Letters From Little Rock

Well, I’m still making good progress towards being a grouchy old man. I came home from the grocery store to a yard full of kids playing ball, and within twenty minutes or so I felt compelled to ask them to “go play ball in someone else’s yard”. I normally would have put up with it for a while longer, but my neck is out pretty bad again and I didn’t sleep at all last night.

Let me back up a little, yesterday when I got up I threw my neck and shoulder out just in the act of getting out of bed. That’s pretty depressing. I suffered all day at work, and when I got home I had no intention of doing anything but going straight to bed. However my dog had a severely swollen face. Just on the right side. My first thought was an insect sting of some kind, but I wasn’t sure if there wasn’t a chance that it was an abscessed tooth. I fed her a couple of crunchy treats and she wasn’t shy about eating on that side so I figured bug bite it is and gave her a couple of benadryl and figured I’d wait and see if the swelling went down. Of course I stayed up a couple of hours to see what the effect was (it didn’t seem to change at all) and didn’t get to bed until about three. I had a previously scheduled appointment with my chiropractor that I was looking forward to at nine so I didn’t expect to get a lot of sleep, but what I actually got was almost no sleep. My neck felt like it was being de-boned every time I moved. I took a couple of aspirin and got out the heating pad and if anything it made the pain worse. Well after I got out of the chiropractor’s I decided to take the dog to the vet (she’s doing nicely now, some anti-inflammatory pills some antibiotics and eighty-five bucks later). Needless to say that by the time I got home I was dog tired myself and starving, so I went to the grocery intending to stock up on hot pads and Doan’s pills, which I did. I was looking forward to a light snack and some rest only to find I had a yard full of kids whooping and hollering. Not hurting anything but all the same, I don’t have kids and I was very tired so I pulled a Mr. Wilson on them and asked them to “go play ball in someone else’s yard”. What a grouch. Most days I’m not at home when they’re out there and it doesn’t bother anybody. They don’t get up to any mischief and it’s probably a pretty good crime deterrent to have a yard full of kids. And of course I did the same sort of stuff when I was a kid, private property is pretty near invisible to most kids. But sometimes when you get just a little older, there’s nothing as important as a nap.

This has probably been the busiest couple of weeks I’ve had at work since I don’t know when. I used to have a couple of fellows in the office with me who had the same job duties I have but in different departments. We were all under different managers, but the same director. Those two lucky bums are both on dayshift right now and my lot in life is to be the last man standing on second shift. It wouldn’t be so bad but we are currently trying like the devil to iron the kinks out of a new engineering/manufacturing process and still not run afoul of the FAA, so things have been a little hectic the last couple of weeks. I’m not normally the type to stress out too much about work or take it home with me, but I have to admit I’ve been bugged and it’s creeping into my dreams lately.

I can usually tell when things are getting me down because for some reason I always have dreams about school when I’m stressed. Usually though it will be some weird combination of school and work. There were times back when I worked at a warehouse and had to work a lot of twelve and fourteen hour days, that I dreamed I had to pass a spelling test or something before I could load pallets on a truck, or maybe I would find myself in dispute with my supervisor and wind up having to go to detention hall. I’ve had that type of dream abut every other night for the last two weeks. I barely remember the one I had last night, but the general gist of it was that my high school friends and my coworkers and I were all employed at some kind of boy’s ranch/flying boat excursion service and there was some danger of not going to college if we didn’t make our flights on time. It was pretty neat to watch the flying boats take off because they were roughly the shape of a paddle wheel boat except with big stubby wings and a tail. They pulled a kind of Disneyland stunt on the passengers. They would take off from an ocean front area and fly around the city for a while then the pilots would pretend they were having engine trouble and make an “emergency” landing in a canal and boat their way around the city and wind up back at the harbor. Meantime me and my buddies were trying like the devil to get one up and running and someone cheated on a true false question and the flying boat took off with one of its wings held on with duct tape or something. Needless to say it crashed. The odd thing was that we weren’t really upset about the fiery deaths as much as the idea that we would have to repeat a grade and not make it to college on time.

Weird little dream. I didn’t get to finish it though because someone was making ungodly racket on the street in front of my house at 7:00 in the morning. I couldn’t figure out what it was but it sounded like someone dragging a metal trashcan down the asphalt.

I was thinking yesterday while I was at work that I was overlooking something. For years I used to work in a warehouse that expected us to be at work before sunup and stay until after sundown most days. There were plenty of days that it was rather like working in a cave, especially during the winter months when the days were short anyway. Unless I made an effort to go outside on break it was easy to lose track of the weather entirely. There were several occasions I worked through tornado warnings and never even realized we had had more than a friendly little shower. I was thinking about that without really paying much attention to what I was thinking. What I was really thinking was about how far away some of the departments I have to visit on a nightly basis have become. The business I work for is expanding and the footprint of the facility keeps becoming more and more splayed out. I have to walk further and further to perform the basic functions of my position. Despite the fact that I have basically a desk job at this point I probably log more miles than I have since the days when I was working in a warehouse. However most of those miles are outdoors now. It’s something I might not have noticed or appreciated if it hadn’t been raining. It’s hard to explain to a lot of folks that one of the perks of the job is the occasional stroll in the rain. Heck, sometimes there’s even freezing rain, you can’t get that working inside.

Once again I’ve been outsmarted by an appliance. A couple of weeks ago at work I was discussing food with a coworker and the subject of rice came up. I’ve been a single man for a long time now and for years I really couldn’t afford to eat out very much so, fact is I’m a pretty good cook by this time. One thing I mentioned to him that always has been pretty hit or miss with me though is rice. I like rice to be perfect. My mother always cooked rice until it was a sticky soupy mush that I didn’t care a whole lot for. I always tend to go to far the other direction and use not quite enough water. I’ve gotten to where I can make rice like I like it about 85% of the time and my co-worker said I should buy a rice cooker. Makes perfect rice every time. His wife is Filipino so he frequently shops at Asian food stores and he told me that was the best place to buy a rice cooker because the models they have are better than the ones you can buy at the average department store even if they are a little more expensive. I got impatient and went ahead and bought a medium priced one at Target. My first time using it, I discovered that, while the rice it makes is pretty nearly perfect, it forms a kind of a skin on the bottom of the cooker. It’s no big deal, but it seems like a waste. I mentioned it to my coworker and he assured me that this was not normal and I should have bought the more expensive kind.

Well, I did the next best thing. Next time I was in Target I bought a cheaper model. My thought was that it was only fifteen bucks and there was a possibility that the first one I bought was defective, so I’d try the cheaper one, if it worked to perfection I’d take the more expensive one back, if it worked the same, well, it was only fifteen bucks right? What I did was I cooked rice in it tonight and found that yep, there was that same skin. It doesn’t affect the flavor of the rice so I went on about my meal and when I was cleaning up I discovered something. Namely, I’m an impatient idiot. The skin apparently is a temporary thing that disappears after the rice sits for about ten minutes. So now I have two perfectly functioning rice cookers sitting side by side and laughing at me.

bought a new bathroom scale over the weekend. I don’t know why, it’s not like the digital camera I bought over the x-mas holidays wasn’t enough to convince me I’m too fat. What prompted me to get a new one was that I thought momentarily that I had lost almost five pounds. I had to double check and when I stepped back on the scale I was a little heavier. After several minutes of stepping on and off the scale I realized I was pretty much just playing the worst carnival game ever and decided to buy a new scale.

My new scale has a couple of features the old one didn’t. Like, number one, right off the bat, it can tell me that I’m actually five pounds heavier than I ever dreamed of being, so there’s that, and then it has a handy dandy percent body fat readout which is horrifying, and it tells me what my hydration level is. Now, I have no idea if the body fat percentage being ungodly high has anything to do with the hydration level being so low or not, but I think there could be a use for the feature regardless of whether it’s really indicative of the state of my health or not. Alcohol displaces water, so the instruction booklet says that if you try to use the scale when you’ve been drinking it may not be accurate. The fact is it should also mean that I now have a way of quantifying my drunkenness without involving the state police. I figure if I take a reading before I start drinking and one after I’m through I should be able to figure out my total alcohol content. It’s a simple proportion formula so if I’m still sober enough to do long division in my head at that point, I should be good to go.

All kidding aside the scale seems like a good investment. I’m going to have to do some research on the hydration level thingy, but aside from that I think it will be a useful tool to monitor my health. One of the first things I did after using it for the first time was to look up some information on hydration on the internet and if I understood it correctly it means I may not be getting enough sodium in my diet. So to be on the safe side I ate a jar of olives.

My usual haunts on the weekend are few; Barnes & Noble, Target, a couple of restaurants that will remain nameless, and a couple of quiet parking lots I like to sit in and write poetry. Aside from that my weekends don’t involve a lot of socializing, which is a good thing I guess since I walked around all of my usual haunts and said my usual hellos to the usual clerks et al that I’m accustomed to bumping into on Saturday and managed to quietly humiliate myself without even realizing. Oh I didn’t drool on myself, there were no spots on my fly, no BO to speak of, the only problem—and it’s hardly worth noticing at all—was that I was wearing mismatched shoes the whole afternoon and didn’t realize it until I got home. Now I’m not so helpless that I don’t know my left from my right foot, and I can tell black from white, but apparently owning two pairs of white tennis shoes is too much for me. Last year I started playing tennis with a high school buddy and decided to invest in a comfortable pair that might hold up a while, hence the Reeboks. I also own a cheap pair of white sneakers that I try to keep relatively clean for somewhat social occasions, my “dress sneaks” as it were. I went out Saturday wearing one of each. And yes the average stranger could tell at a glance that my shoes were mismatched, the Reeboks have some blue on them the cheapos are pure white. I thought for a while maybe there was a foot fetish convention in town, but no, it’s just that I’ve failed the kindergarten graduation requirement.

Again. (Damn nap time to hell!)

Oh well, shoes are complicated.

It’s Saturday, it’s raining and I don’t have anything that I must do. Later I’ll get groceries and run by Barnes and Noble and probably get a bottle of brandy or something and then I’ll have a very nice quiet peaceful time getting quietly snockered as I listen to the Midnight Special. Right now though, absolutely nothing on my mind and nothing on my agenda. A year ago at this time I didn’t think I would ever have the kind of idle time I do now and I’m still not doing real well at managing my new found leisure time, but I’m starting to get the hang of doing nothing again. I used to be great at it when I was a kid, but all those years of ridiculous overtime and seven day work weeks kind of ruined me. 2004 and 2005 I practically lived at work and on the handful of days I got off I tried to cram too much into the day and wound up feeling even more stressed than if I’d been at work. I moved into a different position at work last year around this time and haven’t worked a weekend since, but I think there is some kind of lingering effect from years of chronically elevated adrenaline levels that I’m still not entirely over. I think I’ve finally reached a turning point and maybe won’t make the mistake of taking on a position like that again. My next quality of life mission is to get back on dayshift so maybe I’ll have some chance of being socially active enough to threaten a woman with marriage before I turn forty.

Of course that’s about as realistic as my financial goal of falling assbackwards into vat of money. It’s leveraged optimism is what it is.

My roof was completed on Thursday and it has rained steadily since Friday night with no sign of any leaks or loose shingles, so I’d say the roofing job was a success. I work nights so the disruption to my schedule was pretty extensive and I’m still not quite sure if I should be awake or sleeping, but at least it’s over. Now I can go back to the other minor repairs I had intended to work on this year. Things like putting carpet in my bathrooms and laundry room and generally repainting all over the house as it strikes my fancy. I’ve probably managed to successfully evade the housing boom market and the idea of taking as profit off the house is probably a chimera at this point, but I should still be able to get my investment back out of it. Not that I care, the house has served me well and while I have had my share of aggravations here, mainly city noises, I can’t imagine that those aggravations wouldn’t have been much worse in almost any other neighborhood in the city.

My ambition has always been to live in the country and not have a neighbor that I can see from my back porch. Part of that is because I work odd hours and have a hard time finding the peace and quiet to write when it suits me, but it is also partly just that I don’t particularly like having neighbors. Even in the best of circumstances I value my privacy. I’ve always been the kind of person who can go days without speaking if it comes down to it. I hope that doesn’t sound entirely antisocial because in the abstract I love people. It’s only in the concrete that they get on my nerves. At any rate now that the roofing is over I hope I can get back into a routine on my blog and update a little more regularly than I have been.

Well, I’m in the hands of the rednecks now. They came out Friday and gave me a good quote on reroofing the house and except for the minor inconvenience of having to get up early tomorrow the worst of it is over. At least to me the worst of it has been trying to get a good faith estimate out of somebody. I know part of my problem is that I only discovered I needed the work the weekend before Christmas. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is not the best time to get a quote on anything since so many people are taking time off from work and will find themselves heavily backlogged when they do come back. Still I’m on my fourth business and only one of the previous three even came out to look at the house. And that was after a week of not returning my calls to let me know when or if I could speak to someone who could give me an estimate of the cost. Mind you the estimate was about twice the going rate and I was not remotely moved by the promise of a top quality job. I sort of require that regardless of the cost, and unless they plan on roofing my house with gold leaf there is no way I’m paying twice what the market average is. At any rate I got a quote on the job Friday which was a day after I called and promptly at noon which was when he said he would come by. The business that I’m using is a fairly small time outfit but one known to me by reputation and based on their promptness and matter of fact approach to the consultation, I’m already pretty well satisfied. That plus the back of the pickup had empty beer cans in it. I just don’t trust rednecks without beer, there’s no percentage in it.

I still have no estimate on the cost to repair my roof. My own personal inertia being what it is, if I go more than another couple of days without one I will probably still be waiting for an estimate same time next year. Once I start to learn to live with something I go all the way. I started out with the intent of going with a big outfit and have slowly worked my way down to the friend of a friend route. They should be out tomorrow and I fully expect to be happier with the result regardless of what the actual result is. I expected to have a repair done that would cover about 300 square feet, but the only people who have returned my calls so far want to redo the whole roof or nothing. Even if the folks who come out tomorrow think it is best to redo the whole roof I know I’m going to feel better about it in the long run just because they are friends of a friend. The lack of response out of the bigger outfits has kind of made me doubt their integrity. The big roofing contractors around here seem to have that used car sale mentality and that just rubs me the wrong way. For one thing they just know they have you where they want you, because a leaky roof can morph from a minor problem to a huge problem in a very short time, for another, roofing is the kind of job no one really likes to do himself. A lot of people like to tinker with cars, a lot of folks like to do carpentry, all kinds of folks enjoy landscaping; no one like to tote shingles to the roof and spend the day hammering his thumb. And let me tell you I have hammered my thumb to the point of getting kind of used to it on the roof of my house before, but I’ll never do it again. That kind of inertia I can’t maintain. I’m just lucky I don’t own a nail gun. I might still be stuck up there.