There's Always Something To Do In Salinas

Two weeks ago Sunday night, this happened in my front yard.

One week ago Sunday night, this happened down the block from my house.


It's Sunday again. So far, my friend Heather,

who is visiting from Virginia, was almost killed—KILLED, I tell you—by a hipster driving a shopping car erratically through the condiment aisle at the Whole Foods in Monterey. A condiment aisle where, I might add, I was forced to buy hipster wing sauce for our planned hot wing pizza (shredded chicken, wing sauce, blue cheese and mozzarella, shredded carrot and celery leaves) because they don't have low-rent Frank's Red Hot Sauce.

(Why shop there at all? It's not an unreasonable question. I've just grown very fond of their prepared whole grain pizza dough and as I had 20 lbs. of tomatoes—a case of dry-farmed Early Girls and a case of heirlooms from my favorite farmer, Jamie Collins, owner of Serendipity Farms

—to process and can this afternoon, I wanted to make the dough easier ...) (Take note: we finally, after 18 months of living upstairs in the main house, have kitchen counters.)

So far, it's been a quiet day and I'm hoping men and dogs make it through the night without bullets flying around the hood.

What I've Been Up To...

First, there's this.

And then, there's this.

In a few days, when I get my thoughts together, I'll be writing about how Walgreen's "lost" a prescription for a morphine patch—a so-called Class II Controlled Substance—leading me to waste precious hours that could have been spent sitting with my mother instead of running between pharmacy and doctor's office in a futile effort to help relieve her pain.

Crafternoon

This is grandma.

Not my grandma. My friend Carmela's grandma. I am having a lazy day we're loosely calling crafternoon, which involves pulling out all the craft supplies I have, staring at them for awhile and making nothing. But Carmela and grandma have joined, and Carmela is making jewelry while I futz with paper and glue. Carmela was a red diaper baby. Her grandparents were UFW ... well, not organizers exactly. Let's just say that Cesar Chavez used to camp out at their house with his German shepherds when he was down here pissing off the lettuce growers. Then Carmela's parents became UFW organizers when the UFW was born. Her sister was one of the first babies born under the UFW health plan. Here's Bobby, the oldest of my offspring, knitting. This is fabulous because a) I can't knit and b) he's complaining that his stitches are too tight.

That's about all I got. Chuck spent the morning hooking up irrigation piping in the now-trenched front yard, so now he's up in the tub. Last weekend's adventures in trenching involved running the trencher over the water main, then a call to a plumber who sadly explained the concept of weekend overtime, to which I said, "He cut the water main. How fast can you get here again?" There are a million other things I should be doing, like cleaning out the back hallway or cleaning out the laundry room or ... you get the idea. Tomorrow we will plant tomatoes and basil, and I will muck out the back hallway then. For now, paper and glue.

In October 2010, we scored this on Freecycle. Eight months ago, I dropped it off at the upholstery place on Main Street and told them to hold on for it for a few weeks until I could get to Britex and pick out fabric. Three months ago, I picked out the fabric. And now, we have this:

For the amount of time and trouble and cash, yeah, we could have bought something new. But what the hell. Nothing about this house is easy, so why should the furniture be.

I Know You Are Broke

I Know You Are Broke, a photo by Mary Duan on Flickr.

In 1948, Pat Covici, John Steinbeck's long-time agent, wrote him this letter. Steinbeck had by then "pissed away two fortunes."

You will have to start over, Covici said, and indeed I know you will. "I am groping for something I am convinced you need."

Random Thoughts

1. The last two encounters with my neighbor have ended with me either calling the police, or telling him (after a lot of gesturing and screaming "go fuck yourself" on my part) that if he didn't get out of my face, I was going to call the police. He can treat the rotating cast of screwed-up poohbahs he moves in and out of his house any way he sees fit—it's none of my business—but if he tries anything like aiming his garden hose at my kid's girlfriend again, or verbally harrassing my kids if they're outside playing baseball or walking the dogs, I'm getting a restraining order.

2. Nothing says Happy Holidays quite like a restraining order.

3. Speaking of a lack of restraint, I paid a service an exoribitant amount of money the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to have someone come in and clean the house. It's mostly stuck, or at least it seems to have made keeping it clean a little easier. It might just all be in my head.

4. Which is kind of stuffy right now. The wind had been blowing all week and my eyes have been extra irritated.

5. This is my favorite thing to listen to right now, and the video is also quite charming. My favorite thing to eat right now is a soft pretzel, from the batch Chuck made this afternoon, with mustard.

6. Al the Contractor, the one I believe is in witness protection because he goes by two different last names and I can find no evidence of him online (that's just not normal), recently messaged Chuck and asked him if we had any "before and after" pictures of the house. He can't find the ones he took and he'd like to have some for his portfolio. I'm thinking I might take pictures of the bathroom faucets. The ones where I can only get hot water. Or maybe the kitchen faucet, where I can't get any hot water. Or maybe the light switch in my dining room—the one that's too hot to touch.

I know. First World problems. I'll stop complaining about stupid shit now, I promise.

6. In the spirit of Blackbird and her recent "What I Wore" post, today I am wearing battered yoga pants, a white tank top and a grey cardigan from Target that is spattered with white paint. And Dansko Mary Janes.

Ticking Away

I'm in full-blown not sleeping right mode. It's so wonderfully quiet at night. Nobody is asking questions or demanding anything. I just love to lay here and read and think. Sammy came home from his outing with friends around midnight and announced he hadn't eaten enough vegetables as of late, so i got him some radishes that needed cleaning, and some of the remaining bebe tomatoes from our garden...I would have cut up some carrots and celery if he wanted, but the radishes helped fill the need for crunchy-healhy. He and the puppers went off to bed, Bobby is downstairs on the computer, Chuck is snoring away next to me. If I can get my act together and get some sleep, in the am I'll make them all brunch: scrambled eggs with slivers of smoked salmon mixed in, or with ham. We have biscuits, croissants, some fruit I think.

The snoring, the snoring is setting my teeth on edge .... Chuck is on call all weekend, which means we can't leave the city.
He's going to start baking dozens upon dozens of batches of Christmas cookies instead. His mother's cherry-filled, oatmeal cookie will be one, and chocolate chip of course has to be another. Other than that, he needs a good shortbread, maybe a ginger molasses and maybe a whoopie pie? Not sure.

We're putting our Christmas lists together. I have Chuck's and he wants various kitchen things: some glass measures, some silpats for our new baking sheets, some silicon bowl scrapers and and a new pan. I've asked for a new sweater (this one, http://www.softsurroundings.com/P/Calida_Cardigan/) in grey; a new pair of socks, also in grey, from the cool sock place in SF and a new stash of Nava pencils from PH Design in Texas. I don't really need much of anything, but it's nice to have something to unwrap come Dec. 25.