Gary brought home a kitchen banana hanger. He hasn't had a banana for months, but he explained, "IT HAD A MONKEY ON IT," so what can you do?
He also brought home bananas, so I embraced the banana hanger, if it gets him to eat bananas.
But then, what happens when the bananas are gone? If you are Gary, you hang a monster from the Mansions of Madness game on the banana hanger.
I had to counter. We have lots of monkeys aound here, since that was Gary's nickname in his youth.
Last week Gary bought this dog dish, because Gary feels his parents’ dog is no longer challenged by licking treats out of a Kong. Evidently pets like to chase their food around.
After it arrived I said, "You know who would love that? The raccoons." I know that our raccoons feel their lives are too easy.
He surprised me by saying, "I would love to use that. I should at least test it out."
"I just bought grapes."
It was surprisingly difficult.
We store extra toilet paper in the basement.
When Gary and I agreed on Wednesday night that there would be no exchange of Valentine’s gifts, I admit I thought forlornly of my fortieth birthday, when a put-upon florist deliverywoman staggered into my foyer under the weight of a Chinese vase full of forty roses, one for each year.
So when I heard him come home today I was surprised to see this:
He couldn’t decide between red or yellow, so he asked the floral department if they could put two different types of roses in one vase.
This is how he is. This is good. I asked if he was annoyed that I hadn’t purchased a surprise gift for him (because WE AGREED) and he said, “The red roses are for you and the yellow ones are for me.”
First I bought the German book. This time it was Gary's turn.
He was trying to buy a big salad bowl, because if he makes salad then I can't use the metal bowl to make pie crust (it's the smaller one).
He claims he measured. He claims it didn't cost that much. It cost FIFTY FIVE DOLLARS.
To be fair, he has no idea what a metal bowl costs, and there was nothing in the photo on Amazon to use for scale.
He tried to justify keeping it. I suggested we make an in-ground pool for the raccoons. Or, if we had a baby, we could use it to bathe the baby. Or chop it up in a salad.
Gary makes a salad for dinner sometimes. It's mainly olives and peppers and artichoke hearts and feta. And, a little lettuce. The salad fills up our biggest metal bowl and takes up half a refrigerator shelf. We go through it like an archaeological dig. It takes us over a week. Of course by that time the lettuce is limp but the rest is fine.
Usually that's acceptable to me, but last night Gary elected to go for some salad that was two weeks old.
"Throw that out!" I said. "That's rotten."
"NO IT'S FINE." He gestured at his bowl of salad that had a dressing of pink slime mold. Suit yourself, I thought.
He sat down by me. Salad goes in mouth. "ACK." Salad comes out of mouth. "THIS SALAD IS ROTTEN."
He got up to throw out all the salad and returned with "A SNACK TO GET THIS TASTE OUT OF MY MOUTH." Pretzels and Philadelphia cream cheese.
Pretzels go in mouth. "ACK." Pretzels come out of mouth. "THIS ISN'T CREAM CHEESE."
I can see how he thought the half-used stick of Crisco shortening was cream cheese: they are both wrapped in foil with blue lettering and measurement markings and stored in the catch-all refrigerator deli drawer. I felt for him.
Later he went in for a goodnight kiss. I am afraid I instinctively pulled away from the Pink Slime Mold Crisco mouth.
So, since Gary's adjusting to this new drug, I took over the shopping and cooking duties for the week.
Gary only buys meat that has been rendered down to the size and amount he wants. He won't take a skin off of a chicken breast, or a bone out of a pork chop. I, however, would be glad to butcher a whole cow to get what I want.
They won't sell me a cow. I asked nicely, though, and the butcher at the grocery let me have a seven pound brisket and a giant eye of round roast.
When I came home with all this meat ...
... I knew enough to tell Gary to stay out of the kitchen until I was done sawing and bagging and prepping it all. He was only able to avoid the kitchen for an hour before he came in and began howling about:
I have heard these complaints before. It's okay. It took hours, but we're all set for meat for the next few months, and everything's seasoned and waiting in sous-vide bags. I need that full larder feeling in the winter months, even if I have to play butcher to get it.
Gary before the thyroid drug:
It’s been a week now that Gary’s been medicated for his thyroid.
On the first day he was literally pounding on his skull from the seizure activity and panic attacks. I'm amazed he made it to day two.
For the next few days, he was fairly normal. Then, at two am, he burst in the room and announced he could feel his feet.
"MY FEET FELT WEIRD AND THEN I REALIZED I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO FEEL MY FEET FOR YEARS NOW AND NOW THEY'RE BACK! AND THIS FLOOR IS DIRTY!"
That went on a day ... and then other body parts started waking up. In answer to your question, no - the painful body parts. His chipped elbow started hurting again. His torn shoulder. And then today his lower back began acting up again.
Still, he's decided he rather be alive and in pain than sick and numb.
Today I asked why he wasn’t watching the news. “I DON’T KNOW! IT’S THE THYROID PILL! THE PILL TELLS ME WHAT TO DO!”
Gary this week:
Every year I plan to establish some new Christmas Tradition. This is because our current nuclear family traditions just aren't good enough. I want to establish something that we can still do in twenty years, and it won't seem like Christmas otherwise.
This year I felt like we needed to add a Christmas Breakfast tradition. Something we'd never eat otherwise, like ... waffles.
To that end I purchased a waffle maker which winged its way to me two days before Christmas. This was my official Christmas present, which I ordered, paid for, and wrapped.
I thought: Fatten up the Christmas Waffles! Ring in the Waffles with Fried Chicken baked in. Lay on the bacon and the craisins!
And then, slowly, I tried and failed all number of fancy waffles. Waffles with blueberries are not like pancakes with blueberries, because the berries squish, burst and make everything too damp. The hash browns in the waffle maker were an epic fail, probably because I didn't look at any instructions. The cornmeal waffles were too sweet and dense. I didn't even try the marshmallow and chocolate ones.
The best waffles were the first ones out of the waffle maker. They were heaven, though the dimensions were not quite perfect.
I don't want to see another waffle for a long time, so that makes this an ideal Christmas tradition.
And now on to the the worst part of Christmas day: the part that's just like any other day.
This year's ornaments memorialize the beloved Toto toilet and the new black-and-white infrared wildlife camera. The camera has begun to fail already. I'm sure it wasn't designed to take 600 photos a night. No deer have been captured yet, but the challenge is what makes it fun.
"Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms." - Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, my favorite book
I try to live by the quote above, but I confess to you, Dear Reader, in the last week there have been two occasions in which feelings grabbed the reins and we were chasm-bound. In both cases, Gary stood up for Reason. This is not the natural order in our house.
Reason vs Feelings 1: The Heat
The great room is drafty. It has all the windows, and in winter it is cold. I like to turn up the heat in the whole house because the great room is half the house and the cold makes me feel like a little wounded child. Gary said, “PUT ON SOCKS WHY WOULD WE HEAT UP THE WHOLE HOUSE WHEN YOU COULD PUT ON SOCKS AND THE BATHROOM GETS TOO HOT IF THE HOUSE IS WARM!” I put on socks. Reason 1, Feelings 0.
Reason vs Feelings 2: The Tupperware
The pantry shelf devoted to the flour palette looked unkempt and disorganized.
I went on the Great Tupperware eBay Buying Binge to get storage containers. Gary said, “YOU KNOW THAT EVERY TIME YOU ORGANIZE THINGS YOU END UP TAKING MORE SPACE BECAUSE THE ORGANIZATION THINGS TAKE UP SPACE THEMSELVES SO YOU END UP WITH LESS SPACE!”
This is true. And Gary calls the way I organize the pantry Tupperware Tetris. But, look:
And the labels of the lesser-used back flours are visible from beneath.
So tidy.
Reason 0, Feelings 1.
Anne and Marcia asked if I wanted to go see Handel’s Messiah with them. In preparation, I studied up in Wikipedia. After reading that “Messiah is an English-language oratorio composed in 1741 by George Frideric Handel,” I thought, “well that can’t be right, America wasn’t even founded until 1776,” which is so wrong in at least two ways, if not more.
When I advised Gary that I’d made plans to go see Handel’s Messiah, out of courtesy I asked him if that was something he had planned to do with me.
”I HATE the Messiah!” Gary exclaimed, risking plagues of frogs and boils.
“Oh come on. Who hates the Messiah?”
”You didn’t play the trumpet in high school. I did, and every Christmas every church needed a trumpet player when they did the Messiah. I hate that thing.”
So, here is the stage setup at the Messiah Saturday night.
That looks pretty heavy on the strings, right? Do you see a brass section? No? Looks suspicious.
About a third of the way in, just when I was thinking, “Hmph! All this business about playing the trumpet in the Messiah is utter bull,” two trumpeters snuck in from a door on the right, played for about two minutes, and then disappeared. I almost laughed out loud. I imagined Gary patiently waiting half an hour to play one song and appreciated how it must have felt for him in his teens.
Of course, the main trumpeter re-emerged in the second act because there’s an entire piece written for and about trumpets.
I had a good time imagining high school Gary putting a Herb Alpert spin on that.
We have been playing one of the new-style board games The Kids Play Today. If you don't know: Dungeons and Dragons, which was popular when I was in high school, has heavily influenced today's games, and even the simplest modern game is extraordinarily complex.
We bought one called Mansions of Madness. which is odd in that when I first played it I disliked it. I ended up with the Insane Card, and lets just say I'd had enough insanity in my family on that particular day anyway.
So when we play, we can't go Insane. House Rules. Also known as Cheating. Or, also known as Enjoying the Game. Believe me, it is still plenty hard without the Insanity plaguing you.
Other House Rules:
Take as many steps as you want on your turn.
Take as many turns as you want before the penalty turn.
Give up one of your special tokens, and as a result one symbol on the multi-symbol dice is as good as another.
Fly through walls on the "board" - which is customized for every iteration of the game. (Building the board is my favorite part.)
Use anything you like as your game token. If you look closely at left bottom corner of the board above, Gary is the green plastic monster and I am the silver toilet above him.
The most important rule is that you must read the instructions that guide you through every round out loud, and that each character's voice be read in a unique accent. It SLAYS me hearing Gary try to sound like a Croatian woman. I tried to coach him.
Me: "It's like Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Mooz end skwrill."
Gary: "Moose and squirrel."
Me: "No. Mooz end skwrill."
Gary: "Moss and skworl. "
Me: "Leesin. Leeeesin. Mooooooz end skwril. Mooz -"
Gary: "Mooz n skwi - no, I can't. You just do it."
Strangely, even though we cheat, we have yet to win. All we've been able to do is escape with our lives.
Gary and I have been waiting to take to the streets. We are prepared: the instant Mueller is fired we will drop what we are doing and run downtown to protest.
Well, the day after Sessions was fired, Rachel Maddow told us the Time Is Now, or rather the Time Is the Next Day right in the middle of my doctor's appointment.
We figured the 5:00 protest would last an hour, at least. That's why we were surprised when we got downtown at 5:45 and saw this:
Maybe fifty people? They were just holding signs and eliciting honks. We decided instead to exercise our free right to go to the restaurant across the street and use the bathroom and eat dinner. We thought things might pick up, and if it did we would hear the noise, eat quickly, and join in.
When we got there, all the diners at Caleco's were a buzz about the extremely loud protest that had ruined their dinners. I heard a group complaining while Gary was in the bathroom, then while we were eating I overheard a woman at the next table saying:
"But what were they protesting? I asked one of them, but he wouldn't answer me. Really? If you're going to be that loud, be proud." Her group didn't have an answer.
Because I am an idiot, I caught the woman's eye and said, "I know why."
"Why?" she said, "Is it a Saint Louis thing?"
"Oh no," Gary interrupted (if you can interrupt an eavesdropping), "They're protesting that the President fired the Attorney General and hired someone else instead of allowing the deputy to take the Attorney General's place."
"So it's not a Saint Louis thing." said the woman.
"But isn't that his right?" asked the woman's husband. "He's the President. It's his choice."
Gary went on to explain that it's not, the Justice department is separate and that appointment has to be approved by the Senate, and before he actually said the words "checks and balances" he controlled himself. Argument avoided.
Of course, after we headed home I discovered the argument was not over, it continued in absentia because Gary still had the urge to convince them, even though they were miles away.
No problem. Gary knew to shut it down at the time. Civility triumphed.
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