From the desk of byelka58.
When your memory is as terrible as mine, everything becomes legend much quicker than it would otherwise. Since I can only remember things I've already converted into words (and consequently I remember a lot of words that, strictly speaking, never happened, or at least never happened to me), it's important that I write things down (or up) as they happen. In conclusion: when I cheat you, I'm really only cheating myself. There are things I should have mentioned earlier.
For instance, did you know my older cat has cancer? It's true! Merlin's been sporting some skin lumps for about a year, and I've been ignoring them (there's an clear relationship between the fact that our cats never go to the vet for checkups and the fact that when they do go the vet, they die within six months, but I'm ignoring that as well). Once he started throwing up and defecating nightly in the living room, though, I lost patience with the whole gimp cat experience and scheduled an appointment with a vet. Filling out the associated paperwork, I realized that 1) Merlin has not been to the vet since 1990 and 2) holy crap, Merlin is at least 16. That means he's lived in all four of our houses, from Brandon Mill to the present. The cat is old as the former prime minister he so resembles,1 is what I'm saying, and putting him under anesthesia and such (do cats do chemo? I don't really know. But because of the location of the tumors the surgeons couldn't take enough of the surrounding tissue in one go) isn't a great idea. Anyway, you don't hit on 16, not to the tune of several thousand dollars, and especially when the cat has seemed irked since 1993. The vet, bless her, was completely upfront about the risks, and while she didn't tell me not to treat him, was more than supportive when I hazarded that uh, actually, I wasn't sure whether I was up for it, considering… Merlin is now taking (or being assaulted with, depending on whom you ask) antacids twice a day to soothe the cancerous ulcerations in his GI tract, and aside from his hair coming out around the tumors, he seems to be doing fine. When he can no longer be embarrassed by them, I'll post a little collection of photographs, including the year I trick-or-treated with him (he was an October arrival, and fittingly black; hence the name) and the year I trick-or-treated as him.
Did you know that my mom bought (one third of) a lake house? It's true! Together with some church-friends-turned-neighbors, she found a nice place on Lake Wedowee, just outside (wait for it) Wedowee, AL. It's an Alabama Power lake functionally identical to Lake Lanier, but less crowded and far less expensive. In my opinion, it could do with a few more canoes and a few fewer jet skis (including the two jet skis the co-owners have), but then I'm a misanthropist stick in the mud and a known sympathizer with pseudo-naturalist bullshit. I'm mad about the powerboats because I want to get away to Nature - when I leave my mom's first house to visit her second. Obviously I am a true friend of the environment.
Mom and I were there this weekend, which we spent looking for a local park she found online. Our task might have been easier had she remembered where the park was or what it was called - but then, it might not have been. We began by searching for a state route 85, or 185, which sounded right to her. Although we eventually found a 182, a quick 10 miles or so convinced us that wasn't right. Back in downtown Wedowee, she chatted up some locals who thought they knew the place, maybe, and wasn't it a turn down the road where Mary used to live, past the one gas station (but not the closer one)? Something about an Indian? Armed with that hot tip and an absurdly large six-layer cake our housemates asked us to pick up at the Hub House restaurant, we came back and hit the internet, which provided a name and an address for the park; a jaunt over to Map Quest, and we'd parlayed that into a map and some directions.
About 90 minutes and seven backtracks later, however, we were forced to conclude that we still couldn't find the damn thing. Also, I expect this year older kids will be telling scary Halloween stories about the haunted gold Honda that roams the gravel streets of outer Wedowee, ceaselessly searching for some lost land, back and forth, back and forth. Meanwhile, Mom and I were in protective hysterics, the kind you get when an apparently easy task's sudden difficulty forces you to choose between punchy laughter and the spittier types of rage. Because where the devil was the park?
Back to the 'net again, and it looked like the park was in fact located just a little farther down the gravel road we'd been driving (whose name both MapQuest and Google Maps have wrong). That didn't seem plausible, but who are we to judge? So this morning we tried again, clutching a large post-it with a map sketched on it. As it turns out, not only is the park not down there, but none of the streets indicated on the map are down there, either. There are, however, some lovely oreo-striped cows and a small vineyard.
Very well, then, we'd drive over to nearby Lineville, to scope it out and to see whether it lay on a shortcut to the very-real-and-located-in-physical-space state park we hiked in last weekend. We were driving along talking big about how we'd never really wanted to see that purported park anyway when we passed the “Mad Indian” gas station. Quietly, so as not to spook the park (should it be hiding somewhere close), we continued onward, until we finally and at long last saw an honest-to-God brown sign reading “Flat Rock Park” in comforting letters of several inches' height. Granted, the intersection after that one wasn't signed at all, but it only took us two tries (at a three-way stop…) to find the right direction. That would have done it, except that the park, open daily from 9 AM to 8 PM, was closed. At 11 AM. There was a sign on one gate indicating that the park was open weekends-only until a given date, but the date itself was covered with a thick layer of duct tape, and anyway it was Sunday. All four gates in the chain link fence were padlocked shut, and at the end of the road on the dusty concrete Mom and I knew failure.
The second-nearest thing to the mysteriously unopen park was a white Baptist church with a steeple and a little cemetery. The nearest thing was a modestly-sized house a few minutes away, half rundown and half sheathed in new Tyvek. Other than the weatherproofing, the only sign of human habitation was the lineup of three older cars and vans to one side, in front of an enormous and completely dead oak tree. In the tree, along the roofline, and circling over the house were seventeen vultures. In the front yard, two dogs of medium brownness, and easily thirty cats and kittens of all sizes and coats. The dogs didn't seem disturbed by the cats, or by the vultures, or even by us, when we stopped on the opposite side of the road so I could take pictures. Ditto the cats, who were hanging around in their feline profusion, unconcerned with the dogs or the local population of scavengers. As for the vultures, well, a vulture eating a road-kill squirrel in broad daylight is a fairly ominous sight. A string of vultures, like huge saprobic pigeons on a telephone wire, pushes on into creepiness. When you have a chorus line of vultures on the roof of a house that seems to have been abandoned in a hurry, more vultures in a blasted oak, and beneath their lofty glances the cat and dog have lain down together, you are in backwoods-Alabama2 Lore Sjöberg territory, by which I mean: Weird. Eerie.
(As I write this on an iBook, sitting on the back porch, birds of prey are gathering high over the cove. I'd been thinking hawks (or whatever) until the fellow homeowner walked around the corner and asked, “Do you see all those buzzards? A whole flock of vultures up there.” Well, that's just swell, internet. If you never read this because I never get a chance to post it, that probably means the vultures got the jump on the ol' circle of life. But at least I died in semi-rural Alabama! Yes.)
One last thing you probably didn't know: the company that paid me to evaluate grant applications over the summer recently hired me on a temporary basis to help them carry out another project. It's true! I have a job, at least until Christmas. As the temp, I'm responsible for doing whatever work is so undesirable that it's easier to pay someone $18 an hour for it than it is to talk a salaried employee into taking it up. On Thursday, for instance, I spent three hours stapling. On Friday I began assembling contracts, a magical process that converted 7 and a half billable hours and over two thousand sheets of paper into twenty-nine sets of twenty-four-page forms, in triplicate. Just one hundred and four-three (times three) (times twenty-four) pages to go! There's nothing quite like the feeling of leaving your first week of work knowing that, to the best of your species and gender's ability, you have just ass-raped a forest.
The point is, do you know what I did Monday through Wednesday? Well, two things. When not otherwise occupied, I worked on utilization reviews, which track foster kids' progress through the system. A new one gets generated every six months for every child in state custody, and they all have to be entered into the state's database.3 I am predictably excellent at data entry, due to my Rumplestiltskin-like focus: if you give me a room (or eight boxes) of one thing and tell me to turn it into another, I'll not be denied. Monday I was working so rhythmically I didn't even stop for lunch. (It has since come to my attention that lunch is an invaluable mechanism for breaking up the long passage of the day, so I haven't made that mistake twice.)
But no one is good at everything, my friends, and do you know what the other task was? I was getting paid to answer the phone, y'all. I WAS GETTING PAID TO ANSWER THE PHONE. (I was likewise getting paid to connect callers to the right line, which given the way I feel about telephones is like getting paid to forward people viruses.) There are so many jokes in there I don't know which way to take it. Is it that you always wondered what it would take to get me to answer the phone? Is it that when the president originally called to offer me the job, she complimented me on my “funny” voice mail message, because she herself often feels that way? Is it simply prime grade-A amrony? Because it's fucking something, all right. I suspect that over the next eight weeks my profound dislike for phones will move into phobia territory and then right out the other side and into psychosis. Come January I'll be holed up inside the loom and babbling about stealing the TARDIS so I can go back in time and murder Alexander Graham Bell.4 And they say you can't do anything with a liberal arts degree!
Still not covered: all of the stuff I mentioned last time, plus Bethany and her DVDs, plus new walking trails I cannot visit alone because the guilt-trip will kill me if the murderers don't. Good trails for all that, however, and if you5 were here, meaning in Atlanta, we could walk them together. If you were here here, as in Alabama here, the vultures would probably eat you, too.
1. I.e., Winston Churchill. Who, coincidentally, is dead.
2. Among the many, many things Mom and I passed (though not as many as we would have passed anywhere other than the rural South) on our hunt for the park was a green highway sign reading, in full, “BACKWOODS CHRISTIAN CAMP”. Put a hyphen in there and you've pretty well described the circumstances under which I might prefer to take shelter over at the vulture palace.
3. The state is mostly interested in things like the child's various diagnoses, placement plan, progress toward that placement, academic standing, and so on. Of those, the most remarkable are the diagnoses. I even got to type the phrase "R/O Intermittent Explosive Disorder," and I think I speak for everyone, and above all the foster family, when I say that I'm glad the doctors ruled out intermittent explosions. The more of them you enter, though, the worse you start to feel about your own family; sure, this kid punched a hole in a wall, but so did my brother, one time. And what would DFCS have made of my intense fear of thunderstorms, or my sister's thing with the aliens? Not to mention the collarbone incident.
Then there are the parts of the file that don't get entered into the system. Flipping through one report (looking for the most recent psychological profile), I came across a description of an incident in which a female ward, quote, "placed an undescribable object in her vagina." There's something brilliantly Lovecraft about that "undescribable," although the effect is spoiled when you learn it was a battery, and she had to be treated for possibly sterilizing burns (vaginal burns, ladies). Some of the glee returns when you read she did it to get out of a test… but then you realize she was in second grade at the time, and you're back to being sad.
4. Which is also a bit amronic, actually. I now have my mom watching “Doctor Who” as well as “South Park.” The latter is more quotable, but the former comes on before nine o'clock, so it's hard to say which she likes better. I personally am torn between Ike's voice work, which I love, and the white-hot nerdiness of David Tennant.
5. That would be Nina, probably. Nina! It is autumn! Surely you have had enough of learning?M
For instance, did you know my older cat has cancer? It's true! Merlin's been sporting some skin lumps for about a year, and I've been ignoring them (there's an clear relationship between the fact that our cats never go to the vet for checkups and the fact that when they do go the vet, they die within six months, but I'm ignoring that as well). Once he started throwing up and defecating nightly in the living room, though, I lost patience with the whole gimp cat experience and scheduled an appointment with a vet. Filling out the associated paperwork, I realized that 1) Merlin has not been to the vet since 1990 and 2) holy crap, Merlin is at least 16. That means he's lived in all four of our houses, from Brandon Mill to the present. The cat is old as the former prime minister he so resembles,1 is what I'm saying, and putting him under anesthesia and such (do cats do chemo? I don't really know. But because of the location of the tumors the surgeons couldn't take enough of the surrounding tissue in one go) isn't a great idea. Anyway, you don't hit on 16, not to the tune of several thousand dollars, and especially when the cat has seemed irked since 1993. The vet, bless her, was completely upfront about the risks, and while she didn't tell me not to treat him, was more than supportive when I hazarded that uh, actually, I wasn't sure whether I was up for it, considering… Merlin is now taking (or being assaulted with, depending on whom you ask) antacids twice a day to soothe the cancerous ulcerations in his GI tract, and aside from his hair coming out around the tumors, he seems to be doing fine. When he can no longer be embarrassed by them, I'll post a little collection of photographs, including the year I trick-or-treated with him (he was an October arrival, and fittingly black; hence the name) and the year I trick-or-treated as him.
Did you know that my mom bought (one third of) a lake house? It's true! Together with some church-friends-turned-neighbors, she found a nice place on Lake Wedowee, just outside (wait for it) Wedowee, AL. It's an Alabama Power lake functionally identical to Lake Lanier, but less crowded and far less expensive. In my opinion, it could do with a few more canoes and a few fewer jet skis (including the two jet skis the co-owners have), but then I'm a misanthropist stick in the mud and a known sympathizer with pseudo-naturalist bullshit. I'm mad about the powerboats because I want to get away to Nature - when I leave my mom's first house to visit her second. Obviously I am a true friend of the environment.
Mom and I were there this weekend, which we spent looking for a local park she found online. Our task might have been easier had she remembered where the park was or what it was called - but then, it might not have been. We began by searching for a state route 85, or 185, which sounded right to her. Although we eventually found a 182, a quick 10 miles or so convinced us that wasn't right. Back in downtown Wedowee, she chatted up some locals who thought they knew the place, maybe, and wasn't it a turn down the road where Mary used to live, past the one gas station (but not the closer one)? Something about an Indian? Armed with that hot tip and an absurdly large six-layer cake our housemates asked us to pick up at the Hub House restaurant, we came back and hit the internet, which provided a name and an address for the park; a jaunt over to Map Quest, and we'd parlayed that into a map and some directions.
About 90 minutes and seven backtracks later, however, we were forced to conclude that we still couldn't find the damn thing. Also, I expect this year older kids will be telling scary Halloween stories about the haunted gold Honda that roams the gravel streets of outer Wedowee, ceaselessly searching for some lost land, back and forth, back and forth. Meanwhile, Mom and I were in protective hysterics, the kind you get when an apparently easy task's sudden difficulty forces you to choose between punchy laughter and the spittier types of rage. Because where the devil was the park?
Back to the 'net again, and it looked like the park was in fact located just a little farther down the gravel road we'd been driving (whose name both MapQuest and Google Maps have wrong). That didn't seem plausible, but who are we to judge? So this morning we tried again, clutching a large post-it with a map sketched on it. As it turns out, not only is the park not down there, but none of the streets indicated on the map are down there, either. There are, however, some lovely oreo-striped cows and a small vineyard.
Very well, then, we'd drive over to nearby Lineville, to scope it out and to see whether it lay on a shortcut to the very-real-and-located-in-physical-space state park we hiked in last weekend. We were driving along talking big about how we'd never really wanted to see that purported park anyway when we passed the “Mad Indian” gas station. Quietly, so as not to spook the park (should it be hiding somewhere close), we continued onward, until we finally and at long last saw an honest-to-God brown sign reading “Flat Rock Park” in comforting letters of several inches' height. Granted, the intersection after that one wasn't signed at all, but it only took us two tries (at a three-way stop…) to find the right direction. That would have done it, except that the park, open daily from 9 AM to 8 PM, was closed. At 11 AM. There was a sign on one gate indicating that the park was open weekends-only until a given date, but the date itself was covered with a thick layer of duct tape, and anyway it was Sunday. All four gates in the chain link fence were padlocked shut, and at the end of the road on the dusty concrete Mom and I knew failure.
The second-nearest thing to the mysteriously unopen park was a white Baptist church with a steeple and a little cemetery. The nearest thing was a modestly-sized house a few minutes away, half rundown and half sheathed in new Tyvek. Other than the weatherproofing, the only sign of human habitation was the lineup of three older cars and vans to one side, in front of an enormous and completely dead oak tree. In the tree, along the roofline, and circling over the house were seventeen vultures. In the front yard, two dogs of medium brownness, and easily thirty cats and kittens of all sizes and coats. The dogs didn't seem disturbed by the cats, or by the vultures, or even by us, when we stopped on the opposite side of the road so I could take pictures. Ditto the cats, who were hanging around in their feline profusion, unconcerned with the dogs or the local population of scavengers. As for the vultures, well, a vulture eating a road-kill squirrel in broad daylight is a fairly ominous sight. A string of vultures, like huge saprobic pigeons on a telephone wire, pushes on into creepiness. When you have a chorus line of vultures on the roof of a house that seems to have been abandoned in a hurry, more vultures in a blasted oak, and beneath their lofty glances the cat and dog have lain down together, you are in backwoods-Alabama2 Lore Sjöberg territory, by which I mean: Weird. Eerie.
(As I write this on an iBook, sitting on the back porch, birds of prey are gathering high over the cove. I'd been thinking hawks (or whatever) until the fellow homeowner walked around the corner and asked, “Do you see all those buzzards? A whole flock of vultures up there.” Well, that's just swell, internet. If you never read this because I never get a chance to post it, that probably means the vultures got the jump on the ol' circle of life. But at least I died in semi-rural Alabama! Yes.)
One last thing you probably didn't know: the company that paid me to evaluate grant applications over the summer recently hired me on a temporary basis to help them carry out another project. It's true! I have a job, at least until Christmas. As the temp, I'm responsible for doing whatever work is so undesirable that it's easier to pay someone $18 an hour for it than it is to talk a salaried employee into taking it up. On Thursday, for instance, I spent three hours stapling. On Friday I began assembling contracts, a magical process that converted 7 and a half billable hours and over two thousand sheets of paper into twenty-nine sets of twenty-four-page forms, in triplicate. Just one hundred and four-three (times three) (times twenty-four) pages to go! There's nothing quite like the feeling of leaving your first week of work knowing that, to the best of your species and gender's ability, you have just ass-raped a forest.
The point is, do you know what I did Monday through Wednesday? Well, two things. When not otherwise occupied, I worked on utilization reviews, which track foster kids' progress through the system. A new one gets generated every six months for every child in state custody, and they all have to be entered into the state's database.3 I am predictably excellent at data entry, due to my Rumplestiltskin-like focus: if you give me a room (or eight boxes) of one thing and tell me to turn it into another, I'll not be denied. Monday I was working so rhythmically I didn't even stop for lunch. (It has since come to my attention that lunch is an invaluable mechanism for breaking up the long passage of the day, so I haven't made that mistake twice.)
But no one is good at everything, my friends, and do you know what the other task was? I was getting paid to answer the phone, y'all. I WAS GETTING PAID TO ANSWER THE PHONE. (I was likewise getting paid to connect callers to the right line, which given the way I feel about telephones is like getting paid to forward people viruses.) There are so many jokes in there I don't know which way to take it. Is it that you always wondered what it would take to get me to answer the phone? Is it that when the president originally called to offer me the job, she complimented me on my “funny” voice mail message, because she herself often feels that way? Is it simply prime grade-A amrony? Because it's fucking something, all right. I suspect that over the next eight weeks my profound dislike for phones will move into phobia territory and then right out the other side and into psychosis. Come January I'll be holed up inside the loom and babbling about stealing the TARDIS so I can go back in time and murder Alexander Graham Bell.4 And they say you can't do anything with a liberal arts degree!
Still not covered: all of the stuff I mentioned last time, plus Bethany and her DVDs, plus new walking trails I cannot visit alone because the guilt-trip will kill me if the murderers don't. Good trails for all that, however, and if you5 were here, meaning in Atlanta, we could walk them together. If you were here here, as in Alabama here, the vultures would probably eat you, too.
1. I.e., Winston Churchill. Who, coincidentally, is dead.
2. Among the many, many things Mom and I passed (though not as many as we would have passed anywhere other than the rural South) on our hunt for the park was a green highway sign reading, in full, “BACKWOODS CHRISTIAN CAMP”. Put a hyphen in there and you've pretty well described the circumstances under which I might prefer to take shelter over at the vulture palace.
3. The state is mostly interested in things like the child's various diagnoses, placement plan, progress toward that placement, academic standing, and so on. Of those, the most remarkable are the diagnoses. I even got to type the phrase "R/O Intermittent Explosive Disorder," and I think I speak for everyone, and above all the foster family, when I say that I'm glad the doctors ruled out intermittent explosions. The more of them you enter, though, the worse you start to feel about your own family; sure, this kid punched a hole in a wall, but so did my brother, one time. And what would DFCS have made of my intense fear of thunderstorms, or my sister's thing with the aliens? Not to mention the collarbone incident.
Then there are the parts of the file that don't get entered into the system. Flipping through one report (looking for the most recent psychological profile), I came across a description of an incident in which a female ward, quote, "placed an undescribable object in her vagina." There's something brilliantly Lovecraft about that "undescribable," although the effect is spoiled when you learn it was a battery, and she had to be treated for possibly sterilizing burns (vaginal burns, ladies). Some of the glee returns when you read she did it to get out of a test… but then you realize she was in second grade at the time, and you're back to being sad.
4. Which is also a bit amronic, actually. I now have my mom watching “Doctor Who” as well as “South Park.” The latter is more quotable, but the former comes on before nine o'clock, so it's hard to say which she likes better. I personally am torn between Ike's voice work, which I love, and the white-hot nerdiness of David Tennant.
5. That would be Nina, probably. Nina! It is autumn! Surely you have had enough of learning?M