Diego the wonder Dog | Existential Ennui

Tags

Diego the wonder Dog, life in the meadow, New Mexico

Today is Tuesday, you know what that means? We’re going to have a special, special guest, so take out the carpet,sweep the place clean, strike up the band, and give out with a hip hurray, cuz Tuesday is guest star day.

Oh, don’t mind me, just channeling my childhood which is way way beyond some of you. Anyway, that was the Tuesday theme for the Mickey Mouse Club, with Cubby and Annette and so forth and so on.

Life, define it in a non-biological way if you may be so kind.

Diego has walked his desert, I have cleaned the kitchen (and proceeded to dirty it back up immediately with a huge pot of chicken/andouille sausage gumbo simmering away). I cleaned the bathrooms too, but never thought about cooking in those. That would be just wrong and would be a good indication that I’m in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

I’ve just had a moment to sit down and am thinking about thinking about something more important than cheddar/jalapeño biscuits to accompany the gumbo.

We ate at a fabulous restaurant (read hole-in-the-wall) joint yesterday. It’s the type of place where you stand at the counter and order your food, and then return when they “call your number.” It was some great enchiladas I tell ya. We have become more affectionate toward the green sauce than the red, which says something I guess, although I know not what, and we are okay with the heat most of the time. I am never without a Hatch chile or some jalapeños in my fridge. We have two ristras hanging outside that are mostly dried.

I tend to throw chiles in most everything. They are great with hotdogs and hamburgers, in fact the green chile hamburger is pretty basic here. There are even green chile egg rolls. It’s funny how quickly you adapt to the local cuisine, if indeed you have one.

Diego has settled in as a member of the family. He’s a sneaky snake. He has taken over the library as “his room” and all his toys are scattered across the carpet. When I cleaned the room yesterday, I picked them all up, along with assorted papers he had torn up into bits for my enjoyment, and placed them in his bed.

In a fit of pique, he carted all his toys outside and laid with them, in a serious grump. Before the day was out, everything was back in his room, except for his hedgehog (all are now absent stuffing, because he plans to be a surgeon when he grows up and therefore opens them all up and extracts their innards.), which I found in the middle of the bed. The bed, which he is NOT supposed to get up on.

Which is funny, since he has trouble negotiating the bare floors and jumping off the bed, means that he splays out on the floor when he hits it.

The Contrarian is building some tables for the bedroom. They are both going to be inlaid with ceramic tiling. He’s become quite good actually. He has made four footstools of varying quality, the last two being really nice. Those are in the library. He has made a beautiful wood tray for the dining room table, a laundry cart which substitutes (by an ingenious method) as a grocery cart to move groceries from the garage to the kitchen. The most useful tool is my new cleaning cart which has hooks and boxes and all kinds of gizmos which hold my floor mop, broom, dustpan, all my cleaning products, rags, duster, and my mini-vac.

I can be heard roaming from room to room, singing “bring out your dead, bring out your dead,” which somehow seems apropos from a Monty Python movie.

Which brings to moving.

Having reconnected with a few of my high school mates, I guess I’m surprised at how many of them live in the same basic location that they grew up in. I find that odd. Perhaps I’m odd. I’ve lived in four states. Many of my teen mates have moved to other locations within Michigan, but a rather shocking number still live in Flint or the within the county at least. One even went back and taught 30 years at the same high school!

But then my father never moved when he retired. Which I also found odd.

I don’t think I’d be happy having lived only one place my entire life.

I don’t exactly know what I’d be unhappy about, but I feel that I would have been.

It’s hard to make assessments about people in general if you’ve never experienced people in other locations. Don’t you think?

Everything in this house beeps at you. It’s maddening, and insulting in a strange sort of way, like I’m not a grown up, and need to be reminded.

When the microwave is finished, it beeps. And if you don’t open the door (don’t have to take anything out, mind you (bloody stupid machine!), it will beep again. And again. I haven’t had the time or patience to find out how many times it will do that.

My washer sings to me when it’s done. It plays a song. So does my dryer. It beeps at me when it’s done and tells me I should hurry up and get the clothes out. When I finally do, it plays me a whole song–of beeps. It’s annoying.

My phone sings to me, and so does the Contrarian’s. It sings when someone calls, but it also sings when it’s downloading some crap I don’t care about, like updates to my ziplist or because twitter has 72 new tweets I just gotta know about.

I need some peace and quiet.

Shhhh.

Oh and Diego poops too much. I gotta go pick up poo again.