In medias res

I’ve gotten so used to the remodeling chaos around here that when I got home (to B’s home) from work this evening, I thought about cleaning the floors a bit, then discarded the idea since the Shop Vac is outside.

Tangentially, any time you are reduced to using a Shop Vac to clean the floors inside, it means that you have a lot of mess on your hands.

It seems like I’m reaching inertia on the cleaning, though. And it’s not the living room and bedroom demo, or the dry walling, or the painting, or the other activities that produce mountains of dust and ruble at B’s. It’s the living out of bags. My mother would probably call it the wages of sin or something. I got to my house every week or so, or as often as needed to collect my mail and grab a few more clothing articles. It’s moving out by attrition, or moving in by increments, like the proverbial camel who edges into the tent.

I’ve been pretty happy playing house over here, and certainly am happy with B. Fantastically happy. But it really is a disaster zone, albeit a constantly improving disaster zone. Even B feels like he has no space in his house, as it’s overrun with tools and construction stuff. I have even less space.

I’m reminded of my loner tendencies, too. I have been less active by necessity, and this has resulted in a total loss of my *by myself* wanderings around. It’s just too hard to do any more driving and walking than is absolutely required by my work. The days I can actually drive to the office, I come home to whimper and elevate my foot.

The little bursts of spring we are having make me want to be out and about and active and organizing and sprucing. Sprucing is a wonderful word. But, it looks like my spring cleaning might be relegated to just hanging out and making sure a cleaning service does an acceptable job of returning the place to normalcy.

And we did pick out a great paint color for the dining room last night, so there’s that. That and my idea for an iPhone app that lets you store room dimensions and enter furniture sizes on the fly (read: while at West Elm) to see how they will work in the space. Ohhhh Jesus. If there already is one, I’m giving my BlackBerry to my sister and switching phone carriers.

I was lying in bed this morning, complaining to myself about how much my ankle is hurting now that its forced vacation in a cast has ended. It had grown accustomed to drinking mojitos and napping, or whatever it has been up to for the past couple of months, and now that it is pressed into a bit of service, it fights back by throbbing, aching, and sometimes collapsing on me when I need it.

That’s when I noticed that I could see real, spring-like sunlight streaming from the east and reflecting off of the fog that’s covering the Willamette River a few streets south of us. This is a time of year that (some) Portlanders seem to take a return to clouds as a personal insult, so while I last saw sunlight yesterday afternoon, I had already plummeted back to despair over when spring might really arrive.

But today, at least, the sun seems to be struggling through the Oregonian clouds, and I might go outside and watch the raised beds for sign of any of the seeds we planted last weekend poking up through the dirt.

This is old news, but a couple weeks ago, a tug pushed a barge into a pylon on a Columbia River bridge. That, of course, falls into the whatever category, since no significant damage was done and no one was injured. However, I can’t get it out of my mind because of the name of the tug boat. “Defiance.” Much laughter has revolved around that incident chez In Medias Res.

Google’s April Fool’s Day joke this year really was great.

I spent this great holiday working from home, which of course involved breaking into the microbrew around 3 pm. The hatred I have been feeling toward certain players at work has escalated to contempt, and being powerless to change things, I have resolved to stop worrying about them.

My heart briefly stopped today when I read Food Dude’s farewell to the Portland foodie scene. At least this year I read his prank on April Fool’s Day, rather than days later in Google Reader and thus removed from its context.

We have been gardening lately in an excess of “there’s visible sunlight” exuberance. It’s likely that most of the seeds we have planted will rot in the ground, but I hear rumors of rows of carrots pushing their ways up in the raised beds. This is very exciting to me, as carrots are my most favoritest vegetable to grow, and I hope the claim is not another April 1 prank.

In a sparkling example of pain-induced imcompetence, I recently made two copies of F’s keys and gave them to Dr. M. so she could get into my house. I only realized the mistake when Dr. M. told me it didn’t work on my door.

In my defense, I haven’t used my house keys in two months, since I’m not there very often anymore. When I am, the door is always unlocked because we have, hello, two apparently ferocious dogs who love nothing more than lounging by the door and barking at people.

B’s place, which is where I spend most of my time when I’m not limping in to the office, is in full remodel mode. This week, we won’t even have heat due to drywalling in progress.

It’s fantastic!

I made some cornbread last weekend; since there were just two eaters, we didn’t come close to finishing it. Days later, I was in need of a quick dinner, and decided to try something new. Sooo…I mixed together the remaining cup or so of chili with a can of black beans, poured some jalapeno salsa over the beans, then crumbled the cornbread on top and covered it all with a bit of cheddar. The mess fit into a 9-inch bread pan just right. I expected something edible to emerge from the oven 30 minutes or so later, but what we wound up with was food that was OH MY GOD!!! awesome.

Thought I’d share, in case anyone else out there ever winds up with leftover cornbread.

I had a very much un-look-forwarded-to dinner with A tonight. I haven’t seen her for a few weeks due to being lucky being busy, and was almost getting used to not having a super needy, demanding friend asking me for constant favors. “Please do my taxes.” “Please drive (way over) to my place this weekend and move the trash cans inside, since I’ll be out of town.” “I am so mad at X, and want to get together so I can tell you about it.”

Fortunately, these days, I can respond, “Um, not driving? My foot it be broken?” But I couldn’t say no any longer, so I agreed to a happy hour. I suggested one place, and she was “sick of it,” so she suggested another place, a restaurant that might as well be a Catholic grotto and object of pilgrimage, given its perch on a hillside and uncountable number of stairs leading to the front door. Feeling terse, I responded “Too many stairs. Let’s go to McCormick”s.”

So, I went there. And the fucking old people had all of the handicapped spaces, as I actually suspected on the way. So, I went somewhere else. Unfortunately, by that time my foot was so tired that I was considering running into people in front of me to avoid needing to put in the clutch.

It’s still on the tip of my tongue to tell the next old person I see, “You may be fucking old, but I’m fucking broken, so get out of my parking space!”

A month or so ago, I wrote about online dating. I didn’t wind up meeting the Irish guy. I told everyone to go to hell and cancelled my match.com account. Well, everyone except for #4, “B.” He proved absolutely irresistible. I think I was wondering about how hard I was falling for him even when I wrote that silly entry. We had a series of dates the following week, talked for ages every day, and on the second date, dinner and a movie, he gave me a chaste kiss. Then for our third date, we met for breakfast and made a spectacle of ourselves in the ‘hood, kissing on street corners. The fourth date, we went back to his place and stayed there. The fifth date, we wound up at his place.

While leaving for work the next morning, I fell down his stairs, breaking my foot. That fifth date lasted days and days, and he took care of me, carried me around, brought me coffee, food, my laptop for work, took me to urgent care for x-rays, and generally behaved in the way straight women like me wish every straight guy would. My roommate V stopped by one day to bring me more clothes and met him. As soon as she left, she called me to say “Oh my god! Love him! I’m so happy for you!”

It’s interesting to me to be in a totally dependent situation in which I have to rely on others for anything. That’s generally hard for me, and especially in romantic relationships. Somehow, circumstances have made it so I had to get over that with him, fast.

I’m smitten with him, and my siblings are calling him Mr. Bingley due to the health-related forced stay at his house. But I was secretly wishing that morning that I didn’t have to leave, so the moral, I guess, is be very careful what you wish for, or some such cliche.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to recently. That and major atrophy.

While I think of myself as someone who mainly watches Battlestar Galactica and drinks beer with the housemates when not working or sleeping, this preconception is totally wrong. I also hang out with other people, including the occasional guy I meet on Teh Internets.

In December, I met two guys. I’m thinking it’d be nice to keep a tally because, as a rule, meeting a guy from match.com or whatever has so little impact that I quickly forget not only their names but the very fact that I have met them.

#1: C. Nice guy, fellow Latino-esque person. Fun talking to him, no chemistry. Unfortunately for him, I think he might have been more interested in me than I in him. He was also short, and I like the taller kind.

#2: D. Early forties, intelligent and charming. Nice good night kiss, then neither of us did much more to see each other again. Maybe it was the holidays. Maybe he had something else going on. I apparently wasn’t interested enough to find out.

In January, so far I have met three men, I think. Again, why are people so forgettable? This may be why I won’t go out with anyone unless they happen to hit me up at a particularly magnanimous moment.

#3: H. Wild-haired architect type. Nice guy, a bit hard to understand as he garbles his words and mumbles. He wanted to have sex, and I did too, as it had been….gasp…over a year. These things just get away from you. So, we did. Two weekends in a row. And that was that. We never call, we never write, and I’m fine with that.

#4: B. Super intelligent, witty guy of the forty-ish variety, hooked me with his email if not with his photos. So, when I showed up to meet him, imagine my surprise when I saw that he was totally hot, unlike what his photos suggested. I suggested to my housemate afterwards that maybe the bad-ish photos were a kind of hazing to keep away shallow bimbos. Had a delightful time, and more importantly, we have made real plans to go out again. That will be Wednesday.

#5: R. Another word garbler. What is up with that? Fun to talk politics with, though. A potential “bring into the circle of friends” guy.

Tonight, I’ll probably meet J for a drink. He’s an Irish guy who doesn’t always stand upon his points.

Before this informal history, I had met other people too. Beginning in December was rather arbitrary. The key finding in all of this experimentation is this: I am rarely attracted to anyone I meet, regardless of where I met them from. Because of this, I feel pretty safe trying a first date, as I am very, very unlikely to be hurt.  Guess I’m not a love at first sight kinda girl.

For the most part.

Last year, on the anniversary of Roe v Wade, I had an abortion. I didn’t realize the synchronicity at the time. And I didn’t remember it was the anniversary until a moment ago, when I saw this story about Obama reaffirming the right to choose.

I regret all the circumstances, economic, cultural, interpersonal, and familial, that led me to choose to end a pregnancy, but I am grateful I had the right to make that decision, and grateful to have a president who supports that right in office.