Sunday, April 11
Seeing as it looks like both my brother and I will be gone for the summer, my parents have invited a guy who used to work for us and his new wife to come work for us again - a good deal all around, as we need someone we like and trust to work here, and he needs a job that doesn't involve offices before he goes stark raving mad. They both came down this weekend to inspect the room, which meant that last week was spent in frenzied preperation, trying to make aforesaid room look like something a human being could live in.
The problem is that that particular room was empty when I came home from college. I accordingly dumped all the stuff from college and from my room into it, with the stated goal of dealing with it "when I had time." Some time later, my brother came home and dumped stuff of his in that room, took over my old room, and dumped all the stuff of mine that I didn't want from that room into the empty room. I should add that the empty room had previously been my parents', and was already pretty full of stuff they'd not bothered taking with them when they moved out of the house after that little "all the plumbing exploded" incident.
You begin to see the problem.
It doesn't help that my family is a bunch of packrats. The issue of the National Geographics illustrates this nicely.
My grandparents have been giving us a subscription to National Geographic since I was a kid, and no one wants to throw them away. They're just too damn cool, and besides, we're all guiltily aware that we never read more than one or two of the articles in them. Every time one arrives we get very excited, nab it, and read for a bit - but eventually we end up just flipping through and looking at the pictures. I don't know why. The text is excellent. But somehow we always just look at the pictures. We tell ourselves that we'll read the articles later, but the time gets away from us, and before we know it next month's magazine is here and we have to toss the old one onto the stack (because we can't throw it away, we haven't finished reading it yet) so we can continue to procrastinate with the new issue.
My family moved to this house in 1993. We moved into the house before that in 1988, prior to which we had lived in a rental house for a few months. The National Geographic collection dates back to the latter half of 1987 - the rental house era - which means, I suppose, that in the move before that we must have somehow forced ourselves to throw some magazines away, but the effort of will exhausted us, and we haven't been able to do it since.
National Geographic is a monthly magazine.
We have thirteen years' worth of them.
Let's face it - we're never going to catch up on our reading here.
So my mother proposed that we throw the National Geographic collection away. This was met with a positive catacophony of howling, screaming, and begging, all of it mine. I didn't want to throw the National Geographic collection away.
"It's in the way," my mother pointed out.
"But I need those. I use them for my writing." (Lies. I have used the National Geographic collection as a research tool about twice in my writing career. It's not that they wouldn't be a good resource, in fact they would be a fabulous resource, but that would prevent me dicking around on Google for hours on end.)
"Well, I suppose you can have them if you want them, but you're going to have to keep them in your room. They can't stay out here."
For a moment I weakened. My room was already bursting with overflow from the cleaning frenzy, and this was not a small amount of magazines we were talking about. The house leans towards whatever spot we stack them in. But then I thought of throwing them away.
"Fine. No problem."
My father, who had been listening to this incredulously, put in, "and when you move out, they're going with you."
"Fine."
"I mean it. You live anywhere but here for more than six months, those things are going with you."
"Fine."
"Whoever helps you move is going to hate you. And it's not going to be me."
I shrugged. I had already lost the help of my father and brother in potential future moving events after they'd helped install the seven-foot tall, five-foot wide hardwood bookcase that my brother made me for my birthday. At this stage I figured my future moving help would be so busy cussing me for the bookcase that a hundred pounds of National Geographics would probably pass unnoticed.
So the National Geographics went into my room, along with various suitcases, stacks of empty CD cases, boxes of notebooks, binders full of notes I'd taken in college (some shipped over from my year abroad in New Zealand), childhood toys, kitchen equipment, about twenty different tubes of hand cream, kindergarten art projects, a random assortment of things that I couldn't throw away because they were gifts from someone or another, and piles and piles of clothes. The latter created a problem. I hang my clothes on a cheap little rolling rack that I got at WalMart, which was never very stable and had been looking extra-precarious for some time; the addition of another batch of clothes was apparently too much for it, and I came in from milking to find that the whole thing had fallen over and was sprawled across the floor, and furthermore I couldn't get to it to fix it because of the large number of boxes stacked in the way, none of which I'd gotten cleared up during the day because I'd gotten involved in the vital task of sorting, cataloguing, and creating a searchable computer database for my National Geographic collection.
One day I suppose they will find the gene that causes this sort of behavior and surgically remove it, which will be a great relief to my descendants. But, dammit, I can't help it. I hate throwing stuff away. Broken stuff is bad enough, but stuff that still works and that just isn't getting used, or worn, or read, or has been replaced by a newer model, I can't bring myself to get rid of. I keep thinking I might need it one day. I have five or six vintage Macs in my closet for this exact reason. On this last cleaning binge I really cracked down on myself and filled three trash bags with junk and the back of my car with stuff to go to Goodwill, and I am still keeping too much. I know I am. But if I get rid of more stuff I think I'll have to break down and cry. I am convinced - absolutely convinced - that things like, oh, my notes from Bio 101, are going to come in handy one day.
Bah.
Hardwired into the genes. There'll be a fix for this someday, right up with cancer and the common cold. You wait and see.
In the meantime, I've cleared enough of a path in my room that I can move around, and I'll keep chipping at it over the next few days.
And I found a way to keep my closet rack from falling over again. Thirteen years of National Geographic. That rack isn't going anywhere.
The problem is that that particular room was empty when I came home from college. I accordingly dumped all the stuff from college and from my room into it, with the stated goal of dealing with it "when I had time." Some time later, my brother came home and dumped stuff of his in that room, took over my old room, and dumped all the stuff of mine that I didn't want from that room into the empty room. I should add that the empty room had previously been my parents', and was already pretty full of stuff they'd not bothered taking with them when they moved out of the house after that little "all the plumbing exploded" incident.
You begin to see the problem.
It doesn't help that my family is a bunch of packrats. The issue of the National Geographics illustrates this nicely.
My grandparents have been giving us a subscription to National Geographic since I was a kid, and no one wants to throw them away. They're just too damn cool, and besides, we're all guiltily aware that we never read more than one or two of the articles in them. Every time one arrives we get very excited, nab it, and read for a bit - but eventually we end up just flipping through and looking at the pictures. I don't know why. The text is excellent. But somehow we always just look at the pictures. We tell ourselves that we'll read the articles later, but the time gets away from us, and before we know it next month's magazine is here and we have to toss the old one onto the stack (because we can't throw it away, we haven't finished reading it yet) so we can continue to procrastinate with the new issue.
My family moved to this house in 1993. We moved into the house before that in 1988, prior to which we had lived in a rental house for a few months. The National Geographic collection dates back to the latter half of 1987 - the rental house era - which means, I suppose, that in the move before that we must have somehow forced ourselves to throw some magazines away, but the effort of will exhausted us, and we haven't been able to do it since.
National Geographic is a monthly magazine.
We have thirteen years' worth of them.
Let's face it - we're never going to catch up on our reading here.
So my mother proposed that we throw the National Geographic collection away. This was met with a positive catacophony of howling, screaming, and begging, all of it mine. I didn't want to throw the National Geographic collection away.
"It's in the way," my mother pointed out.
"But I need those. I use them for my writing." (Lies. I have used the National Geographic collection as a research tool about twice in my writing career. It's not that they wouldn't be a good resource, in fact they would be a fabulous resource, but that would prevent me dicking around on Google for hours on end.)
"Well, I suppose you can have them if you want them, but you're going to have to keep them in your room. They can't stay out here."
For a moment I weakened. My room was already bursting with overflow from the cleaning frenzy, and this was not a small amount of magazines we were talking about. The house leans towards whatever spot we stack them in. But then I thought of throwing them away.
"Fine. No problem."
My father, who had been listening to this incredulously, put in, "and when you move out, they're going with you."
"Fine."
"I mean it. You live anywhere but here for more than six months, those things are going with you."
"Fine."
"Whoever helps you move is going to hate you. And it's not going to be me."
I shrugged. I had already lost the help of my father and brother in potential future moving events after they'd helped install the seven-foot tall, five-foot wide hardwood bookcase that my brother made me for my birthday. At this stage I figured my future moving help would be so busy cussing me for the bookcase that a hundred pounds of National Geographics would probably pass unnoticed.
So the National Geographics went into my room, along with various suitcases, stacks of empty CD cases, boxes of notebooks, binders full of notes I'd taken in college (some shipped over from my year abroad in New Zealand), childhood toys, kitchen equipment, about twenty different tubes of hand cream, kindergarten art projects, a random assortment of things that I couldn't throw away because they were gifts from someone or another, and piles and piles of clothes. The latter created a problem. I hang my clothes on a cheap little rolling rack that I got at WalMart, which was never very stable and had been looking extra-precarious for some time; the addition of another batch of clothes was apparently too much for it, and I came in from milking to find that the whole thing had fallen over and was sprawled across the floor, and furthermore I couldn't get to it to fix it because of the large number of boxes stacked in the way, none of which I'd gotten cleared up during the day because I'd gotten involved in the vital task of sorting, cataloguing, and creating a searchable computer database for my National Geographic collection.
One day I suppose they will find the gene that causes this sort of behavior and surgically remove it, which will be a great relief to my descendants. But, dammit, I can't help it. I hate throwing stuff away. Broken stuff is bad enough, but stuff that still works and that just isn't getting used, or worn, or read, or has been replaced by a newer model, I can't bring myself to get rid of. I keep thinking I might need it one day. I have five or six vintage Macs in my closet for this exact reason. On this last cleaning binge I really cracked down on myself and filled three trash bags with junk and the back of my car with stuff to go to Goodwill, and I am still keeping too much. I know I am. But if I get rid of more stuff I think I'll have to break down and cry. I am convinced - absolutely convinced - that things like, oh, my notes from Bio 101, are going to come in handy one day.
Bah.
Hardwired into the genes. There'll be a fix for this someday, right up with cancer and the common cold. You wait and see.
In the meantime, I've cleared enough of a path in my room that I can move around, and I'll keep chipping at it over the next few days.
And I found a way to keep my closet rack from falling over again. Thirteen years of National Geographic. That rack isn't going anywhere.
Thursday, April 01
My modem still does not work, and I got a grand total of five hours of sleep last night, being up with a sickly calf until two am. Also, I am in college registrar hell.
Just so you know.
I have pretty much gotten to the stage where I don't think calves are cute any more, to the relief of my family, which stopped thinking calves were cute about a month ago. Well, that's not entirely true. I still think calves are cute, especially for the first few days of their lives, when they are still dazed and surprised by this whole "world" thing they seem suddenly to have discover and wobble around after their mothers looking wide-eyed and have this adorable confusion over what they're supposed to be doing with all this leg. In this stage they generally regard me with the same wide-eyed curiosity that they accord to everything. It is heart-melting. I find myself apologizing for that disagreeable five minutes or so sometime early in their lives when I attack them, shove vaccine down their throats and eartags in their ears, and dump strong iodine all over their navels (and, generally, myself), although they always seem to be willing to forgive and forget.
Mind, this is just most of the calves. Every couple of days one is born with the absolute conviction that I am the Antichrist, a belief that the vaccinate-eartag-iodine routine tends to cement. Inevitably these are also the calves born with a pretty good control of their legs, meaning that they can not only run away from me, but can kick my kneecaps sharply in the process.
And mind, this is only for the first day or two of life. After about day three even the cutest of calves turn into nothing more than an empty belly with a mouth attached, a mouth that is determined to latch itself onto anything and everything in range that might potentially give milk. You can't even look into a pen without seeing a sea of upturned faces, eyes wide with ravening hunger and mouths open to emit ear-splitting bawls, and as for going into the pen... the calves have very unfortunate aim; they tend to go for between your legs, which is where the udder'd be if we were cows, which we're not. My brother mostly refuses to help me feed calves and when he does tends to spend a lot of time dancing backwards and yelling, "No! No! No balls!" I can ignore this with more equanamity, but they also go for my chest whenever I bend over, which results in my own set of shouts.
(I'm sure that some perverse sod is going to suggest that getting your sensitive areas sucked is not such a bad thing. Guess again. First off, calves have teeth, and they're not afraid to use them. Second off, we're not talking about a gentle, pleasant sucking sensation here. We are talking more about the sort of suction that one sees presented on sci-fi shows right after somebody blows a hole in the hull, only concentrated on a smaller area and with the aforementioned teeth. Think bruises and cuts. Third, when a calf encounters something that does not produce milk immediately - which is to say, nine-tenths of what she chooses to suck on - she gets annoyed and headbutts the crap out of it. I should add at this stage that some of these "babies" outweigh me, and more than once I've ended up sitting on the ground with the wind knocked out of me after a gentle tap from a three-day old. This may help to explain why we strongly discourage any sucking activities, usually by beating their little heads in.)
However, there is still a time - right after you've fed them but before they get hungry again - where they run around and play and are cute again. It happens twice a day and lasts about five minutes. So I still think calves are cute to some extent. The rest of my family, which has started talking about veal a lot, thinks I'm crazy.
On the other hand I'm probably getting a lot of training for motherhood. I'm ready for the incessant demands for food and attention, the strange smells, the disgusting waste products, the noise levels, the slobber - the only problem I forsee is having to remind myself that you have to be a little gentler with children than calves. Picking one up and using it to beat the others is generally frowned upon, I gather, and beating them over the head with a five-gallon bucket is probably right out.
Just so you know.
I have pretty much gotten to the stage where I don't think calves are cute any more, to the relief of my family, which stopped thinking calves were cute about a month ago. Well, that's not entirely true. I still think calves are cute, especially for the first few days of their lives, when they are still dazed and surprised by this whole "world" thing they seem suddenly to have discover and wobble around after their mothers looking wide-eyed and have this adorable confusion over what they're supposed to be doing with all this leg. In this stage they generally regard me with the same wide-eyed curiosity that they accord to everything. It is heart-melting. I find myself apologizing for that disagreeable five minutes or so sometime early in their lives when I attack them, shove vaccine down their throats and eartags in their ears, and dump strong iodine all over their navels (and, generally, myself), although they always seem to be willing to forgive and forget.
Mind, this is just most of the calves. Every couple of days one is born with the absolute conviction that I am the Antichrist, a belief that the vaccinate-eartag-iodine routine tends to cement. Inevitably these are also the calves born with a pretty good control of their legs, meaning that they can not only run away from me, but can kick my kneecaps sharply in the process.
And mind, this is only for the first day or two of life. After about day three even the cutest of calves turn into nothing more than an empty belly with a mouth attached, a mouth that is determined to latch itself onto anything and everything in range that might potentially give milk. You can't even look into a pen without seeing a sea of upturned faces, eyes wide with ravening hunger and mouths open to emit ear-splitting bawls, and as for going into the pen... the calves have very unfortunate aim; they tend to go for between your legs, which is where the udder'd be if we were cows, which we're not. My brother mostly refuses to help me feed calves and when he does tends to spend a lot of time dancing backwards and yelling, "No! No! No balls!" I can ignore this with more equanamity, but they also go for my chest whenever I bend over, which results in my own set of shouts.
(I'm sure that some perverse sod is going to suggest that getting your sensitive areas sucked is not such a bad thing. Guess again. First off, calves have teeth, and they're not afraid to use them. Second off, we're not talking about a gentle, pleasant sucking sensation here. We are talking more about the sort of suction that one sees presented on sci-fi shows right after somebody blows a hole in the hull, only concentrated on a smaller area and with the aforementioned teeth. Think bruises and cuts. Third, when a calf encounters something that does not produce milk immediately - which is to say, nine-tenths of what she chooses to suck on - she gets annoyed and headbutts the crap out of it. I should add at this stage that some of these "babies" outweigh me, and more than once I've ended up sitting on the ground with the wind knocked out of me after a gentle tap from a three-day old. This may help to explain why we strongly discourage any sucking activities, usually by beating their little heads in.)
However, there is still a time - right after you've fed them but before they get hungry again - where they run around and play and are cute again. It happens twice a day and lasts about five minutes. So I still think calves are cute to some extent. The rest of my family, which has started talking about veal a lot, thinks I'm crazy.
On the other hand I'm probably getting a lot of training for motherhood. I'm ready for the incessant demands for food and attention, the strange smells, the disgusting waste products, the noise levels, the slobber - the only problem I forsee is having to remind myself that you have to be a little gentler with children than calves. Picking one up and using it to beat the others is generally frowned upon, I gather, and beating them over the head with a five-gallon bucket is probably right out.
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