Snow

As most of our friends and family know, KT and I recently relocated to Greenville, SC. I originally hail from AZ, while KT grew up in both GA and FL. So the weather in our new community has been a bit of a change for us. We’ve been here for 3 months, roughly. Other than our coats seeing more ‘playtime’ we really hadn’t been too affected. Then it snowed. KT ran in to the yard letting feathery snowflakes land gently on her face. I huddled in my parka and beanie on the porch. KT begged me to come down from my porchly perch, but I refused.

The dogs were ambivalent to least the least about this frozen slush invading the space between their toes. Madeline quickly refused to leave the porch. Wonder where she learned that? Molly gave it a good college try and surprised even herself when she began to enjoy the frosty yard. Her little nub went wild after she tasted her first bite of snow. Madeline and I remained on the porch.

For those of you more familiar with snow and the many forms it takes on as it decays, you will find whats coming next quite funny. Ice. Snow turns to ice. Sometimes slush, but under the slush there was ice. Ice on the stairs. Icicles clung to the roof of the porch. The driveway, the yard, everything took on a crusty sheet of ice. Stupid ice.

I was home sick all weekend. Nasty head cold. I encouraged KT to go out and hang with friends cause I was a bit of a drag. Sleeping all the time, expelling lots of snot from my nose, coughing, looking pathetic… she needed to be free from all that. So Saturday night she headed over to a friend’s house for movie night. I went to bed with the dogs. She called me at 2:45 am on my cell phone.

KT – Sorry to wake you.

ME – No problem.

KT – I need your help.

ME – Call a cab, cold medicine can’t drive.

KT – No. Not that, I’m in the driveway.

Me – What? ok. What do you need?

KT – Your car keeps sliding down the driveway on the ice. I can’t get it to the carport.
(we have a pretty steep and curvy driveway)

ME – Let it slide then park it on the side.

KT – Tried that, now the car is straddling the driveway horizontally. Please come out here. NOW. SH*t.

ME – coming.

By the time I got out the driveway, sure enough, there was my little Scion Xb all out of sorts in the driveway. As I approached the car I saw KT inside desperately clenching the steering wheel. She explained that if she let go of the wheel the car immediately began to slide downhill. But at long as she held the steering wheel firmly, held her foot on the brake and had the emergency brake on, the car didn’t move. Sounds like a solution to me. See you in the morning. NOT. Just kidding. After a heartless attempt to push my car wearing my sweatpants, t-shirt and slippers, I reevaluated the situation. We determined that farther down the drive were a few patches of unfrozen pristine asphalt. We would allow the car to slowly slide to this spot the pull it off to the side of driveway. We were successful. The Scion rested peacefully there for the night.

This happened last weekend. Why am I writing about it now? It’s snowing again.

Love Greenville, love it.

Holiday Lessons, Again.

I have posted before about things I’ve learned, things I learned too late and things I am yet to learn. I have a few new experiences to share. First, when shopping for gifts for KT, do not think like Me, think like her. Once again KT and I are celebrating a dialed back Christmas season. Luckily, I recall the near apocalyptic reaction my ‘meat and eggs‘ question last Christmas, so this year I have been picking out small, fun gifts that are not from the grocery store. KT has asked for wool socks to keep her piggies warm in the new cooler climate we have discovered here in Greenville. No problem, I thought, how hard can buying socks be? Then I started thinking like Me, not her. Problem number one. As we cruised through the Army Navy store this weekend I spotted the perfect deal. Problem number to. Do not buy socks for KT at the Army Navy store. Do not excitedly drag her across the store to show her the $4 wool socks and tell her to pick out as many as she likes. Do not be surprised when she pauses awkwardly trying to think of a response. Do not stare at her like you are looking at 3-carat diamond rings waiting for her to choose her favorite. Do quickly retract your offer and say, “Just kidding, those are so ugly. Let’s go to Kohl’s and look for pretty socks.” Whew.

Holiday lesson two, volume control. While shopping at Target tonight I managed to make a very loud and disturbing statement. Shocking. If heard in context of the conversation that spawned the comment, it would have made sense. But if you were just passing by as I loudly stated, “We should get this tall shoot glass looking vase so that CT can do nut shooters” you might be understandably perplexed. The three teenagers around us with their parents offered a strange glance and steered their cart out of the home accessories aisle. Hmm. Poor choice of words?

MERRY CHRISTMAS.

I Like To Ask Permission

I did a bunch of yard work today. I cleaned out the front beds, trimmed the border grass with the weed whacker and mowed the lawn. We have a gate on the side of the house that I use to get the gear from the backyard to the front yard. Any other time I avoid this gate as it has become a haven of rather large spiders. I hate spiders. I squeal like a little girl if they get too close to me. If one happens to engage in combat with me by invading my perimeter I squash the bastard while screaming and running away. I admit, it must be quite a sight. I have been working on this though. Baby steps. Little jumping spiders are given ample warning to flee the area if they expect to keep their lives. I practice this same technique with spiders, moths and anything I deem a soldier of blood sucking death. Except Mosquitos, they can all go to hell.

Big Mama (she is roughly the size of the palm of my hand)

Anyway, upon arrive at the arachnid gate earlier, I was surprised not to see a spider. Big Mama was gone, she had been holding court there for months. With my new mantra in place, I had spent the last few months running with my head down under her web to get from the back to the front yard. But today she was gone. Sweet. I walked with my head up as I pushed the mower from the back yard. After all my work was done and I had proudly trekked back and forth several times, I saw her. She had been there the entire time clinging waist-high to the fence instead of her usual spot. I stopped dead in my tracks. All I knew to do was ask for permission to pass.

If only the neighbors could see, and maybe they did. I spent the next few trips sweet talking Big Mama into “not launching towards my face and sucking the life out of me.” One trip I begged. “Please don’t hurt me. Please. Please just stay there and I won’t hurt you and you won’t hurt me and…” I felt a squeal approaching my lips so i picked up the pace and sped past her. That was my last trip. Whew.

Just goes to show you, asking for permission can save your life. Thanks Big Mama.

Accepting the challenge…

First, my mom reads this blog. Second, in my parents eyes, the Post Office threw down the gauntlet and they have answered the call. You may or may not be aware of the USPS new flat-rate boxes. If you are, humor me. If you are not, pay attention you are going to learn something. The USPS has several sizes of what they refer to as flat-rate boxes. These boxes, once purchased, can be filled to any weight and mailed for a pre-determined charge. Who cares? My parents.

I am a 32-year-old female living 2000 miles away from where I grew up and where my parents still reside. Although technically I am the middle child, I’m spoiled as if I were the baby. I moved away from home at 22 and have been receiving care packages ever since. What started in college as boxes from home with staples college kids can’t always afford, have turned into pure spoiling. And with the new flat-rate boxes my parents get more bang for their buck.

Coming from AZ and moving to GA there are a few comforts of home I simply cannot get here. The major player in this category is tortillas. Not those white-washed discs you buy at the grocery store, I mean TORTILLAS. Tortillas back home are hand-made daily. They have entire store fronts that deal in this single commodity. Not to mention that these hand-made glories are sold at a fraction of the costs of the white mans flour frisbee’s most people settle for.  So my mom mails them to me, normally 4 dozen at a time. Now it would be silly to just send that, and this is where the game begins. My parents have taken great pride in stuffing flat-rate boxes with as much as possible. Not light-weight stuff either. They weigh the boxes before shipping them and calculate the postage as if they were shipped standard USPS. I’m sure there is a celebratory high-five before dropping the box off to begin its journey.

I guess the message behind this post is simple. Thank you. My care packages now contain more and more goodies as my parents perfect their craft. And luckily mom always finds room for the tampon coupons.

An Interesting Day

Monday was an interesting day. No grand news or exciting developments in my life, but a day of unexpected adventure. Sadly, a friend of mine lost her dog. Her baby boy Teddy magically got out of the yard and has been missing for days. I drove around the area where he was last seen and then checked animal control with no success. Later a JS was looking for him in the wooded area where he was last seen so I also reported for duty. When we still had Ed, we lost him once. He got out of the yard on a rainy day and was running through Thunderbolt like a wild pony. My heart was petrified. Terrified that we would never catch him or worse yet when we did he would be lifeless in the street. We found Ed and brought him home without injury. But I can understand the terrified feeling that surrounds a missing dog, so I trudged through the woods inviting Teddy to return home.

The woods where we looked for Teddy.

As I broke though the treeline and entered the woods I felt ill prepared. So I looked for a weapon, for self-defense of course. I quickly wrestled up a make-shift shank that most prisoners would be proud of. I found an old telephone pole that had been dumped and removed the ceramic knob that supported the cables. It had a rather long and shape screw post that might penetrate deep into any attacker. With my shank in had I went back in, deep into the wood’s following a trail along a creek, yelling “Teddy.” JS and I looked or several hours. I found several transitional homesteads, a turtle, a couple bicycle corpses but no Teddy.

When I got home, dirty and sweaty, the rain came. Within minutes the street in front of the house began to flood.

Flooded Street

As I stood outside talking with a neighbor and another guy whose car stalled, the water level continued to rise. We talked about the awesome drainage in SAV, the fools who kept blasting through the water, the lady whose car was stalled in the middle of the intersection, and how long it would take for the water to go down. See in SAV when the rain comes real fast  and hard it floods, just like any other place. But in SAV you have to take the tide into account. Most of SAV is below sea level, and the tide affects everything. When it rains during high-tide, it floods. Monday it was high-tide, so the flood was bad and lasts until the tide goes out. Anyway, I was on the phone warning KT not to rush home when I woman asked me to help her. She had just walked though the water carrying 10 bags of groceries and was headed to the apartments at the end of the street. She said she had 3 small children on the other side of the street (across the flood) and could I help her get them across the water and to their house. So off I went thigh high in water to piggy-back a kid to safety. Alright, safety is a bit much, he was already safe, but he needed to get home. So I wadded through the water and received my passenger. He was a real cutie, I took off his sweet kicks and attempted to tuck them in his backpack. “NO! Don’t put them in there, they’re dirty!!”  he squealed. This was an unexpected argument, but a good one.  So he climbed up onto my back and we headed back across the water. We chatted about school, the upcoming Halloween festivities and before we knew it we were back on dry land.

All in all, an exciting day. One win, one lose.

Lessons Learned

I sometimes break things. Sometimes when I break things, they really need to get fixed. It’s a supply and demand style of learning. Through the course of recent years I have acquired several valuable skills. True to my life and style of living, these lessons have been procured humorously (well, they are humorous now).

The first lesson I would like to share is the one that taught me to repair drywall. Before we get to the skills involved we should understand how one might find him/herself in need of drywall repair. In my case, we were moving. I hate moving and we do it way too much. KT was somewhere doing something and left a friend and I unattended to move a mattress downstairs. Mistake number one. I was at the top of the stairs, my friend at the bottom. It’s important to know that we had already been moving for several hours and it was a wretchedly hot Savannah day. So when the idea of pushing the mattress down the stairs was presented, I agreed. Mistake number 2. With the mattress up on its side and my friend at the bottom of the stairs, I simply let go. According to our warped wisdom, it should have just slid down the stairs and been caught by its intended receiver. Needless to say, that is NOT what happened. As soon as I released the mattress I knew it was all wrong. It quickly began to topple end over end, smashing into the wall above the door at the bottom of the stairs. Did I mention that this was not my apartment, it was KT’s? Yeah. As the mattress came to a rest, the words “oh, FU*K” slipped from my lips. My dear friend at the bottom of the stairs informed me of my impending doom. “KT gonna kick your A**!”

WAIT! This was actually her idea. I had just gone along. Why do I have to die?

My only salvation would be found on the internet. By the time KT returned and discovered the rather large hole in the wall, I knew how to remedy the situation. I knew the supplies required, how to use them and where to get matching paint. This knowledge though it made me feel better, did little to sooth KT.

In the end two lessons were learned. Never expect a mattress to seamlessly float down a staircase when released. Two, drywall repair is not impossible, and I’m rather adept at it.

Don’t let your doctor do your hair.

I went to the doctor today to have a ‘thing’ on the side of head looked at. KT was super tired of me trying to make her look at it, or sitting next to her on the couch slowly parting my hair and waiting for her to glance over and get an eyeful. She would scream, and for some reason I would laugh. I’m a mean little bugger sometimes. Anyway, it was growing, and getting pretty wicked looking.

After parting the curtains of my hair it was decided that the star of the show “thingy” was doomed to be removed. Many a varied growth have fallen prey to the calm calculated death that my ‘thing’ faced. Doc was pretty sure that it was a Subcutaneous megaporous mutation and that it posed little threat. ( I may have made most of that name up because I thought the word subcutaneous was so interesting I didn’t hear what she said after that). But we decided to remove it anyway. Especially after I told her of my frequent, yet innocent, torture of KT and a new found subconscious need to fiddle with the ‘thingy.’

So the nurse brought in her tray of tools, set up the light and we were ready to go. I thought this would be an ideal time to inquire about my afternoon workout plans. “So is this going to have any effects on my workout plans? I was supposed to go to the gym after this appointment.”  The nurse paused, looked at me ascertain my seriousness, then said (as she giggled), “no, I’m pretty sure that would be a bad idea.”  She walked out of the office and I returned my attention to the tray of medical tools she delivered. I was pleased to see a familiar tool on the tray and a little surprised to find out that doctors use X-acto knifes too (although they call theirs a scalpel). A shot with a secret numbing agent, some tweezers, gauze, alcohol pads, etc. Doc sniped the hair in the area surrounding the soon to be deceased, and then a few injections to numb the scalp. Can’t really explain the order of operations that followed, but in a few minutes she was using a miniature torch to cauterize my scalp. I would like to point out that my doctor also sings while performing such procedures, ” I’m making Miss KT happy, no more thingy to look attttt. hmmmm hhmmm hmmmmm.” She has a lovely voice, so calming.

All that was left was to wrap up my head and be on my way. This is when the laughter broke out. The picture above is what I looked like when leaving the office. I did choose the green wrap over the red and blue. Although Doc is a wonderful doctor, I’m glad she is not my hairdresser. I drove home looking like this, staring out the window at neighboring drivers who were visibly concerned about my driving abilities with what appears to be a decent head wound. Just for fun I’d throw a little twitch in now and again and really freak um out. Like I said, I can be a terrible little bugger. Happy Wednesday!

Old school wins again

I like to shop at a local farmers market for my veggies and such. I go almost every Wednesday to get squash, eggplant, potatoes, eggs, etc. There are several farms that come from neighboring counties to sell their produce. As I was waiting in line to get some organic red potatoes I began to listen in to the conversation in front of me.

buyer: (I missed the start of the conversation) … ” we’re starting our own organic garden on 3 acres. I’m so stoked, its for this local restaurant, we got a full 3 acres and we’re going to grow our own vegetables and such.”

Seller: uh huh

Buyer: (really excited) yeah so how long have you been farming? I’ve always wanted to do this. You know grow my own food and organic too. It so cool. We’re really trying to make a difference (liked he created organic farming)

Seller: (bored) yep, my family has always farmed

buyer: so how many acres do you farm?

seller: 700

conversation over.

Telemarketer hung up on me…

You want a sign that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, that the shit has really hit the fan, that there is NO turning back…. that we are all doomed?

Today a telemarketer hung up on me. Hung up on me. I did not hang up on him. I did not curse at him. I said 20 words, he said 6 words.

ME: Thank you for calling J****** L*******, how may I help you?

TM: May I speak to the owner please?

ME: He’s not in right now, can I take a message?

TM: grrrrrr……   ‘CLICK’

Yes, he growled at me, then ferociously hung up. I heard the receiver crush down against the console all the way in India. I have to admit that when telemarketers begin growling and hanging up on their prey, we are all in trouble. This is true for several reasons. One, their call volume is going to increase because they spend less time on each call. Which results in more unsuspecting victims facing the reality of being hung up on. It’s not like I haven’t been hung up on before, I have even deserved it a few times. But telemarketers are the last bastion of desperate fools that will take anything, anything at all, if they think they stand a chance at selling their product/service. Now they too are abandoning the idea of persistence = success. The consumer is now fully disposable, like a stinky little diaper tossed aside for fresh new one.

Questions from a car ride…

So KT and I went down to Florida this past weekend and we got a late start to the trip home. This left us driving a little later than we had planned, thus being more tired than we expected. In an attempt to entertain KT while she drove I began a session of questions and answers.

Question #1: what would you do if a werewolf ran out of the trees over there right now and jumped into the middle of the road?
KT: think it was a wolf.
ME: but it is on two legs, walking upright.
KT: then I will think it is a man, if I hit it I will stop and go back. There are laws about these things.
Me: but its all hairy and jumps out all ominous like.
KT: I don’t know then

Questions #2: What if a tyrannosaurus swooped down out of the sky in front of the car right now?
KT: Trex’s don’t fly
Me: I mean pterodactyl.
KT: probably wet myself.
Me: anything else or just pee?
KT: at this time I cannot confidently predict how I would react to the sight of  a pterodactyl flying towards us. But I know I would most likely pee my pants.
Me: hmm…ok

KT then politely started talking about the song on the radio.