What animals ARE these?

I do not live with two poodles.
I live with two ferrets in suits of poodle.
Ever watch a ferret for fifteen seconds?
It's up and over and all around, nosing here, darting there. In constant motion, in search of God knows what, but certainly not whatever's easily found.

All night long, the poodles want to get under the blankets. When they've accomplished that, they want to get out from under the blankets. Max has lost every sense he ever owned except a slight bit of scenting ability, which does not help him find the top of the blankets. He roots around, whanging his head upward every other step to knock the blanket out of his way, the whole circuit of the bed. While I lie not breathing, pretending that I can sleep through this. Finally, I open the blankets wide. The fresh cold air rushing underneath next to my warm body allows him to get out.


When I arise in the morning I have One Thing That I Must Do, and that is to medicate the poodles. I tried for a long time to pry their tiny jaws open as I was bent down to their height. It's physically easier to hide the quartered or eighthed pills in bits of butter, or liverwurst, or (and this is the result of lengthy and expensive research) Turkey and Turkey Gravy Gerber Stage 2 baby food. 

No matter what I use as disguise, they find the substance that they must ingest for continued health, eat the expensive and carefully applied disguise food, and spit out the infinitesimal bit of medication.
Afterward they go to the door, stare out and bark at nothing. They don't want to go out; they want me to get up and attend them. They don't need anything; they just want to know that they can make me come to them.


They don't want the food I've put before them. Each wants his brother's food. Same food, same dishes . . . his is different and better.


I've done it to them. I have done it to myself. I know this.
And this is why I must never get another puppy. I must only ever get grown up dogs Who Know How To Act.
I am too easily trained.

Stupid Glue

This is not my oven; I borrowed the picture from This is Broken. I have a microwave oven that looks just like this, except that at the moment mine has no handle on the door. 

You know households where nothing is ever broken for more than a half hour? My impression of many of my usual commenters is that they live in households like that . . . that they live lives of Absolute Tidiness and Good Maintenance.

I and my household are not like that.

More than a year ago, the handle broke off the microwave oven. That is, the bottom of the handle broke loose from the door. We grew accustomed to pulling at the top of the handle, and quite forgot that there was anything amiss, until, of course, the top of the handle finally broke. 
As they always do, eventually. 
The final bond always tears loose, once the separation process has begun...


I waited for Husband to fix it. In the Rule Book, husbands are supposed to be the small appliance fixer people. He didn't fix it. After sufficient time had passed, I went to the store, bought some Super Glue (Husband calls it Stupid Glue) and reattached the handle. It's worked fine for several months now. Last night Husband broke it off again.
This morning I came downstairs and started the coffeemaker. Idly, I picked up the microwave handle to see if I could fit its broken pieces onto the broken pieces remaining on the appliance's door. Voila! It clicked into place without my feeling the first prickle of sweat. 
Amazing! Going to be a good day! I'll just get the Super Glue from the kitchen junk drawer and do this baby up and I'll be a heroine.
And that's when the trouble started.
I have a couple of junk drawers in my kitchen . . . in which are stored more batteries (a few C size, forty AAA, sixty-four N) than in the junk drawers of any twelve people you know. Some of them are in the sealed original packaging. Quite a few are rolling around loose, and yet others sit alone in the blister pack that cozily held two, one of which is now in service. I found four film canisters from a camera I can't even remember owning. I have been saving them for eventual developing. This morning I threw them all away. All the photos are probably of Lake George and the boat we had twenty-five years ago, and little black poodle BeauBear in his white sailor cap and sailor collar. I remember all that quite well enough and don't need pictures (that probably wouldn't develop anyway) to remind me of happy times past. I found several tubes of household adhesive: stuff that needs to be mixed together and applied with a putty knife. I know what that stuff looks like when the [admittedly failsafe] repair is complete. There's a black line that forever shouts, "This is where this thing was broken and got plastered back together!" I found a ring of keys on a keyholder that I loved while I used it. It was a four-inch-long piece of leather with a snap hook on one end. There were four keys on the ring. I have lived without those keys for more than five years; I suspect one of them is a key to a restaurant I worked in, and a couple of others might be to the old Village Hall, which long ago reverted to a private residence that's been owned by, I think, three parties since I worked there. I threw away that whole mess.
So. 
All this, and no tiny tube of Super Glue. I did find an unopened package of Lock Tite . . . an unspillable bottle with a brush the size of a nail polish brush. That's what the picture looked like, anyway. When I opened the package, and then the bottle, the brush was stuck in the dead dried up glue, so I never got a good look at the actual bristles. I remember hearing a comedian saying that you could only ever use Super Glue once because you'd never be able to get the cap off again. I laughed long and hard over that; the truest things are the funniest.


Before I started to write this, I Googled for a photo of a GE microwave with a broken handle and found messageboards full of messages from people with broken microwave handles who had unscrewed one end of the handle, couldn't find how to get at the lower screw attachment and were looking for help. The ensuing discussions got into how to remove and replace the rubber bumper that seals the door and blahblahblah. What?!?!?! Those are people who like the fixing and not the fixed. I guess that's how one fixes things properly. 
I can't be bothered.
I'll make a run to the store later, get another tube of Super Glue, stick the thing back together and call it good. We need milk anyway. After I've used it, maybe I'll put the Super Glue in my makeup bag or somewhere where I'll run across it from time to time and know where it is when I need it again. 


About once every blue moon I wear false eyelashes. 
The tube of eyelash adhesive is about the same size as the Super Glue tube. 


Better rethink that.

Sunday morning, winter

Finally, winter weather. The blinding brightness of sunshine-on-snow is emotionally strengthening. I would not say that I had been wishing for snow cover, but in these first few days, it's pretty and not yet treacherous. After some time, after it's thawed and frozen, thawed and frozen, and it all becomes ice . . . then I'll want it to be gone. I am reserving lots of wood ash for traction. For now, with two more days of a long weekend, lots of wood for the stove, the cold and the howling wind makes me feel cozy . . . like a mouse cuddled up in my nest.

Image from "Old Balls Please" BBC Nature & Outdoors

The presence of the bright full moon has disrupted my hibernation mode. I have closed all the bedroom shades, but I can't stay asleep for more than two hours. Part of that is Max's doing . . . even with his diaper/belly band, he must be lifted to the floor to . . . feel better . . . and then replaced in bed. Part of it is that my brain train won't stop steaming down the track. Far too often I feel, as I lie in bed in the dark, in the quiet, that I am suffering a bout of Irish Alzheimer's, that is, forgetting everything but the grudges. What a weight to drag around! Jacob Marley, adrape in his chains, has nothin' on me in these full moon nights.


I have cinnamon raisin bread in the bread machine. It will be ready in about two hours . . . a long time from now. It does not yet tantalize with its yeasty warm aroma. 
I have the scatter rugs flopping and thumping around in the dryer upstairs. Putting down freshly cleaned scatter rugs makes me feel inordinately virtuous.
I paid the property taxes yesterday . . . drove down and around the hill to the Town Hall and handed over my check and that confusingly arranged tax bill. If not for my exposure to tax bills through Morning Job in Small Pond, I wouldn't have the vaguest idea what amount was required of me. Happily, the amount due is a few fewer hundreds of dollars this year. Thank you Agriculture Credit!


You might remember that last year my middle name, about this time of year, was Sparkles. I was obsessed with pearly sparkly jewelry, nail polish, lotion... I'm back to that now, but my focus seems to be narrowing onto my fingernails. I have a new toy: a crystal nail file. I love it. I keep filing my nails just for the fun of using the pretty thing.

I'm reading nothing but trash. Escapist goop. It suits my mental status in these winter months. 
All right. I have the wood stove going well, I have bread baking . . . I'm going back to bed. 
Because it's Sunday morning and I can.
I never claimed that I got any smarter or more ambitious in the wintertime.

Waitress anxiety dream #4031

It's full moon time again, kiddies, and we all know what that means: June has her epic nightmares and shares them with you. You might want to keep a half a Xanax handy.
Last time I saw the podiatrist, back when my toe was still broken, he said he'd always wanted to wait tables. 
"It's hard work," I said.
"Well, that's what everybody says, but I don't see what's so hard about it," he answered, the innocent. I wonder if I should share the following with him. It's a dream . . . a nightmare, but its parts are certainly real enough. I worked through many . . . many shifts like this.


Out of clean dishes, although there are plenty of dirty ones in the stacks. The heavy coffee mugs have pieces of food stuck and dried inside them. The dishwasher water heater gave up the ghost last night and nobody on the closing crew left a note so we could call the repair person before the store opened. It'll be washing dishes by hand in the bar sink all shift.
On the floor a pile of potato peels. One of the managers sees it, says, "What the hell?" and goes off, I think, to arrange for removal. But it's busy, he never comes back, so we all just step around it over it on top of it to get done what we need to get done. 


No more pre-measured coffee packets for the Bunn coffeemaker . . . partly used bags of No-Name ground coffee here and there in the waitstation. 
"How much to put into the filter?"
"Just so it looks about right." 
And where is the coffeemaker? Oh. Up there on the shelf an arm's length above my head. A maker but no warmer, so that once the pot is made (brewing while customers grit their teeth and tap their fingertips on the tables waiting for their cups) it sits and loses heat, which it does very quickly, necessitating brewing a new pot. ...if you can find enough raw materials and the few seconds and the room, among the coworkers darting here, reaching there . . . five of us with our trays in a twenty square foot floor space. 


No conversation in the waitstation except 


"Is this still hot?"
"Barely."



"This empty?" 
"More coming."


"What the hell is THIS???" from a waitress staring into a coffee cup with a dried bread ball stick inside it. 
"Mm. They're all like that."

I find one of the white crockery cups with the smallest flake of dried red sauce halfway down the inside, wonder for half a second if, untouched, it might just float off in the hot coffee and go down the customer's gullet unremarked. I chip it off with my thumbnail, and pour a cup of coffee from the half-filled brewing pot. Whoever comes after me will have watery coffee, but I have MY customer's, and I'm off out of the madhouse of the back of the house into the diningroom. White cloths, barely enough space to get between tables without my butt knocking over water glasses. 
The guests have no idea what the back of the house looks like, sounds like, smells like. 
Happy guests.


And now here come some disgruntled customers into the waitstation, coming after their coffee. Young men, soft and spoiled looking. 
"What's the problem here? Why have I been waiting for ten minutes for a simple cup of coffee? I'll get my own!" 
I am furious, stern-voiced: "Get out. Get out of here."
They were going, but my hand on one's polo shirted shoulder hurried him along. Part of me wished that his heel would find a drop of water on top of the greasy quarry tile and he'd go down, the pushy arrogant prick.


People at tables outside my station start to wave at me. "Can we get our bill?"  One of my fellow waitresses has left. Her shift is over: she's gone. Never mind her coworkers or her customers. I'm in the diningroom . . . on the stage, as it were, so like a mother bird, I lift my wing and make comforting welcoming noises, gather them underneath. Finding their checks, getting them more . . . what? 
"More coffee? Sure! I'll just whip up a fresh pot for you. It'll take just a few minutes." 
Turning, scanning tables, scanning heads, to see what else I can do on this trip. Anyone close to me would have heard, despite my lips moving not at all, "Oh God. Another flocking pot of flocking coffee."


Somebody orders two entrees and there is only enough left of one of them so that I have to take it out as a side, and lie to make it sound as if the cooks chose to present it that way because of the flavors or aesthetics or something. 
You don't want to admit that you've run out of food, clean dishes, coffee. 
You don't want to say, "We can't find our coffeemaker." 
You want to preserve, for the customers, the image of peace and competence.


And at the end of the shift, you'll go out and have pitchers of beer with your coworkers and laugh and laugh about sliding on a potato peel and nearly cracking your head on the counter edge. Somebody will say, "Why didn't he just go get me a broom so I could stick it up my ass and clean 'em up while I'm pouring drinks!" Laugh so hard you can't breathe . . . about the handle of the full-of-precious-hot-coffee pot coming loose as you reached way up there for it. Laugh about June pushing the customer out of the kitchen: [PUSH]"You can't be back here. [PUSH] We don't want you to [PUSH] get hurt!"

La Belle Langue

I studied and loved French for many years in school. I got pretty good at reading it, even aloud, but to converse with someone was always beyond my comfort level. Years ago when Husband and I were at Terre des Hommes in  Montréal, we enjoyed a ride in a little cart pulled by a strong young man on a bicycle. I tried to ask him if our little jaunt was free and I think I might have asked him if he had stolen the bicycle. He was very gracious in his correction of my error.


So my audible French is limited to reading aloud, preferably to non-French speakers.
And there are some words that I especially enjoy saying...
aucune
grenouille (or any "gr..." word, really)
Montréal (the way Montrealers say it . . . Ma'real)
le pêcheur
les étoiles
soixante-dix-huit
Connecting those words into any reasonable semblance of conversation is not only beyond my comfort level but at this point far far beyond my level of capability as well.


My father was in Brussels in World War II, always wanted to get into France, but never did, I gather. By the time any war stories would have been sensible to me he was dead so what daddy did during the war is a little sketchy. I do recall his speaking French with what sounded like a very authentic accent, though, and when I was first exposed to the study of the language I aspired to sound the way he had. I remember my high school French teacher telling me that when she went to France the muscles of her face hurt for a week from the unaccustomed exercise. 


Several years ago I met a young French exchange student who was staying with friends. I felt very shy about speaking her language to her, but it seemed only fair . . . after all, here she was having to speak American all the time! And O Joy! she told her hosts later that I had a very good accent. 
It remains one of my proudest moments.
I like to think that Dad would have been pleased.

Happy January 1.....

Counting blessings

My coworker's brother has MRSA. It's a horrible horrible illness, causes pain that's off the charts. The patient is receiving a cocktail of antibiotics, his sight might be coming back slowly . . . and so the family waits to see how the recovery will proceed. 
Or not.
Yesterday, Alan said to me, "It's a lesson: Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff."


I woke up this morning thinking, "Only three hours of work today and then another long weekend. Then I thought about Alan's brother, and my viewpoint changed. The three hours of work became a little piece of my life instead of a whole hunk of my day that I just had to live/suffer through before I could resume what I want to do when I want to do it. 
I have a little pain . . . my back is stiff . . . but boy! Compared to the pain some people deal with, I'm kickin' up my heels.


There's no doubt that today I am aging, but I sure am more grateful than I was yesterday.

'T'is The Day!

How much do you know about Christmas? A quiz.
I am unaccustomed to doing so poorly on quizzes that I choose to take for fun. 55%? Come on!


Yesterday the vet gave me a good gift. She pronounced Maxie "not ready to give up yet."
He has a little UTI and some antibiotics to take care of that, and he has some muscle relaxer medication to make his back feel better. He hasn't complained, but he's been walking around hunched up like an inchworm. Medicated, he seems to feel much more comfortable, and he's very nice and quiet: he's sleeping a lot. Maybe it's so very restful to have some relief from what has apparently been ongoing discomfort. Dogs are stoic. Even the ones (Max) who seem like crybabies . . . they're stoic. They bear things that they don't need to bear . . . if only they would tell me!
On Friday night I moved something and a lost tennis ball rolled out; Max was all over it. Not quite up to Fetch, but very happy to see Good Ol' Tennis Ball. And outdoors, he's still prancing like a Saratoga thoroughbred. So the vet's pronouncement was not unexpected, but still very welcome. I guess we'll have him for a while. 
Nice gift.


So here I am, up at 3:00 on Christmas morning, watching my fire in the woodstove, listening to Angus snore next to me. Max never got up out of bed to come downstairs with us . . . he is still a small lump under the blankets upstairs in the bed. MiMau is toasting nicely in her spot in front of the stove. 
Later Husband will fix the prime rib. I'll make whipped potatoes, or maybe twice-baked, and some salad, and we will feast and give the dogs bits of beef, and then we shall all nap at will. 

I have no desserty material, unless I make another chickpea/chocolate cake, which I could whip up in five minutes or so. Honestly, it is an absolutely delectable item, which must be eaten in small portions. Chickpeas are just chockful of fiber. Trust me: I know . . . now, after having eaten two-thirds of the cake in one sitting. I was so annoyed, last Monday night, that I was required to go back to work for a meeting that promised to be long and awful (and turned out to be, in fact, four long hours of tedium and tension) that I scarfed down, in one of my more memorable eating binges, what was left of the cake. I was . . . uncomfortable . . . for three succeeding days and nights. I cannot stress enough how important it is to control one's portion size of that particular delicacy. 
Wow. The memory alone is enough to give me chills.


I hope you all have the kinds of Christmases that you want, whether that's peaceful, exciting, child-wondrous, spiritually rich, or some variation/combination thereof. May you be blessed today in whatever way you wish to be blessed, and may you have the kind of joy that is so evident in this video from the Richmond, Virginia Animal League: Operation Silent Night.

Merry Christmas.

Peace

Ah. It is 4:30am, it is Saturday, Christmas Eve. I have no evergreen tree in my house. I have no Christmas lights, nothing to indicate that it is The Festive Season. Husband and I will exchange no gifts. And yet, you know...? It feels different here right now. I feel content and at peace.
Nothing has changed. Max is still old and feeble, I'm still fat. It's still gray and dark outdoors.
But still, I feel different.

Somebody asked me yesterday if I believed in God. First, I answered with the Correct AA answer: I believe in my Higher Power. Then I said, raising my arms to indicate the cosmos, "I believe in Something, some Plan." I don't need or care to delve into it any more deeply than that. I'm content for it to be Solstice or The Nativity or whatever.

It feels so good.

Ah, Monday. Yet again.

Pay day. That's good, although the thrill is lessened by knowing that the funds were transferred on Friday. Pay day is no longer the Christmas morning that it used to be when I got cash in an envelope. I should just shut up about that and be happy I get a paycheck, shouldn't I?


Weather's supposed to be good today. Right now, it is 24 degrees, and feels like 15. Every time I think of the "feels like" temperature I think of L from Florida scoffing that "If it's _______ degrees, it's  _______  degrees. Never mind what it FEELS like." Easy to say when you live in Florida where the temperature is currently 52 and will top out today in the 70s. How well I remember her shuddering and shivering, wrapped in her coat and an afghan on a balmy October evening when we sat outdoors enjoying an unseasonably warm temperature for the northern hills. "Feels like" ought to get a little more respect from someone who's experienced such an evening. 
Every year the same discussion: She wouldn't be able to stand the northern winter and I wouldn't be able to stand the humidity of a Florida summer. We have finally agreed on that and no longer speak of it.


This evening I will have the pleasure of returning to the office to take notes at a meeting between some volunteer board members and a few representatives of the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants. The proposal is to raze and rebuild. This is the second meeting of the parties. The first was long and labored. Our civic volunteers' comments bordered on the rude: late in the evening the man in the suit who wanted to invest in the community thanked the chairman for a single smile.
I can hardly wait to experience a second parley.

Sunday morning: relaxation cds, "Max's issue," and food

Some weeks ago I bought four or five relaxation cds to play next to my head for night-time going to sleep purposes. I don't need things like that in good weather when the windows are open and I can hear the crickets and the katydids and the owls and the wind sighs through the screens and slides its chiffon sleeves across my legs.

~image borrowed/stolen from One Man's Wonder

But now that the windows are closed and the only sounds I can hear are the snores and groans (and mutters and growls) of the poodles I'm finding these cds to be wonderfully soothing. I have quite a variety of sounds . . . windchimes, and one called "Sounds of Nature" that includes a disturbing sound of some insect that sounds like a buzz saw or an old-fashioned hand-cranked airplane propeller: click-click-click-click-wwwhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnne, over and over again. My favorite has been the thunderstorm that moves in from the distance; thunderstorms always soothe me straight to sleep. Last night I tried a new one called "Golden Pond." Wonderful. Sounds of oars sloshing in the water, crickets, frogs. It was so comforting that I wanted to stay awake and listen to it, but it put me to sleep anyway. Somewhere I have a hypnosis tape . . . it might have been a stop-smoking hypnosis tape . . . that had new-agey music on it and was very relaxing. 

My hair appointment yesterday was at 10:00am. At 8:30am I left a voicemail for my hairdresser asking her to call and comfirm the time. She called at 9:50am to tell me I was due there in ten minutes, not forty, and could I come at 11:30 instead of coming late for the 10:00? I agreed to that change, and mentally reaadjusted the hair/shopping sequence, muttering to myself about how I could have been there had she called me back earlier. It was my fault, though, for having lost the appointment card. The new one is stuck into my car's dashboard where I will see it every time I check my vehicle's velocity. By the time January 21st comes around the card will have become invisible to me. I need a secretary. Or a parent.

I fear that thes Max Issue is going to become a minefield between Husband and me. He seems to feel that Max's increasing issues are no more objectionable than Angus' cavalier attitude toward similar issues. Max knows what to do and can't do it; Angus knows what to do and chooses not to do it. I know the whole issue is disgusting and in deference to your sensibilities I won't go into more detail. Husband removes himself from the problem, leaves the whole thing to me and then recoils from my scent of parfum d'urine de chien. I have a feeling of No-Can-Win.

The man has his redeeming qualities, however. Last night he prepared a delectable repast of fried shrimp. He made cocktail sauce for his dipping, mine was sour cream and salsa verde. 

To die for.

That's another difference between Husband and me. A small supper at my hands is leftover baked potato sliced and broiled with cheddar cheese on top; his is breaded shrimp. He's far more willing than I to go out and buy the shrimp and get his fingers all gicky with flour and egg and crumbs, and he makes shrimp dishes while I make peasanty potato-and-cheese dishes. It might have something to do with the cleaner-upper duties and the person responsible for same.

A post . . . just to keep my hand in

It is 4:40am. The snow is flurrying with exactly the same everywhere-but-straight-down motion as in the "clever piece of technology" in the last post. Max is up with me, has been outdoors, is now considering eating his carefully prepared breakfast kibble. And now, he has tasted a few nuggets and declines the rest. His Enacard, hidden inside the dab of butter, got into him; I don't care if he eats more than that.


For a few weeks I have been considering that Max's time with us might be limited to the easily foreseeable future. His kidneys grow more dysfunctional and the symptoms grow more intrusive. If I had not had the mother I had, I might have disposed of Max long ago. I did have that mother, though, with whom I had no choice but to contend, and that bent the twig of my young self in the direction my mature self has grown. That is to say that many many times I fantasized about dealing death to my mother and being free of the tension and emotional pain she caused me, but I didn't do it, and I probably won't put Max down either until he's much sicker than he is. So far as he knows, life is good. He gets lifted up, lifted down, carried outdoors. Only once have I seen him staring into a corner for a few minutes, but he was calm and not frantic or lost. He found his way out. He's doing about as well as lots of old people who walk around taped into their Depends. 
My psychiatrist says, "But there's something wrong with Max."
My friend says, between the lines, "You are a craven wretch who cannot bear to be an adult and take adult decisions about your pets and your personal way of life, and it will take a crisis for you to do what any normal clean-living person would have done months ago."
And Husband says, "He's happy. Outdoors, he runs around interested in things, enjoying himself," and then, "It's too sad. I can't think about it."
When the day comes, it will be Mom who does the deed.
We have an appointment for an examination and blood tests on . . . Christmas eve at 9AM.


I'm pretty sure I have an appointment for a haircut this morning but I can't find my appointment card. My recollection is that I am to present myself at 10:30am, an awkward time in my Saturday routine. I should be at the supermarket at 10:30, but I don't like to hurry through my early Saturday lazy coffee-drinking time to get to the salon at 9:00am and I don't like to crowd my late morning with appointments. I don't know how much, on a given day, I'll enjoy strolling around the grocery store, examining packages, dreaming up recipes. So I always choose 10:00 or 10:30 for the hair. And I always have this discussion with myself. I think I might have left the card in the console in the car. That's handy, with me here in my nightgown and the car out there in the cold outdoors.


There are things that people say about me, to me, with which I cannot argue but that I do not like.
When someone says, "Poor little Max..." and I say, "What about poor little Mommy?" and the first speaker says, "First, Mommy isn't so little..." I can't honestly take issue with that since it is absolutely true. Compared to almost anyone I know I am . . . the larger of the two. But I think it's a little mean-spirited to say so.
Someone says, "You have a unique relationship with your pets," and I know she means I treat them as if they are humans and not as four-legged servants to my pleasure. It stopped my complaining, and Stopping Complaining is a worthwhile end.
Someone said about one of my last winter's posts that it was clear that I was not a "happy bunny" in the wintertime. No question about that. I determined, after that comment, that I would not post anything that wasn't upbeat, uplifting, smile-worthy. The determination lasted for perhaps two weeks; au fond I am not a Happy Bunny sort of person. The only time of year that I am reliably a happy bunny is early summer, and that only if I am free from the office for several days on end.


Christmas Day rushes hither. I have piles of Christmas gifts in a sack upstairs. Perhaps this weekend I will wrap and mail some. Perhaps I will do that next week or even next month. Husband and I shall have a quiet day with our faces sunk into prime rib (although he tells me it's almost impossible to get prime now and likely it will be choice rib), no revelry, no guests. 
A day of peace. What better?


It has taken about an hour to write this. I'm going back to bed with a bagel and my book. If there's one thing that brings me closer to happy bunnydom than waking up on a Saturday morning, it's having a bonus wakeup on a single Saturday morning!

For sharing at will

Click on the link below. 

When it opens, drag your mouse across the picture.

Positive changes at your command.

It's from an Estonian company!

Stupid Sunday

Click here: Draw a stickman

Snowflakes of the e-kind

Here's something that might use up several hours of otherwise productive time.

Popular Front Snowdays

Poodle boyz photos

Max, pre-haircut

 Max, post-haircut, aka Popsicle stick creature

I knitted that sweater for the boyz' predecessor; he was a little bit bigger than they are.

The boyz have changed my life such that I have been unable to pursue a similar project 

to create a sweater that would fit either of them.

A very unflattering photo of Max in front, Angus in back

I was practically standing on my head so I wouldn't have to get down on the ground . . . 

I don't get back up so good.

Poodle boyz also aging gratefully

The poodle boyz went for haircuts yesterday. Kim had told me that, in the middle of Max's last two grooms, he had suddenly burst into full cry, and had quite dramatic bladder and bowel events . . . on the grooming table . . . while he spun in circles, apparently horrified at his own behavior. So when I made this appointment, Kim and I discussed at length how best to handle Max's "do" for his maximum comfort in the short and long terms. 
We decided that this time she would avoid the hairdryer since that seemed to be the factor that set him off. It could be his hearing . . . I know it's failing . . . maybe there's a tone in the hairdryer motor that hurts his ears or something. So Max got a very close shave all over, except for his puffy little ears, so that he could air dry. He will be wearing his turtleneck sweater for the next several months, poor thing. But he didn't pee and poop all over the grooming table, and he came home much calmer than he has from the last few appointments. 
We live in a winter environment suitable for Samoyeds, and here I have these two little poodles, one of whom looks now like a creature made out of popsicle sticks, with all his little old man age spots showing through his thin little fuzz.
Max's kidneys have been not good for years and they aren't getting any better. One of the things that happens, the vets says, with "bad kidneys" dogs is that they begin to use up their muscle tissue. I expect Max will grow increasingly thin unto near-transparency as time goes by. But in the meantime, he's eating and drinking (oh boy! is he drinking!) and enjoying his life, so onward we go.


When I went to pick up the dogs, Kim was indoors. I went into her shop, clipped her check to the grooming table so she'd find it easily, and got Max out of his crate. I set him on the floor. I reached for the latch on the crate that held Angus, and heard Kim come in. I turned around to say hi and heard a crash. Angus had jumped out of the crate, the floor of which is about at the level of my collarbone . . . and had landed on the floor. He broke a plastic bin as he passed it in his descent of five times his height to a tile-over-cement floor, but he was none the worse for wear. No limp, no bruising, no cuts. Kim and I both watched him closely for a few minutes but he was gamboling and strutting in his usual fashion. I can't believe it. I think he might be indedoggystructible. Knock wood. 


Husband thinks that the weaker Max grows, the more energy Angus sucks up.

Winter, holiday bigotry, country talk, and other things

I have given in and had the snow tires put on. Much as I would like to believe that the weather will continue as unseasonably warm as it has been, we're bound to get winter sooner or later. The roads are clear and dry now and I can feel my tires' metal studs wearing down as I drive. It almost makes me wish for snow. Almost, but not quite.

When I was very young and lived on the way out country dirt road, we would always speak of the paved road at the bottom of the hill as "the state road." I wouldn't have been able to think of the route number off the top of my head, but recognized it when somebody else identified it that way. The reminder was Club 29, a bar with a pretty-colored neon sign that I passed every day on the school bus. As I recall, it was almost next door to the Catholic church. In hamlets, that's the way things are: everything is cheek by jowl with everything else.

Now once again I live on a way out country dirt road and my travel is mostly on or near or across two-lane paved state routes. The roads have names, but the names change as you travel along from hamlet to hamlet, so in conversation, everybody uses the route numbers to identify locations. "Up (or down) 145...", "...over on 443," "Down 30...", "Y'go over 7, up 145 to 10, follow 10 to 162, turn on 165..." Maybe somebody should devise a game, something between Bingo and Uncle Wiggily, just for the local denizens . . . sales of it could be a fund raiser for flood relief.

Somebody sent me an email two days ago with a link to an evil little song discouraging Christmas shopping in non-Christian establishments. The issues I have with the song are many. I deplore the Us and/versus Them premise, but the thing that really pisses me off is that the lyrics indicate a certain willful ignorance. The last lines of the song, "Now let's see, if not for Christ's nativity . . . " there would be no Christmas tree, no dolls and trains that Santa brings, no mistletoe, no this, no that, etc. 

I am no religious scholar, but I'm pretty sure that Christianity made use of existing traditions  as it moved up into and around Europe. I love Christmas lights' colors as much as I loved that neon Club 29 sign . . . but I think pretty flashing Christmas lights out in the snow don't necessarily have a lot to do with the sacred birth of Messiah. So if I'm going out to buy multi-color lights to celebrate the Savior's birth I guess, if I wanted to, I could buy them from a Jew or a Muslim or whoever offers the best price, and not have my eternal salvation suffer from the transaction.

You know . . . what if your Christmas lights aren't actually "out in the snow"? The people who live where there isn't snow in December had better be a little watchful about their celebration habits, or the American Christian Life United folks might be knocking on their doors.

To tell the truth, the first thing that set me off, as I watched the youtube video, was the line that included, "...tryna sell..." 

Tryna?

Is that shorthand for "trying to"?

Whenever you want to raise the rabble, the first step seems to be to dumb it down reeeallll good, so that those who are ruled by emotion rather than any intellectual discipline can say, "They're jes' like us'ns!"

We will now return you to your regular winter holiday celebration programming, whatever it may be.

Seven Good Things in no particular order

1. Lying in bed and having a small poodle nestle his warm body against one's slightly arthritic lower back.
2. Finally clearing up a pile of things dropped in one spot for moving elsewhere "later." I have an antique student desk at the foot of the stairway. It's in a little nook and the perfect place to drop things for later travel upstairs. Except that things seem to grow roots there. Yesterday I bestirred myself to clear out the whole mess.
3. Listening to a Great Horned Owl calling out there in the dark.
4. Being in the middle of a book that wants me to come back to it.
5. Seeing all three animals cavorting and exercising their instincts. All of us outdoors. In complete comfort. In late November.
6. Knowing that I need not go out among the maddened Shoppers who are armed with pepper spray and worse.
7. Sitting and conversing with Husband about news stories or acquaintances or the tractor. Such comfort.

Post-Thanksgiving Saturday

A fairly recent phenomenon: I often wake myself up talking to my dream companions. Husband told me the other morning he could hear me singing in my sleep. He didn't recognize the melody, he said, "but it was tuneful," a choice of words that made me laugh. As I poured my coffee and fed the dogs I had Helen Reddy singing Delta Dawn rattling around in my head. I never cared much for that song; it's hard to believe that, in my sleep, having no one but myself to please, I would choose to sing it.


Thanksgiving Day
A smaller group this year than on any holiday in recent years, but what a combo. Husband invited friend Joe, I invited friend Barb. They'd never met and I had a great deal of fun watching them preen for each other. 
Barb brought her dog Moby with her and Angus, who, you will recall, loves new friends, did his best to drive his guest mad with attention. Moby is an elderly, gentlemanly dog, however, and finally, after increasingly stern admonitions, made it clear that he preferred to watch undistracted for falling food. Angus stood back, tail all a-twitchet, quivering with happiness, but . . . back.
Food holidays belong to Husband and he is always extremely ambitious with his array of menu items. It's a family tradition that something gets forgotten. Usually it's the bread or rolls; this year it was the cranberry sauce. Practically treasonous, isn't it, to forget the cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving? But there it is,  still sitting virginally untouched in the fridge. 
I put away almost more food than we put out. We really have to talk about downsizing his offerings. He thinks maybe it's time to begin dining out on Thanksgiving. Fine with me. I'll be days cleaning and putting away every dish and cooking pan and utensil we own. And that was for four people.
By the time we got to dessert . . . two pies, a two-layer carrot cake, and cookies . . . I was nearly passing out from food overload. Most of the sweets are still nearly intact and I happily nibble between dishwasher loads. 


The weather is unbelievable. When have we ever had such a stretch of sunny, near-sixty-degree days in November? I adore it; I am out walking more now than I was when it was Official Good Weather time. 
Yesterday I thought I had lost my camera. I looked upstairs and down, in all the places where I put things so I won't forget where they are. It was in none of those places. Aha! There it was, among the Keurig cups on the kitchen counter! Who would not have looked there first? I'm just relieved to have it back again. I thought the gremlins (or that goddamn Jim D---- . . . a story for another time) had taken it. 


Late on Thursday evening I was once again reading about the benefits of apple cider vinegar. One site advised that if you drink water all day long, it's as well to add a splash of vinegar at every fill-up rather than add two teaspoons in one "dose." I tried the "adding a splash at every fill-up" yesterday. I do not recommend it. I needed a Pepcid at bedtime, which altogether defeats the purpose of the vinegar.

Damn the peppers!

Who needs peppers for clearing out the sinuses? The fresh horseradish in Husband's shrimp cocktail sauce did the trick.
I have the sensation!

Clearing out the sinuses

The week before last, Husband went to New Jersey and brought back a head cold. He stayed home and slept for half the week. On just the day he announced that he was feeling better, I began to sniffle, and took a day and a half off from work to tip over into sleep. Our household has, for the last couple of weeks, been a house of sleeping shifts.
This New Jersey cold seems relatively painless. It knocked out each of us for seventy-two hours and now sits quietly in our sinuses, not dripping, not hurting, just there. It did not sneak down into my bronchi and morph into a chest cold. You can't imagine how grateful I am for that favor.
Over the weekend I made a pot of chili con carne. I wanted it very very spicy hot. I bought fresh jalapeno peppers and chopped up several of them, making sure to throw in every seed. It fell short of my hopes. It was very tasty chili but it did not sear the linings of my sinuses, making it necessary for me to hold a paper towel at my nostrils while I ate. 
Sunday evening I baked russet potatoes for supper with a little buffet of various toppings, one of which was chopped fresh jalapeno pepper. With the seeds. Delicious. But still not paper-towel-at-the-nostrils material.
Perhaps what I need is to stuff the peppers with potato and eat that.


A friend recommends Ponaris, which for some reason I keep remembering as Peloponnesus. I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer to keep experimenting with food.

News flash: Bad things happen to children

I was sixteen. My sister was away at college. 
My mother had started going to meetings of Parents Without Partners. My sister and I were pleased with that development. Mom had never been a joiner, and it was a relief to know that she was getting out and about with people. It was a great improvement over her sitting at the diningroom table drinking and playing solitaire. I didn't know what the point of the organization was, but it was, apparently, a sort of dating service.
So Mom met this man and she went on a date with him. I think he came to the door to be introduced to me and they left. I watched television and went to bed. I woke up to hear some clumsy noises on the stairs . . . giggling and tripping. The man had brought my very drunk mother home, got her upstairs and poured her into bed. She passed out and he went downstairs. I stayed in bed for a few minutes, but I didn't like the idea that he was downstairs alone in our house. So I got up, in my little flowered jersey nightgown, and I went downstairs.
The lights were on. He was sitting on our couch. I perched on the edge of a chair. I wanted him to go. I didn't want him to be hanging around. We didn't have anything that he would steal, but I didn't like him there unsupervised in our home at midnight. 
He and I conversed. I think I got him a cup of coffee. He glossed over the drunk mother part: Your mom had a little too much to drink. I said that that was not an infrequent occurrence. He noticed my high school picture on a side table.
"Is that you?"
I nodded.
"Do you know what I see in that face? ...in that chin?"
"What?"
"I see . . . determination."
I liked that observation. I felt flattered. I probably made one of those noncommittal indecisive head and shoulder motions that sixteen-year-olds are wont to make.
"May I kiss you?" he asked me.
I thought for a minute. I didn't know how to say no, or indeed, why I should. A kiss isn't a terrible thing in and of itself. "Okay," I said. 
So, anyway, he kissed me. On the lips. It was a pretty chaste kiss. He didn't lean me over or mash his mouth into mine, but it lasted longer than I felt comfortable with, and he was all trembly. It was creepy, and I withdrew and said I thought he'd better go.
He thanked me and, shortly after, got up and left.
I locked the door and went back to bed.
I didn't tell my mother. Mom couldn't handle troubling news.


A year or so before, I hadn't told her that the assistant manager at the cafeteria where I worked after school had taken me into the walk in cooler, his regular choice of trysting places. What with the surprise of it all, the short notice, the nerves, our meeting was just a lot of writhing and sweating, no actual sexual activity, but our few minutes' absence from the rest of the closing crew was noted. His old girlfriend, an older woman of seventeen, was jealous. I was fifteen and flattered. 
He was forty-two.


When I was fourteen I was sure I was pregnant. At breakfast one morning I broke down in tears and shared that fear with my mother. "That isn't possible," she said. "You haven't done anything that would make you pregnant. Do you know what happens to make you pregnant?"
It was 1965. What world did she think I was living in?
She stood up and hugged me. She was shaking. She pressed her hand against my body and said, "There's nothing in there. There's nothing in there." A few days later I knew that I was not pregnant. 
That was all we said about that. 
Ever.


So I guess my point is that probably most kids have experiences that we would all be scandalized to know about. Adults have probably been hitting on kids for as long as there have been adults and kids. I don't think it's particularly healthy or recommended as a way for people to live, but it happens. Adults don't always have the best interests of children at heart, just the way no human always has the best interests of any other human at heart. Adults are not always trustworthy with children, just the way people, in general, are not always trustworthy, period.
I think it's too bad that adults are afraid to touch children who need a hug. Maybe if kids could get hugs when they want them, they wouldn't be so ready to take them from people who shouldn't give them.

It is Sunday at 4:37am and I am awake and growing drowsy. One of the reasons I love to get up in the wee hours is the fuzzy foggy fading that precedes my return to bed and the floating return to sleep. Ah, going back to sleep is one of my life's great pleasures. 
One morning I toddled back to my pillows with chilly toes. I arranged myself among my pillows, pulled the covers up to my ears, made sure my nose was well out into the air. My drift off to sleep was plagued by those cold toes. "I wish I'd fall asleep!" I thought. "My feet always warm up when I fall asleep." 
My consciousness had nearly gone away when a wave of warmth rolled over me from shoulders to feet. It felt just like a bolt of warm cloth moving down my body, enshrouding me in pure deep comfort. It felt so good that I smiled into my pillow, there all by myself, and the thought came to me: "I bet this is how it feels when you die."
Wouldn't it be just something, and not the least bit surprising, to find out that dying feels good?


I read something long ago that pointed out that the human body is designed to enjoy everything that it has to do. The functions required for ongoing life feel good. Eating, sleeping, digestive functions . . . they all feel good. It would make sense that dying would feel good. Not the getting ready to die: I don't mean that. I mean the final moment . . . the giving up of life. 
Maybe it feels good.
Maybe in the last seconds, there is a flash of, "What was I so scared of?"

Sunday evening

It's so nice to have people reading my ramblings and thinking, "Oh, me too!" It is nice, isn't it? Or does it indicate that I never have an original thought? That idea bothers me far less than it would have when I was younger. Especially now that I've reached nearly the middle of Sarum. Believe me: Excepting the occasional interpersonal kindness there is nothing any one of us can do that will amount to a hill of beans a hundred years from now. The things that take up so much of our thought . . . wars, standing stones, wildly successful careers or the lack thereof . . . well, perhaps not standing stones, since I hardly ever think about them . . .  in a hundred years nobody will even know what any of it was about.


It's been an incredibly mild and warm weekend, and I've spent a good deal of time outdoors. 
This afternoon I went around and picked up every one of the solar lights that I put out at the beginning of the Warm Time. About a quarter of the things have stopped working. Maybe the solar batteries have worn out or maybe there isn't enough sun these days to charge them. I put all but two of them into the cardboard box in which they arrived, and put the box in the barn. It was dark enough inside the box that almost all of them began to glow. I closed the flaps so that the light wouldn't escape enough to creep me out should I go out there after dark. The two that I did not put away are on either side of the front door. I like the way they look, and now that it's dark by 5:00pm they'll give me a clue where the house is when I get home from work.


In response to comments:

• School taxes are just another kind of property tax . . . a percentage of the value (as judged by the town assessor and his board) of one's home. School tax bills are sent out by the school district or by the school district's agent (a bank) and the funds  are for use by the school district, as distinct from regular old property taxes which pay for everything else.
• Those pictures are House-And-Barn. One property, two buildings. Three if you count the little garden shed . . . the red thing in the pictures with the poodles.
• We have the boyz trimmed in the very most practical and comfortable cuts we can get. Angus gets close-cropped because he's chubby and has silky hair that grows into mats; Max's body grows weekly thinner and he needs extra wool to help keep him from being shivery. So they both look round and roly-poly, but only one of them is. I had to trim Max's bangs yesterday because they were getting so long that they were irritating his eyes. Now he looks like an opossum. It isn't his best look, but he's more comfortable.
• Where neighbors are close enough to wander across a property line, there would be fences. Here where we hardly see a neighbor from one month to the next, and then only as we wave happily . . . they enjoying their morning walk while my vehicle careens down the hill past them on my way to work . . . we leave it to big fields to provide insulation.

It's Sunday evening.
Eight workdays until the Thanksgiving holiday.
Let the countdown begin.

Random thoughts early on a Saturday morning

I am horrified and incensed at the number of people who seem intelligent and engaged with the world who do not vote. 
Ever.
I know somebody who was running for local office (she lost) and her list of eligible voters revealed that an alarming number of people are not even registered to vote, and that many registered voters never vote. I just can't believe it. With all the brouhaha that goes on about politics . . . everybody I meet seems to have an opinion and why wouldn't they all since opinions are like that other thing that everybody has . . . and a lot of these yahoos don't step foot into their local polling places. 


Woolly bear caterpillars are apparently more of a weather predictor than I ever imagined. I used to work with a man who knew how to read them, or said he did. He would look at one and say, "See? It's going to be an early winter!"
And I'd look and say, "Hunh!"
I don't remember if the following winter turned out to be early or not.
I can't remember two months ago. 
I just remember that I love the light and warm months and I'm sleepy in the dark and cold months and that's how I go on. I might as well be a prehistoric woman. 
Except that I vote. 
Every time.


A friend of mine, years ago, told a bunch of mutual friends that I had not repaid a small debt to her. I had repaid the debt, not an hour, not a half hour, after having incurred it. You know . . . that slander bothers me so much that I think about it in the middle of the night. When I learned of it, it was a long time after the event . . . so long that I didn't know what in the world she was talking about. By the time I remembered, so much more time had elapsed that it seems small of me to be so bothered by it. Let it go, I tell myself, but here I am.


Husband traveled for a good part of last week. I loved it. I made noise in the middle of the night, I ate odd combinations of food, I slept and rose at odd (even odder than usual) hours. Right up until he drove in the driveway I was thinking how nice it would be to have a husband who paid the bills and dropped in once every week or so. The minute he was home, the air felt more comfortable, colors seemed to have more depth, my body felt more comfortable. Everything got . . . right . . . and I hadn't even known I was off kilter.


There is a slight coating of snow on the stone wall, on the picnic table in the front yard. It's supposed to be a sunny Saturday, so it will go away. And Sunday's forecast is "mostly sunny," so that's good. And then the whole week falls apart into gray wet mush. I need to get my snow tires on before the gray wet mush becomes white fluffy mush.


I am reading Sarum and enjoying it. It is so long that it might be the last book I ever read. And the print in the 1100+ page paperback is so small that I might lose my sight before the last page. But it's a story that rolls right along. It reminds me of a social studies book I had when I was in fourth grade. It was about the Piedmont region of the US and was narrated by the children of a family who lived there. My sister ridiculed it: "My social studies books are history books, not storybooks like that one!" I'll bet I remember more about the contents of my "storybook" than she does of her dry old histories of which she was so proud. I do just fine learning my history from stories: nearly all of what I know of World War II is from having read The Winds of War.