Archive for the ‘Home’ Category
I bought a new BBQ! The old one was sad and lonely, a cast off from my mother’s retirement move:
I posted it on craigslist for free and within 20 minutes had 9 takers. Ususally a sign that you should have sold the thing but NO MATTER. It went to a multi-generational family who really needed it and after cramming it into the giftee’s CR-V I was free of the ugliness and looking forward to something new.
I hauled that monster box in from the garage and unpacked violently (see earlier post about how I am all action now). I did it with such determination, scissors flying, that my six year old asked me to consider if a new BBQ was really something worth losing a limb over. And then, the assembly. Twenty minutes in had me hollering “Honeeeeeyyyyy? Can you helllpp meeeee?” into the kitchen for backup.
Ultimately, It was not the take-charge-of-your-destiny event I had envisioned. Nothing sucks the air out of a self-actualization balloon like a loosely translated from Chinese assembly manual for a Kenmore appliance that uses a highly flammable power source.
1.5 hours into the madness we realized we had put the damn thing together backwards on the frame. As in, the front black panel that makes it took all chic and fancy was facing the back fence and we were staring at all the wiry mess that should be concealed. My wife, tired and wishing we did not tend to a Spanish mealtime schedule quite so regularly, sighed and wondered aloud if we were really the kind of people who cared. My last burst of energy was spent unscrewing the base, walking the million pound thing around counter-clockwise and forcing it into place.
Et voila! It is gorgeous and spaceship like.
And a little large. But capable of grilling 28 burgers at once (or so Kenmore says). We had Moroccan night and the lamb was the BOMB.
Burnt shoulders, check. BBQ sauce on my fingers, uh huh.
The ease and delight of summer is here and I’ve climbed on board. The last six months of baby stress have eased somewhat, and recently I’ve begun to participate in normal activities that don’t involve financial fiascos, anti-depressants or mad-dash runs for diapers. I’ve been walking cautiously among those of you with normal sleep schedules and children who at least drink from sippy cups and trying to blend. I’ve even looked cute once or twice, though credit for that is likely due to the new clothes I keep ordering because I’m so deprived of normalcy I can’t remember what’s in the laundry basket, much less keep up with emptying it into that machine in the garage that makes whirring noises.
Sure, I’ve appeared normal to the parents at morning school drop-off. For months, I’ve managed to be chatty and cordial with the friendly parents I know, and aloof in an “I’m staring at my iPhone because I’m receiving critical information in my important job where I run the whole world” way, with the ones I don’t. At work, I’ve appeared as though I easily remember casual requests and have infinite brain capacity and patience for new challenges, even though my to-do list has been the size of Arkansas for months and I often forget whose number I’ve dialed, just as they are picking up.
I have walked the line. The long dark hallway of sleep deprivation and infant-rearing. And it’s high time we got back to business around these parts. It is warm and lovely. I want my life to feel warm and lovely again, not crunchy and gloomy and on the verge of disaster. I would like for my brain, body and level of self-actualization to resemble that which attracted my wife in the first place.
I’m on this kinda-sorta stint of maternity leave and feeling like this is the perfect opportunity for a quickie life makeover. But rather than one where I turn out drastically different, improved and fabulous, like an 18 year old Vespa model in Greece (though, come to think of it, that would work too), I just want things to GET BACK TO NORMAL.
I would like to be able to move my ideas forward, instead of wishing them along on the couch while I do nothing but watch some awful rerun of Laguna Beach and listen to the baby monitor. That’s the jist of it; forward motion. I’m crying out for it. To-do list items crossed off, for once and for all. No more mulling things over. Action time. The house will be lovely, I will take care of myself fully and listen to good music again, actually cook new things instead of relying on standby and brought-in foods and, above all, regain the ability to examine my life.
This will require sleep, breathing fully, eating as though I have more than three minutes to spare. It will require the time to make conscious decisions, rather than issuing quick fight-or-flight reactions. The kind of decisions one makes when one isn’t living in a constant state of panic. I do recall this state of being, but everything has changed with the new baby and now I’ve got to relearn these basic ideas. Like a remedial class on, well, living.
It all begins tomorrow. With the BBQ.
Paint the kids’ room pale winter but slightly playful blue and make it look like this.
Finally listen to the newest Grace Potter which I was so excited about I accidentally ordered three separate times.
And try to get someone to take me to Remedy for a scone.
Simple, but worth sacrifice, all.
The scene: Oakland-Berkeley border. Dusk falls and a slight breeze carries the dusty exhaust from a nearby major street, and the occasional caterwauling of the neighbors up through the warm upstairs windows as the cornflower curtains billow in sync with the swishing of cars speeding by.
The dogs, they are bad. They sneak into the kitchen and clean up the garlic soy butter leftover from the rib eyes and broccoli rabe, licking it sideways off the counter in a way previously thought by mere humans to be a physical impossibility. They paw at their bowls insisting grumpily that the first round of feeding was merely an appetizer.
The five year old dances impatiently, chewing on a tortilla chip, always wishing that she were instead watching a movie and talking about wine. She likes wine. Not in a CPS sort of way, but in a “this smells like black cherries and licorice and can I dip my pinky in and do my come hither eyebrow move” way. She decidedly requests sushi for every meal and impressively lives up to her middle name, which carries a general meaning of “life force” in Sanskrit. She describes the way the boys team “tricks” the girls team each day during kindergarten recess with such outrage and detail, one would think she’s compiling notes for the lawsuit she’ll soon file against the school administration.
One very pregnant thirty-something lesbian putters around the lower, and cooler level of the house, feeling guilty about not having folded the laundry she went through great pains to finish yesterday, while simultaneously wanting to collapse into a fluffy bed of flower petals like they do in movies and take a long, sweet nap, followed by a binge on Orange soda and pretzels without raising an eyebrow with the nurses who keep her on a tight dietary leash, concerned with her newly discovered gestational diabetes. She knows the best 
she can hope for is a reasonable portion of vanilla ice cream in a few hours, but the visual in her mind holds steady.
The kitchen light has been turned off; its counters left practically unrecognizable by the cooking style of her wife who, not with child herself, has been incorporating as many leafy greens as possible into the family diet, to raise everyone’s iron and antioxidant levels. She has recently begun stopping at the neighborhood bakery, butcher and produce market on the way home from work to pick up something to make for dinner, rather than doing one massive food haul on Sunday, and it conveniently makes her feel French. It is typical of her to destroy the kitchen with passion, utiliziing every pan as the menu literally grows with each opening of the refrigerator door: discovering a still firm yellow bell pepper has a snowball effect and suddenly there are three courses where there first was just one.
On the way back from a fantastically problematic camping trip at Lake Shasta, I was stunned by the roadside colors. I was yelling at Lisa, “Over there! Did you get that!?” and furiously tossing the camera all over the car.
As dusk settled it moved from these yellow green hues into purple and powdery browns. It reminded me of Montana. So beautiful! I wanted to redo our entire house in this palette right then and there.