Commotion

Last night G and I watched Iron Man 2, which was quite good. It ended at about 11:30, and I sent her off to brush her teeth while I filled a glass of water in case she got thirsty in the night. When I brought it in, she was already in bed, and I could hear voices in the driveway below her window. We live in a condo complex, so imagine two rows of townhomes with attached garages facing each other and a long driveway (actually a little street with its own name) running between them and then letting out onto the main road.

As I switched off G's bedside lamp, the voices erupted into a full-blown argument:

Man (screaming): Fuck you, bitch!
Woman: [unintelligible]
Man: [unintelligible] Don't you ever [unintelligible] again!

At this point I heard the sound of several loud slaps and ran upstairs to my own bedroom to get my phone. When I came back about 30 seconds later, the argument was still raging and G said "Mom, what is it?" I said "Sshh, I'm going to call the cops" and pulled aside her curtain just in time to see the man reach through the driver's-side window of his car and shove the woman, who was standing just outside the car as if he'd thrown her out, so that she fell into the driveway with the contents of her handbag spilling around her. Then he peeled out onto the street and roared off, leaving her lying there in the dark.

I thought of going outside, but didn't want to rush out there right away in case the jackhole in the car decided to come back and perhaps beat us both up, or worse, run us over. So I opened up G's window and called down to the woman, who was starting to move around a little, feebly, "Are you okay? Do you need me to call anyone for you?"

She sat up, seeming stunned. "I think I'm all right."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah...I just need to pick up my stuff. It's okay. Thanks."

"Okay, if you're sure," I said.

I closed the window, but kept watching through a gap in the curtain while she slowly collected her fallen belongings and put them back into her bag. G said, "What happened?" and I said "That guy was an ass, he hit her and pushed her down. Never have a boyfriend like that." She said "What are you going to do now?" and I said "I'm going to wait and make sure she's really okay."

After a minute or so, the woman got all her things together, stood up and walked out into the glow of the streetlamp just outside the driveway. At this point I finally got a better look at her--she was youngish, maybe 30 or so, with dark hair, and dressed the way you would dress to go out on a Saturday night, in a black tank top and black pants, with heels. She stood there in the pool of light for a moment and then turned left and disappeared from view, digging through her bag as if she were looking for her phone.

I thought about calling the police anyway: even if the guy was long gone, they could have caught up with her easily since she was on foot, and perhaps taken a report or at least found her a ride. But it also crossed my mind that there was a small chance it could be a prostitution-related thing--I didn't think it was, but having grown up in a terrible neighborhood where prostitution was rampant, I knew it wasn't impossible either. If that had been the case, I could have caused her a lot of trouble by getting cops involved, and she was already having a hard enough night, so I let her go. I hope she got home or to a friend's house all right--our area is quite safe, so she was almost certainly in less danger walking, even alone at night, than she would have been with the guy who smacked her around.

G has an unshakable belief that I can handle just about any emergency that might arise (zombie apocalypse? no problem, Mom's got it) so she stayed calm through the whole thing and went tranquilly off to sleep afterward, but I was full of adrenaline for a long time. The most worrisome part is that not a single other person in any of the surrounding buildings so much as looked out a window to see if this poor woman was alive or dead. It wasn't even midnight yet, so I can't have been the only one awake. It's nice to know that the neighbors would be right there for me if I ever screamed in the night. Jeez.

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.

Live and learn and lose

In a tangent to the ongoing family drama, last week I discovered that a lot of our belongings, which were put into storage when we moved just after P died, were auctioned off and sold earlier this year. I had meant to retrieve them when we moved into this house and finally had room to keep them, but when I asked the relative who'd arranged the storage for us about getting them back, I got a vague answer. I had a sinking feeling then that something like this had happened, and now I know I was right.

Among the things we lost were P's comic-book collection, which was extensive and probably worth upward of $10,000, and quite a lot of sentimental stuff, including G's baby clothes and toys--I gave most of them away as she outgrew them, but I'd kept a box or two of favorites--as well as all our Christmas decorations from when P was alive. The first Christmas after he died, I bought a tabletop-size artificial tree and a few miniature ornaments to go on it, and that's what we've been using ever since, waiting on the day when we'd finally have our "real" ones again. I suppose now I can stop waiting and just go buy actual replacements for this Christmas, although I can't really replace ornaments like the one we bought the first year we were married, or the year G was born.

What bothers me most of all about this is that it's my own fault. I'm not a trusting person usually, and I should have known better than to let someone else be responsible for anything I cared about. I did know better, but at the time, I was tired and distracted and this relative was offering to take care of things, so I let him, and I got burned. I'm not even angry at him, just at myself, the same way I'm angry at myself for moving into this house that we now may have to leave, all because of another person's irresponsibility. P would be shocked that I'm in this position--he said to me once, "You don't trust anyone at all, do you?" and I said "No one but you." I should have stuck by that credo. I should have rescued our possessions as soon as possible instead of waiting. I should have done a lot of things, but I didn't. I won't make that mistake again.

A new wrinkle

The last 10 days or so have been quite interesting, and when I say "interesting," I don't mean interesting, I mean interesting.

Without going into too much detail, there's some family drama brewing, drama that, while it has nothing to do with me and G personally, will most likely lead to us having to move because the house we live in (rented from a relative) is going to be put on the market for sale. I'm trying really hard not to be bitter about this, especially because the relative who owns the house is also having her hand forced and isn't to blame, but so far I haven't been very successful. The realtor is coming over tomorrow morning to inspect the property and take photos, and I feel bitter every time I think about it. The idea of having photos taken seems very invasive, but I imagine it's nothing in comparison to how invasive it's going to feel when potential buyers are trooping through here, opening cupboard doors and testing the shower head. I'm sure I wouldn't mind if I owned the place and were selling it for my own benefit, but I don't, and the whole thing is harshing my mellow in a most unpleasant way.

I do have to give a shout-out to the B complex "stress support" vitamins I started taking when all this first went down: I started sleeping better and feeling less on edge almost immediately, and I'm still much calmer than you would expect under the circumstances. I freely admit that it may be a placebo effect, but I really don't care if it is. Vitamins certainly won't do me any harm, and $14.99 is a small price to pay for being able to keep it all together during a trying time. We'll see how well they work once the house actually sells and I have to find a new place to live, then pack up and move all our stuff for the third time in five years. Wherever we end up, we'll have to stay there for a while, because I'm running out of friends who are willing to keep lugging my 500-pound entertainment center and 39388404 boxes of books from one home to another.

House of cards

This school year began with high drama when, a week before the first day, I was informed that the city-run afterschool program had been cut for budget reasons. I had personally called the city's administrative offices the day before and received confirmation that yes, the program was on and would move ahead while the school tried to raise money to help pay for it, so it came as a surprise to me when I received a terse e-mail from the school that essentially said You are all fucked. Actually, I sort of wish they had just come out and said that. It would have added some much-needed humor to the situation.

I called the YMCA, which was the alternate suggestion provided in the e-mail, and was given a price quote for ~12.5 hours a week of "care" that made my head explode. After I'd picked up the fragments of my skull, I spent the next three days worrying and coming up with Rube Goldberg-esque plans for transporting G the two miles from her school to our house. I knew she would be fine on her own once she was safely at home with the door locked, but getting her there, in the absence of school buses, seemed next to impossible. Then, the Friday before school started, I got an automated message on my voice mail - actually half a message, as the first part had been cut off - that retracted Tuesday's e-mail and confirmed what the city had told me in the first place.

If you're imagining me being jerked around like a marionette on a string, that's more or less how I felt by that point. Hey, it's okay! I enjoy stress and uncertainty! They keep life interesting!

Only not.

Anyway, this experience highlighted just how much I rely on the routines I've developed over the last four years. I frequently get told that "you make single parenting look easy," and maybe that's true, but if so, it's not because I'm some sort of superwoman - it's because I have systems in place to keep everything running more or less smoothly. Throw a wrench into one of those systems, and instantly I become that single mother, the flaky, unreliable one who makes people roll their eyes and say uncharitable things under their breath. I've sometimes found myself in conversations where people say those things to me about other single mothers they know, and I always tell them to have a little more sympathy, because I know I'm just one broken-down car or canceled afterschool program away from being in the same position - and that's with only one child to tend to. I can't imagine what it would be like if I had two or three or four.

Seriously?

10 a.m. - G has a dentist appointment because a loose baby tooth has started breaking and coming out in pieces. In the waiting room, women in khakis and T-shirts, each with two or three little kids in tow, look askance at me in my work clothes with a gangly teenage-looking girl who appears years too old to be visiting "Dr. Sarah's Jungle of Smiles," even though she really isn't. After a few minutes, we're called to the back, where our kind and lovely dentist determines that the baby tooth has sat in G's mouth so long past its time that it's basically a hollow shell; also that the gum has started growing up around it. I pay her $60 to pull it out with a massive pair of pliers, and then we leave.

12 p.m. - I arrive at P's mother's house to drop G off with his aunt, who also lives there and is supposed to be keeping her for the afternoon. Auntie isn't there (later, I find out she had to go to jury duty), but Auntie's husband is, and looks startled by our sudden appearance. No one told him we were coming. Argh! I ask him if he's going to be home for a few hours and he says he is, so I say, "Well, I've got to go to work, she's already had lunch, you'll hardly know she's here, see-you-later-bye" and flee, feeling a little guilty about imposing on him. But only a little.

1-4 p.m. - My shoes, which I've owned for at least five years and which have never hurt before, begin to rub a blister on my left foot that ends up requiring a Band-Aid.

5 p.m. I pick G up again, and we go out to dinner because it's hot and I have no desire to cook anything. The restaurant we go to offers make-your-own s'mores, which I almost never let G get, but I figure after the morning's dental trauma and her afternoon of boredom, she deserves a treat. We're sitting there talking and toasting marshmallows when the tabletop fire pit spits a spark directly into my eye. If you've never had a spark in your eye, here's a bit of advice: Don't. It will sting and burn and make your eye water like a spigot, until your other eye finally starts to water in sympathy and you think you've gone blind, which is not a good finish to any meal.

7 p.m. At home, I enjoy my only triumph of the day when I successfully install a new toilet seat in my bathroom. I may have a blister on my foot and a second-degree burn on my eyeball, but I am aces with a screwdriver. Maybe tomorrow I'll take the hinges off all the cupboard doors, just because I can.

Or maybe not.

Tea and sympathy

This morning, while closing my bathroom door, I somehow managed to catch the big toe on my left foot in the gap between the door and the tile. It might have been slightly less excruciating if my toe had been chopped off with a hatchet, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I yelled and said AAARGH and FUCK and a lot of other less-than-ladylike things, and then I hobbled downstairs, still wincing and making pained hissing noises, because I wanted to tell someone about my agony and G was the only one to tell.

"I hurt my foot," I said as I limped into her bedroom.

She glanced up from her Wii game.

"What happened to it?"

"I shut the bathroom door on it. It really hurts a lot. I'm surprised it isn't bleeding."

"Your toenail polish is scraped," she observed, and then she said:

"Can you get me some cold pizza? I'm hungry."

Thanks a lot, kid. I'm bowled over by your concern!

And yet when she saw a kitten with an injured-looking paw on our patio a few months ago, she was in tears begging me to catch it and take it to the vet. Apparently you need four legs and a tail to get any sympathy around here.

Pass the jam please

Every year since P died, one of the things that's bothered me most is not having any presents to open on Christmas morning. It's not as if I need anyone to buy me presents - if I see a book or a knickknack or a pair of earrings I like, I usually buy it for myself then and there. I have enough perfume and shower gel to scent half the city; my kitchen is overflowing with pans and gadgets I hardly use; and if I want to watch movies I can borrow them from Netflix. Still, I never fail to feel a little sorry for myself as I sit on the floor, bleary-eyed and empty-handed, watching G tear the shiny paper off her gifts. I love seeing her happy and excited, of course; that undercurrent of dejection is an instinctual thing, programmed sometime in my own childhood, when being overlooked by Santa would have been as bad as having your birthday forgotten.

Last year I did get a present a little later on Christmas Day, while we were visiting a relative's house. It was a variety pack of Knotts Berry Farm jam, wrapped, but with no ribbon or tag, and it was very clearly one of those gifts that people buy in bulk and keep on hand in case someone turns up unexpectedly and they haven't got anything to give them. The funny part was that I was actually pleased to receive it, because hey! A package to unwrap! If you've ever seen the Peanuts strip where Schroeder berates Violet for giving Charlie Brown a used Valentine, and then Charlie Brown interrupts him and says "I'll take it," well, that was me and my box of jam.

So, with Christmas a week away, I'm mentally preparing myself for yet another holiday in which the best I can hope for is nine different flavors of jam. (It was good jam, by the way. I just finished eating it all a couple of months ago.) I could buy myself a present and wrap it up, of course. I wouldn't even have to spend my own money, since my mother sent me a check earlier this week with instructions to buy something for myself and G. But it wouldn't be the same feeling as getting up in the morning and having surprise packages to open, with presents inside that were chosen just for me. Spoiled? Selfish? Maybe, but there it is.

Lice and how to find them

One thing I've learned from the Lice Crisis is that lice are not as easy to spot as you might think. I brush G's hair for her every morning and help her rinse it in the shower, and I still didn't notice the little buggers until they were practically doing the samba on her scalp, mostly because I didn't know what to look for.

A few real-life friends have asked me this week how they would know if their child had lice, and since I've become an unwilling expert, I thought I would share a few tips for finding and removing them:

- Lice themselves are tiny, fast-moving brown bugs with a lot of legs. You probably won't see them in regular lamplight or indoor light. I finally found them on G by looking at her head under bright morning sunlight.

- Nits are tiny sesame-seed-shaped objects that are attached to one side of a single strand of hair. They're either yellowish brown or white/clear, depending on whether they've hatched or not. You'll find most of them around the hairline, especially behind the ears and at the back of the neck, but they're not limited to those locations, so be sure to look everywhere when you're picking.

- Nits are also glued onto the hair and either have to be combed out or pulled out individually with your fingernails. If you can brush it off or blow it away, it's not a nit.

- Plastic nit combs are crap. Buy a metal one. I got one from CVS that has two interchangeable combs, an attached magnifying glass, a pair of tweezers and a cleaning brush for about $10. I also bought the electronic RobiComb, but it only works on live lice and I'd already eradicated all of those by the time I started using it, so I can't vouch for how well it works.

- Combing will get a lot of the nits out, but nowhere near all. To get the stragglers, you have to pick. Make sure you actually verify that the nit has been removed (you can wipe it off on a wet paper towel) because sometimes they'll slide all the way down to the end of the hair strand and then stick there. Conditioner helps with this part.

- If your kid has thick hair like G does, you will need to section it off with clips while you pick. I've been clipping it up the way hairstylists do at salons and working on the underneath layers first, then the top ones.

Moving on, I only found four nits during this evening's session, and all but one of them were dead/empty, so I think we're winning the war, or at least this skirmish. I'm pretty sure I'll never use the terms "nitpicking" or "going through it with a fine-tooth comb" quite so blithely again, though. And given what I do for a living, I use them both a lot.

You dirty rotten louse

I got so paranoid about having caught G's lice that yesterday I did the smothering treatment on myself as a preventative measure, only with olive oil because a reader had mentioned that it was less smelly and easier to wash out than mayonnaise. I tell you what, there is nothing better for your hair than saturating it in extra-virgin olive oil for two hours. I may or may not have lice, but my hair looks like a goddamn shampoo commercial. So soft! So shiny! So smooth!

In other news, I've discovered that nothing makes you feel more like a primate than sitting and picking vermin out of your little ape's hair. We've done almost 10 hours of picking over the last three days, and I'm still finding a few nits every time I inspect her head, although there are very few now and a lot of them are the dead, empty ones. She's been remarkably patient about this, especially considering how much she hates to have her hair brushed or even touched, and I've rewarded her patience lavishly with ice-cream cones and video games and new DVDs. She's watched Shaun the Sheep: Sheep on the Loose about 15 times since we bought it on Tuesday. Hey, whatever gets us through this, right?

As I wash and pick and comb and vacuum, I'm torn between wishing that P were here to help (and to check my hair for me, OMG) and being glad for his sake that he isn't. I'm pretty clean, but P was almost pathological about it, especially toward the end of his life when it was one of the few things left he could control, and I don't think he would have been able to bear the horror of lice on his child or in his home. He would either have made himself sick with mopping and scrubbing, or he would have done something crazy and desperate like dunking G's head in kerosene, or both. I'd still like to have him here for the emotional support, though. I'm really a very selfish person at heart. Sigh.

Anyway, I have about a million more loads of laundry left to do, I need to vacuum out the inside of the car, and I'll be doing head checks every day for the next two weeks, but I think we may be past the worst of it. I called my mother this evening and begged her to come over on Saturday and inspect me for nits, and she said she would; if that's all clear, hopefully we can resume some semblance of normal life soon. I'm so ready.

I'm in hell

G has been scratching her head a lot for the last week or so, but repeated checks of her scalp revealed nothing until today, when the bright morning sunlight clearly showed BUGS. Yes. Lice. We dodged the bullet back in May when she was exposed at a Girl Scout event, but her friend "Jenny" had them a few days before school ended, and I imagine that's where she got them. Aaargh.

Anyway, cue me calling in to work and then coating G's head in mayonnaise, scrubbing the mayo out in the shower, spending THREE HOURS going through her thick, thick hair with a nit comb, and then stripping every sheet, blanket, rug and pillow from her room to be washed. We're both exhausted, the cats are traumatized and the bathroom smells like a bowl of potato salad that's been left too long in the sun, but on the plus side, the itching that was tormenting her this morning is completely gone.

As for me, I keep feeling as if things with too many legs are crawling all over me, but I think it's psychosomatic because G and I don't share brushes or towels or any of the things that might be vectors for infestation, and also I just had my hair professionally colored on Saturday, which would have killed any creepy-crawlies dead. I wish I could get someone to inspect my head, just to make me feel 100-percent safe, but it's really not something I would ask a friend, even a close one, to do. The dreaded lice check is pretty much a job that only your mother can or should perform.

Here it comes

Friday night is the big annual Fifties-themed sock hop at G's school. She's excited and has already planned her outfit. I'm looking forward to it with all the enthusiasm I would reserve for another root canal. This is because unlike other events, where it's pretty common for one parent to bring the kid(s), the sock hop is a family night, which means that the few people I know well enough to chit-chat with will be with their families, leaving me to languish in total boredom while G alternates between running around with her friends and appearing to announce, "Mom, I need money for popcorn/glow bracelets/root beer floats/raffle tickets/a live raccoon." (OK, I'm kidding about that last one, but if they had a live raccoon booth she would totally be all over it.) I don't mind sitting by myself per se, but three hours is a long time to watch people do the Cha Cha Slide and eavesdrop while they gossip about other people I don't know. I wonder if it would look too weird if I brought a book to read.

How have I managed to have a child in the same school for five years without connecting with any of the other parents, you ask? Beats me. There's certainly a network of parents who know each other, drive each others' kids around, socialize outside school, etc., but I'm not part of it. We went on a big group trick-or-treating expedition last Halloween because G got invited by a friend whose mother is part of that network, and no one except the friend's mother said two words to me all evening. I think it's partly because we don't live in the neighborhood immediately surrounding the school, where most of these relationships seem to flourish; partly because I work full-time and am not at the school during the day; and partly because I don't have much in common with them other than the fact that our kids go to school together.

I know if P were around the situation would be different -- he was the sort of person who could talk to anyone, and if I walked away from him for five minutes in the video store, I'd come back to find him embroiled in a deep discussion with a total stranger about the merits of Jackie Chan vs. Chow Yun-Fat. But, he's gone and I'm crap at small talk, so here we are. It doesn't help that I don't watch TV or follow sports -- he used to say that those were the two golden topics if you wanted to talk to people you didn't know, and from conversations I've overheard, he was right. He also said that most people thought I was standoffish and didn't like them because I didn't jump in and chat, and he was probably right about that too. It isn't true, though; I don't dislike very many people at all. Well, except for those beeyotches from last Halloween. I have a special frowny face for them. Here it is: >:-<

If I only could ...

... chaperone field trips and help with class parties the way G wants me to.

... not feel guilty about staying home with her when she's sick.

... meet her after school with a plate of cookies.

... never miss work because it's a school holiday.

... or because I have to wait for a repairman.

... or for half a dozen other reasons.

... always get home before dark.

... serve balanced meals that we eat at the table, not in front of the TV.

... skip doing errands and go to the park on Saturday.

... see a movie in the theater that is not rated PG.

... do a better job at everything.

... be in two places at once.

... travel in time and space.

... change reality.

If I can't swim after forty days

When last we spoke, my dishwasher had broken, followed straight away by a mysterious backup in the kitchen sink. Badness.

So for the next couple of days after that, the sink kept filling up with hot, greasy water and food debris at random times, prompting me to call the management office twice and ask for someone to come out and look at it. It had drained and was empty on Thursday morning, but when G and I got home from her school fundraiser on Thursday night, it had not only backed up again, but spilled over and flooded the kitchen.

At that point I threw every towel we own down on the floor and called the maintenance emergency number. About half an hour later, the repair guy arrived, somewhat grudgingly (WTF? Is a flood not an emergency? It was last time I checked.) He discovered that either the upstairs or next-door neighbor's garbage disposal was clogged, and their rinse water and ground-up food was coming up in our sink. Ugh! He then disappeared for about 10 minutes and in his absence, the sink made a horrible sucking, gurgling sound and drained for good, leaving behind a mess that looked exactly like stomach contents -- remnants of shredded chicken and rice and some gooey yellow stuff and a sort of red grease. Double ugh!

I spent the next hour and a half scrubbing this glurge out of the sink and off the counter top, throwing away water-damaged items, sopping up standing water on the floor and in the cupboard under the sink, and mopping the tile, gagging all the time because it was just so gross. My own ground-up leftovers would have been bad enough, but this felt like a stranger had strolled in, puked in the kitchen, and left me to clean up the mess.

Anyway, I finally got everything to an acceptable level of cleanliness, but that wasn't the end of my troubles. I'd noticed that the carpet around the edges of the kitchen felt damp, but it wasn't soaked, so I wasn't too worried. Well, apparently "damp" is just as bad as "soaked," because when G and I got home on Friday evening, I opened the front door and was nearly knocked over by the smell of mold that blasted out. I've spent the last two days airing and drying and cleaning, but it still reeks -- downstairs worse than upstairs, but you can smell it everywhere. In addition to the runoff from the tile, I'm fairly sure that water seeped through the dividing wall between the kitchen and the living room and wet the carpet behind the big armoire that holds our television. I can't move the armoire to find out (last time we moved, it took three or four men to shift it) but it feels pretty clammy back there.

The weird thing is that I've been plagued by water problems in the last two places I've lived. In the triplex where we lived with P, we had to get the pots and pans out to catch drips every time it rained, the bathroom ceiling collapsed on me because of a leak in the standpipe, and two days after G and I moved out, a pipe under the kitchen sink burst and flooded the living room with 40 gallons of boiling water. Since we've lived here, the tub in G's bathroom has developed a leak that poured down the outside wall of the building, the hall ceiling has flooded and sagged from air-conditioner overflow, and now this. I don't really believe in ghosts, but if I did, I'd be wondering whether some poor drowned person was trying to send me a message!

Pop quiz

1. How have G and I both managed to fall spectacularly down the stairs, independent of each other, in the last 5 days?

A. Clumsiness is hereditary.
B. The cats are greasing the steps while we're away.
C. A ghost pushed us both from behind.
D. We have carpet gnomes.

2. Why do I now have a sore knee, an aching lower back, and a bruise the size of a tennis ball on my butt, while G is totally unscathed?

A. She's young.
B. I'm old.
C. I didn't try to break my fall because I was carrying my laptop and had to hold it up out of harm's way as I fell. (Priorities!)
D. All of the above

3. How long will it take for the bruise to go away?

A. Two days
B. Two weeks
C. Two months
D. I'm scarred for life.

4. How have I been treating my pain?

A. Lying in bed and watching Doctor Who.
B. Eating lots of cheese and chocolate.
C. Not exercising.
D. All of the above

Brace yourself

Unlike most people who find themselves without a partner at this time of year, I'm not all that bothered by Valentine's Day. P and I were of the "every day is Valentine's Day" school of thought: we did nice things for each other all year long, so there were no great expectations attached to that day in particular. We'd get each other cards and maybe a small gift, but neither of us could have cared less about diamond jewelry, long-stemmed roses and expensive restaurants.

The thing that's worrying me about V-Day is not that I'm going to be alone (in fact, I won't be alone, as G and I have plans to see The Spiderwick Chronicles that night), but that it's likely to lead to the dreaded situation where I have to tell someone who doesn't know it that P is dead. This is an ongoing problem at work, where we keep getting new people who see the family photos at my desk and assume, logically enough, that P is around. I can easily see myself having this conversation before the week is over:

Innocent Bystander: What are you and your husband doing for Valentine's Day?
Me: Well, actually, we're not doing anything because he died two years ago.
IB (shocked and embarrassed): OMG!

Or, there's this equally unpleasant option:

IB: What are you and your husband doing for Valentine's Day?
Me: Nothing.
IB (thinking that P must be a real jerk): Oh.

The last time I dropped the "he's dead" bomb on someone (I thought I'd slipped it into the conversation very casually, but apparently not), the poor woman I told was so mortified that I ended up feeling a lot worse for her than I did for myself. I can explain what happened pretty matter-of-factly at this point, just as I could discuss his illness in clinical terms when he was alive -- it's the way people look at me, as if they think I'm going to fall apart right in front of them, that makes it so awkward. I really don't want to go there again, but I'm not sure how to avoid it. Sometimes I wish you could still wear a black armband to signify that someone in your family had died. It would make things much easier.

In no danger of wasting away

For the last two months, I've been doing 30-40 minutes of cardio 5 times per week, plus weights 3 times per week. While I haven't been dieting per se, I've also been more careful about what I eat -- more fruit and vegetables, fewer cookies and chips. And I've lost a grand total of ...

Three pounds.

Good grief.

On the bright side, weighing three pounds less than I did is better than weighing three pounds more. And my overall health and fitness have definitely improved: climbing the stairs at work used to feel like summiting Everest, and now I can do it easily. Also, it's February, and I haven't yet had the plague that traditionally fells me sometime in December, just in time for Christmas. These are all good things. But still ... three pounds? After all that work?

Stupid middle-aged metabolism.

It's not that I hate myself because I weigh more than X number of pounds, where X = some arbitrary number between "more than a supermodel" and "less than I weighed when I was 9 months pregnant." My current weight isn't terrible; in fact, it's (barely) within the normal range for my height. But it makes me uncomfortable, and more importantly, it makes me not feel like me. The self-image that I carry around in my head is of me weighing X number of pounds, where X = "about what I weighed when G was a toddler, plus a pound or two because I'm older now." That's not what I see when I pass a mirror or look at a photo, and the disconnect bothers me. Losing P was enough of an identity crisis in itself; I don't need to add looking different, and not in a good way, on top of that.

I was mulling all this over last night while pedaling away on the stationary bike (mmm, irony -- almost as delicious as cake) and I thought that really, any sort of angst over appearance is foolish when you look at it from a historical perspective. If I were the age I am now in, say, the fifteenth century -- assuming I hadn't perished in childbirth or been carried off by typhoid -- I would have been pregnant as many as 20 times, experienced life-threatening and possibly disfiguring diseases, and have lost several teeth thanks to poor nutrition and dental hygiene. I'd certainly have no access to sunscreen or hair dye, except maybe henna. In short, I would not only most likely be a grandmother by now, I'd look the part too. Here I am, fretting because my pants are a size 10 instead of a size 6, when by the standards of our ancestors I'm preternaturally youthful and totally hot! Silly me!

I still want to lose the weight, though.

It puts the "work" in "workout"

Four years ago, I bought a stationary bike, which P promptly nicknamed "The Bull" because its handlebars look like a pair of horns.

The Bull:


An actual bull:


At our old place, The Bull lived in the walk-in closet in our bedroom (P would often open the closet door and say "Hello, toro!") and I used it all the time and stayed fit. When we moved here, there was no room for The Bull, so it got shoved out on the patio with everything else that wouldn't fit inside. And I gained 20 pounds.

(You'll have to imagine some before and after photos here, because heck if I'm going to post any.)

I've been meaning to find a home for The Bull indoors and get back into the exercise habit, but I've been busy with other things. On top of that, The Bull has been outside for 16 months, slowly developing a layer of grime and occasionally sitting in the pool of murky water that forms on the patio every time it rains (the management claims there are drainage holes in the patio wall, but they lie), and I was too lazy to clean it. But today, I saw some marvelously awful Polaroids of myself sporting those extra 20 pounds -- 19 of which appear to be in my face -- and realized I couldn't put it off any longer.

So when I got home from work, I dragged The Bull into the living room, and after G went to bed, I used a LOT of towels and a LOT of hot water to remove all the dirt, dust, cobwebs, leaves, pine needles and other junk from it. I dried it off, and I heaved it up the stairs to my bedroom. And when I was finally finished with all that, I was so tired that I had to eat a bowl of cereal and lie down.

You know you're really out of shape when moving your exercise equipment is all the workout you can stand.

Oh, my aching head

Well, it's not actually my aching head, it's G's. P and I both had severe migraines as children -- mine started when I was 4, his at around 8 or 9 -- and so we always suspected it was only a matter of time before G developed them too. Sure enough, they kicked in the year she turned 6 (we did take her to the doctor at the time, but only to confirm what we already knew it was), and now she gets one every couple of months. Tonight is one of those nights, and we've already been through the vomiting stage and are now on to the sleeping-in-a-dark-room stage. Poor girl.

Fire update

Last night: zero smoke and smell.

This morning: eerie red sun; thick, choking smoke, ash flying through the air like snow.

The wind has clearly changed. On the plus side, it's a cooler ocean breeze instead of a hot blast out of the canyons. On the minus side, I feel like an extra in The Last Days of Pompeii.

There's still no danger to us beyond headaches and coughing from the bad air, but it's very unpleasant. It could be so much worse, though. I'm concerned for my mother's friends and their grandchildren, who had to leave their house in Arrowhead and are staying with her for the duration, and also for a former co-worker who lives in the mountains and was prepared to evacuate the last time I heard.

While I was watching some of the news coverage yesterday, I realized that humans are misled. We fool ourselves and each other into thinking that we rule the planet -- that we're important and meaningful -- and to each other, we are. But to nature, we aren't one whit more significant than the cougars or the raccoons or the eagles or the ants. Nature doesn't discriminate. The ancient redwood forest and the shrubs in your front yard are both fodder for the fire. The giant wave sweeps away people and animals together. The same sky arches over great disasters and tiny triumphs.

We are so small.