Drama Queen

As perfect as it’s gonna get?

/ wvfurandroot / 12 Comments

Be still my heart.

OK. It’s way too soon to tell. I shouldn’t even be posting this. But. . .

I’ve been dithering for months now about what color to paint the family room and, also, dithering about whether to paint the family room or the study first.

I went on a full-on tear this past weekend and decided I couldn’t live another second without painting the family room. I didn’t count on two FULL days of moving, cleaning, spackling, and priming. [The family room and kitchen are major disaster areas and the puppies have had enough.]

At the last minute, I switched my decision from Stargazer to Wellspring (blue). Literally. I had the car keys in hand and went to grab the paint chip and changed my mind. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve heard all my tales of woe regarding color and paint. If not, click on the decorating tag and peruse the posts.

Lowe’s cheerfully mixed me up two cans in a nice satin finish – since the color is so dark, I wanted something with a sheen to catch the light.

I have never gotten one-coat-coverage paint to actually cover in one coat, but I’m cautiously optimistic that perhaps this time I have. I painted very slowly and carefully, touching up as I went, and in a room without enough lamps, it’s looking good for one coat. If so, I have a whole unopened can. If not, I know I have enough for a second coat.  [If I succeeded, guess what color the laundry room is going to be?]

My hopes have been raised and dashed all night (It’s midnight and I just finished). Now that this one corner should, presumably, be dry, I’m thinking the one coat thing might have worked, but more importantly, the color may be as perfect as I can get given the damn blue leather sofa that has this weird green cast to it.

Be still my heart.

Morning light will tell.

Perfect or not, this is it. This room is too big and too hard to paint. One way or another, it will be the perfect color. I can be very good at delusional behavior.

I’m going to bed happy.

[I may scream come morning.]

[I’m going to need a lot more white in this room than I’d thought.  No prob, Bob.  Minor adjustments.]

[Please, oh, please, oh please, let morning bring cackles of delight and not despair driven hysterical ones.]

Geek Girl’s Computer Repair Instructions

/ wvfurandroot / 8 Comments

Step 1: Put the incorrigible machine in time-out in a corner. Drink coffee, run amok in the hallways complaining about people who click on stuff they shouldn't be clicking on, take deep breaths, ommmmm for a minute or two, maybe go to lunch or have inconsequential conversations disguised as Terribly Important Communications.

I got those old walkin’ blues.

/ wvfurandroot / 8 Comments

[Soundtrack for the post below. I do love me some Eric.]

The journey begins

Every year starting about now, sometimes a few weeks later, I end up having to walk my hill.

I live at the top of a very steep hill. The driveway/road is very long. It’s also dirt and gravel.

Since I live in my own little ecosystem where I get dramatically more snow than the city 12 miles away in which I work, I’m always concerned my co-workers think I’m telling wild stories. Since I do, upon occasion, tell wild stories, I can’t say as I blame them. Perhaps the oddest thing about it is that my wild stories are true. I attract drama and insanity and chaos like the cat’s fur to my wool coat.

View after 10 paces.

Winter arrived early this year. I’ve been walking the hill for nearly a month. If the weather folk are to be believed, I may still be walking the hill in June. [Editorial comment: I LIKE split infinitives – who makes these damn rules?] I’m already a month into this seasonal aerobic exercise and weight loss regimen and it should just now be starting.

Going down in the morning is not so bad. Walking up in the pitch dark is another story. I religiously carry the cell phone, but as I can’t generally get a signal on the road it really will only serve to allow me to watch the clock to see how long it takes for hypothermia (or blood loss) to kill me. I ponder the wisdom of getting a Lassie – remember how Lassie was always showing up at Timmy’s feet carrying on and him saying, “What is it girl? What?!!!! Farmer John has fallen into the pond and is drowning while we stand here chatting? Let’s go, girl!” [I do need a Lassie. I’ve never had a smart dog. I can’t figure out if I choose slow-learners or if it’s something I do to them.]

The next 100 paces

I still have snow pack on the road. In a spot here and there, just this morning, I noticed dirt and gravel peeking out. When the thaw arrives tomorrow, it will begin to melt in earnest and then sunset will come and go, temps will drop down below freezing, and the road will turn into glare ice – a toboggan run of sorts. Tomorrow, I’m apt to slide down the hill on my back – head first.

My dad drives a big old honking Cadillac Escalade. You could house a family of 4 in there and the 4×4 is so powerful he can climb telephone poles in that gas guzzler. Last year, while trying to get up the hill, he got about halfway up, lost traction, and careened backwards all the way down narrowly missing the peon’s cars parked at the bottom –aka those of us without 4x4s. The penchant of 4x4s to not be worth a shit on ice is why I sold my Jeep a decade ago. I find it far less terrifying to walk the road than to slide down it – sideways and sometimes backwards. It made no sense to put up with that kind of mpg and still be walking the hill. [I might be misleading y’all here – I did sell the Jeep for that reason, but lately I’ve been experiencing 4×4 lust – the road has not been icy – with a 4×4, I could have been riding up and down for most of the past month.]

300 paces & an offroad shortcut.

Depending on the melt, nighttime temps and whether or not days are overcast or sunny, the road may become frozen mud which is worse in many respects. It looks like it’s easy enough to traverse, until I get my NASCAR Queen’s car a third of the way up and then have to back it down (usually in the dark with a filthy rear window).

Did I mention it’s a one-lane road?

A couple of years ago, I was walking down the back way which is easier if the snow is really deep or the road is badly iced. It was a nice walk. It wasn’t bone-numbing cold; and it was early enough that my little patch of earth was quiet and peaceful.

400 paces and more difficult

With Robert Frost in my head, I arrived at the fork of the road to find a car sitting in – actually in – the fork of a tree growing out of the ravine. Since I’d been reading Stephen King the night before, I imagined all sorts of icky stuff, but the car was empty.  [The transition from Frost to King is as awful as it sounds.]

As it turns out, it was my mailman’s car and it had been there since the day before. I had not noticed it on my way up, because it gets awfully dark in my little patch of earth and because my eyes follow the tiny circle of light the flashlight creates near my feet.

The Dreaded Ravine

The mailman had a driven up part way before realizing there was no sign that any vehicles had been the down the hill. Foolish guy – he stopped the car, turned it off, got out to better gauge the condition of the hill and watched his car slide over the edge of the road and wedge itself into a tree.

When they did manage to get the car out of there – [can’t you just hear the tow truck driver at his dinner table?] – they found no damage to the car other than some scratches here and there. Had it been my car, it would have been totaled and I would have had to tell the ridiculous story to my insurance company, friends and family, coworkers and all manner of people – all of them rolling their eyes and thinking, “Here she goes again.” Of course, I still get that when I tell the mailman story, but I take comfort in the fact that it wasn’t my car.

After 1123 paces, I get to de-ice/de-snow the car. Again. Still. Sigh.

With the weather of late, I arrive at my car only to have to de-ice and de-snow it – day after day after day after day. I won’t even get into the ongoing windshield wiper problem.

Even with the predicted thaw, I reckon it will be Saturday before I can get up the hill. Already, the weather folk are talking about the next system due in which may or may not be snow. It seems that my driving up the hill like a big girl will be short-lived. Oh, but really, I’m so looking forward to it.

[I’m thinking Subaru Outback. Do they make them with heated seats? I’ve become addicted to heated seats.]

Fine in ’09, Whine in ’09

/ wvfurandroot / 4 Comments

This time last year, I was sitting on HMOKeefe’s sofa, probably into a bottle of wine and watching a movie. Periodically peering out the window to look at the snow.

I was to have left Massachusetts on New Year’s Eve, but my flight was cancelled due to an impending storm. I was confused as I could be. The Yankees were acting like a bunch of Appalachians in panic over snow that hadn’t started yet. My flight was cancelled hours before the first flake.

It had been an eventful trip. Leaving Charleston, I missed my flight because I couldn’t find a parking spot (yes, at Yeager) and I couldn’t get through security in time (yup) to make my plane. It seems that the VFW from Logan, I think, had decided to go on a cruise. Everyone in town went to the airport to see them off. Do you have any idea how long it takes to get through security when you have to explain, describe, and tut tut about every metal piece involved in knee and hip replacements? Appalachians are nothing if not chatty and polite. There was no way to hurry those folk and nothing for security to do but listen to tales of surgeries.

Anyway. There I am in Yankee-Land with a cancelled flight and no snow on the ground. The snow did arrive – six to eight inches of it – certainly not a big deal by their standards.

Originally, I had wanted to leave New Year’s Day. There’s a tradition that you should be doing at midnight what you want to be doing for the whole of the year. As scheduled, I was going to spend midnight leaving the parking garage of Yeager. But I was told, definitively, all the flights for the 1st were booked. And, so, alas.

The snow came, the snow plows came, and USAir rescheduled my flight for the 1st. Go figure. I went.

HMOKeefe and I had celebrated New Year’s Eve on the 30th with lobster and champagne at home. We’d burned logs in the fireplace, had carnal relations, talked and laughed a great deal and were probably sound asleep by 10 p.m. There are some aspects of middle age I really like – in this example, the leaving behind of midnight frenzies with bunches of drunks.

I’ve had my fair share of midnight frenzies with bunches of drunks. I’ve been one of the drunks. I’ve been single, married, and about to be divorced on New Year’s. In retrospect, the New Year’s Eves I’ve enjoyed the most have always been the ones I spent at home.

My New Year’s as a single person must have been decidedly uneventful, because I can’t bring anything to mind – good or bad. I never sat alone at home and I only remember a couple of big bashes, but there’s not a Woo Hoo or an Oh No in my memory.

My married years were mostly uneventful. Sometimes, we’d go out for dinner. Sometimes not. Sometimes I’d cook a lavish meal. Sometimes it was take-out pizza. For many years, New Year’s Eve was spent in the frozen tundra of Wisconsin with extended family – sometimes a quiet time; sometimes a big house party. A few times, the party petered out and everyone was snoozing long before midnight.

One memorable year, 1999/2000, I got my one and only speeding ticket in Kentucky escaping the Great Frozen North. It had been a week where the family dynamics had gotten completely out of hand and I needed to be home. I had fumed through Wisconsin and Illinois. I had seethed through Indiana. By Kentucky, I smelled home and the mountains were wrapping themselves around me like an old, comfortable quilt. The speed was exhilarating. The thought of my house, my bed, and people I liked was intoxicating.

The cop cut me a break. I had been clocked at 89. I must have been coasting at that second, because I had been doing 93. He wrote the ticket for 74. I never disputed the ticket; paid it gladly. I was home or near enough.

A few years ago, before the bone marrow transplant, HMOKeefe and I dressed to the nines and went to dinner at Savannah’s (Huntington’s fine dining restaurant). I wore full-length Donna Karan, pearls, and spectacular shoes. He wore a great suit and a crisp white shirt. We spent hours eating, came home, and were probably actually awake at midnight. It was lovely. Really lovely. I wouldn’t want to do it every year, but I would like to do it now and again.

It’s the first time I can remember seeing in the New Year in years and it was the last time since.

So. There’s this tradition that at midnight you should be doing what you hope to do all year.

I’ll be sleeping. Despite hours and hours of sleep the past week, I still can’t get enough. It seems I’ve settled into a pattern of long, winter naps. I get up for a few hours, attend to some cleaning and organizing, and crawl back into bed for a couple of hours. Rinse and repeat. I would like to wake tomorrow fully rested and restored. That would make for a terrific 2010.

There is no intention, whatsoever, of seeing midnight tonight. There’s a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator left over from my birthday party. I’ve taken it out a few times thinking to open it and then put it back. I’ve been on Facebook and Twitter twaddling on about how pathetic it is to be spending New Year’s Eve napping and checking friends’ status updates.

It doesn’t really feel pathetic. It’s kind of nice.

I was supposed to be in Massachusetts today. It didn’t work out. While I’m distressed to have broken the tradition of seeing HMOKeefe at this time of year, I have also enjoyed this week at home. It was downtime sorely needed.

I am a homebody that doesn’t get much home time these days. I’ve been a homebody for decades now. Even when single, I spent far more time at home than did my friends. For years and years, my idea of a good weekend has been one where I don’t have to leave my hill.

The holidays always wipe me out. I am tired of it all long before Christmas Day arrives. The hustle and bustle just gets too intense, too frenzied, too loud, too-everything. I am ready to close the year down, pack it up, and whip out a new calendar. I don’t want to erase the year, but I do want to put it away and reflect on it later. Maybe.

I’ve had a week of not leaving the hill.  I’ve wallowed in the quiet peace of it.

This has been an exceptionally challenging year; 2010 looks to share some of the same problems.

This has been an exceptionally good year. 2010 looks to share some of the same blessings.

Fine in ’09 and Whine in’09 have been the yin and yang of the past 365 days. The coming year, I have dubbed Total Zen in 2010. Every year, my wish is to be bored, for just a day or two or three, and every year I am everything but. Still. For 2010, hope springs eternal. The Drama Queen pines for a drama-free existence.

May midnight find you where you want to be, doing what you want to do, with those you want to be with.  May your only drama be that spent in a floodlight accompanied by applause.