I'd hoped to post again before being berated for my blogstapation, but alas, I was a day late and a dollar short. I usually post in my office when work gets slow, and that just hasn't happened in a while. In fact, I haven't been in my office for a while. In fact, when I got back to my office, I found a squatter asleep under the desk. I woke him up and he yelled at me to get out of his house and stop stealing his shoes. Don't worry, I set him up in a phone booth. It's more spacious anyway.
Here's a recap on the last little while. Feel free to read it in several sittings and pretend these entries were written on different days.
Fast Times at Culinard High
Chris started his last semester of culinary school this week. It's the one where the students actually run the real live white-tablecloth restaurant that real live people go to eat a five-course meal. Anyway, the poor guy has to get up at 5:00 a.m. every morning to be there at 7:30. He's already been yelled at by some classically trained British fag who thinks he's Gordon Ramsay. And it looks like he'll have an average of two days a week out of the four he works in the kitchen that he'll have to come home, change clothes, and run to the job he actually gets paid to do to work until 2 a.m. This will go on for ten weeks of his life that he anticipates will knock about five years right off the top of his life expectancy. Pray for the dude.
Do-It-Yourself
This past weekend, I felt myself falling into a funk that I experience on many weekends, especially Saturdays, wherein I have nothing specific to do and am all alone in the wooden box I call home for hours on end. This time, I pledged to not let myself waste any more time on the destructive cycle of getting so bored that I don't feel like doing anything which makes me more bored, etc. I consider this a massive character flaw on my part (although my therapist assures me it's not) and last weekend I decided to challenge it to a duel. I pulled all the living room furniture into the middle of the room, laid down a dropcloth, made the two separate obligatory trips to Lowe's that occur whenever home improvement work is to be undertaken, and got to work painting trim and caulking corners. This is a little chore that was left half-done at the time we moved in and that, predictably, we neglected to finish once we were settled in. It has bugged me every day of my life since then. Why, I ask you, why live with that? So I painted, and I painted, and I painted. Then, when all the world was white with a glorious new coat of paint, I looked overhead and saw that it was not yet good.
No crown moulding.
Okay, I don't know how many of you out there have attempted to install crown moulding, but it's not an intuitive process. Not even for guys. Not even for guys who are very handy and industrious. It is a learned skill, and that's all there is to it. So watching me try to analytically break down the elements of the proper cut was...well, there should've been popcorn. Mom was there trying to help, and she brought Mario with her. For those of you who don't know Mario, he works with our company and he is the handiest guy ever. He's also the coolest. A lot more projects around the duplex would've been left undone had he not been there to help. So the three of us, three reasonably intelligent people, one of whom is a whiz at all things utilitary, none of whom are strangers to "projects", end up sitting there at the end of the day with splinters and shards of improperly cut pieces of $1 a foot pre-finished moulding. Now let me put this in perspective. We all work in a business in which our talents are often underrated, because it's the kind of service people often think they can perform themselves. This is a notion we fight against, because we believe that our talents should be recognized, that our skills should be seen for the societal necessity that they are. At that moment, we looked at each other and saw a room full of hypocrites.
Ultimately, it took four more days and the collaborative power of six individuals to essentially nail some boards to the wall. I will never again think little of a man who is good with a miter saw.
Cat Blog
Our little girl kitten, Peanut, has experienced a rite of passage. No, not like that. She got herself stuck on our roof for the first time. We don't even let them out much since they're not snipped yet, but sometimes when I'm sitting outside, I'll let them go with me and play in the yard. Last time I let them out, Peanut shimmied up the tree that grows right next to our front porch before I could stop her. Do cats just live in the "now" or do they lack any sense of foresight? This happened right before I was about to put them inside and go to class, where I had a test to take. And the only ladder nearby was locked up in the garage that my landlords, who were already gone to work, had the key to. Luckily, she found her way down before she made me late. She didn't stick the landing, but it was her first time.
Symbology
Chris and I got married in a field outside my grandparents' house. We cut down some young sweetgum trees and made a little gazebo type thing out of them. It was one of my favorite makeshift touches we added to the ceremony site. When the big day was over, we left them there and we never really got around to taking them down, mostly 'cause we liked it. Yesterday, I drove by the field on my way home from work and I noticed that one of the trees had started sprouting new growth. I'm not talking about vines growing on it or anything. I mean, there were little branches around the top of it with bright new leaves. I know there are some plants that you can cut off a stem and plant it and Voila! New plant. But a tree? With no root system? Maybe it's the last gasp of a fallen plant with a still semi-functional vascular system, but it was pretty and it made me smile.
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