Tag: photos

I need a vacation

Monday I submitted an updated outline and the first half of the next Coventry book to my publisher after Tim read it and made some edits. (The final draft is due in January, and the novel–A Coventry Wedding–will come out in January 2009.) Then I worked on a big proofreading job for a client. I think I cooked spaghetti, too. I’m not sure what else I did, but it seems like there was plenty to keep me busy.

Tuesday I finished the proofreading job and delivered it. Then I took care of some TJB business. The cable guy came to move the cable into my new office. Actually, my new office is where I originally had my office when we moved into the house. I switched it to the guest room when Tim moved down from NYC and we both needed office space. Once we got wireless, he could office in the TimLair. Since I don’t need all the space I used to require, I’m going back to my little nook off the kitchen. This should mean fewer burned meals and fewer dogs quivering in reaction to the blaring smoke detector. We’ll see.

This week, I learned how to seal tile/grout. After letting the grout cure for a few days, I started with the new tile entry in Tim’s apartment. I probably have some pictures of the way it used to be, but they’re all packed. Still, I can give you a sense of what we’ve done over there.

Yes, more photos, are you surprised?

Along with the dryer and the laptop, I think I broke Lynne and Lindsey

Lynne and Lindsey have both been sick–oddly, right after they helped me deal with upheaval at The Compound. Tom, Tim, and I have been taking Airborne to try to head off any illness. Fortunately, Tim even managed to fly without getting sick, and that’s like a little miracle. One of the reasons I dislike flying is that there is always someone on the plane who’s hacking and sneezing and otherwise trying to infect perfect strangers with germs.

My mom also helped clean the house after the floors were done, and she’s doing okay. Last week, she confessed to Lindsey (who immediately texted me at the laundromat–remember: dryer broken!) that Lindsey was indeed the Queen of Clean. That Old Woman apparently relinquished her title when she caught Lindsey going at a window latch in my living room with a Q-Tip.

photos from cleaning night

Photos for Tim

I’m hoping Tim will be able to get online on Wednesday, so these photos are for him.


I don’t have time to post all the horror stories, but one of them ended in having to create a path down an unused part of The Compound. Because when there are a million other things to do on a rainy, muggy day, that’s what Tom needs to spend his time on. (This is U-Haul’s fault.) Tim, here’s what the path looks like:

The roofing guys pretty well took out the aloe and cactus plants that were outside the dining room. However, these two guys are okay:

As is my handsome man in the moon:

Rex is not sure he likes the new path at first.

Now all three dogs are loving it. Considering what U-Haul, Countrywide, and now a broken dryer–just when I have tons of curtains, pillows, and quilts to wash–have put me through, it’s a relief to stop and smell the rose blooming for Tim outside his kitchen window (seems kind of crazy since you’re buried in snow up there, right?):

Tom, the dogs, and I are staying in the TimLair while the floors are in progress. Margot found River’s duck:

And attacked it.

Later, Margot crashed in Rex’s crate, because everyone knows it’s the best at The Compound:

I felt sorry for Rex when I saw how he’d curled himself into a smaller Margot/Guinness crate:

Except now I realize he uses it even when he doesn’t have to. Apparently the fleece is always softer in the other dog’s crate.

Guinness is all, The hell with that, I’m taking Tim’s bed:

Rex really, really is missing his dad:

Come home soon!

Randomness

The roof is finished. The tile guy is here and starting in the kitchen. The floor guy called and confirmed for Monday. This weekend, Tom will empty the house with help from Jess and Troy. I may grab my laptop and a passel of dogs and run away!

I’m no cake decorator, but my cakes usually taste decent because I was taught certain baking tricks by Lynne over the years. Yesterday, it was an adventure to prepare our weekly Survivor dinner in two kitchens, but I wanted to do it so we could all celebrate Lynne’s birthday together. I cooked a pork roast in the crock pot and made a salad in my kitchen, then steamed green beans and baked a cake in Tim’s kitchen (since my stove is out of commission, though it makes an interesting addition to my dining room, not to mention a bonus challenge in the obstacle course that is my house at this moment).

Lindsey came by in the late afternoon to drop off more boxes (And can I just tell you that her boxes are fantastic?), and we started talking. Or rather, I started talking in some manic way because I’m overtired and overextended and over.this.fucking.house.shit. (But as ever, quite ladylike.) Time raced away, as time does when I’m enjoying the company of a friend, until I realized that I needed to finish Lynne’s cake (although Rex tried very hard to “finish it” in his own way when I was bringing it from Tim’s place to mine).

It wasn’t beautiful, but it was a tribute to Lynne’s little Minute, because Minute has been making Lynne laugh for over a year now, and what makes my friends happy makes me happy. Also, the dog blogs. Who doesn’t love a blogging dog?

I like this photo, because it answers Charlie the Unicorn’s question, “Is the meadow on fire?” No, Charlie, but apparently, Minute’s ass is.

Lynne got here and ALSO brought boxes and then proceeded to pack a few of them, because isn’t that what a friend expects to do when you invite her for a birthday dinner? Thanks, Lynne. Between you, Tim, and Tom, the whole boxing thing hasn’t been the nightmare I feared.

I have told y’all I’m not good at multitasking. I need to take on a task and complete it before I move to something else. Otherwise, I never finish anything. That’s what my life is right now. Just a big unfinished mess. Not finishing things is a feature of the character I’m writing, so maybe on a subconscious level I’ve merged with her so I can write her more authentically. At least that’s going to be my defense about the half-packed boxes, the partially cleaned anything, the e-mails left unread for days, the snail mail unsent, and the other thirty or so things in various stages of not finished that are cluttering my life.

Just to show you how easily I can be distracted, that “y’all” I used in the above paragraph is forcing me to segue into a rant. It’s another “Becky’s pet peeves about words” rant!

First, note the placement of the apostrophe: Y’all. An apostrophe stands for missing letters in a contraction. Since “y’all” is a contraction for “you all,” “ya’ll” makes no sense. There are no letters missing from the “all.” The letters are missing from the “you.” Sadly, over the years, I’ve given up on this; it’s no longer my “y’all” issue, and I barely notice it when people capriciously fling that poor apostrophe everywhere but where it should be. (After all, if it’s not misused there, it’ll probably end up screwing up the possessive pronoun “its.”)

THIS is my y’all issue: IT ALWAYS MEANS MORE THAN ONE PERSON. Other than the fact that I was born in another country and lived for a brief time in the West as a toddler, I spent the first two-thirds of my life living in the Region of Y’all. I never, ever, one time, heard any Southerner use “y’all” to mean only one person. Yet for some reason, whenever Southerners are mocked on television or in movies, we are always portrayed using “y’all” for the singular “you.” WE DON’T. There may be some things that a lot of us don’t get, like why someone would put sugar in cornbread or why anyone ever thought Andrew Dice Clay was funny, but we do generally know how to count.

I can speculate about how this happened, though. Here’s my theory in an example.

Cindi walks into the beauty shop. Rene looks up from teasing Joelle’s hair and says, “Hey, Cindi. How y’all doin’?”

If a person not from the Region of Y’all is sitting there, he or she thinks, There’s no one with Cindi. Dumb Southerners. Don’t they know “y’all” means “you all?” Cindi can’t be an all. She’s just one person. This is what happens when people marry their cousins.

No, Outsider, YOU are not understanding that Rene is using Southern shorthand. Rene is not inquiring merely about Cindi’s well-being. Rene is actually saying, “How are you doing, Cindi? Is your husband over his cold? How’s your mother feeling after her hysterectomy? Is your brother Cletis out of jail yet? Is your sister’s ex-husband still gay?” Or as my high school friend Larry used to put it in his succinct way, “How’s your mama and them?” For those of you with more methodical minds, just remember the formula: Y’all = your mama and them.

What Rene would NEVER say when Cindi walks through the door of the beauty shop is, “Well hey, Cindi, ain’t y’all a sight for sore eyes?” Only a Hollywood Southerner would say that.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. It’s time for me to finish packing the bedroom, get cleaned up, and take That Old Woman on some errands. And when I say, “I hope y’all are feeling better,” I mean everybody who’s been feeling sickish lately like Gary, Shannon, Greg, Rhonda, and Lynne.

And I really hope my Cousin Ron–to whom I am not married–gets to leave the hospital today and continues to heal.

For Lisa

They’ve stopped posting predictions until December 19, but I happened to click on my link at just the right time. I apologize to all of you who hate Todd’s “Spit of Satan,” but Old Faithful is such a showoff in the winter. I caught it when the eruption itself isn’t even that high, but the combination of cold air and steam makes for a stunning view.

Happy birthday

If I counted the number of your birthdays that we’ve celebrated as friends, it would be more than the number of birthdays I admit to. So I won’t tell.

Before you came into my life, if I’d made a list of qualities belonging to the “perfect” friend for me, I wouldn’t have listed the unique traits that make you who you are. You are proof that it’s better to let friendship happen than to make it happen. You stumbled across a shy, sissy of a girl who life had taught to be too cautious, too careful, too safe. You swept into my life like a storm and taught me to run in the rain. You always made me laugh when no one else could, even during those times when you were the one pissing me off.

We went so many places we shouldn’t have gone. Did so many things we shouldn’t have done. We were wild and silly and crazy and exactly what we should have been for the time we grew up in, and I loved every minute of it, even the awful ones, and cherish the memory of every mistake, triumph, bout of laughter, and even the tears. They made us who we are.

It frustrates me at times that there are so few photos of us together. But it’s because first you, then I, would always be the one taking pictures. We have followed each other into so many interests. There are things you’re great at that I could never do, but probably more than anyone in the world, you were the one person who always, ALWAYS, encouraged my creativity, helped me find ways to express it, and were there to celebrate with me when I finally began seeing it manifest.

Whatever age we are, in my head, we are timeless. We will always be the girls talking our way backstage, out of a ticket, into an adventure, and through the forbidden parts of hospitals. We’ll be those girls making silly movies, driving on impulse to our favorite cities. We’ll always love your child together and will be the only ones who know everything about those crazy times before he came. And no matter how many times we do that most terrible of things–meet each other’s eyes in hospital rooms and at funerals–because we have lost so much–I know that we’ll be all right because we also have a lifetime of the strength that comes from being blessed with so much.

We are alike in a few ways, different in many ways, and we are forever friends. Thank you.

Happy birthday, Lynne.