The Daily Tannenbaum

Well, it happened. I got a second cat.

Meet Lucy:

(Potential nickname change pending.)

She was my neighbor’s cat. Six or seven years ago, she was found as a kitten, curled up in the backseat of my neighbor’s friend’s car, having crawled through an open window. The friend had to give her up when she moved, so she gave her to my neighbor. But now my neighbor can’t take her to her new place, so we decided that moving her next door would be the least traumatic option for this transient kitty. Also, since I’m gone almost every weekend and during most of the day, it seemed like a good idea for Micki to have some company.

Not that Micki was really asking for that…

We’re currently in the slow introduction phase, where Lucy stays cloistered in the living room, so that she and Micki can hiss at each other through the door. In a week, Micki will stay in the living room while Lucy puts her scent all over the rest of the cottage. Then they switch again, and then we open the door and let them play like the best buddies they better be.

Meanwhile, I vacuum like hell because Lucy is a long-haired cat and I’m now twice as allergic to my house as I was yesterday. But look at that face!

I’ll keep you updated while struggling to not 1) make this a completely kitty-centric blog and 2) not becoming the crazy cat lady.

UPDATE: I thought I should give my original flavor cat some face-time, too.  Literally:

I haven’t read the book “The $64 Tomato” but after this weekend, I can tell you what it’s about by only reading the title.

People (like me!) move out of the city to the country, look at space in their backyard and think, “why bother going to the store to buy my vegetables? I can grow them RIGHT HERE!”

So those people (like me!) go out and buy a hoe and a shovel, and some seeds, ($30, but I’ll have that hoe and shovel for years!) heeding the advice of all the people who said, “just put some seeds in the ground, and stuff grows!” Excited about transitioning from metropolitan slub dependent on take-out to a self-sufficient Barbara Kingsolver survivalist type, us would-be gardeners spend the first warm spring weekend tilling the soil of our little plots, because if all those weeds could grow so easily, why not tomatoes? Or beets and carrots? Or even Brussels Sprouts?

In my backyard, I’ve got a little plot under a Wisteria vine and another one under a lilac tree that are both sunny (at least until our backyard black walnut tree grows in all its leaves) and raised and very close to my back door.

I pulled out all the weeds with my own two hands (and partially the hands of Birmingham, who I Tom Sawyer’d when he thought he was just coming over to drop off a drill bit.) I started some seeds in pots, carefully taking them inside whenever the weather forecast called for frost, possibly showing them more love than my cat.

I didn’t want to wait until Memorial Day to plant, and since I had days off work last week, I started a little early. The guy at the nursery suggested getting organic material in my soil with some manure. ($4.99 a bag) (for cow shit!) (and later that night I learned horse riding friends are full of shit, and I could have gotten it for free!) Also, I live in Bambi central, so some deer resistant plants ($10 for 12 orange marigolds and $5 for something that looked pretty) filled out the purchase.

On the suggestion of my neighbor, I planted my vegetables in the wisteria plot on a diagonal, because even if none of these plants ever take, it’ll look funky. From my seedlings, I took the beets, the spinach, and the Brussels sprouts and put them in little beds. I also wanted to put the carrots in, but someone suggested to me that I should mix them with radishes, so I went out and bought a package of radish seeds ($1.69).

To mark the beds, I got creative and broke out my oil pastels from college and drew pictures on the back of a cut-up tissue box. But I didn’t want them to get wet, so I went to the Staples on the other side of town ($10 in gas, because I got stuck in traffic not knowing that it was Marist graduation weekend) to get contact paper ($10, because they only sell it in “lifetime supply” size.) (There is no place that sells contact paper on my side of town, I know because I went to every store on my side of town.) ($5 in gas.) But look how nice:

Since I was on the other side of town, I stopped by a craft store looking to see if they had cheaper contact paper, but instead I found that they were selling garden whimsy at 50% off! I got 4 pinwheels, a wind chime, a dragonfly that rings like a bell, and a dragonfly on a spring for ($20).

I am one garden gnome away from erasing from all memory the five years I lived in Manhattan. But look! So pretty:

And the fence (actually procured for free by a previous tenant) so effective against common garden pests.

I was only in California for four days, but my job gives me two (or maybe three now?) weeks of vacation. I’m not certain, because we’re a small company, and our HR department is a desk calendar next to the fax machine where the employees note their days off.

I decided it would be a good idea to take off some extra days upon my return to the east coast to do some spring cleaning and gardening. I’m going back to work on Friday so that I don’t have to deal with a week’s worth of missing stuff on a busy Monday.

But today, I’m free to do what I want, any old time.

Between cleaning, gardening, exploring the Hudson Valley, or just sitting around drinking wine from Sonoma, I can’t decide what to do. Sitting on the computer going through the 500 blog posts in my reader sounds like fun in theory, but I’m pretty sure if I go to every blog in a row, you’re all going to get the same comment. “Sounds great! Sorry I missed it!” Works for most stories, unless someone happened to write about the death of his or her grandmother or getting laid off or something.

I just got up to blow my nose, because while I was away, my cat took the liberty of leaving her hair and dander on every corner of the cottage in protest of my absence. Now I’m having a major allergy attack. It would seem that my choice has been made for me: I need to clean. But getting up from the chair made me feel dizzy, so I’m just going to go back to bed, lying on my hands to keep them from itching my eyes.

Nine times out of ten, when I have to make a choice, I choose “nap.”

UPDATE: I took the nap.  It was glorious.  I promised myself that if I clean out my closet, I’ll get to take Nap: Part II, and if I finish weeding under the lilac bush, I’ll get to take Nap: the Revenge.

I don’t want to make a big deal of this, but you may have noticed that I’m trying to re-instate the 30 activities-Hudson Valley project. The reason I don’t want to make a big deal is two-fold. One is that I’m leaving for San Francisco on Friday, so I won’t be here to report on the happenings of the H.V. for a week. The other is that the last time I made a big announcement about my project, I spent days 1, 2, and 3 in the hospital. Not that I’m one to believe in superstition, but I’m keeping this one low-key just in case.

On Saturday, my second employer and I came to a mutual decision that they no longer needed me because they were over-staffed and I was tired. Now that I have all my weekends free again, it seems like an appropriate time to dig back in to the project. So here goes nothing, and just for good measure, I’m not playing kickball this season.

Every once and a while, I see this sign up when I pass the diner near me:

Birmingham and I stopped once last year, but then I was invalid and then it was winter, and there was no more car cruise, until tonight. On the way home from free pizza night at the gym, I stopped and took a gander at the classic cars that were on display.

(In case you’re wondering, the hula monkey hasn’t had much work since “The Ruins Post,” so now he hangs out on my dashboard, and will be standing in for Mr. Met (the plush keychain) who is enjoying his retirement.)

The owner of the diner is a car enthusiast, so once or twice a month he opens up the lawn adjacent to his establishment so that other car enthusiasts can park, pop their hoods, listen to music, and show off their babies. I was hoping to talk to some of the car owners to ask them some questions about their cars, but there was one big problem.

I’m shy, ya’ll.

I know, you may be thinking, “weren’t you just telling us and all the world about your soy-based flatulence problem?” Yes. I was. But no, I wasn’t. I was typing it. That is much easier than talking. Talking to new people is a real problem for me. It’s almost uncanny in its irrationality, but whenever I talk to strangers I get an awful hot feeling in my chest and face. I lose all control of my ability to speak normally until I’ve had at least one conversation with a person in the past. But I know that if I’m going to do this project, I’m eventually going to have to meet some new people and talk to them. So I tried, determined to talk to one car owner before going home to many shots of whiskey I chose my favorite car:

I procrastinated by circling all the other cars twice and pretending to be interested in the raffle at the main table. Finally I braced myself and walked up to the group sitting in front of the purple 1941 Ford Coupe.

“Hi. Who’s car is this?”

“This is mine.” says a nice looking middle-aged man.

This is where I want to say things like, “How long have you had this car? Did you paint it? Do you own other classic cars? Where do you drive it? ” and so on. But he’s sitting with a group of 5 other Strangers, and all I can think to say is “this is my favorite.” And I can’t even say it like a real person. My nerves cause me to talk in my high-pitched nervous voice. I’ve prepared some audio so you can understand:

My Favorite car

BTW, this was my first foray into creating my own audio. It took me about an hour of opening all the programs that came with my new Mac and then signing up for every podcasting service I could find. That’s why you have it in two formats there, I’m playing around to see what works. (I even figured out how to use sound effects!) Please let me know how it comes out on your computer, or if it doesn’t at all. (If you’re like me and can’t listen to sound on your computer at work, that’s cool, you have something to look forward to when you get home.)

In the coming days, I’m going to muster the courage to meet new people so I can explore the Hudson Valley’s best and brightest. If that doesn’t work, oh well. It’s my blog, and I’ll be shy if I want to. With that in mind, I’d like to leave you some words of wisdom from the purple car’s yellow sticker:

There may be bugs,
There may be chips,
But one thing sure
I drive this Bitch!

UPDATE: I figured out how to make the audio file an MP3. This should work on your computer if the other one didn’t:

Can I bitch about something for a moment that doesn’t involve unreturned phone calls? I can’t stand having to swipe my own credit card at the store. Does anyone know how this trend began? I don’t remember there being an enormous outcry by consumers who couldn’t stand to let go of their card for the 2 seconds it takes a cashier to swipe it. But slowly, stores started adding those little “do it yourself” swipe machines, which hold to no standard. Sometimes you swipe up and down. Sometimes right to left. Sometimes the card is up, sometimes it’s down.

Now they even have ones that you “tap,” and in the 3 months that I had a “tap” card, it never, ever worked.

Sometimes, when you’re done, a harried cashier checks your signature. Most times not, but does it even matter? Has anyone ever worked in a retail job where they were trained in handwriting analysis? I change my signature all the time.

But even worse is when you have to sign with the “stylus” on some broken screen with pen on it from the jerk who used a real pen. Even if the screen is working well, I can’t get my signature to look right. Does anyone even check those, anyway? (This guy did a fun project to find out!) For me, the low point of stylus signing was at a 7-11 in Cape May, NJ where I got in a fight with a cashier who demanded ID when she didn’t like my signature match. I must have gotten pretty testy, because Birmingham likes to use it as a benchmark for my angriest moment. Case in point:

“What happened to your saucepan?”

“I threw it into the sink and dented it while I was upset with a friend on the phone.” (Maybe I’m starting to understand why this friendship is disintegrating.)

“Wow, you must have been as angry as the time you threatened to beat up that 7-11 girl.”

For the record, I don’t think I threatened to beat her up, although I wouldn’t be surprised if in Birmingham’s head the incident has become a full-out catfight.

But the point here is that DIY swiping makes me so annoyed, because I don’t understand the point. It saves me no time at all, especially when I have to then find the button for credit or debit, say “yes” to approve the transaction, and still sign something. It’s demeaning to the cashiers, who must feel like we don’t trust them to swipe our cards properly after they just scanned all the food we’re going to eat next week. I can’t see how it saves any time, since I always swipe wrong on the first try.

I think there is a solution, but it’s unpleasant. There’s also a little thing called “cash” that I’m thinking about trying. I’ll let you know how it goes.