Author Archives: Rhubarb Swank

tough crowd

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Scene: Me, in the kitchen, preparing a piece of chicken with some medication on it for Keppo. Keppo comes out from where he had been sleeping in my office and stands in the middle of the kitchen watching me. 

Me: Are you ready for this? 

I then immediate launch into the aural assault that is 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready For This” from 1991, except I lose the tune about two bars in and it all goes terribly wrong despite my best efforts. Finally I give up.

Keppo: (blinks)

Me: I know. That’s not even how it goes. I was way off.

Keppo: (blinks, eyes the chicken in my hand that I still haven’t given him)

Me: I’m not even sure why I tried to make that work, it’s not like you get the reference. You’re way too young.

Keppo: (side-eyes me and cranes his neck a little bit in a bid to get closer to the chicken)

Me: …AND you’re a dog. 

Keppo: (takes the drug chicken that I finally offer him, turns, and walks all the way out of the room without looking back)

Me, doing a Rodney Dangerfield voice: Tough crowd.

I swear at that point I could hear Keppo heave a weary sigh from the other room…

“Please, somebody call Sarah McLachlan. I would but my paws are stuck in this egregiously cute position. Also I don’t have thumbs.” – Keppo, probably

geranium

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When I was a kid, my mom had a spell of growing red geraniums. She even had my dad mount window box brackets inside the south-facing windows in the kitchen so that she could keep her geraniums alive through the long, harsh Vermont winters. Crimson flowers and ruffly dark green foliage were cheerful to have around during the months when everything seemed endlessly white and grey. In the spring after the threat of frost had passed, she’d bring the window boxes out to the exterior brackets and set them up, then spend all summer tending to the geraniums out there. Watering, dead-heading, fertilizing. She could make most green things grow and she often had flower beds around the house every summer as well, but the geraniums were her pride. She loved how the bright flowers popped against the light grey siding of the house, how you could see them from Route 5, glowing in the afternoon sun. At some point she got over the overwintering geraniums phase – probably because they made a mess and she had enough to do without also having to clean up drifts of shed flower petals every few days. Even after she gave up having them inside, she would still get a couple of large baskets of red geraniums to hang from brackets on the front of the house every summer. 

Dad built a porch on the front of their house a few years back. He built it from the ground up, exactly to his and mom’s specifications: tile floors that could be swept clean of the road dust that accumulated from living close to a busy main road, sturdy wide trim around the top of the balusters so that friends could sit or lean comfortably if all the seats were taken, plenty of room for a table and chairs to accommodate outdoor dinners in the evening sunshine. And big sturdy hooks installed along the beams to hold heavy hanging planters overflowing with frilly green foliage and crimson flowers. The porch was their happy place in the warmer months – they had meals out there every chance they could, and company was always directed out to the porch to sit and visit when the weather was good. 

After mom died last spring, my dad went and got two huge hanging baskets of red geraniums to hang on the porch just like always. He didn’t know how to take care of the geraniums except to water them, but he wanted that reminder of her for the summer. He would often send me pictures of the view from his seat at the porch table: his drink in front of him, his reading glasses sitting off to the side, a citronella oil candle burning to keep the bugs away, early evening sun beating in from the southwest, and always one of the baskets of red geraniums in the background. One time he sent me a picture of one tiny, forlorn, broken egg on the tile floor amidst a scattering of red geranium petals. A little song bird (we never did figure out what kind) had made her nest right in the middle of one of the hanging baskets and laid at least one egg. Whether by mistake, misadventure, or by some plan that made perfect sense to the bird but wouldn’t to us, the egg had fallen out of the nest and ended up on the floor of the porch. Dad left the nest in the basket hoping that the bird would come back and try again but she never did. 

At the end of the summer dad started asking me if I’d take one of the baskets of geraniums home. He wanted me to take them both but they were huge and my 1100 square foot house is not compatible with such monsters. I finally relented and agreed to take one of the baskets. It was so big that I had to clear everything off the top of my dresser in order to accommodate it in a spot that would get enough sun. I’d never taken care of geraniums either, aside from occasionally helping mom water or dead-head hers. Crucially, I also did not inherit her green thumb – where she could make most any green thing grow, I was continually finding new and innovative ways to kill just about any plant that came into my house. Even the “bomb proof” standards like pothos and snake plants have had some close calls in my questionable care. So, I took this hulking geranium in with a healthy amount of skepticism, along with a promise to myself that I wouldn’t beat myself up if it croaked. 

The first couple months of having the geranium went fine. I had to water it in my bathtub because it wouldn’t fit into my kitchen sink, and every watering session resulted in a trail of blood red petals being shed from the spare room to the bathroom and back, but I swept them up and did my best. As we got into the dark months of winter my brain took the predictable downturn that being trapped under feet of snow for weeks on end tends to bring on for me. Terrible things going on in the world didn’t help, nor did the grief that I was still learning to ride the waves of. Which is all to say, I got really fucking depressed and could barely take care of myself for a while there, let alone go into the spare room to drag this massive plant to the bathtub to water it, let it drain, then drag it back to its spot, THEN clean up the mess it created. I would go in and pick the dried-up leaves off it sometimes when I had the energy, and I’d promise myself that maybe that coming weekend I’d water it, especially since the flowers had all died off at that point and there would be no petal mess. I don’t think I managed to water it from December onward, though. 

Around late April, probably close to the anniversary of mom’s death in fact, but I can’t track it exactly to then, the snow had finally mostly melted in the driveway so that I could get over to the makeshift compost pile again. Not so much a proper compost pile really as more of just kind of a graveyard for previously green things. I throw gone-by cut flowers out there, corn husks, the remains of whatever annuals I’ve had potted up on the patio for the summer, stuff like that. But I don’t go so far as to actually get out there with a pitchfork and turn it or water it or anything. I’m not looking to get compost out of it. I’m just pitching stuff back to Mother Nature and letting her do her thing. Anyway, around late April, I decided it was time. The geranium wasn’t fully dead – it still had some leaves – but I didn’t think there was any saving it and I was sick of feeling bad whenever I went into that room and saw it. Plus, even if I COULD bring it back, I truly didn’t want to deal with the mess the flowers made. Geraniums just aren’t the plant for me. So, I gathered up the whole mess of crispy leaves and scraggly branches, wished it well on its journey, and rather unceremoniously heaved it over the stone wall into the plant graveyard. I sent up an apology to my mom at the time, though I know she wouldn’t have faulted me a bit for the decision. She could make most things grow but she also understood the value of not making life harder than it needs to be – especially in a housekeeping capacity. I cleaned off the top of the dresser and put some other stuff there to fill the void that removing the green monster had created. 

Fast forward through a spring and summer of various dramas big and small. Today is the last day of August and we’re on the precipice of another round of darkness. The smell of autumn is in the air even though it’s 78 degrees out. The dog and I tootled around the edge of the driveway in our normal manner earlier: him with his nose to the ground and me with my face to the sky, both of us enjoying the sunshine while we could. As we came along the side of the stone wall I noticed a very out of place flash of crimson in the otherwise solidly green underbrush. A cardinal maybe? We had scarlet tanagers most of the summer but they’ve headed south by now. The red wasn’t moving at all though and that’s not the way of most birds. I leaned over so I could get a better look, then gasped. There in the middle of a tangle of wild blackberry brambles, oak, and beech saplings, was a single blood-red geranium flower head sticking up proudly. It was small but it was unmistakable, with several of the tell-tale frilly and fuzzy bright green geranium leaves right next to it. 

That mostly-dead plant had survived being upended from its pot and left to fend for itself in one of the wettest springs, followed by one of the driest and hottest summers we’ve ever seen. It had not only not croaked, but it had BLOOMED. Those near-neon red flowers bobbed lightly in the breeze as I stared in disbelief. 

I do not believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe that my loved ones are smiling down on me from any kind of heaven. What I do believe in is energy. All matter is, at its most base level, energy. Rocks, plants, people, even plastic or glass…it’s all just energy holding various forms. When something living dies, its energy doesn’t just disappear. It gets slowly absorbed by myriad other life forms, as well as getting released back into the world as heat and light. I also believe energy can, to a certain extent, sometimes “stick” to things. I don’t believe that geranium IS my mom, but I do believe that enough of her energy was around those plants last summer while they lived on her porch, while they witnessed her loved ones repeatedly laugh and cry and share memories of her, that a little bit of it stuck. It came home with me (like other bits of her did in other forms – pictures, clothing, etc). It hung on through a long dark winter of neglect, it allowed me to let it go when I took the plant outside to the compost pile, and it stuck around all summer so that I could see it today and think about my mom again in yet a new way. 

Because I think that’s what most of grief is, after all – it’s a process of thinking about the thing you lost over and over again but in subtly different ways. It’s like a stone rolling back and forth on the beach through wave after wave. Some waves knock a little of the sharp edge off. Other waves are so strong they push the stone far up on the beach out of the reach of the waves for a while until an especially high tide comes along and pulls it back in to be rolled back and forth some more. Eventually, after much rolling, much thinking, you’re left with something smoother. It will probably always be a little bit hard – you wouldn’t want to walk a mile with it in your shoe – but it’s not really sharp enough to cut you anymore. 

I could make analogies about that geranium plant being tough like my mom, or tell myself stories about how it surviving was some kind of sign from her and then try to interpret what it means on a deeper level…but that’s not really me. The reality is that it was an interesting coincidence, it made me smile, and I am grateful to have seen it. I am grateful for the chance to remember my mom in another way and to recall some of the energy she shared with the world. 

measuring time

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My mom had a stroke on April 10th. 

Everything was measured in hours at that point: how many hours she had been off her blood thinners, how many hours since the surgery to remove the clot, how many hours since the second clot was found in her leg, how many hours until that could be operated on to be removed. 

Once she got through those surgeries and was put into the neuro ICU, things started being measured in days. How many days until she would regain consciousness. How many days until she could swallow on her own again. How many days she would be stuck in that bed unable to move in any meaningful way, losing what little mobility she had left. 

When we got to the ten day mark, the hardest question I’ve ever had to consider came up: how many more days do we keep her there, trapped inside a failing body with a brain that would no longer let her express herself, that would likely never regain the ability to swallow enough to allow her to breathe on her own? 

The doctors couldn’t tell us to what extent she was aware of anything or whether there was any of her personality left in there somewhere. She was very clear in her advance directive and during many conversations we had throughout the last 20+ years of her ongoing serious health problems: a life with no independence, a bed-bound life beholden to tubes for air and nutrition, was no life that she wanted to lead. 

And so we decided to let her go. Time was back to being measured in hours at that point, as no one had any idea how long her body would keep going once she was taken off meds and the breathing tube. 

“She might not even make it to the hospice facility”, one nurse told me right before they were getting ready to move her. 

If there’s one thing about my mother though, it’s that she was the most stubborn person I’d ever known, and that apparently was not just a personality trait but something deeply programmed into her physical body as well. She made it to the hospice facility and we were back to counting days. “Short days”, the hospice staff called it. That was the expectation. They were confident that she had a couple days at most. 

She went into hospice on a Friday evening. My husband and I went in to see her that Sunday thinking she was probably close to the end. I spent a couple hours there with her, holding her hand when she’d allow it, telling her over and over that it was ok to go, that we’d all be ok and we’d figure things out, that she didn’t have to hang on for us. I told her to go find various loved ones that had long passed. I told her to relax and think about drinking margaritas on the beach. I told her I loved her and that all I wanted was for her to be at peace. 

I was both hopeful that she’d pass while I was there, and dreading that she would. Every hitch in her breathing, every twitch of her body, would set me on edge thinking that maybe that was it…maybe it was happening. But it didn’t happen that day, or the next. Or the next. I followed along with the nurses’ notes on her medical chart online and called in to talk with them daily. She just kept hanging on despite all signs that her body was ready to go. Ready, but not willing. As always.

On the afternoon of Thursday April 25th I got a call that I had been expecting. Dreading. Hoping for. Her hospice nurse said she had spiked a massive fever and was definitely very near the end now. I notified the people who needed to be notified and I waited. Half an hour later they called again to say she had passed. 

All those hours, all those days, the absolute longest two weeks of my life, were finally done. A month shy of her 69th birthday, my mom was gone. 

The days afterward were a blur of highway miles and phone calls. So much to do and no clue where to start. I have no siblings so it’s just me, my husband and my dad now. And the dogs, of course. Always the dogs, who were forever her biggest concern. But chihuahuas can’t help explain estate law and I wasn’t about to tell my dad that he was on his own in terms of trying to make arrangements, so I put my business pants on and got to work. 

Having the arrangements to focus on kept me relatively calm. It kept me from being the gigantic asshole that I was sorely tempted to be a few times, from burning bridges and saying things I couldn’t take back. Time was back to being measured in days. How many days until she was cremated, how many days until we had death certificates, how many days until we needed to make financial decisions. I remember having the realization that two weeks had passed since her death, and thinking “that’s all? It seems like we’ve been at this so much longer”. 

Last week marked two months of her being gone and again, it feels so much longer…but it also still feels like she could text me at any moment. When I go to my parents’ house it feels like she’s still in the next room. I know that feeling will eventually dissipate. I know someday I’ll recognize just the anniversary of her passing rather than the anniversaries of all the various steps in the process that led up to it. But for now, the After Corinne era is still being measured in days and weeks in my heart. 

qui-noape

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I started writing out the whole story of why I have so much leftover quinoa in my fridge but honestly, you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that I have roughly two cups of cooked quinoa in my fridge that I need to finish, and a sudden, borderline violent, aversion to eating it.

With that context in mind, I present to you:

Things I Would Rather Do Than Eat This Leftover Quinoa (in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list)

– climb a mountain…wearing flip-flops

– catch up on the corporate compliance busywork assignments I have been avoiding at work for the last six months

– sniff week old roadkill

– put on wool socks and then scuff my feet all over the carpets in my house where the relative humidity hasn’t topped 35% in months, and then touch a lightswitch

– enter a space where two pounds of bacon has just been cooked to cripsy perfection and not be allowed to actually have any of said bacon

– go outside and roll in the snow (actually considering this one, as it would at least wake me up)

– have Joe Rogan show up and do running commentary while I walk on the treadmill for ten minutes

– cut the dog’s nails

– listen to 90 minutes of Yacht Rock on XM Radio

– try to explain the concept of corporate personhood to a gaggle of six year olds

– eat literally any other combination of things in this house to make up the equivalent of the nutrition my meatsuit would glean from that two cups of quinoa

I’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be able to face it then.

get off my lawn

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This morning my husband told me a story from his childhood. He talked about how, when he was a kid, he lived in a place that didn’t have a lot of green spaces for the neighborhood kids to play and so they played stuff like rugby and football (soccer if you’re American) in the streets between homes, and in peoples’ driveways. He said there was an old lady across the way who didn’t like them doing this and would stick her head out the door or window yelling something like “take that ball away” repeatedly in an effort to try and get the kids to clear off. Then he said, “when you yell at the squirrels on the bird feeders, that’s what it makes me think of”. Like, literally his whole point of telling me about this formative memory of his childhood was to draw a comparison between that crotchety old lady…and me.

And I suppose he’s not entirely wrong.

You might remember last winter, when I was complaining about how the grey squirrels would launch themselves off the railing or the snowbank, trying to get up to the small bird feeder I had suction-cupped to my actual window, and how hearing them bodily hit the exterior wall over and over again was driving both me and the dog kind of bat-shit. Back at the start of THIS winter, determined to be a problem solver as always, I got two bird feeders and hung them up across from my office window. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to see the birds as up-close as with the window feeder, but at least I wouldn’t be listening to the dog scream-bark about the squirrels thudding and scrabbling against the wall all day every day.

I set the feeders up once the danger of bears had pretty much passed, and immediately had a flock of juncos (the birds, not the pants…you have to be of a certain age to get that reference) visit. The chickadees came shortly after, as well as the sparrows. Everything was pretty copacetic for a while. Then one day, I noticed a red squirrel at one of the feeders. It seemed very polite, sitting nicely on the edge of the feeder eating one seed at a time and dropping the empty hulls down on the ground while it quietly took in the scenery. I have no beef with that type of behavior and so I let it snack in peace. We went a couple more weeks with no issues, but the calm was clearly too good to last…

…because then came the grey squirrels.

Grey squirrels are cute, but they’re absolute birdseed hoovers. And worse, they’re destructive. They’re smart enough to know that if they can’t get at the bird feeder directly, then bringing it down is their next most direct route to stuffing their faces. Within two days of the grey squirrels showing up, I went out to find the roof of one of my feeders pulled apart – the squirrels had been hanging upside down from the edge of it to get at the seeds because they couldn’t fit their fat asses onto the perches at the sides, and had ended up pulling the roof halves right off the nails of the piece holding them together.

I fixed the roof and decided the squirrels no longer got a free pass going forward. I might not be able to keep them out of the feeders entirely, but I could at least make them have to work harder for their ill-gotten gains, and be really fucking annoying to them in the process.

I have this crow call I bought a couple years ago, thinking that I’d bring crows to the yard with it and finally get to live the Crazy Bird Hag In The Woods With Pet Crows life of my dreams. As it happens, that didn’t pan out because crow calls are actually quite difficult to master. If you don’t have the right technique, the thing basically just ends up sounding like you’re blowing through a glorified kazoo…but it’s a loud, sharp sound that is very startling if you’re not expecting it, so I started using it to scare the squirrels off.

Again, I will give credit where it’s due: grey squirrels are smart. The first maybe 20 times I blew the crow call at them, they dove for cover and would stay away for a few hours at a time. Eventually they got used to it, though. Not so used to it that they completely ignored it, but used enough to it that they’d just retreat to a nearby tree branch and sit there staring over at me like, “Bitch, please. The second you move away from the window, we’re going right back to that feeder”. Which they did. Repeatedly. I switched it up on them and started either banging on the window or opening the window and hissing or yelling at them when I caught them on the feeders and again, that worked for a few days, but now they just hop off a little ways and wait for me to go back to my desk. My next plan is to try Slinkies on the shepherd’s crook that the feeders hang off of, but that will have to wait another couple days because said Slinkies haven’t arrived yet.

I’m fairly sure it’s all for naught at this point, as the feeders are close enough to the propane tank that I believe the squirrels could just jump from the top of the tank on to the feeders if they wanted to, and the ground is frozen with a bunch of snow on the ground at this point so I can’t easily move them until spring. But I have to keep trying, just out of principle.

Plus, you know, at least I’m yelling at rodents and not actual kids, so I’m not QUITE as bad as that old lady my husband (rather un-generously, I feel) compared me to. In theory. I’m sticking with that.

“You know you don’t even sound like a crow, right? Like, you don’t even sound like a BIRD. You sound like a middle aged woman with a little bit of disposable income, an internet connection, and too much time on her hands. I’m just saying.” – that squirrel, probably.

my life as an idiot, chapter 768: don’t touch that

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One of my coping mechanisms for dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder, especially right after the time changes and everything is suddenly dark by 4pm, is to add more light to the house. Not overhead lights but rather, candles and strings of fairy lights. Things that give my space a warm and cozy glow. I have a bunch of battery powered candles that run on timers, which is nice – I just need to replace the batteries once in a while and remember to adjust the timers when the clocks change in the spring and the fall. Usually round about the middle of October I start lighting my big pillar candles as well. They’ve lasted a few years, but this year they finally burned down deep enough that I was starting to scorch my fingertips every time I reached down into them to light them with my old standby cigarette lighter.

During one such exercise shortly before Christmas, I muttered something about how when Mark went to pick up stocking stuffers for me, he could get me a long lighter for the candles if he wanted. He, being the ever thoughtful partner that he is, made a mental note of that, and come Christmas morning there was a long skinny box in my stocking. Instead of the standard long butane lighter like you tend to have for lighting grills and such, he had gotten me an electronic lighter specifically for use with candles. I mean, I guess you COULD torch anything with it if you really wanted to, but it says it was designed for lighting candles. The way it works is via a little arc that forms between two electrodes when you push the button. You hold the arc to the candle wick and it catches fire. Science is magic!

I’ve been using the new fancy lighter almost every evening right along for the last few weeks. Every time I click the button and see the teeny little arc form, I feel like some long lost relative of Nikolai Tesla or something, commanding raw electricity with the flick of a finger! It’s more power than a dumbass like me should wield, frankly. As if to prove that very point, this evening when I went to light the candles, I did something pretty stupid.

You may be able to guess where this is going.

Standing there marveling at the teeny little arc crackling between the two electrodes, a dumb thought pinged in my brain:

“Is it…hot? If it sets fire to the wick, it must be hot. But you can’t feel any heat coming off it like with a butane lighter. Welp, one way to find out, I guess.”

And that, dear reader, is when I touched the activated electrodes…YES, BOTH OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME…with the tip of my index finger. It felt like what I imagine a miniature version of being tazed feels like, which made perfect sense to me the second it happened, because DUH. The lighter is, after all, for all intents and purposes, a tiny tazer. I don’t know how many volts zipped through my finger in that split second, but it felt roughly equivalent to when I used to touch electrified fencing at the farm as a kid. Which I used to do for fun sometimes. Which might go a fair way toward explaining some of the things that are wrong with me.

Anyway.

Point being: if it looks like a tiny tazer and it sounds like a tiny tazer, it’s very, VERY likely that touching it is going to FEEL like a tiny tazer. And even tiny tazers pack a pretty good wallop.

I have learned nothing. I already want to touch it again. It’s so pretty and bright. *fascinated cat eyes*

what have I done, part 2: 15 pound boogaloo

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Remember yesterday how I was telling you the mild panic attack I had over the fact that I somehow ended up purchasing what amounted to 15 pounds of crocus bulbs, and I was contemplating how many holes I’d have to dig (which will always be too many holes because I don’t like digging holes or really yard work of any kind) in order to plant 15 pounds of bulbs, and I was pointing out that I likely wouldn’t get them all in the ground before snow fell, because what kind of fucking idiot buys anything to plant in mid to late October in the mountains of New Hampshire (I’m not a Swiftie, but it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me)?

Welp, few things to follow up on:

1. It snowed last night. Not a lot, only a dusting, and we were frankly lucky to get all the way through October without snowfall, as that’s not the norm around here. But still.

2. The bulbs got delivered today, and you guys, something has gone awry in this process somewhere. The UPS tracking had said 15lbs, as established. I was figuring it would be a fairly good sized box, at that weight. My dog’s food comes in 12lb bags, for instance, and those are…good sized boxes. So I had a concept in my head of what to expect. However, the box that showed up is…well, it’s small. It’s not tiny, but it’s like maybe only a little bigger than a 5lb sack of flour. So that was weird.

3. What was weirder was that, when I looked at the label on the box, it actually says 16 lbs:

Exhibit A

4. What’s even weirder than that, is that when I picked the box up, it was most definitely not 16lbs. Not even remotely close. It was in fact so far off of 16lbs that I immediately pulled out the kitchen scale to weigh it:

Exhibit 2

That’s 2lbs 11.4oz, for the record. That’s 13lbs and whatever whatever ounces short of the reported 16 pounds.

I don’t understand. Like, how did they get it THAT wrong? A pound or two, sure, I can see that…but 13 pounds? That seems like ‘thumb firmly on the scale’ territory to me.

I mean, it was a flat shipping fee so it literally doesn’t matter even one bit, but this is the kind of shit that mystifies me.

Anyway. There may or may not be more updates about this situation as it unfolds.

what have I done

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A couple weeks ago, the weather was dreary and depressing around here. I mean, it’s late autumn in New England. The odds of dreary, depressing weather are usually pretty good. Anyway – on this dreary day, I was looking up information about forcing flower bulbs indoors. I have some mini daffodil bulbs I bought as a pot of actual blooming flowers last spring and then, predictably, left them in their pot out by my front steps all summer long and never put them into the ground. The bulbs had started to sprout new growth recently and it got me thinking about whether I could just bring the pot inside, let them grow over the winter, and end up with another cheerful pot of mini daffodils next spring. As with most things in life, the answer was, “well, it’s not quite THAT easy, buckaroo”, which was just about the time I got distracted with the idea of instead buying some crocus bulbs to plant outside for spring. There are currently three individual crocuses that come up in our yard each spring and the amount of joy they bring my serotonin-starved brain come late March or early April is hard to quantify. The idea of being able to multiply that joy many times over simply by digging some holes and dumping some bulbs in and then forgetting about them was especially appealing on aforementioned dreary and depressing day, so I indulged in a little retail therapy and bought a selection of crocus bulbs. I got two different sets: one is just crocuses, and the other is a “Farewell Winter” mix (which I immediately renamed as the “Fuck Off, Winter” mix) that has crocuses, mini hyacinths, and…I don’t know, other stuff. I’m not a botanist. I’m just a person with seasonal depression, regular depression, a credit card, and poor impulse control.

So, I placed my order for the bulbs. There was a warm spell coming up in the forecast and I thought, ‘perfect, I’ll be able to get the bulbs in the ground while it’s warm and they’ll be so happy that, come April, they’ll completely fix my life and everything will be glorious’. A few days later, I realized I hadn’t had any sort of shipping info yet, so I looked up my order on the website. The order still showed as pending, but the company is based in Connecticut, which is only like a four hour drive from here (which, for the non-Americans that might be reading this: that’s what qualifies as relatively local here. I know, it’s bonkers, but this place is huge), so I thought to myself, you know, no big deal. Once they ship, it won’t take long to get here and I can still get the bulbs in the ground while the weather is warm. Certainly before we have any hard frosts, anyway.

I’m sure you can see where this is going by now.

I placed the order on Oct 20th. It shipped…yesterday, Oct 31st. Not only is the few days of warm weather we had long gone, but we’ve now had two nights of hard frosts with temps in the low 20s. Conventional wisdom with bulbs is to plant a few weeks before the first hard frost (which, as an aside, I have always found that to be problematic logic because how the fuck am I supposed to predict when the hard frost hits, you know? This is New Hampshire. It’s like the weather spins a roulette wheel every couple days and you get what you get. Snow in mid May! 75 degrees for three days in mid October! Mother Nature does what she wants and we all just hold on for the ride. But I digress). That window has clearly slammed shut and been locked for the season. Crocus bulbs specifically are pretty hardy though…they come up through the snow, for fuck’s sake…so I’m thinking probably putting them in the ground after a few hard frosts isn’t going to ruin them.

Today, I got an email from UPS saying that my shipment has been delayed and that they’ll be delivering the bulbs tomorrow rather than today. Ok, fine, I wasn’t going to get to do anything with them until the weekend anyway. While looking at the tracking info, something struck me, though: the weight of the package shows as 15lbs.

Fifteen. POUNDS.

I guess I didn’t realize just how many bulbs I was ordering? Because I was not expecting it to be 15 GODSDAMNED POUNDS. Like…that’s a lot of holes to dig. And I am not what you’d call a very ambitious person when it comes to physical labor. I pay someone to mow my lawn. I whine when I have to shovel a path through the snow for the dog. I will 100% call roadside assistance to change a flat tire rather than do it myself. I am a modern woman who certainly CAN do hard things, but I’ll be honest, I’d kind of rather not most of the time if it can be helped. Which, should I have taken this into consideration prior to hitting that “Place Order” button? Probably, but that’s really giving me more credit than I deserve in the realm of capacity for forethought.

So, yeah. It might take me several weekends worth of hole-digging to get these shits planted. I may very well be out here in the yard digging through snow to plant them by the time all is said and done. But you know what? Fuck it. Worst case scenario, none of them take and I have created a makeshift snack vending machine situation in my yard for the local rodents come spring. Best case scenario, I put all the bulbs in the ground, completely forget where I put any of them, and then have the unmitigated joy of seeing them all pop up around the yard in the spring.

Best BEST case scenario, I get all the joy of seeing the crocuses coming up and also have some kind of life-changing revelation about how hard physical labor is a means to salvation or some other Puritan bullshit and I suddenly gain a new interest in doing yard work and cleaning my house.

I’m not going to hold my breath on that one, though.

I want a whole yard full of this in April.

snoozeberries

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I bought some weed gummies last weekend. They’re called Snoozeberries and they’re a 5mg 1:1 THC:CBD situation that’s supposed to promote restful sleep. Yes, I am the boring person who buys cannabis products not to get high, but just to try and sleep better.

Look, I’m no stranger to weed. It was often easier to get than alcohol when we were in high school, especially since I grew up in backwoods Vermont and basically every third classmate’s dad had a plant or two growing in their basement or garage or back behind the barn at any given time. It wasn’t fancy weed – there was no like, Apple Pie Gonzo Balls or Purple Hazy Headwrecker, or any of the other stuff you can get now. All the weed we got ahold of came in crumpled plastic baggies and usually looked a lot like dried oregano (side note: we smoked actual oregano once by mistake. Very much do not recommend). There was just one flavor profile available in our backwoods weed: an unholy mixture of roadkill skunk, gasoline, and those pine tree air fresheners everyone had in their car in the 90s. It was pretty weak stuff for the most part, which suited me fine because I am generally not one who enjoys the feeling of loss of control. I would go from “oh, this is a nice floaty feeling” to “SWEET FANCY MOSES, I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS, THIS IS THE END BEAUTIFUL FRIENDS, TELL MY CAT I’LL MISS HIM” very, very quickly. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have been Too High, and those all involved drinking copious amounts of alcohol in addition to the weed I smoked.

Point being: I’m not a total n00b, but I also was never a heavy user to begin with, and I’m not generally looking to get high anymore so much as I am interested in whether cannabis can help some of my chronic issues (no pun intended).

I’ve never slept well, even as a kid. Over the years I’ve learned some things that help: taking a magnesium supplement in the evening, for instance. Eating less refined sugar. Not firing up TikTok after 7pm if I can help it, because otherwise I’ll enter a time warp for three hours and only be able to hear snippets of Doja Cat songs on loop for another two hours while I lay there watching the flashing lights on the insides of my eyelids. However, there’s always room for improvement, and I felt like adding a little THC to my existing CBD regimen (I have taken 25mg of CBD oil daily for years, I find it helpful for some of my pain and anxiety) to see if I could dial the sleep in a little better.

Enter: Snoozeberries.

Vermont has relatively recently allowed the sale of cannabis for recreational use and new dispensaries have been popping up all over as a result. We happened to be near one last weekend so we stopped in. It was nice and the staff were very friendly, which was good because their menu was totally overwhelming. A huge blackboard ran the whole width of the back wall of the shop, listing all sorts of different flower, edibles, and other cannabis products. I stood there blinking at the board for a couple minutes before the large jovial man behind the counter asked if I needed help. I told him I wanted something edible to help me sleep and he said, “ok, you want Snoozeberries then”. He handed me a jar with a cute little sheep on it, fully of little bitty purple cubes. I handed over my $55 (which, I’m sorry, but $55 for 20 5mg gummies seems like A LOT, doesn’t it? *shakes cane*), and went on my merry way.

When I was ready to test the gummies out that night, I cut one in half to start with. They’re only 5mg each, but I fully subscribe to the “start low, go slow” doctrine, especially since edibles are absorbed differently than smoking. I don’t want to end up one of those “I ate too many gummies and ended up plastered to the bed for six hours having hallucinations of emerging from my own womb over and over” cautionary tales. So, half a Snoozeberry went down the hatch. I sat around watching TV for a bit, then went to bed and read for a while. I was maybe a little more yawn-y than usual, but otherwise felt no noticable effects. My sleep tracker didn’t indicate that I had slept any better the next morning, either.

I did the same thing the next night, and the night after that, to the same result. Tuesday night I finally bucked up and decided to take a whole dose. Tuesday night is game night at our house, and that’s not a euphemism for anything, you perverts. We literally play a board game or card game most Tuesday nights. I took the full Snoozeberry right before we commenced with game night. We played 4 or 5 rounds of Exploding Kittens and then it was time to get ready for bed since we had to be up stupidly early the next day. Mark took Keppo out for the last walk of the evening and, as usual, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

That was just about the time my brain entered the Snoozeberry Zone apparently, because I…could not brush my teeth. Like, I COULD, and I DID, but I had to think so, so hard about how to hold the toothbrush and move it around in my mouth the whole time. I kept having to stop and adjust my grip on the toothbrush to try and get a different angle because it would start to feel all wrong. And just to show you a little slice of how my brain works, I stood there wondering if I was having some kind of stroke or seizure for like 30 seconds before I realized it was probably the gummy. It was so weird though, because I truly didn’t feel the least bit high otherwise. I felt totally normal, except that my fine motor skills had apparently fucking left the building. I had the same issue with my water-flosser after brushing, and it’s a genuine wonder that I didn’t end up blasting myself in the face with that thing, I swear.

I sort of just shook my head at the whole situation and headed to bed. I checked the CPAP tank, fluffed my pillow the way I like, got my little battery-powered candle turned on and shut the light off, and laid down. At that point I did notice that I felt markedly more relaxed than I usually do when first laying down. I sort of just melted into the mattress, in a good way. I laid there enjoying that for a couple minutes before I cracked my book open, when suddenly the whole “struggle-bus tooth brushing due to weed gummy consumption” thing actually hit my brain and it. was. HILARIOUS to me. I mean, I laid there laughing like a fucking loon for probably like three minutes straight. I will admit that I did feel a tiny bit high at that point, but it really didn’t last long. And, again, no discernable difference in actual sleep quality or duration.

So in summation, I believe I paid $55 for some cutesy-named weed gummies, a brief lapse in my dental hygiene, and yet another confirmation that I may now officially be too old to hang…but it was a weirdly good time in its own way, I suppose.

On closer inspection, that sheep does actually look kinda high…

blame Britain

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My dear sweet mother-in-law sends us a calendar from Wales every Christmas. I always look forward to them because I enjoy scenic landscapes and trying to guess how the Welsh words printed on the calendar are pronounced. My husband enjoys them because occasionally there will be a month with a picture of somewhere he’s been and he can point to it and say something like “it’s really nowhere near as nice as that in real life”. I don’t fully understand how castles and fields full of sheep could ever be construed as not nice, but I generally take his word for it. 

ANYWAY. 

So, there is one small problem with the Welsh calendars Mum sends us: they’re printed in the British style, where the weeks start on Monday and end on Sunday. I suppose it’s not the calendars that are the problem as much as my brain, because OH MY LORD, I CANNOT GRASP THIS CONCEPT. You would think, especially many months into the year, I’d be able to make that mental adjustment and hold onto it, but you would be wrong. So wrong.

The calendar gets me at least once a month. I’ll think I’m on top of things, I’ll be so proud that I looked at the calendar and, gasp, PLANNED AHEAD, even…and then I’ll realize that no, I’m a day off AGAIN, because I don’t actually look at the names of the days on the calendar, I just look at the…I don’t know, spaces, I guess? I CAN read, I swear. It’s just that my brain memorizes shapes and patterns way more easily than it absorbs actual alphanumeric data, so if I’m looking for Friday on the calendar my brain will always look at the second to last square on the calendar grid. Except on a British calendar, that’s Saturday, not Friday. Can you see how that might become an issue? 

The latest casualty to fall to my inability to visually process the British calendar is the vacation we’re leaving for next week. It’s not a big trip, just a long weekend in Maine, but it’s something I’ve been super looking forward to because work sucks and life is meaningless and I really like eating lobster while listening to the ocean. Mark booked the hotel, wrote the vacation on the calendar and drew a line through all the days we’d be gone, so that we had the visual reminder. I then did the admin stuff I needed to do: I booked the time off work and I booked a reservation for boarding Keppo. I did my stuff with the understanding that we were leaving for Maine on Wednesday 9/13, because the big thing that said “MAINE” on the calendar was written in the 4th block of the calendar grid. The one smack in the middle of the week. You know, Hump Day. WEDNESDAY. 

You are smart and I’m very predictable, so I’m sure you can see where this is going. 

Mark and I were texting today about some other stuff that needed to happen next week before our trip, mostly that I had to reschedule a chiropractor appointment and I did it for Tuesday next week rather than my normal Wednesday, because, YAY, we’d be on our way to Maine Wednesday! That was all fine and good, no problems. Then this afternoon Mark texts me again saying that something I had said earlier kept niggling him for some reason and he finally figured out what it was: it was that I said we were leaving for Maine on Wednesday when, in fact, our trip starts Thursday. I was like “no no, it’s written on the calendar for Wednesday, I swear! I booked the dog in for Wednesday! I took Wednesday off! We’re going to Maine on WEDNESDAY!”

Then I went out to the kitchen and looked at the calendar. There, in blue marker, were big block letters: M A I N E, written across the 4th block of next week. The middle day. WHICH ON A BRITISH CALENDAR IS FUCKING THURSDAY. 

This image belongs to Disney, by way of some random site that gave it to me when I googled it. I hope Disney never figures out how to sue for pirated images playing in our brains because I’ll be honest, I am the Angry Stitch gif in my head about 17 times per day.

I hate being wrong. Even more than being wrong, I hate an already too-short vacation being shortened by a whole entire day because I read the godsdamned calendar wrong. I feel like I’ve been cheated out of a day of staring at the ocean for hours and I’ll tell you what, I blame the British on a very deep and personal level. 

I also hate that I think I need to ask my mother-in-law to check if the calendars she’s sending us are Dumb American compatible going forward.