The River Green

The day is upon us. Time for turkey, mashed potatoes, friends, family, beer and Marieke’s sweet potato oranges. Unlike last year, we are hosting this time around and are welcoming eight people to our ginormous table.

Part of the reason we opted out of hosting last year was because we didn’t have the energy to clean. Having to spend most of our physical and emotional strength dealing with our friend’s accident meant that we just could not hack hosting. The decision did not go over well with our normal crew- one person in particular responded to our decision with static. I did expect a little more understanding, but I knew it was just expecting too much.

Our day began with some coffee and planning. My first task was to make room in the former Gecko room, for all the stuff that doesn’t belong where we plan to eat dinner and socialize. Marieke’s first task was cleaning the bathroom. An hour later, we seriously considered cancelling. Aunt Flo paid us a three-day-early visit, so that wrenched up the whole works.

It is a mystery to me, how, in under twelve hours, the house looks like a palace- granted a small palace. Maybe a gnome palace, but a palace nonetheless. Speaking of Kabouters (Dutch for gnomes), the vacuum we had to borrow from mom was made for use in only the residents of gnomes. This is the only possible conclusion to draw, given the ridiculous angle one must stand in order to operate it. My mother is what I would call average in height for a woman in her demographic. Marieke and I are what I would call above average in height. I can see over everyone’s head on the bus and in crowds, I tend to be the first to know when it starts to rain. So maybe it’s a matter of perspective.

In digression, I’ll say this: the turkey looks quite defrosted, having spent the last five days sitting in the fridge. Our prep work for tomorrow- food wise- seems like it will be smooth sailing, since we have a CuisinArt hand-me-down that slices carrots faster than the speed of lightning and chops onions like nobody’s business. I’m sad to see our ‘manual’ chopper go, but I won’t miss nursing the wounds suffered to my knuckles from the mandolin slicer that it doubled as. Also gone will be the nearly ninety minutes of slicing four pounds of carrots. It’s a tradeoff, but those things were invented for a reason. Now I can sleep in.

My cousin, David, shared a quote from Melody Beattie that I thought appropriate:

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Melody Beattie

Have a good Thanksgiving.

Labels: family , friends , holidays , house , Thanksgiving

I’m not sure how I feel about not having posted a weird, random event in a while. They happened more before we quit smoking. What’s that about?

Having put the porch in proper winter order, we weren’t too concerned with the warning of excessive wind by the 11:00 news.

At 2:34am, I was startled awake by a terrible noise that could only have resulted from a dumpster falling down the steps. I imagined one of the dumpsters in the alley behind the house shaking free of its moorings, only to have plummeted into the shed in the back, which was now at the bottom of the hill in the back yard, pressing against the dining room wall.

The cat was sure we were being invaded, so under the bed he went. Since the dogs didn't seem at all impressed and Marieke was snoozing away, I guessed that it was a dream and Manfred was only disturbed by my reaction. Upon roaming the house, clad only in my skivvies, brandishing a plumbing wrench and flashlight, I found nothing amiss.

Since the front porch is so wide, I was not able to see the front steps from the front door.

The sidewalk, which is where one end of the gutter is resting in the picture, is about 30 or so feet below the porch. The porch is on the first floor, the bedroom is on the second floor. It was hanging above our second floor bedroom windows.

We estimate that it must have fallen about 60 feet. At 2:34 in the morning, I in my drawers, going from window to window in search of the mysterious noise. What a sight that must have been from across the way.

This is the same gutter that came loose during the snow storm last winter. We managed to control that situation by tying string to it and anchoring it to the roof until our capricious landlord remedied the issue. It seems to have suffered some buckling upon landing, so perhaps it is beyond repair at this point.

At any rate, another weird, random event goes into the books.

Labels: house , random events

Even though I’m having a crisis of mammoth proportions in school and I’m behind on e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, I’ve come into some really awesome music by way of iTunes radio. This website provides the best continuous music heard in quite some time: http://laut.fm/alternativeworld. I’m listening to Phoenix now, but I’ve been introduced to Troy von Balthazar, The Temper Trap, The Twilight Sad, Marquis of Vaudeville- a small sample of the playlist I’m gathering.

And thank goodness… I was starting to dream in Bach and one morning woke up singing Whip It. not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just that something new was definitely needed.

Neil is coming in today to get the geckos and take them to Norfolk. I’m gonna miss the little guys. Think he’s only staying the night. Luckily, we are pounding out the ‘get ready to have people over for Thanksgiving’ cleaning list, so his room is clean(er). We got the porch done last night and Marieke washed the sofa cover so that there is a spot to sit.

I’m falling ever behind and I don’t see any clear sky ahead- at least not before Christmas- which is 43 days away. Fingers crossed, I guess.

Labels: family , house

Season finale of Glee was on tonight. In other news it looks like Semi-Super Tuesday Primary elections for the mid-terms have shaped an interesting November. I’m not as into it as I would normally be. The tea is helping with that.

I met mom at Giant Eagle to get a book from her that she checked out of the Pitt law library for me. The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. It is the 16th edition, which unfortunately does not have the information I need- how does one cite Supreme Court Oral Arguments in APA style? I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find it at all. Thankfully, she is going to photocopy a couple pages out of the most recent edition for me.

This is being written in bed, thanks to the fact that my laptop is so awesome. I had to throw that in there.

For the new school week, I hope to have more practice exercises done for my IT class and maybe this week my writing class will make sense. I haven’t yet written the midterm survey for that class, but it will be scathing. I can’t stand the fact that the prof for my Comp II class can’t write for shit. Or more to the point, her writing is shit. I find that she writes with the same cadence and lack of clarity similarly to the way a certain former GOP VP candidate speaks. It is annoying to say the least.

The coming weeks (maybe months) are not going to be comfortable at all. if there is a way to go without or make due, I can’t think of one. We’re headed to KMart to get the first of two necessities to help us get through. As a result of the predicament, I am now ‘in charge’ of the finances. Oh good, because I certainly didn’t have enough to do already. Ugh. Maybe I’ll feel more useful.

Nearly 2.5 hours after taking my melatonin pill, I am not yet sleepy.

Labels: classes , family , house , politics

In about 80 hours or so, our house will be filled with guests for Thanksgiving. We are expecting 8 people and a 9th for dessert. Among the rituals that are normally fulfilled during these hours is the annual clean for company exercise. While our house is far from a pigsty, it has its little corners of boxes filled with items that have yet to find a home, the ubiquitous hair ball and of course we don't get to use the dining room table on any kind of regular basis, so that is covered in various miscellanea that probably should have a permanent home. The problem isn't one of space, though this house is severely lacking in closets, which adds to the frustration of trying to clean. When it becomes necessary to stuff Aldi bags into the corner by the dog crate because there is no other place for them to live, we yearn for just one simple closet.

The problem is Black Friday and the never-ending pursuit of stuff acquisition. If I had to move out of this house tomorrow and could only take that which I have used for the past year, I could probably make one trip on a bicycle with a sturdy satchel on the rear. But that's only if I had to. Everything else has a bit of memorial significance to it which prompts me to not deposit it at the nearest Goodwill for someone else to have and hold, look at and admire. Each of these things reminds me of one event in my life or another. Photographs would most certainly make the trip with me in the bicycle. Aside from my beloved computer and a coffee mug or two and my clothes, I don't really use anything else in this house. Dishes don't count because you pretty much need them to eat off of and I could purchase a new set for very cheap at the new apartment that I would be bicycling to.

Don't get us wrong. We have made so many trip to Goodwill this year and we went on a Craig's List selling spree in the early summer. We certainly are not against ridding ourselves of the unused, non-living occupants of our house. I guess the larger question becomes why we hold so many inanimate objects close to us as though they were a living person? And then why would we choose to let them gather dust in some random corner instead of revisiting them, or stuff them into a closet?

This is not a rhetorical question it is a practical one. I remember a movie where one of the main characters was asked to house sit for her boss. When she and her boyfriend arrived to feed the cat, there was nothing but a table for the cat food and a litter box. The rest of the apartment was empty. When prompted by an inquisitive look from the boyfriend, the woman said 'He's a minimalist.'

Why can't we all be comfortable with this. I mean, of course we would need a sofa and a coffee table and a few other essential items to accommodate comfort, but what is so horrid about living with only essential things? Is it our materialist nature? Is it our fractured, lonely social order? Could we attribute this to a certain fear that our lives are completely empty without such things to bring us comfort?

I don't have an answer, nor do I yet have either an opinion or a theory.

In any case, there are far worse things I suppose we should be concentrating our analytical skills on such as where we are going to put the shit on the table, where is that attachment to the vacuum that magically removes pet hair from any surface, where is our own Billy Mays (did you know he is from Pittsburgh?) and his amazing RoboClean, which is capable of cleaning your entire house with the simple push of one button, so easy a child can operate it (cut to a child pushing a button on a devise and watching in amazement and wonderment as if it were a home work doing machine)... and the like...

Oh there is so much stuff to do. At least we found all the requested diet drinks for our guests after no less than six, yes six, stores. Now if we can only locate a single bag of Gardetto's pumpernickel rye chips to complete the recipe for chex mix, we're all set.

Labels: black friday , holidays , house , Thanksgiving