Idle essays

So it’s up at 4:30 a.m. Can’t get back to sleep. Climbing out of the sack, realize my belly hurts. A lot. WTF? Ate some prepared shellfish that made me feel funny last night as in have i developed an allergy to shellfish? and so dropped a Benadryl before choir which got rid of the symptoms but mysteriously did not knock me for a loop, as Benadryl usually does.

Get washed, dressed, coiffed so as to be ready to put on interview duds later this morning. Pour hot water over honey, add slice of lemon, drink; this relieves cramps. In jeans, race to Scottsdale meeting, have breakfast, nice time with co-conspirators, get good, really good ideas from the day’s presentation. Write those down. Fly home.  Hit town a little before 9.

Tina is meeting with Accountant, who lives across the street from me. She’d called a few days ago and proposed to come over here afterward to discuss the current client’s project. About ten, she surfaces at the front door.

Charlie is charmed to see a new human, particularly of the nonthreatening female variety. He dances and carries on and starts to jump on Tina. She does not want to be jumped on. He jumps on me. I do not want to be jumped on. He jumps alternately on each of us. We lock him out in the yard. He jumps on the back door and starts to rip it apart. We let him in. While I fix coffee, he jumps on Tina some more. We lock him in his crate. We discuss business.

Around 11:30 Tina leaves, to go on about her day. I have to be out the door before noon, preferably around 11:45.

I feed Charlie, race back to the bedroom and put on my fancy second-hand duds, gather stuff together. Put Charlie out for a couple of minutes, to no avail. Lock him back in his crate. Fly out the door.

Turn on the ignition and hear NPR guy say “and at {mumble} all northbound lanes of State Route 51 are closed because of a car fire in the middle lane.”

Where???? Turn up the radio. “So you should stay out of that area.”

Area? What area???

Take the surface streets up to the school, not knowing which stretch of the 51 is closed. Doesn’t really take much longer but it’s a hassle, every light turning red as i drive up to it and every moron on the planet swerving in front of me and slowing down below the limit.

Park. Traipse to class. Meet students. Take roll. Shovel them out the door. Head over to the department. Wait briefly to be called in and forthwith am summoned to meet the eight-person committee and be grilled.

The period in which Tina and I were wrestling with the dog and trying to formulate a few coherent thoughts was the period I had figured I would be able to rehearse the D&P I was asked to do. Though I’d done it for the students just a few weeks ago, I did want to go over it and try to smooth off the rough edges. But of course, noooooo….

They ask ten questions, and they’re pretty good questions: well thought out, intelligent, and leading enough to allow you to pitch your best pitch. And, I thought, they were pretty revealing of what would be expected on the job. Then I had to give my 15-minute mini-vaudeville show on how to incorporate citations in-text, using MLA style. That probably went off as well as could be expected. I could have had better handouts and could have had some in-class exercises to show them, but given the time constraints, it was probably OK.

What the heck. They’re not going to hire an old lady into that plummy job, anyway, so I’m not wasting my energy on fretting about what I coulda shoulda done.

I asked when they would make a decision. They said they were interviewing ten people (the boss had told me, earlier, that they’d had something like 120 qualified applicants). The committee would narrow that down to three and hoped to be able to report to the interviewees before the end of spring break. Then the lucky three would be interviewed at greater length. When they decide which of those would be the best candidate for the job, they have to send their decision and request to hire off to HR, and therein lay the hang-up. It could be after the end of the semester before they get permission to hire; in fact, it could be close to the beginning of fall semester.

Race from the interview room to the library, where I’d told my students to meet me. This being the final day of class before spring break, I sorta hoped they’d take “go to the library and work on your next paper” to mean “go home.” But noooooo: a dozen of them were hovering. Took roll, met one-on-one with students, discussed, guided, chatted, schmoozed. Finally most of them had faded, except for a couple who had taken up with friends from outside class. Left a little after 3:30.

Hungry. Had no lunch, of course. Daydreamed, while driving home, of defrosting a piece of steak and frying the hashbrowns remaining in the freezer. Personfully resisted buying a bottle of wine on the way home. Really wanted a glass of wine.

Hear both dogs barking frantically as I pull into the garage. Charlie in particular is barking urgently and loudly.

Open the door and WHAM!

Belted in the face with a toss-your-cookies stench!

Charlie has had diarrhea in his crate. The stink fills every room in the house. He’s covered with shit.

Run to the bedroom, pull off the good clothes, haul on a pair of jeans, grab a bottle of shampoo out of the bathroom, run back to the family room, let Charlie out of his foul prison, drag him to the backyard, and…try to wash him.

My god can that dog put up a fight! And he’s now very, very strong.

Finally get most of the shit scrubbed off the dog. He breaks free and does a dancing gallop around and around the backyard, kicking up dirt, which falls back onto his sopping wet coat, covering him with mud.

Give up. Lock him outside. Go inside to clean up the stinking mess.

Dog mattress (not cheap, damn it!) will have to be thrown out. Scrub shit off the wall. Take the Navajo rug down, set it aside, wondering how to find someone who can clean a hand-made museum-quality wool rug, purchased in more halcyon days. Scrub the shit off the floor. Take the crate apart and pull the floor out of it and haul that outdoors and scrub that with detergent and hose it off.

Can’t get the crate outside by myself. Too big for me to maneuver. Sliding it across the floor causes it to smear shit over the tiles. Flip it over. Just too big of a mess for me to cope with alone.

E-mail M’hijito and alert him that he’ll need to help me clean up after his dog when he gets off work. He is understandably thrilled. Scrub more shit off the floors.

Wash the mud off the dog. Capture the dog and wipe him down with a couple of towels. Turn air blue with copious swearing at top of lungs. Very, very annoyed.

Open every door and window in the house. Turn on all the ceiling fans. Good thing it’s a nice day.

Sit down to answer e-mail. Too tired to function. Start to cry. Give up.

In due course, M’hijito arrives. We haul the besmirched crate outdoors, hose it off using a sprayer. He drags the ruined dog bed out to the garbage can in the alley. Scrub the rest of the shit off the family room floor. I vacuum the floors where Charlie has spread mud in his frolics, all over the family room, the dining room, the kitchen, and up and down the hall. M’hijto manhandles the janitorial-sized mop, which is too heavy for me to wring easily, and mops all the floors. While he’s at it, he pulls the refrigerator out from the wall and we clean behind that, too.

We sit outside waiting for the floors to dry.

I suggest that while Jesus was spending 40 days in the desert, he didn’t have to contend with a dog crapping all over his cave. Had he been confronted with such a thing, surely he would have ridden his donkey over to the nearest Safeway and bought a bottle of booze.

“Are you asking what would Jesus do?” says M’hijito.

“I don’t have to ask,” say I. “I know. He would’ve bought himself a bottle of pinot noir.”

We decide we are too exhausted to follow in those footsteps. M’hijito has had lunch at 3:00 p.m. and so turns down the offer of a dinner out, somewhere, anywhere.

Charlie decides to try to rape Cassie. He loves to do that. She doesn’t. She climbs on my lap, seeking safety. Charlie decides to eat the newspaper, having been told to quit eating the potted plants. Is there any question why this beast gets the collywobbles?

M’hijito leaves, his dog in train. Well. In the back of the car.

Quarter to nine. Hungry. Too tired to cook. Too tired to eat. Mercifully, too tired to go out and get beer, wine, or whiskey, and so at least am still on the wagon.

 

 

Surprise! Something didn’t go wrong for a change!

Last month I figured I was $650 or so in the hole, but that was wrong because I’d forgotten to enter the $225 bill for the oven repair. So January actually ended about $875 in the red. {sigh}

Hoping to recover sometime before the utility bills heat up in lockstep with the weather (according to NASA, temps are supposed to go up about 2 degrees in these parts, which would give us 118- to 120-degree days this summer), I’m pinching every penny this month.

Yesterday I went to turn the heat on under a pan and…nothing. The burner would not  light. The other three burners were OK, but this one: dead.

Well, of course it’s the front right-hand burner, the one I use the most. So I figure I’m going to have to call the appliance repair guy again. That’ll be another $250, no doubt.

But since he’s such a nice appliance repair guy, I decide I’d better clean the filthy stove, which I haven’t felt well enough to do since I came down with the present epizootic two weeks ago. It’s extravagantly greasy and dirty.

So last night I put the burner grates in the dishwasher. Soaked the small parts in dish detergent and hot water. Cleaned the shiny parts with white paste for cleaning glass stovetops.

This morning I put the thing back together, admiring how shiny and beautiful it looked. Wondered if the issue was in the burner cap thingie instead of the burner itself. So switched those thingies back and forth, turned on the switch, and…voilà! On it came!

Saved!

I can’t call this a DIY repair, because I didn’t try to fix anything. Apparently whatever was the matter cleared out when I soaked the burner cap thingie and then let it air-dry.

Hallelujah!

Only 20 more days of austerity this month. If nothing else happens, the budget will recover a little. That’ll leave one more month to recover before the utility bills start to rise again. w00t!