The movers unloaded our belongings into the house last weekend. I think I moved the living room couch 34 times until it was finally in the right place and Debra gave the thumbs-up that she was satisfied. The piano has a new home along the only wall in the house that it would work with, and it looks great. I love the view from the top of the stairs, looking down into the very open-floored living and dining rooms…it just has a wonderful sense of space. And The Debra is thrilled with the kitchen and her new appliances, each of which is the size of five full-grown humans and each of which cost the GNP of Suriname. The kitchen’s cupboard configurations are a bit wacky, so she’s been challenged with trying to find places for all her goodies: plates, blenders, mixers, measuring cups and six kinds of salt. It’s hard to pity her, though, since she’s finally got her granite countertops, massive commercial oven and a refrigerator in which we believe Jimmy Hoffa has been tucked away.
The pool is a little green: some time elapsed between the former owners chlorinating it and us moving in and beginning the chloronation process again…and the pump has been working a bit weakly, so there is a little greenish business to nuke before everything is crystal blue again. It was while endeavoring to ascertain if there was a clogged filter somewhere in the pump’s suckage path that I undid the wrong clasp and freed the pump’s motor from the pump itself…and so far have been unable to get it reattached. So we’ve got a guy coming out to help us with that on Saturday who will also give us the low-down on how to care for a pool and show us how much chlorine to add to the water so that we don’t overdo it and burn the eyes out of ourselves when we swim. And Debra, by the way, repaired the in-ground sprinklers - a mighty victory where defeat seemed certain.
And today the cable guys came and hooked up the TV and the broadband modem. So now we have high def and the Intarwebs. The house is full of unpacked and half-packed boxes, each jammed with stuff we don’t have space to store or display, which has been a source of low-level frustration - we need a basement!! But none of that mattered after the cable guys left and I sank into my own couch in my new family room and watched the first game of the NFL season in HD while I sipped a perfectly chilled Diet Coke and ate my favorite cookies from Trader Joe’s.
It was utterly, stupendously wonderful.
*****
As if further scientific proof were necessary, here is additional data that proves alcohol is poison (even if it is sometimes yummy and occasionally a wonderful muscle relaxant):
I came home from work today and poured a small amount of whiskey into a snifter. (Evan Williams…very smooth, buttery and delicious Kentucky bourbon that my ol’ buddy Chris O’Neill turned me on to.) I sipped it throughout the evening while the cable guys did their thing and while I watched the game. I had a snack of blueberry yogurt during that time, too. Well, after finishing up some work in the office I came downstairs and took a sip from the snifter. Along with the smooth, buttery and delicious Evan Williams I felt something lumpy on my tongue. I thought perhaps it was a stray blueberry from the yogurt that had been tucked up somewhere in my mouth and which had come free when I took a sip of whiskey, and I almost chomped down on it and swallowed. But for some reason I didn’t and I caught the lumpy thing on my fingertip and that’s when I realized that I had had a dead fly in my mouth. He - or she - was soft and ball-like, curled up in a fetal position, dead from his or her excursion into my whiskey glass.
I flicked the dead fly into the sink and checked the snifter for any other dead fly detritus. It looked clean enough and it was good whiskey - too good to waste on behalf of a dead fly - so I finished the drink, grateful that I had not chomped down on and eaten the “blueberry”.
