It's come to my attention that there are still people out there who throw actual, genuine effort up against
NaNoWriMo. This confounds me. Not because the vaguest idea of trying to write a novel in a month is enough to give me the stomach flu, no, but rather because it's way too easy. A novel in a month? Please, I do that all the time. In fact
last month I drafted two thousand very cogent, well-developed pages in just under three weeks so
next month I'm going to write a complete novel in Italian, a language I don't actually speak. Change it up a little bit. Offer myself new challenges.
This month, honestly, I think my time will be better served over at NaCuCaMo (National Cure Cancer Month). And then maybe NaBuAFoThoSquFoCaCoWiWoPluMo (National Build A Four Thousand Square Foot Cabin Complete With Working Plumbing Month) to keep me from dozing off after I wrap up the cancer problem.
Baby Cow: It's what's pounded hard with a mallet on the counter and then thrown in boiling oil for breakfast.
My parents have been married for thirty-eight years. This morning I overheard the following discussion while slumped over their kitchen island eating a veal cutlet sandwich at nine in the morning because the only food at my house was either expired or trying valiantly to expire. We'd been talking about
E. Annie Proulx, of all things, and the conversation migrated to something almost as touch-and-go as
The Accordian.
"Oh, what's the name of that actor," my dad mumbled, apropos of literally nothing, "... not John Cusack..."
My mom, with a leap and a prayer and a linen napkin half-ironed in front of her: "Kevin Spacey?"
"Yes!"
I choked on breaded baby cow. "Wait," I interrupted, "explain to me how he says 'not John Cusack' and your automatic response is '
Kevin Spacey'."
They looked at each other and laughed. "We've reached that point in our relationship," my mom said, "where we share the same thoughts."
"Not John Cusack... it's Morgan Freeman!" I yelled.
"Robert Duvall!"
"Alec Baldwin!"
"Billy Bob Thornton!"
"Actually," my mom thought about it, "when he said '
John Cusack' I was probably thinking about
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." A movie they've seen eleven thousand, five hundred times.
That made a kind of sense to me, actually.
But then Dad: "Well, but I was thinking of
The Usual Suspects."
A movie John Cusack isn't even
in. I let it go at the time because I had no fucking idea who was in
The Usual Suspects but I Googled it five minutes ago and sure enough. It's a Cusack no-show.
So. In summation. My parents have achieved odd psychic abilities but continue to maintain a blissful ignorance of ten-year-old pop culture. They also still deep fry thinly pounded meats and serve them between bread with mayonnaise.
When I got home, I discovered that six green onion stalks had hung themselves by their rubberbands and a whole loaf of wheat bread had suffocated itself.
BOO.
Looks like
NaBloPoMo is coming up again, thanks to the stupid calendar, and it looks like
I'm doing it again, thanks to my being awesome. I'll also be donating three sock zombies as prizes to three lucky sadistic souls who successfully complete thirty days of blog posting and need their brains sucked on as a reward. Sort of like a massage, only it's free and you're guaranteed to fall asleep after.
Speaking of sock zombies, I put my remaining Halloween zombies on sale today, seeing as how Halloween is like four days away or something. Or five days. Three? Seven hours? Ten weeks? I don't know, I got a brain "massage" earlier and now my head feels super light and I'm drowsy. Anyway.
Halloween zombies.
I'm available for babysitting. FYI.
Just in case there were people who weren't dismayed and disappointed by my purposeful execution of hundreds of honeybees-- nature's own little capitalists-- allow me to dismay and disappoint you now.
Exhibit Two: Limp and crispy dead seedlings. Previously seen
here. When they were alive. I don't know what happened! They just wouldn't stop crying! I'm not cut out for the responsibility of seedlings, there's too much accountability. I alone brought them into the world-- coaxed them out of their protective shells, cooed unconditional reassurrance, encouraged their upward struggle. But there was a mold problem. A MOLD PROBLEM. I eased up on the watering and set them outside on the patio to dry out.
For two weeks. Too long, apparently. It's heartbreaking. Seventy-two tiny stretched out carcasses, each of them filled with silent rage, each of them reaching out limply for justice. I feel like maybe I should dig a little grave, you know, to honor their memory, but technically that would be
planting them and there's too much insult to injury there.
Dana of
Piddies fame was chosen as the current Featured Seller on Etsy, the highest Etsy honor. I found Dana by chance when I was looking for a
fun gift for Randy's grandbaby, and since then I've made her shop my standard "go-to" for baby gifts. She mentioned this site in the "Top Five Websites" portion of her interview and I don't think I've ever been more flattered.
Go read her interview; it's funny, smart, interesting, and it says nice things about me. Everything I look for in an interview. Buy some of these vampire bat baby slippers, too, because seriously. Vampire bat baby slippers.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make sure my dog doesn't have any fresh drinking water.
Taking care of bees' nest.
That's the best title of any blog post ever written, period. I just want to be on record.
I had the bee guy meet me at my retirement shanty last week to take care of the bee problem. He got all suited up in his bee suit and grabbed his bee-bee gun (hells to the yes) and I, sweaty camera in tow, asked if I could stand in the backyard and watch.
"Sure!" he answered, adjusting his bee space suit so every single part of him was sealed off from the environment.
For the record, I was wearing a tank top and jeans, both decidedly not bee proof. And my plan was to stand forty feet behind a roaring bee hive and take pictures as a trained professional squirted poison into their home and killed their women and children. And the bee guy was totally supportive of this plan. Problem number one. Write it down.
Here's Bee Guy doing his thing. This is about when I realized I was a total idiot who was about to die a puffy death in the fenced backyard of a tenement house. Luckily he wasn't swarmed by thousands of bees "like last time" and so, much to Charles Darwin's continued and bitter disappointment, I lived to see another day unmarred by the stingers of a trillion insulted bees.
The situation according to Bee Guy: There's honey inside the wall. A new hive hasn't set up shop (good news) and the current bee activity is from scavenger bees, bees stopping at my house for honey take out on their way home to the hive. The bad news: if we leave the honey inside the wall, another hive will inevitably move in. The other bad news: in addition to bees, honey seems to be a pretty big draw for ants and enormous cockroaches. At this rate it's only a matter of time before I've got Hansel and Gretel camped out in the backyard. The other, more complicated bad news: the bees, wily little fuckers that they are, have nestled their honey directly behind the electrical power meter and breaker box. And the way the house is laid out, there isn't a way to reach the spot from the inside-- it's a four-inch space between the kitchen and laundry room on the exterior side of the stud.
Bee Guy didn't realize this at first and he thought he could get to the honey through the laundry room.
So he wrestled his way around the water heater and poked some holes in the wall. Apparently it's a pretty scientific test: you poke a bunch of holes in the wall with a screwdriver until the screwdriver comes out sticky. If after say ten or so random holes the screwdriver is still dry, Phase Two dictates that you move on to slamming a hammer into the wall. Not for any real reason, mind, but just because you really enjoy destroying drywall with a hammer and you've already poked all those holes and everything, so fuck it.
Once we'd racked up a $500 drywall / paint bill in the laundry room, Bee Guy and I moved outside to see what kind of damage we could do out there.
This is where the bees are. Directly behind that board, directly in the center, directly totally unattainable. Seriously, all the fresh honey is condensed into this four inch area running in a vertical row
directly behind the conduit. The black smears to the left of the board are bee footprints. The bulbous orange border around the plank is where the previous owner attempted to foam the problem closed. I'm assuming my home inspector was too busy trying to fudge the power and plumbing out of the death zone to notice something as puny as a bee hive cover up.
Bee Guy had a tough decision to make then, whether to risk electrocuting himself to death or you know,
leave, so I went back inside to rip all the wooden blinds out of the windows so I could wash them in the bathtub.
I had just tangled my second set of blinds to the point of wet useless garbage and I was trying to figure out how to pin it on the last tenant because for all intents and purposes I'm a conniving seven-year-old operating inside a grown up's body when I heard Bee Guy holler into the house.
"I think I should just rip that board off the wall."
Whoa. I stood up and barefoot slipped on the wet floor.
"No!" I hollered back. "I think you should definitely not do that!" I'd hung the first set of ruined blinds from the shower curtain rod hoping the Shutter Fairy might come and untangle it in the night and now of course the curtain rod collapsed.
Dude, Bee Guy, you should seriously NOT yank the board off the wall. Bee Guy. No. I ran outside, the second set of wet blinds clanking along with me.
"I'm not an electrician," I told him, "But I have to think that's a bad idea."
"What happened there?" he gestured at my white shuttery torso.
"I don't know. Go get a saw."
He went to get a saw while I pondered large-scale destruction. If I set this joint on fire, would it burn? Or simply caramelize into a giant stucco crème brûlée?
Anyway. Here's what we accomplished with a saw:
Bee Guy managed to cut around the power meter and remove the wood. I stood nearby with a broom the whole time in case Bee Guy cut through a live wire and needed a good poke in the ribs.
The piece of wood behind the pipe above the meter in still intact and needs to come out. And we need to carve out access to the place behind the breaker box, too, since there's a bunch of honey down there.
Here's a closeup of inside the wall:
Nevermind the bee carcasses and fossilized black honey on the left, the new fresh sticky honey is tucked in on the right, there. You can see the honeycomb. After we pull the honey out, my plan is to just stucco over the hole and over the edges of whatever remains of the board, too, so good luck getting back inside there, BEES. Right now the wall is still gaping open like this since Bee Guy is going to have to come back out in a couple of days to finish up with magical tools. The bees were already swarming when we left, aroused as they were by honey in the daytime, so he sprayed a bunch of poison around in the hopes of keeping various sweet-toothed predators-- not to mention lost German children-- at bay.
But right after that I set some cookies out for the shutter fairy, proving once and for all that I am definitely not a part of any solution.
Rule Number Two: If at all possible, stay off Craigslist.
I've written before about the haunted shanty I own across town. Until recently it's been occupied by a single tenant, Mary. Mary has had seventeen phone numbers in three years. Mary was recently forced to vacate my retirement shanty because her son was arrested and taken into what appears to be permanent custody with all of her money. I think that was Mary's first mistake, using a felon as a bank, and I would have suggested as much if I weren't very, very afraid of her.
I hadn't been inside the house since giving Mary the key, and I guess part of me was secretly hoping she'd eventually overwhelm the 60 AC electrical current by turning on two ceiling fans at the same time, the whole action would burn quietly to the ground, and I'd be free to retire someplace else-- preferably someplace with less people buried shallowly under it. Rest assured that could never happen though, not really. You know there's only the one ceiling fan.
I unlocked the door and walked inside this morning for the first time, expecting the worst.
If last year's appraisal of the back yard was any indicator, I could quite possibly be walking into a hastily dismantled meth lab- slash -puppy mill. But the house was damn near pristine. The carpets had been vacuumed, the kitchen and bathroom had been scrubbed, the refrigerator and oven were sparkling clean. She cleaned out every cabinet, every closet, she didn't leave so much as a toilet paper tube behind.
Even the backyard had been emptied; someone bolted a metal-framed gazebo into the concrete patio and it's sort of collapsed in on itself (you can see it in
this picture) but the rest of the hobo carnival had been excavated.
I was standing out there, investigating the laundry room and making a mental note to call the carpet cleaners and buy four outlet covers, when suddenly my eyes focused in thirty directions at once and I realized I was standing in the middle of the bee freeway. Evidently my discount bee guy has a sixty-day guarantee for a reason-- it's Day 73 that's really a problem. I should know better by now, it's the first rule of assassination: if you're paying someone to kill something, just pony up and pay full price.
Can you give children's Benadryl to plants?
On a whim I bought this giant Jiffy seed starter at Home Depot over the weekend. It's almost cool enough outside to replant my flower pots and get everything on the patio squared away for fall, and I'd been mentally throwing around the idea of setting up a greenhouse. It would never work, obviously; not only do I not have the knowledge, stamina, or interest to maintain a greenhouse, but it would be significantly easier to just cut to the chase, hand the giant spiders a thousand dollars, and save myself the inevitable heartache.
But this flimsy plastic tray full of dehydrated soil pellets looked harmless enough-- and it cost significantly less than a grand; worst case scenario, if the giant spiders moved in I was only out ten bucks-- so I grabbed it and some seeds of things I recognized and I spent Sunday evening jamming seeds into fake dirt. I was so impressed with myself for remembering to label what I planted where that I'd almost convinced myself I had any idea what I was doing.
Until I woke up this morning and everything's actually started
growing.
What the hell is
that? What's today, Wednesday? It's been like FIVE HOURS, how are there
plants in there already? I remember planting seeds in elementary school and they took literally
four months to sprout; in January we'd jam them seven inches deep in a dirt-filled styrofoam cup and then in April an entire plant complete with flowers would thrust its way out into the open air, gasping and clawing at the surface like a man trapped beneath an avalanche.
I don't know what to do with these guys now. Every time I go into the kitchen there they are; all alive and thriving and bionic and shit, "Look at me, look at me! I'm alive but if you touch me you'll kill me!" It's like I'm babysitting and all six hundred infants just woke up screaming. And all I wanted to do was make a few bucks, watch a little cable, and eat someone else's frosting.
