We bought our tomatoes from Katy’s farm this year. She made little labels for each plant, written in the same distinctive handwriting she’s had for as long as I can remember, more familiar to me even than my own. I like going out to water my plants every evening and seeing this little piece of my friend, as if a tiny version of her was standing in each pot waving and grinning her giant grin and saying “Hello! Hello! Hello!”
Memories from my childhood, #2
I was at a dinner party with my parents once when I was 14. The couple hosting us had just had a baby, and my dad was talking about the trusting nature of babies. “They don’t so much as flinch when you do something like this,” he said, turning to me and quickly moving his palm towards my face as though he were going to push my head backwards. He stopped at the last second and I just sat there staring at his hand — I hadn’t flinched at all. I guess I didn’t move because I knew there was no possibility in any universe that my dad was going to smack me in the face. We all marveled afterwards at the trust implied by that. It made both me and my dad look pretty good, I think. A nice bond of mutual love and trust there.
The other possibility is that I just have abysmally poor reflexes, and I’m pretty sure my dad and I both considered this explanation for a few seconds before we decided to believe in our beautiful trust. He’s the guy who tried and failed to teach me to ski, play tennis and throw a ball, so he knows about my reflex issues better than most. I guess it doesn’t matter: he could be a supremely trusted parent or he could be willing to lie to cover my terrible lack of coordination; either one makes him a pretty great dad.
Don’t hast.
Gene: You’re saying she likes old country and new country? That’s not possible. I don’t buy it.
Kris: Don’t be ridiculous. People can like disparate kinds of music. Look at me: I like Elliot Smith and I like Kraft.
Gene: The cheese?
Kris: Oh. Not Kraft, Kraftwerk. I like Kraftwerk.
Gene: Really.
Kris: Well I like that one “Du Hast Mich” song.
Gene: That’s Rammstein.
Kris: Whatever. Is there more beer?
If you do things…
At our wedding, Sean made a great toast which centered around a mantra Gene used to repeat when the two of them lived together: “If you do things, they get done.” I guess Gene’s mellowed with age, because in our family now the mantra seems to be “If you need something done and you wait long enough you’ll discover that Gene has a friend who does that thing professionally and then you’ll pay that friend to do the thing which will, consequently, get done.”
His first mantra was catchier, I admit, but this way he has more free time.
When we moved into this house there were three major projects we agreed we would do: landscape the backyard, remodel the kitchen and replace the windows. It took a few years for Gene to really examine his contacts list, but eventually he discovered that a friend from KALX is also a professional carpenter — windows! — and a friend from one of his RPGs is also a general contractor — yard! So our windows are in the process of being replaced right now, and on Monday Gene’s going to pass our yard plans along to his contractor friend and see if this is a project he can do for us. The only thing left to do is to remodel the kitchen, and to do that I need to figure out what I want in there.
I’ve already mentioned the pressure I feel to live up to this house, and completely changing a major room in it is going to be the thing that makes or breaks our relationship. It can’t just look like a Craftsman kitchen but secretly be made of plywood substitutes from Ikea. It has to be a Craftsman kitchen. The whole soul of the house depends on honesty, integrity and quality; if I cut corners the house will know. And it will fall down on me in my sleep.
My options now are to haunt design blogs and painstakingly collect honest, high-quality kitchen ideas, then price them all and figure out who should do the work and schedule everything and budget and save…or I can wait until Gene remembers he has a friend who is a time-traveling 1920s woodworker specializing in kitchens.
Unfortunately, he only knows a couple of time-travelers and coincidentally they’re both bankers from the 1860s, so until he meets more people I’ll need to get to work.
Super
Just thinking about peanut sauce this morning made my scrambled eggs taste like peanut sauce to me. As I see it, there are two explanations:
1. I have a new superpower: I can summon the ghost of past tastes to my mouth anytime I want.
2. My indifferent attitude towards housekeeping caused me to use a plate containing trace elements of peanut butter from a previous meal.
Man, this superpower is awesome.
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Multiples
I’m reading The Story of English in 100 Words. I haven’t finished it yet, so I don’t feel qualified to remark on the success or failure of such an ambitious project, but it includes a fun little list of collective nouns which I will partly reproduce here for your pleasure:
- an absence of waiters
- a rash of dermatologists
- a clutch of mechanics
- a lot of auctioneers
- a mass of priests
But of course the fun thing about collective nouns is that you can invent your own. For example:
- a bleat of tweets
- a hop of IPAs
- a mite of possibilities
- a hamper of cables (anyone who’s ever tried to walk across one of our cable-strewn floors without tripping would understand this one immediately)
Others?
Fore!
I’ve now failed to attend two large book sales and my page-turning finger is kind of starting to itch. I was thinking I might check out the Berkeley Library sale next month; they’re selling 4,500 books, which sounds like SO MANY…until I realize that’s only four times the size of my current collection. Maybe I can just reread some things again. Out of 1,049 books, I have to have forgotten the plot of at least ONE of them. Right?
Ah. Careful examination of my shelves reveals that yes, there is ONE book I’ve mostly forgotten, but it’s P.G. Wodehouse’s Golf Omnibus. Well, if we must, we must.
I can live with that.
Kris: “What do you think of this new header image on Carthage?”
Gene: “What do you mean?”
Kris: “I mean it’s a huge photo of my face. Is it bizarrely egotistical?”
Gene: “It’s appropriately egotistical.”
Kris: “Cool.”
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Dad comes to lunch
Dad: “Something’s amiss with your fence, here.”
Kris: “You think?”
Dad: “Well, I am a skilled woodworker.”
I guess I should add that it doesn’t actually look like this now. It’s still all broken and propped up haphazardly but it’s not actually flat on its face.
Sunblock
Kris: “Check it out, there’s going to be a solar eclipse on May 20 that will be visible from, among other places, Redding.”
Gene: “Cool.”
Kris: “Can you even imagine the number of alien hunters and ghost whisperers who will be out on Lake Shasta to see that? [Looks at calendar.] Oh, too bad, looks like you’re going to be at the Maker Faire that day. You’ll be surrounded by logical types who will completely understand the science behind an eclipse. Everyone’s just going to be glancing up casually, going ‘Oh, the sun and the moon are doing some kind of thing there, a common event in no way caused by elves.’ BORING.”
Gene: ” ‘Doing some kind of thing?’ Do you not know what causes a solar eclipse?”
Kris: “Well, I know it’s not elves.”
Gene: “Okay.”
Kris: “It’s aliens, right?”
Gene: “…Yes. That’s right.”