Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Take that, Algonquin Round Table.

HIM: All fire, or just the one?

ME: I hope just the one. We need fire! It burns things. In a good way.

HIM: Do you think the fire was breaking into the home, and the home destroyed it in an act of self defense? Or was it just some innocent little fire minding its own business when... pow!

ME: It was probably a revenge killing scenario.

HIM: "Hey! I'm just a campfire! I never did anything to you!"

ME: "I've seen what your kind does to houses."

HIM: "Not me! I never hurt anybody! I just toast marshmallows in peace!"

ME: "Oh please. You're all alike."

HIM: Racist!

ME: "You're not trustworthy. You can't be trusted." (confidentially) "That's what 'not trustworthy' means."

HIM: Do you think the campfire taunted the house about not being so trustworthy itself, what with its mortgage being underwater because of the real estate downturn? 

ME: I hope not. That would really be playing with fire.

HIM: YYEEEEEEEAAAAAHHH!

 

Status report

Tired. We are tired. 

Jane has been transformed into a fountain of snot, and though she is being pretty good natured about it, she is still not quite the very pinnacle of well rested good humor, and neither am I. Yet for some reason I decided today would be the right day to clean the front porch, which had gone happily uncleaned since before we moved in.

I should have taken pictures before I started, because it was comically encrusted with

• mysterious black clinging dirt on every surface
• drifts of leaves and twigs and other kinds of more silty dusty dirt
• cobwebs EVERYWHERE 
• really, everywhere

These were dense, creepy, luxuriant cobwebs. They would be the envy of any Halloween propmaster. They covered every window corner, every intersection of planes. They stretched from the back of each chair leg to the floor, and across each gap in the railing.

Some were fairly small and just held more of the black clinging dirt. Others were larger and bedecked with gnats and dried leaves. The biggest one, right by the front door, was about the size and shape of a substantial colander, and full of dead moths.

Oh, look, I missed a corner:

Just multiply that times EVERYWHERE and you get the idea.

Anyway, having strategically waited until it was well into the hottest part of the day, not to mention, of course, the twelve months of cobweb ripening that I'd waited before that, I made my move.

I swept and brushed and swabbed and whacked and toiled and missed that one corner while Jane stood on the other side of the screen door, rattling it and gushing snot, suggesting "Out! Out! Out!" alternating with an occasional "Cheese?" And now the porch is merely ramshackle and dusty (except for that corner) rather than shameful and haunted.

And I am sweaty and stinky and tired and pleased. Mediocrity hooray!

History's most innocuous home invasion

Last night, Steve's parents (who are visiting from Florida) babysat Jane while we went out to a merry picnic dinner in honor of a friend's birthday, followed by an outdoor screening of Singin' in the Rain. I was even more excessively spazzy and logorrheic than usual, perhaps out of giddy confusion at Jane's absence, and everyone was very kind in response.

At the end, we stumbled home, full and fat, saw Steve's parents off to their hotel, and tumbled into bed not long after.

Around 3 am, the cat woke Steve, who tossed him outside as per his catty request, and staggered back to bed. About an hour later, I awoke to a loud crashing sound involving the baby gate separating the front room from the kitchen.

"Izzitthecat?" asked Steve, bleary.

The crashing continued. "It is definitely not the cat," I said, and got out of bed.

If you poke your head out our bedroom door and look to the right, you see this:

At night, it looks something more like this:

And what I saw at about 4:30 this morning looked something like this:

 

I gave a single short SHRIEK before leaping back into the bedroom and onto the bed in a single bound.

When I landed, I gasped: "Person!" 

As I turned on the light, Steve got out of bed himself. In the living room, trapped behind the gate and leaning one very very very drunken hand on the back of the chair, stood a young, biggish white guy wearing a black hoodie.

Steve, very composed, said, "Hey, man, what are you doing in my house?"

The guy blinked a couple of times, and his very, very drunken state was very, very manifest. (The crashing noise had been his several failed attempts to figure out how to navigate the baby gate, running up against it over and over like a not very sophisticated toy robot.)

Steve took him by the arm and led him to the front door. "Okay, you have to get out of here now."

Drunken Hoodie said something like "mrlrmblrm yeah?" and obligingly staggered to the door.

Steve put him outside and locked the front door while I dashed to the now wide open back door and closed and locked it. Then we went back to bed and said "Holy shit" at each other many times. 

Drunken Hoodie meanwhile stood around on our porch for about five minutes, then stumbled over to the wicker chair on our porch, ringing the doorbell with his shoulder on the way, and fell asleep. We decided this was acceptable until morning. (It seems likely that he had mistaken our back door for his back door when staggering home from a party blind drunk, tried it and found that we either failed to lock up when we went to bed or after letting the cat out—hey, let's not do that anymore!—and then washed up—CLANG!—against the baby gate.)

Did you know? It turns out that one's system produces a lot of adrenaline when there are strangers in one's living room at four in the morning. This makes it rather difficult to get back to sleep, unless you are Jane, who was briefly roused by about 30% at the height of the festivities, after which she snurfled and rolled over.

But not to worry! Steve and I both managed to drop off before six, at which time Hoodie woke up and rang the doorbell.

Steve went to the door and he tried, shamblingly and feebly, to come in.

"Okay, dude" (apparently Steve trends surfer under duress) "why are you ringing my bell?"

Hoodie replied, "hrmblarm josh?"

Steve explained that this was our house, Hoodie's friends didn't live here, and that he had to leave. Hoodie obligingly said "flmm yeah," lurched down the porch steps, and walked away.

And that was it! He appears not to have puked or pissed on anything, so we are calling that a win. Godspeed, hammered young hoodie man. I hope your friends take better care of you next time, or that you learn to live in a more recognizable house.

"When I write about this on my weblog," I said to Steve, "I am going to give my poor mother a heart attack." Sorry, mama!

Weighty.

I have just been putting together a very heavy and sturdy piece of child-specific furniture given to us by Steve's parents for my birthday. Jane is not yet quite big or old enough to make use of it, and it remains to be seen whether it will be an albatross or the opposite.

When I was pregnant with Jane, Steve's parents bought us a crib. I hemmed and hawed and suggested that we wait until after she was born to see what we wanted, but that clearly made them feel extremely uneasy. So as her birth approached and they began gnawing off their limbs from anxiety, we caved in and I found a crib that we thought looked nice. It was not cheap. I felt a little discomfort about this, but it arrived and we assembled it and it was quite attractive and the grandparents were happy.

Then Jane slept in our bed for six months and in a portable baby tent at the foot of our bed (or other places around our house and the houses of others—it's portable, after all) ever since. She has spent about four naptimes in the expensive crib and hated every one of them. In the tent she sleeps like—who is a famously good sleeper? Not Rip Van Winkle, because she wakes up appropriately. Like a cat, maybe, or a newly pregnant woman. Anyway, she sleeps and is happy and so are we, except for the guilt about the expensive crib. 

So, have Steve's parents bought us yet another guilt-inducing large item, to my specifications, that will never get any use? Time will tell!

For now I am feeling a complex emotional brew of tired satisfaction in the wake of all that manual labor, a shimmering liminal sheepishness in anticipation of the albatross outcome, optimistic anticipated enjoyment in the case of the alternative outcome, and some trepidation over their rapidly approaching visit, which naturally is what occasioned my assembling the thing now despite its unsuitability to Jane's current developmental moment.

On the other hand, a friend says that he has been eying the selfsame child-specific furniture because his daughter always wants to be up! up! up! in the kitchen to see what's going on. This gives me hope, because (as you know) "up! up! up!" is both the majority of Jane's dialogue and her well-conceived moral and political philosophy. Up with upism!

PS. I recently got and deleted some spam from "Leaky Bowels." If you are feeling sorry for yourself, imagine for a moment what it would be like if "Leaky Bowels" were your real name. 

PPS. I searched for "famous sleepers" and found this. "Perhaps because of the fame and brilliance of these chronic sleepers, it is considered socially acceptable, and even chic, to sleep during conference, colloquium, and seminar talks."

This mini-post brought to you by the letter T.

Hi! We went on a trip, and then we came back. It was great. I had a million great conversations with swell people and stayed up late and ate piles of delicious food. Jane cavorted with doting five- and nine-year-olds, fed delectable brioche to a stinky beagle, and had countless mutually gleeful slapping fights with our hosts' feisty half-grown cat. Steve mostly worked. Poor Steve.

Soon Steve's parents will be visiting us, but I will try to get in at least one real post before then, because I missed you. 

In the meantime, here is a picture of Jane browsing the Times Literary Supplement in my best friend's parents' kitchen:

 

Aux oligo-éléments marins.

HIM: I see that this is allegedly multi-sensory bubble bath.

ME: Sure. It probably tastes like chocolate and sounds like a steam engine.

HIM: Surely there's more to it than that.

ME: I expect it also feels like being poked repeatedly with a pencil eraser. It's educational.

HIM: I mean -- this is the twenty-first century. We don't just believe in five senses anymore. There's proprioception, and temperature, and, uh, whatever the sense of acceleration is called.

ME: Oh, good point. So it's a hash bath, is what you're saying. Where are my hands? I lost track of them again. Oh, here they are, under the bubbles. 

HIM: AAAAH AM I MOVING?! Oh, no, I'm not, it's just the bubble bath. Right.

ME: And actually, tasting like chocolate is totally old news. There's probably been chocolate-flavored bubble bath since 1963.  

(We put Jane in the bath. She seems to enjoy it.)

ME: Jane, is it a festival of the senses? Does it smell like loneliness and taste like the number four?

HIM: (fiddling with the laptop) Does it taste like THIS?

 

But no, actually, it's just blue. SCIENCE!

That's right, ladies.

Some terribly nerdy things that happened in our house in the last five minutes alone:

I said, "I need to find out more about the Prime Directive."

Steve said (aloud, in conversation), "REDACTED. My comment is redacted."

I said, regarding some drink glasses, "You are suffering from an unnecessary multiplication of entities."

And we had a conversation about Klingon penes. (Steve thinks they are probably barbed; I think that, when erect, they are probably VERY VERY hard.)

But, disappointingly, no Jesuits at all.

Steve is taking all of the vitamins:

Jane is just along for the ride on this one.

Meanwhile, the city is currently in the throes of Fiesta/"Old Spanish Days," which manifests ambiently in the form of lots of little girls running around in flamenco dresses, confetti everywhere, and a massive equestrian parade + mariachis.

For the most part the parade participants dress up in spangly sombreros or white-person cowboy gear, but as my local informant said, "as long as you have a horse, anything goes." The most striking example was the matched team of what appeared to be a dozen Revolutionary War cosplayers, complete with Paul Revere manpurses. The donkey-drawn cart full of elderly Shriners was good, too.

(Is there any other kind of Shriner, practically speaking? Yes, the pictures on their website strive mightily to give the impression that their ranks are bursting with plenty of robust young things, but Shriners in the wild tend to look more like they are probably veterans of the Spanish-American War. The fezzes, though?

 

Eternally young.)

Some brief excerpts from Wikipedia.

It is generally agreed that the dish was first prepared for the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I (1830–1916). There are several stories. 

The chorus is played twice; the first time it is followed by a brief pause, the second by the closing of the song. 

Monegasque law stipulates that any non-adulterine child is legitimatized by the eventual marriage of his/her parents, thereupon obtaining the rights to which that child would have been entitled if born in lawful marriage.

As in the opening of the previous book, the group's morale has once again deteriorated, with some members suffering from lack of eating and insomnia, amongst other things. 

While "Kaiser" is literally translatable (as Emperor), the same cannot be said for "Schmarrn". 

 

(Found by searching my IM history for the phrase "Oh, Wikipedia.")

Banner day.

Today's mail included the July issue of Subject Area, and the January issue of Topics in Subject, each in its own envelope.

I am all greasy, and Jane has a rash around her mouth. 

Steve is stuck in the San Francisco airport, waiting for his delayed flight to arrive so that he can come home to my greasy, loving arms.*

Jane, incidentally, would like you to know that this direction is up:

Indeed, all day long, in the stroller, walking about, clambering on the furniture, having her diaper changed, she pipes: UP! UP! UP! and points accordingly, her index finger held proudly aloft like a tiny sceptre.

Yesterday I was untangling a wadded up set of onesie pyjamas and wondered aloud, "Which way is up?" Across the room, Jane's finger immediately flew ceilingward. How true, that way is up. Thank you!

*Oops, Steve's flight has been switched from delayed to canceled. He reports that he still might be able to make it onto some mythical last flight out via standby, but one rather doubts it. Isn't this breaking news exciting? Transit, like your humble narrator: the fascinatingest.