Happy January Damn It!

I don’t want to be a downer, but it does come so naturally, especially in January and February. I’m more than a bit burned out. All the clients whom I begged for work in the aft months of 2007 have come out of the woodwork and want their projects completed now! Work is plentiful; pay, not so much so, (or good, but difficult to get my hands on). In my usual desperation mode, I took on too many projects and I’m now in a bind. Even though I’m working day and night, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Jack is out at the Jet Propulsion Lab for the rest of the month (now that’s a strange sentence) Yet, before he left, he installed a doggy door. This doggy door is not your usual, run-of-the- mill door, it’s a Jack custom spectacular, which isn’t a criticism—far from it. It’s a one-of-a- kind, installed inside of a glass storm door that he found for a great price that he sawed out in the middle of the living room, power tools, saw horse, etc., because it was too cold in the garage. If he’d had more time, he could have made the world’s first automated doggy door. Now there’s an idea!

However, I was then left at home with two old, recalcitrant dogs with the mandate of training them to enter and exit the new aperture. This all came about because the two canines need to go out frequently and a new gig keeps me out for extended hours. Not only has the absence of their fulltime doorwoman worked them into a frenzy, but it’s subzero temps out there, and Jack doesn’t want me to leave the back door propped open for obvious reasons. Once again, I’m stuck between the freelancer’s rock and a hard place: I need more work which may require my presence onsite, but expectations lean toward continuing my at-home duties. Ho-hum. I’m boring myself.

Push come to shove—and it did, Max and Moses could not/would not go through the flap after the first day of its installation—go figure! I had to leave for the day, so what to do? Jack suggested we minimize the risk by taping the flap open. He made these suggestions from thousands of miles away, safely out of my reach. I tried electrical tape; it didn’t work. Then he suggested Gorilla Tape which required a trip to the Tractor Supply Store. Okay, since I have nothing better to do. I listened to a long monologue about this fascinating product from the checkout clerk, but soon found that this stuff was worse than the electrical tape or duct tape. Now Jack had another great idea. Tape it around the top of the door, through the opening, while holding the flap up, thus creating a hammock effect for the flap.

Okay, I’m five foot five, the door is over six feet tall, the doggy door is at the bottom, and it’s 25 degrees outside. Add in two dogs who are suddenly enthralled with all things doggy door, tape that won’t stick to anything but gloms onto itself like gum on a hot sidewalk, a 30 m.p.h. wind and answer this: how old is Kathy and when will she reach Chicago in the 9:15 train traveling north at 75 m.p.h.? Who gives a damn! I’m freezing my butt off and I have to travel to downtown Atlanta—an equation of time, distance, road rage, and pure happenstance that defies all mathematical configurations.

Thoroughly disheveled with a new Mr. Freeze hairdo, I actually achieved the feat. I gather my belongings; turn down the heat to minimize energy consumption, grab my keys and a bird flies past my head in the kitchen. Now I have left that door propped open on many a day and listened to Jack rant about a beast entering the house, but five minutes after I leave an opening a tenth of that of an open door, I’ve got a bird in the house. I won’t even try to describe what ensued but I was determined not to have a little dead creature on my hands when I returned, so I persuaded the bird out—eventually, and I use the word “eventually” very lightly. On the way to work, I was stopped for 15 minutes to watch roadside construction, delayed by a water main break at another juncture, and a rock hit and cracked by windshield five minutes after I hit the expressway. It was a wonderful day, all topped by the fact that when I got home, the Gorilla Tape had miraculously held, but for some strange reason, my entire kitchen was covered in bird sh_t!

Blow My Snow!

When I was 13-years-old, my father’s company transferred us to a part of the country where generations of our family— a combination of Irish, French, English, Dutch, and Cherokee Indian—had never been: Ohio. My God, we were north of the Mason/Dixon line!

I was an Atlanta suburban kid with a heavy Southern accent, yanked from the midst of my first long-awaited year of high school in Georgia, only to be plunked into something called a “middle-school,” a non-entity down south until way later. I could write an entire book on the prejudices I experienced upon my arrival in this state of provincial people, but right now I’m just going to talk about snow.

Why? Because the subject of “snow” just PISSES me off!

Just as one example, stoned out of my mind in the 1970s, I found myself and a friend of mine in a tunnel-vision blizzard out in the country. All I could see was a snow funnel and no road. “We’re going to die!” the Ohio native screamed. “Not helping,” I replied, but I drove safely through the storm.

You see, she had never experienced the road trauma of “Black Ice” that I had survived on, albeit rare occasions, in the South. Snow ain’t got no fear compared to black ice.

Now, whenever the South has snow, the Yamn Dankees down here can’t stop commenting about how stupid we are about this phenomenon that is as rare to us as a hot day in January is to them. Yeah, we’re stupid. We take a holiday and enjoy ourselves when we experience a beautiful anomaly in our region. We use it as a reason to go out and enjoy life with our loved ones, even using the smallest accumulation to try and build a snow (person), throw a snowball, or hopefully let our kids experience the fun of sledding over even the slightest, whitest clump we can find.

We haven’t invested in extensive snow equipment for road clearance, because that would be stupid. And if the rest of you are so hell-bound to get to work every day, just view some of that footage of multiple-car pileups from your region of people who just had to get to work on time. Smart. Really smart.

I recall years ago when a certain Northern transplant sped past us with a condescending glance as in his BMW, he passed us in our hilly suburban neighborhood. His car hit the invisible ice, so often prevalent in our Southern climes, and he lost control and hit a tree. As he sullenly walked past us, we were courteous enough not to say a word. If only our Northern transplants had the upbringin’ to do the same.

Just in Case I Go Missin'

Jack got home from a business trip, one of the few where he rented a vehicle to drive to the site. Usually he flies all the way across or out of the country. He asked me to follow him down to the rental place to return the truck, but first he wanted to stop off at the recycling center. It was crowded when we got there and I didn’t want to muck up the line, so I rolled down my window and told Jack I’d pull around and wait for him at the exit.

I waited and waited. I even talked to a woman about her shaggy dog. Then I saw him coming around the corner, but he was going really fast. Also, remember that this is a rental truck so I wasn’t certain it was Jack. He flies past me. I jump out of my Jeep and try to flag him down. He’s outta there! He zooms right past me and the guys who are doing community service by recycling cardboard look at me like, “What a loser!”

So I get back in the Jeep and call Jack.

“Hello?” he calmly answers.

“Where are you?!”

“I’m going to the rental place.”

“Didn’t you forget something, like me?”

“I didn’t see you.”

“How could you have not seen me? You almost ran over me! You went out of here like a bat out of hell!”

“Well, I didn’t see you.”

“So you left?!”

(Note to self: Don’t rely on being saved by Jack if the house catches on fire.)

Then his classic line that’s like salt on a slug. “Well there’s no sense in arguing about it now.”

AAAaarggh! @##@$%@@&^

I found the rental place and as he exited his vehicle, I jumped in front of him, jumped up and down, and said, “Do ya see me; do ya see me?”

“Smart ass,” he said

At lights out that night I offered some advice: “You know that was a really flawed plan. I can find my way back home, after all. The next time you try to ditch me, we’ll probably have to be outside the borders of the state in order to delay my return.”

“Okay,” he said.

Props to Gir' Friens

Yeah, I’m just trying to be current with that title. As I age, such attempts will probably get worse and, if possible, more pitiful.

January sucks for me even when I try to convince myself otherwise. I’ve been having a bad week for a month and that’s not a typo. For some reason, during these first two months of the New Year, no matter how I try, I can’t suspend disbelief and pretend that life is all A-o-kay. Jack is out of town; I’m working 12-plus hour days, I can’t get clients to pay, and I’m trying to remain patient with two geriatric dogs. They’re old but not senile. They know if I’m on the phone with a client, I’ll feed them copious amounts of meat and cheese to keep them quiet and thus maintain my professionalism. (Yeah, right.)

Then at night, while Jack is away, Max (the Lab with the baritone) barks constantly at me for two hours straight. “What are you saying Lasssie? You want to kill me? Do it; do it now and quickly! I’m beggin’ here.” Then quickly he goes to sleep and I wake up hourly to check his breathing the rest of the night.

Anyway, I allow myself a quarterly crying jag. Not that I schedule it; I just put it off.

I was in the midst, when most-wonderful friend Jill called. She probably thought a family member had passed because I seldom allow ANYONE to witness such episoodies.
She rebuffed my protests and came over with a salad and a bottle ‘o vino. We consumed both, finished off some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and watched a movie where we laughed our butts off at our own comments. Jill destroyed my view of Christian Bales by saying he has Red Skelton teeth and tongue. Oh my God, he does! So in the movie, when an attractive woman talks to him about performing a certain sexual act, it’s all ruined. I can only think of him thanking her with a “”God Bleth!”

We laughed so much that I temporarily forgot the fact that I’m an aging, semi-employed, half-a-hundred year-old woman with highly limited prospects. Thank you my friend!!

Then, after ten years of separation, that crazy Denise called and we arranged a lunch meeting. Our history could be described as hilarious and/or dysfunctional but we’ve never had an ill word between us. We picked up right where we dropped off. “I ordered their most expensive glass of wine at 11:00 a.m.,” she told me when I met her. “I don’t know anything about wine, but I’d rather they think I’m a connoisseur than a common drunk!” Funny line and funny person.

Denise, you’re a hoot and though you always seem to have moola at your disposal, which you always generously offer to bestow upon me, I would recommend you for a reality show any day.

Bottom line: thank God for girlfriends. The true ones truly save our lives from minute to minute and year to year or even when we least expect it. I hope that someday I can do the same for them in return.
God Bleth!

2008--Ain't that Great

It’s 2008 and sometimes I feel about the same age. I think it’s because, as I tell my friends, I look a little more like Nick Nolte’s mug shot every morning when I wake up. The songs that defined my generation in the sixties and seventies are now showing up as boxed-set oldies and Easy Rider’s Dennis Hopper is selling investments or something like that on commercials. Would our hip generation ever have foreseen such a thing thirty something years ago? And speaking of thirty-something, wasn’t there a TV show by the same name about a bunch of young, married whippersnappers? This is the kind of useless trivia bouncing around in what’s left of my withering brain unit. Sure, I can remember the words to the song “A Good Breakfast Starts My Day,” that I learned in the second grade, but I can’t remember a very important point I was going to make a second ago. I have more and more conversations that include someone asking me, “Now what were you saying?” I focus for a minute and have to admit, “I’ve got nothin.’”

I have read that depression and stress affects short-term memory more than almost any other factor, and I’ve got plenty of both, especially in the first two months of the year—what drear. Maybe, like the words in the Steely Dan song, “I’m just growing old,” but I can’t remember the last time I was really excited about anything. (Maybe I just forgot.) Upset, yes. Angry, yes. Frustrated and anxious, yes. Morose, yes. Excited, no. Hey, at least I’ve still got feelings. I will have to say that I'm really looking forward to seeing which politician will be selected to send us down the drain. NOT! Wait a minute. "Down the drain" now where did I hear that phrase? It sounds vaguely familiar.

Anyway, Happy Damn New Year!