Oh, my stars and garters!

Rocks in my head

I have written before about my inability to map out, start, and complete projects. Like my long-planned cactus garden. It's only going to be about 35 square feet. It's not even a garden, it's a mailbox planting. Yet, no lie, entire subdivisions have been built in the time it's taken me to get this together.

After months of inactivity and weeks of dithering, I finally have the dimensions, the plants, and the soil amendment. I even have a potato fork to break up the clay. But now I am stymied. I need rocks. I need rocks now. I can't start without the rocks because they are going to form the border and help anchor the weed cloth. 

But there are no rocks to be found, at least at any place that's open on a holiday weekend to sell them to me. I need about 15 rocks, each about the size of a small rabbit (Eric's description; I would just hold my hands apart about the length of a rabbit and say "yea big").

That doesn't seem unreasonable, but the only rocks I can find are those in my neighbors' yards, taunting me with their rocky good looks. How come they get to have rocks? Who the hell do they think they are? I can hardly go around in the dark digging them up out of people's lawns, but don't think I haven't thought about it.

So unless I can scratch up some rocks tomorrow--and I might mean that literally because I'm going over to Wain's tomorrow to scour his property line for some--my easy weekend project will once again bleed over into a multi-phase disaster.

What the hell is wrong with me? How do you people who, you know, get things done do it? Don't tell me it's because you plan ahead and get started before noon, because that's just stupid.

Another favorite Eric B.

A very distant second, he is, but essential during hurricane season, even for us inland rubberneckers.

Voice mail

My sister and I were talking about crack a few weeks ago for some reason, and she said she'd never smelled it. Really, you've never smelled it walking down a city street or anything? I asked. She said no, and even if she had she wouldn't know it. So I tried to explain. It's sort of a sweetish plasticky smell, very chemical, I said. Oh, she said, and we moved on to other topics because there wasn't too much more to say about that.

Yesterday I got an excited voice message from her after she got back from a trip to San Francisco:

Hello. This is Jill. I am calling to say hello, that I'm home, and you have your choice of souvenirs that I bought, and also to tell you that: I finally smelled some crack last night! In Chinatown! And I thought that you would be very proud of me.

Well, goodbye.

I am proud, and I'm glad I can still teach my sister something every once in a while. I suspect being a big sister will never stop being rewarding.

Friday Free Play

There are those songs that you love and can't even objectively tell if they're good or not because they so firmly belong to a certain place and time. Like I can't hear "Cum on Feel the Noize" without thinking about third-grade P.E. class, which you'd think would not be such a great thing to revisit. But every Friday we had Friday Free Play, which meant we could listen to music and either jump rope or play cageball, a vast improvement over the usual routine of making humiliating, never-ending attempts at passing the Presidential Fitness Test.

The coolest kid in our class was a Quiet Riot fan, and one Friday morning he asked the surly gym teacher to play the single on her little record player with the speaker in front. This kid's status was unassailable; at eight years old, in Plano, Texas, he had a mullet and an earring, wore tight black jeans with a pair of drumsticks in the back pocket, and managed to pull off an honest-to-god strut. He took a little shit for it, but not too much; we all knew no one else even came close.

So all us kids listened, and it went over pretty well. He asked to play it again the next week. And then Friday Free Play was not complete without it, and we clamored for it every single week. We had music, or at least a song we liked because it was part of our own lives and not because we heard it in our mom's car all the time. It was great, being one of fifty sweating, exhilarated third-graders jumping rope to Quiet Riot every Friday.

The next year we abandoned that song for Van Halen's "Jump," which to my nine-year-old self was pleasingly appropriate, given all the rope jumping, and still a pretty good song. 1984 was even the first album I picked out for myself, although the tape mysteriously disappeared after I played it for my mom on a road trip.  I'm sorry, though, "Jump" doesn't rock nearly as hard as "Cum on Feel the Noize," and sometimes people wanted to listen to Huey Lewis or Lionel Richie instead. The point is, it just wasn't the same.

I don't remember what we played in fifth grade. It's possible the surly gym teacher got in trouble for meting out too many swats and we had someone else in charge who was kinder but didn't understand the importance of playing metal 45s during Friday Free Play, but don't quote me on that.

I Googled the coolest kid in third grade just now before I wrote this post and found his band's MySpace page. I've never heard of them, but they sound like a lot of other bands I have. You can tell the band is from Dallas, somehow, by listening to them. I'm a little disappointed I don't like them better, but I am happy to report that he still plays drums and looks exactly like himself.

Restful

I miss living with Roone during campaign season. We would get drunk and throw things at the TV a lot.

I'm taking next week off from work, just 'cause. I want to try my hand at a little landscaping, ride my bike, swim in relatively unpopulated pools and lakes--I always delay my summer vacation until after school's back in for that reason--and read some books. What will all this free time and aimlessness do to my posting frequency? I don't know. It is a mystery! Tune in next week to find out! Or not! Whatever you do is fine with me! Because you are a good person!

Fairy tale

Six months after the wedding, after numerous delays and excuses and after Eric got stood up yesterday at the time and place agreed upon, we finally got our enlargements from the bad photographer man. The pictures look even worse blown up and stuffed into cheap-ass frames. The big portrait made me want to laugh and cry simultaneously, so I just settled for making a weird noise in my throat and put it back in the bag to be dealt with later.

Neither of us are terribly photogenic, it's a fact, but we were so happy that day and I have seen good pictures of the two of us so I know it's not impossible.

I didn't think I would care this much; I mean, Eric and I are together and having a really good time, so what does it matter? It doesn't, not really. But I still think it sucks royally.

Why on earth did I hire this guy? If you ever need a photographer, get references. Lots of references. Don't just go by the portfolio, which this case looked fine, albeit with a few red flags, but it was not representative.

A lot of friends have told me I have an obligation to publicly warn people about this guy, but for some reason I can't bring myself to do it. He's just so pathetic I can't even be angry at him, just at myself for not picking up on those red flags and running away as fast as I could.

Observation and criticism

Our cat is so dumb we have to let him inside to go to the bathroom. Also, my neighbors are playing guitar and singing in their backyard. They sound pretty terrible, but they are trying to harmonize in this broad, soaring way that makes me think they think they sound great, at least.

Welcome Joel, my guest blogger.

Ok, not really, but he sent me this joke today:

Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: I can't tell whether you mean "change a lightbulb" or "have sex in a lightbulb." Can we reword it to remove ambiguity?

Hey, that was great. I hit CTRL+C, a CTRL+V, type a few sentences, and I have a post! Thanks, Joel!

The let's-try-this-again garden

I was so excited to plant a garden last spring. But there was a wedding and the subsequent fallout to deal with first, and then this got in the way, and then that, and then it was May, a little too late to plant. The week after we finally got all our seeds and seedlings in the ground, the temperature shot up to 95. The next week it hit 100. Then 102, where it stubbornly stayed until about a week ago.

We watered every day for as long as we could, but the dry, intense heat resulted in massive garden failure. The seeds all sprouted, coughed feebly a few times, and retreated back into the earth. The seedlings fared no better. Even the succulents started to wilt as the backyard filled with dust and broken dreams. At one point I asked Eric if we hadn't ought to load up the old truck and try our luck out west, where I'd heard there were successful gardens and jobs and fruit just hanging there off the tree so's anyone could pick it, as much as they wanted. Eric got me to lie down, put a cool rag on my head, and counseled patience.

Sure enough, it's finally cooled off a little--sadly, by cooled off I mean 95 with 80 percent humidity--and it's rained at least a little every few days this week. Maybe I'm jumping the gun, but it seems like it's a decent time to plant something again.

Here are the hanging tomato plants we put up. I'd rather plant them in the ground, but our yard is mostly shaded. This way we can move them around until we find them the best sun and hopefully keep the raccoons away. I think they look kind of silly with the swingset chains, but I couldn't find large hanging pots anywhere. Apparently there was a vote a few years back, and they have been eliminated in favor of those coconut fiber atrocities. If I could banish those and year-round icicle lights, I swear the world would instantly become a much lovelier place.

Jury-rigged swingset-chain plastic pots, on the other hand, are classy and beautiful and should be allowed to grace, nay, dominate, everyone's yard. I should have just used pickle buckets, which are free.

Oh, and I planted some basil and some lemon verbena on top of the tomatoes, even though I don't really know what to do with lemon verbena besides smell it. And we put some peppers and mint and stuff in the square foot garden. Now we water and wait, and hope that after all this work we can have a salad in a few months. 

Farm

The farm is nice. Nice roads, nice buildings, nice people. When I go out there, I think it would be great to have something like that. Then I remember I can barely keep two cats, a couple of pecan trees, and a handful of potted succulents alive without feeling a little overwhelmed at times. So forget all that.

The donkey is the greatest. He's like a big dog, if big dogs had hooves and manes and made ungodly braying noises that ring out across the yard.

His braying may be jagged and terrible, but his nose is soft and fuzzy.

Lots of plants in the greenhouse.  I could not do it justice.

Hey, why the long face? Har har har. I'm a little wary of horses.  This one's name is Fancy.

I could not stop taking pictures of the goddamn donkey. I love the goddamn donkey!

Not pictured: Lots of stars, heat lightning, stripey clouds, and beer drinking. That stuff is great but not nearly as photogenic as, say, the donkey.

Fall on your face

The students are trickling back into town. As my life intersects less and less with the UT campus and kids in general, and as our college town becomes more and more a city that happens to have a gigantic university in the middle of it, the UT calendar doesn't really affect me that much. Except when I go to HEB, where the aisles are starting to fill up with clueless-looking girls in rush* shirts walking three abreast and sullen dudes in sandals pushing around carts full of Natural Light and Totino's pizzas. Then the UT calendar affects me very, very much.

My home life is also affected by the start of school. Eric is the one who has to put on his mean face and wrest beers away from a bunch of whiny underaged entitlement monkeys all night, and that makes him grumpy and tired. I'll have to try to be extra sprightly for a while to balance things out.

It's funny, though; the start of school, however removed from my life it is, always makes me feel a little sad and excited. It's even a little cooler out this week, and I have a couple of tomato plants and a little basil guy ready to go in. They would not have lasted two days in the July heat but will probably do beautifully through October.

*Chi O or Zeta, not 2112 or Moving Pictures.

If I were 19 and reading this I'd advise me to shoot myself.

I started cleaning my house as soon as I got home from work tonight. Now I have a clean house but nothing to write about. Except how clean my house is. It's really clean! Well, not really clean. But it's cleaner. Clean enough. This cleaning was long overdue, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend what's supposed to be a pretty, not-too-hot weekend scrubbing grout and washing towels.

This is all the crap I vacuumed out of the carpet. I think carpet is disgusting. I'd like to know who thought Hey, I know, let's put down a permanent absorbent surface upon which everyone will walk, spill food and beer, and vomit up the birds they caught in the backyard! Because I'd like to tell that person their idea was terrible.

I do like that it slowly and invisibly binds up all that filth, hiding the extent of the problem for as long as you need, so you're not confronted with the evidence until you've already done something about it. Carpet has fallen out of favor lately, and rightfully so, but since I've had a house full of it, I have discovered there are advantages.

Fit

Ooh eee ahh oooooo yaaaaaaaaaaargh, I do not recommend getting a mosquito bite on the bottom of your foot.

Olympics

I could totally do all that running and jumping and diving and stuff; it's just that I don't want to.

Not kosher

JLowe* kindly bought these for us this weekend because he wanted to give them to someone and could think of no greater bacon fans in his life.

They are, as promised, full of both smoky bacon and crisp mint flavor. The combination doesn't taste bad so much as fill you with a deep sense of wrongness and the merest hint of violation. I suspect we will have them around for a while.

I also tried a bacon chocolate bar at work the other day. It was a little disappointing in that it was neither very bad nor very good. I had really thought it would be one or the other. Instead it just tasted like a moderately good-quality chocolate bar with Bac-Os mixed in, not the salty-sweet delight/terrible aberration I had been expecting.

Anyway, if you see me around, hit me up for a novelty mint and I'd be delighted to give you one. There were no takers on the Iranian cigarettes, though, so I'm not holding my breath. Which for some reason smells like Altoids and Liquid Smoke right now.

*Who has a master's degree!

Still cain't paint

The painting class was fun, but it is clear I simply do not have a knack for oils, as satisfying as they are to mush them around and mix them together. No one but me, my teacher, and my classmates will ever know the extent of my limitations for sure, though, because I dropped my just-completed, still-wet painting in the parking lot, smearing everything around and embedding filth and gravel in the thick parts. Ah, well.

Cordial invitation

Someday I hope to have money enough to install a pommel horse in my house and hire talented, eager young men to perform on it for me and my friends.

After we get bored with that we can wander off to float on the lazy river that winds around the property, taking a detour to tear it up on the tank-firing range for a few hours. Later, when everyone's dried off and things are winding down a little, we'll watch the in-house ice sculptor do requests. It'll be like the caricatures they draw for you at Six Flags, only so much classier. You'll come to my pommel horse/lazy river/tank/ice sculpture party, won't you? Although I would probably have to ask that you BYOB because all this could get pretty pricey.

Sink or swim or, you know, whatever.

It can't be denied that our swimming teacher is not very interested in teaching us to swim. She likes to give us long drills and then wander off to talk to the lifeguards and send text messages. Unless you get her attention and ask her very specifically to help you with something, you're out of luck. She's only about 18 and she teaches kids' classes and manages the pool all day before she gets to us, so I suspect she's just over it by the time we get there in all our grumpy/eager adult student glory.

Despite the lack of instruction, I've been improving slowly, and my physique has even changed a little after just a week and a half. Really, just the tiniest bit; you wouldn't notice, but I can feel it. The freestyle finally clicked for me. I still flail around and have a hard time getting all my limbs to be where they need to be, but at least I understand why they need to be there to get me through the water. It feels powerful when it works, and incredibly goofy when it doesn't. I can build on that.

I don't think I'll ever be an especially serious swimmer, but I'm thinking about joining the Y by my house to get through the winter months. I feel like a better person all around when I swim regularly, and despite the lameness of the actual class, hitting the pool every evening has been a bright spot in what's been, for various reasons, a crappy couple of weeks.

This weekend: Painting class! I'm going to become a full-fledged dilettante if it kills me. Is "full-fledged dilettante" an oxymoron?  Well, tough.

Tiny Iranian cigarettes

Or should that be cigarettettes? Whatever you call them, they're not bad. One of Eric's customers brought them in to the bar. I've been passing them out whenever I remember to. Ask me the next time you see me and I'll give you one.

Bring me the head of Bob Costas on a stick

Seriously, I can see what's going on. I can tell when one swimmer gets to the end of the lane before the other swimmers. And if I can't, well, that's why your network drummed up all those superfancy garish graphics for us. Really, you don't have to state the obvious constantly, without pausing for thought or effect or to take a goddamned breath. An entire stadium lit up with fireworks shooting off every inch of its perimeter is a stunning sight? You don't say! I would have thought that as ordinary as cockroaches if you hadn't been there to prattle on and on about it.

Other than He Who Will Not Shut Up, I'm enjoying the Olympics. It's great to turn on the TV every time I cruise past it to see some guy doing like a million flips in the air or beat a world record by a hundredth of a point. I'm not much of a sports watcher, but it's fun to watch people who are really, really good at what they do, particularly with the sound off.

Taupe flag of surrender

Beige/taupe/whatever is a great color for a TV room! What the hell was I thinking, trying to impose some actual color on the walls? Seriously, the taupe is deadly dull, but it's not offensive, and whoever did the paint before us did a fantastic job getting it up there. We've decided to take the money we would've spent buying paint and prep crap and put it toward framing colorful art instead. If that makes us lame, so be it, but I prefer to keep my brains inside my head if at all possible. I'm just not feeling the home improvement this month, and Eric doesn't care, so the path of least resistance it is.  What are y'all doing this weekend?

You win this round, week of August 4, 2008!

This week is kicking my ass. Work is busy; it's that, uh, fragile time of the month; and swim lessons are both boring and tiring.

So what better way to cap off such a fine week than spending the weekend painting the biggest and most window-and-door-filled room in the house? We are planning to make it a nice clear yellow. I would even be excited, except that I loathe painting. Loathe. Loooooooathe.  Loooooooooooooooooooooooooa---okay, enough. But it must be done this weekend, or it will never be done at all.  Eric has some record shelves coming in soon, and once all the records are in them we will never move them again. Records are heavy.

Hey, if I get so annoyed with painting that my head explodes, the room could end up yellow with some red and gray accent splatters. That might be pretty. Maybe I can dab a little sea sponge into the contents of my skull and get a nice faux finish up there.

50 square feet of perky

Oh, dear. Imagine the screaming.

Edouard's a jerk.

We were supposed to have a tropical storm tonight. A tropical storm with a warm core rain event, whatever the hell that is. It sounds sort of obscene. Anyway, we were supposed to have one, and I was looking forward to it.

Instead we get nothing. Not even a breeze. While I was excited about a little dramatic weather, I am really mourning the lack of rain. The trees are starting to look dusty and sad, and it depresses me when that happens.

Swim class

It's just not as fun as last time without a ridiculously cute 20-year-old instructor boy that Jennifer and I can cackle over in the changing room like dirty old ladies. Plus I don't think I'd start any swimming lessons with the butterfly right out of the gate, unless the class was called How To Get Your Ass Kicked By A Stroke No One Really Does Because It's Impossible Unless You're Some Sort Of Freak.

But whatever. I already got some good pointers on my kicking. I vow to be able to do the freestyle for 20 minutes without stopping by the end of the month. I also vow to make a michelada out of one of the Lone Stars JLowe and Tina left over here as soon as I finish this post. Thanks, guys! It's good to have goals.

Stupid commute experiment, day over: Concluding

It was 105 today and probably will be again tomorrow. I am so glad I did my stupid commute experiment last week. And that swim lessons start tomorrow. You wouldn't think there'd be a huge difference between 101 and 105, but there is.

The commute experiment was good. It was fun to be out in the world, seeing the same things from a different angle every day. My days seemed longer but also more full. I was forced to be more organized and conscious of time, and I was pleasantly surprised by the new set of muscles that popped up on my legs after just four days.

I thought about transportation a lot all week, from stuff as micro as calculating how many hundredths of a mile I could shave off by cutting through a parking lot all the way up to my admittedly vague understanding of the implications of transportation policy.

I realized how glad I am to live in a neighborhood and a city where I have at least some options, and that it's very nice to work at a place that provides showers, lockers, a somewhat flexible schedule, and a close, safe place to park a car or lock up a bike. The experiment also made me wish Austin were more progressive on transportation issues, although what we do have and what is immediately planned is a start.

Invaluable tools: Google Maps, with its bus and walking directions, the Cap Metro trip planner, Map My Ride, good shoes, and sunscreen.

The end result: Realistically, I've decided I will probably continue to drive to work most of the time. It's a lot faster, for one thing, and as I'm using maybe a half a gallon of gas a day to get to work and back, there's no economic incentive to switch. Actually, I think I spent more money on fuel last week than usual; the activity made me really hungry, so I was eating constantly.

Still, it's great to get out there and move my legs around a little, and it's never bad to take a car off the road, so I've decided to commit to riding my bike to work at least one day a week.

The end. There's already another experiment in the works that I'll get to later, but don't worry. That will be spread out over a year and and will not produce posts nearly as pedantic as this one. 

Stupid commute experiment, day five: Silver biking

Today I rode my silver BMX cruiser. It has no gears and thick tires, but it's zippy and I've been riding it for a while, so I know how to make it do exactly what I want.

Time to work, door to door: 36 minutes, six seconds.

Distance to work: 5.41 miles

Time to get home, door to door: 35 minutes, 38 seconds

Distance home: 5.39 miles

Best parts: I did it! But the best thing ever was getting home tonight, dropping my backpack on the patio, and sticking my whole overheated head in the spray of the hose Eric was using to water the plants. Ahh.

Worst part: Coming dangerously close to throwing up after a short but very steep hill this morning.  Sweating, huffing, and violently gagging all at once is no fun at all. I had been fighting the humidity and a stiff south wind for about four miles when that evil little hill--which I've ridden up hundreds of times with no problems--almost undid me. I guess the cumulative effect of being out in the heat all week finally took its toll.

Tomorrow: Sleeping. Sitting. Swimming. And possibly summarizing.