Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

If anybody reading this has some tools better than the high quality ones I bought in the dollar section of Target

and likes to smash shit to pieces, have I got a job for you!

I dunno what the hell it is (but git mah pitcher beside it!)(Laurie, you’re prolly the only one who will get that reference), but I found it in my back yard shed when I moved in.

At first, I thought it was a dog house. But it has no entrance. Then I thought mebbe it was a bird house. But, again, no holes. I flipped it over and found nuthin’. Except spiders, natch. And I beat them all to hell with a broom while fear-dancing around it. Lucky my back yard has a privacy fence around it, eh?

Best I can figger is that it was the decoration on the house’s or the garage’s roof at some point in the past. Although it’s not shaped to fit on a roof. Unless some previous roof was flat. Beats me.

In any case, I gotta get rid of it to free up space in the shed. See, I am inheriting some exercise equipment and am going to set up a gym in the garage, so I need to move some stuff I have in the garage now into the shed, instead. That means the gnome home–or whatever it is–hasta go.

My cheap-ass wrench won’t keep its grip tightened so I can’t loosen the nuts. If I hadda mallet, I’d just smash the shit out of it. So, y’know, if your toolkit is better equipped than mine (and whose isn’t?), feel free to drop by and dismantle this thing for me. There’s plenty of beer in the fridge.

Okay, so I get home tonight (finally–after having crop-dusted over hill and dale across Southwestern Ontario, shopping for living room furniture on the way home from work) and open up the freezer to take something out to bbq for dinner tonight and–W!T!F!–it looks like it has hailed in my freezer. There’s half-frozen water icelets everywhere and a lotta stuff feels only half-frozen. Befuddled, I empty the freezer into the sink, lamenting over how it’s too damned bad I hosted Father’s Day dinner last weekend, since it appeared that I would have enough unthawed steaks and chicken breasts and rack of lamb to do it (again) this weekend. So much for all those great sales I took advantage of over the past couple of weeks. Fucksakes.

I go get an armload of towels to sop it up.

And notice the front plate of the furnace is off.

Now, this week has been a mite chilly. And a couple nights ago I tried to turn the gas furnace on for the first time since moving in and found that there was no heat coming up through the grates. The blower was blowing but it was blowing chilly air up into my furrowed brow as I stood over the grate, perplexedly looking down at it… as if I thought that if it could see my disappointment it would right itself. Well, I knew that my new gas account was up and active (I should know, since I work for the fuggin gas company !!). After all, I have a gas water heater, too, and there’s been no shortage of hot water since I moved in at the beginning of the month. So all I could conclude was that there was certainly gas coming into the house but it wasn’t getting any further than the water heater. Some valve must be closed or the furnace’s pilot light must be out. Which is fine and dandy and prolly easy to fix if you aren’t ascairt of blowing up your new house. Which I am.

So this sounded like A Job For Dad!

In the meantime, I would just sleep in socks and nestle in between the feather bed beneath me and the duvet on top of me. All cozy and warm, no biggie.

Anyhow, when I discovered Dad had been here today, I gave my parents a call to see 1. why the front plate of the furnace was still off, and 2. if they were aware of a power outage ’round here.

1. Dad couldn’t find the pilot light (this is significant, since my Dad has dealt with gas furnaces his whole adult life, so if he couldn’t find it, sure as shit I wouldn’t've found it) so I will hafta call the gas company (my gas company… the gas company I work for, that is) and have a service call to show me where the frickin pilot light is. 2. Yes, the power had been off while they were here. And now I had a freezer full of unfrozen or half-frozen meat.

*sigh*

But all of that is worth it for this, which I snapped after having cleaned up the freezer and gone out for a walk to clear my head…

BBQ at my place this weekend.

Yes, I will eventually get around to sitting myself down to tell you about my domestication but, at this point, I am finding little time for it and energy being expended elsewhere. I will be relieved to finally settle into my new home but right now I’m still feeling around in the dark (well… not literally–I did manage to set up the utilities!).

After a rain storm this evening, I went out for a walk along the lakeshore in the gloaming and took my camera.

You know there is a reason why I have been so quiet lately…

I will tellya all about it soon. Just ain’t had time yet.

In the meantime, lissen to this and picture me dancing around my livingroom… My very own livingroom.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the telephone?

Hate it, hate it, h!a!t!e! it.

The sound of a ringing phone is anathema to me. It sets my teeth on edge. Doesn’t matter if it’s ye olde fashioned bell ring or one o’ them newfangled song rings. Even hearing somebody’s phone whose ringer is set to vibrate jitterbug across their desk will do it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s my phone or somebody else’s or even a phone in a film or on tv—s’all the same to me.

“Answer it, answer it, a!n!s!w!e!r! it,” I theatrically wave my fist in the direction of the accursed ring.

And, oh, am I relieved when the bell tolls not for me.

What I have is not a phobia. I’m not ascairt of the damned things. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever received extraordinarily bad news over the device which has subsequently made me afraid it’s gonna be similarly awful news whenever it rings. It’s also not a resentment that I have towards the intrusion into whatever I’m doing at the time. I mean, if I’m busy having sex dinner when it rings, that’s what voicemail is for, right?

What I have is just an aversion. The source of it, I do not know for sure. I think I can partly trace it back to a time in the late 70s, when I hadda friend who got a phone jack installed in her washroom. The first time I called her and she answered it in there… eww. I don’t wanna talk on the phone to somebody who’s sittin’ on the can. Please, no. (Incidentally, I am not a washroom-sharer, in case the last coupla sentences didn’t make that clear. While sharing a shower or a bath with a lover is certainly fun fine with me, I remember I once hadda bf who expected to also be able to come in and shave while I was peeing or to come in to poop while I was in the shower, and lemme tellya he was sorely disappointed. “Omigawd, get the fuck outta here, youse!”) With the advent of the cordless phone, of course, all bets were off. I mean, who knew where the person on the other end of the line was or what they were doing?! Egads.

It’s weird to think back to the 70s and 80s when I useta have hours-long phone convos with friends. (I also had a coupla pen pals back then, and our weekly letters were routinely 20 or 30 hand-written pages long. With a history like that, you’d think I’d be able to update this fuggin thing more often, wouldn’t you?) ‘Cause something certainly turned me off that. A phone convo that long nowadays would make me contemplate murder. Or mebbe even suicide. (Nah, not that. Murder for sure, tho.) I would try to think of all kinds of excuses to get off the phone. I wouldn’t care if they were transparent, either. Wanna go now. Buh-bye.

And as much as I dislike getting calls, having to make them also twists my mouth into a moue of distaste. If I can email you instead, I will. I think I do know the reason for this part of the phone aversion, though. It’s because I think I sound a lot more intelligent in writing than I do speaking (quit laughing!). I like the time that writing affords me to say what I mean. I don’t always get it right, but I think I get it right more often than not. Because I can take my time and think about it. That’s why I love email. It became my primary mode of communication with the folks back home when I was living down in Utah.

I wonder (as do you, I suspect) if some intensive psychotherapy might help… The so-called talking cure would be okay as long as I didn’t hafta do it over the telephone, I s’pose.

Add to all this the fact that I am a total Luddite when it comes to technology. I had one of Ma Bell’s ancient rotary dial telephones until approximately 1998.

Then I switched to a cordless. (I don’t know what came over me. Ah, the lure of modernity!) I had that same cordless phone ‘til January of this year, when its performance had grown so spotty that I hadda replace it before a scheduled job interview I had over the phone. At that point, I got another cordless phone. I still haven’t programmed any phone numbers into its speed dial. In fact, there are all kindsa buttons on it whose purpose I don’t know. And if having held onto a rotary dial almost into the 21st century isn’t enough to qualify me as a Luddite, I didn’t get a cellphone until 2005. Yes, you read that correctly: I didn’t get a cellphone ’til about a year ago. And I hardly ever used it. It really was just for emergencies. Like if my car broke down. Or for those inevitable times (read: every time) when I was travelling and my flight was delayed or cancelled and I hadda phone to let the people meeting me at the airport know I’d be late (”Yes, again.”) Or—because I had dialup down in Utah and was always online—folks could call my cellphone (when I remembered to turn it on, that is) if they hadda reach me at home. If they were among the (very) few people to whom I’d given the number, that is. I got one of those pay-as-you-go phones. I would get a 20-minute card every coupla months and never use up all the minutes on it. The service didn’t extend to Canada, so I was left without a cellphone when I moved back here. O, tragedy!

As you can prolly guess, I wasn’t really in a big hurry to get another one. So my parents lent me theirs. I would like to point out that they use theirs about as often as I used mine. For months I carried theirs with me to and from work. I never actually used it. But they started to hint that they would like to have it back so that they could (not) use it, themselves, again. For my birthday back in May they gave me money towards a new cellphone. Yesterday I bought one. (Yes, it took two months from the time they gave me the hint gift to the time I actually got around to getting a phone. How long did I actually shop for one? About 20 minutes. Because I just don’t care what it can or can’t do.)

Got another one of those pay-as-you-go ones.

The only person who’s used it so far was the sales clerk at the Bell Mobility store, who made a call on it to the store phone just to make sure he’d programmed it correctly. I got 10 free minutes with the phone. That should last awhile.

If, after all this kvetching, you actually want my new number, email me and I’ll give it to you.