Le Weekend

My weekend can be summed up with the following words:

Jackhammer
Ultimate Load Center
Pulled Pork Sandwiches
Man-nequin in the Shower

That's all I've got. Photos of the recent destruction at our house will be forthcoming - when the iBook comes home.

AppleCare Earns Its Keep

Why must I love my computer so much, when it obviously hates me?

Not even ten days since my iBook was returned to me with a clean bill of health, the logic board crashed last night.

So, now it's back at the Apple Store, being repaired by a Genius. At least this time the repairs are being handled for free. Yay AppleCare!

In other news I have a headache, and WW has gone out the window this week (Hello, munchies!), and my car has a squeaky chassis that's starting to make me nervous.

Ships in the Night; or Why I'm a Dummy

So, last night I was meant to meet an old friend for dinner in Jamaica Plain. I usually work until 7, and it's 7:15 before I'm in my car and driving home, so I arranged to meet her at 7:45, thus giving myself plenty of time to get out to JP, park, and walk to the restaurant.

What I didn't anticipate was that Nana and Poppy were coming over to watch the kids while Mommy and Daddy went to "Math Night" at the kids' school. They almost always let me leave a little early, and last night was no exception.

No problem, you say, just call your friend on her cell phone and say, "hey, I'm running early. Let's meet at 7:15."

Except that due to a lost phone charger, my cell phone had been down for a few days, and so I hadn't bothered to get her cell number. I wasn't figuring I'd even be able to use it. We'd been making plans via IM and email.

I got to Bukhara a half hour early, and killed some time cleaning out my purse and reading in my car in the parking lot. Then I headed inside to get a table. From 7:30 to 8:15 I waited, reading, drinking water, and munching papadums. At 8:15, I was firmly convinced she wasn't coming - maybe she'd taken an after work nap and forgotten to set an alarm? So, I abandoned my table, ordered some Murg Tikka Masala to go, and waited for my food at the bar.

I left at 8:30, and headed out to route 9 for the half hour drive home. Just as I was pulling into my driveway, an unknown number popped up on my ringing phone. It was was my friend, calling to find out where I was. Turns out she got there a little after I did, but still early, and figured I wouldn't yet be there, and she could catch me on my way in. She never came inside to check, and I never went outside to check, and we were all of twelve feet apart all night. The best/worst part? I left via the back door, which was closer to my car. Had I just gone out the front, I would have at least seen her. Pah!

I guess we're really both dummies, but still.

At least the takeout was good!

Two Observations

Money Can't Buy You Manners

On Saturday, I had to drive to Needham to look at a couch that one of Mark's clients was offering to us. To get from our hovel in Framingham to the pleasantly upper middle class neighborhood where Mark was working, I had to drive through Wellesley. Home of Wellesley and Babson Colleges, home of million dollar starter homes, home of Ming Tsai's restaurant, Blue Ginger (yum), home of Jaguar dealerships and pricey children's photography. This is the kind of town that ought to be in tony Westchester County, NY.

I was driving down Washington Street, a fairly main drag, and watching my speed (I have a healthy respect for small town cops), all the while looking out for my turn. It turns out I was a little lost, but that's another story. I was on Washington Street for no more than five miles overall, and about 15 minutes. During this process I was cut off, cut in front of, and pushed out of my lane no less than 7 times by people driving the following: Jaguar, Mercedes, Lexus, Volvo, Volvo, BMW (the worst kind of driving assh*le), Mercedes.

You might think that the wealthy people who were out and about in their picturesque New England town on a beautiful October morning, behind the wheels of their luxury sedans and urban assault vehicles, would be inclined to love life and their fellow driviers. Actually, they apparently feel more entitled than usual.

Privileged Kids Get Head Lice, Too

Lest you assume that head lice is only for the unwashed masses, I offer you this:

This morning, arriving at work, I was greeted by a postcard from the kids' posh day school. The card had actual size pictures of head lice and nits. Nice, huh?

Turns out rich kids are dirty, too.

Last Night...

Last night I dreamed of Glenn. The best part about it was that it wasn't a sad or bad dream at all. I was getting into a car, not my own, and Glenn was driving. We were going to visit some friends of ours in NY, and I needed to call them, but my cell phone battery needed recharging. He offered me his phone, and I said to him, "No offense, Glennie, but you don't really need a cell phone. After all, you're dead." He just laughed, and told me to call our friend. We talked idly in the car - I don't remember all of it, but I woke feeling really happy, like I'd been hugged.

Later, while I was brushing my teeth, I remembered sitting up in bed when my first alarm wnt off, and saying, "Thanks for coming to see me," before falling back to sleep.

Perhaps it's the strain of Celt in my blood that makes me believe in the fire feasts more than a little. After all, we're about a week from Samhain, when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest...

Project Porch

For those of you still waiting for the finished dining room pictures, you'll need to keep waiting. Currently, there is a couch in our dining room, awaiting being given away to friends of friends.

However, while excavating the newly demolished west side of the house, Mark discovered that the sill is rotting there, too. The problem? you ask. It's twofold, you see, first, the sill is rotting. Hello! Then there's the four-ton poured-concrete front porch preventing him from getting to the rotting sill. Yeah. What kind of dummy pours a concrete porch? ::Sigh::

So, yesterday, Mark took down the badly constructed front porch roof and started investigating the concrete. The neighbors hate us.

The is the house as it was. Note the trio of windows on the first floor left side.

This is the house yesterday.
Note that the windows are larger on the left - that's the gun we jumped.
As of 6PM, there is a big blue tarp covering the front of the house until Mark can patch the holes in the sheathing.

Ack! Daylight! Holes in the sheathing!

Mark is basically my hero, even if sometimes I become a nagging harpie and whine about living in a contruction zone. Cause it's actually really interesting. And it'll be nice when we're done!

Truly Unique

I think we've been through this before....but it's still interesting:

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

We're Legal!

Our building permit got approved!

(good thing, too, since we may have, umm, jumped the gun a little...)

Wide, Wide Heaven

I've just finished reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, at the recommendation of a friend. It's one of those books that's been buzzing in my ear since it was published, but I just never got myself out to pick it up, and it turned up on the shelf here at work, so I started it...

The friend who recommended it to me was asking me how I was in reference to Glenn's suicide in June. As she didn't know him, and wasn't even really around me during the period surrounding his death, I was a little startled, and very touched by her concern. Strangely, that made me apprehensive about reading it... Even though I knew the plotlines to be different in the novel versus my life, was the tender spot I have on my heart about to be ripped open for examination again?

Having finished the novel, I owe my friend a debt of gratitude. What she understood from our conversation was my hope that in whatever passes for an afterlife, Glenn knows how beloved he was, especially given the isolation he must have felt at the end of his life. Having that very idea explored so graciously in a work of fiction allowed me to think on it without pressing the bruise I have from his death.

I think about things like when I should erase his contact information from my cell phone. I know I'll never call that number again. My stomach twists when I see his name in the prompts for certain email distribution lists. Should I remove that byte from my hard drive? Is it an affront to his memory to do that? Rationally, I know it's not, but still, I can't bring myself to do it, and yet I think of him almost weekly, when I hear something, see something, even remember something I would like to share with him and can't. I attended a board meeting at my former prep school last week, and one of the speakers bore a heart-rending resemblance to him from a distance, and I stopped breathing for a moment, suffused with joy. When it deflated, I thought about leaving the room to gather myself up again. I didn't, but I said a little prayer to him.

I like the idea that from his heaven he can see us, to perhaps understand what we're doing and how we're all handling the loss of him, and maybe he can even see that we all love him and cherish him still -

Maybe he'll find a measure of the peace he was lacking during his time with us, and be able to go free into the wide wide heaven without us...

And if it took a work of fiction to make that notion seem less foolish and more heartening to me, I'm going to be glad. I'm going to believe it when I feel his humor brush up against me at odd moments. I'm going to tell his stories when they come up, and hope he smiles hearing the telling.

iBook Update

It left for California today. Uncle Burger, if you're out there, keep her safe for me?

Rat

Please understand that if you plan on seeing The Departed, that this post contains.... SPOILERS!

Mark and I took a rare trip to the movies today. Sleeping in, Irish breakfast at the local pub (traditional and super delish), and a movie? I know...

We saw The Departed, which I was psyched to see because I ran into Martin Sheen on Beacon Street while he was in town to film the movie. Also because the exterior cafe shot with Delahunt and the Irish goon was actually a dry-cleaners on Charles Street that was set dressed for the shot for one day, and I saw them doing it.

!!!SPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERS!!!

Well, I sat through a two-amd-a-half hour movie, and didn't notice the time pass, but two things ruined the film for me. First, good-guy Martin Sheen gets tossed off a Southie warehouse, which just makes me sad (in my head he's still former President Jed Bartlet from the West Wing), and secondly, when Donnie Wahlberg's character shoots Sgt. Colin Sullivan at the end, and you see the rat walking on the balcony, I can't stop thinking, "Christ is that preachy, corny and obvious!" Also, rats in Beacon Hill don't need to climb that high, they stay on the ground where the trash is better. Yeah, yeah, I know it was part of the ongoing social commentary and whatnot, but I was offended. I'm smart enough to get the moral of the story with a trained rat to help me out. And whether the rat was purely symbolic, or some kind of statement about how a new sleezeball will spring up when an old one dies, I still thought of both sans rat symbolism, and I always thought Scorcese was above that.

In the end though, good movie. I was pretty riveted. Until the rat.

Witch in a Sh*tstorm!

**Author's note: 10/8/06: Sorry for the late pulishing on this now week-old entry - I forgot to publish it, which just makes me unreliable, as well as lazy**

To begin at the beginning, since I was a small child, too small actually remember exactly when, I have possessed snow globes. You know, a base of some kind, and a glass globe, full of some viscous liquid within which fake snow, glitter, or whatnot is suspended. Sometime in my preteen years, I recieved one of these with a black base, and inside the globe was a semi cute, quat, frumpy witch, and the "snow" in suspension was black, mixed with tiny black bats.

I still have this collection, now shelved in our yellow room - due to the lavish three bedroom domicile we share ::ahem:: we refer to our two guest rooms by color - where my husband, from time to time, has opportunity to contemplate it (usually coinciding with contemplating tearing out floorboards or a wall). Has subsequently nicknamed it the "witch in a shitstorm" after having shaken it, and decided that's what it looked like. He tried to coin the phrase for a short while, kind of in a "snakes on a plane!" way. Sadly, this new linguistic phenomenon didn't last out the week.

Today, I was in Lowe's, looking for paint color samples and a cheap 3" brush for Mark to apply pesticide to the exterior of the sill under the front of the house, when I actually saw the witch in a shitstorm, in all it's inflatable glory! Then, my eyes adjusted to the present and I realized it was a graveyard scene, not a witch, but seriously, people - giant inflatable "tornado" globes with bats and graveyards?

What ever happened to answering the door dressed as Frankenstein and handing out Mars bars with a Jack-O-Lantern on the porch? When did all the holidays get like this? And why, when I asked (le plus tongue-in-cheek) if there actually was one with a witch, did they tell me, with sincere apology, that I "should have bought it in July, before they sold out."