the one ring.

We'd been talking about getting married for a while. After Daddy got sick, we talked about it some more. Finally, one night, I asked what needed to happen before we were officially "engaged," rather than "probably gonna marry each other someday." He said he needed a ring. And I said no, that wasn't necessary. I don't know what you've heard about musicians, but mine does not make a lot of money. Plus, his car had just died and so there was that to pay for. A symbolic piece of jewelry was not required. After all, I am a modern woman. But he was insistent about it, so I said that the ring we got now didn't have to be The One Ring. He liked that idea, and then he started talking about the ring he was going to buy me when he got rich. Apparently, it's going to be so ridiculously expensive that we're going to keep it in a safe most of the time, which sounds more useless than a regular engagement ring.

Josh has a thing about diamonds. Aside from the whole blood diamonds issue, there is the fact that diamond engagement rings were a marketing device invented by De Beers. Also, he says that De Beers artificially inflates the price on diamonds by hording them and keeping them scarce. My view is that it's just a shiny thing anyway. The value of it is entirely based on its shininess and not on any qualities like usefulness or scarcity. So the price is artificially high? It was all made up in the first place. But I wasn't requiring a diamond, since I didn't require a ring at all. That was his idea, though I would certainly accept a free piece of jewelry, so as not to hurt his feelings.

The next day, to show him that I was serious about getting serious, I spent some time ring shopping. I poked around on Etsy, just to give him examples of things that I liked rather than making specific requests. I sent him an email with half a dozen links to various rings. I was very budget-minded. The most expensive one I sent him was $175, and the cheapest was $22. Only the most expensive one had a diamond, an uncut one at that, which I thought was kinda neat. But the rest were pearls or had no stone at all. You can get white topazes and white sapphires, which look like diamonds, but I didn't like that idea. Just be yourself, little sapphire. If I was going to have a non-traditional ring, I wanted it to look like one, instead of it just being an imposter. I was prepared to rock my weirdo engagement ring, to own my eccentricity, to make others wish they were awesome enough to get such a cool ring. In my list, I even included one that had a puzzle piece on it, to further encourage him to go any way he wanted with this, including a silly way. I felt terrible sending such a gimme list and ended with a line about how none of it mattered at all, it was just a ring, it's him I want.

When I saw him at the end of the day, I immediately asked if he thought I was awful and shallow. He said he hadn't read the email. Then he said that the dog had discovered a new archaeological find in the yard.

While I was looking online, he was driving all over town. He took a crash course in diamonds online and then hit some pawn shops. He found The Ring at the Raleigh Jewelry and Loan, a shop that seemed to specialize more in guns. The guy behind the counter was mistrustful at first. Then Josh said he wanted to buy that ring right there, and the guy figured out A.) Josh was not casing the joint, and B.) he was going to commit his life to some girl. Suddenly aglow in the contagious happiness of a proposal, he was helpful and friendly. Apologizing that he didn't deal a lot in engagement rings, he pulled out a tiny gift box from under the counter. It was truly hideous, made of glittery turquoise plastic with a pink bow that Josh had to tape on.

The man asked him: if I was such a great gal, why was he buying me a ring in a pawn shop? I don't quite understand the sales technique. Even pawn shop owners believe the stigma.

Josh does not believe the stigma. I do not believe the stigma, because it's the same one that says that thrift stores and yard sales are for poor people. Being who we are, it would have been, I dunno, wrong somehow to buy a brand new ring. Plus, at pawn shops, you can negotiate. Josh got them to knock $100 off the price to get it to $650. Later, when we took it to a real live jewelry store to have it resized, the professionals estimated its value at $1800.

That is the kind of man that I want to marry. Makes me all hot just thinking about that kind of savvy shopping.

He worried before he gave it to me that it was not The Ring, the right ring. The funny thing is that as soon as he offered it to me as a way of offering himself, it became The Ring. Like the stone and the metal it's made of, the value is what we attach to it. That would have been true of any diamond or pearl or puzzle piece ring he gave me. So it was this one, which turned out to be just the one I wanted.

o.

Shortly after we moved into the house, Josh spent an afternoon raking the back yard (remember - all trees, no grass). I don't know why he did this, as it didn't seem to accomplish much, but he was very proud of the act. Doing this, he unearthed various bits and pieces of the previous owners' lives. A bottle cap here, a mangled bird feeder there. It was like the arrowheads that some kid in your second grade class had found out near the creek, except not at all exotic. Apparently, us humans are just not capable of not leaving our crap all over the place.

Once we got the dog, even more of this stuff started cropping up. Maybe this went back two or three owners, because it had been too deep to be uncovered in a cursory raking. No, it needed paws. Paws that used to be white but were now kinda orange, thanks to that red dirt we have around here. We'd catch her chewing on something mysterious and have to take it away before she broke her teeth on it.

Some of this stuff was more of the same - plastic bags, broken glass, disposables that hadn't been properly disposed of. And then she started coming up with odd metal things. They look like parts from some kind of mechanical monster. I only engineer non-tangible things, so I have no idea what it could have been. Probably a time machine. I started collecting the more interesting items as a sort of art piece: Remix Archaeology.

I noticed that you could use the "artifacts" to spell out words, specifically the name of Josh's band. I thought it might make a neat picture for their website, but we needed an 'O'. We had one already, and we could just use that one again with a little photo-editing, but I felt that it would be truer to the spirit of Remix Archaeology if we could have a different object. I don't know why, but considering that sculptures consisting of crap my dog dug out of the yard is a relatively new art form, I figure I can make it go however I want.

A couple of weeks ago, Josh mentioned that Remix had found another 'O.' How thrilling! I asked what it was, and he sort of shrugged. Well, that makes sense. It's not like I could tell what any of the other pieces used to be anyway. At home, we were on the back porch, enjoying the ridiculously mild weather. I asked about the new artifact. He went inside to get it, saying that it was small and he hadn't wanted to lose it. He came back and put it in line with the rest of the letters. It was tiny compared to the other letters, and I felt bad that I would have to tell him this piece would not be acceptable for my purposes. It was also very shiny.

O.

I picked it up, and it was on my finger before I had a chance to turn around and see him kneeling before me.

st. george's horse.

I bought a little picture at a yard sale this weekend. The yard sales season is slowly starting up. The birds and the bees and the flowers all got the message about spring coming early this year, but whoever schedules the yard sales was caught napping. But there were a couple of church sales last weekend, which I arrived at just as they were ready to really bargain.

There were several pieces of artwork, all nicely-framed and a couple of them fantastically large. One was a still-life (yawn), another something abstract, and one more was a picture of an Italian bridge. I'm sure I could have gotten each one for less than $10, but none of them were really speaking to me. There was one little one, though, that I liked. I hate to trot out the old saying about not knowing about art, but knowing what I like, but that's pretty much me all over. So I brought it home, because I liked the expression on the horse's face.

As it turns out, the painting is of St. George slaying the dragon. I sorta figured that, except that I'd always pictured the dragon to be, you know, bigger. This one looked to be more in danger of being trampled by the horse than anything else, but maybe that's the part of the story you never hear: how it was really St. George's horse all along. Anyway, the painting was done by Raphael, which made me feel better about liking it. Any artist who got to be a ninja turtle was probably pretty good.

We looked around for a place to put it. I've written at length before about how we basically just decorate by putting all the stuff we like into one room. Maybe we're idiots, but it seems to actually sorta work. Ordinarily, you'd never put a sarcophagus next to a sled, but we did, and somehow it seems to be fine. I guess we're just trendsetters.

We finally found a nice little spot above our paper mache figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. It's a horse theme. Is it just me, or does this ridiculous mix of styles totally work?

Don't mind the Storm Trooper. At some point, he will be glued to the dashboard of Josh's band van. For now, he's just hanging out with the other horses.

confession.

I stole some pens from my dad.

He always had a lot of pens, like, more than would ever be reasonably necessary. He bought them in large multi-packs, maybe because they're cheaper that way and also because of some kind of Boy Scout logic that told him you can never have too many pens. He is absent-minded, too, so maybe they disappear like socks in the dryer. I don't have a specific memory, but it's easy for me to imagine him grumping around the house, looking for a pen. Daddy is a constant low-level grumbler. But it's light-hearted. Crotchedy. Say something smart back and earn a grin in response.

But the last time I visited, when he was in the hospital the whole time and not at the house for mealtimes with the rest of us, I saw a big cup full of pens on his desk. And they were the same kind I have at home, that I buy for full price at the shiny retail office supply store in two-packs because I like them so much. You know, you should always have a good pen handy.

So I took them. THREE of them.

In my defense:
1. There were a bunch left.
2. They were dusty.
3. Everything I associate with him has become incredibly significant.

foreign affairs.

As usual, my policy against buying more books (due to already having a "to-read" pile taller than something really tall) has been a total failure. I have no defense, at least no good one. I could say that I only pick books that look really really good and are really really cheap, but that has always been the case. That's how I got too many books in the first place. I have tightened my standards. I only buy books that are major award winners or by authors that I trust. Unfortunately, that still leads to me bringing them home in piles, though smaller piles than before. What I really need to do is to stop looking, to pass by the book section completely. And I sometimes try to do that, but then something catches my eye and I figure if there is one good one, there are probably more, and then it's all over.

The Durham Rescue Mission, a gigantic thrift store that still can't hold all its stock, has a free pile of books. Getting tossed into the free pile seems to be luck of the draw, as there is no consistency in condition or quality. One of the books I recently rescued from the pile up was this one:

Had I just been scanning the shelves, I never would have picked up this book. All you can tell from the side is that it's a pulp paperback, a mass-produced romance novel. The cover, featuring a man holding a woman with a mysterious smile on her face, with vaguely European landmarks in the misty background, looks like a bodice-ripper. The back cover features a glowing review excerpt from Cosmo, which is not a periodical I go to for book recommendations. Here is the blurb:

She met him on the plane. A most unsuitable man, she thought. Certainly not someone a sensible American professor on her way to do some serious research in London should consider becoming involved with. Yet there was something about Chuck Mumpson that Vinnie Miner found oddly irresistible...
Handsome, married yet separated, Fred Turner is another American in London doing research. But his days gathering facts in the British Museum pale besides his nights in the arms of the lovely television actress Lady Rosemary Radley...
Two Americans abroad. Two foreign affairs of the most unlikely sort. Two lives opening to passions and choices only dreamed of - embarking on journeys that would change them both forever.

This book was not marketed to me. I once stopped into a used bookstore that was nestled unobtrusively into a strip mall. I was hoping that I had found a hidden gem, but the place was wall to wall romance novels. My general feeling about these books is that they are sort of all alike. I was amazed that there were so many different books, since the genre as a whole seemed so formulaic. The lady running the store tried very hard to help me by pointing me to the Mystery Romance, the Historical Romance, the Western Romance, and I don't remember what else. I spent about five minutes with a very narrow shelf labelled "Classics" before thanking her and scooting out the door. I didn't see it, and if I had I would not have noticed it, but it's entirely possible that Foreign Affairs was somewhere in that little shop, maybe in the Overseas Romance section.

But I did see it in the free pile of the Durham Resuce Mission, and because it was in a pile and not on a shelf, I happened to see that magical little gold seal on the front: "Winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for fiction." And my brain could not compute what that seal was doing on what looked like a completely standard romance novel. Of course, the answer is that it is a romance novel, in that it is about relationships. It also, according to the Pulitzer committee (and Cosmo's book reviewer), is a dang good book.

I looked up the book on Amazon to see what kind of cover it had now. It looks like the kind of book I would have pulled off a shelf. The marketing of this edition is no less of a formula than it was for the other. It's just that the formula adds up to a different kind of reader. Me, for instance.

I do my book-buying based mostly on covers. I have been impressed with my ability to consistently pick good books. In fact, I've been getting a little smug about it. A lot of times, I can't remember where I got a book or what made me pick it up, but when I finish it, I find that I liked it. Good job, me, you rock at finding the awesome book among the thousands of ones that suck. But maybe this is not so much a matter of me knowing how to pick a good book as the marketing people knowing how to sell me a book that I will like, i.e. think is good. It is their job to help people find books that they will like. So they pick a design and a description and a selection of positive reviews that will attract the right people. Sometimes you need multiple editions to attract all the disparate groups of people, each of them convinced that they don't like "those other" kinds of books.

I suppose you could say that the lesson for me here was that I should not judge books by their covers. The text inside either edition of Foreign Affairs is the same, and it is what won the Pulitzer. Just because an author uses romance as her form doesn't mean that she can't write a heck of a book.

But the cover of a book has less to do with the quality of the contents than who the publishers are trying to sell the book to. It seems that I should judge books by their covers, because someone out there has got me pegged. They know what kinds of books I like, and they know what to do to make me buy them.

kent road sandwich.

When Josh first moved to Raleigh, he used to live with four other guys in a house on Kent Road. It was not a nice house, or maybe it used to be a long time ago. However, when he lived there, it really should have been condemned. There was no heating and cooling built-in, so the guys supplied their own space heaters and oscillating fans. The basement flooded every time it rained even a little bit. There was a lot of very questionable wiring. It was a dirty, nasty place, but the price was right.

I used to live in a hole, too, back when I was a poor college student. My hole was on Howard Street in Boone, a basement apartment that also flooded, had two windows in the whole place, and noticeably slanted floors (which was interesting in combination with the flooding). My bedroom had a six-inch hole in the wall covered by a piece of cardboard. But I loved the Howard Street apartment. It was just so full of character, and when you're young and stupid and poor, it's very easy to confuse flaws with charm. I feel like everyone should live in a crappy apartment at some point in their lives; then, the only way you can go is up.

However, my Howard Street apartment was a huge step up from the Kent Road house, and the difference was Kent Road itself. It was a capital-B Bad neighborhood. Rather, it was more like a little pocket Bad neighborhood, surrounded by reasonably safe student housing on three sides and the beltline on the other. It's the kind of Bad neighborhood you'd end up in by accident, because you were just trying to cut from Kaplan Drive to Western Boulevard, and you had no idea that in between was a reliable place to buy crack.

Here's a nice little story to illustrate life on Kent Road:

One night, maybe even very early morning, Josh's brother decided to go for a walk. This was, of course, a terrible idea, and I really don't even want to speculate what he was thinking. But Josh figured that if he couldn't talk his brother out of it, he might as well accompany him. They also took along the dog, because dogs don't care how dangerous the neighborhood is, they always like to go walkies. Down the road, they encountered a man sitting on the sidewalk, cleaning a shotgun. The man looks at them, looks at the dog, looks at them again, and then just nods to them. They continue on their way, end of non-story.

I'm sorry, did I forget to mention that the dog is a Rottweiler? I guess that was an important part of the story. Whoops!

But yeah, that's the kind of place that Kent Road is. I never really thought about that until after they moved into the Caldwell Drive house, where the worst thing was the busybody across the street who complained about that same Rottweiler getting into her flower bed. After they moved out, though, it seemed like pure luck that they got out alive.

The thing is, there is this weird sort of nostalgia associated with the places you live when you are young and stupid and poor, even places like Kent Road. I guess it's selective memory. Or maybe a yearning for your own bygone youth.

As a part of being young and stupid and poor, we ate a lot of crappy food. I was not poor at the time, but I couldn't cook, and I was cheap. So we ate frozen pizzas like they were going out of style. A lot of frozen french fries, too and sometimes mac and cheese with hot dogs. Every once in a while, we would really splurge by buying a bag of rolls, an onion, a green pepper, sliced provolone, and whatever cut of beef was marked down because it was about to expire. And also a bag of frozen french fries and soda and/or beer. We'd grill the sliced veggies and the beef, then dump the whole pile onto two bun bottoms that were sitting right next to each other on a plate, I guess because dividing things up would be too hard. Then we put the cheese on the hot mess and chowed down on a pair of snuggly steak sandwiches.

This, friends, was high living at Kent Road.

It's actually a pretty good sandwich, though I can't eat one without thinking about Kent Road and all the other assorted memories I have of my weekends there. We don't make them much anymore, probably because I rarely have steak in the house, and I've learned to cook since our Bad neighborhood days. But then one day a couple of weeks ago, I found myself with some leftover grilled chicken that I needed to use, and thus the Kent Road Sandwich was reborn.

It's not quite the same as it used to be, but then again, we're not either.

Kent Road Sandwich

• 1 T salt
• 1 1/2 t white pepper
• 1 1/2 t garlic powder
• 3/4 t cayenne pepper
• 1 t black pepper
• 1 t cumin
• 1/2 t basil

• chicken breasts
• onion, sliced
• green pepper, sliced
• buns
• cheese of your choice (provolone, mozzarella, monterey jack, whatevs)

1. Mix up the spices in a bowl. (Note: This is a spice mix I yoinked out of a Paul Prudhomme cookbook. You can make chicken this way and use in bunches of other ways. That Prudhomme guy knows how to spice a chicken.)
   
2. Dredge the chicken in the spice mix. Brown both sides in a frying pan. Transfer chicken to a glass baking dish, bake in 175 degree oven for 12 minutes, or until cooked through (cooking time depends on thickness of chicken. You could probably pound it flat before cooking if you wanted to get fancy).


3. While chicken is in the oven, saute onions and peppers in butter until they start to brown. You will not need to add any seasoning whatsoever to the veggies, as the spice on the chicken will do all the flavor work. I sometimes use the same pan, so the veggies get the spices that hung out in the pan.


4. Once chicken is done, slice it up.


5. Broil buns in oven until toasted (or use a toaster or toaster oven or flamethrower). You may also want to consider mayonnaise at this point.


6. Combine ingredients such that they form a sandwich. If you want, you could also put the completed sandwiches back into the oven for just a minute to get the cheese all melty.


7. Eat. Imagine that you are terribly poor and living in a really crappy house. Make it seem romantic in your mind.

fine.

Once, in college, I ran into a girl that I had roomed with in the dorms. We never had any huge blowout fights, though I did throw some rolls of toilet paper at her once. But we were not well-matched. She was very tidy, while I was not. She was incredibly uptight, and I was only kinda uptight and in different ways. We didn't hate each other, and had we not lived in the same small room, we might even have been friends. Anyway, I hadn't seen her or talked to her much since we all moved out. I didn't particularly want to stop and chat with her now, but the fact that we had shared a bunk bed for a year did mean that I should probably say hello.

"Oh hey, how are you?" she asked.

"Fine." This was a terrible lie, because I had a nasty cold, which was immediately obvious because my voice sounded raspy. I actually had trouble getting the word out, my voice was so bad. She gave me a funny look, because I sure didn't sound fine. I guess she knew that I wasn't very good at small talk, so hopefully she chalked it up to that, rather than me trying to avoid extending our conversation.

This story does not tell a particularly flattering picture of me. I would like to tell more positive stories about myself, but I just have so many more of the other kind.

Last Saturday, after visiting my dad in the hospital, I went to Josh's show in Boone. And it was weird, to be at a bar, having a beer, watching a show, while my dad was in the ICU. People I knew said hello, how are you, and I was always fine. Not because I didn't like those people or wanted to cut short talking to them, but because I didn't want to discuss my ongoing family emergency. And with them not knowing anything about it, that was pretty easy. I was fine. My dad was not fine, and that knowledge was lurking in the back of my mind the whole time, but I was fine and nothing in my voice indicated otherwise.

Then Josh's dad and step-mom showed up, and they already knew, because Josh had told them. Not that there was any reason he shouldn't tell them, because these people spend Christmas at my house; we are family. His step-mom came toward me, arms outstretched and her head titled to one side, and I was horrified to realize that I was about to receive a sympathetic hug.

Yup, that's me, being horrified at being the recipient of love and concern from another human being.

She asked how I was ("Fine"), and how my dad was ("Okay"). I told her that he was stable in the hospital, that his right leg had stopped working on him but he was moving it now, that I had seen him and he had been sedated but lucid. It was a very positive outlook. And that was a satisfactory answer, in fact, it was downright chipper. Perhaps I did not need sympathetic hugs after all, just regular haven't-seen-you-in-a-while hugs.

That was the short version, so here's the extended: my dad has atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that leads to strokes. He will not take any medicine for it. It is not an unusual condition for someone his age (77), nor is the medication he would take new-fangled or experimental. But Daddy does not trust doctors. He's been that way for a long time, and within my family, it's not an entirely unusual viewpoint, though he is taking it the furthest (hey, we're competitive, too).

I would like to believe that this refusal of his is more about acceptance of mortality than stubbornness and paranoid distrust. Maybe he feels like he has had a rich and full life and is not interested in being immobile and dependent in order to buy a few more years of being immobile and dependent. This is the story that I have told myself. I have no idea what its relation is to the truth or even to any stories that Daddy might tell, but it makes me feel better about the fact that my daddy is choosing to die. I do firmly believe that he does not fear death, but I don't understand why that would make him choose not to live.

It is his right to make that choice, no matter how much it upsets me and my siblings or burdens my mother, his caretaker. We all die, and I hope that when it's my time, I exhibit the kind of acceptance I'm ascribing to him. Except that the choice is not even that simple. By choosing to not take preventative measures against them, he is choosing to have more strokes. Which may kill him in one go or they may take him out, one piece at a time over the course of years. So I am in the awkward position of having to hope that my daddy has a great big stroke that kills him dead.

In this situation, that is the best thing to hope for. It is a crappy little hope.

So I didn't want sympathetic hugs and I didn't want to talk about my dad because I didn't want to talk about that. I didn't want to have to explain why he was refusing treatment, nor did I want to have to watch other people realize that they had no possible idea how to comfort me in this situation. So I would not mention that part at all, and then try to act as happy and hopeful as they did about his promising recovery. Because I was fine.

***************************

Predictably, my dad did get sick again. He came down with some wicked vertigo and his body rejected anything that might have been food. At the hospital, the doctor told him that they might as well send him home, because they couldn't do anything if he wouldn't let them. He thought about it, talked to my brother a while, and finally decided that he might as well try the drugs for a trial period.

And so we have a better hope, cautious, but still something to be happy about. I am better than fine.

next life.

My first car was a 1991 maroon Toyota Corolla station wagon, seven years old with 170,000 miles. It had been my mother's mail route car. It had a bumper sticker on it that said, "If you've got a mailbox, we'll find it." It was a good car, but all that through-wind-and-rain-and-sleet stuff can be hard on a machine. About two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, my dad swerved to avoid a car that was pulling out in front of him and took out some mailboxes, which left a big dent in the back door. I fixed it by never using that door.

The next spring, I played Peppermint Patty in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." We made cartoony flowers for the set out of colored foam and pipe cleaners. After the show ended, I stole a foam flower and hung it from the rear-view mirror of the car. Thus she was christened the Pattywagon.

She took me to school and back, to youth group and back, and on all those little afternoon jaunts that were my first taste of freedom at sixteen years old and 97 cents a gallon. Compared to the mail route, Patty's second life was easy street, but by the time I was about to graduate from high school, she had come to be too unreliable for my college-bound needs, my upcoming second life. My parents had been saving for my education, but when I got scholarships to pay for it, they offered to either take me on an overseas trip or buy me a car. I picked the car. We went up to Toyota of Boone and picked out a teal Corolla with gray interior. It had power nothing, but my parents did let me add on a CD player. They got a $1000 rebate for being loyal Toyota customers.

The Pattywagon entered her third life at a rural car auction, where she went for $300 (nine years old, 190,000 miles). The new owner was a young couple who needed a beater car for the wife to tool around in. I still have the flower.

The first time I drove Gypsy, my replacement Corolla, was to my high school baccalaureate. My friend Wesley, who was really into cars, after sticking his face into the trunk and inhaling deeply, announced that she was less than a month old. Which was cool, I guess, or maybe just really weird. The point was, she was new.

In my own way, I drove her through wind and rain and sleet. There were also at least three blizzards. My college roommate Nick, a mechanic, used to tell me that I should put a Celica engine in her, but I guess we have different ideas of cars. He wants them to go fast, but I just want them to go. Just get me there, it's your job. Cars are all, by nature, very hard workers.

She did not come to be named Gypsy until I'd had her for six years and was well into my third life. By then, she had taken me up and down the mountains, killed a deer, and been my companion on weekly trips to the arms of my long-distance boyfriend, at $3 a gallon. The interior handle on one of the back doors broke, and I fixed it by never using that door. There were dents, there were scratches, there was a hole in the ceiling fabric and a barbecue sauce stain in the seat. She died sitting in traffic, after eight years and 160,000 miles.

I bought a new red Honda Fit. She has seen one blizzard and at various times has transported a sarcophagus, a table, and a bass amplifier cabinet. She is, as yet, unnamed. These things take time.

I called in a favor from Nick, who now worked in a junkyard and had access to parts. He fixed Gypsy for the price of dinner. I sold Gypsy to Josh for $1000, though we never transferred the title. He drove her back and forth to the restaurant, back and forth to band practice. Once, I don't even know how, he managed to transport the sarcophagus in her.

Sunday night, I picked Josh up from a random church parking lot, where he had coaxed Gypsy in to get her out of traffic. She wasn't very interested in accelerating anymore. AAA towed her to a garage, where they told me it would be $1100 just to get her running again. Then, once I had saved up a little more money, I could fix all the other problems that they weren't even telling me about. Also, she needed new tires. Eleven years old, 187,000 miles. We decided to let her go.

Until Josh buys another car, we are sharing the Fit. It's inconvenient and a hassle, but it's fine, because the Fit is a very hard worker.

I sent an email to my mechanic, asking about the best resources for buying a new old car. He answered, but wanted to know what was going to happen to Gypsy. We were planning on donating her, but he immediately offered $200 for her without asking what was wrong with her. He wanted to fix her and drive her around. It seemed appropriate that the person who had revived Gypsy into her second life would own her in her third. Maybe he'd put a Celica engine in her, though there ain't nothing wrong with the engine that she has.

For the past few days, Josh has spent his off-duty hours looking at the cars on CraigsList; he IMs some to me at work. Some of these ads are not serious leads - ancient Army jeeps, a 1974 Jaguar that is only $800 but doesn't run (but is beautiful). And then intermixed with all these ridiculous cars he would buy if he had the money and the space are a series of old Japanese sedans and wagons, looking to enter into their second or third (or fourth) lives. I wonder what he will name it.

pitbulloon.

I asked the stars what to do. They, being giant burning balls of gas, did not answer. Or they did, but I don't speak Twinkle. Instead, the leash in my hand pulled in the direction of the street. That was Remix telling me that what I should do was go for a walk with her. It was 7 PM and dark and 40 degrees, but we went for a walk. My neighborhood is safe, and I had a flashlight and a pitbull.

Just a few hours earlier, we had both been sitting on the futon. Her stomach started heaving. I knew she was about to throw up, and I tried to move her off the futon, but she was not inclined to relocate. That's the thing about big dogs. You require their cooperation and obedience more than a dog you can simply pick up.

This is not a big deal. She's thrown up before. The pile smelled like dog food and was mostly chunks, with a few tiny green leaves mixed in. You wanted to read a description of my dog's vomit, right? Now I could get her to move and so I let her out into the backyard. Whatever else she had to do, she could do out there. Then I went back and cleaned up the futon. The poor, poor futon, which before we got a dog probably could have been passed down to another member of my family like it was passed to me. But no, it will die in my house at the paws of a pitbull.

I looked out the back window to check on her. She'd made another pile of half-digested dog food and was now lying next to it, looking pathetic. I kept peeking out the window at her to see if she was done dumping her stomach contents out, so I could let her back in. I could imagine my reaction if my mother made me go outside in the cold when I was sick. If only I could teach Remix how to use a vomit pan. She wasn't moving at all. And then at one point I noticed another little pile she had made, but this one was sitting at her back end. She hadn't even gotten up to poop.

That scared me. Vomit we've dealt with before, but the not moving and the passive defecation were new. My dog was sick.

Josh said we should wait and see. I was not comforted by this. We threw some towels on the futon to make a little sick bed. Then we went out to get her. She didn't raise her head at all, and getting her up was out of the question. So Josh picked her up, all 60 pounds of her, and carried her inside. We set her up on the towels. She lied in her new position, just as still as she had been outside. Josh felt her nose and verified that it was cold and wet. Thus our canine medical knowledge was exhausted.

I called the vet, because an expert would know whatever step came after touching her nose. They told me to bring her in. Josh said of course they did, because if they said to just wait and see and then our dog up and died, we'd hold them responsible. I heard him, he sounded reasonable, but then again, my dog was sick.

We drove to the vet. While we had carried Remix out to the car, when we got to the doctor's office, she hopped out of the back seat and sniffed around. I was torn between relief and wishing that she'd go back to acting sick, so I wouldn't look like a hysterical pet owner.

We waited for the doctor in the examination room, where they advertised specials for your pet's annual physical, which included all kinds of shots and tests and even x-rays. "These animals have better health care than a lot of people," I said. "Like me?" Josh asked.

The doctor examined her and told us that she had a cold. She was coughing in the doctor's office, and he asked if that's what she had been doing when she threw up. Apparently coughing will activate a dog's gag reflex, which can cause them to vomit. You can tell the difference by watching whether they cough or heave before it all comes out. I thought back, and I'd thought she'd heaved before upchucking, but since she was coughing now, I couldn't be certain. Again, I felt relieved, but also disatisfied with the answer. A cold would not make her lie down and look like she was waiting for death. He perscribed an oral antiobiotic to give her at home and also gave her a shot of penicillin so that she could start getting better quicker.

We can all agree that it was probably a waste of $123. Because my dog was sick, but not that sick, and I really should have just listened to Josh. I listened to him on the drive home from the vet's, as he told me how I should have listened to him earlier.

We got home and Remix drank her bowl of water to the last drop. She seemed fine. I sat on the futon, feeling utterly defeated, because somehow you can fail at owning a dog. She came over to the befouled futon covered in towels and sat down next to me.

She smiled.

No, really. When she's panting, her mouth is so wide that it looks like she is smiling, but this was different. Her mouth was closed, but the sides of her mouth were stretching stretching stretching back to her ears. It looked like a commercial where they digitize a dog's mouth to smile after delivering the punchline. We'd never seen anything like it. What is it, girl? Why are you smiling, puppypants?

She threw up. On the towels, on the futon, on me, a whole bowl of water and a couple of kibble chunks for good measure. There was no coughing, this was no gag reflex, this was projectile vomiting. So much for a cold. I told you, my dog was sick.

I had to go run a couple errands and Josh had to go to work. We put her in her crate, so that if she were going to be sick, it would be contained to a limited area. Again, it seemed like punishment. I went off, imagining myself coming home and finding a dead dog all locked up in a crate, in a pool of her own vomit.

But she did not die while I was out. She stirred as I came in, and she got quickly to her feet as I unlocked the crate. We had a snuggly reunion. She kept putting her paws over her face, like I'd seen her do after walking into a spider web. Something was bugging her. I held up her face to get a look at her.

Her face was comically swollen. Her lips and jowls were red and puffy. One eye was unable to open all the way. I guess my dog and my boyfriend are allergic to penicillin.

What did I do? I called the vet. By this time, they were closed for the day, but the recorded message directed me to call an all-night clinic. Which I did. I said the vet had given my dog a shot and now she was swelling up like a pitbulloon. They said I should bring her in, just to be safe, since it was possible the swelling could interfere with her breathing. I was out in the driveway, with the address of the all-night clinic typed into my phone for navigation, when I stopped where I stood and asked the stars what I should do, because it was all too familiar and I didn't know how to tell how sick a dog was and she couldn't tell me either.

Remix hates the car and loves to walk. She wasn't helpful on whether this was a medical emergency, but she was pretty clear on wanting to take a walk in the moonlight. So that's what we did. Because I didn't want to make the same mistake twice, at least not in one day. Because a dog that wants to take a walk can't be that sick. Because sometimes when you don't know what to do, you should probably take a walk, and you might as well take the dog, too.

When we got back, she was still energetic and happy and Remix-y. I tentatively gave her a bowl full of water and she again drank it to the bottom. I sat with her on the pile of dirty towels and tried to decide if the swelling was any different. Twice, she burped, and I jumped up so fast to get away from the coming onslaught that I startled her. I watched her closely for any trace of a smile. Finally, I just took her out into the backyard, where she spent the time trying to find the pieces of upchucked dog food that I'd thrown out before.

After fifteen minutes, I decided that she was probably not going to hurl, so we came back inside. I started googling allergic reactions in dogs. She went back to pawing at her face. She scratched her head and rolled around on the futon, trying hard to scratch an itch that would not remain scratched. She trotted upstairs. I went looking for her, and found her with her head under the bed. I also found the hives. They were travelling up her legs, red and angry bumps that made her fur stick out unevenly as if she had a bad case of mange. They were on her stomach and her head, and they were starting to close her other eye. They had not been there half an hour ago.

Time to go to the vet. As I led her out to the car, I felt the familiar tug of a strong and resistant dog. I thought she wanted to go for a walk, but no, she was rolling around in the gravel in an effort to stop the itch.

I tried hard to figure out what lesson I should be learning. Because she wouldn't have gotten the penicillin, and thus this reaction, if I had not freaked out before, but here I was again, scared that my dog was going to die now because of what I had done when I thought she had been about to die before.

On the drive over, I lectured myself. I still wasn't sure that I wasn't overreacting again, but I wanted to stop second-guessing myself. This is the path you have chosen, and now you own it. I wondered how much it was going to cost. I asked myself how much I was willing to pay to save the dog, if it came to that. How much was Remix worth to me?

Again, at the vet, she was curious and interested and not sick-acting. But at least this time, she looked absolutely terrible. The nurse asked if they could go ahead and give her some anti-histamines and steroids, and I said yes, please. They brought her out again a few minutes later, and she already looked ten times better. The hives were not visible from a distance, and the swelling was not so noticeable. We were directed to an examination room to wait on the doctor. Remix sniffed around the empty room, then settled down at my feet.

A few minutes later, the doctor's face appeared at the window. Remix growled and barked. She's not a particularly barky dog, but she does dislike some people. As the doctor came in, Remix continued to act like a mean dog. I kept a strong hand on her collar and got a treat out of my bag to get her to be good. She sat again at my feet, eyes on the biscuit, occasionally turning around to growl. I apologized. It was embarrassing.

I told the whole story again, about the throwing up and the lying there, what the other doctor had said and done, about when Remix smiled and threw up on me. The conclusion was that the allergic reaction could have been from the penicillin or it could have been from whatever made her sick in the first place. Basically, if I was trying to learn anything from this experience, they sure weren't going to help me.

The doctor said that based on the blood tests, she really shood keep Remix overnight. I am no professional, but the gist of it was that the swelling could make the dog's blood sludgy. Remix had sludgy blood, but she was also pretty dehydrated, which is also a cause of sludge blood. So the doc was leaving it up to me, because it wasn't necessarily a dangerous situation and because Remix was so obviously unhappy. I could pay $400 to leave my dog here overnight with an IV drip, or I could take her home. I played the mean dog card and said I wanted to take her home.

So many decisions in one day. Each one felt like deciding whether my dog lived or died.

Since I was taking her home, they wanted to inject her with fluid. The nurse came in to take her back to for this procedure, and I guess the nurse passed the test, because Remix went to her like she couldn't wait to have another injection. They did a subcutaneous fluid injection, which pretty much means that they pump a bunch of water under the skin. Remix came back with a camel hump, a water pitbulloon. They said dogs had a lot of stretch and space in their bodies that allowed for that, and I just took their word for it, because it looked weird and terrible.

Finally, finally, finally, we left. $210. This time, I felt like I was getting off easy. I stopped on the way home for some Benedryl, which I was to give her if the swelling came back. She had some water and then immediately settled down for the night in a tight little ball on the futon. Her weird fluid sac stuck out at an unsettling angle.

The next day, she was fine. The fluid sac had moved to her side, but was smaller. The vet called to check on her and say he'd gotten a fax of the details of her nighttime visit. He said it was probably not the penicillin, but whatever had made her sick in the first place. I said sure, because it was free to lie. But I won't be letting them give her penicillin again. And next time she throws up, she can just watch cartoons on the couch for a while and feel bad like the rest of us.

good timing.

I was having trouble getting out of bed. I had plans, and I needed to get going, but still I stayed in the warm. It was a beautiful Saturday, but too cold for yard sales. Josh had a show in Boone that night. My hometown was right on the way, and I was planning on dropping in on my brother's family. My niece was turning eight, and I figured I could just swoop in for the birthday party on my way to Josh's show. Everyone loves a swooping aunt. I hadn't mentioned anything about visiting to anyone. I was going to buy a bottle of chocolate wine, which my mom and I had agreed was probably gross, but that we'd secretly like to try. I had lots of things to get together before I left, and it was a long drive, yet I was having trouble ordering my body to throw off the covers.

The phone rang. My mom. She asked if I was at a yard sale. We talked.

I lay back down again. So instead of driving to their house, I'd drive to the hospital. My dad had had a stroke early that morning, and he was in intensive care. Now, more than ever, I really needed to get my stuff together and drive. Still I stayed put. The news should have dispelled my inertia, but somehow I felt even more glued down than before.

Before Josh's grandfather had died, he'd been sick for several months. He would fall and they'd take him to the hospital. He had a couple of surgeries. Every time we talked to Josh's mom, the situation sounded grim, but we suspected that was partly because of the state of mind of the news-bearer. We made it out to see them one weekend. We sat with his grandparents in the living room and chatted. His grandfather drifted in and out of sleep in his chair, answering questions when we asked, but mostly just listening or dozing. He was wearing a chest brace of some sort that kept him up sitting up, even as he seemed to sink into it. When we started getting ready to leave, he pulled Josh aside to have a good talk about the future.

While he was by no means a spring chicken, he seemed stable. We left feeling better about him being with us a little longer. A few days later, he died. Grandmother told us that he mentioned our visit several times. It was just good timing. There had been weekends when we could have gone to visit, but we didn't. Had he died after one of those weekends, we would have forgotten what we had done, only remembered what we hadn't done. Either way, we got a life lesson in seizing the day.

I thought about our good timing while I continued to lie in my bed in Raleigh. Somewhere in Morganton, my dad was lying in a hospital bed. I had already been planning to stop by, whether they knew it or not. Good timing.

I got up. Time to go.

harry potter and the ridiculously-named stew.

I am a terrible hypocrite. The best thing to do if you ever find yourself saying one thing and doing another is to 'fess up to it on the internet. Then, haivng acknowledged your faults, you can continue being a hypocrite all you want. After all, you told everybody in the whole world about what you did, and what more can anyone reasonably ask?

Here's what I did. After I nagged and whined about how Josh's library was going to take over the house, he started going through them and getting rid of some of them. He put them in a stack for me to take to the used book store. I looked through them and instead of putting them in the "Bookstore" bag I keep for just such purpose, I put them in the "For Sandra" stack instead.

One of the books was a cookbook called Great British Cooking: A Well-Kept Secret. It's geared toward American cooks, and so as a part of enticing would-be buyers, all the recipes have very silly names, so as to make them seem more exotic (Singin' Hinnies, Gooseberry Fool, Angels on Horseback, etc.). The introduction starts off with an excerpt from Virginia Woolf and continues with a series of jokes about how bad British cooking is.

Josh found this at some yard sale or thrift store, I suspect with the thought of giving it to a coworker of his who hails from the British Isles. Of course, that was a goofy, if well-intentioned idea. It would be like giving me a cookbook of Southern American recipes adapted for British cooks. I don't use very many cookbooks at all, because the internet is full of recipes with pictures and reviews from real live home chefs. But I decided that I might as well cook one British recipe, to decide whether the book might be worth keeping. I looked through most of them and picked out one suited to my kitchen - meaning that all the ingredients were things that I already had in the pantry or the freezer.

This is an important consideration for me. I talk cooking with another lady, and I once asked if she had any good meatless recipes. She sent me something with mascarpone in it, and I had to explain that I was more interested in things that I could make with basic pantry staples, which mascarpone was not. I want delicious recipes, but I also want something that makes sense for everyday eating.

Anyway, what I picked out and what I made was Chiddingly Hot Pot. I promise I did not pick it out for the name, because most of the dishes in the book had similarly ridiculous titles. As it turns out, this dish is also included in the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, where the author claims it's referenced in chapter 15 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It's basically just beef stew. But it's good beef stew. It was easy to make, and while it did require a couple hours to cook, most of that is baking time, so I was able to go see if the dish was actually referenced in Harry Potter.

It seems like the compiler of the Harry Potter cookbook may also be picking recipes just for the silly names, because the actual book just says that someone was eating a "stew." Oh well.

Chiddingly Hot Pot
By Jane Garmey

2 lbs. stewing beef, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 Tbs. flour
2 Tbs. oil
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
2 medium-sized onions, finely chopped
salt*
freshly ground black pepper
2 medium-sized potatoes, sliced in rounds
3 cloves
1 Tbs. tarragon vinegar*
1 oz. melted butter
Approx. 2 cups beef stock
Preheat the oven to 325° F.
Dust the meat with flour and brown it in the oil in a frying pan over low heat. Remove the meat and fry the celery and onions in the same pan for 3 minutes.

Put a layer of onions and celery in the bottom of a deep casserole, then a layer of meat and after that a layer of potatoes. Season each layer with salt and pepper and add the cloves and vinegar. Repeat the layers and finish with a layer of potatoes. Brush them with the melted butter and add enough stock to reach just below the potatoes.

Cover the casserole and cook for 1 ½ hours. Remove the cover and cook for an additional ½ hour to brown the potatoes.

Notes: I left out the salt, because I was using canned beef stock, which has plenty. I also didn't have any idea what tarragon vinegar was, so I used apple cider vinegar and threw in a bit of parsley that was languishing in my fridge. Tarragon, parsley, whatever. I also did both the sauteing and the oven cooking in a Dutch oven, so it was sort of a one-dish meal. You could even say it was a hot pot!

sense and sensibility.

I guess nagging works, because Josh started culling his books last week. It's hasn't been so bad. Really, all he's doing is organizing them, and there are so many duplicates and obvious discards that without even trying very hard, he has managed to get rid of 20 or so. And that's after only having gone through two shelves! Now we only have to do the books in the five shelves left in that room, plus another five shelves scattered around the house, plus the several stacks on the floor and finally the books that are still in their thrift store "THANK YOU" bags.

We talked before about how he was going to organize them and came to no conclusions, but as soon as we started going through them, natural categories emerged. Most of them will just be arranged alphabetically by author, but he also has a lot that are edited, like poetry and short story collections. Then there are a lot of reference books, textbooks, and antique books, which will have their own sections.

I recently did my own reorganization recently, so I was full of helpful advice, which was immediately rejected. While Josh and I both have standard-issue human brains, his is apparently a different model. In terms of organizing, we have drastically different approaches, and while his is absurd and wrong and, worst of all, inefficient, I backed off and let him design his own library his own way. We also talked about how he would decide which books to keep and which to toss (by toss, I mean take to the used book store for credit). My own criteria was based on whether or not I would ever actually read the book. After all, the point of a book is to read it, and if it is not going to get read, it is not fulfilling its book destiny, so I should pass it on to someone who will read it. Josh listened to me politely as I talked about book destinies, and then he said that he had two criteria for keeping a book: is it beautiful and is it true? And just so you know, "true" does not mean "factual," no, no, that would be far too objective a thing to measure.

It all sounds like some vague hippie nonsense to me, but again, it's his room. I feel very pleased with myself whenever I hear the awful phrase "man-cave," knowing that my man would rather have a library. And I have been pleased to see that whatever test he uses, he mostly gets rid of the ones I consider easy tosses, for instance a coffee table book about gnomes that I was aghast that he brought into the house. As it turns out, it is beautiful, but not true.

There are other books that he keeps and I can't fathom why, and not just because I don't exactly understand how to determine truth and beauty the way he defines it. I guess that's the problem. He doesn't define it, he just experiences it and knows. I questioned keeping A Survey of European Civilization, arguing sensibly that whatever information was inside was likely available on the internet, constantly updated and not taking up space inside the house. He is never going to sit down and read this book, so on the day that he decided he wanted to know more about the topic, he could bring up the ol' googler and learn to his heart's content. His response was to read a random paragraph to himself and then start talking about what he'd read, plus all the other things he thought of because of it. Reading is just a way to spark his brain, as if everything he inputs is merely a springboard for his imagination. And I wanted to crack open his head at that moment, not just because he doesn't make any dang sense, but also because it sounds CRAZY in there, and I kinda wanted to see it.

It's all very well and good for a practical and straight-forward woman like myself to fall in love with a poet and dream about our lovely curly-haired babies who will take on the world by using both halves of their brains. But when it comes to the daily business of living with a poet, it turns out that some people are poets because their brains look like Dali paintings inside. How he ever finds anything in there, I'll never know. But I do love that man, and something about the way he judges books makes me feel beautiful and true by having passed his test.

spilled ink.

My boss called me into his office to look at a bug he wanted me to investigate. Our program's printing capabilities weren't working on the Mac. Printing in general is a sort of lost area of our application. It hasn't worked quite right in a long time, but so few people use it that no one complains that much. Either that, or people have been suffering silently for years. Neither possibility is difficult to imagine.

I went to his office, and he tried to print two different documents. Nothing happened. Yup, that's a bug. I went back to my desk to see if it worked any better on Windows. I opened up a file that I had been using earlier to test something else. It had maybe seven lines of text in it, just a bunch of junk. I told the program to print, and the little bubble popped up to tell me that a document had been sent to the printer. I went over to the printer and saw a giant stack of paper sitting on top. Someone had certainly done a lot of printing. Having just finished up my taxes this week, I wondered if someone had a particularly complicated situation that might require every IRS form ever created.

I took a peek at one of the pages in the giant stack of printed paper to see if I could at least deliver it to the owner. What I saw was the print-out of a couple of giant files, in fact the very ones that my boss had been using to test printing in his office. Oh. I guess printing was working just fine, it was just pretending not to work. I took them to his office, where we both had a good chuckle at his expense, and I dropped the whole stack in the recycling bin.

You know, printing used to be hard. You used to have to take each individual letter that you needed and position it just so. It used to be someone's job just to do that one thing all day long. What used to be a tedious and deliberate process is now something that we manage to do accidentally. Silly me, I just printed off fifty pages that I didn't even need! I swear, we're just surrounded by magic.

enemy of the good.

Once, I let slip to a coworker that my neighbor, Gail, had a lot of animals. In fact, my exact phrasing might have been "animal hoarder."

"What?! Have you reported her?"

Reported her? Such a thought had never crossed my mind. That seems like the kind of thing that might create neighborhood hostilities. I suppose I could go with an anonymous tip, not giving my name and also wearing a fake moustache while making the call (just in case). Besides, Gail is a nice lady. Not that nice ladies are incapable of doing things that the authorities should know about, but this wasn't one of them.

While I wonder sometimes whether Gail's living arrangement is healthy for her, I never worry about the animals. I will probably never know what all she has living inside the house, but the dogs that tumble outside in a shaggy bundle every afternoon to bark at my dog all seem to be fine. Are they up to date on all their shots? Probably not. Are they bathed regularly? It's doubtful, but then again, I bet the dogs prefer it that way.

These animals were exactly one step from death before Gail swooped in and added them to her brood. She likes to go to a small local shelter one county over, where they do not have the space or resources that our urban county shelter has. That shelter pretty much has to wipe out their whole occupancy every single week. All those dogs were facing being put down, and now they have a home. They have food, shelter, a good-sized yard, and a person who loves them. It probably would be better for everyone if those dogs were spread out over more homes, but that option is not on the table. Lots of things would be better for the animals, but none of those things are actually being offered.

I read an article not too long ago about how many rescue organizations and no-kill shelters make it hard for people to adopt animals. They ask a lot of questions, do in-home visits, and often reject prospective pet-owners because of seemingly random and irrelevant reasons. Some of them require that owners only work part-time. These well-meaning animal lovers just want to make sure the pets go to good homes. But as a result of the intense application process and high rejection rate, a lot of people give up and go to an animal breeder instead. Of course, that makes me sad for a different reason. Go to the pound! It's cheap and incredibly easy to walk right out with a great animal. I know that people like to have the option to choose a specific breed, but my feeling is that once you actually have an animal companion, it turns out that it was just the one you wanted.

Reporting Gail would be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The problem of pet overpopulation is too big to be excluding people who want to help. I explained all this in a hurry to my coworker, and by the end of it, I had her convinced that Gail was just a crazy, but nice, animal lady who was rescuing dogs from certain death so they could live in a happy doggy home. It is not the perfect dog home, but then again, it's hard to say that a human would be able to define that anyway.

free with a one-night stay.

Thing 1: Shoes
Mike showed up in his work clothes. One of Josh's old high school buddies, he was planning on staying the night with us. He came straight from his job at the bank, so he brought a change of clothes but forgot to bring any shoes besides his dress loafers. Josh has a bunch of shoes that he doesn't wear much. He buys them at the thrift store because they're $3.50 and they fit and because he can't get over the fact that some people apparently wear a pair of shoes once and then get rid of them. He pulled a pair of brown Adidas out of the closet that looked brand new and told Mike to just keep them. No, really, dude, it's fine.

Thing 2: Player Piano
At some point during the evening, we all went up into the library. Mike's visited a few times, but this was the first time he'd ever been in this room, this book-lovers sanctuary. Josh's book buying has slowed down as of late, but it still goes on at an unsustainable pace. Besides the completely full shelves, there are stacks of books on the floor that haven't quite made it into the (unimplemented) organizational system.

"Wow, next time I want a book to read, I'll just ask you," Mike said.

"What kind of books do you like to read?"

"Sci-fi."

I went over to a specific shelf, the free shelf. We often upgrade our books when we find a nicer copy of one we already have; the extra copy goes on this shelf to be given away to anyone who might want it. We're not big sci-fi readers, but I did find a copy of Player Piano, so I handed it over to Mike.

Thing 3: Maps
The next morning, Mike was taking a self-guided tour of the living room. This happens a lot - visitors just walk around looking at the weird things that we have surrounded ourselves with. He enjoyed reading the entry about Hitler in our set of 1934 dictionaries (the entry concludes with his 1923 imprisonment), he remarked on the sheer number of clocks, and he also noticed the maps. One he liked in particular was of Europe by Blaeu. These maps are a neat style. Aside from the geographical information, they also have little vignettes of people from different areas featured on the map, showing them in traditional dress. Plus, sometimes there are pictures of sea monsters in the oceans.

I bought this map in a set of several at a yard sale. I had sent some duplicates to my sister, but the rest of them had been sitting upstairs since I bought them, waiting for frames. Without a thought, I offered him the rest of the maps to him. I have enough maps on the walls (not that I won't ever put up more!).

I guess the point is that we have a lot of stuff, and it's true that we accumulate more than we end up using. A lot goes back into the secondhand market. But we give away a lot of stuff, too. It's so easy to be generous when things cost so little. And when it turns out that someone we know could use something we just happen to have, it's like fate that we bought it in the first place.

chili chili bang bang.

It was time for the Fourth Annual Company Chili Cookoff. Despite having been here for five years, I've never participated. The first year, I didn't have a good chili recipe that I could go to. I'd hate to stake my cooking reputation on something untried; I'm far to square for that. So I said that I would find a good recipe before the next year.

That was pretty much my excuse for the next three years, too. I made chili a couple of times at home, but they were nothing special. Why couldn't we have a contest where I knew I could knock their socks off? Let's have a chocolate pie contest! Or biscuits! Shrimp patties! These are things that I can do.

I was not planning on participating this year either. This year was a little special, because the guy who organizes the chili cookoff was leaving the company, and the event was schedule for his very last day. Earlier in the week, he sent out an email saying that the contest might be cancelled due to lack of entries. So of course I felt bad that there might not be a contest at all, and I gave in.

Our company is not big enough for it, but I wish there were multiple categories to compete in. We have one vegetarian dude, and he always brings a meatless version. But he never wins, because how can he? How can he hope to compete against other chilis which have two, sometimes three kinds of meat in them? I mean, if there were more vegetarians, he might have a shot. But there aren't, and so he doesn't.

I wish there was a category for no-meat, another one for one-meat, and finally a meat-tastic group. I knew from the beginning that I was not interested in buying sausage and steak tips and smoked pork. I mean, sure, if you're going to spend $30 at the butchers, then you can win the chili cookoff, but that didn't seem fair.

But whatever, I guess the fun is in participating. Or something. Josh once went to a chili restaurant that served some special Texas variety called Terlingua Chili. He raved about it, and I filed that fact away in my memory until I had to come up with a beef-only chili recipe that could compete with steak tips and sausage. Not that I actually believed it would be competitive, but when you have no chance, the best you can do is something totally different. Feel free to apply this philosophy to other areas of your life.

Terlingua Chili

Okay, so I cheated a little. I cooked the ground beef in bacon grease. But I had the bacon anyway, and I used it to work on training Remix to "stay." She is bacon-motivated.

I thought my chili creation was fantastic. It has a soft and smoky flavor followed by a sneaky heat. That was the serrano peppers, which were simmered along with everything else, but then removed. I'd never cooked with serranos before, and I had to ask the produce manager which ones they were. Two serrano peppers at $1.99 a pound comes to four cents. I paid in cash.

I still knew that I was not going to win, but I at least felt like this was a solid entry. And I still had something of a chance: in addition to the taste contest, there is also a prize for the best-named chili. I guess I cheated on this part, too, because I googled the phrase "chili name pun" and the internet gave me "Chili Chili Bang Bang." Thank you, anonymous internet commenter! Then I spent far too much time making up a goofy poster to hang above my CrockPot. All the other slow cookers were more modern, with digital timers and removeable crocks. Mine looked like the one your mom gives you when you get your first apartment, which it was.

I did not win the taste contest. I did not win the naming contest. I did win the "Oldest CrockPot" contest, which was more unofficial.

I hung the poster up in my cube, where it makes me giggle every time I look at it. Okay, I didn't win, but I did get a good recipe and a fun poster out of it. And also a valuable lesson about the value of participating. Or something.

laundry duty.

"Do you and Josh do each other's laundry?"

As she asks this, I am folding a pair of boxer shorts, so I guess the question is answered. She and her boyfriend are planning to move in together. They are looking for a house, which I guess is the fun part, and talking about laundry, which is probably not. He told her already that he thinks they should each do only their own laundry.

"Well, when laundry needs to be done, it gets done," is my response. She looks shocked, and I don't know why. I can't figure out if I sounded like a whip-cracker or a doormat.

We don't have any official division of labor. There's no chart with our names and a list of chores. We are both capable of recognizing when something needs to be done and we are equally capable of taking care of it. We are also both slobs, and so some things are allowed to slide for a while. Since our toleration for mess is similar, this doesn't create a problem. My sister, the other slobby one, married a man who had a very tidy mother. While he wants things to be clean, he doesn't necessarily want to spend his time scrubbing baseboards. They must have made their peace over this. Their house is not particularly clean. Equality is awesome, y'all.

I remember when I lived with roommates, the division of chores was an issue. One roommate wanted us to each be responsible for ourselves. In her system, each person would buy their own food and wash their own dishes. I didn't like this system. For one thing, it seemed reasonable that we could share some staple items, provided we each contributed in restocking. I mean, were we each supposed to buy our own toilet paper? This did not extend to specialty items, like fancy foods or alcohol. But by all means, have some of my milk, it's fine. I also thought that washing each individual dish as it was used was inefficient. However, my more communal system does require everyone to chip in of their own accord.

It didn't quite work out to anyone's ideas. But we were all pretty non-confrontational, so while there was grumbling, there were few actual fights. Still, there was enough tension about it that when I moved out, that was one of the things I relished most about living alone. Only then do both systems work together. All restocking and cleaning acts are communal, because there is a commune of one. I could wash the dishes or leave them, and the only person who cared was me.

But there has never been that kind of tension between me and Josh. I already wanted a team system with my roommates, so it seemed even more obvious that a romantic couple living together would be that way. Even the census forms we filled out indicated as much; we registered as "partners." These dishes need to be washed, so wash them. This laundry needs to be done, so do it. And it seems to have worked out fine. I have never felt resentful about the things I do, and I feel grateful for the things he does.

Every once in a while, I will wish that he did a little something more, or rather, something differently. Sometimes when I come home from work, the dog's water bowl is empty. Now, I always feed the dog. But he is home during the day because of his schedule, so he usually walks her. We didn't sit down and discuss this, it just worked out that way. But the water is something that needs to be monitored, rather than something that can be done on a schedule. So I just asked him to please check on her water before he goes to work, because sometimes it was empty. He said absolutely, sorry for not doing it before. And that was it. I mentioned before that he would do laundry when he needed clean work clothes (which is more often than I would need to do laundry), but I was resentful that none of my clothes ever made it from the hamper into that load of black pants and black shirts. I mentioned it to him, and the next time I folded a pile of clothes that he had washed, I found several of my things in there.

I'm not trying to say that our relationship is superior to anyone's, nor that we will never have squabbles over household contributions (we had quite a fantastic blow-out during the cleaning frenzy leading up to Christmas - crying and name-calling). Lord knows how well this will hold up when there are children, who are walking mess-machines. We just have a system that works for us right now because we both want it to work.

The snooty part of me thinks that if you're arguing about laundry before you even move in together, it's a bad sign. However, I did not voice this thought to her, because I have made a lot of improvements on the filter between my head and my mouth. Plus, there's no reason they wouldn't be able to work something out that makes them both happy. Maybe they'll be celebrating their 50th anniversary, each still washing their own clothes.

buck oh eight.

Sometimes, when my will is weak, I stop at McDonalds on the way to work for a cup of coffee. It is a waste of time and money to do so. I have coffee at home and tea at work. McDonald's isn't even actually on my way; I have to drive a couple of stoplights past my usual turn to get there. But I do like the coffee and the whole ritual of making an unnecessary stop for a little treat.

Also, I sorta like just going to McDonalds. Besides the coffee, one thing I like is the cross-section of America you can find underneath the golden arches. There are tables of retired men, who drink their tiny senior cups of coffee while reading the newspapers and chewing the fat. There are young professional types like me, though most of them evidently work at offices that require a bit more effort in the appearance of their employees. Truckloads of construction workers stop off on their way to a site. Half of the staff behind the counter is bilingual, and they switch effortlessly between languages depending on who is ordering.

I was waiting my turn in line. The guy in front of me, a scraggly middle-aged black man in a faded sweatshirt and jeans, ordered a coffee. All sizes of coffee are a buck at this particular Mickey D's, and so the total was $1.08. He had a single and a five. To avoid breaking the five, he asked his friend if he had any change. The friend did not. I sensed an opportunity to be a nice person, so I stepped forward and offered a dime from my coin purse. By that time, the clerk already had the dude's fiver, so the larger bill was going to be broken anyway. Oh well.

The man got his $4.02 back. He gave me the two pennies, which I expected. And then he stuffed another dollar into my hand. Apparently, giving out dimes could possibly be a very good investment opportunity, reaping an immediate 900% return on investment. I tried to say no, because it was completely unnecessary. Plus, it sort of took the shine off my nice gesture by rewarding it. But he was insistent, saying, "You might need it someday." I shrugged and relented. I wondered if it was important to him that I not think he needed it today, just like it was important to me for him to not think I piped up with the expectation of a reward.

I ordered my coffee and paid my own $1.08. I stuffed the extra dollar into the Ronald McDonald House donation box. Pass it on, pass it on.

thaings bin tuff.

I'm about to divulge some super-secret information here. So listen up, and I will tell you about a secret message inside my house.

Yesterday, you learned about the map of my property which hangs proudly in the house which it illustrates. You also learned that I bought the frame secondhand. The frame is hand-made. If you turn it around, you can see the where they stopped staining the wood. They did a good job, certainly better than most anything I've ever made.

When I bought the frame, it was displaying a painting of a little girl standing in a field of sunflowers. That description sounds very nice and soothing, but the picture was not. There was something creepy and sad about it, like it was a picture of little Jenny from Forrest Gump hiding from her drunk and abusive father. I couldn't find a copy of it online, though I did find many nice pictures of little girls in sunflower fields. Art is art, and maybe this picture was meant to be depressing, but I wouldn't want it in my house.

As it happens, it is in my house. The picture was printed on some kind of sturdy cardboard, and so I kept it to be the backing and just covered up the front with my map. I will probably never have to look at it again, because the map is sorta fragile and I'm not going to risk damaging it by removing it from the frame. However, the creepy sunflower girl picture is not the secret.

The secret is on the back of the sunflower picture. There is a message, presumably written by whoever gifted the homemade frame and picture. I reproduce that message exactly for you here.

Baby,
Happy V. Day. I just won't you to know that I love you so much. Sorry if some times you don't think I am showing it enough. Becuase I say things the wrong way. I am trying my hardest every day to say things the right way. I know that thaings bin tuff for you and me but I know that we are two strong people who wont a happy famiely. I know you are trying. So am I. I know we can make it. Deep in my heart I know I married a very special wife and going to be mommy. Who try's her best. I also know you are doing a great job in beeing a good wife. It is tuff but you can do it you are a lot stronger then you think. So give your self alot of credit. Thing's will get better because together we can beat any battle together because we are a strong team.
Love your,
Husband

I am spoiled, because I date a poet, but I have to agree that the fella had a tendency to say things the wrong way. Well, he made a nice frame, even if his writing skills weren't great. Hey, he is trying, and that's not nothing.

It is easy for me to come up with a horrifying picture based on this message. Something about the combination of terrible spelling, a troubled marriage, and a baby on the way paints an image more vividly sad than the little girl in the sunflowers. But that's not fair. I have an official personal policy to assume the best when I'll never know one way or the other. The story that I invent around this message only affects my mental state. So let's just all assume that these two kids worked it out and their baby grew up to win the Nobel Prize.

This is the kind of thing you end up with when you shop at the thrift store. Pretty much everything has its own little history, though usually it's not written in sharpie on the back (though sometimes the Goodwill price is). And now you know one of my house's secrets. Feel special.

you are here.

It is a well-documented fact that I love maps. When you blog, all sorts of useless information gets documented. No one was ever able to put down in writing the location of the Holy Grail, but at least future generations will know that I really like maps, hate cantaloupe, and that once I got locked in a Goodwill dressing room.

How much do I like maps? Well, I have one in pretty much every room in my house, including one of the bathrooms. You might find this to be excessive, but I promise that each map is different. If you are not a map person, you may think that a map is a map is a map, but that's just not true. It's not just that they show different locations, which they do, but they are different kinds of maps. They communicate the concept of geography in different ways, depending on their initial purpose. So my topographical map is different than my elementary schoolroom map, which is in turn different from my geological survey map.

The very first thing that you will see upon entering my home is a map. It hangs in the foyer, facing the front door. It is a map of the very property on which you stand.

When I bought the house, the previous owners gave me a landscaping plan that had been drawn up, but never implemented. It was a grand plan, done by a real professional landscaper. It is hand-drawn in pencil and ink, dated September 25, 1989. The house was built in 1984, so it's likely the first owners had this done. And then they never implemented this grand scheme of foliage. I'm glad they didn't. If they had, I might not have even bought the house. What enticed me were the trees, and while the interior of the house is truly marvelous, had the exterior been dotted with variegated ligustrum and dwarf abelia and white caladium, I might not have looked any closer. I would have said, man, that looks like a lot of work. Trees are beautiful landscaping that require no upkeep.

So they gave me this diagram, along with a set of house keys. Likely, the previous owners had given it to them and they didn't know what to do with it but keep it. It was rolled up and flattened, having been passed down from owner to owner, all of them too lazy or too tree-hugging to put it into effect, but not willing to get rid of it.

I thought it was pretty neat, a totally unexpected part of the home-buying transaction. A couple weeks later, I serendipitously found a rustic wooden and burlap frame at Goodwill that fit perfectly, and I hung it up in my new foyer. I just thought it was a cool drawing, but then later, I realized it was yet another map (I'm a little slow). Josh says it was a weird thing to display, but it seemed glaringly obvious to me. Maybe it is weird, but it's also fantastic. Really, how many people have a hand-drawn map of their land? It's so specific; you could put a "YOU ARE HERE" sticker on it. I like my maps to show places that I love, and I love this tiny piece of the world.

Someday, I will probably leave this house. At that point, I will have to make the hard decision whether to pass the map down to the next owner. I am already resisting the idea. Right now, it is a map of my property, but then it will be a map of my first home (sentimental maps!). How will I know that the next people will appreciate and love this drawing the way that I do? They may have great taste in houses, but they may not be map people, and even if I gift them the frame, they might just shove it in a closet somewhere, or worse, throw it away.

I guess I'll just have to keep it. Oh well!

the revolution.

Note: A dude at work lent me book by Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto. He is a True Believer. I try really hard to avoid discussing politics at work (okay, anywhere), but I let my guard down and got pulled into a conversation and then I was given a book (that's how much I dislike discussing politics - I think of it as something I have to guard against). Anyway, this is my response that I sent to him in an email. After I finished writing it, I thought I might as well throw it up here. Which may be a mistake, as it seems to be starting a political discussion.

I have no problem with ending the war on terror and the war on drugs. By all means, reduce our military drastically and stop with the undeclared wars. Legalize pot. What we've been doing has not been working, so let's try something else. As for the stuff about the Federal Reserve, I know next to nothing about it, so I don't feel qualified to say one way or the other.

I do have a problem with ending the social safety net. The system is imperfect, not sustainable as it is, and it may even encourage dependency like he says. But I'm not willing to say that government does not have a place in taking care of the poor. He says that before we had these programs, then the poor were provided for by other people. It's quite a nice picture - remember when the government minded it's own dang business and we all just took care of each other? I have no doubt that Paul and many people he knew did work for free or reduced pay. But that is anecdotal evidence and gives no indication of how well this provided for the poor. I talked to Mike the other day, who said that with a reduced tax burden (as well as not having the idea that they are helping the poor through their taxes), people would care more for each other. I'm just not sure that's true. He called it cynicism, but I call it realism (but that's exactly what a cynic would say).

Part of the reason that I am so skeptical of the rosy picture Paul painted is because I recently read a rebuttal of his statement that that the Civil War was unnecessary, that Lincoln should've just bought the slaves. One of the books that he recommends in the back is The Real Lincoln, which is along these lines. This is just...wrong. Here is the debunking, in four parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

I know I'm responding to stuff that was not in the book, but my point is that I don't trust Paul's version of history, even history that he personally remembers. Memory is faulty, and his perspective is one of white male privilege (gah, I sound like such a liberal). That's not his fault, of course, but to assume that his perspective tells the whole picture is ridiculous.

He does not say much about the Civil Rights era. He does sort of gloss over Jim Crow as an unfortunate side effect of people have the freedom to govern themselves, which sort of made my eyes cross. He does not say how he feels about the integration of schools. Rand Paul got in some trouble for saying he would've voted against the Civil Rights Act. Those things were local government acting on the will of the people. Sometimes the will of the people is racist and wrong, and we need something to step in and say no, guys, we can't do it like this. Whether government should play that role, I don't know. I'm not sure who else would, but it's hard to imagine because I have grown up in the world where that was part of government's place. I just have a hard time saying that the federal government stepping in and taking away the right for states to set voting laws that prevented whole segments of the population from having a voice is necessarily bad.

Government is just people. We get some things right, we screw other things up. Just like individuals, we're all just guessing what the right thing to do is. Anything that gets too big has the tendency to become corrupt and inefficient, because it's just a magnifier of all our worst traits. I guess that's a concentration of power thing, but government is just one example of that (see also: corporations, unions, religious institutions, probably others).

I think Ron Paul is a good man, and I'm glad that someone is saying these things. Our government probably is too big, but I don't necessarily want his version either. His base is young, and it may be years before his real influence is known. I was already planning on voting for him in the primary, though you have to admit the other choices are not very inspiring, when they're not outright repellant. But the more I see of the world, the more complicated it gets. I am suspicious of anyone who says there is one answer to everything.

Thank you for lending me the book. It's good that I have a firm grasp of what he is saying, rather than hearing everything secondhand.