The lovey Hippo receives affection.
Miss Tibbit savours lovey Hippo belly contents.
Hamish administers love to the thinner lovey HIppo.
We all celebrate Valentine’s love in our way.
I prefer mine with less evisceration.
The sunlight glowed through yesterday morning’s snowfall so that the dogs and I were surrounded by whirling and sparkling crystals on morning walkies. Miss Tibbit, the useless little black dog, pranced down the side walk in her bouncing happy stride. Hamish the Corgi sniffed, raced to the next interesting spot, and sniffed again. The world was bright and full of opportunities – a snow storm in the sunshine? Anything seemed possible.
Across the street a car door creaked open and the dogs and I listened to a tubercular hacking emerging from the ancient sedan. Miss Tibbit stopped to look and Hamish glanced over from his position against some unfortunate shrubbery.
The hacking head leaned out of the car and drooled a liquidy mess onto the street. Awesome, I said to the dogs. Miss Tibbit strained against the leash, deeply interested. Let’s go check it out, she said to Hamish who walked up next to her. Ok, Hamish said as he stepped off the curb.
In the brilliant shine of a sunlit snowfall I fought the dogs down the block away from this fresh excitement. Their noses pointed high to cop sniffs and their little feet struggled in the snow and ice against my pull on their leashes. The possibilities of yesterday’s sparkling morning were broader, and a little less cheery than I hoped. I looked up and sighed into the snowing falling from the blue sky while the dogs breathed deeply of another interesting spot.
And it is no wonder really that Wiggins the Cat was poking his head in there. To a cat, a Croc that size might be something to crawl into. Hang out in. Attack people from the comfort of.
The question as I see it is more along the lines of, what happened that caused the cat to puke inside the Croc? As I think about the mechanics of it, having watched Wiggins the Cat puke more than once in his 14 years, I try to imagine his posture. Was his head inside the Croc or did he projectile? If he projectiled, why into the Croc?
The Spouse assures me that he also calmly thought through the scenario as he slid his foot into the Croc at 6:10am this morning for running the dogs in the yard. He thought, why is my foot wet? Did I get snow in my shoe during the bedtime dog trip to the yard? No, he concluded, there’s no snow on the ground right now. Did the cat pee in my shoe? He started feeling angry during that thought he tells me. But no. Not pee. He learned it was puke when he inspected the bubbled, white, foamy mess on his foot. Or when he sniffed the Croc, his story isn’t clear on this detail.
We should, as a group, be asking ourselves was it coincidence that the cat’s head was in the Spouse’s Croc when the unstoppable need to vomit coalesced? Should we all, or perhaps one sacrificial member of the crew, sniff the Croc? Please, feel free to volunteer.
Just a little sniff?
“Spouse,” I say, coming in the house after driving home in the rain, “we need to research new tires for the Mini.”
The WideEyedSpouse perks up. New tires means hours of research on TireRack, DiscountTireDirect, and Mini Cooper S forums. Productive research, not idle research. The Spouse opens his laptop.
Do we get tires that perform best in snow and rain but are less ideal in summer asphalt conditions? Would we prefer a better warm weather adventure driving experience and have tires that are merely adequate during the times of year when it is best to go slow and careful anyway?
Do we replace the run-flats that give a buckboard ride to the Mini with conventional performance tires and toss a donut spare in the boot? “How spirited is your driving?” the Spouse asks me. This isn’t a subject I care to discuss. I pretend I didn’t hear the question.
As we watch evening TV (Episode 107 of Star Trek Next Gen), I listen to the Spouse clickety click around the internet. I see that he has several windows open simultaneously and he isn’t really paying attention to the TV because Captain Picard makes a funny face and the Spouse doesn’t laugh.
“Ok,” he finally turns the laptop toward me, “I figured it out.”
Pictured on the laptop screen is a BMW 3 series station wagon. A vehicle widely acknowledged as providing one of the best driving experiences in North America. I look at the image and then look over at the Spouse. “Heh?” I ask.
“It comes with new tires,” he says.
And that friends, is how the WideEyedHousehold handles every day vehicular wear and tear. So far I am resisting the car fever. It is kept low-grade by the winter temperatures this week. It is too frigid to make any decisions about anything. And way too cold to have a really enjoyable test drive.
I just wanted a rubber band. One rubber band from the kitchen junk basket.
This was too much to ask from the junk basket. Four minutes and thirty seven seconds into the task I marched – marched calmly – to the basement for my sledge hammer. It is a 10 pound sledge. Not the heaviest. It has a shock absorbing plastic handle. Not the most traditional.
It works.
(When I bought my sledge two older guys in line with me nudged each other a whole lot until one of them worked up the nerve to ask – “Is that for your husband’s truck? Heh heh heh,” they both laughed and poked each other with gnarled index fingers. “Hoo boy, he must have done something pret-ty bad. Heh heh heh.” I didn’t smile. “Yep,” I said.)
Anyway.
Next time I want a rubber band, the [new] kitchen junk basket should consider giving it up easy.
Gloriously foul and endlessly fascinating, snow trash happens when the deep snow melts and reveals the urban detritus of weeks. It is a special seasonal process to be enjoyed only a few times a year. Because I happen to be a professional studier of the material remnants of human activity, I can’t look away from a nice nasty city snow bank. I like them to be really full of good stuff and I stop for particularly rich ones to be sure I’m seeing everything. This isn’t the WideEyedSpouse’s favorite activity, but the dogs sure don’t mind.
Dog dookies are ubiquitous in the melting snow banks. Big, small, dark, light. You can really see the variety of diets fed to the neighborhood canines. Here in Buffalo chicken bones also are typical in the melting snow mounds. Perplexing. Yes, Buffalo Chicken wings, but does everyone eat them all the time? They must fly from car windows like confetti.
I see newspapers, catalogs, dryer sheets, and Kleenex that appear used but may just be wet from the melt. I haven’t developed a way to determine used versus wet yet but I do tend to think crumpled means used. They come in all colors: white, pink, green, yellow. I have suspicions that the yellows started as white and they are in fact used.
A shoe appears every now and again and it baffles me every time. Where does that single shoe come from? Who walked home with one shoe? If you noted that your shoe had come loose from your foot, in the winter, would you not backtrack? Go on a little hunt for your missing shoe? What I should do is determine if the single shoe is statistically significantly correlated with the presence of a spray of brightly colored vomit. Which, by the way, can be observed on the white snow with alarming frequency. Here my broader hypothesis is that inebriated people throw up hard enough to toss a shoe, and then they don’t notice their shoe is gone. Although, there are no bars in the immediate vicinity, so they must be home drinkers. Alternatively, the vomit could innocently result from too many chicken wings or a terrible Kleenex supported flu that hits while walking the family dog (which parsimoniously explains the vomit, the Kleenex litter, the uncleaned up dookies, AND maybe even the shoe. Now that’s hypothetical model building friends.). I might be looking for too many causal links. I can’t help myself, that’s what I do.
Yesterday the dogs and I saw something entirely new. A unique specimen. A kidzbop 3 CD had sliced into a snow bank and it gleamed in the morning sun. A prize. Hamish sniffed it pretty good and Tibbit wee’d near it. From its position in the snow bank, about 1.4 meters in from the street, I could posit that kidzbop 3 had been flung from a moving car. The presence of the kidzbop cd in the snowbank distracted me all day and I developed a series of hypotheses explaining why the cd had been flung:
H1: “What? No baby I don’t have any kids.” Fling.
H2. I went home and found kidzbop 3 online. Gave it a listen. Who wouldn’t?. And so, Hypothesis 2: Track 1: remake of Soak up the Sun. Track 2: remake of Hey Baby Hey Baby Hey sung by tunelessly chanting children. Track 3: (does it even matter?)…Fling.
H3: “Oh look, a cd came in my used car…” Fling.
H4: “Oh God, the baby just puked in the car! All over everything!” Fling.
H5: “Mamamamamama play kidzbop. Play kidzbop. Play it. Play it. Plaaaaaayyyyy iiitttt.” Fling.
I went back later to get kidzbop 3. It was gone. Gone.
“Good thing we have the worm bin,” I said to the Spouse the other day.
He gave me a blank, flat eyed stare. “Why?” he asked in a tone that said he didn’t really want to talk about the worm bin, could think of no good thing related to the worm bin.
“Because the compost heap is frozen,” I told him, feeling cheerful and content with my little WideEyedEcosystem.
The Spouse turned in his chair and peered out the kitchen window to the back garden. I could see him noting the foot of snow draped over the garden. I could see him not making the connection. He, as you may recall (Worm Bin Chronicles: Inception), hates the worm bin. Spine-tingling, hair-raising hates the notion of hundreds or thousands of juicy, wriggling worms snacking, always munching in a bin in our house.
“If we didn’t have the worm bin, where would we put the veggie trash?” I asked him.
He sipped his beer and thought. “The trash?” he asked.
I glared at him and slapped my Fedco Seeds catalog onto the counter. I flipped to page 128 and spun the catalog around, pointing about halfway down the page to the Worm Castings offering (8 quarts for $15.00). “Those worms are making money in there,” I told him. “At least they have a job,” I said, referring to our lay-about small black dog of limited wits and multiple degrees (P.K, F.C.)
The Spouse leaned forward in his chair a bit to peer at the fine print of the catalog. “Uh huh,” he said and leaned back unconvinced, unconvincable I fear.
Stop 1: Scottsville, Esmont, Charlottesville Virginia WideEyedFunks:
I was spooning caviar onto a smear of cream cheese at the pre-Christmas dinner snackie spread. Sister-in-law L. and Older Brother set us up with fine cheeses, Dracula’s Dilemma pickled garlic, some kind of awesome aged herbed salami. And caviar.
Our WideEyedParents were across the room and from around the Christmas tree we could hear dad shouting at mom: “Do you want some cold cuts?”
“A cool one?” she said, “no, I don’t want a beer.” Heh. Might be time for hearing tests.
Sister-in-law N. pushed through Sister-in-law L. and me to get to the snackies, “Quit snack blocking,” she told us. I inched my counter stool over an inch or so, but not really too far. I hadn’t tried all the cheeses yet.
I lifted my caviar cracker to take a bite. “You eat that stuff?” Older Brother asked, clearly doubtful. I shrugged and ate the cracker. Older Brother watched me chew. “I don’t eat it,” he said. “Good,” Sister-in-law L. said, “more for the rest of us.”
Older Brother glanced at her and put his attention back on me. “Caviar reminds me of when I had chicken pox in my mouth,” he paused, I think to judge my response. I had stopped chewing, riveted despite my worries for what was coming. “When the chicken pox popped they released salty juices that tasted juuuuust like caviar.” He smiled at me. I swallowed my chewed up and popped caviar with difficulty.
Younger brother walked by, jiggling Baby Nephew. “Oops,” Younger Brother said, watching a big drooly spit up splat to the floor. Hamish and Miss Tibbit were mildly interested. Oldest Brother called from the Sunny Southwest. We talked about Sister-in-law J.’s belly dancing costume and safety pins. Young nephew strolled past in his new skateboard helmet, and Niece clacked at her new laptop.
Stop 2: Ocean City, New Jersey Family of WideEyedSpouse
Two particularly elegant women from My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding accidently joined us for Christmas 2.0.
Older Niece wore her excellent new hat while she thumbed at something on her new smarty phone and Younger Niece trotted around the living room, tormenting Hamish with her interest in his plush fur. He ran, WideEyed, from corner to corner seeking asylum.
Sister-in-law K and Brother-in-law P sat numbly watching Younger Niece and Christmas 2.0 events. They manage in retail and Christmas is Not Kind to the folks who at the most fundamental level facilitate our national economic security.
Mother-in-law sniffed her new Chanel perfume, remembering Valentine’s gifts from her dad back in the day, and WideEyedSpouse and I waited to see what the relentlessly greedy Miss Tibbit would manage to steal from the table.
All the while, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding flickered on the TV behind us, benign and quiet, until we noticed the bride and her maid of honor beating each other into the sidewalk outside of their wedding hall. Sister-in-law K. grabbed the remote to turn it up. We watched in awe.
Stop 3: Buffalo, New York WideEyedHousehold
1,500 miles, 14 accidents in the cat hut, 2 major winter storms, 9 bottles of water, 7 travel cups of coffee, 6 days later, and we are home. The Christmas candles burned in the windows of the WideEyedHouse to greet us. The new snow gleamed on the garden fence and pergola, and Miss Tibbit did a little dance in the drive while Hamish rolled and rolled in the snow.
Last Tuesday evening the WideEyedSpouse and I marched down the block with Miss Tibbit to her training final exam and graduation, belching the happy taste of Sahlen’s hot dogs and a reasonable lost-grape-of-Chile Carménère red wine. We were all nervous. Miss Tibbit had been nervous all day with an upset stomach which she emptied explosively on the side of the bed, the bed post, and the floor.
Miss Tibbit passed the test with what might be considered a C. Maybe a C+ with a special commendation for savant treat catching. She walks beautifully, sits like a dream, and will not/can not resist throwing herself on people to demonstrate her love. She escaped her leash during Cooper the standard poodle’s walking exam. Mayhem. Demerits. She won a ribbon for showing the most improvement during the course. Which means, of course, everyone recognized her remedial start state.
Miss Tibbit waking from a rejuvenating post-baccalaureate nap.
Yesterday the WideEyedSpouse stood gazing down at Miss Tibbit, who was lounging across three remotes, the Xbox controller and the WII wand on the living room sofa. He asked when she intended to take her newly inked diploma out on the streets to look for a job. Miss Tibbit stretched and blinked at him. She needs time to chill after the intense discipline she used to earn her degree, she told him. She has to get in touch with what will make her fulfilled, figure out what the next step is. She heard there’re advanced degrees in dock jumping, agility, and citizenship. She’s going to ask around, see what other dogs think of the different programs. Maybe travel a bit. WideEyedSpouse stared at her for a moment and then walked with purpose out of the room and down the hall.
I heard ice cubes clackle into a glass in the kitchen and then the fizt of one of my Fever-Tree tonic waters opening. The WideEyedSpouse was mixing himself a nice, super-premium Gin and Tonic rather than pursuing the conversation with Miss Tibbit. He knew, as I know, soon enough the WideEyedHousehold will be writing more checks for Miss Tibbit’s graduate education. Her dog brother Hamish the Corgi knows it too, and I can see him planning something expensive to even the score on his own account.
It is an unfortunate quirk of WideEyedFunk life that I can’t have anything nice. I drop things. Trip over things. Knock things from mantels, shelves, the wall. My ruination of something precious is always followed by stomping and loud wailing on the theme of “Why can’t I have anything nice?” for fifteen to thirty minutes
This time it was my Cleo Skribent left-handed nib, stainless steel, piston reservoir fountain pen. I don’t carry this pen out of the house because it will be lost. I use it at my desk and planned to do so for the next 40 years. And then over the weekend I dropped it. Of course I did.
Because the Cleo Skribent is so wonderfully heavy, it fell with authority. Because the Cleo Skribent hand-enameled nib is so wonderfully lovely and precise, it bent all to crap. The fall from my desk was effectively the annihilation of all that is nice about my desk life. I love this pen and I love the peacock blue ink I put in it. Go ahead, write your grocery list with a pen that cost more than the groceries. You’ll see – milk, eggs, dog chow, beer…they never looked so good. Yes, ball point will work, as will pencil, blood, chipped stone, or wax tablets pressed with cut reeds. I prefer my Cleo Skribent.
I was in the kitchen, under the bright stove light with some needle nosed pliers, weeping and wailing, shrieking and feeling sorry for myself when the WideEyedSpouse found me. Or perhaps more accurately, when he decided it had gone on long enough to be interesting.
The pliers were too big. The nib was too bent. I needed jeweler’s tools. I needed to send it away for repairs. I might as well just throw it in a drawer because This Pen Is Dead to Me. I Can’t Have Anything Nice. I sulked away to the kitchen table with a medicinal glass of wine.
The WideEyedSpouse swigged from his can of Pepsi and had a look at the Cleo Skribent. He unscrewed parts, pulled things apart that I was sure weren’t meant to BE apart, and ended up with just the bent nib and a pair of pliers way too big for the job. He bent a little, peered at little, bent a little, peered a little. After a little while he handed my whole pen back to me. It worked. Like it never even happened.
“Awesome,” the WideEyedSpouse said, “There is nothing I can’t fix. And I don’t even need the proper tools to do it.” He looked pretty smug.
But who cares. The Cleo Skribent writes again. I’ll let him have this one.
wideeyedfunk 