The Most Valuable Skill

Outcomes are easy to visualize. Process, less so.

When my parents moved into the house I mostly grew up in (I was two), my mother apparently said "first thing we do is change this kitchen around," which they did 20 years later.

Readers of this blog will remember that in 2007 I wrote an AWFUL LOT about fixing the drainage around our foundation, which we did in 2013.

I know how the launch party for my first novel goes. You are invited.

Yesterday men came and ground our road up into pebbles, then laid the pebbles back down and shaved and graded them and rolled them flat in preparation for laying down new blacktop. (This was to replace the dug-up roadway where the sewer and drainage lines had been installed back in January and February.)

(Yeah, we had the drainage project done in January and February. When it started, it was going to be a ten-day job—because outcomes are easy to visualize—and the ten-day forecast was for temperatures in the 40s. It wasn't a ten-day job. Temperatures were not in the 40s.)

One night a few years ago, around New Year's Day, a logical, disciplined woman who lives with me and I went out for a date and took a notebook and drew a timeline of our lives. Things like college dates, anniversaries, milestone birthdays, retirement &c. (There was an asterisk at the bottom indicating that all future events were speculative and conditional.) Since then each year we've collaborated on a big brown sheet of craft paper capturing all the stuff we want to pay attention to that year. Outcomes, mostly.

But what I love is what happens on that paper throughout the year. It gets rolled up and put on top of the washing machine in the alcove in the front room (we call it the parlor, because fancy). It gets unrolled, usually by me, okay, during stressful moments, just to make sure we're on track. We amend it. Check things off. X out stuff we don't care about anymore, or that we've written off as eggnog-driven delusions. Sometimes we write in interim steps toward a goal. We see the year unscroll. Process.

The thing I'm trying to show myself, when I pause, is that even the goals are process. Late tonight, feeling an urge, I sat down to write something and faced the usual wall of dull facts staring at me about blogging: it's not important; it's not advancing your career; it's not your best work; it's not your novel; your big revelations were captured in English in the early 1800s and by the ancient Greeks before that and by you in 2008; &c.

But, outcomes. The first thing we do is change this kitchen around. Someday I'm going to get that water problem fixed. Gonna publish that book. You can't do an outcome. You can only plug away. That's where I think I meant to be going with this. An easy message that had to be approached obliquely, worried at, whittled down to, before it could be reached: Plugging away is the most valuable skill. I've highlighted it for the kids. Outcomes don't even matter, really, when you plug away.

Said all this before, of course. Nothing new here. Except, in a day or two, someone's going to repave my road. And after, I'll unroll the big sheet of craft paper labeled 2013 and I'll check off "repave." I'll tweak a scene in that manuscript. I'll look back at the sheet and see that "insulation" is next and I'll look at the life timeline and I'll see we're right where we hoped we'd be: alive. Doing things. Plugging away.


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Encounters with the Wildlife

I.
There's a screen in the upstairs bathroom window, but there are these gnats that have evolved to be small enough to fit through its apertures because they derive some unexplained biological benefit from flitting around on the ceiling, just above the wall sconce, until they die and fall into it. There is a local legend that every time the sconce fills up with the carcasses of dead gnats, a doughty Viking warrior who long ago lost an ill-advised bar bet comes back from the dead, trudges into the house and up the stairs, tears the sconce from the wall and drains it in a single hearty draught, burps, places the sconce gently on the edge of the sink, and calls his friend Larry's brother-in-law who "[can] totally rewire shit."

II.
The day before I caught the pike, my brother and I were fishing for pickerel from the canoe. Nearby, the lilypads began moving of their own accord, spreading apart as though making way for an invisible bride walking upon the water. As I crossed myself and shook my charm bracelet, my brother looked UNDER that water and spotted the snapping turtle. We both peered at it in the shallows, remarking that its mighty legs alone would serve as hams, while its garbage-can-lid-sized shell would make an ideal garbage can lid. So imagine a garbage can lid balanced on four hams, but it's, like, swimming. I wish I had a picture, but the snapping turtle consumed the very idea of my camera before I even thought it -- which is just how big that turtle was.

III.
Next day, I caught my first northern pike. You know, you're just sitting there dangling bits of colored plastic decorated with needle-sharp bent metal barbs into the water and a fucking fish bites your shit. When animals attack, right?

IV.
Various deer. Constantly.

V.
Mouse in the grill. Covered that.


VI.
Some roadkill.

VII.
Oh, right, this morning. They've repaved the parking lot at the office park where I work, and this morning there was a security guard on the hot tar, standing watch over a "snapping turtle" -- I have to put it in quotes because of that one I saw in the Adirondacks last week -- as it crossed from god-knows-where to wherever-the-hell.

VIII.
I was tucking my son in tonight when I saw a yellowjacket sitting on his window sill, slowly undulating one antenna. I picked up North Dakota, gathered my courage, and thwapped it. It crackled like evil rice krispies. I still don't know if it was actually already dead, or paralyzed or something, but still, the bravery.

Just then I heard the heavy tread of a Viking on the stairs.

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Taking Out the Garbage

Our household waste goes into a bunch of piles.
  • Compost
  • Glass, plastic, metal
  • Cardboard, paper
  • Back to the diaper service
  • Traditional garbage -- paper towels/tissues, packaging, non-compost food waste
  • The corpses of those who would call us self-righteous and smug

So what's actually great about this is that I get to go outside a lot, where the animals dwell. It's not that we're BETTER than anyone else. Anyone who clogs our landscape -- and the children, and freedom -- with cigarette butts, Schlitz cans, old stuffed animals, etc., is perfectly fine with me. I just like making piles. And if every time I wash out a dirty cloth diaper it makes the Virgin Mary smile, so much the better.

I can't believe I'm going to post this, but I checked in the bucket of things to say and it was empty except for this post. You have my apologies. Do check back sometime, wouldya?

UPDATE: You deserve better. Here's something from the commute:






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Benchmarking: a Study in What Passes for Discomfort Among the Affluent

I’d never really encountered the word benchmarking until I came to my current job in the financial services industry. I’ve since warmed to it. Because it’s what I do all the time as I wonder just how other people are making it.

Don’t get me wrong: we’re making it. I’ve been told that enough times by enough people who know, and things are definitely more comfortable around here this year. I’m convinced, finally. But if we’re making it, why the pit in the stomach? Why the sense that we’re one room short of a full complement of rooms? Why do the ceilings seem a couple of inches too low and we powerless to change that?

I started writing this entry, then came up against the fact of our making it and had to cast my mind back, had to relocate my principles. Oh, that’s right: we chose it. A manifesto was perhaps written.

Once in a while, that rankles. The principles and justifications seem a little more elusive, a little less apparent. Are the kids just growing faster than we thought? Are the toy piles and innovative storage solutions (nooks, crannies) getting overfilled? Is it just the persistent sugar ants and nonresponsive exterminators that make us feel a hair below the comfort zone of privilege we feel we should inhabit? Hard to say. The people I meet, the bloggers I read, I want to know: how are they making it? It’s not about status per se. It’s more about the practicalities. "Look honey, that’s a one-income household but their ceilings are higher than ours!" It’s not about the high ceilings. It’s about the how. How do they have higher ceilings than ours?

If we’re making it, and we wanted higher ceilings, why do we have these low ones? I go back to our decisions, and realize again: we chose it. [Just squashed an ant.] Tonight, again, writing that first paragraph, I reran the math we ran when we sold the more expensive, larger house to purchase this 1,100 square foot one. I see what we did. I remember why. And I calm down a little.

But here’s the rub, for me: my fiscal conservatism is characterized more by fear of failure and pessimism than it is by frugality and intelligently converting money into more money.

So I benchmark, and it comes out like this: There are people with a near-innate self assurance. It comes across as street smarts, business savvy, negotiating skill. Sometimes there’s physical handiness. It combines tolerance for risk with an apparently willful lack of imagination regarding risk. Some of the least socially adept people I know have it. CEOs have it. It’s in the easy self-assurance of the lawyer, or the contractor, or the banker. It’s not just blind certainty; it’s that coupled with skill at mitigating risk. Many entrepreneurs have it—but it doesn’t seem prevalent in the more distant reaches of the cube farms. Sometimes those who possess this complex of traits actually fail, but I suspect they simply pick up and move on to the next project.

I haven’t got the gene. So what I DO have is a small old house whose purchase was very safe and which left us in pretty good shape for college down the road, PLUS a job in a cube, swoopy floors, little sugar ants, unfinished novels, a floody basement, poor air circulation, bats, and, sometimes, a sense that even this can’t last.

And that, friends, is what passes for making it. How are you making it?


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Assembly Required

I.


We have a neighbor – single mom to a four-year-old. She works full time, owns her house where she lives with her sister and the kid. She can install molding. She knows how to demo sheet rock and clean it up proper. Ceiling fan? She could do it.

She made fun of me this weekend because I chose to use an innovative technique to attach the front panel of my deerproof Plant Containment Unit to the body of the thing. She would have used a hinge. I went with the plastic zip ties. Because I moved AWAY from the upper east side, thank you very much, and I don’t need a hinge to open the damn thing. That’s what the can is for. I use another zip tie to close it.

I hope that when Lopsides crashes through her yard chewing on a cucumber, wrapped in chicken wire, the lashings and tomato stakes that make up my garden fence trailing from his farkakte antlers, that I am there to take a picture to share with you, O Internet.

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II.


In our town, on May 28th each year, the A/C Man comes through the main street on his great waggon that is drawn by four and twenty white oxen and piled to the canvas with the shiny bodies of sparkling new air conditioners. These his strapping sons heave down to the children of the town who give their tuppence to the sister, a barefooted redhaired girl in gingham who prances along with a tin pot for the money and who always keeps the change. The town children don’t seem to mind; it is the season. Hoisting their massive metal burdens to their narrow shoulders they stagger gamely home up the side streets on the hill, calling to their parents “Mother, Father, come see! It’s the Haier Koolblast ZX90! Do come, and bring baby Zillah, I’m sure she’d like to see her face reflected in its surface!” And the parents come, leading the little ones, who gurgle at the corrugated knobs and who must be chided for trying to lick the glistening side panels.

Then the Dads collect a few choice items and, with a prodigious will and profusion of sweat, take the window sashes out wrong, attach the brackets like a crazy person, slam the fucking thing into the godDAMN window frame, remove it because it’s WRONG, bend a couple of pieces of metal to fit around the projecting thing in the non-standard window, then carefully put…it…backDOWNONTHEIRMOTHERFUCKINGPINKY and finally shove a piece of plywood into the open space above, drive several screws into it haphazardly and assume they’ll figure it out in autumn. Fuck. They need a beer.

The A/C Man eats last fall’s thawed venison with the mayor and they laugh late into the night over a tankard of mead while watching Blazing Saddles on the TiVo. His children tend the air conditioners, making sure each has its ration of freon and straw, before they fall asleep under the wain, dreaming of sunshine and shade.

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III.





















When the Chattanooga Iron Works closed down, the men walked the high-summer streets forlorn, their denim-ticking overalls picking up the red clay dust, until they came to Herd’s Garage. Clement Herd sat out front on a crate happy as a pig in shit and they stood around and one of them pulled out a mason jar half full and they passed it until finally someone said “Clem, why the hell are you so all-fired happy?” And Clem pulled out the blueprints for the cast iron and steel Char-Griller Super Pro Charcoal Grill/Smoker and all the men threw their caps in the air and they opened the shop that very week.

And, much later, I got one of those and I put it together. And I made this:



May all your parts fit snugly, and may all your washers be included in the original packaging this summer.


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How I Envy Those with Certitude, and the Wealthy; also, Otters

I often find myself believing that doubt makes people more interesting; that those interesting people who are interesting because they display no doubt (not that everyone who displays no doubt is interesting, are you following me, but that some people are interesting because they engage in doubt-worthy enterprises but display no doubt, outwardly) are, in fact, hiding vast reservoirs of doubt and that is what actually makes them interesting.

In case that’s true, I hang on to doubt the way my parents hang on to old newspapers and magazines, and you’d be hard-put to get me to sell it off or, worst of all, throw it away.

Which is why it’s so very very strange that I envy those who are certain. Certain of anything, really, I don’t care what, although I feel most envious of those who are certain about things I disagree with. Because those things would have to be really really hard to believe in the first place. Can you imagine how rock-solid one’s certainty would have to be to be so very very convinced of such things?

I imagine that the Certain Person’s day goes something like this: upon waking in a comfortable bed he or she richly deserves under a roof that could belong to no other, the Certain Person puts on clothes that look terrific and heads downstairs to greet the smartest kids in their class and to eat a perfectly normal breakfast after taking a shower using the infinite supply of hot water. Picking up the keys to the exact right car, he or she leaves his or her hard-won and well-deserved house—a house that fits his or her personality and makes him or her feel a rich sense of achievement—to drive to work at a job that pays the bills and offers a dose of personal pride; this is no fly-by-night outfit, either, but a trusted, benevolent employer where he or she pictures him- or herself advancing into the golden glow of a fulfilling career. Driving to work listening to the news, knowing that we’re fighting for freedom someplace where our enemies live, he or she is comforted by the knowledge that our leaders know best what’s safest for all Americans and will do their utmost to see our lives made even better. And that the Lord is looking out for those leaders, and for the troops, and for each and every one of us. And that criminals are bad bad people, worse than him or her, and deserving of punishment of all kinds. After working really hard at that fulfilling job and doing the best work of anyone in the whole department, he or she heads home with the expectation that the nutritious, prion-free dinner he or she is going to eat will be one of many in an uninterrupted string of healthy meals of great deliciousness. And after the dinner and a dose of very funny and realistic medical television, he or she will go to bed and enjoy the hottest marital relations anyone is having anywhere with his or her immortal spouse, then drift off into what is sure to be a sound sleep, knowing that the next day will be more or less the same, a beautiful necklace of sunrises and sunsets stretching into a restful retirement and a secure old age, followed at last by the eternal reward of the afterlife.

Ahh, the Certain. What a joy it must be to be you.

And then there are the wealthy, who, it is well known, can purchase happiness. And otters are extremely good swimmers and very cute.


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You're Probably Wondering What's Under the Overhang Next to the Garage

1) Plastic "lawn bench" 2) paint cans 3) plastic basketball net 4) folded 20' x 20' vinyl banners printed with paintings by Degas and Modigliani 5) sawhorses 6) snake containment equipment (old kitty litter container, stick) 7) plastic flowerboxes 8) planting trays 9) bucket 10) recycling bin containing broken vintage glass 11) plastic bucket containing rusty, dangerous old bits of metal 12) plastic flowerpots 13) chaises longues (plastic) 14) bricks 15) box labeled 'eBay' containing various kitchenware.

What's under the overhang beside YOUR garage? he asked, in a transparent attempt to garner comments.


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Finding Room

One enters our house into a 9' x 16' room we call the parlor, for it is where we keep the piano. We also keep the washer and dryer there, in a closet along one side. Because that's where they fit.

And although we both sort of sighed about that -- a house too small for a laundry room -- it is a very convenient location for laundry, not being stuck down in a cellar. The closet has a sliding door that hides the unsightliness, there are cabinets above, the machines are super-quiet, and you don't have to be sequestered to wash the clothes and can keep an eye on the kids, if they're about. So let's just shhh about the laundry, then. It's the parlor.

Like most rooms in our house, it does triple duty, so it's also the entry foyer, with a rack of coathooks artfully hidden behind the door and a shoe rack underneath it, piled with thousands of boots, work shoes, running shoes, hats and gloves. The hooks periodically swell with an unsightly mass of coats; this week we instituted the If It Wasn't Worn this Week, Put It in the Back Closet Rule. There are two armchairs just inside, which, although designed to accommodate the human form, are typically occupied by briefcases, backpacks, coats and coat parts, purses, tote bags full of necessaries, and books. No different from your house, of course.

This room's primary characteristic is that it is not a space for socialization. You don't Go there; you either pass through or you do laundry. We do keep the stickers in a secretary bookcase there, as well, so you might stop in when you require an adhesive-backed Parasaurolophus to shut someone up reward someone for good behavior. Otherwise, it's a way station, despite the chairs, despite our sense that space is at such a premium that we should make this room usable, desirable, worthy of attention.

To add injury to the insult of the room's uselessness, in the fall we had an Incident. Back then I crowed in this space about the installation of new baseboard moldings, an event that had been awaited since we moved in a year earlier and removed the old ones to allow the laying of new floors. And more recently I alluded to the fact that, during that process, a contractor drove two really thin nails directly into one of the radiator pipes in the wall. No problem, until you add cold weather, the heat goes on all night, the pipe expands, radiator water pours out into the wall and seeps into the (new) floors and subfloor and sheet rock and insulation and eventually pours down the outside of the foundation, which is when you notice it.

Part of the process that followed involved removal of the lower half of the sheetrock wall and insulation in the parlor. The wall behind the piano, half gone. The wall you face as you enter. And so it will remain until we get the scratch together to fix it up. (The contractor's insurance will pay, but we'll pay first. And yes, I could learn, but it would be my first one, and it would be ugly, and it would be prominent.) We're not in despair over this, precisely, but there it is, half a wall missing, just as you enter, sigh.

This weekend we invited some locals over for afternoon eggnog, so we snugged the piano up against that wall, performed precise calculations to dim and redirect the lights, put two large portraits of our kids on the extant half of the wall, and assumed that the room's standard traffic flow would prevail and that no one would see the exposed studs and electrical conduit as they headed for the dining room.

What was funny, though, was that on entering, people subconsciously hesitated a second to process the two portraits...they slowed, and lingered in there, and even stepped back into the parlor after settling their coat and getting a drink...a switch had flipped, and the room's energy was now curiously social. As the party wound down a couple of hours later, it gravitated toward the parlor. A couple of people sat in the chairs (relieved of their household burdens for the occasion). Our friend and his daughter began playing the piano. We went in there. After the last guests left, we sat down in the chairs ourselves, until two other neighbors came over with a bottle of wine, and our smaller party found itself seated entirely in the parlor for another hour.

Maybe it was the exposed wall letting something in. Maybe we subconsciously steered people into our unused social space. Who knows? Our parlor made music and laughter last night. Missing sheet rock or no, we keep growing into this little place, finding that its modest boundaries hold more than we noticed at first glance.

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What Lies Beneath

That's right, NaBloPoMo, BRING IT ON. I'm posting TWICE today. The real reason? After waiting five years to write something about the Bigfoot Conference, I thought it was so lame and short that I'm giving you, my readers, a little lagniappe to make up for it.

And by a little, I mean very little. Don't get your hopes up.

Anyway, as I do most weekends, what with one thing or another, I spent some time on my belly under the house yesterday, poking around, taking pictures of mold, pulling out some wet insulation. Call it a hobby. In any case, as I tugged a sheet of insulation, a little acorn fell out and rolled onto the floor. An enterprising mouse had clearly put it aside for winter. Awwww.

Then I rolled the insulation over and became a cartoon as an avalanche of acorns rained down on my head, scattering everywhere.







Cute x 100!




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Nailed

Baseboards and labor: $1500.00
Nails: $1.60
Two small nails in copper radiator pipe: $0
Replacing new floors, one wall, insulation, removing mold, reinstalling radiator and baseboard: Priceless

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Now THAT's a Sunday!

It's during the yard work that we spot the water dripping down the outside of the foundation. I get out the ladder and clean all the gutters, then head down into the crawlspace under the parlor (that sounds pretentious, but "parlor/laundry room" sounds stupid) -- a place I've never actually ventured before.

It's clean and concrete-floored and the floor joists above are insulated -- this is the new part of the cellar. However, since it's at least partly below ground, I'd donned my spelunking gear: a backwards baseball cap (underground is the only acceptable locale for that particular fashion statement), safety goggles, dust mask, paint pants, work gloves, boots. You know, in case I come across a spider.

I crawl like a worm over to the corner, where sure enough there's some water dripping down the inside of the foundation. The insulation above seems pendulous, and ripples ominously when I poke it. My wife brings down a bucket and heaves it to me. I cut a hole in the insulation and let it drain. It drains. And drains. I run out to the store, have dinner, build a car from a kit, paint the Sistine Chapel, come back. It's still draining.

Using my homeowner's skilz, I deduce that there is some water up in there. It's apparently leaked down either 1) the inside of the walls or 2) the outside of the walls. If there's a third option -- perhaps the walls were actually made of water and they're melting? maybe the Borrowers left the tub running? -- I don't know what it is.

Worse, I don't know what the source of the water is, even after cutting away the insulation. I rule out the washing machine, because it's not wet anywhere near it and the water would be on top of the floor, which it's not. It's either a leaking radiator pipe or my first thought -- that the gutters had overflowed. I can't satisfactorily select either, which makes me seize up...which expert to call?

So I'm just lying there on the floor of the crawl space, nice and cool, listening to the burble of the water trickling into my bucket, remembering Richard Carlson and wondering what the hell I've done with that god damned book, when my wife sticks her head back in and asks "what's the story with the dead mouse?"

"Which one's that?" I moan, thinking about just what a Sunday conversation this is going to be.

"The one in the dining room. Did you kill it?"

"What are you asking me? Does it have a story?"

"It's under your shoe."

"My..."

"Your shoe. The ones you were wearing this morning."

"To the diner?" we both say. "Yes," she answers us.

"Is it, like, guts and everything?"

"I don't know," she says. "It's sorta squished. You must have stepped on it..."

She's of the opinion that the mouse is my job -- not because she's squeamish (not about mice, anyway), but because I'd apparently been the stepper. Reluctantly, I leave the pleasant woodland sound of the water filling my bucket, crawl forth from my little sanctuary under the parlor/laundry room and hoist my chemical-resistant corpus upstairs.

It's dead, but it's not a mouse. It's a mole. Possibly the unluckiest mole that ever lived. He must have popped himself outside -- "Back in a sec, hon, just gonna grab a worm...need anything?" and got trod upon, then sorta got stuck in the arch of my Skecher. Fortunately protected from any animal contact by my nature-proof clothing, I pick it up and bring it outside. Some crows are loitering in the backyard. I toss it to them and go back in to consult smarter homeowners than me about the water.

Ahh, Sunday, you never fail to deliver. Still, I'd rather be the human with the unwanted damp crawlspace than the mole who'll never go back to his.


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Floor, meet wall. Wall, floor.

"Bring it back," an assertive woman said to me last year, standing in our new dining room. She was pointing at the ugly open wound between the brand-new, raggedly planked edge of the floor and the wall. Pale flourescent light from the cellar glimmered through the opening, and the stairs were visible if you cared to look.

She didn't care to. "You can leave the rest of it out there, but bring back the one piece that went along here," she said. So I went back out to the nail-studded debris pile beside the garage and selected "DR#10," the length of beaten, squat, hammer-marked and pry-bar splintered shitty pine that had formerly been the baseboard in that spot. I placed it back into its old location, where it handily blocked the view. Even stunted, beaten and ugly, it improved the room a little. But I wouldn't bring back its kin; no, I knew that in short order we would have new baseboards. I agreed because for the next few weeks -- just until the new baseboards were in -- I wanted my wife to be able to eat in the same room as the unfinished work without having to peer into the cellar, down near where the snakes live.

Yes, we'd get those new baseboards, just as soon as we got a leeetle extra cash together and then whoops we had another baby a month after moving in.

1.25 years pass. I think in that time I may've mentioned baseboards in this space. So you'll understand if my celebration of the matter seems out of proportion to the ease of the task, but I can say today, without fear of hyperbole, that THE NEW BASEBOARDS, INSTALLED TODAY, HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE. Ring the bells, ye givers-of-a-shit-about-the-baseboards, because that glorious day long foretold but oft scoffed at -- and even ofter ignored completely -- has finally arrived and I don't know about you but we are now complete beings here, as complete as the rooms in which our new, clean, tall baseboards stand proudly on the floor and hug the walls in a slow, slow dance.

That is to say, we look better, but we still need to be painted.















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Archaeologize at Home! Ask Me How!

We've got a glass farm going next to the house. Requires no sunlight or water—basically all you have to do is throw a bunch of broken glass on the ground and kick some dirt over it, then die, then in 80 years someone else buys the house and keeps noticing all this glass glinting through the soil in the patch of woods back behind the shed. Actually, it doesn't sound fun to start such a farm—because of the having to die part—but we, the beneficiaries of our predecessor's foresight, started the glass harvest this past weekend.



And what a trove of jagged crap we've discovered! A few minutes' work with a pick and a hoe yields not just glass, but an enchanting array of flaking and rusty bits of metal, a spoon, wire, a fragmented leather(n) child's shoe, pot handles, a ribeye bone, plus the fragments of bottles and crockery, some bearing decorations and some plain. Like us, the previous homesteaders enjoyed both the milk and the whiskey, plus other unknown sasparillas, lemon cokes, Efficacious Solutions, laudanum, & c. They apparently ate from plates. There are some of what appear to be horseless carriage parts -- at least, they're completely rust-bloated, larger and heavier than any normal household metal object we use today. Although I suppose they could be parts of dismantled stoves or other appliances.

I'm clinging to the thought that this was an appropriate site for the disposal of household waste in the early part of the 20th century. Before a couple of additions onto the house in the last twenty years or so, this spot was even more distant from the actual building, and I'm assuming—persuading myself, really—that it wasn't a filthy, lazy and vile habit to throw your crap in a disorganized heap in an unused part of your own property instead of carting it to a communal dump someplace. I'm telling myself that this stuff is old because I'd much prefer it to have happened when it seems it would have been more appropriate, and so far the lack of tupperware, Alberto V05 cans, 8-track cassettes or frilly velour tuxedos mixed into the junk supports my wishful thinking.



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Another Day, Another F%cking Animal

I just grabbed bat #2 (or maybe it was #1, returned!) out of the fireplace, showed it off to an appreciative woman who lives with me, and tossed it out into the night. Between the bats and the snakes, I'm wondering if maybe Lord Voldemort, from the Harry Potter books*, hasn't taken up residence in our cellar.









*Hi! You must be from Google. I live upstate! (Also, Lindsay Lohan!)

UPDATE: No search hits for Harry Potter or Lindsay Lohan, but I did get someone looking for "man fcking animal," so I guess I'm on the right track! Go Internet!
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Animal Control

I'm in a hotel parking lot in Utica when the phone rings. It's HQ.

"There's a fucking bat in the house."

It's tempting to say that this kind of thing always happens when I'm away, but that wouldn't be true. The creatures pretty much feel free to come and go as they please around here. From the deer having a snooze in the driveway around dusk, to the possums murdering one another just outside the bedroom window, to the snakes lounging in the cellar staircase, the animal kingdom is goverened under the su casa=mi casa rule.

This particular animal is the only one of the household variety that gives me the willies. Oh sure, I hates me the possums, because they look like they'd be happy to slit your throat and drink your blood, and I'm afraid of bears because they kill people occasionally, but bats look like all they want to do is crawl up your pants leg and scrabble around, squeaking. Ghhhah.

In other words, there are times when one's glad to be in Utica, and this was one of them. At ease in my distance from the bat, I offered some lame advice ("get the neighbors") and proceeded about my business. Later I got the update.

"We couldn't find it inside, but we saw one outside." We concluded that this must've been the one that was inside, and now it was outside, case closed, goodbye unwelcome mammal of the night. I returned Sunday evening and checked inside the fireplace, shining a flashlight around and into a quarter-inch-wide crack in the bricks — where I saw a bat wedged in like it had been poked in there with a stick.

The willies came back. So I got the Equipment: safety goggles, long screwdriver, work gloves, duct tape around the pants legs (kidding). I went back and the bat was gone. So I laid a fire and let 'er rip. A good smoky fire ought to flush out order Chiroptera.

A couple of hours later, after a nice meal and pleasant company, I went back over there and listened to the scrabbling and squeaking of at least one healthy bat. I looked back into the fireplace and saw this:



So I grabbed the camera, to show how brave I am gloves, grasped the bat gently but firmly, and tossed it out into the yard.

This morning, on my way to work, I stopped to help a turtle cross the road. It peed all the way across.


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Bursting in Air

Last night, alerted between downpours by thunderous warning shots from the pending fireworks display on the town land next door, the boy and I trudged through the woods -- down a freshly weed-whacked path through poison ivy and other nefarious plants -- to the field behind the library from which much water flows.

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Flashback to February 2006; an observant woman who lives with me is taking a walk around this house, looking at the roof from the yard. "What's that six-foot scorch mark?" she asks the realtor showing the place. There is an ugly black scar spanning eight or ten rows of shingle.

"Hoooo-eeee, they don't make chimneys like that anymore," says the woman, pointing at another house.

"No, no, THAT scorchmark," says my wife, pointing to the scorch mark on this house.

"And it's a whole third of an acre," explains the realtor. "Plenty of room to expand."

"Hey, is that from the fireworks you guys told us are so close?" I venture.

"Shall we look at the cellar?" she asks. "They've just put in a fabulous Be-Dri™ system down there. Bone. Dry."
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So we get out there, in the rain, and the fireworks start. Like small-town fireworks everywhere they're half-baked, going off occasionally, sometimes in sequence, sometimes not high enough. A bunch of us crowd under the overhang on the public library to evade both the rain and the falling ash. A couple of big ones explode about thirty feet up. The pall of smoke sometimes fogs our view, but the smell of the gunpowder is nice.

They do two finales, but we've already started back before we realize there's a final barrage. I'm stepping through dense undergrowth cautiously, my comrade ahead of me with the light. Vivid flashes, accompanied by ear-shattering crashes, slam into us and light our way. The boy, wearing earplugs, seems more or less unfazed, or perhaps numbed. The breeze kicks up at our back, and the shadows of trees stand out stark, like tall strangers in the mist around us, and still this last volley continues, BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG, each percussion picking out every stem of oily weed and jagged thorn as we hasten through the undergrowth back to the house.

In the morning there are busted pieces of rocket, shreds of paper, wisps of fuse and string, all of it smoky, scorched, blackened. On the cars, on the lawn, hanging in the trees. There are only a couple of pieces on the roof, which was fortunately well soaked by the rain.



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