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reader, writer, unregenerate comma-splicer |
Kris: What’s the cask ale tonight?
Waitress: It’s…a beer?
Kris: …Right. But…what kind of beer?
Waitress: Um, it’s like a kind of golden beer…
Kris: I guess I mean, what style is it?
Waitress: Oh, it’s a German style?
Kris: …
Waitress: …Should I just get you the information card?
Kris: That would be great, thank you.
Gene and I were sitting at the picnic table at our campsite, playing Dominion and drinking microbrews (are you seeing a theme here?) when we heard a terrific thumping and grumbling coming from the campsite next to ours. The sites at Glacier, at least in this campground, are divided by stands of trees, which is nice for privacy but does make it hard to spy on your grumbling neighbors. However, by craning his neck a little Gene could see next door.
“He’s trying to chop wood with a hatchet,” he marveled. “I should loan him our axe.”
“Yes,” I said. “Tell him to keep it.” (This axe is a sore point with me. On the one hand, we have consistently needed it on camping trips to chop wood into nice fire-sized pieces which allow me to have s’mores. On the other hand, I am always convinced Gene will lose a toe in the process and then what the hell will I do? He does all the driving, after all.)
So Gene went and got the axe and walked it next door, calling out “Hey, do you want to try something other than a hatchet?”
“If he can use an axe, he’s welcome to try it,” replied a woman who I assumed was the hatchet-operator’s wife.
“Yeah, I think an axe would be better,” said the hatchet operator, and walked forward into my sightline to claim it. And I swear to you, Harry Potter was standing there. I mean a young Harry, before the series even begins. He was just this tiny, way-too-skinny kid in enormous glasses. His hair was over his forehead so I couldn’t see if he had a scar, but I figured a scar was not far away as Gene handed over the axe and walked back to our table.
“Did you just give an axe to, like, an eight year old kid?” I demanded.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Jesus, I hope we’re not liable,” I said.
Luckily everything turned out fine, or head wounds might have been the theme of our trip. Still, accio axe, am I right?
Wielding the death machine.
Gene and I are sitting at the picnic table at our campsite playing twenty or thirty rounds of Dominion and drinking microbrews (why? what do YOU do when you camp?) when a minivan pulls up to our site and honks. We turn around. For about half a minute, the driver just sits and stares at us, as if the honk were communication enough. Then she hollers out “Do you want to see my bear?”
Operating on Jim’s “responding to Dwight” principle from The Office, Gene immediately says “Absolutely we do.”
We walk over and the woman climbs out of the van and opens the sliding door. Inside on the seat with its seatbelt securely fastened is a bear. It is made of wood. The paws are molded to hold a roll of toilet paper, and there is a pouch on the stomach. “For magazines?” Gene asks.
“Right!” the woman says. “I found him at a garage sale and I just snapped him up. I call him T.P.”
“Makes sense,” says Gene, while I try not to stare, fascinated, at the obviously recent stitches covering the woman’s forehead.
“I’m going around the campground showing him to everyone,” says the woman with the fresh head wound.
“Sounds good,” Gene says. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” says the woman, and drives on to the next occupied campsite.
“Did you, uh, notice her head wound?” I ask Gene as we return to our game.
“Yup.”
“Maybe we should have called someone?”
“She’s fine,” he says. “You want another beer?”
“Sure,” I say, and go back to schooling him in Dominion.
The pocket gopher is a solitary creature. It does not even like other pocket gophers. If two pocket gophers encounter one another, they frequently fight to the death.
So how are there still pocket gophers in the world? Is there some kind of underground lab where pocket gophers are cloning themselves? Nope. As you might expect, dating amongst pocket gophers is fraught with peril. A male pocket gopher, when he begins to feel the urge, will dig to the burrow of a female pocket gopher and crawl in there hoping beyond hope that she is also in the mood and not about to claw his face off. As soon as they finish, assuming they get that far — the phrase “getting lucky” has a rich meaning amongst pocket gophers, where “getting unlucky” means your would-be-girlfriend murders you with her teeth — both parties return to their isolated existence, seldom even venturing above ground.
Except for mating, these solitary rodents do not socialize, says my book Wild Animals of North America. No lunch with friends, no New Year’s Eve parties, no gossipy little phone calls with your mom, no Christmas morning pastry-fest with your husband. Just a few brief encounters and then it’s you and your thoughts, alone together, forever. Can you imagine? It gives me a whole new appreciation for the rich (some may say over-scheduled) social life Gene and I have got going on.
The solitary pocket gopher.
We have vines drooping with tomatoes and overflowing pots of basil in our garden, so naturally I am thinking about mozzarella today, the third ingredient in a caprese salad.
It is my understanding — and taking a few Italian classes by no means makes me an expert, so don’t quote me on this or anything — that in Italian, a doubled-up letter in a word indicates a pause. In “mozzarella,” you let your mouth form the “z” sound and then pause for a split second before you let it out. You speak the “l” but hold it a bit longer than you normally would. Mo…zzarelllla. I can’t stop picturing this word as a long string of itself, sliding off a pizza slice.
Words and food, food and words. It’s kind of all I’m interested in these days.
We have a new look here at Carthage!
Questions? Comments? Feedback? All can now be left in the new, improved comments. No more signing in (for now, anyway), and no more long wait for your comment to load, followed by an incomprehensible error message.
I am not married to any part of this template, just testing it out. Stuff I would like to know from you:
-If you’re having a tough time loading the page or viewing anything.
-If you’re finding any part of this harder to read — font type, colors, contrast, etc.
-If you are a fan of this header graphic.
-Anything else you’d like to share.
Meanwhile, I am dancing around the house cheering for my webmaster/husband, who makes my life so much prettier. Woot!
Gene: Blah blah blah Randy Savage.
Me: Ha ha! Randy Savage. ‘Step into a Slim Jim.’
*crickets*
Gene: Did you just say ‘step into a Slim Jim’?
Me: Yes?
Gene: Not snap into a Slim Jim?
Me: Uh…
Gene: What is this, like Slim Jim-themed lingerie? ‘Excuse me, I’m going to go step into a Slim Jim.’
Me: Oh, shut up.
Gene got out the hedge clippers on Saturday night to clean up some of the greedier branches blocking the front paths, and I got out a beer and sat around to watch him clean up the branches. While he was clipping, he found a little robin’s nest in the loquat tree out front. I knew it was a robin’s nest because there was one sad little blue egg which had rolled out of the nest and was balanced on a branch. Clearly the robins had given up the whole business as a bad job and moved to Canada or something.
Or so we thought. Gene started to clip some of the branches around the nest and
AUGH ANGRY ROBINS!
Gene was dive-bombed and did NOT shriek like a girl, but I was doing enough shrieking for both of us. To the point where one of our human neighbors poked his head outside and mildly offered to let us borrow his shotgun to deal with the wildlife. It was very exciting. I am pretty sure no robins were harmed in the making of this blog entry, but I also have not gone back to the nest to check. Because I value my hair and eyes, and do not want to be attacked again.
Relatedly, a question: do I need to do something with that sad little stray egg? I mean, will it just rot on that branch and turn into a scary sulfur egg if left to itself? Or will something eventually come and eat it? I do not want to go back into that war zone, but neither do I want a stinky loquat tree.
Last night I dreamed I found raccoons in our basement. Given the general brass balls of the Alameda raccoons, it’s not impossible that this will prove prophetic, but I think it was more likely my brain reminding me that I still have a load of laundry in the dryer waiting to be folded. Housewife dreams, lord help me.
Today, in true housewife fashion, I have been Minwaxing our outdoor furniture, and also part of my leg. I can take this leg into any weather now with confidence, or at least this part of this leg. Not sure how to get Minwax off skin without the skin coming too. Nail polish remover? Time to experiment, and what better laboratory for polyurethane-based experiments than my own body?
I have a new imaginary pet dog. (Some of you may remember my other imaginary pet dog, Honey. She’s still around too.) My new dog is a beagle named Harriet Vane, after the heroine of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels by Dorothy Sayers. Like Harriet Vane in the books, my Harriet is inquisitive and smart and has a beautiful deep voice when she barks.
This dog is very real to me. I know just what part of the bed she sleeps on, and what her favorite toy is, and I have already taught her a trick. (When I say “Harriet, it’s LORD PETER!” she runs away a little distance. Because Harriet is always fleeing Lord Peter’s advances in the books.) When I am feeling especially fond of her, which is most of the time, I call her Hairball.
I have already convinced Gene that we should re-do our plan for the yard, eliminating the fire pit circle and instead making that area into a little wildflower meadow where Harriet Vane can do her needful business in privacy. After all, how often are we going to use a fire pit? Whereas Harriet Vane will need that meadow every day. I know I convinced Gene because he fell asleep during the discussion, which in marriage traditionally signals defeat.
Harriet Vane and I have already been to a dog park together (we go three days a week and she runs until she falls over, because Harriet Vane needs to stay in good shape to catch murderers), and she has already befriended her crazy Aunt Molly. Right now she is lying next to me chewing on a bone bigger than her head. It’s very cute.
This is not my Harriet Vane. But I kind of wish it was.