Okay, be honest

DO I have a sign on my forehead that says, "crazy people come talk to me!"?? Do I? I do, don't I?

Saturday it was the Angry Onion Lady, tonight it was Crazy Laundromat Man.

I was in the laundromat waiting on my laundry. Normally I'd do that sitting in my car reading, but one of my dryers sounded like it was getting ready for lift-off and I wanted to keep an eye on it for possible trajectory in case I had to chase it down with my car and retrieve my unmentionables. So here I am, sitting quietly on a bench watching the dryer vibrate, when this large, spry old man comes up and starts talking at me.

It seems he had to get insurance to get his red truck licensed so he could carry "fast freight" because he already had his CDL and someone waved their hand in his direction so he got an American flag and put that on his truck and we'll just see how they like that because he's been serving this country his whole life ever since he was just a little boy when he was a G-man decoding secret files that somebody put in a suitcase and threw off a train and because of that 50,000 people died in one day. One day! (The suitcase/train/secret documents makes me think of something I once heard or read somewhere but I have no idea what or where.)

I smiled and nodded and very carefully avoided eye contact and the minute my dryers stopped I grabbed my slightly damp clothes and made a hasty exit.

Why me? One of the managers at Walmart says I look "sympathetic" and seem "nice" and "approachable". I have GOT to stop that!

Ziss Boom Bah!

Also POW, BAM, and Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Definitely Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

Yes, I finally got that pesky electricity hooked up in my new house. The smoke has cleared, there doesn't seem to be any lasting damage to the breaker box and my heart beat has returned to something approaching normal.

Next: Plumbing! :D

The Perils of Produce

Yesterday I had a run in with an Angry Onion Lady. She came up while I was scraping old PLU stickers out of a bin liner with my fingernails and announced that "we have some questions about these onions back here!"

As near as I could tell she was alone, so I must assume she was either using the royal "we" or suffering some form of multiple personality disorder. Anyway . . . .

Answering questions about all things producian being part of my job, I followed her politely in spite of her agressive manner. She stopped in front of a display of bulk yellow onions and asked what kind they were. I told her they were yellow onions and she spun around and literally snarled at me. "I can see that!"

So why did you ask . . . ?

"That's what they are," I said, trying to pacify her. "They don't have another name. They're just yellow onions."

"Are they hot?"

"No, ma'am. The yellow onions are the mildest variety."

"I hate mild onions!"

At this point, I realize in retrospect, I should have said, 'Oh, in that case, they're hot. Thanks for asking. Have a nice day.' and gone back to my PLU stickers. But no! I stick around to try to be helpful.

She goes from there to a side rack stocked with bagged yellow onions. "What are these?"

I cringe. "Yellow onions."

"Are they hot?"

Oddly enough, putting onions in mesh bags does not change the flavor. Still, I probably should have said yes.

"No, yellow onions are the mildest onion."

"I hate mild onions!" she announced, dropping the bag into her shopping cart.

So you're buying them why . . . ?

"Yellow onions are what you generally cook with," I began, trying to clear things up.

She spun towards me and howled, "NO! I cook with hot onions. They make everything else taste better too!"

"Well," I said hesitantly, "maybe you'd prefer red onions, like you put on hamburgers. They tend to have more of a bite."

Picture a mad witch queen in a fairy tale. Picture her at the point where she's just about to defeat the lovely princess, ensnare the handsome prince and enslave the kingdom. I'm not talking Disney here. I mean a real Grimm fairy tale, with blood and torture and stuff. Picture the evil witch queen leaning forward, eyes gleaming with avarice, gnarled old hands twisted into grasping claws before her face, mouth gaping in a half-grin of anticipation, strands of spittle clinging to her chin.

Can you picture her?

She looks just a little less crazy than the Angry Onion Lady did at the mention of red onions.

"Yes! You have red onions? Where are they?"

"Well, we don't have them in bags," I apologized. "Just in bulk. They're right there."

I pointed to the red onions, in the bin next to the bagged yellow onions, which were identifiable by the fact that they were, well, red.

She followed my gaze and her face fell. She glared at me in fury and disbelief. "Pah! I don't want those red onions! I tried those things. They don't have any flavor." She looked me up and down in contempt. "Those aren't red onions. They're just red onions. When I say I want red onions I don't mean I want red onions, I mean I want red onions!"

I backed away slowly, careful not to make eye contact, and returned to my empty bin. I'd left a cart full of oranges there and I figured I could hide behind it and even use them as projectiles if it became necessary to defend myself. The last I saw of the Angry Onion Lady, she was stomping off between the apples and the citrus fruit muttering to herself. "Can't get good-tasting vegetables anymore! It's all this damned organic crap!"

Nothing she'd been anywhere near was organic, but I sure as heck wasn't going to say anything.

Know what she was like? Do you remember The Waltons? Remember how Grandma Walton was always sharp-tongued and snippy? Kind of crotchety-yet-lovable? Well, this woman was sort of like that. She was kind of crotchety-yet-not-lovable. More like crotchety-yet-a-total-bitch. She was even scarier than Cranky Mr. Cauliflower or The Evil Culligan man!

But, here's the thing. Reading this now, you're probably thinking I've exaggerated. I haven't. If anything, I've played down her attitude and speech. She really was that angry. About onions.

Chapter and Verse

Mindy Tarquini keeps telling me I need to write a non-fiction book about my experiences converting an Amish-built shed into a liveable cottage (before winter!). I haven't taken too many notes, but I have started a list of chapter headings (in no particular order):

• TRENCHES, and why you shouldn't dig them until you know for sure where they need to go.


• Why planning is the second thing you should do.


• TOOLS and how to lose them.


• Why you should respect electricity and what happens when you don't.


• The unfitness of wasps as subcontractors.


• Why it is important to measure FIRST, cut SECOND.


• 101 ways to hurt yourself without even trying.


• Slip-sliding away, or What happens when you try to install a submersible pump without having a clue what you're doing. (I haven't actually gotten to that part yet, so consider this a prophecy.)


• How many times do I have to give up before I can actually stop trying?


• Why it is better to have a first-aid kit in advance, than wish you'd had one in retrospect.


• The importance of clear-cut guidelines and why I wish I'd used some.


• The folly of shopping for electrical supplies without knowing exactly what you need.


• How to pretend it's someone else's fault when you're exchanging electrical supplies. ("I told the dog I thought I'd need a 100 amp breaker box, but he was just sure . . . .")


• What to say when your friends laugh at you.


• What to say when your cats laugh at you.


(Image from here.)


• 1001 excuses you can use for still not having the electricity hooked up.
• Power tools and how not to use them.


• And, finally, a handy glossary of swear words.

So, how's the project going? Uh, kind of like the search for Bin Laden. Nothing yet, but I keep hoping. :-/

Random Weirdness

I need to write Miss Manners and ask her how you can ask someone if they're an idiot without being rude. Walking down the Walmart lot to go to work last week I passed a truck with a logo which read "Signs Excetera". Seriously. Excetera. So, how far does one trust a sign company that can't spell its own name? But it occurred to me, wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, that maybe in some way that I can't figure, it's not a misspelling but rather a clever play on words. Maybe the owner's name is Excet? Or something. I'd ask, but I just don't know how to phrase the question.

In a book of ghost stories I came across a description of Block Island (extra points if you know what famous ghost story is connected with Block Island!) as looking like "an inverted pork chop". There's a right way up and a wrong way up for a pork chop?

I'm still working on getting my little cabin ready to move into. My various nephews' promised assistance has not materialized and I'm pretty much doing it all by myself. I am slowly accumulating things I need, though (got a good, slightly-used submersible pump last week!) and I figure every little bit of progress counts. I'm almost ready to finally look up the electricity. Little worried, though. My friend Chris explained exactly what I need to do and it sounds easy enough. But then he immediately launched into a story about how he almost electrocuted himself with a welder and a brush hog. :-[

This is the same guy who impaled himself on a tractor, took out the inseam of his jeans with a chainsaw, ran over his car with a skid loader and sank his truck. I swear I could write a book about the guys I work with! I'd call it, Fools Rush In With Power Tools Where Angels Fear To Tread.

Daddy

Sometime about 1959 or '60 my mother was living in Eugene, Oregon with her older half-brother. After twenty years of marriage, she'd finally left her abusive prick of a husband down in the Deep South, taken their eight children and moved away. Two decades of physical and emotional abuse had left her disillusioned with marriage and with men in general and she had determined that she was finished with the whole mess.

My uncle (whom I never met) was working as a mechanic at a shop that serviced the big logging trucks and one day he told her, "that logger I told you about, the one with the great big hands, lost his wife and now he's raising all those kids alone." Mom didn't remember him ever mentioning a logger with big hands, but she recalled this conversation later.

Some time after that (I'm not too clear on the timeline) Mom had moved into a house of her own. A couple named Harold and Margie lived up the street from her. Harold's sister had died of cancer and they kept her kids a lot while their father was working. Margie constantly sang the praises of her widowered brother-in-law, but Mom wasn't buying. Still, after a while she got curious enough to want to meet him. One day when she saw his car parked in front of their house she took a cup of sugar she'd never borrowed over to "return it" to Margie. That was the day my parents met.

Daddy was a big man, in every way: Physically big, big-hearted, great of spirit. Standing six foot two, he had to turn his shoulders to go through an ordinary doorway. You could drop a quarter through his wedding ring. And he was the kindest person I've ever met.

Children and animals adored him. Most of the pictures we have of him show him with a baby in his arms, a child on his lap, a cat on his shoulders and/or a dog at his feet. At one point we acquired a Shetland mare who'd come to us from an abusive home and had lost one eye. Dad was the only person who was ever able to approach her.

Though he'd never gone beyond the eighth grade, he was an intelligent person with a quick wit and an unexpectedly sharp sense of humor. (My mother told him once she was going to town to get bread. He replied, "okay, but don't hang my name on it.") He loved Louis L'Amour books and John Wayne movies (people have told me John Wayne reminds them of Dad), and hated cruelty, bigotry and injustice. He appreciated good comedy and was sucker for a happy ending, where the good guy gets the girl and the bad guy gets what's coming to him. I can still see him in his late seventies, when he was in the thrall of his last illness, sitting in his old recliner, bright eyes faded to a watery China blue, chuckling his deep, gentle chuckle at the end of some movie and surreptitiously wiping away tears.

If it sounds like I'm describing a saint, that's because in my mind, I am. I know he had flaws; that he wasn't perfect. He was human and never claimed to be anything else. But, whatever there was to detract from his sterling character, I cannot call it to mind, nor do I want to. In my memories he was all the best that a person can be: Kind, gentle, warm, wise, strong, safe, funny. Good. He died in April, 1991, after a lingering illness, at the age of 78.

I miss him still.

Time for the annual Cider Story

Cider is evil. Did you know that? Sure, it looks innocent, a rich, brown nectar sitting there on the shelf in clear plastic jugs, beckoning the unwary. But deep in its dark soul lurks dastardly and terrifying plots!

Okay, maybe not. But I am paranoid about cider, as everyone who works with me comes to find out each fall when the yearly pallet of Louisburg Apple Cider arrives in the store. But there is a reason for my paranoia, and it is this:

The first autumn I worked at Walmart I spilled 47 gallons of apple cider.

Actually, I didn't spill it. It spilled itself at me. I just got to clean it up. In the Walmart "spills and hazardous waste training module" it says that "spill in excess of 10 gallons are considered too big to be cleaned up by store employees". Don't you believe it! See, it happened like this:

We have a walk-in produce cooler that's about eight feet wide and about twelve feet deep, with wide steel shelving lining both sides. When the shelves are full, the excess is stored on wooden pallets down the center of the cooler, and there is almost always at least one pallet full of freight in the cooler. (Sometimes there are as many as three. If we get slammed with more than that we have to take over the meat prep room which is unpleasant because then we have to kidnap Glen, who bitches about it, and tie him up in the Culligan water softener cage. We'd take over the deli cooler, but those deli girls are just scary!)

Well, the first fall I worked produce we had a pallet full of cider against the back wall. The cider was stacked seven cases high with four one-gallon plastic jugs per case and we were down to two rows of cider with other things on the front of the pallet. None of us were aware that the bottom cases had gotten wet and that the only thing holding up the cider stacked against the wall on the left side was the stack in front of it. I took the cider from that stack out to fill the floor display, came back and the entire stack had collapsed. The cooler floor was littered with busted jugs, sopping cardboard and approximately 24 gallons of apple cider.

Obviously, I couldn't clean up the mess with the pallet in the way. I got a pallet jack (sort of a manual fork lift) and very carefully pulled the pallet out into the produce area in front of the door. I successfully maneuvered it past the floor drain right outside the cooler, swivelled it slowly and set it down ever so gently.

And POW! Another stack of cider went over!

That's how I spilled 47 gallons of apple cider. Two years have passed since then with no other major mishaps (we did have a couple of jugs explode last year, but that's only to be expected). I still don't trust the stuff, though. I know it's just sitting there . . . watching . . . biding its time . . . .