Tales from the Shark Tank

I just received an Anti-B*sh joke from my elderly (past 80) cousin Larry, who has been a rabid right-wing Republican for as long as I’ve known him. You know, the kind that had a “Love it or leave it” bumper sticker back in the late ’60s/ early ’70s?

Our illustrious pres has lost the True Believers.

It was, essentially, a three day celebration. Saturday night we went to the Music Mill in Indianapolis to see Great Big Sea. As my husband puts it, they are either a rock band that plays a lot of trad and Celtic stuff, uses acoustic instruments, and has people playing accordion, fiddle, pennywhistle and other assorted not-very-rockish instruments, or else they’re a Newfoundland Celtic band that plays really loud. By any classification, they are fabulous. So grandparents babysat our favorite son, and we had dinner and then went in for the concert in company with a whole bunch of our favorite people. It was the last stop on their tour, and they pulled out all the stops, since they didn’t have to go anywhere after that except home. It was a truly amazing show, and I believe we will make a point of going anytime they’re performing in range of us. Last time there were 2 or 3 years between Indy appearances. I really hope they don’t wait that long again.

Sunday, after going to see my folks, we took Joseph to play with his cousins and had a lovely family dinner, which ended in singing Happy Birthday to my much loved spouse. He keeps saying he is now ancient and decrepit, and I keep saying he can’t be because I’m not and he’s younger than I am.

And Monday my in-laws once again babysat our son, as my husband and I went out to celebrate our anniversary. We’ve been wedded 19 years now, and people still take us for newlyweds sometimes. It’s a secure enough relationship that we can blithely sing along to a break-up song (Great Big Sea’s Awkward Conversation) while holding hands. What can I say – I can’t imagine being married to anyone else, can’t even imagine wanting to be. Oh, sure, there are things from that 19 years I’d as soon have done without, but my husband isn’t one of them. We visited a bookstore last night after dinner, and when the manager (a friend) joked that a bookstore wasn’t most people’s concept of romantic, told her we’d done that on our honeymoon too. We thought ourselves lucky on our wedding day, as do most couples. Nineteen years later, we still do.

About 12:30 this afternoon, I set out for what should reasonably have been a one hour errand. If the crowds at the store were beyond horrid, it might be an hour an a half.

I got home somewhat past 6:00 p.m., having called upon my husband at 3:00 to pack up his laptop to work from home, as there was no way on this or any other planet I was going to meet that big yellow bus that was due to squeal to a halt in front of our house at 3:38 p.m. Fortunately he was able to do so.

The store was indeed crowded, but it was duly dealt with and all necessary items acquired. Among them were several bags of softener salt, which I requested assistance with. I am capable of shlepping forty pound bags, but I no longer feel compelled to do so. So this nice strong young man loads these three bags into the back of my minivan, and I hear a faint hisss. Huh? Indiana has snakes, but they aren’t usually big enough to be audible, and are even less likely to be found in mega-store parking lots. I looked down, as did the young man. “Ma’am, your tire’s pretty low” he said. I agreed. “If you can drive it around to the other side of the store, they can fix it.” Well, no, no they couldn’t, because it finished flattening itself as we watched. It was too flat to drive around the building in a matter of perhaps a minute.

So ok. I have roadside assistance on my cell phone account, and I called them. I will give them full credit; when I explained the problem of the impending arrival of school bus, they got someone out to me in 20 minutes flat. I was very impressed.

While I was waiting, my cell phone rang. It was someone from the overnight shipper I had been instructed to use to get my laptop in for repair. (That’s another story; for now, suffice it to say that I’m already irritable about the matter.) It was shipped two weeks ago. So this lady is asking me where it was supposed to be going. It developed that the computer had not gone to the repair facility. It had gone wandering around Florida for two weeks, and had finally meandered its way back to its point of origin. It was supposed to have been back to me no later than the middle of this week, and I had notified the service rep when it shipped – and he didn’t notice that it never arrived? So about half a dozen phone calls and much explanation later, she’d figured out what was supposed to have happened, and was trying to a) get it to its destination yet tonight and b) alert the service rep as to what had happened and tell him to get this one to the front of the queue because otherwise they were going to have a remarkably angry lawyer breathing down their necks. At one point she thanked me for being nice about it. I confess to being mystified by that. I mean, I didn’t cuss at the woman – she hadn’t done it, and was trying to make it right. But I had let my voice increase somewhat in both volume and pitch, and the words were not chosen for sweet gentility. Whatever.

Meanwhile the tow truck driver arrived after the first couple of conversations with the shipping rep. I’m thinking all will at least be well automotively, as the driver removed my now flat-as-a-fluke tire and began to unfasten my spare, which in a minivan is inconveniently attached to the undercarriage.

Except that no matter how much he turns the bolt that’s supposed to lower the spare, nothing happens. So he crawls under the car. Nope, nothing happening. The spare is there, and in good condition, but it isn’t moving. Some banging with a wrench ensues. Muttering follows. An arm emerges, grabs the crowbar he’d set aside, and withdraws back under the car as he says “it’s rusted into place here. I’m not sure there’s any way to get it off.” More banging, this time with the crowbar. That was the point at which I called my husband and asked him to meet the bus. Meanwhile, the banging has gotten louder and the muttering has acquired distinct overtones of suppressed profanity. Finally he came out and said he would have to get the car up on a lift. Well, ok, he’s got a tow truck, I can accept that with equanimity. But he decided to give it one last try…and it finally gave up. Hooray! We have achieved spare tire! He put it on the van, put the flat in the back, and I was ready to go. I opened my back door to put my purse in the car, closed it…and the molding fell off the front door. My car has just come home from the body shop (and that’s yet another tale).

We’re planning to go to Indy tomorrow evening, so I didn’t want to have to deal with this tomorrow. Since my husband was already home (and no way could I have made it on time), I went to get both trim and tire attended to. Trim was easy. It was an “oops” thing, loosened inadvertently when the front end got worked on. So they took it off to clean off the adhesive, and I’ll take the car back tomorrow, whereupon it will take all of 15 minutes to put it back on. Since I have to be out anyway, taking the cats to board while we’re away, no big deal. But it did add another quarter hour to my “one hour errand”, which by now was up to four hours.

Onward to the tire emporium. They’re very nice, and very busy. And it turned out that something assaulted my sidewall, which cannot be fixed, so I now have a new tire. I am home and have actually managed to assemble and consume a reasonable dinner, and tomorrow I will get the trim back on my car.

And if anyone sees Loki or Coyote or Raven or Puck or whichever of the tricksters decided I needed a lesson, do me a favor? Tell him, her or it that I moved to Alpha Centauri?

Every evening around 9:00, my living room is host to event to make professional wrestling look tame. I refer, of course, to the F.F.W. No, I don’t mean W.W.F.; I am referring to Feline Federation Wrestling.

Tonight it was Sophia who started it, though they do take turns. Both of them were lounging, Sophia doing her best imitation of a furry meatloaf and Tornado stretched out luxuriously on her side. Suddenly Sophia sprang into action, leaping on her daughter and flipping her over onto her back with a swipe of a capable forepaw, snarling as if posed for a medieval coat-of-arms. Tornado gave back as good as she was getting, wrapping front legs around Sophia’s neck and opening her mouth to show a great many predatory teeth. Each of them looked very fierce indeed, to the best of a small house-cat’s ability.

They rolled and wrestled around for a few minutes, until first Sophia and then Tornado managed to get their respective mouths around some vulnerable portion of their opponent’s anatomy – an ear in one case, a cheek in the other. It looked like bloodshed was in the immediate future, as they pinned each other down and….began to wash each other.

Combat cat-bathing. I’m sure it will be all the rage someday. It’s at least as interesting as minnow fishing.

Anyone who hangs around with me for long enough will hear me say “the only irrevocable mistakes are made with scissors.” I tend to consider the backspace and delete keys on my keyboard the electronic equivalent of scissors, so it still applies pretty much across the board.

But in this case, the irrevocable mistakes were literally made with scissors. Sewing shears, to be precise. See, brocade is both thick and very slippery, which makes it tricky to cut evenly in layers. And I was in a hurry. And trying to work without a pattern – which I do all the time, but usually in fabrics like wool, linen, cotton, or silk noil, all of which have a certain amount of integrity and self-respect, and so do not try to slither out of reach or otherwise escape.

Brocade has no self respect, or no self control, or something like that. Anyway, this pulled away and slipped out of my scissors even as I was cutting so enthusiastically that in the end, the facings of our boychick’s costume were in ravelled out shreds, (and in the trash) the edges of his wrapped over-robe were hemmed or bound but not faced, the belt was a length of glitzy scrap trim, and neither under-tunic nor turban happened at all. But he went to the carnival and had a fabulous time, got a tornado painted on his cheek in face-paint which he proudly showed me, and came home with three noisemakers (which I am already ready to banish) and a beaming smile that lasted until this morning. So even if the costume wasn’t up to my usual standards and will end up consigned to the costume donation box at school, it served its purpose admirably.

But if I make another costume out of brocade? I’m doing it with more than a single day to work and a pattern. Either that, or it’s gonna be a rectangle of fabric with a hole in the middle to pull over someone’s head. No, wait. That won’t work either. That hole would have to be cut…with scissors.