You're Doing It Wrong

This is at the elementary school near our house. I was trying to get the camera as high as I could. You can see the shadows of my arms

Bob started sabbatical in January and doesn’t go back to teaching until September.

I almost wrote “doesn’t go back to work” until September but it’s not like he’s sitting around the couch ordering me to bring him another sandwich.

He’s got a bunch of projects he’s working on and he’s taking classes. And he’s also way more involved in domestic contributions. My favorite is that he’s doing most of the laundry.

During the first couple of weeks while we were transitioning to the new routine, I never thought I’d make it.

He was there when I left. He was there when I got home. He spent most of the day without a lot of contact with other people. The minute I hit the door he wanted to tell me all! about! his! day!

We had a couple of major shouting matches where I said I need to put down my purse and change into my sweatpants and enjoy 15 minutes of peace and quiet when I get home from work. And he would be all defensive about just wanting to connect with me when I got home.

Now that we’re settled in, I like having him on sabbatical. He’s way more relaxed and doing all kinds of things that feed his hungry mind. Last week he went to MacWorld in San Francisco for a few days. Normally I look forward to a few days with the house to myself but not this time.

I always give Bob a hard time because he has no concept of how much I eat. Whenever he makes my plate I say: think of how much you think I would eat and then cut it in half. And he still hands me plates mounded with pasta or giant blobs of meat and sauce. Most of the time I insist on fixing my own plate.

I guess I have no concept about how much I eat either because I had all these menu plans. I thawed out some tomato soup that I made last summer. And I had a few potatoes and leeks that were in their last days so I made a pot of potato leek soup. And I a few other plans but it took me the entire time to finish the potato leek soup.

This morning we divided into A and B Teams and worked on trip planning. He did trains. I did accommodations. I’m finally feeling like we’re really going somewhere.

This is part two to the photo I posted here. I don’t love boats. There are times when I will get on a boat without drama but generally I’d rather just not get on a boat. We have a whole series of photos of me on boats doing my boatface which I will have to post someday. Boatface is an uphappy face.

My father grew-up in a huge port city and he does love boats. And his family. I don’t think we ever did anything in our visits to Hamburg that didn’t include a harbor cruise, a ferry trip, a river taxi or whathaveyouonaboat.

The photo above is from a ferry we took to an island called Föhr. It was windy and cold and August. We went to visit my cousin who was at a summer camp. My note on the back of the photo says: “Notice the windswept seas.”

Here’s a quote from the travel journal [as in original]:

There was a nice beach and lots of little beach seats. Unfortunatly it was very, very cold with and icey wind blowing. We had a nice lunch and we walked around through the shops. This island is like Denmark – kinda. There are windmills and some of the roofs of the houses are thatched with this straw stuff.
The ferry journey home was very rough and it rained all afternoon.

I uploaded a bunch of photos earlier this week thinking I’d have them when I posted and then I never had enough time to post them all.

Here’s my other main story:

I started my personal webpage in 1996. Back in those days you got a website from your Internet provider. My url was: www.teleport.com/~prentz. And you had to learn some basic HTML and FTP your files where you were instructed to.

You can see early versions on archive.org.

Try this.

I started with blogger in 2001 and got my own domain in there somewhere.

A couple weeks ago I got a message from blogger that they weren’t supporting FTP any more.

I spent at least half a day thinking: “I didn’t even know there were other choices.”

I re-read the stuff a million times and I think I get it know and I did some homework and I think what’s going to happen is that I’m going to find a new host and change platforms. I’m not asking for technical advice, I’m covered.

This is something I’ve thought about for the past several years but to paraphrase Kenman I never wanted to spend a day-and-a-half staring at my computer and saying, “Shit.”

I might possibly get to it this weekend although I have a chore stack that I intend to tackle. I get Monday off and I think I’m going to make it a not writing day and prioritize all these other things that I’ve been putting off.

So, if you try to find my site and it’s a hopeless mess. That’s what’s going on.

North Sea in Summer 78. I don’t know why I’m putting this photo with this post.

Back in the eighties I had a job in Hollywood at a film camera rental place. Every morning, I think at about 10am, a food truck would come.

Maria, the receptionist, would announce the arrival of the truck but for some reason, the big boss didn’t want her to make the broadcast over the system intercom. She had to go to each individual extension.

My desk was near hers and every morning I’d get to hear it. Maria was (is?) an actress and she’d have to say it about 30 times often with great enthusiasm:

The truck is here.
THE TRUCK IS HERE.
The TRUCK is here.
The truck IS here.
The truck IS HEEEEE-RRRREEEEE.

And so forth. I’ve been out of touch with her for eons but if I had her phone number I’d call her right now and holler: The truck is here.

The truck food was pretty good. One of my favorites was the quesadilla which had a cilantro-y salsa folded inside and was the perfect combination of outer crunch and inside melty cheese. I don’t think I ate any other food from the truck.

One of my Clarion West instructors Connie Willis signs her latest book for me.

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been trying to get this story revised and ready to submit. It’s a long one and has given me an extra amount of headache since the very first draft.

That one was set aside for a little rest and I started preparing a different story for submitting. This one was a lot more fun which was a refreshing surprise. I thought maybe I was always going to find revisions agonizing.

My point is that I’ve been putting almost all of my free time into these stories and I’m starting to feel a bit frazzled on everything else. As soon I get them both submitted I’m taking a day to do maintenance which includes house things, yard work, errands and probably the taxes, also the millions of photos and duplicates I have in various unlabled folders and the 50 URLs I have saved in a folder in my desktop to look at later. Why do I do this to myself?

I can’t help it. I saved them, now I have to look.

I did finally get a few more of those old photos scanned and will share later this week.

When we moved into the new office building about 18 months ago, among the first thing we did was check out the restaurant and the sundries market.

After moving we went to the restaurant bar for happy hour. It smelled like beer and had the ambiance of a bar in an airport hotel. We decided never to go there again. It later went out of business. It’s like a haunted restaurant now because all the stuff is still in there, including the hard liquor, and occasionally there will be a light on and a few chairs moved around, but no people.

We also only went into the sundries market one time. Co-worker smokes. She didn’t have his brand. She didn’t have his back-up brand. We never never went in there again.

The sundries market was tiny and didn’t even have good candy. The whole place reeked of despair. There was a 50-ish lady who is the only person I ever saw working in there and she never smiled. It wasn’t like she was a person who doesn’t smile much, it was like she was about 5 minutes a way from swallowing a box of paper clips to end it all.

One day the place was locked up and there was a big sign that the business license was expired. But she returned. And she seemed to be trying. There was a sign that she now sold coffee. Two sizes. Small and large. There was a sign they now served Chinese food.

Our law clerk last summer bought soda from there even after I told him it was the most depressing sundries shop in the world.

I didn’t even like to walk past it. I always thought it was too bad they didn’t get some charming person in there and paint the walls and sell yummy baked goods.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a sign that they had new management. I saw two new people working in there. Bummer lady is gone. They wear bright green smocks and have colorful signs up and a big display of sandwiches.

I don’t know for sure because I still can’t bring myself to go in there.

Today’s my mother-in-law’s birthday.

I had a good week but I woke up at 2:30am this morning and I’m completely droopy right now. I had an epic post planned but the scanner decided to go crazy on me so we’ll have to look forward to it later.

Here’s one of the shots from the Europe trip. I wrote on the back, “Arc D’Triumph Aug 78.” I love the cars.

Tonight’s update is that I sold another story, “Estelle Makes the Casino Run,” which will be available online on June 1st. The table of contents is here: Innsmouth Free Press.

I’m excited to see my name turn up in one of my Google vanity alerts from something other than my own blog.

At last, all my major responsibilities for the week are over. Comcast has been and and gone. The guy seemed slightly taken aback when I ran out to the truck and thanked him.

Now I’ve got a little free time and I think I’m going to squander part of it by sitting on the couch and watching one of my shows.

Today was writer’s group and I usually bake a treat. When I know I’m going to be busy I usually buy cookie dough or brownie mix to make it easy. This week I was mesmerized by the pictures of layer cakes on the cake mix boxes and threw a mix in my cart. Of course, later I realized that made no sense. That I wasn’t going to pour the mix in a bowl and pull a frosted layer cake out of the oven.

I thought I could make it a bundt cake and drizzle something over the top. I hollered at Kira and Amanda for help and Amanda recommended a basic ganache and explained how to do it.

I made the cake last night but I waited until this morning at the last minute to do the topping. I needed to bathe before the meeting and the chocolate wasn’t melting so I finally put it in my improvised double boiler and put it on low and jumped in the shower. When I returned it was all melty and I very delicately attempted to drizzle it on my cake.

PLOP. PLOP.

I used a spatula to smear it around. I wasn’t sure whether this was a disaster or not. It’s not a great photo. I still need a “make your food look pretty on your blog” tutorial. It tasted fantastic and everyone loved it. That’s good enough for me.

On Tuesday I had a smoked bacon cheeseburger and fries that ruined my digestive system for 24 hours but was so totally worth it.

Patti with surprise appearance by Severus Snape. (Peter Buck)

When I started this post almost two hours ago, it was going to be about seeing Patti Smith talk about her new memoir this week. But we’ve had a minor clusterfuk in the meanwhile so I’m going to write about that instead.

Here’s Hannah’s review of Patti in Seattle. The first time I met Hannah was at a soccer game. The second time I met Hannah was at a Patti Smith show. If the third time we met it was at a Star Wars convention, we would have had to get married. But she’s not a Star Wars fanatic. But she loves to read and is a fiction librarian which is even better. But we already married other people.

Here’s Bob’s review of Patti in Portland.

Onto today’s surprise adventure.

We have this giant hedge between our house and the house next door. Today we had someone come over to prune our trees and whack back the hedge.

A couple of hours ago he knocked on the door to let me know that he’d accidentally cut the phone line to the house next door. Okay! Crap!

I got on the horn and sat through the phone tree from hell, did a song and dance to get the repair department. “No not my phone, the phone next door,” and so forth like this. They told me there was no record of them having a landline.

Yay! They won’t be inconvenienced.

The phone company made an appointment to come fix it anyway and I put a note on the neighbor’s door letting them know what was happening.

Could it possibly be that easy?

No. Neighbor comes over and thanks me for the note but informs me she has no cable and no internet. And she’s not happy. And who can blame her? Who wants to come home from work and find you have no cable because of your stupid neighbors?

So now I have to get on the horn with Comcast and go through another phone tree. [Hint: when the phonebot asks you to explain the problem yell at it. It’ll transfer you to a person.] More back and forth and when can they come? Monday. Yikes! Please don’t make me go to angry neighbor’s house and tell her she has to wait until Monday. More back and forth. The best they can do is tomorrow.

Then back to the phone company’s phone tree to cancel that service call.

Then over to neighbor’s with more apologies and explanation.

Then pour a glass of wine.

Let’s just hope the repair goes as planned. The guy said “there is no way on earth someone won’t be there to repair it tomorrow.”

Another photo from Germany. Look at my Mom’s giant purse. That’s my sister exiting the WC. Me and my bitchin feathered hair are holding my Kodak camera which must be the source of the old packet of random photos of castles and lakes with no people or interesting things to look at that I have in my photo box.

Here’s a journal entry from that trip, exactly as in original:

Sunday August 20th
Today we went to a old ruined castle. The walls were thick and high. There was a wonderful view of the Rhine River. We crossed the border and went to Heidleburg. Heidleberg is a wonderful little city where we stayed in a nice hotel with featherbeds and a nice big bathroom. We took a short walk to the train station. That night we went to a famous resteraunt and had a good meal.

You can really get a sense of my early genius. I’m grateful we didn’t lose that detail about the hotel bathroom.

In the process of my regular Sunday afternoon taking stock of things I noticed that I have a crazy busy week coming up. Posting will be cranky if at all.