Lead it back home 29 July 2010

If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know that I live in military housing.  I love it here.  Some of my friends aren’t too happy about our surroundings, as they are used to nicer homes, but I love my house.  It’s almost twice the size of the house we owned in Washington state, and the layout is awesome.  Plus, it’s almost like living in a detached home, since our houses are connected at the garage.  I can’t ever hear my neighbors.  It’s fabulous.

I also like living where my neighbors are in the military.  Not that there’s anything wrong with civilians — I love you all.  But civilians, while friendly, run on a totally different time schedule than military wives.  Most civilians I have met take things slowly when they meet a new person.  I haven’t got that kind of time, though.  If it takes you a year or two to warm up to me, I’ll be gone before we can get a proper friendship going.  That, and I’ve been shunned by civilians when they find out I’m military because they don’t feel like putting forth the effort into a friendship where I’ll just be moving away in a few years anyhow.  I can understand that, but I can’t live like that.  If I did, I wouldn’t have any friends.  Ever.

But living in military housing doesn’t protect us from the nutjobs.  Case in point: the lady around the corner from me.  Let’s call her Crazy Lady.

Here’s a little back story first, though.  My neighborhood is halfway between the two major drags of the island.  As such, it’s commonly used as a cut-through by lots of people who have no business being in our neighborhood.  We don’t live on the base, but rather just outside it, so there are no gates (well, there’s a gate at one end, but it’s kept open) to keep anyone in or out.  It sucks that people cut through, but what can you do.

Nothing.

So Crazy Lady lives on one of the streets that is sometimes used by the folks who cut through.  Generally they go on the street behind her, but we’ve had a ton of construction lately that has closed off that street. So it’s on to her street they go.  Before she moved into her unit, back when my dear friend T lived in that house, they had installed a speed bump right outside her house.  It’s the most annoying speed bump, only about fifty or a hundred feet away from a stop sign in either direction.  So you stop, go a tiny way, stop for the speed bump, go a tiny way, and stop again for the stop sign.  Very annoying.

But I guess that just wasn’t enough for her.  When Crazy Lady moved in, she put up all these SLOW CHILDREN PLAYING signs all over her front yard.  Now she’s got some semi-permanent ones that she’s installed up and down her street.  I’m not quite sure why she has them up; there are permanent metal signs installed on every stop sign as well.  And it’s not like anyone can get up to any kind of speed on her street anyhow, unless they run all the stop signs, which will then cause them to hit the speed bump hard enough to damage their car.

Well, whatever.  Put up signs, I don’t care.  I still roll my eyes every time I see one of them.

A couple days ago, though, as Kurt was coming home from work, he noticed her outside with her camcorder.  He thought she said something to him, so he stopped to talk.  She informed him that she had filmed him coming down the street, and because it took him only seven seconds to go from the stop sign to the speed bump, he was speeding.  She had written down his license plate number, and she planned on submitting it to the police.

When he came home to tell me that, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  I wanted to rush outside and quote the Barenaked Ladies to her: “Lady, you’re an idiot!”  She has so much time that she’s going to sit there and video everyone coming down the street because she feels as though they are speeding.  True, the speed limit is just 15mph here in housing (I thought it was 25mph, but I keep my speed to 20 — oops, I guess I’m speeding too), but it’s really hard to go 15mph.  Kurt went back out to discuss the issue with her, and she told him that she’s petitioning to have the gate to the neighborhood closed to prevent people from cutting through.

So because she happens to live on a slightly busy street, she wants to inconvenience everyone who lives in the neighborhood and force them to go around their ass to get to their elbow.  Not only that, but the closest emergency response team would come into our neighborhood through that entrance.  If that gate were closed, it would take them three times as long to respond.

I wonder if she realizes her children would be affected in that case.

Kurt called our leasing company to let them know that she’s worked up about all of this, and they told us that no matter what, they can’t close that gate.  It’s no longer really military housing; they’re trying to get civilians to rent here as well.  It’s a public street, and there is no way they can restrict access to it.  I have seen cops sitting in driveways nearby, monitoring the situation and ticketing people who run the stop signs.  Clearly the police know what’s going on, so I don’t think any more can be done.

Here’s the kicker — she has an enormous backyard.  Most of the houses in my neighborhood no longer have fences in the back because they were falling apart.  It was easier to pull them down than to repair them.  So she has this enormous green space right behind her house.  I’m really confused why she doesn’t just put her kids out back to play, instead of getting so worked up about the folks driving past her house.  That, and why doesn’t she just move to a quieter street?  Sure, it would be a pain for her, but there are plenty of empty units around.  Then she can live on a quiet, dead-end street where there’s no traffic, and the rest of us don’t have to worry about being filmed and reported to the police.

If I were her, though, I’d be a helluva lot less concerned about the traffic on my street and more worried about the demolition going on.  The leasing company is pulling down many houses around us, two on my street alone.  These are old houses, with lead paint on the walls, and probably asbestos in the insulation.  Why doesn’t she get worked up about all of that being flung into the air as they’re demolishing the houses?  There’s one right across the street from her that will get pulled down.  I’d be more worried about that, personally — and I am, too.  The house across the street from me will be torn down sometime soon.  I guess I’ll be keeping the doors shut and the a/c on while the demolition is going on.

I wonder if anyone’s told her that there’s lead in our ground.  Maybe that would be enough for her to keep her kids inside all the time, and we wouldn’t have to worry about her monitoring our speed through the neighborhood.

Hmmm.  There’s a thought.

Never know how much I care 27 July 2010

So last night, after a delicious dinner of Coffee-Brined Chicken Drumsticks with a side of diced cucumber dressed with rice vinegar (the chicken is oh so good, though I usually use less salt than it calls for), I got it into my head that I wanted to go to Walmart.

Before you chastise me too greatly for visiting the evil, evil empire that is that big blue box store, let me remind you that I live on an island.  A tiny island.  In a tiny state.  We have a sum total of four Target stores in the entire state — and one is closed because the mall in which it is located is still recovering from the flooding that occurred back in April.  They’re hoping to open the mall back up sometime next month.  Let’s see, since that mall is closed, I think that leaves us with one true mall in the entire state as well, way up in Providence.  There just aren’t many options for us.  Granted, we live very near to Massachusetts, which is where we do most of our shopping. But even still, our choices are limited.

And sometimes, honestly, I do not feel like driving half an hour to get off the island to do a little window shopping when there is a Walmart a mile from my house.  So shoot me.

However, Kurt decided it was not to Walmart that we needed to go, but instead to a few stores in the opposite direction.  First up, Ocean State Job Lots.

That store cracks me right the hell up.  It’s like the sad little sister of Big Lots, the one who tries so hard but just can’t measure up to her better, prettier, more well-known sister.  When stores can’t sell their stock, they sell it off to stores like Big Lots and Job Lots so they can recoup some of their expenses, and then those stores sell it for much cheaper than you’d be able to buy it at a normal store.  Some things are good quality, like the Speedo swimsuits for women I saw for sale for $10 yesterday, instead of the $70 they run in department stores.  Others are not quite so nice.  There’s always clothing of questionable quality and design that looks like it’ll fall apart the first time you run it through the washer.  So you just have to be careful what you buy from a store like that.

We managed to spend about $20 in Job Lots last night.  Kurt found a tool he absolutely had to have, while I contented myself with some really nifty postcards (10 for $1!) and some Tom’s of Maine toothpaste.  We also managed to find quite a bit that we wanted in the food department.  I’m usually somewhat nervous about buying food from Job Lots, but I checked all the expiration dates before I put the items in our cart.  We like to buy these Indian shelf-stable ready-meals that we normally get from the health food store for $3 a piece, but at Job Lots they were just $2.  It’s the easiest dinner ever; heat and serve over rice.  The ones we get are pretty good for you too, with no artificial or unpronounceable ingredients.  We just have to be careful we’re getting ones without nuts, due to Grace’s allergy.  I also found some bitter orange soda — NOM.

But the best deal of all was some steel-cut oats by Bob’s Red Mill that was just $2.79 for 12 ounces.  Usually steel-cut oats can be pretty darn expensive, running more than $5 for a tin at most grocery stores.  It’s so worth it, though; the flavor and texture is nothing like instant oatmeal.  I usually make it in the crockpot overnight, and it turns out perfectly.  In fact, Grace has asked me to make it for her on her next school day.

I also noticed that they had agave syrup for super cheap as well, which made me a little irritated as I had bought some at the health food store for three times the price.  And it was the same brand!  Grr.

Oh, well.  At least now I know I can get it at Job Lots, even if I always feel a little dirty and strange when I come out.

And then it was off to the pet store.  What better way to spend an evening than to let the kids go nuts in a pet store??  Apparently the pet store guy fed the piranhas some goldfish right when Kurt and the kids got inside.  I’d gone back into Job Lots to pick up some toothpicks (1000 for $1.25) and some peppercorns (88¢), so I missed all the excitement.  Another couple came in right after me and spent most of their time near the birds at the front of the store.  I tell you what, the parrots did not like the woman.  At all.  Every single time she came near one of them, they would squawk their heads off.  I didn’t know parrots could be so loud!  I jumped each time one went off.

One of the parrots could talk — but never when you were standing right in front of her.  We kept trying to get her to say something, but as soon as we gave up and walked away, she’d mutter, “Hello” — and it’s creepy how human she sounded.

We also got to see teeny tiny baby hamsters, still pink and blind, curled up in a mass in a corner of their cage.  So cute!  Grace wanted to take one home, but I haven’t had good experience with hamsters.  They tend to die on me.  Yuck.

I had a dwarf hamster when I was eleven or twelve, I guess.  No, I had to be older because I was living in Nebraska.  So…. Thirteen?  I loved my dwarf hamster so much, but I guess her cage was too close to the window because she caught a chill and died of pneumonia.  Then my parents replaced her with a large teddy bear hamster, which promptly gave birth to a litter of baby hamsters.  My parents were less than pleased.  We sold most of them back to the pet store but kept one as company for the momma hamster.  At some point the momma hamster died, and I guess I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to my hamsters because the other hamster decided to snack on his momma.  It was not a pretty sight.

So I suppose hamsters are off the list as potential pets for us.  Besides, we have two cats.  What more do we need?  Nothing, that’s what.

I know you’ll find love again 20 July 2010

Three weeks without an update.  I am still alive, yes, I am.  But what a busy three weeks it has been!!  Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty of what all I have been doing; it loses quite a lot in the retelling.

It all started with a visit from my friend’s mom.  Somehow she and I get along very, very well, and she thought it’d be fun to come down and go to the beach.  The problem is, two days beforehand, Grace had come down completely randomly with a stomach bug.  Poor kid.  I felt so badly for her, but there was nothing I could do.  She couldn’t keep anything down — not water, not clear soda, nothing.  It got to the point where she absolutely refused to put anything in her mouth because it would make her sick.  But she was a real trooper about it all.

Then ME came down with the stomach bug the day my friend’s mom was to arrive.  I hadn’t been sure if she was going to come after all, so I didn’t think to call her.  When she arrived, I told her of the situation, and she said that since she had had six kids, it wouldn’t bother her to stay — at long as it was no imposition on me.  I was glad of her company; I was trying to do everything in my power to prevent myself from catching the Stomach Bug of Doom.

Unfortunately, Kurt wasn’t so lucky, and ended up racing to the bathroom at 5am the next morning.  I told my friend’s mom we couldn’t go to the beach; I didn’t want to do anything that I couldn’t get home in a hurry in case Kurt needed me.

Yes, I left Kurt alone while he was sick.  Honestly, he threw me out of the house.  He doesn’t really like being fussed over when he’s sick like that.  When he’s just got a cold or some such, he enjoys the pampering, as do we all.  But when he’s that kind of sick, he wants to be left to his own devices.  I can’t blame him.  He made me leave the baby with him too; he figured since they were both sick, they could keep each other company.  He didn’t really throw up much, but he felt like absolute crap all day Saturday — which worried me because he had to leave on a business trip early on Sunday morning.  Fortunately by Saturday night he was feeling much better.

So instead of the beach, I took my friend’s mom down to Brenton Point State Park, which is always a good time, but was even more fun because there was a kite fair going on.  I love that place.  It’s right at the tip of the island, and gets all the crazy winds coming off the Atlantic Ocean, making it the perfect place to fly kites.  There are always kite-flyers there, and it’s always a lovely thing to watch.  We went down on the rocks and watched the waves break against the shoreline, getting fairly wet in the process, before making our way back to the park and taking in the kite fair.  Grace was able to make her own miniature kit, and she was so cute in her new dress and her cowboy boots and cowboy hats that one of the coordinators had to take a photo of her.

The very next day, as Kurt flew down to Virginia on a business trip, my high school buddy and his wife (who write jointly over at Mixed Drinks With Dr. Pepper, he as The Pedant and she as Sherbs) arrived for a visit.  They currently live in northern Virginia, not far from where The Pedant and I attended high school lo those many years ago.

I tell you what, The Pedant and Sherbs are the kind of guests you want to have.  I was so sad to see them leave after only four days together!  They realized that with Kurt gone, I couldn’t do a whole lot with them because it was just not child-friendly.   So one day they went off to do the mansions, while another day we all visited the one property that is fun for kids — the Green Animals Topiary Garden.  Of course, it was about a million degrees with high humidity the day we went, but the kids handled it well, and they loved running along all the paths to see all the pretty flowers.  And eventually, Sherbs and I found a lovely spot in the shade, where we sat and chatted for a while as The Pedant played with the kids.

Not only were they wonderful with my kids, but they both love to cook!  One night for dinner, I made this amazing asparagus and herb lasagna that was quite a bit of work to put together, but oh so worth it in the end.  And another night, all three of us worked together to make this delicious dinner that involved wrapping fresh chard leaves (from their CSA — so you know it was fresh) around feta and cooking it with garlic and wine.  I enjoyed it so much that I’m planning on making it for Kurt this week!  Except the chard I bought from the farmer’s market on Saturday went bad by Monday, so I’ll have to buy another bunch from the farmer’s market on Thursday.

But having the kids all day to myself plus having houseguests did begin to take its toll, and I seriously needed a break.  Fortunately a good friend of mine here agreed to take the kids off my hands, and The Pedant, Sherbs, and I had a lovely ADULT dinner at a local French bistro.  The food was simply amazing.  I don’t want you taunt you with it, but tell you what — you come visit me here and I’ll take you there.  Bring some moolah, though; the place ain’t cheap.  It’s beyond worth it, though.

Beyond having houseguests back-to-back and fighting off the Stomach Bug of Doom (which I did manage to escape, thank the lord almighty), I haven’t been doing much.  Generally I have been stepping away from the computer more and more, hence my lack of commenting, for which I apologize, and instead I’ve been diving headfirst into my reading.  My friend’s mom brought me three books to read, one of which was a volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.  I devoured three of the works inside, one of which was a condensed version of Pearl S. Buck’s My Several Worlds, which she wrote about growing up in early 20th century China as the daughter of American missionaries.  It’s  fascinating look at that country, from a time before the Communists took over, and it makes one realize how much has been lost because of Communism.  That’s not to say that imperial China was perfect — not in the least.  But it used to be a much different nation.

And speaking of reading, I think it’s time to get back to my current novel, Lady of the Snakes by Rachel Pastan.  It’s such an engaging read that I’ve read 113 pages since yesterday, and it’s why I didn’t manage to get to sleep till after 2am last night.  Oops.  I’ll just have to catch a nap later today.  Oh darn.