Jun 9, 2009 | Captain OCD
When people ask if we still have the llamas, I always say no, we don’t, but Captain OCD does. He feeds and waters them, I ignore them. Until I wake up in the morning, take a look outside, and look again because do I see a llama in the back, a considerable distance away from their fenced pasture? Which I now notice has a gate gently swinging in the breeze. Seeing one llama in the wild is a problem because there are two of them. They always stay together, though, so I was reasonably sure the other was close by, and he was. But because I’ve just woken up, I don’t know how long they’ve been free or if they’ve caused any damage.
They are big animals and they eat just about anything that is or was green. Which comes in handy because any weeds I might pull or blackberries I remove get tossed into the pasture, and they think it’s dessert time. Not so handy if the neighbors have any green material they’re fond of. Captain OCD once gave them a bag of freshly cut grass and now, whenever they see the lawnmower, they stand by the fence like they’re waiting for Santa Claus to come over and empty his bag of treats.
They don’t actively try to escape but they’ve gotten out of the pasture a few times when Captain OCD forgets to bungee-cord the gate closed in addition to latching it. Because that happens right before he leaves for work, he’s never had to try to capture them and get them out of potential harm’s way. Because of that, he’s experienced my extreme displeasure only after the fact. Big animals like that on the road could make quite a mess of both them and any vehicle they get in the way of.
Our dog goes nuts when the llamas do anything she thinks is inappropriate, like rolling in the big dust hole they’ve developed over the years. She barks like a madman and, if she’s not contained, runs out to the pasture and barks and pesters them until they humor her and stand up and behave the way she thinks proper livestock should behave. But a couple of llamas outside the fence, munching on the neighbors’ lawn (lucky for us, the deer dispatched their rose garden years ago)? Apparantly not a problem for her. Not until I attempt to herd them back where they belong, because if there’s any herding to be done, she thinks she’s the dog for job.
Jun 5, 2009 | Captain OCD
We were at the grocery store the other night when Captain OCD spied a display of sushi (I’m using that term generically – I don’t know from sushi because my tastes run toward fish sticks, and not those fancy-pants ones from Costco with “More Fish!”). Sometimes I buy sushi for him at Costco so he can take it for lunch, but he rarely buys it for himself. He loves it, but my understanding is that there is not, in general, a lot of eating of sushi on underground construction crews.
He was terribly excited at the sudden solution to tomorrow’s lunch and, after picking out the package he wanted, said, “Yes! I just saved myself a lot of time in the morning!” I suggested that if a simple package of sushi would make such a difference to his morning, perhaps he needed to rethink his lunch-making practices.
This will save me about 45 minutes!
Really? Forty-five minutes just to make your lunch? [Doesn’t matter to me as long as he doesn’t wake me up during the commission of lunch, which is not a given because he has woken me in the past to tell me about a particularly fine lunch he’s just prepared.]
There’s planning involved. I have to decide what to have and what will go with the main course. [I was not aware that a lunch that one carries to a job site and then eats while sitting on a stack of sewer pipes has a hierarchy of courses.] I might need to boil some eggs so I can make deviled eggs. There might be chicken salad to make. I might have to defrost some jam. Cut up watermelon and make a fruit-salad dressing. Make soup out of the ham bone.
This is the guy who doesn’t eat lunch on the weekends, when he works at least as hard as he does during the week, which is very hard indeed, so it’s a bit odd that he puts so much thought into his weekday repasts.
Here’s how the reverse conversation would go:
Are you making your lunch tomorrow?
No.
Do you want me to make you a lunch?
Yes, please.
As long as you don’t wake me up to tell me about it.
May 11, 2009 | Captain OCD
Because I woke up on Saturday morning to this list of things we’re out of:
Captain OCD spends seven days a week working physically harder on just one of those days than I will in my entire life. With sports, he’s ultra competitive and goes for blood, but doesn’t really care if he wins or loses (I’ve finally figured out the reason I don’t care for games of any kind is because I was born with zero competitive spirit). The other day I mentioned, again, that apparent dichotomy of personality types and he said that he doesn’t care if he wins or loses to someone else because he competes with himself, not other people. That explains a lot. When he’s working, he’s constantly competing with himself to get that project done faster and better than he’s done it before. That’s how he works, and he needs to work hard both for physical and mental reasons. If he has to sit inside at a desk for too long, he gets nervous and shaky.
When he’s not pushing his body to accomplish physical tasks that people half his age refuse to even try because it looks too hard, he loves to cook. Which works out well for a lazy spouse who likes to cook for a reason, but hates cooking just because we have to eat on a semi-regular schedule. On Saturday morning I awoke to the wonderful smell of a freshly baked something or other that obviously included brown sugar, cinnamon, and fruit. Alas, he’d made rhubarb crisp and I’m not a fan of rhubarb. But C2 was home and it made her happy.
I love how he’ll move literally tons of enormous rocks by hand, rock-by-rock, to build the wall he designed (kicking and whining because to draw a plan requires hours inside, sitting at a drawing board) because he can’t get a machine into the space. I love how he’ll use brute strength to muscle the materials he specifies into adherence to his artistic vision to create features that make people happy every time they look at them. I love how, on another job, he’ll let someone much younger than he is use the excavator to set the rock because each rock “speaks to me” and he won’t know which face to show until he sees it in context with the other rocks, and the next morning he’ll harvest some of his rhubarb (that’s not a euphemism) to make a lovely little crisp and leave the kitchen cleaner than it was before he started. I also find it amusing that he hates gadgets, and yet decided that the pastry blender we have is useless crap. And that he calls oatmeal Quaker Oats, especially since the only reason I buy oatmeal is for baking and I haven’t bought Quaker Oats brand in years.
May 3, 2009 | Captain OCD
For two years I’ve known that C2’s insurance coverage under Captain OCD runs out when she turns 21. Because the standard is usually 24 years old if the dependent is a full-time student, I reread that paragraph of the insurance manual at least 100 times. Yep, 21, whether in school or not. Because his union self-insures, there are some odd rules, so this didn’t surprise me. For example, in this state, insurance companies are required to cover immunizations. Our insurance doesn’t. But how can that be? Turns out that self-insured companies are not held to the same rules.
A few days ago I called the insurance administrator about another matter and, when she asked if she could help me with anything else, I said yes: “About the part where dependents aren’t covered after 20 even if they’re full-time students . . .” “Oh, sure they are!” I was going to ask if it were possible to keep C2 on the same policy by paying for her insurance ourselves, since she wouldn’t be covered anymore. Her answer precluded the need for my question, but I knew what I had read. She continued, “As long as they remain full-time students, they’re covered until they turn 24.” Surely the rules had changed because I know what I read, but I didn’t mention that. Instead, I thanked her for the good news, hung up, then got out the manual so that I could prove her wrong. The paragraph was easy to find because I’d previously highlighted it because, judging from my prolific use of variously colored highlighting tools in textbooks, I must believe that highlighting – color-coded highlighting – improves one’s comprehension. Sure enough, it says what the woman on the phone said it did. I am a careful reader and had reread the paragraph many times because it contained important information, important enough to highlight, so the only explanation is that the words had changed while the manual was sitting in the filing cabinet. I congratulated myself for not being a jackass, this time, and insisting that she must be wrong because I know what I read many, many times.
I was telling Captain OCD this story this morning and he said he hates it when you read something and don’t find out until much later that you didn’t read what you thought you did. He said when he was a kid he had one of those Creepy Crawler toys that you use to mold bugs and things out of plastic goop. He ended up with a lot of bottles of the molding goop with about half an inch left in the bottom because the label said to not use the contents entirely. Because they weren’t empty, he didn’t throw them away, even though he couldn’t use them. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t use all the goop, but he followed the directions because he, a kid, was in no position to argue with Mattel, who surely knew more about their toys than he did. He was too young to understand that one reason for the warning could be so that kids like him had to buy even more goop. Until one day several years later he read the label again. It said to not use the contents internally.
Feb 23, 2009 | Captain OCD
Captain OCD is talking on the phone with someone he’s done work for off and on since he was in college, explaining what he’s done this weekend to fix a few problems with her irrigation system or something. I walk by, give him a quick kiss, and he says, into the phone, “Okay. I love you. Bye.”
He’s decided he’s not a good multi-tasker.
Jan 29, 2009 | Captain OCD
This one’s for you, Stacey.
This morning Captain OCD had some time on his hands before he went to work, so he made each of us some breakfast. Mine was scrambled eggs, a sausage patty, and cleverly arranged mandarin orange segments, all waiting for me when I got up, after he’d left for work. Sweet, I know. I have asked him several times if he would like me to get up in the morning when he does and his answer is always a revealingly hasty and slightly panicked “No! That’s okay, you sleep.” I am not offended because I know I’d get in the way and he’s done just fine so far without my help in pointing out possible shortcomings in his lunch-making techniques.
His breakfast was more along the lines of a Spanish omelet, which probably would not be sanctioned by our former Spanish exchange student because it typically consists of everything in the refrigerator plus hot sauce. He had to decide how many eggs to use and I can eat about half an egg in the morning before it makes me queasy, but scrambling half an egg isn’t feasible. That, however, was not the conundrum: He had some serious egg-carton balancing issues to wrestle with. I buy eggs at Costco, two dozen per carton. Lucky for him, we happened to have an extra full carton in the refrigerator, which provided him with more options, but presented somewhat more of a cognitive burden. He had to take an inventory of both egg cartons combined, then determine the number of eggs to scramble, without wasting too much, given my wimpy egg-eating ability, so that he was left with a number that would allow an equitable and balanced distribution of eggs across both cartons. He might have wanted a four-egg omelet, but spatial considerations limited him to a three-egg omelet.
I did not ask how long this process took, but he was eager to show me his solution when he got home. One can only imagine what the reaction on his face would have been if he’d opened the egg cartons to discover that I’d used some eggs during the day, not realizing the effort he’d put into balancing both cartons at once. Now I can cross “worrying about egg-carton symmetry” right off my list.
