I have just discovered my new favorite way to handle BART annoyances!

So, there’s this owl called the Northern White-Faced Owl. It has a defense mechanism that is just…well, awesome.

But, I don’t know how effective it is.

So I think I’m going to mimic its behavior on BART the next time I am approached by someone who clearly is going to be a pain. (Video plays rather LOUD and BEAT-Y music, rocker discretion is advised for those taking a little break at work…)

Imma gonna go practice in front of the mirror, like, RIGHT NOW…

How To Make Your Spouse Do Stuff, Den of Chaos Edition

We needed some kind of window covering in the master bathroom – the nekkid windows in there are like tiny but powerful heaters, driving up the temperature not only in there, but all the way in the master bedroom as well.

I finally got off my arse and got the ball rolling on that. Yesterday, the raw materials arrived. And I looked at them…and then I looked at my husband…and I thought to myself, OH boy…this is going to end up being like the downstairs bathroom, which has needed new flooring for, like, four YEARS now…

And sure enough, he was settling into a mode that clearly told me I was going to be hard-pressed to get any finger-lifting from him. After all these years together, I can just tell when he’s going to be resistant to the suggestion that now would be a GREAT time to get on that project.

But I am a wily old fox. So when I had wrapped up the bulk of my work for the day, I wandered downstairs, rummaged together all those raw materials, then poked my head into the Man Cave and casually told Himself that I was going to, you know, just go ahead and get the curtain rods hung, you know, now-ish.

Two…seconds…later…

(Note how Mr. Tall Guy doesn’t even need a ladder to do this. I would have needed one. How I planned to use a ladder in the bathtub [which, yes, is where he’s actually standing right there], I have no idea. But I’m sure it would have been a) dangerous and b) awkward and c) he would have pitched a major hissy fit about me doing it “like that” if he’d caught me in the act.)

I have found that I have three basics ways I can attempt to coerce Himself into doing these sorts of Domestic Chores on my schedule:

1. Needle-n-nag
2. Humor (comedian type, not “awww, you’re RIGHT, this IS soul-suckingly hard to deal with, awwwwww” humoring)
3. Cheerfully tell him never mind, I’ll do it m’self, ‘kay?

The first method has a really lousy success rate. Frankly, I think men as a general rule have developed a genetic resistance to it that kicks in the instant they are married. Thus pretty much all that ever happens when I try to use the jab-jab-poke-poke-how-about-now-how-about-now-how-about-now method of spousal encouragement is that he will quickly discover he has approximately 32,418 much more important things that absolutely, positively, no matter WHAT, need to be done first.

Like sharpening his screwdrivers. Or organizing his Netflix queue. Oiling the Shopsmith. You know, man-stuff no woman could ever understand. (Pfffffft, yeah-right. Who does he think he’s kidding?! Like the Supreme Goddess of Procrastination can’t recognize her own subtle ways at work…!)

The second one has a much better success rate but sometimes takes a while because it lacks any sense of urgency, since the addition of same tends to cause it to lose the humor part and degenerate into needle-n-nag. Plus he’s so damned funny right back at me that I’ll get distracted by the humor and forget that I’m trying to get him to DO something, crap, what WAS it…?

(Aside: this is a key benefit of marrying someone with a raging case of ADD. I may carry on three different conversations at the same time with you with alarming frequency – which is damned confusing I’ll grant you but at least you’re not actually inside my head, where there’s usually more like eight or ten or twelve simultaneous-but-completely-separate streams going – but I also completely forget what it was I was trying to make you do given any kind of distraction what-so-ever…so simply asking me if I’ve gotten any good blacksmithing recipes in Warcraft lately can buy you, like, three days of not being bugged about whatever-it-was. Score.)

But the third method (which we both know is merely a variant of the second one but with a dash of danger added to it for added spiciness), particularly when it comes to things like hanging curtain rods or pictures or anything ELSE which, done incorrectly, leads to crookedness, has a nearly 100% success rate for me.

It’s like the instant he realizes that I’m no really heading for the power drill (!!) and no really am going to slap those things up all half-arsed (!!!) and with very little regard for math and/or measurements (faints) (which, for the record, I totally will, because I always think that the ‘hold out my fist with my thumb sticking up and squint at it’ method of leveling is going to be close enough for gummint work), this dark vision yawns open before him of having to spend the next gah only knows how many years walking past something that is {shudder} crooked.

He’s the kind of guy who is physically incapable of leaving a crooked picture alone. He will adjust it. Also he will re-file all the cards at the stationary store if he finds them misfiled. I would mock him for this, but that would be like throwing rocks at a neighbor from the yard of my glass house.

Anyway, he had those rods hung in about half of nothing flat. And walked away smiling, because, crooked curtain rods, AVERTED.

And then I took a $3.98 package of plastic garden netting (what, you thought I’d bought actual curtains to hang there? Please, have you MET me?!), cut it to fit, and did you happen to notice the plants on the windowsill there? Or should I say living curtains, because…

Yes. I’m growing the curtains. AAAAAAH!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! I KNOW RIGHT?! I laughed so hard just thinking about doing this last month, and now I keep getting up so I can go look at it, even at this super-early stage, and then I just giggle and snicker like crazy.

These are moccasin rice beans. I bought a bag of them to eat at the Bean Festival last year, and having found that they were becoming really hard to find, decided to see if I could start growing my own. Which I could, and rather easily at that. Woo hoo.

From the test bunch I grew over the winter, I expect the vines to end up anywhere from three to five feet long by the end of their lifespan, with ridiculously large window coverings leaves on relatively thin, wiry vines. Within another week or so, they should start popping out small, pinkish-white blooms – the test batch actually started out rather modestly, then suddenly went nuts right after the first pods were swelling up.

I think that’s the part I’m looking forward to, and hoping works out again on this larger scale. If it works out the way I hope it will, it will be amazing…those lovely, lush leaves with the bright, shy little flowers and their subtle, almost-not-even-there scent…like growing my own little set of promises where I’m sure to see them, every single day.

Earth and Sun

This morning, Eldest informed me that it was Earth Day (no, really? because I’d only gotten five hundred emails from assorted companies saying, ‘EARTH DAY IS TUESDAY, SHOP EARLY AND OFTEN TO SAVE THE PLANET!’, so really, Earth Day arrived completely without warning this year) and asked if we, you know, did anything around the Den to, uh, save the Earth, or something like that?

It’s funny how much of ‘green’ stuff is…boring. Especially the stuff that has the best impact. Fluorescent bulbs? Replacing a pathetically inefficient heating/air conditioning unit with a best of breed new one? The new water heater? The front-load washer/dryer?

Yawn.

Reducing the amount of packaging we buy, reusing things, patching rather than replacing jeans, avid (rabid) recycling procedures, producing so little waste that we can use the smallest trash tote the city provides, using reusable containers in our packed lunches, all of that…big yawn.

Bake bread in a solar oven in the backyard, an act which saves all of thirty cents off the electric bill, using a $240 Sun Oven?

Coooooooooooooool.

OK, I admit that I, too, find the Sun Oven to be cooooooooool. It’s a fairly new toy and is fun to use. It sets up ridiculously easily, and gets not only hotter than your average homemade type – the hottest I ever got with one of my aluminum-foil-and-plywood endeavors was well under 200 degrees, while this particular model has shot right up to 350 degrees in twenty minutes – but stays there for as long as I can keep the sunlight focused on it. It has enough room on the cooking surface for two bread pans side-by-side, or a good-sized casserole dish. Yesterday, yes, I did indeed bake two loaves of bread in roughly an hour using nothing but the Power of the Sun.

Ooooooh, aaaaaaaaah.

There is no discernable difference between the loaves I baked in the Sun Oven and those I baked in the electric one. Their taste, appearance and texture are identical. The only real difference was in baking time – the electric oven takes about 40 minutes, the Sun Oven took a full hour.

Last week, it made a wonderful ‘crockpot style’ chicken stock (allowed to simmer for five hours) and a chicken and rice casserole – it would have taken about 40 minutes in the kitchen, it took an hour and a half outside.

Eldest took her backyard-baked bread to school in a reusable sandwich box, in her lead-free insulated lunch box.

It isn’t Grand or Glorious. It is, in fact, rather like tossing a grain of sand into the scales. There you go, my weighty contribution to Saving the World. That much less energy used for cooking, and in the coming dog days of summer, to removing the heat that energy generated inside the Den.

But it’s a start, anyway. Even small steps take us that much closer to where we want to go – far closer than we’d be if we just sat on our rumps thinking about doing something.

Someday, I hope people will look back on all these machinations and say, "How cute! But of course, that was before we had Eterna-Energy packs and Carbon-B-Gone..."

Dear Boca Java,

Now, you know how much I love you. You know that I am passionately fond of your Kenya Kruising, the Boca Sunrise and other rather long list of coffees I enjoy from you regularly; and that I also have a fond place for many of your flavored coffees, like Lee’s Caramel Kiss Island and Beachside Blog.

But really now, we need to have a little talk.

I can’t handle this.

You…you put maple syrup and smoky bacon…IN…my…coffee??

I’m fairly certain this is me, not you. After all, you’ve had the Hound Dog Heaven coffee, flavored with peanut butter and bananas, for as long as I’ve known you. Obviously, other people do not share my irrational phobias around what does and does not “belong” in coffee. My mind is obviously narrow. I have shallow horizons. I lack adventurous spirit.

But I just can’t, I mean c-a-n-’-t, deal with this concept.

It isn’t just the bacon and syrup thing. In some ways, as a person who may on occasion skip that most important meal of the day but NEVER her coffee, it makes perfect sense. All the flavors of a real breakfast, and when my mother asks what I had for breakfast I can mutter, “Coffee, syrup, bacon…” and she will assume that I actually sat down and ate something when in fact all I did was pound back a cup of coffee while standing at the sink yelling things like, “WILL you put on your shoes, DON’T hit your sister and what do you MEAN you were supposed to read 6,273 pages of War and Peace last night and write a fifteen page essay about it?!”

I worry about compatibility issues.

See, I put real maple syrup on my table at home, a flavor which I have been told by some heretics people who obviously lost their taste buds in a tragic McDonald’s Super Pancake Breakfast incident is an ‘acquired taste’. So I mean, what are you using? Are we talking real Vermont syrup flavoring, or that melted plastic with genuine artificial flavorings added most folks consider to be syrup? And what happens if the smoke flavor you’re using in your coffee clashes with the smoke flavor infused by our local meat market into our bacon? I’m pretty sure they use a proprietary blend there, so I worry, YES INDEED I DO WORRY, that if I were to make this coffee at breakfast time (and honestly, would I want it any other time?), I could have a situation where the coffee didn’t go well with my actual breakfast.

Imagine, coffee not going well with waffles and bacon. I’m pretty sure it could actually cause the Apocalypse to descend upon us. Which frightens and yet intrigues me.

Hmm.

Well, maybe I’ll just get a little Baby Boca sample bag of it…purely for the sake of research. But I hope you will forgive me if I draw odd circles on my floor and maybe light some candles or incense whatever it is you do to prevent $DEMON from stealing your soul under such circumstances.

OK. Glad we had this little chat. Looking forward to our next delivery, I remain your devoted fan (except not of the peanut butter and bananas coffee because that is wrong),

MotherChaos