Poopy

Okay, say something damnit. Hi – another busy weekend. Too busy. Ed and I sat in the hot tub last night – under a canopy of stars and towering redwood trees – and decompressed our weekend. Too busy. So much so that I feel really resentful toward all the going’s on. Not toward any one person or thing – just the whole package – it was too much. And too many foiled ventures. Perhaps if some of them had yielded better fruits.

Despite this, I happened to get some great pictures of a tree frog, above the waterfall at Elliot. The rangers were out in full force, meaning the Honey Bee was leashed the entire time. Used to be one was allowed up to three dogs, off leash, under voice control, in this open space area. Someone has deemed it a sensitive wild life habitat, however. So now the dogs must be leashed. From my understanding the only sensitive wild life area is a roped off area near one of the fire roads. I’m sure dogs run through that area from time to time. But just as often, because the sign explaining what the sensitive wild life habitat is all about is posted in the middle of the sensitive, roped off area, humans have to crawl over the rope, through the sensitive area, to read that it’s a sensitive area and be informed they need to stay off/out of it. Sheer genius. And the dogs are the problem. Jeeeeesh.

I know, I should oblige and follow the rules – but I can’t. I try to make up for it in other ways… rouge broom pulling excursions, frog docenting (though not always gleefully), caring for the planet in my own ways. Hopefully is the cosmic pinball game I’m equalizing my karma points. I’m sure one day I’ll get a ticket, and I’ll just deserve it. She’s a good girl – well behaved, sunny disposition, avoids people, loves kids – it’s really me. I’m the problem.

So I’m about to drop over $1300 on what I’ve learned is called bathroom trim. That’s the faucets for the sink and the shower stuff – handles, spout for the tub, etc. etc. That’s in addition to the 200-and-something I spent online for the showerhead from Mac The Antique Plumber. I figure, however, since I decided not to buy a new bathtub and since no wood rot was discovered in the walls/floors/ceiling, etc, I could splurge a little and get the trim I wanted and liked. Even still, it feels rather overwhelming and extravagant and crazy. Be that as it may – I’m gonna have the nicest trim in town.

It smells poopy around here.

Pronoia

I know, I know, I’ve been terrible about updating here. Things have been going along swimmingly, yet quite busily as well. (Is busily a word?)

I love that when touched by Ithuriel’s spear, the true form of evil is revealed. So occasionally I pick the flower and hold it, waiting for something to change – wondering if the evil that lurks in me will suddenly become revealed in some striking form. As long as I look pretty much the same, at least we can assume I’m not cloaked – you get what you see – fangs and all (wink.)

For those who remember the Hell’s Kitchen saga of last year, what you mightn’t know is that the saga never ended. There remained a built-in dishwasher that never had a cabinet to build itself into. Without said cabinet, the dishwasher, when opened to be loaded or unloaded, would become front-heavy and tip. Hundreds of dollars of broken dishes later leaves me restless. The floor has never been quite finished, trim was never trum. And what’s gone unmentioned is that we haven’t had a bathroom – for the past year it’s been all sub flooring and a teetering toilet. To shower we go use the back cottage and the sink has been shut off for a year given a leakage problem. The little room can hardly be called a bathroom, and more suitably called a rather undignified toilet.

And there’s the problem of contractors/skilled labor in this part of the world being invariably (though not universally, as I’ve recently discovered) unreliable. Well, suddenly and without expectation a guy called me who’d gotten my name from a neighbor and through a rather whirlwind chain of events demolition began on the bathroom last Friday and has been proceeding at break neck speed ever since.

Sure, there was a trip to LA before that that failed to get mentioned here I believe, and last weekend a trip to DC. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever. What’s important is that this bathroom is finally coming together and every discovery has been great news! The walls and floor were ripped up to unveil NO dry rot! This is absolutely amazing (and what one gets for having a house built of precious woods!) An area that has been cause to suspect a roof leakage problem reveals itself to be a sink that drains under the house… as opposed to in a drain (!?!??!) It was easily connected to a drain and suddenly this likely means that there is/was no roof damage!

And all this news leads me to a notion called pronoia. It was first coined by a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. It means nearly the opposite of paranoia. It is a notion that there is a conspiracy by the universe to shower you with blessings. That by 10 am, an hundred things in the universe have conspired to go right, just for you. It really seems to be happening that way, if we pay attention.

There’ll be more later… but for now, if we touch ithuriel’s spear to Hell’s Kitchen it’s looking much better.. and the bathroom, the bathroom, the bathroom… ah.. what more can I say about that bathroom? It commences… love, love, love!

93

I just got back from seeing United 93. I’m stunned. I’m reeling at how gripping it was, how difficult it was to watch and how affected I was by it. This from me – jaded, compartmentalized, heady and detached? Wow. It’s saying something, isn’t it? I’m vibrating. I certainly never believed that seeing the planes hit the towers would ever have an effect on me again, having been so visually and emotionally numbed by terminal repeat of major news outlets. But on a big screen in a context, it left me breathless.

It didn’t have that Spielberg-I-can-manufacture-precisely-one-emotion thing going. It conjured many. I would have been angry had the messages been overly political or patriotic. Sure, it’s a political event, it’s difficult for it not to be political. But this film was amazingly raw. We all know the outcome. I wasn’t left with feelings of nationalism. Strangely, I think that would have cheapened it. That might sound odd – it’s how I feel.