Warning: Fractured Post Ahead
The weatherman said it was going to rain today. I was all excited, like, “Yes! Rain! Now I don’t have to water the basil plant today!” And then this morning I awoke to a slightly-gray-but-not-gray-enough-to-produce rain sort of sky, and when I took the dog outside, the basil plant was all wilted and falling over and sputtering, “But … you and I … were going … to make … pesto … together … Why? … Why?”
Delicious, yet entirely too melodramatic. That’s the problem with basil.
We went to the Cleveland Browns’ pre-season football game last night. On the way home, I asked Marc if we could please not sit in the Dawg Pound any more, should we decide to take in future Browns games. For those of you not in the know, the Dawg Pound is the section of bleacher seats located at one of the end zones. Ask a Browns fan, and they’ll tell you that people who sit in the Dawg Pound are the most dedicated Browns fans. Ask me, and I’ll tell you that Dawg Pound people are certifiable.
Bleacher seats are, ostensibly, cheaper than the rest of the seats in the stadium, but this is a relative concept because the bleacher seats still cost forty dollars per ticket. I know there are people out there who think paying forty dollars per ticket for any sort of event – NFL games, NASCAR races, concerts in any way involving Dave Matthews – is de rigueur for entertainment, but I’m rather of the opinion that there is almost nothing worth forty dollars per ticket. Jesus Christ Live and In Concert, maybe. But probably not. They’d probably wind up putting out a DVD anyway, and then I could rent it.
Here now is a partial list of Dawg Pound goings-on last night:
- Local celebrity/rabid (pun intended) fan "Big Dawg," rather husky gentleman who outfits himself in rubber dog mask and cap with attached felt ears, wields giant rawhide bone, periodically using said item to beat living hell out of any inanimate object within immediate vicinity. Throughout game, fans approach him to ask for photos and autographs.
- Husband and I periodically hit with flying detritus including popcorn, peanuts, and beer. The latter sometimes arrived in cups, sometimes not. Husband spends five minutes fishing peanut shells out of our shared Dr. Pepper.
- Arm-wrestling content two rows ahead of us between massive drunken man and drunken man sporting canine face paint.
- Five rows ahead of us, two women begin making out. Not "we are two women in love and want to express it here and now in presence of contracted National Football League players" making-out, but rather "This kiss is at the behest of the 50 or 60 screaming inebriated men surrounding us. Observe as we slide our tongues in and out of each other’s mouths in a decidedly unrealistic but wholly pornographic manner! Hear the cheers of throngs of appreciative men" I hoist Marc’s jaw from where it has fallen against the concrete floor and reaffix it to his head.
- Fight breaks out between random drunken woman and Make Out Girl #2. Police are summoned.
- Six uniformed officers arrive to put stop to fisticuffs.
- Five minutes later, fight breaks out between two gentlemen in the next section. Again, police show up.
- Five minutes later, Marc and I leave to "get a head-start on traffic." We have become people who leave events early to avoid traffic. We are now officially old.
And now I must go get ready for a party in which attendees have been asked to dress as martians (no, i don't know why). Unfortunately, my Ray Walston costume is at the dry cleaner's so I think I’m going to have to get creative.
posted by Kate at 5:19 PM link/comments
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Fiat Lux
We’re experiencing some technical difficulties over here at Foster/Farnsworth Headquarters in the form of electrical trouble.
Back in October after the sellers had accepted our offer, we had the requisite Professional Home Inspection performed on our soon-to-be home. The inspector pronounced the dwelling "in better condition than houses half its age," and Marc and I nearly caused ourselves permanent musculoskeletal damage with the mighty, self-inflicted back pats.
There was one problem, the inspector said, and then he said something about electric and a circuit something and 30 something maybe not being sufficient something. Marc seemed to understand what he was saying, but it would have made exactly as much sense to me had the inspector suggested that our electrical system was controlled by the whims of Master Zygorx and his band of merry body thetans via clever and judicious use of whimsically-colored space sparklers. "You might want to consider getting that taken care of," said the inspector.
Yes, yes, Mr. Inspector Guy, there are lots of things that need taking care of around here. The criminally-hideous blouse valances (with shades of mauve! and rose! gah!) in the living room, for example. And possibly the fact that the downstairs powder room is decorated to resemble a men’s private executive washroom.
The December closing date passed; we moved in, secured and installed a dog, and spent the majority of the ensuing months cursing the three or four hundred feet of snow we got last winter. Correction: I cursed the snow. My husband plowed it off the driveway, and then he and the dog would dance around the yard like a couple of snow ninnies rejoicing in the glory of 9 more goddamned inches. I on the other hand rigged up a television within ear- and eye-shot of the outdoor deck and spent most of the winter watching “The Apprentice” from the hot tub while swigging Belgian lambic straight from the bottle. Who would you rather hang out with?
Eventually the snow melted and approximately five seconds after the last blob of gray winter mush evaporated from the streets, it was 95 degrees outside, because Cleveland does not believe in moderation. Our home lacks central air conditioning, so Marc began the task of installing three window units throughout the house, and the units worked admirably until the day I decided to run the dishwasher while the AC units were chugging away. Suddenly, all the electricity in the house vanished. Marc went down to the basement and proclaimed that we’d flipped the breaker.
But why did it flip, I wanted to know, and my dear husband reminded me what the inspector had said. "We only have a 30-amp system," Marc said. "We should have at least 100 amps, and until that happens, we’re not going to be able to run everything at once."
Fine. Okay. I get it. I really didn’t want to have to sacrifice precious Freon-cooled air, but a couple of temporary warm spots in the house were totally worth running the dishwasher. This wasn’t perfect, but I could make do. Hell, I thought, I used to drive a Firebird with a broken driver’s side door, and I had to climb in through the passenger side. I used to not even have air conditioning. I used to stay alive eating nothing but Ramen and potatoes. I used to drink Genessee cream ale every single day. I can do this.
And I can. I could. I could remember to turn off the upstairs window unit to run the dishwasher. No problem. That is, until the circuit starting flipping whenever I ran the microwave. Or the toaster oven. Or my bleeding hair dryer, and pretty soon I was freezing in horror every time I even considered using any sort of appliance, and not a day went by when you couldn’t find either Marc or me standing somewhere in the house screaming something like, "HONEY! I need to charge my cell phone! Could you unplug the refrigerator?"
We started calling electricians.
One of the more interesting facts that has come to light (pardon the pun) during this process is that not only do we have insufficient amperage, but also a dastardly circuit box called Federal Pacific that, as the lore goes, has a rather alarming proclivity to occasionally not flip when overloaded, thus causing giant fires that kill housefuls of sleeping people.
Now comes the part where we must pay Thousands of Dollars (well, just less than two thousand, to be fair, but that still counts to me as Thousands of Dollars) to have an electrician rip out the wiry guts of our home and replace them with something less likely to contribute to our demise. Apparently we are also replacing the "mast." Mast? Do we live on a pirate ship? I am so confused.
All I really have to say is thank god for Marc and my dad and people like my friends Nat and Keith and Melinda and Will, all of whom have this amazing ability to Know Useful Stuff, like that a mast is an electricy thing that lives outside the house and does … something, and that furnaces have filters that need to be changed, and that sometimes cars need rotors and oil and fluids and stuff. Thanks, guys. Where would I be if it weren’t for you?
Up in flames, apparently.
posted by Kate at 11:55 AM link/comments
Sunday, August 07, 2005
And Ooo-Whee, Shut My Mouth, Slap Your Grandma
My grandmother, who is 85 and a diabetic, nearly went in to a coma a few nights ago because her blood sugar level dropped to a staggering low. Frantic phone calls, an ambulance, and a late-night visit to the emergency room ensued. Fortunately, she is OK and recuperating at my parents' house.
It is widely known that there exists in my family a strong propensity for Being Stubborn. Everyone in our family is stubborn to some degree (particularly my brother, who gets it from both my mother's and father's sides, and whose stubbornness is -- I'm quite sure -- entirely capable of exerting measurable horsepower). My grandmother is, literally, the Mother of all Stubbornness, and nowhere is this currently more apparent than in her abject refusal to eat enough food to sustain human life.
A couple of days ago, my mother called me at work, laughing her ass off, to tell me this: My brother (in a battle of wills that I can only imagine must have been nothing short of apocalyptic) was trying to get Grandma, who is a bit hard-of-hearing, to have something to eat, and every time he called to her from the kitchen, she responded with "Huh?"
My brother: Woman! You need a hearing aid!
Grandma: Huh?
My brother: YOU NEED A HEARING AID!
Grandma: NO! I don't have to urinate!
My brother: NO! I SAID YOU NEED A HEARING AID!
Grandma: And I told YOU I didn't HAVE to urinate!
My brother: NOOOO. I SAIIIID. YOU. NEED. A. HEAAAAAAARING. AIIIIIIIIID.
Grandma: Oh. No, I don't need that, either.
We've asked her to please eat more; we've begged her to please eat more; we've threatened putting her in "a home." All to no avail. My mother and aunt, desperate to get nourishment down her gullet, signed her up for Meals on Wheels, which is a daily service that shows up at her house with a fully-cooked, ready-to-eat lunch and dinner. All she has to do is unwrap and eat. We all thought this plan was going reasonably well until the other night. The reason she almost fell in to a coma? She simply hadn't felt like eating dinner, which, in a diabetic with her medical history, is sort of akin to someone in renal failure saying, "Eh. I think I'll just pass on the dialysis today, thanks just the same."
In an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem, we've asked her why she doesn't want to eat. The answer she gives is this: "I'm not hungry, and I can't stand all those colors." Colors? Fuck ... what? COLORS? What are you talking about, old woman? "You know how that food is," she says, her face contorting into a look of disgust usually reserved for someone who's unexpectedly come into contact with a great deal of fecal matter. "It has all those colors mixed together. It makes me sick to even think about all those colors." Then she shudders audibly.
How do you argue with that? There is no way to counter, because there is no way to remove the color from food. We've discussed simply feeding her nothing but vanilla milkshakes and cauliflower, because technically, white is not a color, but rather the absence of it. We've also discussed calling the optometrist to see if he could outfit her with a set of black-and-white contact lenses so she can't see all those fucking colors. So far, though, we've not arrived at a single feasible solution, and if we don't come up with something soon, I think my mother might just tie her up and start shoving garden salads down her throat, screaming, "No colors, huh? Take THAT yellow pepper and THAT cherry tomato, bitch!"
None of this would surprise me, because just as we all stubborn, we're also moderately (lovably?) insane, and one of the unspoken things that keeps my mother and my aunt from throwing up their hands in defeat, from pitching Grandma into a nursing home where her eating will be someone else's problem, is that they know, just as I do, there is some part of us that is exactly like her, and I hope that if I am so lucky to survive for another five decades or so, there will be someone around to protect me from myself.
posted by Kate at 2:17 PM link/comments
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Please Refresh Your Browsers
So. Yes. Right. If anyone’s still bothering to check in on this site, I thought I’d let you know that I’m trying to get things going around here again. This site started in 2000 as a group blog whose primary purpose was for my friends and me – in that way that only wise asses in their middle 20s can – to wax on about how clever we all were. Five years hence, I still think we’re a bunch of clever buggers, but it’s become apparent that this thang ain’t what it used to be, and by that I mean "No one but me posts anything, and even I don’t post anything all that often."
Lately I’ve been sort of examining my life and thinking that I need to Do Something, and it all sort of hit home the other night when I found myself sitting home alone on the couch watching "Being Bobby Brown" and wondering how the hell I got to the point where I whiled away my time watching a man talk about how he once helpfully pulled a turd out of his wife’s ass, and how not only am I watching such a thing, but not actually really enjoying it at all, but staring at it because, well, the new season of Law & Order doesn’t start up ‘til next month, and the History Channel’s having another All-Nazi Marathon (Dear History Channel: Please find something else to talk about besides Nazis. Thank you.), and I could run on upstairs and get that book I’ve been reading, but that would require me to actually go upstairs and maybe turn off the television. Is it any wonder, then, why I collapsed upon my poor work-weary husband a couple of weeks ago, snotting all over his good tie and whining about being depressed and unhappy with my career? And he held me, and then told me – in a very kind way – that I ought to really just shut the fuck up and Do Something Besides Watching TiVoed Episodes of Dr. Phil and King of the Hill, and maybe that Something ought to be writing.
I think I told him to go to hell, which is my normal response when he’s being very perfectly right about something.
From here on in, it’s just going to be me chiming in here at Six-Layer Kate. I never really paid a lot of attention to what kind of readership the site got when we were in full swing, and it’s not as though I ever attained (or aspired to) Blog Rockstar status, but on quite a few occasions over the past half-year or so, I’ve been asked by friends, family, acquaintances, and even a couple of people at my 10-year high school reunion (the fuck? how did they find this site? but if they're reading, hello!), "Why don’t you post to your blog anymore?" And I usually mutter some crap about how, y’know, I got married and we bought a house and got a dog and stuff, and it was hard to find the time to post what with all the working and buying of weed whackers and a great big suggestive-looking leaf blower/sucker contraption that makes me laugh like hell whenever Marc uses it around the yard because it looks like he has a giant dick and scrotum strapped across his chest. Evidence:
At any rate, my excuses are bullshit, and the real reason I don’t post (and why I don’t write) any more are because I’ve been lazy, and I want to stop that now.
Lock and load. Here we I go again.
posted by Kate at 11:47 PM link/comments