Chef Boy ‘R Mine

The Ides of June

/ wvfurandroot / 4 Comments
Birthday Boy
Birthday Boy

The 15th of June ushers in a season of birthdays and other anniversaries that rivals Christmas in expense. Chef Boy ‘R Mine’s natal day kicks off the season. The 16th is my brother’s birthday and the 23rd is my father’s. Father’s Day usually falls in there somewhere. My mother will turn 69 on July 6th and I hit 50 in August. Niece’s, nephew’s, and friend’s are scattered about between now and September.

HMOKeefe and I met online in June. He also will mark the two-year anniversary of his bone marrow transplant in June. His daughter’s birthday is in June.

My birthday resembles a bacchanal jubilee event since the entrance of HMOKeefe in my life. Appalled that I didn’t’ do much to celebrate mine (due, in part, to overdosing on cake after the June-July events), he persuaded me to mark mine with great fanfare and hedonism.

I’m a quadruple Leo according to my astrological chart, so the persuasion wasn’t all that rough. I went from not much to marking the day with self-indulgence, to a week of intense partying, to a month. My own birthday damages my wallet just as much as the others’ I celebrate. I’ve taken to giving my self a present each year. With a budget of roughly a $100, I give myself something I would never buy under normal circumstances – something I want but can’t justify.

Chef Boy ‘R Mine, however, is the champ of Birthday Season. The only child, the only grandchild, and resembling me far too much for his own good, the anniversary of his birth is a circus. As he got older, it got more and more difficult to blow his mind with a stellar present.

When he was 12 a new friend came to visit. In tow was her dog Whomper. Child of Mine felt instantly in love with her little dachshund. At the time, he was already moving into his faux angry young man phase (although he insists it’s not anger, but angst), so watching him lavish love and attention on Whomper was a bit startling.

While not thrilled with the idea of a puppy, the ex and I agreed a dachshund was in order to mark the 13th. Presumably the Fruit of My Loins was old enough to care for and train the puppy. After a rather frantic search, Ex O’Mine came home on the 11th of June with a little, wiggly body of unconditional love and cuteness.

The idea was to hide her from the boy until the 15th.

Well. That was impossible. I hadn’t realized 8-week-old puppies could be so noisy.

dachshundstatue
For the love of Stevie. . .

I spent a day or two locked in the master bedroom with a puppy that melted my heart. She and I bonded. Big time. And since we did, any time I left the bedroom, she whined and whimpered. On the 13th, we gave in and realized it was impossible. Uncharacteristically, the boy slept late that morning, so the opportunity to slip a puppy into bed with him was irresistible.

Boy oh boy was Chef Boy ‘R Mine surprised. Since I had been adamant for so long that there would be no dogs in this house, he was shocked and intensely happy. Not only had we managed to come up with a great birthday present, we had come up with the best present ever.

He named her Stevie after Steve Prefontaine, a cross-country runner he was emulating.

Everyone who met Stevie fell in love with her; she’s the standard by which all dogs are measured. She was a cracker-jack. She also thought she was my dog. She went running with the guys. She cuddled with them. But she wouldn’t go to sleep at night until I did and, given a choice, it was always my lap that she settled into.

A few years later, she died in a tragic accident that I still can’t talk about without tearing up. I regret, intensely, not taking more pictures of her.

In my kitchen is a carved wooden statue of a dachshund. I found it a few years ago and bought it for my birthday.

stevieflipped
Celebratory Stevie

I didn’t take a lot of photos until I was given a new camera for my birthday. I hadn’t realized what a pain my old camera was until the new one entered my life; but the contrariness of the old one probably explains why there are years of my life undocumented.

Some days I can barely remember Stevie’s features. I look at the one good picture of her that I have and she comes into focus again.  Even so, the focus is getting blurrier with time. I miss her still.

Take photos of your life – the big, the small, the things that capture your attention, the people and flora and fauna that rock your world. Take pictures of the stuff you’ve worked hard to acquire. Capture the scenery. Document the celebrations. Mark it all and keep it.

So? What are you reading?

/ wvfurandroot / 15 Comments
Books!
Books!

I’ve been so busy with work, personal drama and the garden that I haven’t been reading much. Since books are a great passion of mine, not reading creates a hole in my personal well-being which must be corrected – and soon.

Books, books, and more books.
Books and more books.

I joke that the only thing holding up the barn is my books and bookshelves. At one time, I could brag that I had read every book in the house except for the few in the unread pile next to my bed.

Between the craziness of my life and the fact that I now have a Significant Other who reads even more than I do (and passes his books on to me), I now have, at minimum, 200 unread books in this house. I have one whole bookcase dedicated to the unread, but now they’re spilling over. I’m also pretty sure there’s a passel of unread books in the nook under the stairs that I can’t get to because of the painting supply debris blocking access.

It’s crazy. And I love it.

Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona and Henry Huggins series were the first books that really rocked my world. However, it was Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy that lit the fire of a passion for good literature.

Current reading.
Current reading.

My preferred book is fiction, but in the past few years I’ve developed an appreciation for nonfiction. Whatever it is I’m reading, it must show proper respect for the power and beauty of words. No matter how interesting the subject, if it’s not written well, I don’t have the patience to read it.

I read to get lost in the dance of well-chosen words creating worlds of ideas. I do read some pop-lit, but only if the writer is a gifted story teller – King and Grisham, for instance. [Actually, King is a better writer than he gets credit for. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. Lisey’s Story is a thing of beauty as is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.]

The past few years, I’ve gone on genre jags. For awhile it was the “quirky” writers – Tom Robbins, Vonnegut, Christopher Moore, Jeannette Winterson. Then it was world literature – writers from Latin America, India, Russia, etc. A couple of summers ago, I completely devoured Susan Howatch’s Church of England series. Right now, I’m mixing it up.

Bed books.
Bed books.

I’ve got 4 books going at the moment, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s biography, a Paul Auster novel, some nonfiction about writer’s block and creativity, and essays on women writers and their dogs.

Those 4 books have been on my nightstand for more than a month. Normally, they would have been devoured in about a week.

The unread bookcase contains a plethora of marvelous stories – I know this because most of them have been pre-screened by HMOKeefe. For the most part, we agree on what constitutes a good book, but true to his gender, he tends to wax rhapsodic about some truly bad stuff (Moby Dick, for example).

I imagine myself sprawled in the garden with a book, a glass of iced tea, and the lazy drone of bees – a recreation of my childhood out-of-school summers when I could finally read as much as I wanted to without the annoying interruption of school. Please, please, let it be so. (Yes, I will have the annoying interruption of work, but some things can’t be avoided.)

Two of my favorite things - Chef Boy 'R Mine and books.
Two of my favorite things –
Chef Boy ‘R Mine and books.

I love talking about books and the ideas they hold.  I can drone on and on and on about a book.  Once I get going it’s nigh unto impossible to get me to shut up.  Moreover, I also think it’s appropriate given my love of them that I use them as the bedrock for home decoration.  They’re everywhere (except bathrooms) in bookcases, in stacks, on the floor, on tables, tucked under stairs, next to the exercise bike.  Everywhere.  And I do read them.

So? What are you reading?

Rain

/ wvfurandroot / 4 Comments
Not a good time for the <br>windshield wipers to go on the blink (again).
Not a good time for the
windshield wipers to go on the blink.

I’m tired of rain.

Oh sure, it was all good and fine up to a point, but not now. Not in spring. Not when I have gardening to do. Not when I need electricity.

I love summer storms – the ones that roll in about mid-July and punctuate my birthday month of August.

[Note: I’m turning 50 this year and am oddly excited about it. I haven’t set up a gift registry (yet?), so feel free to ask me what I want. ]

In a proper summer storm (July and August), I’m quite content to sit somewhere and watch the pyrotechnics in the sky. I have fond memories of Chef Boy ‘R Mine and I sitting on the floor looking out the glass doors and shouting “Boom in the sky!” when the thunder and lightening rolled. He was just 2 and initially fearful of the storm – I decided to make it fun for him and fun we had. There’s no sound in the world better than baby giggles.

Storms in May are another matter entirely. I can garden in the rain, if I have to, and I’ve had to. But now, we’re at that point where I’d like to sit out there and admire my handiwork. It’s one thing to work in the rain, but to just sit out there like a garden statue while getting soaked seems a little too eccentric even for me.  Especially when it’s not just rain, but torrents – the white water version of rain. 

[Note:  By the way, I’d like a garden Buddha for my birthday.  I’ll settle for a head, but I’d be tickled with a roly poly seated Buddha.]

Candlelight Blues
Candlelight Blues

It seems like it’s rained forever. Coming off the Winter from Hell, I am sick-to-death of stuff that makes my power go out.  So, if I can’t sit in the garden at my table with the fabulous floral centerpiece, I’d like to be here, cruising the web, maybe watch a movie and catch up with friends on Skype. Can’t do that either.   It would be nice to be able to cook dinner.  Baths by candlelight are sensuous and wonderful (even alone), but you can only sit in the bathtub for so long. 

Candlelight is not quite as romantic alone.

I can’t do laundry which has piled up to the ceiling during the great 2009 Gardenpalooza. Can’t vacuum. The batteries in my Itty Bitty Book Light have died. I’m getting cranky. What’s worse is that the power comes and goes. Just when I think it’s come back on, I lose it again. Living in a clearing in the middle of a forest, I’ve learned the inevitability of power outages during any kind of inclement weather, but that on/off stuff wears on my nerves.

Weather Dude says this pattern could last through the weekend. I’m not sure how many days in a row we’ve had rain, officially, but it seems like 971. I’ve had enough. I’m positively pruney (and not from marathon baths).

I am tired of rain. Really. Now, the laptop battery is dying (goodbye Freecell!). I’ll post this when the power comes back on for good or if it stays on long enough to do so.

Sigh.