Meanwhile, on Lifestyle of the Poor and Stupid…

Some time ago, Your Faithful Correspondent went to her local supermarket/pharmacy in search of nasal decongestant that would get the job done.

You know, the kind that (in California) you have to produce a driver’s license and fill out home address information and all kind of stuff so they can track exactly how many boxes of the stuff you’ve bought because <sarcasm> $DEITY knows this totally prevents people from cooking up batches of meth in their kitchens or the trunks of their cars or whatever-all else people do such things. </sarcasm>

Like this stuff.

NOW. When I got to the supermarket/pharmacy, they had changed their rules such that instead of going to the pharmacy to get these things, you took the card from the shelf to the front register, and then the cashier would go get the product for you from a locked cupboard located somewhere near Tibet or possibly Antarctica not so very close to her register.

This makes perfect sense. Because why have the pharmacy technicians in charge of such things? After all, it’s not like they would have any more insight into such things as what-all are the key differences between Brand A and Brand B, or what the box actually looks like, or whether or not it will take six months and several governmental-sized bribes to get a new shipment of the stuff in if what you’re looking for should happen to be out of stock.

And cashiers love to be sent scurrying all over the store trying to get these answers. Particularly if they have long lines of irate customers who are all dealing with the spring-time allergy + cold season. Because it’s so restful for them and all.

So when I got to the front of the line and presented my pull-card for the twenty count of Advil Congestion Relief + Meth Ingredients, the cashier rolled her eyes pointedly, muttered something that sounded vaguely like, “If I could have just five minutes in the ring with the yahoo who thought this was a good idea…!” and schlepped off to Burma in search of the holy grail.

Time passed.

And then she came back with the ten count and announced that there were no twenty count packages available.

Now. I wanted the twenty count for two reasons: One, hi, family of SIX, three adult-sized members suffering Severe Sniffles.

We will go through a box of ten, even at one-pill-per-dose, in nothing flat.

And two, the twenty-count was on sale.

So I asked if, seeing as how they were out of the size I needed and all, we could do That Thing that the pharmacy has done for me I dunno how many times in the past, and I could get two boxes of the ten-count for the sale-price of the twenty.

Which apparently hit her ears like this: “Prove that a countable set of parabolas α(y−β) 2 +γ=x , for α,β,γ∈R , doesn't cover the entire xy plane.”

FIRST, she went back to the Bermuda Triangle to make absolutely sure they did not have the twenty-count boxes. Since I was going to be difficult about it and all.

THEN, having ascertained that neither Jimmy Hoffa nor a twenty-count box were lurking in the bottom of the Dead Sea, she pulled on her parka, raised some huskies from puppies, hitched them to the sled she carved from hickory she cultivated herself from seeds, and sledded to the pharmacy over in the North Pole; there, she consulted Santa and eight of the twelve disciples so she could come back to tell me that sure, yes, of course they could.

THEN she switched to her mountaineering attire and scaled back up Everest to get me the second box of ten-count.

AND THEN…well, we had a problem. And it was called the register wouldn’t let her do it.

Which is not actually true, as was pointed out to her by three separate people – the problem wasn’t the register, it was the fact that she couldn’t scan the 10-count boxes and then attempt to override the price.

“Look, you hafta type in the number, from here,” the manager-on-duty told her brusquely upon being summoned for the second time over All This, jabbing a finger at the UPC numbers at the bottom of the pull-card for the twenty-count box.

“Prove that a countable set of parabolas…”

This went on for a ridiculous length of time. One of the pharmacy techs told me a few days later that his fingers were itching to just grab the boxes from her, take me over to the pharmacy register, and do it his damn self…but this is now Against Policy™, so all they can do is stand helplessly by while cashiers rummage through the non-prescription-but-controlled-sorta-at-least-in-California bucket looking for things they can’t find, and/or grabbing the wrong thing at least four times, etc.

After several attempts to scan and adjust the price, she eventually just shot me A Look sideways, scanned both boxes, did something random with the discount button, and in desperately matter-of-fact tones read off a total that was a tiny bit too much to be the twenty count sale price, but considerably less than the cost of two ten-count boxes.

I wrestled with myself for a moment about it, because, principle of the thing. But then I decided that on the whole, I really didn’t want to grow old and die standing there at the register arguing with her over about eighty cents worth of price difference.

Plus the people behind me were getting restless.

And I couldn’t blame them. I’ve been behind That Person too, you know, the one who wants to fight to the death over whether or not a $0.10 coupon which expired in 2006 is ‘still good’ or can be used on a product that isn’t the one specified (“but, it’s cereal! it totally should count!” “ma’am, this coupon expired in June 2009, and also is for Post cereals only. You’ve got our biggest bag of Captain McCheapy’s Sugar Coated Nuke’ems, which are not made by Post. Even if it wasn’t expired, you cannot use a manufacturer’s coupon from Post on a Captain McCheapy product.” “BUT. IT. IS. FOR. CEREAL. AND. THIS. IS. CEREAL!!!”)

So I shut up and paid the extra $0.80 and grumbled all the way home, threw them into the medicine cupboard, and called it a day. And forgot all about it pretty fast because that’s kind of how I tend to be; I’ll get irrationally pissed off about something really minor like this, but it blows over fast and by the next day I’m usually confused when you ask me if I’ve gotten over, you know, that thing I was ranting and raving about the day before. Huh? WHAT decongestant? I don’t remember being mad about decongestant, that sounds like a really stupid thing to get mad about…

But then today, I was digging around in there and noticed that, as is typical around here, both boxes had been opened and a few of the tablets used from both. Argh. And I decided that I’d go ahead and migrate all the tablets into just one box because it would be less clutter.

Which was when I noticed that the second box…was not like the first.

(For the record, I really can’t blame the cashier for this one…these boxes are absolutely identical in terms of size, shape, color, everything except that “10-v-20” on the box, WHICH is not as obvious when you’re looking at the two boxes in your hand as it is when someone has scanned them in and helpfully circled AND drawn a large red arrow on the box using their mad Microsoft Paint skilz.)

I honestly can’t decide whether I find this hysterically funny, or insanely irritating.

Because now, well…this kind of means that I got that ten-count box for only $0.80. Which is about five bucks less than it should have cost.

Damn, NOW I feel guilty…

BUT, I also know, I KNOW FOR A FACT!, that if I were to take these two boxes back to the supermarket/pharmacy, and march up to the Customer Service desk and say, “Hi, yeah, so! Funny story, {tells whole story, in three-part harmony and with several reprises of the chorus}, soooooo, I figure I must owe you about five bucks? Ish? But I don’t have the receipt anymore and can’t remember exactly what all the prices were, soooooooooooooo…yeah. There it is, then! Think we have some way to figure all this out?”…

…they might just call security on me, you know? And that’s a road I don’t want to go down again, believe you me.

So I guess I’ll just have to live with the guilt and stay away from any anime series with “bad people get their comeuppance” themes for a while.

Because otherwise, I might just have nightmares about that five bucks.

Randomly Thursday

I am so tired right now it defies description. SEE, for reasons too bizarre and random for me to really grasp, I got to enjoy one of my not-as-rare-as-I’d-like-them-to-be bouts of inability to sleep. I finally got into bed at about 1:30 in the morning. And then it took forever to actually get to sleep.

And then my alarm went off at 3:30. You know, like it always does on my in-the-office days.

I punched that snooze button like it had stiffed me with its bar bill the night before. Which was really unfair of me, seeing as how it was actually the buzzer that was offending me.

I fully intend to go to bed as shortly as possible.

And I probably won’t, for reasons that will make no sense whatsoever (cough-WARCRAFT-cough).

I think the thing that irritates me the most about these weird little attacks of inability-to-sleep is that they are not at all the same as “not being tired” or “not wanting to go to bed” or even “being so busy having fun that one simply can’t go to bed, wheeeee.”

It was more like, my eyelids are constantly sinking into a verrrrrrry prolonged BLINK and I’m so tired I think I’m gonna die BUT YET I’m also agitated and wired and also DAMMIT HOT FLASHES, NOT RIGHT NOW I HATE YOU I HATE YOU SO MUCH ARE MY EARS LITERALLY IN-FLAMES-ON-FIRE-RIGHT-NOW AND @^*&@ MY BACK HURTS AND ^@&^@*& MY HIP HURTS AND @*^&@*^&@ YOU, WRISTS, YOU’RE JUST BEING WHINY TO BE DOING SOMETHING AND WE BOTH KNOW IT!!!!!

Kids, take it from me: Being a “grownup” is not as cool as it looks on paper. Especially when you’re a female grownup of the ‘more than halfway through your 40s” group, because perimenopause becomes “perfectly normal” for you even though you totally do not feel (or act) “old enough” for it.

Also, my ears were burning all day long. JUST my ears. And sure enough, whenever I went into the bathroom, they were bright stinkin’ red, like I was terminally embarrassed or something. Screw you, hormones, you’re on your way OUT and GOOD RIDDANCE TO YOU.

So let’s just say I didn’t exactly have high expectations in re: productivity today.

But somehow, by the end of the day, I’d actually gotten quite a lot done. Figured out a couple issues that have been sitting “out there” forever. Put some finishing touches on one thing, roughed in the outline of the next piece of it. Smoothed a few ruffled feathers. Stuck my foot in my mouth only once, but was able to extract it without, you know, surgery.

Yessir. Somehow, I think I ended up being a Really Useful Engine today. Miracles: Believe in them!  

SPEAKING OF ROUGHING THINGS IN…you know how teenagers will go hiding in their room for hours on end and you kind of wonder what they’re up to in there? Like, are they secretly vampires, afraid of the deadly Day Star? Or perhaps they’re hibernating, like bears, and intend to only emerge when they’re safely past high school? (Would not blame them for that…) Or maybe they’re racking up several hundred terabytes worth of text messages? Or trying to figure out how to hack past the parental controls on the Internet?

Well. Here’s the kind of thing Eldest gets up to, pretty much whenever she’s not being forced to do something else.

I will never stop being amazed by things like this. Especially since personally, when it comes to drawing, I have all the artistic talent of a rock. Whereas Eldest will sit down at the kitchen table with a set of colored pencils and produce…

(She says she doesn’t like this one. It’s just not quite THERE somehow, you know, I mean, eh, she says. I think it’s awesome. The more I look at it, the more awesome it gets. Even if it is a riff on My Little Pony. Which is not really my thing. Whatever. I like it. The end.) (Really. The end. Because, Warcraft. My guild has gone without my presence for almost forty-eight hours now. Gah only knows what-all may have gone on while I wasn’t on to make wisecracks about It All and otherwise not actually HELP much…)

I daren’t close my eyes, for fear of little men…in control centers…with automated paging systems…

LET THE GLADSOME TIDINGS GO FORTH: Tonight is my last night being Primary On-Call Tech Group Person. As of tomorrow morning? I am off the hook.

For a while, anyway.

MAN. It has been…interesting. Mostly because it has been years and years and years since I last had to be the pager-toting “emergency responder,” you know?

My phone has been jingling and jangling since Friday night. Almost every single night, something has gone wrong enough to warrant me getting a page, followed rapid-fire by emails saying “WHAT’S THE STATUS?!” followed by pages and emails saying “PLS CALL 800-SPLAIN-SELF NOW.”

Or, more accurately, something-anything has gone wrong – and apparently, we have a bit of a hair-trigger about it.

Where “we” here means “the centralized control center people who have an automated system which generates problem tickets, pages and emails leading to calls wherein the actual humans in the control center can’t figure out why they paged and/or emailed you about it either.”

But the thing that is killing me on it is, I get started too danged early in the morning to be dealing with “issues” at 11:30 at night, you know? Like last night, when my phone was still doing the jitterbug at midnight, and I’d been up since 3:30 in the morning because it was a “commute in” day, and they paged me three times in rapid succession and I was all, “DUDE. IT’S A JOB THAT IS SET TO ‘DO NOT ALERT ON FAIL.’ I REALLY DON’T GIVE A FLYING @*^&@ ABOUT IT, AND NEITHER DOES ANYBODY ELSE. WHAT DO I NEED TO SAY TO YOU TO MAKE YOU STOP. PAGING. ME. ABOUT. IT?!”

Of course, that was only inside my head. With my voice, I was saying things like blah blah terminate and yadda yadda non-critical and no impact and other soothing-like things.

…all the while feeling my blood pressure rise as the insides of my eyelids scraped repeatedly on the sandpaper that my eyeballs had become at some point between the 2-1/2 hour commute back home and that last ‘PLS CALL NOW’ page…

And then I was just sitting there, mindlessly fishing in Warcraft while I kept half an eye on the stupid job to make sure it did either succeed or terminate within the specified timeframe, until 12:30.

But of course, even though it was a WFH day for me today, I was still awake at 5:30. Because:

1. The husband wants the alarm set for 5:30 even though he has absolutely no intention of actually getting UP until 6:30 at the earliest
2. I want to be working by 6:30
3. Well, ‘want’ is a relative term – more ‘I like to keep my working hours as close to steady as I can’
4. My back and hip were killing me. Because of course they were. Because they love to act out whenever it would be least convenient. It’s a THING with them.

And then I spent all day today wondering why I was so damned tired now with bonus crankiness! I don’t think I’ve had to work so hard to contain my considerable Powers of Sarcasm™ in a good long while.

I’m slightly afraid to go to bed right now. I desperately want to, mind you, because I’ve shot right past being ‘tired’ and am solidly in the ‘stupid tired’ range…but still…I’m slightly afraid to try for it.

Because you know what happens the minute I get to sleep, right?

OH yeah. {beep! beep! beep! beep!} (woot! woot! woot!)

“Status report, Number One!”

“Captain. It would appear that our ship is under attack by the Alien Snot Monkeys of Planet Zerboxinix.”

“Great Scott! That would be an awesome name for a band, Number One!”

“Yes, yes it would, Captain; unfortunately, they are not a band, they are data-eating creatures which thrive by devouring log files, and they are causing massive job failures throughout our systems. We estimate we will suffer total system collapse in approximately eight minutes, forty-three seconds.”

“Well, somebody had better page the on-call, then.”

“Very good, Captain.”

And then I will drag myself out of bed, log in, stare at it for a minute and say, “Um, guys…see that ‘0’ right there? Under ‘Alert On Fail’? That would mean no, do NOT alert on fail. WHY-FOR YOU CALLING ME WITH THE PAGING AND FREAKING OUT?!”

…sigh…

To sum up? I’m so glad my on-call rotation is (almost) over now.

Pass the mute button and the sleep-masks, it’s a party around HERE tomorrow night…!

The tyranny of the inbox

On Easter Sunday, while attempting the acrobatic feat that is draining potatoes so they could be mashed, I kicked my own foot.

I.

Kicked.

My.

Own.

Foot.

Now friends…this is the sort of feat I swear nobody else could pull off. I have no idea how I did it. I have no idea exactly what I did, even. But the net result is, my right foot kicked my left foot on the big toe, and tore that toenail halfway back and all the way across.

Yeah. It felt awesome. And now, it’s all hot and tender and a tiny bit swollen (great, just great…I’m grimly determined to believe that this is just ‘healing at work,’ but must admit I am keeping an anxious eye on it because staph infections, they love me)  (and that, America, is why there was a sudden run on Neosporin) – which is why I decided that instead of going to do something more constructive that involved standing, I would simply stay right here at my desk and do something computer-y.

I know! I said to myself, cheerfully. That email of mine is getting a bit out of hand, let’s deal with THAT…

And then, I opened my email client.

And then, I made this weird noise that sounded a bit like a parrot trying to swallow a box of rubberbands bigger than its whole body, because I have over 900 unread email messages sitting in my inbox right now. If I were to be precise (which would take up more time which would mean I didn’t have to face up to dealing with them just yet, so, do let’s), I have nine hundred and sixty-seven unread emails waiting breathlessly for me to acknowledge them.

I have no idea how many there all altogether, because I am far too chicken to actually look. The grim, bright-blue ‘967’ staring at me is quite enough, thank you, I don’t feel the need to explore how many additional items – from Gah Alone Knows how long ago – I actually did read (or at least glance at) (or accidentally open and immediately close), categorize as ‘something I should probably do something about, like, maybe respond to’ and leave there so I would do so and then, erm, well.

I…got distracted…?

Knowing as I do that 99% of these are junk mail and adverts, I also know that I should theoretically be able to rip through the whole inbox and pare it down to less than two dozen in less than half an hour.

You’d think anyway.

But first of all, sometimes, well, I’ll be ripping along deleting stuff and then I’ll suddenly go, “Wait, what? 3 herbs that will improve your ability to focus? You have my attention, Farmer’s Almanac…”

{…two hours of Internet surfing go by…}

And secondly, well, I’ll be honest: It’s not exactly high on on my List of Fun Stuff I’d Like To Do. I’d say it’s somewhere right above reorganizing the cable-barf in my desk drawer (which is also rather epic, and consists of charges for electronics we may or may not even have any more, earbuds with jacks that do not plug into any device that I know of, and the like), and below things like nailing down once and for all which of the too-many pens in my drawer still write, and throwing away, with BOLD and DECISIVE movements, the ones that do not write any longer.

I know. My goals are lofty. And also epic. Additionally, I would someday like to have all my socks matched up in pairs again. (It would likely be faster to simply start throwing away all the singles, but we all know how likely that is emotionally. Ya. Not gonna happen.) (Plus, you know the missing sock would immediately turn up…if I could just somehow manage to throw them away without actually throwing them away-away, I’d have so many pairs of socks that I’d need to buy a second house just to store them.)

PLUS, there is always the danger that I will become irrationally annoyed about something like the overuse of the word ‘hurry’ in these emails.

“HURRY! WE ABSOLUTELY MEAN IT, THIS IS THE BIGGEST SALE IN THE HISTORY OF SALES! HURRY! ENDING SOON! HURRY!!!!!”

And then I might do something silly like perform a search on my inbox to prove my point, so that I can put statistics around it and write some big long rambling blog post in which I put forth said statistics with something like, “Did you know that if I have 974 emails in my inbox, probably about 94 of them will contain the word ‘hurry’ in the subject?! And that’s almost 10%? Which pretty much proves that the people who write advertisement-emails have very limited vocabularies and probably all went to the same marketing school, where they were told to action learnings by using the go-words with verve or something equally nerve-jangling.”

(Aside: 974?! Really!?! Crap. They’re worse than rabbits!)

For a good long while, true story, I had a rule on my email client that automatically deleted any email with the word ‘hurry’ in the subject. Because it does rather irk me, you know? “Hurry! Our sale is far more important than whatever else you planned to do today, ONLY A FEW HOURS LEFT!!!!, so, put that coffee cup down right now and HURRY!!! BUY SOMETHING! HURRY! NOW! BUY SOMETHING!”

…alternatively, heck with you, imma-gonna DELETE your advertisement AUTOMATICALLY, so THERE…!

{sips coffee defiantly}

Buuuuuuuut, then a rather (cough-cough) high maintenance person in my little circle started sending me increasingly urgent emails about something (you see where this is going, right?); and the subject was something like “hurry up and answer dammit!”

Which later became “Re: hurry up and answer dammit” or “FW: hurry up and answer dammit” and all of which went straight to the trash folder because that was the rule.

Oops.

So, rules are not my friend.

Likewise, whenever I try to elevate my spam filter in a desperate attempt to prevent myself from being crushed beneath the crazy number of stores eagerly telling me that they have the perfect Christmas present for my tree-frog loving Schnauzer (wait, what?), well, it promptly starts screening out things like dinner invitations or birth announcements or things that say stuff like “I am taking your non-response to be agreement. See you on the fourteenth. p.s., you could also try checking your voicemail once in a damn while, honestly, what are you, nine?!”

But it still lets through all the “HURRY!” and “Adorable and very expensive dresses you’ll never in a million years actually wear because have they MET you?!” stuff.

All of which really leads me to this: Holy mackerel, this is SO. STUPID!

Push come to shove, I could probably right click on my inbox, select ‘delete all,’ click ‘yes,’ and you know what would happen out there in the Big Bad World?

Exactly. Nothing.

Because since 99% of them are junk, and the other 1% were sent to me by people who were probably muttering something like “I don’t even know why I bother, she’s never gonna {get / see / read / respond to} this…” but inexplicably love me anyway…well.

Really, I don’t know why I should even bother with it any further.

Which is why instead of dealing with the inbox, I’m going to head on into World of Warcraft now, see if I can get into raid finder and score me some good gear.

Or level one of my alts.

Or something, you know, meaningful.

Thanks for helping me work through the issue, gang.

For the Horde!!!!

The rant is ON

Today’s Adventures In Going Amongst The People brought a braying jackass well-intentioned woman basically opined that Captain Adventure was horribly afflicted with a terrible disease, and needed – needed – to be “cured.”

You know, so he could be a “normal” person. (<= hint: this sentence contains a keyword which comes with a money-back guarantee to set me off in a big way) (additional hint: it has quotes around it)

And she was ob-frickin-noxious about it. Reared up on her hind legs hee-hawing all sorts of nonsense to a train full of captives…one of those types who read two articles on some website and is now a self-proclaimed Subject Matter Expert™, who knows eeeeeeeeverything about how {evil MegaCorp.com} is {evil conspiracy plot} aided of course by {obligatory governmental connection} to {evil act}.

I’m afraid I was so pissed off by the time she wound down her little speech on the train that I just about lost all powers of speech, and thus could only mutter something indistinct that probably sounded like “…grrraumph hem-haw fizzle vetch…” at her as she was practically trying to ram her stupid pamphlet down the front of my shirt.

I really didn’t want to “discuss” it right then. Mostly because “discuss” would have undoubtedly ended up being “screaming about” – and there likely would have been vulgarities uttered.

But in some ways, I find myself sorry I didn’t haul off and hit her upside the head with a few choice adverbs. It’s been itching and itching, ever since.

MIND YOU, I’m not about to burst into some musical number about how perfectly awesome it is to have an autistic kid. It’s not perfectly awesome. There are things about it that straight-up suck. There are times when I look at him as he’s stomping around being autistic and think, …dude, I’m just…kind of TIRED of this right now…it’s also loaded with uncertainty, fear, doubts, inconvenience, embarrassment and other negative sorts of things.

But at the same time, I really don’t think he needs to be “fixed.” He’s not broken. Plus, autism is deep in his wiring, so to speak; the way he views the world, the way he thinks, the way he translates various sensory inputs, is just different from most people.

To “cure” him would be to…change him.

To make him not my Captain anymore.

My mind rejects that concept rather violently. The idea of taking away something that is so central to who he is appalls me. It feels a lot like she was walking up and saying, “Oh, wow, you got one of those models? They’re defective, ya know? You should throw that one away and get one of the newer ones.”

ABOUT MY CHILD.

{…HACKLES…ACTIVATED…!!!!!}

And much as I know that’s not what she meant (exactly) and that I’m probably being overly sensitive about the whole thing and should just let it go already…well.

You know what? I don’t want to “make him normal.” I just want to figure out how I can help him figure out how to get the things he will want to have, or do, or be. Because you know what? He has special challenges, sure, but he also has special strengths.

Those too are part of this thing she calls a “horrible disease.” They’re part of what she wants to “cure” in the name of making him “normal.”

Shall we throw those away, just because they’re stronger than “normal” child strengths? Or consider that collateral damage acceptable because it would be more convenient, or less embarrassing, to me not to have to put my hands over his when the flapping is getting out of hand in public? 

…sigh…

It’s “Autism Awareness Month,” of course. There are people doing really good work under the same banner; but inevitably, you’re going to get the people who just…don’t necessarily think these things all the way through, who are innocently trying to “help” when they say “Oh, you should murder that child, then resurrect him as a different, more desirable one!” (Oops. Apparently, I have still not quite gotten the ire out of my system…)

And I have to acknowledge that it is entirely possible that I’m the weird one for feeling that way. I have to admit, there’s a certain likelihood that a “normal” mother would want to change her “Not-Normal” child.

“Normal” is, after all…safest. A “normal” child has a higher probability of having a “good” life, a steady, improving-on-what-my-parents-had sort of one-foot-before-the-other life.

A “normal” child won’t be labeled, won’t have to explain themselves, won’t have to carry notes from their doctors or wear wristbands or any of that.

So, maybe I’m the one who needs to reexamine their reality a bit.

But still.

I wouldn’t change a hair on his head. Or a thought inside it.

He doesn’t need to be cured of being himself. No. There is nothing, nothing wrong with who he is.

He only needs to be helped, so that he, not his autism, can decide what his life will be like.

That’s how I see it, anyway.

And how I always will see it.

Weirdness: It’s what’s for dinner

Lately, I haven’t had a lot of energy in the evenings for making anything particularly interesting for dinner.

Actually, I think that sentence should probably be a lot shorter. it should probably read, “Lately, I haven’t had a lot of the energy in the evenings for making to make anything particularly interesting for dinner.”

Tonight, though, I had just enough left over to indulge a case of The Sillies that hit me and throw together something to keep the Denizens guessing a bit. Which is pretty much my primary goal in life, second only to giving them plenty of things to tell their therapist about in years to come.

I take these sorts of duties very seriously, so! Step One: “Sushi” rice

Now, I’m not an expert and I probably do it all wrong, but, this is how I make rice I intend to use in rice balls or rolled-up-sushi-like-things. Inside this bowl is three cups of CalRose rice (family of six, remember, plus inevitable neighbor-kids whose parents never, ever, feed them, no really, like, NEVER) (unless I’m making something gross for dinner, like palak paneer [spinach with “weird” homemade cheese that is, $DEITY my witness, made only of milk + lemon juice] or curry lentils, in which case their mom is Julia Childs and they just remembered she’s making a twelve-course pizza extravaganza or something like that) (but I digress). This is a readily-available white rice, medium-grain, that cooks up plump and sticky – perfect for molding into things like rice balls, sushi or just flat-out molding because it’s fun in a lunchbox. Why the heck not? I do not see any laws on the books that says lunch has to be ‘serious’ just because you’re an adult. And molding little devils complete with black pepper dyed horns and red pepper flakes for eyes, and possibly a screaming jalapeno-round for a mouth, to go with your 5-Alarm Texas Chili bento seems only natural to me.

But I digress. Again.

This rice needs to be rinsed a few times in cold water before you cook it. I rub it gently between my hands each time under water; the first rinse is usually like real whole milk, the second rinse is like non-fat milk, and the third, while still a bit cloudy, is usually clear enough that you can see the rice in the water.

After rinsing, I just cook it per package instructions. Which in my case consists of “add 1-1/2 cups water for every cup of rice, drop all into rice cooker, and hit ‘white rice’ button.”

Next, I grabbed some hot dogs and some spaghetti and oh yes, I did.

 

I saw this on the internet somewhere and went, “SQUEEEEE!! I have got to try that!!” I will grant you that it is a bit on the ‘fiddly’ side, but it’s not a bit hard and the look on the Denizen faces was totally worth it.

Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. So. One pot of boiling water with several drops of green food dye in it…

…plus a generous handful of angel hair pasta equals…

IT’S SEAWEED, GET IT?! Because of the not-sushi roll thing?

Shredded carrots (which were still in the ground a few hours ago, which makes me feel all cool and self-sufficient and some junk until I remember that these particular carrots are only still there because I sort of forgot about them and then when I was weeding I was all, ohmygosh, hello there, I forgot about you! and they were looking at me like, …geesh…! and so I made a mental note that they were a) there and b) ready to pull and then when I needed carrots I was all, OH YEAH, I TOTALLY HAVE A BUNCH READY RIGHT NOW, DON’T I! which I rather suspect downgrades my coolness-factor a bit but at this point I’ll take whatever I can get and also rambling run-on sentence crown of supremeness: STILL mine, HA!)  and thin-sliced ham.

Totally authentic “sushi” fillings.

As long as you have “sushi” in “quotes.” (<= loophole!!)

The blue thing there is a silicon baking mat, which I find does a great job rolling rice into those long logs for slicing. I used a knife this time because I couldn’t find my preferred tool for things like this (and also cinnamon rolls, this works a treat for cutting up cinnamon roll dough), which would be unflavored, plain, no-wax dental floss (trust me on this, do not get, like, ‘mint’ flavored floss). Position the floss under what you want to slice, cross it over itself on the top and zzzzzzzzzzzip!! Makes lovely, not-squashed-oval little rounds.

But, couldn’t find it. So I used a knife. So the “sushi” wasn’t really round, it was oval. Which made me think of eyes. Which is why I changed the plating at the last second from being ‘double-jointed squids in seaweed fronds gazing soulfully at the two moons of whatever that world the Wolfriders are from’ to ‘You MUST pay the rent!!’ (Bonus geek points for getting that reference.)

Things to tell their therapist about in years to come: Check. I am the frickin’ MOTHER OF THE YEAR, Y’ALL.

Eldest walked in, snickered, snagged a couple slices of rice-roll, and went back to drawing manga. Danger Mouse made herself a bento to take to school tomorrow to show off. Boo Bug rolled her eyes, grinned, told me it was awesome, and ate every bite.

Then Captain Adventure came in, looked at his plate for a moment, then looked at me sidelong with a crooked smile and asked, “Is it a-posed to be an eye-face wif da mooose-tash?”

And then I died from the excessive cuteness of him, the end.

Ah, the little reminders life gives us

My eyes are killing me right now. I’ve got the font set to about a 400-point size and I’m still having trouble seeing it. (It would likely help if I weren’t doing a reverse-blinking thing where I open them ever so briefly, take a quick glance to make sure I haven’t gotten my fingers in the wrong place and started typing ‘yi[[omh’ and like that, then close them again for a while.) (But then they sting. And ache. And feel like I have rocks in them. Argh!)

I have no idea what’s up with this lately. It started last week, this end-of-day eyeball-aching thing. Feels a bit like I’ve been putting drops of acid into them and then having a game of Don’t Blink with the sun or something.

I can’t decide whether I think I’m just that much more tired than usual, or if I’m not taking care of them throughout the day the way I think I am, or maybe I’m allergic to some perfume or other at the office, or…what.

But that’s not the biggest problem. No. The worst thing of all is that…I have no idea what to do with myself, really.

I can’t knit.

I can’t play a video game.

I can’t watch TV.

Let alone read.

And I don’t really like audio books, either. They tend to give me a headache. Plus I get irritated because I don’t like the way the reader does things. That’s not how I would have imagined she would have said that, I will fume.

And I know I will be even more critical right now, because it’s making me just generally pissy, this whole eyeball-aching thing.

So, well, about all I can do is sit here, with my eyes mostly closed, and listen to the sound of my boredom as it claws at the inside of my head until bedtime.

So many things in life that I never really think about much. Every so often some tragic story will come up where somebody lost their sight or hearing or sense of smell or what-have-you, and for a brief moment I shudder and think, Wow, that would really suck…and maybe I say a few words into the Great Stillness about blessings and strength and other stuff you say when there’s really nothing you CAN say, but you feel you must say SOMETHING.

And then I go back to whatever I was doing. Queasiness over, and another potential realization of just how fragile the life to which I’ve grown accustomed really is, averted.

Being forced to actually not do stuff for an appreciable amount of time because of something – being unable to keep my eyes open, not being able to get up my own stairs when my back is really having An Episode, those times when I’ve popped a tendon in my elbow or wrist and had to take a week or so completely off all knitting needles, keyboards, stirring-of-pots or pulling-of-weeds – well, it’s quite an eye-opener.

Oooo. Ouch. OK, that was a rather unfortunate word-choice, right there. {wince} I think maybe I’ll give this up for now, and resume whining at Eldest about how annoying it is and asking her what time it is now seeing as how the clock is just a big old blur to me right now…

(It’s probably just allergies. I have some suspicions around some rather pervasive scents at the office right now. In related news, I suppose writing my Congressman about drafting up a law banning all perfumes in public places is probably a touch much? Yeah, I…kinda figured…)

Perhaps we should ALL just go with “Smith”

Earlier this week, we had An Incident™ at the high school which necessitated me dropping everything and rushing over there so I could stand around for – I swear I am not making this up – going on four hours waiting to hand over my id, spell my darling child’s name, and wait for her to be summoned forth from the stadium unto my loving arms.

Yeah. It was a thousand kinds of awesome. But what made things truly awful wasn’t so much the process itself, but rather my fellow parents.

YA KNOW…one the one hand, I understand. It was hot and cold by turns out there. The process was painfully slow. And seemed like it was being done in a crazily upside-down manner. And for those who weren’t completely sure that the whole thing was a big old Nothing courtesy of teenagers being stupid, it might even have been a little frightening. (For the record, this was not me. I was so damned certain that it was just a group of teenagers being stupid that if it hadn’t been a) early in the morning, thus Eldest would have been stuck outside in the elements all frickin’ day and b) her birthday, thank you very much, I wouldn’t have come down to get her in the first place. But I digress.)

STILL. Parents. Look at my eyes, and answer me this: What the @^*&@ is wrong with you people?!

LET’S REVIEW SOME OF THE TALKING POINTS I TOOK AWAY FROM ALL THIS, SHALL WE? 

• We get that you are not happy to be dragged away from whatever you were doing to stand in lines.
• Everybody feels that way.
• So, shut up already.
• Cutting the line is way not cool
• Trying to do it repeatedly becomes exponentially uncool
• WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO PULL, JACKASS.
• SERIOUSLY, STOP IT.
• Dude. While I understand your feelings (and even privately agree with them), saying, “I tell you what, @^*&@, you try that again and I-a-gonna bust you UP” to the woman as she is being escorted to the back of the line after trying a THIRD time to cut the line…is a little much.
• Mom, please tell me you did not just call your kid on his cell phone and ask him to attempt a breakout, and then argue with him when he said it was a way bad idea, and point out that there was a hole in the fence right next to you.
• I mean, you realize that’s an automatic three day suspension, right?
• PLUS, you understand that when they go over the list and realize that he a) was here BEFORE the incident and b) WAS checked into the stadium but c) was never check OUT of it…he’s automatically a Person of Interest to the cops, right?
• You think this is inconvenient? Try explaining why your kid pulled that particular stunt, in the middle of All This.
• But please let me know before you do. I wanna sell tickets.
• When a school is in lockdown, things like pesky rules are not going to be ‘bent,’ let alone ‘broken’
• This means trying to pick up your neighbor/friend/cousin’s kid when you are not officially authorized to do so? Is not happening.
• Yes, even if you can prove you live ‘right next door’
• Yes, even if the kid “totally knows who you are”
• Yes, even if you have some female voice on the phone saying “I am his mother, and I approve this pickup.”
• Yes, even if you can produce ID with the same last name on it.
• I know there aren’t very many people named “Rodriguez” in California {pause to roll eyes}, but this still doesn’t authorize you to take a child off a school campus in the middle of a lockdown
• Or any other time, for that matter
• Also, quit arguing about whether or not you “have to” produce identification before picking up your child.
• This is nothing new or special
• You have to produce this any time you pick up your child during school hours.
• Dentist appointment? Please show me your driver’s license.
• Funeral? Driver’s license, please.
• Note: the “please” is optional
• Why on earth you think the school being lockdown means rules should be looser than otherwise is beyond me.
• Also, you’re holding up the line
• And I’m-a-gonna bust you UP for it in about two seconds
• ‘Cause my feet hurt. Really badly.
• And we won’t even get started on the back-cramps.

BUT MY PERSONAL FAVORITE OF ALL THE ATROCITIES I WITNESSES DURING MY THREE-SOME-HOURS OF LOITERING AROUND THERE, the one that had me struggling sooooooo hard not to bust out laughing right there in front of God and Everybody (which likely would have gotten me punched in the face by numerous people who saw no humor in anything by this point), was this little farce-in-three-movements.

Tired Teacher (TT): Okay, so, what is the child’s name?

Idiot Mother (IM): Sam Cardoza. (<= totally not his real name)

{TT beings flipping through New York City Phonebook Sized book of forms and such}

TT: Um…what’s the last name again?

IM: Cardoza.

TT: Erm…how do you spell that?

IM: {shouting to make it clear she thinks TT is a moron for having to ask} SEA-AY-DEE-OH-ZEE-AY.

TT: …and, he is in the tenth grade, correct? (<= also not his actual grade level)

IM: YesssssssssSSSSSSSS!!!! {tone says, “You are a moron, of course he’s in the tenth grade, what other grade would he be in?”}

Me: {thinks: aaaaaaaand, are you QUITE sure he goes to THIS school…?} snicker!

{They both shoot me a dirty look. I try to appear that I’m sneezing. I fail. I don’t really care, but I attempt to appear as though I do and return my attention to my knitting.} {well, duh, I had my knitting with me. it is the only reason the false alarm didn’t turn into a national news story about the insane woman who went all bat-poop crazy while standing in an interminable line to pick up her kid during a lockdown at a high school. Film at eleven.}

TT: So, he’s not in my book…um…lemme just…

{pow-wow ensues amongst all the desks, effectively bringing all pickup to a screeching halt as all books are being checked for one Cardoza, Sam (or Samuel, or Sammy, or Starts-With-S) }

TT: Can you write the name down for me? (Clearly, she is hoping she’s still got the wrong spelling or something)

IM: {sighs from somewhere about three feet under her toes, glares at TT, glares around at everybody else for good measure, scrawls something completely illegible on a scrap of paper and flings it at TT}

{TT’s face assumes a look of absolute despair. Nobody could possibly read this. Even a pharmacist would be all like, “Dude. Can you do that in Latin or Greek or English, instead of, what are these, hieroglyphics?” MEANWHILE, somebody with that “I Am In Charge Around Here, $DEITY Help Me” look approaches. Let’s call her IC for short}

IC: {brightly!} {ooooh, you’re good, IC, very, very good…} What seems to be the problem here? 

{explanation of the non-existent Sam Cardoza ensues. IC looks pained. She prides herself on knowing all the kids in the school, this kid is not ringing a bell. She has failed in her personal mission.}

IC: Ah, so, are you sure he’s in the tenth grade?

IM: {EXPLOSION!! already told her and KABOOM! and furthermore and KAH-POW!! and another thing WHAM-BAM-SMACK!}…and I will call his father and…his father’s name is Singh-like-the-big-shot-guy-Singh just you wait…!

{there is a silence you could cut with a knife at this point…a long, desperate silence while TT is undoubtedly controlling her urge to leap up from the table and strangle the life out of this crazy person, broken only by choking sounds coming from Yours Truly because I am about to die laughing…}

TT: {quietly, and with truly admirable professionalism} Ah, here he is…under SINGH…!!!!!!

{signing out happens while I marvel at her ability to leave it at that…I might have been shouting, “OH, SO ACTUALLY, ‘CARDOZA’ IS SPELLED ESS-AYE-ENN…?!”}

{Sassparilla Singh, a.k.a. Sam Cardoza, is summoned from the stadium, received by his now-flustered mother, rolls his eyes in classic teenager-boy fashion at her hopelessness, mutters something about ‘gawd, mom!!’ and slouches off in her irate wake}

And, as I stepped up to product my ID so I could finally rescue Eldest from the elements…I happened to glance over and catch TT’s eye.

“Fun day at work, huh?” I asked her, practically gnawing my lip off trying not to laugh.

We looked at each other for a moment, appraisingly…and then we started laughing so hard we could hardly stand.

The Denizens think I’m crazy, and disorganized, and otherwise hopeless.

Ha. At least I know that their last name is Grasselfofferphlepinocks, and that Eldest usually goes by Serdingawinginer.

(Which is, sadly, not that far off what was actually called into the stadium. They mangled it so badly that I whipped out my phone to text, ‘Um, ya, that…is supposed to be YOU, babe’ because I couldn’t imagine she would realize it otherwise.)

I blame MacGyver

YA KNOW…there are things I do that, in retrospect, I look at and just kind of…shake my head, tiredly, and shrug, and wonder aloud what I’m going to do with myself because, really now…why?

SUCH AS finding myself with a bunch of terracotta pots I’d like to use to start some broccoli, and I have nowhere inside to do this, but we’re still in the time of year where we ‘boomerang’ a lot, temperature-wise.

It was 43 degrees when I left the house this morning. It was 74 when I got home half an hour ago, 69 now, and on its way to  a guesstimated low of 44 tonight. California: We ARE a desert state.

It isn’t actually the 40-somethings that worry me – it’s the occasional, usually abrupt, dips further down that tend to kill off things I try to start outside this time of year.

Which is why I found myself wishing I had some kind of greenhouse-ish thing I could use, YOU know, something with a cover (and not weed cover because that, I’ve got), and then I could use the old ‘milk jugs full of water’ trick to bump up the temperature just a bit if I needed to and waitaminute, gimmie that busted-up old white plastic patio table, and also one of the sprinkler-type end-of-line deals…oh, and the clippers, AND the clicker (which is what we say when we mean ‘a fire starter with a trigger’)…

…aaaaaaand, uh, that plastic thing that came off that broken thing, YA, PERFECT! {RUSTLE-RUSTLE-RUSTLE-clip-ffffffffst-shove-hold-two-three-four-five-six-SET!-tug-tug-TIE-TIE}…

…HEY LOOK, IT’S A GREENHOUSE! SORTA!!”

(What you can’t see here is, I insulated the underside of the table with a combination of newspaper, really old felt, some filthy wool batting I found lying around, aaaaand I’m not actually sure what-all else because I was just sort of grabbing random stuff at that point to make it thicker.) (It is a sickness, people, a SICKNESS…) (Oh, and, I use the clicker to gently warm up the cut end of the drip hose; it’s slightly tricky the first couple times, but once you get the hang of it [pronounced: quit MELTING the hose] it’s a really fast and easy thing to do, and it makes it a lot easier to get the drip dealies into the line [particularly for those of us with achy hands that like to go all weak at the worst possible moments], and then if you put a little pressure on the softened hose as it cools back down, it makes an excellent seal that is less likely to be dripping water where you don’t want it to go.)

I totally blame MacGyver for this kind of thing. Even though to be honest, I almost never actually watched the show back in the day, it just sort of imbued the American psyche or something. And now I do things like amuse myself in waiting rooms by thinking of fifteen ways I could use objects in the room to simultaneously ward off a terrorist attack, inform the President of the plot, survive the Zombpocalypse, repair a broken pair of sandals and put together a three course meal for six people.

Or put together extremely odd looking contraptions out of things that arguably should have gone to the city dump months or even years ago, but which we kept either ‘in case’ or due to sheer inertia until I suddenly decided I had a use for them again.

It is how we roll.

Anyway! In other news, I am about as sore as I have ever been in my whole, pathetic life right now! Because in other other news, I finally wandered out into the yard to see what the lay of the land was.

And mostly, it lay like this.

…sigh…

Every year, I go through this.

EVERY. YEAR.

And every year, I say to myself, firmly, “NEXT YEAR, I SHALL NOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN!!” And I make all sorts of plans whereby, in no more than a few minutes a week!, I shall maintain order throughout the winter yea verily right through the coldest, most-frozen months!, I will stay on top of this and there shall not be the annual weeping and gnashing of teeth over the waist-high weeds, leftover dead-things I never cleaned up after the first “surprise” frost, etc. etc. etc.

And I fully believe that I will, too.

But then winter happens. And I go out one or two times in defiance of the cold, and my hands and/or hips and/or knees go into Super Tilt mode and then I say welllllll, OK, it’s a LITTLE too cold for this today, I’ll just table it for now and pick it up next weekend when it’s sunnier…at which point I have not merely taken a step onto that slippery slope, but flung my cardboard down on it and done a running-start belly-flop onto it while screaming “COWABUNGA!!!!!!” at the top of my lungs.

Possibly while wearing cut offs and a tank top.

Which are the absolute best attire for cardboard sledding down a slippery hill. Because you get the coolest, most long-lasting scars that way, which makes the storytelling later totally awesome.

But I digress.

Mind you, it wouldn’t really matter all that much if I did get out there every weekend all winter; the weeds don’t start coming up until right around the first of March, and then they don’t come up slowly but rather in a way that defies all logic.

One minute, there’s just enough to make you go, “Huh. I’m going to have to get out there and deal with that soon…”, and the next weekend bam! You’re at tigers-could-be-living-in-it-for-all-we-know levels of weed encroachment.

Fortunately, I had a couple volunteers for the first bit.

(The shorter one was in it because he realized that since his turn on the computer was to start ‘after I’ve finished weeding out here,’ it was in his best interest to hurry things along. Well played, sir.)

As we cleared weeds, we found that some of the seeds from the last planting had over-wintered, sharpened their elbows and gotten into the game.

After we’d cleared that bed, my forces withdrew to amuse themselves with things like games and homework (the tall one has a ludicrous amount of that), and I continued on to this.

NOW, as I started diligently working my way down this fence, I looked at the delicate fronds you can see in the bottom left foreground there and thought to myself, wow…I wonder what THOSE are, they look EXACTLY like carrots!

And that was because…

…oh…

CHECK THIS OUT. This is after I’d removed all the weeds.

I have no idea how they got there. None. I suspect that what we’re seeing here is the result of a packet of seeds getting blown off the patio table, and then scattered down the fence line; I know I didn’t plant them there, because most of them are waaaaaaay too close to the cement (and therefore pretty far from the drip line), and are incredibly random in placement; there are also just a few spread out into this little bed, and even a couple right up against the fence.

Really feels like a wind-sow to me. Particularly given this.

Uh-huh. On the left side, too. Got to have been some Seeds Gone Wild action. {Insert ‘sowing wild $plant’ joke of choice here.}

And I’ll take it, because this time of year, I’ll take anything I can get, really; we’ve got a few carrots I “stored” in the ground over the winter, and some onions that could be pulled early and used in a pinch, but overall…this is the hardest time of year in terms of gratification.

A lot of this.

Not so much of this.

(This was a few weeks ago. The lemon tree was feeling enthusiastic again this year. I swear, if I show that tree any kindness, give it even half the recommended fertilizer and a passing nod in the general direction of correct pruning care, it goes nuts like this.)

Last year really wasn’t a particularly good one for the garden. We had some ugly pest invasions, a lot of water issues (broken valves, leaking pipes, drips-that-don’t-drip, etc.), me working too many hours (and then being so damned tired that suggestions about the garden needing to be looked to resulted in snarling and/or snapping and/or heavy sighing and vague grumbling but no action taken) and so forth and so on.

I have high hopes for this year, as long as my body can keep up with the demands being put on it; it’s really protesting this weekend’s endeavors, and pitching quite a childish fit about it to boot. It’s actually pretty funny to watch me trying to do things like, say, get out of bed in the morning, or get out of a chair after I’ve been sitting for a while.

Which reminds me. I’ll bet I could totally engineer myself a set of handrails for our bathroom out of PVC left over from the last ‘reroute all the sprinklers’ adventure…

Reality may not be my strong suit

This week is turning out to be one of the sort where I feel as though time is holding its breath; like it is watching a particularly delicate maneuver being performed and doesn't want to risk disturbing the players involved.

Which is a poetic way of saying, "is it over yet?!" (How about now? Now? What do you mean, 'it's only Wednesday,' it has GOT to be at LEAST friday by now...)

When I'm not being irritated by it, these sorts of weeks fascinate me by driving home how very odd a species we are.

Night / not-night wasn't good enough for US, oh no! We had to put rules on time, break it up into standardized blocks so we could utterly disregard what sun, moon, stars, weather or our own bodies told us and be able to say we should be here or there, doing this or that, because! 9:00, dude!

I love us so much for that kind of thing, you know? Our breathtaking arrogance charms me, little insignificant specks of carbon saying, "Now see here, Natural Order, we have decided this thing you do with the days-get-shorter-then-longer doesn't work for us, so, here's how it's gonna be..."

We are magnificent in our flippancy, are we not?

None of which changes the fact that, on this Thursday, I feel as though it should be Saturday at least. The restless nature of Spring is seeping into me, pricking my mind with the notion that I have so very much more to do today, while my body insists that the day has already dragged on far longer than it should have already and that the last thing needed would be anything else.

Which I suppose is just another variation of the human tendency to reject Nature's reality to substitute our own; I'm not quite ready to accept that the relatively (physically) lazy days of winter are nearly over, and soon my 'free' time will begin disappearing into endless weeding and mulching and planting and harvesting and processing and otherwise not having much free time at all.

I know I will enjoy it once it's underway...but for now, when I'm still enjoying being "forced" to stay indoors by wind or rain or cold, I must admit that every time I look outside and think I really should think about fixing the beds or checking the drip lines...I find myself feeling strangely more tired than I was when the thought first occurred to me...

Down and dirty

I planted strawberries this weekend. And also some broccoli. It was the first planting for the new year, which means it was damned hard work.

I am sore in muscles I hadn’t heard from since…well, about this same time last year. I was moving slowly and without a lot of enthusiasm today, I can tell you; but it’s a start, and it will get better.

I have to believe that, or all is lost.

The bed where the strawberries went was a mess; that whole side area was, as always at the beginning of the season, covered in weeds that somehow manage to spring up to waist-high in what seems like a matter of hours. Plus there was all kinds of wind-blown debris, plastic bags to leaves and everything between. Toppled over wood. Cardboard boxes from some point when the husband was moving things around in the shed, and skipped the step where he put the boxes back into it.

So they sat out there, in the wind and rain and sun, becoming a nest for earwigs and spiders. Lovely.

A few weeks ago, I hastily turned some almost-finished compost into that bed; yesterday, I finished actually working it in, and topped it off with some of the precious “finished” stuff.

It never ceases to amaze me, compost. I suppose someday it’ll be old hat enough to raise no particular emotion from me, but at present…every time I work with it, I find myself amazed by the small miracle it represents.

It’s not generally very pretty when it starts out. Crushed up eggshells, and onion skins. Grass clippings. Tea bags. Shredded junk mail. Fireplace ash. Apple peels. Bits of pie crust. The bones from a beef roast, burned in the fireplace along with some of the wood from the trees we took out a couple years ago, and pulverized with a mallet. Vines. Weeds. All kinds of crap.

Waste, come right down to it; things that ordinarily would have been tossed into the tote to be put out on the curb on a Tuesday night, to be hauled off to the dump.

Instead, it’s probably gone into the tumbler for two weeks of intense burn-down.

(This gets really hot, comparatively-speaking – breaks tough things down super-fast, so fast that it will go from “almost too full to get the lid on it” to “I thought you said this was full, but it isn’t even a quarter full!” in about a week.)

And then it starts the ride down the bins, from right to left…about a month in each…

(Moving day! Bin two to bin three, please…)

…until it comes out like this.

And that is not only loaded with nutrients, but is of a nearly-perfect texture – it is light, and loamy, exactly the sort of environment that invites roots to stretch out and get cozy. It breaks up the clay that persists in surfacing throughout the yard, prevents it from turning back into the near-concrete it would like to be, locking its precious minerals away from the growing plants.

It’s just dirt. But it’s our dirt, in ways that go beyond deeds and titles.

Now. If I could just figure out how to plant an ibuprofen tree for the backache that comes with all this poetic dirt-making…

Watching the space

Several months ago, a tired, run-down and empty building put brown paper over all the windows, hiding its plans from the outside world. A sign went up that said, simply, Watch This Space.

Almost every day since then, I’ve stopped at some point during my daily grind to stare at it. Sometimes there were rustlings behind the paper. I’ve never seen a person come or go, but sometimes I hear them moving around in there, scraping sounds that could be furniture…or somebody applying drywall…or…something…

Sometimes, the door is cracked open and I can peek inside and see…well, not much, really. Paint brushes on top of closed cans; a floor covered with neatly taped newspaper; ladders leaning against walls and looking oddly abandoned; that kind of thing.

Watch This Space, the sign confidently says.

So I watch. I watch, and wait, and wonder what it will be. When it will be.

Some days, I’m sure it will soon be something amazing; I think of the miracles fresh paint and carpet can bring about, how the application of human ingenuity and affection can breathe such life into mere things, and I look at the brown paper and the Watch This Space sign and envision Boutique d’Awesome, which will have more amazing, almost magical things than can I can imagine.

Other days, I find my attitude to be a bit less sunny. I stare at the motionless place, the hasn’t-actually-changed-in-all-this-time building on the run-down street in this economically depressed town and find myself certain that whatever it was going to be, whatever it thought it was going to become…it hasn’t got a prayer. It’s going to just stay nothing, forever.

 It’s just going to stay like this, promising…well, promising nothing.

 An instruction to “watch this space” doesn’t actually promise a damn thing, come right down to it. Shoot, could just be a big old joke, you know? Let’s pretend we’re going to come up with something GRAND, and see how long we can keep people stopping to see if it’s there yet, hahahaha!

And then I’m rather annoyed, because I feel like I’ve been played.

Except that the next day, or the day after that…well…I’d swear I heard something that might have been somebody installing…ovens? Or moving a piano? An Irish accent, or the chime of crystal.

Definitely there’s…something…coming soon…probably…maybe…

So I keep watching the space. Maybe today. Or tomorrow. Or next month. Almost certainly by second quarter this year, don’t you think?

Sure.

It’s probably pretty close to ready. Almost has to be.

I just need to…be patient. Give it the time it clearly needs. Have a little faith.

A little trust.

Except, it’s taking longer than I’m used to waiting.

And I don’t like that empty building. It’s creepy, and unnatural. And…kind of sad, too. Like it wants to be something glamorous, or meaningful, or useful, or…something.

Something that bustles, instead of just sitting there trying to work up the energy to finish what it started.

It wouldn’t bug me so much if it weren’t my own mind I’m talking about here. Which has been just kind of…sitting there for about three months longer than forever, insincerely muttering “…working on it…” at me every time I’ve asked how things were going, whether it had anything, you know, to share with the class.

It really does feel like I’m a run-down building trapped in some kind of infinite loop of any second now, I’m going to have a “ta-da!” moment, and then you’ll see, I’m pretty sure whatever-it-is that I’m trying to finish coming up with is going to be pretty cool, and you’ll be, like, WOW, and I’ll be, like, I KNOW, RIGHT?! and then…we’ll be HAPPY and BUSY and ENERGETIC again, instead of this weird, tired, EMPTY, I-just-wanna-siddown-and-stare-at-something-that-doesn’t-WANT-anything-from-me thing…

It doesn’t even have the decency to be something dramatic like depression, or significant psychological event, or anything else I could, with a straight face, use as an excuse for the overall meh-ness I’ve been exhibiting for a while now.

OH no. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing meaningful…arguably, it’s even a good thing, a part of a natural cycle of feast-and-famine that puts me in a state of (sorta) rest.

I’m usually a person who can find ways to complicate her life without even trying, and be convinced that it’s a hundred kinds of awesome. But every so often, for no apparent reason, well, my little ship rushes headlong into the doldrums and the sails go pfffffffffth*flutter*flop and, well…there I am. Stuck. Sitting there. Rocking on becalmed seas, waiting for a breeze that feels like it will never come.

I never see it coming. It always bewilders me. No matter how many times it has happened to me throughout my life, I always find myself dumbstruck by its advent. What the…?! Whaddya mean, ‘Don’t know, don’t care, don’t wanna, leave me alone, I’m tired’?! C’mon, let’s do…SOMETHING! Let’s…make…maybe we could…you know what would be cool? Huh? you know what would…c’mon, work with me here, I can’t finish that sentence without you, Creativity, let’s go, OFF the bench…c’mon!...HERE we go…!

And it’ll make a half-hearted effort, rustle some papers around, get out the brushes and the cans of paint, set a ladder against the wall, point at a few items that might do with a makeover…and then while I’m not looking, it just waddles off to the nearest chair, plops down, and flips on a video game or starts a new anime series or buries its nose in a book and refuses to look up.

You know we REALLY need to get the seedlings started for the spring planting, right? I’ll ask.

{grunt!}

Hey. HEY. Talkin’ to you here! I was thinking of casting on a vest or something. What do you think? Maybe I could make…something…you know…vest-y…with YARN?

{shrug!}

So! Um! How about…you know that thing you were…there was, it was, like…? You wanna…?

{glare!}

…sigh…ooookayyyy, maybe not…

Now, I know how this will go down. Just when I think that this time, maybe it’s really forever; maybe I used up the very last of my energy somehow, maybe I’m just all dried up, maybe…oh perish the thought!...I have become a grownup, and this is how they are, you know, just all go to work, come home, yell about chores and homework and dishes and go to bed so we can get up and do it all again the next day…right when I’m starting to say to myself, you know, it’s probably a good thing, because, it IS rather restful, you know, this whole ‘I don’t feel like doing anything, I’m just going to sit here and do NOTHING instead’ and after all, you really SHOULD act your age, because being a goofball is a bit…ahem…well, YOU know, at YOUR AGE for heaven’s sake…you could at least PRETEND to be mature now and then…right about then, as I’m reconciling to being just kind of blah and deciding it’s just fine by me…I’ll suddenly hear myself thinking…

…ever so quietly…but oh so brightly…

…oooooooo…you know what would be COOL…?

And ten minutes later I will be happily overcomplicating my life again, up to my elbows in projects no sane person would ever undertake, complaining about things being crazy then turning right around and going, “How cool is this!” like it makes perfect sense to carve smooshed-together bars of almost-used-up soaps into blobs that look like squashed zucchinis and insisting they are ‘obviously’ walruses and such.

But until then…well…there’s really not much I can do, except believe that something is happening behind the papered-up windows and shut doors, and wait patiently to see what it is.

Watch the space, and wait for it to become a sign.

Aaaaaaaany day now…

(Seriously, any time now…NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING, BUT, KINDA BORED OVER HERE…)

(Patience: not my strong suit)

And now, midair blogging!

Apparently in the years between 'the last time I flew' and 'now,' the human race has made a few evolutionary steps...like having Wifi available at 30,000 feet.

I just spent the last hour and a half playing Warcraft FROM THE PLANE.

I had to do it, just 'cause I COULD.

I'm on my way home from a business trip to Charlotte, NC; I think it was an excellent trip and am very pleased with how much I learned while I was there...and can't WAIT to get home. While four days can hardly be considered anything like an EPIC amount of time away from home, it was, juuuuust enough for the internal grumbling to start.

Shower not hot enough. Food not spicy enough. Food too spicy. Ran out of books to read. Wireless too slow. Stupid chair too 'bouncy.'

Etc, etc, etc.

Plus, of course, the eerie quiet; the inescapable feeling of having forgotten something that comes with being away from the family. The same constant noise I complain about when home becomes, in its absence, a feeling not unlike being watched, or that maybe you left your keys on the table at the restaurant.

Only, not so definite. Just a vague feeling of Amiss, the sense that not all is where it ought to be...and the slow, steady realization that what is out of place is...you.

It will be good to get home to my Chaos; to be made irritable by the noise and the mess, the constant mommy-mommy-mommy, the daily dose of nonsense and need.

Don't tell them I said so, because it would really wreck my cool, 'eh, whatever, you're-ok-I-guess' thing...but I surely have missed those Denizens of mine.

Yeah...I really kinda have...

Perhaps I shall call it The Round Tuit...

'Course, if I were going to call it the "round" tuit, I really should be making it, uh, a CIRCLE-ISH shape, instead of a bunch of long RECTANGLES sewn together. And "square" tuit really doesn't have the same 'hehe, see what I did there? Because I finally got aROUND to it?!' punch. BUT AT THE SAME TIME, I don't WANT a *round* blanket - I want a *square* one.

I know. I too shudder at the life-or-death Drama of this. Although I'm sure I will be RICH after selling the rights to my life's story to Hollywood.

Ahem. Aaaaaaaanyway - you know how after you've made a pair of socks, there always seems to be JUST ENOUGH yarn left over the you can't bear to (gasp!) throw it away, but at the same time there really isn't enough to DO anything with it, so, you put the micro-ball of scraps into a box or bag somewhere for, like, eight years, and then it gets to the point where you've tripped over the box one time too many and so you say to yourself, "Self! That's it! The time is NOW! I'm going to just...cast on 40 stitiches and knit strips in plain garter grabbing whatever random ball comes to hand as each one runs out until it is GONE!"?

Point. Reached.

Miscellaneous

As I’ve been pondering the changes we’re making and the budget changes I’m going to undoubtedly be making because of them, one thing that keeps coming back into my mind is how bizarre it is that having a reliable, same-every-time paycheck is…foreign to me.

I’m not accustomed to approaching a budget the way the vast majority of Americans do: Being able to say “I can count on this much money coming in, on the following days…”

For me, budgeting has usually been done with more of a high/low estimation of what I would probably be bringing home – trying to guesstimate for each month how many days I wouldn’t be paid for due to somebody being sick or the company being closed for a holiday, trying to keep a read on how likely it was that the project would be continued following the latest round of budgeting by the client, and so forth.

The idea of having two paychecks that will arrive at exactly the same times each month for exactly the same amounts…is a little hard for me to get my arms around.

But I suspect I’ll get used to it.

I’m almost to the point of actually doing stuff at work; up until now, it’s all basically been “research” – reading through approximately 32,000 pages on various Wiki libraries about which parts go with what parts by huh-now?! methods.

I’ve been enjoying the relatively free time while it lasts. And trying to make my work-day eight hours and then HARD-STOP.

I need to get into the habit of not attempting to do “everything” myself; and of making sure I split my attention more evenly between work and home.

And also I need to take better care of my garden. Last year was a pretty rotten one, all things considered; and it was entirely because I didn’t put in the same effort I had before, choosing instead to allow myself to be dragged into all-night coding “parties,” working over weekends on projects I knew were doomed to failure no matter what I tried, but, gamely wading in and trying anyway.

It’s going to be another interesting year.

Can’t wait to see where it leads us.