LauraCatoe.com

In the spring, when Dad & Patsy were having a yard sale at the house in Southside, I met Bruce Cornutt’s dad. (Bruce is renting Dad’s house.) Pa Cornutt used to work for the postal service, and he still remembers where the people on his route live.

We’re going on 2 years at the duplii (Brad and Cindy are even closer to the 2-year mark), and we still get each other’s mail. I don’t really care that the mail carrier know my name, but c’mon, at least learn that one side is 204 and one side is 204A. And where is my Netflix DVD that was supposed to be here already?!

I’ve made little placards with our names on them to go on the mailboxes. Hopefully they won’t look too tacky and will help the various mail peoples in getting it straight. I think if it was ever just one carrier, they might learn. But it is never the same person.

Mark of adulthood #21
Complaining about the postal service.

I’ve been getting headaches off and on for a week, which is unusual for me. The one I had this morning was the kind where just walking up a flight of stairs (say, to the Newsroom) made my head pound. Eventually, I just went and asked my editors if I had anything for tomorrow’s paper. Since I don’t, they let me go home.

I’m blaming the headaches on the humidity. Like, the barometric pressure inside my head is affected or something. How do you fight the weather?

I think the heat is also to blame for Satine’s repeated petulant meows since I’ve been home. She’s either saying “what are you doing here? shouldn’t you be at work?” or she’s complaining “it’s too damn hot outside. fix it.” In answer to her meows, I keep letting her in and out of the house. Kris hates it when I do that.

But I’m sort of at a loss. I mean, here I am at home, not sick in one of those ways that exiles you to bed, but I can’t bend over or read or move too fast or my head throbs. And once you let a headache “go there,” it doesn’t come back.

So I’ve done some laundry and looked for a pair of pliers and am waiting on the Ellen show to come on. And Satine meows. A lot. She is a grumpy kitty today.

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Tranquility,
originally uploaded by DameCatoe.

The Doctors Phil and Pat Ramsey are in town visiting with GJ. Phil is a cousin of my mom’s, what relation does that make him to me? Does it involve the term “once-removed”? Cause I never can figure out when that term is applicable. The Drs. have invited us to dinner this evening, and we have pleasantly accepted. I’m going to suggest El Tapatio.

Last night, there was a Mystery Smell. It appeared sometime after 9pm. When I left work, it was monsooning out, so I was soaked. The first thing I did when I got home was change clothes. The bedroom smelled fine. I pulled the laundry basket out of my closet, which also smelled fine. I worked at the computer until after seven, no odd smells about the office.

I sat down in the normal-odored living room and turned on the tv, settling on CSI because it was one I’d read. (Really, I just had to see Wil Wheaton in it.) It was just after CSI was over that I noticed The Smell. Eventually, the topic was addressed.

“Did you fart?”

“No, I thought you did.”

“Um, no.”

“Did you leave a really stinky poo in the bathroom?”

“Also, no.”

We headed upstairs to investigate. Our heating and air system hardly works upstairs, so we keep the ceiling fans on and have started putting a floor fan at the top of the stairs to blow the hot air down. It really does help, but last night it was just blowing a really bad smell into the living room.

We sniffed each room. “Stronger in here!” “Not in here!” Still had no idea where it was coming from. I made Kris turn off all the fans and the A/C. Where is it coming from? The bedroom. Great.

All the sniffing had worn Kris out and he was ready for bed, but my sense of smell can be really sensitive sometimes and this reek was the kind that you never get used to. Kris thought it smelled like something burning; I thought it smelled like wet dog food.

It seemed strongest in my closet (Kris even looked in the attic) until all the air flow ceased. I crawled on hands and knees and made Kris get back out of bad to second nose me.

“It’s there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

There being a gap between the bedroom floor and the shoe molding, just outside my closet. The smell was between our side of the duplex and the Norris side.

You guys, the smell was so bad, I could not sleep last night. A smell so rank, I eventually went downstairs to sleep on the sofa.

It was better this morning, but if it’s back tonight, I may be camping in the backyard. Maybe Crazy Lola sent one of her rats to die in my walls, cause she knows I’ve been laughing at her on the internet.

You win this round, Lola!

I had lunch with Dad today, and I was bemoaning that I’d left some stuff for his tenants at home. That struck me as One of Those Things – like, who coulda guessed we would both end up having tenants? Not just any ol’ tenants, but friends?

In a way, we both married into the situation. Patsy already had two rental units, and since Dad moved in with her, it opened his house for rent. And I sure never would have become a landlady had I not married Kris. It all starts the wheels in my head a-turnin,’ looking for a bigger meaning.

To find where the dominoes start to fall into one another, you have to go back to when Kris and I decided to get married. I didn’t want to move to his house in Oneonta. Why would I? My job and church are here, my friends and family are here. The only thing in Oneonta was Kris’ parents. We’d both be commuters. Thankfully, Kris decided to move here. (If the choice had been me move to Oneonta or us not get married, I can say there’s an 85% chance I’d be living in Oneonta. At least there’s still a Mi Casita there.)

Though his parents thought he was insane, Kris put his house on the market. I was living in my apartment on Broad St. and the rent was about to go up $100, so Kris began looking around for a rental house. Our highest criteria was that it be close to the interstate. Bonuses were if it was near my job or our church. Enter the house on Argyle Circle. He called to tell me about it and told me it was in the historic district. “Where’s that?” I had to ask.

Kris thought it was a shame that nobody lived in the brick duplex next door, so when he heard our new friends Brad and Cindy were looking for a place to live, he asked the guy who sometimes came to do a little yardwork next door “are these places for rent?” And then we bought them, and then Jaimie and the Woodlaysons moved in and then GJ moved downtown to be near us and then Kris’ parents decided to move to Gadsden and had liked the historic district ever since we moved in… and you know how it goes.

It was the same sort of daisy chain happenstance that led to me being in a band. I wonder what other sorts of shenanigans are lining up, dot to dot, even now. Hopefully something fun.

There are thirty chapters in the latest Harry Potter book. I was on Chapter 27 when it hit me that soon I’d be finished and the wait for Book VII would begin. But I didn’t dare try to make the book last, not after what happened last time.

Book V came out around the time my mother died. I had it in my possesion, but obviously there were more pressing issues at hand and I hadn’t begun reading it yet. (After the burial, I was at a relative’s house who said “there will never be any of that Harry Potter stuff in this house!” My copy was in the car in the driveway.) I was studiously avoiding any and all websites that might mention the book. And then I stumbled into a topic on the derfleeganforum (a topic that had nothing to do with HP, if I remember right) and someone had posted, no spoiler warning, “I can’t believe they killed –” Well, I’ll leave it at that in case you, dear reader, don’t happen to know who dies in Book V.

I’d heard that someone bites it in this book, too, and I wanted to find out the old-fashioned way. It made me cry.

Consolation rests in the release of Goblet of Fire this fall.