Squire Tuck went to a circus training camp this weekend (what they’re called
in czech literally translates as "concentration camp" but i think
perhaps we’ll just call it a "training camp", hm?) so Friar Tuck and i
scurried off to the cottage to do all the stuff we can’t do when Squire Tuck
is there, because we’re afraid he might be scarred by the experience.

no, actually i meant pulling the asbestos panels off the wall, gutter brain.

so we pulled the remaining panel off the wall. it was behind the stove,
so first we had to take apart the stove and drag the rustingly foul
parts out, and then we pulled the panel off. i say "we" but i mean
mainly Friar Tuck, although i helped with the heavy lifting a little. i
mainly was sorting the existing stuff into piles in the hopes that
perhaps now that the roof is done we can get someone to come and haul
it all away, so i’d like it neatly stacked for efficient removal.

i’m so mad about the asbestos: the roof was asbestos tiles and the wall
panels were impregnated with asbestos, and there’s even these strings
that the guy used to stuff into the cracks that Friar Tuck says are made with
asbestos. also there’s a lot of glass wool, but i’m not even getting
into that. i’m mad because trying to find someone to haul it off is
proving to be very difficult, and trying to find a place that will take
it isn’t easy either, and the quotes we’re getting from the places that do accept it are
really high.

everybody has a different idea for what we should do with it. my
favorite suggestion was "grind it up in a woodchipper and then
distribute it in a field somewhere"; the roofer suggested that we just
bury it out in the forest. obviously not doing either of these things;
nor do i plan to just dump it at some construction site in the middle
of the night (although that is a leetle tempting)– i have enough money
to pay for it to be legally disposed of, and i will, because i am an
upstanding person and because i enjoy criticizing others, which means i
can’t be too much of an asshole without being a hypocrite.

but i do think that other people are poorer, and perhaps less upstanding, and
are taking these suggestions, and are getting rid of their once totally
legal roofs by means less than legal, and it makes me incredibly
pissed, because i can’t even be that mad at them. who wants to spend
more than the price of a new roof on getting rid of an old roof? it’s
messed up.

in addition to frolicking in the asbestos, Friar Tuck also gave me some
better instructions with the chainsaw so i got to be all i am woman
hear me roar and slash through one of the three giant piles of wood.
the firewood is totally stacking up for the winter. i sawed everything
into nice, stove-sized pieces, and then we did a thing where i was
doing the stacking while Friar Tuck was axing the bigger pieces, and i had to
grab the piece and then turn to the stack while Friar Tuck swung the ax down,
then turn back and grab the fresh piece while he got the next log out,
and i remembered when the guys would make mochi in japan in an usu
(like a giant mortar and pestle) in front of the train station, and
while we were not nearly that efficient or dangerous i still liked
falling into the rhythm of work, repetitive work that requires your
attention nonetheless.

so: good weekend. although my everything hurts a bit today. i am a
pampered pale lady and did not realize that not having muscles didn”t
mean they wouldn’t hurt.

we’ll all be very grateful to hear that my ego got its proper dressing down this weekend and that my head has now shrunk back to a sensible size. i can do many, many things of tremendous importance in the world. i can organize socks. i can explain the difference between good and well. i can boil water like a madman. i can make pickled eggs. i can quote at crazy length from just about any movie released between 1984 and 1994. i can untangle knots without resorting to the alexandrian solution. these are all, i am sure you will agree, highly useful skills.

however,  i cannot consistently break a forest of tasks into individual trees. i get lost in the forest every single time. this is usually a metaphorical forest, but this weekend at the cottage i came to understand that a literal forest, or even a literal clump of trees, can reduce me to rocking back and forth and staring at my useless hands. i cannot run a chainsaw for more than about 10 minutes without flipping out. even if the chainsaw weren’t a problem, i cannot prune a tree for any use, because i get too distracted by my desire for symmetry and my fear of falling (one of my many talents is that i can completely wipe out while walking slowly on a perfectly level sidewalk, so i’m not really crazy about situations from which even stable people topple). i cannot seem to stack wood without getting a zillion splinters in my fingers.

i’m really good at taking out splinters, though. i’m good at small things. i’m like, all fingers, no arms.

i continue to be bad at interviews, even when i have time to prepare the answers.

i’m nice! gosh i’m nice. perhaps you haven’t noticed how nice i am, so
let me tell you. no, wait: first i’ll tell you, and then i want you to
repeat it back to me, just so i know we’re on the same page. ready?
NICE. we will also accept sweet. kind. helpful. pleasant. agreeable. no? can i get an
adequate? hello? is this thing on?

gar. it’s unbearable with me lately. i am not to be borne. i cannot do
the laundry without pointing out that i am doing the laundry. cannot
cook a meal without pointing out that i cooked it. dishes, you don’t
even want to know. if i god forbid should do something that i think
someone else might not notice, fix something that nobody other than me
knew was broken, clean something that nobody other than me knew was
dirty, find something that nobody else knew was lost? nobody needs to worry about
missing a thing. steven tyler would be so grateful. see how i washed
your socks?
and folded them into tidy little snails? and then organized your sock
drawer by sock length and color? aren’t i wonderful? simply marvelous?
nice?

blech. fortunately i am blessed to live with a boy who enthusiastically
plays along (yes! i did see how you cooked that meal using three whole
pots! hey, did you like how i noticed? wasn’t that nice of me to
notice!) and a man who absolutely
doesn’t (oh, anne. oh my.). luckily we all know that we’re on
anne’s crazy train, that this is a transition and not a destination,
and i am confident that we will presently be disembarking at a much
more
pleasant station; one in which i will again simply function instead of
pointing
out that i do.

i went to the hospital yesterday. i had to make an appointment for a
Procedure and the telephonary was just too overwhelming to face, so i
grabbed a book and went in person. three hours, my friends, just me and
mr.
obama and terribly hardbacked plastic benches (and some people who made
me look the picture of health, which is always a blast). the doctor was
devastatingly cute and laughed at my jokes, and i instantly fell in
love which is always a good thing when you’re about to take your
clothes off.

about the book i’m reading (dreams from my father): i really like
barack obama. i have no idea what i think of him as presidential
material but i am all weak in the knees for anybody who can write a
grammatical, powerful sentence. he’s no jefferson but he is maybe,
like, sam seaborn. the book is interesting to me in terms of my current
preoccupation with the degree to which we are defined by our culture,
and his approach to it is an interesting combination of wide-eyed and
even-handed that i’m ready to hear.

pretty much that’s it, i think. there’s a parent/teacher meeting to
which i am not remotely looking forward, but i didn’t eat uncooked
chicken in the hopes i would get salmonella, so in a way we’re making
process. i may even be nice, although i don’t think my capabilities stretch quite that far.

I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t in some measure of physical pain. A month? Maybe almost two. I know some people are in pain all the time, real serious pain that is worse than a toothache or a crunkledy back, and I’m not comparing myself to them at all. It’s just: I don’t think about myself this way. I think of myself as fairly impervious. I am the person who will get three hours of sleep and get up the next day and wash windows and wax the floor. I am the woman who will smash her hand through the window and go out dancing after she gets home from the hospital. I am not one to be held back by a boo-boo, and it is almost never more serious than a boo-boo. So it troubles me to realize that I cannot remember the last day that I did not wake and stretch and wince, the last day I did not take something for pain, the last day that I did not consider, before starting a task, whether it was going to hurt. It troubles me first because it makes me feel like a physical wuss and second because I think a certain lack of self-reliance indicates a weakness in mental focus that doesn’t bode well.

It’s spring. I think it’s probably time for a change. I can get up the hill to the cottage without stopping but I think somehow I need to be kicked back into shape anyway. I do not like feeling weak, feeling incapable, feeling powerless. I think I need my body to remember that it is a valuable member of team anne, and I think I need to get it off the bench, where it is sulking. I’m not sure how yet but I am determined.

This weekend we went to the cottage, where we finally have a real roof. A roof is very good and now we are planning to think towards real walls, woot. We spent the weekend shredding branches from the pruned apple trees into manageable piles of fragrant woodchips, and jumping up and down on the compost pile. Good times, y’all. It was cold and windy and frustrating in parts but mostly it was all snails climbing Mt. Fuji. Oh, and Easter was awesome. I got thwacked a little harder than usual (uhm, ow) and also a sunburn (again, and louder: ow) but the sun was shining and my friends are lovely and the pickled eggs turned out great and altogether I feel fairly cheery, just not entirely right.

1. eat a lot of beets
2. forget that you ate a lot of beets

happy easter, my peeps. i’ll probably have something to say about pickled beets and purple eggs later.

dear DVD that i didn’t even watch,

where are you? i went to the store yesterday to get a light romantic
comedy because watching back to back episodes of heroes on top of the
internal unpleasantness is starting to mess with me. i feel
sufficiently craptastic these days without adding to it the fact that i
have not saved a cheerleader and i am so totally not on the list,
unless bursting into tears over stupid things is a superpower. if i
were around someone who bursts into flames, they could say, "the jiggly
handle of the frying pan; remember that old christmas commercial;
sharing different heartbeats" and i would totally quench
them with my salty salty self so there’s that.

so that’s where you come in, my dearest DVD, my DVD for which (whom?) i
actually Put On Pants and Left The House, smiling lumpishly at the
lovely girl who works behind the counter there and hoping that i do not
smell, as i suspect i do, like rotting old man mouth. i probably do,
and she’s probably just too nice to even wince. she probably had to do
some heavy bulimic gasping once i left, but she held it together while
i selected a movie and we were all very proud of me, with the pants and
all.

i felt so proud i even went to get cat litter because some portion of
the weeping may be the ammonia stinging my eyes, what do i know. and
then that propelled me to open the mailbox, which i sort of haven’t
done in a while, because i thought Look At Me Out And Functioning Woot
Go Me except there was nothing in the mailbox except a WATCHTOWER which
i briefly noted was in english so that must be who was ringing the
doorbell earlier today. i feel a sudden need to switch to second person
here, like "you briefly note that the watchtower is in english" because
implying to you in a first person narrative that i’m losing my mind is
maybe frightening you, my DVD. my mind is perfectly intact, DVD, as
evidenced by the fact that i am able to write complete sentences. it’s
just a little edgy. like the world, like hic sunt dracones.

anyway, so i threw out the watchtower and came home ready to watch some
kissing, some wacky misunderstanding, some hijinks, and then some more
kissing. dear DVD, where are you? i’m sorry i frightened you but really
it’s not my way to lose things <cough>wallet</cough>, okay,
not my way to lose things often and i can’t understand how i managed to
lose a DVD i didn’t even watch. i blame society. society made me the
loser of DVDs that i am. society also found me barehandedly sifting
through the bag of recently discarded cat litter looking for a lost DVD
that may have accidentally gotten entangled in the previously discarded
watchtower, but this story arc will never reach the correct target.

sigh. the dentist didn’t answer the phone today. i brushed my teeth and
put on my pants again and went to the DVD store and filled out a
missing person’s report for you. i’m ready to love you baby if you’ll
just come back. come back before monday and they won’t charge me for
you, kay? in the meantime i got kiss kiss bang bang. not a replacement,
a distraction. murdering the time until you come back.

yrs &c,
anne tuckova

what we did: i played boutros at my sister's on my very first night back. allow me please to interrupt myself to highly recommend modafinal, which enables pilots to fly remarkably well for forty hours without sleep, and also makes it possible for me to get out the periodic coherent sentence even very late at night and with jet lag, although it is not such an artificial enhancer that i actually won boutros or successfully argued the virtues of america or anything. sigh. i know that many people take sleeping pills to help overcome jet lag but the provigil rocked my world. i didn't exactly cry when my father asked me to give him back the bottle, but i thought about it.
what we ate: extraordinary mexican food, although i can't remember what specifically.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: fernando was the captain of a starship, and ellen was the first officer. us: why isn't ellen the captain? Squire Tuck: because she's younger. when fer was learning to pilot the ship, ellen was still in starfleet academy destroying records. us: destroying records? Squire Tuck: she was like, totally breaking all of them.

what we did: we hung out at my parents' house, where we did useful things like Discuss the State of the Cotthut and Shop For Clothes In My Size and File My Taxes. once again, what is with the tax unhappiness from people? i'm happy to make enough that i'm finally paying something back; i'm happy to be sensible enough to have budgeted for it. when the government starts asking for more than i would automatically pay a reasonably good server, i may squack a bit, but seriously. in my dream world, at least some portion of our tax paperwork would go to asserting where we want the money to go, because certainly voting doesn't seem to get me the people who make the decisions i want, and it seems like surely this could be an individual decision, where the money goes, but i know it's a dream. my dreams are entertaining to me, what do you want? i was told "but then we'd have this incredibly well-funded public television and no military" and i feel like: yeah. my point exactly.
what we ate: so much goodness! my father seared ahi tuna for me which is his way of saying he likes me even though he suspects me of democratic inclinations; my mother bought my beloved bagels and masses of raw vegetables and dip, which i think is her way of being a little pleased that i follow library scandals such as the newbery scrotum, because it means i was paying attention at least some of the time. plus they took us out a bunch. you know what Squire Tuck had? queserasadilla. over and over again.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: gar, i forgot. something that andrea told me to write down.

what we did: we saw ste3ve and david, who apparently live on daylight saving time, at least on fridays, but compensate by being delightful.
what we ate: some kind of "rainforesty" chicken (?) thing and invisible bruschetta; a caesar salad the size of my skull and a martini the size of my eardrum, which is the opposite of how i usually like things but it worked out fine.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: mom you are not supposed to look at other people anymore when you are married. me: look, if we're in cabos, and i get that shrimp thing, and you get yet another quesadilla, and i go, "hey, that looks yummy!" does that mean i'm going to eat your whole meal? Squire Tuck: of course not, because you know you want the shrimp. me: … Squire Tuck: okay, but you should only look at the young ones.

what we did: spent a few days in sonora with our former housemates, which was remarkable in the way that finding your old comfy shoes and putting them on and realizing your feet still fit in them pretty much perfectly. which is to say: not surprising, but still delightful.
what we ate: the most delicious pancakes ever. some grilled fish that Squire Tuck still can't stop talking about. kale, which was so cleverly disguised that i could taste the love and not the bitter green at all.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: look, i have a pistol and a lightsaber. i'm captain jack vader!

what we did: we went to vegas. i do not have the bandwidth to tell you how much fun i had.
what we ate: among many other fabulous and bizarre things, we came upon an all-you-can-eat japanese buffet thing, which was so so so good. i ate my body weight in sushi.
around that time, Squire Tuck said:  when you die i think i will have special marble poured over you like a statue, but it will be really you instead of a statue, and then your grandchildren, even your great-great-greatest grandchildren will know how you looked, right now and always.

any of you who haven't already guessed that i came home to three-week old food rotting in the fridge and laundry draped all over the furniture as if it had gotten itself dried but just didn't have the energy to walk itself into the drawers have not been playing along these past years. also, Squire Tuck is totally behind in school. those of you who think i was in any way surprised or even particularly angry about either of these things are new to the game. 

i promise to be more reflective and stuff presently, but i had to get this out before a week passed and i was all, "was i gone? or did i just have an exceptionally nice dream?"

i had maybe four layered and totally interesting conversations with my brother-in-law today.

my mother worked on measurements and proportions with Squire Tuck by baking cookies in metric. they were quite tasty. and my dad built little rockets with him and they shot them over the house. my parents are going all science on my boy, and it’s adorable beyond words.

we watched a documentary on mr. rogers and i wept as hard as i did the day he died. normally i like my heroes complex and human and fallible; for example i love jim henson because he understood children and because he sampled swedish porn. but i love mr. rogers like some people love jesus.

it was my father’s birthday today, and we went to see "ansel adams and georgia o’keeffe" which turned out to be "photos ansel adams took when georgia o’keeffe and a bunch of other people went on a trip with him" and was kind of disappointed because i thought it would be more muse-ish, but was still neat because ansel adams photographs a human face like it’s a big magnificient rock with a juniper tree in the middle, and that’s kind of cool.

also we saw bridge to terabithia. i cried even before the movie started because there were all these kids in booster seats around us, plus two busloads of schoolchildren, and i thought, nobody knows what these kids are in for because who would do that if they knew. "do they not know?" i kept asking my mother, who was as baffled as i was. but mostly people were quiet, which anymore i don’t expect people to understand what i understand, but i want them to shut up so i can get that understanding. so that was good. word to the wise: expect to be disappointed, and perhaps you will not be. for example, the special effects, which i had thought would be my deal breaker, were actually okay.

we leave for vegas tomorrow. what happens in vegas will most probably be reported on later, so ha.

i’m in yr time zone, eating yr fudz. spicy chicken drive through was my only mediocre call. other than that, high quality mexican after being seated by a woman with more bust showing than i do when i am naked, bagels bagels bagels i love you the best, more mexican, indian, japanese more than i could eat, ever so many nut-bearing pastries, ever ever so many salads. i am going to start dabbing newman’s salad dressings behind my ears and you will want to make out with me even more than you already do.

other than food i will observe that my parents’ house, although still iceboxingly cold, is a lot more comfortable than i remember it being, and i’ve spent some quality time lounging. its mostly digestive lounging but still involved being more supine than i usually get here. it’s good.

also noticing that people seem to correct each other’s grammar and usage more when i’m around. it is funny, because i fix stuff all day and have less desire to do so when i am off duty. this is why we are all happy i have the job i have, because otherwise i would be a non-stop pedantic bore. ANYWAY. there’s my dad, whose spelling is so admittedly creative that even bill gates doesn’t know what he’s trying to say, going after my sister for "john and me were there." so i bring out the pedant in others. nice.

Squire Tuck is celebrating Squire Tuckukah, in which every day we celebrate the miracle of Squire Tuck with gifts and fancy desserts. he’s taking it gracefully, as befits a little prince. we’ve only had a couple conversations in czech, which is like our twinspeak here, our secret lost language, and i think that’s a good sign. proc ona to dela, kdyz to neni zdravy? nevim, ale nic nerikej! nerikam, jezis. dobre.

i’m having a good time so far. i’ve got the disconnected sorrow that comes with jet lag, but i am generally doing fine. i just wanted to let you know.

this is your brain. this is your brain on monday.

a fun conversation to have with yourself when walking alone is the one
that starts, "remember when we were in paris together and we ate the
croissants?" it is more fun if you do it in a french accent. today i
nearly moved myself to tears with the "and you said you would always
love me, and that you had never loved me," and decided that perhaps
street performance is too much at 7:30, even if it is just for an
audience of one.

i finally submitted the formal request to let Squire Tuck out of school for
three weeks. STARTING FRIDAY. it is a whirlwind life we lead, tuckovans.

noticing how much of my time is spent wishing i were small,
really small. i’d like to fit inside your pocket. you could carry me
around like christopher robin carried piglet. i sometimes feel so rank
with my own obsessions that i doubt my ability to be of much use to
anyone, even small comfort, but i would like to be. and i would like to
get a good look at an inkpot, like piglet did.

today in czech class i misplaced the words for anesthesia, virus, and
museums. the mind simply would not produce them in czech, so i did the
thing you aren’t supposed to do and went looking for them in english,
hoping to trigger the czech word. interestingly, i had also lost the
english words. brain the size of a planet, it’s no wonder things go
missing, but still.

i went to buy the bus tickets to the airport. this is maybe the most unprepared i’ve
been for an epic journey. (all my journeys are epic). usually i’m packed by now (because i used to
take days to pack, and now i can do it in an hour, but i still do it
days before the departure, because i am not very clever about doing
things). the bus i planned for is sold out (see? see how i should have
planned ahead), so i had to flip out and wander around downtown trying
to think of how to make it right. a man was looking at the lacy underwear in
a shop window while holding a newspaper over his head to ward off the
freezing rain, and he walked right into me.

i have a headache that is slightly larger than my head and a small furry knife in the back of my throat. perhaps i should pack just in case things get worse.