goblinbox

In which you get what you ask for, and I had to ask for an adventure.

For the 4th I stood in a wheat field on the east side of town with Landi, my 23-year-old friend who just graduated from culinary school, and burned sparklers while watching the professional shows off on the horizon. We completed celebrating the holiday with 7-Eleven nachos and a few cartoons at her apartment. I was home around midnight.

The next day she texted “Mountain drive?” and I replied, “Sure, why not!” She came to pick me up. When I asked if she was sure her car would make it, she replied that she had no reason to think it wouldn’t.

We tried to take Bindu with us, but I don’t think Landi’s Nova has a firewall in it. The passenger compartment, even with the windows rolled down, was far too hot for a 13-year-old dog. We dropped her off, limp and panting, at my place after running an errand to Landi’s apartment and back.

We bought ice, a gallon of green tea, grapes, and Cheetos at Loney’s and then enjoyed a leisurely drive out past Dixie and up a few thousand feet to Lewis Peak. The girl just kept going and going and going, over gravel and then dirt and then gullies, past dwellings and beyond services, until we were up where nobody lives and we ran out of road. She parked and we took a walk.

It was gorgeous.

When we returned to the Nova, it started right up – unusual because it normally requires three to five attempts – and we began our decent. About 500 yards along, the car died.

And never started again.

Oh, we tried. Landi checked her fluids, banged her air filter a few times, and beat various engine components with an old windshield wiper blade, but while the thing got spark it just wouldn’t turn over.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which I had entirely too much damned fun at the party, just like I knew I would, but oh holy FUCK my head hurts. And the word of the day is ‘bittersweet.’

I went over to Baby Girl’s yesterday afternoon intending to stay only long enough to firm up our transportation plans to the party, but as we were visiting in her living room a tree limb fell out of the tree she parks under and smashed her car. The morning’s thunderstorms had been past for a couple of hours, the sky was blue, and there was no wind, but a big damn branch decided to drop 30 feet and do at least two thousand dollars worth of damage anyway.

So I stayed to take pictures for her claim and hang out with her while she called her agent, landlord, and the police. Eventually I split for home to shower, then I went back to pick her up… and long story short, I didn’t get out to The Ex’s party until 7:30.

The party was quite well along when we arrived. Uncle L was BBQing up a storm in the bottom level of the barn, one dude was already passed out drunk in The Ex’s truck, tents were going up, and there was a pack of yellow dogs begging partygoers shamelessly for bratwurst. There was power to the barn and a boom box was playing music. The Ex waved at me, and I went to chat with him for a moment. There were friends in from out of town, and I went for a round of hugs. The yellow dogs had to say hi and put their muddy paws on me.

NLW finally got me focused on lemondrops, so she and I and a couple other women snuck into the house to make a batch. The women were asking me left and right where things were and if they could do this or that. I kept saying, “I have no idea where anything is, and I can’t answer questions of permission because I don’t live here!” It was amusing, because as four of us were making lemondrops and the other two were organizing food to take out to the barn, they all kept asking me things anyway – “Are there any serving spoons we can take outside?” “Do you know where a measuring cup is?” “Can I use this pitcher?” – and then giggling once they realized they’d done it again.

It was so strange, so foreign. That room used to be my kitchen… but now I don’t know where anything is. It looks completely different. I’ve never in my life felt so awkward, so very much like a guest. That room and I had no relationship any more, my kitchen of five years.

Aki had made a divorce cake and it was in the fridge. It was a three-tiered chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and blue piping, with Homies arranged on the very top. It was beautiful, even with the silly toys on it. Unfortunately everybody forgot about it and it was never served. (I’m hoping The Ex will bring me some next week when he comes to pick Truck up for work.)

After we’d made our pitcher of lemondrop martinis, I sent basically everyone outside on one pretense or another and took a peek through the house. My goal was to find and take my warez folder – I’m getting sick of not having my software library handy – and to pull the hard drive out of my computer.

When I walked through what had been the living room, it had very few things in it – and basically all of them mine. No couch, no TV, no rug… a practically empty room, with a table in the corner covered in dusty knickknacks.

Upstairs, I glanced into what had been, when I moved out, the master bedroom: now it’s a… living room? There’s a couch in there, the entertainment center, a propane wall heater I’m convinced had never been there before, the end tables. My office chair. Ashtrays: he smokes inside now.

I looked in to what had been my office, and… the room is now a bedroom. He’d moved all of my crap for me (and I’d had a lot of stuff in there). I was both pleased (that he’d done the work for me) and dismayed (that damn near all traces of my having lived there are now erased). I crossed the hall and opened another door: all my stuff had been consolidated and moved into one of the under-construction rooms. I went in and felt around but it was past dusk and the room has no fixtures. From what I could tell in the near-dark, things weren’t badly treated but they’re not packed, just stacked in a room that is, with its lack of drywall or insulation and occasional holes where the siding is missing, nearly open to the elements. I imagine what’s left in the old living room will end up there if The Ex’s organizational spree continues, and soon I’ll just back my jeep up to the steps and load it all out.

Without a flashlight there was no point in even trying to go through anything, it’d been moved and stacked and I didn’t know where anything was. I closed the door and, feeling somehow both lighter and heavier, went outside to join my friends – and the martinis – on the porch. Read the rest of this entry »

In which you see the progress my househusband has made.

While it’s true that there are piles of clothes all over the house, the floors haven’t been swept in weeks, and there are little chunks and flecks of dried foods stuck to the kitchen counters, my home-bound husband has been doing a little something ’round the house of late.

I present to you… the Remodel Gallery!

The future living room:

The future kitchen:

The future upstairs half-bath:

And in other news, the peacock likes to hang out on the porch. Plus he’s grown a really lovely tail for this year:

Also I hear there’s weather on the way. There was a watch out earlier, but the NWS has just upgraded us to a full-on winter storm warning: rain, freezing rain, and snow in the region… all between now and tomorrow evening. Yuck.

In which you all immediately feel very, very sorry for Bread.

This morning, the toilet backed up. All over the bathroom floor.

When I went downstairs to get ready for work, the floor was wet and Bread had a box fan running to dry it. “You,” he snapped, “will not put any more kleenex in the toilet!” (Everything is my fault.) As I stepped into the bathroom, he said, “Don’t go in there, the fucking toilet overflowed!”

“I have to take a shower and get ready for work,” I replied.

“Fine! Whatever,” he said.

I stepped into the shower pan, took off my undies, turned the water on and bathed. When I got out, I threw a towel on the floor and stood on that to put slippers on, then went and dressed in the laundry room.

I gave Bread shit for blaming the overflow on me. “It’s not from kleenex. I suppose the fact that the plumbing backs up every year around this time is totally irrelevant,” I said.

He went on again about how my flushing kleenex down the toilet was going to stop.

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, whatever, dude. You know more about plumbing than I do, but I fail to see how a bit of kleenex can hold a candle to an entire turd in terms of load on the system.”

“Trust me. Toilet paper backs it up.”

“Uh. Okay,” I said.

“You don’t have to run the snake!” he said.

“Oh, poor you. You have to do a chore today,” I said.

“I don’t want to do this shit!”

“Dude, it’s not like you’re busy. Plus, I’m guessing the toilet overflowed all over the floor because it was running, because you weren’t paying attention when you flushed it.”

“Well, yeah,” he said, frowning.

(Aside: the lever broke some months ago, so that one had to remove the top of the tank and plunge her entire arm in there to pull the stopper up in order to flush. I got sick of it right quick and solved the problem with some vinyl-covered clothesline wire and some packing tape. There is, as they say, nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, so if you come to my house in 2018 you’ll have to pull the green cord hanging out from underneath the slightly-ajar tank cover in order to flush the downstairs toilet. I guarantee it. The point of all this is that if the clothesline doesn’t retract properly, the toilet runs because the stopper’s still up.)

Basically, Bread hates plumbing, especially the part that deals with shit. He has a very healthy dislike for black water; it creeps him out. Our house is a zillion years old and we’re not entirely sure how the septic system works, but every year in January or February, we have to rent a snake and snake it out. It’s just part of living there.

“I hate this fucking place,” Bread said.

“It does present its difficulties,” I replied. I didn’t bring up the two thousand things I hate about it, because since he’s been home for the past three weeks and has done a little housekeeping of his own he’s started to regale me upon my return from work at night with statements like, “Now I understand what a pain in the ass it is to try to keep this fucking place clean! I spent all afternoon decobwebbing in here, and you can’t even tell.”

You’re preachin’ to the choir there, sweet thing, you’re preachin’ to the choir.

In which I review all the big stuff. Did I mention I think I’m having a mid-life crisis?

Basically, in reviewing my life, I suddenly noticed a few trends. A couple of things popped into my head with disturbing clarity while I was talking with my friend Deb in New York, and a few more have become clear in the few weeks since then.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I feel much more fabulous than I should when I’m on vacation. Vacation should be fun, of course, but when it’s so much better that you don’t even miss your real life, you have to suspect that something’s up.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I have no panic symptoms when I’m on vacation by myself.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that when I’m away, anything and everything feels possible. When I think about moving, getting a job, finding a place to live, getting a gig, even dealing with the farm property, it all seems like nothing more than a little work. But when I’m here, oh my God, it all feels like a fucking vortex, an albatross, an impossibly heavy ball and chain. We’ll never get the remodel done, we’ll never get through all the shit we need to do to get out of here, we’re stuck here for the next eight years. Read the rest of this entry »

When I drive to work in the morning, this is what I look at.

Miles and miles of green Iowa farmland.

I suppose it’s idyllic, but I’ve lived out in the country long enough that I have to deliberately enjoy my surroundings to notice them at all.

Below is the stop sign at the end of my gravel road where it intersects with Hwy 34. That’s about a thousand acres of corn there on the far side of the blacktop.

This morning was gorgeous. The sky was clear and blue, the air wasn’t 110 degrees, everything looked green and lush.

The rain yesterday and last night really, really helped. I actually used a light blanket last night, and turned off the A/C for the first time in many days. (I like a hot day just fine, but when it’s over a hundred Nature’s just showing off. I don’t think it’s funny when stuff in my car melts in the time it takes me to get home from the grocery store.)

I drive past several thousand acres of feed corn and soybeans every day. My house sits in the bottom of a U-shape of cropland; this year they’re growing mostly feed corn on all the surrounding acreage. Sometimes it’s soybeans. It means we’re not very close to our nearest neighbor, and on corn years it means Brett and I say “Knee high by the fourth of July!” to each other at least once, and we’re not even farmers.

On bean years, I stop and eat some on the way to swimming in the triangle pond and think about picking and blanching some for a nice edamame snack. (I never get around to it, and eat all my edamame at sushi restaurants.)

Another way of putting it is that we live right in the middle of where they grow the millions of bushels of feed corn needed to feed to the pigs that become your breakfast bacon, and I test our ponds and well water every year or two for fertilizer and pesticides.

But it’s quiet, and we can see millions of stars at night.

All in all, a pleasant drive to work this morning with the blue sky and the windows down and the breeze and the rain-washed smells. Not a lot of things better than the morning after a cooling summer rain.

P.S. I love my camera phone. Ho-ly SHIT, people. It takes crappy low-res pictures, but it’s so fun.

There is a clutch of baby chicks living in the air conditioner in our bedroom window.

Why birds would decide to lay eggs in a window unit AC is beyond me, but the babies have been cheeping their little hearts out for two days now.

And yes, the unit has been running 24/7 since Brett put it in the window, and before that it was inside the house. Which means Ma & Pa Bird built their nest in a running AC unit.

Isn’t nature weird?

Yesterday I napped. A lot. (Why must I have yet another fucking cold?) I also waxed the kitchen floor, and it looks pretty cool. I still have never cleaned the top of the fridge, and we’ve lived there for four years. (The way I figure, if something’s above my head and I can’t see it, it doesn’t really need to be cleaned.)

Brett went to town in the late morning and didn’t come back for hours; when he did, he had Bo and Joe in tow.

We went to the demolition derby to watch Jimbo run. (I missed it because I was off buying funnel cakes, but apparently Jimbo took the hardest hit of the event – a rear ender that was so hard his glasses actually flew off his face.) Jimbo’s little brother, who derbys every year and even went so far this year as to rebuild his engine, was DQ’d for hitting another’s driver side door.

Joe sat with me and finished off my funnel cake with me. I love Joe. His hair is doing marvelous things these days; it’s all unruly and slightly dreaded. He’s got great hair. (He’s playing next Saturday night at Backroads; y’all should be there as drunk and belligerent as you’re capable of being.)

I only watched a few of the demo heats. Once you’ve seen cars smash into each other on mud, you’ve seen cars smash into each other on mud. I ended up in the jeep reading sci-fi on my PPC before the night was through. I had a good time, though. I mean, FUNNEL CAKES, hello!

Remember that tree that fell on one of Brett’s trucks during a recent storm?

Well, now it’s bark dust. The branches, anyway. The trunk is now firewood.

Brett rented a chipper from 1-Stop yesterday, and I helped him shove enough wood through it to fill the entire back of his full-sized pickup’s bed.

That is ONE. SCARY. MACHINE. Talk about a nice way to get rid of the evidence! I mean, if you were stupid enough to get your hand caught in the thing, it would suck your entire arm though in nanoseconds, and it would be gone. Just gone. You could totally kill people and grind ‘em up in that thing, no problem.

I’m not afraid of rodents nor of spiders, but that chipper scared the hell out of me. Good God.

Yet, it does make really nice bark dust.

I’m at work.

Last night a tree crushed one of Brett’s many trucks. I’m a bad wife, I suggested he’d be less traumatized if I were hit by a tree. (I’d be more sympathetic if he didn’t have so many trucks.) The storm was awesome. I barely slept at all.

I can swallow without pain. When I open my pill bottle, it smells like eggs. I am not sure how I feel about this.

I am now certain that men cannot taste their food. Two specific images will serve to convince you of this as well:

1. Last night I made Brett a steak in a dry pan, and I did not season the meat at all. He said dinner was fantastic. (I normally season his steaks carefully, sear them in cast iron, sautee them with onions or mushrooms, and deglaze the pan with beer or wine or cognac and butter.)
2. Once I made gratin dauphinois for Joe. He put sri racha on it before tasting it. I have never forgiven him for this.

Walking through the laundry room, I heard something scratching inside the furnace. Bindu heard it too. We went to investigate.

I determined the sound was coming from behind our 50-year-old gas furnace’s removable panel. I put my hand on the handle, and Bindu stationed herself at my feet to catch whatever might fall out and munch its head.

I pulled the panel off… and a bird flew out.

I have no idea how it got in there. Sometimes things come down the chimney and end up inside the wood stove, but how an entire adult bird came down the chimney and ended up inside the access panel of the damn gas furnace I will never understand.

After bonking into a few windows, the bird finally found the open door and flew out to blessed freedom, and probably a much-needed brunch of bugs.

I wonder if it will blog about the experience.
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I’m uploading pics of my new tattoo in the background, but since I’m on dial-up out here in the sticks, it’ll take forEVer. And yes that is my ass crack, thank you. (If you’ve never had a tattoo: the reason it looks like this is that it’s new, which means it’s still a little swollen, and it’s shiny because one keeps a new tattoo covered in ointment for a week or so, so that the skin doesn’t dry out and scab off. The tattoo above the new one is several years old.)

I slept more than five hours in a row last night, which speaks volumes for how fatigued I was after our whirlwind Chicago trip. Yay! And my GOD I had so much fun. Have I mentioned how much fun I had?!? I HAD SO MUCH FUN!

Today we took the eBay guy’s new toy to ABF to ship it, by way of 1-Stop rental for a box and some bailing wire, but they weren’t open yet. After a call to determine they’d remain not open for more than an hour, we came home and had a nooner (it was actually about one, but Mr. Brett insisted on calling it a nooner anyway) and then I took a nap.

UNTIL SIX.

IN THE EVENING.

Brett had gone out to mow the lawn and failed to notice that I hadn’t gotten up, and he totally laughed at me when I wandered into the living room at SIX P-fucking-M looking all touseled.

I called ABF and they were still open, so we drove back into town and dropped off the pallet, which proved to be rather fun in a redneck way, and then hit the Dairy Bar for malts. And Mr. Brett had a chili dog, which I enjoyed watching him eat almost as much as he obviously enjoyed eating it. “Only thing that would make this better is if it was a foot-long,” he pronounced afterward.

Then we hit Wal-Mart for canning lids and twelve pounds of salt and came home.

The canning lids were because Brett wanted (me) to pickle some asparagus, and the salt was for the asparagus patch. Aparently some old farmer dude told Brett in a bar recently that salt will kill grass and weeds but doesn’t harm asparagus, and since our asparagus patch looks more like lawn than garden he’s been wanting to give this salt approach a try.

There wasn’t all that much asparagus to pick this evening, so we only did a couple quarts, but I put four asian red hot chilis in each jar along with many cloves of garlic, so this batch should be hot as hell. My previous batches (here’s my first foray in pictures; but I’m much more legit now and I have a big canning pot and everything) were yummy but not particularly hot, and Brett wants some that is, to quote his redneck self, “so hot you need two assholes”-hot.

Now, if our VCR is actually still cabled to the entertainment center, I intend to go downstairs and so something I rarely do: commandeer the glass teat and watch something. On purpose. I’m rather in the mood to see Contact, a movie I adore, and I just happen to have it on video. Hopefully those tatt pics will finish uploading eventually.