Daybook

Outside my window... the sunlight has made that subtle shift from summer to autumn.

I am thinking... I'll go mental if this week is as boring as last week.

I am thankful for... having the money to get my brakes fixed, even if I would much rather have spent that money on something more fun.

From the kitchen... I'm planning to make this vegetable curry for dinner tonight (for my dinner anyway; G won't want any and will probably have pasta).

I am wearing... black capri sweatpants and a navy blue tank top.

I am creating... a new look for G's bedroom. She wants all black furniture, so I've slowly been replacing the light wood stuff she's had since she was two. This weekend I bought and assembled a bookcase; now all she needs is a loft bed, which will probably be her Christmas present this year.

I am going... to see some Shakespeare later this week.

I am reading... Neverwhere

I am hoping... that G has an easy transition to junior high.

I am hearing... Ben Harper singing "Diamonds on the Inside" from my laptop.

Around the house... I think G is still sleeping (I've been in to wake her a couple of times, but she just goes right back to sleep). One of the cats is in her room and the other one is lounging on the floor of my room.

One of my favorite things... believe it or not, is cleaning the house. I don't like everyday chores like vacuuming and dishes very much, but I love when I can do the really detailed cleaning that I rarely have time for.

A few plans for the rest of the week: We have the aforementioned Shakespeare play to attend, plus an orientation and dinner for incoming seventh-graders the following day. I've been talking to P's cousin about getting together with her and her daughter on Friday - we haven't seen them in more than two years, even though they only live a 30-minute drive away - but I don't know if it will actually come to fruition.

Here is a picture for thought I am sharing...

This photo is exactly what I wish my life were like. I don't play the double bass, or any instrument, but in my fantasy world, I would, and I'd have a room just like that and sit around playing Beethoven symphonies all day long. Except between three and four o'clock every afternoon, when someone would serve me tea and cookies on the terrace that I imagine is right underneath that window. I guess in my fantasy world I would also have a maid. And a cook who knew how to bake shortbread.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

A short review of the first week of my end-of-summer vacation:

Had car problems
Was without a car for 48 hours
Registered G for junior high
Paid $450 for new brakes
Had repair crew in house for an entire morning*
Did work
Found BEES IN MY HOUSE**
Watched a week's worth of groceries vanish in four days
BEES. IN MY HOUSE.
Did more work
Went nowhere except grocery store and post office
OMG BEES

* The good part of this is that our air conditioning finally, finally works. It works so well that yesterday I thought "Wow, it's nice and cool in my bedroom; I think I'll lie down and enjoy it." Next thing I knew, I opened my eyes and an hour and a half had passed. I went downstairs and G was huddled under a blanket, shivering. Do your worst, California autumn! We're ready.

The bad part is that one of the repairmen asked to use our upstairs bathroom while he was here, and let's just say it wasn't a Number One. I know when you've got to go, you've got to go, and I could hardly send the poor guy to the service station down the street, but the idea of a total stranger taking a dump in my bathroom really bothered me at a visceral level. (Yes, I know, I use public restrooms that thousands of total strangers have used before me. It's not the same.) I need to go in and sanitize now that some time has passed - I couldn't bring myself to do it earlier.

** Yesterday morning I was lying in bed, drinking my coffee and reading my email, when I heard a loud buzzing/humming noise. Investigation revealed a large bee/wasp/hornet thing bumping around the inside of my bedroom window. I managed to trap it with my empty cereal bowl and release it outside, and then I heard the same noise coming from inside the wall behind my bed, near the electrical outlet where my bedside lamp plugs in. While I was taping up the open space in the outlet so nothing winged and many-legged could squeeze its way through, G called "Mom, there's some kind of insect on the wall down here, and I don't know what it is, and I'm not going close enough to find out." I went downstairs, and sure enough, it was another flying stinger. I couldn't catch that one, so I sucked it up with the vacuum hose of doom. I haven't seen or heard any more since then (the one in the wall buzzed a bit more and then stopped) but I did find about 30 of them lying dead on the little balcony outside my bedroom. If I don't post again, it will be because a swarm carried me away in the night and made me their queen.

Hot air

On Monday, I telecommuted so I could be at home to deal with the air conditioning repair guys, who were supposed to arrive at 9 a.m.

At 8 a.m., I got a phone call saying that the delivery truck with the new condenser unit was delayed and wouldn't come until 11.

At 11:30, I got another call saying that it might be as late as 1 p.m.

At 1:15, the phone rang again: "They'll be there within 45 minutes."

At 1:50, two guys finally rolled up and got started.

At 3:30, they announced that they had to leave (WTF?!) but the company's owner, who'd done the initial estimate, would be there in about 15 minutes to finish the job.

At 5 p.m., the replacement guy called me outside and explained that everything was hooked up properly, but that mice had eaten all the wires and insulation that ran under the deck and connected the condenser to the furnace in the garage. He said he would have to come back with a crew and crawl underneath to fix all that and install a rodent-stopping screen before the system would work. So, to sum up, the air conditioning still doesn't function, the furnace is now disconnected as well (not that we need it at the moment, but really) and I can't have the repair guys back until next week, when I'm on vacation and have time to deal with them. Oh joy.

During the course of this long, long day, we also discovered that it's like freaking Wild Kingdom under the deck. In addition to the wire-and-insulation-loving mice, the first two repair guys found a possum skeleton; and when one of the guys stuck his hand into a hole in the wooden steps leading down from the deck to the condenser, a gray cat came shooting out and nearly scared us both to death. (Apparently it was using the hollow inside of the top step as a hideout. Sorry about that, cat.) Thanks to our own two cats, none of these creatures have ever entered the house proper--if you were a mouse, you'd need testicles like cannonballs to dare poke your nose out with that pair of bloodthirsty killers on the loose--but just the thought of them lurking around out there gives me the shivers. Ugh.

Mind you, we haven't had A/C for any of the three summers we've lived in this house (the old condenser was the original c. 1985 model and was already defunct when we moved in), so we're in no worse shape now than a week ago. It's just having the promise of cool air dangled in front of us and then yanked away that makes it seem worse somehow. A friend of mine suggested that when the system is finally working, we should crank the thermostat down to 55 degrees and have a party with parkas and hot chocolate. Sounds good to me.

Welcome home

Thirteen ways to know you're at our house:

1. The area near the front door looks like a shoe store on clearance day.

2. You can't get a hamburger for dinner, or any other type of meat.

3. Fruits Basket is probably playing on TV somewhere.

4. Cats are watching you balefully from high places.

5. The shelves are stuffed with books, and all around the house you find open, face-down books in various stages of being read.

6. You can access the Internet in at least three different ways at any given time.

7. The reading material in the bathroom is a copy of Archaeology magazine, open to a page with a photo of a hideous unwrapped mummy.

8. Black is clearly someone's favorite color.

9. Someone else is clearly in love with jewelry.

10. The kid-drawn art on the fridge is anime-style.

11. It's an all-female house, but the older family photos include a tall, dark-haired guy with a nice smile.

12. It's okay to randomly burst into song if you feel like it (and if you wait long enough, someone will).

13. Someone will probably still be awake at midnight.

Mr. Sandman

Apparently that three-hour nap I took this afternoon was a bad idea, since it's 3:41 in the morning and sleep is nowhere in sight.

I wasn't intending for the nap to stretch out that long, and indeed when G was younger she would have woken me almost as soon as my eyes closed. But now she's twelve, and twelve-year-olds are crafty enough to know that if they wake you up, you might make them stop watching TV and clean their rooms or take a shower or something equally heinous. So, if I happen to doze off, she leaves me unconscious until I wake up on my own. In fact, she has literally tried to lure me into napping in the past by covering me with a blanket when I'm lying on the sofa, which seems all sweet and solicitous until you realize it's like throwing a towel over a parrot's cage. Hey, you're annoying me. Stop squawking and go to sleep.

The worst part? It works!

Injurish

Four weeks ago upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He kicked my leg from under me

...at least, that's the only explanation I've got for how I managed to pull a calf muscle, not by skiing or parachuting or zip lining, but by climbing the stairs in my own home.

I should say first that climbing stairs is hardly an uncommon activity at our house. It's a townhome with four levels connected by three flights of stairs, and you can't so much as get a glass of water without going up or down some steps. We've lived here for two and a half years and I have legs of iron. Or so I thought.

Ha ha! That'll teach me to think!

So on this night, I'd just sent G off to bed and was on my way upstairs to my own room. As I reached the third step, she called "Hey, Mom, come and look at this," and when I pivoted to go back down again, something went ping in my right calf. Imagine a big, thick elastic band breaking inside your body, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it felt like. All at once, I couldn't put any weight on my leg, and it hurt like nineteen different flavors of hell. I said "AARRGHGHGHGH!" or something like that, and went hopping and stumbling into G's room, where I sat on her bed and tried to stretch and massage and do anything that might make the pain stop.

After a bit, it improved enough for me to hobble into the kitchen for some ice and then upstairs to lie down with my leg propped on pillows. While I was lying there, it occurred to me that if this was a really serious injury--which seemed unlikely, given how it had happened, but then there I was, immobile--I was hosed. It was after ten on a weeknight, I was home alone with a not-quite-teenage kid, and there was absolutely no one I could call to take me to the ER. The idea of teaching G to drive the car fluttered across my mind, and then I decided that since there weren't any actual splintered bone ends sticking out of my leg, I would wait overnight, and maybe my Jedi mind powers would heal me while I slept.

I wouldn't exactly say that brilliant plan worked, but I was able to get around better by the next day, though I still couldn't put my foot flat on the ground. I thought of gritting my teeth and toughing it out, but finally gave in and went to urgent care, where I saw a doctor who looked as if he'd just graduated from high school. (Does this mean I'm getting old? Probably. Dammit.) I described how I'd hurt myself and what the pain felt like, and then we had the following exchange:

Doctor: Are you a scientist by any chance?
Me: No, why do you ask?
Doctor: You're very meticulous about details.
Me: I'm an editor.
Doctor: That explains it.

He was a hilarious guy and I kind of enjoyed the appointment, even though he scolded me for not wearing proper walking shoes while injured--I had tried my best to choose a reasonable pair that morning, but was hampered by the fact that my closet is full of three-inch platforms and spike-heeled stompy boots--and suggested that I go out and buy some New Balance or Saucony trainers. Er ... no. The corporate dress code does not allow for that sort of thing. He also said that it would take four weeks for my leg to heal completely, and at the time I nodded and smiled and thought Yeah, sure. I'll be fine in a couple of days, tops. Well, he was right, because it's been four weeks today, and the last tiny lingering bit of soreness is finally leaving me. (Which probably also means I'm getting old. Dammit!)

So, to sum up what I've learned from this experience:

1. You can hurt yourself doing nothing.
2. Leg injuries take longer to heal than you think.
3. Doctors sometimes know more than you do.
4. It's bad not to know any of your neighbors when you might need a ride to the hospital.
5. I'm getting old.

Unsupervised

Seven things I did while G was at overnight camp for most of a week:

1. Spent pretty much an entire day lying on my bed and reading.

2. Took myself to see Captain America.

3. Had French bread and Salsa Verde Doritos for dinner two nights in a row.

4. Belted out "Rehab" repeatedly at the top of my lungs while cleaning the kitchen. (RIP, Amy Winehouse)

5. Borrowed one of G's shirts so I wouldn't have to do laundry.

6. Used my laptop, uninterrupted, for hours at a stretch.

7. Ate the last fudgsicle.

I know, wild and crazy, right? It's like Lord of the Flies if the protagonist were a middle-aged suburban mother!

I can't help myself

Today I went to Subway, and while I was waiting to pay for my order, I looked to my right and saw a laser-printed notice that read:

THIS LOCATION OPEN 24 HOURS
BEGINNNING JULY 15

"Do you know your sign has an extra letter?" I asked the teenage cashier.

"What?" he said.

I pointed. He started to laugh.

"Hey, [name]," he called to the manager, who was showing another employee how to clean the drink machine. "You put an extra 'n' in 'beginning.'"

"What?"

"In the sign. 'Beginning' has an extra 'n.'"

"Oh," said the manager. To me, he said, "That's been up for two weeks and no one else has noticed."

"I'm sorry," I said, starting to feel like a jerk. "I'm an editor. It's my job to notice."

"It's in all of them," giggled the cashier, who had gone to inspect the identical signs stuck in different locations around the shop.

At that point, I grabbed my sandwich and my Diet Coke and escaped, because the manager was looking a little too angry for my taste. Hey, buddy, I usually charge people money for my services. How about a free cookie or something instead of a glower?

Aging ungracefully

Shopping for a dress for G to wear to her sixth-grade promotion ceremony:

Me: You don't want that one. It's going to make you look like a 40-year-old woman.
G: You mean...like you?
Me: Yes. And I don't even want to look like a 40-year-old woman, so I'm pretty sure you don't either.

Mathletes

G: We had our math placement test for junior high today.
Me: Oh?
G: There was stuff on there I've never seen before. What are those problems with the number between two lines?
Me: I don't know, draw one for me and maybe I'll recognize it.
G: It looked like | 25 |
Me: I have no idea what that is.

(pause while both of us look at it, baffled)

Me: Maybe it means, "Twenty-five, YAY!"*

We both got a good laugh out of that. Clearly neither of us will be medaling in the Math Olympics anytime soon.

*Like this emoticon: \o/

A visit to the past

G suggested going to Medieval Times for Mothers' Day this year. As it happened, I'd never been there before, which made it an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by celebrating the holiday and adding an experience to my list of new things, so off we went.

I was secretly expecting it to be cheesy tourist crap--which is why I'd never gone, despite living in the area for 30 years--but I was wrong. IT WAS SO MUCH FUN. The idea is that you're at this tournament in medieval Spain, and the section you're seated in is represented by a particular knight, and you cheer him on in battle. It's easier to get into than you might think; even G, who is usually too full of almost-teen self-consciousness to participate in that sort of thing, was screaming and clapping and yelling "Boo!" and "Get him!" during the final epic battle between the Yellow Knight and the evil Green Knight. There are displays of dressage and falconry, and tournament games, and jousting, and hand-to-hand combat, and it's really pretty neat. (And it didn't hurt that three of the knights, including ours, were smoking hot. Wow.) Here are a few photos:

The arena before the show started. 

Dressage display.

Our knight was the Black and White Knight.

This is a flower that he kissed and then threw to us in the stands. I've never seen G come so close to swooning before.

Galloping blurrily off to the joust.

Jousting!

They have the obligatory overpriced merchandise to buy, and people wanting to take your photo and sell it to you for $10, but we ignored all that and just enjoyed the pageantry. G is already longing to go back, so I suspect we may be spending her next birthday there. Definitely a good time.

One thing that bothered me a bit about the day--and in fact has been a general annoyance lately--is that almost no one realizes I'm G's mother anymore. She looks older than she is, mostly because she's so tall, and I look younger than I am, and so strangers assume that I'm her friend or elder sister, or sometimes her aunt. When we arrived at the castle, the person checking reservations at the gate wished the women ahead of and behind me a happy Mothers' Day, but not me. Inside, they were handing out flowers to the mothers; I wasn't offered one. Obviously with my 40th birthday only a few months away, it's nice not to look old enough to be the mother of an apparent teenager, but I am a mother and proud of it, and I'd like to be recognized as one.

It does sting a little, too, to think that if P were still alive, people would probably have no trouble pegging us as the parents and G as our child; it's G and me being on our own together that throws them off. But there's not much I can do about it, short of investing in some MOTHER and DAUGHTER T-shirts or sticky labels--and embarrassing as G thinks I am at times, I'm not that over the top. Yet.

Body follies

We had an unexpectedly chilly weekend and I turned the central heat on a few times. This morning, I woke up with a split lip, a bloody nose and aching sinuses. Dry air much?

Also this morning, G had an adolescent complexion crisis. She came up to me in the kitchen, pulled her hair back and said "Look at this!"

"Hmm, looks like a breakout," I said.

"What do I do?! I don't have enough concealer to cover all that!"

"Well, there's not much you can do," I said. "You can't wear a whole face full of makeup, so you've just kind of got to deal. I'm sorry."

"Isn't there anything that can help?" she moaned.

"We can try buying some tinted moisturizer after I pick you up tonight," I offered. "That might cover it a little without looking all heavy like foundation. I know it sucks, but the reality is that for the next few years, breaking out is going to be a fact of life for you."

"I didn't know it was going to be this bad," she said as she went away to try artfully draping her hair over her forehead.

I didn't have the heart to tell her it can get a lot worse!

After years of experience

G: Can I have a bagel?
Me: You just ate a huge dinner and dessert. You don't need a bagel.
G: I'm hungry though.
Me: Give your meal a chance to settle, and then if you're still hungry, you can have a bagel.
G: How long do I have to wait?
Me: An hour.
G: Are you going to start the hour over again every time I ask?
Me: You know me so well.

Stupid trees

Or, as I have also called them over the last 48 hours, dumb trees, damn trees, rotten trees, and FUCKING TREES I HATE YOU.

Gah.

In case you hadn't guessed, I am allergic to trees, or at least to their pollen. In late March and early April, the trees pollinate like crazy, merrily propagating their DNA all over Southern California in a great big arboreal orgy, and I turn into a sneezing wheezing dripping coughing snorfling mess. Allergy medicine keeps it at least somewhat under control (when I was in college, before you could buy Claritin without a prescription, I thought I was going to get thrown out of my Asian American Lit class one spring for blowing my nose 39809849034 times in an hour) but it's still miserable.

The enemy.

 On that note, why is it that when you have a cold, you're sick, but when you have allergies, it's "just allergies?" I would much rather have a cold than a full-blown allergy attack--at least with a cold, you don't get that maddening sensation of the entire inside of your head itching, from the roof of your mouth to the space between your sinuses and your brain. Plus, with a cold you're officially allowed to eat soup and lie in bed, whereas with allergies you're supposed to jump up and run a marathon because it's "just allergies" and you're "not really sick." Only you are.

Something is wrong with this world we live in, I tell you. I can't do anything about it right now, though, because I have to blow my nose again. And then go out and kick a tree.

It's not Fiction Friday, but how about a Manuscript Monday?

Just for a change of pace, I thought I'd post the story I wrote for that Writers' Digest contest back in January. Entries had to be 750 words or less and begin with the sentence It was on a bright, starry night that the traveling circus rolled into town. I gave mine a title when I entered it, but for the life of me I can't remember now what it was, so here we go:

---

It was on a bright, starry night that the traveling circus rolled into town. Lydia and I were right there to meet it, all fizzy inside with excitement. We hadn't had a circus come in at least twenty years—-maybe thirty. I guess word gets around on the entertainment circuit.

“You remember the last time, Sissy?” Lydia asked as we watched the hubbub of people and animals. Two men passed in front of us, sweating, hauling a lot of striped canvas attached to ropes. A few yards away, a lady in a red-and-white leotard bent over backward, casually, and walked a few steps on her hands.

“I remember.”

“It was fun, wasn't it?”

I nodded.

“What was your best part?”

“The acrobats,” I said, knowing that wasn't what she meant.

Lydia giggled. “Not mine. My best part was when we--”

“Hey, you kids!”

We turned around at the sound of the voice—Lydia first, then me—and found a man just behind us, looming thin and tall and straight like a pine tree, made even taller by a top hat that looked out of place with his work clothes.

“That's the ringmaster,” I whispered.

“Aren't you girls out kind of late? Your folks know where you're at?”

“Yes sir,” said Lydia, looking up at him as only Lydia could, with those big eyes of hers as sweet and melting as brown sugar. “Daddy said we could come down and watch a while. You gonna set the whole circus up tonight?”

Like most grown-ups, the ringmaster clearly thought Lydia was cute as a button. “You bet,” he said. “By the time you wake up in the morning, it'll all be ready, and tomorrow night we'll do the show.”

“And are there gonna be elephants and horses? And a tightrope walker? And a lion tamer?”

“All that and then some.”

I was imagining it—the roar of cannons, the glitter of spangled costumes, the smell of animals and popcorn and sawdust—when I realized that Lydia was giving the ringmaster that look, the one she used to get when we were perusing the candy display at the old five and dime. She drew a slow, deep breath, like the first half of a sigh, and leaned toward him with yearning written all over her sweet little pixie face. Before she could get any further than that, I stuck out one of my brand-new Sunday shoes and trod on her foot hard enough to leave a crater in the soft black dirt.

“Oww! Sissy!”

“Oops,” I said. “Sorry. We've got to get going now, mister. We'll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“I'll look for you,” said the ringmaster, and ruffled Lydia's hair. “You girls be careful on the way home. There's bad things in the dark, you know.”

“We know,” I said. “Come on, Lyds.”

“We're going to get them all after the show anyway,” Lydia whined as I dragged her through the park, past the abandoned swings with their rusted-out chains . “Mayor Gibson said so at the town meeting. What difference would it make if I have this one now?”

“Because there's no show without him, dummy! He's not just some old carny, he's the boss of the whole circus. If you hurt him—if you so much as spook him—they'll pull up and leave, and then I won't get to see it. And I been waiting too long to let that happen.”

“But Sissy—”

“But Sissy nothing.” I curled my lip and showed her the tips of my teeth, gleaming in the moonlight. “If you mess this circus up for me, Lydia Jones, I will get up early one night and hammer a two-by-four right through you, just see if I won't.”

“Honestly,” Lydia huffed. “Anyone would think you didn't want to kill them.”

“I want to kill them all right,” I said. “But after the show. Don't forget whose fault it was that I almost missed it last time.”

That shut Lydia up. We trudged on, with my legs just outpacing her shorter ones.

“The stars are real pretty, aren't they, Sissy?” Lydia offered after a while, wanting to make up already, or maybe just hoping to avoid being staked in her sleep. “So close and bright. It'll be a nice night tomorrow.”

“Yes,” I said. “It sure will.”

----

That's all for now. Hope to be back in a day or two with a post of actual substance!