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 22, 2009 | General
We never go on vacation. We only go on adventures. What happens if the plane is late or they don’t have your hotel room? That would ruin your vacation, but an adventure’s always an adventure! Dorothy Oberto, Mrs. Oh Boy! Oberto!, in the Seattle Times
This past weekend C2, my sister-in-law, and I drove to Montana for a wedding. Late flights weren’t a concern, but we stayed in hotels. As Suzanne Sugerbaker said, one of them was a lot more Mo than Ho. The first one, though, was a lovely two-bedroom, two-bathroom suite on the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene and is part of a time-share organization that my brother and sister-in-law belong to. After C2 had taken her shower I turned on the water at about 10:00 AM and waited until it was nice and hot. For about 30 seconds, it turns out. After determining that the cold water taking my breath away was not due to operator error, from the bathroom I inquired if these places ran out of hot water. Fully clothed and standing next to the bathtub (in the master suite), which she’d filled with warm water, my sister-in-law replied with a sheepish “yes.”
Not having hot water for a shower is pretty far down the catastrophe index, but that doesn’t make it any less unpleasant. My legs burned for two days after shaving in cold water and I washed my hair in the sink, with cold water. I’m not a fan of cold water, but then I remembered Mrs. Oberto’s words and decided that running out of hot water was just part of the adventure. I was clean, my hair was clean. Like magic, my attitude adjusted almost in spite of myself.
We left Coeur d’Alene with plenty of time to make the 4:00 wedding. We drove through Kellogg, Idaho to see the Dave Smith Motors phenomenon and stopped to eat lunch (according to our friendly and chatty waitress, the next day anyone could ski for free, courtesy of Dave Smith). From there we relied on the GPS time estimate and directions. For an hour we were focused on the reported ETA: 3:40, and at one point cheered when we shaved off a minute. We’d hoped to be there by 3:30, but 9 minutes later was close enough, especially since no one knew we were coming. The GPS took us over the river to a part of the town I’d never been to. Which is not a surprise, given that I’ve been there only twice before, each time for about an hour. We were back to 3:40. No church in sight, but it’s a small place. Surely there’s no church back here? It’s 3:50. If the GPS is wrong, we have no idea where we are and we’ll never make the wedding on time. At 3:58 we see the church. Whew! I’d hate to come all this way and miss the wedding. At 3:59 we turn into the parking lot, at which time C2 says, “Wait, is there a time change?” She’d looked at her cell phone, which said 4:59.
We laughed so hard we couldn’t stand up straight. Now we know that the GPS unit is so busy pinging satellites for our position on the road that it can’t be bothered to ask if we’ve traversed a time zone.
Once again I recalled Mrs. Oberto’s words, we drove half a block down the road to help set up for the reception, and enjoyed ourselves for the next few hours. No more vacations for me. From now on, it’s adventures only.
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 | General
Every year spring seems to happen overnight. One day I get out of the car in the driveway and notice that all of the trees have leaves on them and everything is in full bloom. I like to think that the dog is enjoying the fresh springtime color.
Today is the first time I noticed this blue thing (this is four plants and I’ve just been told it’s a lithodora) and the red azalea in bloom. Clearly, my effort to be more observant of my surroundings is not going well. That’s the roof of Captain OCD’s sister’s house in the background. When we first moved in 23 years ago, there was a smaller, old house there. It was so dark and rainy for so long (one of those 100-year storms that seem to happen every 10 years or so) and the blackberries and overgrown hedge so thick and high along the fence that we didn’t know existed that we didn’t realize there was a house there until after we’d lived here for more than a month. Because we didn’t know there was a house there, we didn’t know that an old woman lived there. She rarely left the house, which is why she was found dead inside the house after not being seen for a few days. Our nephew, not one given toward flights of fancy, says he’s seen her in front of the bathroom and he just walks through her. Good thing they don’t look at this Web site because our niece doesn’t know about the dead lady, which is prime freak-out material. Because things have changed so much and because relatives live there now, it’s hard to imagine that we had no idea all of this was happening just a few feet from our house. This entry did not exist back then.
Several years ago I conceded to my short attention span and suggested that “we” put trees in all of the pots on the deck instead of annuals that inevitably suffer from my lack of follow-through. The result is Japanese maples that provide lots of color that changes throughout the season with zero effort on my part. There is a place about 30 miles from here that makes these aggregate pots (you’ll see their planters, outdoor benches and tables, and trash cans throughout the country in public parks and other public spaces). Every Memorial Day they have a huge sale, which is when we buy these pots that never need to be replaced.
It’s a good thing the gardening isn’t left up to me.
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.
Apr 22, 2009 | How to
Ventilation tubes for an underground bunker awaiting habitation in the event of Armageddon?Or potato planters? Either way, they’re a lovely addition to the landscape.
Because I’m not much of a gardener and I’m lazy, I assume that if I know a gardening trick, it must be old news. But Captain OCD didn’t know about this trick until I told him a few years ago, and most of his life has been spent with plants. I thought everyone knew the trick about planting potatoes in old tires or garbage cans (these are drainage pipes), but I’ve recently been told otherwise.
Plant the potatoes in the ground and put the tires or whatever you use over them. Or, you can put a little dirt (I think that’s generally known as soil in gardening parlance) in the tubes and plant the potatoes in that. As they grow, cover them with dirt (leaving the top of the plants free), a little at a time, throughout the season. You can periodically dig new potatoes throughout the growing season. By the end of the season you’ll have potatoes both in the ground and in the dirt in the container. At the end of the season when the plants die back (after they flower), leave the potatoes in the dirt for a week and then dig them: They’ll keep a lot longer that way. Two years ago we had potatoes for months after the end of the growing season (kept in a cool, dark place). This is an efficient way to get a lot of potatoes in a smaller area, and the dirt stays warmer, so they grow well.
These big black things seem to spontaneously generate each year, so that there are about twice as many as last year. Captain OCD is terribly excited to get his garden going this year (and I haven’t had to remind him that the only thing I’m doing with the garden is eating out of it), and has added purple potatoes to the inventory to go along with white, red, and yellow potatoes.
