wideeyedfunk

Tag: Buffalo NY

  • Responsibility avoidance, Or, There are two kinds of spurs my friend.

    The grass in the back yard is long. Mowing has become critical.

    IMG_2093

    The new back stoop remains unfinished. The parts are in the garage, some assembly required. The new house colors, still undecided. Stripping the old paint, urgent.

    Stoop

    But it’s raining. 47 hundredths of an inch today so far in a long slow endless shower. Well now, that’s just too bad. All of the day’s chores were outside chores. Howsoever will I pass the time?

    RainGauge

    I’ll tell you how, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and a lace knitting project. 178 minutes of men of poor moral character. Italian made cotton Tahki yarn in a peaceable spring leaf green, bamboo needles, and a simple leaf lace scarf pattern. A match made in work avoidance heaven.

    knitting

    I knit three, and watched Blondie shoot Tuco down from the gallows for the second time… “I’ll keep the money and you can have the rope”. Slipped one purlwise, knit two and passed slip stitch over while Tuco caught Blondie in his hotel room… “There are two kinds of spurs my friend. Those that come in by the door, and those that come in by the window.” Slip slip knit while Angel Eyes’ thug Wallace beat the name of the cemetery out of Tuco and the prison camp orchestra played.

    40 minutes of the movie to go, Tuco and Blondie are just about the blow the bridge, and I figure I can knit another 20 or 30 rows if I don’t get too caught up in the three way standoff over the grave.

  • Sweet Tibbit gets her money’s worth out of a jelly bean.

    Hamish the Corgi and Miss Tibbit can’t stop thinking about jelly beans.

    DogsI’m looking at Sweet Tibbit now and she’s laying on the window seat gazing into the middle distance. She seems vacuous, blank-eyed, awaiting stimulus. I assure you she is thinking about jelly beans.  Hamish is lounged on the sofa, chin propped and contemplative. He is also thinking about jelly beans.

    Because they are dogs, they both like, or rather, don’t dislike, every color jelly bean. I believe that there is a slight preference for pink, red and purple jelly beans over black, orange, and green. It is hard to tell with Hamish because he crunch-gulps so swiftly that the experience is over by the time his Corgi brain has the opportunity to form an opinion.

    Tibbit (2)Sweet Tibbit, she savors a jelly bean. She snuffles the bean with her strangely mobile little black nose.  If it proves acceptable (and it always does but certain colors are approved more quickly), if acceptable Sweet Tibbit takes the bean with her tiny front nibble teeth and pursed lips. It disappears into her maw. Her catfish-like whiskers twitch as she repositions her prize to her molars. This is a mistake Sweet Tibbit makes every time. Really, every time.

    The bean embeds into Miss Tibbit’s molars.

    We all watch Miss Tibbit make rictus faces and chew with great exaggerated jaw movement. Her awkwardly too-big-for-her-mouth tongue flaps around. She pauses and looks at us. Makes a little test chew. Nope, not done. The rictus, chewing, flapping tongue scene starts again.

    Hamish feels an injustice has been perpetrated. He glances from Sweet Tibbit eating her jelly bean to me to the jelly bean bag. His meaning is quite clear. Miss Tibbit’s jelly bean was obviously better than the cheezy little one he got.

    As I reach into the jelly bean bag for another one, Miss Tibbit abruptly stops chewing and looks pointedly at my hand. She is trying to demonstrate that she is ready for another bean.  I hold my hand in the bag for a moment. Tibbit stares. I wait. I can see her lips trying to pull back into a rictus for more chewing. She is forcibly restraining them. I wait. Ricuts, flap, flap flap of the tongue.

    Miss Tibbit gets more out of a single jelly bean than anyone I have ever seen. Sweet Tibbit, so simple, so sweet.

  • The little table asked to come home with me.

    We meant to get to the estate sale earlier but the lure of sleeping late on Saturday morning proved too much. As it turned out, we got there in time. This estate sale was 4 stories of furniture, rugs, leaded windows, and interesting heaps of stuff. It was in a partially converted industrial warehouse in downtown Buffalo and I can’t figure out what was going on. Maybe some living space, maybe some packrat issues, maybe a business?  Wasn’t clear.

    SoldSignThe stuff was arranged on raw cement floors flea market style on the first and fourth  floors, stacked warehouse shelving on part of the second, and weird decadent lounge on the second and third with little side rooms of warehouse chaos. Everything was tagged twice. Black price was Friday. Red price was Saturday morning.  Everything was at least half off the red price and we were told by another dusty scrounger that it was best to just talk to Andrew (one of our local estate sale moguls) for the best deal.

    HeaderThe WideEyedSpouse and I both have wicked colds but we girded ourselves and tromped through the levels twice, three times. Second floor: antique leaded glass window: $20. Second floor, loft: mahogany mini side table $20. Not veneer. First floor: bureau with bookmatched drawer veneer $30. Fourth floor: two ironstone platters: $10 and one leathertopped side table: $20.

    ChairI was running my hand over the veneer on the bureau when I saw the little maple kitchen table and chairs. My breath caught. It was weird how my breath caught. I saw like it had happened, was happening, would happen again and again – I saw myself sitting at that table in my bathrobe drinking coffee and reading the paper in the morning sun. The table and chairs aren’t anything special. They’re probably c. 1920s, hard used, and one chair is sort of broken. They were dirty. Didn’t matter, they were already mine.  I looked at the price tag. Red price said $100.

    The sharks were circling tighter. I felt a little thrill of fear. I needed the floor person who established prices and marked items sold – ah! There she was about fifty feet away with people walking toward her. I made eye contact and smiled big, bright, like she was family I hadn’t seen in years. She started for me and ignored the other people. The power of positive feelings! The little kitchen table and chairs were mine. Er, ours. The WideEyedSpouse is welcome to sit there with me.

    BureauThe people milling and swirling around the sale were getting increasingly desperate while we loaded our loot. “You want to sell that?”  an older couple asked when we walked by with the bureau. I thought they were joking but maybe not. “How much did you pay for that?” a chic blond asked us moments later, her eyes were running over the intact drawer fronts. “Thirty dollars,” I said. “You done good,” she told me and broke into a stiff jog toward the building entrance.

    The little table is all set up in the kitchen. I scrubbed it and the chairs with a vinegar and water mix. The Spouse tightened some screws. I sat at it to clip coupons and shuffle through the Sunday paper. After three years living here, I felt warm, and safe, and settled.

    InKitchen

  • Why my laundry day just got easier.

    “You ask if you’re my laundry hump like it’s some kind of punishment.”  The WideEyedSpouse watched me fold another one of his t-shirts and sipped his Milk Stout Nitro. “Honestly, I’m a little taken aback,” he added.

  • Desperate times, moldy (delicious) measures.

    The time comes in every household when there’s nothing to eat. Just now, right this minute, it came to the WideEyedHousehold. The Mini and I splashed home from the Bug Lab and the Dry Cleaner through slush and muck and I was starving. The Mini wasn’t starving, it has a nice, expensive full tank of premium in the belly. I was STARVING.

    As I steered around interdimensional pot holes, I worked my way through the cupboards and fridge in my head. Chips, gone. Cheezits – a stale two or three rattling in the box. Cookies. Nope. Chocolate. Nope. Ice cream. Nope. Nothing. Sure, I was shoving ingredients out of my way (in the cupboards in my head) but there was nothing to eat. It doesn’t have to make sense. When a person is feeling peckish only certain eats will fix it. None of those eats were in my house.

    I got home, hung up the dry cleaning, said hi to the dogs, and hit the fridge. Nothing. I dangled there in the open door. Milk. Eggs. 57 stale bread ends each in their own little bag. A couple of lumps of dryish, greenish cheese. Ketchup, and three kinds of French mustard. Chutney. Jars of bacon fat. Because Grandma D always saved hers and I figured there must be a reason.

    And, oh, a treasure – one lonely English muffin with a thin skim of bluey-pink along the edge.

    Ahhh, yes. From the fridge dregs of rejected bits and things I forgot about I found something to eat. Toasted slightly moldy English muffin, buttered. Topped, while still warm from the toaster mind you, with sweet English cheddar with the green parts scraped off and a dollop of precious green tomato chutney we canned last fall. Crunchy. Sweet. Salty. Greasy. All the (important) food groups represented.

    I’m just swallowing the last bite, well, Miss T and Hamish are actually having the very last bites, and I’m here to tell you – aside from the faint whiff of decay and old fridge, my desperation eats were really good. I want more. I wonder if that rock hard butt end of a sourdough batard would toast well? The dogs and I are going to go check.

  • Jeans Requiem

    My favorite jeans became disreputable approximately one year ago. One week ago, 50 weeks after they had moved from faded-but-tidy to holey-and-disreputable, two separate incidents forced me to recognize the end may have come for the favorite jeans.

    Incident 1: Mel and I were scoring targets at the archery range. I held the clipboard with the score sheet, pencil poised. Mel said nothing. I waited. Still nothing. I glanced up. Mel was looking at my jeans. Or rather, he was looking at the holes. Each knee was exposed, with rips running about 5 or 6 inches north and south of the rip epicenters. In that area of my pants, there weren’t so much pants as knees with flaps of pants framing them. “Looks like you’re falling out of your jeans there,” Mel gestured at the place where my jeans should be in case I wasn’t aware of the areas of offense. “Huh,” I said. I cavalierly dismissed his concerns because Mel is Methuselah and may have conservative notions of appropriate attire.

    Incident 2: The WideEyedSpouse and I were selecting new spectacles at the Optician. Expensive process. We take our time. Try on everything. And why not? I thought I looked cute as a button in my Joan of Arctics, little blue blazer and favorite jeans. The Spouse said to me, “Man, you really need a new pair of jeans.” I peered at him through the Kate Spade frames I was trying out. I opened my mouth to say something rude but the Optician from across the room beat me to it, “Yeah,” he agreed with The Spouse, “when they get that bad you have to be careful about bending over in public.”

    Jeans2Slumped on the sofa with a glass of wine that evening I picked at the fringes of denim along the tears in my jeans. I thought about all the places, all the countries we’d been to together. Reviewed all the really fantastic outfits we’d made together. I’d given professional papers in these jeans. Taught in them. Worn them for uncountable hours of research and writing. Flip flopped through summers in them.

    I am now wearing a new pair of jeans. They are awkward and stiff. I look like someone else in them. I feel like I am wearing someone else’s pants. The waist feels funny. It is distressing and I keep thinking about my favorite jeans, washed and carefully folded in the bottom of the pants drawer of my bureau. Are they lonely in there? Will the new jeans gloat about our forthcoming adventures? I want to go put them on. But I can’t, I mustn’t. The much loved, favorite jeans can only be worn in memory now.

  • “You married a winner.”

    The rain is lashing down on the ice and slush and the temps are standing just above freezing. Hamish the Corgi went belly deep into greasy puddles on the walkies. Miss Tibbit the Useless fastidiously danced along the margins of the sidewalk lakes. She was clearly disgusted. The WideEyedSpouse and I were disgusted. It is disgusting out there.

    The Mighty Pathfinder hauled us and our rattling, quivered arrows and bow cases to the conservation society for archery league. Nothing good was on the radio, advertisements on most every station but the preacher man’s. It’s just a little too apocalyptic to listen to talk about a savior when we’re hurtling through traffic at light speeds in a big truck. So the flip flip flip of the wipers counterpointed the every changing melodies of bad songs and local radio ads as the Spouse rolled through the stations.

    We skittered across the glaciered parking lot of the conservation society clubhouse and thumped our boots on the snow mats before throwing open the door. It was warm and bright and dry inside and full of the league members setting up bows, belting on quivers. “Hey now,” I half yelled into the room. “Hey!” came back at us.

    PinI always set my recurve up faster than the Spouse, my gear is simpler and I guess I don’t have the eye for precision. He was tightening a sight screw and I was putzing with my stuff when Paul C., our league leader, swooped into our table space. He was holding a little manila envelope to the Spouse, “Congratulations,” he smiled. The Spouse is inherently suspicious. He didn’t take the envelope straight away. “For what?” he asked, peering out from under his Lancaster Archery Supply hat. “You won your class on one of the Sunday shoots,” Paul held the envelope closer. Matt took it, opened it, looked at the cool little winner pin. “Looks like you married a winner,” Diane said to me from the sign in counter.

    Heh. That cracked me up.

    DeerHeadFrontSo we shot our arrows. More or less ok for both of us. The Spouse’s pin gleamed on his quiver. The deer heads in the corner patiently displayed the conservation society tshirts for sale. And the rain lashed down outside. I was in the end lane against the wall and I could see it out there through the window: cold, wet, ugly.

    The Spouse’s team beat my team tonight, but near the end my shooting improved. The weather didn’t and we scrambled through the rain to the Pathfinder, from the Pathfinder to the back door, and now the WideEyedHousehold is huddled on the sofa safe from the day. And you know, I married a winner. We have a quiver pin to prove it.

  • Filtering winter.

    I have dogs. I have work. Sometimes the WideEyedHousehold needs staples like groceries or wine.

    There’s no choice for me, no opt out, no polite refusal. I have to go outside into the Winter at least three time a day. Miss Tibbit the Useless prefers fewer times in truly foul conditions. Hamish the Corgi goes out there whenever I go, climate is secondary to boon companionship.

    Two tools allow me to filter out the Winter.

    1. Joan of Arctic wool lined, faux-furry, Sorel rubber boots. I wear them with my suits, squeeze them on over my ancient magic-dissertation-writing sweatpants, tuck my jeans down in. I CAN’T FEEL THE COLD IN THEM. Knees down, I’m inside, next to a roaring fire.Boots

    2. Kate Spade gigantic sunglasses. I poke those architectural specs onto my nose during howling snow storms, for days of hazy winter twilight at noon, and in those rare-for-Buffalo sun-glared snow conditions. The lenses are so big, cover so much of my face…everything on the far side of the Kate Spades is artificial, none of it is real out there. Things exist only if I decide they do. Everything is better when I’m in the Kate Spades.

    KateSpades

    That’s it. The Winter is absurd. It won’t stop. Get yourself some quality filters and occupy a warm, gloaming place of your own making.

  • Peckish.

    And then I came across the WideEyedSpouse,
    standing in the dark kitchen,
    eating pickles.

    I left him to it.

  • Removing the self.

    ArcheryJan2014_cropLike I keep telling the WideEyedSpouse, the trick to fixing a series of bad shots is to take the self out of the equation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no expert on shooting a bow and I never will be one. The best I can hope for is less embarrassing scores in the coming months and years.

    However.

    I can claim expert status on trying really hard and failing. Then trying again. In an annoyingly recursive cycle of going after the same goal in slightly different ways. The emotional, intellectual, and temporal investments for most of my goals are catastrophically high. The failure part is gruesome. Picking myself back up, reorganizing, icing down the lumps – these are my unfortunate areas of expertise. I sure wish crowing over victories and throwing celebratory champagne parties were my practiced skills.

    But.

    Failing to hit a bullseye in archery is such a miniscule failure, a wee moment of disappointment in myself and my abilities. And it is repeated with rapidfire frequency. Twang. Miss. Twang. Miss. Twang. Miss. Multiple failures in under a minute. I feel my eyes bulging and the top of my head wanting to blast off. Inappropriate language hovers around my tongue, wanting to be said. And then, I get used to it.

    Then I can remove myself from the moment. I remove myself from the preparation and the consequences. I shut off the bits of myself that fret, that count results before the action is taken. For about 15 seconds I live entirely in Now. Twang. Bullseye.

    When it works, there’s a little surge of adrenaline. A chemical victory party. I stand for a few seconds and let that fade. Subtract the self. Twang. Bullseye. Please, I hope this works for the big goals too.