Archive: August 2009

On Saturday, after a torrential downpour, JG noticed that water was dripping from our entryway light fixture. What the heck? He shut off the electricity and poked around the crawl space above the top floor, but he couldn’t find a visible leak. Our documents from buying this house are very vague on roof maintenance — apparently, they did some work on it, but we don’t know when or what it entailed — so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we might have to replace the whole thing. JG is worried that we will have to spend our whole savings (emergency car and vacation funds) if the repair is significant, and knowing that we have been financially responsible in the past is small consolation.

This morning, I’ve called five roofers and made three appointments for estimates, and I am hoping and praying that what we saw was just a product of a loose shingle and the heaviest rain of the season. Fortunately, my boss is being really understandable about my unpredictable lateness or ducking out early, but I really hope I don’t have to use up vacation days trying to fix whatever problem is there. Water damage and mold are my two biggest fears in owning a house, so this maybe-kind-of-potential leak scares the bejeezus out of me.

To make matters worse, when I came into work today, I found that the Urgent E-mail Lady has struck again. The deadline for department newsletter content was last Friday, and I planned to lay it all out this week. On Wednesday, I sent my normal two-day reminder to the folks who hadn’t already sent me their pieces, and UEL wrote back (red exclamation point!) that I would get her piece “by Friday, if not tomorrow.” Well! This morning, there is no article in my inbox, and I wrote her an e-mail asking for a status update, which is my subtle way of asking where the freak the article is because the deadline already passed. I know that if I tell that I am pushing off her article until the next issue, she will have a fit in the form of an e-mail with an angry exclamation point, CCed to my boss and her bosses. I look forward to it.

To finish off the trifecta of trauma, I got an e-mail from one of the administrative assistants saying that we’re having a birthday celebration for one of the uppity ups tomorrow at 11am, and could we let her know if we can come and bring food items? This e-mail bothered me on a few levels, but most severely:

• If you are soliciting people to bring food for your event, it is common courtesy to give them more than, oh, say, 22 hours of notice.
• Hardly any one else gets formal birthday celebrations around here, but I know people will fall over themselves to bring something and go to this thing because it is Prime Sucking Up Time.

Immediately, a flurry of Reply All responses flew in. People volunteered for vegetables and dip! Carrot cake! Cheese and crackers! Chips and dip! Blueberry coffee cake! Paper products! I quickly skimmed the To field in the message: there will only be twenty of us if everyone comes. How much food did we really need?

I responded to the assistant to ask if she needed anything else, and she replied, “Whatever food item you want to bring is fine!”

Thank you, but that was supremely unhelpful.

It appears that I will look very bad if I don’t bring something, so what easy thing can I make with some combination of all-purpose flour, granulated sugar, brown sugar, confectioner’s sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla, butter, shortening, walnuts, a cup of white chocolate chips, an ounce of baker’s chocolate, and a miniature Heath bar? I have no time to go to the store because it’s my night to make dinner, and I have to leave work early today because, of course, I scheduled the first roofing estimate appointment for tonight.

If I make a chocolate-chip-cookie base and only use white chips, and only half the prescribed amount, is that okay? What if I made half of a cookie recipe into a 8×8-inch pan and cut it into bars? Would white chocolate and Heath bar make a weird combination? Or white chocolate, Heath bar, and walnuts? Gah. My mind is spinning.

In my first big move of the Black Boot Search of 2009, I ordered a pair from Piperlime that came in the mail this week. I was worried that they might be a little too, uh, hooker-esque for work, but they aren’t nearly as vampy in person. When I tried them on, my foot wiggled around a lot in the heel-ankle area, so I think I need a smaller size. Unfortunately, my calves just barely crammed in there, so I am afraid that a half size down won’t contain them. The heel height and toe point are right, so I may take advantage of Piperlime’s free return shipping and try a different size. Regardless, this pair is  a good candidate if I don’t find anything at a DSW trip sometime within my 45-day return window. The search continues.

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When people ask me how work is going, I usually answer in terms of my computer. Its performance makes a direct impact on my quality of life at the office, and the continual freezing, stalling, and overall bad behavior usually renders me a complete crank by the end of the day. I’ve taken to filing and buffing my nails as it cranks through processes, and my nails have never looked so good. Finally, I submitted a help desk ticket detailing all the times it would freeze (including, but not limited to, when I open a new application, open another window of the same application, switch between applications, plug in a flash drive, and receive an e-mail), and a tech guy came up this morning to take a look. As it turns out, the minimum memory requirement to run Windows XP is 512 MB, and I had a measly 256 MB, which explains everything. He upgraded me to 1 GB, and my computer is running like a dream. I have a feeling that my nails will suffer from the upgrade, but I am willing to make that sacrifice.

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I had a dentist appointment this morning, like I have every 4-6 weeks for almost a year and a half. All of the assistants, the hygienists, and the doctors know me on sight, but Carol, the receptionist, knows me the best.

“Oh!” she said when I came in, “you’re early!” She knows that I usually come bursting through the door a few minutes late.

“For once, right? Could I talk to Steve about my account?”

“Yep, go right on back.”

I went over my most recent bill with the finance guy, and then an assistant came to get me for my appointment. She said excitedly, “I saw your chart! It’s your last day in your trays, right?”

Yes! It is! Throw me a party!

At last, I don’t have to wear my orthodontic trays during the day! I don’t have annoying cemented bumps on my teeth for added friction! I don’t have to figure out a ladylike way to remove plastic trays from my mouth when confronted with surprise food items! At my next appointment — in six months, not six weeks — I have to figure out what kind of long-term retainer I need, but for now, the daily hassle is over. Best of all, my teeth are straight and floss-able. There is no photographic evidence because, although my teeth are much improved, they are still gigantic. Apparently, orthodontia can’t fix that, but that’s okay with me.

“Are you looking forward to football season?” I asked.

JG and I were sitting on the couch this weekend tossing around ideas for new tailgate menus, like barbecue wings or pancakes. Even though it’s fun to think about what the upcoming season has in store, it’s also intimidating because fall is our busiest time of year.

“Yeah, I am,” JG said. “Delaware should be good, and the family fantasy league will be fun.”

He paused, then added, “I’m glad you like coming to football games.”

I do like going. In a lot of ways, committing to a whole season of Delaware home games brings back my days in the marching band, and I have a certain masochistic attitude toward outlasting inclement weather. I enjoy the ritual of it all: putting on my jersey; seeing how fast we can set up our tailgate site; singing the alto harmony line to the national anthem; and cheering for the band at half time. It’s fun going back to campus and being part of something bigger than myself, even if it’s just a stadium filled with 20,000 other Blue Hens yelling at the same referee.

When I think back to my college career, only the fond memories spring to mind, even though my time there certainly wasn’t all positive. The bad times, like being dumped by a boyfriend just days before my birthday; my horrible, 6-person rhetoric class that met at 8am; and stressful hours spent decoding organic chemistry emerge so dimly in comparison to brighter, better times.

My favorite chemistry teacher, an adorable Texan man in his seventies, always dressed up for Halloween; my favorite ones were the knight and the wizard. The building that houses the English department has a lovely rotunda on the top floor where the names of the English canon authors are painted along the circumference, and I loved sitting up there and reading during my spare half-hours between classes. When I was a freshman mentor, the other mentor in my building came down to my room to flop into my beanbag chair and talk almost every Friday afternoon; we called them our “office hours.” In 2003, when the football team was making a run for the national championship, JG and I (along with a group of engineer friends) chipped away at the ice-encrusted student bleachers to watch our team win what we fondly refer to as the “snow bowl.”

All of these rose-tinged memories are in stark contrast to what happens when I think about high school. My immediate associations are tough and harsh. I wanted to get out of there as fast as humanly possible and run past the constraints I perceived in my town and my school. I never lingered because I was bound for college and my very own new life.

Sometimes, it’s hard to explain why I love Delaware football so much when I only tolerate college football as a whole, and I can’t abide professional football, notable exceptions being the Superbowl and any Joe Flacco highlight reels. Part of it is definitely that I get to spend the whole time with JG, and it’s a fun thing we can share. However, when I’m singing along to the alma mater, there’s something bigger and deeper going on, and it reminds me of all the reasons I loved college and who I became there.

I’ve been trying to synthesize the weekend coherently, but nothing has gelled in a satisfactory manner. I don’t mean to imply that the weekend was full of stupendous adventures for which there are no words. There are words; they’re just rather ordinary ones.

It’s not that I have a problem with that. I am actually quite proud of what JG and I accomplished during his last real weekend of summer vacation before his in-service days start. We helped two friends load their moving truck in the sticky August morning air, tripping over neighbor children who did their part by carrying down individual weights, one at a time per child. Meanwhile, a slow cooker of chili simmered in our kitchen, awaiting its fate to become easy frozen dinners of the future. Friends of ours just moved into a house right near us, so I spent the afternoon painting walls and discussing books. For dinner, JG and I went to a Tex-Mex joint, and the tacky decor and loud music were kind of exhilarating. The friendly waitress assured me that the fried catfish appetizer was not spicy, although she did not warn us about its raging temperature. We toasted JG’s last bout of freedom with Mexican beer and melon margaritas before settling down to our blackened swordfish and shrimp-crawfish quesadilla. After church, I set us up to make a triple batch of potstickers, or as we later referred to the marathon of folding over 130 of them, Dumplingfest. We froze four portions to be eaten later, and we ate the fifth portion for dinner, along with the edamame from our CSA.

So, no, it’s not as though we saw any beautiful views or came to any groundbreaking revelations. We spent the weekend together, and there was no drama; we just tripped along pleasantly, getting things done and catching whatever movies were on TV. It was really comforting, like when we would laze the weekend away in college.

As I tried to pull together some sort of pithy statement about all the mundane things we did, it reminded me of a conversation from last spring when I was talking with a group of friends about the difference between loving and liking someone. We came to the vague consensus that loving someone is sometimes a conscious, intentional action, but liking somebody is the result of natural, affable affinity. One of us said, “I mean, I love my husband all the time, but it’s even better when I like him!”

This weekend, JG and didn’t have to make a concerted effort to love each other; we just relaxed and liked each other. In a weird, nonromantic way, it really was better.