Honestly, I love summer. Summer Slacker Girl is back and here to stay, at least for a few months. I am, at this very moment, wearing Birkenstocks and my toenails are painted Rock and Roll Red. That pretty much symbolizes my entire worldview right there. Feet as metaphor. Hmmm. I need another pedicure.
I feel perfectly vindicated by my ridiculous Summer Slacker Girl attitude. Last night, Mo came over for dinner and I made her an omelet with sourdough toast (and the exquisite chopped cherry jam, which makes any dinner extraordinary) because I was too lazy to actually cook anything. Normally, I would have been hauling out the broiled salmon fillets, tossing spring green/grape tomato/feta/strawberry salads with my own balsamic vinaigrette. But no. Fuck that shit. Omelets are high cuisine, baby. Especially if you respect your eggs, show them proper reverence, and use more butter than is probably healthy.
However, the weather has been pretty shitty around here. Cooler than normal, definitely, as though winter still wants us to remember that it owns our asses. Certainly not some of the lovely hot pool weather that I cherish over the summer, but I’m sure that it’s just about to happen. We’ve had a lot of rain in the past couple of months. My favorite sunken ship hull that sticks out of the Fox has now disappeared, which is disturbing, as I seem to remember it sticks up a good three feet above the water. Or maybe the pelicans sailed off on it towards drier climes. Although one might think that pelicans wouldn’t mind the rain, but given their blinding white feathers, I would think that it would perturb them to no end. It ruins my day when I get a drop of iced tea on one of my white t-shirts.
I live about three blocks from a very large high school, which has some lovely benefits in that during the months when we are most likely to be outside, the high school is in fact, mostly empty, and also a bevy of jailbait rock hard football playing abs runs across my sidewalk about the time I am pulling into my driveway, but the downside is that the other nine months of the year, there is insane traffic right when I am leaving for work and also, high school students litter as though they are somehow equating personal freedom with crumpled Arby’s bags and discarded KFC cups, droplets of Mountain Dew Code Red clinging to the inside like inverted jewels.
But the other thing that sucks about this is that this high school also contains one of eight (I think) emergency sirens in the city. Imagine that. Eight for the entire city (which has considerable sprawl, definitely bigger than the city of San Francisco) means that they are pretty damn loud. A few nights ago, I was in the bedroom, a stripe of nose pore mask across my nose, falling asleep as I watched Tivo and waited for fifteen minutes to pass so I could rip off the mask and go to bed. So when one went off in the midst of a not-all-that-impressive thunderstorm a couple of nights ago, I got a little nervous. I tried to turn the channel to check the news channels but Ricky was recording something, some cable something that did not give one whit that we were in some kind of weather emergency, then I got up out of bed, wandered into the living room, flipped the forty-two different switches that are needed to turn on the television, the cable, the stereo, the DVD player (because everything runs through there, for some crazy (Esteban) reason), and the mysterious black box that apparently needs to be turned on. And when I flip manually to a local station (because I dropped the remote onto the floor, which caused it to vomit batteries out of its anus, but I didn’t look down when it happened and now all I can find are two AA batteries and the remote control back) and then watched as the Technicolor radar screen splashed into view, with lots of imposing yellows and reds and oranges and blues and greens. Wait, the blue was the Lake. But still, apparently the reds, they were something to worry about. And then it was put into motion, except that the announcer sounded like Jim Morrison. Oh, stereo wasn’t set to VCR (which, ironically, is the one thing we don’t have). Ok, so, a funnel cloud, no, two, but far far away and somewhere west. So not a big deal. I had at least a half hour to listen to sirens. I turned everything off and went back to bed, listening to the weak rain and occasional distant thunder. The siren stopped, whirring softly for at least five minutes as it wound down. That’s one thing the people who don’t live near the siren miss out’ the afterglow of emergency siren. It might be up there with cicadas for one of my favorite summer sounds.
I flipped off the Tivo and twisted into my sleeping position (sort of on my side, both arms crossed under my pillow, a corner of the comforter tucked between my knees so that I have one leg hanging out) and started drifting off. Then I heard the frantic whirring again and then the siren let loose once more. Crap. A desperate thought ran through my head ‘Shut up, you idiot, do you want the tornados to know where we are?’ Because if I were a tornado, the first thing I’d do was cut off that infernal racket. I looked over at the cat, who was stretched out on Esteban’s side of the bed (he was out with his friends watching anime). I decided that since the sirens were from the Eisenhower era, obviously a tornado hasn’t hit ours in a very long time, and also, if I started to hear the sound of a train coming, I would grab the cat and hurtle myself down into the basement.
And then fell immediately asleep.
When I woke in the middle of the night, it had stopped raining, Esteban was sleeping next to me and we still had a roof. Probably not the best plan for survival but whatever. Also, in all the excitement, I forgot about my nose pore mask, which had now been shrinking my pores for roughly 45 times longer than advised by the label. I pulled it off, and imagine my surprise when my nose did not come with it. Bah. The world has too many warnings. They’re all just hoopla. I’ll bet that it’s safe to swim with sharks too.
I do however, have some grand plans for the summer. I have finally wrenched creative co-control for kitchen flooring decisions from Esteban and have now vetoed our original plan for vinyl flooring (secret: I loathe the shyte and have never seen a vinyl floor for which I have happy feelings) and am going with laminate, as it looks reasonably like hardwood without being as fragile. I found a lovely reddish burlwood version that has a gorgeous exotic look and yet enough like plank boards to fit in with the feel of our 1949 bungalow. Also, it reminds me of the bird’s eye maple sleigh bed that I used to sleep in before I moved in with Esteban and began the dark decade of painful achy waterbed sleep.
Also, Esteban has promised to stop undermining my attempts at renovations with his procrastinating. He now apparently really wants to get things done. We’ll see how long that lasts, but I’m riding that wave hard, baby, and just going to see where it takes us.
My big plans for the weekend involve the Farmer’s Market and watching movies. I hope your weekend is just as scintillating. If you need any excitement, there’s still plenty of discussion happening in the Gay Marriage/Polygamy/Sex With Lemurs comments section of the previous entry.
