Jill Blevins: Stories

Friends

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 02:07:57 GMT

Friends, the non-Flushing Kind

You know how when you’ve had a really good vacation, you whine for the next couple of days? Be grateful you’ve not been around me for the past week. I have good friends, though. They’re used to it. I do this every time.

I can’t help it. We visited Jenn -- once the estranged, drug-addicted, offspring with twenty tattooes -- who is now the perfect little Mom to her perfect little daughter. We stayed in places with both carpet and sheetrock. We made fun of everything Disney, which is something you can’t work up too much guilt over criticizing.

Now we’re home and the Florida vitamin D sunshine has worn off. We’re back into our steady-state of terminal laziness. It took only hours until we started whining about the house. Okay, minutes. You try opening up your bedroom door and bumping into plumbing supplies and a big, dirty shop-vac and see how long your vacation high lasts. There’s so much work to ignore on this house.

We ignored it all morning today until there was absolutely nothing remotely interesting on TV. Even then, we watched things we’d normally not watch. I never thought I could be so fascinated by turkeys in the wild and the history of the Virgin Guadalupe.

“I’m going to get going,” Charlie said after at least three hot beverages. I didn’t want to work on the house as I’m saving that for when I want to feel useful or when I want to pay teenagers to feel useful. I found useless paperwork to do instead.

This is my way of feeling busy without accomplishing a single, useful thing. I know: busyness is not accomplishment. I’ve been saying this to myself since we returned and all it’s done is make me feel even more useless and unaccomplished. You know what? You can get used to feeling useless. I’m almost there.

Charlie, being useful and accomplished, got busy in the upstairs bathroom. He started by trying to wrench off an old water line valve to the sink. Like everything else in this house, it needed replacing before he covered it up and moved on. Did I mention this was the first thing he did all day, all week since we returned from vacation? As soon as he tugged on the old, corroded valve, he broke the entire copper fitting onto which it was mounted.

He’d never sweated copper before. Sweating refers, he tells me, to when you heat up the copper pipes and solder the joints. “I think I can do it because I have to,” he said. “I think I’ll give it a try.”

I found more things to do which involved trips to places with plumbing. When he goes to Home Depot, especially for plumbing, he can be gone a while. He’s had the water turned off for a few hours now. I’ve gotten good at learning to go with the flow. The kids are on their own.

When he returned, he soldered the pipes, let them cool, and went outside to turn the water back on. “Yell if it’s leaking,” he told the Vegan who stood at plumbing watch. I stayed downstairs. This is the key to remodeling survival. If you don’t have to watch a potential nightmare firsthand, stay away. It makes it easier to laugh about later.

The Vegan yelled, Charlie went back upstairs and made another attempt at soldering, tried to turn the water on again, and again I heard the Vegan yell. Charlie didn’t even swear. He only needs two times to realize he can’t do something. This is why I don’t get in the middle of things and give advice. We’d still be trying and still out of water.

Charlie called Kevin, our sometime sub and full-time friend. Kevin has come to our plumbing rescue several times on this house already. Today, however, he isn’t answering his phone. I remember today’s the day he and his wife, Kristine, move her office. This happens to be the exact time they’re doing the most important part of their move, as she works out of their home and can’t be down a day. Kevin hasn’t called back.

This also happens to be one of those days we’ve agreed to greet at our church. We told the Vegan, “There’s no water; you’ll have to drive somewhere to pee. We’ll be back after we greet and visit a dying friend. It might be a while. Sorry.”

We ran off to the gym to shower then barely made it to church. We forgot all about our lack of home plumbing while we shook hands, laughed, and made jokes with people on their way into church. Most of the time while doing this job we even remember not to swear. I think I only swore once this time.

After church, we rushed over to our friend Tatsue’s house. Before we went to Florida she was laughing and joking with us and the rest of our close friends. Now she’s in hospice care and has only a few days left to live. We almost forgot we had no plumbing.

Charlie called Kevin on the way: “You don’t have to wait for us to come home, Kevin,” Charlie said. “The Vegan will be around but you know how he is. He probably hasn’t noticed the water is off yet. If you get this message and want to come over and solder the upstairs bathroom valve, we’d owe you.”

Tatsue was in a hospice bed with a morphine drip, surrounded by friends and family. It is so hard to see someone so accomplished so weak and tiny and helpless. It was even harder to see her wearing the same expression you’ve seen on other dying people. If you’ve been around people close to death, you know the exact expression I mean. We’ll all be wearing this expression some day.

Charlie remembered our plumbing problem after a few hours and called the Vegan, still at home: “Did some people come over to fix the plumbing while we were gone?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s fixed already?”

“Yes,” he said. “I just took a shower.”

“Okay, then. Nice talking to you,” Charlie told him. Sometimes talking to a teenager is way too much work.

I didn’t think about going to the store or nagging the kids to do it, so we had nothing to eat. It’s too late by now to eat out anywhere, so we stopped at Wild Oats. We got in a conversation about death while the cashier was talking on the phone to someone else, so there were two conversations going on at the same time.

When the cashier hung up, she apologized. “It’s probably better you didn’t listen,” I said. “We just came from a dying friend and that’s what we were talking about. Probably not something you want to listen to, actually.”

“I’ve been dealing with dying friends myself,” she said. “Quite a few, actually.”

Oddly, this made me feel better. Sometimes a few words at the right time can straighten things right out.

We came home, used the plumbing as much as we wanted, and even tried to have a conversation with the Vegan. It was easy to get a few words out of him when I gave him my organic, dairy-free chocolate bar. For me, it was a good trade-off.

Kristine called right after that. “What kind of cancer does Tatsue have?” she asked. She was more interested in our friend, who she’s never met, than bragging about her husband’s emergency plumbing skills. Charlie agreed to help them move as part of our plumbing payment.

“Yeah, we came over and fixed your pipes,” she said. “As far as your plumbing skills are concerned, Kevin said you make a really good Cop.”

Charlie told me later that while Kristine was listening to our message for help, Kevin was gathering up his tools. They left within ten minutes of returning home. How’d we get so lucky to have friends this cool?

“Did the Vegan say anything about us teasing him?” Kristine asked.

“No. There’s not a lot that doesn’t get by him, though, when he’s chatting online.”

“We knocked on the door and asked him if we could borrow a cup of water. He let us in without saying anything and went back to his computer.”

Later, Kevin told Charlie not to use water-soluble flux. “That stuff’s no good,” he said. “You have to use regular flux. It took about ten minutes to fix your pipes. It took longer to drive out there.”

I can’t help but think of my good friends now every time I flush.

Florida Trip Pics

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:19:36 GMT

Trip Pics

We couldn't wait to get into the Florida water.   Charlie's sister's toilet overflowed the first full night we stayed there (gratefully with clean water from the defective tank).    Nicci and the General, Chey, stayed up until 4 am stomping on towels and twisting them out, hence their new names, Stacy the Stomper and Tracy the Twister.

While everyone else was at the NASCAR races, we went to Daytona Beach where Chey and Nicci went parasailing.   It turns out when you're mouthy, you get dunked. They don't have to let you down either, if you're really sarcastic.

Instead of going on the good, scary rides, we went to Magic Kingdom. Don't ever listen to the Radisson Hotel Concierge recommendations when she's got a tour package to sell.

Chey and Nicci at Magic Kingdom, hanging out with the only males over age eight.

Cheyenneh and Nicci on the return flight, trying to deal with the extreme turbulence. They continued back to Oregon while we got off at Albuquerque to visit Charlie's oldest and wisest daughter, Jenn. Charlie just can't get a break: it's all females, all the time on his vacations lately.

Here's Charlie with his first grandchild, Presley. After all the stress Jenn went through, especially while living in our little Kosovo, Presley is just about perfect. She's already calmer than the General was at a month old.

Here's Presley and Jenn, looking as calm and happy as they seemed. Jenn likes being a Mom and so far she's doing great. It was very hard to leave.

We got to hang out with Jenn's brother Brian while we were in town. He doesn't have any kids -- good thing since he likes his job cleaning up contaminated labs. Plague anyone? Jenn keeps him in the kitchen, as you can see.

California Uber Alles

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 01:15:23 GMT

California Uber Alles*

I live in California now and I didn’t even have to move.

It happened this morning. I went in earlier than normal to the gym. Replacing the usual grunting muscle-heads was a line-up of retirees. These weren’t the familiar slow folks from the water-movement class. These were Californian seniors, I could tell.

The men had unusually straight spines, not normal for older Oregonians who’ve spent a lifetime bent over, trying to stay dry. The women wore their white and gray hair in young, hip, swingy styles like my 16 year-old daughter’s friends. Oregonian women, once we get that AARP card, turn into our own Grandmas. Our hair becomes short, thin and wavy, and our closet is full of out of date clothing which we wear with frugal pride. We know the only bright thing in an Oregon winter is our matching pink workout outfits.

These Californian seniors looked like they’d put up a fight if you made them wear last year’s fashions. They wore so much skin-tight lycra that you could almost see their plastic surgery scars. Their faces were tanned, healthy, and pulled up tight. One look and you knew they weren’t from around here.

Okay, I admit it: so am I. This is how I can spot them/us. Not only was I born in the Bay Area, but my oldest son is 5^th generation San Franciscan. I grew up around people who were blessed beyond belief and believed they deserved it. I thought it was normal. I thought everyone woke up to a bright sunshiny day full of hope and equity.

I moved to Oregon when I was 19. I lasted six months and swore I’d never return. I had a hard time waking up to rain every morning. This was when Oregon really had rain. It rained hard all day, every day. I felt like I was in a cold, mold-filled sauna. I had to move, it was ruining my hairstyle. Hair was important to me then; I was still such a Californian.

It’d be hard to find much Californian in me now after a decade of living in Oregon. I don’t even have a hairstyle. If I did, it would do wonderfully in this past Oregon winter. It’s been dry, sunny, and as close to perfect as anywhere I’ve ever lived, including California. I feel guilty I ever complained about the rain.

My parents live in California. We have weather competitions when we call. “It’s 70 degrees and sunny,” my Dad might say. “It’s 40 degrees and raining hard,” I’ll reply. I could never win, unless winning is losing.

Today, my Mom emailed me from California. She wrote it’s been raining all week and most of the winter and she’s sick of it. She’s dealing with it by getting “really into being cozy and warm: a cup of hot cocoa, a mystery, soft music (lately it’s been Beethoven), a blankie and a hot, crackling fire.” I win! Now she’s the one in Oregon winter survival mode.

In Oregon winter survival mode, you turn into Laura Ingalls Wilder no matter how little your house and whether or not it’s on the prairie. You spend your day with cocoa and blankies staying warm by the fire.

If you see the sun, you run outside. You see whole neighborhoods come alive. Kids you’ve never seen before appear outside to play, people go for a run, and neighbors pick up their FoodDay collection off their driveway. It’s only a matter of time before the rain starts again so you take advantage of the Vitamin D. You know it won’t last.

People don’t do that in California. They assume the sun will be there when they’re good and ready to enjoy it. They schedule a run when it’s convenient, not when the sun’s out. It’s always out. You can count on that in California; up until this winter, anyway.

I’m doing leg-extensions near the California seniors. They start talking to the guy at the next machine. Here’s my chance to prove myself wrong. They could be Oregonians: I shouldn’t be so judgmental. Oregonians can have healthy tans and bright smiles and fancy clothes, right?

“Ben’s moving up on the 3^rd,” one senior says. “His house appraised for exactly what they offered him. In California, he’d only be able to buy another ranch. He’s looking at a house on the lake. Everything’s so cheap here compared to home.”

“I just spoke to my realtor this morning,” another one says. “I’m going to try to get my kids up here, too. They could afford a big place here.”

When I lived in California, people introduced themselves by how much their house was worth. “Can you believe it?” they’d say. “I only paid a tenth of that five years ago.” It was worth the rain to get away from the equity greed.

You’d think I’d appreciate Californians moving in and hiking up housing prices since we plan to sell this fixer the second we’ve replaced the last piece of 1970’s Mexican-style linoleum press-on tile. A quick sale at full price is a good thing, right?

Not when you have to buy again. I’ve been in this situation before. Californians discovered Montana through the movies and started buying up property in our little town. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article and before you knew it, we couldn’t afford our own property taxes. We did what anyone would do: cash out. This is how you end up homeless in Montana.

Montana looked completely different by the time we left town. The shops were remodeled and bought out by boutiques. People started talking with California intonation, that is, their sentences went up at the end like they were asking a question when they weren’t. They’d say rude things, smile, and say, “it’s all good.” It was California with snow.

I got out of the gym before I started to worry about my hair. Kevin, our friend and more-than-honest non-Californian sub, was home. He’d just finished up his part of the 33 years of goo-filled plumbing replacement in the upstairs bathroom. “Three hours and I didn’t even have to go to Home Depot,” he said. “That’s a first. I always have to take about three trips when I’m doing plumbing.”

“Charlie went three times yesterday,” I said. “That’s why you’re here. He gave up.”

Being around Californians all morning, I had to ask about his fixer for sale in this hot housing market. I’m glad someone’s getting out from their fixer nightmare. It gives me hope we can find a sucker happy enough to buy our ranch in this cul-de-sac from hell.

“Sold in a day,” he said. “Almost exactly what we asked for. We move into the rental in two weeks.”

Rather than trying to handle two real estate transactions in one month, they’re renting. After eight years of fixer burn-out, they need a few months of house detox. I’m even more jealous. Someone else has to deal with their plumbing when it gets full of goo.

“Now I’m worried the housing market will boom underneath us,” Kevin says. “We might be priced out of the market if we wait a year. Prices are skyrocketing.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “If we can’t find another house in town, we have to buy another car and commute. I hate driving in traffic and I don’t even want to think about being far from a Peet’s.”

“Oh buy another car,” Kevin said. “You’ll be fine.”

How can you feel sorry for yourself when you hear straight talk like that?

It’s important to get your mind off things that worry you, so I went to Peet’s. I rummaged through the newspaper basket to find something mindless to read, like “Ask Amy” in the Living section. I can always use some good advice.

Instead all I could find was Friday’s copy of the Wall Street Journal. I sat down, opened up the Weekend Journal and saw a photo of three houses I drove by less than five minutes ago. I would have rather seen “Ask Amy.” The article sub-head read, “Unexpected Hot Spots.” I start reading, “As home prices soar,” and “big gains,” and stop.

It’s the dreaded Wall Street Journal article. The turf wars have begun. The Californians can come in with their money and say it’s all good, but it’ll be a while before anyone’s ready to call this part of town a hot spot. You can’t drive by the fake-rock façade of Rosewood Market down the street and think soaring home prices. Your first thought will probably be to lock the doors.

Still, I’ve done this before and I know what this means. I explain my concerns to Charlie. He seems worry-free and excited about soaring zip code housing gains, even if they’re lakeside rather than train-track-side. Regardless, I’m not excited about the roof-free living potential if we sell.

“We’re competitive,” Charlie says, trying to reassure me. “We’ll find something. If we don’t we can always move to Florida.”

He’s always thinking of how to move to Florida. He grew up there and whines about how much better it is, even though he has to see a dermatologist to undo the effects of that glorious Florida sun. The General lately has decided she, too, needs to move to Florida. They both have this vision of surfing and boating all day. Besides small things such as a good job and a bad fixer, I’m the only reason we’re still here.

Besides, Californians don’t move to Florida.

*I met Jello Biafra when the Dead Kennedys were hot and we were both living in San Francisco. I met his fiance and he met the loser boyfriend I had at the time. I talked to him long enough to find out his real name (Eric) and long enough to realize California has a reputation that attracts a certain type of person. I left for Oregon the next year.

The Right Room For It

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 06:53:29 GMT

The Right Room for It

“These subjects don’t come up with our other friends,” we were told this weekend. This was after about four hours of non-stop laughing so I was pretty sure we weren’t being offensive. These friends seem to share our same limit where funny stops and disgusting begins. We can stay well within the appropriate range while talking about all sorts of bodily functions, especially passing gas.

Once someone points something out like this, you tend to notice how much you talk about it. Before breakfast this morning, Charlie and I were already started in on our first fart conversation. I can’t even remember how the subject came up.

“Every week during the third grade,” Charlie said, “we’d sit on the floor in a circle to read. This one kid, Dennis, he’d look around and wait for the perfect time to pass gas. Everybody would break out laughing. The teacher got so mad at me because I couldn’t stop laughing. The madder she got, the harder I laughed. That’s when I realized farts were funny.”

You never stop learning something new about your spouse, do you?

“When my sister and I passed gas,” Charlie continued, “my mother used to say, ‘If you’re going to do that, go to the bathroom. That’s the right room for it.’ We’d look at each other and say, ‘Why would we want to do that?’ I still don’t know how that makes sense. I don’t understand how that works. Isn’t the bathroom for more tangible things?”

The enclosed space of a bathroom and the enjoyment of passing gas do not blend well together when you have only one functioning bathroom. They also don’t blen together when you’re working on the door-less non-functioning bathroom, and you have a certain natural response to a bathroom. This is why I got out of the house today when Charlie first started working on the bathroom.

He wasn’t around when I returned but he was thoughtful enough to leave a message on the phone. “I had to get plumbing parts,” he said. “I turned off the water, so don’t take a crap or anything.” I didn’t think anything about it until I wondered, ‘Do I know any other women who’ve listened to messages like this on their phones?’

He seemed to be taking his time and I drank a lot of Peet’s this morning. I paged him and let him know these facts. I let him draw his own conclusions. Now we’re even: he probably doesn’t know other men who receive pages detailing their wife’s bathroom habits.

He returned home before the situation became unbearable for me. I’ve lived without a bathroom; I know exactly how much time I have.

Charlie turned on the water and started in the bathroom tiling. I thought I’d be a good wife and see what he was doing. This is an important room, after all.

“You’re supposed to draw two perpendicular lines on the floor,” he said. “You’re supposed to have a grid so everything’s straight. I’ve looked through gun sights all my life, so I feel confident drawing only one line. I’m a one-line guy.”

He mixed the thin-set mortar and started laying down tile. He kept telling me to cut tile for him; telling me I’d like it. I found excuses to do it later. It was more fun to watch. I might want to do this sometime but I’d have to work up to it on an inconspicuous part of the house. I’ll let the man of the house do the bathroom. It seems more appropriate.

He gave up asking me to cut his tile, so I felt safe asking more questions without having to do work afterward. I asked him, “Why do you start on the entryway side?”

“I like to lay it in rows,” he said, “starting from the doorway toward the opposite wall. You start with solid pieces of tile then you work your way back so you get the appearance of the tile disappearing under the wall.”

He checked the level of the floor and spread extra thin-set mortar on the uneven spots. It looked fun, but it was more fun to look. So far I’ve done nothing today and I intend to keep it that way.

The Vegan came home and said, “You’re going to tile yourself into a corner.”

Charlie explained the ways of tiling, showing he’s given some thought to what he’s doing. The Vegan stared and, seeing nothing further to find fault with, left.

After finishing the first row, the General came by to check on his work. “Big deal,” she said. “You’ve got three tiles laid down.”

“Nothing like a compliment to keep you going,” Charlie said. “I’m working my ass off for a silent stare and a ‘big deal.’ I’ll show them.”

Ever since I read him an article about the science of passing gas, he hasn’t held back. He tells me it’s my fault for telling me holding back could cause gastrointestinal damage. He’s polite, though. He listened to his Mom: he uses the bathroom.

I went back downstairs to unimportant work doing things that didn’t need to be done. Charlie and the Vegan and General were all upstairs. Every time one of the kids walked by the bathroom, they made a comment about the odor. Charlie could have blamed the smell on the future toilet’s open waste pipe hole. He laughed instead. They quickly found other things to do where the air is clear.

When I was brave enough, I went upstairs again to see how he was doing. He was the most content I’ve seen him all weekend. He’s in the bathroom, covering the crappy bathroom floor with beautiful tile, doing a good job of keeping his gastrointestinal system healthy.

His mother would be proud.

Flop Turn River

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 03:54:23 GMT

Flop Turn River

Some days are destined to be crap. No matter what you try to do, you end up doing nothing. If you’d known this was going to be a throwaway day, you’d plan for it. You’d enjoy your lack of productivity instead of increasing your frustration. If you were Charlie and me, you’d watch poker on TV and you wouldn’t feel guilty.

Charlie told everyone he was taking the day off to tile the bathroom. Knowing he didn’t have to get up early, he stayed up much later. 9:00 a.m, the time I start feeling guilty for not working, came and went without him. Not a good, sensible, productive start to the day.

With me, it’s 50/50 whether I’m going to get anything done during the course of any day. When the things you do aren’t tangible, you can do a lot of nothing before anyone notices. You can pass for working when you look busy and you’re working for yourself.

Charlie wakes up and starts watching poker on TV. If I keep working, he’d look unproductive so I start watching, too. Is poker this interesting if you’re not avoiding anything productive?

People are so worried about losing money. What about all that lost time? Tournaments can last four days which you’ll never get back. You can watch poker on TV all morning without a chance of winning a nickel. I know, because that’s exactly what we did.

“I like watching poker because the best liar wins,” Charlie says. “Usually when you lie, you lose. It’s definitely different than work.”

Charlie played poker only once, and that was with people from work at a retreat. “I had to keep looking at the cheat sheet to figure out what kind of hand I had,” he said. “I ended up winning a lot of money. I haven’t played since. I’m gambling on this house for now.”

The only reason we stopped watching poker is because we were cut off. We weren’t strong enough to stop on our own. When the tournament ended, we got up as fast as we could. We could have justified watching anything at that point, even the History channel.

Charlie went upstairs and got to work. He wanted to make sure the plumbing worked well enough before he sealed it in behind the new tile. I knew how well it worked by the sounds coming from the bathroom. Swearing isn’t a good sign.

“You know what a diverter is?” he said. “You twist it one way for a shower and the other for a bath. On ours, twist it one way and you get a shower and a bath. Twist it the other way and you get nothing. I’m off to Home Depot.”

He came back, worked for a little bit until he got frustrated again. He bought and tried two different diverters. Both gave you a shower and a bath at the same time. He decided the diverter might not be the problem.

He got a flashlight and looked into the inside guts of the control tree. “There’s thirty years of goop in here. No wonder it doesn’t work. I probably should have looked at it first. That’s why I’m not a plumber.”

When you give up, you call a professional. He called Kevin, our trusty sub and friend who did so much work this fall, we have hope we’ll finish this house.

Charlie showed Kevin the aged goop inside the control tree. “You know, I think you need a new tree,” he said. “I’ll come over and help you do it.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Charlie said. “Why don’t you do it when I’m in Florida next week?”

“Okay.”

That was the end of that day. Charlie wouldn’t have been any more productive if he’d stayed the couch. Even your day is sometimes a gamble.

Jenn and Presley

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 23:11:30 GMT

Jenn and Presley: This is what happens when you live in Camp Crap for two months. See this if you're curious.

No

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 21:10:09 GMT

“Get in,” the General says. She pulls off the road and lets me in. I get the feeling she’s been prowling the streets looking for me. I’m not hiding; I’m on a walk enjoying the beautiful weather. I suspect my wallet will regret this.

“I’m holding you hostage,” she says. “I need something from you.”

People scare the crap out of you when you start having kids. “Just wait until they’re teenagers,” they say. “You think diapers are difficult; you just wait.”

I had kids very young so I was already scared. By the time they were teenagers, I’d used up all my fear. I counted the years until they’d be adults and figured I could last. I’ve gone through worse.

I learned the word ‘no.’ Contrary to popular belief out here in the ‘burbs, teenagers don’t turn into aliens if you use it on them. If you know this, you’ll survive. You might even have some money left by the time they move out.

Without slowing, the General turns a corner into a residential area. She’s still in third gear and almost stalls. To avoid this she speeds up to about 35. We’re in the older part of town where older people walk on the streets without sidewalks. She zooms by a few pedestrians who scoot over when they hear her coming.

“Is this how you drive?” I ask.

“No.” She knows this word too, apparently.

She pulls out a couple of Blazer tickets and hands them to me. She’s not looking where she’s driving; she’s almost on the other side of the road. I’m too scared to say anything.

“Look what I got,” she says. “Free!”

“Good, then you don’t need anything from me.”

“We need a ride,” she says. “Meagan and I are too scared to drive up there by ourselves.”

“I’d be scared, too, the way you drive. I’m busy, though.”

“Whatever you’re doing isn’t as important as me.”

“No.”

“Okay, whatever. I need $10 for food at the Blazers game tonight. You can add it to what I owe you. Can I drive you to the bank?”

“No.”

“You don’t have any cash,” she says. “I checked all your hiding places.”

“Yes I do.”

“Oh. You have new hiding places.” She smiles. We’ve been playing this game since she was two. She wants something she can’t have. I hide it. She finds my hiding spot. I find a new one. The difference between then and now is that then, she stole. Now, she tells me. At least she’s honest although no one else in the house has yet to take anything, even money, even left out in the open.

“You should be proud of me,” she says. “I’ve only been absent five times this year so far. Last year at this time I was absent 18 times. Aren’t I good?”

“No.”

“My friends all have, like, 30 absences.”

“Get new friends.”

“I’m serious. You should reward me.”

“Are all their absences on Mondays, like yours?”

She pulls up to the driveway, quiet for once. She got what she wanted and I’m only out $10. We both feel victorious.

“We got bored,” she said, arriving home early. “I couldn’t sit still for that long.”

“Speaking of A.D.D,” Charlie says. “How’s that Dr working for you?”

“We have the most awkward silences,” she says. “He’ll be like, ‘Hi, how are you?’ I’ll say, ‘Fine.’ Silence. ‘How’s school?’ ‘Fine.’ Silence. We just sit there staring. Awkward.”

“Silence?” I say. “You?”

“He has me put boxes in these structures,” she says. “He says, ‘No one’s ever been so careful as me on tests. I can remember all the details when copying drawings. I can remember lists. I can still remember them: ‘chair, table, bench, crayon, pencil, book, car, boat, tree.’ See? He says I’m OCD.”

“I thought you were A.D.D,” Charlie says.

“All I want is the Adderall. I wish he’d hurry up and prescribe some. I could buy it in the hallway. Seriously, I could easily be an addict. I want that stuff so bad. I could sell it, too. $30 each. That’s a lot of Abercrombie.”

“Do I need to explain why the step-daughter of a Cop shouldn’t be selling meds in school hallways?” Charlie says.

“Speaking of Cops,” she says, “Meagan got a ticket for parking on the crosswalk. She wanted me to tell you.”

“What am I supposed to do? I didn’t give it to her.”

“The parking tickets look like gift certificates,” she says. “Did you know that? They look like someone left a gift certificate on your windshield. Then you open it up and, lucky you, you owe $237 for parking on the crosswalk.

“Just for that,” she says, looking at Charlie, “I think you should make me hot chocolate.” She knows better than to look at me. She knows my two-letter response.

“I can make you mashed potatoes if you want,” he says.

“No thanks. Hot chocolate. And toast.”

Charlie gets up like a well-trained dog. It takes a lot of tenaciousness to want Charlie to step in the kitchen again after the mashed potatoes, even if it’s just toast and hot chocolate.

He’s taking a long time, a lot longer than normal. I could help but that’d start a backwards trend. Teenagers can sense backing down, even from upstairs in their room.

“Have you ever used a toaster before?” I ask Charlie.

“No.” He sounds like he’s happy, like he’s working on a project. I leave him alone.

He brings her toast and hot chocolate up to her room.

“It’s burnt,” she says. “And the hot chocolate is goo. I’m hungry, so I’ll eat it anyway.”

“Anything else?” he says politely. Honestly, the rest of us all have first and second-degree black belts. She’s only a yellow belt but she rules the house. Martial Arts are no match for 16 year-old Generals.

She softens up, becoming very whiney and sweet. “Well,” she says. She coughs a couple of times for effect. “There is one thing.”

“What?” Charlie says. “I have a few minutes.”

She coughs once more. “A credit card.”

He started laughing so hard he couldn’t even say ‘no.’

Meagan and the General getting ready for the Blazers game. If I were my Mom, I'd be saying, "You're not going out of the house looking like that, are you?"

Smells Like Meat

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 04:09:44 GMT

Smells Like Meat

The Vegan hands me a paper covered in circles. “You have to do this,” he says. “It’s my homework for Health.”

“This looks better than the Health homework I had in high school,” I say. “Is this a reproductive system diagram?”

“My name goes in the center circle.”

“You always have to be the center of everything,” I say. “It’s all about you, isn’t it?”

“You fill in all the other circles with my character traits.”

“How many times can I write ‘lazy?’”

“Once.”

“But I’m lazy too. Where do you think you got it from?”

Charlie grabs the paper and runs downstairs. “I’ll do it.”

The Vegan doesn’t seem to care. He leaves to do whatever it is he does when he’s not chatting on the computer. This leaves me to be the adult.

Charlie has already written, “Runs into trucks, especially mine,” and “Likes to make fun of Cops.”

“I don’t think those are character traits,” I say, trying to sound adult-like.

“Has a skateboarding shoe obsession,” he writes. “Admits he’s lazy but doesn’t have the initiative to do anything about it,” “Won’t tell his parents he has a girlfriend.”

I give up.

“Works at Arby’s while being a Vegan.”

“That’s good,” I say. “You can have good things on there.”

The Vegan planned to get a job this past summer, like all his friends. Unlike all his friends, he didn’t. He collected job applications on his desk and stressed out at the thought of filling them out until it was too late and he could throw them away.

Naturally, he had to work on the house to pay for gas and car insurance. He didn’t like working for us, but he liked it better than filling in job applications and turning them in.

“Work at Arby’s,” Bobb, whose real name is John, says. “My sister got me my job, and I think I can get you one. A couple of people are quitting soon. They don’t give you enough hours. It’d be perfect for you.”

“I don’t want to be surrounded by dead animal flesh all day,” the Vegan says. “That’s the last place I’d work."

He continued to restock his application collection with paperwork from lots of fun places. He imagined himself working at ValuVillage, Wild Oats, and several cool retail shops. In reality, he ended up edging almost all the crappy ceilings in our little Kosovo.

Last month, he gave up even doing that. He used Christmas money to pay his car insurance rather than giving up his chat room time to paint. He doesn’t realize I saved this work especially for him, just so he’d have something to do. I’m thoughtful like that. Now I’m going to have to finish the last bits of cutting in the ceilings of Camp Crap because the Vegan got himself a job.

Bobb, whose real name is John, stopped by about a week ago. “Can you believe the Vegan?” he said.

“What? Are you referring to the extreme amount of slacking one kid can do?”

“He not only filled out an Arby’s application, but he turned it in. He chased the manager down and shook his hand. He talked loud enough so people could hear him. He sounded all salesman-like. It’s a side of the Vegan I didn’t know existed.”

This is a kid who is too lazy to even feed himself. Boiling water for ramen or waiting for food to cook in the microwave is too much work. He prefers to steal candy from the General’s stash, wash it down with a quart of soy milk and call it dinner. I’ll sometimes make him dinner, vegan of course, and set it at his desk. My Mom’s a registered dietician. She’d disown me if I didn’t try to do something.

I’ll walk by his room the next morning and see the dinner I made the night before still sitting next to his keyboard, still looking untouched.

“I thought you were hungry.”

“I forgot,” he says. “I ate a little but it got cold. Can I eat it later?”

It’s so cold and crusty that it wouldn’t tempt rats. Even little kids eat, don’t they?

He went to Arby’s a few days after filling in the application. He didn’t say it was an interview and he returned about a half an hour later, so we didn’t ask.

“I start on Monday,” he said later. He grinned, as would I if I knew I’d never have to cut in another ceiling around here.

Before we could ask him embarrassing questions after coming home the first day, he took off his uniform and put it in the wash. He cleaned up his room and asked if we owned an iron. It took me several tries before I found it hidden in a closet. I don’t even use it.

“Do you notice how he’s hanging up his uniform?” Charlie said. “I didn’t bother finishing his closet before since he only knew how to use the floor. I didn’t know he knew how to hang up clothes. I’ve never seen him take care of his things, unless it’s skater shoes. He’s even straightening his nametag.”

Now, when Charlie sees the Vegan at home he says, “Don’t you have a job?”

“I already worked for two hours,” he says. “I’m still in training.”

“Don’t go crazy,” Charlie says. “You don’t want to burn yourself out. My first job I worked from 3 pm to 10 at night. I went to school in the morning and did it all over again all week. I never heard of a two hour shift.”

“Is it fun?” I ask. It’s been a long time since he was employed. Two years ago he got laid off from a gas station. He swore he’d never work pumping gas again. He never worked doing anything for way too long.

“You have to remember things,” he said, “but there’s no homework. It’s good; it keeps you busy.”

“You like it?”

“Yeah. The only downside is coming home smelling like meat.”

If there’s an empty circle left on his Health homework, I’m filling it with, “Smells like meat.”

The Wood Pile

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 22:25:05 GMT

The Wood Pile

“I love you, Kevin,” Kristine says to her husband when he arrives home. “You love me, right?”

“What did you do?” He knows something’s up. They’re not newlyweds.

In fact, Kevin and Kristine are the only couple we know who do fixers and are still happily married. They’ve been working on their Northeast Victorian for eight years. Lately, the only progress they’re willing to show us is in their garden. We’re competitive, but we’re both losing at the quick-flip two-year fixer plan.

We meet at their house. We always meet at their house. That way we can see their progress and they don’t have to see our lack thereof. We just say they have better pizza places in the Northeast. That part is true.

“This is the ugliest house we’ve ever lived in and the longest we’ve ever lived anywhere,” they say often. That is true, too. It’s true for me, too.

“This house is the reason our credit is so bad,” they also say. “It’s a money pit. There’s so much work to do, we don’t want to do it anymore. The neighbors have their house, a mirror image of ours, on the market for $260K. We’re thinking of selling.

“What?” This, they never say.

“We have friends with a rental six blocks away. The rent’s half our mortgage. We want to get out from under this mess. Our credit was golden when we bought this place.”

I’ve never been so envious. I thought I was jealous when they were in the middle of restoring their Victorian. Our ranch in the cul just doesn’t have the potential of a Victorian in trendy Northeast.

“On a whim,” Kristine says, “we talked to a realtor. She said we could make more than enough to pay off our debt and have plenty left over.”

“We asked her, ‘shouldn’t we finish fixing it up? We have plans to enclose the back porch, install a pedestal sink, and put in a spiral staircase.’

“She said, ‘No. Whoever wants this house would yank out whatever you do anyway. You’d get an investor at this price or someone who wants to fix it up the way they want it.

“You don’t have to tell me NOT to do anything,” Kristine told the realtor. “We’ve been not doing anything for years.”

That wasn’t even a week ago and the realtor’s coming over tomorrow morning to sign papers. If I had lots of money, I’d buy this place myself. Kevin did such a beautiful job on their bathroom; it’s the first place I visit. I had to have one last look.

“What did you do, Kristine?” Kevin says again.

“We have eight years of old electronics hiding in the attic,” Kristine says, “twelve dozen empty bottles for home-brewing that are just a mess. That stuff was stupid.”

“Was?”

“I decided to get rid of one thing every day. I put an ad on Craigslist saying, ‘Free wood, come and get it.’ Within ten minutes I had three trucks backing in here fighting over cut-offs from eight years of construction jobs. I had to look at that pile for eight years.”

“I had Brazilian cherry in there.”

“You had a toolbox filled with electrical stuff under there, too. I bet you didn’t know that was in under all that stuff.”

“I knew exactly where it was,” Kevin says. “I dug in there two years ago to get something out.”

“We don’t have a fireplace.”

“It’d be good campfire wood.”

“You haven’t gone camping in three years.”

“That Brazilian cherry would have lit up a beautiful blue flame. Did you get rid of that 6x6 old growth leaning against the wall?

“Mmm, yes.”

“Now you have a clean slate,” I tell Kevin. He’s gotten quiet. “You can start all over making a new pile.”

“That’s a way to look at it.”

“He’s just upset because I’ve gotten rid of all his stuff so far,” Kristine says. “His is the big stuff. I’m scared of the rental kitchen. It’s so small you can’t open the refrigerator door all the way. You can’t open the vegetable bins.”

“It’s okay,” Kevin says after a moment. “I saved the best stuff in the attic.”

“The attic’s next,” Kristine says.

I am so jealous.

Bad Bathrooms

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 07:56:48 GMT

Bad Bathrooms

One of Charlie’s friends comes over to borrow the tile saw. “I had to redo my girlfriend’s bathroom,” he says. “It was so bad I wouldn’t use it.”

“Bad like what?” I ask. Now I’m interested. If there’s a disgusting bathroom and someone wants to talk about it, I’m in. I love to hear about people living in disgusting places. How tough are you? Do you have squirrels playing behind the toilet like we did last year? Is it worse than a gas station restroom? Tell me more. I can take it.

“It’s a regular 1960s house,” he says. “The vanity countertop was laminate, trimmed in chrome. That’s bad enough, but someone painted it gray. Touch it and you scratch off the paint.

“I decided it had to go and took it out. Someone kicked out a hole in the wall. Instead of replacing the drywall, they stuffed it full of newspapers, duct taped over and spackled on top. I poked around with my hammer, afraid of what I’d find. I thought it was a huge rat’s nest. Luckily, it was just twenty year-old newspapers.”

Twenty year-old newspapers sound clean compared to the toilet we’ve had in the upstairs bathroom. In its old age, it didn’t understand the way things were supposed to flow. It liked to reject more than it flushed. We stopped using it, and more importantly, cleaning it, when Charlie installed the toilet downstairs.

Charlie seemed happy to remove it. Now there’s a hole in the floor which makes the toilet smell floral by comparison. I wondered how he could work in there until I noticed he’d covered the hole with the current issue of National Geographic Traveller, which I hadn’t finished reading. I have now.

When he pulled off the 33 year old cheap vanity, he called me over to have a look. “Look at this drywall. It’s like oatmeal,” he said. Oatmeal doesn’t smell like 33 years of dry rot mixed with mold. It smells like horse stables mixed with old standing water. I made an excuse and ran off to the other side of the house.

A little while later, Charlie called me back. “Look,” he said. “You can stick your finger through the floor. The sink must have been leaking for years.”

He pulled his finger out of the floor and looked at it closely. It was covered in wet, brown cakey stuff. Is this procedure necessary?

“I expected ordinary wet ply strands of plywood,” he said. “Don’t tell me they put particle board under here.”

Even I know particle board swells up and turns to goo when it gets wet. Charlie called Kevin, his contractor buddy and our sometime sub. When you find treasure like this, you want to share.

“Everywhere else is sub-floor, 5/8” plywood,” he told Kevin. “Under the sink and toilet, I discovered they put a 2’ by 6’ sheet of particle board.”

“They must have run out,” Kevin said. “And they must have been high, or not paid very well.”

After several more comments like, “I can’t believe somebody did that,” and, “Whoever built this house didn’t know what they were doing,” Charlie hung up and prepared for another trip to Home Depot.

“I need to get yet another sheet of plywood,” he said. “The next person sticking their finger in the floor isn’t going to see cake. That was really stupid.” Either commiserating with Kevin, who has a fixer from hell of his own, or the idea of going to Home Depot put Charlie in a great mood. I stayed home smelling dry rot.

In high school my best friend and I used to sneak out of class and catch a bus to the beach. Once we miscalculated and didn’t have enough money to pay for return tickets. We went to a gas station and asked if we could clean the bathrooms for $5. They happily obliged. We were too worried about getting caught cutting school to think about what we were breathing and touching.

“Why are you doing this?” a bunch of guys in a convertible asked us. When we explained they said, “That’s nasty. Here, take our $5 and leave.” We thanked them, pretended to leave, and finished the job for another $5. We had enough money to get milkshakes and get home without getting caught.

Nasty bathrooms never used to bother me. That was before I lived with one smelling of dry rot. It was a lot easier to live with squirrels.

When Your Own Kids Won’t Eat With You, Find Someone Else’s

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:50:24 GMT

When Your Own Kids Won’t Eat With You, Find Someone Else’s

I keep reading about normal, healthy families eating together. I’d feel guilty, but I live with the General and the Vegan. Try eating with these two. One does a College-level biology dissection on everything on his plate. The other talks so loud the neighbors cover their ears while, at the same time, chewing big bites with her mouth open. This is why we find people with normal, healthy families and eat with their kids instead.

Charlie and I taught Tae Kwon Do through the local Parks and Rec for many years. Many normal, healthy families with normal, healthy kids paid us to yell at their kids every Tuesday, Thursday and sometimes Saturday. Some of these people don’t run the other direction when we cross paths.

One of our students, Matt, who stayed with us long enough to get his black belt, bumped into us at church. Granted, it was dark and we were off in a corner, but he still introduced us to his girlfriend, Virginia, without rolling his eyes or sneering. We decided if he wasn’t embarrassed to hug us, which he did, we’d go the next step: we’d take them out to sushi.

The Vegan and the General used to love sushi. Like normal, healthy people, they got tired of it eventually. They’d rather eat frosted flakes than eat pretty vegetables and fish wrapped in white rice and seaweed. They’d rather put a pop tart in the toaster than put ginger and wasabi on a spider roll.

We can’t even bribe the Vegan with the promise of a new pair of skater shoes. We don’t bribe the General; we don’t think they want her back. The last time, she looked at the train/conveyor belt full of little plates of fish and rice and yelled, “When’s the American food coming around? Where’re the hamburgers?”

Matt and Virginia arrived a few minutes late. We assumed it’s because they are students. Students usually have better things to do than eat sushi with old people who once made them put their bodies in compromising positions and then beat on them mercilessly. We were happy they showed up at all. It’s more than we get from our own kids.

“Great directions, Magellen.”

“I told you I don’t know street names,” I said. “It’s in Beaverton, behind Hooters. You’re a guy; isn’t that enough?”

“We got directions from someone at Radio Shack,” Matt says, “in Portland.”

“Oops.”

“I still owe you for spraying me,” Matt says to Charlie. “I’m the only person on this planet who’s been sprayed with Lysol, in my mouth, in the middle of a belt test.”

“I forgot I did that.”

“I haven’t, don’t worry.”

“I was spraying equipment,” Charlie says. “You looked too serious.”

“It was a belt test.”

I ask the question every normal, healthy parent asks of their kids, “How’s school?”

“I think I’m majoring in video games. I play more than anyone I know, and I go to U of O.”

“You could be drinking,” Charlie says. “That’s what people did before video games.”

“I’m too addicted to solitaire to expand to video games.”

Virginia high-five’s me. “Me, too!” she says.

I like this girl.

Matt’s been to Japan, so he knows the proper names for things. He eats with his mouth closed and without us resorting to bribes. He’s eating things we’ve only watched other people eat. Charlie can’t get him to try sea urchin, though. Not even some of our raised-in-Japan friends will eat sea urchin.

“These octopus dumplings are good,” Matt says, getting another plateful.

There’s something my kids will never say.

“They’re better than the ones I had in Japan.” He gets a plate for Virginia. “Try them.”

She’s cute and happy and she obliges. “I think I ate a sucker,” she says. “Are you supposed to?”

“It’s octopus.”

“Someone was asking about you recently,” I said. “There were so many Matt’s in Tae Kwon Do so I asked him, ‘Which Matt?’ He said, ‘The Matt with the Hobbitt feet.’ Everyone instantly knew who you were.”

The General called and was talking so fast I couldn’t understand her. I think she was asking permission for something but I was on a wasabi high. I said ‘yes’ a few times and she hung up. We said goodbye to the normal, healthy kids and returned home.

The Vegan, as usual is on the skater chat rooms. I notice many empty water bottles lined up next to his keyboard. The General drinks water. He, being Vegan, eats ramen and drinks Squirt. I figure the General hasn’t cleaned up for a while.

“Look!”

“What?” Charlie says. I’m too busy counting water bottles to respond. There are eighteen.

“I drank all those.”

“Don’t you have to take a leak?”

“I just did!”

He seemed a bit too proud of the way he spent his evening. Before I could try to say something motherly, the General arrived home.

“I just went to Hooters,” she says. “It was awesome. None of my friends were allowed to go. I said, ‘I called my Mom and she said yes. I don’t think she heard me right.’”

“You talk too fast.”

“You’ve been threatening to go to Hooters ever since it opened,” Charlie said. “I didn’t believe you’d actually go. What’s a bunch of sixteen year-old girls doing at Hooters?”

“We got t-shirts. We saw lots of crusty old men degrading women. They degrade women so bad it was almost funny to watch. They couldn’t move their eyes up from chest level.”

“Why do you think it’s called ‘Hooters?’”

She looks at the Vegan and starts shouting, “Dylan’s stoned! Dylan’s stoned!”

“He doesn’t have any money for dope,” I say. That’s the most motherly thing I can think of saying.

“Look,” she says, grabbing him by the collar. “Look at him, he’s stoned.”

He’s laughing so hard, he can’t talk. This does nothing to convince us she’s wrong.

“See?”

“I, uh, heh heh, uh,” the Vegan says.

“Listen to him. Look at his eyes.

“Heh heh, uh, heh heh heh.”

“He is stoned,” Charlie said.

“He’s laughing like he’s stoned,” I say, “but he’s not eating oreos.”

“Oreos,” he says. “That sounds good. Do we have any oreos?”

“I could eat oreos,” Charlie says.

“Oreos?” the General says. “Do we have oreos?”

When they say you should eat together to be a normal, healthy family, do oreos count?

Jenn news

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 18:20:41 GMT

(Sorry about the old photo - I couldn't wait any longer)

Jenn news: Presley is here!
Jenn* had her baby daughter, Presley, on January 29th at 2:10 pm.
She weighs 7 pounds, 14 ounces, has black curly hair and blue eyes.
I'll post pictures in a few weeks after we get to visit.

*Jenn is Charlie's oldest, once-estranged, daughter who lives in New Mexico. She came to stay with us for two months at the end of the summer last year when she found herself pregnant, unmarried, unemployed, and afraid to go back home. She also has twenty tattoos, which I can't wait to see what pregnancy did to the centrally-located few. No pictures for you!

Home Show Proof

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 02:28:23 GMT

All the proof you need that 1). I'm not writing fiction and 2). She who owns the camera is without embarrassing pictures.

Free Candy and Bumper Stickers

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 02:03:59 GMT

Free Candy and Bumper Stickers

Tightwads are the kind of people who use free tickets just because they’re free. It doesn’t matter if their time would be better spent doing something else; if the tickets are free, why not? They’re open to any new adventure, as long as it’s free. Free equals fun.

I am the product of a long line of tightwads. I’m a tightwad infant compared to the rest of my gene pool. My people are the ones you see trying to pass off as senior citizens while still in their 40’s, just to get the early bird special at Denney’s. I hate Denney’s. A true tightwad doesn’t have the discernment to dislike Denney’s. What tastes better than a discount?

My oldest son got a new job at Adobe Systems. He’s never worked at a place where he didn’t have to wear a name tag or a uniform, so that’s one reason he loves this job. The other reason is the free stuff. Tightwads love free stuff. He is obviously in my gene pool.

“I had a great day today at work,” he says. “We had free pizza, so I have leftovers in the car. I don’t have to shop for food all weekend. And I got free tickets to the Home Show. You want ‘em?”

A tightwad says yes. “Yes,” Charlie says. “What Home Show?”

“I don’t know,” Evan says. “They were free, so I got two. I took the tickets so I could go and get free samples. You can have ‘em. I don’t want to pay for parking.”

We have paid-for carpet ready to install after we finish the messy jobs. I don’t think either Charlie or I believe we’ll be ready for carpet before summer, so why not prove ourselves right? When you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you don’t walk too fast. We’ve been walking slowly for four years. We need a day off from our usual days off.

“It’ll be research,” Charlie says. “We might find some new products or learn shortcuts. We need to keep up with the trends.”

We stop at Peet’s first to keep up with the Northwest trend of drinking too much coffee. This is one trend we’ve grabbed onto with both fists and won’t let go. We’re afraid of what other trend we might glom onto if we did. We know people who spend their free time dressing up as cowboys and re-enacting battle scenes from the old West. Drinking three decaf refills with lots of half and half seems harmless in comparison.

Right about noon, Charlie perks up. “Are you finished?” he says. “Are you finished now? Hurry, let’s go. Come on. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. There’s free stuff. Let’s go.”

Who am I to question someone willing to waste a day to get a bagful of cheap candy and free bumper stickers? A normal-looking couple kisses at the table next to us and it’s making me uncomfortable. That used to be Charlie and me. Will we do that again when we don’t have camp crap to come home to?

The fixer is always in the back of our minds, dulling everything. We’ve had this house longer than we’ve been officially married. What will we have to bother us when we don’t live here anymore? I hope we don’t turn our angst onto each other. I hope we’re happy under all this house misery. I hope we can finish this house so someday we can make people in Peet’s uncomfortable.

We drove around and around the Coliseum, looking for Home Show signs. We found a lot of people walking around with mortgage company bags and mops, so we knew we were close. We pull into a parking structure.

“You here for the Home Show?” the parking attendant asks.

“If we can find it.”

“You’re not the first. I tell you, they weren’t sober when they got this one ready. A man must have done it, that’s all I can say.”

“We screw everything up,” Charlie says. My mom whispers these anti-man things when there aren’t any men around. She says it about kitchens with bad floor plans, pap smear equipment, and tampons; things about which men might not have good first-hand knowledge. She’d never say it about signage, not directly to a man. This parking attendant must have more stress than me. I wonder if she lives in a fixer, waiting for a man to finish up the bathroom.

We walk right up to the turnstile with our complimentary tickets. The thrill of literal freedom makes this whole wasted day worthwhile. We may be wasting our time, but we’re not wasting our money. We’ll leave that to everyone around us while we find the bathrooms. All that Peet’s means we get to use free toilet paper.

You don’t want to use the Memorial Coliseum bathrooms unless you want to feel good about the smell of your own bathroom. You could almost see the smell, it was so bad. Why is it I’m the one who gets the wet seat? Isn’t this the women’s bathroom? If you are going to pee all over the seat, go use the men’s. It can’t smell worse. The dry rot Charlie’s pulling out of our own 33 years of peed-on bathroom floor smells better than this.

There’s nothing holding us back now. Charlie sees an open massage chair at the Relax the Back display. We have friends with this model, so Charlie ignores the salesman, operates the remote like a pro and settles in. All his hurrying comes to an end.

The salesman talks to him for a little while, but all he gets out of Charlie are vowel sounds. I’m looking at brochures and comparing prices. If I weren’t a tightwad, I might consider buying one of these. Charlie seems to like it. It’d be a nice gift. He’d have to be a doctor or lawyer, though, so I could afford to buy him one. If we could afford one of these, we wouldn’t have to do fixers. We could buy a real house and make other people fix it up. We’d be so relaxed we wouldn’t need massage chairs. Do you see how fixers change your life? Do not go gently into that good house deal.

We stop by the ReBuilding Center display and pick up a few free bumper stickers.

“Do you know about our place?”

“We know about it very well,” Charlie tells the woman at the booth. “We have a garage full of stuff ready to donate whenever we stop going to Home Shows and get back to work on our fixer.”

“I’m doing a fixer, too,” she says. She doesn’t look like it. She’s very calm and speaks in complete sentences. “I didn’t do your usual buff n’ scuff. I took it down to the bones. It was uninhabitable when I started. Now she’s becoming a beautiful old lady.”

This should make me feel good about doing fixers, but it doesn’t. All the work we’re doing and we don’t have a beautiful old lady in there anywhere. All you can coax out of a cheap 70s ranch on a white-trash cul-de-sac is a dirty old man, if you’re lucky.

“Come on people, take one,” a guy holding plastic bags says. “I got a bag quota I’ve got to give away.” Nobody wants his empty plastic bags. We laugh but don’t reach for a bag. Charlie has his hands full of candy. He’s good at scooping large quantities from display bowls without even slowing down.

“Nothing will stick or stain this board,” a guy with a too-loud microphone says. “This board sells on QVC for $20. They don’t tell you that you’ll have to throw it away after two months. They don’t tell you the fine print. You could get two of ours for that price. That’s a bargain. We’re 100% made in America.”

I keep listening long after we walk by. I could have bought one of those boards, even if I don’t currently have a counter to put it on. I’m a pushover most of the time, but not this time. When someone’s as pushy as this guy, I don’t have a problem resisting. Neither, did it appear, did anyone else. We walked by him a few times and I never saw anyone pull out a wad of cash.

“Why do I feel like I’m at a circus?” Charlie says.

“It shines. It polishes,” another barker says. “Just one spray and wipe and you can take off years of tarnish.”

We watch this guy squirt his product on a not-too-dirty hood of what looks like an older mustang or camaro. “Who knows what he has on that car hood?” Charlie says. “It could be doughnut glaze he put on there this morning.”

Charlie starts walking quickly to the end of the aisle. He holds out his hand, gets a couple of cheesecake samples and eats them both before I’ve caught up. “You didn’t want one, did you?”

“Did it taste like plastic?” I say. “It looked like plastic.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It was free.”

We walk quickly compared to the Home Show mall zombies. We dart in and out of groups of families while I look for an interesting booth. There are interesting booths, only because they seem out of place. “Why are there aromatherapy and dog food booths at a home show?” I ask Charlie.

He can’t answer. He’s got a face full of the Vita-Mix sample smoothie, given to him by a woman who looked like she’d never followed a recipe in her life. “You can use this for your fondues, your sauces, your marinades,” she says. “You’ll have perfect pasta sauce every time.” I notice the only people who stop to listen are older men. They’re not so much listening as staring.

“Wine tasting,” Charlie says. “Look!”

He’s in high free-stuff gear. He runs to the end of the aisle and asks the pourer for a sample.

“Three for a dollar,” she says.

“To taste?”

“You don’t spit this stuff out. It’s that good.”

“Let’s go,” he says. “If we hurry, we can still get free samples at New Season’s.”

I hope I have a few years left before he’s excited about the early bird special at Denney’s.

Make Me

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:04:57 GMT

Make Me

(Note for grammatical tightwads: I put an apostrophe between the ‘me’ and the ‘s’ because ‘me’s’ looks better than ‘mes.’ Just try to make me change it. Go on, make me.)

I knew it was coming; it was way past time. I dread this moment as soon as I get up in the morning.

“Time for bed,” Charlie says.

“I don’t want to yet,” I say. “Five more minutes.” I say this every night. I’m surprised he doesn’t start reminding me when he gets home from work.

“I need to get up early.”

I have all the power. I can ignore him. I can be a bad wife and tell him to go to bed by himself. I can be a good wife and push myself off the couch. It comes down to this to prove what kind of person I am. I weigh this decision every night, every year, ever since I can remember.

“Make me.”

“What?” Charlie asks. “Did you say, ‘make me?’”

“I’m talking to myself.”

It’s easier to do something you don’t want to do if you divide yourself in two. The responsible part of you can fight it out with your inner teenager. You probably shouldn’t voice this out loud, though. Not everyone will laugh like Charlie does.

My inner teenager was still grumbing as I noticed what a struggle it is to force yourself to do things you don’t want to do. You have to turn on a little extra effort, you have to create a push, a spark, an energy source and a pilot light to break inertia. Even when you’re grown up, you need to say ‘make me’ to yourself. A body at rest tends to stay at rest.

Consciously, it’s hard to notice the amount of make-me’s you use during a regular day. You have to use a make-me to get out of bed in the morning and to get off the couch at night, you have to use a make-me to do things on your to-do list, errands, dishes, and laundry. If you live in Oregon, you have to use a make-me to run in the rain. When you use a day’s allotment of make-me’s at work by ten am, you know you’re in the wrong job. The more make-me’s, the more stressful your job. Stress is the result of too many make-me’s.

People have different make-me allotments for their day. The Vegan, I’ve noticed, is stingy with his make-me’s. He won’t use them to get up in the morning, even on days with finals. I think this is why he sleeps in so late on weekends. You don’t need a make-me to get up when you’re really bored. Save your make-me’s and get really bored. You’ll find something to do, even if it’s just getting up to go to bed.

The General, on the other hand, is never at rest. She gets her make-me allotment from my 78 year-old Dad. He does way too many things before his wife makes him sit down for breakfast. He tends to stay in motion all day, even if he’s doing nothing. I’ve seen his to do lists and they look more boring than mine. I’d have to use a lot of make-me’s to buy and replace a refrigerator light bulb, call around for the cheapest body shop to repair his car, and make lots of doctor appointments. It still takes weeks to me to make myself call for doctor appointments. Put me on hold, make me listen to Muzak, and I have to hang up.

“Sorry I can’t make myself go to bed sooner.”

“If I didn’t work,” he says, “I’d stay up so late I wouldn’t get up out of bed until after noon.”

“You? That’s crazy.”

“I need structure. I can’t make myself do anything.”

“Didn’t you recently work a ten hour day sick, come home ready to go to bed then go back out and work all night on an accident?”

“That’s just the way it is when you do accident reconstruction. You don’t think about it.”

“I wouldn’t need to say ‘make-me’ to myself to get to bed if I was supposed to do accident reconstruction all night long.”

“You’re more disciplined than me,” he says. “Make me go to the gym. I can’t make myself. I need help.”

“Going to the gym is easy. I’d rather do that than stay at home and talk to people about work they don’t want to do for me. Find something you really don’t want to do then whatever you have to do will seem easier.”

“It’s easier if you make me.”

Mashed Potatoes

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 01:24:23 GMT

Mashed Potatoes

“Make me mashed potatoes.”

“You make ‘em, it’s 10 PM.”

“I’m worn out,” the General says. “I used all my skills to make a milkshake. I’m exhausted.”

She sees she’s not getting anywhere with words. She walks by and blocks the TV we’re watching with a box of mashed potatoes. One of us, Charlie or me, has to get up and move it or we’ll never know which designer on HGTV will fill some rich guy’s gorgeous loft with uncomfortable furniture.

“Thanks,” she says sarcastically. “You’re good parents.”

“You’re welcome,” Charlie says.

I made her dinner, exactly what she wanted, hours ago. I gave up saying ‘you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’ when she started saying it back to me. She’d rather catch flies with guilt. It may take more effort, but she’s better at shaming than sweetness. If cuteness is called for, she calls on Nicci.

“I’m not feeding you again.”

“You’re promoting anorexia, Mom.”

I start laughing.

“If you’re not going to make them, Charlie you make them. You don’t do sh*t.”

Charlie starts laughing now.

“You can have the rest of my milkshake if you make them.”

That did it. I’ve never seen him pick up a pan, except to put under drips. Now he’s in the kitchen with a box of potatoes. I was tempted to watch but that would mean getting up. I don’t want to start a trend.

Now I’m free to control the remote any way I chose. I chose to watch furniture being made from cast-iron and foam while flipping through every channel on the menu at least twice during the boring parts. Nobody complained.

Fifteen minutes later, Charlie showed me a bowlful of potato soup. “They’re a little runny,” he said. He brought them up to the General and I returned the remote to its rightful owner, or so I let Charlie believe. He has no idea how good I am at flipping that thing. I don’t even have to look.

“I didn’t know you knew how to cook.”

“I looked at the box,” he said. “There’s three steps. I looked at the first one. I didn’t look at the other two.”

“Did you find the measuring cups?”

“We didn’t have regular milk so I used soy. I guessed; I don’t know how to measure. It said two tablespoons butter so I put in a stick. I was supposed to wait until it boiled before I put in the potato pouch, but I didn’t. That was my downfall.

“I let them stand for three minutes like it said, but they were still watery. I thought, ‘I’ll bring them up to her; she won’t notice.’ First thing she said was, ‘ew, they’re liquid.’”

We didn’t hear any more about it until the next day. Charlie got home first and noticed a hardened lump of potatoes in the garbage can. Since our kitchen is half-remodeled, the first thing you see walking into our house is a canful of potatoes.

The General ran downstairs, shouting, “Mom! Mom!”

She sees Charlie and says, “Oh, sh*t. It’s you.”

She hangs her head and turns to go upstairs. That’s when Charlie’s friend walks in. He stopped by to pick up our old weight bench, which has been adorned with Christmas ornaments since we took down the tree. She stops, looks at Charlie’s friend, smiles as cute as her friend Nicci and says, “Oh, hi!”

“What am I?” Charlie says.

“Guess what?” she says. “If Jordan gets an A on her test, she gets any car she wants.”

Charlie goes upstairs to verify this. Anyone in the cul-de-sac would know there are sixteen year-old girls in the house. They sound the same whether they’re studying or text-messaging each other’s boyfriends or just plain screaming.

“Is it true you get a car if you get an A?”

“Oh yeah,” Jordan says. “I get any car I want if I get an A.”

“What good parents you have.”

“Oh no, it’s not like that. They know there’s no way I’m getting an A. That’s why they’re saying that.”

“You need to cheat,” Charlie says.

“Oh believe me, I am. That’s why I’m sitting here with these guys.”

“What about you, Meagan?” Charlie asks.

“My parents are Nazis. I have to work for a car. Lately, though, they’re trying to buy my love. You know what? I have to say that it’s working.”

“I see you threw out the potatoes I worked so hard to make you last night,” Charlie says to the General. “How’d they taste?”

“They tasted like butt.”

Jordan and Meagan look shocked.

“Honestly,” the General says, “it’s the worst food I’ve ever eaten in my life.”

“They were made with love. I slaved over them for a long time.”

“Eight minutes,” she says. “I can read the box.”

“Actually it was twelve. I screwed up.”

She didn’t even have to use her shaming skills to convince us to order pizza tonight. The mashed potatoes are still in full view.

Finals

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:40:38 GMT

Finals

It’s finals week for the General and the Vegan. They’re not my finals, I tell them; I never have to go to high school again. If you do most of what you’re supposed to, you won’t either.

The General doesn’t simply study; she worries. She studies all the time, often at Starbucks with a bunch of girls, all talking on their cells, their books open, pens flying, arguing about which Steinbeck quotes the teacher might ask. She sits in a sea of papers in her room, reviewing her and everyone else’s notes, all night long.

“Get to bed,” we say if we get up in the middle of the night and walk past her room.

“Are you joking me?” she says. “I have six and a half hours until this test. I’m not going to waste it sleeping.”

She wastes it worrying instead. She leaves the house with a deer in the headlights look. “I can read ‘The DaVinci Code’ this weekend for extra credit,” she says, “so when I flunk this test it won’t hurt my grade so much.”

We don’t have to ask her how she did on her tests when she gets home. It’s the first thing out of her mouth.

“I think I got an ‘A.’”

“See? Next time don’t worry so much.”

“That is, I think I got an ‘A’ if the person in front of me got an ‘A.’ That’s who I copied from.”

We’ve bred male offspring void of the school-worry gene. Of all the five sons and step-sons we claim, none of them hung out with the college-bound academics. Once Josh, Charlie’s youngest, was in danger of flunking a required English class. We knew this because instead of playing Rainbow 6, he worked on a big speech right in front of us, like a normal kid. We asked him later how he did.

“I think I did pretty well,” he said. “I think I got an ‘A.’”

“You had an ‘F’ before. What do you think your grade is now?”

“Oh it’s still an ‘F.’”

The Vegan flunked almost everything, including ceramics, during his freshman year. “Get a 4.0,” we told him, “and we’ll give you $500.” He got so many 4.0s he bought a car. We had to stop the incentive program or run out of money to finish the house. You can guess what happened after that.

All he did to get a 4.0 was do the homework. He is one of those people who never gets anything wrong on tests. Even if he wasn’t in class or doesn’t understand the material, he aces tests. This is what he relies on, rather than actual work. When you can get good grades without studying, why study?

Instead he makes up for the General’s lack of sleep and entertainment. He won’t let the General on the computer, as he has to catch up on his chat room conversations. When everyone signs off to go study, he goes to sleep.

“You know you’re going to have to put your grade point average on every application you fill out,” we say.

“I’m going to community college.”

“Applications for jobs, too,” Charlie says. “I know. I had to write ‘1.67’ way too many times.”

It didn’t matter. He was so relaxed about the first day of finals, he slept in until 11:30 am.

“Can you call in sick for me?” he asked. He drove over from his Dad’s, where he was staying for the week. Even his loser Dad was up and out already.

“No.”

“I really am sick. Listen: my voice is raspy. I’m getting a cold.”

“No.”

“How about if I do my homework? I have a couple of make-up poems to write. I can write a movie review and get extra credit. I can turn it in tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

“Please?”

“Okay,” I said. “You better.”

He kicked the General off the computer and spent the next four hours chatting online. The General pitched a fit for the same four hours as her homework went undone.

After a few more General fits, he gave in and let her on for ten minutes while he wrote a poem about having a sister who pitches fits. He kicked her off and chatted online for the rest of the evening and went back to his Dad’s to sleep, leaving his poem at our house. So much for his priorities.

If I lived through my kids, I’d be stressed. I’d worry; I’d get the General into therapy and bribe the Vegan. Instead, I remember I don’t have to ever spend another hour in high school. That’s all the therapy I need.

Who-Poo

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 01:56:00 GMT

Who-Poo

Maybe you’re different. Maybe you, reading this, have plans you’ve methodically scheduled. Your life is going according to your list. Everything’s steady. You’ll get where you’re going and you can predict the arrival time.

I have no idea what that feels like. Charlie and I thought we’d be done with this house in two years. All the other houses we’ve done took two years or less. None of them had foundation problems and none of them were done while living with teenagers. We didn’t factor any of this into our estimated completion time. We didn’t factor anything into our estimated completion time. We’ve done fixers before. We don’t need to estimate.

We’ve learned the hard way timelines and schedules work for anyone, no matter how much A.D.D. you have to overcome. We’re really getting sick of this house. We’ll do anything to get it done. We’re desperate, so we’re scheduling.

Charlie took a whole week off to destroy the 32 years of crap we call the upstairs bathroom. A week should be enough, we thought. It’s only old and ugly; it’s not in ashes. We can do this. We’ll even have fun getting rid of the press-on mexican-themed linoleum floor squares, the cheapest vanity sold in 1973, and the possessed overflowing toilet from hell.

You can’t start a remodel vacation without a trip to Home Depot. We even made a list, assuming we could get everything we needed without extra trips for missing hardware. Charlie shopped for all the boring things, like wallboard, and I picked out the tub.

I’ve been whining for a whirlpool ever since I saw a HGTV show where the family bought a house just because the wife wanted the whirlpool. I want someone to buy our house. If the wife gets starry-eyed over the whirlpool tub, maybe she won’t notice she’s buying a house without a master bedroom or master bath. I picked out a pretty one.

Charlie tried to sway me. “It’d be so easy to replace the tub with a regular tub. I don’t know what extra parts I need.”

A Home Depot guy, appearing from nowhere, said, “All you need is a universal drain kit. Here’s one.”

Charlie was completely sold on the whirlpool tub after hearing how easy it’d be to install and how it might distract potential homeowners. He drove home very excited. “Who-poo!” he kept saying. “Who-poo! We got us a who-poo tub!”

He woke up, ready to work. It’s vacation, so we had to catch up on daytime TV. There’s nothing to catch up on but that didn’t stop us. We enjoyed watching poker even though neither one of us knew what we were looking at. We watched “Made” on MTV, which made me cry every time a fat girl achieved her dream of being a lifeguard. When the rich cheerleader from Vero Beach achieved her dream of becoming a skateboarder, I didn’t cry but I stopped swearing. Her house didn’t have a bathroom worthy of the Middle Ages.

The first thing Charlie did was bust up the stained, old tub. In the first house we fixed up together, Charlie called all his strong friends to help lift out the cast iron tub. They all pulled their backs while the tub stayed put.

I went in to see why they were whining. “Just get a sledgehammer,” I said. They didn’t think it would work. I went back to being a girl while they tried, and quickly broke it up in pieces. “I wish I’d thought of that sooner,” they said, amazed at my skills and extensive knowledge.

Charlie collected the cast iron pieces in a recycle bin. Since he couldn’t lift the tub, he probably shouldn’t lift the pieces but he didn’t realize this until too late. He pulled his back during the first part of the first job on his first week of vacation.

He didn’t stop working. Instead, we took longer while catching up on daytime TV while I rubbed the big knot in his back. We still don’t know anything about poker, though. I didn’t rub that long.

Charlie pulled off walls and found the studs dry-rot free. This is the first time we’ve pulled off a wall and not found problems. It might be a good week after all.

While making adjustments to the floor, things returned to normal. Charlie found enough dry rot to have to replace much of the floor sheeting. Usually he has spare building materials around, but he was out of ¾” ply, the standard thickness.

He made a trip to Home Depot and returned with his sheeting. After taking the time to cut a template, cut the sheeting, and fit it on the floor, he noticed the sheeting was not standard ¾” but 5/8”. He couldn’t return it since he’d cut into it. Being cheap, this was almost as upsetting as wasting half the afternoon on this uselessness. He returned to Home Depot one more time.

“They had every size but ¾”,” Charlie said when he came back. “They had ¾” pressboard, so I bought that. I’m tired.”

He cut the pressboard to fit, then remembered he’s doing a bathroom. When pressboard gets wet it turns into pasta. He realized this after he cut into this, too, so again he couldn’t return it. “Why did I do that?” he said. By this time it was so late, all the stores were closed. His day was involuntarily over.

Around noon, he got going and headed out to Lowe’s. “Remind me never to go to Lowe’s again,” he said when he returned. “You walk down the aisle and the clerks scatter like cockroaches. If they don’t disappear, it’s because they’re stocking. If you dare want something near them, they’ll sigh and make disgusted-type noises until you get out of the way.”

It took him only a few minutes to cut out the correct size plywood and replace the floor sheeting. He should have tried to savor this part of the job as much as he could; plumbing is next.

He put together the universal drain kit and found out the universal drain was way too short. Once again, he took a visit to Home Depot. He found the plumbing clerk and asked him what to do.

“You’ll have to buy one of these $65 whirlpool drain kits.”

You don’t know Charlie if you think he’ll spend $65 on a couple of pvc pipes. Instead, he found a longer extension pipe to match the whirlpool opening depth and saved himself close to $65.

He put his new drain kit together and it looked like it’d work. He rounded up all the teenaged boys in the house to help him lift the whirlpool in for a dry-fit. That’s when he noticed the drain flange extended beyond the lip of the tub, meaning it wouldn’t clear the studs on the opening of the tub. One more trip to Home Depot.

The same plumbing clerk came by to see why Charlie was in his aisle once again. He explained his problem.

“That’s why we sell this $65 drain kit,” he said. “The smaller flange clears the studs.”

“This universal drain kit isn’t so universal, is it?”

“I guess not.”

Charlie decided to go to the professionals at the plumbing store. One of the clerks there remembered him from his previous toilet installation problems. Charlie explained his drain dilemma and within a few minutes, he had a proper fitting drain kit. He may have spent half the day with this one problem, but he saved $40. It’s Charlie’s vacation. If this is how he wants to spend it, who am I to complain? I don’t want to push it: this tub would be done if I wasn’t wanting a who-poo.

Charlie bolted it all together and it looked like it’d work fine. Before completing the installation, he decided to read the instructions. The motor needed a single dedicated line from the breaker panel; something he hadn’t figured in. He went out to the breaker panel to have a look.

“I’m going to be smart this time,” he said. He called Home Depot first to see if they carried Cutler-type breakers.

“Of course,” they said.

He was on his way, once again, to Home Depot. He returned without incident.

The rest of his vacation day was spent crawling around old blown insulation well past its prime, drilling hole, and fishing line from the future tub to the fuse box.

Charlie put the tub in place one more time to make sure everything fit. Amazingly, it did. Next, the whirlpool manufacturer recommended applying a wrap-around adhesive gasket all around the tub before installing it. Charlie did what he was told.

He and the spare teenagers put the tub in place again, or would have if it’d fit. With the recommended gasket, the tub is ¾” longer. This is when I decided to get out of the house and do errands.

“I pulled the tub out,” he told me when I returned, “and cut a slab into perfectly good drywall. I had to create a slot to slide the tub through so it’d land in its new home.”

“Does it work?”

“All except for the drainage pipe,” he said. “It’s supposed to hook into the universal drain pipe but it’s four inches off. I had to make another trip to you-know-where to get more pipe to make up for the four inches and get another p-trap. The p-trap is full of goo.”

He tells me while he’s looking for plumbing parts, he overhears a customer ask the Home Depot clerk how to go from a 1 ½” to 1 ¼” reducer for a sink. They don’t make this part. “I don’t know,” the clerk says, “I’m in electrical.” He called on the phone. Nobody knew.

“I couldn’t help myself. ’All you need is a compression ring,’ I said. I showed him the ring and cap to use. I know how frustrating it is not to get an answer.

“The customer said, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’

“When I was ready to return to my search for plumbing parts, another guy came up to me asking a question. It was then I noticed I had a line of customers waiting for my advice.”

“’I have a drain that won’t fit,’ the next guy said.

“I don’t work here.

“’Yeah, but you a plumber.’

“I’m not a plumber, I said. I don’t know anything. You don’t want to ask me.”

“He showed me his problem anyway. I said, ‘Oh, that’s easy.’ He couldn’t get a good seal. ‘Just use plumber’s putty.’”

“’Oh. Good idea,’ the guy said. ‘Plumber’s putty. I never thought of that. That would seal the gap.’

“Yeah, that stuff works,’ I said.

The Home Depot clerk said, ‘Hey, you want a job?’

“’No,’ I said. ‘I’ve already got two. Thanks anyway.’”

He spent the rest of the day installing the extension and the goo-free p-trap. One week later, we’ve got a who-poo.

“The only bright spot in this whole who-poo week,” Charlie said as he was getting ready for work this morning, “is that when I was in the plumbing store explaining my dilemma, there was another customer standing there complaining.

“’Every time I do a plumbing project,’ he said, ‘it involves at least three trips to the plumbing store before I find out what’s wrong.’

“’If you’re only doing three trips,’ the plumbing clerk said, ‘you’re ahead of everyone else. ‘I have customers who often take seven trips before they figure out what they need.’

“I felt good that I only made about four trips per problem,” Charlie said. “I’m within the average.”

It’s nice to feel normal. I’m already planning Charlie’s next vacation.

Tug of War

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 22:31:48 GMT

Tug of War

“Did you guys move my car?” the General says,” because we parked in a really good spot, and it wasn’t there.”

“Move your car?” Charlie says. “What do you mean, ‘move your car?’”

Jordan, the General’s friend, stands next to the General with a look of unbelief on her face. Does her friend really live with parents who re-park their daughter’s car when she’s out to breakfast at Denney’s?

“We were parked right in front. When we went out, it was across the parking lot. We looked at each other and said, ‘Are we that blonde?’”

The General notices I’m starting to laugh.

“I can’t believe you guys would do that.”

“We were going to move it to the parking lot next door,” I say as if that made any difference.

She stomps up to her room, making frustrated-type noises, ready to devise her next scheme to separate us from our money. This is what we do on weekends: play credit-card tug-of-war with the General.

“Watch,” Charlie says. “It won’t be an hour before she’ll think up a justification for why she should separate us from our money. Do you see her M.O?”

“I don’t know what M.O. stands for,” I said. “I was always too embarrassed to ask.”

“Method of Operation. She’ll plan to do something, which she plans to do anyway. Then she’ll say, ‘since I’m doing this, I should get this.’

“The first this has nothing to do with us. If she can make it sound benevolent, she thinks she should get rewarded with the second this. Yesterday she said, ‘Since I’m planning a surprise sweet 16^th birthday kidnapping for my friend, I should get money to pay for everything.’

“That doesn’t work, so she tries the direct approach next. ‘Mom,’ she says, ‘I need the credit card to pay for balloons and money so we can kidnap my friend and take her out to breakfast before school.’”

“If I say no,” I say, “she gets mad and threatens to go to her Dad’s. I’ll say, ‘That’s a good idea,’ which gets her more frustrated, which gets her back into her room, devising another scheme.

Sure enough, with ten minutes to spare, she’s refining her M.O.

“Mom, I need money.”

Like I’m not going to ask why. “Why?”

“I need binders for school.”

“You just got binders.”

She doesn’t deny she just bought binders last weekend. Instead, she finds a way to explain why she needs more binders. After a fairly convincing line of reasoning, I’m not convinced.

“Fine,” she says. “Thanks for ruining my life. I have to meet Meagan and I’m not coming back because you guys are mean.”

She comes back within another hour.

“Nice to see you,” I say. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

She makes frustrating noises and heads to her room.

“Oh look,” Charlie says. “She didn’t leave us after all.”

She gives him a smart-ass look.

“You need to do some work, Missy.”

Nothing.

“No work-ee, no drive-ee.”

“You’ll have to drive me and I know that won’t happen, so give up now.”

“I don’t mind driving you,” I said. “I haven’t been driving for a while.”

“That’d be fine,” Charlie says. “We can do that.”

More frustrating noises as she shuts the door. The cycle begins again.

Lights Off?

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 00:22:50 GMT

Lights Off?

The Vegan calls. He never calls; I didn’t know he knew how to use a phone. “Can you give me a jump?” he said. “I left my lights on this morning. My battery’s dead.”

Charlie had to go to Home Depot anyway, being an hour since his last visit. When he’s working on the house, he might as well be working at Home Depot. He’s there more than he is here.

The Vegan pulled up into the coveted close spot in the driveway. He turned off his car and went inside to go chat with his friends online. I assume that’s what he did; I didn’t notice. He’s a steady, dependable kind of guy with a steady routine. Too bad he can’t get a job and use these dependable skills for good. He’d be perfect if you need someone to chat online with skaters all night.

Charlie came home with a big piece of pvc pipe and got back to work in the bathroom upstairs. I didn’t ask what he was doing. I find his construction projects much more interesting if I hear about them all at once at the end of the day. Otherwise, he might get the idea I know what he’s talking about.

The Vegan ran downstairs. This is new. “It’s a nice day so we’re going skating. Where’s food?”

When I was eighteen, I prepared everything I ate. I had eating disorders, so it wasn’t too much trouble. I did my own laundry, balanced my own checking account, and bought everything I needed with money I earned myself. He can’t even find his pants in the morning, his room is so messy. Cleaning his room is his only job right now. He’s a lot easier to live with than I was and he doesn’t have eating disorders, so I made him a sandwich.

He ran out the door and quickly ran back in. “My battery’s dead again,” he said. “Can you give me a jump?”

“This is one of those reasons why I got married,” I said. “Hey, Charlie!”

“Just a minute,” Charlie yelled from the bathroom.

The Vegan went outside again to wait and soon heard a big crunch. I assumed it was the Vegan skating down the driveway and crashing into the garbage cans. He swore once, really loudly, which isn’t usual. I decided to go outside to tell him he probably shouldn’t swear so loudly in the middle of the day in our middle-class cul-de-sac. I rarely get a chance to Mom him.

I opened the front door and saw the Vegan’s car rolled backwards down the driveway and smashed into Charlie’s big-ass honkin’ truck. The Vegan’s driver’s side door was open and he was trapped between the car door and the truck. I couldn’t see his arm.

“Ow!”

Charlie ran outside right behind me yelling, “Are you okay?”

“My arm is ripped a little.” He pulled his arm away from between the door and the truck, where it was pinned. He had a gash all up his left forearm but he still had an arm and he didn’t need stitches. It looked pretty painful, though. It looked worse than his legs after an intense day of bad skating.

“Thank God,” Charlie said. “From the upstairs window, I couldn’t see your legs. I had visions of you trying to skate on your hands.”

“This has been the worst day.”

“It could have been worse. You still have legs.”

The Vegan pulled the driver’s side door away from the truck and tried to close it. He opened and closed it several times before it closed, crunching the Vegan’s front panel. It sounded like a slow-motion crash. I hate that sound.

Charlie unhooked the truck from the back of the Honda. The side door of the big-ass truck now has a small-ass punch mark. The Honda was already missing a brake light, and now it’s missing a brake light and a back end corner, too.

“What were you doing?”

“I thought I’d move my car closer to the truck. Since I couldn’t start it, I thought I’d let it roll backwards. I couldn’t turn the steering wheel fast enough. I forgot about using the parking brake.”

“Too bad you didn’t hit the police car,” Charlie said, looking at his work car resting less than five feet away. “It has better insurance.”

“Should have turned off my lights this morning,” he said. He pulled more pieces of trim off the driver’s side door so it’d close, helped Charlie recharge his car, and drove off mumbling, “I hate cars.”

“Call if you get stuck again,” I said.

“Don’t forget to turn off your lights,” Charlie said.

The Vegan returned along with the cold and rain and the mail. The car insurance bill arrived and I thought it was someone else’s. It had more than doubled. Less than six months ago, the Vegan turned left on a blind corner and ran into someone. “A shopping cart would do more damage than what I did,” he said, but the victim sued our insurance. I showed the Vegan the bill.

“How am I supposed to pay for community college?” he said. “I had plans to buy stuff. Fine. I’ll walk. I’ll take the bus.”

“It’s not that expensive.”

“How am I supposed to get ahead?”

I said reassuring Mom things while thinking maybe he should consider another career goal. He wants to be a mail carrier.

After a few hours of skate chat, he seemed back to normal but it’s hard to tell. His sister, the General, got all the drama genes. You have to really pay attention with him to gauge his mood. You have to stay out of the way with his sister.

“Would you mind shopping?” I asked him. There isn’t much food in the house and he likes to look around WinCo for vegan-y things. He seems to enjoy reading ingredient labels, searching for gelatin and other animal by-products in otherwise vegan products. Some people meditate, some people drink. He scouts for whey.

He took my ATM card and left. After about 45 minutes, he returned. He didn’t seem very calm.

“What’s your code?” he said. “I tried all these possible pin numbers.”

He showed me a list of numbers written neatly on a full sheet of paper.

“I thought by now you’d have it memorized. It’s none of those.”

I gave him the right number and he left. He returned after another 45 minutes, even less calm.

“I tried the right code, but it wouldn’t accept it. I went to the other bank across town and tried it again. It wouldn’t accept it there, either. I’m too frustrated to shop now.”

I scraped up some cash and told him to go get Subway, his favorite. A few friends came over so he didn’t go right away. He spent a lot of time calming down, although he didn’t look anywhere near as frustrated as the General does when she’s not frustrated at all.

He returned quickly. Too quickly. “They just closed,” he said. “Should have turned my lights off this morning.”

He’ll remember next time, I’m guessing.

Bathtub in a Box

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:18:19 GMT

Bathtub in a Box

“I’m the only one who didn’t inherit the bathtub gene,” my oldest son says. “Everyone else takes baths for hours. They’re not done ‘till the hot water’s gone.”

My oldest and I are both shower people. The last time we took baths was when we lived in England and had no choice. Our house there was huge and full of bathrooms; bath rooms, not shower rooms. We were happy to come back to the States and return to washing while standing up.

This might change. Right now there’s a never-used whirlpool bath in the hallway, questioning my washing stances. It’s calling my name, like cookies just out of the oven, or like Abercrombie calling the General’s name when she’s within five miles of the mall. Stances and good credit hide in another room without plumbing.

Charlie took a week off to bring the upstairs bathroom up to or beyond Civil War standards. The first day he pulled a muscle in his back. This is not the first or second time he’s done exactly that. He walks around unable to turn his head, like he’s wearing an invisible neck brace. I give him backrubs with hopes of getting in the bath by the end of the week. He thinks I’m being generous. I’m just stinky.

The Vegan saw the bath in a box in the garage. Charlie asked him to help him carry it upstairs and the Vegan left his chat room mid-sentence. “Are you going to have this ready by 9 pm tonight?” he asks, “because that’s when I want to take my bath.”

Charlie figured he could be serious and tell him he hasn’t removed the old tub and doesn’t even know how much dry rot he’s going to have to replace, or he could turn the questioning around and bother the Vegan.

Naturally, he chose option B. “When are you going to bring your girlfriend over so we can all meet her?”

“No,” the Vegan says. “Nope. Not.”

“I need to tell you about the birds and the bees. All of us, including your girlfriend, have to sit down and talk about this and how you need to keep your distance from her physically. We don’t want any babies around here.”

“No! Nope! Not!”

“I need to give you some fatherly advice about women. I was really good with the women,” Charlie says. “Before your Mom, of course. I had my way with them. Let me tell you all about it.”

“No! No! Stop!”

The Vegan not only ran off, he ran all the way out of the house. He opened the door to leave. Then, when no one but Charlie was looking, he flipped him off. It’s become his favorite thing: flip Charlie off when nobody is looking but Charlie. Charlie acts hurt and upset, says, ‘Did you see that?’ and the Vegan laughs and runs out. I’m not sure the nosy neighbors know it’s a game.

In the ensuing calmness, Charlie gets out the sledgehammer destroys the peace, our eardrums, and the old tub. He can barely swing the sledgehammer, but this doesn’t slow him down. When the tub is destroyed, however, he can’t move enough to take the heavy cast-iron remnants out of the bathroom. Luckily, the Vegan has friends. One of them, Bobb whose real name is John, stops by.

“What are you doing right now?” Charlie asks.

“I have a feeling you’ll tell me,” he says.

Bobb/John, carries out big garbage containers full of broken-up old tub.

“Where’ve you been lately?”

“I was at my Grandma’s funeral,” Bobb/John says.

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s okay. She just had her teeth cleaned two days before she died. She was 100 years old. Nobody cried. She had a great life. And guess what? I have another Grandma.”

“You just met her?”

“I didn’t know. I asked my relatives, ‘Why have I never met this Grandma?’ They said, ‘Nobody likes her.’ Turns out she likes me. I like her, too, but she’s old. I played my violin for the funeral and this new Grandma says, ‘You play so nicely. Can you play for my funeral?’ Awkward.

“She was singing along to my playing. She tried, but she’s old. The girl can’t sing. So she tried humming. That didn’t work either, but it was better than the singing so she kept going. She was cool.”

Bobb, whose real name is John, asked if he could do anything else. It was tempting, but we let him get back to being a kid.

Charlie felt so productive he stopped to have a diet Pepsi.

“No,” the General said when she saw him sitting down. “Get it ready. Get the bathroom done now. Go, go, go, go!”

She waited around outside the upstairs bathroom door while Charlie pulled up flooring. Whenever he’d open the door to go get something, she’d say, “I want to be first.” As soon as she saw she was waiting in line way too early, like someone waiting outside the movie theatre months before Star Wars opens, she gave up and took a shower downstairs.

By now there are pieces of the floor missing so you can see right through to the downstairs bathroom. Charlie forgot the General was down there grooming. He measured the new bathtub against the old plumbing, looking for a way to return the whirlpool bath and get a plain, easy-to-install tub. While checking to see if the p-trap, the drainpipe, lined up, Cheyenneh happened to look up. He had his face pressed against the p-trap but it didn’t look good.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said before he could explain he wasn’t looking at her and didn’t see anything anyway. “I have another job for you.”

She soon came upstairs and handed Charlie two windshield wipers and a side-view mirror for her car.

“You need to put these on now.”

“It’s 9:00 at night.”

“Fine, I can’t see. If it rains tomorrow, no telling what’ll happen.”

Charlie knows better than to argue with the Princess of Persuasion. He dropped the tub work and spent the next hour putting on wiper blades. These were the most complicated assembly wiper blades available. If she’d purchased blades only, that would have been easy.

Charlie opened up the package, threw the directions away, and went outside to install them. Soon he was back inside reading the once-discarded directions. The General wouldn’t excuse him until she gave the blades a test-drive. She wouldn’t let him sit down until he adjusted them a few times.

Then she brought out this goofy mirror film to put over a broken side mirror. We didn’t ask how she broke her passenger side mirror. We don’t ask why she’s got syrup and shaving cream in her car, either.

“This isn’t going to work,” Charlie said. “Your mirror is too broken.”

“Can you go with me to get it repaired?”

“Okay, I’ll go with you sometime.”

“Now.”

“It’s 9:30 at night.”

“You have an excuse for everything,” she said as she went up to her room.

I’m excited about the new, relaxing whirlpool bath. I think I’ll let the General go first. It’d be more relaxing for everyone that way.

One Down, Eleven to Go

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:01:46 GMT

One Room Down, Eleven to Go

“When I get a house, I’m installing automatic doors just like in Star Trek,” my oldest son said. “I already figured it out. I’ll put a motor inside a pocket door, and sensors on the top and bottom. When anyone comes close, the door will automatically disappear.”

He came over to look at the new bathroom. He went straight for the Canadian washer and dryer to have a closer look. They do resemble something from Star Trek, come to think of it.

“We’ve done other stuff,” Charlie said.

“I can’t get past these,” he said. “They’re cool. Did I tell you I got a bunch of components for my apartment? I’m rewiring my sound system.”

“Are you opening up walls? I thought you were going to move.”

“I am. This is stuff I can take with me. No, you guys scared me off from doing anything like construction.”

“Scared us off, too,” Charlie said.

The General came downstairs with bags of girl-stuff, armed to settle into the new bathroom. We haven’t seen her since last night, when she pulled me aside and said, “I need to talk to you.” She looked me straight in the eye like she needed to tell me a big secret. I knew better: she needed money.

“I have a lot of plans,” she said. We were heading out the door with plans of our own, not that she noticed. “I’m completely out of gas. I don’t even know how I got home.”

“Oh,” I said. “I hate it when that happens.” I opened the door to leave.

“But I won’t be able to go anywhere. I need money.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. “I just did bills. ‘Bye.”

I thought she’d be annoyed since we went out and she stayed home. Instead, the first thing she asked me today was what she could do to earn money.

“You want to do my errands? We have no food and I need stuff from Office Depot and Target.”

Her face lit up like she won the lottery. “Make a list.”

She doesn’t realize shopping for things you need is different than shopping for clothes for yourself. If it were fun, I’d do it. It turns out that the five hours of work she does each week for the privilege of driving is the exact amount of time it takes to do all my errands. I’ve turned into a Princess: I write a list and everything magically appears. The only way this situation could improve is if I didn’t have to pay. Using credit cards, I can pretend this until the end of the month.

She came upstairs and opened the bathroom door where Charlie started working. “I am totally obsessed with that bathroom,” she said. “I moved all my stuff down there. I’m obsessed.”

She shut the door and looked for me. “I want to show you what I did down there,” she said. I was up on a ladder, cutting in the ceiling. It took me three weeks to get motivated to put a paint brush back in my hand. If I stopped, it might take me another three weeks. I made her wait until I got to the corner, so at least it looked like I meant to stop.

She gave me a tour of where she’s put away her brushes and make-up in the bathroom cabinets. I realized she’s never lived in a nice house. As soon as we fix up a fixer, we move on. It’s been four years since we’ve finished anything. We suck.

On the way out the door, armed with my shopping lists and credit card, she said, “There’s something wrong with my tire. It’s all wobbly.”

I interrupt Charlie pulling tile from the moldy bathroom wall. I opened the door and got a big whiff of 32 years of bathroom smells.

“I’m sending the General on four hours of errands,” I said, holding my nose. “Can you have a look at her tires? She says they’re wobbly.”

He saw the General sitting in her car with the radio on full blast, honking the horn. She gestured for Charlie to hurry up. Her windows were rolled up, so Charlie knocked to get her to open the door.

“What do you mean, ‘they’re wobbly?’”

“What?”

“Turn the radio down,” he says. “What’s wrong with your tires?”

“I don’t know.”

“I need more information. Is one part of the car lower than the other?”

“I don’t know.”

He put his foot on the tires and shook them to see if they were wobbly. He checked the lug nuts to see if they were tight. He couldn’t find anything wrong.

“Does it vibrate?” he said. “Does it wobble?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably my driving. I gotta go.”

She backed out of the driveway and stalled, right in front of Charlie. She pretended not to be embarrassed, started it up and drove off. With all the peace and quiet, we got a lot of work done. We decided to reward ourselves by going to the Kennedy School.

The Kennedy School is a once-abandoned 1915 elementary school, remodeled into a beautiful hotel, restaurant, movie theater, and McMenamin’s brewery. Remodeled is the key word. Everything we do, even those things we do to get away from our remodel, has to do with remodeling. This is not recommended for one’s sanity.

Going to the movies on a weeknight is recommended. You don’t have to park three blocks away and walk by all the cute Northeast Portland bungalows. This would be a nice treat, except we’re always late. We drove right up and parked in the tree-filled lot, like normal people do. As I got out, I noticed Charlie standing.

“Listen,” he said. “You can hear the ice on the tree branches.”

You miss a lot when you’re in a hurry. The tree branches had a thick coat of ice and when the wind blew, they sounded like chimes. With the clear night sky, all you could see was moonlight reflecting on the ice. It looked like a movie.

Good thing, because five minutes after the movie started, Charlie said, “Haven’t we seen this before?”

The movie was my choice. I talked it up all day. Charlie wanted to see something new. I wanted to be spoiled. When you watch a movie at the Kennedy School, you can sit on a couch and eat pizza and drink whatever you want as long as you want. No one under 21 is allowed, so the loud bratty teenagers have to hang out at the multiplex.

Five more minutes and it was obvious we’d seen this movie before.

“It’s okay,” Charlie said. “At least it’s good. I just don’t like the end where he gets all shot up.”

I couldn’t remember the ending. One good thing about being us: movies are new even when we’ve seen them before.

I kept nibbling on the pizza sitting in front of me even when I was getting sick of pizza. This is the only problem with going to the Kennedy school. Charlie thinks of it as an advantage. We’ll drive across the greater Metro area for free Diet Coke refills.

I reached for another crust as something moved on the floor in front of us.

“Is that a rat?”

“It looked like a lobster.”

“That was a big-ass rat.”

No more pizza for me.

When it was over, Charlie said, “that movie was better the second time.”

“Especially since nobody got shot.”

The wonderful guy who supplies our refills waved good-bye.

Charlie responded with, “A big rat ran across the floor.”

“Serious?”

“Yeah. Right in the middle of the movie.”

“You’re serious?” He started laughing and couldn’t stop. We started laughing, too. If McMenamin’s could attract tourists from all over the world and still have rats, maybe someday we could attract some buyer from somewhere and still have some sanity. This doesn’t mean we’ll remember movie endings, though.

Winter Storm

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 04:33:46 GMT

Winter Storm

We openly flouted last night’s dramatic winter storm warnings. We drove the big-ass honkin’ truck with three bald tires to our friends’ house for dinner. Other friends defied the warning, too, but they brought pajamas and toothbrushes and four good tires. They believed the forecast and assumed the roads would be closed. We knew better than to believe we’d get to stay overnight in our friends’ beautiful house. We were right.

The winter storm held off until long after we were tucked into our crappy mattress flopped on the soon-to-be-replaced carpet. There’s so much drama over weather in Oregon that winter storm warnings sound like the pending apocalypse. Kids stay home from school and cars stay off the roads for two hours until the sun comes out, it warms up to forty degrees, and everyone’s already bored.

We lived in Montana when the General and the Vegan were little. One winter it didn’t get warmer than -30 degrees for three weeks straight. They went to school. They didn’t have Snow Days. Even when they were preschoolers they went to school. Even when it was -30 degrees they had recess.

I remember watching the teachers take a long time to get all the kids bundled up. It took even longer to get them outside because one by one they’d ask to use the bathroom, and have to peel everything off, pee, and put everything back on. “They go outside everyday,” the teachers said. “Even if it’s only for ten minutes at a time, they go outside.” That’s how you raise manly men in Montana. For the Vegan’s sake, we should have never moved.

We left late from our friends’ house last night, hoping the roads would freeze so we didn’t have to come home to . . . home. I have a bad case of house envy; I love everyone’s house. People say, “I’m so embarrassed; my house is such a mess.” Are they talking about their house, I wonder? Are they being polite? People only say these things when they’ve never seen the mess in which I live.

“I love that house,” I said when we finally left.

“Do you remember the first time we came here?” Charlie said. “You said, ‘I couldn’t live in their house. There’s nothing to fix up.’”

“What an idiot I was.”

I’m continuing in my idiotry; I haven’t been to Peet’s for almost a week. My friends are worried.

“Will we see you at Peet’s in the morning?” a friend asked me last night.

“We can’t do that anymore,” I said. “We don’t get started on the house until noon.”

I saw confusion on my friend’s face. Normal people don’t stay at Peet’s for three hours? “How long do you stay?” she said.

“At least until noon. Remember, Charlie can do four refills. We used to drive our kids around all day on the weekends just so we’d have an excuse not to get started on the house.”

“You must be happy with the progress,” she said. “You’ve got a potty.”

I wonder if most people talk about their friends’ toilets during casual conversation.

We went to bed determined to start up on the house tomorrow with motivation and excitement. We woke up and couldn’t find our excitement anywhere.

Last weekend we wasted our Peet’s time watching poker. Charlie and I made bets with each other over who would win the tournament. We had to watch the whole thing to find out both of us were wrong. We don’t know much about poker, it turns out.

This weekend we avoided the poker tournament except on commercials. Bob Vila was on TLC, and watching this isn’t like wasting time. It’s more like school. This might be why we spent most of the hour making fun of him. Bob’s adult son was helping plaster on this particular show. Bob ordered him around and interrupted him mid-sentence, making this one of his more interesting shows. It was almost like being at Peet’s.

Charlie accidentally flipped to the Discovery channel where he lost two hours of work time to Engineering Marvels. Even I was tired of sitting by this time, so I decided to do some cooking to see if I still knew how.

It’s amazing how little counter space you really need. Charlie ripped up the kitchen last summer and before he got distracted with the front deck, he installed the free-standing range. This is my work area.

I line up all the ingredients, utensils, and everything I need on the back. I mix and work on the left front burner while I use the right front burner for actual cooking. I don’t like the smell of burning plastic and so far I’ve been lucky. If I need more space, I can always use the top of the microwave. This is heaven compared to the open pit I cooked in when we were building a house in Montana; warmer, too.

I ended up making soup, two different kinds of bread, and vegan chocolate cake while Charlie watched bridges being built in France. Eventually he went downstairs to start his day. “I should be done in an hour,” he said. I knew better. This house is as cheap and nasty as they come. Add 32 years to cheap and nasty and nothing’s easy.

Soon I heard swearing coming from downstairs. I hate being right.

“I’m missing parts,” he said. “I’m calling up George Morlan. If they’re open, I’m going out. Pray for me.”

I looked outside. The little neighbor kids were under the big-ass honkin’ truck pulling off icicles. The big neighbor kids were sliding down the street on saucers. Freezing rain means everything’s covered in an inch of water, trapped by an inch of ice. The big kids are probably getting some good sliding but they won’t be out long. Freezing rain is wetter than Montana snow. There’s not even a car on the road.

Charlie started up the big-ass honkin’ truck while calling his buddies to find a good safe, passable driving route to the plumbing store. The Vegan walked up, sliding around. He was at his Dad’s and decided it’d be fun to slide around outside, too. I think it’s the only time I’ve seen him walk since he got a car.

Charlie loaded up the sink while the Vegan loaded up on cake. They both hopped into the truck and skidded off.

“It is super-slick out there,” he said when he returned. “You can’t go more than five miles an hour. I turned to come into the cul-de-sac and slid down the hill instead. I had to turn around in the Korean Church parking lot.”

“Did you get what you needed?”

“I almost had to return the $39 sink. We couldn’t find anything that’d work. Luckily, I found the guy who helped us buy this sink and he figured something out. ‘It’s not the right part,’ he said, ‘but it’ll work if you stick a bunch of construction adhesive on the back of it.”

I left him alone and it didn’t take him long to start swearing again.

“Why are you swearing?”

“I’m swearing? I didn’t notice,” he said. “I got the sink installed, I connected the faucet, I turned on the water, and everything’s working perfectly. I look down and the shut-off valves at the bottom are both leaking like crazy. I have to go back to George Morlan and get replacements.”

He held up the shut-off valve parts. “Look,” he said. “Look at all that crap in there.”

I looked and wished I hadn’t. The opening was full of icky brown goo.

“We could have been brushing our teeth with that,” I said. “Can’t you go back tomorrow? It’s dark and slicker than before.”

“I don’t care,” Charlie said. “I’m not stopping. I don’t want to start tomorrow with this hanging over my head. This is war.”

This time he left without even calling his buddies to check road conditions. Charlie’s from Florida. The only Florida road hazards he’s mentioned involved Snowbirds and Blue Hairs rather than sliding down hills and turning around at the Korean Church.

If he returns, I’ll have to ask about his preschool years.

That's Good Enough

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 06:39:21 GMT

That’s Good Enough

No one does cheap like my Dad. His house is an encyclopedia of cheap. He uses interior doors on the exterior of his house. He found his fireplace screens abandoned on the side of the road. I once noticed dry-rot on his outside windows. When I showed him, he said, “I couldn’t find flashing anywhere, so I put another coat of paint on the window trim. That’s good enough.”

Whenever Charlie and I do a crappy job on something, we’ll say, “That’s good enough.” Then we’ll laugh and quickly undo the mistake. If you have to say, “That’s good enough,” it’s not.

Charlie couldn’t end the day today without a trip to the Man-Candy Store: Home Depot. He needed epoxy for the shower. If this bathroom he’s creating is going to be civilized, I decided it needed a medicine cabinet, too. I trust only myself for this design decision.

We divided and conquered upon arrival. Charlie ran off, excited to hang out in the putty aisle. I found a medicine cabinet within two or three minutes and dropped it in his cart. Then, being around so many toilets and sinks on display, I ran off to the ladies’ room. I love using a bathroom someone else has to clean.

On the way back, I walked by the refrigerators. Currently, we have a big black upright coffin in our kitchen filled only with soy milk. It gives us something to complain about. If we put anything else in there, it freezes regardless of the setting adjustment.

It’s ugly and we know we have to replace it before we show the house. We don’t want to make this big of a decision. We would have to live with it wherever we live next, just like we’re living with the big, black coffin we stupidly bought on sale. Don’t ever dangle a sale tag in front of me; I end up being blind about everything else. What was I thinking?

I noticed three appliance sales guys sitting on washers, facing the refrigerators and talking. They’re directly across from a refrigerator, stainless, with a $300 price tag. I see it but pretend not to. I keep walking until I find Charlie. He’s at the register, checking out.

“I found a $300 refrigerator,” I said. “Stop what you’re doing before it’s sold.”

“Can you hold on a minute?” he told the cashier. She nodded like she’s done this hundreds of times before. Maybe there are lots of people who get distracted and have to stop mid-purchase.

I rushed over and pointed to my find. “This is the cheapest stainless refrigerator you’ll ever see,” I said. That’s all the information I needed. I was ready to buy.

“What’s wrong with it?”

An appliance guy appeared from around the corner. “Nothing if you don’t mind a big ding,” he said. He pointed to a huge dent in the bottom of the door corner.

“Someone had trouble moving. It’s a good deal.”

I smiled. I am victorious.

“Oh, no,” Charlie said. “I want to get something better than that. As soon as we buy it, we’ll be thinking about how to get rid of it.”

“Nobody’ll notice,” I said. “It’s stainless. It’s the same color as duct tape. You could tape over it, or better yet, cover it with magnets.”

“It’s going to look awful when we show the house,” he said. “Magnets? Down by your feet?”

“It’s good enough,” I said without thinking. When I heard myself, I heard my Dad. There will be no $300 refrigerator in my future.

We took our medicine cabinet and epoxy and left.

Charlie decided this was also the time to go to George Morlan Plumbing Supply. In the back of the truck, unbeknownst to me, he’d loaded the beautiful pedestal sink I’d picked up on my last blinding sale binge. The foot of the sink was way too big to fit anywhere with a baseboard, hence the sale price. We have baseboards now, so the sink’s coming back home to George.

“I could waste a lot of time and money trying to force that sink,” Charlie explained, “or I could be smart and get another one. I’m learning.”

I was too distracted thinking about how dented refrigerators made my Dad come out of my mouth to comment.

Charlie unloaded the pedestal sink while I looked around. This place has everything a rich person’s plumbing would desire. I love to walk around and see how much people will pay to pee.

I noticed Charlie starting to look at the pedestal sinks so I walked over and joined him. Before I could say anything, a sales clerk came by.

“Looking for anything in particular?”

“Something cheap,” I said. “Whatever’s good enough.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Charlie said. “She wanted to buy a refrigerator with a big dent in it.”

“It was a good deal.”

“These are cheap,” he said. He pointed to a few pedestal sinks in the shape of a half-shell. If you know anything about me, you know I don’t go for swirly stuff.

I kept looking and found one for under $100, half the price of my original sale sink.

The clerk went out back to see if he had any in stock. He was gone for more than a minute, so I started to get bored. Charlie seemed excited, being a guy, to stand around for an eternity amidst a sea of sinks.

“I’m bored sh*tless,” I said. “I’m going to look at expensive stuff.”

I found a small little room covered in dark wood filled with the weirdest bathroom fixtures I’d ever seen this side of HGTV. I found the fancy shower/tub enclosure that my hero Rachel Reynolds has in her house. If something’s really nice, Charlie and I now say, “That’s good enough for Rachel.” Rachel Reynolds is about as opposite of my Dad as you can get.

I noticed the clerk had returned and was talking to Charlie. I trust Charlie, but I’m nosy. What could be so exciting about a pedestal sink?

“I made an executive decision,” Charlie said. “I found this sink on the floor full of dust. It’s $39.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I say this as if I’ve never looked at a dented $300 refrigerator in my life.

“Someone returned it without the box,” the clerk said.

“No dents?”

“Nothing wrong with it,” he said. “We want to get rid of it.”

Charlie seemed proud. He out-Dad’d me and I have a genetic advantage. He did it without dents, too.

Charlie and the clerk talked for a little while. When the conversation turned to toilet seats, I had to find a reason to excuse myself.

“Standing around all these toilets is making me want to go to the bathroom,” I said. “Be right back.”

I returned to find them talking about . . . toilet seats. “We’ll take a couple of your finest $25 plastic models,” Charlie said. “Nothing but the best for my butt.”

“If you want cheap, we have some $8 ones,” the clerk said. “They’re painted wood.”

Charlie seemed hesitant, so I spoke up. “Two of your finest $8 toilet seats, then,” I said.

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” the clerk asked. “Don’t you want to look at them first?”

“They’re good enough,” I said. My Dad would be proud. Is that a good thing?

Civilization

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 06:07:10 GMT

Civilization

I once lived in a house without water. We had a beautiful huge septic system, designed by innovative friends who knew what they were doing. Without water, however, we couldn’t use it. There’s nothing more disheartening than looking at a beautiful hooked-up toilet and having to pee in the bushes outside.

This was when I lived in Montana. We never did finish that house or live in it after winter came and it got too cold. I never used that beautiful toilet.

I did, for a time, live with friends who didn’t even have a septic system. They had, and preferred, their double-wide outhouse. They had four kids, which I guess explained the two holes in the bench seat. I didn’t live there very long for fear of having to share. I’m selfish that way.

We’ve had a downstairs dungeon in Camp Kosovo for almost four years now. The kids and I were afraid to go down there for weeks at a time. We had a squirrel family living behind the toilet and another mammal family living under the shower stall. The toilet itself made a gas station men’s room look hygienic. You had to go upstairs to return to the developed world.

Now Charlie’s promised we’ll have civilization downstairs within the week. “It should take about a day and a half,” he said. I know better but I pretend this might be the time when nothing goes wrong.

I don’t have to pretend for long. It’s not even noon and I can hear him swearing. All he was going to do was install the toilet. He’s installed dozens. Why is this particular toilet such a challenge? Why is everything about this house such a challenge? You have to wonder what illegal substances were available to construction workers building ranch cheap ranch homes in 1973. By the quality of their work, I’m assuming drugs were cheap and construction workers were quite well-paid.

“I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s had this problem,” Charlie says, resurfacing again. “The toilet bolts are set in the slab, and I tiled over the slab. Now the bolts are too short. I’m going to work on the shower instead.”

He’s swearing again. I’m thinking of all kinds of things I can do in the opposite end of the house. When we lived in the little coastal-looking bungalow, I’d have to go to the gym when he started swearing. Now I can stay inside do dishes. 2,000 square feet of split-level is why our marriage is better than ever.

“I did something as simple as take the shower handles off so I could replace them,” he says. “I always take the part off and hand it to the clerk instead of trying to describe what I need. As soon as I took off old handle, it sprung a huge leak. I’m turning off the water and taking the broken part to Home Depot.”

I went to the gym and came back a long time later.

“I shared my broken parts with a Home Depot guy who said, ‘we don’t carry that old thing. You’re going to have to go to a plumbing store.

“I drove across town to the plumbing store. They had the part in stock so I felt like this wasn’t going to be another waste of a day. Feeling lucky, I asked for extensions for the toilet bolts.

“’Never heard of those,’ the guy said.

“He directed me to another, even fancier plumbing store. They’d never heard of bolt extensions, either, but the clerk was excited to solve my problem. ‘I can rig something up,’ he said.

“He returned with an open-end bolt bolted to a longer bolt, which I think will work. Did I tell you I’ve decided to declare war on this house?”

I didn’t hear any more swearing. Declaring war is a lot quieter than the usual frustration. I went downstairs to see how the potty battle was going.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the new, clean, seatless toilet. “It’s in. I guess we forgot to buy a seat, which is only a problem for you.”

“You think so?” I said. He didn’t know me in the flush-free days of outdoor Montana living.

“Let’s see if it works,” he said. “I’ll let you take the first flush.”

“No, you,” I said. Flushing with a witness, even if it’s my husband, just wasn’t right. I have too many uncivilized memories and one of them is of a double-wide outhouse in Montana I narrowly avoided sharing.

“We’ll do it together,” he said. He took my hand and pushed down the handle. I swear, he was giggling. I outwardly contained my excitement, however it’s been a while since anything in this house has flushed without healthy fear of overflowing. It was a satisfying sound.

I took a minute to be grateful for running water and septic systems. I’m also grateful to see the squirrel family evicted, too. There’s nothing like sitting on a toilet with the sound of furry creatures playing behind your naked ass.

The battle cries returned once Charlie tried to install the shower door. I was downstairs at this time, thinking it was safe to paint.

“Nothing’s straight in this house,” he said. “The shower floor isn’t level, so the door was crooked unless I trimmed one of the jambs. I wasn’t paying attention when I cut the striker jamb. Now I’m an inch too short. I’m calling the manufacturer for a replacement then we’re going out tonight. I gotta get out of here.”

And when we return, we’ll have a clean toilet. I love civilization.