Pantsless

I've opened a blog post window without knowing what I want to write about. Usually I have only a vague notion-- some minor irritation, a persistent image, a fraction of a story-- but today I thought, hey, why not treat the blog like my brother, who I call with no provocation and often with nothing to say.

Hi!

I'm driving the rally car today and made a special cd for the occasion full of shifting, clutch popping music only to find that of all the super souped-up features Subaru included, like the silly button to spray cold water somewhere in the engine with a button in the cabin, compatibility with MP3 cds was not one of them. So instead I listened to Talk of the Nation on NPR. It's just as well, I suppose. I passed four highway patrol cars on the way to work. Apparently April Fool's Day brings out the Bandit in all of us, and Smokey needed to flex his preventative might.

Pants is gone for a month to the Edge of Nowhere, Nevada. I've almost forgotten to be sad to see him go, I've been so happy about getting to stay in California. The morning he left I performed my now-traditional complete femme-ing of the house. I cleaned the place. That gets italics because it included dusting the baseboards and the top of the fridge and using the special pain in the ass marble cleaner on the bathroom and kitchen countertops, which necessitates ruining a cleaning rag and then polishing my way dangerously close to tendonitis.

Then I went out in the front yard and harvested massive, beautiful roses for a table arrangement from the only bush the previous tenants didn't dig up and haul away with them. The complete deforestation of what once must have been pretty extensive landscaping has left our yard with a weird topography. There are pits and dents everywhere that make mowing hazardous. The fact that it looks level is an illusion accomplished by overgrown grass, sort of like if you had a really lumpy head and managed to disguise it with an uneven haircut. The blisters on my hands attest to this obnoxious terrain. I mowed the lawn the day before Pants left in order to head off any claims that he needed to be doing that instead of drinking Cuba Libres with me and blasting the stereo, and it worked until he asked me which gas I put in the mower.

"You used the premium, right? The one I labeled for you?"

"I used one you labeled, but it didn't say premium, it said 'mixed'."

Pause.

"I broke the mower, didn't I?"

"No, but you didn't do it any favors."

"Can I make it up to the mower?"

The answer to this, thankfully, was yes, but only after a long lecture on how the mower and edger differ and therefore need different fuels. I now know way too much about two-cycle engines. Pants' rationale, and I vaguely remember a discussion about this with much pointing and explaining, was that if he labeled the cans and put the big can next to the big yard apparatus and the little can next to the little yard apparatus, I would surely remember which apparatus took which fuel. Since he usually mows and edges, though, the instructions got filed away in the file for "Important things I'll ask about again later." I've now done him one better-- I've drawn a mower on the mower gas and an edger on the edger gas.

This is one instance in the long list of things we're trying to figure out for how things will be when he deploys. Easily the biggest and most pressing is where the hell we're going to live, and we're still slow dancing with that one, its monstrous sweaty hands grabbing us both a little too low and a little too tight, but we'll figure it out. There are any number of lovely little houses in our town and the town nearby, but most of them are foreclosures, and there's something vulture-y about looking at those. I also wonder, deep in my hippie heart, about the bad mojo such a place might harbor. Here are people who dipped beneath the surface of the fiscal waters and couldn't flail their way back up. I understand our financial situation for the most part, and have seen firsthand that much of our stinginess is in the interest of avoiding debt and saving for retirement, but I can't help but feel that if their situation was an inner tube, ours is little more than a survival raft. One good jab and we're in the water too. Does it make sense now to commit to a mortgage? Does it ever?

I've also met wives, finally, for Pants' new squadron and it's like finding water in the desert, or learning to fish termites out of a giant rock-like mound. Not that they bear any resemblance to insects or mud-- it just feels like such a victory to finally be in a position to find people to introduce myself to. I'm trying not to seem too home-schooled about it ("HI! I'M SO GLAD TO MEET YOU! I LIKE BOOKS!"), but it takes some of the anxiety out of the idea of being (ha!) Pantsless for so long.