We went to the pumpkin patch today with Baby Fight Club
Godzilla kicks back amongst the giant city-crushing squash.
Godzilla gives an oddly chipper little wave.
Godzilla is displeased with his minions for making him continue to sit among the pumpkins.
And from last weekend… yes, we went apple picking again, and LPG and the Lad each had their own golf carts. Oi.
yeah well.
Today? Sucks. Like 40 foot high flaming letters on top of Mt. Doom electricity making a dull annoying *zzzzzznt* noise level of suck. I really thought this morning was the apex of suckage, as the baby would not calm down. Angie the cleaning woman called in a panic looking to reschedule (shut up, I make no bones about being a princess). The baby took a 12 minute nap instead of 45. The baby, wired for sound, was disasterously playful during lunch, and would stick his hand in his mouth, fish out his food, and throw it at my hair. I would set everything down to clean up, and Mr. Wants To Play With His Cake And Eat It Too would shriek over the fact that he’s hungry and I wasn’t feeding him right that fucking second. So I’d start feeding him again, and he’d be happy again, and then playful, and then stick his hand in his mou– yeah, you see where this is going.
Did I get a shower to wash my hair? No.
Errands were a disaster of shrieky baby, stuff not in stock, annoying salespeople, and oh yeah, Old Man in an F-150 jumping the curb and nearly running me over in the toys r us parking lot. I exaggerate not. I waited for him to get out of his vehicle so I could give him a piece of my mind. I get home, intent on starting to deal with the 2 bushels of apples we picked this weekend (do I own a food mill? No. Do I have multiple tin pie plates on hand? No. Fuck.) when the phone rings, and the day truly goes down the shitter.
The Kegerator, sweet, stupid, abused in 2 homes and now in the loving care of my mom, kegerator, has cancer. Bladder, to be exact, and mom has agreed to do pallative care but not surgery or chemo. There are too many tumors for surgery, and, well, the recommended chemotheraputic agent for this is cisplatin, which as a lovely kick in the pants is precisely the same chemo my dad was on- oh wait, that’s the chemo which made him drop dead of a heart attack. So mom’s dealing with the here and now plus that lovely reminder to days gone by. Mom is not a weeper, so boy howdy do I want to hit things, or hide under the covers, or hide in the tub, when she calls me crying. Mom doesn’t cry. She got a tiny bit choky at the Lad’s and my wedding. But she does cry about her dogs (we bawled all over each other when we had to put the last one down), and voila, here we are again.
It’s truly not fair, Keg is 10, which is late middle age, but he had a sucky sucky early life, and now that he’s living the good life it’s going to be cut short. He’ll be on a med which apparently does a good job of halting tumor progression and is a painkiller (the vet’s own dog, in fact, has been on it for 18 months), but when the time comes, mom’s putting him to sleep. And she’s made it clear: The Kegmeister is the last dog, unless a few years hence she gets a wee, sleek Italian greyhound, because she wants to be able to travel to see us and the bebe, but more to the point, because she doesn’t want to stick anyone with taking care of the dog should her health decline. And with his passing, she will well and truly be alone. We don’t live near her any more, she staunchly refuses to date (not out of some unending devotion to Dad, but rather because “I damn well refuse to live my life to please anyone else ever again.”), and there will be no dog. And so there’s a tiny tiny part of me strangely confronting my mother’s mortality about this.
Meanwhile, Kegmeister is blissfully unaware there’s anything wrong with him, and is barking at the phone and howling for treats. Stupid, stupid, huggable, scritchable, lovable pooch.
Tomorrow’s our wedding anniversary, conveniently also the anniversary of when we got together as a couple (before you all ‘awwwww’ and mock me for how cute and disgusting it is, here was the wedding date logic: we wanted a fall wedding, October in Chicago is your best bet for non assy fall weather, and we needed to shoot the gap between Yom Kippur and Halloween, and that weekend in 1997 was a bye week for the Packers. I have my priorities). Together for 9, married for 6 (the ‘iron’ anniversary for the traditionalists, ‘wood’ on the modern gift list. You there, in the back, stop snigger. Yes, I said wood. Stop it! What are you, 12? Oh, uh, ok.) Now, however, you can mock me for sappiness. For today’s entry (since I don’t think I’ll get a chance to update tomorrow) is an ode to the spousal unit, a recitation of some of the things I love, in no particular order. Only some, cause there are a trillion, and I don’t want to hork the server.
1. The way he looks at me when we wake up, of a Sunday morning.
2. That he makes me coffee without being asked to.
3. How gentle he is with our son.
4. That he brings me ice cream late in the evening.
5. The way he wriggles his very fine ass when he’s doing the happy dance.
6. How he insists I take myself off for massages, or me time at the bookstore.
7. That he prints up silly fake menus and lights the torches outside and the fire inside so Leather Pants Grrl, he, and I can unwind like normal adults.
8. That he takes the morning feed so I can sleep.
9. That he understands my need for a damn fine hotel rather than necessarily the cheapest one.
10. His eyes.
11. That we have 9 year old jokes.
12. When he randomly brings me flowers.
13. That I get the last full glass of wine from the bottle.
14. The look on his face when he’s holding Sean.
15. That if he hears the Jacuzzi shut off early, he’ll come bounding in to restart it for me from the wall switch so I don’t have to get out of the tub.
16. That he gives me my space.
17. How very much he loves his pleather pants.
18. The happy noises he makes when I toy with his hair.
19. How much he clearly respects my intellect.
20. That he was totally behind my going consultant, even though it wasn’t the safe route.
21. That I never ever have to mow the freaking lawn.
22. That before I even asked about it, he offered to do whatever’s necessary to take care of Sean if I need to get out to NY soon, for a friend.
23. That he makes sure I’ve got my big fluffy towel, even if it means he has to stop shaving and go retrieve it from wherever it got tossed.
24. That he puts up with my mother’s eccentricities.
25. That he gets me chocolate during PMS-o-rama
26. That he once went toe to toe with the U of C pharmacist about filling my pill prescription, and paid for a year’s worth, himself, so I wouldn’t have to go back every month. The 4 women in line behind him applauded wildly.
27. That he supported my every decision about pregnancy. And respected the food insanity.
28. That he unwinds by cleaning.
29. That he makes a conscious effort every day to make my life easier.
30. That he’s smart and a smartass
31. His laugh.
32. How very obvious it is that he loves me.
Mwah, bucko.
I love owning my own home. It’s a hell of a lot better than pouring cash down the eternal gullet of rent. I wish my client were somewhat smoother in paying me regularly, but as the hysteria of summer is giving way to contracts and some hope in hell of eventually getting paid on Big Project #1, and definitely getting paid on project #2, a wench’s thoughts turn to… the enormous list of crap to be done around the house. Our friends R and E have a list of stuff to do, on the board in their kitchen. When I first saw the list, I was all ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. Now I have my own insane list of money sucking stuff to do. Every thing on the list is a bunch of lovely bottles of wine not being processed by my liver. And a bunch of it stems from the godawful, height of 1989 Kansas taste that our house was decorated in (thanks, decorator hired by the builder. I hope your shoulder pads- and I have no doubt you still wear them, along with frost eyeshadow and lipstick- rise up and choke off your breath in the night some day. I anticipate your last word will be a whispered, mournful, ‘chintz!’) and it’s time and money and skill to deal with, all three of which I have in minute quantities.
Curious about the list? It’s behind the cut, as who the hell really cares? But read and laugh, if you wish, at the ridiculous to the sublime.
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And as our week fades slowly into the sunset
….we say Thank the Freakin Lord. Where has wench been?
-Work. Well, isn’t life fun. My biggest client, the one whom I finally woohoo contracted with, still doesn’t have funding for that project. So no paycheck for the Wench. But they did land another project, which they do have startup funds for, and so they’ve contract me for- holy cow- 37-50% of my time until Nov 11. Sweet jesus lord on a triscuit, I’m getting paid. Um, on a project I was completely unprepared to have land in my lap, and heaven help us if startup funding comes through on the other project, because then we will have to pull off a ton of work on that before the big industry conference Nov 7-11. And I will have suddenly found myself working 80% of the time for the next month. Eeep. Hello, this is wench’s ass. This is wench’s ass in a hothothot cast iron frying pan! Sizzle, wench, sizzle!
-House. I hit the wall. I hit the wall of tenseness and worry and grouchiness (and it was ugly, and things were hashed out, and it is much better now), but much of it is manifesting in renewed house activity. Sunday we go to find a coffeetable which will not be a dire toddler head trauma waiting to happen (ou current coffeetable is a lovely honk of simple Roche Bobois [inherited from the uncles who bought their condo fully furnished] glass: an X of tension-clamped together glass as the base, and a square of glass that merely balances on top. Oh yeah. I can just see the many comic ways in which my child could brain himself on this, several of which involve him hitting the edge with enough force that the top then spins off, nails the leg of the couch, shatters, and pelts him with fragments of glass. This table is a DCFS intervention waiting to happen. There are even scratches in the top from my engagement ring, which lamentably make it look like I’ve been a little shaky while drawing my lines of blow.) Today, after weeks of the light being blown out in our shower and mildew inexplicably taking over the edges, I went medieval on its ass and dug out all the old caulk and recaulked the fucker, and it no longer feels like a shower in the lockdown level. I called Matt, our local remodel guy/desperate college student to get a bid for him to deal with the wallpaper in the kitchen.
In short, I’m tired of the house not being reflective of us, wholly and completely. Goodbye, stripey wallpaper like I’m inside a McDonald’s fry box. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass.
And so now, it is time for me to kill the last of my Corona and pass out. Tomorrow, LPG comes over midafternoon, we kibbutz, we cook, she and the Lad watch Angel, I get some me time, she sleeps over, and Sunday morning while the entire KC metro area is at church, we go furniture shopping.
He’s learning to sit up. We’re at the ‘woohoo he’s sitting grab the cam-nonono don’t fall ov-ah fuck!’ stage.
