Man, yesterday was an awesome day. I busted ass and yet feel great.
I think this is how Martha Stewart does it. This must be how she gets so much done and still has time to raise chickens.
Friday night I was having a hell of time falling asleep. I even had to make myself a jumongous glass of chocolate milk at 12:30 a.m. this morning, which then did the trick. Esteban got home at 3:30, after a rousing evening of drinking beer on a friend’s back porch. Ah yes, you can take the man out of the hicks, but you can’t take the hick out of the man.
I woke up refreshed and vital at 6:30 this morning. I had tons of energy! I was springing in every step. Why can’t I be energetic on six hours of sleep during the week? Why am I dragged out on eight hours, hating the alarm clock? It’s a mystery.
I jumped out of bed, threw on my clothes because it was Saturday morning and that means one thing, boys and girls, one glorious tantalizing thing:
FARMER’S MARKET!!!!!!!!!!!!
I tousled my hair with my fingers and went sans makeup, as it is truly the hippy thing to do. One does not attend the Green Bay Downtown Farmer’s Market in full makeup nor even a hint of eye-liner. That’s for suburbanites and the organic farmers will laugh at you and charge you $1 more per pound of potatoes. I booked and got there roughly fifteen minutes after it opened, which is prime. Not a huge crowd yet and still too chilly for the hornets. Being there at 7:15 a.m. also means that you will get to hear the various church bells chime in their early morning services at the surrounding cathedrals and churches downtown.
Sometimes I love living in Green Bay.
Farmer’s Market score: 1 loaf white bread, two tomatoes, one jalepeno pepper, one huge bunch of cilantro, two bouquets of English roses, three enormous peaches, a jar of pickled mushrooms (for Esteban), a pound of white mushrooms, half a peck of Rome apples, two bunches of radishes, a pint of hickory nuts, a glass of freshly squeezed strawberry/orange juice and a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie.
Yep. Sometimes Green Bay rocks.
Then I hustled over to Ward and June’s house. I always purchase Ward some radishes whenever I go to the Farmer’s Market because he loves them, but June will not allow him to buy them. Apparently, whenever he eats radishes, he burps fiery radishes burps at her for some time. Thus, I am the man’s only radish supply and I take this responsibility very seriously. After all, it’s not like I am the recipient of the radish burps, so anything I can do to make my Pop happy.
June came running out of the house when I pulled up and gave me a big bone-crushing hug. You see, even though we’ve talked on the phone since the attack and I’ve not left Green Bay, she’s not been truly convinced that I have not been somehow injured in Tuesday’s tragedy. I gave them a bouquet of roses, the hickory nuts, the radishes, some apples, and a peach. I chatted with them for awhile, being the awesome daughter that I am, and found out that they have actually purchased the pool I talked them into earlier this summer. They are so excited to install it next spring. Score again and it was not even 9 o’clock!
Then I drove back home and woke up Esteban, who was in the deepest drooling coma I’ve yet seen. After some amount of whining and pleas for sexual paybacks, Esteban finally arose and we went out to breakfast. There, he fluxuated from staring into the coffee pot to staring at the salt and pepper shakers. I, on the other hand, was chirpy and gay. You know, ‘gay’ in the 1940’s ‘Judy Garland and Andy Rooney’ kind of way. Not that I would have a problem with being gay the other way, I just didn’t want you to think I was mentally undressing Eunice, our waitress, and running my eyes up and down her varicose veined legs or anything.
If our waitress were Eliza Dushku, then maybe it would have been the other kind of gay. Because I’d do her in a heartbeat. Maybe Gwen Stefani too. I’m entranced by her stomach in the video where she’s inexplicably riding a four-wheeler through Manhatten. When she’s showing her stomach, I cannot look away.
After breakfast, I made Esteban take apart our lamppost outside so I could get some replacement bulbs. For some reason, the bulbs in our porch light and lamppost burn out at eighty times the rate of normal bulbs. They only last about a month or something, it’s ridiculous. They’re not normal bulbs, they are clear and have this weird little point. I think it’s supposed to look like a flame, but I don’t think the lightbulb people are faking anyone out on this issue. All six of the bulbs in both lights had burnt out and we had no front lighting at all. Time to fix that.
I also grabbed Fern’s baby present and birthday present from the kitchen, where it has lived all summer. I missed Fern’s baby shower. The child is now over a month old and yet in my kitchen is where the baby present sat. I was all about clearing up loose ends.
First I went to Fern’s house, where she is living with her parents and husband. I gave her the presents and chatted with them, apologizing immensely for my “Bad Friend” actions of not stopping by earlier with the presents. She accused me of “going crazy in the baby department” so I know that my gift made up for the tardiness. I felt bad, though, when she unwrapped the little sandals. I had purchased and wrapped it all in June and honestly forgot what I had given them. I’m just relieved that I didn’t buy anything that was now too small for him, so I’m overlooking the little “non-seasonal” thing. Bad Friend Incident: Taken Care Of!
Then I drove to Home Depot. There I saw Mellow Yellow and his wife Mrs. Yellow. You see, in the deepest darkest winter, when I have complete cabin fever, my friends and I sometimes go to the Holiday Inn and sing karaoke with all of the other people who never got enough attention as children. The reason I go to the Holiday Inn is that mostly good singers go there, and I don’t have to sit through a million off-key renditions of ‘Man I feel like a Woman’ or ‘The Thunder Rolls’. Sure, you get an occaisional wedding party who must go up and slaughter ‘Love Shack’ or ‘Summer Nights’, but for the most part, it’s all ‘professionals’.
Yes. I know that I’m a dork. But let’s move on.
Occasionally, we see Mellow Yellow there. He is this older gentleman who is six foot three and probably weighs 145 pounds. He always wears a brightly colored shirt (I’ve seen him wearing teal, yellow, fuchsia and lime green), tight blue jeans with a handkerchief in the back left pocket which matches his shirt, black penny loafers and socks which also match the shirt and the handkerchief. Around his neck is a chain with a glow-in-the-dark alien head. It does not necessarily match the shirt/handkerchief/sock combo (with the exception of the lime green ensemble, which does match). He has his silver hair styled in a pompadour and wears a goatee with the mustache waxed into a little point. I call him Mellow Yellow because he only sings three songs, one of them being Mellow Yellow. He sings Mellow Yellow every time I see him (and the lyrics of the song being ‘they call me Mellow Yellow’ gives me a strike against originality but sue me). I can’t recall his other two songs, but they are also from the sixties and equally as hokey and strange.
The Karaoke host guy told me that Mellow Yellow cornered him before the New Year’s Eve 1999 and told him about how he was getting ready for the aliens to come and take him and Mrs. Yellow to their mother ship.
I couldn’t make this up if I tried.
Anyway, Mellow and Mrs. Yellow were at Home Depot and Mellow had deviated from his normal attire. He was wearing a red and white striped shirt that had to have dated back to 1976 and a pair of pants which looked as though they had been sewn out of an American flag, with the stripes going vertically down his legs. He looked like one of those Uncle Sam guys that walk on stilts at Fourth of July parades.
Only he wasn’t on stilts.
I did not get near enough to see if he was wearing the alien pendant or not.
What is more, Mellow and Mrs. Yellow were going everywhere I was going. I mean, they stopped at the very same aisle as I did for the light bulbs, standing literally right next to me as I picked them out. They were looking at rope lights, undoubtedly to better light the UFO landing strip they have on the roof of their house. They didn’t recognize me. I fled with my twelve light bulbs and didn’t even stop to drool at the Jacuzzi hot tubs. I was that discombobulated.
Back home, I washed out the insides of both light fixtures, removing the dead bugs and everything. I know. I’m as stunned as you are. Esteban was floored, or maybe would have been if he weren’t in a hung-over stupor. He mowed the lawn for six hours. Before you get impressed, it’s a two-hour job, people.
I then began to attack the rust at the bottom of our lamppost. Our lamppost was one of the very first home improvements we did. Actually, what we did was replace the existing lamppost, which had fallen apart and was basically a 40 watt bulb on a stick. But the lamppost sits in a huge snow bank for most of the year and was beginning to rust. I gave the rust spots a cursory scraping with a wire brush and had given up and was going to just spray that shit with the Rustoleum when Esteban had a rare moment of clarity. He approached me with an extension cord and an electric drill. Instead of a drill bit, it had a wire brush on it. He showed me the difference between using that thing and the manual wire brush.
I went to town on that pole, working it up and down for at least an hour. The pole actually started getting hot from friction.
Boy, that last paragraph almost read like porn. Power tool porn.
Power tools fucking rock. That’s all I’m going to say. I killed all of the rust. I actually blew away an earwig on the ground too. It was easy to get a little carried away. Then I cleaned the pole and taped off the light and then painted it. Very cool. It’s all shiny and black now. Shiny poles make me happy. They remind me of my days as a stripper at the Wolf’s Den. If you don’t have a shiny pole, you get a heat rash in the most inconvenient of places, you know.
After all of our home care, we treated ourselves to decadent frozen custard sundaes. Mine was a Fudgeana, which is the most perfect of all sundaes’banana, hot fudge, and pecans. YUMMMM! It just happened to be Esteban’s all time favorite flavor-of-the-day’Death By Chocolate, so he just got a couple of scoops of that.
We went for a lovely ride in Esteban’s truck. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ came on the radio, so we both sang it at the top of our lungs with the windows rolled down. Esteban has a hard time hitting the high notes. I love him anyway.
Then we came home and Esteban watched some anime and I went to bed because I was beat. Even though I didn’t do even an ounce of laundry or any other of my normal Saturday things, I still felt a huge sense of accomplishment and had a great day. I hope your Saturday was just as grand!
Dick Gephardt looks amazingly like Adam West, TV’s Batman.
