Until Next Year

Work has been nonstop since October 2—until last week.

October started a new fiscal year for the U.S. EPA, where I work as a contractor editing scientific documents. The new year brought a new editor and a new client: Washington DC. That’s why we’re so busy—because we are editing for both the Cincinnati and the DC offices. Thank goodness for the new editor.

Things at work eased last week, and tomorrow I am leaving for a three-week vacation to New Zealand. The new editor is concerned he’s going to get dumped on. This is usually a slow time of the year, yet I know he’s going to get the final two chapters of an involved document we’ve been working on since the beginning of October. (The author was supposed to have it in to us by Monday, two days ago so that I could have helped considerably. However…) So when the rest does come in, poor Cris, the new editor, will have a time of it. I feel sorry for him now, but in a couple days it won’t even cross my mind as I lie on the beaches of northeast New Zealand.

I need the break as stress plus the weather have done a number on my skin: it’s dry and rashy and has been for the past couple weeks. My stress rash first appeared in 1998, and experience assures me that once I step on a plane, looking forward to a new adventure, my stress rash clears up. (And people wonder why I travel so often. To waylay stress!!)

Mark’s nephew and a friend will be staying at our house while we’re away. Mark loaded the kitchen with junk food for the young men. I have left them instructions to water my plant and suggestions for places to go since they’ll be so close to the city proper.

Until next year, adios.

Reminiscences

Thanksgiving was so nice this year. My brother Mike and his family came from Delaware for a visit. On Wednesday night we had a big dinner with cousins, but on Thanksgiving day we rode 4-wheelers at my other brother’s house (4-wheelers being the all-terrain vehicles, like a dirt bike with four really big wheels).
After our ride we sat around the campfire and reminisced, retelling stories we tell every year. Like the one about Chris being tired of taking the trash out to the barrel to burn (this was back about 1970) so he decided to burn it in the house instead—and then not letting anyone in the house because, after he lit it, he knew he’d done something bad. Or the one about Chris throwing the coconut through the window—the closed window; he claims to this day that he thought it was a ball of yarn. Or the one about my cousin Lance and me, at about ages 6 and 7, getting caught in the upstairs shower stall paging through Grandpa’s Playboy magazine.

Mike’s stories are always funny with a hint of sad. He’s the oldest: 10 years older than me, four and a half older than Chris.

A typical Mike story usually involves him taking the responsible role, watching out for his younger siblings. For example, one cold, winter day in my brothers’ youths, they and a neighbor boy a year younger than Chris tramped back the drive, between the barns, over the field, and down the hill to the creek. The creek was great fun in the winter, but we had to be careful because some sections were pretty deep and didn’t always freeze solid.

So the three boys are down at the creek hitting each other over the head with thin ice, like theater glass, sliding along, exploring, and SPLASH! The neighbor falls in up to his ankles.

What to do, what to do?

By the time he got back to the house in those wet boots, he’d probably have frost bite. Mike could carry him maybe, if he didn’t have to go up the hill. Hmm? Being the good neighbor, Mike gives up his own boots and decides to wait on the creek bank on the condition that Chris and/or the neighbor bring him back a pair of warm, dry boots.

The walk from the creek to the house only takes about five minutes. Still, Mike waits and waits. After what seems like an hour he begrudgingly concludes that Chris and the neighbor are not coming back.

Freezing and finally, Mike gets to the house in his soggy stocking feet, walks in and sees Chris and the neighbor boy sipping hot chocolate and watching cartoons.

Every year Mike recounts the story, he imitates the wide-eyed, drop-jawed, innocent look of “Oh, I forgot,” that flashed onto Chris’s face when he saw his older brother. And every year by the end of the story Mike is seething.

I guess really cold feet are not soon forgotten.

Reminiscences (Part 2)

So on gorgeous, sunny Thanksgiving day—cool enough to be comfortable in sweatshirt and jeans sitting around the fire after our 4-wheel adventure—as we tell stories about our shared youth and life on the farm, Chris starts a story that neither Mike nor I nor anyone has heard.

“You know, Mom would give us 25 cents for every mouse we caught, dead or alive. I set traps up and checked ‘em a couple times a week. Sometimes they’d still be alive in the trap, and I’d take ‘em out to the horse trough and play with ‘em before I turned ‘em in; you know, mice can’t swim. Well, then I came up with a real money maker.
I’d fill a 55-gallon drum up about a third of the way with water and smear peanut butter on the end of a section of Hot Wheels track and then balance it on the edge of the drum. When a mouse walked out to get the peanut butter, it’d tip the track into the drum along with the mouse.” Chris nodded and grinned really big.”

How ingenious! I was so impressed! (Who knew mice couldn’t swim though? Even chickens can swim.) I asked him how old he was.

Probably seven.

Mike and I both have degrees in engineering. Chris didn’t even go to college. Yet he’s the one who always concocts some simple mechanical solution to an involved problem. I wish Mom was then as impressed as I am now. Then she might have contacted the paper. I can see the headline:

“Preteen catches mice with water, peanut butter, and Hot Wheels track.”

Of course, Mom probably had no idea of more than half her little boy’s tricks. He was crafty. Still is.

Restaurant Review: Pappadeaux a Pappadud

Last week my husband and I went out to eat at a fancy sea food restaurant he wanted to try: Pappadeaux in Springdale near the Rt. 4/275 interchange. We didn’t know it was so fancy until we walked into the place and felt a bit underdressed. It was early on a Wednesday and the place hadn’t filled yet so our casual attire went mostly unnoticed.

The menu was sufficient with standard as well as unique sea food fair; however, the least expensive entrée cost $19 and change. And that's without salad or bread. That’s a bit pricey for a casual meal out for us. The Caesar salad was $9, and our table tent advertised margaritas for $7.95!!!

I ordered the catfish fillet for $19+ and asked what vegetable it came with. The waiter answered, “The catfish fillet comes with rice.”
I simply stared, wondering if I should let him know that rice is not a vegetable.
Mark broke the silence, in hopes of thwarting a smart response from me: “Just order a vegetable on the side.”
I considered that, but before the waiter had come to take our orders, I checked that a side of broccoli cost $2.75. I’m not likely to pay almost three times as much for only a third of what I could (get Mark to) fix myself.

The waiter helpfully chimed in that substitutions are welcomed.

So I ordered the catfish with broccoli, thank you, and Mark got the shrimp kabob with asparagus and what the menu identified as “dirty” rice. Our waiter bragged that the asparagus wasn’t the normal asparagus you can get from the market. No, theirs was nuclear-sized asparagus.
“The smaller the asparagus the more tender,” I thought. I kept it to myself though as I had created enough tension with my silent treatment after the waiter said rice was a vegetable.

After half an hour our waiter delivered our entrees and warned us of the “hot plates.” Without fail I take warnings like that as a challenge to test the plate. Once our waiter turned, I touched my plate, then Mark’s. They were warm and not even very warm, just warm. The food was hot however.

My meal was good though I prefer my broccoli cooked a little more. Mark’s shrimp, we both agreed, was simply satisfactory; the flavoring wasn’t distinct enough. Applebee’s probably offers the same thing for $10 less. He was a little less than satisfied with his dirty rice with bits of sausage in it. And the asparagus? With the girth of an index finger and near the length of two, it was tougher than my broccoli.

Our bill came to just over $40. On the way out we each nabbed a peppermint swirl from the basket near the exit. Complimentary after-dinner mints are a nice touch, yet I thought peppermint swirls a tad unsophisticated. Individually wrapped buttermints would have better helped the establishment achieve its desired ambience.

Shall we entertain ourselves at Pappadeaux again? Pappadoubtful.

1100 Copies Out There

Hey! Good news this week. A reporter with a small, neighborhood paper interviewed me about the book. The article she writes will be in next week’s College Hill Currents newspaper.

Also this week the publisher of hoi polloi , a start-up literary mag produced in Massachusetts, contacted me with some interview questions that I can complete at my leisure before returning to him. He tells me “Your story is inspiring and I believe it would be a terrific addition to our first issue of hoi polloi.” The first issue is due in the spring or summer of 2007.

Wow, Massachusetts!

Last weekend I had two signings and sold a total of 21 books. I have two this weekend too and hope I do as well or better. Only 10 boxes of My Lost Summer take up space in my house now, down from 20. That’s 400 copies gone and 400 yet to go. Of the 400 gone, I gave away close to 100 for a total of about 300 sold. LSI, the national supplier, has sold almost 800 copies. Even Great Britain’s LSI has sold a few. So in this first year about 1100 copies of My Lost Summer are out there. Yay!