Category Archives: random

steve

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We have this neighbor named Steve.

Well, Steve might not actually BE his name, but that’s what we call him.

He also technically might be a “her” rather than a “him”. It’s hard to tell, honestly…

…because Steve is a chipmunk.

The Steve Saga started back last summer. Our actual human neighbor, Gary, has his mailbox affixed to this antique standing scale. One day last summer I was walking Junior, Professional Harsher of Mellows, down our road. As we rounded the corner by Gary’s mailbox, a chipmunk came barreling out of the underbrush growing along the edge of the lawn and dove straight under the platform part of the scale that the mailbox is attached to.

Ever since then, Junior has been OBSESSED with the platform. He let up over the winter while the chipmunk was hibernating, but this spring when things started thawing out, Junie was right back at it – sniffing, digging and making tiny angry Wookie noises every time he got near the platform.

Mark decided the chipmunk needed a name a few weeks back, so he started referring to him as Steve.

It wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that I have this terrible habit of talking to the dog while I walk him. Not just general guidance like “good boy” and “no, don’t eat poop”, but often fairly extensive one-sided conversations.

I mean, Junie never actually answers me BACK, so that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still probably somewhat disconcerting for the neighbors to look out their windows at 7am and see me wandering around mumbling in a sing-songy voice about how Steve’s not home and can’t take your call right now but if you leave your name and a brief message…

…yeah.

chip2

“Do veef nuff mek mah mouf wook faf?” – Steve the chipmunk

 

 

home alone 3: the sandwiching

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Oh, hey. Remember when I used to write shit here a long time ago? I should probably do that again. Right now seems like a good time since it’s a gorgeous day out, I told like three different people I’d visit them today, AND I have a list of Chores I Wanted To Get Done. So obviously, the best course of action is to procrastinate like a motherfucker.

Anyway.

The last couple weeks have been weird. My husband has been having to work later shifts than normal so I’ve been home alone for dinner like 3-4 nights a week lately. On the one hand, that means less dishes to wash and not having to watch Judge Judy while we eat (don’t ask). On the other hand, I get weird when I’m home alone.

I mean, I’m definitely weird anyway, but Home Alone me is…weirder. More weird? Whatever. You wouldn’t think it would affect me much, considering I was an only child who was alone a lot growing up and then I lived by myself for like seven years before I got married. But, yeah. Home Alone me is an odd duck.

Basically, I forget how to feed myself when I’m home alone. Not in the sense that I run around smearing pureed squash on the dog instead of eating it (the squash I mean, not the dog. He’s kind of an ‘it’ because he’s neutered, but I definitely wouldn’t eat him. Wait, what? Jesus, reel it in Shelby. Gahd.), but more in the “let’s eat three bites each of several disparate foodstuffs, or just a generally inappropriate amount of any one thing and call that dinner” sense. One night last week it was smoked cheese, maple creme cookies and chicken soup. Not all together, but like…a few bites here, a few bites there. One other night I had like four pieces of bread and butter, and a beer. NOT AN APPROPRIATE DINNER ON ANY LEVEL.

It’s not just dinner. Pretty much any meal where I don’t have to feed another human being other than myself, I end up eating strangely. This afternoon, for example, Mark is out doing a thing and I’ve managed to eat: four dates, a handful of salt-and-vinegar almonds, and a “sandwich” for “lunch” (picture me air-quoting those). The “sandwich” consisted of a piece of steak left over from last night’s dinner, stuck between two pieces of the Cheddar Parmesan sourdough bread I made yesterday. No dressing, no veggies, no accoutrements of any kind. I didn’t even fucking slice the steak or warm it up first!

You think I’m kidding but I’m not:

IMG_20160306_143538039_HDR

Seems legit.

 

I guess throwing a steak between two pieces of bread and calling it a sandwich isn’t THAT weird in the grand scheme of things, but still. For someone who actually really likes to cook, you’d think I could have come up with something a little more ambitious to gnaw on.

 

 

showering with ghosts, aka: you can’t go home again

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I spent this past weekend at my parents’ house. They had planned a trip out of town and we were staying at their house to keep their dogs company.We live three miles down the road from them so it’s not like we had very far to go to get there, but it was an interesting experience none the less.

Sleeping in my old room was weird but not terribly so. It’s funny how quickly you become reacquainted with things – traffic noise from the nearby road, the way the neighbor’s outside light shines in the bedroom window just so, the sounds of the house creaking and popping in the cold (it was 15 below on Saturday night, not including the wind chill). I wouldn’t say that I slept great while we were there, but it felt pretty familiar even so.

What really threw me off though, was taking a shower at their house. The shower isn’t any different than it ever was – same grey tiles, same black grout. Same creepy drain cover that isn’t actually attached but rather just sits there over the drain hole and slides off if you hit it with your toe. I read too much Stephen King as a teenager to ever be ok with anything other than firmly affixed drain covers, for what it’s worth.

Anyway – point being, nothing about the shower itself had changed appreciably since the last time I showered there many years ago. And really, it’s not like I’ve changed all that much either. But there was just something about standing there smelling the slight sulfur funk of the water, looking out the frosted glass door into the grey and blue bathroom, touching that damn drain cover with my toes and getting creeped the fuck out by it all over again. It wasn’t nostalgic as much as…just wrong feeling. It felt like I was intruding – like I had walked into a stranger’s house and gotten into their shower, but at the same time it was all incredibly familiar because I’ve done it thousands of times before.

It was like I remembered the shower, but the shower didn’t remember me. And that was a little bit sad-making.

But then I got over it because the alternative was to start taking showers at my parents’ house more often and I’m sorry but that drain cover is just WAY too fucking creepy. NO THANK YOU.

babyskunky1

Here’s a sassy baby skunk picture I found on Google after I did an image search for “creepy drains” and scared myself so badly that nothing other than a cute animal picture palate cleanser could make me feel better about life. Baby skunk says GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR!

a bone in hand is worth two in the…WAIT…

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I’ve had a big raw-hide bone sitting around in my office for like, a year and a half.

bone

ang nyang nyang

Originally, I brought it in for my boss’s dog, Remy. Remy started coming in to the office with my boss a few days a week because the other family dog (who had been Remy’s side-kick for his whole life), had recently passed away and Remy was having some separation anxiety issues. He was a big, goofy, friendly golden retriever (is there any other kind?), and he liked to rest his chin on my lap while I was typing. I’d have entire conversations with him (like I do with my own dog), complete with “Remy voice” answering my questions to him, etc.

As an aside, if my office-mates were at all iffy on my level of crazy before (which…doubtful), I’m sure that seeing the way I carried on when the dog was in the office PRETTY MUCH cemented it for them.

Anyway.

So, my one beef with Remy was his amazingly foul breath. He was an old dog and had some sketchy teeth. Plus dogs like to eat gross stuff and Remy was no exception. It was summer when he was visiting us so with the combination of his long flowing coat and our suck-ass air conditioning, it made for a lot of panting. Bad-teeth-scented, “I cleaned the catbox for mom and dad right before we came to work and I don’t have thumbs so I think you know what THAT means”-tinged, eye-water-inducing panting. With his chin in my lap. Often for upwards of 10-15 minutes at a time. Usually while looking up at me in that angelic way that made it impossible for me to tell him to go away because I am a SUCKER.

Golden_Retriever_Schultz_head

“Sure, I eat poop. You’re still going to pet me, though. Come on, pet me. DOOO ITTTTT.”

Brushing Remy’s teeth was kind of out, because I wanted to actually keep all my digits intact and also it wasn’t really my place to start doing hygiene maintenance on someone else’s dog (although knowing my boss, he probably would have been all for it and may have even offered me money to do it). The next best thing I could think of was a rawhide bone. I was hoping that if I brought one in for him, he’d gnaw on it a little and scrape a couple layers of olfactory horror off his chompers before coming to rest his chin in my lap for scritch-time. I talked to Boss to make sure it was ok, then I went out and procured a nice big golden retriever sized rawhide bone.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, Remy gave nary a single winged fuck about that bone. He barely sniffed at it when I presented it to him. I left it on the floor by his snooze spot for a full week in the hopes he might get curious and give it a try.

Nope. Not one nibble. Not even another sniff.

Sighing and steeling myself for afternoons of smelling catshit-flavored death-breath from then on, I picked the bone up, set it on a shelf behind my desk and basically forgot about it unless someone came in and made a comment or joke about it.

Fast forward to today.

The guy that rents the office across the hall has a big, elderly black lab mix that he brings to work with him most days. He keeps the dog shut up in his office with him for the most part, but sometimes he doesn’t close the door tightly so the dog noses it open and goes on walk-about around the second floor. The guy is usually very quick to herd the dog back into his office but today I guess he was on the phone or something because Neighbor Dog was standing at the top of the stairs wagging his tail happily as I made the steep and arduous trek back up to my aerie (seriously, these stairs are fucking brutal. It’s like Frodo’s climb up Mt. Doom every morning when I get to work).

I stopped at the top and gave Neighbor Dog some well-deserved skritches, then continued on to my office, dog following closely behind. Guy Across The Hall popped his head into my office shortly there-after and apologized for the dog bothering us. We said no, of course it wasn’t a bother, we liked the company, etc. Then all of a sudden I remembered the rejected rawhide bone. I held it up (the dog had his back turned) and raised my eyebrows questioningly. Guy smiled and nodded, saying, “sure!”, so I stepped around the partition and presented the bone to Neighbor Dog.
Neighbor Dog sniffed it once and looked at me, slightly puzzled. I offered it again, saying “it’s ok, you can haz”.
He sniffed it again cautiously, then gave a big wag of tail, chomped onto the bone and bolted across the hall with it, much to my joy (and not a small amount of relief, honestly. I didn’t know if I could take another bone rejection).

So, moral of the story I guess, is to always keep a rawhide bone at your desk.

And that even if one shit-breath dog doesn’t want your bone, another one will eventually come along who does.

And most importantly, that dogs are awesome. Even the shit-breath ones.

Also, I ramble. But you know that by now.

something, something, Tom Petty

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I should probably write something.

I’m alive. That’s something.

I have a roof over my head, a fridge full of food, a family that loves me and a pretty awesome dog. Those are somethings.

I have a good job working with mostly pretty cool people and some exciting opportunities on the horizon. That’s something.

Now if I could just stop feeling so fucking hollow inside, like the world’s biggest, most echo-y-est echo chamber, that would REALLY be something.

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Metaphor or dirty coffee cup? You decide.

It will eventually be ok. I know this. It all comes back around eventually. But like Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part.

Tom Petty also said “I’m barely prolific and incredibly lazy”. So, you know. He’s clearly my people and I have to believe him.

 

 

 

 

the lost art of changing the roll

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How long does it take to change the roll of toilet paper, really? I’ve never timed myself, but I’d guesstimate that it typically takes about 5-10 seconds. Maybe double that if you have to like, walk across the bathroom to get a replacement roll of toilet paper and walk it back to the holder (in which case, you need to maybe rethink the layout of your bathroom).

Given that it takes so little time and energy to change out an empty roll for a full one, why is it that so many people just leave the empty roll for someone else to replace? It’s not like it’s costing you any money. You don’t even have to elevate your heart rate. You’re not touching anything gross. You aren’t going to miss an important phone call or miss out on a big business deal by lingering in the bathroom an extra ten seconds.

Basically the only thing you’re achieving by NOT changing the toilet paper roll is making someone else’s day just a tiny bit worse, whether it’s at home or at work.  If you could choose between making someone’s day suck slightly more or making it suck slightly less, why wouldn’t you choose to make it suck less? I’m the nihilistic misanthrope here, and even I can manage to muster up enough give-a-shit for my fellow man to bother to change the fucking toilet roll when I empty it.

tp

The shreds hanging from it are just an extra dose of fuck you. Don’t be this guy.

 

 

klutz life

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slip-and-fall

I didn’t choose the klutz life, the klutz life chose me.

I’ve always been a klutz. In addition to being a fat-ass (it’s ok, I’m at peace with it. Plus, it’s literally true), I’m also fairly tall at 5’10”. I have long legs and big feet, and both seem to like to get tangled up in things.

I hadn’t done anything particularly klutzy in quite a while before today. I had mostly managed to remain upright at the appropriate times and kept all my body parts largely intact. The worst I could come up with were a few burns from a particularly hate-filled cookie sheet last week. No biggie, comparatively speaking.

But, all good things must come to an end, as they say.

This afternoon as I was walking back to my apartment from the car, I stepped up onto the concrete slab of the breezeway that separates our place from the neighbor’s, and promptly careened forward in violent fashion.

Here seems a good place to note that one of the downsides of being tall is that it seems like it takes longer to hit the ground when you’re falling, so you have more time to consider your impending doom. You also have slightly more time to try and enact mid-course corrections, but let’s be honest, those very rarely pan out once rapid descent has begun.

This was one of those times where I was sort of slow-motion falling, so my brain was trying to compensate for the misstep and help me catch my footing again…but it was way too late. As a result, I took what amounted to three giant beyond-full-stride steps across the breezeway in ever-increasingly out of balance fashion, and then went down like a ton of shit three inches from the front door of the apartment across from ours.

First of all, THANK FUCK the tenant in that apartment had recently moved out and so wasn’t around to see my slow-motion descent into pain and suffering; or worse, the subsequent peeling of myself up off the cold concrete slab while swearing a blue streak and trying not to cry. Second of all, thank fuck AGAIN for the fact that I fell where I did because if I had been just a few inches closer to the door I’d be at the ER having broken glass picked out of my previously-cute face right now.

Once I got myself up off the concrete (with no small amount of Bambi-on-ice-type machinations), I turned to look back and see what it was I had tripped on. The only thing I could find was a small stone, about a half inch long and quarter inch thick, sitting innocently enough near the edge of the step.

Whether it was that bastarding little thing that sent me into my very painful sprawl, I have no way of knowing…but I think I’m going to blame it, just out of spite.

fuck Kokomo

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When I was in elementary school, music class was basically my everything. Some kids live for recess…I LIVED for music class.

We went through a few music teachers during my years in school (which, after a brief stint of thinking I wanted to be a music teacher myself and spending a very small amount of time in a classroom with a bunch of howling banshees…I mean, children…I can totally understand why). My favorite by far was an exotic (for late ’80’s rural Vermont, anyway) Latina woman named Maricel.

I’m not sure how old Maricel was when she was teaching us, but looking back on some of the songs she taught us, I have to figure she was probably fairly young. She taught us some traditional Spanish-language songs, but her main thing was pop music. For instance, for the spring concert circa 1989 or 1990, she had the 8th grade class learn and sing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I was a lowly 4th grader at that point and I was so impressed because geez, that song was like, EDGY. To a ten year old, anyway.

Maricel’s song selection for MY class that year was “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. I was kind of obsessed with the Beach Boys at the time (mostly their older catalog – I was snob even back then), so “Kokomo” was right up my alley.

Or so I thought.

Part of the problem was that even as a young kid, I had a good ear for music. I could usually sing a melody back accurately after hearing it just once or twice. If you’ve ever heard “Kokomo”, you know it’s a very simple melody with a ton of repetition. So basically, I learned to sing “Kokomo” in one 45-minute class period.

Enter the second part of the problem: I was (and still am) very, VERY impatient. I didn’t understand why we had to keep beating the “Kokomo” horse after the third or fourth class because it was very clearly dead to me at that point. The horse, I mean. I are phrase good.

Anyway – you can probably guess how it went. Because we were performing the song at the big spring concert, it had to be PERFECT, so we rehearsed it SUPER EXTRA A LOT TIMES A MILLIONTY…and I got really fucking bored, really fucking quickly.

A bored Shelby is not generally a disruptive Shelby – I wasn’t the kid who would start singing a different song or take off running around the room or something. I’d just kind of slip off into la-la land and do my own thing inside my head until something more shiny and interesting came along. The thing about daydreaming though, is that you often absorb bits of what’s going on around you in real life even though you’re essentially off with the fairies. So the whole time I was standing there going through the motions in class while secretly planning out my unicorn ranch, my brain was still being subjected to the song “Kokomo” being repeated over and over…and over…

…and over…

…and 25(ish) years later? I CANNOT FUCKING STAND THAT SONG. It annoys me to an irrational degree. All I have to hear is that first breathy phrase, “Aaaa-ruba, Jamaica…”, and I’m scrambling to switch the station. Gah, it made me twitch even just hearing it in my head when I typed it just then!

By the way, did I mention that my co-worker listens exclusively to the Margaritaville XM Radio station at work? EXCLUSIVELY. Not on headphones, either. Margaritaville refers, of course, to the Jimmy Buffett song of the same name, and the station’s playlist is comprised of similar beachy, laid-back, Caribbean-feeling tunes.

Like, for instance, “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys…

minion

#Iwokeuplikethis

Sundays with Junior

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There are certain things I do on Sundays.

I grocery shop on Sundays, because that’s when the week’s flyer goes into effect.  I like to go early before the godly post-church crowds clog up the aisles.  It’s less about the fact that they all just came from church and more about the fact that I don’t like seething masses of humanity.

Sundays are laundry day, too.  I’m capable of doing laundry other days of the week but frankly, why wash today what you can put off until Sunday?  I have a carefully curated supply of clean clothes (all laid out on the spare room bed, in fact!), that will last me the whole work week without needing to do laundry so long as nothing, uhhh, untoward happens.  Like random pants-shitting.  Which I’m NOT in the habit of doing currently, I feel it necessary to point out.

Sunday also involves trying to appease our tiny white overlord, Junior.  As much as I would love for him to be, Junior is not work-dog material.  The last time I tried to take him to work with me on a weekday when the office was fully staffed, he peed on my office-mate’s chair leg, barked incessantly any time someone came up or down the stairs adjacent to my office, and growled at my boss.  So, Junior stays home instead of coming to work with me.  It probably breaks my heart more than it breaks his, but none the less, Sunday is the day I usually try to make it up to him ahead of having to leave him home alone for 40 more hours in the coming week.

As far as appeasement goes, Junior is generally a pretty simple overlord to work for:

He wants walkies, during which he will exert his authority over the world at large by peeing on any upright structures he encounters and barking at the neighbor cats.

He wants bites of whatever anyone eats, especially if it’s almond butter.

He wants a warm lap to curl up in if he so chooses, but he will be neither forced nor cajoled into cuddling, no sir!

He wants a car ride of appropriate length (none of that “once round the driveway” nonsense he used to settle for as a puppy), and there will be bonus virgins for you in Heaven if the ride happens to be punctuated by a visit to Nana’s house.

And, above all, he wants to play.  Acceptable games include “Chase Junior Around The Apartment”, “Throw This Thing That Junior Has Brought You”, and “Try To Get This Thing From Junior So You Can Throw It But End Up Mostly Just Chasing Him Around The Apartment”.

"Quit lollygagging and throw that thing, Mahm!"

“Quit lollygagging and throw that thing, Mahm!”

"Look, if you're not going to throw it, then at least put your hand in it and wiggle it around enticingly." (That's what she said)

“Look, if you’re not going to throw it, then at least put your hand in it and wiggle it around enticingly.” (That’s what she said)

"ANG NYANG NYANG, FINGERS, NOM!"

“ANG NYANG NYANG, FINGERS, NOM!”

I’m on a mountain.

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I’m way up on a mountain today, playing cards at a gaming convention. Wheee!

No snow, but plenty of wind!

No snow, but plenty of wind!

The last few years we’ve come up here there has already been snow on the ground but it has been unseasonably warm this past week so this is the brownest we’ve ever seen Killington.

Sorry, I know this post is lame but I wanted to keep up with NaBloPoMo and knew I wouldnt be anywhere near a computer until late tonight.

Also, how cool is it that I’m on top of a mountain in Vermont and can still post this to the internet from my phone?! Technology, man.