I Can Now Cross "Help Birth Baby" Off the Bucket List

I hardly feel like I have the right to complain about how tired I am right now. After all, I'm not the rock star who birthed a baby in the middle of her living room last night. That honor goes to my friend Layla, who, while clutching the hands of some of her best women friends, her husband at her back, and her first child at her side, gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

Layla asked me some weeks ago to be a part of her home birth. My duty was to babysit her first child, whom I affectionately call "Neener", while the new baby was being born. Neener didn't need much hand-holding, though. She was as big a rock star as her mommy.

I, on the other hand, fell apart at the seams. I could hardly keep my eyes open past 4 am. I couldn't sleep, either, as every capillary in my body was surging with adrenaline. I spent the rest of the night in my "catjamas" (as Neener dubbed them) alternating between heightened alertness and utter exhaustion.

But it was worth it. Oh, man, was it worth it. If I had any doubts left about what the human body is capable of, they were all dispelled last night at 3 am.



Welcome to the world, Kai Lucca.

Special thanks to Andrea for capturing this gorgeous shot.

Like A Wristwatch Inside A Turkey. Sort Of.

Internet, I have a weird secret to tell you. I'm sharing this secret with you because, this afternoon, my secret lodged itself in a bag of potting soil, or underneath a potted cucumber plant (impossible to tell which), and I can't hide it anymore.

I engage in a beauty ritual that rubs up against all my au-naturel, no-morning-routine, simplify to the point of monkishness, urban greenie lifestyle.

Sometimes, I wear fake nails. And not on all my fingers, either.

I don't do it for looks entirely. I would be lying if I said I didn't like the way nicely manicured nails look. Who doesn't? The real reason I sometimes wear fake nails, though, is for comfort. Seriously. I type all day long for work. More to the point, I ten-key all day long for work. That means that my right hand is curled up into a digit punching perma-claw for about 75% of my waking hours. My nails tend to break very easily. And when my nails are different lengths, it really bugs. It messes with my sense of balance. One finger might have a regular length nail on it, and another might have a slightly longer nail on it. Another might have one hacked right down to the quick because I accidentally smashed it into a file cabinet drawer a week ago. I hate the sensation of first my sensitive bare fingertip, and then a small talon, and then my sensitive bare finger again, hitting the keys. It's my own private nails on chalkboard. Or biting down on tongue depressors. Whatever. Insert gag reflex-inducing peeve here. So, to keep them all strong and the same length, I sometimes glue down a few falsies.

I know, I know. Horrible. Deplorable, even. Do I even KNOW what's in nail glue? If it can hold a grown man in a hard hat to an I-beam, what must it be doing to the DNA just underneath my nails? And all the Toluene and formaldehyde in nail polish? Aren't I just ASKING for my kids to be born with five heads? And what becomes of my poor nail beds once I soak them in paint thinner to get those claws off? And the bottles, once they are used up? Where do they go? Am I not just contributing to an ever increasing pile of non-recyclable, downright toxic trash that will be with us for milennia? And don't I normally rail against all the products we use in our daily lives that are positively AWFUL for the planet? These are questions I choose not to ask myself, Internet. I'm not proud of the fact. It's one of my guilty pleasures, and so long as Sally Hansen continues to make nail polish the color of pumpkins and eggplants, I will continue to apply my industrialized war paint.

So.

It's T-minus two weeks until my starts are ready to go into the ground (or, in my apartment-dwelling case, into the pots that will line the driveway) so today I got out some more yogurt cups and thinned the herd a little. About two and a half weeks ago, I planted four different kinds of tomato seeds. I planted a few of each variety thinking that, of the dozen or so that that I planted, only a few would take. Well, mother nature is a fertile lady this year, and instead of four or five, I got roughly ten. Any by the looks of it, there are more on the way.

So, I had to separate some of the little buggers because the yogurt cups were starting to get crowded. I went down to the basement to grab some potting soil, came back upstairs, and set up shop on my kitchen counter. I pulled the teensy weensy little starts from their soil, put them into new yogurt cups, watered them, and put them back on the windowsill. And then I went to wash my hands. Which is when I noticed this:

My pinky nail was missing. My fake pinky nail. I didn't even feel it come off. Gross. Grosser still? It's probably hanging out in one of the yogurt cups. I guess if in the Fall, the cucumbers come up with orange-tinted skins, we'll know where it went.

Bye Bye, Burdy

Well, CLH finally left for Mexico this morning. Between the rants about garage sales and panic attacks, I think I forgot to mention this, um, enormous factoid: CLH is sailing 2800 miles from Mexico to Hawaii with three other men on a 47 foot sailboat and will be gone for about a month.

Hey! Guess what? I'm going to sleep diagonally in my bed for thirty days straight!

I spent the day volleying back and forth from smiling giddily over being a "free" woman for thirty days, and crying like a baby. 'Cause, you know. I'm stable like that. NPR reports on a day of mourning for earthquake victims in China? Okay with me. Hearing the Eels song "Fresh Feeling"? Totally not okay. Total tearjerker.

I've been rattling around the house all day, which does not help at all with this sudden feeling of loneliness. I count on small things, like the smell of CLH's coffee in the morning, and the soft computer glow and tinny music coming from his side of the office when I wake up, to get me through the day. When I woke up this morning (after driving CLH to the airport at the ungodly hour of 5:45 am. Seriously, how do you people with the jobs do it?) the office was cold and quiet and then it set in: no CLH for 30 days.

It usually goes like this for me: whenever we are apart for long periods of time, I miss him and weep intermittently for about four days. By day seven I'm like "Stan? Stan who?" Last year when I left for Burning Man, I cried silently behind the novel I was reading on the bus. I don't know why I get so freaking emotional. It's not like he was dead, or that I wasn't going to see him ever again. It's just that we spend a LOT of time together, and being apart for the first time in a long time was just felt, well, devastating.

Of course, the last time I left, I knew CLH wasn't going anywhere. I knew he'd be at our apartment when I got back in ten days. This time around, it's a little more serious. There's all kinds of shit that can go wrong. Things like capsizing and shark attacks and injury and shit that only the Discovery Channel can design a mini-series around.

I have been trying VERY hard not to focus on all the things that can go wrong on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Did you notice I wrote the words "shark attack" and didn't have to faint? That's the NEW me talking. The new me who is reading a book she found at Goodwill in the self help section of the book department about panic attacks and anxiety. The old me would have needed to be cradled like a baby and told that shark attacks are few and far between (probably as frequent as alien abductions is my guess) and that CLH and his crew are going to be fine. The new me is convinced that everything's going to be just fine WITHOUT needing to be cradled like a baby. Take THAT, anxiety! (high fives with adrenal glands).

Now, to make sure I'm using my Single Lady time to its utmost potential while CLH is gone, I've got a bucket list going (and I'm not even sure I'm using "bucket list" correctly here so excuse me while I go use the Internet. {here's me clicking open another window in Mozilla and Googling "bucket list" and grimacing}. Okay, I'm back. Um. I don't want to give anyone the idea that I'm terminally ill. So maybe I shouldn't call it a bucket list. Maybe it's more of a finite to-do list.)

Alright, I'm so exhausted from lack of sleep my eyes burn. So here's just a few things:

Do a detox diet
Take trapeze lessons
Lose ten pounds
Write a children's book
Update this blog more often
Clean out the 'fridge

Some of the things are more thrilling than others. You can't believe how excited I am to clean out the 'fridge.

Goodnight, sweet Burdy. I hope you are ready for the adventure of a lifetime.

Greg, You Loser

It's Saturday, so that means CLH and I have our own breakfasts. (He has a lumberjack's plate of eggs and potatoes and bacon and toast and coffee and I had a cup of tea and some old M&M's I find in the bottom of our snack drawer). I do what I do every Saturday morning after I make my tea: I sit with my laptop at the kitchen table scouring the Internet for estate sales in my neighborhood.

Estate sales, in my opinion, are very different from garage sales. I've spent lots of time rooting around in dilapidated produce boxes full of old Christmas decorations and doilies like a hungry raccoon in a garbage can, so I should know.

Garage sales are goldmines for people who want to refurnish their apartments with dated, well-worn couches or who have lost every cord to every electronic appliance they have ever owned and need replacements. If you ever need either of those two things (or several dozen novelty mugs or maybe a gajillion books on how to lose weight, find Jesus, or how to program in HTML), then garage sales are for you.

But if you want to find a framed painting of president Kennedy, 27 pristine vinyl albums of Scandinavian Folk Songs, and a decades old collection of Avon men's cologne bottles shaped like ram's horns, antique cars, and various sports equipment* in one house, then estate sales are your thing.

*real things I've found at estate sales.

I don't usually "do" garage sales unless I've thoroughly investigated the estate sales in the area. I think it's because the estate sale people are different than the garage sale people. The words are in their ads are spelled correctly, their lists of items for sale aren't fifty unreadable miles long, and the ads are usually inviting, friendly even. They include phrases like "Lots of good stuff" and "Great deals to be had" (a nice departure from the usual non-grammatical run-ons for garage sales that include vague threats in all caps like "I WON'T HELP YOU CARRY THIS STUFF OUT SO YOU'D BETTER BRING YOUR FRIENDS. AND A TRUCK. I WON'T HELP YOU. SERIOUSLY. I'M PHYSICALLY INCAPABLE".)

I think it's because the estate sale people are type As. And borderline hoarders. And that's cool with me. I like visiting with "my people" on the weekends.

Today, though, I skipped the usual estate sales and since the weather was getting nicer (you know, fifty-degrees-instead-of-forty-nicer. Nicer as in I'll-wear-my-scarf-and-winter-coat-but skip-the-hat-today nicer) I decided to visit only the outside sales.

And, oh boy.

There was the lady who wove (is it even possible to weave going 11 miles an hour?) down the street clearly looking for the same garage sale we were. I parked almost half a block away, walked, and still beat her there. She was, meanwhile, using up half the street and all of her might to parallel park in a space about 75 feet long. 'Cause, you know. She pays taxes. Why not use the whole road?

There was nothing good at this sale. Terrible Parking Job Lady, though, seemed VERY interested in an old-school compression powered paint gun. As part of her punishment for making me wait in the middle of the street for a totally not-worth-it garage sale, I was secretly hoping the thing would discharge in her face while she stared down the barrel. Garage saling makes me competitive. Forget sports. And academics. If you really want to unleash my inner tiger, put me in a starting gate alongside a half dozen middle aged women in mom jeans and appliqued sweaters and see who comes running out of there first. I am NOT afraid to shove when there's cheap crap at stake.

The next to last garage sale featured a a garage sale classic: Mr. This Stuff Is Too Good For You Guy.

"Greg" was sitting in his garage wearing sunglasses and listening to his Walkman when we walked up (I know his name because he shook my hand after our deal and told me his name and that I should check out his "other stuff" tomorrow as well, at the Fremont Sunday Market). There were like maybe 20 things for sale, and they were all jumbled in boxes, stacked in no particular order, sprawled out over one quarter of the garage. The rest of the garage was full of boxes of... wood. I think. Something an urban garage shouldn't be full of. Weird. Anywho, the whole time we were there, he kept talking about how awesome this "other" stuff was that he had somewhere else.

This guy was a pro. He must have been able to smell when we were about to direct our attention elsewhere, because as soon as we did, he launched into a oral history of the thing we were looking at, waxed poetic about how it was one of a kind, and did we need a replica of the Starship Enterprise? Because if we did, he had one. It was worth a lot but that he would be willing to let it go for less. And then, if he we even so much as opened our mouths to protest about the price, or the "need" for whatever he was offering, he vacillated between wanting to stroke the thing lovingly and letting it go for a bargain. And if there's one thing I hate more than the people who write garage sale ads with bad punctuation, it's people who try to convince me that the crap I'm rooting through like a hungry raccoon is worth hundreds of dollars and that I should feel bad for offering them less than that for their crap. You know what, Greg? If this record of Kabuki music I'm holding in my hand is so rare and expensive, why is it here, in this mildewy box, next to a car buffer and a golf ball puzzle? You don't want to take my lousy dollar bill for your stupid record? Then why are you selling it? If you like it so much, why don't you keep it? WHY DON'T YOU MARRY IT, GREG? Oh, you've got more stuff, Greg? Oh, I'm sorry. Your buddy has more? Well, where is your buddy and his "stuff", Greg? See, this is the way capitalism** works: If you want me to give you money for something, you need have your goods in front of you, in real time, with a price tag on it. When I go to the supermarket, I usually make sure my bag of oranges is in my cart before I hand the cashier my credit card. And when I fill up my car with gas, I buy it from a gas station that has gas to offer, not one whose "buddy" has some more gas around here somewhere...

**Okay, this is not how capitalism actually works. This is how it should work. Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps? Yeah. They don't count as capitalism. They're just straight up gambling hall adrenaline junkie bullshit. Just sayin'.

Anywho, we managed to convince Greg to take our crumpled five dollar bill for the records we picked out, and I have to say, they've been worth every cent. Especially this one:


It's worth two bucks just to stare in awe at this guy's cigarette ash and wonder what Jedi mind tricks he was using at the time to stand so still. Or what in the hell they make cigarettes in Asia out of...