What Makes Me Laugh

When I arrived home from work last week Doug told me to “check the camera” for Cocoa’s daily adventure. High larious! I think the photos tell the story pretty well.

Cocoa thinking about her next adventure in the kitty jungle

Peaches looks on as Cocoa starts her ascent

Can you find Cocoa in the Green Ash?

I spy six magpies

If they would only get a little closer I might catch one!

Going down is the hardest part.

So, that was a short sabbatical, but I had to break it. I’ve been dying to write about food, which is better than dying because of food, which is the other option on the table for me. At the beginning of the month, I was diagnosed with Celiac disease (also known as Celiac sprue, which is where the title of the blog post came from). This means that if I eat wheat, or other forms of flour with gluten in it, my body gets really angry and starts doing crazy things to my small intestine that nobody but me really wants to hear about.

 Chances are you know someone like me, who can’t have any gluten, and you think, as you’re chewing on something delectable, ”God, I hope I never have to go without my bread.” I seriously don’t hope that for you either, but I’m happy that the cure for my “disease” made me feel a lot better.

Anyway, going “gluten-free” wouldn’t be so difficult if I didn’t have a few other teeny weeny food problems to deal with. Namely, I’m also allergic to all dairy, eggs, peanuts, bananas, and cane sugar (and maybe almonds and asparagus, not really sure yet). I’m basically a vegan who eats meat, but no Kung Pao. Does that make sense?

I used to bake. A lot. Which makes sense now, because a lot of times you actually crave the foods you’re allergic to, and boy did I crave pizza. Which, BTW, if you’ve never heard Mike Birbiglia’s monologue about pizza, you’re missing out. Download it on itunes.

The good news is that I do feel better and I’m losing weight like a banshee. The bad news is that  I took a pledge to not complain for 49-days, so I’m trying to be all up-beat and positive about the whole thing while reading gluten-free food blogs like a porn addict. I’m not kidding about this. I could look at photos of gluten-free brownies for hours and contemplate whether it would be better to use date sugar or .

 I even considered starting my own gluten-free food blog, but then I decided I would really just go to the dark side and not think of anything else all day except for how to find the perfect sugar substitutes for baking something without eggs or wheat. I’ve already spent hours trying to find pure chocolate that hasn’t been processed without nuts or dairy or cane sugar. Good luck with that one. It doesn’t exist.

The other bad news is that my grocery bills jumped exponentially, which is weird since you’d think that now that I’m making all of my own meals (and I mean all of my own meals – I even contemplated buying my own grain mill this morning while driving to work) I would actually save money. However buying fresh, organic, and unusually hard-to-find foods is hard on a budget. But, I’m not complaining. No sir-ee. Especially since Doug has taken on my allergies as if they are his own, and is eating only what I can eat (what a man).

The good news is that I am eating all sorts of yummy things. Agave syrup, apricots, avacodos, strawberries, salmon, cherries, melon, brown rice chips, coconut milk, hemp milk, wine, brown rice cereal … hey, you get the picture.  People should be so lucky to have my kind of a problem.

Anyway, my sense of humor is back, in full force, and I’m trying to laugh at the fact that I just called our local wine shop to find some gluten-free wines (don’t ask – something about the oak barrels and paste) which made me feel like a freak. You never know, I might throw in a recipe section on this blog for Celiacs with a sense of humor (I have to admit, this is a very very small crowd with Celiac sufferers – mostly because they have a hard time getting people to take them seriously and stop waving pizza around in front of us).  Sigh.

 No complaints here.

Well, folks, it has been a fun ride, but I think it’s time to hang up my blogging hat for a while. This is partly due to the fact that I lost my sense of humor somewhere during the Gulf oil spill, and I haven’t spotted it yet. It’s partly due to summer, which is short around here, and I need to soak up as much sun as possible before it leaves our hemisphere. But mostly … (insert drumroll here) … I’m working on the second draft of my novel and I’m so close to being done that I can taste it. All other writing is taking a back seat to this project, and you’ll hear more about it soon.

In the meantime, I’m going out to buy a real journal. I haven’t written in one since I started to blog and frankly, I miss it. You can tell yourself you’ll burn it afterward and write all kinds of stuff in a journal that you’d never put online. You can bore yourself silly writing about gardening and no one will even care. Maybe somewhere in there I’ll find my sense of humor again.

To those of you who have commented and supported my blog, I really thank you. It’s been fun to meet other bloggers, some of whom seem like real kindred spirits, and to share thoughts with friends and family. So, consider this your cyber hug. We’ll meet up again soon.

We’ve been preparing the garden and doing our own form of early summer weed whacking. Doug is our resident Zen master dandelion slayer, bending over good portions of the day to pull them by hand from the yard. If it were up to me they’d probably take over the yard, but Doug is persistent.

Doug's dead dandelion pile

Early summer around here is a magnificent party, where the lilacs and apple blossom fragrance fills the air, and the mountains shine with snow on top of velvet green. It makes me want to write poetry. Instead, I soak up the fresh rain, putter in our garden, and root for Doug against the dandelions. May it always be thus.

I haven’t been up to blogging much lately in part because I wake up to National Public Radio. News about the oil spill in the Gulf nearly kills my day. I just want to pull the covers over my head and go back to bed. It doesn’t put me in the mood to laugh.

But, my friend sent me a news clip from USA Today about the Gulf that made me laugh. In fact, I get a chuckle out of it nearly every day. Hundreds of thousands of hair clippings from pets and people are being stuffed into used pantyhose and shipped to the Gulf to help soak up the oil. This is the idea of Matter of Trust, a tiny non-profit in San Francisco that helps recycle and reuse natural fibers. You can learn how to donate to the cause at their website.

To date, I haven’t seen anything that confirms that cleanup crews will use the natural fiber booms, but the idea of stuffing our collective hairs into used pantyhose for cleanup does make me feel like there is a way our cats and us can help. The only problem is our rate of hair loss is not nearly fast enough for this process. By the time I filled one pantyhose leg with my cat’s hair it might be a month from now. This is not because they don’t shed like crazy, but mainly because I can’t get them to sit still long enough to groom them for more than five seconds at a time.

Anyway, if you’re wondering what to do with all of your unwanted hair, well, get your combs and scissors out, someone wants it!

It was 2 a.m. and after four hours of telling Doug that I would turn off my reading lamp, “in a minute” I was finally asleep. Just barely. I was in that dream state where the concepts of flying, friends from high school, the color purple, and cows all seem to come together in a drama that involved me running around my house from a purple cow. I had just escaped from the cow when I woke up

What was that noise? I knew that I heard something. It sounded like spoons falling in the sink. Were there spoons falling in the sink in my dream? I searched my memory. No, just purple cows. I lifted my head off the pillow, listening intently through the sound of my noise machine for further noises.

I didn’t a.) turn off my sound machine, or b.) wake up Doug because if there really was an intruder in the house I don’t know want him to know I’m awake.Why? Well, first there is the element of surprise. If you can crawl out of bed and hide behind the door with a golf club you may have a chance for a crushing blow to the head when he opens the door. This is my Hollywood strategy.

Second, there is the element of escape. This is my anti-Hollywood strategy, where you do the thing that no self-respecting hero would actually do, but might save your own skin.

But I couldn’t abandon my husband and two cats to an intruder, nor did I have a golf club anywhere nearby so I continued to lie in bed, trying to breathe as quietly as possible, listening for more spoons falling in sinks. Was that a footstep? Our house creaks all the time. It’s old, and it makes noises of its own that I don’t even notice during the day but I do at night.

I wondered whether I could crawl over Doug and reach the bear spray. We have three cans for self-defense against grizzly bears, but in the entire time we’ve owned them we’ve only ever sprayed ourselves. This is why we don’t own any guns.  Pepper spray is very painful, so  Doug likes to keep one next to the bed “just in case.” This would be a good idea if he was the light sleeper in the relationship. Instead, it was me who was lying there, wondering if I could slip the safety off without alerting the intruder to the fact that I was awake and armed with pepper spray.

At that exact moment, the bedroom door swung open and my entire body levitated above the bed in shock. I was too paralyzed to scream, but it also dawned on me that there was no head in the doorway  so either our intruder was a little-person or my cat had decided to come in for a midnight snuggle. My breathing started to return to normal, and Peaches jumped up on the bed and curled up next to me.

Peaches checks out Blue Heaven and Whisper Yellow

Dear Whisper Yellow,

It was love at first sight. There we were. In the hardware store. I was looking at Butter Cream, wondering if she was the one when I saw you and all thoughts of Butter Cream flew from my head. I knew, deep down, that you were the one for me.

We brought you home and put you on our wall. Right above the white wainscoting that had been there for 100 years but we thought we could fix it would look nice. Later we bought new wainscoting to accent your sunny smile. You looked beautiful. Your cheeriness made me feel happy. I started to compare you to all my favorite lemon and cream desserts. I wanted to write poetry. You looked like lemon chiffon pie. You looked like Schwan’s vanilla ice cream. I wanted to eat you.

But then, we put our Blue Heaven Marmoleum on the floor, and I started to fall out of love with you. Believe me. It’s not you. It’s me. Seriously. Don’t Cry. We can still be friends. I’ll tell my friends about you. You’ll find another love. What’s that you say? Just be honest? Don’t beat around the bush?

Well, here’s the thing. I started to think: Whisper Yellow. Blue Heaven. Whisper Yellow. Blue Heaven. What does that remind me of? Oh no. Not that. A nursery. I just turned my bathroom into a nursery! I realized that I don’t know you that well. We barely started our relationship and there we were, talking about kids. It was just too soon. I’m not ready for that kind of commitment.

I think it’s time we ended things. I hope you can forgive me. If it’s any consolation, I’m heart broken too. So heart broken, that, believe it or not, my new color is called Desolate.

Love,

Janelle

Our clawfoot tub, now in the kitchen.

Our extended family may not agree on religion, politics, or sports teams, but they can agree on one thing: “You need a new toilet.”

Every family member who visits says this to us and we always have the same response: “We know.”

It’s funny. I don’t remember noticing the toilet before we bought the house, but as soon as we moved in it became the primary topic of conversation.

“Why do you think it’s like that?” I asked, staring down at the brown, blue and green stained porcelain bowl.

“Minerals,” Doug said.

Our house was built in 1918. The toilet looked like it was built in 1818.

Still, it worked. Okay, so you needed a plunger for anything besides number 1, but as long as you were careful, it worked. We nicknamed it the Geyser because of our close proximity to Yellowstone and its strange colors and ability to shoot water.

I tried various cleaners on the stains until I could no longer stand the thought of flushing another toxic chemical down the toilet. We had other remodeling priorities, we thought, and as long as we warned visitors it was no big deal. Turns out, when you live with something long enough, you forget to warn people until it’s nearly too late.

“Um.” Tap, tap, tap on the bathroom door. “Sorry to disturb you, but we really need you to know that the toilet was like that when we moved in here and if there is any doubt in your mind about whether it will flush please use the plunger.”

We forgot to warn my mother-in-law before she visited, and she was waiting for Doug on the porch when he arrived home.

“What happened in there?” she demanded.

“In where?” Doug asked, genuinely confused.

“The bathroom.”

“Oh.”

When my father-in-law came to visit he immediately offered to buy us a new toilet. “C’mon,” he said. “We’re going to the hardware store and we’re getting you a new toilet. Shouldn’t cost more than $75.”

This was a kind offer, but we gently explained that actually a new toilet in an old house would mean ripping out the existing floor, and once you go there, an entire remodel including plumbing. We didn’t want to ruin his vacation entirely.

Because, you see, this is our only bathroom. That’s right, and we are currently in week two of the remodel, which did include removing the clawfoot tub, ripping out the cheap  flooring put in by the previous owners, and taking out the toilet. Not an inexpensive undertaking, but a necessary one.

Our toilet is not gone, however. It’s currently a big part of our lives in the garage, where we are employing space age technology to take care of our waste until a new one can be properly installed.

The Geyser, now in the garage

I’m not kidding. A local company called Cleanwaste sells “Go Anywhere Toilet Kits” which includes a bag that fits over a toilet seat with a powder in the bottom called Poo Powder. They also sell Wag Bags for camping and emergency situations. According to their website, “Poo Powder is a proprietary blend of a NASA-developed super-absorbent designed to gel and encapsulate liquid and solid waste, and a natural deodorizing agent and decay catalyst.” Which means, that you can poo in the bag, it biodegrades, and you can dump the sealed bag into your garbage without having to worry about it exploding or smelling. I know, eww. But a bigger eww would be not having something like that around in this situation.

Where are we bathing? At the gym. Doug claimed that he could go without a shower for a month, which I told him not to brag about, and he broke down after Day 3. Remember, Doug was a river guide for many years and bathed in a river the whole summer, but even he admits that this is different since he is doing the entire remodel himself and is covered in construction materials by the end of the day.

I try to remind him. “When it’s finished the bathroom will be gorgeous, just like our kitchen remodel, and we won’t have to knock on the door when people come over for dinner. Won’t that be nice?“

I’ve been thinking lately that Pavlov had a cat. Prior to his saliva-inducing, bell-ringing dog research, Pavlov’s cats were ringing his bell, making him get up in the middle of the night to tend to their every want and need and that’s what gave him the idea for his research in the first place (sixth grade students, please take note, this is not something worth plagiarizing for your report).

At four in the morning, when Pavlov’s cat jostled his academic regalia against the door to wake him, he got up to pee and he thought, “By jove, I’ve got it!” Or actually, something that translates to “By jove” in Russian. But anyway, my cats have perfected the art of negative stimuli on me and I no longer sleep all the way through the night.

Somewhere around 4 a.m. one of them will climb on top of my bedstand and knock my shades against the window, creating instant anxiety that she will rip a hole in it with her paw and I am up and she jumps down. At this point I realize I need to use the facilities. They follow me out of the bedroom to the bathroom and I close the door soundly on them in the living room before returning to sleep.

At 6 a.m. they start to meow outside of the bedroom door. I own a sound machine, and the meows cut through it and earplugs. If by some miracle the sound doesn’t rouse me they rattle the doorknob or twang the doorjamb until I can’t stand it any longer and get up to feed them. If I was a morning person, this would get me up for good, but I’m not so I go back to sleep for the fifteen minutes it takes them to eat.

After breakfast, they meow loudly to be let out and I dutifully rise again, open the door, tell them to be good and watch them run down the steps to the backyard to play. I toddle back to bed and reset the alarm to 7:30, have the craziest dream of my life, and rise to open the door for them to come back in at 7:30. This goes on every morning.

Yes, I have tried spraying them in the face with water, but then I’m already up so what good does it do that I’m spraying them in the face? Yes, I have thought about locking them out of the bedroom, but this is a small house and there is no corner where I cannot here them yowl. So, I’ve done what any good dog would do. I go to bed early.

A few buds are out on the lilac trees, which worries us a little since we have a few more snowstorms to get through before warm weather is here to stay, but never you mind, I’m going to enjoy the sun that’s shining today. Doug is making me a big breakfast (my favorite meal of the day) and the cats are romping around in the yard. We’re all feeling frisky.

My mom sent me some Easter photos, and I have to pass on our secret family recipe (shh … it’s a secret) for how to tie dye your Easter eggs. Simply add a tablespoon of vegetable oil to each of your dye pots, dip in the egg, wipe it off, and then dip in the next pot. It makes an amazing looking kaleidoscope of colors on your egg, and you look like an artistic genius. This is the only craft I’ve completed where I look like an artistic genius, so I do enjoy it. Hope you do too!