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October 24, 2008 | 2 Comments

What a difference a year makes

…or more precisely, eight and a half months. Back last January, when Susanne was being courted by the college that later hired her, I had a call from an administrator at the college who was interested in my resume. Originally, my journal post went something like this:

I got a call from the College that wants to bring Susanne on board next fall. The voice mail had the name of a person and said she was the head of advancement and then asked me to call back. Not knowing what the hell “advancement” meant (am I not advanced enough? I do walk on two legs, after all, and I haven’t dragged my knuckles on the floor in years), I figured she was a head hunter or some such. I called her back. I got her voice mail. It went like this:

“Hi, this is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of Advancement at XX College. Please leave the date and time you called, and your name and number, and I’ll call you at my earliest opportunity. Thank you. *cough*

Hi, this is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of [pause]

Hi, this is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of Advancement Services at XX College. Please leave the date and time you called, and I’ll call you at my earliest opportunity. Thanks.

This is Betsy K—-, Director of the Department of Advancement Services at XX College. Please leave your name and number, and the time and date that you called. I will call you at my earliest opportunity. Thank you.”

I swear, she recorded the outgoing message SEVEN TIMES. I waited patiently, trying not to laugh in the phone’s microphone, because of course I had no idea at that point just when the beep would begin. And so I wondered:

1. how could she not realize she was saving 27 messages?
2. why has nobody told her yet?

Anyway, I did indeed leave my name, number, time and date of call. She called me back. She offered me a job as her assistant, basically, but I said we could talk in a few days since she only had about 10 minutes to go over things with me.

Really? Wow. I am kind of at a loss for words. I don’t even understand the job duties because she was so inarticulate. It has something to do with data reporting, SQL queries, and institutional endowment. Those are my words. Hers were more like, databases, project management, wow, and this college is cool.

Fast forward to today. Limping through the administration building looking for the ID office so I can go to the campus gym and library, I see a familiar name on one of the doors. It’s her! Rampant outgoing message leaver! I try to casually assess the woman sitting at the desk. She doesn’t look at all like I’d pictured — in my mind’s eye I saw a nervous woman with tight hair, a la Bree Van De Kamp. This woman was dressed like a college student in black stretch pants, a green sweater, and penny loafers. She had an office three times the size of my last cube, and for those former SSA colleagues paying attention, a name plate on her door. (Note to SSA: since you’ve already paid for it, feel free to send me my name plate whenever it finally arrives. You’ve got my address already!)

I couldn’t help myself. Could this earnest outgoing message leaving woman be interesting to talk to? Did she repeat everything she had to say 7 times? Could the number 7 be like, a divine number for her?

“Honey, I need you to go to the store. Could you go to the store for me? I need some things from the store, so how about you stop by there? Dear, this is really important, I need you to swing by the store. So if you could pick up a few items for me from the store, that would be great. Just please go to the store today. Hey, you know what would be great — stopping by the store today!”

Okay, somehow I’ve made this woman become my mother. Hmm.

Anyway, I poked my head in and introduced myself, and she remembered me from last winter. After the awkward, “no no, I haven’t found a job yet” moment, we chatted about Walla Walla and what is and isn’t in it. No knishes, bagels, whitefish or any other cuisine a good boy from New Jersey would crave in that 3 a.m. in the morning suddenly way. One, count it, one, liquor store. For 26,000 people. She was friendly and nice and putting a face to the answering machine message and phone calls did a lot to make her more human. And I was glad I met her, even if I still can’t envision myself working for her. And there is the issue of I continue not to have any idea what her job is, or what mine might have been.

Just another day in Wallyworld!

October 22, 2008 | 0 Comments

Back in the high life again

The airline industry is just not what it used to be. I know I’m not saying anything people don’t already know, but reading headlines about paying for each checked bag and not getting a tiny package of two mini-pretzels anymore is also not the same as living with the changes.

Take overhead containers on the planes themselves. There’s just no way to get your overnight bag in them, because everyone else’s overnight bags are already stuffed into them. I bet you could fit an olympic-sized swimming pool in the cargo areas at this point because all of our crap is sitting over our heads. Anything not to pay another $15 for a trip in a flying gas can.

I also want to ask: how much are the airlines saving on the peanuts and pretzels? Okay, okay, the answer is out there — $650,000. This multi-billion dollar industry is hurting, I understand, but when the flights are packed together and you’re hobbling through an airport on one bad leg and one that sounds like a bowl of Rice Crispies, with no time to get even the most depressing burger from Burger King Express (isn’t it already a scaled-down fast food restaurant? what the hell does “express” mean?), a bag of a few pretzels for your 5-hour flight is suddenly critically important. And sure, I could spend $9 on a cup of sulfurized fruit, yogurt, and granola, but the 10 hours of feeling stupid for paying top dollar for crap food doesn’t seem worth it.

After oversleeping past my 3:30 a.m. wake up, I groggily looked at my cell phone and screamed silently as I saw it was now 5:37. My flight was leaving Dulles Airport, site of the personally infamous 2005 Big Toe Mishap, 50 miles away from where I was. I cursed, stumbled to the computer and looked up the Airline’s customer service line. After 45 minutes of trying to explain I wanted to rebook my flight, I was told I had to go to the airport. Note to United Airlines: please redo your “help” protocol so you tell customers this information in the first 5 minutes and not the 45th!

I hopped in the rental car, along with the rest of the Beltway early morning rush hour traffic, and eventually I got to Dulles. I was happy to get on the plane, not so happy for the lack of leg room, and really not happy with my seatmate to the right. Seatmate to the Right had obviously showered not in water, as I hear is standard (see last post), but in tea tree oil and eucalyptus oil. She smelled like she’d screwed a koala, seriously, or like she was taking the best-defense-is-a-good-offense approach to the whole anti-perfume movement. I couldn’t even look out the window because putting my nostrils two inches closer to her body made me overwhelmed with the powerfully bad smell. It was like sitting next to an Aveda store after an earthquake. That flight was 5 and a half hours, people. Five and a half hours of TEA TREE OIL. And just to note — there is no bloody point to huffing tea tree oil, unless you want a bad headache in the middle of your forehead. So boys and girls, just say no to tea tree oil huffing, mkay?

My flight from Seattle to Spokane was less perfumatic, more turbulent. We had a flight attendant who had clearly previously been a performer at Cirque du Soleil, for she had amazing balance and control as the propellor plane dipped and weaved and bounced like it was Oscar de la Hoya in a fight. I could tell we were close to Walla Walla because

1. at 23,000 feet you can practically read the license plates on the cars below

2. I could almost smell the Bad Broccoli Plant

3. the wheat fields began appearing, like such:

 

wheat fields

wheat fields

Living in Washington for 8 weeks, it was almost familiar, though not really. But now I’m home, olfactory senses intact, big toe unbroken, and back in the arms of my honey.

Next post: getting through the Dulles Airport is a lot harder than it would seem to be.

October 15, 2008 | 0 Comments

A very not advisable way to wake up in the morning

How nice that cell phones come equipped with alarms you can set. So it was that my little LG Rumor phone woke us up at 5:30 so I could take Susanne to the airport. She’s set to teach tonight, after she flies to Denver, changes planes, lands in Spokane, drives 3 hours to Walla Walla and gets to exhale a couple of times before the debate begins.

I turned around at BWI and drove back to the lovely Michael’s house, checked email, and fell back asleep at 7:30. At 11 I groggily got up, walked through the closet and then connected guest bathroom. Turn on the hot and cold taps to the shower. Shuffle in. Stand under the water, fumbling for the shower gel. Then I transferred into “awake” from the semi-dream space of an odd-hour nap. (I call those “poison naps,” but that’s for another story.)

I am practiced at turning off the hot and cold taps together, for I greatly detest having a last spurt of too-hot or too-cold water just before I’m toweling off. Hey, it’s my shower, I get to be as controlling as I want. So, both taps closed. But water was still coming out the top of the shower. My brain was a little slow in computing that something was wrong. I opened and closed the cold water tap. Still flowing. I noticed that the pipe itself was turning, not just the handle. Uh-oh. Before I could really compute how to fix the problem, the faucet blew out of the wall like a torpedo and suddenly a hard jet of water was slamming across the shower and all over the wall, and then it took the 90 degree angle and raced across the bathroom onto the floor. It looked like this:

 

The shower unplugged

The shower unplugged

Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. But it was quite the forceful thick stream of water! I called out to Michael’s roommate, who himself took a moment to realize someone was calling his name, and a little desperately. He gently knocked on the bathroom door. I was in the shower holding the water off with my back, draping the curtain over the front of me, in some stupid attempt to preserve my regular level of modesty. 

“Come in!”

He heard the pounding surf and asked what happened. I held up the faucet and four-inch section of pipe.

“Oh, shit,” he said. My thoughts exactly.

I asked him to find the water cut-off for the condo, since trying to put the pipe back in place didn’t work at all, what with the pound force of pressure working against me. I could hear him looking everywhere for the valve, next to the washer/dryer, the water heater, out on the back deck in the utility room. Nowhere. He thought maybe such a thing didn’t exist, but I’ve watched enough Holmes on Homes to know every house in America has a freaking cut-off valve for just such a water crisis. By this point I was standing outside the shower with my hand over the stream directing the water to the back corner of the shower stall, but the level of water was rising faster than the drain could take it away. Watching my left knee I moved a couple of towels onto the drenched floor to sop up the mess.

Michael’s roommate stuck his head back in the bathroom. “I can’t find it anywhere! He was starting to look a bit panicked. “Call Michael,” I shouted over the din. 

“I called his office three times.”

“Cell phone,” I shouted.

“Oh, right!” he shouted back at me.

At this point, 1.2 miles away, Michael saunters into his office, having a busy but productive morning at work. His assistant tells him his phone has been ringing off the hook. Michael also sees a message on his cell, and as he’s checking it, sees that his roommate has also been calling his desk. So he calls back, saying, “Hey there,” in a merry sing-song tone.

“No,” says the roommate, which at that moment became a shortcut for “stop talking and help me find the water cut off valve.”

For those of you unfamiliar with Michael, let me just say here that the word “nonplussed” came into existence in part because of him. For even when he’s livid, he’ll just tell you quietly that he is currently very angry, and that’s about it. If hothead is one polar extreme, Michael is fairly close to the other end.

He calmly directed his roommate as to the location of the cutoff, and I felt the water ease and then cease, dribbling out and then ending like a grizzly bear succumbing to a massive dose of tranquilizers from a scientist’s dart. 

I suppose this means I have not been a very good houseguest, so the plan now is to make a nice supper of lamb shank, roasted tomatoes and orzo, and a mixed green salad. I’ll need the water back on, of course.

October 14, 2008 | 0 Comments

Meanwhile…

Random assessment of things I’ve noticed since leaving W2 and visiting the DC Metro area:

1. It takes a hellishly long time to get out of the eastern half of Washington State, as if a stubborn forcefield is slowing us down, some kind of invisible quicksand we’ve found ourselves in. No, maybe it’s more like when you were a kid at the beach and you stood in the surf and sunk a quarter inch further into the sand with each crested wave. And then thinking that walking out of it when you were buried up to mid-calf would still be easy, but surprisingly wasn’t. It’s kind of like that.

 

Cute and fresh pumpkin

Cute and fresh pumpkin

2. Being away for 8 weeks and coming back isn’t really like returning after 8 years, but enough has changed to make me feel like I’ve lost track of the goings on here. New construction, new coffeeshop (Peregrine has replaced the thieving Murky Coffee on 7th SE), new headlines about people I don’t remember.

3. I’m getting good at rushing through the introductions so I can find out how everyone REALLY is.

4. Space is so much tighter here than in the west, but for this Easterner, tight space = comforting, and loose space = lonesome. I am trying to rewire my brain, but it’s challenging (see #1 for description of challenging).

5. I really miss my friends. I am trying not to see Walla Walla as a space in which I lack friends, income, the joys of a good job, the feeling of being successful and attached to the larger world, but without any friends, income, or job, this is difficult. Lea said to me yesterday that the universe gently suggests to us to take a break when we need one, and when we ignore the gentle suggestions, it pretty much forces us to take that break. I don’t disagree with her. I’m going to do my best to insert a structure into my day, but to give my knee the rehabilitation that it needs, get into my writing whether I’m any good at it or not, be there for Susanne as she adjusts to her new work environment, and see where all of that takes me. Being back in DC for a time has been good so far at helping me see how much stress I’ve lived with while I’ve lived here the past 11 years, and to see that W2 might really be a way to get some decompression from all of that.

6. Getting such decompression requires that I adjust my values from where they’ve been — focus more on family and relationships, and less on the tropes of DC success, which haven’t actually made me happy.

7. I love trees. Driving under canopies, driving through stocky rolling hills knowing I’m never more than 20 miles from a river, lake, or ocean. Hearing crickets at night. I want to find some terrain near where we now live that I can identify with. And I want to find new sounds that are native to W2, or that will make me feel like I’ve come home after a trip away.

8. I love watching Susanne get really into a conversation with someone. She sometimes holds back in the beginning, listening and making her judgments, and then several minutes in she starts the back and forth volley of ideas. I wonder if that’s how she plays tennis.

 

Eastern Market building

Eastern Market building

9. People outside DC really don’t understand the comraderie between people who work together to make things happen here. How “mavericks” don’t necessarily make things better, and how “outsiders” need to spend so much time getting to know people here — becoming insiders, essentially — that they don’t actually change the fundamental way the system works. I wish we’d all stop pretending that people who know how to make law and enact policy are bad people be definition. They’re people who are good at their jobs, and there’s nothing wrong with effectively governing a nation.

10. I really wish I’d have gotten to be here for the next inaugural walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe I’ll watch it like a football game that you mute so you don’t have to hear the insipid reporting on the play by play.

October 6, 2008 | 1 Comment

Cake and conversation

Susanne and I attended a potluck for members of her department at the College. We were tasked with providing the desserts, which indicated a few things, namely:

1. They must have known subconsciously to give this course to us, the cake-makers. We had not yet provided any confections to them.

2. They thought something like dessert was the easiest course to pass off, because most people just put oil and eggs into a bowl with mass market cake mix. Thus, they were trying to go easy on us.

3. They figured we’d all be too drunk after drinking Walla Walla wine to care if the dessert was passable or not.

Truthfully, Susanne volunteered us for dessert. But in her defense, she waited to see what others picked first, so somehow the desserts portion of the meal hung around during the selection process. Who would have expected that Dessert would be like the fat kid who doesn’t get called for kickball and is left standing there at the end pushing up his glasses looking miserable? But enough about me.

We showed up with an apple caramel cheesecake and a chocolate budino. I did not get a picture of the chocolate budino, unfortunately. I did, however, capture the cheesecake.

 

Caramel apple cheesecake

Caramel apple cheesecake

The potluck was nice, consisting of a cold quinoa salad, mixed greens, the standard but perennial favorite of cheese and crackers. There was also a vegetable enchilada casserole, Greek stew, shrimp pad thai, and a “hot dish,” which is verbiage for a Minnesotan casserole, which officially made it A Potluck from Around the World. They did indeed enjoy our offerings, and I think we achieved our goal of cementing a reputation for well cooked and baked delicacies. I know there’s a lot of “cementing” in front of us, but we’ve only just begun — we’re only 6 weeks into living here. There are a lot of good meals ahead of us.

Today Susanne and I went to our new favorite Colville Street Patisserie, and there we met two older ladies from town who struck up an interesting conversation about Social Security and disability. There’s something about a smaller town, perhaps, that lends itself to more intimate talk, for it is such that we discovered one of them receives an SSA disability check. Her friend said she’d remember my name because she lives in Everett, Washington. I suppose I have to get over there at some point and take a hokey picture next to the sign. When the woman from town said she got her first check three weeks after filing an application, I knew she must have a terminal condition. She was smiling, she was enjoying an eclair, and she said she was going to be happy for every day she has left. She’s taken in 37 foster children over the last 20 years, and we got into quite the discussion about how our country handles social services. It was an interesting mix of old-style conservatism (read: pull yourself up by your bootstraps) and an affection for children and their interests that smacked of veteran social worker. She clearly still wanted to make a difference, life by life. She certainly left an effect on me.

October 3, 2008 | 1 Comment

Welcome to Touch It

Let’s start with a poll. How would you pronounce the following word: Touchet. Would you say:

Too-SHAY, as in the French

TUH-shee, as in one’s derriere

TOUCH-it, if you were pretending not to understand French pronounciation

TOO-shee, just to put that option in the list (read, I have nothing witty to say about this)

 

If you picked the last choice, you win! The town of Touchet, Washington, is pronounced TOO-shee. Susanne and I wondered about “touch it” because we had driven through Havre, Montana, on the way into town, which the locals pronounce “HAVE-er. French, what’s that? No worries, they can call their villages whatever they like. Just don’t expect that out-of-towners will have any clue how to replicate the name.

 

 

Paper Mill

Paper Mill

Driving on Route 12 through Touchet toward the setting sun, you will at some point intersect the very pretty Columbia River. Unfortunately for the river, near the port of Walla Walla sits a paper mill and a slaughterhouse. For olfactory reasons I refuse to slow down long enough to investigate which of these creates the smell I am about to describe, or if there is some awful marriage of odors that creates such a cesspool of particulate that hangs in the air on the roadway, waiting for people to drive through, like an ambush of molecules. For there I am, traveling at 60 mph, looking at the pretty river and the still-fascinating windmill towers lined up on the tops of the hills, and then it hits me. It’s like three tons of broccoli were allowed to slowly rot and decay, the green of the flowerettes turning yellow and then brown, liquefying in a mass of death and abandonment. Paper mill my ass. I call it the Bad Broccoli plant, because honestly, it doesn’t smell like turned lettuce or sausage or groundhog. It’s bad broccoli. We make sure to shut off the air conditioning, close the windows, and then we cross our fingers and hope for the best.

 

And yes, it’s the only road out of town in that direction. So perhaps I should call it the Bad Broccoli Plant of Inevitability.

October 2, 2008 | 1 Comment

Image(ining) the possibilities

Well, so I met with the orthopedic on Tuesday to discuss the results of my MRI. The emergency room doctor had said that the probable issue was a dislocated kneecap with accompanying effusion (swelling), and the physician’s assistant out here in W2 said it was a likely meniscus tear. Turns out . . . drumroll, please, that I . . .

 

ACL tear on MRI scan

ACL tear on MRI scan

tore my ACL and my meniscus! So thoughtful of me to really go all the way and injure myself multiply in one fell swoop. Further, the fact that I’ve injured myself in two areas of the knee as seen on the MRI scan concerns the doc that there’s even more damage not evident until they see inside the knee during surgery. In any case, they can fix it. Because I tore clean through the ACL, it balled up in two places where it was attached to the bone, which is why it was immediately unstable — it was like trying to stand on two rubber balls stacked on top of each other. A totally torn ACL, however, tends to shrivel and dissolve inside the knee joint, leaving no remnant of itself, which explains why it’s actually been easier to walk, but sometimes feels unstable. The good news is I’m not in a lot of pain; the bad news is that now I’m asking more of all the remaining ligaments, tendons, muscles, and bones on that side, and I’m slowly wearing out my healthy knee on the other side.

We decided that I would work out in the pool at the local YMCA and on a stationary bicycle, dropping 10-20 pounds before having surgery in late November. And then I should be on the road to getting back to my old self! Except I’ll watch the crazy dance moves from my early 20s.

And now that I think of it, it’s really annoying that in all these years of avoiding skiing in order to protect my knees (seriously, does anyone give me more than 10 minutes before I go crashing down the side of a mountain), I still broke my knee! Sheesh!

The option we’re going to take is to use conditioned cadaver ligament for the replacement, since my other alternatives are to take ligaments from other parts of my body, which would limit me where we’ve taken it for this reconstruction. One of my friends worries that I’ll get ligament from a formerly “evil” person, and I have tried to tell her that I don’t think Cheney is officially dead yet. Let’s leave the Buffy subplots to the terrain of Joss Whedon’s mind, shall we?

October 1, 2008 | 4 Comments

Hunting the burger

 

Ice Burg take out

Ice Burg take out

So we figured, when we first set foot out in the prairie, that good meat would be easy to find. We must have, after all, driven past a couple hundred ranches, cattle auction houses, loading bays, and I know we went past a slaughterhouse because the smell sticks with you for at least half a mile. Meat, I presumed, would be tasty, well marbled, and as fresh as possible in this version of the universe. And although I made these presumptions, I didn’t come out here thinking, “hey, let’s compare burgers!” I discovered that in a town of 26,000, things like having “the best burger in town” take on a level of import not possible in larger towns of say, 500,000, where people have so many options it would be pointless to try to compare them all. Unless you were an editor for DCist, that is.

 

Thus without further ado, I relay the following:

1. Fast Eddie’s Drive-In — as noted in an earlier post, there are a lot of drive-ins and drive-throughs here. Eddie’s is 50s drive-in all the way except that the waitresses don’t roll out on skates. Eddie’s has a lot of items on its menu, which is posted conveniently on a white board that our intrepid reviewer attempted to read at the wrong time of day, as the sun was beaming mercilessly into his eyes. Said reviewer, however, did think to presume that cheeseburgers would be available as an option for patrons, and just went ahead and ordered that. The burger was a little on the small side, but the price point was in league with this, so not a big deal. It was piping hot, almost too hot to eat, and the lettuce wasn’t as crispy as it should have been, because it would take titanium lettuce to stand up to those Mercurian temperatures. Seriously I — I mean, the reviewer — could have probably worked a little nuclear fusion on the surface of the meat it was hot enough. The chocolate malt shake, on the other hand, was oh so refreshingly chilled, just thin enough to get through the straw without sucking up a lung in the process, and had just the right amount of Whopper. They should, in the reviewer’s opinion, be reminiscent of Whoppers without overpowering the user.

2. Ice Burg Drive-In — this is more a leisurely paced drive-through than a drive-in per se, as they will tell you to pull up to the window once you’ve ordered and they’re ready for you. So you can’t do your best Fred Flintstone impersonation with the food hanging off your window. The cheese on this burger was the best cheese all around, but honestly people, most Americans order cheeseburgers because we want extra lipids and flavor, and we figure, if you’re going to eat something as bad for you as a burger, you might as well throw those last shreds of caution to the wind and slap some cheese on it. We don’t order cheeseburgers thinking we’re going to get the best gruyere this side of the Atlantic (or Pacific, or wherever). The bun was way too big for the meat patty, making this reviewer chip away at the outer ring of bread, throwing it to the birds who had lined up for just such an opportunity. (This reviewer does not pretend to be original, see.) The vanilla shake was very, very thick, almost impossible to suck up the straw. In fact, after running into a grocery store and coming back into the car after 20 minutes, the shake was still too thick to drink. The taste was spot-on, but hello, one needs to be able to physically ingest the thing in order to ascertain its flavor.

3. Coffee Connection Cafe — There’s nothing here that even remotely suggests burgers, not in the name, anyway. This is a diner with three separate areas — a coffeehouse room, a room with computers one can rent, and a line of diner booths with a counter and stools. Free WiFi all throughout. And they have a much-touted bison burger. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “bison burger?!? But aren’t buffalo extinct?” Well, bison and buffalo are not the same, in fact. There are no buffalo in the North American continent. Actual buffalo, like water buffalo, are in Asia. According to Wikipedia, anyway. Bison are going strong in the West here. And bison meat is sweeter, leaner, and faster-cooking than cattle meat. Thus it is that we tried the bison burger here, and it is a good find/good eat. Thick on the bun, with a nice choice of cheeses (see earlier paragraph for instant contradiction), its only drawback is the automatic relish they secretly tuck under the meat. Relish? Relish is for middle-aged New Yorker men to get on their hotdogs so they can tell their wives that they had vegetables that day. Relish is not something for a nuanced meat like bison to have to contend with. So tell them to please, hold the relish. The shakes are fine for a diner that obviously doesn’t make many of them. Eddie’s shakes win this three-way contest hands down. But the Cafe Connection has the best burger so far.

Next up, MRI results, construction on the recycling center next door, and Everett Gets a Tooth.

September 25, 2008 | 0 Comments

Little stories, gone gently unsaid

 

Corner Market in Seattle

Corner Market in Seattle

 

 

“Interesting” is one of those words that can mean pretty much anything, but usually means nothing. Used as a conversational nudge, it means, “go on, I’m listening.” Said drawn out in the beginning, like, “iiiiiiiinteresting,” it means you just found something odd. Said after a pause, like, “that’s . . . interesting,” means you just found something really odd. Looking at the actual Webster’s definition, however, it simply means “holding the attention : arousing interest.”

So judge for yourself when I describe the following as arousing my interest:

1. The fellow who comes by the recycling center several times a day to scrounge through the materials to see if there’s anything he wants. So-marked treasures are piled into his wagon, which is attached to his 1950s bicycle. The most “interesting” thing about him is his outfit — always a dusty pair of overalls with no shirt underneath, so one can easily see just how filthy he is. I actually get concerned about him because he seems so duly dedicated and driftless. I wonder where he sleeps at night. 

 

The ceiling in question

The ceiling in question

2. The ceiling in the smallest bedroom of our Liar House is made of plaster. Okay, not so interesting. But when the plaster was in its infancy and still wet, someone drew all over it. There’s a tic-tac-toe board and a set of Olympic rings, the words “California,” Walla Walla,” and “Paula,” as if someone were documenting her own travel to this isolated village. Was it inscribed in a year of the Olympic games? We do know from a previous resident that it was there in 2002, but earlier than that, we have no idea.

3. There’s a small photo in our basement, a knock off of some cheap Olin Mills portrait. Four women of varying ages, all blonde, smiling a little too much like they hailed from Stepford, Massachusetts. No idea when that was left here, why it’s in the basement, of all places, if it’s a joke or placed ironically.

4. Tuesday is lawn moving day, which I presume will end shortly — probably when the college shuts off the automatic lawn sprinklers. Our band-playing neighbors next door have a large trampoline in the backyard. When the mowing guy comes by, he doesn’t drive up in one of those long-bed pickup trucks with a green “Landscaping” painted on the side. He arrives by street in his riding lawnmower, as if he pops up from the ground like our watering system, or possibly like a mechanized, humongous hedgehog. I’ve never actually seen him not sitting in the mower. Thus his strategy for moving the trampoline, which obviously blocks a big swath of lawn, is to ram it, head on, move where it recently had been, and then ram it from the other side. So the sound of this is amusing and a bit worrisome: mowmowmowmowBANGmowmowmowmowBANGBANGmowmowmowmowmow.

Those are just the top four interesting people and things in this corner of town. Perhaps next week I’ll move off campus with a few more mysteries.

Meanwhile, it’s clear I need to get out more often.

September 23, 2008 | 3 Comments

Idio(t)syncrasies

A few weeks ago Susanne and I ventured to a large banking institution to open a joint checking and savings account. I mean, we are married, after all, I suppose it’s time we join our moneys — even though, ahem, I have no income to speak of at the moment. I haven’t gotten desperate enough yet to start selling brownies and Shrinky-Dinks in front of the house, even though that pulled in a nice $2.85 for me weekly in the late 70s. I spent a lot of time making those Shrinky-Dinks, thank you very much, mostly traced from SuperMag and Scooby-Doo comics. There were also the little “shell people” I would craft after visits to the Jersey Shore, with googely eyes crazy glued to the tops to give them that little extra something. Those were my seasonal wares and were always gone by late September, so you had to get there quickly before they were snatched up, pipe cleaners and all.

So in the Bank of [insert country name here] we set up our accounts, and then had the banal joy of selecting debit card designs from a wonderful panoply of choices that would really say something about us as individuals. Oh, the variety was stunning — any particular baseball team we wanted, a full spectrum of national not-for-profit causes and organizations, scenic vistas of various regions across the country, the list was just endless, really. I imagine it would be akin to a Soviet-era Russian standing in the middle of Wegmans trying to select just one kind of potato chip. It blew our minds, really.

There were those that we could rule out quickly — nothing anti-choice or overly religious. Nothing with an animated character, lest German businesspeople scoff at us like they do in that American Express commercial (talk about advertising by snobbery!). Nothing falsely or extremely patriotic — because also, I am not one for breaking the Flag Code of the United States. The flag is the flag, and it’s not supposed to be represented except as a flag, for the love of Pete. And if you don’t believe me, here is the text from the U.S. Code:

 

§176. Respect for flag

No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, State flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor.

  • (a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
  • (b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
  • (c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
  • (d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general.
  • (e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.
  • (f) The flag should never be used as a covering for a ceiling.
  • (g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.
  • (h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
  • (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.
  • (j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.
  • The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.

 

Who’s patriotic now, huh? Okay, back to the story.
If all of our choices had been equal, I suppose we would have picked some innocuous card face, though we did intend all along to get something different so that we could easily identify the joint account cards from our individual account cards. The bank employee working with us pointed out that the Washington State University cards would give us 15% matching on our “Save the Change” program, and that tipped the balance for us. We ordered the WSU cards, which smartly bear the university’s logo, which is this:
Cougars logo

Cougars logo

Cute, right? I mean, sort of. How logo-y of it to use the letters from the institution to form the cougar, its mascot. Now for those of you unfamiliar with the situation, as I recently counted myself among all of you, there is this big big rivalry between the University of Washington alums and fans and those of the WSU set. University of Washington, or “U-Dub,” as they call themselves, are mostly western Washingtonians, and WSU folks are mostly easterners. If you’ve been following this blog closely (and don’t lie, I see my readership falling off in the last week, so you can’t fool me), you’ll remember that I’ve mentioned an east-side, west-side rift before. Seeing the Cougars logo apparently causes great happiness here in Walla Walla, because every fricking time I’ve pulled out the card over here, the person delivering our service exclaims, “Cougars!” At lunch last week at this little Internet cafe/diner (no really, it’s an Internet cafe and diner), the owner saw the card and clapped me on the shoulder, saying, “Everett, I didn’t know you were a Cougar! I learn something new about you every week!”
Oh buddy, if only you knew. If only. Cougar is the least of my surprises!
I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was just for a 15% match for three months from our craptastic bank. Well, I say craptastic, but at the rate the bank system is going, it will be the last one standing, and then it’ll be like that bad movie that had Sly Stallone in it where all the restaurants were gone except for Taco Bell and the 7-layer burrito and Chilito are the only things anyone eats anymore. It’ll be just like that.
I figured I didn’t want to destroy his happiness at seeing another Cougar in his midst. Besides, he’d walked away to go ring me up. But now it’s like a running joke — my days, rather on the boring side, punctuated by brief moments of exuberant “Cougars!” among my neighbors and people in this side of the state.
During our trip to Seattle last weekend, it was a different story, however, since that’s the west side of the state. I begged forgiveness when using it to pay for things, I pleaded ignorance of their long struggle against the truly inept and ignorant easterners who blithely voted against them in every election. They looked down their noses at me or sighed or said “it’s okay,” in that bored Seattle way that signals that it’s really not okay, take your awful Cougars card and get the hell out of our pretty store that sells Spanish haute cuisine preparation materials. Perhaps I should blame it on the rain — they get so much rain there it’s bound to curb your enthusiasm at some point.
It’s weird to be situated in the east, in the conservative part of the state, and have people be so instantaneously overjoyed by a slim piece of plastic, and attach their newfound happiness to me, just because I’m wielding it. I’m probably more of a Seattle kind of person than I am a Walla Walla person, long rows of vineyard or not, but to them I’m one of their kind because this is where I live now and this is the damn debit card I’m holding, and look how cute it is that I’m assimilating. Very weird. And in its own way, sweet.
Hydrangeas in Seattle

Hydrangeas in Seattle

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