I Swear It's True

We have two new puppies.  Yes, you heard me.  Two…new…puppies.  One boy and one girl.  Before anyone reminds me about putting my foot down and other nonsense like that, let me make one thing perfectly clear.  The puppies are not permanent residents.  They are a business proposition.  They were acquired to be trained and sold.  Period.  They are not staying.  At least not without someone else going, preferably not me.  I refuse to become attached to them.  In fact, they don’t even have names.  I don’t intend to name them.  Well, one of them might have already earned a name because of his recent adventure.  Why is it that most of our adventures involve our dogs?  Maybe that is inevitable when you have a pack as large as ours.  One thing I know for sure is that the male puppy is very lucky to be here.

Since the puppies arrived at our house three weeks ago, John has been very conscientious about knowing their location whenever a vehicle is moving.  He goes out every morning when I leave for work, and he shuts them in their pen when he is using the tractor so he doesn’t have to be aware of their movements.  That’s why it was surprising last week when he got distracted by a phone call and started his pickup without doing puppy reconnaissance.  He only moved a few feet when an odd thud caused him to stop abruptly with a sick feeling in his stomach.

The male puppy was screaming and flopping around under the pickup.  His location indicated that his head must have been run over by one of the front tires, and the dirt and gravel in his mouth seemed to support that conclusion.  John carried him to a shady spot in the grass for observation to determine if he needed to take action to end his suffering.  As his cries subsided, John began to clean the dirt and gravel out of his mouth.  As he dug out the last of the rocks, the puppy bit down on his finger.  John wasn’t sure if he was trying to play with him or get even.  He brought the puppy some water, and he began to drink.  That was certainly a good sign, but not a guarantee of survival.  Within minutes he was taking some tentative steps.  He had some mild paralysis on one side for a couple of days, but in less than 72 hours, he was completely recovered.

We decided that it surely must have been a glancing blow from the tire rather than a direct hit, and the vehicle that inflicted the damage was a small Toyota rather than a full size pickup.  Nonetheless, such a narrow escape has us calling the male, Lucky.  That means we probably need to find a name for the little lady as well, but even with names, Lucky and Lady are not staying.  Luck can only take you so far!

This past month has been a trying time to say the least.  First we had a water leak in pipes buried beneath the concrete floor in the house.  After a couple of attempts to solve the problem ourselves, we had one ersatz plumber who looked things over and never came back.  Then we found a real plumber who solved the problem by circumventing the leaking portion of the line with new pipes he ran above ground.  The plumbing issue was fixed on a Tuesday, and the following Saturday the tornado that narrowly missed our house came through leaving enormous cottonwood trees piled everywhere as if they were matches dropped at some giant’s campsite.  After 10 days of cleanup from the storm, the third, and I’m hoping final, catastrophe occurred.

Exactly two weeks after the plumbing repair, I was getting ready to leave the house that morning when I noticed a problem with the toilet in our bathroom.  I got the plunger and went to work on it with no success.  I went into the other bathroom to see if that toilet would flush, and I discovered water all over the floor from an unknown origin.  I threw down some towels, and walked into the living room where John was sitting on the couch reading posts on his coon dog forum.  I told him we were having plumbing problems with one stool overflowing and the other with a mysterious leak.  Even though he has never been quick to spring into action when dealing with home repairs, I was still unprepared when he responded with, “What do you want me to do about it?”  Since my grandchildren may read this blog some day, I will paraphrase the thoughts that went through my head.  “How about getting off the couch and pretending like you care,” or “I know I’m going out on a limb here, but what about calling a plumber.”  Instead I simply said, “I don’t know what to tell you to do about it.  I’m just telling you not to use either bathroom,” and I headed out the door.

When I got back that evening, John had the original faux plumber, who couldn’t resolve the water leak issue, back with his machine to clean out the sewer line.  Unfortunately, they were having problems finding the sewer line which resulted in two excavations in the front yard.  After two days of digging, cleaning, and cursing, the line was cleared, and things could return to normal.  Well, almost normal.  John filled in the deeper of the holes immediately as it was in a high traffic area and posed a significant danger to anyone or anything that might fall in.  The other hole is quite large, but it is much shallower and isn’t in a highly traveled area. I am hopeful that it will be filled in before I start my Christmas shopping.

I know that the problems we face aren’t as serious as the ones many people endure, but if the next few weeks were a little less eventful, that would be great.  As I thought about this last adventure, I realized that John had to dig two very large holes with a shovel, cut through the sewer line with a reciprocating saw while standing in one of the holes, dip “water” out by hand after the line was cut, and fill the holes back in with a shovel.  It wasn’t necessary for me to tell him what I wanted him to do about it.  His karma did that for me!

John’s love of the outdoors in general, and fishing, trapping, and hunting specifically, has lead me to remark on more than one occasion that he lived 150 years too late.  If he were born in 1803 rather than 1953, he would have been a young man during the height of mountain man activity from 1830–1840. The longer he is retired, the more certain I am that my statement is true.

John has always been an avid hunter, but he has also done a bit of trapping over the years.  In the early years of our marriage, prices were high enough that he actually supplemented our income by selling furs.  He took a hiatus from the activity for almost 30 years, but this winter he dug through his cache of outdoor supplies to find his traps and headed for the river.

I’m not sure if John’s traps weren’t working properly because they were rusty or if he was embarrassed because his old traps weren’t as pretty as the ones the other kids had.  Whatever the reason, he decided they needed “spruced up.”  After finding a recipe on the internet, he created a homemade brew by boiling black walnuts in a big tub placed over an open fire and balanced atop two steel posts.  His setup looked vaguely like a witch’s cauldron, but at least he didn’t try to do it in the house on the electric stove, so he is trainable.  He put the traps in the solution and let them soak for several days.  The process actually worked on some of the traps.  Others he had to redo using a commercial solution, but eventually they all came out restored to their former luster.

His trapping success rate this year wasn’t as high as in the past, but he did catch three beavers and enough raccoons that I’m sure he will continue the activity next year.  That can only mean more boiling pots over open flames in the yard and more dead varmints on the premises.

John enjoys the comforts of home, but he probably could have adapted to the rugged lifestyle of those long ago frontiersmen.  He might prefer the title of Mountain Man, but what’s in a name? That which we call a redneck by any other name would be as sweet. (With apologies to the Bard)

I have come to accept John’s limitations in the area of daily communication.  However, I have always hoped that in a crisis, he might somehow miraculously develop the ability to say what he means.  The storm last weekend proved that whether the circumstances are mundane or life-and-death, he will never change.

We had been hearing the weather forecasters tell us for days that the conditions on Saturday were going to be extremely volatile, but in Kansas, we tend to develop an unhealthy disdain for storm warnings.  The average Sunflower State resident will experience hundreds, if not thousands, of tornado warnings and watches over a lifetime without ever experiencing a tornado up close and personal.  Familiarity really does breed contempt, but that all changed for us around 10:00 p.m.

A very potent EF3 or EF4 tornado passed by just a few miles north of us Saturday afternoon.  John was glued to the radar, and we both went outside several times to watch the clouds roll in and ascertain the path of the approaching storm.  We listened to the damage reports, gave thanks that no one was injured, and went on with our routine activities, which for me included picking asparagus.

That evening I was in the kitchen cleaning the asparagus when John wandered in about 9:30 and said in a rather casual voice, “I think we need to go to the trailer.”  Everyone knows that a mobile home is the last place you should choose as a refuge during inclement weather, but our house doesn’t have a basement and our trailer does.  I know it sounds weird, but since the entire southern exposure of our house is made of glass, the trailer is the safest place during a storm.  I put the asparagus in the refrigerator and was cleaning up around the sink when John said less casually, “I mean we need to go NOW!”  I grabbed my dog, Champ, along with my purse and my shoes and wished my resident meteorologist had given me enough warning to pack my computer, my iPad, and the rest of the dogs.

We were in the basement of the trailer less than 10 minutes when the electricity went out, and the howling wind turned into a deafening roar.  Dust started to swirl where the basement wall connected with the floor of the trailer just above our heads, and I began to wonder when the roof was going to disintegrate.  At this moment John said what could have been his last words to me, “I think this is it.”  Really?  What exactly did he think “it” was?  Was “it” the tornado, our imminent death, or both.  Either way I had imagined our final moments together might have included his profession of eternal love or the selfless act of shielding me with his body.  Of course I didn’t do either of those things for him, but I was on the phone with our son, John, and it would have been rude to put him on hold.

Fortunately, we had very little property damage, but we lost around 50 trees.  Many of them were enormous cottonwoods that had been around for decades.  As we spent the next day cleaning up all the debris from the storm, I marveled at how John took charge of the situation.  Whether he was moving trees with the tractor, running a chainsaw, or directing the neighbors and relatives who came to help, he was able to bring some order to the chaos all around us.  That was when I knew his inability to articulate his feelings or make symbolic gestures didn’t matter.  What matters is his constancy in good times and bad.  Yes, I think this is it!

“You are what you eat.”  That’s a familiar quotation to most people, but few know its origin.  In 1826, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante.  The translation means “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”  It usually is unnecessary for me to tell what I eat because it is only too obvious to anyone who casts a cursory glance my way since I often wear what I eat.

Even when I’m being careful, I often end up with drops or splatters of food and beverage on my clothing.  My morning coffee seems to be the worst offender, but that stands to reason since I have a cup every morning on my 45 minute drive.  The paved portion of the road I travel has its share of bumps, and the gravel road is a sartorial catastrophe waiting to happen.  However, my experience this morning tops anything I’ve done in the past.

I was about 20 minutes into my drive when I hit one of the aforementioned bumps just as I was taking a sip of coffee which caused a surge of liquid that I struggled to keep in my mouth.  Unfortunately, a tiny bit slipped down my throat before I was ready to swallow.  It is amazing that so much dialogue can pass between your conscious brain and your involuntary nervous system in a nanosecond.

Brain:  You cannot spit out this coffee because it will make an unbelievable mess.

Body:  Seriously, I am choking to death and you are worried about the mess that’s about to occur.

Brain:  Maybe you could spit the coffee back into that little opening in the lid.

Body:  I have taken your suggestion under advisement, but that doesn’t seem to be the best course of action at this time.

The first part came out in a fine mist that I sprayed across the dashboard of the car, but the bulk of the coffee dribbled down my chin onto my shirt and slacks.  I pulled to the side of the road and frantically dug tissues out of my purse to clean up the mess as best I could.  Since I was almost half way to the office, I decided to continue on and get a new outfit once I got to town.  The shops in the Mall didn’t open until 10:00 so I checked out the spring collection at Wal-Mart and found something suitable in fairly short order.

I am looking forward to retirement for several reasons, but one of the benefits will be the end of the daily commute.  Once that is over, I may have a chance to win when I play “Guess What I Had for Lunch.”  Until then, I will always lose because there are too many clues when you wear what you eat!

Home Improvement (Parts I & II) chronicled the adventure John and I undertook when we replaced our garbage disposal last summer. That project left no doubt that neither one of us deserves the title of “handy” when it comes to home repair. That is an unfortunate fact because it is almost impossible to find a handyman these days, especially in rural Kansas. With that in mind, the most recent domicile malfunction left me at the mercy of Mr. Fix-It.

The first indication of trouble came in the form of an unusually warm vinyl floor in the west bathroom. That bathroom is generally so cold that I keep a small space heater in there all winter. I almost always use the bathroom that adjoins our bedroom so I have no idea how long the hot water had been leaking under the floor before I happened to walk in there barefoot one day and noticed the change. Our house sits on a slab foundation so the floor temperature was the only indication at that point that we had a problem.  I’m not sure how long it took me to remember to tell John about my discovery, but it was at least a week so I was happy to see him spring into action two weeks later and finally call a repairman who evaluated the situation and then disappeared.

After three weeks of waiting for the repairman to return, we received an electric bill that was $150 higher than normal so John decided to take action himself.  He started turning off the switch in the breaker box that controlled the hot water heater whenever it wasn’t in use.  Okay, that solved one problem but created another.  I had to wait 15 minutes every morning for the water to heat before I could take a shower.  Not a crisis to be sure but certainly inconvenient.

This past weekend I consulted with some of John’s family members who are “handy” to see if they could think of a solution that didn’t involve a jackhammer in my living room breaking up concrete.  They suggested a short term solution that seemed to provide a workable option until we could get a new line run above ground.  Armed with their instructions, John cut the hot water line between the two bathrooms and capped the end.  This action should have cut off the hot water in the east bathroom and stopped the leak under the concrete.  It did both of those things, but it also eliminated the availability of hot water everywhere in the house except the shower in the west bathroom.

I truly appreciate John’s efforts, and I no longer have to wait for water to heat before I shower, but I don’t think I will be completely at ease until hot water comes out of all the faucets marked for that function.  I’m considering enrolling in our local community college for some courses in basic carpentry, plumbing, and heating/air conditioning.  The only reliable, long term solution is for me to become Mrs. Fix-It.

Quality control is important to the survival of any operation.  In fact, it is so critical that many companies assign a quality control team that focuses on each specific project.  This quality control process places an emphasis on three main aspects:  defined and well managed processes, competence (knowledge, skills, experience, and qualifications), and soft elements (integrity, confidence, organizational culture, motivation, team spirit, and quality relationships).  Since John has been experiencing some quality control problems with his dishwashing, I have been wondering if applying this model would help improve his performance.

I thought I had a clearly defined process when I showed John how to load the dishwasher.  It’s probably not a well managed process because he threatens to quit whenever I offer suggestions of better ways to arrange the dishes.  However, the real breakdown occurs when he unloads the dishwasher because a simple inspection of the dishes and a rewash of any dirty items would render the loading process a moot point.

I’m not sure how to address the area of competence, as 15 months on the job would seem to be enough experience, but he has never washed dishes professionally nor has he received any other instruction outside of the crash course I gave him.  Maybe he could do an apprenticeship in a restaurant or go to dishwashing camp this summer!

More than likely, the soft elements are the problem.  I need to help John develop confidence in his ability to produce clean dishes and instill a sense of pride in a job well done.  I could also work to improve our organizational culture, motivation, team spirit, and quality relationships.  Maybe I could hold a pep rally for him after every meal.

I thought about seeking professional help from some organizational guru like Bill Gates, but then I remembered he is responsible for Windows Me.  So much for quality control.  In reality, I only have two choices.  I can wash dishes myself or I can inspect every dish before I use it.  John is a quality guy, but I’m just kidding myself if I think I have any control!

If you are a woman and you have been married to a man for longer than a month, you are probably familiar with the condition known as “Man Eyes.”  Man Eyes is an affliction that renders men incapable of seeing an object they are searching for even if it is in plain sight.  There are degrees of visual impairment, but the disability seems to worsen exponentially in relation to the importance of the object to the wife who has asked him to look for it.  Perhaps the condition isn’t as pervasive among men as I fear, but most of the women I know have husbands who suffer from the condition in varying degrees.

Of course John suffers from an acute case of Man Eyes.  I have learned over the years that if the object is in plain sight, he can sometimes find it with detailed directions along with a little trial and error.  If another object has to be moved to find the item, I’m better off sending the dog to look for it.  The perfect case to illustrate my point happened last Friday.  I went to the grocery store and spent the required 45 minutes finding all the items on my list.  After placing all the groceries on the checkout counter, I opened my purse to retrieve my wallet.  After several minutes of an increasingly frantic search, I had to admit it was not there, and of course my checkbook fits neatly into my wallet so I had no way to pay for the groceries.

My first thought was that it had fallen out in the car, or I had taken it out at the office and forgot to put it back in my purse.  After searching those two spots, I called John at home so he could look there.  As I am listening to his search, my panic starts to build as each area of the house yields no results.  When he finally gives up the search, I have to grapple with the idea that perhaps someone had stolen my wallet.  I had a knot in my stomach as I mentally ran through all the credit cards I would have to cancel, automatic payments I would have to reschedule, and various forms of identification I would have to replace.

Not quite ready to admit defeat, I went back to the grocery store and retraced my steps.  I checked at customer service to see if a wallet had been found.  I had a brief moment of hope when I learned one had been turned in, but it wasn’t mine.  I briefly considered the possibility of asking for that wallet and assuming that person’s identity because it seemed easier than what lay before me.  Defeated and dejected, I spent a few minutes looking through the trashcans outside the store on the off chance that the thief had grabbed the cash and ditched the wallet at the earliest opportunity.  No luck!

I called home to tell John I was just leaving town since my search had taken almost an hour.  I was about to end the call when, as an afterthought, I asked him if he’d checked the bench in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room.  He said he had looked there but not “thoroughly” so he would try again.  To his surprise, but not mine, there was my wallet.  Relief outweighed exasperation but not by much.  The next time I need John to look for something, I’m going to tell him to put Champ on the phone.

John’s cooking is improving.  It really is!  He made chicken and noodles the other night and it was, dare I say it, almost as good as mine.  Since he used chicken, rather than pork, in his entree, I have tangible evidence that he can learn from past mistakes (Men Are from Mars, John Is from OGLE-TR-56b).  However, he still experiences a misstep from time to time.  In fact, every time he cooks the potential exists for an unexpected adventure.

For the last few weeks, he has been fixated on finding uses for the various bags of dried beans we have on hand that do not include meat in the recipe.  He certainly is no vegetarian so I had no explanation for his obsession to eschew meat in this instance.  In fact, ham and beans and red beans and rice with sausage are two of his favorite meals.  When I asked him to explain why the recipe had to be devoid of meat, all he would say was that he wanted the beans as a side dish, not the main course.  I told him beans could be the side dish even with meat in the recipe.  With great aggravation in his voice he said, “I don’t want it to have meat in it.  I want it to be a simple side dish like a can of pork and beans.”  I paused for a moment, but he didn’t realize what he had said so I slowly repeated it.  “…a simple side dish like PORK and beans.  I think the message here is that beans don’t have a distinct taste of their own so they need meat of some sort to add flavor.”  I could hear the defeat in his voice as he said, “Shut up.”

Despite my objections, he found a recipe for Cajun beans, put the beans in a large bowl to soak overnight, and transferred them to the crockpot the next morning.  When I got home from work and saw the amount of beans he had cooked that night, I started to ask him if the Duggars were coming over for supper, but we don’t watch “19 Kids and Counting,” and most popular culture references are lost on him anyway.  Instead I took a small helping, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best.  Unlike the pork and noodles he once fixed, the beans were edible.  Unfortunately, when he asked what I thought about them, the kindest thing I could think to say was that they were tender.  They weren’t unpleasant, but they were definitely bland and fairly tasteless, at least in my opinion.  He professed to love them.  That’s a good thing because he’s going to be eating them for a LONG time.

As I said, his cooking is improving, but I think he needs to perfect the basics before he gets too adventurous.  I do appreciate his efforts and the increased free time I have now that I don’t do all the cooking.  In fact, it is so nice to share that task that I will happily follow along on his kitchen misadventures.

John’s grandfather, also named John, was legendary for his ability to fall asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.  On hot summer days, Grandpa John would often take a short nap after lunch so I have heard many anecdotal accounts of his extraordinary ability. When people would ask how he could fall asleep so quickly he would give the simple response, “That’s the sign of a clear conscience.”  Unfortunately, he passed the trait on to his grandson.  I don’t mean that it’s unfortunate because I want John to toss and turn for hours every night before falling asleep, but occasionally it would be nice if he were available to help out after 9:00 p.m. Ultimately, this begs the question, “Can your conscience be too clear?”

For example, about a month ago I agreed to watch all 5 of the grandchildren so when John said he would help out, I was very appreciative.  I was especially thankful that I didn’t have to take 2 six-year-olds, 2 four-year-olds, and 1 twenty-one-month old to the grocery store because I needed to get the ingredients to make pies for a belated family Christmas gathering the next day.  When I got back from the store, he was already on the couch watching television but still awake.  Nonetheless, since he was horizontal, I knew he was on his way to Slumberland despite the fact that it was still early, none of the girls were ready for bed, and I had 5 pies to make for the next day.

Since John typically goes to bed early, this wouldn’t have been a noteworthy evening if not for the fact that 1 of the six-year-olds started vomiting around 9:00 p.m. just as I was in the middle of making my first pie.  I won’t go into graphic detail, but the poor girl was sick at least once every hour until 11:00 the next morning.  Around midnight I helped her make a dash to the bathroom, and I was standing in the doorway ready to offer support when John got up from the couch, wandered down the hallway, and stopped just a couple of steps away.  He listened to the pitiful retching for a moment and said, “Is someone taking a bath?”  A bit stunned by his question I replied, “It’s midnight.  Who do you think would be taking a bath at this hour?  Did you forget that Azbey is sick?”  When he indicated that he also needed the bathroom, I suggested that he try one of the other two in the house because this one was going to be occupied for a while.  In short order he was in bed sound asleep.  I shook my head in disbelief as I knew there was no way I could sleep while any of the grandchildren were sick.  Azbey was incredibly brave through the ordeal proving that she is, indeed, tough like a toad.  Somehow in between caring for her and making pies, I got the other 4 children into bed and took my last pie out of the oven at 1:00 a.m.

Over the course of the next few days, everyone in the house that evening succumbed to the illness so John didn’t escape unscathed.  In his defense, I never asked for any help once I got back from the store.  John is good at many things, but doing anything after 9:00 p.m., especially caring for a sick child, is outside his area of expertise so I guess there was no point in both of us losing sleep.  Upon reflection, I think his ability to sleep through chaos and turmoil has more to do with his hearing deficit and less to do with a mind free from guilt.  Nobody’s conscience is that clear.