...Or Maybe Phineas

I went to buy a battery for my camera last night, but I forgot and bought Uncle Ben’s white rice for Johnny instead. He’d been whinging for it, and I’d been trying to convince him to finish that last measly cup of generic white rice in the canister before refilling it with something else – but once I crossed the threshold of the grocery store I couldn’t remember why I’d stepped inside, so I just bought the first thing I remembered. I grabbed the big box, too. Three pounds. Cost six dollars, and does fuck-all for my camera. So you’re just going to have to take my word on this…

I don’t know if you could tell, but I wasn’t really much in the mood for Christmas this year. Not to get all Scroogerific or anything, because I am usually The Quintessential Christmas Elf, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Half the ornaments never made it to the tree, the cookie cutters stayed in their Ziploc bags, the angel orchestra is still sitting on its bandstand in its box, and I wrapped my gifts with leftover wedding paper (hey, it’s white; stick a red or green bow on it and it looks festive enough).

But this weekend we had a couple people over, so I had to knock off the half-assery. I didn’t unpack the angels or re-wrap the gifts or anything, but I did take out my Christmas linens. The red & green tablecloth with matching dishtowel and oven mitt, and the (not quite matching, but who cares) red, white & green placemats. Not that I was setting the table for a sit-down meal or anything – we were only doing finger foods and a light buffet – but the placemats went on the coffee table under the chips & dip, and made it look a little more as if I cared.

I didn’t dress the part, though. Not for any humbug reason, but because the occasion was a football game, and I had to wear my football shirt or else they’d lose (sometimes they lose anyway, but that’s because somebody, somewhere, is wearing the wrong socks). I put my Good White Turtleneck on underneath it – the Good White Turtleneck that I’d gotten from my mom for Christmas and worn (and washed, and dried) every day since – and I felt clean and warm.

But it was like 60 degrees on Sunday, which made it something like 70 in the house. Pretty soon I was feeling a little too warm in my Good White Turtleneck, and not so very clean.

See, a Good White Turtleneck is a rare thing – you really don’t know you’ve got one until you’ve worn it and washed it and worn it again – but all the things that make it Good make it not at all suitable for warmer weather. For instance:

1. The collar must reach your ears when you turn it up, and it musn’t sag (I went to prep school in the ‘80s: if I fold down the collar on my turtlenecks even now, they will come and rescind my diploma).
2. The cuffs must hug your wrists in such a snug, soft manner that no air sneaks in – which, in turn, means you can never push them up, or else they’ll stretch.
And, finally:
3. The fabric must be soft, thick enough to stand alone on an autumn afternoon, yet thin enough not to bunch and bind as one of many February layers.

The Turtleneck in question passed all three -- even after two washings in as many days -- so naturally I ran screaming to the laundry room at halftime to strip it off. Well, hell, I was sweating like a whore, and I couldn’t very well take off my football jersey, could I? We had to win, so we could make the playoffs!

Sigh.

Anyway, I took it off and threw it in the washing machine (which, in this house, doubles as a laundry hamper), put the football shirt back on and resumed post-Christmas munching. Oh my god, I went on to eat so many chips & dips. But at least (which is so unlike me) I didn’t spill a drop of it on my New White Shirt! Didn’t spill a drop of anything on the placemats, either. Nobody did. Which also, around here, qualifies as some kind of post-Christmas miracle.

The next day – yesterday – Johnny got sent home from work early because, as he put it, “there were too many goddamn kids running around.” I had told him I’d do the cleaning-up from the football game festivities when I got home at 3:00 or so, but instead I walked into a house that was all fresh-scrubbed and smelled like chicken soup. It wasn’t soup, not yet – it was still in the stocky stages – but it was a hell of a lot better than dirty dip-dishes and crusty old pot-pie.

“I even,” he announced all proudly, “washed the linens.”

You… the…

Oh no.

See, there are certain Things that Johnny thinks are True, and they just Aren’t. Cuchulain, for example (sorry, love), never existed. It is okay to wash a travel mug with soap (we have strictly labeled his-n-hers, because he claims Palmolive leaves a tell-tale taste behind, and I don’t want to drink nine years of nasty sludge – though, in his defense, he does soak his in Clorox once in a while, which he insists leaves no lingering note). And, no matter what your mother did, you really don’t have to wash every laundry load in hot. As a matter of fact, you really can’t. Especially if you tossed the Christmas linens in there with my Good White Turtleneck.

Sorry: my Good Pink Turtleneck.

Yes, indeedy, David: our Christmas placemats are now green & pink & red, and my Good New Turtleneck looks like something out of Tahoe Barbie. Or Tahoe Ken, I suppose. I wouldn’t put a soft shade of carnation-pink past Ken.

I checked the tag and found the brand and ordered myself a replacement. Ordered two, in fact, figuring I’d make Johnny pay me back for them both, somehow. But then I took the wash out of the dryer and that saw he already had...

Because all three new Christmas pairs of Good White Jockey Shorts were in there, too.

I think, from here on out, I’ll call him Ken.

We Have A Winner!

Someone named Janice (whom I call my Nana)
Is, for this contest, our top-tier Banana
Or Kiwi, I should say, since she is from New Z.
(Which for some reason's endlessly tickling to me).
At any rate, Janice -- with her eagle eye --
Spotted the constant I asked you to spy.
(And also did Sammie, though she's #2,
But I wasn't specific, so Sam, here's to you.)

On the back of the couch, in the upper left corner
Lies Sister, the cat, just like Little Jack Horner.
Only sister does not have her thumb in a pie,
She just has a really mean look in her eye.
She always does, really, it's no fault of Jan's,
Or Sammie's or any of you also-rans:

She's also not dead, though she does look that way.
She's just mad that I took all her laundry away.

Day 26?, "Project" 10: The Storm Is Over...

I did it! I folded all the laundry and put it all away! I have a couch in my bedroom, look!

Oh, and I may have overreacted about the rag-bag. I waited to fold laundry till they came out of the dryer, so I could do it all at once. But then I realized there wasn't enough shelf space for all those t-shirts, so I asked Johnny if he had any ideas. He said "Put them in a trash bag in the basement, Hon. They're only rags."

But I thought--? You said--!

He's only keeping two of them, apparently. He washed the lot because they smelled bad. Because, you know, your rags ought to smell lemony-fresh before you put them in a trash bag in the basement.

The thing is, though, I may have caught a bit of Johnny Fever. Because I found this shirt and pulled it out:

It's Van Heusen! And it's perfect! That doesn't make me as bad as Johnny, right?

You may even notice that the closet doors are closed. That's because I cleaned the closet out while I was at it (sort of -- not enough to show you pictures of the inside but enough to shut the doors). I had to. There was no place to put the clothes. And in the bottom of the closet I found this:

My Yale Shakespeare! That I got at...

the Brattle Book Shop -- on their outside shelf! For $3/book! Complete! That was like three and a half years ago and they've been sitting in that bag waiting for me to do something about them ever since. Ooh, I think I smell a shelving project for Miss Prudence...

While I was still folding clothes, Johnny had the sterile balls to come in and ask me if I'd go get him a pack of cigarettes. I was wearing sleep shorts and a wife-beater tank top without a bra (don't try to picture it, it isn't pretty) and I was sweating from all the cleaning and folding, so I told him I thought he'd live another 45 minutes until his guitar lesson was through and he could go himself (honestly, I didn't use the F word). Then I started to feel bad, and I decided that if I was done folding before he was done guitaring then I'd go.

But then I opened the closet door -- right after I took that picture -- to put the shirt away, and the door fell off the track and I had to spend the next twenty minutes in there with my flowery screwdriver trying to get it level.

He's gone now, for his own cigarettes and (I imagine) a wee pint.

So I flipped the mattresses and made the bed without him.

Aren't you proud of me?

Here's your contest for today, same prize as before (guess it right and I'll make a poem with your name): can you spot the one constant in all these couch-pictures?

Day -- hm, I seem to have gotten confused somewhere. Let's just say 26: Accomplished (yuh-huh, my Nana says so).
Time: Diana's been dead for four days, plus previews and everything.
Cost: Nothing.
Johnny Having Work Lined Up For Tomorrow So I Can Actually Do Something Around Here: Priceless (he's back, by the way: I just heard him crank up the lawn mower...)

Anybody Want A Husband?

Oh my god he's making me nuts!

I just got home from running all those errands (ooh, and I got road-raged while I was out there! Some guy tried to cut me off in a parking lot and I didn't let him, and he honked and then he followed me! I wasn't sure he was following me until I pulled into Wendy's to get a soda but the drive-through line was too long and I didn't feel like parking and walking in just to get a soda when I was on my way to the grocery store anyway, so I just drove around and pulled back out again, and he did the same thing right behind me! Scary. I finally lost him by cutting through the liquor store parking lot on my way to Super 88. Phew!)

Anyway, so I just got home and while I was out he "cleaned up" the back hallway. Where I'd been working all this month. Which means that now the paint thinner, the 5F5, the gloves and rags and steel wool are all in the kitchen -- on the floor next to the basement door but not actually in the basement. Because this is how Johnny cleans things up. He moves everything to another place, then he sweeps the floor and leaves the pile, all the while making jokes about what a slob I am.

That, or he follows me around and offers to do whatever I am doing. If I let him and move on to something else, he follows me again.

Yes, Dear. Thank you, Dear. Now go away.

He didn't help me put away the groceries so much as stand over my shoulder asking what everything in the refrigerator was, and then he decided it was time to go through the cupboards to visit his canned fish (the anchovies and mackerel and such he likes to get in his Christmas stocking but very rarely ever eats).

Didn't you say you planned to mow the lawn today, Dear?

Well, he figures he'll wait for that until the sun goes down a piece (it is really hot, but he has a guitar lesson at 5:30 that is supposed to be an hour but always runs till sometime after eight) so he thinks he might's well go ahead and make some pasta salad. Boiling the big blue pot of water on the gas stove. Because it's just too hot to mow the lawn. Yeesh.

He's already announced that we'll have pork roast for dinner. (Did I mention that it's hot? And that he's giving a guitar lesson through the preparing-dinner hour?) And now he just marched in to show me a spaghetti sauce he found in the freezer that he thinks we'll have tomorrow. Canned mackerel and salad the night after that (yuck, not for me, thanks). I don't know when he thinks we'll eat the pasta salad...

I'm not sure if I can manage to accomplish anything Puritanical with Wee Jimmy on a tear like this. He'll sit down when Christine gets here for her lesson, but I make myself scarce when she arrives because she's thirteen and I don't want to make her shy to sing and play.

Besides, when she's here is the only time I ever fold the laundry. Hide in the bedroom, sit on the floor, watch a DVD of something Johnny would not abide (tonight it's The Queen -- a woman often referred to in this house as "that dozy old fuck") and fold, fold, fold my little heart out. I'm not sure, but I think the pile might be breeding...



If I get it all done, does that count?