my sister is visiting with her family so doctor mig is out for the next coupla weeks.
if anything beats little kids with jetlag, i don't know what it is.
Everybody's bitching about our cold, rainy summer here but I like it. I left my umbrella at home this morning and pocketed my sunglasses instead, not because I'm an optimist, but because doing that works well to jinx the weather into raining all day.
So far so good.
It's not a summer this year, it's some new season. A season of lounge music, which I only recently discovered, to my everlasting pleasure. Driving in the rain this morning, laid back music threading perfectly with the beat of the windshield wipers I thought about the deer who haven't revealed themselves in months, preferring the deep woods this time of year. Thought about them and there two does were, grazing in a field by the freeway, nut brown in the rain.
Then a Portishead number came on the car stereo to top it off. And then, in town, the garbage truck in front of me turned off and got out of my way.
I like this new season, but it needs a name.
Many people write to me, asking me, Mig, they ask, I'm invited to a diplomatic reception, how should I behave?
Alpha and I were at such a reception recently, and I paid special-close attention this time to be able to pass on useful, tested advice rather than theoretical blather.
Personally, I prefer whining but it wasn't getting me anywhere and then I read this quote in a caption under a picture of Sir Karl Popper ["inventor of sex enhancer" joke goes here] where he says something about life being a process of problem-solving and that reminded me of something else he said, about how we learn through our mistakes and all that tipped me over the edge into the abyss of Trying Something New:
Rephrase whine as concrete problem --> identify possible solution --> implement possible solution --> record level of success, failure --> record whether this solves the whine, or whether further problems or better solutions must be solved/implemented.
Or: Dissatisfaction with appearance. Possible solution: Lose weight. Which leads to another problem: How to lose weight. Possible solution: eat less and exercise more. Result: down four kilos so far, yay.
Or: Lousy conversationalist. Possible solution: incite convesation partners to talk about themselves. Result: works like a charm so far.
Girl: Mom, do men have a thing like menopause too?
Mom: Yes. Male menopause, yes.
Man: [Holds hands over ears]
Girl: Could that explain why dad is so cranky lately?
Mom: I suppose so, honey.
Man: Lalalalalala.
If your surname was Estomen, and you had a son, would you name him Norman?
At the newsstand, glossy advice: Summer of Sex, 56 Things You've Never Tried; Secrets to Great Abs; 40 Secret Rules of Being a Guy. On and on. It's like an industry.
Let's make a magazine. Put your headlines and or articles in the comments.
Those articles used to disappoint me until I stopped reading them. A load of pork, or air (perhaps both, like those bacon-rind things they sell in the store in the chips section) wrapped around an obvious core. Want great abs? Lose the fat and do a ton of situps. The secret of losing weight? Eat less. Quit smoking? Stop putting cigarettes in your mouth.
56 things you've never tried… that could be interesting, except that 56 things would not even be the tip of the iceberg of things I've never tried. I get embarrassed stuffing the turkey for Thanksgiving, man. I'll leave it to someone else to guess what those 56 things could be.
Secret rules of being a guy, though. What would those be? What have we observed about being a guy?
I was sitting around with a bunch of young diplomats from around the world the other day drinking coffee and talking about international relations.
I looked, but was unable to find a post about the actual assembly of our large wading pool anywhere in my archives. So I took the old one apart and built another one exactly the same on the same spot this weekend.
It's been very wet here this summer and the wall along the stairs leading from the backyard into the cellar has been damp. We thought maybe the pool was leaking. So we thought about replacing it. The metal side of the pool was a little bent in one spot, and we found one small hole in the lining which I fixed but still. It occurred to us that maybe the pool wasn't the problem after all, just the wet weather. Later we even became convinced of this, but by this time it was too late, we were too suspicious of the pool and it had to go.
We had this image in our heads of the pool exploding when filled, and inundating our cellar.
So I took it apart. Then I made the spot as perfectly level as I could, with a gentle incline towards the neighbors' backyard, so if it ever did explode, they would get the water.
New pools were on sale at the hardware store. However, my wife insisted I get one of the blanket things you put underneath to protect the vinyl lining, and they cost an extra €55. Just for a blanket thing. What a racket.
Perfectly level. Got the little metal track-thing assembled that the walls fit into. Alpha, Beta and Gamma helped me put up the wall and I got the ends bolted together. Alpha had suggested getting more people to help, but these would have been her relatives, and I did not have the nervous wherewithall this weekend to handle their involvement in such a complicated undertaking.
"Shouldn't you get the clothespins to hold the lining to the edge while you get it straight?" Alpha asks me.
"What for? I have you guys to hold it," I say. Girls.
This was around 7 PM, maybe 7.30. Estimated time to completion: 45 minutes, tops.
8.45 PM: The last of what look like 100 clothespins is in place. I am standing in the middle of the wading pool. A garden hose is slowly filling the pool with ice-cold water. The women are standing around the pool, holding the edges of the wall to keep it from doing anything fishy. "Gosh, take a look at that storm front," Alpha says. I look, but don't notice it at first because it's so enormous, like the Death Star only bigger and blacker, against the nearly black sky.
9.30 PM: The lining is arranged perfectly. The water is up around my ankles. I have begun to slip the plastic clamping sleeve around the top rim of the pool. Its function is to secure the vinyl lining, but it keeps popping off, so it is temporarily held on by the clothespins now. "Dad?" Gamma says. "Yes honey?" "Is the water cold?" "It's not so bad once your feet go numb," I say. The mosquitos have found us.
10.00 PM: All the lights in the house are turned on so that we can see something, but it doesn't help much, about two candles' worth. I'm trying to figure out how to work the metal track thing that goes around the top rim of the pool to hold the plastic clamping sleeve in place. It is a system of wider and narrower metal elements that clip over the plastic sleeve and then slide into one another, only the question is, are you supposed to clip them over the sleeve individually and then slide them into one another afterwards, or assemble the entire ring beforehand and then clip it on all at once? If it's the former, who's strong enough to slide the little fuckers into each other afterwards since they hold like steel once clipped on and how do you work the final piece; if it's the latter, how do you hold the ring without it bending and kinking? And the ends fit well enough into each other in theory, but they don't seem to want to mate in actual practice, at least in the dark.
"Do we have any flashlights with working batteries?" I ask. It is three hours past Gamma's bedtime and something has made her cry. Alpha is comforting her. Beta brings two small flashlights, the tiniest ones Maglite makes, and shines a dim orange dot onto the ends of the metal track I am trying to get to mate.
"What am I?" Beta asks.
"Not now, honey," I say. Something in my voice prevents her from pressing.
10.30 PM: Top rim in place. Alpha is in the house putting Gamma to bed finally. Beta and I inspect our handiwork. The water is between my ankles and knees. It feels warm, which concerns me, although I decide permanent nerve damage is unlikely. "Look, dad, the wall of the pool has popped out of the track thing on the bottom."
I have this image of the pool bursting again. The place where the wall has popped out is on the side by our cellar stairs. I wiggle the wall and press down and press out at the bottom with my big toe (gently so as not to damage the lining) and it goes back into the track. Whew.
It pops back out when I release pressure.
I get it back in. It pops out in another place six feet away.
Beta and I go back and forth between the two spots. When we fix one, it pops out in the other spot.
"Do you ever feel as if you're being punished by Zeus?" she asks.
"Eh?"
"Zeus had the best punishments, where some terrible thing gets repeated over and over," she says.
"Eh, nah," I say.
11.15 PM: I climb out of the pool and turn off the water. Tomorrow is another day. Beta and I go into the house and drink some tea with Alpha.
Epilogue: The following day I figured out that the wall wasn't staying in the track because the track was too low at that point - I had overlooked a low spot in the sand. When I filled it with sand and rocks, it raised the track to the right level and the wall stayed in. The filter/pump is now mounted and the pool is nearly full. Hopefully if it bursts, it'll all go into the neighbor's yard.
Also, I built another house for the hedgehogs. A duplex this time, with feeding/sleeping quarters separated by a wall and separate entrances. I figured if there were just one door and an interior hallway connecting the two rooms, they might stay indoors all the time and never get any fresh air. We may eventually move some of them to a safer place in the woods, and so they'll need a house of their own, is the idea.
Also, I broke the mirror on the medicine cabinet this morning. I was plugging in my hairdryer and the whole shebang fell off the hooks holding it up and it crashed down onto the sink, breaking the glass lampshade over the halogen light on the top of it and sending this crack diagonally across the mirror. I stood there for a minute, looking at my dopey expression in the mirror now 6 inches from my face. "The Mirror Crack'ed," I thought. I vacuumed up the glass. This woke up Alpha, who came downstairs and said, "The Mirror Crack'ed, eh?"
"This'll make it a lot easier to change the little halogen bulb when it burns out," I said.
My native guide takes me to a secluded location known for hedge-hog sightings. We put out food and hide in our blind. (all pictures link to larger popup images).
Soon, two emerge from their lair: a mother and a young one.
Then the remaining three young hedge-hogs emerge and start wolfing down the food. They can be distinguished by the colors of their snouts, which range from dark to light. Albino hedge-hogs have been sighted in Austria, where they are relatively common, but none of these are albinos. One of the young ones has the habit of climbing completely into the food dish and standing on the food, which I conclude he does in order to have more for himself. The little runt is the last one to get any food, spending the first several minutes jockeying for position.
We are quite surprised when a fifth young hedge-hog emerges from the lair, since we only moved four to the backyard from their burrow in front of our house. No idea where this little guy came from. We assume the mother remembered him and moved him from the burrow to the back yard one night after we went to bed.
Eventually, the hedge-hogs notice the guy taking pictures of them a foot from their dish, and I back off so as not to stress them out.
When you call into work from home and one of the hot secretaries answers, don't expect your wife to appreciate all the different levels of irony when you purr into the phone, "hey beautiful, this is Mig."
