J.P.

In less than an hour it will officially be spring! Winter will be over and spring will be upon us. I think Mother Nature missed the memo, it’s in the mid 20s right now.

Happy Spring. Have you hugged a daffodil today?

For some reason I awoke this morning in full domestic mode. I wanted to clean. I wanted to redecorate. I want to make this house POP. So after a nice little breakfast, Earl and I started cleaning and scrubbing the house. He did bathrooms, I did the kitchen. I actually scraped enough gunk off the stove to find out the original color of it. It’s off white! Maybe it’s almond. Earl came in and said, “Hmmm… I always thought the stove was avocado.” Nevertheless, it’s looking spiffy now. We’re afraid to cook in fear of getting it dirty.

Earl continued to work on the bathrooms while I tackled the next chore, dusting. I have to admit I’m not a big fan of dusting. I don’t like spraying crap on the end table to make it shine. The cat slides off when he jumps on it and it’s smells way too lemony for my taste. So we just swiffed our way through it with a handy little Swiffer duster. Much quicker and much better.

No cleaning project is complete without mopping the kitchen floor. So I did the honors and found the original tile pattern after a little bit of elbow grease. Earl and I are such sloppy cooks in the kitchen!

I must admit that occasionally I feel overwhelmed by our house. It’s pretty good sized and with both our busy schedules always grinding away, sometimes keeping the house up to health standards can be challenging. We’ve talked about moving to a smaller place just so we wouldn’t have so much work to do to keep the house clean. But I’ve decided I like our home. It just needs a little TLC once in a while.

Next domestic attack: the basement!

Earl and I are staying pretty much at home this weekend because of my work on-call schedule. It’s certainly a change of pace from the past two weekends, but we probably needed this time to catch up on some household chores.

I wish I could write about how productive I’ve been today getting the house clean, but I haven’t done much of that today. Surprisingly, work has kept me somewhat busy today which means a little comp time in a week or two which will be very nice.

Tonight we are going to a party at one of Earl’s co-worker’s house. Hopefully the on-call gods will be kind.

As I was heading for my car to escape for lunch, I noticed that the city DPW painted the traditional green line down the middle of the main street in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and the big parade tomorrow.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade here is usually very interesting. Traditionally, Mother Nature blesses us with a last blast of winter so there’s often snow on the ground. Sometimes there’s a blizzard. In fact, Dolly Parton was once stranded in the downtown hotel after a performance the previous night and was unable to leave due to the blizzard hitting the area. Bored, she looked out her hotel window and saw the St. Patrick’s Day parade proceeding right through downtown. You could barely see the floats from all the snow, but there it was, your average parade in the middle of a snowstorm. Dolly relayed the experience to the rest of America on David Letterman the following Monday night.

Back in my radio days, the station I worked for made an appearance in the parade, reminding folks why our station was best. One year we tried to get fancy and hired a tractor trailer to provide the stage for our music, inviting listeners up on the bed of the trailer to dance along with the music. We set up the booth traditionally used when we were on location, which was unwieldy at best. (It wasn’t meant to be moving). The bed of the trailer was so icy that we had to form a human chain and hold on for our dear lives so that people wouldn’t be pitched off the back everytime the parade started moving. Since there were several youngsters aboard, the music director reminded us that we should watch our language. The truck took off and she punctuated the experience with a “holy fuckin’ shit” as she held on for dear life. After the initial shock we pummeled the crowd with tootsie rolls, lollipops and dum-dums, because nothing says “listen to the radio” better than a rock hard frozen tootsie roll.

The following year it was 75 degrees for a change and I convinced the new night jock, a handsome young man, to go shirtless to “tease the ladies”. Come to find out, he was too good at teasing the ladies and had to be fired when I found him more than just teasing the ladies in the studio during his air shift.

Ah, good times.

So tonight Earl and I are going to have swig of beer and eat something festive like cabbage to celebrate the holiday. We’ll skip the parade tomorrow since it’s no longer mandatory for us and because I’m on call.

I’m betting it’s going to be snowing.

Last night, Earl and I caught that new show on HBO, “Big Love”. It’s a drama that basically follows a non-traditional family, a husband (Bill Paxton) and his three (yes I said “three”) wives and children that live in a suburban Utah town. The husband owns a chain of hardware stores and is juggling the stress of his job, his family, his ailing father and paranoid mother and his business “financers”.

The show didn’t really grip me but I found the premise interesting. For the first time in a long while, there was something different on the television screen. I don’t think there’s been a television series with polygomy as the backdrop before. I didn’t find myself engaged by the show though.

While we were watching the program I kept asking Earl, “Are there really groups living in compounds like that in Utah?” and “Do people really live like that?”, as if he’s the expert on social habits in Utah. I’ve been fortunate enough to see many, many different living arrangements in my life but I’ve never been to a compound where all the women were married to one man. That’s a new one for me. Discussing the show with my co-worker today I was surprised that such a compound exists not too far from here. She mentioned that it’s populated by a “three old women” now and they give tours of the place. In fact, one of her college classes went there on a field trip.

I believe that love is love is love is love is love and that it takes many shapes and forms and works in an infinite number of ways. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that what works for couple (or group) “A” doesn’t necessarily work for others. I’ve seen couples with multiple sex partners. I’ve seen couples that wouldn’t allow each other the luxury of even looking at another person in a romantic way. I’ve met couples that thrived on arguing to the point that they threw kitchen knives at each other when they fought. I once met a couple years ago where one locked the other up in a cage for the night. All of this is good, because it’s diversity in people that makes the world go ’round.

Earl and I added “Big Love” to the TiVo to-do list simply because it’s something different to watch. Will I go crazy with anticipation waiting for the next show? Probably not, I’m reserving that for “Medium” these days. But I think it’s great that another small niche of society gets a little air time.