This, that, and oh yeah, that other thing.

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Entries will be sparse between now and Sunday as we are expecting the arrival of my nephew early tomorrow morning. (Zen Master Gabe, for those of you who know him.) Much fun is on the table and I am really looking forward to getting some solo time with him. Our plans include a day trip to San Antonio to see the BELIEVE IT OR NOT museum (we are both huge fans of the strange and cheesy), the ALAMO and some other stuff. Also in the works are a trip to NATURAL BRIDGE CAVERNS, some Austin sight-seeing and a few other fun side trips. Today I heard a commercial for THE COOKIE LOUNGE – I think we might need to check that out, too.
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My day started out with a major irritation – thanks, Post Office! I hate our local station – it’s deep in the hood, there’s rarely more than one service window open and the people who work there are slow and surly. I only go there if I have to, otherwise I frequent the station where I have my P.O. Box. Anyhow, after about fifteen minutes of bullshit, I left with the package our delivery person was too lazy to put on his truck yesterday. This is the guy who will pull up on the road and honk rather than actually carry packages to our door like he’s supposed to. I think it may have something to do with the fact that he weighs at least 300 pounds. Lazy fucker.
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My toothless spot seems to be healing nicely. I’m still a little surprised that I came through all that so easily but I guess the anticipation is always worse than the actuality when it comes to such things. You might say it was making me late, keeping me wai-ai-ai-ai-aitin’. Ahem. Now I wait and see if my teeth start migrating into the hole. Such fun! I love being old. No, I don’t. What was I talking about?
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S. and I have again been invited to house-sit at a mansion that belongs to one of his clients. Our job for the weekend will be to drink wine, lounge in museum-like luxury, swim in the pool and chase hippies off the back property when EEYORE’S BIRTHDAY lets out from the park below the property. Last year, only a few people tried to shortcut through the property — all we had to do was shine our flashlights in their direction, inform them that they were trespassing and they quickly turned heel. Which is good, because I would hate to have to beat down a hippie. Or maybe I wouldn’t.
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And on that violent note, I bid you adieu.

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Reasons to be cheerful, part one.

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Know where I’m going at the end of May? Do ya? No? Wanna know? I am going to KATE’S LAZY MEADOW. Seethe with jealousy, suckers.
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Other happy-making things include the kick-ass anniversary dinner S. treated me to at Vespaio last night. I tend to eat at their baby sister Enoteca more often and had forgotten the treasures that awaited me. I had a polenta/gorgonzola/mushroom appetizer and a simple but well done carbonara dish. I had to forgo a salad because of socket-healing issues but I did try a few bites of S.’s. Yum. And Readers Guide, I want you to know that for dessert I had something that looked suspiciously like a Whoopie Pie.
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Also creating great happiness for me is the fact that I am now the proud owner of an original piece of Lynda Barry artwork. Our agreement prohibits me from reproducing it here, but if anyone wants to see it, let me know and I’ll email you a pic. My love and admiration for that woman knows no bounds and possibly verges on being creepy, but I don’t care. I strongly recommend that you writers out there buy her book WHAT IT IS. It will rock your writing world. And if you’re not a writer, buy it anyway. It has the capacity to rock an unlimited variety of worlds.
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And more immediately happy-creating is the fact that I will be leaving shortly to enjoy a walk with the now-by-invite-only-so-I-won’t-post-a-link Miss Freida Bee, whom I haven’t seen in over a month. Will we see the shiftless hippie dude? Will we mock the outfits of our fellow trail denizens? Will one of us have to pee and use the homeless way stations along the trail? Stay tuned….
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Dadburned varmints.

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I fell asleep reading on the couch last night and woke up from a dream – thinking I’d heard a knock at the door – then realized it was just Stevie chasing who knows what across the porch. I got up to let him in and when I opened the door, I caught a very faint smell of cigarette smoke. Hi, Dad.
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At 3:30 this morning, I was awakened again, this time by the howls of coyotes across the pasture and the panicked cries of the horses in their stalls. Then, as the coyotes moved across the property, every dog between here and McKinney Falls started barking. Stevie, who had opted to sleep inside, leapt off the bed and ran from door to window to door growling while Astra slept on, oblivious.
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And me? I got up and went back to work on the book. Progress is being made and I am feeling slightly less frozen with fear than I was over the past few weeks. I haven’t spoken with the subject in almost a month, so I put in a call to her this morning to check in and see if she can make time to meet this week. The story is there – more fully fleshed out than I had realized, but I still want to get as much face time with her as possible because every meeting has yielded some new, tantalizing tidbit or quote. I was talking to a friend this morning and he suggested that perhaps I am dreading moving forward on the book because the research journey has been so energizing. The truth is that I really like the subject and will be sorry when she is dragged from my hands and mind and into the public consciousness again. But she needs the money and so do I, so onward I go.
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Toothless.

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The molar is out. It was a very quick and completely painless procedure – the actual extraction took no more than ten minutes. Although I told him I’m a two-beer drunk and am resistant to ingesting anything mind-altering, the dentist convinced me to take nitrous oxide for the first time and I have to say – if you have any kind of dental anxiety, DO.IT. I didn’t really feel altered in any way but it does lend to physical relaxation which makes for a more pleasant experience. I opted not to get any serious painkillers and instead took two hyper-doses of Advil to stave off the pain. My jaw is a bit sore this morning, but that’s about it. So, hooray! Now I have to decide when and if I want to do anything about the missing tooth. I was thinking about something along these lines, even though it’s in a spot that doesn’t show.

Or maybe I’ll get a whole row, Classy, no?

Of course, a whole mouthful would be nice:

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I had a lovely and unexpected online reunion with some old work colleagues yesterday. I’ve kept in touch with one person from that job. Last week, one of our former co-workers was featured in a NYTimes article and my contact sent out a blanket email to a bunch of us and that in turn prompted a bunch of group emails in which we’ve all been sharing the gory details of our lives since we parted company. We worked together in fund-raising at a major Chicago cultural institution and I have to say that they were some of the brightest and most fun coworkers I’ve had. It’s been really great to be in touch with them again.
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I have a few errands to run today but that’s about it. S. is out of town and I plan to hunker back down with the mystery project and try to get it into submission format. It’s past time for me to do that. I’ve been dragging my heels on doing so out of fear but I need to just get over that and get the stupid thing out there. Writing…it’s not just a job…it’s an obsessive, anxiety-producing lifestyle!
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Beau Ring.

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I don’t seem to have much for you this week, imaginary friends. In a few hours, I will be having my tooth extracted. I have been assured that this will be a quick and relatively painless procedure and I am willing that to be true. So far, I’ve been able to keep my anxiety to a minimum and have resisted the temptation to scour the internet for horror stories. I am also planning to spend the afternoon with the charges in an effort to not dwell on whatever associated pain there is. The root canal/crown option seemed expensive (and, in my informal survey of people far and wide, would probably end up with the tooth being pulled eventually anyway) so out it comes. I can get a bridge or implant later if it looks like my teeth are trying to migrate but I’ll deal with that if and when the time comes.
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Our anniversary passed quietly – we have plans for a bigger celebration this weekend. As seems to be our pattern, I opted for nice but mostly practical gifts while S. found a truly lovely and symbolic item for me. Who knew that a hopeless romantic like me would suck so horribly at the execution of such things. I guess being married to such a lovely flower as me should be enough. Right, internet? RIGHT?!
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We’ve had sufficient rain in the past few days to bring our yard back to life. It’s not quite lush but it’s getting there and while this may seem unexciting to you, it is thrilling to me. We’ve had nothing but an expanse of brown dirt out there for the past 10 months and it’s nice to look out and see green. Most of our yard is horseherb, which grows quickly and is fairly drought resistant, so I’m hoping that this will last through at least part of the summer. We’ll see.
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I have some good kid artwork to share with you but I think I’ll save that for later today.
End transmission.
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It was twenty years ago today…

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…Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.

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And it was four years ago today that S. and I walked through the wet grass in our backyard, through a sea of people who love us and vowed to be wed. I was a very fat and surly bride and willingly admit that I did not enjoy the planning of said event. The outcome was good, though. Like anyone else, we have to work hard at this being married thing but I can honestly say that I found the right person for me.

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Happy Anniversary, S.!

Writing’s on the wall…

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In the past two days, I have seen two, one-armed men. The man I saw yesterday was missing his right arm, the one I saw tonight was missing his left. Because I am a freak, I’ve decided this must be some kind of omen. A perusal of my dictionary of superstitions and a cursory internet search have turned up nothing. So I ask you, internet, does anyone out there know of an omen or superstition about seeing a one-armed man? If so, I would appreciate hearing it.

Oh, and the first one to make a “Fugitive” joke gets a size 9.5 to the butt.

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No. Just…no. Possibly HELL no.

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I thought the DOODLE BRA was the most asinine product I’d seen all year, but looky what S. found last night: BABY BANGS. As in fake hair for babies. Specifically, baby girls.

Let’s ignore, if we can, the idea that any parent would find a bald baby as somehow lacking to the point that they would buy such a hideous thing. I suspect these are the same parents who dress their kids like hookers and enter them into beauty pageants at age two. But, I digress.

If you look at the INSTRUCTION page and the disturbing images contained therein, you’ll see that they suggest using hairspray to hold the baby bangs in place. Hairspray. On an infant.
“Don’t breathe, Tiffany, mommy needs to spray your fake hair into place.”

Ugh.

p.s. Scroll back one for advice on how to avoid B.O.
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Tee-hee.

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Sloth.

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Didn’t do much of note over the past few days but S. and I did manage to purchase and plant some stuff, including an abutilon or chinese lantern:

and a pretty blue columbine:

and some bougainvillea that we planted along the back fence to replace the trumpet vine that didn’t make it through the winter:

We also got some Thai basil and I will probably go back to get something to replace the moss roses that made it through the winter but are, for some reason, dying now. Our winters are so mild here that we almost never lose plants but this year we lost the hibiscus (replaced with the chinese lantern) and a few scraggly herbs but that’s it. Things are finally looking green thanks to the rain two weeks ago and we may even have enough of a yard to mow if we get more rain this week. One of our neighbors cut all the dry grass out of the pasture just before the rain and even it is looking fairly green, although I doubt we’ll get the abundance of wildflowers we had last year.
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I had a hilarious phone conversation with the younger charge yesterday. The charges and their folks went north for their spring break last week and he was updating me on all sorts of things. He was pretty much done talking to me but his older brother wanted the phone, so the conversation turned to a filibuster:

YC: (apropos of absolutely nothing) So…um….Laura….I’m wondering…um….why do they wave a flag at the end of a car race?

(I answer him and can hear his older brother in the background, urging him to hand over the phone)

YC: I just have one more thing, though…um….uh….Laura….I am wondering…why are there so many toys in my house?

(Older charge is getting audibly more impatient so I answer quickly and can hear his mom telling YC to tell me goodbye. She then gets on the phone and we are both in hysterics at the wiliness of younger charge. Older charge then gets on the phone.)

OC: (incensed) He was just STALLING.

I went on to have a nice conversation with OC, during which he told me that it felt like it had been “10 months” since he’d seen me. Awww. He also told me that Baby Charge started crawling last week – I can’t wait to see that! As Older Charge put it yesterday, “He is Baby On-The-Move!”
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Walking with my mom last week reminded me of how good that makes me feel so I am off to brave the shiftless hippie by myself. Happy Monday to you all.

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