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reader, writer, unregenerate comma-splicer |
The Alameda Library Sale is this weekend! At first I thought the website said they would be selling between 800-1000 books, which is…pretty much like if you came over to my house to shop. But then I realized they will be selling 800-1000 BOXES of books.
I am all over this. All over it.
These past few days it’s been warm enough to jump into the pool and then immediately out again, shrieking a little bit in a quiet way to myself. Today it’s warm enough to jump in the pool and then swim around for a while and then wish I had some sort of floaty to lay on and read. And then get out again without shrieking and be dry in seconds.
Excuse me now, I have to go pick an orange off our tree and have a swim.
Having managed to scare the duck off at last, we’ve naturally developed a new wildlife problem. One of those cooing birds — my mom says he’s a pigeon, but I never heard pigeons making such a lovely noise in SF — has started appearing in the upper inside corner of our porch roof, and yesterday he brought a girlfriend. Looks like all the neighborhood wildlife wants to nest at our house, probably because they can sense the waves of love radiating from the place like a fond toaster oven.
“What happens if they nest there?” Gene asked this morning.
“We probably use the back entrance until their babies grow up,” I said. “Otherwise I think they’ll dive-bomb us.”
“Okay, they’re not nesting there,” he said. So today I’m going to put my little gargoyle statue up there and hope for the best.
But what’s next? Raccoons in the ice closet? Mice in the laundry chute? Or will some of the thousands of dentists in our four-block radius sneak over to couple up under the orange tree? It is a never-ending whirlwind of love and park-rangership over here, I tell you what.
As some of you know, one of the neighborhood ducks has recently adopted us. And by “us,” I mean “our pool,” which he seems to look on as his own personal kingdom. I have been chasing him off the pool at least twice a day, and still he returns anyway. Having the cover on makes no difference to him — he will cheerfully sit in the half-inch puddles on top of the cover.
Gene is baffled as to why this bothers me so much. The thing that really worries me is that he (duck) has brought a girlfriend around two or three times, and this is duckling season, people! She’s looking for a place to nest. Now, would it really be so bad to have sweet baby ducks paddling around in my pool? Let’s ask the well-known and respected Duck Rescue Network:
“Spring is the time when ducks are searching for a place to raise their young. Your pool provides them with a nice private water source and a perfect environment to do this. Even if you welcome the ducks there are a few things to consider.
* Chlorine when property diluted does not harm ducklings. According to the Massachusetts Audubon Society site, the droppings are not a health hazard if you maintain an adequate level of chemicals (by which I assume they mean chlorine).
* Duck droppings are not harmful, but should be removed. Chlorine is the most effective sanitizer, but be sure you check the water balance prior to shocking your pool.”
So far, so good. The baby ducks will be just fine, right? THINK AGAIN:
“* Once baby ducks are hatched mom will take them to the water source (your pool) babies will get in and realize they can’t get out. They will drown, die from exhaustion and get sucked into the pool filter.”
So…not ideal.
Luckily, the internet has a range of really stupid ideas, ranging from colorful plastic snakes ranged around the pool, to something called the Terror Eyes Balloon, which is pretty much just what it sounds like. I think I’ll stick to good, old-fashioned waving my arms and yelling.
Terror Eyes.
A little while ago I decided to take over the guest bathroom as my own bathroom, since the master bath which we’d been sharing is lit only by two hideous fluorescent bars, while the guest bath has lovely normal lights, including one in the shower.
Since then I’ve been girlyfying it and the guest room like crazy — using power tools and elbow grease, naturally, as a girl should. For starters, I swapped out the ugly forest green toilet seat for a new white one. Gene, on seeing me wrestle with the installation, started to say “Have you thought about trying — ”
“Wait!” I said. “Consider for a moment that your normally helpless wife has managed to correctly measure and remove the old seat and is now installing the new one without help from you, and it’s all going swimmingly. Take a moment to be impressed.”
“I withdraw my suggestion,” he agreed.
I also used a power drill to hang a new full-length mirror, used the grease of my elbows to remove the scarred old vanity door, and hung some lovely girly pictures in both the guest bath and the guest room. Then I measured and (with Gene’s help) got wood cut to size for a vanity table I’m making, which I painted and stenciled yesterday. Now Gene just has to show me how to use our new circular saw so I can mount my new table on two-by-fours that I will drill and screw into the wall. Meanwhile, I will use our new stud finder to mount a shelf today where I can display books like The Illustrated Letters of Jane Austen, The Language of Flowers, and The One Hundred. After that, I’ll go buy some lavender paint and get started on the bathroom walls, which need to be re-done in semi-gloss.
When I am done, I will have a purple, mermaid-themed bathroom and a flowery purple and white dressing room, all achieved through my use of drill, saw, and frequent trips to Home Depot. In short, I find the best way to be feminine is through tools.
I started doing a very small morning workout a little while ago. For the first couple of days my body was confused, then angry about what was happening, but on the third day I woke up and found my legs raring to go, like “Hey, let’s do that stepping up and down thing you like! We’re cool with it.”
This is kind of how it works with flossing, too, right? At first your gums try to kill you and then after a little while they’re grumbling at night if you’re too slow to get in there with some string.
Clearly exercise and good dental hygiene are gateway drugs to more exercise and dental hygiene, and I think it’s weird there is no organization to warn people about that. Because now I’m having to have regular conversations with my legs and teeth, which are two body parts I was not speaking to before.
Okay, yes, it’s possible that my entire experience of the internet consists of links my friends put on Facebook and links I find on The Hairpin. Oh well, so what if you all have seen this blog written by a stroke survivor. It’s great.
I love this: “If the words coming out of your mouth are not what you intend, who’s talking?”
This is kind of what worries me about my drunk self as well. I am not ever totally certain who’s in charge at those moments.
Gene and I started taking walks around the neighborhood this week, a trend I hope will continue throughout the summer. Up until now, I have always considered the height of romance to be when your boyfriend wins you a stuffed animal at a carnival and then tilts your head up to kiss you, an image imprinted on my nine year old brain by The Sleepover Friends and enforced by The Babysitter’s Club. But now I know the height of romance is walking with your new husband through your new neighborhood on a warm spring evening when all the flowers are still open and the sun is lighting up all the little parks and mansions and small girls on scooters are yelling “Orange juice, fifty cents!” because I guess it is too early in the year for a lemonade stand.
I loved San Francisco, as you all know, but Alameda has grown on me like a beautiful, jewel-green fungus. We passed by friends’ houses on our walk last night, and we had dinner at a really good Vietnamese place, and we ran into a minor celebrity who Gene sort of knows (what-up, Will the Thrill) and we stopped at one of our island’s two (two! so ridiculous) tiki bars to say hi at Jon and Rob. Had we been in the Castro we would have been defeated by our first windy hill, and if we weren’t defeated there would still have been no friends’ houses in a twenty block radius, and no really good Vietnamese places (in the Castro at least) and the celebrity would have been Bevan Dufty, and we wouldn’t know anyone at the bar. And the little girls selling orange juice would have been homeless men.
I still love San Francisco, but it’s good here. It’s definitely good.
As I settle into this ridiculous yacht of ours, I realize more and more that I only have one decorating style: books. A room does not look right to me unless you can see some books in it, and books are also, for the most part, the only pretty knick-knacks we own.
A computer and a book in every room, that’s our motto from here on out.
I was idly skimming yet another one of those fashion articles you see every year around this time that tells you what kind of bathing suit to buy to hide your figure flaws. And I realized for the first time that maybe they aren’t flaws. Maybe that’s just your figure. Why is what the magazines lovingly call “a pear shape” so bad? Why do I have to try and find a bathing suit that pads my non-existent chest and hides my hips and thighs with some sort of ruffled skirt? (Yes, it took me 31 years to get here. Yes, I am ashamed.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never walked around judging myself and others based on these articles. But somehow it also never occurred to me that these magazines are, quite simply, batshit-crazy. Why on earth would we all want to have the same figure? Is it so that we can engage in wacky Sweet Valley High-type hijinks and pull some kind of switcheroo on one another’s husbands in the dark?
Wait, is that the reason?
“Good night, sweethe — HOLY SHIT WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?”