Tales from the Shark Tank

It’s a bit disconcerting when a gust of wind blows against the house, and you feel the breeze stir your hair.

With the window closed.

Purim is this coming Sunday, and I have to come up with a costume for my small son. This year he really understands the story, and he wants to be Haman. Yep, you got it right, the villain of the piece who schemes to destroy the Jews of Persia, is foiled by the heroism of Esther and her Uncle Mordechai, (and did anyone else ever notice as a kid that Esther was in a position to do something because she concealed her background?), and in the end is hanged on the scaffold Haman had ordered constructed to execute Mordechai. Hearing tales like that, is it any wonder I understood irony before I started school? But that’s beside the point.

So lacking utterly in costuming inspiration, I decided to look for images of Haman online. He’s generally depicted as wearing a lot of black, which really doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, black is the color of villainy in our culture, but this was a guy whose vanity and hubris were what brought his downfall. He was the King’s principal adviser. I’d expect him to be wearing cloth-of-gold and purple silks, not black. Ok, inspiration is beginning to strike, and I think I can find something suitable in my stash. Tunic with wrapped over-robe, but let’s see what else Google can turn up for me.

So I clicked on a link for a Purim carnival, to find that…it’s an SCA event in Pennsylvania. My first thought was “wow, that’s unusual!” And my second was “No, wait.” Back when I was in college, my oath-sister had been Seneschal of the SCA group in Bloomington. We had needed a theme for a spring event, and there was darn near open warfare between the warrior and pacifist contingents. We needed something that both could enjoy, and the date provided inspiration. I suggested a Purim Carnival. Never mind that I was the only Jewish member of the group at the time. Never mind that no one else even knew what Purim was, let alone what a Purim Carnival entailed or how to organize one. For that matter, never mind that I had never organized anything larger than a family Seder at the time. I agreed to be autocrat, along with a friend, and we did it. In spite of things like my lack of written recipes and anything resembling administrative skills, we carried it off. If we could do that in 1979, then I don’t know why I should be surprised to find it being done in 2007. It would be more surprising if it weren’t.

And having figured that out, I’m going back to designing a suitably gaudy costume for Haman. I wonder if I can convince my son to wear a gold cloth turban.

Our son looked up from his book the other day to ask “Mom, what does ‘daring’ mean?” I told him that it meant to do something that was difficult and dangerous, or risky. He pondered a moment, then solemnly pronounced his opinion.

“Oh” he said. “It’s a synonym for ’stupid’.”

Yesterday we got a call from the school’s instant alert system, informing us that school would be delayed two hours today. This morning at 5:30, the phone rang again. No, we weren’t on delay, school was canceled outright. I looked out the window and understood why immediately.

It wasn’t snowing all that hard, really, but the snow was blowing sideways, and when I looked for our landlord’s barn half a mile away, I couldn’t see it. As I watched, the snow-plow went by. Fifteen minutes later, you really couldn’t tell. Miss Tornado insisted on going out, but was back at the door before I managed to count to five. She did that a couple of times, and then I put a stop to it, having noticed that in the brief time the door was opened for her, snow had blown in on the other end of the glass door. I had a small snowdrift in the track of the sliding door on the inside. That is not, as they say, the way they wrote it up in the owner’s manual. At least it’s pretty when I look outside.

The good news is that our landlady had a plumber in while we were in Chicago for the weekend, and all our pipes are thawed. They have also been moved to the inside of the house, so that they show, instead of being concealed inside the walls. It looks pretty dreadful, but hopefully it will keep them thawed. She’s figured out that the cats are indoor creatures, and she’s decided she’s ok with it. Not that my housekeeping is great – quite the contrary – but until you see them you can’t tell they’re here. Since the problem before was olfactory, she’s decided to let it be. I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t.

The weird part of this, though, is that in the process of redoing the pipes to the toilet the guy accidentally ran the line from the hot water pipe rather than the cold. I told the owner about it, and she’ll get it straightened round as soon as she can. But meanwhile, I think I’m just as glad the pipes are that much less likely to freeze!

I’m hoping devoutly that there’s school tomorrow. I can handle being snowed in myself, but being snowed into a small house with a bored 9 year old boy is an exercise requiring more patience than I have at the moment. I usually handle the vagaries of weather fairly well, but just now being housebound is getting really old. I’ve been growling at everyone this evening, a thing I do not like. I don’t know. Blizzard or no blizzard, if he’s home tomorrow I’ll be taking him to the library or a movie or something. We have got to get out of this house.

I expected many things as a consequence of surgery.

I did not expect to need new clothes. I’d been told by friends who’ve had similar procedures that I’d want soft stuff for a couple of weeks, but after that I should be able to wear my jeans, etc without problem.

Not so much. That collection of inch long incisions? Two of them are exactly at my waist, one on each side of my navel. My waistband goes right over them. Another is right at the top of the zipper. None of those take kindly to being constricted under stiff fabric, or worse yet fabric and metal. I only own two pair of elastic or drawstring waist pants that aren’t thin knit workout pants, and now my doc tells me it’s gonna be at least a couple of months before I can wear something like jeans comfortably unless they’re too big.

So I’m going shopping. I can think of many worse problems, y’know?

My beloved husband and I were discussing the whys and wherefores of our inability to thaw those of our pipes which are frozen. One of them actually broke, so now there’s a new section of pipe and a hole in the wall at the foot of the stairs, containing soggy insulation that will have to be replaced. Scary, that – the pipes were indeed inside the insulation, with no more than thin paneling between them and the heated part of the house, and they still managed to freeze…but I digress.

I commented that my efforts at heating the areas where assorted pipes run had clearly not been aimed at the correct spots, since everything north of the bathroom sink remains frozen. My husband said he thought I had probably indeed identified them, but had not been able to warm them sufficiently in the face of atmospheric opposition.

Or, in his own phrase “Something about it being cold as Bush’s heart dipped in liquid nitrogen.”

I love my husband’s comparisons.

Let’s start with something simple here. I still can’t lift more than 10 pounds, and that’s not comfortable yet. I drove for the first time since surgery yesterday. I’m not really up to speed by any stretch of anyone’s imagination yet. That’s not surprising, but it does make what’s happening here all the more annoying.

It’s the coldest it’s been since we moved up here, and this house just doesn’t handle it. So any waterpipe that isn’t actively running will freeze, and now it turns out some that were have done. First we lost the hot water in the kitchen. Then somebody forgot and shut off the cold. It was found no more than an hour later, and despite open cabinet doors had already frozen. So now we’re carrying water from the bathroom to the kitchen.

Then last night I discovered that the water to the toilet had frozen. Ok, there’s no way to leave that running, but now flushing is a matter of filling a bucket in the tub and dumping it in. Remember that lifting limit? My husband’s the only one who can actually do it.

This morning got worse. We have hot water in the bathroom sink that looks like the outflow from a steel mill, there’s so much rust in it, but the cold water to that same sink froze overnight while it was running!. It was working at 3:00 a.m. when I got up, but not at 8:00 when we woke for the day. (The good news is that our son is getting old enough to be willing to play and let us sleep for awhile….yaaaay!!!!!) So now we have running cold water only to the tub.

Prior experience has been that once the water system freezes, thawing it is hopeless until the temperature is above 18 F. and the wind under 10 mph. Of course, wind matters less as the temperature increases. But it’s a balmy 0 F. out there at this moment, with 25 mph winds, and that’s not due to improve until Thursday, when it might make it up to 20 F.. So we get to live with this until then. I’m told it’s the worst it’s been in 27 years, and I can well believe it. And for all of me, it can wait that long again!

“You find fannish types in the oddest places.”

A friend of mine sent me that. He and his S.O. had been at a shiva gathering for a cousin of hers, a woman younger than any of us who had finally lost to breast and ovarian cancer after 14 years. Evidently they had gotten into a conversation with someone else there in which S.F. fandom and cons had come up, to find the woman they were talking to delighted to learn that there actually was a community based around those interests.

He’s right. You do meet kindred spirits in the oddest places. I met one of my dearest friends in, of all things, a software development meeting. She is a tech writer, and was the designated scribe; I was there as subject matter expert on statutory requirements. Neither of us remembers exactly what was said, only that she muttered something sotto voce and that I looked across the table at her for the few minutes until the break, then threw caution to the winds and wise-cracked right back. Those at our end of the table who heard the exchange were completely mystified. That was no surprise, as if I recall correctly following it would have required knowledge of both the SCA and science fiction.

She wasn’t expecting anyone to answer. She was just commenting on the general uselessness of the meeting in a way she thought would be reasonably discrete. That might not have been the most mundane, conformist workplace on the planet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in the top ten. And yet there was a kindred spirit of a sort you find only a few times in a lifetime, and that only if you are lucky. I really can’t think of a stranger place to find such a friend.