Month: September 2006

Small Spaces

On September 28, 2006

I recently bought a beautiful old blue house that I am in love with. As a 106-year-old would, this one needs some love and elbow grease applied to it. Wonder Boy and I decided to attack the pantry first. It’s an add choice given that the kitchen could use some serious updating, but we easily rationalized it. After all, once you fill a pantry, do you ever want to unload it and store all your food and stuff around the house while you rehab the room? No. And the storage in the pantry is crucial to the kitchen space because there is a severe lack of storage and cabinetry. The pantry has lots of shelving space and plenty of room to house the food I keep on hand – generally not very much.

Anyway, the point is that Wonder Boy and I decided to take the pantry on as the first home improvement project. It’s a small room – maybe 4 feet by feet. How hard could it be?

HA!

I would go into a detailed description of the pantry, which should be done soon, and it’s brand new, handmade shelves with refinished wood floors and freshly painted walls and trim, but it’s a very sad story that involves me crying a lot. The project, which was supposed to be done in a weekend, has taken more than a month to complete. But when it’s done, as it should be on Sunday or so, I am going to lick it. I will lick the shelves, the floor and walls. That’s how excited I am.

Make cassettes like the one above. This one is courtesy of Jason N.

Taking you down one notch at a time

By Kate

On September 28, 2006

In work

I live in a medical world. I work at a medical center, I do freelance work for two different medical companies, I have several physicians who attend to my own medical needs and I have friends who have elected to become doctors.

It’s been those friends who have set the standards for what I think of doctors. I remember being a year or two out of college at my friend Mike’s house and another friend, Jason (one of the many to come in and out of my life) was talking about his medical school interviews. He had been doing various internships (in morgues) and exploring summer work abroad to learn a little about alternative medicine. The thing that killed me about Jason, and ultimately ended up killing our friendship a few years later, was how he turned into a complete egomaniac as soon as he started talking about being a doctor. I called him out on it, because what else are friends for, and he told me he needed to be a egomaniac. He said, and I am paraphrasing here because it was too long ago for me to remember his exact words, “I need to be egotistical. As a doctor I will be having control over people lives – whether they live or die. You can’t take on that kind of responsibility without having ego. How else could you keep convincing yourself you could do the job?”

For a while I accepted that. For like 2 seconds.

I respect my doctors the same way I respect my mechanic, the woman who rings me up at the grocery, the man who drives my shuttle bus at work. I respect anyone who does their job and does it well. I don’t think anyone is better than me and I don’t respect anyone more than I respect myself. No one deserves that.

So, as a personal rule, I call doctors by their first names. It’s the absolute quickest way to deal with them as an equal. On occasion I run into a doctor, as I did just the other day, who played the prick card and makes me feel small. I haven’t gotten to a place where I never am reduced to feeling itty bitty, but I am working on it.

Tonight I am meeting a doctor for the first time, not for work but for my own medical needs, and we’ll see how it goes.

Her name is Elizabeth.

The gum that cums in your mouth

By Kate

On September 14, 2006

In family / friends

I could have grown up into a full-fledged sugar-holic. My dad worked for a company that sold, among other things, lots of types of candies and cookies. There were always samples around the house. Actually, “samples” makes it sounds like little mini-packages of the candies and cookies. Oh no. We had CASES of the stuff sitting in our basement and garage. So where as most kids might go sneak a hard candy from their mom’s purse, I would sneak and entire case from the garage.

Truth be told, I was not a very good sneak and I had three younger sibling obsessed with finding me out and letting my mom know of my misdeeds (ha, Ellie, I know you’re reading this). But regardless, I learned how to consume hundreds of servings of candy in about 10 minutes. I built up a resistance to sugar and sugar substitute products that is really quite admirable.

And then, somehow, I quit the habit. I lost my passion for sugar and began a romance with salt that plagues me still. I mean, what is better that a salty chip dissolving on your tongue with it’s tart texture of flavors flooding your taste buds? Nothing.

One remnant of my younger days remains – my love of chewing gum. I like all the stupid childhood classics: Big League Chew, Bubble Yum, Hubba Bubba. But my favorite is Freshen-Up. Whenever I used to hang out with my grandfather, he chewed Freshen-Up. So when he offered me gum that’s what I got. It’s great. You bite into one of the pieces and a gelatinous goo works its ways out.

No one sells Freshen-Up, it seems, except for back roads gas stations. Whenever Wonder Boy and I are on trips, I spend every put stop scouring gas stations for some Freshen-Up. (I only like the green and blue flavors, though. The pink will do in a pinch but the red is straight up nasty.)

Today I stopped at the convenient store at work for some gum – I’ve been stressed and grinding and clenching my teeth so I thought chewing some gum would wear out my jaw so I would stop – and lo and behold! the store sells Freshen-Up! Oh, happy days.

Read My Fingers

By Kate

On September 5, 2006

In family / friends

This weekend Wonder Boy and I attended a wedding of his cousins. It was a very classy affair that ended with a reception at Marion College in Indianapolis. During the dinner part of the reception I was sitting at a table with Wonder Boy, his cousin Jack, his mom and step-dad and me. At a table just across the room were a bunch of Wonder Boy’s cousins. We all spent the better part of an hour signing back and forth between tables, but our collective knowledge of sign language involves the following words:

Sheep
Shrimp
Monkey
Chicken
Eat
Shit
Fuck(er)
Bitch
Asshole

As you can imagine, the phrases you can make from those words are limited and all a little on the dirty side. We were having immense fun.

All throughout the meal one of the servers kept giving us sidelong glances that indicated she knew we were up to no good. Finally she stopped at our table and just stared at us. So we asked, innocently enough, “Um, do you know sign language?”

Her response: “I’m a sign language instructor.”