Unforseen expenditures

I didn't expect to need a new water tank. My house is five years old. I have friends with children older than my house. They haven't needed a new liver yet, so why is the gut of my house in need of a transplant?

Oh well, I'm not too upset about it, as the water tank still has three months on its six-year warranty. I cut it close, but I dodged a bullet. I'll still need to pay installation costs, but that's a pittance compared to a new tank, which is piped into my radiant floor heating system. Cha-ching.

I'm annoyed about having to buy a new Christmas tree. I was blessed with the hand-me-down Family Tree that Mom has had since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It was rickety and threatened to smoosh anyone who walked too closely, but it did the job.

So why did I buy a new one and add the old one to our nation's landfills? Because of Ellie Bean.

Yes, Miss Bean strikes again. After the tree was up, we plugged it in (having left the lights on it from last year). A string was out. I went on the hunt for a broken clear bulb on a green string against the backdrop of a green tree. Good thing my eyes are relatively young still.

I ran my hand along the length of the string. My fingers came into contact with something sharp. I looked closer. The bulb wasn't broken...but the string was.

The string was completely severed in two, wires protruding with several millimeters of exposed copper.

"What do you think would happen if I plugged it in?" Mom asked my dad.

"You, um, probably don't want to do that."

"Why? What'll happen?"

Dad sighed. "I don't really want to find out, Marji." He turned to me. "Kate, I think it's time for a new tree."

He was right. I needed a tree that could withstand the weight of my cats' gnawing on the wires without falling over. I like my ornaments being intact, not to mention my kitties.

I brought home a beautiful, pre-lit tree from Home Depot. On the receipt was a promo code to enter a drawing worth $5000. I have entered, full of hope that I'll win and be able to replace my kitchen counter tops that look like they're covered in dried vomit. Merry Christmas to me!

The cats have made their home underneath the new tree. But the moment I hear the ring of the oversized jingle bells hanging from the lower branches, the pump-action squirt gun gets busted out and the kitties get a spray of their own medicine. Sure, I get a drop of water or two on the floor, but it's kind of a nice parallel - water on the living room floor, and a flood in the laundry room while I wait for a new tank.

Geneaology, schmeaneology.

I've never cared much about where I came from. I'm a lot more interested in where I'm going, right? Right?

I seem to be alone in this mindset. My mom's family is very "relation-oriented." On a trip to England with my cousin several years ago, we just had to stop at the Isle of Man for a couple of days to do some geneaological research. Not to mention it was January, on an Isle, and therefore "freezing cold" doesn't do the weather justice. At one point, I ducked into a library to warm up for a moment. While I sat, vigorously rubbing warmth back into my hands, a patron came into the library and was greeted by the man behind the counter.

"Hello there! I haven't seen you in awhile!"

"No, no, been busy and whatnot. Thought I'd pop in for a moment, let me eyeballs thaw a bit."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

All in all, the trip to the Isle of Man was worth a couple of days' sojourn from the mainland. It is an adorable place, seemingly untouched by technology. Did I learn anything of interest about my family? No. But I enjoyed myself.

I was talking on the phone with my paternal uncle the other night. He asked if I was done with school.

"Yep, I've got my master's in hand, all is good. Now comes the fun part of paying off the loans."

Uncle Ronnie launched into a very long story about a cousin of his, who I remind him so much of. "My cousin was really smart, like you, and loved education. In fact, I saw a picture the other day, and said, 'Wow, he looks just like little Katie!'"

He?

"His name was Ernie. He'd be your uncle, I think. Uncle Ernie. Boy, you are just a spittin' image of your great Uncle Ernie."

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Well....wonderful!" I said, forcing enthusiasm into my voice. I was sincerely hoping Uncle Ernie was very feminine-looking. It would be somewhat of a salve to my ego.

I relayed this story to Mom. She regarded me.

"You really do, you know. I saw a picture of him once."

I sighed. Oh well, something to add to the Match.com profile - "has close-knit ties to her extended family."

The weight of empty pockets

I have found a new inspiration for losing weight.

Being broke.

Yes, ladies and gentleman. I have reached the point where I really don't look all that hot in my clothes, and I don't have the money to buy bigger clothes. I've got some dang cute clothes in boxes in my shed that I haven't been able to wear in years, and it would be like winning a free shopping spree if I were able to wear them. And, I'm guaranteed to lose a few pounds when I open the boxes after a brown recluse comes scuttling out and bites me and I land in the hospital for a few weeks while I'm being detoxified.

This needing to lose a few is a really great thing to happen to me. I needed a fire lit under my rear, and not having clothes to wear to work is a blazing inferno underneath my flat cheeks, misshapen from hours and hours of being planted in a desk chair.

Plus, working out is a great stress reliever. I realized I needed to do something after I threw a hissy fit at one of my coworkers, delivered in a style of passive-agressive silent slamming papers on counters that I think I really should patent.

This is a GREAT time in my life to jump back on the "my body is a temple" bandwagon. I can hear my mom groaning - Mom, I promise not to turn back into workout Nazi. But the holiday season is here again, and this year, I can't eat jack crap anyway thanks to my wheat allergy. What better time to not want to eat jack crap?

So, I'm posting my starting point here - 162. (For the record, 10lbs of that is metal from my hip replacements. But, it's weight that is on my knees and ankles and feet, so I'm counting it.)

Stay tuned! 140, here I come!

Halloween Horrors

Last night was Hairy S Truman's first Halloween with me. I don't know how he spent Halloween last year - being chased by crazy owners trying to get him to mate with a girl doggie so that they could sell the puppies for hundreds of dollars? Being chased by twenty other orphaned weiners in the backyard of the dachshund rescue?

This year, Trumie spent one hour and fourteen minutes locked in my guest room. The kitties were locked in the craft room. I sat in the living room, bags of candy ready.

Truman barked. And barked. And barked. Continuously. For an hour and fourteen minutes. Between trick-or-treaters, I dashed down the hall to check in on him.

My guest bed had dog poop, dog pee, and dog vomit on it.

Truman cowered underneath the bed, shaking.

"Oh, Stinky man, come here," I said, reaching for the dog. He darted back underneath the bed, as scared as he was the first day I brought him home from the rescue place.

This isn't good. I worked for a year to get him to settle in and trust me. I'm not going to undo it for a night of giving away $50 of candy that my stupid gluten intolerance won't let me even sneak a piece here and there.

I was finally able to pick up the dog and I brought him out to the living room. I put him in his bag (a pink shoulder bag a 'la Paris Hilton) and let him hang out on my shoulder for the next hour.

"What a cute puppy!" the children squealed after I opened the door. I bent to put candy in their sacks. They were more interested in petting the dog. For the love of Pete. You mean to tell me I could have saved $50 on candy and just let kids pet my dog?

Between door bell rings, I cleaned up the poop, stripped the sheets off the bed (and forgot to wash them, I'm remembering as I write this. At least I remembered to toss the poop before answering the door).

At about 8:15, Truman had had enough. He was wiggly and wanted to run around. I still had a fair amount of candy left, but "42nd Street" was starting on PBS and I was getting hungry for dinner.

I turned off my porch lights and let Trumie out of his bag. He squirmed around, licked the freed kitties' rears for them, and ran up his stairs onto the sofa to see what I was having for dinner. I curled up and counted my night's visitors. 80. Not so bad. But what to do about the leftover candy?

I briefly considered unloading it on the office Monday morning, but I hated to see that much money go to expanding my coworker's waistlines.

The Time Machine! I jumped off the sofa and dumped the candy into a plastic sack. I tied it real tight and stuck it into the back corner of my freezer. I'm already three bags of candy up for next year! Come to think of it, I might have found a new investment model - buy Halloween candy for next year at this year's prices, and just stick it in the freezer.

But, as mom says, what if the candy is nasty by next year? Well, then people won't come to my house anymore, thereby obviating the need to by any candy at all.

On second thought, $50 is a small price to pay for seeing cute little kids dressed up in ridiculous costumes. Entertaining for me, character-building for them: Halloween is a win-win situation.

My skin, it's too thin.

So now I've gotten two rejections on my spy-thriller novel. One would have thought I'd have racked up a lot more than that by now. Since these rejections were based on the first 3 chapters (or my whole book) they take a lot longer to get the "no" back than if I was pitching to agents who only wanted a query letter. Those agents guarantee you a "no" before you're completely sure if your email actually sent or not.

Nothing stops me in my tracks faster than a "no." This is my mother's fault on two levels:
1) She trained me so well as a child that to me, "no" means "no." I don't ask someone else, I just stop the behavior. And

2) Mom always told me (and still tells me on a daily basis) what a wonderful, perfect person I am, and that everything I do is perfection. Imagine my surprise when grumpy agents deprived of oxygen in their Manhattan skyscraper offices say my stuff is "not for them."

So, I've been conveniently losing myself in craft-show season, telling myself to knit more kitchen towels. They're heinously ugly, those crocheted-top things that women over sixty hang from the doors of their ovens, but they sell well, so, what's one to do. Not like my stack of papers/novel is going anyplace any time soon. Woe is me LOL.

It's official.

I am giving up on men. No, I'm not becoming a lesbian. Although sometimes I think that would make life easier. But you can't make a quiche out of a bowl of cereal, and my middle name is Froot Loop. (Well, it was, before I went Gluten Free. Now it's Chex. But Froot Loop sounds better, so we'll go with that.)

What caused the Great Giveup of 2009? We'll call him Spike. See, Spike and I dated about a year and a half ago for a few months. Things were going great! And then I got the best dump line I've ever gotten: "Now that my confidence is up, I'd like to see what else is out there."

Fast forward a year. He and I are getting along again. He calls me a couple of times, and asks if I want to go see a movie. Great! I repeat the mantra to myself - "this is only friends hanging out...this is only friends hanging out..."

Midway through the movie, I notice movement out of the corner of my eye. It's his hand, creeping closer to mine, the way we did in seventh grade. You know, the ol' brush up against the other person's pinky and "Oh well, we're here, might as well hold hands."

It was weird. It was holding-hands-with-my-brother weird.

Maybe there's still something there, I told myself. I did pine after this guy for awhile. So when he invited me over for dinner one evening, I accepted.

Again, the hand thing. I asked him to pause the movie and said, "Hey, what's going on here? Are we...?" He said, "You know, sometimes in life it's good to have a mulligan."

Well that's true. I can understand wanting a second chance with me. I am that awesome.

But as we're sitting there, holding hands, something wasn't right.

A few days later, he called me. I opened my cell, before realizing who called. "Oh crap," I muttered, reflexively flipping the phone shut. I spent the evening torn between hoping he hadn't heard my "oh crap", and deciding whether or not to return his call.

I finally did what any confrontation-adverse person would do - I sent him an email.

"I don't get the feeling that you actually want to be with me," I wrote. "It seems like you're bored, and I happen to be around. It's like you'd just be biding your time until something better came along."

I got back a response, which I wasn't really expecting. I wasn't expecting the exact wording, either:

"Wow, you're pretty good!"

But, this experience has been good for me. I learned my instincts on men can be trusted. I was spot on with my feelings. And, now I don't have to hang out with him or return his calls if I don't want to. Can you imagine the guilt I'd feel if he called in the middle of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"? I mean, call him back, snoopy, call him, watch snoopy.

Eh, that's a no-brainer. Everyone knows that THIS year the Great Pumpkin will rise out of the pumpkin patch.

Evolution of Entitlement

I got a major rejection this week. (No, not by a guy. Rejection from the male species has long since been relegated to the "I got a hangnail" category of disappointment.) My manuscript for my spy-thriller novel got rejected by what is arguably the biggest literary agency in America.

Damn! Double-damn. I'm bummed. I worked crazy hard on that book, and both of my parents loved it! Yeah, whatever, you say. Your parents? Not exactly unbiased sources. You would be correct in regards to my mom. She actually wore the macaroni necklaces I made her in grade school.

My father, on the other hand, calls a spade a spade. When I played the trumpet in high school, he was not my biggest fan. He knew I didn't have the chops for playing the trumpet long before I had come to terms with that, and the fact that I took my playing so ridiculously seriously added to his skeptical listening of my performances. With my writing, on the other hand, he's right there with Mom, believing in me, and supporting me by being proof-reader and holey-ideas man.

My point is this: my dad is a smart guy. If he thinks something is worthwhile, he's usually right. Besides salmon. There's really no good reason to eat fish. Two days after eating fish, you can still smell it in the shower, emanating from your pores. I think sucking on cloves of garlic produces less stink.

So I'm bummed. I'm working crazy hard on the plotting for the next book and finishing up the rewrite of my memoir. Through this, I wanted to watch TV.

Wednesday nights give me grief. Do I watch "Glee" and DVR "Criminal Minds"? Do I DVR "Glee" and watch "Criminal Minds" later with my parents? If I had a DVR that worked like the rest of the world's DVRs, I could watch one and record the other. Unfortunately, after miniature verbal warfare with DirecTV over the breakage of my last DVR (which I LEASE from them...), I consider myself lucky to have a DVR at all.

I settled on DVR-ing "Criminal Minds" and watching "Glee" in my craft room. No big deal, except my craft room is a bastion of activity. Just "sitting" in that room is akin to being adrift in the middle of the Atlantic and not paddling, despite your environment telling you that you should probably get to work. Impossible.

As I cut the materials for a series of pre-made scrapbooks I'm going to sell at mom's craft shows this year, I pouted.

Then I realized how stupid my pouting is. Ten years ago, we didn't have this problem. If we were lucky, we had a VCR which recorded programs while we were out of the house. Being out of the house, we were not taping one and watching the other. We were out of the house. Now, we want to record three shows simultaneously, watch them without commercials, all while never leaving our sofas.

Is this okay? Who are we turning into if we think we can walk into Baskin Robbins and have a sample of all 31 ice creams? We have to decide. Decisions are good. They build character. Believing I'm entitled to everything just because I'm aware of the existance of everything is pretty Kanye-West-ish of me. I need to decide what I want, and then I need to work for it.

What I want is to be a success at what I love. I'm making a choice - I choose to be a success.

I will turn off the TV and work at my writing.

After "Glee" is over.