Ponderings and Musings

Earl and I have decided that we are not going to watch “American Idol” for a while. I was fully prepared to jump onto this latest season in full snark mode, but last night’s auditions in Seattle were just too mean spirited. The judges were pretty mean spirited on Tuesday, last night they were just downright mean. We weren’t entertained at all.

Now I don’t consider Earl and I to be ultra politically correct guys. Once in a while we may snicker privately when we shouldn’t or we may tell a joke that’s a little rude. However, we know the limits of good taste and last night a line crossed. The three judges on American Idol hit a new low. Three people “in the business” really have no business making fun of a contestant’s physical apperance by calling him a monkey. Paula Abdul, regardless of her state of inebriation, should not cheer a contestant on when they’re in the room and then laugh uproariously when they’ve left. That was just humiliating for all involved. The judges and the producers should be ashamed of themselves.

We’re not watching the rest of the audition process. We may boycott the rest of the season. It’s just become too mean.

Earl and I decided to treat ourselves for lunch today and go to the Applebee’s that’s not too far away, using one of our holiday gift certificates in the process. Trying to stay within the realm of good health, I ordered a “Confetti Chicken” dish from the Weight Watchers menu, Earl ordered a grilled chicken salad from the same selection.

Mine was quite yummy.

Earl wasn’t as thrilled with his dish.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a fresh selection of vegetables in a salad. Unfortunately, Applebee’s felt differently because Earl had an assortment of wilted and browning salad greens in his dish. The very kind server came over and asked how we were enjoying our meal. Earl’s first response was “Honestly?” I then gripped the table in preparation for what was to follow. Actually, I was expecting his standard, “This is the worst meal I’ve had in my life”, but he didn’t say that, instead he expressed his understable disappointment with his meal. The server looked as if she had been stabbed but she apologized for the meal and offered to get another; Earl replied that he would just pick at what he had since he was pressed for time.

We were expecting the manager to come over after the server flew back to the kitchen, but the manager never arrived. The server even asked if we had talked to the manager as she had requested their presence, but apparently they don’t work during the busy lunch hour or something.

After the initial discussiong with the server, Earl and I continued to eat in silence. It wasn’t that I was embarassed or upset by his honesty with the server, quite the contrary, I’m glad he had said something. It was just that I felt that this was another notch in what I was sensing to be a bad day for him. So I broke the silence with a simple question.

“Do you think you’ve had a mid-life crisis, are having a mid-life crisis, or haven’t had one yet?”

I don’t know why I asked that, as he’s probably one of the most grounded people I’ve ever met in my life, but he shot me a look that said, “I’m am not having a mid-life crisis”, before he calming said, “Why do you ask?”. Not knowing how to gracefully dig myself out of that conversational vacuum, I simply replied with “oh, I was just curious.” Things were fine after that.

Small wonder I played it safe tonight and served up a pancake supper. There wasn’t a vegetable in sight.

When I resigned from my job at the end of this past year, I thought I would have a lot of time before school started to get some things done. I had visions of multiple blog entries everyday, following the important matters occurring in the news and accomplishing tasks on my “to do” list with unprecedented time to do so. Classes start in less than a week and I’m finding that I’m busier now than when I was working. I think I’m a little surprised by this.

I can say without hesitation that my priorities have changed considerably. Back in the “old days” I was happy with the state of the kitchen floor if we didn’t stick to it. This morning I found myself armed with the broom and dustpan waiting for the cat to finish his kibble so I could scoop up his mess. I stop Earl at the door when he comes home from work and before he gets his kiss, I insist that his shoes come off. The washer has run more cycles in the past two weeks then it did the entire month before. I’m looking forward to stopping at the dry cleaners tomorrow morning.

What in the heck has happened to me?

I used to yak on and on about how I was turning into some domestic god because I vacuumed a little bit and shoved things under the bed. Yesterday I moved all the furniture in the bedroom so I could thoroughly clean everything. It paid off though; Earl didn’t sneeze once in bed last night.

See, there’s always a bright side.

Just to keep Earl on his toes I left a voicemail at his office telling him to stop at the store on his way home as I was fresh out of bon-bons.

He brought home some mop-n-glo. He knows his way to my heart.

I think I surprised Earl a little bit today. When he got home from work, I was in the basement pulling wire through the framing for the new rooms we’re having built down there. There was also a meatloaf in the oven, ready to enjoy as soon as he had decompressed from the day’s activities.

Who knew I’d have a few tricks up my sleeve after all these years.

When all was said and done, we survived the meatloaf just fine (it was my first attempt at meatloaf) and no one was electrocuted when I finished hooking up the wiring.

It’s the little things that make life interesting. Wait until he sees what I do tomorrow with a naked chicken.

When we made the decision that I could go back to school full-time, one of the considerations was that the on-line spending had to come to a stop. I could no longer go wild on ebay and would no longer be able to enjoy the high one gets from a daily UPS visit.

Apparently the new rule applies to only one of us because Earl had two packages arrive today.

The first package was from KitchenAid. It’s a cozy cover for a our “classic mixer”. It does wonders at keeping our mixer free from schmutz and complimenting our kitchen décor. It gives one a warm, domestic feeling.

The other package contained a labeling system for the clothes closet. Earl cleaned his closet out a couple of days ago and organized everything into sections. The long sleeved dress shirts go in one part, the jeans go in another, etc. In an effort to keep things neat and tidy after the houseboy (me) does the laundry, he now has labels that instruct me where to hang what. He even has a label for “empty hangers”.

He has dashed one of my two favorite household pasttimes as I now will no longer have to play the “find the hangers” game in his closet. By the way, the other favorite pasttime is called “bang my head on the top of the oven while I clean it.”

Keeping time with the latest trends, the labels come in both an English and Spanish version. Since we are on a budget due to my struggling student status, I’ve been informed that my closet will be organized in Spanish.

Olé.

Our cat Tom is freaked out because there’s a stranger in our house this week. He keeps running up to me and looking at me with the “are you going to do something about this?” look in his eyes. Tomorrow he’ll probably start clawing me.

The reason we have a stranger in our house is because we’re having the walls in our basement built, along with a few other odds and ends that needed to be done. When the project is completed, Earl and I will be moving our offices into the basement so that the spare bedrooms can be spare bedrooms again. The recording studio is also being moved into the basement. I’m looking forward to the new “play space”.

The nice thing about this project is that my family’s contracting business is doing the work. It’s a bit of a drive for them but Earl and I both felt it was best to have someone that we know will do a good job doing the work.

The few odds and ends that needed to be completed included the hot tub leaking into the garage and spackling the walls in the downstairs bathroom and laundry room where the owner discovered he didn’t put any joint compound on the plumbing before he sealed the walls up. There’s a trap door under the guest room toilet that was never made to “look pretty”, but that’s been taken care of now.

I swear that if Earl and I ever move again we’re going to build a house from the ground up so that we know what is going where and how it’s getting put there. George (the contractor) and I discovered today that for some unexplicable reason our hot tub drains away from the main plumbing of the house, where it does a loop over the garage, dumps through a trap that can only be accessed by removing the floor under the walk-in closet in the master bath (I don’t know why we have a walk-in closet in the master bath, so don’t ask), and then goes back to where it was suppose to go in the first place. This little loopity-loop was leaking because there was apparently no joint compound on the pipe fittings.

Oy.

George fixed the problem and we made sure everything was nice and dry before he put the new trap door in the garage ceiling. It’s next to the other trap door that the previous owner’s put in when the toilet leaked into the garage a number of years ago.

Tomorrow he starts with the basement walls. Home improvement can be exciting.

Earl and I have a bucket that we throw all our spare change in. We’ve used the same bucket (an old dishwasher detergent bucket) since our first apartment and have only sat down to wrap change three or four times in the past decade. Since we don’t like fishing through change when we’re at a store or restaurant, the bucket was about three quarters full this morning. So we lugged it to one of those coin counting machines at the grocery store. When all was said and done, we had about $175 in change and after we turned in our credit slip and paid the coin counting machine fee, we left with about $166 in cash.

Since we had more money than we anticipated, we went to the mall and bought one of those Ab-Lounge machines that are constantly being advertised on television. Now the ads promise all these wonderous things will happen to those that use this mechanical marvel of exercise. Despite their claims, I don’t anticipate having six-packs abs in a week’s time, but I must admit that the machine does make it a little easier on my back to do the traditional crunches. I’ve just completed my first ride on the thing and I was able to clock in 100 sit-ups. My mid-section is killing me as I type this, but my back doesn’t feel as sore as it usually does after 20 traditional crunches.

Perhaps I’ll be able to bounce a quarter off my stomach at the end of the month.

One of the requirements of going to college in the lovely state of New York is that you have to have record of two doses of an “MMR” vaccine, to immunize yourself against measles, mumps and ruebella. These doses can be in the form of vaccines or by actually having said diseases, you just need to provide documentation to your college health center so that they can tell the state that you’re a healthy student.

I think I mentioned a while back that coming up with documentation to prove that I have already had the vaccine has been difficult. My elementary and high school health records are sketchy as Nurse Needles apparently didn’t believe in thorough documentation. My health records for when I was a child and when I was at college have both been shredded. However, the college was willing to accept what little proof I did have as one dose of the vaccines. All I needed to do was get a second dose or blood work to prove that I’m already immune.

Now let’s all keep in mind that if I was a part-time student, a member of the faculty or other college staff member, I would have no need to show this documentation. Apparently in New York State only full-time students are capable of spreading the plague; teachers, part-time students and other staff are already immune by virtue of not being full-time. Oh yes, in addition it’s impossible for me to spread the aforementioned diseases before February 15 because I have until then to prove that I’m immune.

I had a physical with my doctor a couple of weeks ago and he said that this would be no problem, we’d simply include the screening to make sure I was immune with the routine blood work. I’d then turn in the documentation to the college and I’d be free and clear.

Wrong.

My blood tests came back today indicating that I was *probably* immune from measles, mumps and ruebella, but it is not an absolute certainty. Therefore, any of Nurse Needles documentation that I had provided was null and void and I need to get two doses of the MMR vaccine, 30 days apart, before Feburary 15 or they will come into the classroom and force me off the college campus.

I think this is stupid.

First of all, the documentation I have says that I received my first MMR in April 1969. Bzzzzz. New York State says you have to have it within four days of your first birthday or it doesn’t count. So back in the day Dr. Hoedown jumped the gun and gave me my vaccination too early. Apparently I have infected everyone around me since then because it wasn’t within four days of my first birthday. I have survived spinal meningitis, I have seen the white light, I have lived through what should have been a fatal car crash, but by god I need to get my measles, mumps and ruebella vaccine right away before I bring the plague upon Mohawk Valley Community College.

Secondly, I’ve already gone to college. I’ve already proved all this, but that’s right, they shredded all my documents. So tomorrow I get to go to the county health clinic where I’ll get me my first of two vaccines. If they make me sick, I’m suing everyone within eyeshot and in Albany.

Where do I get the vaccine against ridiculous government bureaucracy?

It’s another beautiful day in Upstate New York and today is the first “real” day of 2007. I just got off the phone with my sister and she asked “How is the first day as houseboy?”. Isn’t she humorous. The house is still standing, there hasn’t been any cleaning catastrophes and I haven’t killed any of the smattering of seniors at the grocery store, so all in all I would say it’s been a success. The true test will be to see if Earl survives my homemade spaghetti sauce tonight.

I had forgotten that shopping at the grocery store in the middle of the day is a completely diffferent experience from shopping at night or on the weekend. The pace is a slower, a lot, lot slower. Daytime shoppers are afraid of the new-fangled self-serve checkouts. Those that venture to the self-serve lane are afraid to touch here to start. They need guidance. Cars and carts move in completely random directions. People block aisles to gossip. All that can be seen behind the steering wheel of the randomly moving cars is a pile of hair. The speed limits on the road change by a prescribed formula: take the posted limit, divide it by two and then subtract your age, remove the negative sign and then ignore the result and anyone around you.

Yet, everyone I encountered can live to read my tale. I must be mellowing out or something.

So here it is, a brand new year. Everyone gets a chance to start fresh as a whole new year lies before us. What occurred in 2006 happened last year so we needn’t worry about it any longer, because this is a new year. The world is new!

It was at approximately 8:00 p.m. this evening that I said to myself, “OH MY GOD”.

Tomorrow marks my first day of this new life I’ve chosen as a struggling student. Since I am now unemployed and eager to impress my lover tomorrow (as the new cook of the house), I was installed in the kitchen cutting up vegetables to be packed with his lunch this week. After breezing through that task with all my fingers and toes still intact, I decided I would make us tuna salad sandwiches. It was then that I realized that at 38 years old while I had traveled in three countries, 42 states and had heard several different words for the carbonated beverage we call soda, I had never made tuna salad before in my life. Ever. Armed with several cookbooks from Williams-Sonoma, I can confidently say that while I can find ways to make things like Coq Au Vin, Lobster Thermador and Filet Mignon Almondine, there are no recipes for tuna salad to be found. Not even next to the picture of the smiling fish on the Chicken of the Sea can. I did find a guide to stuffing a tomato with tuna, but that looked rather risky for my first adventure as lunch line lady.

Now I know why my mother had her nose in that red and white checked cookbook back when we were kids. That’s where all the secrets are! All I can say is thank goodness for the internet. I found a lovely little recipe for tuna salad. I blended the recommended ingredients together and it came out looking like something edible. I didn’t have pickle relish as recommended so I chopped up some sweet pickles and threw in some of the juice. I was proud of myself for improvising.

I’m hoping that Earl is a good sport about my first attempt at making tuna salad, because there’s one other thing I learned from my mother: how to swipe a plate of food away from someone that’s complaining about it and then stuff it down the disposer.

Let’s hope we both survive tomorrow’s lunch to tell another tale.