Day in the Life of an Idiot

 Mason is headed back to Wesleyan at the end of this month and so we are rushing to get a few house projects done before he heads out. This morning--at THE MOST AWKWARD TIME, of course--the Home Depot truck showed up with our pallet of retaining wall bricks. Worse, because he arrived on a day when all of the Homesmart Energy people are at work at the end of my block, there was NO WAY he could maneuver his little forklift to leave the huge pile of bricks on a wooden thingie anywhere but on the street. 

So Mason and I ended up having to breakdown the pallet first thing. Mason had barely shaved. I didn't know which end was up. But, somehow, miraculously, we got all the bricks moved up to a spot under our maple tree and the wooden pallet rolled into the backyard, hopefully to be gifted to someone on the neighborhood Buy Nothing group.

Now I'm just sweaty and tired and EXTRA stupid, you know?

Seems like a Monday.

 
Image: blue iris growing in my boulevard garden.

As previously discussed, my attempts at gardening this year feel very... fail. Thanks to the timing of our trip to Connecticut, I didn't get a good head start. There are a lot of leaves still in the beds, and at this point it might be more disruptive to try to move them. I am trying to see what leaving the leaves in the woodland garden does, but the others? Not so much. 

But, what's that (in)famous line from Jurassic Park? Life finds a way.

It's also been really dry here in Minnesota. I believe we are officially in a drought (again.) We had just gotten out of it after the snow melt, and yet now we are this very strange position of having parts of the state flooded while also being in a drought. When Mason and I were driving around Fort Snelling State Park yesterday, there were roads we couldn't take due to high water. Even though, as I drove us there, I could see several burned out lawns already.  Worse, it always seems like it might rain every morning, but the haze in the sky is actually from the Canadian forest fires, not potential relief. 

Yet, my peonies are out there in my backyard doing their best. Likewise, the Solomon's seal and bleeding hearts.


Image: Variegated Solomon's Seal. 


Image: bleeding hearts and hostas

The other big news around Chez MoreRounds (or, if you prefer, Roundhouse,) is that we got a new stove/oven. I guess in the US they always come together, so maybe I should call it a "range." But, it's that thing with which you cook and bake things. We opted for a new gas oven, so that was extra exciting because as part of the installation we had to have a gas technician do the hook-up. Mason, when we were prepping the house so the delivery people could get it through the door, asked nervously, "Should we even BE here if they're screwing around with the gas??" I mean, I kind of don't blame him for this sentiment, but it's actually a fairly simple hook-up. I just have this rule about handiwork I will do, which is "call a professional for electricity and gas." My feeling is that while, yes, water can do a lot of damage to a house, not hooking it up properly will not immediately kill me. So, I have done some plumbing? And props to all of you who rewire things? I won't argue with you if you suggest to me that some rewiring is not only easy, but fun. I'm just not that brave. I won't work with things that can murderize me if I make a small mistake.

 
Image fancy new oven. (Our floor looks filthy in this picture, but the tiles are actually grey with black "marbling," trust me, I also hate them. They are very retro, but never look clean.)

Anyway, this is the new beast. Today is the first day I will be making anything on it. The delivery came late enough in the day that we had all pre-agreed that it was a pizza day.

I have a couple of cute stories about the install itself. First of all, the guy who was our gas technician was named Lee. We hit it off immediately because he was very chatty... possibly the first person I have met in a long time who appears to be more extroverted than I am, more about that in a second. I actually started to get out of his way, so as not to hover over him while he worked, and he said that the company was actually appreciated, but then said, "Unless you're an old, white guy in boxers who insists on standing right in front of me while I'm crouched on the floor." Which, I laughed pretty hard at that. So, we fell into talking a bit and I did the Minnesotan thing about apologizing for the state of my kitchen, etc., and he said, "Oh, this is nothing," and then proceeded to tell me about his FIRST DAY on the job where he and his partner were called to an actual hoarder house. They're hauling out the old oven, when, out from the warming oven, scurries an entire family of RATS. One of which, in sheer panic, crawls up his pants leg and tried to hide in Lee's jacket. He's so freaked out that he dropped the oven and they ended up leaving a dent in the floor. Somehow, he not only STAYED WITH THIS JOB, but also apparently didn't get fired. 

But, at one point, I did leave him because he was struggling with removing the old hose (did I mention that the other thing I learned about Lee was that he is younger than our previous stove?) which had corroded over the 30+ years that we owned the previous stove. And, I was surprised to hear him talking to someone. Apparently, Lee is enough of an extrovert that he called one of his friends to chat with while he struggled with my appliance.

As an uber-extrovert, I found that deeply charming. 

I gave him very high marks on the review that the company sent along afterwards. 

The other big news from yesterday is that there is some progress on my novel. My editor, who is very savvy like this, has suggested that it "WOULD BE NICE" (hint, hint!!) to be able to put out a press release for my lesbian space opera during Pride Month. Seeing the brilliance in this, I have agreed that I will spend the next couple of days really looking at what I have left and make some educated guesses as to when I can deliver it to Wizard's Tower.

On top of that, of course, I finally need to decide on a title for this thing. Currently, I am in the "there are no wrong answers" phase of this process, but I'm going to have to narrow it down to something serious soon. Likewise, Cheryl Morgan has asked me for a blurb to sell "what it's about" to people, and so that's another project I'm tackling.

The good news part of this? I will definitely have a book out this year. 

The bad news? I'm going to finally have to get serious about finishing it!  I mean, I have 70,000+ words, so it is already technically novel length, if not yet "novel shaped." 

 Y'all, I fixed our upstairs toilet. This fix involved having to turn the water off, so I feel like a SUPER butch.

That is all.

Thank you for coming to my moment of self-appreciation TED Talk.

 ...that went down the drain? THIS drain?



Magic works, people. Magic WORKS.

Unfortunately.

I think, at least, I reversed the spell soon enough that it won't cost us the full amount that I had written on the paper, but holy hell.

So, what happened? Well, Mason went to take his bath last night. A wash cloth fell behind the tub. He couldn't reach it, so he thought, "I'll shift the tub a little." The other pipes going into the tub are clearly flexible, so he didn't even consider the 110 year old lead pipe connecting the tub to the drain pipe. SNAP! And a, "Ummmm.... mom? Ima?"

He feels terrible, but we all talked about THAT SPELL, so no one is blaming him. Or me, for that matter. We're all pretty cranky with Llwellyn's spell proof reader, but you know... the truth is, if it snapped that easily, it was bound to happen. My reversal of the spell may have saved us from the "what if" of had Mason not noticed until it was time to drain his bath.  That might have cost us a new pipe, a new bathroom floor, and, as this is our second story bathroom, a new kitchen ceiling as well.

As we say here in Minnesota: Could be worse.

Today I was supposed to meet my friend Anna D. at the Science Museum, but that will be postponed until Friday, as I have to ADUT today and secure a plumber.  Fun times!

 I mostly managed to stay off the internet today because I knew what was coming. 

Today was Mason's first day at his new job at the Science Museum. When I picked him up around 2 pm, there were a lot of other parents waiting out front in their cars. This program hired 80 students, I think. Most of what I know about what Mason will be doing is still fairly vague, but it seems like he's enjoying it. Today, apparently, they did a lot of getting to know you exercises and got a tour of the Science Museum (and the special employee tour which included the cheap, slightly broken vending machines.)

Shawn and I went to Menard's to pick up some plastic bins. We're continuing to deal with the fallout of Mason's reorganization of his room. He wanted a desk, which we bought for him some time ago, but moving the desk in meant moving OUT a bunch of books and disassembling (and selling) the top part of his bunk bed. A number of the books that got moved out will go to the little free library. But, there are also a lot of sentimental favorites that will be saved for the next generation of Morehouse-Rounds, and so those are getting put into bins and hauled up to the attic. (Which of course also necessitated a slight re-organization of the attic, because: of course.)

By the end of this we were all tired, cranky, and hangry. We ended up having a spat about dinner, which resulted in a drive through Culver's and a trip to Cafe Latte for gigantic pieces of PIE and CAKE because f*ck everything.

It seemed clear to me that we all had short fuses because we knew what had happened in the Senate.

It's been an awful week.

And we have only just begun to fight.

 I'm sitting on the porch because the weather is so nice.

It's 50 F / 10 C out, which probably doesn't really warrant wide open windows, but, after the last bit of winter we've had here, it's just what I need.

I spent a good portion of this morning cleaning.  Shawn is on her bi-annual or semiannual (or whichever word means twice yearly) fairly deep cleaning kick. I say "fairly" deep, because we are NOT the sorts to move the fridge to clean behind or anything of that magnitude. But, I scoot around on the floor and scrub-up bits of cat puke and dust that have become part of the decor over the past several months. Of course, the frustrating part is that when I'm finished with all of this no one will be able to tell that I've made a dent. Our house generates cat puke and dust spontaneously, I believe. Like, I bet if we moved everything out and hosed the place down, the very next day it would look Miss Havisham's.

I decided today would be a good day for housecleaning because, for reasons known only to the universe, I woke up incredibly sleepy.  It might have been the weird dream involving the sushi place that served their sushi with a bucket of live minnows and prawns, as well as a side of roe-encrusted nan.  Perhaps that wasn't restful. It seemed wise to take advantage of my sleepiness to do some mindless drudgery. 

Right, back to it!

In a minute I'm going to change into my painting clothes and go paint our fence.  It's already green, so I'm re-painting it green...which may seem like an odd choice.  I can't quite remember why we thought this was a good idea in the first place.  I do remember painting it the very first time many, many moons ago and our next door neighbor saying from her second story porch (just loud enough for me to hear), "Tsk, those Micks will paint anything green."  

This is not as random as it may seem.  

She apparently thought we were Irish due to the bumper sticker on my car at the time which read, "26 + 6 = 1" (which is a reference to the partition of Ireland and my personal politics.)  And you know, we painted our porch green too... so she might have had cause to think we had some kind of weird love of the color green. And, god knows, I might have been blasting Irish music while painting, too, so... not as odd an assumption as you might think, given that I'm Czech and Polish and German.  

When I was talking to Naomi about this last night at Wyrdsmiths, we stopped to wonder what a Czech or Polish or German person might paint a thing if they were feeling particularly patriotic.  Turns out, red would work for all of them.  But, I'm not painting everything red.  I mean, it DOES still kind of suit my politics, but you know., then the neighbors would have to be all, "Tsk, those Commies will paint anything red!"

In un-related news, I was going to see if I could find a Japanese language 'tape' to listen to while outside painting.  I may just have to listen to music (oh noz!) but it would be nice to reinforce my Japanese.... because, damn, I feel far too old to be starting a new language.  Though, as a bonus, I've been listening to my "John Learner" tapes in the car again.  What is funny is that, of course, what I remember best is the English and I find myself, not so much listening to learn the language, as making up crazy stories about the life and adventures of John Learner.

This is what I mean about too old.  The Japanese just bounces off me and I'm off in my imaginary world with fictitious John Learner.

Sads.

Speaking of things Japanese, though, I signed Mason and I up for Anime Detour.  We are now officially attending together!  That should be great fun.  I'm really looking forward to it.

Okay, I should stop stalling.  There is a fence to paint!

I'm officially overdue on my WiP now. It took a lot longer to recover from the total computer crash than expected, but I *do* think that the revision has made this a much stronger book. I have about 30,000 words left to write, which, if I push things, I can do in 15 days.

I may be fairly absent here, though, because of that.

Not much to report over the weekend, anyway. It really feels like fall here in the Twin Cities, so we got a lot of around the house errands done. I tend to gear up, physically, this time of year. So, there is paint ready to be applied to fences and walls and all sorts of projects like that. I also made a lovely batch of roasted acorn squash soup that's quite delicious as well. I'll be having that for lunches for the next several days, I think.

Mason has started up a new swimming class. He's in level 2, and he loves it. Now that he's figured out how to float, he's really got a lot more confidence in the water. It's nice to see.

We were all set to have him start painting the back fence when his friend from across the street came over. As Shawn posted in her FB: fence painting can wait, childhood can't. I do love that we have that sort of thing going in our neighborhood right now, where there are kids who know they can come over, knock on the door, and have Mason come out to play. That reminds me of my own childhood.

For myself, I really need to figure out how to get to the gym in the mornings/afternoons, so that I can get into the habit before the snow flies.

Okay, enough of this for now. Must write.

If you missed listening to me blather live on KFAI's "Write On! Radio" you can catch it in the archived files: http://www.kfai.org/writeonradio.

Actually finding the file is kind of confusing. You have to click on the archive for 7/20/10, and accept the terms and conditions. Then it looks like you got nowhere because there's a list of all the guests, etc. BUT, if you scroll down past the announcements you'll find a tiny little header "Previous Shows" and a reddish button for either .mp3 stream or real audio. That's the show. I'm in the second half. As far as I know there's no good way to skip ahead, alas. I'd say I'm worth the wait, but I'm not sure that's true. (I felt like SUCH a dork.)

People who listened live said I did okay, but I felt stupid to the point of being giddy and I'm disappointed I didn't get a chance to mention my up-coming gig at Uncles or Resurrection Code by name.

Speaking of feeling like I'm all over the place, I've hit the ground running for the second day in a row. I had a couple of birthday related errands this morning (for the little boy, who won't be so little soon. On the 24th he turns 7!) One of which took me out to the Maul, which is always insane. Then I zipped home long enough to paint about four more slats of the neighbor's side of the fence. The white house to the south of us is under new management. The landlady is very nice, but has an inspector on her to improve the property (yay!). One of the things they wanted done was for the fence to be painted, and since it's technically ours we promised to do it. But, it's a bigger job that it sounds because sections are quite rotten (it was a fence we got second-hand -- one of our first big house projects and like a lot of our first jobs, we didn't really know what we were doing yet.) So I had to replace a few boards, prime them, etc. All in between bouts of torrental rain and the roofing trauma.

I'm making slow progress on that. Plus, I just got a call from Steve, our roof guy, and I need to run back home because I took the pictures of the roofing process off the front porch and he needs them to be there for the inspector. Oh, yeah, and the gutter guys come today.

As well as a photographer from the Pioneer Press.

The only time the photographer could come was 3:00, which is when I usually leave to pick up Mason. So I very cleverly arranged for a playdate for Mason with his friend Ava, and Ava's family is going to take them directly to their place. Normally, Mason would be over the moon at this sort of thing, but he's been going through that phase I remember clearly -- the one where you finally sort of realize for the first time that things DON'T ALWAYS WORK OUT. Suddenly, the world become full of horrible possibilites. What if while I'm at school the Russians drop a nuke? Will I see my parents again? (That was my big one.) But for him it's what if ima doesn't come to pick me up because she's in a car accident?? Or, more strange to us, what if ima and mama just decide to suddenly leave me alone and drive away and never come back?

This new phase first presented with the latter question, which baffled Shawn and me. I mean, what? Why would we abandon Mason and, what, fly off to the South of France? I don't know if he overheard us joking about that sort of thing when we thought he was asleep (which I will admit to likely having done) and took it seriously, or if, as I now suspect, it's all part of this bigger nebulous fear of THINGS GOING WRONG.

I used to have nighmares. Mason, so far, doesn't. I wonder if this is just the outward manifestation of what my subconcious tried to deal with.

Anyway, I have to run. More later.