In which… ah, fuck it.

The entire point of yesterday’s post was to get Truck to comment. He did not. Bitch.

Today: I got up, cleaned house, meditated, napped, ate leftover enchiladas, and cleaned more house. I’ve done more laundry than you can shake a stick at. I got rid of the cat pee smell in the living room (but I honestly don’t know what did it – I just cleaned and/or vacuumed and/or laundered everything and now it’s gone). I swept. I dusted. I de-cobwebbed. I even scrubbed the tray under the dish drainer.

Outside it’s overcast and dreary. The leaves are turning stunning colors and then falling immediately to their deaths. Brett’s dog Stella has been lounging in my jeep since 1:30 and will not get out no matter what I tell her.

I’m going to town to buy groceries. I will probably have a cocktail first. As always, I love the word “cocktail.” Cocktail!

My dad will arrive sometime this weekend.

Hattie came out Sunday to visit. She’s so cool. We hung out and admired my felted lamb, talked and talked and talked, and drank half a bottle of wine. I also fed her dinner, since she was still there at dinner time and her curiosity about the Pepsi pot roast got the better of her.

Once when I was enjoying an after-work cocktail at the Dew Drop, Dixie, who can cook, told me that the secret to crock pot pot roasts was Pepsi. I made noises of disbelief, and then she and a few other folk like Harry Balls declared their love for the Pepsi pot roast. Naturally I had to find a recipe on the Internet.

I finally took the plunge and made one Sunday for Mr. Brett. The ingredients are terrifying: a 3-4 lb. pot roast, a 12-oz. Pepsi, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a packet of onion soup mix. Could it be any more white trash? I mixed the soups and Pepsi together, then put the meat in it and turned the crock pot on low and left it to its own devices for a few hours because frankly, the whole idea was grossing me out. Later I threw in chopped onion, celery, and carrots per the recipe, and was surprized that it no longer smelled disgusting but seemed to have taken on some of the qualities of edible food.

Around six thirty I baked biscuits and tossed a quick green salad and we sat to eat. Halfway through the meal, Hattie annouced, “There’s something to this Pepsi thing,” and grinned at me. Mr. Brett was too busy eating to even say anything. I guess Pepsi pot roast really is edible after all.

Lord knows I’ll never eat one, but Mr. Brett and Hattie seemed pleased with their Sunday dinner. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with having an arsenal of extraordinarily quick and easy crock pot recipes around! It really makes you feel like a real farm wife to serve up things like pot roasts and biscuits, but in reality a meal like that only takes about fifteen minutes. Shhh, don’t tell Mr. Brett.

For dinner last night I made tuna steaks, and new potatoes and mushrooms in the BBQ wok. I love my BBQ wok. If you don’t have one, get one. They’re amazing. You take any combo of chopped veggies, toss ’em in some marinade (olive oil, salt, and pepper is often more than adequate) and throw them in the wok on the grill. They come out tasting amazing.

Since it was so blisteringly hot, I went to lie down in front of the fan after dinner last night and fell asleep before eight.

I woke up at midnight and ate six Frootie Ice pops on the porch in the dark, with two of the dogs lying beside me.

I should be doing housework, but I’ve learned something: housework always needs to be done. Always.

I have a husband who works construction, a cat, and three dogs. My house is old. I live at the end of a gravel road. In Iowa. There is never a moment when I can say, “My house is clean,” because there’s never any such moment. My house will never be clean.

But I! I can most definitely be tan.

(Yes, it’s difficult to take your own picture.)

Brett’s home today – no materials at the job site means no work for him to do – and that always throws me totally off my domestic stride. He’s just not supposed to be here when I’m cleaning the damn house. Basically I’ve accomplished nothing beyond making lunch, doing the ubiquitious dishes, putting away the laundry, and dusting half-heartedly.

The good news is that the guy Brett and his partner are working for finally sent money. Er, sort of. He said he’d send an International money order, but he didn’t. He sent a check. So it’s sitting in the account waiting to turn into real money. (I have my doubts that this transformation will actually take place, due to all the spooky crap Brett’s been telling me about this job.) (If the check bounces I will be so poor, yes. But I must admit I will take a certain amount of pleasure in my DH when he goes to the job site and UNDOES HIS WORK WITH HIS TITANIUM CROW BAR.) (He doesn’t like it when he doesn’t get paid. It rarely happens, but when you sign a contract with Mr. Brett, you’d better goddamn pay him what you said you’d pay him. THE MAN OWNS A TITANIUM CROW BAR, for heaven’s sake.)

Brett and I spent quite a while dealing with his eBay auction this afternoon. “Dealing” involved sitting in front of the computer during the auction’s final 40 minutes and clicking Refresh like total freaks. The guy who actually won the auction was suspended from eBay UK shortly afterward, but the next highest bidder purchased it and says he’ll pay via Paypal tomorrow.

If he actually does, I will get to go to Chicago to see Todd Rundgren tomorrow night. If he does not, I will have wasted a little over a hundred bucks on tickets that I will have absolutely no way to scalp since I have them in real ticket form rather than a transferrable e-ticket format.

Let me state right now that if we don’t get to go, I WILL BE SUPREMELY PISSED.

Brett, who is famous for doing absurdly irresponsible shit with money, is still making noises about thinking we shouldn’t go because we’re so broke right now blah blah blah blah BLAH, and I was forced to poke him in the gut and say, “If this were someone YOU love – like B.B. King – instead of Todd, you wouldn’t think twice about going. So shut the fuck up with your quasi-responsible maybe-we-ought-not-to-spend-money-right-now BULLSHIT! I know you don’t give a shit about Todd, BUT I DO. If we get the money, we’re going. TODD IS GODD. And that’s SO final.” He not only giggled, he agreed – because I AM SO RIGHT.

Then, lest we forget how black his heart truly is, he began looking at the Jade Dragon Tattoo web site, because, as I said, he’s famous for doing absurdly irresponsible shit with money.

In a nutshell: we can’t go if the hoist guy doesn’t pay tomorrow, but if we DO go, he’ll insist on getting a tattoo. And women are supposed to be the irrational sex!

So far today:

Get up, go back to bed, get back up, herbal tea, work out, laundry, dusting, change sheets, laundry, lunch, wash blankets, dishes, make bread, think about making rhubarb pie then decide making a crust would just be too much of a pain in the ass, lie around aimlessly and read, clean the living room, take out the garbage, laundry.

Now I’m thinking about dinner, and still considering making a pie although I don’t really know if I want the world to know I’d made both bread AND pie in the same day. It seems a little like overkill.

My pits reek, BTW. Working out + housecleaning = stinky Mushlette. But the weather is fucking DIVINE! It’s breezy and balmy and downright freakin’ perfect out, and I love it.

The other day a bird got in the house, and it flapped at each and every window until it found the open door and went back out. I have a set of six tiny, delicate cordials made of Depression glass (you can even see a couple of them here) and I keep them on the kitchen window sill so I can look at them while doing the dishes. The bird knocked every single one to the counter below.

Amazingly, all but one survived.

Right now, I am not doing the following:

– sweeping the stairs
– making the bed
– putting away that massive pile of clean & folded laundry
– tidying the LR
– vacuuming the LR
– dusting the LR
– tidying the rest of the house
– doing the dishes
– going to the bank
– sweeping the entryway
– washing the throw rugs that are all utterly laden with mud from the recent wet spring weather
– cleaning the toilets

I will get most if not all of this done today, natch, but not until the last goddamn minute. I think I need to re-read that Flylady book or something (too bad Anna’s got my copy and hasn’t spoken to me in a year). I’ve developed all these bad housekeeping habits!

For instance, it’s noon and while I am dressed I haven’t brushed my hair. I have dishes soaking in the sink because I started them and then just wandered off. I’ve got piles of clean laundry all over the laundry room, and it would take all of five minutes to put it all away, but I just keep walking past it.

Weird life discovery: it’s so much harder to do routine, boring, mindless work with a good attitude than it is to do actual rocket science! Seriously. Making yourself do the endless routine crap of life with an attitude of service and gratitude is the hardest thing there is to do; the monkey mind provides all these distractions and excuses… It really is easier just to do what needs to be done, but getting to THAT reality is a never-ending lesson! I learn it and then forget it, learn it and forget it, learn it and forget it… I’m beginning to suspect I’m really not all that damned intelligent.

Except I have managed to talk myself out of resisting my chores! (Maybe I’m not so ignorant after all.) I’m off to breeze through my to-do list; then I’ll get back on the goblinbox again later, GUILT FREE.

Yesterday it was spring and we let the fire go out. I looked for crocuses but didn’t find any.

Today there’s a fire going again, and it’s chilly out. I went to town for lunch and groceries and another visit to Dr. Crossland, and came home and made Mr. Brett a big pot of beef stew.

I dusted, tidied, did laundry. Did dishes. Made the bed. Yawn. Housework is so BORING. Shook out some rugs. Took out the trash. Folded, picked up, put away.

Love that Dr. Crossland, though!
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