Shivering Timbers

It was the end of summer in 2006 when I first noticed something was amiss with the giant oak tree in our yard. Even though it was roughly the same size as another oak on our property, it only had about half the foliage. The fact that one of the branches hanging over the house appeared to be entirely lifeless was a matter of some concern. Still... oak trees have deep roots and some of the strongest wood around. We weathered through the winter with only mild apprehension during some of the heavier storms. It wasn't until the end of this summer that a close friend of mine pointed out that at least three of the branches were now dead, and that two of them were hanging over the house, and that all of them were very large. Suddenly, the fact that oak was a very strong wood took on a different meaning. Oak... is a very heavy wood. I took a much closer look at our tree.

Large black nodules growing out of the side of the trunk proved to be a very specific fungus that feasts only upon the dead wood of trees. Several websites informed me that to find it on a live tree typically signals the impending (or current) death of the entire tree. How lovely! My immediate research into tree removal specialists was put on hold by three critical factors. First, I had just been laid off of work, so expensive tree service seemed significantly outside my budget. Second, the local telephone/power pole for our neighborhood is actually tethered to the tree- it seemed important to have the power company unhook it before I chopped it down (call me crazy). Third, I was generally disbelieving that the tree could honestly come tumbling down with no warning, and was therefore somewhat apathetic in my research (I said they were critical reasons, not smart ones). So I called PG&E, who informed me that it would take their engineers 4-6 months to do... anything at all useful. I grumblingly filed my request anyways (what else could I do?), and trudged through October and November, figuring I'd get a job and *then* worry about what to do with the tree. Unfortunately, the tree had a rather different agenda.

It was the third week of December, and we got our first real rainstorm of the season. It was nothing to worry about, just a lot of rain and a bit of wind lasting 2-3 days. Quite the contrary to worrisome, the storm was a blessed relief. Last year we only got about a third of our average rainfall, putting us into a semi-critical drought. According to a friend of mine, this is why our oak trees dropped about ten billion acorns on us this fall. In drought years, oaks dramatically increase their output in the hopes that a few seeds will still take root. I can only imagine that this increase during a drought is extremely hard on even the healthiest of trees. I'm certain that for our ailing oak, it was the final straw.

On the evening of the 18th of December, Staci and I were sitting down to a viewing of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and a DiGiornio home baked pizza (I don't care what the commercials tell you... it doesn't taste like delivery. Not even close. It doesn't taste bad, but let's be clear. It doesn't even smell like delivery.) We were just getting to the part of the movie where you start to realize something truly odd is going on, when something truly odd happened to us.

I instinctively knew in my bones what the cracking sound was, but there was not enough time for the electrical impulse to follow through to my conscious thoughts. Less than a second later, the back half of our house shook like an earthquake (for those of you who do not live in California and deal regularly with earthquakes, let me just say that it shook like a tree fell on it.) As pictures fell from the walls, and lightbulbs flew forcibly from our track lighting, I sat frozen in my seat, only able to wait to see what came next. Another fraction of a second later, the front half of the house shook almost as hard, as a tree came into our living room through the skylight. The skylight... Staci was sitting directly... DIRECTLY... under it. You'd think that as I watched all of the pieces of plexiglass and tree bits rain down upon her, it would have been in slow motion. In actuality, it all happened way way too fast... to fast to act... to fast to think. As those first electrical impulses of my brain I mentioned earlier, finally reached my muscles to act, I found that even though I'm not an overly religious man I was already beseeching to the higher power with surprising rapidity ("Ohgodohgodohgodohgod!"). A brief eternity of nanoseconds later, the electrical signals made it to the rest of my body. I grabbed Staci and helped her to her feet (yanked her arm over my shoulder and heaved upwards), and retreated with her to the bedroom (half dragged her through the house) lest the tree decide to come the rest of the way into the living room (and kill us a whole bunch).

All-in-all, we were incredibly lucky. Miraculously, Staci was not badly injured. A long scratch on one arm and a general sense of panic seemed to be the only damage she took. A return to the living room revealed that the only item that was destroyed was the skylight. Even Staci's pizza survived. Because there had been a break in the rainstorm, we didn't get any water into the house, and I was able to climb onto the roof and cover the skylight with a tarp after calling my insurance company. I cleaned up the plexiglass and tree bark out of the living room, and Staci and I watched the rest of our movie in a surreal daze (which was actually appropriate for that film). As I said, incredibly lucky were we.

Removing the limb off of the roof the next day was quite a trick, as it weighed at least 300 lbs. But leverage is a powerful tool, and long relatively straight tree limbs sitting on an angled roof present a very easy fulcrum/lever situation. Hmmm... a noticeable twinge in my lower back just now reminds me that the fulcrum/lever situation was better described as relatively easy, not very easy (now stop twinging me, you silly back - I already fed you Advil today). After replacing the skylight and having a professional roofer evaluate our roof as undamaged (but in need of a few non-critical touchups), we were right as rain. Still, with a tree this size hanging over the house, the street, and the power lines, I suppose it's time to get serious about calling a tree company, eh?

Yeeeah.

Talkin' Turkey

Thanksgiving has always been a time to gather with friends and/or family, and spend the day enjoying their company while eating more food than you would normally consume in a week's time. But the gathering has always been a location that I travel to. A destination. We've never had Thanksgiving in our home- not in the traditional sense, at least.

When I left the nest many many years ago, I moved into an apartment, and continued to live in apartments right up until I bought this home in the woods. These various multi-family living spaces all shared a number of similarities over the years, one of which was the accursed electric stove. I cannot say enough in condemnation of the electric stove. It is a working of great evil upon this earth, and may yet someday prove to be the downfall of the civilization of man! Have you ever tried to cook rice on one of these beasts??? AARGHH!! Ahem... for those of you who would like to take a moment to defend the electric stove, telling me of the great technological advances in recent years and the spiffy new "rice" setting that the latest models undoubtedly come equipped with... let me give you a platform upon which to speak. But first, before you begin, let me put my fingers in my ears and say: LA LA LALALA LA LA LA LA! FOO FOO FOO FOO FOO FOO FOO!! ICANTHEARYOU!! NYAH!!! NYAH!!!!

Are you finished? Good. Now, to move on to the point of this entry.

Moving into this house gave me access at long last to a gas powered stove, and for the first time I've been able to cook properly since I moved out of my parent's house. But my years of inferior cooking surfaces left me feeling unsure of myself and my food preparation abilites. A bit inadequate. It has been a long and hard road of recovery, but I finally felt that this was the year. The year that I would stuff a turkey into the oven and attempt to feed family members a glorious meal without accidentally killing them.

Step One: Finding test subjects. I gave a call to all of our immediate family members (because they are the most blindly trusting and ultimately forgiving), and invited them to join Staci and me for a sumptuous feast. Staci's parents and brother were available *and* willing to sign all the accident waiver forms, so I was in business! For the record, my own parents and brother had already committed to Turkey at another locale. It's not like they knew of some sort of inherent dangers from personal experience and opted out. I am not a bad cook, even if I don't win any culinary awards.

Step Two: Building the menu. It seems that there are a great many ways to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner, from suspiciously simple to freakishly complex. Luckily for me, our local supermarket chain had published a delightful little brochure on the "perfect turkey dinner" in "three hours or less." This turned out to be more of a guideline than an actual instruction manual, since a closer inspection of the side dishes revealed a frightening level of experimentation that we were ultimately unwilling to engage in. So I turned to my old friend, the internet. If you have never gone to the internet to search for recipes, I highly recommend you take a day or two to peruse the series of tubes marked "food". They say that the largest source of traffic on the net is porn, and if that's true then food must come in at a close second. I sifted through hundreds of recipes on multiple websites before finally selecting some interesting looking stuffing (I suppose it's called "dressing" when you cook it outside the turkey as I ultimately did), and sweet potato recipes that didn't involve painfully complicated instructions. These combined with a salad, my mother's mashed potato recipe, the turkey (obviously), and enough chips/dips/veggies/rolls to make an Atkins dieter weep, and we were good to go!

Step Three: Shopping. Have you ever shopped for a Thanksgiving dinner? UGH. 'Nuff said. I will elaborate only to tell you that disaster was barely averted in the purchase of the turkey itself. The internet, for some ungodly reason, informed me that the proper size of a turkey was roughly a pound per person - a pound and a half if you want leftovers. This ratio was confirmed on several websites (evil websites run by Thanksgiving saboteurs, apparently). A quick calculation and the addition of a mythical sixth dinner guest to accommodate for the eating capacity of Staci's brother and father (and maybe me too... ^_^) led me to the estimate of eight or nine pounds being about right. Staci's mother set me straight, by indicating that an eight pound turkey might feed five very small, anorexic people who had just eaten a large lunch. But for a group like us (perhaps the polar opposite of small and anorexic), a turkey would most certainly need to be twice that size. She was ultimately right on the money - disaster averted!

Step Four: Preparing the meal. I now understand why this is only done once a year. For those of you who do it again on Christmas... what are you, crazy??? Let me just say that three hours was an aggressive estimate. From start to finish was closer to four hours, and I don't think I stopped moving the entire time. On top of that, Staci's brother jumped in for a great deal of that time to assist me. The poor foolish boy would ask me if I needed help, and would instantly find himself doing one of of the many menial and back breaking chores. Peeling, chopping, de-boning. I felt a tad guilty sticking him with the grunt work, but he's young and resilient so he recovers faster than me! Without his assistance, the prep time might of gained another hour, or perhaps I would have just crumpled into a lifeless ball in the center of the kitchen about halfway through. As it was, the preparation went off pretty much without a hitch. We'll discuss the "pretty much" qualifier in the next section.

Step Five: EATING!! It was delish. A couple of hiccups did ultimately surface. Firstly, I burned the dressing. Following timed directions is a mistake in Thanksgiving prep when you've never tested your oven for such things before (or even when you have - I've been told that turkeys never cook the same way twice, and I believe it.) Fortunately it turned out that the dressing was good *even though* it was burned. I can't wait to try it again under optimal conditions - it'll probably knock our socks off. The second hiccup was a surprisingly bland sweet potato recipe. Ah well, what can you do but toss it out and try another one next year. The final hiccup was that the turkey didn't quite cook through to the center. This turned out to be at least partially due to the fact that I didn't remove the bag of "giblets" from the turkey. I thought that a turkey only had one body cavity, see? So when I pulled all the junk out of one side, I thought I was done. Laugh if you like, but patting down a 16 pound carcass with oil and spices is disturbing enough, and reaching inside of it was doubly so. I didn't examine it more than I had to... or thought I had to. The turkey was tasty anyways, so no harm done. In the end, there was more than enough to eat for everyone, and we ate almost to bursting. Just as our forefathers intended.

Step Six: Resting. Four hours of cooking followed by an hour of eating is almost as grueling as a hike of the same length through the woods! I was incredibly exhausted, but also happy and deeply satisfied both physically and mentally. The dinner was a roaring success! So at the fruitful end of my quest to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner, you might ask the telling question: Would I ever do it again? I answer with a resounding yes... of course I would... er... probably.

...Eventually.

Ask me again in October.

Oíche Shamhna

Autumn is a time of considerable change- a time for preparation. The world hunkers down and gets ready for winter. Our massive oak trees shed all their leaves, burying my backyard in a sea of brown, reminding me that my leaf blower is broken. The squirrels and the blue jays posture violently with each other, squawking and squealing, as they to try to gather the acorns that have fallen onto our roof. The power company goes into overdrive replacing telephone poles and trimming trees along our windy mountain road before the rains hit - local residents complain of the shoddy butchery done to their foliage. Bears start packing on the pounds for their big sleep (I don't think we have local bears... but it's just... iconic, you know?). And Santa Cruz well and truly shuts down. Tourist season is over, and the sleepy beach town that has been here for over 130 years returns to its roots.

I always like this time of year. Walking across the nearly deserted beaches, or hitting the serenely quiet redwood trails in solitude... it's a great time for reflection. I find myself undergoing a number of changes as well during this season. Finishing what projects that I can on the house: Getting the grass planted before the frosts come, patching the road so that my nice new fence doesn't drown in a lake of rainwater, painting my bathroom with mold resistant paint. And... looking for a new job. Or to be more realistic... looking for a new career. The mortgage industry doesn't really have a place for me anymore. It's a surprising turn of events that has left many professionals in the same land of confusion that I find myself. Where to go from here? What do I do about money? I can't work on my house forever...

As I sit on my couch and stare out of my skylight, a crow walks along one of the larger branches of our tree and methodically picks twigs from it, dropping each of them with a mildly annoying thud onto my roof. The mildly annoyed part of my brain begins to suspect that this crow might be the reason I recently keep waking up at ungodly hours of the morning, but the introspective part questions the purpose of this crow's behavior. What is the motivation?? Is it looking for bugs? Or is it simply bored? Or is there some other unfathomable purpose that I cannot divine? Is it a sign?

After a few minutes of thought, I suddenly realize that I know the answer. The crow is doing exactly what it must in order to survive to the next season. Whether it's looking for food sources or trying to build a nest makes no difference at all. Driven by boredom or driven by instinct, this crow plucks at the twigs so that it may prevail until Spring.

And that's when I see the connection. My fruitless bids for employment, my slashing of the budget, my mad scampering to fix the house... it's no different than the shedding oaks, or the power company, or the inscrutable crow. I'm simply picking away at the twigs - keeping busy with the things that need to be done this Autumn so that I too can prevail. Everything is going to be okay.

I'm preparing for Winter.

Mending Fences

In my last post, I alluded to the fact that my bathroom renovation wasn't going quite as planned. I made references to looking back someday on the then-current situation and laughing good-naturedly. I implied that it would be around that same time that I'd be able to talk jovially about what happened. Well... I've come to an important realization...

I will *never* find the bathroom situation to be light-hearted, amusing or jovial. It was simply too painful, and my psychological and fiscal injuries were too severe. In fact, it pains me to say that the bathroom is still unfinished. The shower works... although the grout is so shoddily done that it disintegrates on a literally daily basis. In fact, everything that my general contractor touched in that room turned into an unholy nightmare (thank heavens that the toilet was not on his agenda!) I was so shaken by the disaster that after I fired him, I could not go back to work on the room myself. Or hire anyone else to fix his incompetence. It was simply too traumatic. Eight thousand dollars spent on... shoddy tilework... damaged cabinetry... half finished texturing... questionable framework construction... and a demolition of my walls, floor and ceiling that were never fully rebuilt. Not to mention that I spent nearly three weeks without a functional shower. Can you blame me for running for the hills and hiding?

I needed something to go right. I needed a success. I needed to tip the scales back to neutral so I could get over this bad patch. A close friend of mine had been employing a very handy worker on his property, and with my friend's endorsement of him I hired him to replace the fence around our property. I scraped together the meager remains of our savings, and sunk it into the purchase of wood for the job.

My property doesn't seem to be that big until you actually attempt to build a fence around it. The size is deceptive thanks to a problem that is undoubtedly unique to mountainous backwoods and like areas. You see, thanks to annoying geographic anomalies like creeks, mountains, and giant freaking redwood trees, it seems that square parcels are not always the most expedient thing to employ in the woods. After weeks of agonizing over county maps with a ruler and a compass, some government employee probably got himself good and liquored up, and just connected the dots. As it so happens, my property received one of these alcohol induced shapes. I'd best describe it as a pentagon with the top point worn down into a curve. Take the creek and the steep hill into account, and the usable land more resembles a piece of elbow macaroni, with the outer curve of the macaroni facing the street. It turns out after some careful measurements, that I needed about 200 feet of fence materials to keep my macaroni noodle private. Hoo boy, that's a lot of cheese sauce!

Still, after a bit of looking I found a decent price for the wood, and my worker jumped in and got started. He was none too pleased by the macaroni situation either, as putting up a straight fence with square fence posts is not the easiest thing to do on a property with no ninety degree angles, for reasons that may be obvious. Nonetheless, after a relatively short time he was finished... yes... finished!! Just like that! A project planned, purchased, and completed... and all inside my budget - could it be true??? YES! It felt absolutely gratifying after my months of despair and disappointment. I danced a happy jig.

Now I would hate to disappoint my good readers with an upbeat ending so perfectly balanced as that, and apparently so would the hand of fate, for the very same week that my fence was completed ... I lost my job. Yes, it's true. My company could not keep up with the competition in the face of dwindling business, and suffered a long, slow, agonizing death. There is no suitable or humane way to euthanize a company... you just have to watch it languish and finally perish with some sort of terrible final gasp. As a result of that death rattle, I'm now among the ranks of the unemployed. Obviously this puts a bit of a damper on my finances. Since my finances were *already* severely dampered by my ex-contractor on top of the fact that I'm now looking for a job, I find myself in the rather unusual role of hiring myself to finish the work on the bathroom and the yard.

Fortunately for me, I will work for food.

Constructive Criticism

The funny thing about living in a home that is essentially a 60+ year old converted summer cabin, is that it generally needs some repair work. During our initial hunt for a home two years ago, we came across some serious doozies. My favorite bargain opportunity was a delightful little home situated literally alongside a dry creek bed. Yes... LITERALLY. There was actually a water line about halfway up the side of the house. On the other side of the house, was a steep embankment of almost bare dirt and some very tall pine trees hanging at unnatural angles toward the roof. Actually in retrospect I suppose that they were perfectly natural angles - it was the location of the house in relation to the trees that seemed vaguely wrong. And by vaguely, I do mean disasterously. The real estate agent couldn't get his key to work in the lock, and after a few minutes of jiggling it, I told him not to bother. I had no intention of swimming around inside my house while waiting for the mountain to shuffle off and bury us alive in the next rain storm.

The place we finally picked was a nice exception to some of the "fixer uppers" we had looked at. The roof, for example, was not made of blue tarpaulin. The interior didn't smell like mold. The yard could be negotiated without a back hoe. The house, in fact, was in very serviceable condition as the current owners had been diligently working on making it nice. Most of the repairs that were needed were either cosmetic or were longer term problems that could be solved gradually. And so we moved in and got settled. Now after nearly two years, some of those cosmetic repairs are starting to feel more... urgent. And many of my well-intentioned DIY projects need to be finished off by someone who knows what the hell they are doing.

Firstly, I'd like to defend that last statement. I *have* managed to do some good work myself. Things that I didn't think a sheltered city boy such as myself was capable of. But I also discovered that I have limits. Stuff that I stared at and said to myself, "You do not want to even attempt that, buddy." One of those things was the completion of our detached art studio. Since the day we moved in, we were determined to convert this old storage shed into a useful art space for Staci, and a laundry room (and before I get hate mail, let me just clarify that they would absolutely be separate rooms, and that I usually do the household laundry anyways, and yay to equality in the sexes... and please don't hurt me). The shed was already wired with electricity, water, and gas. All that needed to be done was... everything else! So, we hired a carpenter to fix the floor and install a window, and then... abruptly ran out of money.

Due to an unexpected change in job status, my excess income went the way of the Dodo, and suddenly I was faced with the onerous task of finishing the job myself. No problem, I thought to myself, I'm a reasonably intelligent person. I can figure out how to finish this room in no time! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! A year later, the job remained woefully incomplete despite my best efforts. I had indeed made significant progress, putting in insulation, wallboard, rewiring the electrical, and even replacing some termite/water damaged subfloor. I felt like a veritable handyman, except for the fact that I was stuck on how to finish the ceiling, and the doorway, and... erm... all the rest. I had to admit that I was at a total impasse. I needed the help of a professional.

And so we decided to embark upon the ominous Refinance. (cue dramatic music!) It was a very tough choice to make after I spent over 10 years slaving towards paying off a college credit card - I remain very wary of burdening myself with extra debt. However, I find that one does what one must when it comes to the homestead, and so we took out most of the equity in our home in the hopes that we could better our living conditions.

I debated on whether or not to hire licensed workers to complete the studio. On the one hand, the guys that hang out in front of my local hardware/lumber store are quite cheap by the hour, but on the other hand they say that you usually get what you pay for and I wanted to be able to hire someone who could work unsupervised. And perhaps someone who spoke fluent English... or even some English. So I ended up paying top dollar for a gentleman who had a general contractor's license and many years of experience. I was fairly certain that by paying the premium price, I would get the premium service (this is why you pay the premium price, is it not?). It was worth it to me to not have to worry about all the details, and he seemed perfectly willing to handle the entire job from start to finish. He and I discussed a number of projects that I had in mind, first of which was the studio completion. He gave me a reasonable estimate that I could live with, and off we went!

This is the part of the story where I learn an important lesson about communicating with my general contractor. It seems that he mistook my easy going nature about costs and expenditures as an indication that money was unimportant to me (instead of what it was: a misplaced trust that we were on target with the estimate), and after nine days of work on a five day project (and with no end in sight)... he discovered he was wrong. It seems that his estimate was accurate in much the same way that one could say that Niagra Falls holds perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of gallons of water. Thousands, by complete coincidence... is how many dollars he was off by in his estimate. Ouch! I found myself having no choice but to stop the job. I told him that there simply wasn't any money for going any further over budget. I told him that if we were going to get the next project right, we had to stop this one. I told him that our next project was to completely renovate my only bathroom, and the estimate needed to be accurate since that wasn't a job we could stop midstream. He agreed completely with me, and said that we would be extremely careful and go over the details in... um... detail.

I should point out that the reason I didn't just fire this man, is because he was the husband of one of my co-workers. This gave me a reason to trust him, you see? Perhaps you don't see. Perhaps you are the sort of person who laughs cruelly at another's pain! Or perhaps you just have a bit more wisdom than I did. Well... experience brings wisdom, doesn't it? And I'm certainly in the process of receiving a mammoth sized load of experience. Anyways, back to the story! I figured the fiasco with the studio was as much my own fault as anyone's, since I didn't make clear that there was a cap on the funds. Well... now it was clear. Crystal clear.

Fortunately for me, the contractor completed enough of the studio job that I was able to complete the rest myself, and I must say that it looks wonderful. My floor installation was not exactly what you would call "professional", but it looks nice nonetheless. And the laundry room won't be done for quite a while, but then again the money we would have spent on the washer and dryer is gone... so I suppose it's rather a moot point. We've already started moving Staci's art related belongings into the room, and our downstairs basement/storage facility is starting to clear out and take on characteristics that one can begin to associate with an actual living space. Really it's like adding 400+ square feet to a 660 square foot house! Very exciting.

On the other hand, the bathroom project is still in progress and is going considerably less well. I generally like to keep my posts amusing or at least light hearted, and not furious tirades of primal rage, screaming hissy fits, and tear soaked sob fests. It is for this reason that I won't be posting about the bathroom until I can have that "one day we'll all look back on this and laugh" laugh. Which isn't due to be out for awhile yet. Nope... not for a long long while.

Scratching Post

Urushiol Oil is a substance greatly mis-understood by the general populace. One can most commonly find it on plants like Poison Oak, Poison Ivy, and Poison Sumac. These plants, however, are not actually poisonous in the traditional sense. The skin rash associated with touching them is nothing more than an allergic reaction, and if you were to eat some, you probably would not get sick. However... as I sit here writing this post while swathed from head to toe in Benedryl cream, scratching at my skin with a ferocity usually reserved for melee combat in a war scenario... saying that it is nothing more than an allergic reaction is a lot like saying that Hurricane Katrina was nothing more than a weather incident.

I first noticed the Poison Oak growing on my property about 4 weeks ago, but it wasn't really until the week before last that I decided I should do something about it. I've had a run in with Poison Oak once before, but I'd had no idea at the time what had caused the rash on my arms. A doctor was similiarly stumped, since it hadn't correlated to a run through the underbrush. Remind me never to go back to that doctor - I apparently have a 1 week delay between contact and outbreak. Most people react within 24-48 hours, but there you have it. So this time around, I knew what to expect. Or so I thought.

My anti-poison oak gear consisted of a long sleeve shirt, a pair of jeans, gloves, old shoes, and a pair of safety glasses. Next time I will purchase a hazmat suit because this was completely inadequate. I managed to catch my wrists several times, and caught a branch across the face during my mission of destruction.

Here is where things went from bad to worse.

Upon finishing the cleanup of the offending plant (more like a tree), I decided that a vigorous scrub down was in order. So I jumped into the shower and took soap and washcloth and rubbed my wrists and face raw. This, I only learned later, was absolutely the worst thing I could have done. Urushiol binds to the skin in as little as 5 minutes but can take up to 2 hours. The piping hot water melted the oil and opened up all the pores on my body at the same time. One of my co-workers said "Like a pad of butter on a freshly toasted english muffin", and it is an apt analogy. Blissfully ignorant of the damage I had just done to myself, I continued with my other weekend chores.

About 5 or 6 days later, the tell tale bumps arrived. They itched, but not too bad. "Oh well, I guess the shower didn't work," I thought to myself, "Or maybe it won't be as bad as before." Har har har. Three days later, my wrists looked like something out of a zombie movie, and the basic rash had spread to nearly my entire body. It was no coincidence that the rash followed the exact lines that water runs down me in the shower. Try following that line of water on yourself, sometime, and you'll know why me-so-miserable.

So as I stocked up on creams and tried not to scratch, I decided to educate myself about the source of my new affliction. This is where I learned about all the misinformation about poison oak and its brethren. Firstly and most importantly, it's not contagious. The oil can be spread from surface to surface, but once it has bonded to your skin, it's harmless to everyone but you. Secondly, the rash does not spread. People complaining of later outbreaks are either re-infecting themselves with the oil, or are suffering from some secondary auto-immune body response (your body is so hopped up on itchy rash, that it starts popping up hives on other parts of your body simply because the system is overloaded and freaking out), or else they have scratched so much that they've caused an infection. There is no such thing as a "systemic reaction" since the oil never reaches your bloodstream (inhaling smoke from burning poison oak is a dangerous exception that could kill you). And finally, as an observation made by me after finding several reputable websites with wildly conflicting information,... most everything else is probably bunk. I swear I could not find an authoritative source of information that agreed 100% with anyone else. You'd think that with 85% of Americans allergic to the stuff, that someone would have done a comprehensive study by now.

So... here I sit... in agony. The word "itchy" does not accurately describe what poison oak does to you. An itch is an errant tickle on the surface of the skin. A quick scrubbing of the area with your nails alleviates it. Not so with the poison oak. The sensation starts out like an itch, and builds to a desperate and defeaning noise of nerve endings all screaming the same word at the top of their lungs. It's not a word in the English language, it is a word that only the neurons in your brain can understand. But loosely translated, the word means: "SCRATCHMESCRATCHMEOHGODSCRATCHME FORTHELOVEOFALLTHAT'SHOLYANDUNHOLYFROMNOWUNTIL THEENDOFTIMESCRATCHMESCRATCHMEORIWILLKILLYOU!!!!" This word is shouted thousands of times per second. And let me tell you, there is no conscious will that can resist that call. I scratch and scratch until my skin is raw. I try to make the pain from scratching override the itch. It's a preferable sensation, even though it only lasts a few seconds. I think that poison oak could probably replace the current unacceptable forms of interrogation and torture that you read so much about in the news these days. Just brush the inmate in poison oak, wait a week, then tie their arms to a chair and ask them questions while waving a tube of cream under their nose. Good god I'd talk!

I'm ready to talk now!

EPILOGUE: Nearly three weeks after I wrote this post... and less than a week after the last of the rash cleared up... I have gotten poison oak again. Did I romp through the underbrush? No. Did I even step off of pavement in the last three weeks? Not that I can recall. This is why someone would be hard pressed to believe me when I said there is no such thing as a systemic reaction or that the rash doesn't spread. But after giving the matter much frustrated consideration, I highly suspect that what happened is that washing the clothes I wore during the poison oak clearing was simply not enough. The oil persisted through detergent, hot water, and a full dry cycle. And so by wearing the pants again, I re-exposed myself. Oh yay, me so happy. I'm debating whether to wash the shirt and pants again, or to burn them. If I burn them, though, I'd better be careful not to inhale the smoke. Sheesh!

Space Invaders

I try to live in harmony with nature, I really do. I have a habit of being rather unforgiving to spiders (we all have our faults, do we not?) but when it comes to an invasion of ants I will always blame myself before taking it out on the poor little critters. Perhaps this comes from living in the county of Santa Cruz, which seems to be built in its entirety upon an ant hill that, if disturbed, could end mankind as we know it.

"I shouldn't have left that half empty glass of coke sitting next to the syrup covered breakfast platter and the bowl of cereal," I would muse to myself, "I was just inviting them to the feast of their lives!" Then I'd clean up the mess and put all my sugary foodstuffs into ziploc bags for 6 months while I waited for the ants to forget. It was my own fault, but with simple maintenance and a cleanliness regimen that teetered on the edge of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder I triumphed and the ants would go back to the neighbor's house or wherever their natural habitat happened to be.

So when the latest invasion struck, I knew exactly what to do - I pulled out the sponge and the Formula 409, and went to work. Three boxes of ziplocs later, the cereal was safe from infestation, the brown sugar was in full lockdown, the kitchen trash was floating on a moat of liquid fire, and the raisins were in a hermetically sealed tomb. I patiently waited for the ants to dissipate. But this time... something was different.

Most colonies of ants will send out several scouts to look for food, and if they are fortunate enough to find some then they will report back to the captain of the guard who orders an immediate full scale troop movement. Soon the supply lines are established, and the foody item is harvested for as long as possible before the thermonuclear sponge incurs massive casualties. However, if the scouts do not find any food, the captain soon re-deploys his resources to a different region. So when I see a few ants milling around the house, my first instinct is not to kill them, but to make sure they don't find anything. In Santa Cruz, one typically learns to coexist peacefully with the ants if one wants to stay sane.

This is why after rendering my house free from even forensic evidence of food, I simply waited. Sure enough, the ants went into "scout" mode and the little guys were scurrying about looking for what happened to all the food. I reasoned that in a few days, life would return to normal. A few days later... I realized that something was wrong. The ants were still scouting, but now there were more of them. Additionally, they seemed drawn to moisture, and would form lines into the sink even though it was clean. "How very odd," I thought, "but ants are ants. Soon they will be gone." Two weeks later, the ants moved into the bathroom. A week later, they were in the living room and we were starting to find them in the bed. Within another week, I sat at my computer desk chatting to an acquaintance online while ants crawled in and out of the keyboard, across the screen, and on my arms and face. It was like I was living inside the hive. Very very quietly... I began to scream.

The internet helped me back to sanity. Other than their completely unexplainable behavior, these ants had one very unusual characteristic. When you smushed one under your thumb (or in my case violently pounded 17 of them while screaming bloody murder), they emitted a rather stinky odor. Googling "smelly ants" led me to the "Odorous House Ant". An informative website had this to say: "Odorous house ants (OHAs), known by the scientific name of Tapinoma sessile, are one of the most common species of ants encountered indoors." For being so damn common, I'd never run into the buggers before. It turns out that they can move their nest frequently (every few weeks), have multiple queens (so ant bait isn't as effective), multiple satellite nests (!!!) and they can live just about anywhere (including inside your walls). Identifying them by the website's pictures was quite easy as they walked across my monitor screen while I read about them. Information on how to control these tricky pests took up the next three pages of the document I was reading. "In the event that a combination of these methods is not effective, you may want to consider hiring a professional exterminator. Sometimes, even professionals have a difficult time eradicating this particular pest." L-O-V-E-L-Y.

And so we come to the part of the story where Zeke buys deadly poison, and fills his house with it.

Yes, I purchased three "bug bombs" designed to kill anything foolish enough to be alive when I set them off. According to the instructions on the can, I only needed to cover my dishes with a cloth and make sure that no food was out and exposed when I set them off, and everything would be fine. And yet... I needed to cover the floor around the bug bombs with newspaper so that it didn't discolor the wood or eat through finishes. Hmmm.... riiight. This stuff was clearly harmless. Staci and I took a few additional precautions not required by the instructions, put the hamster in our half-finished detached art studio (a story for another time, faithful readers), and packed up the car for a fun-filled day not-in-the-house. Then as Staci got into the car, I closed up the house, planned my escape route, and took a very very deep breath of air and held it.

Popping open the bug bomb is a lot like lighting a flare, except that the only way a flare can kill you is if you try to extinguish it on your forehead. All you have to do for the bug bomb to kill you... is wait for a minute. As I yanked the easy-pull tab from the top of the can, smoke began shooting out of the top at a distance of 2 or 3 feet. I tried not to look at it, as I imagined its very image might be deadly, like a medusa. As I placed the can on it's pedastal, and tilted it from 180 degrees to 90 degrees, I instinctively crouched low to stay on the can side of the 3 foot spout of death. Then I scuttled out of the room like a crab, with my lungs less-than-politely asking me for oxygen. I still had 2 more, and the second can was at the other end of the house. It's a small house, but I realized I wasn't going to make it. I stuck my head out the front door and took a breath. The taste of the poison was on my tongue in an instant. Oh GREAT! I took a slight breath in, hoping to get enough oxygen to open the second can without getting enough poison to do me harm, and ran back inside to what used to be my home. Another gout of vaporous death was unleashed, and I ran from the house like a man fleeing a battlefield. The third can was blissfully positioned downstairs. I took deep breaths of clean air while I walked down the exterior stairs to the basement space.

Now before I continue with my story, I should describe our basement space for you. Basically, it consists of two very low ceilinged rooms filled halfway to brimming with boxes of stuff that awaits the completion of our detached art studio (a story for another time, dear readers, now stop asking about it). Why is this relevant, you may ask? Imagine the amount of empty volume available in such a place. Tiny rooms with half their empty space filled by big boxes. Now imagine opening a pressurized can of poison in such a room without an independent source of oxygen. Let's just say that the room filled with poison gas almost instantly, and my crab scuttling took on a desperate sort of mad crawl that would have worked well in any horror movie for "Victim #3" as I tried to escape its death embrace. When I felt the wind of the bug bomb on my face, I closed my eyes (somehow I thought this would protect me - once again hearkening back to my medusa analogy) and made it out the door as best I could from memory.

The rest of my day was lovely.

We returned that evening to a house that smelled slightly... bad... and slept uneasily in our pest free home. Did I feel a little ill that night? Yes. But I survived. And I am happy to report... the ants did not.

They did find our curbside trashcan, however.

They can have it.

Culinary Commitment

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and had over 360 songs and poems to his name when he died at the age of 36, including the well known "Auld Lang Syne". You may ask what this has to do with me, and I would reply "absolutely nothing". At least that was true until last night.

A friend of ours approached me this past Monday with an offer to join him at a dinner that celebrated "Celtic culture" on Saturday that he, himself, had been invited to. He was fairly hazy on the details, but he assured me that it would be a fun night out and a chance to visit a local restaurant that Staci and I have been meaning to visit for a while. So we purchased tickets to this "Burns Dinner" with very little idea of what we were actually getting into.

It wasn't until Saturday afternoon that it occured to me that a very useful tool known as the "internet" might yield a few details about the event, and so I looked it up and subsequently learned volumes about Robert Burns. I also found that the "Burns Dinner" or "Burns Supper" is a worldwide celebration of the man typically held on or near his birthday, and is a tradition that has been carried on since the end of the 18th century. Wikipedia detailed the typical format of the evening, the structure of which was fairly flexible excepting for the following: "The only items which the informal suppers have in common are haggis, Scotch whiskey, and perhaps a poem or two." The inclusion of haggis definitely got my attention. Having never had it before (and having a vague, horrifying idea of what it was), I was quite reluctant to have a meal of "haggis, tatties, and neeps." After a few moments of deep consideration, though, I decided I could and should keep an open mind about it and steadfastly resolved to go through with the meal.

And then I used the internet again, to look up Haggis.

I won't trouble you with the gruesome details - look them up yourself if you are really curious. Let's just say that after learning more than I wanted to know, I recited to myself the following mantra: "You've eaten sausages and hot dogs... you can do this." Also, the United States has outlawed the usage of lungs for human consumption, which was somewhat of a comfort.

And so we travelled to the restaurant, emboldened by our new found knowledge, and found ourselves in a room of 50+ local residents, more than half of which were dressed in traditional Scottish attire, and all of which were suffering the pleasant effects of a Scotch whiskey tasting event that had been going on for over an hour before we arrived (and continued until we left at the end of the night).

The evening was a blast! It reminded me of why I like close knit communities so much- everyone shares a common culture. Here was a common culture *within* a close knit community! People read poems and sang songs by Burns, played the bagpipes and the harp, laughed and cavorted and welcomed with open arms anyone who would join them in the evening's festivities. It didn't matter if you were Scotch by birth or "by inoculation" (as one reader said "the only Scotch in me, is what I've emptied from my glass"), or just there for the show. It was grand. Haggis *was* served, but only as a precursor to the actual meal. I'll admit I was quite relieved, but I had some nonetheless.

Haggis tastes like a cross between sausage and a liver pate. It's also fairly gummy (owing to the inclusion of oatmeal in the recipe, no doubt). To my own surprise I found it quite edible, and I actually went back for more. Our friend who invited us has had "the real deal" in Europe, and he said that this haggis was fairly tame but very much like it's spicier, gamier cousin across the Atlantic.

I'm sure that the missing lungs are to blame.

Reintroduction

Thirteen months ago, I started writing about my experiences in the small town of Boulder Creek. My endeavors were recorded in a private forum of close friends as random entries and pictures, scribbled notes and stream of consciousness, and... frankly... as mad ideas brewing in my head and never quite put to paper. All that changed one month ago, when I organized my crazed meanderings into a cohesive series of blog entries, and brought it all up to date here on this Blogger site.

So here we are on the one month anniversary of the one year anniversary of my brand new blog. Please feel free to read from the beginning, because with the exception of two close friends and some person from Chile who hit my page yesterday... you've never been here before.