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My Profile
Because I can't bear to eulogize Doug - 2008-08-19
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8:41 a.m. - 2008-07-22
I am amused. Sunday we went to the folk's house to swim and despite it being in the wane of the afternoon and a liberal coat of SPF 45 and the pool being mostly in the shade I got some color. Not burnt enough to hurt or blister, but I'm not copier paper white anymore either. Sheesh. Then yesterday after dinner Mick and I got jiggy with the pruning shears and took after some overgrown shrubbery. ("Nee!") The shears' handles are well-padded and I certainly wasn't snipping all that hard, but my fingers blistered up anyhow. I have become a delicate flower to end all delicate flowers. This is especially funny because on Friday after we helped MIL pick out her car Mick and I went to his gym. I went there to watch Mick and coo admiringly, but ended up having a go on some of the weight machines and made Mick's eyes bulge with the amount of weight and number of reps I did. "Baby, I knew you were strong but…wow!" When you can impress a semi-pro weight lifter you know you have some serious gym chops. So if I am a delicate flower I am obviously an exotic night blooming one that can strangle unwary jungle explorers in their sleep. Always a good thing. I have my office windows open for the first time in over a week. It's my usual habit to at open them before I go to bed so my stinky little cubby can get some fresh air during the night, but it's been too humid and stayed too hot in the overnight to shut down the a/c. Re-cooling the office in the morning would have taken too much time and too much juice. So it's nice this morning to look out the open windows and see the trimmed shrubbery and hear the birdies instead of being sealed up in here with drawn blinds and the window unit racketing and roaring in my ear. Makes me feel like part of the world again. I've missed the avian chorus and expect my favorite wild turkey hen and her ginormous brood to come by any minute now. 14 chicks! 14 grapefruit-sized fuzzy cuties I have dubbed 'the turklets'. I think my ex-husband has gone off his chump. When we were married he never gifted me with the usual lover's trinkets like flowers and bon-bons, a free-cycler before free-cycling was cool, Mike would occasionally drag home someone's cast off hunk of junk, lay it at my feet and proudly say, "Look what I got you!" Sometimes it was useful, but more often I was left goggle-eyed and dumbstruck over my mate's bizarre token of affection. Finally I'd stammer out, "Oh boy, my own cotton gin! Gee, how'd you know I'd been needing one of those?" (Hey, you do what you have to to keep your marriage going.) Recently Mike has been oddly cooperative and helpful. Passing strange, but I don't bother my head much about what's doing with him. After an extremely labor-intensive quarter century I've enjoyed the last couple years of giddy freedom from having to wonder what kind of nonsense and mess he's gotten himself into now. The ex is on his own to bungle, fumble, snafu and louse things up all by his lonesome. So imagine my surprise when Mick got home the other day and came into my office to ask why there was a washing machine sitting in the driveway next to the cellar door. A washing machine? Not a clue. The weather has been really weird lately but I'd never heard of it raining Maytags. I checked my phone and sure enough there was a message from the ex saying he'd 'brung me sumpfin'. That tone! That cotton gin note in his voice gave me the creeps. For certain I was glad enough to get another washer, the current one leaks and the barrel is rusted all to hell, but the days of him laying a dead gopher at my feet expecting praise are over. And from the sound of it the ex didn't think this was so at all. You'd think after two years he'd have found some new woman to gift with dead gophers and cotton gins, but like I said at the start, my ex has really come unbolted lately. Along with doing seriously strange shit like chopping firewood last week when it was 99 degrees and calling the house to ask if I knew where his wallet was, the ex has been seeking out Mick to strike up happy little guy-to-guy chats in the backyard. Now a cotton gin disguised as a washing machine. Off his chump. The ex is section 8. Looney tunes. Wouldn't it be just my luck if the state declared him incompetent I got stuck with custody of my nutty ex-husband?
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