We watched One Hour Photo last night and my mind cannot seem to let it go. I keep thinking about how old and weak they made Robin Williams look to play the part. He is an incredible actor and usually he has an incredibly powerful presence on the screen in whatever role he is in. But in this, he seemed too small. The word that kept springing into my head was ‘diminished’. They shrunk him into this empty old man, this person with no life, no home except for the sterile walls of an apartment that might as well have been vacant from the amount of personality he put into it. The entire movie I watched him play this sad and empty old man and I kept cringing, knowing that here was a person who would someday snap and do something horrible because there was never anything in him to allow him to resist it.

Richard noted that there were times when he thought he might end up like the character in that movie, but even if we had never met and never married and even if he had remained a bachelor all his life I cannot believe that he could ever end up as lost as that poor old man. We build things into our lives when we are young to keep ourselves busy and happy. We build friendships and make acquaintances and we learn how to go out and force ourselves to interact with other people, even though there are times when it is so hard to do, because we need – everyone needs – even some small bit of color in their lives. So how terrifying it was to watch someone on screen who never found his own bit of color, and know that there are people out there just like him, hidden away by the sheer fact that they are so completely unnoticeable.

********

I had just walked in the door yesterday afternoon and was putting away bags of vegetables for making soup, and peaches for making pie, when the phone rang. It was Richard, stranded alongside the freeway with a flat tire, and sounding tired and frustrated that he was going to miss his meeting.

So I hopped back into my car, crossed my fingers that the gas tank would have at least enough to get me to him, and him to his meeting, and zipped off to find him. Then he took my car, since it could at least handle driving at freeway speeds, and I drove his car very slowly and carefully to the nearest tire place which was, naturally, closed for the day. So then I ended up driving it home taking all the back country roads and toodling along at the incredible speed of about 35 miles per hour since spare tires really aren’t supposed to be used for those distances, and certainly not at high speeds, and this morning we did the car switch again, since my job is a bit more flexible than his and I could afford the hour it took to take the car to a tire place and fork over a large chunk of money to get a new one.

The guy at the tire shop was extremely nice. He didn’t treat me like I had no clue because I am female and he didn’t call me ma’am in that condescending tone that I seem to get in other car maintenance type places. And when I asked whether we should replace both rear tires instead of just the one to keep them consistent he didn’t immediately jump on a chance to make a sale, but instead pointed out that the other tire was in good shape and didn’t need replacing.

I don’t know exactly what it is that Richard managed to do to that tire, by the way, but whatever it was, was pretty impressive. The tire was cracked in three placed along the sides and there was no way it could simply be repaired. I wonder if it just couldn’t handle the heat we’ve had earlier this summer and something finally just made all the weak spots explode.

********

Richard and I have started a new project (because after all, what good is it to have that shared domain if we aren’t doing shared things on it?). So without further delay, let me introduce our new, joint photoblog: Cat’s Eye View It probably won’t be quite a picture a day, but the goal is get pretty darn close.

There is a tree on the wall in my breakfast nook.

Granted it is a very faint tree, done only in pencil lines, and right now it is a rather bare and leafless tree. But it is a tree, nonetheless. And those pencil lines trace out branches that jut ever so slightly onto the ceiling and travel just around the corner into the kitchen, and roots that leave the wall space and cross down to the baseboards.

I did not put this tree there, less you think that somehow I magically sprouted some small modicum of artistic talent. A friend of mine who is one of those incredibly artistic, crafty types of people came over and drew it onto the wall for me. My input was to sit on the stairs and watch her in awe, and then attempt to have an opinion when she wondered if maybe it needed more twigs. And my assignment, now that there is a penciled tree on my wall, is to go find a suitable color of brown and paint it.

Basically, this whole process is nothing more than a grown-up version of paint-by-numbers, I suppose, except it’ll all be one color and really I just have to stay within the lines. Artistic I may not be, but I could always at least stay in the lines. It’s a small and pathetic talent, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. I may not be able to do this tree without a whole lot of help, but I am consoling myself with the knowledge that at least I will be able to do the clouds in the claustrophobic toilet room upstairs all by myself, and that surely has to count for something.

Labor day is coming up so I’m hoping to get the paint sometime this week and get the first part done. Then the incredibly talented friend will come back to make add knots and swirls and make it look less like brown streaks on the wall and more like the bark of a tree, and she says she will show me how to make leaves, and the plan right now is that after a few rounds of me doing the basic painting and her coming over to make it actually look nice, we are going to have one heck of an awesome tree in our breakfast nook.

Usually, when it is summer here in the Sacramento valley, we stay inside where it is air conditioned and cool. We only open the windows late in the evening when the temperature outside has dropped to more bearable levels (although sometimes it’s too hot even for that), and we only venture outside in the evening when we are going somewhere; from one air conditioned place to another. Summer in the Sacramento valley is not my favorite time of year. I have never been a fan of the heat, and this summer there have been far too many days of 90+ degrees for my taste.

Last night, however, was a summer night I would gladly repeat. This is because last night we had a thunderstorm (in August!); a thunderstorm to beat all thunderstorms; a thunderstorm with more flash and bang and length and coverage than any thunderstorm I have ever seen before.

Driving home from Yosemite we saw a few lightning flashes in the distance but I didn’t think anything of it. There was rain while we were there in the park and I assumed it was just left over from whatever cloud system had passed by to dump water on us there. But that storm system apparently followed us home, and by the time it was dark, the storm was in full force.

I walked outside to get the mail and stared up into the sky in delighted awe. Lightning flashed so often that it lit up the sky in every direction. There was rain but it was soft and warm and not at all distracting from the show being put on by the night sky. It was with great reluctance I returned inside, and I opened all the windows to let in the cool rain-scented air.

The thunder didn’t start until later, and by then I’d wisely closed all the windows, more against the sporadic downpours of heavy rain than against the noise. It closed in slowly on our little town until it was crashing directly overhead, so loud it seemed as if someone had set up timpani in our attic. It woke me at about 1am – both the rattle of thunder so loud I could almost feel it, and the frantic exodus of seven terrified cats who practically flew through the air to find places to hide from the noise. And then again a few hours later, as if someone was bowling across our wood floors – great roars of sound and rain until it sounded as if it might come somehow through the roof.

When I woke this morning the rain had mostly stopped and the thunder was finally dying away. The early morning sun made it hard to tell if there was still lightning and by the time I left for work the storm had all but disappeared, leaving nothing but a lingering humidity, and flashing clocks on all the digital appliances since, as thunderstorms do, it had knocked out the power.

We’ve been talking about it all day, this incredible storm. It’s cleared away completely now and we can already feel the heat settling back over the area, shoving away any wishful thinking that perhaps fall’s cooler weather might be just around the corner. By tonight it will seem as if last night never happened.

This entry is a collaboration for On Display. This month’s topic is “summer nights.”

I went to bed last night around 9 because I was so tired, which meant instead of waking up at 3am this morning I woke at 1:30; time enough for me to stare blankly at the ceiling and then dose on and off fitfully until the alarm clock went off at 6 and I had to finally get out of bed.

The air smelled of rain all day; no great surprise since it’s been raining on and off all morning. There was an air of exhausted excitement today, mainly, I suppose, because we all knew we were almost done. A steady collection of bags and suitcases slowly accumulated behind the screens covered in construction plans and artists’ renderings of final products as the day wore on.

I did manage to get a little bit of the Yosemite experience last night. We walked up to the base of Yosemite Falls (a rocky bed for the river that only flows in winter and spring). It was almost a bit of a disappointment, because at the base, you cannot even see the top piece of the falls. That’s only visible from further away. It was a quick 20-minute walk, hardly enough to call a hike, but at least a brief taste of what it’s like out here, when you’re not in day-long meetings during the prime nature-experiencing hours of the day.

The meeting itself has been an experience. The previous few months of head-first immersion into the murky world of construction costs have at least given me enough of a background so I haven’t been hopelessly lost in the discussions, and even better, I’m not the only one who’s never done one of these workshops, so I’m learning the process along with the bulk of the room. And for the most part, everyone here is interested in seeing where it leads us. Granted there are the requisite few who come in with chips on their shoulders, determined to have their say and get their way and be as negative as possible in the process. But luckily in this case the number is few, and the majority of the group seems not so interested in humoring them.

Today had the potential to be more serious, due both to the fact that it was the last day and we had a lot to still cover, as well as the fact that we were hitting some pretty volatile discussion topics. But it didn’t end up serious – primarily because of the squirrels. The room we were in tended to get pretty warm during the day and if there was air conditioning, it wasn’t very good. So to avoid getting to warm (and thus putting everyone to sleep) we left the doors on either end open to allow the breezes in. It wasn’t a problem Tuesday and Wednesday, but for whatever reason today the squirrels could just no longer resist the invitation. So every once in a while throughout the day someone would leap from their seats and scuttle, laughing, towards the door, half-bent at the waist and flapping hands wildly to shoo out a squirrel. I wanted so badly to be able to get a picture – especially of the rather fat one that came in and was only noticed when it meandered out from under my chair (!!), but unlike when they were outside, the squirrels that came in to join the meeting didn’t feel the need to stop and pose for the camera.

Meeting finally over, we took a quick detour down to Yosemite Village and I got a disappointingly foggy shot of Half Dome. And then we headed home, listening to the 5th Harry Potter book on tape, each of us lost in our thoughts, glad we went, but even more glad to be done.

Important things I have learned so far this week:

• Pine nuts should never be used as a primary ingredient for pie.
• More importantly, pine nuts should never be used in pie, period.
• No dinner is worth driving 40 minutes down extremely windy roads for.
• Additionally, no dinner is worth traveling 40 minutes afterwards up windy mountain roads. Especially when the dinner involved the previously mentioned pie.
• August is a very bad time to visit Yosemite if you prefer seeing the world’s 5th largest waterfall, as opposed to the world’s fifth largest anemic trickle of water down impressive faces of rock.
• Wasps prefer biscuits and gravy to people.
• Children will whine about anything anyway. See earlier point for clarification.
• Mother Nature and allergy medication are a match made in heaven.
• One should never assume that the room number displayed on the phone is the actual room number one is in when one is setting up a wakeup call.
• It is possible to take part in a three day value analysis workshop on only 3 hours of sleep per night (due to waking promptly at 3am each morning for no reason whatsoever), but it is not advisable.
• One of the cutest things ever is a herd (pack? gaggle?) of fuzzy squirrels all taking dust baths together.
• Cuter yet is when one of them comes over to inspect your shoes.
• Even though it was probably just looking for food and would have cheerfully gnawed off one of your limbs if it thought it smelled tasty enough.
• Mars can still be seen even through really big trees (if you are tired enough).
• Everyone should be ignored by wildlife now and then.

It took us about four hours to drive here. It was so hot the air conditioning in the car never really quite kicked in. We listened to CD’s of Prairie Home Companion joke shows and talked about random things – most of them having nothing whatsoever to do with work.

El Capitan really is an amazingly huge cliff. We determined that the sheer lack of toilet facilities would be enough to prevent most of us from ever attempting to climb (no really, think about it. Nowhere to camp; you just hook your sleeping bag on and hang all night, and so when you have to go, well…). Half Dome is probably more impressive if I could see it from the dome side and not the half side.

There are a handful of scrappy grey and white squirrels who keep darting across the patio of my hotel room. They’re joined by a cluster of some kind of jays, with little scruffy tufts on their heads. I think it’s the squirrels I hear barking, but the little notebook of Useful Information in my room says that the mice around here can be pretty loud as well. I think I’d better take my allergy medication just in case, considering my sensitivity to rodents, and the fact that my eyes have been itching and sore since we entered the valley (it’s probably not just the mice, is my guess).

I stepped onto the patio of my room here and took this shot. I’ve never been to Yosemite before and I’m not really going to have much time to see the park during the time I”m here, since most of the time I’ll be inside, in meetings.

But still. Somehow it’s hard to say business travel sucks, and mean it, when it includes things like this.

Today I woke up stiff and tired, and my legs ache from all the squatting and lifting and lugging that we did yesterday. I know it was only one ton of rocks – and I can say ‘only’ because building the wall took a few tons of rocks and all that dirt to fill that darn flowerbed weighed even more than the stones for the wall so ‘just’ one ton really wasn’t too bad in comparison. But it didn’t matter to my legs, which have spent the day in a permanent state of ouch, causing me to hobble up and down stairs and hills like an old lady, and making sitting and standing comical events in the meantime.

It made it a little interesting for our afternoon’s festivities, which included a trip to the State Fair. It opened on Friday and we both decided it would be fun to go, and with both of us going out of town this week and everything else kicking in over the next few weeks, we figured this weekend was our best chance, regardless of how sore we might be.

So we went to the fair. We walked around all the county exhibits and tried to track down all the ones for counties we visited during our few months with Benthic Creatures. We tracked down the exhibit for our own county and found out later it had actually won an award for its sheer spiffiness. We wandered around the art exhibits and decided that the life-sized bull made entirely of butter knives (with a few metal pie plates thrown in here and there) was quite possibly the coolest art thing of all this year.

Then we meandered down the midway, where we searched but did not find any sort of haunted house ride (alas). We got free samples of some kind of new frappuchino, and also veggie burgers, and then said to heck with healthy eating and split a funnel cake (because Richard, the poor deprived soul, had never had a funnel cake before).

Fortified with our monthly allotment of fried bread products, we next set off (with a slight detour through the fountain to take advantage of the spray) for the vendors’ exhibits, where we took shameless advantage of the booth selling industrial strength foot and back massaging equipment that looked suspiciously like portable sanders covered in fabric, and we had fun checking out all the latest in Things No Home Should Be Without. Fortunately, we decided that our home could somehow survive without all of those things anyway and headed next for the sideshow.

The sideshow was mainly things like exhibits of the World’s Largest Cow, and also the world’s largest snake – a 400-pound python that looked as if it would have been perfectly capable of swallowing a few small people, if it could be bothered to wake up. For the petting zoo enthusiasts there were scorpions to play with (live, no less), snakes (of the smaller and less likely to ingest people variety), and various other critters. Richard took the opportunity to pet a giant millipede. I declined because, well, euww.

And what sideshow would be complete without a guy dressed all in black eating fire, or a guy who not only swallowed up to three swords at once, but also put live tarantulas in his mouth (yes the thought still makes me squirm even after I saw it done). And if that weren’t enough there were also the Chinese acrobats, which include the guy who balanced on a stack of six or seven chairs standing on four wine bottles on a rickety little table, or the woman who folded herself into positions no normal person should ever be able to attain.

When we got home yesterday there was a pallet sitting on the driveway (Long-time readers should recognize this phenomenon by now). This time, however, unlike the last few times, it was only one pallet – and it contained a fairly small (by comparison) pile of rocks.

So when we got up this morning we went outside and dragged all the rocks to the backyard and laid them all out on the ground side by side to get a sense of sizes and shapes, and then we went off to Davis for the traditional Saturday breakfast of cornmeal waffles with pecan butter, followed by a quick trip to the farmer’s market to stock up on more fresh-picked corn, grapes, and a handful of white peaches. And after that we swung by the lawn and garden store to load Richard’s car down with about half a yard of potting soil (luckily it was in bags, as this would have been a tad messy in the back seat) and then finally returned home to start the rocky fun.

Naturally, since Murphy’s Law is always in effect, it was extremely hot today (high 90’s). But we were determined (or rather, I was determined – I think Richard would have been just as happy to leave the rocks right where we’d dumped them), so we dumped potting soil all over the path area around the raised flower bed we’d built earlier this summer, and then started laying rocks.

It isn’t an exact science, this sort of path building. You grab the largest stones first and sort of drop them in the dirt and then you get down on your knees and dig in the dirt until the rock settles enough that it doesn’t rock when you step on it, and then you get back up and go pick up another rock and you do it over and over and over and over until either all the rocks are laid, or the path is as full of rocks as it can be.

And then when all the rocks are nestled gently in the potting soil (which smells suspiciously like cow manure, by the way, and has an annoying tendency to filter inside the gardening gloves no matter what you might do to stop it), you spray down the whole path until the aforementioned potting soil becomes mud. This is to allow the (extremely heavy) rocks to settle enough so that they won’t have a tendency to wobble when people walk on them later.

For now, we’re just letting the rocks sit, in order for them to all settle as much as they’re going to. The next stage is to get a few flats of creepers and start filling in the open spaces and the next stage after that will be to call it a year and not do any more heavy lifting or deep knee bending or digging until next summer.

Just to keep things in perspective, that flower bed you see there is about 2 1/2 feet high, and it is 12 feet across.

Richard lost his Palm Pilot last week. The Palm Pilot that he just got a few months ago. The very expensive upgraded spiffy Palm m515.

Wince.

Sometime Monday evening of last week, he mentioned in a bit of a panic that he could not find it. He’d searched his car and his bag he totes everything around in. He’d looked through all of his drawers in the computer room, and under every piece of furniture in the house and no sign of it. He asked at work, checking his desk and all his coworkers, asking the cleaning crew, putting up a lost ad in the paper. No Palm Pilot.

I joined in the search as soon as I heard the news, and together we poked and peered and prodded. We tried to think of every possible scenario where it might have gone. And when we finally decided that it was probably a lost cause we went out and got a replacement (I got a new digital camera at the same time, so it was new toys all around.

Then Sunday night, as I was sitting in the guest/storage room typing in a list of all my Nancy Drew books for an inventory, I heard the unmistakable sound of a Palm Pilot alarm beeping. It sounded very quiet, and at first I thought it was his new one or mine. But after checking, neither of ours had had any reason to beep, and suddenly it occurred to both of us that maybe the missing Palm Pilot was still somewhere in the house after all.

I’ve so far been the only one to hear it go off. And each time we’ve scoured the guest room in hopes of finding it, since that seems the most likely place for it right now, without any luck.

So now we have resorted to camping out in the guest room for hours on end, waiting for it to beep again, so maybe we’ll have a better idea of where it might be. And it is driving us both nuts. I have heard it go off now three times but we cannot seem to locate it. We are beginning to think that it has somehow slipped into another dimension – a fact that, considering it lives in a house with seven dimension-slipping cats, doesn’t seem so far fetched as you might expect.

The cats, so far, are the only ones getting anything out of this great (and possibly futile) Palm Pilot hunt. Because the guest room gets incredibly stuffy with the doors closed, I have been resorting to leaving it open so I can still listen for random beeping while still being able to breathe. This means the cats have suddenly had access to the Great Forbidden Chamber, because back when we moved in we had some kind of grand scheme of having an actual guest room with (wait for it!) an actual guest *bed*, which would be kept cat (and thus the theory went, cat hair) free.

Well, flash forward a few months with the advent of the happy peeing-on-the-downstairs-futon cat party which resulted in us tossing the futon mattress downstairs and lugging the one from the guest room down to the one in the living room (after first encasing it in pee-repellent vinyl), and add in the fact that there really isn’t anywhere else in the house for random bookshelves, leftover computer monitors and other parts, and Richard’s weight bench to go, and the guest room morphed pretty quickly into the ‘place where random junk accumulates’ room. And yes for whatever bizarre amusement we still refer to it as our guest room because I think in both of our heads there is this silly dream that we might somehow be able to transform it within minutes to a cozy sleeping spot should the need ever arises.

But back to the subject. This evening I spent over an hour lurking in the guest room, sitting on the futon frame that is lacking a futon mattress (and may I point out that futon frames are not exactly comfy all by themselves), straining to hear any noise at all. All this accomplished was giving me an incredibly sore rear and a nagging voice in my head telling me I really ought to break down one of these days and attempt to get that room a teensy bit more organized. So far, however, the Palm Pilot remains stubbornly hidden. Plus, now that it has taunted me with the initial round of beeps, it refuses to offer any more audible clues as to its whereabouts. I have a sneaking suspicion that we will only find it once we move out of this house – an event which probably will not happen for a few decades if either of us has anything to say about it. And in the meantime I am starting to get a little tired of hanging out in the guest room waiting for it to beep.

I think that after last night, I should probably ban myself from going back to eBay for a rather long time. I have probably reserved far too much money in the last 24 hours, even though it’s my personal money and I’ve very carefully avoided touching the joint account out of which we have to do important things like pay mortgage and insurance and other bills. And what am I spending all this money on, you ask? Books. Or rather, more specifically, Nancy Drew books.

To be fair, there are a few devil duckies in the mix, since every once in a while I go poking around on eBay when I get really bored, and devil duckies are one of those things I look for. I found a hot pink one and a purple one and best of all, one done entirely in camouflage and how, I ask you, was I supposed to just walk away from any of those without bidding? It was probably for the best that the one book of sheet music I really wanted was up to about $50 and there is just no way I am willing to pay more than $20 for it because that’s about what I paid for all the others, and then for whatever reason I decided to see what was available for Nancy Drew books and oh my god there were pages and pages of them up for auction and it was really late at night and I was a little wired for some reason and unable to sleep so before I knew it I had suddenly acquired a rather impressive list of auctions in which I was actively bidding.

I know how cheesy these books are, and yet I still went on this bidding binge for more of them. There are always two completely separate mysteries that somehow end up linked together and interspersed amid the discussion of clues and shifty characters are the inevitable comments about the matronly housekeeper, and Nancy’s cousins, and of course the lengthy descriptions of the smart and oh-so-stylish outfits Nancy and her pals wore while fending off bad guys. I started getting them when I was a little girl and then once I was older I started actively looking for the ones I was missing, and actually managed to score some of the really old prints, back when they came with book jackets and Nancy had a 50’s hairstyle on the cover and still referred to Ned Nickerson as her “favorite date”, before they went and updated the pictures and the language to more ‘modern’ standards. And for whatever reason, I have always had this little secret desire to finish up the collection, as long as I could find the earlier versions.

I did drag the laptop into the guest room where all the kids’ and young adults’ books are stashed, and I did a really quick spreadsheet listing all the books I currently have plus their numbers and then I went poking around on Google until I found a site that lists all the old series and figured out the names of the ones I was missing and then hit eBay with a vengeance.

So far I’ve won about twelve or so and I think I have another five or six pending (plus the devil duckies. One cannot ever forget the devil duckies. And actually, the word ‘won’ isn’t exactly the most appropriate, since if we go by the usual assumption that winning means getting something for free, technically I really didn’t win squat (except perhaps the chance to fork out some cash)). I also keep logging into eBay to check on the time remaining on all the rest, and the ping of arriving email sends me scrambing for the inbox to see if maybe another one finally closed and maybe I won. But the main point here is that I am well on my way to finishing off that collection. There are a still a few I haven’t been able to find, and it’s possible I may not be the top bidder on some of the still-pending auctions, but that’s okay for now. I think my eBay binge has been accomplished for this half of the year and perhaps it’s actually better to leave a few left to aspire to, months down the road when I finally release myself from eBay probation.