The Birds and the Bees

For the past three weeks I have been completely consumed by (as opposed to consuming) vagina. Vagina vagina vagina vagina vagina. I think I’ve heard, said, and seen more vagina in the past week than I’ve heard, said, or seen vagina in the last 4 decades. It’s actually kept me from updating, I’ve been so immersed in vagina. Allow me to explain why.

Oh wait! First I have to update everything mentioned in my last report:

1. Two bees, or not two bees:

Yup. I went to the needlework shindig in a beekeeper costume. It was painful and humiliating and I cried when she put it on me. NewWifey(tm) on the other hand was joyous and empowered and left a trail of honey everywhere she went. I think it was honey.

2. Hotel food sucks. I made my own:

(Crappy picture of asparagus and shrimp risotto, using stock made by simmering the shrimp shells and asparagus trimmings. Other guests were beating down our door to get some once the smell leaked out.)

3. NewWifey(tm)’s products sold well, so we were able to afford gas to get home.

4. After a long, heartfelt, and at times contentious phone call, I convinced NewWifey(tm)’s friend to ditch her stupid plan to have me make filet mignon while they were putting us up. She agreed to Châteaubriand. But when I arrived I found she’d instructed her butcher to cut it into four individual portions, thus negating the entire reason for serving Châteaubriand in the first place. Oh well. I made them perfectly anyway. Of course. That, despite the fact that I was still mostly drunk following our adult beverage tour.

5. In addition to the distillery crawl we’d also hopped the border into North Carolina to take the EIGHTY FUCKING DOLLARS PER HEAD tour of the largest private residence in these United States. Eighty dollars per rube! No wonder they could afford it.

We didn’t pay the 80 bucks, though. In addition to not having 80 dollars between us, let alone each, it turns out our hosts have season tickets which allows them to bring two guests along gratis, and we were it. Take that, wealthy rail tycoon scions! That’s one less egg in your caviar ration this week.

(Two bits of trivia I learned on the tour, and I suspect they’re interconnected: none of the 43 bathrooms in the estate have sinks, and the average lifespan back then was 51.)

6. After the needlework show we drove to NewWifey(tm)’s mom’s house in Ozarkistan for a 3 day visit. Her mom fills a 2-gallon hanging bird feeder every morning, and every morning every cardinal within a 50 mile radius lines up on the fence waiting for her to go back inside:

It was easy to tell the married couples:

These birds may look dainty, but don’t let the little bastards fool you. They do not suffer interlopers:

Unless the interloper is bigger than them:

“I’m called woodpecker for a reason, small beaks. Scram.”

They scrammed:

It was a pretty windy morning the day I shot these (from inside the kitchen, through a door screen, hand-holding a zoom with the fastest shutter speed I could manage, thankyouverymuch) and some of the smaller birds were struggling to maintain their perch, not to mention their dignity:

Birds with larger craniums opted for more secure structures:

The jig was up when one of their lookouts spotted me and alerted the flock:

And so ended my one and only foray into avian voyeurism.

It did remind me of a great joke, though: Did you hear the Pope came down with Bird Flu? He got it from a cardinal….

Thangu. Thangu verra much.

7. This tiny little town at the top of Arkansas is apparently known as one of the best trout fishing spots in the country. Not being a fisherman myself though, I basically spent my three days there listening to Mom tell stories about her cat and eating BBQ (it was worth it for the BBQ).

For a town that probably has fewer people than I have teeth, they do for some reason have two rather large thrift stores. On my last day there, in a lull between “Adventures of Fluffy” chapters, I walked over to one to check out their wares. The first thing I saw when I walked in was – I kid you not – a wall of 8-track tapes, flanked on one side by a wall of Playstation-2 games, and on the other side by a wall of 8-bit NES games. Five bucks each.

Pretty much everything else in the store was contemporary to those. Lots of home canning gear, farming implements, checked polyester bell bottoms (’70’s?), etc. But not seeing anything appropriate for someone who resides in this century, I headed for the door.

Right at the exit though there was a small glass case that held their stock of “jewelry”, the majority of which seemed to be those plastic rosaries the Sisters of the Perpetual Fist throw into their envelopes along with the donation request. But off to the side there was a bucket – a literal bucket – that was filled almost to the brim with watches. And next to the bucket was a pile of watch straps. The sign in front said, “All Watches $5, Straps $1“.

I asked the clerk if I could see the bucket, and when she handed it over I dumped the contents onto the counter. I sifted through a ton of all womens watches, almost all of which were junky cheap fashion dreck – the kind with the word “Quartz” on the face, and nothing else. There was an exception though. One of the last watches to drop from the pail was a dark grey number, and to my surprise when I picked it up found it was a ladies Skagen 4SSS. A recently discontinued style, but it looked in near mint condition with only a small scuff on the back (probably from being tossed into a bucket).

I know this wasn’t on the order of finding a Faberge Egg or anything, but still. Seeing something of that quality buried among watches most people wouldn’t pay 5 dollars for new was quite a surprise. The only thing that might have startled me more would have been if I’d seen a “Vote Bernie!” bumper sticker on one of the pickup trucks in town. Or anything other than a pickup truck in town. And for that matter, an American pickup truck. They don’t even allow foreign phrases in that part of the country. Y’all.

Anyway, needless to say, I forked over a fiver. While I was at it I also grabbed one of the mens watch bands, an unmarked reddish leather job that had obviously never been worn. It didn’t have a brand name or even the size number on the back, but I decided to be a maniac and throw caution to the wind for once and take THE BIGGEST CHANCE OF MY LIFE. I paid the dollar.

As luck would have it NewWifey(tm) needs a watch. But she doesn’t want a watch that she has to wind or shake or even worry about the battery going dead. I was actually planning on ordering either a Seiko Solar or a Citizen Eco Drive for her once we got home, as both run off solar cells and never need attention for as long as there is a sun.

However once she saw the Danish designed and Swiss made Skagen, her adamant objection to quartz power evaporated faster than my pride did when I first put on that beekeeper getup. Score! A hundred fifty bucks saved.

On the ride home we stopped and got a battery for it – cost twice as much as the watch itself, dammit – and she hasn’t taken it off her wrist since.

And hey – the $1 mystery watch band turned out to fit my blingtastic Seiko “Cocktail Time” dress watch perfectly!

Check out the happy couple:

8. After three days we said goodbye to Mom and spent the next three days driving home.

For 2 days and 21 hours of the trip it was sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows…never mind, that was a stupid song. But yeah, from Arkansas to Missouri to Tennessee to West Virginia to Virginia to Pennsylvania it was clear sailing. Blue skies overhead, fields covered with new grass, trees starting to bud.

Then on Saturday we crossed into New Jersey.

What the HELL??

Is that….snow??

My god!

This is what I get for ordering NewWifey(tm) to adhere to a strict media blackout for the duration of the trip. Neither of us had any idea that in our absence the eastern seaboard of the United States had been slammed by not one, but two Level 7 Armageddon Snowpocalypse Death Matches. The last weather forecast I saw when we’d left on our little jaunt two weeks prior showed nothing but cheery little sun emojis over every day of the week. After that, nada.

The last hour of that 8 hour trip we grew increasingly tense, as every mile seemed to be buried an inch deeper under snow than the last. By the time we reached the top of Mt. Crumpit and pulled up to DangerHouse you couldn’t tell ground features anymore. I actually thought someone had built a shed in our driveway while we were gone until I realized it was drifting snow that had piled against and over our Subaru Forester to the height of our second floor window.

And guess what? Our snow shovels were in the garage. In the garage that our now 20-foot tall Subaru Forester was parked right up against so no thieves could break in that way.

I was wearing chinos and a polo shirt. Sneakers. NewWifey(tm) was in leggings and a sweatshirt. Open toe sandals.

I got out of the Nissan and started snow-swimming up the driveway.

It took 3 hours to get to the Subaru, tunnel down to the driver’s side door, back it up far enough to open the garage, grab boots, coats, and shovels, swim back to the Nissan where NewWifey(tm) was listening to the Harry Potter audio book series (Dumbledore dies, sorry), then both shovel enough of the drive to get the Nissan off the street. We couldn’t use the snow blower because 1. the snow had already compacted down enough that it was the consistency of wet clay, and 2. it was still two feet over the top of the blower. It had to be shovels.

On Sunday we drank three bottles of wine and ate Entenmann’s chocolate covered donuts all day. We dunked.

9. The next day I went back to work. And that’s when vagina happened.

But this post is already too long. Sorry, but vagina will have to wait. Clam up. If you will. But don’t worry, I’ll get to that story more quickly this time. Trust me, it’s worth it. Vagina always is.

Ciao!

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