Dinner is served

My fella has been wistfully requesting chocolate pudding pie since I've known him. I tried the Jello pudding he remembered from his childhood and it was a dismal failure, several times. Southern Living was a gift from my child last Christmas and I've actually been feeling too poorly to make many of its recipes so far; but this month's issue had this beauty and I've never had a SL recipe fail. Kroger failed me in the search for the chocolate wafers to make a homemade crust, but one Keebler chocolate crust and the rest of the recipe later and, voila. Homemade Chocolate pudding pie that is firm and gorgeous. It's made with eight ounces of Ghirardelli 60% Cacao and sixteen ounces of whipping cream; hard to go wrong with that. It called for rum but not having any I used Jack Daniels and it was stellar. Oh, there was taco soup, too, but after he yummed down two bowls of that the fella yummed down two pieces of this and bemoaned keeping it in his fridge, as he feels it is not safe around him. I'm just relieved to have found a nice, simple, perfect recipe for this favorite thing of his.

Do Not Want

My cats before these two half-wild things were content to go outside, pee in a flowerbed, turn around, and come back in the house. The present two feral rescues my boyfriend has talked me into have kept things around here, to put it mildly, lively. The orange one with the loud purr ate a hole in the floor of the house and escaped out of it as a kitten to thwart my well-intentioned plan to convert him to gracious home living. The calico has to be checked on her every entry during the day to prevent the daily murder of an anole lizard under the dining room table. The kitty rodeo they put on every day and night at ten sharp leaves every rug and piece of furniture askew and the dog looking a mite nervous. And the dead squirrel who appeared twice under the dining room table, once intact and next regurgitated after I had flung his corpse into the ditch, is best forgotten.
Orange badman is the one I love best because he does love to curl up next to me and purr hugely. Tonight he did not come when I called him and I was concerned, as he had a scrape on his tail and I wanted to check on it. A few hours later, Rachel Maddow was on the DVR and I heard some scratching at the front door. I opened to check to see if it was him, and greeted him happily....um. What is that. No, really. Why is your head down, and what is gray, exactly.
Discretion being the better part of valor, he went under the coffee table, and I went for the broom and a small plastic trash can, visions of the previous squirrel violation dancing in my head. I poked the ginger avenger with the broomstick and he waved me off: nothing to see here, nothing in my mouth.  I peered more closely; sure enough. Nothing in his mouth. But in my only pair of shoes that I wear? My Keens that I wear all day, every day?
There is a black button nose, twitch-wise, and a pair of beady eyes. Smallish roundish gray ear, also. Yeah, way cute, whatever. Vermin in my Keen. Fucking cat has verminated my Keen. There is a squirrel in my Keen. I hook the shoe into the trashcan with the broomstick and look closer; guess what. No cute furry squirrel tail even. Cat has totally ratted my Keen, not even squirrelated it, rattleated vermilated violated now my shoe has bubonic plague and hantavirus dammit. There is a rat in my shoe in my house. Rat.
Boy their tails are ugly.
I take the trash can to the front porch, dump the shoe out, rat runs off, calico takes off after it, I lock the door after the both of them. Keen goes into the washer.
I definitely should have held out for the Abyssinian I wanted in the first damn place.

Pro and Con list

The guys in New Orleans are being weaselly about coughing up relocation money upfront. Ninety days after I got there isn't much help; as I told the bossman, I have one set of money, and it's enough to get me there or fix up this house so renting it would pay the mortgage, but not enough to do both. I can't carry two places to live for three months on what they are willing to pay, I'd go through all my renovation money. He was going to look into getting the payment upfront and call me back. He hasn't. But, honestly, that is good.
I was going to take the job out of panic. Violating my own Rule #1, Don't Panic.
 Yeah, it's in my new field and was a good salary offer. But I won't run out of money here for several months and I think on further reflection that hauling an old sick anxious dog and two half-wild cats to a strange place, starting a new job, and studying for boards that I have to pass to keep that new job is no way to stay healthy. I ate some fried food this weekend and incapacitated myself for a day and a half. Plain stupid but it did remind me how hard life would be with absolutely no one to help when I can't just wish away the symptoms of the chronic illness that's had me by the tail for more than a year now. I yowled  at my sister and spoiled her lunch hour with my angst over this; I honestly have been unable to get a job interview here in town and it's scary to let a sure thing go, even a sure thing that would pile some killer stress on. Then I yowled at one of my friends on the phone, and was finally calm enough to discuss it with my fella. He doesn't want me to go, and thinks it will be too hard altogether, but wasn't going to say so because he was being supportive of having a job, any job. I'm still determined to clean the house like I'm leaving it, but I really think if that guy calls me back I am going to have to take a deep breath and tell him the month it's taken them to get back to me has let something else come up. I'm not going to let on that the something is studying for boards and praying, praying, for a job here in town.

No One Else Will Think This Is Funny

But when we were driving through Pennsylvania, it almost made us die. The roads in Pennsylvania were pretty terrible, all washboardy, so we had been pounded in that truck for hours and were punchy. Plus, the horrendous stench of the cowshit of the Lehigh valley is like nothing you can imagine, unless your car has broken down outside Bakersfield, California, by the feedlots. So, we are looking for our exit to the hotel, in vain, and sooo tired and beat-up. There is a sign! We will read it!
It says, Shartlesville, 16 Miles.
I say, Shartlesville sounds like a place where everyone looks all surprised all the time because they made a mess in their pants when they thought they were just going to fart.
My daughter started laughing so hard I thought she was going to drive the truck off the road. She does this thing when I crack her up that she loses her breath and starts hitting her leg while tears run down her face. Her eyes started to squinch up and she was trying to say, sharting, startling, startled shartled.  I was making bug-eyed ooops my pants are full of poo faces. The truck started to swerve around and I saw the little blue car appear briefly in the rear view mirror.
Wait, wait, don't kill us, not that funny....hold on...
She wiped her eyes with one hand and did some gasping and we had to drop the subject for a while.
It took us about another two or three hours weaving through the bumpy, crappy road-work Pennsyvania highway night to find our exit past Allentown.
We got to our hotel and it was a shithole. It was two stories and lacked an elevator. Horrible tattooed middle-aged women were staggering into a disco on the first floor. We dragged our suitcases upstairs, shooed some guidos away from our door to enter it, glared at the grimy bathroom ceiling and 80's striped wallpaper, and said to each other,
Not Allentown, Shartlesville.

Filters and a Rapid Descent into Madness

Last night we were lying around like slugs, I on the computer and he watching some trainwreck on TV. Oh, it was a tattoo show; he is horrified by tattoos and watches it by switching it off and on like there are snakes on it. When Kat comes on he lets out a stifled, "Ugh". There was a particularly unusual setup and I "heard" him consider something very un-p.c. in his thoughts. So I peered around the computer and repeated it. He allowed as that wasn't nice to say. I allowed as how I hadn't thought of it, just repeating it. He grunted in assent and laughed at himself for being so rude, even inside his head. The thing I like about it is, it didn't weird him out at all. The tattoos did.
I enjoyed the hard work of setting up my kid's apartment even though it involved constant cleaning; it all seemed to make something good happen. I have been working on my house since I got home and every day it gets harder. The front rooms looked better, at first.  Now they are starting to fill up with crap for the yard sale I have promised myself. I  have worked on the bedrooms for days and they still don't look much better unless you check closely for dust. Every day I attack another closet, bookcase, box of abandoned stuff my kid wanted to keep but not sort, or desk drawer. My eyes and lips burn but thanks to the big allergy workup, I now know that it's a form of angioedema that won't kill me so I can just suffer and power through it. But it's really upsetting me in a cumulative way; I spend a couple of hours every day searching vainly or applying vainly for local jobs. I am waiting for my drug-screen to come back so I can get a start date from the guys down South. When that happens, I will have to negotiate a relocation allowance just to get down there, and then the real madness will start. When I got sick it crept up on me; my feet filled up with bone spurs while I worked 270-hour months, half of them on the road, and never sorted the chemicals and baskets in the laundry room, the clothes I got too fat for, the junk that filled the drawers. Once I was felled and couldn't stand or bend over without fainting, the place turned into a bonafide Hoarders site; if it got in here, I had to get someone else to remove it or it didn't leave. It's truly scary what three years of that will do to your home after fifteen years of having someone keep it tidy for you.  I found a lot of unorganized photos and sorted them out of the sleeves, and the ones of the house just killed me, it used to look so much nicer. I got this huge, wistful, sad nostalgia for my housekeeper, my health, my ability to bounce between jobs, my stamina to keep the yard up, and it slams me every time my nose starts to itch while cleaning out a cabinet. Cleaning gives me the blues on a good day but cleaning without visible progress while on hold for my life is sending me around the bend.

Knowing, Not Knowing, and Friday the 13th

So, here is something else I don't usually tell people. I know stuff other people don't know by ways they don't know it, and I'm not sure how I get the information. It's not much of a blessing, the information is often negative.
I have had many, many boyfriends who were convinced I was psychic. Actually, all of them that were paying any attention at all.  I really could just sit next to them and "hear" their thoughts in my heads and would often respond to what they were mulling over. When I was young and had no filter at all it caused a shitload of discord, to put it mildly. I really never understood why it freaked them out so badly. One of the nicest things about my Asperger's boyfriend is that he does not care when I respond to what he is thinking. Apparently it fits the worldview of a mild aut to have one's girlfriend hear one's thoughts.
Women are generally somewhat better at hiding their thoughts but many are startlingly loud thinkers as well and probably the reason I don't have many women friends.
It's only really pleasant with my child; she was electively mute for the first several-several-several years of her life, and we developed an elaborate means of thinking back and forth across the car or room which defies explanation; we could decide on meals, choose something fun, and even tell jokes. A lot of it went away when she got older, but we can still do the jokes, and I am forbidden to look at her in church for that reason. One of the hardest things about the trip we just took is during the drive when I started really being in lots of pain, remarkably quickly, and was doing everything in my power not to let her know, she was not in the least deceived; and when she got so tense on that bad stretch of road in Alabama, I got a muscle spasm in my neck. Neither one of us can hide distress or pain from each other and we are reflexive liars about both.
A good case could be made for me just being a good pattern-reader, if I wasn't so myopic, really. My child's primary, outstanding "giftedness" is in pattern recognition ability according to the school psychologists, and I have color memory and distance memory and some other odd pattern abilities.
Every now and then something just hits me in the middle of the chest like a random negative energy particle and I get this horrible premonition. It goes all over me. It's rarely wrong as far as, something really pretty bad will happen in the next day once that worry bomb goes off. Sometimes I'm awake, sometimes I'm asleep, but they are usually about twelve to 24 hours ahead of the disaster. I just hate the fuck out of them because they are like someone yelling "look out!" at you when you are driving....hell, you are looking out, dammit, you are driving!
I got one yesterday afternoon on a day when nothing was out of the ordinary at all. I just realized that the new job hadn't called me back about the pre-employment physical, and I went cold all the way to my toenails, and my chest started hurting. I have enough money to live on until March, there wasn't a reason for the doom reaction, and I've been shaky ever since.
When the pets got me up this morning, one of them had disgraced themself with a very unhygenic act in the kitchen, and the refrigerator had died, again. Not really Friday the 13 type stuff except for the cost of replacing a fridge. I sucked up my courage and called the new boss, and he called me back four hours later with a contact number to go have a drug screen done next week. Drug screen, pssht. Piece of cake.
So it does look like I'm moving to the Gulf Coast, which is enough to dread, I guess. Maybe that was the premonition, not the dead fridge and the large pile of cat turds. How's the hurricane forecast for this season shaping up, anyway?

Deep Intake of Breath

I finally have a job offer. It's six hours away. In New Orleans, home of hurricanes and rampant crime, and where neither my cats nor my ancient dog would be anything but continually restless. It has a good salary and benefits, a possibility of a sign-on bonus I could use for relocation, did I mention an actual salary instead of hourly work for the first time in twelve years, and it's in my new field that I trained for while I was sick. My boyfriend, who has Asperger's and hates to travel, is not going to be buying it. So there goes that if I pass the pre-employment physical. Yep. Pre-employment physical. For someone who's been on disability for, oh, um, hey...nine or ten months. Fuck.
Not worrying so much about the whole relocation thing, really; not a good liar. No need to relocate if they withdraw their offer because, fuck this, you are a CRIP!!!! How close can you trim the truth on a pre-employment physical form? Damn, I can't remember what-all they asked before but I can't imagine how I can pass one. I can put my daily meds only, the pain stuff is not daily, mostly. Leave out the TENS unit if they don't ask directly, and I don't remember a form asking about one directly. Crap, I don't know how I will finesse this one but the local job that was going to call me today, sure thing, aces....crickets.  Nothing.
I am definitely blackballed here in town. And since MegaFormerEmployer cut me off from getting unemployment by LYING about firing me for being unable to work 12 hour shifts, I've got to get a job before I run through the pittance that is long-term disability. So when they call me to go take that pre-employment physical, I'm going to take a deep breath, hold it, and answer each question as narrowly as possible without actually telling a story. Because employed and crazy is better than homeless and crazy.

Poltergeist

I honestly did vacuum and mop before I left for a week but you sure could not tell on my arrival home. So I got out the tools today to attack the whole haunted-house vibe from the rolls of cobwebby fur in every corner. It wasn't just the fur, either: it looked like a poltergeist had been at the place with receipts, pens, pill bottles, magazines, and letters in every possible spot on the floor. Apparently not only does nature abhor a vacuum, my cats abhor a clean floor and attempt to fill it with as much plastic and paper as they can lay their kitty paws on in my absence. I got quite a bit done, though. The place can sure use it, since I've been laid up one way or another for more than a year and a half. But if I can hit one bookcase or corner a day, eventually it will look more like my house again and less like a half-finished episode of Hoarders.
I talk to OoA#1 about four times a day and she is keeping busy and it's cooler there, at least. She seems pretty resigned to having a sucky birthday tomorrow and I am resigned to not telling her I told her so. I spend quite some time playing on the Southwest Airlines website researching fares for her to come home at Christmas. She will be going to NYC at the end of the week to stay with friends so that will cheer her up. Which will cheer me up.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

We drove, day before yesterday, around the neighborhood a little in the atrocious heat. There was artisan mozzarella and guaranteed sweet corn at the tiny Italian farmer's market, so we got some. We gaped and oohed at the gorgeous Victorian and Grecian homes in her new neighborhood at fifteen miles an hour with no one behind us to honk, and found where a waterfall came out of the side of the hill to crash into the canal that goes into the Hudson. Then we went down the street to Wynantskill and got antipasto salad and the best cannoli you ever saw, at least a million calories apiece she said, filled with mascarpone and whipped cream and chocolate chips and drizzled with chocolate syrup.
We had gotten everything put together the day before, right before the worst of the heat set in. No air-conditioning in a third-floor walkup on a ninety-degree day is no joke, and the two fans we had pointed at us didn't keep the sweat dried off. We had to wait until after dark to put up the curtain rods because it was more than a hundred degrees by the ceiling. Fabulous, eleven-foot, white-molding ceilings, but hot bastards nonetheless.
Here is what everything was: She put together the six-drawer Ikea Hemnes dresser while I was at the stores all day Wednesday getting stuff to finish out the apartment and taking a conference call. She and I fought a huge pitched battle with her enormous Ikea padded headboard frame; it came with six vital screw-holes in very awkward places not predrilled. If an Indonesian Ikea worker ever hears the words, "My name is Loosey Ricardo. You did not drill the leg-holder holes for my daughter's bed. Prepare to die", he should not be surprised.  The nightstand was a piece of cake. The dining room table was enormously heavy and the pegs were a huge bitch to pound in; we did ruin a cake of Dial soap her aunt had randomly given her by rubbing it on the pegs and that helped some but our latissimus dorsi will probably never be the same anyway. Three of the four dining chairs were no big deal, the fourth had mis-drilled holes, easily corrected once the Home Depot trip to obtain drill bits was completed. The six-foot bookshelf was completed in the time it took Steel Magnolias to run; Shelby lay dying, refusing to open her eyes, as I pounded the nails into its back.  The lamps just screwed together; Ikea had fooled us with displaying the wrong bulbs for them, but Home Depot to the rescue again, and a couple of white-wire shelf units for the kitchen and office nook later, all we need is....a microwave stand. Her grandfather got her a microwave that looked small on the box and out of the box was HUGE, wouldn't fit on the counter, and had to squat on the floor in the corner in the dining room to prepare our guaranteed sweet corn that it was just too fuckin hot to boil water for. Incidentally: if you wash it and leave the inside leaves on, microwaving about two and a half minutes an ear makes mightyfine sweet corn without heating up the house. Damn, it was good.
The drive to New York was a nightmare of pain; she was a trouper but it was fourteen hours of bad road the first day and twelve hours of better road the next. Alabama I am talking to you, Interstate 59 is not supposed to be two lanes with a sand shoulder. Pulling a car on a dolly down that, in the dark, is best described as a growth experience. One that firmly establishes the belief that Alabama's chief traffic engineer should have to do that task nightly. Tennessee and Virginia know how to pave a highway, but Pennsyvania, for godsakes, all those picturesque buggies on the side roads do not make up for the overwhelming smell of cowshit in the entire Lehigh valley and the washboard interstate interspersed with roadwork crashwalls with no outside lane stripe. The four and a half hours of getting to New Jersey, getting covered with bruises fighting the Ikea boxes into the Penske truck, and driving to the apartment were minor in comparison. And her building manager came through like a champ; he got his brother to come for the weekend, who was formerly a mover, and the two of them moved everything up two impossibly narrow and steep flights of stairs cheerfully. After the first day at the apartment, I had to throw away my TENS unit electrodes; they are meant to last for months but I had sweated off the gel in the drive and during the New Jersey Ikea leg. But they came through when needed and I just subbed in a bunch of Lidocaine patches; I had been wearing both to make it on the trip.
I filled up her fridge and cabinets with food and organized her kitchen and utility closet. Her apartment is beautiful, a jewel-box of peach and yellow with blue and brown accents. She is doing what she does best: worrying. About passing her intro tests, about finding friends, about being homesick. I had tried to talk her into moving a few weeks later, closer to the beginning of school, but she wanted to be settled; now she is anxious about loneliness. She drove me to the airport yesterday and couldn't talk when we hugged goodbye; she did the death-grip like when she hung onto me at college and begged me not to go off and leave her there, after she had begged me to let her go off that far. So I did what I have always done when she panics. Fight my own panic down, back into the corner where it needs to die. Forget that I wanted her to stay two more weeks, hell, that I wanted her to pursue that offer from New Orleans for Christ's sake, not godforsaken New York fucking snowbound State.  Straighten out my face, my voice, my neck. Look all happy, all calm, all reassuring, all cheerful. Say something completely rude to make her laugh. And once I get the laugh, kiss her up and remind her that we've been here before, that she felt this way at Trinity and ended up loving it and missing it and having to go see it this October; and that we are Steel Magnolias who can drive a big orange truck towing a cute blue car and put together furniture and say fuck doing it and bake awesome cookies to thank the nice guys for moving and make it all look easy. And in four years we will be laughing about this now, and she will be homesick for Troy on her way to somewhere else, because she will have done great here and had a great time and now she's just got to go back and start on that. Right? Right.