A perfect day for someone else to begin planting the garden in the old hot tub in the deck.
The dirt on those jeans is one day’s accumulation. Now you know how they get that way.
It would be easier for me to poke my eyes out with a fork than to plunge my gloveless fingertips into the dirt like that.
Those things on the ends of his arms? Tools.
Because he gets up hours before I do, Captain OCD is explaining part of his morning routine to me.
In the morning I switch between The Weather Channel and the news [by which he means NW Cable News].
You know, you’re getting the weather in St. Louis on The Weather Channel [Mr. Rogers for old people].
Yeah, but it eventually gets back to the local weather.
Which is what you’re getting from NW Cable News, only much more frequently.
Yeah, but I take the average of the two.
You do what now?
If one says it’s going to be 41 degrees and the other says it’s going to be 43 degrees, it’s going to be 42 degrees.
This is why he has to get up so early. These things don’t figure themselves out.
Even though I don’t drink coffee (no moral objection, just don’t like it), I get it ready for Captain OCD every night. Because I don’t drink it, I have no idea if it’s good or not. If I ever make you coffee, it’s to your benefit to be honest when I ask if it’s okay.
This morning I get up to a note in the kitchen: “Coffee works better when you use water.”
I have to do everything around here.
Captain OCD does a lot of the cooking around here, but by no means all. When we first started going out, we decided that a pork-roast dinner with mashed potatoes and all that goes along with it sounded good. At the grocery store, after we’d chosen a roast, he was wandering the aisles. I asked what he was looking for: potato buds. Because that’s what his mom used, and those were the “good” ones. If he’d said he was looking for severed puppy heads I would have been only equally as horrified. My mom didn’t do mixes of any kind (I still don’t), and she made cake or cookies several times a week (I don’t), so instant mashed potatoes was a crime against nature that I could not fathom. Although, my whole life I wanted nothing more than a bakery cake for my birthday. But, no, cake from scratch was all we ever got. It was a hard life.
Why, then, when the kids have questions about cooking, do the phone calls go like this?
Hi, is Daddy home?
No, why?
I need to know how to make mashed potatoes.
I’m the one who taught Captain OCD how to make mashed potatoes. True, he usually makes the mashed potatoes now, and he’s perfected the art to such a degree that when we’re at someone else’s house for dinner, and the cook is looking for help, we all volunteer him to mash the potatoes, but I was making real mashed potatoes while he was pouring freeze-dried crap out of a box.
Honey? Honey? Do we still have AAA?
Hmmm? What? Yes. Why?
Captain OCD has just woken me up to ask if we have AAA. We always have AAA. What time is it? It feels like I’ve been sleeping for only a couple of hours and in my sleep-deprived, newly woken haze I try to figure out what’s going on without committing to opening my eyes. He must have left for work, the truck broke down, and then he walked back home to call AAA. Wait a minute: This isn’t 1978. He has a cell phone and an AAA card in his wallet and so has no need to walk home to make a phone call. Given his propensity to wake me up to share his excitement about weather conditions in areas I’ve never heard of, though, that’s not too far outside the realm of possibility.
What happened?
The truck is in the pond.
Of course it is.
This is grounds for the opening of the eyes and a glance at the clock. It’s 6:15. I feel like I’ve been sleeping for only a couple of hours because I have been sleeping for only a couple of hours. It sort of occurs to me that the only way to get to the pond is through the pasture, which is, as pastures often are, surrounded by a fence. Which means the truck had to go through two fences and possibly a couple of llamas to reach the pond. I was still too groggy to articulate my thoughts, but he answered them anyway:
I have the llamas locked in the stall. I have a lot of fence to fix.
When he got out his AAA card, he noticed that it said it expired at the end of May, which is when he woke me up to ask if we still had AAA. That’s reasonable enough. We get so much promotional material from AAA that I throw it away at the post office without opening the envelopes, which is probably what I did with the renewal notice because I swear I just renewed it a couple of months ago. FYI: There is someone available at the AAA 800-number at 6:30 AM who will be happy to renew your membership.
I get up and look out the window:
What happened?
The truck was warming up, I came back in to take my vitamins and grab my coffee, and I heard chains rattling. I looked out the window to see the truck heading into the pasture.
What happened?
The vibrations and the weight of the Bobcat must have pushed the trailer over the wheel chock, the one I drive over every time I park the truck.
You’re able to drive over the wheel chock, and yet you expected it hold the truck in place?
It always does. Except, as we now know, when the truck is pointed the other way with the Bobcat on the trailer and hooked up to the truck. I probably shouldn’t do that again.
I renew the membership and head back to bed. He starts to call AAA to ask for a tow:
Do not tell them it’s in a pond. They don’t do offroad. [Don’t ask me how I know this.]
I won’t: It’s off the edge of the driveway.
Which was true.
We have a fan going in the bedroom all year long for white noise and I can’t sleep without it. So, what I didn’t know until later in the afternoon, because Captain OCD failed to mention this part of the story, is that the whole commotion was very loud, his sister and brother-in-law from next door got out of bed to come over to see what was going on, Captain OCD unhooked the trailer, unloaded the Bobcat, chained it up to the truck, and brother-in-law got in the truck to try to drive it out while Captain OCD pulled with the Bobcat. I’m guessing that was all quite noisy, but I heard none of it. His sister said she looked out their bedroom window to see the truck heading across the pasture, Captain OCD running fast out of the house, two llamas looking in all directions at once, and the dog trying to herd the whole mess into some semblance of order. Not until then did he come back in the house to wake me up about his AAA card.
While you can renew your AAA membership at 6:30 AM, a tow truck might not be dispatched until 8:00 AM. Which gives one an opportunity to mend fences in the interim.
At about 2:30 I answer the phone:
Hi! I’m on my way home.
Okay, see you in a bit.
Okay, I’m just going to do this and that and that and then I’ll be home.
Good, but how come so early?
Oh, there was a little incident earlier.
I’ve learned that we have different definitions of both little and incident.
What kind of incident?
Oh, I rolled the Bobcat today.
And you’re okay? It’s okay?
Oh, yeah. No big deal. It was slow enough that I had time to turn it off before I landed at the bottom.
At the bottom of what? Did you hit anything on the way down?
No.
And you’re not hurt?
Oh, no. Not like I’ve never done this before. I’m fine.
The Bobcat is a tool, and he operates it with a finesse that is beautiful to watch. Like all of his tools, however, he expects it to work as hard as he does. Sometimes, though, the laws of physics and geology have had enough and find it necessary to toss him around to remind him who’s boss.
Tonight I talked to C1, who called to see if Captain OCD had gotten the Bobcat started again. Apparently, they talked a number of times today. Here’s the first of their conversations:
What kind of hydraulic fluid does the Bobcat take?
Use 10-30 if you can’t get the Bobcat stuff.
Okay then. I’ll go get some.
Why do you need hydraulic fluid?
Oh, there was a bit of a mishap earlier.
What kind of mishap?
Just a small one. I rolled the Bobcat.
Did you get hurt?
Nah, just hit my head and I’m going to be sore. You know, the usual when you roll a machine and you’re still in it.
If I’d rolled a machine while operating it, it would have been a significant part of my day.