Naps, Pee, and Skill Saws

Not enough sleep since the last pain shot hyped me up and I sailed through last week to crash on the weekend. So of course, I woke at 5:30 today, less than 6 hours after I sank beneath the sleep deep waves, full of blog ideas and bursting to get up and write all this shit down. Only God knows why, and she’s too busy laughing to tell.
We just paid off this fine little condo in one of the pleasantest corners of Woodbridge, right by a fine old windrow of eucalypti—the oldest things around here, animate or no. Yes, we paid this handsome house off. Right as the little bugger started crying out loud for serious maintenance. In the summer, we got the patio in the garden regrouted to make it uniform and safe—a long, messy job.
Then about a month ago, the hubby took my hand and led me outside to my lovely little garden full of roses and plumeria and jade and begonias. Such a lovely place. Such a lovely gesture. I thought he was being romantic when he led me under the patio cover toward a raised bed walled by lava rock and said, “Look at that.”
He pointed down at the tropical plants. I looked down, expecting to see a beautiful lily or fern as his reference, but was instead met with a troublesome sight. Where the closest white patio cover support beam should have been straight and, well, supportive, there were concave waves in the wood grain. Concave, meaning air pockets in wood. Dry rot. (A term I’ve never understood, since it’s from water damage.) And a bad sign in one’s patio supports.
So we called in a family-owned company and handed over much cash to fix the patio cover. A few days’ work, said the father, who was going in for a colonoscopy the day he took our check. Then it started to rain. In October. For a week. Unheard of here. Yet, it did.
So the workmen got a late start. Their first few days, they arrived mid-morning and left mid-afternoon, stopping for lunch and long phone calls. They painted new patio beams over the grass and the sprinklers came on, wetting their work, making them dive for the sprinklers and break a sprinkler head. One day, they took off after an hour and a half on the job to go see their dad in the hospital. He had a rectal bleed, and they couldn’t stay at work knowing he'd been in the hospital for a whole hour, could they? I’m not even sure he was in the hospital. Maybe his son milked this magic word to get them a day off. They never returned to work that day, though all the older man had was hemorrhoids. So on it went, the workers coming well after Good Morning America finished and leaving well before my son got home from school.
Skip to yesterday. I’d been exhausted all weekend, from the weather change or the time change or maybe letdown from the magic anti-inflammatory cocktail injected into my butt days before. A phone call had kept me up late the night before. Then up with the sun, I knew I’d need a nap before teaching in the evening.
But it was a culminative day in many respects. Our bedroom carpet is the only carpet in the house, and as such, seems to be the chosen emergency latrine for the "rental dog"—the one we’d like to send back to her previous owners, if only we knew who they were. She was found shivering by a freeway fence up in L.A. back in 2004, and we’ve been her faithful feeders ever since. She’s winsome and pretty, a blonde poodle with a circus-style jump and a shy, warbly attitude. But she can’t be fully trained. Her childhood must have been too fraught. We can never catch her in the act. She’s a sneak peer. In my bedroom.
Well, the bedroom has smelled of dog pee for several months now, and carpet cleaning for one room is very expensive. So three months ago, the hubby decided to buy his own carpet cleaner. It came a few days later and was unwrapped in the garage. And there it sat. For months. The hubby, in his male style of execution, must have thought that spending the money to order the thing was equivalent to spending the money to have the rug cleaned by professionals. Job discharged.
But the bedroom still smelled like dog pee. Hubby can’t smell anything, and I can’t manage the carpet cleaner with my current back problem. The kids, who have time nightly to socialize all over the web, would never be able to spare themselves from their giant, convenient homework loads and cute girlfriends for such a task, so we had a stale mate. Stale in more ways than one. That bedroom was rank, the acrid pee smell at times rolling over me in powerful waves, almost as strong as our local ocean. And it had gotten much worse of late with the workmen in the back yard, hammering and sawing and tromping around with loads of wood and giant saw horses. Miss Untrained-Never-Will-Be-Trained-So-Glad-You-Got-Me-A-Dog-Door wouldn’t go outside to do her business, and we had been too busy to chase her around the block every 2 hours to make sure she did it outside.
So I blew up last week, citing the pee smell and many other things, and the hubby finally decided to clean the rug yesterday. (Translation: I finally threatened to call a carpet cleaning company.) But he’s a creature of great habit, and rug cleaning for him equates with windows being open for 48 hours afterward so the rug can dry. And it was our first really chilly day. And the workmen were suddenly bursting with screaming industry.
So yesterday afternoon, I found myself desperate for sleep, huddled under the covers in my own bed, with a skill saw and fifteen hammers shearing off my ears from right outside my wide-open windows. My chilly brain would start to float off to lala-land nothingness (I’m really a good sleeper), then get chewwwwed sideways with another roaring burst of cheerful wood chippage. Then a BAM BAM BAM to seal the deal. On and on and on it went for what seemed like eternity, until my head felt like it was under the saw blade itself.
Why do such things sometimes coincide with such seeming pointedness? Why on this one day that I was so tired and so needy did Peter finally capitulate? Why did the workmen suddenly become conscientious and do the bulk of their sawing for the whole job well past their normal quitting time and well into my sacred nap timespace?
Was Mercury retrograde? Was Saturn angry? Was Neptune dyspeptic?
I tried to move to my son’s room, but his grumbling at being displaced and “You’re using my covers?” teen outrage sent my inner victim into rage, and I sulked instead of sleeping.
I am still tired. And cranky. But I do own this house. Outright. That’s MY patio cover they’re fixing, again today, right through naptime.
Well, the carpet doesn’t smell of pee any more. But just wait. It’s only Wednesday, and the workmen are not quite done scaring Her Majesty out of the yard yet.

Post-Christmas Letter

Well, I'm writing a tad, but still cooking and cleaning up from Christmas, and watching missed movies. So for today, I'm posting the Christmas letter I sent to the family and friends. Minus the address.

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Dear People,
Life is full. We have a new house since January 19. Two miles from the old house. With a graceful amount of room throughout, big enough for parties. Big enough for the twelve people we had at Thanksgiving. Maybe 25 next year. It's got a lovely garden with roses, plumeria, azaleas, camellias, ferns and fountains front and back. There are Hawaiian koa wood floors downstairs and dark cherry floors upstairs, extra windows and built-in cabinets, and a whole bonus room for laundry. The living room is calm and peaceful with many windows and high views of giant eucalypti. We got new sofas and fancy lamps, but no coffee table. Need to leave the dance floor free. The family room is cozy and full of dogs and computers. The neighbors are friendly, except the very noisy crows in the trees. A car is in the garage!! Our attic is full. The boys have new bikes to get to high school. We like it. You should come and see it.
I'm teaching ESL at Coastline Community College since enrollments went down at Golden West College. I thank God daily for my fabulous job and hope California budget cuts are kind to us. Peter is still enjoying his pseudo-retired life since his layoff last December. He swims and walks daily, and he's taken over running the house in a big way, which I appreciate.
Scott is a senior and totally full of it as most seniors are, taking only 5 classes, (with an A minus average) and applying for college—mostly UCs and CSUs. Hey, California tax dollars provide great schools. SAT combined score: 2200 (out of 2400.) He's a babe as well. Six feet two, the quiet type, a great sloucher with a terrific smile. He also knows all the best websites.
David (14) is a happy-though-he'd-never-admit-it freshman with 3 honors classes. He swears—er—slaves daily over Spanish 2, mountains of geometry homework and a science fair project where he tortured plants for weeks. No more tuba. No more climbing trees. No more taunting his brother with a wild glint in his eyes. So he can see the computer to chat with his friends online, the amazing curls get cut twice a year, whether they need it or not. No, we don't know where the curls came from, but he is ours.
No fabulous family trips this year. Just a run up the state with Scott to check out colleges in July. He got bored. We got to San Francisco and Berkeley for the first time in ages. I visited my friend India in Wyoming for a few days, and I went to Washington state twice, once to visit Mom and once to bring her here to live. At 88, visiting doctors seems like Mom's hobby. She sees two a week. We have many more doctors in a small radius here than there are in rural Washington. Mom's new place is just around the corner from us and has a view of the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains on a clear day. It's just been remodeled, and is very cute. She's had a tough time with arthritic joint pain recently, but things are looking up.
I've taken 4 writing classes with Jack Grapes now, and I still love to write. For my next novel, I'm considering three female characters, one who's starting a fast food chain selling quality soups and salads—with Weight Watchers points counted. Another is engineering a computerized car that runs on bio-fuels (like soup and salad leftovers) and converts to light rail—you can drive it up and get connected to a train of other people's vehicles and go fifty or a thousand miles in record time on public rails, then just drive off the track and do your own thing. The last woman, zaftig, ethnic and very classy, wins an impossible national election in a time of unprecedented economic downturn. Her recovery plan involves tax dollars spent on programs developing a healthy fast food market, new public transit systems that allow converted cars on them, and methods to change organic garbage into green fuel. Which stinks when burned. The bad guy, who threatens our heroes with foreclosure, scandal, and severe acne, is a Detroit dunderhead Hummer exec, married to a soybean oil hydrogenation queen. Pushing Bad Fats and Oils on America, these two sadly end up drowned in a vat of McDonald's special sauce.
Title: One Fat, Two Fat, Red Fat, Blue Fat: Big, Bad Oil vs. The Little Fat That Could
OR: The Lean, Green Farting Machine

Sarah Palin, eat your heart out. ;)

Enjoy your year!
Love, US Warm Weather Folk

That's all for today, but stay tuned in the coming weeks for more words of wisdom and silliness as I delve into my deepest, darkest emotions to make Jack happy and rid myself of this back pain that seems to be highly correlated to repressed emotional shit.

:)
Amy

first blog, like a first bath for the baby

Whoohoo. I get a blog, finally.
I'll try to do it without getting shit in my eye.
Yeehaa. My Christmas present from my kids!
Happy Holidays.