Please note that I have added more of my favorite things on the side bar, much like
a tea tray set out for company. Help yourself, let me know if you have any questions,
and if you would like a recipe, please mention that fact somewhere so I can respond
accordingly. Enjoy, and pass the sugar.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Shades and Tints, Highlights, Lowlights
Snippets and remnants of the past few days: yes, they are as random as they seem. What a bizarre week.
Five Year Old [slightly annoyed]: Elizabeth, why do you keep moving my toothbrush to your shelf?
Me: Because that's not your toothbrush, that's my toothbrush.
Five Year Old: No it's not, it's my toothbrush.
Me: Let me show you. (enter bathroom). See, here's your toothbrush.
Five Year Old [emitting five year old giggle]: But I used to have one that's identical. Well, I've been using your toothbrush for a few days! Aaaahahahahahaa!
Me: Then the joke is on you, because I've been using it too!
Editor's Note: Yes, the five year old down the hall knows the word identical. I also taught him the word transparent. Yes, he did used to have an identical toothbrush. He will be six this week so his Mom, myself and our Other Roommate will be throwing a Spiderman birthday party. Come one, come all.
At a different point in the week: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGH, I'm applying to different PhD programs and I'm both confident and nervous, please pray I don't puke all over the computer screen. AAAAAAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGH.
The day before yesterday: At work, state was in the building, one lady had a seizure in physical therapy and nurses went running, later in the day our Beloved 105 year old was trying to move around without her walker and fell. It was traumatic. I hated it. The bizarre note on that situation is that a) we were supposed to go out to lunch for - ahem - get this - "National Activity Professional Week" and couldn't because state was in the building, and, furthermore, I had to call 911 for the 105 year old because I happened to be doing something I haven't done in a long time, which was prank calling my boss with my coworker from another part of the building. I was doing really well until the nurses' aide ran up screaming "DIAL 911!!!!" and I blurted "gotta go!" into the receiver. It would have been a great leg-pulling too, but the prank ended up being on us, because my boss laughed her backside off at us. In my dismay I had said "I'm never making a prank call again" because I was so traumatized at the fact that I'd had to call 911 for our Beloved 105 year old. Somehow, I felt that my prank call was causally linked to the frail, birdlike lady falling and hitting her head later requiring three stitches. She looks, and sounds, like Yoda, is about Yoda's height, and has a great sense of humor. She likes to do our bowling activity, and sometimes gets confused, thinking someone switched her underwear with men's underwear. After that day there was nothing to do but what women having been doing for centuries to cope with stress: I went home and boiled a chicken.
In other notes, our kitchen floor is about two thirds pulled up. We've been excavating through FIVE LAYERS of ugly, cheap, smelly linoleum down to the buried hardwood. But good news, our bathroom will have drywall soon. When the water heater got miffed this past week and went on strike, I had to bathe out of a Pampered Chef pitcher since all hot water had to be procured through the teakettle on the stove. But, more good news, we negotiated with the hot water heater and now it's back on board.
In other good news, GO COLTS. In bad news, I missed the end of the game.
Well, I hope whatever week you had, it now seems normal and calm in comparison.
Five Year Old [slightly annoyed]: Elizabeth, why do you keep moving my toothbrush to your shelf?
Me: Because that's not your toothbrush, that's my toothbrush.
Five Year Old: No it's not, it's my toothbrush.
Me: Let me show you. (enter bathroom). See, here's your toothbrush.
Five Year Old [emitting five year old giggle]: But I used to have one that's identical. Well, I've been using your toothbrush for a few days! Aaaahahahahahaa!
Me: Then the joke is on you, because I've been using it too!
Editor's Note: Yes, the five year old down the hall knows the word identical. I also taught him the word transparent. Yes, he did used to have an identical toothbrush. He will be six this week so his Mom, myself and our Other Roommate will be throwing a Spiderman birthday party. Come one, come all.
At a different point in the week: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGH, I'm applying to different PhD programs and I'm both confident and nervous, please pray I don't puke all over the computer screen. AAAAAAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGH.
The day before yesterday: At work, state was in the building, one lady had a seizure in physical therapy and nurses went running, later in the day our Beloved 105 year old was trying to move around without her walker and fell. It was traumatic. I hated it. The bizarre note on that situation is that a) we were supposed to go out to lunch for - ahem - get this - "National Activity Professional Week" and couldn't because state was in the building, and, furthermore, I had to call 911 for the 105 year old because I happened to be doing something I haven't done in a long time, which was prank calling my boss with my coworker from another part of the building. I was doing really well until the nurses' aide ran up screaming "DIAL 911!!!!" and I blurted "gotta go!" into the receiver. It would have been a great leg-pulling too, but the prank ended up being on us, because my boss laughed her backside off at us. In my dismay I had said "I'm never making a prank call again" because I was so traumatized at the fact that I'd had to call 911 for our Beloved 105 year old. Somehow, I felt that my prank call was causally linked to the frail, birdlike lady falling and hitting her head later requiring three stitches. She looks, and sounds, like Yoda, is about Yoda's height, and has a great sense of humor. She likes to do our bowling activity, and sometimes gets confused, thinking someone switched her underwear with men's underwear. After that day there was nothing to do but what women having been doing for centuries to cope with stress: I went home and boiled a chicken.
In other notes, our kitchen floor is about two thirds pulled up. We've been excavating through FIVE LAYERS of ugly, cheap, smelly linoleum down to the buried hardwood. But good news, our bathroom will have drywall soon. When the water heater got miffed this past week and went on strike, I had to bathe out of a Pampered Chef pitcher since all hot water had to be procured through the teakettle on the stove. But, more good news, we negotiated with the hot water heater and now it's back on board.
In other good news, GO COLTS. In bad news, I missed the end of the game.
Well, I hope whatever week you had, it now seems normal and calm in comparison.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Coal Miner's Daughter
The dust is settling.
Not just from the holiday cyclone of travel and tradition.
No. Literally. The dust is settling.
Yesterday I returned to my home that I share with Two Friends and a Five Year Old
to find Angie covered with coal. I could practically see clouds of it when she coughed.
"You burn coal?" you might say.
No, but apparently residents about eighty years ago did,
and dust settled in the ceiling which Angie took down in the bathroom this week.
Oh. Did I mention we tore down our bathroom this weekend?
Picture Rosie the Riveter attacking ancient plaster walls with the back end of a hammer. It was liberating. It was freeing. It was dusty.
Several bruises, scratches, and stuffy noses later, the walls in our bathroom were removed after
throwing lumber out of the second story window to the yard below and scooping Ground Zero's worth of rubble from the floor. My thumbs have never been this sore.
But you find things out, like what wallpaper was favored forty years ago, or brick hidden behind the wall that you're now going to leave exposed, or coal. What a Kentucky thing to drift in thick, grimy layers all over the place - coal.
So if you stop by to take a bath, beware - squirrels from the attic may be doing high dives into our tub in their tiny little goggles and Speedos.
What kind of foundation have you built?
What will people find years after you've left a place?
What's hidden in your heart, buried under layers of wallpaper or plaster or 2x4's?
Be courageous enough to grasp a hammer and examine your own abode.
Remember - what you accumulate, what you harbor, what you bury away, will eventually
be left to others.
No one is an island. We all live with others' coal.
Not just from the holiday cyclone of travel and tradition.
No. Literally. The dust is settling.
Yesterday I returned to my home that I share with Two Friends and a Five Year Old
to find Angie covered with coal. I could practically see clouds of it when she coughed.
"You burn coal?" you might say.
No, but apparently residents about eighty years ago did,
and dust settled in the ceiling which Angie took down in the bathroom this week.
Oh. Did I mention we tore down our bathroom this weekend?
Picture Rosie the Riveter attacking ancient plaster walls with the back end of a hammer. It was liberating. It was freeing. It was dusty.
Several bruises, scratches, and stuffy noses later, the walls in our bathroom were removed after
throwing lumber out of the second story window to the yard below and scooping Ground Zero's worth of rubble from the floor. My thumbs have never been this sore.
But you find things out, like what wallpaper was favored forty years ago, or brick hidden behind the wall that you're now going to leave exposed, or coal. What a Kentucky thing to drift in thick, grimy layers all over the place - coal.
So if you stop by to take a bath, beware - squirrels from the attic may be doing high dives into our tub in their tiny little goggles and Speedos.
What kind of foundation have you built?
What will people find years after you've left a place?
What's hidden in your heart, buried under layers of wallpaper or plaster or 2x4's?
Be courageous enough to grasp a hammer and examine your own abode.
Remember - what you accumulate, what you harbor, what you bury away, will eventually
be left to others.
No one is an island. We all live with others' coal.
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