Friday, October 31, 2008
Closest Thing I Have to a Religious Holiday
Last night I tried to get ready for the party but it's difficult when everything is still so chaotic from the move. I cleaned the kitchen up as best I could and then of course young M and some of his friends staged a midnight raid and all my work was undone. I also bought some tiny pumpkins in the mad theory that I would carve them all quick and stuff because they are small. Wrong. I am not Martha Stewart and I think the fact that I actually drew a lame little face on one of them with a sharpie was doing pretty damn well. I mean. Anyway, I had visitors: first, my brother, who stopped by to tell me that the ham he got me at the Amish farm might be poisoned.
"The honey I got at the same time is inedible," he said darkly.
"Inedible honey?" I said, "Isn't that impossible?"
"Think about it," he said, "Do you ever hear of great Amish cuisine? Do people go out for Amish food? Does Rachel Ray ever host great Amish chefs? They eat that food because they don't know any better."
"Well, it's a Halloween party," I said practically, "and I already got the cute little rolls. I'll tell people that the ham might be deadly and then they can eat at their own risk."
So, you know, if the headline tomorrow is Deadly Halloween Ham Strikes, well, there you have it. And then C came over for a while, which was nice and he's going to show me how to buy drugs from Canada over the internet, which will come in very handy.
This morning as I was trying to fly out the door (dressed in black and orange and I even dug out my Halloween earrings and charm bracelets) to my annual Big Heaps O'Fun Gynecological Exam, the boiler guy came. He was Russian. They're always Russian, lately. I suppose that makes sense - what with Russia being so cold and post Soviet and all, every other person there must be a furnace/boiler engineer. (I learned my foreign policy from the You Betcha School of Wasilla, AK)
"See, is working," he said impatiently. "Valve turned off. Was propane problem."
"No, no," I pleaded, "It worked for 40 minutes last time too. Please stick around."
"Will see," he said, and looked at my heaters. "Hot water, copper, very good, work better than cast iron. But propane too expensive, put in heat pump."
"Yes," I said, eventually, but now I have to flee, and I left him with the QOB and young M, hoping devoutly that somebody could figure out how to write him a check. Apparently he did stick around and the temperature gauge on the boiler was the problem and it is, supposedly, fixed, to the tune of 150 rubles. Mutter mutter joys of homeownership when you don't actually even own it and last night there was a foreclosure notice on the door and I had to call the lawyer this morning etc., etc.
I got to the gyno's office 15 minutes late, which mattered not at all, and discovered that the entire office staff was in full costume. That was kind of amusing, particularly the witch doctor, although I had to stop myself from asking the extremely faux-tan receptionist if she was supposed to be an Oompa Loompa. My actual gyno, though, was just dressed normally and I still haven't decided if I am happy or sad about that. I mean, there are only a very few circumstances in life where you get to have somebody in full costume - like, what if she was dressed like Frankenstein or something? Or, god forbid, a political costume? Eeeee! - probing about in your nether bits and it would have been something to write about. On the other hand, I think I'd just as soon leave that experience for a perhaps less clinical hypothetical future. Or not at all.