Several years ago, when we lived in South Dakota, Fuzzy and I spent a weekend hanging out in Minneapolis. We saw an ice show, ate sushi at a place called Origami, and hung out with a friend at the only branch of our favorite restaurant that exists (as far as I know) east of the Rockies. Or even east of the Sierras, for that matter.

On a sunny summer Sunday afternoon, we drove through Minneapolis, and, looking for a cafe, stumbled upon an art musem instead. I don’t remember which museum, only that there was a jazz band playing in a round room, and there was an exhibit of jade pieces. Fuzzy was enthralled by a three dimensional mural (there’s a name for this but it eludes me, just now) that included tigers, miniaturized but poised to defend or attack, depending on the viewer’s perspective. The sculpture that I was most drawn to was a jade representation of the Virgin Mary, with a translucent jade veil. At least, I think it was Mary, it’s quite possible I’m remembering it wrong. All I am certain of is that I was transfixed, and stared at it for what felt like hours, because it just touched me, in that inexplicable way that art has, of making itself felt.

Counterpoint to the beauty and serenity of those jade pieces: the vast majority of my neighbors sport cement statuary in their front yards. Some of the pieces are subtle: a rabbit tucked in the flower garden, some nearly-generic saint tucked in a niche, a bird bath, a fountain. These, I find whimisical. Some of my neighbors, however, fail to realize that while our houses are “Texas sized,” with the smallest being 1550 square feet (for sale on the end of my street, actually, 3/2.5 $116k), they are, by and large (mostly large), ordinary houses, not mansions, and so, when I notice the folks with lions flanking their walkways, I have to laugh. Especially since said stone beasties are generally out of proportion to the house they’re guarding – after all, no one here lives in the New York Public Library.

And then there are the folks with the cement poodle. I can’d decide if this is merely whimsical (like the rabbits and birdbaths) or absurd, because it’s life-sized, and sits (literally) on their lawn, facing out onto the corner. Mostly, I guess, I’m amused by my dog’s reaction to it. Zorro doesn’t ever notice it, but Cleo thinks it’s there to taunt her, and whenever our walks take us past this house, she goes into Alert mode, her tail curling over her back, her cheeks puffing out, a low growl simmering in her throat.

“Cleo,” I tell her. “It’s just a statue.”

But she never believes me.

I woke this morning with every muscle in my body screaming in pain, and a sinus headache making me dizzy and nauseous. Ibuprofen, stretching, sleep, and a really really long hot shower have since made everthing but the sinus headache go away, but I still felt yucky enough that when Fuzzy called to say he was going to dinner with guys from another site, I didn’t give him the chance to invite me to join. They went to a restaurant I’ve been dying to try. We’ll be going together for our anniversary, in a few weeks.

As for me, I had a quiet night, cuddling with dogs, and watching mindless movies (Laws of Attraction) and television (Sex and the City on On Demand (season 4)) – just the kind of night I needed, with no pressure to cook or tell Fuzzy how to cook, or have to entertain anyone.

I indulged in a glass of red wine.

Now, Fuzzy is home, and the dogs are no longer antsy, and I am cozy, and surrounded by striped cotton sheets, tons of pillows and a nautical blue quilt…and I’m feeling much better. There’s a lot to be said for theraputic escapism.

So, today on our walk, I took Zorro and Cleo out to the very edge of our neighborhood, to one of the houses closest to the through street that connects our development to civilization (aka Starbucks). Zorro wasn’t happy about this, as it was early evening by the time we left the house, and that meant actual cars on the streets. He doesn’t like cars. Or trucks. Especially trucks.

But we went that way because one of our neighbors who lives on that street has the most amazing lawn. Healthy, green, lush, with beautiful flowers. And I want to know who cares for it. You see, I’m having serious Lawn Envy and Garden Lust.

So, I left them a note, telling them that whenever we drove by I looked at their yard, and really loved it.

We shall see what happens.

In my job as a loan processor, and sometimes loan officer, I deal with a LOT of wholesale lenders. A lot. Most are pretty good, a few are so scary it’s beyond belief, and one or two are just phenominal.

My favorte lender EVER is a company in Novato, California, called 1st National. I’m pretty sure they bought out Sierra Pacific, at some point, because the website’s the same. But whatever. I love working with them. They’re always polite, they’re always responsive, and they have a staff that, while not always the most experienced, at least doesn’t make me feel like I’m training their underwriters for them.

On Thursday, I FedExed two loan files to underwriters. One loan went to 1st National, the other to Another Lender in the Same Building. They were similar files in identical stages of completeness. The file at 1st National is going into docs today. The one at the Other Lender won’t even be approved til Thursday. The market is not so busy that four-day turnaround times are usual or standard, and I’m annoyed.

The broker I did these files FOR isn’t a huge company. There’s one broker, and two part-time loan officers. They don’t generate a ton of business, but it’s enough…usually. Not enough that this company has a lot of clout with lenders, though, which is why I try to maintain relationships with the reps, via email and stuff. It helps. (Also it tends to result in me being gifted with lovely bottles of Beaujolais and Merlot at the holidays. Never a bad thing.)

So, I called the Other Lender, and asked for a rush, and they basically said, “Your broker almost never submits here; why should we bother rushing a file for you?” to which I answer, here, Because, by doing so it might convince us to use you MORE.

There’s a line in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, where Eliza tells Colonel Pickering, “…the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how shes treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

In similar fashion, 1st National treats every broker as if they were a top producer.

It’s really very wonderful.

I have a love-hate relationship with weekends. I love that Fuzzy is home, so we can do stuff together, I love that I don’t have to think about rates or documentation, and, just as I did as a child, I love staying up later than usual.

But I’m having a problem with weekends and water. It’s no secret that I’m not a great fan of drinking water. And I’m trying really hard to drink enough water, because I know it’s healthy. Weekdays are easy because, while my routine doesn’t LOOK like a routine from the outside, there’s enough structure there to keep me on track.

But weekends are brutal, because we sleep late, or are out of the house for long periods of time, so I don’t drink enough water, and by Monday morning I’m dehydrated, cranky, and groggy.

This is not fun.
And caffeine does not help.

So, I’m not writing anything chatty today. Just marking down that today I recognize that I need to drink more water on weekends.

It began like any other rainy Saturday – we lingered in bed far beyond the time when the alarm went off, not wanting to leave the comfort and warmth of cozy sheets and fluffy quilts, but then the dogs insisted that they needed to go out.

At 10:00 or so, we let Zorro and Cleo into the back yard.
At 10:15, Zorro returned, with a balloon for a face. I panicked, because he has bad teeth, and the swelling was similar to the swelling an abcessed tooth would have caused, and called the nearest vet, who said, “Oh, bring him in.”

I was not impressed with the vet, who wasn’t really listening to us, and didn’t even introduce himself, in person or on the phone, but he was gentle with the dog, treated him kindly, soothed him while he poked and prodded. Apparently he merely lacks people-skills. His diagnoses was “Yes, he does have bad teeth, but it’s not an abcess, probably more like an encounter with fire ants, and this is definitely an allergic reaction.)

By 11:30 we were back home, Zorro had been given a cortisone injection, and we’d been instructed to dose him with benadryl three times over the next 24 hours. (We did this by wrapping half a pink benadryl caplet in cream cheese, and feeding Cleo un-laced cream cheese as a decoy.)

It wasn’t until late this afternoon that the swelling subsided, and our chihuahua looked less like a pug.

As for me, despite Zorro being the one getting mega-doses of benadryl, I’m the one in antihistamine haze today.

It’s not quite midnight, but I’m ready for bed.

Anna from The Particular Ordinary posts this challenge, which she co-sponsors:

Describe an event in your growing up that changed you. [That’s rather broad, so let’s make it tougher] It has to be something personal, something that you know will never happen to you again.

It’s no secret that I read a lot. I always have. There’s a kind of magic in words on a page, in plot and character, that transports me to all sorts of places. Through books, I’ve been in the night kitchen with Mickey, sipped tea with Mr. Tumnus, cried over Beth’s death (and later, over Jo refusing Laurie’s proposal), and been as faithful as Watson about following Holmes’s explanations. So you might think that the one moment that most affected my life was the one in which I first connected the sounds to the squiggly lines of type, first actually read. The thing is, I don’t remember that moment. I don’t even remember the process, or remember how old I was when pretending to read, while looking at picture books, became actual reading.

I do, however, remember the moment in which I learned just how far outside the real world I could travel, helped by books.

It was sometime in early fall of 1977. I was seven years old, and missing my two front teeth, and after about a month at school in Golden, Colorado, we’d moved to the tiny mountain town of Georgetown, home of cute houses, and even cuter shops, and often used as a movie backdrop. I was being thrust into yet another new school, but at seven, this was more an adventure for me, than the annoyance changing schools would later become.

I don’t remember the series of events that led to my placement as the only second-grader in a fourth-grade reading class, but I do remember that a girl named Dina (or Deena?) was assigned to show me around. The order of the day was to select a book from the school library, and read quietly, so Dina (it’s shorter than Deena, even if it’s wrong), showed me the library, and introduced me to the librarian, who impressed me so little that I don’t remember the person’s gender, let alone their name.

I was reading the Little House… books that year, and so I selected the first in the series that I hadn’t yet read: On the Banks of Plum Creek. I don’t know how long I read, or what went on around me, I just know that I opened the book and began reading about Laura and Mary exploring their new home in a dugout – I marvel now at how large LIW made a dugout sound – having actually SEEN such a house, I’m amazed that anyone would be able to tolerate more than an hour in such a place.

I’d gotten to the point in the book where Laura and Mary manipulate Nellie into wading into the section of the creek where the leeches live, and then the external world broke through the bubble of my imagination, and I realized I’d read through the whole class, and part of the next. I was new, so no one had noticed.

It was the first time I learned that it was possible to virtually hide in a book, and it was knowledge that would serve me well over the next three years.

I don’t talk about it much – practically never, really – but I’ve never met my biological father. He and my mother never married, despite lobbying by both sets of parents, and he was never part of my life. My mother’s first husband was incredibly abusive. I don’t remember details, just constant tension and fear, with flashes of details – my name spoken in a certain tone of voice freaks me out, beige classic VW Beetles make me want to hide, and I remember the flash of light glinting off a child-sized baton that I had, as he raised it to hit my mother, and later, as my mother and I were leaving for the last time, his voice as he took me aside and hissed that someday he’d hunt me down and kill me. I’ve moved past that time, for the most part, and don’t care to relive the details – there were good memories from those years, and I prefer to dwell on them.

But the thing that saved my sanity was the ability to completely lose track of reality, while reading, the trick I learned when I was seven.

When my mother and J. would fight, screaming matches followed by slammed doors, and days of tension, and sometimes physical fights, I’d retreat to the bottom bunk of my bunk beds, close the curtains I’d attached to the side, turn on a flashlight suspended from the far support, and read myself to someplace safe and happy. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were my rescuers more often than I care to count, but I often immersed myself in the classics too. In my head, I chatted with Jane Eyre over bowls of stew, or snuck through the forest with Hawkeye.

It took several years for me to feel entirely safe and settled, and getting lost in books continued to be my source of security. At ten, I shared tomato sandwiches with Harriet M. Welsh (from whom I adopted the habit of ALWAYS using my middle initial), at twelve, I mocked Arthur Dent with Zaphod Beeblebrox, and at eighteen after a rough exam, I played chess on a sailboat with a soulful Russian called Solarin.

These days, escapist reading is a more casual comfort, done for pleasure, and not to hide from anything scarier than cramps, or a bad cold, but sometimes I still have these reading-zen moments where reality is totally non-existant and I’m literally lost in a good book. I suspect one of the reasons I loved Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is because his heroine is doing (in her reality), what I’ve only been able to do via my imagination.

I barely made it to Curves on Friday, I thought, since they close at noon, and I didn’t get there until 11:32 AM, but apparently the noon thing is a guideline, at this Curves, and not a hard and fast rule. It must be nice to have a hobby business, and love your job that much.

At any rate, I didn’t feel well, and I was so concerned about staying upright, because I was congested and sinussy, that it was 2/3 of the way through my workout before I realized that they were playing the Christian workout music I’d read about on a chat board. Now, I believe that people should have the right to listen to whatever they want, but I have to admit that if I’d been feeling at all normal, I’d have requested different music, and, because these women are all pretty nice, they wouldn’t have cared, and everyone would have been happy.

But I wasn’t feeling well, and so I finished my workout, while listening to this pumped-up praise with a combined reaction of being amused and being appalled.

The song that amused me most has a lyric that goes “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” and as I was doing my last set on the abductor/adductor machine, I was seeing these images in my head of a Jesus-figure doing a Windex commercial. “For cleanliness that is truly divine…”

The song that appalled me most was their treatment of “Amazing Grace,” a song that I really love, and that has personal importance to me. I goggled at the radio, and reflected that this is why I don’t like Christian pop and Christian rock. It’s not the message of the music I have the largest issue with, it’s that setting Amazing Grace to a dance beat ruins the impact of the song, turns it into just another catchy tune, with no deep spirituality at all. (Incidentally, I feel the same way about cursing. When you use words like “fuck” in normal conversation, you diminish the power of strong language. You eliminate the shock value.)

Still, I finished my workout laughing, because, really, you haven’t lived til you’ve had the experience of doing crunches to the tune of “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” done in 11/4 time with a disco beat.

Today for the first time my mother sounded like an old woman on the phone. She isn’t actually old, having just turned 55 on Monday, but she’s sick, and sounded frail and weak and small, and the sound of her voice, usually so vibrant, but today, pathetic, is haunting me.

I find myself distracted by frightening thoughts of my mother someday living with us.

Some day in the far far far future, and only when we’ve run out of the necessary funds to keep her in a lounge chair on the beach with hardbodied young men bringing her margaritas every hour, as is her mostly-in-jest wish.

I’ve been musing on stories I want to write, but I can’t quite get them from my brain to my fingers.

I have an article I want to write, and I can’t focus enough to sit down and do it.

Last night, I stayed up til five, watching the lightening and counting the seconds until the thunder, as if the counting was a measure of my life.

Today, I’ve been in a sort of sleepy fog, flitting between tasks, but not settling to any of them.

My irises (brought home by Fuzzy on his last trip to the grocery store) are starting to curl, as if they know I’ve been reflecting upon mortality today.

The mums and carnations from valentines day remain smugly intact, their intense colors dragging me back from my more morbid thoughts.

My muse is silent these days, so I’m offering instead a picture of a pair of Frye boots I’m lusting after…I could never actually WEAR them, as I’m far too short to wear tall boots, but I’m lusting after them anyway.

(I’m also cross-posting this to the new shoe_whores community on LiveJournal.)

I think it’s the move to Texas that has put boots on my brain, really.