Whatta Fiasco

Just when you think you’ve got a decision made, and even though it’s hard
and not exactly what you want, you know you can follow through on it, just
then is when the ground shifts underneath you. It looks as though Max may
have found an apartment after all, but the conditions under which he’s
moving out will be slightly different than expected. We’ll make it work.
Hopefully he will too. Being a parent can really suck sometimes.

The good news is from Lisa, or at least about Lisa as relayed by her
mother. Louise contacted hubby this week in order to try to get money out
of him. The reason is unimportant, but no money was had. The good news is
that Lisa has found a coffee shop in Nowhere where the cool coffee shop
type kids hang out, and she’s been hanging out with them. Socializing.
Making friends. Having a good time. Between that and spending more time
with her cousins over at her aunt’s house, the tension between her and her
grandmother sounds much reduced. And that the relief of the tension has
resulted in something extraordinarily good for her is the finest
buttercream frosting you ever tasted on that particular cake.

Tonight I’m babysitting Ms.K. so her parents can go see a movie together.
She was happy happy baby until three minutes after they walked out the
door. Then she spent an hour being unconsolable baby who would not be
held. I finally laid her on the couch next to me and we played the drag
the blanket back and foth across her face game for almost an hour before
she manifested her Shriek of Doom powers again. She still didn’t want to
be held. She thrashed about in her cage (ok, her Pack’nPlay pen) for a few
minutes before she ate a little and fell asleep.

Oops. Time to go deal with the cute little tyrant again.

So there I was, in a really decent mood all day. Until I got home and
found the electric bill. And checked the thermostat. Sure enough, someone
had overridden the programming. Again. At least when I asked him about it,
Max had the grace to admit that he’s been messing with it. Then I
explained just how expensive that messing around was and asked him not to
do it anymore. It’s hard not to think that he ought to know better, but
it’s not as if he’s ever paid an electric bill in his life. Or any other
bill, forthat matter. I’m not asking him to chip in on this one, but
between this and his phone bill maybe he’ll begin to get some sense of
what his lifestyle might cost if he were paying for it.

Then I put aside all thought of the electric bill and did something I’d
been wanting to do for ages. I went out with hubby to have sushi for
dinner. It was very nice indeed. Yellowtail tuna with wasabi. Yum.

No doom. No gloom. Nary a complaint worth the time to mention.

I discovered last week that the not-a-greasy-spoon deli next door has
quiche on Tuesdays, and only Tuesdays. And the current crop is being made
with homegrown tomatoes. A quarter wedge on top of a mound of fresh mixed
greens (iceberg need not apply for snooty deli salad position) is almost
seven bucks, but what the heck. So I blew off the opportunity to get
swimming burritos and weak iced-tea with the in-crowd. Result: Eh, not
bad. Pretty darned good, actually, but I’m not sure it’s seven dollars
good. They use a high proportion of egg whites and go light on the cheese,
making it relatively healthy as such things go. So-so semi-soggy crust was
a downside but the flavor was good. It’s now on my every-now-and-then list
but not a regular.

The foundations of the world shake. If the Topeka library is anything like
as good as their website, I may have found a reason to go to Topeka other
than the rainforest and some wicked good quiche. And I should be able to
get a library card, even though I don’t live in the county. (Oh, and they
have one of Michael Kandel’s books.) They’re going to take away my cool
hipster card if I’m not careful.

Two weeks ago (or was it three?) I had never heard of Queer Eye for
a Straight Guy. Then I heard one mention, maybe two. Now I cannot
turn on the television without seeing it and my head is still reeling.
It’s so precious and camp and over the top, if only it weren’t trying so
terribly hard to be so unbelievably gay. You’ve got to be a buff Atlas to
carry around this much stereotype on waxed shoulders. I enjoyed it anyhow.
But I hope you’ll pardon me I’m staying away from the television for a few
days.

Yesterday morning I had enough of the mes in the house and Max not lifting
a finger to even clean up after himself , so I did something about it.
After running a few errands I went and in cleaned the upstairs bathroom. I
scrubbed the bathtub. I scrubbed the toilet. I cleaned the sink and
counter and even cleaned the mirror. I scrubbed the light plate. I tossed
all the dirty towels and whatnot into a pile in the hallway to see if
anyone caught a clue. And then I went in and washed the dishes and cleaned
the stove top. All while Max was sitting at the computer in the
diningroom. He left soon after without saying a word, but when I got home
tonight, he had washed his dinner dishes instead of just leaving the mess
sitting in the sink. The towels are still on the floor, but I can wash
those tomorrow and I’ll take whatever progress I can get, even if I have
to use the magic guilt by demonstration method.

Fencing practice went well tonight, but hot. I thought last week was hot,
but tonight was worse. I was hotter inside than it was outside, mostly due
to almost no moving air. Sweat city and a heat headache. I pushed it a
little harder than I probably should have but the fencing was good. And
even though my foot was feeling it by the end of the evening, it wasn’t
affecting my fencing. Finally!

Afterwards we went out to the local brewery and Ariadne ordered something
I’d been curious about; a beer float. In this case it was the house stout
with a scoop of vanilla icecream. Think beer cappuccino. Ok, think of
something that sounds better than that, but that’s what it tastes like.
Candy beer. Really, it’s quite good. I’ll have to get one of my own next
time.

What a lovely day for sleeping in, except that I was out trying to get
things done in the middle of the afternoon heat. What silliness. I got the
invading elms along the driveway knocked back again and then decided to
retreat to the relatively cool indoors. Hubby was even more ambitious and
got Gigi (my motorcycle) out for her first shakedown ride of the season.
She’s doing very well so farbut will probably be getting some new rear
shocks. Not only are the current shocks old, but we can get new ones that
will lower the bike by about another inch. That sounds just about right to
me. I should get to ride some next weekend with any luck.

Max still doesn’t have a job, but he has an appointment Monday morning
with two friends to see about a place they want to rent together. We’ve
offered to continue supporting him at the current level for the tim being,
but that will only just cover most of his share of the rent before
utilities and food and entertainment. If they do get the apartment, I
think he’ll finally have the motivation he needs to become employed. I
think this would be a very good thing for him. And I wouldn’t mind having
my house back for a little while.

—

It seems to me that the field of philosophy (and in particular the
philosophy of language) is a thicket littered with the corpses of models
strangled by the injudicious extension of metaphors. Yes, I know that
sounds silly and pompous but I mean it. When one speaks of white blood
cells recognizing an invader in the body, and then of myself recognizing
my friend Jon and his wife from across the airport terminal, you are only
asking for trouble if you treat the two uses of the word ‘recognizes’ as
completely (or even nearly!) isomorphic. I also suspect that these self
same corpses are behind much of the criticism of many of the ’soft’
sciences, but I don’t have anything to back that up beyond a niggling
intuition.

Anyhow, it’s all making for very slow slogging through the Umberto Eco
I’ve been in the process of reading. It’s not that he’s strangling fresh
bodies; it’s that he insists upon stopping to label (and sometimes
autopsy) each separate corpse he comes upon. I should have known I was in
trouble when the first fifty pages were devoted to the uses and meanings
of the verb ‘to be’ through several different languages. But just when I’m
ready to give it up as a bad joke and a waste of time, he comes up with
something interesting enough to keep me going.

Good grief, it’s hot today.

Back to fencing again! The new location is not bad. It’s in an old gymnasium with a stunning end-grain wood floor (which is about to get refinished) in midtown. It has offstreet parking. It has decent restrooms and a drinking fountain with cool water. It’s also well located for after practice dinner and beer. The only downsides so far are a lack of air-conditioning and the gym not being handicap accessible. On the other hand, we’ve also been given permission to use the cafeteria (which does have airconditioning, but we have to move all the tbales and chairs out fo the way and then put them back when we’re done) which is accessible and will also make for nice overflow space when holding tournaments. The gym just isn’t big enough to do more than three full strips at the absolute maximum, and the KC Open really needs at least six strips to run reasonably. We’ll get it worked out.

So I fenced again, and I fenced like crap. More accurately, I fenced the way I used to fence. Regression sucks. But by the end of the evening the fencing brain was starting to work and the body was beginning to remember. It’s coming back, slowly. Part of the slowness is that, in spite of a three week break, my foot still isn’t healed. It’s better than it was but it’s not back to full strength and that’s very frustrating. So I get to be patient a little while longer. At least I get to fence while I’m being patient.

In other news, Max learned a life lesson yesterday. About a week ago he got tired of how long it was taking to walk around town, so a friend of his gave him an old clunker bike. Max figured it was a crappy enough bike that, so long as he didn’t leave it sitting too long, he wouldn’t need to worry about locking it up. No such luck.

Luckily he decided not to go protest the opening of the Dole Center for Politics. Why he’d want to protest it, I’m not sure. I’m no fan of the man’s politics myself, but the center isn’t about the man’s personal politics. At any rate, all his friends who did decide to protest got arrested. And all that sympathy I might have felt for him from getting his bike stolen? It all disappeared when I walked out of the house this morning and found a bag on the front steps with stuff in it that would have gotten him more than a simple arrest if he’d taken it to the protest. Not enough to get him kicked out of the house, lucky him.

Hubby and I took our Tuesday night to go see Johnny English. I adore Rowan Atkinson, but the slapstick humor was quite a bit too predictable. And his character was so bumblingly likeable that several times I had to cover my eyes rather than watch him make a fool of himself again. I don’t hide my eyes at horror movies, but I do at overly painful comedies. (Austin Powers had several of those movements too.) But the blow-out scene is enough to redeem any discomfort, assuming you didn’t already get your money’s worth out of the schwing. Good fluffy fun.

In other news, Max is still talking the talk about getting a job and getting an apartment, but his feet aren’t doing much walking. Hubby and I had another talk over dinner about what our expectations are and how we need to communicate those expectations more clearly to Max. (Not that lack of directness or clarity can explain all of his lapses by any means.) We also discussed options for dealing with a continued failure to meet our expectations. Communication before the fact is a good thing.

Tonight is our first fencing practice since before Summer Nationals. That was about one more wek of break than I had expected and the longest break from fencing I’ve had since I started. (I should have been doing daily footwork drills, but I haven’t, although I did get a tiny bit of weight work in during the interim. Going to practice is a good thing.) Tonight will be the first night in our new location. No air conditioning for the rest of the summer will be a bit brutal, but it’s better than not fencing.

Ok, I think I’m mostly coherent now. It took forever to get myself to slow down enough to sleep yesterday. I would lay down to nap, end up reading for half an hour or so, sleep for maybe an hour, and then find myself awake again. I didn’t have have any trouble getting up on time this morning either.

So, what kept me up so late Sunday night. I knew Jon was going to stop by the hotel when he got back in town in order to get his house keys back as I checked in on his animals while he and B. were gone for the weekend. As it turned out, he made it back into town just abotut the time I was going to be dropping off my rental car at the airport, so he offered to pick me up and give me a ride back to the hotel. Very nice of him. And then he wanted to know if I’d be interested in going with him to play a board game at a friend’s house, with the warning that things would likely run very late.

The friend hosting this get together turned out to not only be a fencer with RPI, but also the divisional vice-chair, and an epee fencer. We had a good time trading stories about divisional politics shenanigans (theirs just might be worse than ours, but it’s close) and fencing stories in general. If I had known, I might have gone ahead and brought my fencing gear. If I end up out that way again, I probably will. (Oh, and this afternoon I was looking at Andy’s fencing club’s web site and realized that I know the coach there. It’s a freaky small world.) The discussion also turned to giving Jon a mild amount of grief over no longer fencing, but only a little bit because he maanged to bung up an ankle pretty good at a tournament a few years ago and it still bothers him. That’s too bad because it would be a lot of fun to fence him, even if he is tall. (Andy would be fun to fence too.)

Anyhow, that’s how I ended up staying up until after two in the morning playing Attack and deciding not to bother sleeping before needing to be at the airport by four-thirty. It was worth it.

Can you tell I had a good vacation? I had a great vacation. Dammit. All you people in the northeast who don’t know what a good thing you have, be careful or I’ll make you take a vacation in Kansas. Ha!

I’m home again after an uneventful flight and an even shorter layover in Atlanta than I had flying out there. And after pulling an all-nighter. Sleep? What’s that? I nearly left my airline ticket in the bathroom at the Albany airport. Lack of sleep combined with lack of food was playing havoc with my judgement. It was a fun trip. Now I’m home and I’ve had something to eat. Maybe I can get some sleep. I hope so. More tomorrow.

Yesterday Jon and I spent the afternoon driving around in the rain shopping for cat food and checking out gaming stores and just generally chatting before he had to pack up and leave for the weekend. Very relaxing, and I learned something.

You know those miniatures that role play gamers like to collect and paint? Do you know how many of them they can end up with? (Scads and oodles!) Did you ever wonder how they moved those slightly delicate models with their easily chipped paint? I hadn’t, but now I know. Someone came up with the clever idea of creating thick foam pads partially scored in half-inch (or so) cubes. You pull out the bits you don’t need, leaving little foam pockets appropriately shaped for your various miniatures. The pads come in varying depths, from one to five inches to accomodate different sized models. Then you pay a bazillion bucks to get a soft case sized to fit the foam pads. Insert models, stack pads in case, and go play. Nifty. And the retail mark up on those pads has got to be amazing. I wonder for what use they were originally designed?

When I got back to the hotel and checked online, I found the news that Elf and his best friend were busy having a new primate delivered while I was helping Jon load up his car! Everyone is fine and Elf sounds over the moon happy. I sent my felicitations.

Today’s plan was to head east out of Troy, New York to find Vermont. Bennington, in fact. I’ve never been to Vermont and it’s not all that far on the map, and I’ve already paid for the rental car and the tank of gas. (And thereby got a free upgrade, woo! I hadn’t originally intended to be doing that much driving, but something about insisting on paying for roughly four-hundred miles worth of gasoline when you’re renting an economy car makes the rental companies twitch. Next thing you know, you’re driving out in a Corolla.)

It was a lovely drive with twisty little two-lane black-top highway and a fifty-five mile an hour speed limit. You drive and you drive and you don’t think you’re ever going to completely escape Troy, when suddenly you do. And there are these enormous red barns with white trim and fields of corn on nearly vertical fields, and beautiful streams. Next thign you know you pop over a ridge and you see the grand vista from western Bennington. Gorgeous. It’s seventy-five degrees with fluffly white clouds decorating the sky, the car windows are down and there’s an immense obelisk rising up out of the valley. Bizarre and wonderful.

About now I notice that I’ve achieved my initial goal and it’s not quite eleven-thirty even. Good heavens. The drive is too nice to quit. I keep going and pick up 9E out of town for some baby mountain driving. You’d never think you were in Colorado, but it’s still fun and there’s plenty of babbling brook filled with monster granite boulders to look at as you drive. Right about now the fifty mile an hour speed limit sounds just fine. I like Vermont. Then, coming down out of f the mountain I run into a stretch where the pavement abruptly disapears and the highway becomes a bumpy dirt road. Adventure! When I get stopped for a stretch of one lane dirt track, I quickly consult my trusty map and notice that there’s a Troy, New Hampshire. Eureka! I now have a goal for the day. Who could resist driving from Troy to Troy on such a day?

Eventually the pavement returns and I notice a good viewing spot on a curve, with a walkway overlook and a gift shop. It was time to get out and stretch. The view from Hogback Mountain was nice and I bet it’s spectacular in the fall. The gift shop was the usual. Lots of maple sugar and maple syrup products. But if you’re ever tempted by a bottle of Vermont Maple Soda, you might want to pass and pick up something else instead. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t the sickly sweet I had expected. It most definitely was maple but that just made it all the stranger.

Past a little more construction, I eventually found myself in the town of Brattleboro, right at the eastern edge of Vermont. That’s where I caught a glimpse of a covered bridge for the first time. There was also a framer’s market going on next door and the traffic was bad enough they had someone standing out there directing people through. It was the Creamery covered bridge. Right pretty but too much traffic and I still had another Troy to find.

Instead of the covered bridge I got sucked over a big iron one and boom, I was in New Hampshire. I’m not sure why, but New Hampshire didn’t seem quite as nice as Vermont had just on the other side of the river. Which is not to besmirch the reputation of that fine state, but it was an omen of not very terrible things to come. The highway to Keene, NH was broad and fast with lots and lots of motorcycles (mostly Harleys) going the other way.

Then I made my mistake and took the wrong highway out of Keene. I knew that from the map I should be in Troy by two in the afternoon, so when two had come and gone without any Troy-like signs, I got the map out again. Concord. I was heading north to Concord instead of south to Troy. How silly. How disappointing to not make my goal, but I wasn’t all that fond of New Hampshire anyhow and I wanted to be back in New York in time to feed Jon and B.’s cat for them. Lady Miaows-a-Lot (she doesn’t, but she’s cute) was expecting me so I turned around and headed back. And that’s how my Troy to Troy trip became a Troy to Hillsboro and back again instead.