Ah, Spring. When you get a few warm days in a row, turn off the furnace and absolutely refuse to turn it back on - even when the warm days end and you get frost at night. And the house, which leaks heat like a sieve, suddenly becomes incredibly well-insulated, keeping in the freezing temps from the night all day long. Still, I refuse - REFUSE to turn the furnace back on. I want at least one, maybe two power/gas bills (they’re the same company here so you never get a break) that are less than $300.00. Just a couple of those would be nice; I’m not too demanding.
But it’s damned cold in here, I don’t care what the thermometer says. At the end of April, I’m wearing sweats, socks from my eBay shopping spree and a large sweater while I’m sitting here. Coffee turns cold on me before I’ve gotten halfway through the cup, and there’s about a 20-second interval between it burning my tongue and being lukewarm. *shudder* We mowed the lawn (okay, so RANDY mowed the lawn. But I watched) yesterday for the first time and last night we had rain mixed with snow. I actually had to drag out my long winter coat and boots yesterday.
The floor is cold, the walls are cold, outside is cold - and windy - and the bed…..
Okay, the bed is a whole separate issue. I am probably the last person on the face of the planet who has just given up a waterbed. I’ve had one since I was 14, which is certainly long enough for me to have forgotten how ice-damned-cold a regular bed can be when you climb into it at night. I have always wondered why people who do not have small children wear pajamas. Now I know. It’s to insulate the skin from the freezing shock of crawling between those sheets at night. Plus, I am too lazy to want to make enough of my own body heat to warm the bed; I want the bed to do it for me. There is nothing like getting into a pre-warmed bed at night when you’ve spent the day shivering and resolutely refusing to do anything to warm up other than piling on the sweaters. Then you burrow down, feeling the bed warming your extremities - and well-padded places - sigh happily and go to sleep wrapped in warmth and comfort. You don’t even dread the possibility of a bladder-call in the night because no matter how cold the toilet is, you know the bed is waiting for you.
Not so this bed. Oh, it waits, but it’s like a pit stop during a race; the whole time you’re peeing, you know the bed is slowly cooling by degrees. And this is a Sleep Number bed, which is neat, but Randy has his own side which is divided from mine not only by a foam separator, but also his actual sleep number which is higher than mine. So cuddling isn’t as comfy as it could be. For me, that is. Randy never really has appreciated the opportunity to be a good husband by allowing me to press my icy skin against his sleep-warmed body, thereby stealing all of his hard-won heat. I don’t know why.
And then there’s the whole “stay in exactly the same spot and position” thing, which I had also forgotten. I’ve spent the last half of my life (okay, longer than that but I’m in denial so shut up) climbing into a bed that was toasty warm so I could just kind of sprawl out and not worry about cold spots. So I keep doing that and being forcibly reminded. I shuffle upstairs half asleep, climb into bed and am instantly awakened.
DaBoy can always tell when Randy and I have gone to bed; he can hear the cries of “Oh, my GOD”, “Eeee!” and “Did you put ICE packs in here??” that indicate we’ve taken the plunge. Last night, Randy told me through chattering teeth and blue lips that it’ll be nice come summer. Even if the A/C can’t keep up, that bed will certainly cool us off at first.
The only advantage is that I have absolutely no desire to have the windows open to keep the bedroom cool. Well, and the other advantage, which is that we no longer wake up feeling as though we’ve spent the night being kicked by mules. It’s a very comfortable bed, once it warms up and you can uncurl from the fetal position. Now DaBoy wants one.
It is 3:48 in the morning. Because it’s Spring in Iowa and as usual, all the thunderstorms they spent the week warning us were going to hang around all day Monday held off until now. Now, there is a line of them headed straight for us, so I am giving the office in the basement it’s first test. It has one of those tiny basement windows that Randy thoughtfully covered by cramming a piece of cardboard into, is 90% underground and DaBoy calls it the Bat Cave. Even during the day you have to have lights on down here. And a sweater.
At this hour, the world is a different place. Everyone except me in the world is asleep, including the anchors at The Weather Channel. They go on a recorded loop until around 5-ish; the only live part of the show is the radar. Which is really not attractive right now. The cat is demanding his breakfast because the first one down the stairs in the morning is responsible for feeding him. I just discovered a spider on the wall, and decided to let him live - until I realized he’d moved in with his whole family: three of them within a square foot radius. I found another use for those little abridged telephone books. Somehow, I’m thinking it’s not a use the phone company would want to use in their ads. “Anything you need to find, we have it listed! The book the other guys don’t want you to know about! It’s also great for smashing spiders during thunderstorms at 3 AM!”
So anyway, me, the cat and Marilyn Manson are hanging out. Well, the cat is hanging out upstairs yelling under the door because he can’t tell time and doesn’t get why I haven’t fed him three hours early. He’s up, I’m up, why is his bowl still empty?
The only real fear I have at this point - besides a tornado - is the power going out. In which case, this will be my last will and testament because they’ll find me curled up in a ball under my desk, where I haven’t checked yet for spiders, and I’ll be dead or mentally incompetent from fear. I want all of my stuff to go to DaBoy except for that one painting Randy’s Aunt Dawn really wants. She can have that one; they all know which one it is. Randy will be my Executor.
Speaking of Executors - hey, in my About Me section on the right side of the page there, I said I write about whatever comes to mind; don’t say you weren’t warned about my SOC writing tendencies - something kind of funny happened the other night while DaBoy was setting the table for dinner. I’d roasted this ham, the damned thing was like, eleven pounds, which means we still have 8 pounds of ham in the freezer. But I digress. Anyway, DaBoy was setting the table when he noticed that one of the euphemistically named “steak knives” had a spot of rust on it and became concerned.
“Mom,” he said. “This knife is rusty.”
“Yeah, I know,” I answered from the stove. “It’s no big deal.”
“Rust is dangerous,” he informed us.
“It’s really okay,” Randy reassured him while trying to carve up the ham. “It’s a small spot, can be scrubbed off with a Brillo and you probably don’t have to use the knife anyway. This ham is falling apart.”
“But doesn’t rust give you something?” DaBoy persisted.
“Yes,” I replied, stirring. “It can give you tetanus. We’ve all had our shots, don’t worry.”
“Oh, I’m not worried,” he said, shrugging. “I gave the knife to Randy.”
This is my family life. I wonder sometimes who will actually be needing therapy by the time DaBoy has a family of his own.
I’m jumpy. I always get jumpy at this time of year because I have a thunderstorm phobia. And, yes, I live in Tornado Alley. Shut up. I mention being jumpy because that’s my life right now; jumping at every little noise. The other day, I was eating lunch and crunched a Dorito. As you do. And the cat, who was walking past me at the time, leaped up in the air, then came straight down and turned his head to glare at me over his shoulder. However, he had to look for me as I was no longer in my chair. I was hanging from the ceiling because my scaring the cat scared me that badly.
DaBoy has laryngitis. He sounds like one of those dead guys in a Stephen King movie. He also has a habit of beginning a conversation with me before he even sees where I am; so long as we’re both in the same part of the house, that’s good enough for him. The laryngitis is irritating him, so he keeps clearing his throat a lot. So from behind me, at the other end of a darkened hallway, with no warning, I hear what sounds like an extremely large and vicious animal snarling. Aaaaaand, back up to the ceiling I go.
Randy deals with it all with equanimity. He knows to not come bounding into a room with a cheerful yell and a slam of the door. He knows that once I unpeel my fingernails from the ceiling tile, I will use them on him. He speaks soothingly in a calm, steady tone of voice, even when telling me something really cool or really annoying.
Except last night, he let me down. Well, it wasn’t really his fault, to be fair. We were sitting in the garage having a cigarette at around midnight. The garage door was open about two feet from the ground and I was sitting closest to it. I had turned away from the door to address Randy, when I turned back and found myself literally face to face with a full-grown Husky dog. I must’ve sucked in seven or eight gallons of air. My heart literally skipped a beat - which I never knew was possible. My blood turned to ice, and I got an adrenaline rush that would have launched the space shuttle.
Apparently, the dog had escaped and was wandering the neighborhood, saw that we were in the garage and decided to pay us a neighborly visit. Randy only saw it a split second before I did; it came into the garage from the other side of the car, just appearing like magic around the rear bumper. I patted the dog on the head to make sure it was real, but it decided that there were much less freaky people to visit and left the scene. It took me probably five minutes to recover.
And then the dog came back. The adrenal gland can only manufacture so much adrenaline at a time, so this second appearance didn’t have quite as spectacular an effect as the first one, but only because if I had cut myself at that moment, only ice cubes and pure adrenaline would have come out. There just wasn’t anything left in my adrenal gland. I did give my lungs another good workout, though. The dog, who paid not the slightest attention to Randy, by the way, seemed to enjoy my reaction because after vanishing into the night for the second time, it materialized at my knee a third time.
By then, I just didn’t have anything left to react with. I started petting the dog, got a phone number off the collar, and called the owner. Well, damn straight, I did! If her dog was going to amuse itself by scaring twenty years off my life, I was going to make sure the person responsible wasn’t going to get any sleep, either.
But she really is a responsible owner. After ascertaining where we were, she told me the dog’s name (Tasha) and said she’d throw on some clothes and come get her. Which she actually did. By then, Tasha had wandered over to the next block, probably having decided that I wasn’t going to provide any more entertainment. We met the owner at the base of our driveway, pointed her in the right direction and listened to her despairing cries of “Taaaaaashaaaaaaa” for another 10 minutes. Apparently, there was another dog that was supposed to be with Tasha, but we never saw one.
I hope she found them. I also hope I can get in with my hairdresser in the very near future. I’m starting to look like the Bride of Frankenstein.
You know, the usual; laundry, running errands, getting little household things done. We finally hauled the waterbed upstairs and set it up so now we have a dresser in the pedestal, not to mention an actual bed. The plan is to fill the waterbed mattress with air, thereby turning it into an airbed, which will hopefully allow Randy and I to sleep on it at the same time. He doesn’t have all the parts he needs to use the air compressor to fill it, and this is where our story begins:
The next door neighbor has been a widow for a little less than a year. Her husband was a carpenter, and like so many men, was unable to resist buying the tools of his trade whenever he saw something he could get for a good deal or at a garage sale. Now she has a garage filled with things that plug in and make loud noise, usually have something sharp attached and all do something carpentry-related, but doesn’t have any idea what most of them are. Randy and I met her during neighborhood cleanup, at which time he noticed compressor parts. He went over there yesterday, bought some things including a cordless drill, an airhose and god knows what all else. He didn’t have enough cash on him to pay for it all right then, so he ran to the ATM to get it.
While he was gone, she went to church, we decided to go to Olive Garden for dinner and it happened that while we were just getting ready to leave she came home. Randy walked over to pay her, DaBoy and I stayed in the garage. DaBoy was wandering around and I was sitting in a lawn chair. DaBoy rushed over to me and in a voice that would drown out a fighter jet flying overhead at 20 feet says, “Her car looks like it has Oreos all over it!” It’s a black car, and the image that came to mind was that the strip on the side of the car had come off, as they do, leaving behind the white brackets where they glued it in. So I said, “Oh, my GOD, shush up!”
“But Mom, it really looks like it’s got Oreos on it!”
“That’s rude!” I exclaimed. “Maybe she LIKES it that way. Now hush!”
“How could anyone like-”
“Hush!”
And from the driveway next door, Randy said, “Are those cookies?”
Well, hell. Now I have to apologize to DaBoy, but first I gotta go see it for myself. Yep, sure enough, the windows on the car were covered in Oreos. Doublestuffs, no less. Evidently, her son is a junior in high school, drives that car to school every day, and has girls who have a crush on him. So they decided to decorate his car, not realizing that he wasn’t driving it yesterday; he had his mother’s car and she had his. We all stood there for a moment admiring the new decor while their dog, a big, black animal with the innocuous name of “Bear” tried earnestly to tear his way out of the front window to get at me and Randy. Mostly Randy; since her husband died, the dog has become fiercely protective.
So we all went home, Randy and DaBoy needing to blow noses (it was cold and windy. Iowa in April. Who knew?) and I waited in the garage for them when I was approached by the neighbor’s daughter. She told me that her mom was going to put the dog out so he wouldn’t bark at us. I thought she meant put the dog in the back yard, so we could remain out front and explained that we were leaving anyway. Then I see mom headed across the driveways holding the dog by his leash…..and muzzle.
Turns out, he’s a labrador, which blew me away; I’ve never even heard of a labrador to whom any new person isn’t an instant lifelong friend. And true to his breed, on our turf, he acted just like any other lab I’ve ever met; excited, thrilled to meet us and wanting lots of attention. The hope here is that we can go out onto the deck and smoke our cigarettes while talking on the phone (that’s a direct quote from the neighbor, who knows that I’ve done that a few times……how, exactly??) and not have to spend the entire time listening to the dog barking ferociously at us from the other side of the fence.
After meeting Bear, we all piled into the car and went to Olive Garden. Where we were seated next to a table of about 7 guys in their early 20s. I hate being stuck next to parties like that; they never can seem to talk quietly or remember that they’re not the only people in the room.
***************************We interrupt this story to share another one************************************
A very good friend of mine tells a story about going shopping for a new dress with spaghetti straps, IIRC. In the process of trying on dresses, she removed her bra and stuffed it into her purse. While at the cash register, she was digging through her purse, getting more and more frustrated as she was unable to find her wallet, grabbed her hairbrush and snatched it out of her purse. This brush was, of course, entangled in the bra, which resulted in the bra sailing freely across the space separating her from an older gentleman and landing on his head. The moral of the story is, naturally, that the floor never, ever opens up and swallows you when you need it to.
*************************************We now return you to your regularly scheduled story********************************
Anyway, we were sitting there trying to hear each other over the whoops and hollering of the table next to us. I finally got fed up, leaned across the table and addressed DaBoy. “SO,” I shouted, “WHY IS THERE NO SCHOOL ON FRIDAY?”
The room quieted instantaneously. DaBoy turned pink and muttered, “I dunno,” while Randy remembered the above bra story and realized the truth of that story’s moral. This, of course, delighted DaBoy, who is expected to behave himself with decorum and manners at all times when we are in public. Except when his mother doesn’t behave herself.
Dinner went on, Randy sinking lower and lower into his seat until his chin seemed to be resting on the table itself. Part of his problem was that he’d ordered a Tequila Sunrise, and they’d brought him one with a little sword embedded in an orange section and topped with a cherry. And here I’d gone and attracted everyone’s attention to him and his little frilly drink, hair that needs cutting and torn up jeans. Meanwhile, DaBoy and I were still talking and the volume of the conversations around us fluctuated in range from deafening to not-too-bad.
DaBoy has a tendency to mutter. I mention this because it’s relevent. He had begun to get bouncy - literally. Randy was trying to sign the credit card slip, DaBoy is bouncing and giggling, I wasn’t helping the situation and had begun to bounce myself a little, when DaBoy muttered something including the word, “movement”. I asked him to repeat himself. He did, but it wasn’t any clearer the second time. To me, it sounded a lot different than I was sure it was spoken, but to be sure, I asked,
“What? Why are you talking about bowel movements?”
This of course, was during one of those inexplicable lulls in the volume of conversations in any crowded room, so my voice carried very well to all corners and all diners in the vicinity. Randy envisioned a bra flying through the air again, hunkered down and turned red. DaBoy, being a 14-year old male, found it hysterically funny while I was just shrugging my shoulders at the inevitability of it all.
Needless to say, Randy rushed us out of there as quickly and unobtrusively as possible, waiting until I pulled into the garage to breathe a heavy sigh of relief. Hee.
You’d think he would know by now that DaBoy and I may be nuts, but that Randy himself is with us of his own free will. Which makes him nuttier than my son and I will ever be.
That’s what I’m thinking about. Fantasizing, really. Killing the cat.
Why, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Because he’s obnoxious. Explain to me, please, why he feels compelled to walk right past Randy, who feeds him every morning; past DaBoy’s room where DaBoy - who cleans out his litterbox and is usually lying in bed instead of getting up and getting ready for school - to stick his paw under my closed bedroom door, rattle it, howl under the door and then run? Actually, I know why he runs; he does it because he knows he’s absolutely forbidden to pull that crap and will get thoroughly soaked with the spray bottle if I can catch him.
But why mess with me in the first place? I don’t feed him, I don’t clean up after him and out of all three of us, I’m the one who isn’t accessible in the mornings. He’s perfectly content to ignore me all day while the guys are at school and work, but the minute they get home, he’s all over me like a bad rash. What’d I do??
This morning I had to actually lay there for a few minutes after the door-rattling and howling stopped, just so he didn’t get the idea that my getting up had anything to do with him. If that works, even ONCE, he’ll do it every day until he dies. Untimely-wise or not. Yet, he can’t seem to get the idea that me catching him on any un-fabric-ed surface gets him sprayed and/or shoved onto the floor. I saved his life the other night; Randy and I walked in to catch him on the kitchen table frantically trying to eat a foot-long lanyard that Randy used to carry around a flash-drive. The damned cat jumped down and ran away from me while I tried to get it out of his mouth. You could hear him choking on it and it was that more than anything else that let me grab him. Not realizing what it was (not that it would have mattered much but if I’d known, I’d have been a little more gentle), I got hold of the lanyard and snatched it out of his mouth. And throat. And esophagus. And stomach, for all I know. What I do know is that Randy threw it in the trash and now needs a new one.
Why do we get pets and then spend the next however long trying to live a normal life in spite of them?
What amazes me is how much he’s changed since Susie died. He spent the first four years of his life being a shadow. We adopted them at the same time when they were 8 weeks old so for all intents and purposes, they never really knew life without each other. He never has been conventionally playful or particularly social. Most of the time we had to get him to come to us so we could pet him or play with him, but the instant Susie showed up, he was gone. They never fought, always played well together, groomed each other and in general got along great. But since she’s died, he’s a different cat altogether. Susie was the lover; she always had to be in someone’s lap (which wasn’t easy, considering she weighed about 18 lbs and was an enormous cat) but Elwood had his bubble.
He still does - I called the vet the other day to ask them a question, and referred to him as “Hellcat” before she was done looking him up. Her response was instantaneous: “Oh, yeah, Elwood!”
Anyway I still want to kick him. Right now, he’s peacefully asleep on the floor in the living room….or he might be in my chaise. He’ll leave me alone almost all day, but the minute the guys get back, he’ll be all over me. I just don’t get it.
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