Week at the Knees

Puppy Exodus. Car Regression.

Test Mania. House Improvement Panic.

Sermon Obsession. Threefer Gastro-Intestinal Blowout.

And Advent!

Puppy Exodus

Patches, sweet Patches. I know that he was responsible, in his cute, yappy, aggressive way, for both of my Mom’s broken hips. He’d just take off when he saw another dog, and if she wasn’t braced for it, she would topple. The broken elbow was only because he was attached to her when a random, inebriated youth sailed past on a bicycle, tangling Patches up, pulling Mom down. But she loved him nonetheless. Like a Mother would.

Anyway, he cheered her to the very end. Even the nurses at Summer Shades realized that Esther was more into holding her dog than walking, seeing her son (moi) or grandson (Teo-Toot), or even eating. Eating – that was the problem at the end... She lost focus on keeping alive, which makes sense, considering everything... But still Patches cheered her up.

Anyway, Patches left our abode. Marin took him to live with a teacher friend of Kay, who used to puppy sit for him when I was down at the parsonage. A little breath of my Mom left the house with him. But Marin, she’s glad to move beyond the yappy dog, in hopes, I suspect, of acquiring more of a gentle, Alaska-appropriate (thick coat) dog for her and the Toot. Me, I’m a cat person. I cuddle nightly with Jamie (a.k.a. Pissy Kitty).

Car Regression

We got sucked into thinking about cars last Friday when Marin’s co-worker Matt, who has two little boys and bought a ‘92 Toyota Previa van in Seattle and drove it up here, spotted a ‘91 model. Why would we want a van? Well, there’s the baby on the way, the baby already on board, and there’s the fact that Marin’s pickup truck can’t hold more than three of us at any given time. And we need at least a station wagon, for skis and junk, and two babies, though no station wagon will fit skis and babies, so there’s the van possibility, which would do both, but then there’s the moral issue: should we have a big gas-guzzler (we think 20 mpg is a guzzler) or should we go for the next level up – the 30 mpg teeny car with great crash testing? And no skis. Or a ski carrier on top, minus the wind resistance gas-mileage factor.

Now, since my father was car-obsessed (and motorcycle obsessed... maybe “vehicle obsessed” is the appropriate term) I’d sit and steep over it, worry and feel overwhelmed. I remember asking my brother Ronnie to help me buy a car twelve fifteen years ago, and we got a nice deal on an Audi ‘90, but the side of me which loved the sporty car fought with the side of me which thought it too extravagant for my neighborhood in Philadelphia and my lot in life, that I asked him to keep it in suburban Emmaus at his house (for one year), and drive it when he could.

Unlike me, Marin calls people and does stuff. So, we called out to North Pole, and there we were, driving out last Saturday to test drive it. It was okay, cheap, cheapish, actually, it was expensive considering what the various car sites on the web were saying. About $1,000 higher than it should be, at $3,600. But we got Chris the seller to agree that he’d lower the price by any required repairs our mechanic came up with.

Okay, then we got suctioned into the local Toyota/ Honda dealer on the way back from the post office, looking for a Matrix or something, and this cool guy Jeremiah who was 26, plays in a rock band, and had homemade tattoos here and there, and former piercings, steers us toward a Scion xD, essentially a Toyota Corolla but actually rather cute. Curtain air bags and an iPod plug in. $15,500. Whoa. Did I mention iPod?

You know how this stuff goes, you come home and look at Consumer Reports, and then at Edmunds.com, and worry. Lots of worry. I haven’t had a paycheck since August of 2004. We’re kind of spent out. But Marin’s ‘00 Toyota truck will bring, say, $12,500.

Monday we discovered two things of great import vis a vis the used ‘91 Previa. One, that nobody wanted to look at the engine for us because you have to take the driver and passenger seats out in order to get to the engine. Hm. Okay. Then we (okay, Marin) called the name which was listed as the original owner of the car in the service records, someone I knew from the progressive community in town. Turns out that he never owned a red 1991 Previa. Owned two other ones, though. Rattled off the present owners. No Chris. Hm. Okay. So, what was Chris with the Previa talking about when he was waving around those records he’d proudly kept on the car? Marin asked him point blank. “It wasn’t repossessed,” he replied, and continued on, advising Marin (who doesn’t mind these kind of direct, confrontational phone calls, which I avoid like the plague) not to consider buying any domestic mini-vans. End of engagement, amicable dissolution.

So, Monday night we called Jeremiah’s colleague, Devon, “Fire up the Odyssey.” They had an ‘03 Honda Van (Odyssey) for $14,900, and we drove that around the loop a little. Couldn’t figure out the radio. Also, it was maybe 15 degrees out (warm for here), and the huge interior space never really heated up. Hm. Then we drove an ‘05 Pontiac Vibe which is a version of the Toyota Matrix (a cutie little station wagon) Marin’s taken with. Hot in ten minutes. But it was...small. Any connection?

Interlude: MaTeo and I broke through the barrier to tear-free hair cuts, at Angela’s Alaska Bush Cutters down on Cushman. First time the Toot and I have been since Esther died. Angela was good with Mom, efficient and sweet. Normally I’d have to hog-tie Teo in my lap and Angela would do a version of a haircut in under 4 minutes. This time he sat in the booster chair, though he insisted on holding my hand, actually, both of them, the whole time, except when I was steadying his head for trims with the clipper, the buzz of which freaks him out. And then, the reward of her last Tootsie Pop, a cherry smell filling up the car as we drove around on errands.

Tuesday, my day off from Matteo (he has pre-school) I squandered a couple hours creating a spreadsheet of car data from various websites. Like 12 different real and imagined cars measuring up next to each other, luggage capacity, wheelbase, etc., and then creating a rating scale from one to five for criteria like “would this car embarrass us for any reason”, one being oh my god yes, and five being hanging out the window happy. Oddly the ‘03 Honda Odyssey was winning, the last time I looked.

Then Wednesday morning, as Marin was heading out the door to work, I got a call from my brother Ronnie, whom I thought was in Seattle (I’d jokingly emailed him to look into used Odysseys down there and we could drive one back up to Alaska with Matteo, winter camping along the way), and he was wondering were Marin and I interested in his Odyssey, an ‘05, with only 25K miles on it. I thought, whoa, that’s an interesting curve ball. He needed to consult with Carol his wife first. It fizzled by Saturday, then revved up again by Sunday – they might consider driving it out to Seattle when the weather warmed up... Hm...

Marin carried the car mall energy the rest of the week, driving a high-gas-mileage ‘07 Honda Civic on Wednesday, and a newly arrived on the lot ‘08 Honda Fit, the car that our friends Jen and Ian researched and ended up buying a couple months ago, on Friday. The only Fit they have is an automatic, I think Marin’s sold on a stick. Aaaugh!

Test Mania

I had about three or four vocational aptitude tests (no, seriously) to finish before Matteo returned home Tuesday, to give the UU’s a shot at analyzing whether I look like adequate ministerial material, when Marin and I go to San Francisco next week. The tests put me into a total funk, asking post-adolescent questions about how I behave at parties, do I crack jokes or do I hide in a corner? Would I rather draw buildings or build a birdhouse? Ugh. It reminded me of a time when these kinds of tests would actually tell me something I didn’t know about myself. I just hope I don’t flunk out.

Sermon Obsession

I’d been collecting ideas on my upcoming sermon for weeks. It was going to be based on a reading of Stephen Dunn’s “At the Smithville Methodist Church.” The poem is about a little girl who is happily complicit in being clandestinely evangelized during a local church’s vacation bible school, and whose parents are a little embarrassed by her enthusiasm, and their own profound skepticism. They are way “over” church, Jesus, and all that.

I have always wanted to use the poem for a sermon, but never wanted to give aid and comfort to the enemy, the smug proselytizers of Christianity, who imagine themselves above the perplexities of humanists and other intellectuals who don’t know what to say, faced by rock solid faith.

I ended up focusing on three stages of being mentored into a community: the call, the learning of significant stories, and the journey forth (and back). I still think the healthier a community is, the more attention it pays to newcomers and children, to helping them become “family” while growing in understanding, and discovering gifts they have to share.

So, on Matteo’s second day in pre-school this week, Thursday, I hunkered down and read, and wrote and outlined, and lay down to try to get perspective. By mid-day I was pretty exhausted, and took off to check the mail and look for an Advent Calendar for Matteo. I found about a dozen used Pooh books instead. But by the time I got back home, my “sacred” time of thinking and reading had evaporated. It was time for Marin and Matteo to come home, 3:30 (they were going to get him a flu shot, but there weren’t any to be had that afternoon).

House Improvement Panic

So here’s the top secret portion of this blog entry. We’ve been sleeping upstairs – in the living room – since our winter radon test came back at some number I can’t discuss here (realtor alert), but which isn’t actually a problem (alert off).

A half hour after Marin and Teo got home on Thursday, Bill Reynolds, who retrofitted our cabin on the other side of town to filter out smoke during wildfire summer pollution debacles, came by to talk to us about how to interpret/ live with the data.

He talked about there being no direct correlation between numbers like ours (low) and anything physiological, though people he knows in Fairbanks who have ten times what we have, or 20 times, do actually have lung cancer. Okay.

What he was more concerned about was something else, which I can’t discuss here (realtor alert). If we put in a whole house HRV (Heat Recovery Ventilator), however, that problem will disappear (alert off), and the first problem (not problem) will also disappear, and it will only cost us around $7,000. Estimate.

Goodbye new car. We’ll retrofit the pickup to hold an infant between the spare tire and the wheel-well behind the cab back in the topper. Or something.

The Threefer Gastro-intestinal Blowout

By week’s end, the crud which had been reported by friends of ours as a horror story from which we had luckily been spared – projectile vomiting and diarrhea – visited the Merkel Kuizenga abode.

(TMI alert – too much information.) We’d gone to bed early early, like 9. Matteo was restless, jumping up crying a couple of times in the first hours of sleep. But then the sound of disaster. Before we knew what was happening, I turned on the lamp to reveal Matteo, lovingly held in his mother’s lap like the broken body of Jesus rests in the lap of the Madonna, with chunks of undigested apple ‘n bread on the covers, on his snowsuit (he sleeps in snowsuits not under covers), her arms, her sweatpants, her hair? Needless to say, it was time for the two of them to move from the foam mattress and carpet area to the linoleum. A few chunks trailing. Gradually I packed the washer with all his bed linen, his clothes, her clothes, and a shower was underway. Note: chunks don’t wash away, they just get cleaner (we think.)

I myself had two midnight crud events later that night, noisy, violent, ‘nuff said. Lying there, wishing it away, but no luck. Marin got off with a couple days of the trots, I was glad she was spared.

Surprisingly, I didn’t emerge from my pajamas, nor did I spend much time off my back all day Friday. Matteo was a little prince, coming around with hugs and kisses, brushing away my hair to plant them on my forehead, patting my back with his little hands. Begging me to play with him. Me begging his indulgence. He didn’t maraud too much, remarkably.

Saturday I was feeling a little better, not good enough to eat, though. Marin and Matteo indulged my panic about needing time to get the sermon together, by doing errands or napping or visiting friends through most of the day. And I was indeed grateful.

And Advent

I forgot that I was thinking of doing an Advent blog. Here it is, the first Sunday in Advent. Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying. Not in the UU Hymnal. Four Sundays until Christmas. Not sure how many till Winter Solstice. I must not have "passed over" yet.