The Desert Mermaid

Dang, my hands are getting a bit ripped up lately. It's a sign of a lot of entertaining myself, though.

Causes of hand-rip-uppery:

-CAUSE #1: This here bird. Lucy's friendly and cheerful and loves hanging out with me, but sometimes she does take bites out of my fingers. I've managed to convince her not to do it as much, but she still does in certain situations.

The annoying thing is that the best way to break them of the habit is to not snatch your fingers away, because that's what the bird wants. Instead you're supposed to hold your finger there or even push into it, which will throw the bird off-balance both physically and mentally. And that takes some damn willpower when that hooked bill is pinching with nutcracking force.

But we're having a good time other than that. I have also taught her not to be afraid of cardboard paper towel rolls because they contain treats. And she had a nice bath in a dish last weekend, but since then she's been less interested in the bath dish but keeps bathing in her water dish. So she's keeping clean.

She likes NPR. She will be an erudite bird.


-CAUSE #2: Been cooking a lot. I'm eating quite well (Lucy likes lasagna, too), and most of the dishes I've made are pretty good. However, we will not speak of the attempt to make corn dogs ever again. Turns out hot oil is hot.


-CAUSE #3: Kittens who still don't know how to retract their claws. I probably won't even feel completely at ease having a bird and I'm going to bring a pair of tiny kitties into my life. I am an idiot.

But we did have a nice day where the neighbors took the kittens out so they could romp on the lawn. Which was rather hilarious when our party attracted a whole bunch of neighbor kids. The poor kittens had started out exploring the concept of grass, but ended up exploring the concept of getting constantly picked up and juggled by six kids aged 4-11.


-CAUSE #4: Trimming grapevines. We shoulda done this months ago, but there was this whole MOVING thing going on. So I had to do it myself, though one of Dad's former patients, who works at a vineyard, came to show me how. (He got a pretty alarmed look on his face when he saw the 45-degree angle at which the vines are set up. Life on a mountainside has its disadvantages. But I enjoyed the trimming--it's kind of meditative.

Also, it turns out I am a wizard. I trimmed half of them, and then later that day it suddenly got cold and snowed. A few days later, it was springy again! So I trimmed the rest, and then THREE FUCKING FEET of snow promptly crashed into my house.

So apparently I have the power to summon snowstorms by trimming grapevines. Sure, it's very specific, but still. I AM ELSA. BOW DOWN BEFORE ME!


-CAUSE #5: Eczema.

No, seriously, that's it. Eczema is a plague upon me. Such is my life.


In conclusion, yes, I am having a good time, except for the eczema. All I have to do is buy some Band-Aids.

Space Place Job has me jumping through hoops before I can start working there. They're hoping sometime next week. In the meantime I get to sit around and build up anxiety about it. I'm not used to having somewhere to be five days a week, and the thought of doing that is alarming, especially since I have to get up in the--GUH--morning on each of those days.

The biggest thing is anticipating something without having experienced it, though. I'm terrible at that. So if you'll excuse me, I'm just gonna sit here and worry for a few more days.

Hoo, busy weekend!

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It turns out a pitched roof doesn't do much good if it connects to a flat awning over one's deck. The entire back half of the thing is sagging dangerously, and it's going to take money--a whole lotta spending money!--to fix it. In a stunning development, our homeowners' insurance is actualy going to pay for some of it. And as long as they're rebuilding anyway, they're going to throw in some skylights for free! Maybe the lighting in my house will actually improve!

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Went to a Passover seder this weekend at Kate'n'Matt's. I had never been to a seder before. I am really not the sort you would normally invite to a seder unless you are exceptionally laid-back. Fortunately, Kate'n'Matt and their other Jewish buddy are exceptionally laid-back, so it was in the nature of a fun dinner party with some tradition tossed in. Also it was vegetarian, and Kate is a great vegetarian cook. Once we got to the part where we can actually eat, it was delicious.

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Finally got some new soil worked into my garden and planted some beets and radishes and carrots, with the assistance of an enthusiastic three-ish-year-old neighbor who has been acting as local anecdotal evidence of the existence of Einstein Syndrome. Until a few months ago the little guy only communicated with squeaks and shrieks, when most two-to-three-year-olds are progressing from two-word telegraphic speech to full sentences. Then one day apparently his brain was all "Hey: WORDS!" and suddenly he went from little squeals to being full on motormouth. He narrated the whole time he scooped dirt and planted seeds and watered the garden and, I think, suggested mixing concrete in with the dirt to make a skyscraper. I ... I may have created a monster.

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So, yes, it's lovely and summery out, and it is marred only by the fact that our next-door neighbors are AWFUL dog owners. They like to leave their stupid fucking pit bull* out on the back porch so that he can launch into a thousand years of barking every time something startles him, such as when a stiff breeze blows through the backyard or a moth lands on the side of the house. You would think this would be an easily solved problem--"Hey, your dog barks his fool head off whenever you're gone, here, I even printed out some tips on how to train him to not do that, thanks"--but these neighbors, like so many bad dog owners, are also terrible people, and a casual suggestion that maybe they should actually pay some attention to their dog results in DECLARATIONS OF WAR. Do not get me STARTED on the Saga Of This Goddamn Fool Dog. It's a tale retold many times in bad sitcoms. I wish it would stay in them.

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But it is so NICE out! I may just head out and climb a tree. Maybe take along my notebook, get this stubborn installment of Scatterstone worked out (it's a great installment, so by god I gotta get it RIGHT!). Or maybe I'll just noodle around on my ocarina. If that dog's gonna bark, I might as well give him something to bark ABOUT.


*SPECIAL NOTE TO PIT BULL APOLOGISTS: I am sure there are lovely pit bulls in the world! I expect they have responsible owners and are themselves the very essence of dog urbanity! There are certainly pit bulls out there with intelligence and poise and the ability to not bark like incessant car alarms! THIS PIT BULL IS NOT ONE OF THEM.

Hey, cool--just got a callback on a part-time job at another library!

Good to know those resumes I've been sending into cyberspace are getting somewhere, anyway.

Oh Dear Optimus Christ, Why The Hell Is This In The Book Drop?

With your host, the Library Aide!

Our two contestants today:

1. It’s probably evidence in some nefarious crime or other, for pretty obvious reasons … say hello to a license plate!
2. They were tied into rings holding a multiple-DVD case closed. A round of applause for a pair of what I’m really hoping were balloons!

All right, so, we’ve met our contestants, now YOU be the judge … which is more ominous?

Y’all, this has been a WEIRD damn week at the Liberry. If my story shows up on an episode of Law’n’Order: We Totally Made This Up And Did Not Rip It From The Headlines In Any Way, I recommend not being surprised.

So! It seems y'all think I should write in to Maxwell P. Mormonator III about seeing if he has any spare job lying around.

I have to admit, I knew the answer already. Why did I ask you, then? Well, I needed y'all to kick me in the pants to actually do it, partially because I am the world's greatest procrastinator, and partially because I'm afraid he will remember me and have a job opening, and then I'd have to, y'know, do WORK.

On the plus side, it beats the hell out of Dad's Office Of Despair as a second job. If I get yelled at by one more person with a painkiller habit back pain, I am going to demonstrate, using Dad's old plastic take-apart brain model, exactly where I'm going to insert that refill of oxycontin they're demanding because they just ate their previous refill like it was a tube of M&Ms Minis.

After that, another book-related job seems like a really nice break.

So I kept trying to do some basic exercising—running through forms, jogging in place, whatever—the last few days, and have failed miserably on account of cramps, made worse by the fact that I’m trying out one o’ them menstrual cups I hear the kids going on about. And yet despite the fact that it’s far smaller than the bucket I could probably use,* it has thrown the entire lower end into massive WE GOT MOVIE SIGN pandemonium.

“Well,” thought I, “at least I can do some upper-body stuff, right?”

Basically, what I’m trying to say is, I need to diversify my upper-body repertoire, because after two days of chest fly reps, GODDAMN ARE MY ARMS TIRED. Perhaps I will take tomorrow off from Exercise Time. Pushing book trucks will count as my workout.

Meanwhile, in news from inside my head, I was smoothing out the bumps in a conversation in Doctors! and all of a sudden Ghil had whipped out the space! equivalent of wallet photos of his kids to show the others. What the hell, y’all, I didn’t even know he HAD kids. I mean, sure, they both are rather more of a background presence in his life, but … damn, the things your own characters will keep secret from you if you let ’em.


*And while I appreciate the concept, I’d like to point out that the marketing has the same sort of flaw other hygiene products do, and thus if Ursula Vernon’s concept ever takes off I am so buying Blackbeard the Pirate’s Bucket o’ Blood. ("Yarr, this here high-grade silicon bucket can be swabbed with a tissue an' stowed in a discreet cotton Jolly Roger pouch fer the wench what finds herself a-sailin' the crimson tides.")

I have discovered why so many librarians, when you go to browse the shelves, have a tendency to shoot you looks suggesting they’re about to come after you barking like a territorial dog.

It’s often because they are contemplating coming after you barking like a territorial dog.

I JUST SHELVED THOSE DVDs. It took me an hour and a half to do it, too, because they were all over the place. And I know—I know, do you hear me—that you are not going to put that DVD back in the place you just pulled it from, even if you decide not to check it out. Some unimaginable force, some possessing demon, will cause you to wander out of the DVD section with something family friendly like, say, Captivity or Hostel, and that force will lead you directly to the children’s section, where you’ll drop the DVD into one of the board book bins, probably next to the bin containing the entire Curious George series and also the Esquire issue the mystical forces caused you to pick up earlier.

You will then snag a junior reader and meander over to stick it amongst the Nora Roberts hardbacks.

I used to think that all that Library Education was a bit superfluous. I used to think that, if a person was in a library, it meant they had a nodding acquaintance with books, or, at least, the alphabet.

Guess how fast I’ve been disabused of that notion?

Fortunately, I secretly enjoy putting things back in order again. It just hurts my idealism to realize that other people don’t seem to feel the need for things to be in order.

I love the way cat tails shrink when they’re soaking wet. The sudden loss of apparent mass is hilariously pathetic.

Yes, we bathed the cats today. This is a big deal—our cats are the semi-feral Outdoor Cat type who rarely get dunked—except, you know, in extenuating circumstances. And the circumstances have become extenuating—Fern, especially, has spent pretty much the entire summer just sitting around in dirt. It’s her new hobby. Every time I go outside, somewhere in the front garden I can see a big ball of increasingly filthy fuzz just meatloafin’ around.

We were going to let it go till the end of the month, but Fern’s other hobby is meatloafin’ in the clean laundry hampers.

“I think,” Mom said, stepping out of the washroom with a re-washed stack of jeans, “that we should probably not wait any longer.”

Charlotte got a bath too—while she doesn’t trail around a Pigpen-worthy cloud of debris like her sister, she does like to pull off the heads of small woodland creatures, and that deserves some washing.

Anyway, on Bath Day the drawbacks of irregular schedules is made abundantly clear: perhaps if we bathed them more often they’d be more sanguine about it. As it is, however, there’s a reason we refer to it as “waterboarding the cats.” But with Mom and me on actual cat wrangling duty and Dad taking his job of cat taunting very seriously, we got ’em looking more or less halfway decent.

They’ve spent the rest of the day nursing their injured dignity* and, probably, wondering what they did to incur our wrath. As for me, I’ve spent the rest of mine nursing a couple of gashes down my arm.

Pets are great.


*By composure grooming and, of course, rolling around in the dirt.

It’s driveway-tearing-out day!

For years, our driveway has been “flat.” This means that every time it rains, a giant puddle gathers in the middle of it, leaking into the garage sometimes. Normally this isn’t a big deal, since around here puddles don’t last too long after the rain, but summer’s been soggy this year, and we’re worried about mosquitos spawning, stale water, crocodiles breeding and biting off our feet, etc..

So today, we’re ripping out the driveway and getting a new one with BLACKJACK! And HOOKERS! that will have drainage and be slanted. It’s actually kind of interesting to watch them work.

And if you’re the four-year-old across the street, it’s positively enthralling.

This kid is all about trucks and heavy equipment. He’s got multiple DVDs about garbage trucks and fire trucks and lumberyards, and every single Tonka truck ever made in the last ten years,* and he knows more about trucks than I do.** Little guy has truck wallpaper and construction equipment pajamas and racetracks and bulldozer-themed dishes.

And then a whole bunch of trucks and construction equipment shows up across the street.

It’s a little like if I was four and I found out mermaids lived in the driveway puddle.

Yeah, so he showed up on our porch today in a hard hat with his Sesame Street toolbelt and plastic battery-powered jackhammer, a look of total awe on his face as he watched the driveway guys spreading gravel around and drive big old Black Cats around.

I gotta admit, I sympathize. Engineering is kind of hypnotic, even through my car-blindness. Except, with me, I keep scanning the equipment looking for Autobot or Decepticon symbols, so perhaps it’s not quite the same for me as for the kid.

Lucky him. He’s fine with the stuff that’s actually there.


*The plastic kind. Which are fine and good because they don’t become lumps of rust like our metal ones did, but which are not nearly so satisfyingly, you know, metallic.

**Okay, this isn’t really hard. As I’ve said in the past, I am car-blind. I classify them using the Go, Dog, Go! method: big cars, little cars, black cars, white cars. And that extends to trucks.