Well it's time for another bi-yearly posting.  I'd really like to have more to bitch about but Dick has been working out of town for months at a time and is only home for a few weeks in between.  So while he goes to work where they house him, feed him, rent him a car to drive and provide him with internet and free fed-ex, I get to stay home and take care of finances, taxes, the house, the livestock and the cars, cook, clean, find a full time job and send him things that he needs.  So it's turned into the perfect marriage, really, leaving me with little to complain about.

Right now he happens to be home for a bit.  This is handy for things like building barns and coops and also for him to have the opportunity to tell me in person how I should be handling everything differently.  I should be doing everything more, faster and also with greater enthusiasm.  I should store things in different places and feed the animals at different times.  Oh how I wish he could spend more time here.  

He'll have to go back to work soon and I can't stop thinking about how much I'm going to miss how each and every night in the dark we have to start picking up his billion and one tools from the yard, clean up the sawdust, stack the wood, tarp it, neatly roll up the extension cords and move the work table so as to leave a spotless construction site.  What I like most about this is the mosquito bites from doing it at peak mosquito activity time.  Oh wait, no I remembered something I like better even than that.  I LOVE that it's then 9:30 p.m. and he gets to go inside with his muddy filthy shoes on and walk across my clean floor, take off his sweaty filthy clothes and drape them carefully on the backs of all the dining room chairs while I get him a beer and then he gets to take his shower while I cook dinner.   After dinner, when it's approximately 11 p.m. he gets to go to bed while I take my shower and then clean up his clothes and shoes and put them in the laundry. 

The thing is, when he goes back to his job, I'm not going to have the pleasure of him getting up and going outside to work on the barns without turning on the coffee maker.  I mean sure, I'll still be able to make the coffee and feed the livestock and then come inside and clean house.  But I won't get to then go out and help with construction until it's time for me to make lunch, clean it up and then do the bills and think about dinner before going back out to swing a hammer under his supervision.  Also?  I have outside mud shoes and I leave them on the back porch so there's always less mopping to do-quel suckage!  And I put my dirty clothes in the hamper, so there goes that treat.  I'm sure I'll end up eating at a reasonable hour and I'll probably get to wash before dinner if I've been out moving hay and am dirty and sweaty. 

I will lack supervision and advice about when exactly I should drive the recycling to the recycling center.  How will I manage?  I mean sure, I'll have instant messenger and email so I can be reminded to lock the doors and change the air filters and put new mothballs in the attic.  But it's not the same.  I'll miss the superior look and the "dad" tone of voice.  I guess I could always console myself by having him fed ex his laundry home so I can wash and fold it and fed ex it back to him.

Right, so like I was saying a few months ago.   Dick and I have moved from the west coast to the east.  And once I got the place cleaned, painted, repaired and unpacked Dick came to live here, too.  We seem to have settled into a routine that has me doing all the cooking, cleaning and bill paying while he generally fixes up the garage all day and occasionally mows the grass.  Domestic, Pastoral bliss.

We've had a visit from Judy and Frank already during which Judy and I replaced all our blood with tequila, Frank spent most of his time trying to pick a fight with Judy for every word that came out of her mouth and Dick-well, he didn't do much of anything.  Find what you're good at and do it, that's his creedo. 

We've also had a visit from Dick's parents.  Now complaining about the in-laws is neither difficult nor original, but what the hell?  Settle in, this is gonna get wordy.

 Let me give you the characters and a little backstory.  Dick's dad, Ted, is an architect and olympic nitpicker.  His mom, Cathy, is a professional nutbag.  And by that I mean she is some kind of spatial dynamics therapist.  Spatial Dynamics, as I understand it, is basically the act of getting people to pay you to do performace art style dance at your developmentally challenged family member to cure them of autism.  It's all part of their anthroposophical, homeopathic,  pretentious lifestyle.  Both of them are better than everyone else in the whole world.  They drink better wine, have nicer floors, know more about politics and what's right and what's wrong and do a better job at saving the planet than you do.  Ted's alright.  As long as you don't slip up and let politics become a subject of discussion he's quiet and generally polite.  He really does know a lot about a lot but he mostly keeps it to himself.  And he does buy good wine.  Cathy, though.  Cathy just can't shut up.  Apparently there's no herbal remedy for diarrhea of the mouth. 

Now, we knew that buying an old house was going to perk the interest of Ted, but we thought we'd have some time before undergoing the inspection.  Dick's younger sister, Mary and her (jewish!  I mean it's no problem for us but his parents are so pissed about him marrying a gentile! what racists!) husband, Josh just had a baby.  The first grandchild. We thought that Mary's baby would allow us to fly under the radar for awhile.  Unfortunately Cathy wore out her welcome in the home of her daughter by going to "help" them with the baby for two weeks.  Josh is a doctor.  Of conventional medicine.  Of course, to Cathy there's no greater evil than conventional medicine.  So she apparently spent the two weeks protecting the baby from developmental disorders by not letting her sit in the vibrating swing and telling Josh how wrong he is about everything.  Josh is obviously trying to turn his daughter autistic or something.  So after she drove them nuts for as long as she could she had no real barrier to coming here.  Luckily it was only three days.  Two weeks and blood would be shed.

On the way home from picking Cathy and Ted up at the airport Cathy got the whole "Josh's parents still can't stand that Josh married a gentile my aren't we better and less racist than they are" thing out of the way quickly and started telling me about some program Mary had done.  Some kind of natural medicine thing.  Because Mary always had a lot of yeast infections.  She didn't know what the program was or what it was called, but she knew it was natural.  And boy it sure was an eye-opener for Josh, what with him being a conventional doctor and it being natural and his medicine not working and the natural one being the cure and all.  I listened politely because, well, what else can you do?  There's no point arguing with her and for god's sake don't ask questions unless you want to encourage her to talk MORE than she already does.  Then later she was telling us about how Dick's brother (Mike)'s wife, Eileen went to do the spatial dynamics as a cure for infertility.  This comment was directed at me because I'm infertile and have ignored all her suggestions.  The point being that one of Dick's cousins was in the waiting room for HIS spatial dynamics appointment when Eileen came out of hers and he commented that she'd never been more beautiful than she was at that moment.  So spatial dynamics is the cure for autism, infertility and ugliness, I guess.  Since that little comment did not have the effect she was hoping for, namely for me to go Wow!  Maybe I should try it!, she went back to Mary's program.  Mary's NATURAL thing.  In fact, every time there was a lapse in the conversation she brought it up.  By day three I was ready to choke her out.  Choking is an all natural cure for being alive, by the way.  On the way to the airport she thought she'd give the natural program thing one last sell.  It being four in the morning, and me not being awake nor tolerant, I chose to reply, something I would never have done had I been caffeinated and alert. 

She kept on about Mary's yeast infections and I finally said, "Yeah well I don't get them.  Never have."  Thinking, I guess, that she'd just shut the hell up for a minute or two having failed to cure me of something.  But she didn't.  She said, "How can that be?"  And I said, "I don't know.  I don't eat much sugar, for one thing.  I know that can cause them for some people."  She countered that everyone gets them and not everyone eats a lot of sugar.  Having realized my fatal mistake and cursing myself for giving her more to say, I refrained from commenting about the irony of how leading a completely natural, organic, homeopathic lifestyle seems to cause yeast infections.  She thought about it for a couple of seconds.  Then she said she wished she could remember the name of it, this program.  She wasn't sure what it was, but she knew it was good.  Then she brightened and proclaimed, "I bet it would really work for your allergies." 

A program that she knows fuck-all about, and can't remember the name of, is evidently the cure for yeast infections and allergies, at least.  I bet it makes the bald grow hair, the blind see, eliminates cancer and makes boring people interesting.  IF ONLY WE KNEW WHAT IT WAS CALLED!  We could save the world.  We've found the cure for everything but we don't know what it is. 

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P.S.:

 Mary?  If having your mother talk about your yeast infections to anyone who will listen, including your father and brothers, isn't bad enough?  Now your yeast infections are the dominion of anyone with an internet connection. Your brother and I are glad to hear that your vagina is doing much better now and would like to be updated whenver there is anything new going on with your vagina.  I'll post bulletins here so the whole world can stay up to date with your vaginal news. 

If a man came to a fork in the road in the forest and there was no woman around, would he starve to death before he actually made a decision on his own?

Here's a little story about the dumbest man in the world, we'll call him FRED and his saintly wife, we'll call her JULIE.

"Did you remember to scoop the litter box?"  Yeah, homeboy was almost WEARING the contents of that litter box after that.  Just how stupid could he actually be?  Asshat!