|
|
|
beef fwith otherf
Saturday, July 10 2004
When we were married fifteen months ago, Gretchen and I received lots of gifts from various people. Some people made contributions to animal shelters in our name. Others bought us gift certificates or gave us kitchenware. The wealthiest couple present at our wedding gave us a birdhouse. True, it was an especially elaborate birdhouse full of fussy Victorian details, but it was poorly constructed and fell apart after being outside for a single winter. It had been cheaply glued and nailed together; apparently it had belonged to the class of fancy looking gifts that are designed to be impressive when given, but aren't designed to persist much beyond that point. But I'm not one to accept such careless ruin. The other day I pieced together the remains of the birdhouse (leaving out a set of miniature rails guarding its widow's walk). I fastened it together using Gorilla Glue and drywall screws, happily splitting the wood in places where the wood was too thing and the screws were too thick. Split wood is never a problem when there's an ample amount of Gorilla Glue, which is unusual in that it foams and expands as it dries. I then slathered on a proper asphalt roof. I still need to figure out what colors I'll be using to paint it; it had originally (and coincidentally) been the same drab McMansion Grey as our house, but that color is about as popular around here as beef franks at a Bangalore potluck.
I spent most of the day again at that idiosyncratic Eagle's Nest house, alternately puzzled, amused, and infuriated by the things I encountered. I saw some evidence of squirrel damage on one of the electrical wires in the ceiling above the bathroom. The little fucker had chewed entirely through the black hot wire and it had been respliced by somebody. It seems unlikely that a squirrel could survive doing such a thing, but then again, he did chew all the way through the wire, which meant he was alive for some time after first getting through the plastic insulation to the live copper.
This evening Gretchen and I attended an art opening in Woodstock for a friend of a friend. We keep socializing with these friends of our friends, but always with the friends themselves there, so our relationship hasn't advanced, I don't think you could say, beyond the friend of a friend status. It has, however, advanced to something, because we were invited back to the after-opening party and potluck at their house. Some of our other friends happened to be at this party too (though we'd befriended them through entirely different channels). These other friends were Carmel and Steve, the couple who live in the fabulous homemade house out at the corner of Spillway and Lapla. Carmel pointed to one of the younger women at the party (she was probably in her thirties) and commented to me, "she looks too brown." She meant that the woman looked unnaturally tanned. "No, she's probably Indian," I jested. "No way," said Carmel, "Her name is Kate." "But her last named might be Bharabapohr, and she probably brought the Aloo Gobi." It turned out that the Aloo Gobi had actually been brought by a blond woman who teaches Indian cookery in Woodstock. Lord knows, there can't be too much of that going on in this blighted Indian food desert. (Though she doesn't cube her potatoes into small enough pieces.)
The featured drink at the party was cosmopolitans delivered in pitchers. One table had a few too many rounds of the cosmo and a guy with bleached blond hair was getting loud and his speech was slurring. It was actually kind of unusual to be sober enough at a party to be aware of someone else's drunkeness, but hello adulthood. Anyway, the cosmo tended to make him volunteer comments that sober person would never say. As we were saying our goodbyes, he told us, "Yourf bothf goodth lookingth, buth youth bothf wanfth to beef fwith otherf peepalth." On the way home, Gretchen told me that sometimes when I get drunk I slur just as much as this guy, a fact that for some reason I found surprising.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?040710 feedback
previous | next |
