Whatta Fiasco

I could write about the freak summer downpour that made the downspouts on the office building across from mine look like fire hoses spraying water clear across the alley. Or I could write about how we got to fencing practice to find that air conditioning had been installed in the gym, but how we still sweated like crazy anyhow. (No complaints on the AC though!) I could write about how four of us ordered beer floats at the brewery last night and the waitress didn’t even bat an eye. I could even write about what a mistake it is to eat chocolate chocolate chip cookies after drinking too much coffee. I really should know better.

Instead I’m going to take a short break from writing here until after the weekend. I’m sure I’ll have plenty to write about then.

Eh. I sucked it up, got money out of savings, and paid the worst of the bills today. Done and gone. Time to move on. There are plenty more things to worry about.

In the realm of being proactive, I’m giving strong consideration to taking a day off work for the purpose of getting some major cleaning done around the house. Crazy, huh. Cleaning, sorting, packing, pitching. If all I got done was the upstairs, that would be a huge improvement. We’ll see.

Fencing is going well. Not perfect, but well. I got some new work shoes about three weeks ago (did I mention them? I don’t recall) and they have a great deal more support than the flimsy slipper things I usually wear. I wasn’t at all convinced that they’d make any difference, but they did. They do. The tendinitis in my foot still hurts and that foot is still weaker, but my footwork drills are getting more intense while the pain is getting less. Last night I was almost back to gliding across the floor again. Hmm. I just realized that smooth fencing footwork has a lot in common with the glide step from marching band. Maybe that’s why my footwork was so smooth so soon after I started. Anyhow, it feels very good to be getting back to it. There are two good (read, difficult) competitions coming up in the next two months and I’d like to be ready for them.

This morning I thought for certain I was going to have to give one of my customers some bad news. I was convinced that because of a minor bobble we were going to have to push the roll out date back another week. The world wouldn’t end, and I did manage to accommodate a number of last minute changes, but still. I don’t like doing that to people. And then my Good Fairy Admin waved his magic wand and the briar patch dissolved into a cloud of shimmering glitter that got all over my keyboard, or something. I’m not entirely sure that he didn’t know what he was doing but I don’t ask Greeks about the price of the tea their horses drink.

My dishes are clean. The trash has been taken out. I have lunch made for the next two days. (Basil polenta and garlic tofu. I need to remember to get some red lentils to make some dal soon.) I’m resisting the urge to redesign the site again. I figure if I can keep my hands out of the code until this weekend then the time sink of faire should forestall that nonsense for another two months. And I drove through some more fat raindrops this evening to find a house that was cool and even the cats were happy once I refilled their feeder.

I was really hoping my worries were unfounded. Not that it would have made any difference, but I’ve yet more evidence that I should trust my gut instincts. I got my phone bill this morning. It was close enough to what I had feared to make no never mind. Upset was just the beginning of my response this morning. Anger. Disappointment. And when I informed Max of the first call he knew there was a much larger one just waiting for me to find out about. He still said nothing. The hell of it is that if he’d done a little research, those phone calls would have been just a fraction of what they ended up being.

Sad. The anger is (mostly) gone. The money’s spent and can’t be recalled. Max is out of the house and not likely to find a way to run up bills in our name without our permission. Now I just have to juggle things in order to be able to pay for the experience. Could I report these calls as fraudulent and try to get them taken off my bill? Sure, and I might even be able to make it work, but it wouldn’t be right. If he’d made the calls after we asked him to move out of the house, I might. But no. I’ll suck it up and deal with it.

Other than that and continuing triple digit temperatures (before calculating the heat index, thank you), things are going fairly well. The good news is that a cold front is supposed to come through sometime Friday and drop us firmly back into the eighties for the weekend. I’ll believe it when I see it, but I won’t be complaining.

To take arms in the struggle of ideas is to have lost. Not all ideas fight fair you say? Still fire is best fought with fire and doubt is both ally and foe; fire indeed.

This weekend the sun is my enemy. Merciless. I retreat. This morning I found a cave like coffee house and hid within its cool confines, downing cups of strong coffee and cutting words, thumbing my nose at the summer sun. Until today I wouldn’t have considered comparing the writing styles of R. A. MacAvoy and Gene Wolf.

Too much coffee later it was off to the library to return a DVD, Hitchcock’s Notorious, cool satiny silver tones. The library wasn’t open yet so I found a patch of shade and still green grass and settled myself in to feed the chiggers while reading. The wind over the hill was a blast from an oven filled with scorched pine needles. When the library opened I took my book inside but the air conditioned cool was not as inviting as the shade.

Back home the heat has once again overcome the air conditioning. The cats lay still, stretched out on tile floors. I am also unmoving in front of the fan as the sun sinks and the temperature slowly climbs a long hill. Even the locusts dance at the doorway, begging to come in. Soon the tide will turn. Soon it will be too dark to read. Then I can take a cool shower and do my laundry.

Wow. I didn’t find out until this morning that Larryville was the hottest spot in the country yesterday. I must say, 109F is hot even for around here. I spent most of it sitting in my cubicle drinking hot coffee to stay warm. Bizarre. When I got home from work at about six-thirty, the air conditioner was still working away but it was ninety-two degrees upstairs. Ugh. When I got back home the second time, at eight, it was still over 100F in Kansas City. It was cooler in Larryville though because the heat had squeezed an isolated thunderstorm out of the sky while I was running around town. Big fat rain drops. And as soon as the streets got wet, you could hear emergency service sirens all over town, mostly headed for traffic accidents. I had to reroute around a nasty one at a main intersection by my house.

But I made it to the library. I ended up not getting any of the books I had been considering (no more Ian McEwan yet, no Nabakov, no Richard Dawkins) but I did find a novel by a local author that looked intriguing, Secrets of the Tsil Cafe by Thomas Averill. And I found an R.A. McAvoy trilogy hiding in the regular fiction section instead of in SciFi and Fantasy. I’ve noticed a tendency for my library to migrate some fantasy and sf into the regular fiction shelves. Mostly, but not always, it’s well known authors. And that (at least partially) explains why the SF section has stayed pretty much the same size for years and years now while acquiring new books at an impressive rate. Another side effect is that I can judge the increase in the size of the general fiction collection by checking known sign posts. Oh look, A.S. Byatt has moved down another two shelves and the V.S. Naipaul are in roughly the same place but have jumped to the other side of the aisle. Which reminds me to submit a purchase suggestion through the library web site. If they’re willing to spend money on Pinker’s Blank Slate, then they ought to be willing to get a copy of Dennett’s Freedom Evolves.

After the library run I made it to the local organic grocery in search of fresh basil to make some Thai inspired spring rolls. (Not the fried kind.) Success! Not only did I find fresh basil, locally grown basil, but I also found several varieties including Thai basil. I’ve had a package of those round rice paper sheet things in my cabinet for months and months (or maybe a year) and I decided that it just wouldn’t be right if I didn’t have the fresh basil leaves to wrap up in them.

The rest of the ingredients were massively improvised. (How could I possibly go wrong with fresh basil?) I cooked up some basmati rice, boiled some eggs, and beat together some crunchy peanut butter with a generous dab of chili garlic sauce, some light soy and a dash of vinegar. Chop up an egg. Dice a bit of raw sweet onion. Pour the left over egg boiling water into a large pot big enough to accommodate the circumference of the rice sheets. I learned the hard way to not dump in a handful at a time; they turn into a sticky, inseparable mess that way. Just dunk one at a time in very hot water for a few seconds. Don’t let them go completely limp or they’ll fall apart before you can get anything wrapped up in them. I was going to use the lime and some garlic herb tofu as well, but it was too darned hot in the kitchen to be messing around any longer than I was. Next time I need to use more vegetables and keep the dipping water for the rice paper hot. Remember that you can differentiate varieties of filling by carefully choosing what goes onto the rice paper first.

Max made it to his appointment to get glasses yesterday after some mix up about where he an d hubby were going to meet. Then he had the gall to complain that he didn’t like the selection of frames available at the store they went to. All he wanted was a pair of simple dark plastic frames like he had before. Not much to ask, was it? Except that simple pair of frames he got last time was a pair of over-priced Italian designer frames that I wasn’t entirely happy paying for back when we had more money. When his dad pointed out that there were programs to help people without money get glasses, the complaining was drastically reduced and the selection process picked up speed.

Amazing.

Things happen. Life goes. Tuesday night hubby and I were heading for dinner in town after having determined there weren’t any films out we wanted to see. And who should we see walking along the sidewalk near the restaurant we’d selected but Max. Still sans glasses. So we waved him down and offered to buy him dinner. Not much to say and it wasn’t the time to grill him. We had a nice dinner. He was supposed to meet his dad at the office this morning so they can go get him some new glasses. Then he can start job hunting again.

Mrs. Maggie fell out at renfest site the other night and broke both bones in her left forearm. Considering all the other stuff going on in her life and the complications in her household, this is not a good time, but it sounds like they’re coping. She had surgery yesterday to install plates and pins and came through fine. I’m hoping to see her soon.
The heat continues unabated. The air conditioner continues to bobble now and then, deciding to take a nap when the temperature gets too high. But it looks like it ran through yesterday’s heat without a hitch. With any luck it will get us through until the weather breaks. I hope that happens soon, like before the end of the month. Ha.

Last night I got a free pint at the brewery in celebration of their tenth anniversary. I paid for it by having to listen to the entire first set of a local band whose lead singer thinks he’s Johnny Cash. Brain dead drummer. Honestly, they could have been lots worse, but the volume made up for any modicum of talent. But the little girl who turned into a dancing fool in the aisles as soon as the music started almost made up for it.

I need to take some books back to the library. Of course, one of them was due yesterday. Of course. And most of the books I’ve been waiting for have been checked out and aren’t due until tomorrow. There are plenty of other things I ought to be doing, mostly cleaning. I’m not feeling motivated to do any of them at the moment. Maybe it’s waking up at three or four in the morning the last two nights and not being able to get back to sleep right away. Or maybe it’s the cash flow situation which has me worried enough that it’s hard to even imagine having fun. I need to get over that. I’m hoping I feel better after I get my long distance phone bill tomorrow.

It disappeared on Friday morning. I stopped on my way to work to pick a few ripe tomatoes. Instead of taking them inside, I set them on the dashboard of my car. As soon as I took off, one of the tomatoes made a mad dash for freedom, flying off the dashboard and disappearing into the ether. Being shod with clunky shoes instead of slippers I can pull off my feet (letting me feel around on the floor of the car with my toes for dropped change), I spent the drive in just waiting to feel a squish under my shoe, or under the gas pedal. Nothing. Several searches around the floorboards, under seats, and in nooks and crannies revealed no tomato. Hubby suggested that a flashlight would help. I pooh-poohed. This morning, worried that the tomato would decompose in situ, I reached into the side pocket of my car door where the flashlight lives… and found a wrinkled tomato.

There might be a moral in there somewhere.

Yesterday was me not dealing well with too many little sources of stress and I did a bad job of diagnosing my problem. Stress is a lot easier to figure out when there are one or two big problems playing the eight-hundred pound gorilla game on your back. The whole bunch of little things just slid right under my diagnostic radar, leaving me less pleasant to deal with (and less happy) than I would have liked. Live and learn. At least I didn’t step on the tomato.

Today was the first site day for renfest. The fencing crew turned out to
transform the plywood floor from our old fencing location into an outdoor
fencing strip at renfest. Too many sheets of four by eight plywood, all of
which needed to be painted. The layer on the bottom had to have a
preservative applied, and the frothy vile green stuff quickly got
nicknamed Swamp Water and Toxic Goo. Nasty stuff, but it should keep the
wood from rotting or being munched to pieces by bugs. The rest just needed
to be painted, and much paint was applied. By the end of the day we had
everything painted and screwed together except for the final layer. We’ll
finish that up next week.

How amazingly nice to see old friends and the friends I almost never see
except at renfest. We also got to see the rehearsal for the Royal Ball
(complete with the brand new Cinderella, whee), and some still rather
early looking rehearsals for the chess match. Once they get it all pulled
together it’s going to be good as usual. And they have the right people to
do the pulling in the next two weeks.

We worked hard in temperatures in the upper nineties, but we were still
only out there for seven hours. I’m wiped. And now that I’ve washed off
the last of the Toxic Goo and the paint, I’m ready to pretend being human
again.

August 15, 2003

It’s been a decent week at work. One project is wrapping up nicely. I had
some last minute tweaks thisafternoon and then the documentation will get
done on Monday. And I picked up another quick project to work on next
week. Then I can jump back into the fray of the waiting demons. I’m quite
satisfied at the moment.

We heard from Max again. I was expecting it to take a little longer, say
another week or so, but he broke his glasses. He was in a soccer game and
caught a ball in the face and the remains flew into the middle of the fray
where they were stepped on. He didn’t bother to save the pieces, winning
him no points with his dad. And now he expects us to just replace them,
thankyouverymuch, also winning him no points. It is, needless to say, bad
timing for this, on top of the aggravation.

I’m looking forward to a time when we hear from him for some other reason
than he needs money. It’s going to be awhile. In the meantime, I can be
happy that at least we’re still hearing from him.