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Yes, those fish are for eatin’. They are huge. They’re called spoonbill, or paddlefish, and they’re only in five major U.S. rivers, the biggest being Missouri & Mississippi (the others are tributaries to these two) – we fish the Mighty MO (which goes into/through the Lake of the Ozarks). The only other place in the world to catch them is the Yangtze river in China. They look prehistoric, and the only way you catch them is by snagging. It’s a fair amount of work, you have to find them, and basically catch one on a hook by running your line into it. And they fight. And they’re good eatin’. So good. OMG. I can’t WAIT to get down to the lake to have some!
And if I do? I now have all sorts of bells & whistles on my phone, and you bet your ass I’ll be mobile blogging my moment!
My phone chirped at me, and the message was a photo from James – showing a limit of crappie. For whatever reason, the photo is teeny tiny, but I still got the point:
Then, not much later? I get this picture.
OK, good lord. The fishing? It is good. Less than thirty minutes later, I get another jingle from my phone:
Now I’m just worried they’re gonna catch them all before I get there this weekend! Sheesh!
I swear, I blogged about this a while back. But I’ve searched my archives (even using an external search tool), and nothing shows up. (If you remember reading it, tell me! I’d hate to turn this into the Alzheimer Files.) So, here goes, another 8-Track Flashback!
Back in the day – 1976 – when the family moved onto the farm, and we built our dome home, my dad was extremely eco-friendly. We were getting Back to Nature. We had running water, and electricity, and a two-party-line phone (of course I listened in, once, and got totally busted by my mother). That phone, as I recall, could kill a fellow. Back then, phones were made of lead, or something equally weighty, and our phone was mounted on the wall, complete with the 20-foot tangled cord and the finger-button dialers, that whirred and clicked as you rotated it over to the stopping mechanism and it returned to its original position. Anyway, where I was going with this is that we were pretty rustic. In that we had no indoor toilet. We had an outhouse. Allow me to educate you a bit in the construction of outhouses, as I assume most of you were raised with flushing toilets. Outhouses are best when they’re a bit of a distance from the house. Ours had a path that led to it, lined with wood (slippery as shit when wet), and no rail – so if you slipped to the right on your voyage out, you could ostensibly end up 30 feet down in a ravine. Things you consider in the dark of night, in the winter. You truly become skilled at determining how badly you actually have to go.
Anyway, as a kid, I went everywhere with my dad. I remember long, boring trips to the hardware store, where I would gaze around and stare at all the uninteresting things, waiting, waiting, waiting. I was too young to be left to my own devices in the VW bus, or in the store, really, so I trailed along behind him, and I didn’t interrupt or ask many questions, because he was always really focused on the job at hand. So all of these trips are one giant blur of DULL in my memory, except for one.
We turned down the aisle that held all of the bathroom accoutrements, stopping in front of an expansive display of toilet seats. My father looked down at me, and said, “You pick it out.” I was transfixed. And a little disbelieving. I looked up at him, my face clearly saying, “Really?” He nodded. “You pick out our toilet seat!” Finally, a decision, an option, a choice, and not just any choice, but one that we would live with for the foreseeable future. Keep in mind, I was 8? So my taste was not yet formed into the refined, persnickety influence that tries to govern me today.
I gazed up at the three rows of seats. Mostly white, some wooden, nothing really stood out until my eyes landed upon It. I pointed at The One. It was fabulous. Absolutely tremendous. And exactly what you’d get if you asked an eight-year-old to design your outhouse. I remember he looked at me sideways, the way he did when he was still figuring out what to say, what to do. “Really?” he said. “Yes!” I exclaimed. Transfixed. Hypnotized. By what was the most fabulous toilet seat in the entire line-up.
It was completely drenched in Cherry Red paint.
On the lid, in black, there was a tree in the lower right. With a branch extending out, and a hole in the tree, with two yellow eyes looking out. Foreshadowing! Simply a portent of things to come. Because, then, you lifted the lid, and you were greeted by an enormous 1970’s owl, in thick black lines, covering the entire inside of the lid, WINKING AT YOU.
He looked at me, and saw my excitement. My abject love of the bright red toilet seat with the communicative owl. “OK,” he said. We bought it and took it home.
I think my mother was a little taken aback, and I remember overhearing something to the effect of “What? This? Really?” (Yes, I got a lot of my style tutelage at her hands, and for all her faults, I’ll give her that – she has got style, and she probably realized that day she needed to Start Earlier.) I puffed out a little when I heard my father say, “I told Jennifer she could pick it out.” Why yes he did. Jennifer did pick it. Picked out a WINNER. And out to the outhouse it went. Many a cold night, I visited my owl buddy. I remember when a grade-school boyfriend gave me a gold ring, with a tree on it, and then a few days later, asked for it back. I lied, and told him I’d lost it, angered that he no longer wanted to be my boyfriend. I looked at that owl as I tossed the ring through the hole that night. Winking, knowingly. Agreeing that he was a schmuck.
We eventually tore down the dome home, and put in toilets and marble floors and vaulted ceilings and the house became something of a palace, a far cry from its dome home footings, poured over the original concrete. The outhouse, too, was torn down, the path fell away, and the people who bought the farm, who own this chunk of my past, have no idea of the comedy and drama, the style (and lack thereof) that was rooted and grown, interwoven and cemented, in my mind, in my life, in my memories. In addition to the toilet seat itself, my most cherished part of that memory is that my father told my mother we were keeping it. Because I had chosen it. It’s why I weep every time I watch Little Miss Sunshine. We all have a little Olive in us, and we all want to be loved for exactly who we are. Questionable taste and all.
P.S. I’ve looked everywhere for a photo of this toilet seat. I saw one on eBay a while back (wrong color, but same visual), and had no luck today finding it. As they say, they just don’t make ’em like they used to….
As we were discussing some costs and pricing ideas for a client, talk of how much a television spot would cost to produce came up. (Making television spots is really one of those huge gradations between “really awful Hi-8 filmstrip with badly dressed business owner starring in ad” to “CGI technicolor rainbows and extremely expensive actor as spokesperson”. Basically, you can range between $5,000 and half a million dollars, and in most situations, you get what you pay for. (Though, admittedly, there have been numerous, really-expensive ads that completely missed their mark.)
Anyway, someone said, well, start with $100,000? And we’re trying to determine how the costs relate to our media budgets, because it doesn’t do a lot of good to spend $100k on a tv spot you can’t afford to air, and so this conversation was sort of going around and around and at first, I thought the 100 grand was kind of high, until I was struck by a thought (and of course, I said it out loud), “I mean, $100 grand? That’s not that bad, when you consider you can spend $80 grand on HOOKERS.”
Not that we’ll use that logic if the client asks, but I’m still agog at spending the monetary equivalent of a nice SUV, a good boat, a nice chunk in savings and an all-inclusive vacation for two on hos. Or just one ho and a madam, who you KNOW is getting a really kick-ass cut of that money. You get my drift. Many a television spot has been made for less.
Still shaking my head….but I DID love the interview on NPR with an Albany madam, who was pissed he, the governor who advocated keeping dollars in-state, took his business to D.C….. (you have to click on “listen” to hear it, it’s not in the article – and it’s about 3 mins in.)
The light pools in wobbly squares in the back yard, as my eyes strain into the darkness, waiting for a shape to appear. The contrast between the streaming light from the breakfast nook and the darkness of the night play tricks on my eyes, as I peer for Suzy, our black lab, to mosey in from a corner of the yard. While I wait, I feel the cold night air on my skin and inside my lungs. I scan back and forth, but find myself mostly watching the patches of light, because that is where I will know I’ve seen her, not tricked by a branch dancing in the wind beyond my scope of vision.
I’m struck by how the darkness blurs the edges of what is illuminated. Even when we think we see something, we believe it to be so – it can be something else completely. It’s easier to decide – right or wrong – than to live in the blurry, undefined edges.
I had my one-year exam today for my Lasik-ed eyes; my vision is perfect, and it’s been 20 years since anyone’s said that. I have some challenges adjusting between close-up and distance, but that’s just part and parcel with being almost 40. Some things are clearer, others are not, and having excellent vision is only part of that equation.
Don’t get me wrong – I do love getting home in daylight, without the sun sinking into the west and shadows creeping in along the edges. I am just not enthralled with the whole “getting up” part that bookends the beginning of the day. And yesterday, I discovered we’d forgotten to adjust the clock on the thermostat, so no wonder it was freezing chilly cold when I got up! (And it’s why I promptly went back to bed under warm covers.)
I have kitchen duty this week at work (which I only remembered today, so some kind soul did my work yesterday & this morning. The guilt!) and I follow the most fastidious man on the planet. I’m shocked he doesn’t clean the kitchen with a toothbrush. He actually dries all the bottoms of the coffee mugs as he moves them from the dishwasher to the cupboard. Dude takes his job seriously. At least the kitchen is spotless before I start my tour of duty….
And, in completely unrelated news (this is practically a Random Orts post but I’m not inclined to edit it…), the Wo and I got new phones when we renewed our contract with T-Mobile. The customer service person I talked to the other day almost got down on their knees and bowed through the phone, because we’ve been with them since 2000, and that’s like, 50 years in phone years. We both got slider phones – mine’s a RIZR and his is a Samsung somethin’ or other, and now we both have the internets on our phones, and we’re like a geriatric duo, figuring out how to browse while Mo-BILE. (not while driving, but just ON the mo-bile.) I’m struggling because Yahoo keeps coming up in GIANT FONTS! BIG LETTERS! Like it not only thinks I’m old, but I’m blind. No like. Don’t care for the tiny keys and I’m not going to convert to texting anytime soon (We didn’t get that package.) But it was fun to check my email while waiting for my lunch date to show up!
So much else going on – some bloggable, some not, one of my projects is hatching, and I’ll show you sooooon. Promise!
P.S. I discovered today that the whole process of consuming Pez is much more straightforward if you rip open the entire paper container and eat them straight away, instead of installing them into the little plastic dispenser. I’m all about cutting out the plastic middleman and unnecessary steps.
I read an E Weekly review of a memoir over the weekend, and I have to say, I had the same reaction (I’ve since discovered) many other people did – “Huh? Really?” I think in the wake of so many frauds (or accusations of fraud)in the literary world combined with my fervent devotion to The Wire, I found myself a little bit skeptical, especially the part about her birthday party where she got a cake and 9mm. It just seemed too – Hollywood. Unauthentic. A little too perfect. I thought of James Frey, and wondered if someone would discover this author, as he had done, had embellished and overstated the facts. In fact, the author went to a private school in the Valley, and the publisher has withdrawn the book. Do people not realize the truth will out? You can’t pretend to be a foster child from the ghetto, no matter how much you may believe it in your mind, when you’re not.
The reason I’m pulling the comparison to the The Wire is because of the newspaper storyline and the reporter making up quotes, starting a snowball that only grew and grew under the weight of that original, small, golf-ball sized lie. The entire final season of The Wire ended last night, and I watched it, enthralled and hooked, just as I was every season. Only a little sadder, since this was the final episode, the end of it all. The complexity and layers of writing and character development made this one of the greatest shows on television, and while it took some time to get into – several episodes before things felt like they were cohesive – it was a gem in the rubble of our usual entertainment, where all storylines are neatly ordered, the music rises and falls as we expect it to, endings are tidy, and usually, the good guys win. Not so with this show. But oh so brilliant. I can’t wait to watch it all over again, from the very beginning, like a good book, where you catch more of the nuances and see more depth as you read it again. But,(spoiler alert!) there is something to be said for the deliciousness of a first moment that can’t be recreated ever again – when McNulty called bullshit on the reporter, even though it never came back around with consequences for the offender – the moment was there and the fraud was seen for what it was. Absolutely priceless. What was really head-shaking was in the last montage scene, where the guilty reporter helps catapult the paper to award-winning status, and the diligent, hard-working reporter (who didn’t make anything up) gets shunted to the suburban rag. Ain’t that the way it goes…..
There have been lots of changes in my world – nothing earth-shattering, but enough to make a noticeable difference, both personally & at work. Our company changed their name, we all got new business cards, and from what I understand, there’s going to be a lot of painting going on in the near future. Yay for fumes!
Outside of work, I’ve been bizzy bizzy bizzy. It looks to continue for the foreseeable future, too – I taught a sock class at The Studio (Hi Carrie!) and there are lots more classes this month, plus overseeing the sock club for March & April. I must say I had a hold-my-breath moment when I arrived for the first class & Carrie said, “I read your blog!” There’s always that fraction of a second when I mentally see my blog flash before my eyes and I wonder, OH god, have I offended anyone lately? Actually, I usually accomplish that in person quite well without a monitor or time to edit.
I also busted in on the UFO crew at MisKnits this week, and of course I can only remember about three people’s names. Notably, Carmen was NOT there, furthering my belief that we have a time-space continuum between us. I am still laughing at Laura’s comment on my watermelons…….she was referring to the colors in my socks, but of COURSE I took it in a completely adolescent direction.
Oh, and we had a rep lunch on Wednesday, and four girls put away a TON of sushi. Not a literal ton? But a whole damn lot. I took photos, just to torture James. I’m thoughtful that way. One of the platters didn’t turn out, apparently I can’t turn my camera off too quickly after taking a picture, or else the photo comes up as “damaged”.
We ate all but TWO pieces. I think our waiter was impressed.
Speaking of Wednesday, that was Tripper’s Snip Day. (Some Day of Beauty! It definitely was an extra-high Brazilian!) I got up early & shuttled him down to the vet – James went and got him, and we are happy to report that not only does he not even seem to notice his balls are gone? He was jumping and being his usual goofy-ass self within 24 hours of the surgery. (I do not understand how you’re supposed to keep a labrador from running, jumping or basically doing any of their normal activities for seven days post-surgery. We’d have to put him in a full-body cast.) Tripper appreciates your good thoughts & wishes for him!
In random, and not-particularly-interesting news, my lost earring was found & on my desk when I came into work this morning. It really is the small things that can make your day! We were driving out to a new business pitch yesterday & out of habit, I felt my earlobe – to discover one of my earrings was missing. Since I’d been out at a client meeting that morning, and all over the agency throughout the day, I wasn’t overly optimistic I’d find it. Seeing it on my desk made my morning! (Oh, and I did take out the other earring, just to prevent that “I’m A Pirate!” look for the pitch!)
If ever there was a Friday that warranted a “TGIF”, this is it. Enjoy your weekends, and I hope my new normal resumes soon!
….But this week, his balls are coming off.
We’ve planned to neuter Tripper since we decided we were his forever home, and just haven’t gotten around to doing it. It seemed to drop on the to-do list once he stopped attempting to hump Polly or Suzy, and it’s just sort of been “out there” on my radar of things I need to get to.
And then Saturday happened. James was running an errand, and I was bustling around the house, engaged in one of those never-ending unfolding projects where you start with cleaning off and organizing one small section and then that leads to X….and Y….and the small section still isn’t done so you circle around and then you see, oh, hey, the counter is still cluttered with the 12 cans of sliced beets James bought for you to pickle, and so you start mentally calculating that project into your day, and you go back to the bedroom to ….wha? There’s something wet on the floor. But not much. It seems to be right by the Pillow of Power, and that seems to be a little wet, but again, we’ve had accidents in the house and this looked like a little slosh, not an outright – ooooooooh fuck, as my eyes went UPWARD on the side of the bed and saw a large circle of wetness on my comforter hanging off the end of the bed. There’s only two mammals in the house who can aim their pee, and one of them wasn’t home. That left only one culprit, and I cursed his furry ball sacs as I stomped down to the washing machine.
And that is how Tripper’s Balls moved to the top of my to-do list. The appointment has been made.