The Diaryland edit window ate most of the last entry and I was too disgusted to retype it all when it happened. The doctor took x-rays and confirmed that nothing was broken, but I did manage to tear the hell out of two ligaments (one of which was the weird swollen crest on the top of my foot). This was due to the way that my foot tipped on the root, as the shock and pain of the twist is what caused the fall in the first place.
Stupid redwoods.
I recited the recipe for recuperation with her: Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation. Blahety blah blah. She also gave me an air cast to immobilize my ankle which would give those ligaments a chance to recover. Wearing the air cast has been sort of annoying, because I have been forced to wear socks every day. I sort of hate wearing socks when it’s warm outside. I hate washing them, I hate pairing them up and I hate trying to find non-paired socks in the morning (because in reality, I pair up the obvious mates and then get impatient and throw the rest into a laundry basket that we call the Singles Club). If I didn’t live in such a bastard of a climate, I would probably end up going without socks all the time.
Except argyle. I love me some argyle socks.
So not only did I have to wear socks, I also had to wear New Balance sneakers to work every day, because it was the only shoe that could fit over the cast which had enough padding to not be painful. Sadly, while it hurt much less than walking without shoe and cast, wearing both while sitting hurt too, because the shoe pulled the cast upwards and pressed against the dysfunctional ligaments. So I had a choice: I could not wear a cast and be in agony while walking but perfectly content to sit on my ass, or I could wear the cast and decent shoes and have low-level pain the entire day.
After two weeks of wandering around the office in jeans and sneakers, the foot has returned to its normal size and I can now wear business clothes and my standard rotation of loafers to work again. I didn’t wear the cast on Sunday, but by the end of the evening, my foot was aching for the first time in a week, so I’m going another week wearing it. It’s pretty comfortable in the loafers, and is really more of a pain in the ass than anything. Mostly, I hate feeling unprofessional in the stupid sneakers.
It’s fall here. I don’t know what it is in the rest of the country/world, but it’s most certainly fall here. It’s raining and dark and we’re having lots of thunderstorms and schizophrenic weather. Warm during the day, very crisp at night. The leaves are peaking, a sort of orangey golden gorgeousness that I just never get enough of. I really pity the people whose leaves just turn brown and drop. It’s almost worth the cold weather, seeing what the leaves look like underneath their chlorophyll.
I know I’ve said it before, but fall in Wisconsin is something that you just have to see to believe. There’s something emotional in it, so much more than a Christmas Eve snowfall. There is the scent of harvest, of good dark humus and drying hayfields. I took a deep breath this morning on my walk into work and could smell fallen damp leaves, the coppery undertones of the recent thunderstorm and a hint of burned wood. One of my favorite things about living in our house is that Wood Chopping Guy starts his furnace right about now, and when you stand on our front porch, the masculine scent of crackling pine wafts over our rooftop and conks you right on top of the head. It’s a gorgeous thing, that.
As for furnaces, Esteban had ours rechecked. I don’t know how old our furnace is, as it came with the house, but it is apparently four thousand years old and used to run on the oil of wooly mammoths. And it has a crack in the something or other, which translates to a) instant death if we had turned it on and b) five million dollars for a new furnace. The furnace guy left the furnace in pieces in the basement, perhaps so that we wouldn’t accidentally turn it on and cause an avenging angel to leap from its bowels and hack off our heads with a flaming sword or something. I don’t know. Mechanical stuff.
Esteban called and told me this while the furnace guy was measuring our house to tell us what kind of new five million dollar furnace we needed. Apparently, our furnace was too huge for our house (because they had to make it big enough to fit the wooly mammoth inside of it, maybe) and was running at some ridiculously inefficient rate. As a granola-cruncher who would probably drive a hybrid if they weren’t all so annoying, I can understand inefficiency and the desire to conserve our energy resources, but honestly? Our house is crazily insulated and after we put the new windows in, despite the fact that heating and electricity bills have skyrocketed over the last two years, ours stayed pretty much the same. In fact, in 10 years, I think it’s only gone up $40. So why would we spend five million dollars, just to save what really wasn’t that big of a deal in the first place? Yes, this is the same complacency that caused me to pay 9 years worth of unneccesary mortgage insurance. My attitude was that we were going to sell the house anyway, so let’s save our furnace wad for the next house. The selling price of our house would be the same whether we sunk five thousand dollars into an energy-efficient furnace or not. Esteban feels that I’m being unreasonable and unfriendly, but hey, we BOUGHT the house with a crappy roof and a four thousand year old furnace in it. Is it unreasonable to want to recoup some of the money that we’ve put into improvements?
In truth, the minute we replaced all of the windows in the house, Esteban has been itching to replace the furnace and the roof, so this verdict of deadly furnace was thrilling for him. I couldn’t really argue with that, after all. Then he mentioned that our perfectly good central air-conditioner would also need to be replaced. You see, they’d have to cut the line and bleed out all of the Cold-Making Stuff (sorry, my mind got distracted by thoughts of Project Runway while he was explaining this) and we could have a unit that was both a furnace and an air-conditioner put in for just a few million dollars more. After some questioning, he finally admitted that no, they don’t HAVE to replace the central air, they could just recharge it for a few dollars, but since it’s at least 10 years old, it seems like they should just knock it down and get the Super HotFlash 2010 installed. Good business sense!
Need I point out that we plan to sell the house in the next 12-16 months? Not that I expect it, but it’s even possible that we will be moving before we even NEED a central air. Also, I want to point out that in two months time, we will have put more money into our basement on completely boring and utilitarian things than I spent traveling in the last three years. Three YEARS!
I have suggested that we just sell the house before we actually need the furnace and let the new people figure it out. Perhaps they wouldn’t notice? Esteban has vetoed this suggestion. I think he’s being unreasonable. It’s not like I was suggesting that we wouldn’t leave the pieces.
Next time I get paid, I’m just going to walk to the stairs and throw a few twenties down there, because clearly, the basement gods need to be appeased.
This weekend, I made a run to the farmer’s market, where I got, among other things, a spaghetti squash. I’ve been hungry for spaghetti, but don’t want to think about the pasta carbs, so I’m going to try this and see how it works. Esteban is skeptical, as he is about all vegetable matter, but ah well. I got started painting another coat on the door, but then realized that I had no detail paint for the trim around the window, and needed another brush anyway, so made a quick run to Home Depot. Then I realized that I had forgotten to go to the butcher after the farmer’s market, so I drove out there too. I like to go immediately after the farmer’s market and get there as they open, because it is crazy busy on Saturdays and they are only open until noon. In fact, by 10:30 am, the parking lot was crazy and had someone not been pulling out of a rock star parking spot, I probably would have given up and gone home. But I didn’t and went inside, where I pulled number 59 when the number board said 30. Craziness. I was content to wait patiently, because the alternative was to go home and scrape paint. I got some baby back ribs, some beef stew meat for chili (I’m having a big of a ground beef squick right now), a big hunk of beef to roast later this week and a few hot sticks for Esteban. This time, I eschewed their delightfully decorated sugar cookies and my god, clearly I am a saint because those cookies are the shit.
Back at home, I threw together a rib rub, slapped it on the racks and threw them into the fridge to do their thing. I then finished the final coat of high gloss Real Red on the breezeway door, did the detail painting (which took forever) around the window, and then started scraping the back garage door, which was so full of dry rot and crumbly that I just knocked the worst of it off and then moved onto the potting shed door. Esteban was helping The Jason move all day Saturday, so I had to heft the doors around by myself. The garage door was light, since it had half a window, but my goodness, I suspect that the potting shed is actually a bomb shelter, as its door seems to be reinforced with solid lead. I managed to hoist it up onto the saw horses, only to realize that it was shorter than the other doors and the horses were spread too far apart. More hoisting, more hefting, and finally set the thing in place just as Esteban was driving up. Nice timing, bucket. My back ached for the rest of the day, although honestly, it could have been all the manual scraping too. I contented myself through most of it with the knowledge that I was definitely giving my biceps and triceps a workout. Esteban pulled up a chair and started on one of the inset panels, while I made the second run of the day out to Home Depot for another flap wheel and a fresh scraper blade.
We worked until sunset and then collapsed in the house and watched television, waiting for the ribs to finish cooking. I cooked them for almost three hours, per Alton Brown’s suggestion, but in retrospect, the last time that I made them, they were in there for almost four hours and came out absolutely exquisite. I also made the Brussels sprouts I had gotten at the Farmer’s Market. I did them with browned butter and garlic, hoping that Esteban would try them and to his credit, he did, immediately making a face and then spitting it out into the sink. Well, at least he tried. Brussel sprouts are not my favorite vegetable in the world, but in watching so much Food TV, I had forgotten that fact. Had either of us actually liked the things, I’m sure that the browned butter and garlic would have been perfection, but I only made it through six small ones before giving up to my childhood disliking and hiding them beneath my napkin. We had a Marietta varietal red with dinner, scored from World Market, and it was pretty decent. (We’re afraid to drink the Elevage, even though it would have paired nicely with the bbq ribs. The Elevage has become our honor student teenage daughter. Nothing will ever be good enough for it.) Go cheap wine go!
Because any weekend won’t be complete without at least a Home Depot Trilogy, on Sunday morning, we went out for Starbucks and went back to the Depot for new doorknobs. Once again, my rule of thumb stands true: as long as the doors were being messed with, it was a good time to replace the old handles and rekey the locks to match the front door. So now, there’s only one key needed to get into the house and the freshly painted door has a shiny new doorknob and everything is all safe and wonderful. And the breezeway door is completely finished and rehung. A total feeling of accomplishment. I fucking love fall.
