How to Disappear Completely

Two weeks tomorrow.

I spend most of the day clearing out the office, going through all of the drawers and little corners where things collect. I go through every pocket thoroughly, even when I get so weary of the task that I want nothing more than to close the drawer back up, put the lid back on the box, come back to it tomorrow. I sort through every stack of paper, pull down every picture and postcard off of the memo board, read every letter and birthday card. Many of them go into a box in the garage. I cannot bring myself to get rid of them, but I am compelled to pull all of them down.

I move around the rest of the house, but there isn't much left anyway. One drawer in the buffet and half a dozen snapshots in frames. I change out all but two of the pictures. If my printer worked, it would all have been done today. I resolve to find another printer tomorrow. I clear out the buffet, and there isn't even anything significant enough for me to set aside for him. Expired coupons and a handful of screws. Only clutter.

I wander around again with a home staging eye. Have I missed anything? If someone new walked through, someone who had never met us together, would they have any idea? Did I leave a note tacked on the refrigerator, or some little trinket that hinted at a marriage? But no, aside from those two photos on the stairs, there is nothing.

I have erased him.

A Conversation via Text Message #2

August 28, 2011 - Operation: Absent Accountant Boy, day 5 -

Me: Deadbolt done, but the door’s giving me a little trouble.

Doc: Good news on the deadbolt! Which door – garage to outside world, or laundry to garage??

Me: Laundry to garage. The mechanism is too long, so the latch is sticking out. Wonder if it’s adjustable. Reading directions now.

Me: “Enlarge hole with file if necessary”? You f&$kers! F&$kity f&$k f&$k f&$k your f&$king file! I should probably stop and get a bite to eat, huh?

Doc: Which hole do you have to enlarge, btw?

Me: The round one. I think it has to be slightly more oblong so that the knob and the latch will fit.

Doc: That’s a big hole to make bigger. Does it have to be lots bigger?

Me: Figuring that out now. Weird how it doesn’t just work. The old and new are both Weslock.

Me: Ah! There is an adjustment. Yay!

Doc: Phew!!! That’s good news.

Me: Well, don’t get too excited, because I can’t figure it out. :-(

Me: Except that I just did. What is it with doorknobs and bad instructions???

Doc: Kind of like IKEA instructions. :-) Glad you got it, tho.

Me: I just pierced my own nose with a screwdriver. No kidding. Please come over.

Doc: O jesus.


You might be wondering how I managed to pierce my own nose, from the inside out, with a screwdriver while installing a doorknob. Here's the deal. I was trying to lever the mounting plate loose with a pair of slotted screwdrivers, because I didn’t realize that I could take the handle and the rose off after I’d snapped them into place - not having tried on the old knobs, because it was easier to cut the roses off with tin snips than to read the directions - and the smaller screwdriver snapped back and…you know what? It doesn’t make much sense when I try to explain it. The important part was that I pierced my nose from the inside out with a screwdriver, staunched the copious bleeding with a shop towel full of ice, then went looking for a bigger screwdriver so that I could exact my revenge on the doorknob. And by "copious bleeding" I mean "it won't stop long enough for me to tell if I've torn my whole nostril away from my face, so I guess we just keep going about our business and apply pressure". Which is what I did. Hardcore.

I was victorious, by the way. The new knob looks and works great, and my nose healed without too much trouble. I thought about popping a stud through there while it was open, a sort of jaunty reminder of my accomplishments, but the hole closed up too quicky.

When Accountant Boy saw the post on Facebook, he commented "Please for the love of God STOP! Somebody go over to our house and lock the tool chest!" I could almost hear him screaming from Australia. Sensitive to the fact that he might worry, being all the way on the other side of the world while I did God-knows-what to myself and the house, I managed to stay injury-free for the remainder of his trip. I got a lot of nagging projects tackled so that we wouldn't have to think about them every weekend.

I think he liked all of the work I did during Operation: AAA. I hope he did. It's hard to tell. Things have gone a little strange. But that's not today's story.

One-sleeve Wonder

So exciting! So very exciting! Yaaaaaay!

"What," you may be asking. "What is so exciting? Did you finish the Tweedy Aran Cardigan already? How unusually productive of you. Congratulations! Is the just a closeup of the whole thing?"

No, not exactly.

"Oh, yeah. It does look like it's not seamed. Is that all that's left? Where's the rest of it?"

Just the sleeve.

"Yes....just the sleeve to sew up, and that's why you're so excited?"

It's just the first sleeve. I'm only as far as the first sleeve.

"Oh. Well. Hmmm."

But I'm super excited to say that I got this much done, because now I know that there's hope. It seems as though it's taking forever for me to get through even a few rows a day. Binding off that sleeve was the high point of my week. Which is kind of sad. Look, it was exciting, O.K.? Just go with it.


Here's the odd thing. When Winston reviewed this yarn last week, he brought up the apparent color difference between my yarn and the picture on the website. Look at how pink it looks under this light. It's just about the color on the website. This colorway does not look this pink in any other light I've had it in, either at home or in my office, day or night.

The reason I'm pushing so hard to get most of it done by the middle of February is that I need to know if I'm going to need more. If I know that I'm going to run out, then I'll go to Stitches at the end of the month and talk with the Black Water Abbey folks. That would be my only reason for going to Stitches this year, as I'm still working through yarns I bought there six years ago. This sleeve took about three ounces, which is about 3/4 of the ball. I have six balls total.


This is the light that's throwing the pink flare on the yarn. It's two plates of glass sandwiching what looks like really heavy soldering wire, with two dozen little white lights poking down through the top of it. It's creepy from above, like a bunch of wires plugging into the head of the Borg queen, but luckily I'm not tall enough to see it from that angle. This is the same light that I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, the one that makes my skin look warm. It's odd, because the light looks so white that it seems like it would make everything look cooler, but it turns out that the opposite is true.

Stupid Things I Miss, Part 1

There are certain things that were just better at my old house.

I love my new house. I love my neighborhood, and my view of Mount Diablo. I love that Accountant Boy isn't in constant danger of bumping into walls as he walks around. Our old house had four bedrooms and two bathrooms, each with a doorway, tightly compressed into 1200 square feet. Every time he turned a corner, he ran into a different corner. So it's nice to have a house that's more his scale. I didn't mind the smaller house, but I'm a foot shorter than he is. I could live in a hobbit cottage and be happy.

The new house is bigger, it's more modern, it has central heat and air, and it's welcoming and attractive. Yes, I'm glad we moved.

Still, some things were just better at the old house. When I used the hair dryer, the lights in the bathroom didn't dim. When I walked past the windows, I didn't feel the burning rays of the sun on my skin through the glass. The kitchen, well, that goes without saying. But you know what I really miss? The photo lighting.

I haven't found a good spot yet for photography, maybe because the windows don't have UV filtering glass, or maybe because the house faces west, so we don't get filtered midday sun. The beige carpet is a bland backdrop, and the lighting on the purple couches is either too bright or too dark, with no area in between. Also, the counters in the old house made a perfect backdrop. They were the color of warm sand, a color that complemented everything I put on them, and they were honed so they didn't produce a glare. The white tile in the new kitchen makes everything I place on it look sickly and grey.

I know it's stupid to miss my old house because of the lack of adequate knitwear-friendly photographic lighting. I know I could take my works-in-progress over there and photograph them, and we probably should go over there more than we do anyway, because if we did, we would have seen that I'd screwed up the timer on the irrigation system, and then lawn would still be alive, and Daisy and I wouldn't be having this regret-filled conversation about our mutual misunderstanding. ("I told you it looked bad!" "I thought you were talking about the patches where the puppy pees." "I was!" "But the whole lawn's dead!" "She pees in more than one place..." "How much do you think she pees?! She's not an elephant, for God's sake. It's the whole lawn!" "I TOLD you it looked bad...") We all thought we were giving the clearest answers, and none of us realized that we weren't asking the right questions, and we all feel really bad about it, and it's nothing that a generous amount of overseeding won't fix, and Ron the Gardener is disgusted with the lot of us. Long story short, we all killed the lawn, but never mind that now. We've gone off point. The point is, if I miss the beautiful lighting in my former front room, I should haul my ass and my knitting over there instead of complaining about it.

But what's this? Have I maybe stumbled onto something here? These shots look pretty good to me. I like the hue, I like the light levels. All I have to do is schedule my photo shoots for 8:17 a.m. and make sure whatever I'm shooting will fit on the bright orange top of my tiny bistro table. That pretty much limits me to two skeins of yarn, books, and maybe one crochet hook.

So here it is. A sample of the yarn that's going to make Violette le Duc and the book containing the pattern, set against the lovely orange backdrop of the cheapest round tablecloth I could find and Bed Bath and Beyond.


"Suzanne, did you just buy more yarn, right after saying you were done for the year?"

Yes. Don't judge. I'm having a bit of a time lately. And it was my birthday. Look! Over there! A puppy!

Blown Off Course

"Ahoy!"

"Oh, hey there, Pirate Skull Planter. What's up?"

"I be wantin' to thank ye, lass."

"For?"

"Fer the fine scarf ye've wrapped 'round me neck, o' course. It'll keep the icy spray of the sea from chillin' the bones. Might be a tad long, though. We're ya aimin' to make a neckerchief or replacement rope for the mainsail?"

Aww. He seems so happy. Nobody tell him that the long foundation chain isn't going to be a scarf for him. Also, nobody tell him that he doesn't actually sail or have a neck.

Yes, with only an hour's worth of work left on my Tagliatelle ribbed tank, I've abandoned it for another stumbling attempt at crochet. Daisy took it up a couple of weeks ago, and she's already producing beautiful, complicated work. She's currently about halfway done with the Butterfly Wrap from StitchDiva. I, on the other hand, keep making foundation chains and ripping them out again.

Complicating matters, because nothing's ever simple in Bananaland, I seem to have broken my middle finger on my right hand yet again. Remember when I said that I have no depth perception? Way back in high school, I broke my finger trying to catch a football, because I couldn't really tell where the football was in relation to my hand, and more importantly, to my face. It's a thing I do, panicking when something appears to be flying at speed toward my head. I throw whichever of my appendages is handy in the flying object's path.

"Aye! I've got better depth perception, though I be missing both eyes and wear a patch o'er one of the holes."

Thanks for that, Pirate Skull Planter. Anyway, a couple of weekends ago, I pulled a rolling cooler off of the top of the beer fridge and lost control of it. I kept it from landing on my head by deflecting it with the tip of my middle finger. The cooler had a bottle opener in it, and I wanted a beer, but I didn't want to go inside to get the opener off of the bar because I didn't want to wake up the dog. What? Like you've never almost clocked yourself in the head with picnic furniture because your dog was napping on your couch, but you really wanted a bottle of beer, even though you were standing inches away from a keg refrigerator and a freezer full of pint glasses. Yeah, like I'm the only one who's done that. Right.

I probably chipped my finger again, so it's kind of hard to knit because I curl my middle finger in around the needle, and there's not too much finger curling to be had right now. The last time I did something like this, during the landscaping madness of 2003, the hand specialist told me to soak my hand in warm, soapy water and simply wait for it to stop hurting. He suggested that I might accomplish this by washing dishes in the sink. I suggested that he might go soak his sexist head in that same sink, and we had a good laugh at each other's expenses.

That's what I get for wanting to celebrate my clean garage with a Sam Adams Summer Ale, I guess. I should have taken pictures of the garage. It looks spectacular. I've rearranged all of my craft supplies so that they fit in the cabinet that used to hang in my kitchen.


That center cabinet is on my garage floor, now. I keep all of the beading, knitting and craft supplies in it.

Oh, yes. We've done some work on the kitchen. I haven't talked about that at all, and since I'm being fueled by too little sleep and an extra-strong cup of tea this morning, I feel like talking about it now.


We went crazy a few weeks ago and did a little work on the bland kitchen. We tried out a couple of colors before deciding that we'd already found the one we liked, and it was all over the walls of our old house. "Why do we keep trying to make it different? We know what we like." Now we have another gallon of paint that we know we don't like sitting out in the reorganized garage, but never mind about that now.


You know the really crazy part? I'm actually starting to like this kitchen more than the old one. It's bright, even though the color on the walls is called Burgundy Black. The electric cooktop is easier to use and clean that the gas. I'm actually finding that I don't mind the tiny oven. It heats up fast because there's not much room for air in there. I can't roast a very big turkey, but I only try to do that once a year anyway. It'd be nice to have better cabinets and countertops, and maybe a vent fan, but we're doing alright without those things.

The paint and new lighting were less than $250, even including the gallon of Celestial Yellow that we're never going to use. The kitchen remodel at our old house cost about four hundred times that much. I think we might be getting smarter.

Maybe it's the caffeine talking, but I'm in a good mood about the whole thing. I feel like it's finally becoming our house now that we have the time and energy to put our stamp on it. I love having everything organized and clean, no dead spaces for spiders and vermin to hang out. Next up? The hedges along the side yard. Me, the broken finger on my trigger-squeezing hand, the two-foot blades of my electric hedge trimmer, and dangling power cords. What could possibly go wrong?

The Haps

Behold the 'Mo!


Ah, yeah. It's coming along nicely.

We're at the halfway mark, which means there's still plenty of time to get in on the action. It's tax deductible, and it's an important cause, both for the research and for the education. If you don't have a few bucks to give, please at least give the men in your life a little nudge to get tested for it. I had a guy come up to me at work yesterday and ask me what a prostate was. He wasn't kidding. "Would I know if I had one?" Oh, dude. I can't even explain it to you without getting sent to HR, but yes, you most likely have a prostate. Maybe I'm more aware of the issue because my grandfather died from prostate cancer, and my dad's dying from prostate cancer, and so many other men I know have had it. It's amazing to me that it's not something that every man knows about and gets tested for.

I'm almost done with the first front of Sienna, although I'm pretty sure I managed to screw up my improvised shaping. I'm going with it anyway because, like Big Guy, I'm all about moving forward. I don't have pictures of it yet.

So many fascinating things happening in Bananaland! We moved onto the friendliest street in Contra Costa County. Our new neighbors sold us one of their keg refrigerators, so now we have beer on tap in our garage.

My parents are getting remarried in three weeks and we're inviting two hundred people to the wedding. I've now found a reason to get back into a physical training regime. I'm planning on wearing a dress that absolutely does not fit me as of this moment.

I took the train down to see them last week, and my mom lost track of what time I was supposed to arrive, so I sat at the Hanford train station for two hours. I met some lovely people and learned valuable life lessons. I learned that, while "I'm black and you're white, and we get along fine, right?", it's just not possible for blacks and whites to get along with Latinos because, in the words of my new friend Anthony, "wetbacks won't ever give you a dollar, man." I also learned that I have something called "woman ways", and if I'd really needed another dollar to call my mom from the payphone, I could have used said "ways" to get it. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of Anthony, Miss Budweiser-in-a-Big-Gulp or the Latino gentleman who denied Anthony his very reasonable request for money, because I didn't want to take out my camera in front of them.

Instead, please content yourself with this lovely shot of Mount Diablo, taken from my very own bedroom window just this morning. Sure, the keg refrigerator and the bonfires in the courtyard are nice, but this is really why we moved.

Banditos

So I haven't said much about the new house. It's somewhat like what I do with knitting. "I'll take a picture of my progress. Well, maybe I'd better finish the sleeve first. O.K., now I'll talk about it. On second thought, maybe I'll wait to post about it until after I've seamed the body."

I'm doing the same thing with the house. I didn't want to put up any pictures before we were in escrow, because they might not have accepted our offer. I didn't want to put up any pictures before the home inspection, because we might have been so horrified by the home inspection that we didn't take the house. At this point, there are very few things that could stop us. I don't think it's going to hurt to post a picture or two.

The picture above is obviously the view into the kitchen. It's not the Award Winning Kitchen, but it's bright and pleasant, and I think with a little paint and some time to re-learn how to use electric appliances, we'll be just fine.


Here are three of the seven raccoons that wandered along the fence during the home inspection. They looked like a happy troupe. What's not clear in this picture is that there is a drainage culvert below the fence, and several feet of terraced hillside between the culvert and the decks. I had this vision of Lucy racing madly toward the fence to chase the wild creatures, falling off the terraces and breaking her leg in the cement drainage ditch. We'll have to fence in the upper part of the yard for her. Also, my often imperiled compost worms are going to be put in jeapardy once more. I'm hoping a fifteen pound barbell weight on the lid of their bin will keep them safe.

There are more pictures, but I think I'm going to hold them back for now. Don't want to jinx it.

Glass Table Gator

"You guys? Hey, you guys? You know what I really like? I like you, and I like Buddy, even though he wants to claw my face off, and I like my rope, and I like you, and I really like El Pollo Loco, so I was thinking that maybe you could drop some chicken under the table, you know, if you wanted to do that, because that would make me really, really happy. By the way, this is Lucy. Umm...hi!"

Oh, such bad, bad habits we've stopped actively discouraging in her this summer. She does this thing where she gets as flat onto the floor as she possibly can be, then follows our movements with just her eyes. "Aww, but look at her! She's so cute! And she has cancer! Give her half of your dinner, just this once. We'll start making her obey again tomorrow."

Nothing new on the house front, except that the trouble in the mortgage market is holding us up. If a high tide raises all boats, the inverse is also true. This current ebb is stranding the whole fleet. Without going too far into it, I'll just say that if Accountant Boy and I can't get a reasonable rate on a home loan right now, nobody can.

I'm only an hour away from finishing the chimera that was once Shaped Lace Tee/Krista/Bella. All that's left is weaving in the ends. More on this later.

Inner Monologues

From left to right:

"Ughhhh..."

"Hmmmmph."

"He-e-e-e-y!"

"That fill flash is going to make me look like Satan. Wait a tick. Maybe I AM Satan. Who's to say I'm not? I wonder if any of these people know that they're in my presence. Glowing red eyes, supremely bad attitude, distrust of any food that can be prefaced with the phrase "spicy buffalo-style"...no, that doesn't make me Satan. That makes me French. I wonder if any of these people know I'm French?"

* * * * *

The routine, she is blown all to Hell and gone.

Accountant Boy and I have decided that, as beautiful as our little house has become over the past few years, we're never going to stop referring to it as our "little" house. Deciding that we were, in fact, living in a charming starter home, and that we could afford to live in a home that doesn't need qualifiers like "starter" or "little", we launched a home search.

On our first weekend out, we fell hard for a multi-level contemporary house with a view of the valley. There's a long story about it being snatched from under our noses and then subsequently becoming available, only to then not hold up to our scrutiny and criticism. Let's just say she was pretty in the club lighting, not so pretty in the daylight. I've already bought a house with water damage, sewer problems and a stove that spills gas into the kitchen, thank you very much. I'm not falling for that shit twice. Anyway, the take-away from that story is that we spent a lot of time looking over the property report from old Coyote Ugly there, and it made us realize that we had some work to do on our own home before having it appraised or, God forbid, put on the market.

Work. That's what we've been doing for the last two weeks. Work. Trimming, patching, sanding, painting, grouting, pruning, scraping and cleaning. No knitting. No long cardio sessions at the gym. Very little cooking. Too many burritos. Not enough couch time with Buddy. (I am displeased, the Woman. Severely displeased. --BtC) Like I said, routine shot right to Hell. Now that the appraiser has come through, and it's looking somewhat likely that Daisy and Falstaff will be renting our current house once we move into a new one, some of the pressure is off. We can get back into the good routine we had going during the early months of summer, with the gym, good dinners, and a little relaxation every once in a while.

I hope to get back into some knitting sometime soon, maybe once I regain the use of my right thumb.

* * * * *

The guy just to the left of me in the above picture? That's my cousin. We'll call him Scooby, because when we were all very young, he loved to imitate Scooby-Doo. He's also my real estate agent. We love him, because he isn't trying to sell us a bill of goods along with a home. He gives us an honest opinion. "You think this place smells like cat piss?" "I don't know, Scoob. I think it just smells like closed-up, overly warm house." "Nah. This place is a cat-pisser. Onward!"