Projects

My house is dirty. I hate when people say, "My house might be messy but it's clean underneath." My house is usually pretty well picked up, but basically there's a layer of crud underneath. Laundry is usually done, but it's stacked in baskets all over my bedroom. The kitchen counters are cleared off, but the sink is full of dishes; and that's a shame since I have a dishwasher...that usually needs emptied of clean dishes. Per usual, I need to scrub floors, run the sweeper and get out the Pledge and the Windex. I really need to do something about this situation today.

I have a huge plastic storage bin full of family photos that need scanned and put on disk. I got custody of them when my folks died in 2001 and the plan is to make a copy of everything for each of my three siblings and then arrange the hard copies into some kind of albums or books or something and divide them up. This project has been in process since 2002 when I moved into the homestead. And honestly? It's not my fault it hasn't got off the ground yet. I unhook my printer every time I move my puter (at least once a week) and now I can't get it to work at all. Sometimes I get so far as to actually start sorting the photos into some kind of semblence of order...and then a holiday comes along and I shove them all into envelopes and back in the huge plastic storage bin. Freduian, perhaps? Am I not ready to deal with this yet?

My cellar scares me. Some people have basements....I have a cellar. This house was built in the twenties, with a ceramic block foundation. That leaks. And molds. And smells. Spiders love it down there. I think mice would love it down there if it weren't for my firece hunter - killer cat (heh). My parent's old worthless crap is down there. My old worthless crap is down there. My son's old worthless crop is down there. The world's old worthless crap is down there. I'm sorry. I just can't continue to think about this right now. It's bumming me out.

I spent about three million dollars when I moved in here on new windows and doors, a new furnace, gutters, paint job, a little fencing and a garage. My son, my sister, my brother-in-law, his entire family, and I worked our tails off on this place. The A/C is now broken (it needs a new motherboard) and the garage door won't open with the remotes. Not sure what the problem is with that. Honestly. What did I do in a previous life to deserve this?

So the plan this weekend is to make some real progress on these on-going, never-ending, hung-around-my-neck projects. I'm in a nesting mood, which is good. I got up this morning and I feel like cooking. I made pasta salad. I've got the stuff to make meatballs in the fridge....I'm going to do that next, right after I finish my coffee and quit horsing around on line. Then I'm going to do some major constructive shit.

My sister just called and asked if I was up for a trip to Target.

To hell with this house...I'm going to Target.

Shame

Last night I met up with a couple of women friends to chat about a recent trip we took to San Diego; to share our pictures and have a few (too many) cocktails. Another friend joined us who couldn't actually go to San Diego with us, but the four of us went to New Orleans together last year, so we had to act out some of the highlights of the fun she missed.

For instance there was the trolley adventure to Old Town, where we were communing with a crazy lady with a stroller full of garbage and a hanger on her head (no kidding) and a young mentally challenged fella who would shove a tupperware container full of Almond Joys at you every time you looked in his direction (for your shopping pleasure). Lord knows we needed a cocktail after that.

And there was the Padres - Mariners baseball ball game, awesome, after which we went to a restaurant called Dick's. It's the place where the servers are mean to the customers. That was something. Such hijinx and hilarity. We definitely needed a drink after that.

It pretty much turned out that we needed a drink after everywhere we went. And always ready with a cold beer or a Boston Beach Something or Other was our good buddy William, the hotel bartender. William was so fine. William was our hero. William will live forever in my heart, so special was our brief time together in the land of perpetual sunshine and 75 degree weather. Though I'm not entirely sure William knows it.

So as we're rehashing our trip and telling our stories, one of the women (who is now my ex-friend) says, "Oh yeah, and remember how you drank the ice bucket in the morning, Liz?"

For the record, I clearly remember stating at the time, "I'm so thirsty I could literally DIE. Would it be a sin if I drank the ice water that's left in the ice bucket?"

"Oh go ahead," they said. "There's totally nothing wrong with that. Why we hardly had our hands in the ice bucket last night....go ahead and drink it."

I poured the water (which still had cubes!) into a glass and I drank the ice bucket. And water never tasted so good in my whole life.

And then I clearly remember saying, "Now what happens in San Diego, stays in San Diego, right?"

Wrong!

WTF??

My son will be a junior at OSU in the fall and we've done a lot of driving back and forth to Columbus in the last two years. That's two and a half hours one way (when my son is doing the driving) and three hours back (when I am). Invariably there is at least one flaming asshat driver accompanying us down I-71.

Of course you get your usual assortment of annoying tailgaters and road ragers and little old people hunched over their steering wheels; but there's always at least one driver that you'd like to haul out of their car and throttle on the side of the highway.

So yesterday we were following a guy in the passing lane who would neither pass nor get out of the way. My son was getting more and more frustrated and finally turned to me and said, "Before I make this trip again I swear I'm going to get a piece of cardboard and write WTF on it with a black Sharpie and when I finally get past a jackass like this guy ahead of me I'm going to just hold up my sign as I drive by."

"Hey, I'm pretty sure we could market that," I said.

That kid? He's a clever bastard.