell and then wanders around the side of the house. Also exceptionally convenient when you're clutching a robe around you and squinting out the peephole ten minutes before dawn.
I'm guessing about that last part. But when I'm lying warm in bed listening to Randy stumble down the hall and swear into the peephole, I imagine that's how it goes.
When Big Joe gets Randy to let him trim the trees, he unloads three or four strapping twenty-somethings from his truck, and then he walks around the yard all day barking orders and swinging a rusty machete at people. That's the extent of his participation, the machete swinging. I imagine it's the one thing Big Joe and I have in common, this random flailing of large knives.
So Big Joe stopped by this morning, right on schedule, and Randy followed him around the side of the house to get a price. I've been in the back of the house all day and when I came out to the kitchen a few minutes ago, I expected to look out the window and see a passel of college kids running around the backyard with chainsaws. What I
actually saw was one-- ONE-- seventy-five year-old man. Hobbling around the yard. With a chainsaw.
It's heartbreaking. I'm not kidding, this guy's seventy years old if he's a day. I called Randy at work to tell him Big Joe's got his grandpa over here doing all the work. So now Randy can spend the rest of the afternoon trying to calculate our personal liability when Gramps inevitably gets a tremor and saws his arm off, and I'm trying to figure out how many Centrum Silver I should crush up and dissolve in his thermos.
Big Joe just came to the door; apparently they've got another job this afternoon so they'll have to come back tomorrow to finish. "I'll have more help tomorrow," he said, picking grass off his machete blade. I can only assume he means his pregnant wife and four-year-old twins.
Pork sushi for everyone!
The first email I opened this morning was one announcing that I've been approved for health insurance.
Finally. It sure took me long enough to find a company too lazy to do a lot of fact checking. Perfect timing, too, since I just ran out of sunscreen. And there's an icepick juggling class I've been dying to take.
Randy and I are getting married next February.
Or March. Or January. Whichever month is the least romantic and the most business-like.
We've been together for going on eight years now. The far, far majority of that time has been spectacularly well spent-- a fact we both acknowledged during a four-minute drive to Lowe's last month wherein we also decided to make this shit legal. I've had longer conversations with telemarketers, frankly, and that's probably why I was able to get through the whole thing without having to wrap a paper bag around my mouth or drop roll out the passenger side window.
I'm excited and happy, don't get me wrong-- it's just that the thought of planning a traditional wedding makes my brain scrunch down into my neck. I would make a terrible spy for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason has to be that any amount of invaluable information can be extracted from me simply by handing over a
Modern Bride magazine and telling me to make shit happen. I'm not religious, I'm not detail oriented, I have the attention span of a shark at the bottom of a waterslide, it's just not my deal.
The
marriage part, though, that's the part I'm excited about. Any time two people in a loving relationship decide to take their commitment to the next level-- whatever that level may be; moving in together, having kids together, investing in a kegerator together-- that seems like a reason to celebrate.
So I mentioned it to a few people at our New Year's party. Casually.
Hey, we've decided to get married next year, just FYI. And no sooner than the words were out of my mouth, a giant estrogen cloud of squee slammed me in the back.
No, wait, I wanted to say, buckled over as I was from the squee.
I was totally wrong there-- we're actually breaking up. But right about then, Christopher started driving his school bus around the backyard and we all had to start running.
I faced the joyous squee committee again when we stopped jogging for our lives. "Very, very, casual," I stressed. No formal engagement, no engagement ring (I tend to lose expensive things and, let's face it, I don't need another pawn temptation), no showers-- bridal, rain, cleansing, or otherwise, no super formal ceremony.
The joyous squee board was confused.
"But... okay, but you
have to have a dress. Because... you
have to."
I considered a minute. "Okay," I conceded. I like dresses. I'm down with a dress. But something completely plain. Hot, but plain. Long. Ivory. Silk. It will be my wedding dress, and then it will be my nightgown. Ooooh. All of a sudden this is very important to me, this conversion. It's suddenly critical that my wedding dress double as sleepwear.
But I managed to keep that part from the darling squee committee.
In my mind, nothing will change, really. We'll just be married. I've been telling the Direct TV people and the Verizon people we've been married for years. I probably won't even change my last name, although Erin
2 is marrying Randy's son, Christopher, in November, and the thought of making things even
more difficult by having the same first AND last name is a kind of awesome I'll have to put some serious thought into.
Here's how I picture it: Randy and I, his three kids, their significant others, my parents. A cruise? Belize? Mexico? On a beach somewhere.
Ooooh, people will say.
That's one hell of a dressing gown. Flowers? Flowers seem like a lot of work. I feel my brain start to skooch when I think too much about flowers. But if there aren't any flowers, what do I do with my hands? My silk ivory nightgown doesn't have
pockets, after all. Hey, what about those finger trap things?
That could work. Something small, something with a subtle checkerboard design... my hands would be demurely captured and fidget-free! I bet I could get like four hundred of those things for the same price as some stupid flowers. And finger traps
don't die. Perfect! I just have to be sure I can wrangle out of it before the whole "wedding ring" part of the ceremony, but I'm not really worried. I'm generally pretty sweaty.
P.S. Randy just walked into the office. "Whatcha doing?"
"Nothing. Writing about us getting married."
"Who?"
Yeah, she's really more of an "aquaintance".
When you've been sick for almost two months, you find yourself suddenly open to wellness advice your healthier self never would have considered.
"You should do the
master cleanse," my friend, Linda, told me last weekend. "It's amazing," she said. "You'll feel like a whole new person."
Well sure! Nothing but laxative tea, salt water, lemons and maple syrup for ten days? What could possibly go wrong
there? My current dietary anarchy plan clearly isn't working, so let's try a little communism. Ask any nutritionist who's currently driving cabs or selling timeshares for a living: the human body is no place for common sense or moderation.
So I shuffled my teeming intestines down to Whole Foods for citrus and syrup. "It'll be great," I told Randy, "It's not that long. And it's supposed to be amazing. I can at least
try, right? What's the worst that can happen?"
"I guess we'll find out." Randy is immune to quick fixes and reckless exuberance. He will no doubt live to be one-hundred-and-seven. Note to self: enjoy these last four years.
So Sunday night I drank my steaming cup of laxative tea and went to bed, dreaming of all the live squirrels and intact hamburgers I'd no doubt start flushing out on the morrow. And bright and early Monday, I dutifully choked down the first requisite thirty-two ounce dose of warm salt water. I once fell off the deck of a moving sailboat into the Gulf of Mexico, and this was a lot like that. If they ever film an
Open Water 3, it will no doubt feature six friends who make a pact to try the master cleanse; two will breathe wrong while swallowing and suffocate immediately, another will make it through twenty ounces only to give up and hang himself, two more become delirious with four ounces to go and stab each other in the neck, and the sixth will finish, lose sixteen pounds of intestinal garbage and live happily ever after.
Roughly eighteen seconds after setting down the empty cup, my lower quadrants were screaming for mercy. And while I was settling myself in the bathroom, the stars of fate were busy lining up into attack formation. Our septic system-- content to gurgle and digest and contently hum along with no help or interaction from us for seventeen years-- decided at that exact second to revolt, causing everything that should go
down to come
up. Into all of our sinks, tubs, and showers.
Yeah. That's probably the
worst that could happen. Our septic clog repair guy agreed wholeheartedly. And because thirty-two ounces of salt water takes longer than an afternoon to work its demon way completely out of your twitching corpse, I had the 2am, 3:17am, 3:44am, 4:35am, and 6:20am pleasure of denouncing salt, liquids, lemons, and bright ideas forever. We're going to try a little internal democracy for a while, I think, goddamned Linda and her sparkling colon be damned. In hindsight, I should have known something was up when she had to unzip the mouth of her black leather hood to tell me how AWESOME it was going to be.
Maybe you actually CAN be too careful.
I was driving home from the store this afternoon when Tom Petty's
American Girl came on the radio. Thirty seconds in, I realized I was making a deliberate and conscious effort
not to sing along. Because obviously if you're alone and driving and singing along to
American Girl, when you get home you'll just have to deal with some scary handicapped dude parked in your driveway who needs your help loading a crappy sofa into the back of his van. And I think we all know how
that ends.
Craft Update:
Different from a Kraft update in that it doesn't require milk and margarine.
#1: Months ago, I
embroidered some adorable animals drawn by Erika onto a giant piece of linen with the honorable intention of making her a pillow. Like most of my honorable intentions, this one inevitably balled itself up and hid trembling in a drawer. I'm sending this wrinkled, embroidered piece of linen bordered in sloppy masking tape to you on Monday,
Erika. And in hindsight, I don't think it should be made into a pillow; I'm not sure there's a pillow form on Earth large enough to fit inside it. Maybe a tablecloth. Or a mattress cover!
#2: Erika, I'm also sending you the thirty pounds of sea glass I finally crated home from Mexico.
Randy and I have two completely different interpretations of "walking on the beach". Randy strides along the surf at a fast clip, face in the wind, squinting into the sun, enjoying the air and the sea and feeling alive. He carries a garbage bag to pick up trash along the way. Small turtles and passing sea birds stop to get his autograph, mistaking him for Al Gore. He returns with a healthy appetite, red-cheeked and calves gleaming, the shore all the better for having known him.
I stumble around in front of the condo, hair slicked back with some kind of food, blind with no sunglasses, cold. Flip-flops were a bad choice-- two
left flip-flops a worse choice. I squat in front of a shell deposit with a greasy Ziploc bag and lean in to scour for sea glass. I'm in front of an eleven-story active construction project. No one whistles. I pick up a piece of green glass.
Still sharp, I think. I put it back on the beach where I found it. A sea bird wing slaps me across the face. I return, starving, right foot sore, wet and sandy from falling off the sea wall.
Anyway. I think I remember Erika's sister uses sea glass for something? Whatever. I don't really even care. See what happens when I try to make something nice for you? You get half a pillowcase the size of an area rug and a bag of shattered, dirty beer bottles. One day I'll dig the remnants of my last afghan out of the closet and send it to some lucky bastard inside a box of sticky pop cans.
#3: Against all odds, I did manage to finish the first square of my multi-square embroidery quilt.
It only took me... what year is this? The leaves are all satin stitch, and the flowers and vase are done in a brick stitch. I somehow avoided spilling food all over it, too, so I must be a big girl now.
Apparently, it's impossible for me to make anything that doesn't include every single color thread I have in my possession. When I start something, I have a limited and tasteful color scheme in mind, I swear, but then something happens halfway in and I can't resist the compulsion to add blue and purple and orange. And green and hot pink. In for a penny, right? Oh, and copper!
So now I can think about starting the remaining squares of this mythical quilt.
I look at it all spread out on the table like this-- and that's only about half of it, mind-- and the next fifty years of my life flashes in front of my eyes. I can't even work up the energy to
iron on the transfers, let alone stitch it.
How long does something like this take? Factoring in the four and five year guilty breaks I tend to take, I'm estimating anywhere from seventy-three to eighty-six years. I plan to donate my body to science when I die, and I guess I should stipulate that if they're planning on doing something cool like cryogenically freezing me and then waking me up hundreds of years in the future, they should really make sure this whole unfinished quilt project thing goes up in flames first. Because otherwise I will totally pretend to be dead still.
#4:
Zombies. Big ones and small ones. The small ones are surprisingly potent. Like scorpions.
Randy and I are in Mexico right now with The Jake. About an hour ago, I watched a small child scramble furiously up the beach to get away from what she no doubt thought was a hairy Orca whale with legs.
The Jake is fat. I was hoping maybe it was just fur-fat, and when he ran into the ocean I kept my fingers crossed that he'd suddenly be transformed into something svelt with ribs and lean muscle mass, but no. He cannonballed in, for one. And then I couldn't even find him-- I stood scanning the water with my hand over my eyes for ten minutes before I realized Jake was actually the walrus panting next to me.
Last week at the vet, he weighed in at 81 pounds. From what I've read, Australian Shepherds should fall inside the 50 - 65 pound range. Whenever I tactfully mention this to The Jake, he starts gnawing on his own foot, pretending like he doesn't know what I'm talking about. I know he understands me-- any dog that can order a large sausage pizza and breadsticks can comprehend a simple conversation about BMI.
At his last checkup, after he lumbered up onto the scale and off again, I asked the vet how much I should be feeding Jake.
"Less," the vet answered.
"Yeah," I laughed. Sheepishly. "He's pretty overweight, isn't he?" We stood and watched Jake lie down. It was like watching a stegosaurus try to curl up on a yoga mat. "So what
should he weigh?"
"Less."
Oh. So that's an actual
answer, then.
Less. I thought we were just being cool and blasé back there. Okay. Well, thank you,
doctor, I really appreciate your very scientific input, here. I didn't realize "Warmer / Colder" was a respected medical strategy, but hey. You're the one with your cat's picture on the wall. I'll call you when my dog explodes.
Since then, we've been feeding Jake about a third less food a day. And he gets significantly fewer cheddar cheese time-outs. I left him upstairs a few minutes ago to come down and check my email, and I'm sure when I get back he'll be passed out on the floor, a snoring sea otter blocking the door. I'm just thankful we're in another country; I would never have left him alone up there, but I'm almost positive he doesn't know to say "do you deliver" in Spanish.
2008: I'm Wrong About Everything!
We had some people over for New Year's Eve-- just a few people, casual-- but man, it's hard to maintain "casual" when you're firing off industrial grade fireworks at three in the morning. Naked.
So last night Randy and I were getting ready to go out and get dinner because something unspeakable had happened to my kitchen while I was out in the backyard the night before, dodging things. But a bunch of prepped, uncooked food was still in the fridge and I, peckish before dinner-- imagine-- grabbed two rounds of gouda cheese I had wrapped with raw crescent rolls the day before and I popped them in the oven. It's very good, the gouda wrapped in crescent rolls; the bread cooks around the cheese and the cheese melts... nothing to hate there. And it was nice to learn the oven was still working, even through all those marshmallows.
Randy passed through on his way to take a shower. Paused in front of the oven. Confused.
"Hey, aren't we getting ready to go eat?"
Yes. Yes, we are.
"So... didn't we say this morning we'd just peel the dough off the cheese and save the cheese?"
Possibly. Wait,
morning? What?
"And aren't these a lot better hot? And we're leaving."
I'M THROUGH JUSTIFYING MY DECISION CONCERNING THE CHEESE AND THE BREAD, RANDY.
Which was an awesome call, because when I went to the oven a few minutes later, I found this:
I guess when you open a roll of crescent rolls, stretch them around a couple of cheese blobs, and then leave them on the counter for twenty-two hours, they lose their will to live. Or puff.
I've got some uncooked artichoke dip in the fridge, too; I'll put it in the oven right before we go to sleep tonight.
We have this shallow rectangular basket that we keep on top of the refrigerator. I tossed it up there when I moved in, and shortly thereafter it became the Key Basket. For keys. Boat keys, trailer keys, bus keys. Extra car keys. Mexico condo keys. You know. Keys. I myself have yet to reach the boat, trailer, or bus driving echelon of my personal mobility pilgrimage, and my hook keeps me fairly well organized besides, so I don't have much call for Key Basket. Imagine my surprise, then, when I went looking for an extra house key only to find fourteen separate vehicle insurance cards (2000 - 2008), a current check from the Arizona Department of Revenue made out to Randy's mother (who passed away roughly twenty-five years ago), a twenty dollar bill, and a dirty butter knife.
This bar looks fairly innocuous, right? Randy unwrapped it for the front bathroom yesterday. It's nice. It's oblong. It smells like clean things. Nothing overly remarkable. And then I went to wash my hands and it was like washing my hands with a globe. I didn't realize my soap dish was the size of a NASA satellite receiver, but there you go. It might not even be soap-- it might just be a giant sweet smelling egg that lathers. I'm afraid to use it too much, lest I walk into the bathroom one day and find a baby dinosaur in the sink. And unless baby dinosaurs eat bars of soap or insurance cards, that's going to be a problem.
Randy and I have two completely different interpretations of "walking on the beach". Randy strides along the surf at a fast clip, face in the wind, squinting into the sun, enjoying the air and the sea and feeling alive. He carries a garbage bag to pick up trash along the way. Small turtles and passing sea birds stop to get his autograph, mistaking him for Al Gore. He returns with a healthy appetite, red-cheeked and calves gleaming, the shore all the better for having known him.
It only took me... what year is this? The leaves are all satin stitch, and the flowers and vase are done in a brick stitch. I somehow avoided spilling food all over it, too, so I must be a big girl now.
Apparently, it's impossible for me to make anything that doesn't include every single color thread I have in my possession. When I start something, I have a limited and tasteful color scheme in mind, I swear, but then something happens halfway in and I can't resist the compulsion to add blue and purple and orange. And green and hot pink. In for a penny, right? Oh, and copper!
I look at it all spread out on the table like this-- and that's only about half of it, mind-- and the next fifty years of my life flashes in front of my eyes. I can't even work up the energy to iron on the transfers, let alone stitch it.
How long does something like this take? Factoring in the four and five year guilty breaks I tend to take, I'm estimating anywhere from seventy-three to eighty-six years. I plan to donate my body to science when I die, and I guess I should stipulate that if they're planning on doing something cool like cryogenically freezing me and then waking me up hundreds of years in the future, they should really make sure this whole unfinished quilt project thing goes up in flames first. Because otherwise I will totally pretend to be dead still.