Three days off

Our division gave us three days off work this week as a reward for shipping a product that took most of the last three years to build. When I joined the team I'm on now in February of 2003, they'd already been working on the release for about six months. It shipped this week. And now we all get to breathe a sigh of relief and prepare for the next round.

Brett, having switched divisions recently, didn't get his well-earned three days off, despite having been there for the whole project, so I'm home by myself. And let me tell you, three days off, at home, alone, have got visions of hausfrau-dom ringing in my head. I could get used to this. How long, I wonder, would it take for playing stay-at-home housewife to get dull?

I suspect it would, eventually - get dull, that is - but I'd sure like to find out.

Ah well. Back to work I go next Monday, fantasies of a nice six month break aside. And in my three days off I have accomplished the following:

• Unpacked the last two boxes from the move six months ago, and in the process found all of Brett's ties and his good shoes. You can see how much we dress up.
• Bought (finally) the treadmill I've been wanting for months and had it delivered today.
• Plopped the cat down on the running treadmill (on a very low setting) and watched his look of confusion as he was slowly deposited off the other end of the belt. Laughed myself silly.
• Got bloodwork done for my new supplemental life insurance that finance guy told me we needed to get.
• Planted two hundred tulips and six lilies.
• Had lunch at Matt's At The Market with Ann, my old boss and dear friend.
• Bought big gobs of flowers, fresh fish, and lots of organic produce at Pike Place Market.
• Assembled a large, full-length, adjustable-swivel mirror and carried it up the stairs.
• Got all the laundry done before the weekend. Wow - what will we do on Sunday?
• Set up dinner reservations for Saturday night out - finally, finally, we're going to XO Bistro, a semi-new French place that replaced my favorite French restaurant in town, Cassis. I'm cautiously hopeful that I'll like it almost as much.
• Cooked sea bass in parchment and roasted eggplant for Brett, last night.
• Visited the Italian meat market up the road that we've been meaning to check out, and bought one of every sausage they had, again for Brett, the sausage afficionado.
• Read Candy Freak (thank you Kim!), half of Tulipomania, all I'm going to read of a strange book called House of Leaves, and half of Toast, by Nigel Slater, whose cookbook Appetite I adore -- along with one issue each of The New Yorker, Harpers, Oprah, Better Homes and Gardens, and Container Gardening.
• Watched at least one on demand movie.
• Worked out twice.
• Slept until ten two out of three days.

So nice to have free time! I was going to do a little work, these three days, but I find that I have no problem filling up my time in a hundred other ways.

Goodfellas

Learned the other night that Brett's new boss, who I have yet to meet, was in Goodfellas. (One of my favorite movies, incidentally.)

So of course we immediately had to dig it out and track down all of the scenes he appears in.

You know that scene where Jimmy gets the call in the phone booth that Joe Pesci didn't get made, he got killed? "He's gone, Jimmy, there was nothing we could do." Fine cinematic moment. Well, right at the point where he hangs up, a dark haired guy walks behind him and gets into a garbage truck and starts it up. That, friends, is my husband's boss.

And later, when Ray Liotta walks into the diner after getting out of prison to meet with Jimmy, and he's worrying about whether Jimmy is there to kill him -- just when he walks in, a dark haired man and an attractive blond walk past him out the door. Again, my husband's boss.

How utterly strange.

Slippers

I have a big pair of fuzzy, white slippers. They're not attractive, I'll grant you that. While not spouting any claws, like the popular bear-feet slippers, they do make my feet about twice as big as normal, and covered in white faux fur. They're downright unappealing. But they're warm, and I often wander around in the evenings wearing them.

Except that last night, I noticed that Brett's cat Max, ever prone to skittishness, is afraid of them.

I opened the door to call him in last night and he came running from his perch on my parents' porch, all enthusiasm and meowing, eager to come have a snack. Until, that is, he got within sight of my feet. He took one look at my huge fuzzy feet and did a full recoil backwards, back arched, and then ran for the bushes.

Why?

Observed

The other day I saw a very elderly man walking down a busy street in Redmond, dressed in a rather unusual head-to-toe brown jumpsuit, not unlike a flight suit or mechanics uniform, and supporting himself with an extremely large candy cane.

What, I wonder, could be the story behind that?

My secret?

I think I'm becoming hooked on America's Next Top Model.

Oh god, how did this happen? It's just that it's the only semi-interesting thing that's on before Lost, and for some reason Wednesday night I'm usually planted in front of the tv. At first I was just watching it to pass the time, or had it on while I was reading something but wasn't paying attention. But... then I started paying attention. And then I started enjoying it.

And tonight... tonight I actually tuned in on purpose.

I can feel my brain shriveling as we speak.

And back to the chiropractor we go

Apparently, it's possible to sprain your back. Not down low in your back where it would seem obvious, but up between your shoulderblades. Who knew!

Monday morning, exactly 24 hours after I hoisted a large box at about eye level for ... oh, about a minute and a half, before dropping it in dismay, I woke up to find that either I had been stabbed in the back during my sleep or had (I thought) pinched a nerve. Right between my shoulderblades -- breathing deeply in was quite unpleasant, as was bending, sitting up, walking, or just generally being alive. I did get up and drag myself to the gym, where my trainer took one look at the dork that was me and sent me home. Home home - no work, no gym, and certainly no flinging weights around. Spent the day being flat, which was quite dull. Even reading was a strain.

So - back to the chiropractor for me tonight. They'd moved since I last visited, which led to about a half hour of wandering around lost in the bowels of old Redmond, where all roads lead to nowhere. But I got there, and sure enough, it was muscular. Sprained whatsit. Swelling in the something or other. And after being cracked and poked and prodded and massaged a little, I'm feeling quite a bit better.

No weights tomorrow morning though. I think I'll save the heavy workouts for next week.

Ruby anniversary

This weekend was my parent's fortieth wedding anniversary. Forty years - the ruby anniversary.

Here they are on their wedding day, in 1965. They were married at a small Presbyterian church in Tiffin, Ohio, with just family members and a few friends. At that time, waiting until you were in your mid-thirties to wed was less common than it is now, but it meant that they both led interesting lives for a while as single adults. My Dad served in the navy, lived in Hawaii, California, Chicago, designed guidance systems for missiles, took road trips with some crazy buddy I never met, went back to school, became a teacher, and, then, met my mother. My mother worked her way through college in her twenties with more than a handful of jobs, lived in Canada, taught in West Virginia, traveled a bit with her sister, and, then, met my father.

When I was little, I thought thirty was ancient. My sister and I couldn't fathom ever being so old ourselves as our parents were when they married. And yet, in 2003, there I was, 33 myself, standing at the altar with the love of my life, understanding that repeating some of the patterns from your parents' lives is a good thing. History, a sense of place, are valuable. So is knowing who you are before you decide to tie your life to another person's. This I learned from my parents.

I, too, led an interesting life before I married Brett. I moved, step by step, further and further away from the small town I grew up in -- first Pittsburgh, then DC, then New York, then the West coast. Before I was 25, I starved my way through graduate school, made and broke off a bad engagement, quietly wrote fiction and flung it out into the world, made strange and interesting friends, and got my first taste of success in the business world. By thirty, I'd traveled abroad, moved across the country, and changed nearly everything about my life. Brett's life was equally rich and varied, full of learning and loss and adventure. And when we came together, we were ready.

I didn't know when I was a kid how young your thirties really still is. Here my parents are again, on their wedding day. Look at the hope on their faces. Look how fresh their hearts are. After forty years, they still do almost everything together. They are each other's strongest companion and closest friend. They're never without each other. Every day, we see them coming from or going out on one of their walks. They go to the store together. They sit on their porch each afternoon and watch the world go by and chat for hours.

"What do they talk about after forty years?" one of our neighbors asked me a few months back. "Imagine having that much to say to each other."

The thing is, I can imagine it. And I hope that in 2043, Brett and I are still as close as they are.

Aloha, Monkey and Herschel

Herschel and Monkey modeling their aloha-wear in Hawaii:




Herschel investigating hula girls:


Herschel's new best friends -- June and Richard, Alaska natives who were married the day before on Molokai, and who were on their way home to sell their houses and move to Hawaii for good:

New computer

This post brought to you from my brand new, small, sleek, sexy little Sony Vaio. :) Yay!

It weighs four pounds.

Garden destruction

Seattle's gotten cold since we left - we left at the end of summer and came back to mid fall. It was 85 in Hawaii and has been a steady 51 degrees here since we returned, with all the rain we were foolishly expecting from Tropical Ennui Kenneth. My new job requires me to spend about half of my day in other buildings, which means that I'm getting rained on a lot, tromping back and forth. Bleah.

Aside from that, it's kind of nice, this chilly turn. I like how Seattle smells in the fall, and the leaves have turned nicely this year, and it's calming somehow, these seasons. I'm not sure how you get that restful fall feeling if you live somewhere like Hawaii year round where the days vary only between gorgeous and slightly-less-gorgeous. Wouldn't that get dull? Sun AGAIN?

The garden self-destructed while I was gone. A big wind storm knocked over one of my wisterias out front, a collossus that weighs about a ton and a half, killing at least one rose bush and damaging another. It was tied to a hook, but the rope holding it up must have snapped. I've got to find a better way to support it, or just take it out.

Two of the tomato pots blew over, too. They survived, but tomato season is definitely over. I'm going to take the plants out of their pots this weekend and recycle the dirt. And another tomato season comes to a close. I picked what was left - about 15 full size tomatoes. Definitely my best year ever for tomato plants. I'll post a roundup of the varieties that did especially well in the next week or two, for those of you gardening in this climate.

Now for a winter full of faux-matoes, those shapeless, hard as a rock, red balls you can buy at the store. I don't really object to their existence -- in their own way, they're kind of pleasing, if that's all you can get. All I ask is that we not CALL them tomatoes. Clearly, they bear no relation to the real thing.

I mean, c'mon.

Our menagerie

We're home, and we're slowly getting back on mainland time - hopefully tonight we'll be able to go to bed at a normal time. Tuesday we got home at midnight and were up until two a.m. Last night we tried to go to bed at 11:00 only to get up and goof off for another hour because we weren't tired yet. Tonight, I think we'll be tired enough at the right time.

Apparently while we were away a large party of raccoons -- or rather, a small party of extremely large raccoons -- had a party in our kitchen. At 4 a.m. on Saturday morning our housesitter was awakened by a huge crash, only to find a raccoon the size of a collie (and associated friends) running out the previously-locked cat door.

Our locking cat door seems to be a bust on all fronts. It keeps the critters neither in nor out, be they cats or non-cats. It was locked and covered that night, of course, as it always is, but the cover was found nearly ten feet away, having been tossed across the room in disdain, and our measly concrete block was no obstacle.

On the other hand, I suspect that the presence of raccoons is keeping Trooper out of our backyard, so it's not a complete wash.

Bougainvillea

Restaurant of the undead

Yesterday we ate at the Restaurant Of The Dead. It wasn't literally called that - it was the something-or-other Ranch House, up in Waimea. We were looking for something else, the Koa House Grill, a joint much praised by our guidebook and which used to exist but no longer does, so we ended up here instead.

Our first hint that something might be amiss was when, after parking our car behind the facility, we decided to walk around and enter the front door of the restaurant, only to find that there was, in fact, no front door, because the restaurant was fronted by a very old and creepy cemetery. The graves abutted right up to the wall of the building. Why, why, why, would you build your restaurant right exactly there, we wondered?

(cue spooky music here)

This would have scared some people off, but we were hungry and tired and it was raining, so we just wandered around back and went in. Reasonable looking place, about five parties dining, about twenty five empty tables.

Remarkably unanimated and hard-to-hear Maitre'd: We'll have to see if we can fit you in.

Um... twenty five empty tables? None of which ever filled up while we were there.

Shortly after we were seated, we started to wonder if, in fact, all of the employees were, perhaps, residents of the cemetery out front. There was a peculiar shuffle/stumble that many of them had, and they all spoke in low, nearly inaudible tones. They seemed to know nothing about food or drinks. There was just a particular lack of animation to the whole experience. Could they have some more nefarious purpose that satisfying the appetite of random travelers?

After an excruciatingly long wait, we finally got drinks, and then an hour or so later, were served some food that was decent enough. When the entrees came, I decided to order a glass of wine to go with my duck.

Me: Can I please have a glass of Chianti?
Waiter: (looks blankly at me)
Me: It was on your wine menu by the glass.
Waiter: Chianti - hrm. Is... is that a red?

That's when I knew the gig was up. This was no regular restaurant. This was the Restaurant of the Undead, a place the frustrated and semi-animated departed to fill their vacant hours by pretending to be waiters. Close to home, reasonable commute, the chance to talk to real people... I could see how this could be good employment.

By the time we left the skies had darkened and a creepy fog had set in, along with the attendant drizzle that frequently accompanies trips to Waimea, which is 2000 feet up from Waikoloa and on the fringe of the rainer side of the island. There was a chill in the air.

Next time we'll just go to McDonalds. ;)



* You may blame the tone of this post on the fact that my old team at work gave me, among other wonderful and equally thoughtful parting gifts, the complete DVD set for season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show which Brett and I are quietly addicted to, and which we've been watching every evening since we got here. Nonstop ghouls, demons, ghosts, and vampires for seven days straight.