Okay, I am freezing. I just took an ice-cold shower. I left for Portland on Friday, and when I came back yesterday, my hot water was 100% vamoosed. The heater is dead, dead, dead. A call to the landlord mysteriously revealed that his voicemail box is…full?
I sent a letter to him today to get the ball rolling. Once I am sure the letter got there, I get to wait longer! And then if there is still nothing, I get to buy a comparable water heater and have it installed.
In the meantime, cold showers. Portland was nice. I have NOTHING but chattering teeth. Also I will be updating more on The Queen’s Scullery, nice if you care about obscure food genre. I will try to think of something to say when my brain thaws. I want to cook like a Victorian, not bathe like one.
A very short post to say that sometimes I find notes I have made to myself about things that pop into my head when I am too busy/tired/overwrought to write.
1. Mother Returns
Kind of forgot about the Father!
L. continues to visit father’s lab for monitoring, testing, and catches idea that his father is still alive (HOW WHY)
They go on the news to ask if anyone’s seen their father??
Wow, just give me the Pulitzer now, dudes. I am kind of afraid to even open that file after this.
2.Flavorofhubris: Kanye
???
3. Normal lady activites
such as
childbirth
flensing +
cheating on one’s taxes
A mental person has apparently commandeered my notebook, I don’t remember any of this.
Note to self about notes to self: Add context and instructions next time.
A bookshelf was left behind by the previous tenants, who were apparently some disreputable characters. There is evidence of either untended or very determined children all over this house in the forms of scribbles on many unpaintable surfaces, and last night as I was planting lavender bushes the neighbor was telling us about previous escapee dogs from our backyard, about drug deals, and about children appearing and being taken away again. Apparently the owner did not even want to rent to people with children again, which is a double-edged sword because if you refuse to rent a five-bedroom in an ungentrified neighborhood to a family, then you are going to get a batch of college students. He liked us on sight, though, which was nice.
Since the bookshelf was abandoned, I decided to take advantage of it, rather than letting it gather dust in the garage. I think it will hold all my cookbooks, plus my Hall & Oates records, WOO. It looked like it had been built-in somewhere previously, since the sides were unpainted and drippy and there were loose screws in its back. Where it had been built into was a mystery, since there is no place for a built-in shelf here.
P. came out to supervise.
“You should leave the edges blank so we can paint those the purple you got to break up all the gold,” he said.
“CHUH,” I replied. “I have TRAINING in COLOR THEORY OK. When I need some math done, I will call you, Mr. Math Degree, oh wait no I will not because I can do calculations in my head faster than you can.”
“Oh no you did not. I just think…”
“THIS IS ART, THIS IS INTERIOR DECORATING.”
“Spray painting everything you own gold is not ‘interior decorating.”
BLASPHEMY!
I live for these arguments.
Before!
Umm…During!
It’s kind of streaky. Two cans did not cover everything, I now see in the light of day. I was so high I missed a whole panel last night and did not even realize it. WOO FUMES. That was a fun five minutes, then the headache, oh god the headache.
I always spend all this time at the hardware store staring at all the metallic spray paint and I come home with the exact same shade of Rustoleum gold EVERY TIME. I think I have a soft spot for this color because A. it is awesome and B. it is the very first color I tagged with as a juvenile delinquent. I was eight years old and I had the nozzle turned backwards and it went RIGHT INTO MY RIGHT EYE. However, I did not cry because, don’t let the spike hair fool you, like, I’m not a bitch.
Ananka and I were out at Greenlake doing our usual thing, walkity walk, bitchity bitch. She was kind enough to come see the new house and give it the stamp of approval. The general consensus seems to be that the new house will be good for parties, like snobby wine kind.
We decided there was too much blood in our caffeine stream, so we made a pit stop to refuel. I was catching Ananka up on various dramz in line when this woman who had been waiting behind us interrupted.
“Excuse me,” she said. I was in my own bubble, as usual, and thought we were blocking the pathway or something. I turned. “I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation, but my daughter wants to say something to you.”
What, where, who the fuck was this. I put on my neutral face. Was this woman familiar? She was not. I looked down at her little daughter who was in a stroller and was nibbling on her finger. Did I know her from my Strudel’s preschool? No.
The child paused for a long moment, looking up at me. She held her hand out. “HI,” she finally managed. This is the thing she wanted to say to me?
“She is interested in your hair,” her mother said. “I do my hair red sometimes but she wants me to put pink in.”
Ahh…ok.
As we were leaving, I asked Ananka if she thought the exchange was…a little weird?
“Yes, totally,” she said.
“How rude,” I said.
“I think it was less about the kid and more about how she wanted to let you know she dyes her hair sometimes.”
Hi! Move happened. We had a new guy who was dropping stuff, and this sounds crazy, but it was funny. All my stuff is funky boho flea market crap pile anyhow, so MEH, what’s a few more scratches. Less Crate & Barrel, more Waterlogged Cardboard Box & Dumpster. Does it make you crazy when bloggers show off their homes and it looks like there should be an “A. $599.99, color shown: Hunter” in the corner? Maybe I am just a snot.
Here comes the moving truck!
Look at these tough guys moving my chickenhaus.
Anyway, here are my sad sticks in my new split level. Today I think we do the final furniture shifting.
If I had to guess I would say this thing was built in the early 80s. I spent time growing up in split levels and I had my older daughter in one (blood + white berber=thank god for midwives and their bag of tricks) so I am quite fond of them. Other than the fact that this one is a five-bedroom, it’s mostly the same as all the others. The lack of a basement/storage motivated me to send a lot of stuff off to charity, which, I needed that kick in the pants. I don’t think I had done a proper cleanout since everything went cattywampus at the old place in 2008.
Also, I finally have internets today. The technician came out after customer service spent a while dicking me around on the phone, but he was really good. Apparently my signal strength here is very weak, which is worrying since I am working from home now, but I have a backup plan involving laptops and local cafes, if necessary.
I am tired but happy! More later. As I was moving, I discovered what someone did to Rosie the Riveter. :'( I suspect it was Not Me, who is usually responsible for things like this in my house.
WHY DO YOU HATE FEMINISM, OK?
P.S. Heh, Franny walked by and saw the picture of Rosie as I was uploading it and said I DID NOT DO THAT and I didn’t even say anything. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
P.P.S. Someone asked me if I boxed up P. and took him with. A: Yes. Useful babbydaddies are hard to come by. We are getting along like a house afire, ngl.
Okay! It is 24 hours until our massive move, which is a whole 40 BLOCKS, WOW. There is nothing left but my room. My closet is not really a proper disaster, but it is sort of an odd shape and I cannot see everything that is in it. I am kind of wondering what I will find. Sex toy receipts? Shirts from 2004 that were kind of a bad idea then, and have only got worse with age, surely? There is a black lace thing that looked really boho and cool in the store with a camisole under it, but when I came home it morphed into something Prince’s keytar player would wear in, like, 1991. How does that happen?
My room was supposed to be done by now, but I was sabotaged by packing the girls’ room yesterday. They gave it a “thorough” cleaning last weekend, and I was so busy with other things I took a look and it looked good, but I was probably in such a hurry that it was good in like a “El Camino in a sandstorm” way. If I saw one in a sandstorm, I might think for a minute it was a real car.
I had my moving crates and the objective of paring down their bookshelf by half. Their shelves are a mix of really great classics and comics, as well as the DARK SIDE which is things like those Candy Fairy and Rainbow Fairy books, childrens’ literature that is written through what I imagine is a combination of algorithms, phrase-generation software, and depression in a giant hospital-green room where other similar childrens’ series are being cranked out for a fraction of a cent per word. It is like these things just grow on your shelves like a fungus. “At least they are reading” is only an acceptable defense of these types of books when every other piece of age-appropriate literature has been burned. I am convinced that a diet consisting only of these books will certainly result in a batch of Thunderdome plane crash nitwit children talking about tomorrow-morrow land, a happy place where you can always find the next book in the series.
So, ahem, these types of books were siphoned out for the thrift store. I had my trash bag for broken toys and a bag for recycling all the four million pictures and origami swans and birthday cards from three years ago children enjoy hoarding. Then I started encountering the little bombs here and there. At the top of the bookshelf there was a tomato pincushion that Franny had found in the street on the way home from school, and it was surrounded by dozens of rusty pins (the tomato was wet when she had brought it home, and I kind of pretended none of it was happening, really. Soggy street pin tomato, ugh.) Of course I stuck my hand into the pile of pins when I reached up, and they rained rusty pinny death down on me. Was this an ancient temple or a kid’s room? What next, floor spikes?
Seriously, though, other than that it was not too bad. There was a huge amount of broken stuff, which always amazes me. I think my last contract sapped my energy so much I was not doing regular toy sorts like I used to, so things had built up a bit. One thing that always gets me is the drifts of kid crud that can happen behind dressers. They build up little worlds on the edge of shelves with small dollies and scraps of paper and wee tea sets and animals and a table that is the thingie from the middle of the pizza box and the shelf gets bumped later or there is a fight and it all goes flying into the beyond, to be found and swept up later by me. It always looks the same, too, and seems to be composed of the same stuffs: glitter, loose hot pink boa feathers, plastic play coins, doll leg, 7 Legos, doll house teapot (sans lid), paper scraps, Kleenex with blood (?) on, funky tattoo bandaid, quarter machine rings, googly eye. I think there is some pink fake-fur covered planet somewhere that has this girl crud as a planetary ring.
Sometimes I ask Franny if I can post things, like her hula hoop video. Now that she is 9, I am very mindful of the fact that soon other little cretins friends will be on the internet, looking for evidence that their classmates are mortal and fallible. Of course I will not tell you the naughty things she does and says. She is always perfect, casual, talented, and good-looking.
So she’s not embarrassed yet.
FRANNY: “MOM TAKE A PICTURE OF US AND PUT IT ON THE INTERNET AND TELL EVERYONE WE ARE JUST HEADS AND THAT WE ARE YOUR PET HEADS OK.”
Okay.
Strudel, however, is still young enough to make a couple of mistakes.
I don’t usually feel I need to justify anything I write here, but I need to say something. I feel like I have to follow up. I have some more pieces to the puzzle that was this weekend. I have to write this down. When I went to court years ago, the fact that I wrote about the few good things, the fact that I used humor and put a positive spin on my situation was used against me. Writing about the bad times means that people see the ugly underbelly, which I was not totally ready for. It was too close–I was living it.
It also begs the question of why a person tolerates the terrible things they are writing about. Reader, I was not ready for that judgment, and I was not ready for the changes I needed to make. Not until 2003, but you know that story already.
Now I am letting it out, for good or for bad. I need to tell you. I know there is a sea of people out there who are going through this too. I need someone to hear what divorce with kids can be like, what this pointless bullshit tug of war is like. I hope you do better than I did, but I think I am doing well now. Time is healing.
So Franny walked into my house last night, having been dropped off at the appointed hour after missing a day of camp for really no good reason. This is about as corny as I get around here, but I will tell you that she walked in BEAMING, like glowing, and I saw she was so happy to be home, and it seemed like all the kermitflailing from this weekend was pretty fricking moot. She made a beeline towards me and we all squeezed her and Strudel immediately started gabbling at her.
I was so relieved when I saw she was okay and not really upset. During his long harangue on the phone Sunday night I discovered that Franny is “very unhappy at my house” and because I did not reply to his first email saying that he wanted me to pick her up in West Seattle at a party she “thought that I was injured or sick” and that he was “thinking really hard about child support and changing her living situation.” Perhaps I will think really hard about my student loans and see if they get paid off.
I will confess to you that it really, really hurt me to think that Franny was secretly unhappy here, or that she was worried about me in any way this weekend.
“Franny,” I said, tentatively, “were you worried about me when I did not reply to the email from your dad about changing your drop off time?”
“No,” she said. “I know if something was wrong, P. would call us.”
Knife turned against me. I could hear the unspoken, “You are a bad mother” in his words. I told him I heard him use that manipulative tone on dozens of people over the years, and it was not possible for him to guilt me into agreeing to anything.
Later I took her to see the new house and we had a serious talk on the way there. I felt like a shitheel asking her if she was unhappy, and would she like to talk or change anything? I felt very “I just thought you should know” and I despise being that person, but what to do? How to get to the bottom of these things? No one else will.
Franny began crying and screaming furiously in the backseat. She really flipped her Pop-Tarts for a second. Nothing makes her madder than having words put into her mouth. “When he lies about what I say, I feel so used,” she said.
Now he proposes that she move to where he lives for middle school. He is even being kind enough to not charge me child support. He is trying to backroom negotiate with me, in spite of the fact that he has already completely broken the parenting plan.
He was kind of slurring and not tracking the conversation well on Sunday (“What are you talking about? What does that mean?” he kept saying) and I assumed he was taking her to some kind of family barbecue/party thing, but I found out he was screaming at me from a grown up bash, and he probably was drunk. I kind of wish I would have recorded it and set it to music so he could have his own Bale Out moment. I had a feeling his wife was not around since he is not allowed to swear at home.
Anyway, as usual I am ha ha deflect everything with humor, but I am concerned. I am not scared, but concerned. I am afraid that since he has seen his sister recently that she has given him some of her infamous advice, but I could be very wrong. I would be shocked if his wife wanted him to throw thousands at dragging me back into court to call me a whore, dogfucker, satanist, whatever. I think this is much ado about nothing and I can forgive the drunken blowup. As P. said, “It must be hard not to have a reverse gear.”
I am sad I am going to miss the Capitol Hill Block Party due to packing, especially my BFF Atmosphere. This seems appropriate today.
Longtime readers will be unsurprised to learn that at the end of spring, before school was even threatening to let out, I arranged camp for both of my girls, since I knew I would be doing some kind of work this summer and they would need fun safe things to do. Once I had done the sign up, paid the monies, and had gotten confirmation, I very quickly cranked a schedule out to Franny’s father, who generally takes her for half the summer now. We have settled into a routine–once he moved off in 2007 or so after leaving brief notice on my voicemail that I “would be ‘handling’ Franny most of the time, if that was okay” he picks her up every other weekend and takes her for two weeks of the month in the summer.
As always, I try to plan the schedule so drop offs and pickups are close to the middle and end of the month and call for a minimum of contact between us. Things have been rather terse between me and his new wife since he forged my name to get Franny out of the country, so that avenue is kind of out as well. I heard no response from him regarding the summer camp schedule, which was both unsurprising (the not hearing back) and designed to make things as easy for him as possible, as far as explicitness and avoiding his evil bitch ex-wife. His father, who was CC’ed on the mail for his own information, replied within a day, so I know it did not just bounce.
The last time I saw him, which was a couple of weeks ago when he was picking Franny up from my house an hour after camp closed (I am very glad the little man in my stomach was telling me he was not going to show, and to take her home when I picked up Strudel) he claimed never to have seen such a camp schedule in his everloving life. Who? What? Where is camp again?
“Okay,” I said. What could I say? No apology for being late, no interest in knowing what was going on, really. This is the man I am legally obligated to send my child off with every so often.
Can I tell you? He looks old now. He is slightly stooped and his eyes are getting beady. His hair is getting frizzy with grey. He has put on weight, which, I know. Life happens. Still, it is shocking when this is the man who people would ask me what I was doing with him and how I landed him because he was just so handsome and I, apparently, was the dog’s breakfast. “Are you two…siblings?” He looks like he has been hit by a bat. I reckon child #3 has caught up with him.
In theory I am supposed to see Franny tomorrow evening after camp. Will he find the schedule? Will he figure it out? Starting on Friday he began emailing, calling, and texting me in an attempt to ditch her early (today) because he happened to be in West Seattle. But I should meet them there after the party they attended because that is only “fair.”
Don’t tell me about fair. Really. No. I was at the courthouse on business on Friday and I went in through the wrong doors. The murals on the ground came swooping up towards me and my head started pounding–I could hear my heart up in my ears. The worst day in court six years ago came rushing back to me and I began crying uncontrollably as I walked through the metal detector, down the halls, towards the elevator bay. No one seemed fazed, really. I imagine there is a ton of crying at the courthouse.
So…this person…still blithely asks me for favors that are not going to be forthcoming, as if I ever ask him for everything, as if we have some kind of arrangement, as if we have some kind of exchange. This person had the temerity to ditch our child with me and move away, and yet fuss at me for claiming her on my taxes this year. What do you do with this?
I did not return any of his calls or texts. I have to file these things under “sounds like a personal problem” and not engage because if I give anything it will be endless and draining and there will be no return on it. I guess you just have to say “whatever, dude” and keep living your life and be there when Franny’s face falls when he is late again.
P.S. He just texted me to say that since he has not heard from me this weekend he is making “alternative arrangements” for her care. In spite of the fact that she is all set for camp and has been for months. Off. His. Rocker. I replied that as far as I was concerned the camp schedule was still valid. I’ll keep you posted.
P.P.S. Now he is texting that he does not know what “please reread the camp schedule” means. Head, have you met my friend, Desk?
Denouement: I had to call him after he spent a few exchanges pretending like he didn’t know what I was talking about. He actually countered some of my arguments with “SHUT UP” and “NO U.” Awesome. This is a very proud day for his people.
So, the end of yesterday was that I ended up at SNOOP DOGG, which I forgot was even happening. It was amazing. I should quit my job more often, really. This week has been great.
Snoop Dogg would like to remind you to do three things every day:
1. Brush your teeth
2. Thank god you made it to another day
3. Smoke weed
They were giving out eye drops AT THE DOOR. Way to know your crowd.
