Mighty Worker

There’s a lot of work to be done here in the home. Gene has a lot of work-doing skills, but no free time. I have a lot of free time, but few skills. I’ve been trying to shift the balance in favor of Gene having more time, but it is gradually dawning on me that I may be going about this backwards.

And so I learned to use a power drill — after a few false starts — and successfully hung curtains rods all by myself. Emboldened by this success, I went a little power-drill-mad and started using it all kinds of places, including the bathroom wall where I wanted to hang some pictures. Specifically, the tiny patch of bathroom wall right above the outlet. And as I was preparing to drill there, I was actually thinking to myself “Hm, outlet…unseen wiring in the wall…metal drill…should I reconsider this? Nah.

Well, as I am sitting here typing this, I think you can guess that I was miraculously not electrocuted. Somehow I managed not to hit any wiring. But I am pretty sure that use of tools will eventually lead to me living on in a vegetative state. Way more than I do now, even. But this will not stop me! I am empowered and I must put holes in our wall!

Now, who has a stud finder? I am hankering to hang some really heavy shelves right over my expensive computer monitor and then put some large things on them.

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Home

Because I know it so well, the Montgomery Street BART station feels more like home than certain parts of my house. I’m lookin’ at you, kitchen.

Luckily there are plenty of parts of the house that feel completely like home now, because I know them every bit as well as I ever knew the weird honeycombed walls of the Montgomery station. There is a stair railing (for example), third from the top, that I always grab as I’m making the sharp curve around the landing, which is as homey as anything could be.

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Man Not On A Wire

I’ve been getting quotes from a few different companies to see how much it would cost to chop down the two acacia trees in our backyard. These trees are easily six stories tall; great looming sun-eating monsters that have forced all the other plants in the yard to grow completely sideways in a desperate attempt to photosynthesize. Anyway. Today I discovered that all these tree companies are planning to come out here and climb the trees not with cranes but with their bare hands, while holding chainsaws, and cut them down that way.

What the hell? How is it possible that I can’t afford to hire a live-in butler or a chauffeur or a jester, and yet I can easily afford to hire a guy to climb six wind-rattling stories of tree while gripping a chainsaw between his teeth? And now that I know this, what other ridiculous tasks can I pay people to do?

What I really want to know is: is this a normal, reasonable thing for a skilled professional to do? Or is this like when you see the pictures of the guys building a bridge without wires or safety nets and you think “man, people sure were horrible to the workers back in those days,” except those days are today, in your own backyard, and those people are you?

bridgebuilders.jpg

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What worries me most

It’s not so much that I talk to cupcakes while I’m making them. It’s the things I say.

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My Favorite

I walked into the kitchen at 11:30 last night to find Gene dismembering a cow. Our fridge is now full, full, FULL of beef. We’re having a few of his work friends over today, you see, to celebrate the death of some product they all hated, and the company apparently feels that the best way to keep your workers productive is to clog their arteries until they’re unable to get up from their desks.

This is a milestone in my secret career as a 1950s housewife: Hosting Your Husband’s Business Associates. I suspect that as with most 1950’s housewife duties, the secret is mayo. (Is your chicken dry and tasteless? Serve mayo as a sauce! Pesky stain on that white sofa? Slap a little mayo on it, they’ll never know the difference!) We’ve already got enough beef to account for one entire rainforest acre, and Gene is attending to the cocktail portion of the evening (hint: these cocktails come in kegs). All I need to do is sides. But what is best? Individual pineapple-based fruit cups with mayo dressing? Shrimp cocktail with mayo? Mayo with mayo?

Well, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get started. Eighty-six jars of Best Foods ain’t gonna buy themselves.

mayohorror.jpg

“Mayonnaise surprise? My favorite!”

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If you like it then you shoulda put a bird on it.

With all the boxes of cutlery, flowers, tablecloths and so on to be taken to the wedding site, somehow we mislaid a roll of tulle intended to decorate our little altar. The moms, desperately wishing for at least one part of this hippie-ass wedding to be floaty and white, dashed out to a fabric store on the wedding morning and obtained more tulle — which was then never used.

But I am proud to say that today, at last, I have answered the question: What do you do with a ginormous roll of tulle when you’re already married? I present to you The Guest Room of Unending Wedded Bliss (hint: the tulle is the window scarves):

TulleScarves.jpg

Also please note that I did, indeed, put a bird on it:

TulleScarvesBird.jpg

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Back to the studio

I am at last beginning to get my act together in the house. For the first several months I was kind of walking around in a daze, waiting for someone to come and say it had all been a mistake and that we’d need to move back to our 750 square foot apartment, but now I am starting to be capable of walking through a room and thinking “Wait, should that ugly plywood shelving unit really be in the corner of our beautiful living room? Or could I find a better place for it, like someone else’s house?”

Wait, should I still be storing my CDs in a hideous filthy plastic chest of drawers?

Wait, should the bathroom tile have shreds of carpet glued to it?

Wait, why is the kitchen so ugl — LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.

(SO not ready to think about the kitchen yet.)

All this is by way of explaining why I rarely talk much about my day-to-day life here: it’s because I’m so focused on the house, which is extraordinarily boring. Except to me.

Okay, back to books and dog jokes.

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I made a little place for the cheese

As much as I do not want a dog really at all, I have to admit that sometimes when cooking if I accidentally drop a bit of warm orzo on my bare foot, I will just let it stay there until I have to walk again because it feels kind of like the little bits of drool Roxie used to drop on me while she was waiting to get her cheese slice.

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Water

Today I’m thinking about water. No surprise, as the remnants of the Japan tsunami race towards me to engulf…well, about three feet of beach, probably.

But really, watching the footage of what happened in Japan makes me think about earthquakes, which are not, you know, totally unheard of here on our side of the world. And that makes me think about water, and all the other emergency prep we haven’t done.

If, like me, you were just planning to loot your neighbor’s house when the next one hits, let me invite you to change your plan with me and build an emergency kit. Heck, our house even came with two man-sized safes in which to store our supplies (just in case our neighbors are also on the looting plan). Don’t forget the duct tape!

(Side note: why is a disposable camera on the list? Is that so I can blog about it later with images? Or in case I get invited to a wedding or high school graduation mid-disaster?)

Use your weekend to get this done. Then you can attend all those “Aid for Japan” celebrity concerts with a free mind in the upcoming weeks.

1/12/18 Edited to add: If you’re looking for more info from 72hours.org, they recommend checking out their guide to disaster recovery. I recommend it, too. Guys, I’m not gonna lie: it’s been seven years since I wrote this post and still my emergency kit kind of sucks. Let’s all make a plan to not die in some horrible disaster-related way in this new year of 2018, WHO’S WITH ME.

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Money tree

I was in Washington, D.C., for a day last week. (In fact, I’ve been zipping all over the east coast for a week, hence my absence from Carthage.) Seeing all the giant stone palaces made me feel more warmly towards the federal government — how bad can they be if they have buildings like that?

I did, however, notice that most of the trees were decorated with fancy metal plaques telling the name of the tree. I think I’ve worked out why our country is in debt.

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