Routine Maintenence

I have always taken pride in my ability to enjoy things that are not typically male. I love to cook, iron and I’m a laundry genius until some someone mixes up my cleaning agents! Okay, I don’t read labels any better than I read directions. I love female authors, and while I don’t exactly read romance novels, often my favorite books are pretty close to exactly that. I don’t necessarily enjoy putting the hammer down (in the middle of adding a room on my house) to cook supper, but I’ve done it many times. I don’t consider myself exceptional; I just have a problem with gender assigned roles.

I understand that this is not always a good thing, and I feel sure that my wife and daughter would agree. I have worked them both like hired help during construction projects and we have all gone to bed mad more than once suffering from the backlash caused by my “unrealistic” expectations. I won’t say that I’m proud of this, but if I’m going to be your mother at dinner time, you can be my man while the work is going on!

But there is one instance where I know that I am all male. Please remember that this is a G-rated post as your mind begins to wander. Welcome back. The time that it is most obvious that I am all male is anytime a doctor is involved. My man’s version of needing a doctor involves wrapping a severed body part in a wet towel for safe and healthy re-attachment. Anything less is like taking a perfectly good car to a mechanic, leaving a blank check, and asking him to find something to fix! Not really, but when I went this week to be checked for a suspicious spot on my face and the doctor told me to take of my shirt…let’s just say I wasn’t surprised. “We’ll find something to remove!”

Understand that I mean everything I’ve previously said about doctors as a joke. I want to be better at this and luckily I am about to have my wish. Anything that sits in the sun for fifty years has (if not an expiration date) a definite need of maintenance. I will do better. I love my family and I plan to live long enough to thoroughly annoy my daughter. Luckily the doctor made an appointment for me to come back in six months to be checked again. We’ll call this something that every real man understands; routine maintenance! Take the whole family and we’ll call it fleet maintenance! Ahh oomp! But I really did like the doctor, he was a nice guy. Maybe I’ll take him a batch of homemade yeast rolls on my next visit!

A Cobbler's Son

“A cobbler’s son has no shoes” I’ve been aware of this saying for what seems like most of my life, but until recently I’d never given it much thought. Honestly I think the primary use of this saying is to let someone off the hook for not doing something that they should have long since done; so let’s just say it makes a good excuse. Because if you really think about it…this is a really stupid phrase!

Have you ever seen a pawn shop owner that didn’t wear a lot of jewelry; or a hardware store owner using a hammer with duct tape on the handle? Antique dealers with a particle board entertainment center standing proudly in the living room are about as common as an accountant with tax problems. I’m not so sure cobblers really exist in modern times, but I all but guarantee you that the owner of a shoe store has an exceptional (if not embarrassing) collection of footwear! Trust me; the cobbler’s son would have had plenty of shoes if he hadn’t spent so much time with that damn budget-killing puppet!

I think of this today as I sit in my recliner typing on the computer. This is without a doubt my favorite spot in the house and it’s where I do some of my best thinking. But today, instead of kicking back comfortably while writing, I am sharing my space with a massive 6 ½ pound chair-hogging Chihuahua! Dog number two; pet number four. The cobbler’s shoes are beginning to stack up.

As a family we have discussed the merits of owning one dog at a time on many occasions. This had to be spoken aloud when we started volunteering for an animal rescue group, otherwise we would quickly become a satellite location! The best way to spot the new guy at the shelter is to count his animals. But I really don’t intend to have too many and I tell myself that if the new dogs wasn’t the polar opposite of my old one, I would not have taken her home. I tell myself lots of things.

I think I will sign off now and maybe go and change my shoes. I’ve had this one pair on since breakfast, and while they are very comfortable, I really have some others that I want to wear today!                          

Smile

One of the best parts of getting a new pet is choosing the perfect name. Of course this is just a technicality for me because I’ve always been of the school of thought that a really good pet deserves a dozen names! I often call them by a secondary name for so long that I forget what their given name really is! It’s probably a good thing my animals don’t have a Social Security card or I could be charged with identity theft!

Imagine for a minute the volume of names that must be chosen by an animal rescue group. Some do come already named, but the vast majority of them come in with no name. I have been amazed how quickly they learn the names they are given, but in an atmosphere as crowded as this, they really seem to long for an identity.

I’ve recently started volunteering at the shelter again after a 25+ year absence. My younger brother got me started back then, but honestly I had my feelings hurt pretty early on and was unable to stay. I always admired him for possessing a gene that I obviously lacked; he was a diligent and dedicated volunteer and I feel sure that he helped choose many names for the animals over the years.

I have to admit that I think of my brother often, but when visiting the shelter I think of him constantly. My brother Gus was the type of guy that a dog would approach without hesitation. Okay, they approach me the same way, but it is sometimes with a growl and fangs bared! Gus told me that the reason this happened was because I needed to smile more. He said that the look on my face (the one I deemed concentration) was a little scary to dogs and people. More than once, when I passed him driving down the road, he would call me and say one word; “smile”. I would look at my reflection in the rearview mirror, smile as wide as I could manage, and do my best to hold it for the rest of the day.

Okay, I have gotten way off course on the subject of naming pets. After all this time I still enjoy talking about my brother as much as ever and I still give myself the old rearview-mirror-check more than you might imagine. But as I rode home Saturday afternoon from a long ARF adoption event at a local business, I had no need to check my smile. I was very tired, but it had been a good day. Two dogs that had just met that day found great homes; Turtle and…wait for it…Gus! I hope you smiled too.

Vacation Pictures

Okay, there is nothing quite like a brand new computer! It still has that new computer smell and jumps around as fast as lightning. But I have to admit that I become really attached to one after I’ve had it for a while. It’s kind of like your favorite shoes or a well-worn baseball glove; a part of the family. But when something goes wrong…I have to stop myself from throwing it out the window! I’m glad I don’t have such a volatile relationship with my family.

The latest near-miss episode involving my virtual best friend happened last night. Granted I had no business even being on the computer given the fact that I had just driven the six hours that officially ended a four day beach vacation. I should have been unpacking or cleaning up the dinner dishes, but what I really wanted to do was scroll through my vacation pictures! Milk it just a few more minutes!

I took the card out of the camera and slipped it in my card reader as I have done a million times before. I scrolled through the thumbnail images and chose several to email some friends we had met there on a fishing trip. I leaned forward slightly for a closer look and the laptop moved just enough to bump the USB connection of the reader with my freshly suntanned leg. The computer made the “new hardware” sound and the images disappeared. When I tried to open them back up...that damn loose USB port! Now it said that the SD card needed formatting! I had well over one hundred pictures that would be wiped out by this function.

I immediately looked online at several SD card repair programs that claimed to be absolutely free, but that was only to look at the pictures. “Oh, you mean you wanted to save them? Well that will be $39.95, you should have said so before you loaded all the software”. Luckily my wife stopped me before I downloaded a direct link to a Russian boiler room. Under direct orders to “leave it alone” I went to bed and promised to visit Office Max the next morning.

Luckily the clerk at Office Max had no idea what I was talking about. “Why don’t you just format the card yourself” was the best she could do. Wow, I never thought of that! Can I just throw my camera in the trash here or do I need to take it home and put it in the recycling? Sorry, the impatience returned there for a second. To make this story simply too long instead of way too long, I’ll finish up here. After a desperate plea, a Facebook friend sent me an article that mentioned a program called PhotoRec. It was absolutely free and it not only retrieved my vacation photos, it brought back about 200 more that I had long since erased from my camera! It runs in a DOS format that I don’t begin to understand, but it can’t be too hard because I saved my pictures! I may just keep that old baseball glove a little longer!

Pompous Grass

When I traded my home and 80 acres in the country for a subdivision inside the city limit, I saw no need to keep my tractor. Of course my wife didn’t think that was the best of ideas, but I was really kind of tired of trying to keep it running anyway. I don’t know the exact acreage of my current yard, but the little push mower I owned seemed to be adequate to preen what little lawn I was now charged with maintaining. I must have forgotten what dragging around a lawnmower in 100 degree heat really feels like!

One of the best ways to combat the pain of outdoor work in this type of heat is to only work early in the morning and late evening. Unless you are retired, or independently wealthy, this leaves the evening as the only option for weekday maintenance. Get off work, eat supper, drink a couple of beers, and see if you can have a heart attack before bedtime! Wait a minute…it sounds like I’m complaining about summertime. I’m better now; I just slapped myself.

I thought of one such summer evening this morning as I read a friend’s Facebook post about a battle waged with a clump of Pampas Grass. It was probably my second season in the new house, and I was doing my best to finish cutting the scorched summer grass with what little daylight remained. The main part of the yard was done and I was trimming the little strip that touches the street. After pushing the mower all the way to my neighbor’s mailbox, I turned to drag the screaming beast in the opposite direction. If the heat was stressing my heart, what I turned to face almost stopped it! Every one of those awful English horror movies I watched as kid had just come true; I was locked in a death gaze with Count Dracula!

Okay, it wasn’t an actual vampire, but my heart was a little slower at figuring this out than my head was. This stoic demon I faced was actually my dark-headed, dark featured Romanian neighbor that I really didn’t know very well. The fact that he was offering the use of his “sit-down” mower calmed my nerves a touch, but I was still shaken as I relayed the evening’s events to my wife and daughter. Of course they thought this was pretty funny, and once I sat down and stopped stripping cloves of the garlic bunch, I enjoyed a pretty good laugh at myself as well. I knew what his real name was, but from that day forward he was referred to (in private of course) as Boris.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I’m sitting on his back deck having a taste of his favorite scotch. His English is not perfect, but after a couple of drinks we seem to understand each other pretty well. But alcohol also has a way of relaxing the tongue and after I slipped the first time and called him Boris (he didn’t notice) I decided to just pack up and go home before I did it again. I walked through the dark mumbling his real name over and over; doing my best to bring the truth to the forefront!

That was a long story to explain my grandmother’s love of pompous grass! But what I do know is that she knew (at some point anyway) what the real name of this plant was. But she had used her pet name for so long I doubt that she remembered anymore. Her name for this plant was so etched in what she knew that I feel sure it sounded funny to say the correct name. If you say, or think… or hate something for a long enough period of time it becomes the truth.

A path

Buried in my list of unpublished blogs are three drafts, written about the same subject, that I just can’t seem to finish. I think I know what I want to say, but each time I begin I end up spiraling in several (often unrelated) directions. How could a subject so simple lead my mind in so many directions? I’ve made an executive decision to just lay it out there and see where everyone else’s mind wants to go.

The subject in question is a small dirt trail carved neatly into the thick green grass of my lawn. This path winds around the side of my house from the garage to the back steps and is as neat and smooth as any made by man or machine. Both of my cats and my current dog use this path on a daily basis and I have even witnessed the propane delivery guy drag his hose around back using the trail as though it was made just for him. At only a few inches wide, I have always been amazed at how permanent this trail has become.

The machine that carved this path was a little 35 pound border collie. Even though he has been gone for almost two years, the trail is as neat and smooth as the last day he used it. As I was cutting the grass last weekend, I have to admit that my heart skipped a little when turned toward this side of the house and noticed the path; he was a good guy and a great companion. But I also understand that he created this trail simply because it was the shortest distance between to places he wanted to be; he wasn’t carving a monument to honor his existence.

But as we go about our day to day lives, how do we know exactly when we are creating something as permanent and lasting as this faint little trail? Maybe we should just assume that we always are. Speak as though someone is listening; act as though everyone is watching. You never know, one of those little trails you are carving may be one that will still be here long after you are gone.

The World is Round And I Can Prove It

The ink on my marriage license was probably still wet when I began looking for a good spot to build a house for my wife and I. Of course I was a rookie husband and didn’t understand (yet) that all I really needed to do was put my wife on the task and it would be solved. Once she was on board we would go from simply looking and wishing (man style), to actually purchasing (woman style). Though this was almost 25 years ago, I can still remember it like it was yesterday; “What do you mean you need to think about it? This is what you said you…we…wanted. Just sign the damn papers!” I did; she was right.

Of course I needed a second push not too long after we moved on to the property. The trailer we were temporarily (this is a relative term…as decisive as kind of or probably) calling home was the complete package; cozy, mine and paid for. I had my pre-planned share of responses to the I-though-you-said-we-were-going-to-build-a-house music that had become the soundtrack of my life, but the one I usually settled on was our lack of money. “What do you mean you need to think about it? You said if you…we…could get the money we would build a house. Just sign the damn papers!” I did; she was right again.

If I sat here and continued to tick off the timeline of my life it would end pretty much with the same few sentences as the previous paragraphs. I have no doubt that most successful relationships are fairly similar even if the roles are reversed; somebody fattens up the hog and the other makes food out of it. I’ve lived long enough to know that the history books left out the part where someone (Mrs. Columbus?) said “You said the world was round and if you had the money you…we…could prove it. Just sign the damn papers! He did; somebody was right, again.

We all need that little push of validation and we rely on it whether we realize it or not. It is so easy to accuse others of back seat driving and second guessing your well-laid plans, when the real problem lies with our ability to have our good ideas perfected. Credit is both fleeting and worthless; too much is harmful. To throw the dart and hit the bullseye on the first try is, and will always be, luck. You can be really good, but you will never be a champion alone.