Month 1 Roundup

 

This month we visited a Goatery! Somehow Mom found out there is a goat farm on Johns Island that's being run by a guy she went to high school with. Us gals consulted Olivia's nap schedule and then loaded up and set out. By now you may have picked up my subtle hints that all I want in life is land and farm animals, so my excitement levels were off the charts. 
Oh but it wasn't just goats. Chickens, pigs, donkeys and cows all delighted our spirits that day. We pet them and fed them and watched them poop their various shapes and consistencies. The chickens would follow us around the farm and peck at our legs. They took quite a liking to Mom's suede boots, They surrounded her like little feathered raptors and she stood casually, chatting with her old friend while they clucked and pecked at her and pooped around her feet. 

The cows were nearly the best part. They were beef cows, all black with a white belt of hair around their waists. "Oreos" their keeper called them. One fluffy brown cow had just delivered a baby cow that morning THAT MORNING!! and it was the cutest little sweet thing I've ever seen. Mama Cow wouldn't let us get close but Baby Cow was about the size of Pippa with fluffy grey hair and giant eyes. The cuteness was too much to take in. 
Over in Goat World, we learned lots of things. Diet, mating, rectangular pupils, etc. All hundred and some goats wore a collar with their name stitched on. Sheila, Uma, and Kelsey were favorites. One named Louise had fondness for my lower half. She rubbed her boney head on my thighs and bottom for a full five minutes. Struck me as very funny.

We celebrated Brett's 34th birthday with Ellie and Caroline and then again with his family. His folks kept talking about him turning 33 and every time he or I tried to correct them something distracting would happen and the message would get lost. Brett would patiently take in their musings and then say, "Actually, I'm 34." 
"Clint, don't you need to check the grill?"

"It's my 34th birthday," Brett said again later as we topped off our drinks. 
"Jeff, do you remember your 33rd birthday?" 

I decided to take a mathematical approach. "Yep, Brett was born in 1987. That was 34 years ago. That makes him 34 today!" I said to the whole dinner table. 
"What house were we in in '87?"

Brett and I gave up and decided we would try again next year. 

Over on the Homefront, we've moved into another phase of additions and improvements. 

We plan to continue what has turned out to be an endless paint job on the back porch. We planted forty-one little ligustrum bushes along the back fence in an attempt to eventually block out the neighbors and make me feel less exposed. I haven't fully worked out why I deemed this necessary. We still have side neighbors to worry about and I would never be leaping around in the yard in the nude so the distain I've developed towards the unsavory exposure in the very back seems discriminatory. I have wondered if the neighbors back there see the new hedge for the obvious purpose I put it there. I would like to block you please, yes. 

And just when my upper body recovered from this job, Brett woke me up early on Saturday morning to mix 7 eighty-pound bags of concrete for him while he built new footings under the house. We have wonderfully slanted floors in the house. Nothing sits quite flush with the ground so as you walk through the house bookcases and chairs tremble in your presence as though you are a powerful warrior to be feared. Glasses clink and lamps flicker and while I find it charming and a good reason to mind one's walking posture, Brett is burdened by the "uneven distribution of weight." 

So we're adding two footings to help level the floor and somehow I got the job that is normally tackled by high-powered machinery on wheels. By my fifth bag I had a great technique developed that involved using the hose on full-blast as the initial mixing method. When my pot-o-honey was ready, I lifted that load (lift with the knees!!  - Brett) up, straight up by the handles of the wheelbarrow and the sludge would slowly burble into a plastic tray placed just inside the crawlspace under the house. Then it would be pulled into the darkness by Brett who had to push the hundred pounds along the ground as he slithered through on his belly. I'd begin my next batch. Brett would be gone a good while, spreading and stuffing the cement into place and then he'd reemerge for a few breaths of clean air before my batch was ready. 

After the first footing, Brett was ready to call it a day. I was thankful and did not encourage him to go the extra mile. I started the job in doubled-up socks, thick boots, and an oversized puffy coat. When Brett finally came out from under the house I was barefoot in a tank top. Admittedly, I tweaked a little something lifting the wheelbarrow and had to give the ol' back a few days off. We're rested and ready for the next footing ... and Dad just told us he has an electric cement mixer that can pump it all right into place. 

Also, Aunt Georgia, look at our Bonsai progress.

Let's see, what else? Pup cuddles, family dinners. We've been watching some strange movies. 

We also went for a crisp beach walk and then sat in the sun. It's the little things.

United We Sit

In another month and some change, it will have been a year of the Covid life. Brett's been going into the office on Mondays recently and it's caused me much reflection and inner turmoil. Admittedly, I've grown attached to this conjoined way of living. Seeing as I like him and all, I really love that he's always around. Whether he shares this notion is debatable as I've become quite spirited in my downtime - which is more and more frequent. 

"Brett! How many people do you think we've spoken to in our lives that have killed someone?"

"Suppose the sky is as tall as the earth is deep and were just a smear of jelly between two slices of bread."

"Hey Bubbles? Can you explain an engine to me?"

"Where did you put that jar of long matches?"

I talk at my desk all day long and Brett usually grunts or acknowledges me in some way so that I don't get mad at him for ignoring me. This is usually my Lux off-season anyways but with the current state of things, I'm not doing a lot of bookings and proposals. It's not that I'm not getting inquiries. It's that I can't make money on a Covid wedding's budget so I'm just turning folks down left and right until full-sized parties with full-sized budgets are a thing again. If Brett didn't have a real person job, I'd have had to go find some employment which means I'd have looped back around to being a miserable member of society. 

So anyways, Brett's been enjoying a Monday furlough each week and it leaves me in a state of content paralysis. I have spent the last year running all of my thoughts past Brett for confirmation, negotiation, dismissal, or joined company. I only eat breakfast or lunch because he makes me, so today I floundered around for 30 minutes wondering if I should scrounge up lunch or if food would appear if I used The Force. I don't know what times to exercise or walk the dogs because those things are determined by Brett's workload that day. Because I can't walk alone, oh no. I'm dependent. I need my companion to execute any task or else I'll wind up on the couch watching home makeover shows. 

Also, we've had so much take-out in the last year. You know the smell of a hot paper bag? That gets me excited, cause I know there's a meal inside. 
I've developed a Pavlovian response to hot cardboard. 

At the very beginning of all this, I was much less productive with Brett home, what with his blasting conference calls and stressful work tunes. Then I turned into a very busy worker (mostly out of fear that he would notice my fondness for home makeover shows) and we found our rhythm in perpetual company. Recently he's taken notice that most of the things I say out loud don't merit a response which I disagree with and on those days I think about wapping him on the back of the head with any of the pieces from our cast iron collection. But with him gone, well. I've got Stockholm Syndrome. 

I'd forgotten how quiet it is to be in the house without my Jolly Lean Giant. I don't like it.
I've gotten spoiled.

Here is the latest in my perpetual home makeover with a budget of $0. I've swapped back to "light and airy" in the living room but I've decided it looks too girlie. In the dining room I created a cozy reading section.
We still eat at the coffee table.

Current Efforts

With that written but unfinished book of mine loitering around wondering if it counts or not, I'm putting in the effort to tidy the dern thing up and see about publishing. The thing is, I wrote all the stories and proclaimed myself done. But as I drifted off one night I thought of a much more interesting way to describe an aspect of one of those stories. And if I took that and ran with it, it created a theme and a point (which my musings never have) and an entirely different story told about the same events. Basically, I drifted off coming up with a better story, so I rewrote it and now it's much funnier and more informative. Later, I drifted off drawing a parallel between three separate stories. So the next day I mushed them into one longer essay that, with a little more musing and joking tossed in, became more dynamic and interesting. I realized I could and should rewrite every story. I needed to look at them through this more professional filter. And I also realized this could go on forever and that no essay is ever truly finished. 

So I've given myself until April. I will edit and rewrite and connect dots on all of my irrelevant tales and then I'll finally send them to an agent so that they can break my heart. Doesn't that sound fun? Creating a deadline has made me sit down and do my work. I also found out that if you, like... practice? writing? you kind of like... come up with better stuff?

I bought a prompts journal. This makes me laugh. It's causing me to amass a self-focused collection of favorites and preferences and memories. "Write about a time you spoke up for someone." 
"What's your favorite room in your house?"
"Write a journal entry from the point of view of your dog."

I've also employed some other tactics I used in school when my creativity needed a nudge. When I couldn't come up with something to write about, I had a professor that told me to pick a newspaper headline and use it start a story. Ahem... 

"Woman Catches, Kills 13-foot Alligator." 

 

She insisted he came to her in a dream. His forty bottom teeth exposed in a gentle, leathery smile; the coo of his oblong, lip-less mouth gently lulling her into a deeper sleep. 

“He asked for freedom!” she exclaimed from the courthouse interrogation room. Jingles, the beloved mascot for B. Hardy FumiGator Services spent his afternoons lounging in the sunshine on the banks of the stagnant pond that festered outside of Mr. Hardy’s office building. 

"Police Seek Darth Vader Masked Suspect."

“Perhaps this was a bad idea,” she suggested dryly, as though she hadn’t said it before. She’d had enough of his foolish schemes, each one more appalling and dubious than the last. After last month’s charade with the banana taffy and the eye-patch she'd thought the worst was over. But this, well this just tops them all. He pushed past her into the living room. Sweat beading on his forehead, he had that wild look in his eyes as he frantically gathered newspapers and plastic bags. His boot laces trailed behind him and his childhood Darth Vader mask hung from his belt.

"Five-Year-Old Boy Wins Alaska Moose Calling Contest"

Martin Shrouder was large for a five year old. His tremendous arms had him splitting wood by the time he was in preschool. Perhaps it was his appalling diet. Or maybe the bizarre rearing tactics used by his “parents” for lack of a better term. Either way, his peculiar habits had the town in a frenzy half of the time. The other half Martin spent in the woods searching for bugs and climbing trees; the same as any other kid, if in fact other kindergarteners were allowed to wander unescorted through the wilderness.

Year 11. Day 1.

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Oh boy are you ready for the eleventh year of blogging? You know, if Aunt Georgia had never moved to Idaho, none of this would have happened. Who knew that her decision to move to a mountaintop would mean I'd begin an unpaid and lackluster career in journalism and entertainment that would last more than a decade? On the other hand, if she had never relocated to those jagged peaks, would I have found out that I liked to write? I owe it all to Aunt Georgie. AG. Awe Geez.

As I was saying this time last year, a restructuring is in order. As time has passed I realized that the restructuring bit would only be on my end and that you folks won't notice the change so really I ought not bother to mention it. That said, prepare yourself for more creative writings, journal entries, and strange blurbs I've cranked out that I don't know what to do with. And family updates of course.

All of it accompanied by unrelated photographs.