Can You Hear Me Now?
Life should be more like a cell phone plan. All about nights and weekends.
Some funny stuff happens when you live somewhere cold. For instance, when I got in my '87 Dodge Raider this morning (after unplugging the heater and prying the door open with a broom handle), I discovered that the half-full (yep, she's an optimist!) diet Coke I left on the dash last night was frozen solid. I jumped out to scrape the windshield and fiddled with the paper soda cup until the chunk of brown ice fell out into the snow in a bubbly, dirty-looking cone. That's not all. I pillaged my sister's fridge while at her house at lunch today to check on the puppies and let Daisy out, and left my plunder (a Tupperware tub full of pasta) on the seat of my truck when I went back to work. When I went home at five'o'clock, it too was solid. Mom frequently sends me out to the trunk of her Buick to get a frozen pizza or bag of frozen chicken breasts or the last foil-wrapped loaf of last year’s potica. Jo drove around for two months last winter with a couple of medium-sized turkeys rolling around in her trunk like loose bowling balls.
Sometimes it feels like nobody's listening, and then out of the blue somebody says exactly what you were thinking and it doesn't matter anymore that you may be alone again tomorrow. The half of my queen-sized bed that should be empty never is; there are half a dozen books, a half-finished crocheting project, two live cats, half-folded clean laundry, a bank statement, two empty CD cases, a gift, an old calendar, a half-read letter, an art supply catalog, various throw pillows and two Boyds bears, a drafting pencil and eight clean paintbrushes bound together with a rubber band, all tangled up in my blue and white afghan. Once I found a fossil there, and once a dried lemon peel from the vase of citrus potpourri on the dresser.
It took me two hours to wrap the remaining Christmas gifts still piled on my couch tonight. A lot of them were things that I carefully thought out and wrote on a list and hunted for in the jungle of Ogden. But also, and infinitely more fun, I had two boxes of giftable things I’d collected all year that had to be assigned to the most likely recipient. Those are the best things, the surprises that happened when I wasn’t under holiday duress. And as usual, it all just came together.
I’m heartened by the fact that I’ve never loved a shirt enough to want to wash it each night before bed, hang it up to dry, and wear it again the next day. I don’t know anybody who does that for sure, but I have my suspicions. I lived something like that way for a month in Europe when I was fifteen. Got very boring. Almost, almost I could do that with the beloved camo ringer tee I bought in Innsbruck, Austria, after a crazy lightning storm, which fit like pajamas then but now looks like I’m on my way to the basement of Area 51 in Salt Lake City on fetish night, and I’d be way overdressed, believe me. Boy oh boy… the seasons and days and bra sizes sure do add up.
Stand by for more puppy pictures. I’m taking tomorrow off (in a futile attempt at insurgency) so there’ll be time!
Some funny stuff happens when you live somewhere cold. For instance, when I got in my '87 Dodge Raider this morning (after unplugging the heater and prying the door open with a broom handle), I discovered that the half-full (yep, she's an optimist!) diet Coke I left on the dash last night was frozen solid. I jumped out to scrape the windshield and fiddled with the paper soda cup until the chunk of brown ice fell out into the snow in a bubbly, dirty-looking cone. That's not all. I pillaged my sister's fridge while at her house at lunch today to check on the puppies and let Daisy out, and left my plunder (a Tupperware tub full of pasta) on the seat of my truck when I went back to work. When I went home at five'o'clock, it too was solid. Mom frequently sends me out to the trunk of her Buick to get a frozen pizza or bag of frozen chicken breasts or the last foil-wrapped loaf of last year’s potica. Jo drove around for two months last winter with a couple of medium-sized turkeys rolling around in her trunk like loose bowling balls.
Sometimes it feels like nobody's listening, and then out of the blue somebody says exactly what you were thinking and it doesn't matter anymore that you may be alone again tomorrow. The half of my queen-sized bed that should be empty never is; there are half a dozen books, a half-finished crocheting project, two live cats, half-folded clean laundry, a bank statement, two empty CD cases, a gift, an old calendar, a half-read letter, an art supply catalog, various throw pillows and two Boyds bears, a drafting pencil and eight clean paintbrushes bound together with a rubber band, all tangled up in my blue and white afghan. Once I found a fossil there, and once a dried lemon peel from the vase of citrus potpourri on the dresser.
It took me two hours to wrap the remaining Christmas gifts still piled on my couch tonight. A lot of them were things that I carefully thought out and wrote on a list and hunted for in the jungle of Ogden. But also, and infinitely more fun, I had two boxes of giftable things I’d collected all year that had to be assigned to the most likely recipient. Those are the best things, the surprises that happened when I wasn’t under holiday duress. And as usual, it all just came together.
I’m heartened by the fact that I’ve never loved a shirt enough to want to wash it each night before bed, hang it up to dry, and wear it again the next day. I don’t know anybody who does that for sure, but I have my suspicions. I lived something like that way for a month in Europe when I was fifteen. Got very boring. Almost, almost I could do that with the beloved camo ringer tee I bought in Innsbruck, Austria, after a crazy lightning storm, which fit like pajamas then but now looks like I’m on my way to the basement of Area 51 in Salt Lake City on fetish night, and I’d be way overdressed, believe me. Boy oh boy… the seasons and days and bra sizes sure do add up.
Stand by for more puppy pictures. I’m taking tomorrow off (in a futile attempt at insurgency) so there’ll be time!
posted by A at
11:07 PM
2 Comments:
What is potica? --Libby
Potica! Poe-teet-sa. It's an eastern-European sweetbread, in my case Slovenian, with a spiral filling of ground walnuts, honey, and spices. It's a pain to make because you have to roll the dough really long and flat, spread the filling (which is a pain to prepare, itself) over it, roll it up, and cut it into loaves by tying skinny string tighter and tighter until a the dough separates and seals at the end. Most people don't bake theirs in a loaf pan, but Gramma started doing so because otherwise it can come out pretty deformed if you just lump it onto a cookie sheet. It's an acquired taste, I guess, because nobody at City Hall likes it besides me and Jo, who is Norwegian. I keep finding her things that say "Uff-da!" She always makes things like lufsa (a doughy potato tortilla thing) and kringla (a doughy potato cookie thing) and nobody likes those but us, either. Everybody else brings cheesecake.
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