The House That Jack-Offs Built

Some of you may know already that Sister Meg and I have been undergoing a double bathroom renovation for over two years. I won't post about that quite yet - you'll know how it all turns out when you open your eyes one bright morning and see MASSACRE AT DESIGN EXPO splashed on the color TV - but it might surprise you to know we've decided to upgrade the kitchen a little (through a different store, needless to say). Nothing super major - just countertops and a backsplash. The counters are gonna be a Corian-like product. We switched from a light granite to a grey granite finish at the last second (we'll see how that turns out). Stainless undermounted sink. White tile backsplash with a little stripe of pewter-finished detail liner. Two short chalkboard-painted walls. They already came and measured and the whole thing is supposed to be done in three weeks. We told them about our troubles with the OTHER store and they are amusingly determined to show them up.

In other news! The toilet leak turned out to be a shower leak so - totally still under warranty and now I think they have to replace my entire bedroom ceiling. Hahahahahaah, eat it, Expo. But until that is fixed, we have a toilet that works upstairs and a shower that works downstairs, and it's very confusing when you wake up in the middle of the night for a second or two. Sometimes I just go outside and pee in the bushes.

Sederrriffic!

So! Sunday Night I went to Chicago Meg's house on the river for my first seder. Capital S on that? I dunno. It was so nutty! I had no idea. I mean! If I had known about this religion that MAKES you drink wine - FOUR TIMES! - I would have signed up for that ages ago. Chicago Meg said we were supposed to throw it back, too, so you really do get woozy pretty quickly. A lot of it was fuzzy to me - some familiar stuff (Miriam, river, reeds, blah blah, wandering, Red Sea) and some not so familiar (like why the "mortar" tasted like fruit; I mean if it's meant to be a symbol of enslavery, it seems to me it should taste bad, not magically delicious!) But whatever, no one asked me my opinion of the plot.

Chicago Meg set a lovely table and I was pleased to discover that there were lots of props. I liked the ten-plague-finger-puppets the best. These were actually a re-gift, originally given to me by my Lady Author friend Katharine Weber, but I passed them on to Chicago Meg because I didn't have any History of the Hebrews puppet shows planned in my immediate future. At the time. But now I might want them back! There were also finger puppets for the Four Questions, about which I will say: these are not the Four Questions I would have asked. But anyway, these four seem popular.

Chicago Meg lives on the river and her dining room overlooks the Grand Ole Opry complex. And you know what that means! Right on cue during the Red Sea part of the story...here comes the General Jackson Showboat, chugging upriver, overloaded with buffet-grazing tourists and blaring "Sweet Home Alabama." Okay, no, not really, it was a different song. One we could not identify, but we all decided the story would be better if it was "Sweet Home Alabama," which actually does get played on the General Jackson steamboat every night, so we aren't changing the story too much. We toyed with "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," but thought, no, that is too much for anyone to believe. We (okay: I) interrupted the story to all run out and take pictures of it.

Okay, so then there was brisket and matzoh ball soup and green beans and our friend Lauren brought a pavlova that was pretty damned great and there was wine wine wine, oh there was wine. Seems like there was one part where we had to go on a treasure hunt for a cracker. They made the non-Jews do it since there weren't enough kids (there was just one) to do it. The cracker was hidden in a grandfather clock. Sister Meg found it. Then we opened up the books again and finished the plot of Passover. I give the story an 8.

Then, just like Moses did after he parted the Red Sea and freed the slaves by writing the Emancipation Proclamation and inventing electricity (again: wine), we picked out paint colors for Chicago Meg's bedroom. Jamaican Aqua, which isn't at all the color you think it is. We also discovered that accent walls - where you paint one wall a different color - are OUT! Don't even THINK of it! PASS ME THE SMELLING SALTS! After all that finger puppetry and crazy made-up-sounding singing, it was nice to learn something at last!

The Pantry Chronicles

No hike this week! It was crazy cold - at least for April - and Chicago Meg's parents were here (they taught us bridge!) so we were all distracted by that. We did go to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday, where stupid black-toothed Jewel squawked her way through a few songs. Last week it was the Opera. This week it was the Opry. Next week...what? Oprah?

I decided to tackle the pantry. It's been in need of cleaning, thinning and reorganizing for well over a year. So here are some thrilling pictures of that. The first three are the "during." Then the "after." Don't ask me why I have all that Splenda; I have no idea. Perhaps I am planning to give a bunch of mice cancer. YOU'LL NEVER KNOW. But this project ended up involving a hack saw and so that turned out to be a pretty exciting pantry-cleaning, when I got to use the Man Tools. It was harder than a hike and about halfway through it, I thought "I might actually just have to move." But I stuck with it and now it's practically the nicest room in the house.

Then I went to learn bridge and it's HARD and it's NOT COMPATIBLE WITH DRINKING because you have to pay a lot of attention. Chicago Meg's mother threatened me! "I'm GOING TO KILL HIM" was her exact quote. But then, I had just bid "five diamonds and a kitty kat!" or something, so maybe I deserved a little threatening. We'll see if it sticks. I did dream a little bit about it and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia was in the dream criticizing my bridge playing. Chicago Meg's mom and dad brought me what is supposedly the world's best beef jerky - from Smoky Davis in Idaho - so I look forward to the eating of that.

Then this morning the contractor showed up to start finishing the two-year-long bathroom renovation and ha ha ha the brand new upstairs toilet is leaking through the ceiling into my bedroom so now they have to rip out my bedroom ceiling to figure all that out, because if they go through the bathroom upstairs, they'll destroy un-matchable marble tile. I almost fell down laughing. Or crying. Or something. I can't even talk about it really; maybe one day I'll be ready. ANYWAY! Let's look at the pretty pantry to draw our focus! P-r-e-t-t-y. Pretty. No crying. There there. That's a good boy. Sssshhhhh.

Opera, Woods, Gnomes

Saturday, Chicago Meg and I went to the live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's "La Boheme," which they broadcast into movie theatres around the world. It's a pretty cool idea and it was fun, but if they'd cut out the seventeen intermissions and two hours of backstage chitchat, the whole thing would have been an hour and a half long and thus much less dread-inducing to most people. There were about fifty people in the room. It's funny seeing an opera in a movie theatre as opposed to an opera house - people still do all the annoying movie theatre things - unwrap sandwiches wrapped in what sounds like corrugated tin, chit chatting, cell-phone answering. It's not cheap - $22 - so I was a little irritated by all that. And then they left the lights up well into the second act and I had to go out and ask for them to turn down the lights in "La Boheme" and I was predictably greeted with "in the huh?" I'll go again, but I might go over to the fancy side of town the next time.

Then on Sunday, Chicago Meg and Nashville Carol and I went on a 2.5 mile hike in Edwin Warner Park, the Harpeth Woods Trail. Muddy, muddy, muddy. Also this one had a lot of "up" and it was not as easy as I would like it to be for when we go to Big South Fork in just six weeks (!); I am wondering if we are as prepared as we think we are. Chicago Meg brought her dog Cooper again and that was nice - he's a great dog - though because it was a beautiful day there were precisely eleventy thousand other dogs on the trail and so that slowed us down because Cooper is Still Learning how to handle the presence of other dogs. Sometimes he doesn't even look at them and sometimes he goes bananas. It's very unpredictable and we can't quite identify the trigger. Then as the trail skirted the picnic area, there was REALLY LOUD music, like half Latino and half Moroccan. And seriously, it was LOUD. I could barely hear myself complaining! This was the loudest Nature I've ever experienced.

The woods were filled - and I mean filled - with trillium. All along the trail, the whole time. I've never seen so much trillium. I kept pointing it out and the ladies were like "yeah, WE'VE SEEN IT" as they marched on. So then I quit pointing it out. We circled back down to the parking lot and loaded up and left. After that, Chicago Meg and I went and decimated a Target and a World Market. I bought sherbet lemons and a measuring cup. She bought a breadbox. Then we went to the scary gnome store. And so ended another fascinating Day in the Life. JEALOUS?

Yeah, So Eight Miles Is A Long Fucking Way

This week's hike was an out-and-back at Long Hunter State Park, the Bryant Grove Trail, on the edge of Percy Priest Lake. The problem with out-and-back hikes is you see the same boring stuff on the way back that you saw on the way there. Caterpillars! Trillium! Cedar trees! More cedar trees! Then you see it all backwards. BORING! But! This was actually a pretty surprising hike. I had verrrry low expectations, but it turned out to be pretty fantastic, scenery-wise. Most of the hike was along the lakeshore - this is a lake that's famous for turning up dead bodies, but Chicago Meg and I were disappointed that we didn't see one bobbing facedown in the water. We had her dog with us, despite the big NO PETS sign (our cover story was going to be that Chicago Meg had just recently been blinded and that Cooper was her guide dog trainee and then she was supposed to bump into a tree) but we never got snagged.

Long Hunter is mostly made up of a series of cedar forests interspersed with some more open, glade-like areas. It's very unusual - one minute it feels like Wisconsin (so says Chicago Meg and she would know, so no posting about how that's wrong) and then the next minute it feels like the thickets of East Texas. It's really odd. There was almost no one on the trail ... which is good because I'm not sure how good of an actress Chicago Meg is and she might have blown the blind-act we had worked up.

We did have one lingering question. We saw a flock of, uhhh, something skittering across a field. They were shaped like pheasants but they were big like turkeys. What are those? Seriously, they were like waist-high. (That's not what's in the pic below - I know that's a heron). We saw another one of the mystery birds in the woods (and it could run fast), along with a fox. I'd never seen a fox in person before so that was exciting.

This particular trail was marked in half-mile increments and we're a little suspicious - they seemed like some AWFULLY long half-miles. Eight miles might be my limit at this point in my life because I was some serious-assed tired. We determined that the one thing missing from nature was a Coke machine. I'm not sure I'll do this actual trail again, but I'll definitely visit Long Hunter again when the seasons change. It was a surprise.

The Easter Parade and Also Two Lady Hikers

So Saturday I went out to Farmer Jason's for a big old-fashioned egg hunt. This is like the seventh or eighth time they've done it and it's gradually turned into my favorite party of they year, mainly because we're allowed to drink wine at eleven in the morning. Farmer Jason and his wife Suzy live on a big beautiful farm in Bon Aqua, Tennessee and it's always a beautiful day when they have this party - I don't know how they do it. Lots of musicians show up with their children and that's always fun to see - musicians not focused on THEMSELVES non-stop. Victor Wooten of the Wooten Brothers was there. Usually I play the Easter Bunny but I couldn't get the suit this year, so I just hopped around in my regular clothes, puzzling children far and wide. The usual: hide the eggs while you suppress the children inside - it's always fun to go and listen to how LOUD forty children can be. The exact decibel level is, well, I don't really know but LOUD.

The hunt went off without a hitch and I spent some time taking photographs of Suzy's garden tableaux; she has a knack for the nutty. An owl in a picket fence. A disco ball in a tree. A rusting doll house among the daffodils. Fetuses in a jar. She's the Howard Finster of Bon Aqua! Only not crazy and not dead. Side note: Howard Finster was the officiating minister at Suzy & Farmer Jason's wedding and it was FULL. BLOWN. CRAAAAAZY.
















On Sunday, I went on a 6.4 mile hike, again to Beaman Park, with Chicago Meg, Sister Meg and Regular Carol and a dog named Cooper. Two things: 6.4 miles isn't as far as it sounds and cigarette smokers walk the fastest. I saw Sister Meg at the beginning of the hike and then again at the end. She was too far ahead the rest of the time. We all had a grand time talking about our total amount of weight loss - 80 pounds among us all! - and Carol regaled us with stories about her mother who wants some goddamned bread and butter on the table whether she's going to eat it or not. And also about our friend Mary Beth, who is famous for saying things like "isn't it WEIRD how AIR is CLEAR? I mean if it wasn't we couldn't SEE each other." or "I wonder if when you get to be a GHOST you get to choose where you hang out or if they SEND you somewhere. I wanna be a ghost." So there was a whole bunch of talking about crazy people on Easter Sunday in Beaman Park.


After the hike we were "cooling down" (that's hiker talk!) before we got into the car and uh-oh, here comes my worst nightmare! Other hikers! With GEAR! And poles! Multiple poles! And dumb jackets with zippers and oh, all the shit that makes me crazy. I was rolling my eyes a little because we had just done the whole damned hiking trail system and Sister Meg practically did it in Hello Kitty flip-flops and here were these jackasses looking like they were thinking about tackling Everest before breaking for lunch back at the Chick-fil-A. So then they piped up: "Are you here for the hiking meet-up" and we all said no and then they said that they were part of TennesseeTrails.org which seems to be a Scientology-like cult based on the zeal and enthusiasm with which two of the ladies tried to recruit me. They focused on me pretty much and I admit I probably did encourage them when I asked for a newsletter - WHICH THEY JUST HAPPENED TO HAVE! - but then the did that thing that almost every single other hiker - especially the gear nerd ones - does: they got competitive. "What hikes have you gone on?" Um, some. "How long did you hike?" A while. "Where are you hiking next?" Um, over there. I don't know why they all do it but they do. Then they tried to encourage me to rush right home and sign up because then I could be INVOLVED in putting the next NEWSLETTER together! Hahahahah. The Two Megs and the One Carol loved that - I thought they were actually going to WARN the hiker ladies that they better be careful about what they wish for, that if I got involved, I'd not only redesign the newsletter to MY liking but I'd have those two excommunicated from the club! Which was totally probably true. I do tend to lean to the bossy side.

The whole encounter reaffirmed and confirmed my deep belief that you should NEVER join a club of like-minded people. Eighty percent of them will be pushy and have hundred dollar hiking poles.

Office Space

So! My company (er, we haven't updated in a while. Or maybe ever.) is moving. We're going from a fourth-floor corporate-y environment to a really raw space in an up-and-coming neighborhood just south of downtown (but still walkable). We're sharing a building with Crema, the new high-end fancy coffee spot...that's Loretta parked right out front! The Crema people are really cool, in that coffee shop way that I always like. Rave review for Crema.

Here are a few of the "before" pictures. The windows are currently papered, but the room will be filled with natural light. The walls will all be white, with the one long window-less one painted traffic-cone orange. Leaning on that orange wall will be big 4x8 panels of chalkboard. Also included is a picture of the giant bridge visible from our front window. Most of the work we have to have done is going to be bartered, so that's a relief. I certanly don't look forward to the painting part, though.