lrk

Yesterday afternoon, I thought something had died in my garage. This wasn’t a ridiculous thing to think. Since we’ve moved in, we’ve had members of at least three non-human species in our garage. If there were any more of them, Nova could do a follow up to Frozen Planet called Rural Garage where they’d just shoot a two part series on the complex ecosystem behind our dryer.

The first animal we saw was a field mouse that actually turned out to be at least two field mice. There are probably more, but have you ever tried to tell field mice apart? Let’s just say that they’re similar enough that I’ve only bothered giving names to two of them.

The first one I called Algernon. We found him trapped in our garage sink, too tiny and weak to do anything more than eep pitifully. I felt so sad for Algie that I tried to give him some cheese, but he was too scared to eat it. Either that or he doesn’t like sharp cheddar. Eric took him outside for me.

There’s also a rather wily mouse I’ve named Houdini, because he’s managed to avoid or escape Eric’s stupid humane mouse traps. The problem here is that Eric is a vegetarian, and I find tiny animals adorable. Between the two of us, we should just surrender the house to the damn vermin.

The next animal we found was a little garter snake. Eric left this one up to me, so I dealt with it by just leaving the garage door open until he decided to leave. I had a brief hope that he would take out a few of the mice, but he was really so small that I’m not sure who would have won that fight.

One night Eric left the garage door open, which meant, of course, that when he went to get in his car the next morning, there was a large bird roosting on it. It could have been worse. We do live in mountain lion territory. Anyway, Eric chased it around the garage for awhile until he finally decided to go outside and scare the bird through the back window so it flew out the garage door.

You can see that the idea that something might die in our garage is not at all a stretch of the imagination, although depending on the size of the next animal we find in there, it’s not unlikely to be one of us. So, when our garage started to smell like death, we weren’t that surprised. We opened a window and figured it would go away in a couple of days.

We’d forgotten that we now have something else in the house that smells like death: propane gas!

I’d been out and about yesterday afternoon (ok, I had a meeting at Google, and I was stealing as many snacks as I could stuff into my mouth like a chipmunk), and when I got home, the smell seemed less deathy. I didn’t get around to making dinner until about 9:45. That’s when I turned on the stove.

I’m just going to wait for you to imagine the stove bursting into a ball of flame while I run from it like Tom Cruise in every action movie he’s ever been in. Exciting, yes? That didn’t happen.

What did happen was...nothing. It wouldn’t light. I tried a few times, since the stove is tricky. That’s when I realized that it wouldn’t light because there was no gas coming out of it. That’s when I started to hyperventilate, and imagine that I had propane poisoning (which, it turns out, isn’t really a thing, but that didn’t stop me from contracting it).

I rushed out to the propane tank to check it. Sure enough, it was on zero. There was no propane. Holy shit, I decided with very little evidence, we’d had a gas leak. We could have died in a fiery inferno all day today.

In the interests of not killing my few readers with questionably functional hearts, I’m going to spoil things for you by saying this was 100% not true. However, that has never stopped me from believing in my imminent death before (see also: psychosomatic salmonella, psychosomatic allergic reactions, plane crashes, and sharks).

Eric, always helpful, Googled propane leaks and announced, “This is bad. This is very bad. We were incredibly lucky. Not lucky like that time in Hawaii when we didn’t die in the car crash. Actually lucky. Like the people in the car in front of us who weren’t in a car crash.”

I called the propane company emergency line. The woman on the other end was helpful, yet not in any way reassuring. She assured me she would send somebody out right away. She advised me to not smoke (really? this is a thing people do when they think there’s a gas leak?), to not turn things off or on (which I’d been doing all day), and to get out of the house.

Now, it was 10pm at 2,000 feet in early spring. It was about 40 degrees and pitch black outside. Also, the propane tank was completely empty. If being in the house was going to kill me, it would have already done it. So, we compromised by staying inside but a) not smoking, and b) panicking.

Eric and I discussed contingency plans.
“Are we going to have to spend the weekend at the Four Seasons in Half Moon Bay?” he asked.
“Don’t be silly, honey,” I said, “The Sofitel is closer, cheaper, and they have a nice breakfast.”
“I like a nice breakfast.”

We then went back to panicking while we waited for the service guy. About 11:30pm, the service guy finally found my house, which is in the wrong place on Google maps and also invisible. He wasn’t exactly reassuring either. Maybe it was the fact that he showed up with his wife and two chihuahuas. I’m not making that up. Anyway, he told me that there was nothing he could do tonight, but he confirmed the tank was empty, disconnected it and told me somebody would be at the house between 6am and 8am the next morning.

There went our plans for the Four Seasons.

Although, to be fair, having someone show up at 6am the next morning wasn’t that big of a deal, because in typical Laura fashion, I was completely unable to sleep. Instead, I simply replayed all the ways I could have blown myself to smithereens the previous day.

Oh, also I shivered. You see, our furnace runs on propane. No propane means no heat. Eric briefly mentioned starting a fire in the fireplace for warmth, but seeing as (we believed) we’d had a gas leak, starting a fire seemed even more contraindicated than smoking. Although, to be fair, by the time 6am rolled around, burning to death didn’t seem like quite as bad of an option. At least it would have been warm.

The new service technician showed up around 8am. No chihuahuas this time, but he did have his big gas truck. I explained that I was pretty sure we’d had a gas leak. He reassured me he’d do a leak test. It would take about 10 minutes. I asked if we should leave the house while he did it. He looked at me as if I were insane.

“Ok, you’re all set,” he said.
“Did you find the leak?” I asked.
“There wasn’t a leak. The tank was just empty.”
“Wait, what about the smell of death in my house yesterday?” I almost yelled, instantly reverting to panic mode.
“Yeah, that happens when the tank runs empty.”
“Wait, what?”
“The stuff that they put in the propane to make it smell...it gathers at the bottom of the tank as a vapor, not a liquid. When the propane runs out, that stuff comes through the line and makes everything smell terrible.”
“But my tank isn’t supposed to run out,” I said. “I’m on autofill. You’re supposed to come back and fill it when it gets close to empty.”
“Sorry about that,” he said. “We’ve got a new system. It’s not working too well yet.”
“Ok, but if I smell gas again, I’m calling you back.”
“Sure,” he said. “You should call us any time you think you smell gas.”

It’s been 12 hours. I do not smell any gas.

On the upside, I’m the proud new owner of a flammable gas detection alarm that I’m installing in my garage. Just in case an animal ever does actually die in there.

Part of owning a house is, apparently, trying to get to know your neighbors. One of the problems with being Eric and me (ok, really the ONLY problem), is the fact that we are shut ins.

And why wouldn’t we be shut ins? We find ourselves endlessly entertaining. We subsist largely on a diet of caffeine, frozen burritos, and salty snacks. We find small talk with strangers physically painful. If that’s not the backstory of everybody on Hoarders, I don’t know what is.

But now that we live in the mountains, we figured it would make sense to get to know some of the other mountain folk. We went about this in the way you’d expect from us - we joined the internet mailing list for the neighborhood.

That’s when we realized that our neighborhood is not like other neighborhoods, and not just because we’re surrounded by mountain lions and what we’re pretty sure is a Norwegian militia training camp.

No, our neighborhood is different because everybody owns an animal, and nobody owns a fence.

Let’s compare a message from my brother’s neighborhood email list to a typical message from mine. In case you are one of three people reading this who are not related to me, my brother lives in a Stepford neighborhood in Southern California.

Here’s a typical post and follow up post he forwarded to me:
 
Dear neighbors, 
At approximately 7:00 pm tonight a disheveled looking man wearing an orange shirt, holding a metal pipe was seen coming out of the canyon by the [redacted] gates.  He followed a family and then dissapeared into the canyon again.  Be aware and call the police if you see him again.
Thanks,
[name redacted]
Dear Neighbors,
I have just been advised that this man is a guest of a homeowner in our community.  He had a walking stick not a metal pipe.  He is not a danger to anyone.
Sorry for the misinformation.
[name redacted]

For the record, I’m just assuming that, in the above email, “disheveled” is some sort of code for “ethnic.” I’ve been to the neighborhood. It’s a reasonable assumption.

Now, here’s a typical post from our email list:

Dear neighbors,
My dog, Bucky, got out again! He’s a mixed breed with no tags or collar. Please give us a call at [redacted] if you see him.

And by “typical” I’d say that the list is at least 25% lost dogs and cats or found dogs and cats. It’s like the entire neighborhood is on a pet exchange program.

One of my favorite emails was from somebody who found a cat with no tags. The finder claimed the cat answered to “Mustache,” to which I barely refrained from replying, “HOW ON EARTH DID YOU FIGURE THAT OUT???” before I realized that the whole thing must be a joke because cats don’t answer to anything.

It’s not all dogs and cats, either. One recent email was somebody wanting to find the owner of an escaped turtle. Another was somebody with extra hermit crab supplies, since their hermit crabs had died. I’m assuming the crabs escaped from an unfenced yard and were eaten by a mountain lion.

What I desperately want to do is to start losing and finding other types of animals on the list.

“Dear neighbors, Has anybody seen a brown and white wildebeest? Mine seems to have wandered off from my unfenced yard. Answers to Hoofer.”

“Hey all, I found a cute little guy that I think is an agouti. Or maybe a capybara. No tags, but he is wearing a monocle and a top hat. Might be the tiniest bit rabid. Answers to ‘Ouch, stop biting me!’ Does he belong to anybody?”

I’m pretty sure this will help me get to know my neighbors better, although I’m a little afraid they’ll be carrying pitchforks and torches when I meet them.

Eric and I sort of suck at being grown ups. Don’t get me wrong. We’re plenty old. We’re just not very good at doing grown up things.

Our ideal day probably consists of solving weird puzzles, eating snack foods, and napping, while I imagine our grown up friends brunching and reading the New York Times and golfing and...I don’t really know what grown ups do, which should prove my point right there. Are there country clubs involved?

We did buy a house, though. That’s a kind of grown up thing to do. And we only did it like 10 years after everybody else. It gives me hope that some day I might learn to keep a house plant alive or finish a New Yorker article.

The problem with doing one grown up thing is that you end up thinking you should probably do other grown up things. For example, our new house has kind of a lot of walls that don’t have anything on them, while most of our grown up friends seem to have some sort of art work covering theirs.

So, the last couple of weekends, we went to Santa Cruz Open Studios with some friends of ours. These friends are not like us. They are grown ups. They know stuff about art and wine. I don’t think they even own a console gaming system. I honestly have no idea why they hang out with us. Maybe they’re considering having children and want to see what it’s like.

Our goal at the open studios was to start replacing the old French cafe posters that I’ve had since just after college with actual art made by actual artists. I mean, we weren’t looking for Van Goghs, but we wanted something real. Something serious.

What we got was birds wearing party hats.

Look, we were really doing our best. We’d looked at some very nice abstracts. Some of them had textures or nails or something. They were interesting and attractive and grown up.

Then we found an artist who mostly painted brightly colored pictures of birds with party hats, and we fell in love.

But it wasn’t just birds with party hats. She also did collages where she took pictures of bird heads and put them onto old timey photographs of people. I now own what can best be described as a formal 19th century portrait of a family of finches. It is glorious.

I’ve never been a big fan of having family photos all over the house, perhaps because my family is not exactly filled with super models, but now I suddenly see the appeal. I desperately want the entire history of my bird-headed family documented on film - from Great Grandpa Plover in the old country to little Robin’s team soccer photo from last season.

I can’t help but think this project may completely undermine my desire to fill my new home with lovely, serious, adult things, but I just don’t care. If I can’t hang pictures of birds with party hats and immigrant portraits with bird heads, what’s the point of being a grown up anyway?

My life now has value. And by that, I mean that my death now has a specific dollar value, since I purchased life insurance.

Like so many other things, this did not go as smoothly for me as it does for everybody else in the world, because I am apparently not like other humans.

If you want to make a drinking game out of this post, the rule is to drink every time I find a new way to say, “I don’t care what happens then, because I’LL BE DEAD.” Afterward, do not complain to me about your alcohol poisoning. You have been warned.

First I should explain why somebody who doesn’t care what happens after she’s dead bothered to get life insurance in the first place. You see, I bullied Eric into buying a house with me.

It’s not that he doesn’t love the house. It’s just that he would never have thought to himself, “I want to go into debt for the next 30 years to move someplace 15 minutes away from anything interesting and 45 minutes away from where I have to be every day. Also, if it could be riddled with dry rot, that would be outstanding. And don’t forget to make everything leak!” He’s stupid that way.

Unfortunately, my bullying skills were not good enough to convince him to buy the WHOLE house. I could only get him to agree to pay for about half of it, which means I’m on the hook for the other half.

Since Kleins are, by nature, delicate flowers, prone to consumption and other wasting diseases, and since my new commute involves 15 minutes on a vertical road about the width of a goat track which is frequently covered with suicidal ninja deer that remain invisible until just before they leap into the middle of the road, I figured that there was a small chance I wouldn’t be around to pay off all of my half.

Also, I told Eric he had to get life insurance, because the chances that I’ll kill him in his sleep are significantly higher now that we own a house together, and he rightfully told me that it wasn’t fair to just insure his life.

Cut to last week, when I went in to my insurance agent’s office to sign up for life insurance, which I have to do because I’m self-employed, which means I can’t just get it through a group policy with my employer.

The following is not a transcript, but it certainly captures the essence of our conversation:

Me: I would like to get exactly enough coverage so that, if I die in the next 15 years or so, my boyfriend doesn’t lose the house.
Agent: Ok, so were you thinking $500k? A million?
Me: That’s right. I was able to bully my boyfriend into buying a $2 million house. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but let’s go with a lot less than that.
Agent: But you may get a price break if you go to $500k.
Me: Yeah, I’m annoying enough that I don’t want to incentivize my death any more than absolutely necessary. What have you got for around $250k?
Agent: Well let’s just see what it would cost for $250k, then.
Me: Yes, let’s.
Agent: Who do you want to be the beneficiary?
Me: My boyfriend.
Agent: Ok, and if you were to both die in a fiery crash, who would you want to get the money.
Me: Wow. You went a little dark there. Honestly, I don’t care.
Agent: You...don’t care?
Me: Nope. Don’t care. You see, I’ll be dead.
Agent: Is there anybody in your family who might need the money?
Me: Considering the fact that I’m the poor relative in my family, I’m going to go with “Oh, hells no.”
Agent: Do you have any children?
Me: Nope.
Agent: How about Stanford? You like them. You could give it to them.
Me: Sure, because they need the money. Let’s just give it all to my mom. She’ll give some of it to charity. Also she’s the least likely to kill me for it. I mean she hasn’t killed me so far, and she’s small enough that I think I could take her.
Agent: Anybody else?
Me: It took us 10 minutes to determine that I barely care enough to come up with one alternate. I’m not suddenly going to start caring, you know. That’s not how this works.
Agent: What about Eric’s son?
Me: What about him?
Agent: Do you want him to have any of it?
Me: Did I mention that I’ll be dead? And that dead people don’t care about things?
Agent: Yes, but you need to decide what will happen to the money if it doesn’t go to either Eric or your mother.
Me: Do I also need to decide what to do with it in the event of a zombie apocalypse?
Agent: ...
Me: I also won’t care then. Because I’ll be dead. Or possibly undead. But probably just dead.
Agent: So, no other beneficiaries then?
Me: I’m glad you’re catching on.
Agent: Let’s look at the price difference between $250k and $500k.
Me: Whatever blows your skirt up.
Agent: Look, it’s less than twice as much per year!
Me: Neat! It’s also significantly more than I’m willing to pay for something from which I derive exactly 0 benefit.
Agent: Have you ever lost anyone close to you?
Me: My mother killed my parakeet when I was at camp. Hmm...now that I think of it, maybe my dad would be a better alternate...
Agent: Sometimes when people lose somebody close to them, it can be very devastating. 

Me: I hope so.
Agent: I beg your pardon?
Me: I mean, Eric had better be at least a little devastated. I’m pretty awesome. It would be tough to lose me.
Agent: Yes, well, it can be hard for people to work sometimes after somebody they care about dies.
Me: Yeah, he’d better plan for that. Because it’s pretty hard for him to work now. Mostly because he’s lazy.
Agent: Did you want to get anything extra to cover his expenses if he has trouble working after your death?
Me: [hysterical laughter]
Agent: So, I take it that’s a no, then.
Me: I'm not interested in supporting his disinclination to work now. I don't know why being dead would make me more likely to do it. 
Agent: Ok, I think we’re all done here. We’ve got you signed up for a very small amount of life insurance.
Me: Great! Thanks. I hope nobody ever benefits from this!

  You may be wondering why it’s been so long since I blogged. Well, let’s catch you up then.

The last several months have been spent improving my business, buying a house, learning to compost, and wondering when the mid-life crisis will set in. I already own a small, red sports car, so it makes the timing a little tough to pinpoint.

The thing about owning a house is that, no matter how conservative you were when deciding how much you could afford, after you buy it the house will suck up all available capital. This is, sadly, extra true for those of us who employ the otherwise outstanding philosophy of Rich People Solutions for Everyday Problems.

You see, RPSfEP is wonderful when trying to decide which pair of python-print platform stilettos to buy. Both, obviously! Rich People Solutions! The problem came along when I tried to apply the philosophy to home ownership.

Home ownership has, unfortunately, skewed the price curve of things that are available for me to buy. Before, I would casually spend hundreds of dollars on things like shoes and purses, but things in the thousands still gave me some pause.

Then, during the home purchasing process, I was asked to wire a couple hundred thousand dollars to a stranger’s bank account. Since I had never been involved with a kidnap and ransom, a large drug buy, or a home purchase before, this was a novel experience for me. And it seems to have increased my tolerance for transferring huge sums of money to other people.

Then there were the other large expenditures. Every time I asked how old the roof was, the seller would reply, “It doesn’t leak!” I silently added the word “yet” to this statement and decided to immediately replace what turned out to be a 32 year old roof. This was a good thing, since there was a good amount of dry rot beneath the roof. And under the siding. And in the decks. And in one of the doors. You get the picture. I got the bill. And I paid it without flinching, because it was so much less than that initial wire.

Once the roof was fixed, I discovered that what had been billed as “a crack in the garage floor” was actually more like a small, but developing, hill in the concrete caused by an aggressive tree root. This wouldn’t have been too bad if the concrete hadn’t mounded up high enough that I couldn’t actually get a car into one side of the garage without bottoming out. I had two choices: fix the concrete or buy an SUV. Fixing the concrete turned out to be the slightly more economical option.

I hired several large men to jackhammer out the concrete on one side of the garage to expose the root. If you’ve never seen the root system of a 100 foot redwood, imagine a kraken slowly rising from the earth to attack your garage. Well, my garage. The large men defeated the kraken without damaging the tree (which I wanted to avoid so that it didn’t come crashing down on my house, thereby causing even more expensive damage). This also was not cheap, but it was still considerably less than the wire.

So that I don’t bore you with the details, let me give you a list of a few of the other things that the criminal who previously owned the house had not taken care of:

• The dryer (or, as I like to call it, the only major appliance NOT covered by the home warranty) broke within 3 weeks of our move in date.
• The chimneys (there are three) had apparently not been cleaned in recent memory, so the buildup was about three fires away from causing the bricks themselves to burst into flames.
• The duct work for the dryer had previously been “fixed” with masking tape and optimism.
• The master bathroom is missing several key features like towel racks within hailing distance of the shower and toilet paper holders and anything that isn’t tiled in a hideous shade of brown. Also, it has a bidet, which really has to go because this isn’t the 1970s or France.

This list does not include a) the furniture I need to buy because I suddenly have a family room (which currently holds two chairs, a Rock Band drum set, and all the art work I own stacked in a pile) or b) the seven million things I haven’t found yet that will no doubt cost me more money.

And that, dear friends, is why my tolerance for spending has been thrown off enough that I may have to abandon Rich People Solutions for Everyday Problems, at least for a while. Otherwise, I’m likely to end up retiling the hideous brown bathroom with faberge eggs and pigeon blood rubies, because the expense will simply fail to register. Rich People Solutions!

Of course, the problem with switching away from RPSfEP all at once is that I tend to make really stupid tradeoffs. For example, I’m putting in a lower deck with a hot tub. And by “I’m putting in” I mean, of course, that I’m paying a qualified professional to put in, because building a deck and installing a hot tub myself would almost certainly mean my death by nail gun, electrocution, or drowning.

Putting in the deck meant that I had to move some giant rhododendrons. I could have paid a guy to do this, but then I thought to myself, “no, that is a Rich People Solution,” and I decided to move them myself.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that this decision may have been influenced by my friend Beth, or as I’ll call her from now on, that bitch who is good at things. You see, Beth also just bought a house. And Beth comes to work every day and shows me before and after pictures of the miracles she has wrought with her own two hands.

Seriously, the before pictures look like something out of Blade Runner, while the afters look like the reveal on Extreme Home Makeover. And she’s done a huge amount of the work herself, because apparently, she is magical. Or else she’s lying to me and secretly paying people.

I have my theories. Especially after the rhododendrons.

So, I think to myself, “I can move these rhododendrons. I don’t have to pay a guy. It’s what Beth would do, right? HOW HARD COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE?”

Three hours of menial labor later, this is what I have to show for my adventure:

• 2 large, mystery bruises
• 5 nasty scrapes from rhododendron branches
• 1 ugly gash from a shovel
• 1 case of psychosomatic tetanus
• 4 large holes in my backyard
• 2 dead rhododendrons

Frankly, Rich People Solutions is suddenly starting to look a whole lot better. I still may have to rethink the tiling scheme in the master bath, though.

I feel as if I’ve been letting you all down. You see, I know how much you enjoy laughing at my pain, but I haven’t been posting much of it, since, knock on wood, life’s been pretty damn great lately.

That is all about to change.

With Eric’s kid graduating from high school this year (I deal with this by pretending Eric became a father at the age of 6), we’re finally realizing our dream of moving out to the woods. Note: Eric insists we tell his kid where we’re moving and that we don’t just sneak out in the middle of the night like the Baltimore Colts. I have reluctantly agreed.

So far, we’ve looked at several different houses, and there are two that are serious contenders. One is what I like to call a Beginner House. That’s the sort of house that you move into, paint a wall, maybe replace a bathroom fixture, and then live there for the next ten years without having to worry about anything exploding or falling down a hill.

The other house is an Advanced House. That is the house you desperately want me to move into, because it will increase the frequency of painful blog posts by a factor of infinity.

The Advanced House reminds me quite a lot of the Winchester Mystery House. This is because I got lost three times while touring it for 15 minutes. It’s big, but not big enough to get lost three times. I think the spare bedrooms were laid out by M C Escher.

But at least most of it is rotting! That’s right. I learned something important today. “Deferred maintenance” is realtor code for “you will almost certainly fall through these decks at some point in the very near future.” This applies also to the roof, walls, swimming pool, and every other surface of the building. One of the bathtubs is held together by duct tape. One of the decks is held together by something green that I fear is one good genetic mutation away from sentience.

Want another tip? Ok! You can say the house is “minutes away” from anything convenient in the house listing, regardless of HOW MANY minutes away you actually are! In this case, the answer is, “about 30 minutes.” That’s still minutes! It’s just rather a lot of them, when you string them all together like that.

But I digress.

Eric is rather excited about the Advanced House because it has a large, unfinished area that he thinks would be great as a workshop. He specifically mentioned a table saw. You know how many minutes away that house is from an emergency room? If Eric gets a table saw, I’ll bet we find out!

I’m honestly not sure which way we’re going to go on this. We might end up waiting a few months to see if anything somewhere between the two houses comes on the market. I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

If we do buy the Advanced House, you’re all invited to the house warming party. Just be sure to bring some power tools, and don’t all stand together on the deck at once.  

 Let me preface this by saying that my mom is a great cook. If cooking were war, she would be Napoleon. And turkey would be her Waterloo.

When my parents moved a few years ago, my mom left her 20 year old, reliable, double ovens behind her. The new house came equipped with a “gourmet kitchen” that had clearly been designed by people who loved paying too much for things that don’t work. Her single, incredibly expensive oven is a lovely shade of electric blue, and it is almost big enough to make a couple of slices of toast.

This means that we’ve had to be creative over the last couple years with the Thanksgiving turkey. I suggested a shoe horn and a tub of Crisco (is there anything that doesn’t make better?), but my mother opted for cooking the bird on the grill instead.

That’s one of the reasons why the Thanksgiving cooking schedule typically goes something like this:

9:00 am - prep bird
9:30 am - put bird on grill
9:45 am - start drinking
10:15 am - check grill to see where all the smoke is coming from
10:16 am - realize we’ve forgotten where we put the fire extinguisher last November
10:17 am - pull the flaming turkey from the grill with nothing but a pair of terry cloth oven mitts
10:20 am - send dad to Walgreen’s to pick up burn ointments and bourbon (for the pain)
1:00 pm - eat!

Honestly, the few minutes that the bird spends on fire tends to give it a lovely (and only slightly carcinogenic) smoky flavor. It also makes the bird cook in record time, so it’s done after only a few hours on the grill. It’s an unusual technique, but 2 hours at 350 and 5 minutes at whatever temperature it is that makes terry cloth melt and adhere to skin really seems to do the trick.

This year, however, was different. This year, thanks to a fancy new grill and an overpriced digital thermometer, the bird never caught fire. In fact, as we found out later, the bird never actually finished cooking.

After a couple of hours on the grill, my mom took the temperature of the turkey, and the overpriced digital thermometer read something like 3 degrees away from turning into turkey charcoal, so she pulled it. An hour or so later, when we cut into it, we realized that it was...let’s say...a bit on the pink side. The white meat was fine though, and we didn’t need all 26 pounds of turkey, so we went ahead and served the cooked part.

Unfortunately, after dinner, my brother and I decided that we would dismantle the rest of the carcass for making into soup. That’s when we realized that the entire bottom half of the bird was essentially turkey sashimi.

This all would have been ok if my brother and I didn’t share an inherited medical condition: hypochondria (we got it from my dad!). At roughly 10 pm, I received this call from my brother:

Me: hello?
Mike: I think I have the bird disease.
Me: You have bird flu? Is that still a thing? I thought it was pigs that were going to kill us. Or is it monkey pox? Terrorists?
Mike: That turkey was raw!
Me: Well, yes, but when’s the last time raw poultry hurt anybody? Oh, wait... Do you actually have any symptoms?
Mike: My stomach hurts, and I feel dizzy.
Me: Couldn’t that be attributed to the fact that you ate most of a pumpkin cheesecake and you’re still drunk 9 hours after Thanksgiving dinner?
Mike: BIRD DISEASE!
Me: We’re all going to die.

I laughed about my brother’s paranoia. Then I started to feel sick. Well, not ACTUALLY sick. Just like I was about to be sick at any moment. I had contracted the third worst disease you can get from eating undercooked poultry: psychosomatic salmonella. Note: the first two are avian flu (BIRD DISEASE!) and actual salmonella.

Symptoms of psychosomatic salmonella include:
Inability to sleep because you know that at any second you are going to start exhibiting symptoms of actual salmonella
Getting out of bed at 3 am to Google salmonella in order to find out what those symptoms might be so that you will recognize them when they start
Cursing loudly at your stupid, drunk brother for convincing you that you are going to die of some fucking bird disease

Obviously, Mike and I are both fully recovered from our bouts with psychosomatic salmonella. I’d like to say that we’ve learned an important lesson, but I’m thinking of giving him a call later to ask about this weird lump I found on my toe. I need to know whether imaginary foot cancer runs in the family.

 A little while ago, my friend Ellen produced a printout of an email that I had written back in the mid-90s. (An email printout! Remember when people did that?) It was a note I’d written to her while she was in Europe, and I was just keeping her up to date on everything that was going on back home in the few weeks she was gone.

To be clear, this is roughly how that list would read these days:

• Went to karate on Wednesday
• Worked
• Opened a nice white burgundy over the weekend, but couldn’t finish it
• Worked
• Wrote a design blog post about incorporating design into agile development processes
• SNORE

That is NOT the list of things I was doing in the mid-90s. I can’t reproduce the whole thing here for fear of embarrassing the [now] innocent, but let’s just say things seemed more FUN back then. I DID things. Lots of things. Frankly, I was exhausted just reading the list of parties, dinners, and drunken benders I apparently attended in the 3 weeks Ellen was gone.

That’s why I’m starting this new series of blog posts entitled Klein Klassics. These are stories that some of you may know already, but I’m finally writing them down. They are stories that actually happened back in the days before I blogged. And yes, I’m doing that because sadly way more entertaining stuff happened back in the days before I blogged. Talk about bad timing…

Today’s installment: The Acquisition

Once upon a time, I worked at a startup...ok, well, that doesn’t seem a lot different from now, but this was back in the late 90s, when working at a startup was guaranteed to make you rich beyond your wildest dreams and venture capital fell off of trees like overripe fruit.
Those were heady days, full of acquisitions and overvalued IPOs and launch parties with entertainment lineups full of washed up 80s hair bands and OH MY GOD I MISS THE 90s.

Ahem...to continue...

One day, I wandered into the office at the crack of 10, only to be confronted by a large group of people gathered in the lobby. I started to go to my desk to put down my messenger bag (of COURSE I had a messenger bag...it was the 90s, remember?), but I was stopped by a member of senior management who asked me not to go to my desk yet, as there would soon be an announcement.

Puzzled, I shrugged, set my bag down, and sat on the floor with the rest of my colleagues. That’s when we were told that we had been purchased by a little company I won’t name, but that rhymes with Shcmamazon. And there was much rejoicing, because several of the people in that room had just become very, very rich. I, as a fairly junior member of the team with very little stock, was not one of them.

Now, as I said, it was the early days, and I’m not sure that it was clear to the company doing the purchasing that, while they did own the purchased company, they did not, in fact, own the employees of said company. This led them to believe that they could do things like tell everybody, “Hey! You’re all moving to Seattle! In three weeks! For a pay cut! WHEEEEE!”

To which I replied something along the lines of, “Oh, hell no.” In fact, a few of us who were fairly new to the company and didn’t have a lot of stock, said no. This confused the purchasing company. They decided that they were going to get what they had purchased, and so they started to woo us.

The day after the purchase, I walked into my office to find a bouquet of flowers on my chair from the purchasing company. This was...odd. But nice. A little creepy, perhaps, but nice. “See,” they were saying, “just because we own you, doesn’t mean there won’t be some romance!” The next day, there were chocolates. Another nice gesture, but I still wasn’t moving to Seattle.

The following day, we had a poetry contest. Oddly enough, my ironic haiku won. The prize? A gift certificate to Victoria’s Secret. I kid you not, I had now received flowers, chocolates, and lingerie from the company that had just purchased me. I let them know I wasn’t putting out until I got a diamond.

This angered the purchasing company. Quite a bit, as it turned out. And you wouldn’t like them when they were angry.

They took me into a small room. Now, it was August, and rather warm, and I was placed in a sunny spot near a window. I remember feeling sweaty and a little lightheaded as I faced a high level member of my company’s management team and somebody from the HR department at the purchasing company.

Why, they wanted to know, was I not interested in upending my entire life in the Bay Area, where I’d lived for almost 10 years and had friends and an apartment, to move to someplace where I knew nobody and had no interest in living? 

Knowing that I had been in the Stanford Band, one member of the inquisition asked, “Is it the band? Because we can find you another band.”

“I don’t think you can,” I replied. “But it’s not the band. I just don’t want to move to Seattle.”

This went on for more than an hour. “Why not?” “For all of the reasons I've already given you.” “But why?” “I already told you.” “But what if we ask again?” “Are you going to charge me with something, or am I free to leave?”

Finally, in a moment of desperation, I faked an injury.

“I can’t move to Seattle. I have a...medical condition, and it’s being treated here.”

“What sort of medical condition?” they asked. Yes, they actually asked me to reveal a private medical condition, which seems like it's probably illegal, although maybe not if the medical condition is entirely fictional. 

“Ummm...it’s a sort of mental illness,” I said, thinking they COULDN’T POSSIBLY pry into that.

“What sort of mental illness?” they actually asked, I swear to God. “You know, we have lots of very good hospitals and doctors in Seattle.”

Great. Now I had to make up a medical condition. One that would get worse in Seattle. Thankfully, years of hypochondria and a newfound addiction to looking up medical conditions on the internet came to my rescue. “I have Seasonal Affective Disorder,” I pulled out of my ass. “I can’t move to Seattle, because of the weather.”

“You know,” HR said, “that can be treated with anti-depressants.”

That’s right. A member of human resources was explaining that I should just start taking drugs in order to move to a city I had no interest in moving to in order to work at a company I had no interest in working at for a pay cut and very little stock. “I’m going to leave now,” I said, and finally stood up to go.

“Is there anything we could do to get you to join the company?” they asked.

“Well,” I thought, “you could have not offered me drugs or pried into my made up mental illness.”

“No,” I said. “There isn’t.”

Fascinatingly, my interview was not the weirdest one. A good friend of mine who also worked for the company, had a rather interesting side business. Here’s roughly how her interview went.

“Well, the thing is, I have a second job at night, and I need it to make ends meet and pay off student loans and things.”

“That’s fine!” said the lady from HR. “We can even help you with that. What sort of job is it?”

“I’m a professional dominatrix.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

I don’t actually know if the purchasing company helped her move her pro-dom business, but I know that a few years later, when I was in Seattle for a wedding, I dropped by her dungeon to say hi.

 Remember our package thief? I thought he had struck again. In fact, at this moment, I still have no idea exactly what happened. It’s a total mystery. Here’s the story:

A few weeks ago, I ordered something from Gilt, a site that offers discounts on a few expensive things a day. Now, I had never bought anything from Gilt, because typically they offer things like Frette sheets for “only” $1500 per set and Natural Wood Crayons for “only” $50.

No, I am not making that up. Natural Wood Crayons are a real thing, apparently. They are crayons. Made of wood. Natural Wood. As opposed to that unnatural wood. I don’t even want to think about the sorts of abominations those trees are committing to make their wood so unnatural.

Anyway, I found something on Gilt that I actually wanted and that was a pretty good deal. It’s not important what it was. Ok, actually it is important what it was. The problem is, what it was was a little embarrassing. We’ll get to that later.

So, on Wednesday, I was wondering why it was taking so long to deliver, and I checked the package tracking number they had sent me. The package tracking said it had been delivered on Monday, the only day of the week when I’d been gone all afternoon.

Fuck, I thought. The package thief has struck again!

I thought about calling the police, but this time I really had no proof it had been stolen. It just wasn’t on my porch when I got home on Monday night. Similarly, I couldn’t ask Gilt for a refund, since they’d apparently shipped me something. UPS claimed they’d delivered it. I resigned myself to being out $80 and decided I’d get all future packages shipped to Eric’s office.

Then I remembered, my credit card will sometimes reimburse me for lost or stolen items bought with the card! Huzzah! I’d never used the service before, but I figured that I’d give it a shot. The guy said he could help me, but he needed some information. First he got the date of purchase, etc.

Then this happened:
Customer Service Guy: About how much did the package cost?
Me: About $80.
CSG: And what was in the package.
Me: (pause) Ummm...clothing.
CSG: What type of clothing?
Me: (longer pause) Oh...you know just clothing.
CSG: Yes, but what type?
Me: (mumbling) Underwear.
CSG: Women’s underwear. So, like lingerie?
Me: SPANX. IT WAS SPANX, ALRIGHT? I HAD $80 WORTH OF SPANX DELIVERED TO MY HOUSE.

Now that my secret was out, he proceeded to tell me that I would need to file a police report. Great, I thought. Now I will have had exactly two interactions with the Sunnyvale Police. I will be known as the woman who reported stolen internet garbage bags AND stolen discount internet embarrassing undergarments. Fantastic. Sounds like the perfect way to get my number blocked by 911.

And it’s not like I don’t order other stuff to the house. I could have been the person who had several 19th century British novels stolen from her front porch. Or computer cables. Or workout gear. Or shoes. But crazy package thief doesn’t steal those things, apparently. He only steals internet garbage bags and discount internet embarrassing undergarments. THANKS, PACKAGE THIEF.

Instead of calling the police department, I tried filing a claim with UPS, just in case the package hadn’t actually been delivered rather than having been stolen. I wasn’t hopeful, but I was trying pretty hard to convince myself that calling the police over stolen discount internet embarrassing undergarments was not necessary.

As it turns out, I was right. This morning, for reasons I can not begin to explain, my package ended up on my kitchen table, presumably found on the porch and placed there when Court left for school this morning.

I can think of a few different options:

1. It was delivered to a neighbor by mistake, and they only now got around to returning it.
2. Court brought it in on Monday, but forgot to tell me and then forgot where he put it, and only stumbled across it when he was cleaning his trainwreck of a room.
3. UPS discovered that they hadn’t actually delivered it and dropped it off without knocking despite the fact that I’ve asked them not to deliver anything without a signature.
4. The package thief suddenly realized that this was the house that bulk orders internet garbage bags and decided that it wasn’t even worth opening this one.

Whichever it was, I’m just happy that I’m not out $80, and I can now look slightly less lumpy in my discount internet embarrassing underwear.

So, Amazon Prime has changed my life in a few key ways. For one, it’s turned me from a person who almost qualifies as a shut in to an actual shut in. For another thing, it’s turned me from a person with quite a lot of disposable income into a person with considerably less disposable income. It also, apparently, has turned me into the kind of person who gets visited by the police over stolen garbage bags.

I’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, for those of you who don’t know what Amazon Prime is, allow me to introduce you to the lazy shopper’s equivalent of crack cocaine. For some totally reasonable amount of money per year, Amazon will ship you anything in the world in 2 days for free. You still have to pay for the item, but you were probably going to do that anyway, weren’t you?

Well, no. That’s the thing. Years ago, I stopped shopping at Costco because I realized that I don’t really WANT that much toothpaste at once. I also don’t typically need to buy a radiator, a diamond tennis bracelet, and an entire salmon all in one shopping trip. And yet, that’s more or less the shopping experience I have on Amazon now. Plus, thanks to the fact that they only sell many items in bulk, I currently have enough Vitamin D capsules to allow me to avoid sun exposure (ie. “not leave the house”) for the next several years. And yes, I was planning to do that anyway.

It also means that I had several hundred garbage bags stolen from my front porch.

Eric and I were both out of the house for the afternoon. Court left the house for a volunteer thing around noon. Eric was back by 3:30 or so, and when he checked the front porch for packages, he found an open Amazon box and an open cardboard box with “Glad” printed on the outside. Someone had sliced open the outer box, seen that the inner box probably contained a lot of garbage bags, sliced that open, and stolen the contents.

I was annoyed, obviously, but it was $25 worth of garbage bags. I was hardly going to call the police about it. Mostly because of the embarrassment of explaining to an officer that I was too lazy to drive 2 miles to Safeway for my garbage bags, but also because I couldn’t imagine that anything would be done about something so trivial.

Then it got weird. A guy who lives in a neighboring unit came by and asked if Laura lived here and if she had recently ordered a lot of garbage bags. I admitted that this was true. Now multiple strangers knew I was the sort of person to order garbage bags over the internet. Neat.

My neighbor, Bob (his name has been changed), had had a package stolen a few weeks ago. Presumably, it was something more expensive than garbage bags, since practically everything you’d order from the internet is, really. He’d heard from several other neighbors who had also had things stolen.

Bob was pissed. He works at home, so he decided to patrol the neighborhood in the afternoons occasionally to see if he could spot the guy who kept coming in and stealing stuff. So, the day our package was stolen, Bob saw a suspicious character with a bag leaving the complex. Bob confronted the guy, took his picture, and threatened to call the cops unless the guy allowed Bob to see what was in his bag. The guy happily showed Bob the contents of the bag. It was a whole lot of garbage bags. Bob shrugged and told the guy to move along because WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD ORDER GARBAGE BAGS FROM THE INTERNET?

A little while later, he found a packing slip in the bushes with a receipt for several hundred garbage bags. Bob’s no dummy. He put two and two together and realized that his crazy neighbor was bulk ordering garbage bags and he’d just let a criminal go free.

So, Bob came by, explained what had happened, and asked me to call the police. To report stolen garbage bags. He said that he was going to the police the next day with a picture of the guy, so my weird garbage bag hoarding tendencies were exposed anyway. I might as well be the kind of person who calls the police about their theft.

I called the police and explained to the guy at the desk what had happened. Trying not to laugh, he transferred me to dispatch who didn’t even bother trying not to laugh. “You’re the one with the stolen garbage bags?” he asked. I sighed and confirmed this. “We’re sending a unit over now.”

In a way, I guess it’s nice to know that the city where you live is so incredibly safe that they will send an officer to your door within 10 minutes to take a report about your stolen internet garbage bags.

The officer was very polite, but he also explained that there really wasn’t much they could do. They can’t get fingerprints off cardboard (or they won’t bother for $25 worth of stolen garbage bags), and they can’t prove that it wasn’t just a weird coincidence that the sketchy guy in the complex happened to have several hundred garbage bags on the same afternoon that I had a bunch of them stolen. As he patiently pointed out, “It’s not like garbage bags have serial numbers.”

The officer did promise to go over to Bob’s house and take a look at the picture Bob took of the guy, since the officer figured he probably had dealt with the sketchy guy before. In the cop’s words, “We do tend to deal with the same people over and over. And over and over and over.”

So, in the end, I lose $25, and a whole lot more people know that I’m the sort of person who bulk orders garbage bags from the internet, which I still feel is rather embarrassing, but I’m not entirely sure why.

Eric, on the other hand, has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. He thinks it’s our neighbor, Bob, who has been stealing the packages, and he got a picture of some random stranger and had us call the police in order to throw everybody off the scent.

His other theory is that Bob has some sort of a grudge against the guy whose picture he had, and he’s planning to murder him and then stage it to look like the guy had been interrupted stealing a package.

My theory is that Eric should no longer be allowed to read Agatha Christie novels or watch Law & Order marathons. Also, that I should stop mail ordering so god damn many garbage bags.