Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

people

azaleas are a lie

by

If I’ve learned anything from my first year of home ownership, it’s that I have forgotten everything any of my Biology teachers every taught me about the kingdom Plantae.

The human body, environmental science, chemistry – they all make sense to me. Home repair? Electricity? I can handle it.

Flowers? A complete lie. Total bullshit.

Azaleas bloom in spring, their flowers often lasting several weeks. Shade tolerant, they prefer living near or under trees.

A few weeks ago our neighbor’s massive block of azalea bushes were in full, hot-pink bloom – the exact color of my Gem and the Holograms bicycle, circa age six.

“They must be new,” I exclaimed to E as we toiled in our front lawn, “because I don’t remember anything pink from last year.”

E fixed me with a look – the look she gives me when she can’t tell if my naivete is a conversational ploy or if I could really be that ignorant about something

“You realize,” she said evenly and carefully, “that those are the same bushes that have always been there. Right now they are flowering. So, you see, they are pink.”

“You mean to tell me that we’ve lived here an entire year and I’ve never noticed that her bushes are actually covered in hot pink flowers?That seems hard to miss.”

E examined my face for a tell – some indication I was putting her on. There was none; I am awesome at bluffing when I don’t even realize I am bluffing AKA I have no idea what we’re talking about.

“Peter, not all plants flower for all of spring. Azaleas only flower for a few weeks. Last year they probably flowered before we saw the house, or even between when we saw it and when we moved in. You know, like our pink tree.”

I considered our pink tree. Really it was a tree-colored tree, but per its pink tree-print on the Google Maps overview of our house, it had produced delicate pink blossoms for a week, which then fluttered away to cover the neighborhood. But that was a tree! Bushes, I reasoned were something different.

I thought back to all of my grandmothers’ flowers from childhood, and I didn’t remember any of them coming and going as they pleased. They were flowers, and that’s what they did – flower.

I rendered my reply.

“That’s bullshit. Flowers don’t come and go week to week. Except for, like, tulips or other special stuff. Maybe they’ve just,” I stammered, flummoxed for an explanation, “matured this year. Maybe they are in hedge puberty this year.”

E shook her head in submission. “Okay. Let’s talk about this again in two weeks.”

It’s been two weeks.

Yeah, the bushes are now green, again.

We’ve hit claydirt!

by

Her car slowed to a crawl by the curb as she rolled down the window.

“Hi there!” She exclaimed.

I had no idea who she was.

“Are you having problems with your pipes?” she asked, her voice filled with sympathy.

I looked up from my shoveling, one leg hiked up on the pile of dirt while I wiped the sweat from my brow with the opposite hand, reflecting that I was striking one of the more manly poses from which I’ve ever been interrupted, and replied.

“Sure looks like it, huh!”

As it turns out, we were not having a problem with our pipes, or really any kind of problem at all. Everything was proceeding according to plan. E’s plan.

Mostly.

You see, all home repairs are remanded to the exclusive custody of E due to a combination of my OCD and my having never lived in a house where I was allowed to do anything to anything.

As a result, I can’t even put a screw into a wall without wanting to call in an architect. I’m like, “You want me to do WHAT to the WALL of OUR HOUSE that WE OWN? Are you sure?”

And then E takes the drill from me, sinks a screw into the wall, and hangs a picture. Or installs a laundry system or hooks up a digital thermostat or whatever other crazy MacGyver insanity she does while I’m worriedly reading and re-reading instruction booklets and internet how-tos.

So, when E proposed a plan for regrading our front lawn that began with, “find some free fill dirt from Craigslist,” I just nodded. I mean, first, she’s always right, but also, it’s not like we are going to break the front lawn, right?

Like, what’s the worst that could happen?

Right. That question got a little less rhetorical on Thursday night when a 30-year-old dump truck cracked a panel of our sidewalk and dug its wheels into our lawn in a possibly irretrievable fashion.

For a few minutes I really thought we had acquired a permanent 30-year-old dump truck lawn ornament, which I guess I was okay with. That was before it stood on its rickety pneumatic hind legs to expel what was surely close to a ton of dirt onto our front lawn. Then there was also the chance that the entire thing would tip over backwards and somersault through our front window.

Well, we got rid of the truck, but were left with a pile of dirt that was only slightly smaller than a VW Bug, bristling with hunks of broken concrete. Honestly, it looked to be about 30% dirt, 70% shattered ruins. Between the broken sidewalk, the massive tire rut, and the subsequent pile of rubble it really did look like we were digging up a ruptured sewer pipe.

Which maybe is why three separate people asked about that, even when I was halfway through shoveling said dirt to its final resting place. Because, as it turns out, the rubble was not bristling with concrete – it was clay dirt, and all of the various rock-like bits were clay that easily gave way beneath my shovel.

(Gina was able to discern this immediately when she arrived for rehearsal yesterday, despite my trying to convince her the yard was filled with rubble from a giant robot fight that had occured in our lawn over the weekend. Maybe I should have skipped the giant robot part.)

Three hours of manly labor later and the pile was half-depleted – more of a buttress than a Bug – while our lawn is now graded up almost a foot at the foundation of the house.

What might my solution have been, you ask? I probably would have paid one of the three landscape engineers we are personally acquainted with a large sum of money to find a solution that involved neither a dump truck or me spending a day shoveling dirt.

Of course, E’s solution was free less the cost of the new sidewalk panel, plus I got to look manly for an afternoon, so that’s why she’s in charge of these things.

bondage is progress

by


Oh, the things I'll do for my art.

Last night E tied me to a chair in the middle of our freshly painted dining room so I could research my novel.

You see, last night I was blasting out words at an amazing pace on the El when it came time for my protagonist to be cuffed to a chair.

Despite many contortions on the El, I couldn’t figure out how far he could stretch, or if he could stand up and walk. The lack of detail was killing me. My nonstop flow of words dried to a trickle.

I hurried down our street, rereading what I had written on my laptop, only twice stumbling off of the sidewalk and into hedges. I unlocked our front door, flung it open, and announced to E:

Honey, I need to you to tie me to a folding chair and take pictures of it!

**

I’ve always been afraid that I don’t know enough to be an author.

I’m obsessive about details. I always have been. As a kid I would compare stacks GI Joe file cards to make sure their stories were consistent.

Oh the irony: Gina the chemist is writing a book and a blog, and Peter the communicator is learning chemistry.

I love getting lost in the fictional histories other authors have created, but I never thought I could create one of my own. I mean, have you watched the special features on the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD? Tolkien wrote entire history books about his fictional world. He wrote a frickin’ language!

Me? I’m not well-traveled. I don’t know much about history. I haven’t taken science class since the 90s. I don’t know how anything works or how to take it apart or how to turn it into a bomb. I don’t even know the right way to describe a lot of things, like architecture or clothes.

That’s why I like writing songs. Songs have their own internal logic. Sure, they might reference something in the real world, but only for a word or two.

We learned that I would have to make an excuse for the character's feet not to be secured, because I was a deadly weapon with the folding chair tied to me.

Late in September Gina challenged me to do National Novel Writing Month. I didn’t say yes right away.  I spent all of October outlining my story and sketching the details of my characters. If I was going to join I wanted a mythology of my own.

While I outlined I hit a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but I didn’t let them stop me.  I’m smart. I can acquire knowledge. Better to start out with ideas.

A few of my characters  do things that involve some pretty intense knowledge of chemistry and physics. In my outline I glossed over the details, but now it’s time to write about them. I can’t always be asking Gina about every little detail, so to get started I bought Chemistry for Dummies.

And, last night I needed to find out how hard a character could swing a folding chair he was flexicuffed to in order to knock out another character, so I had E tie me up and take photographs of it.

Why? Because that’s what an author does.

something like life

by

I’ve got this elaborate editorial calendar telling me what to write and when to post, but if I just stick to the calendar that sucks a bit of the me out of the blog, eh?

Life continues to be a non-stop whirlwind of communications and music, which is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to be, so yay for the continued status quo! When not in actual rehearals I’m writing songs (for the soundtrack to Eric Smith’s novel), a novel (for NaNoWriMo), and a blog (just because, and for NaBloPoMo).

As it happens,Gina is also writing songs (at the moment, as a soundtrack to Boardwalk Empire), a novel (she’s the one who convinced me to do NaBloPoMo), and a blog (she is not the only one of us who exerts peer pressure).

I think this is pretty much what I imagined our adulthood would be like as a seventeen year-old, except for I’m married to someone way hotter than I imagined and Gina is engaged to a lawyer.

Speaking of: Elise, who has the same hectic rehearsal schedule as me but less of the writing, has starting painting the house in approved non-vomitorious colors. I think it’s very “nice” that she’s painting, which is to say I think painting (and, in general, decorating) is something people with too much money and spare time do to occupy themselves.

The only photographic evidence of us as Lucas and Corey from Empire Records, courtesy of our friend Tina, who was such a perfect Rachel Berry that it was a little disturbing. Note E's gold star, awarded from Rachel.

(Lest you think I am debuting this sideways insult of my wife here on the blog, she’s been hearing it for years. I’d wager she’d be happy if I just blogged about it and stopped whining about it in the house.)

As someone with neither money nor spare time, the whole process is perplexing to me. She had to use special gray primer on our dining room walls, which took an entire day to paint on and when she was done I was like, “Awesome, it’s gray, can we leave it like that?” and she had to explain that it was just the primer.

I’m all about gray. I think grays are totally exempt from every being vomit-inducing. Now the dining room is cranberry. I hear that’s supposed to aid in digestion, so I stood in it while I was eating raviolis before rehearsal last night. I ate them pretty quickly, but I think that’s just because I hadn’t eaten anything for about 22 hours. I’m not sure about the digestion angle.

The one downside to my constant flurry of words and sounds is it doesn’t leave a lot of time to interact with people I’m not writing or rehearsing with (or for taking things out of the dryer, but that’s another story). I think my next availability for a dinner with friends might be in December.

A snapshot of the last ten days of my life: Saw three concerts (one in New York), rehearsed three times, started three new songs for my soundtrack to Eric Smith’s book, tried to find a way to post three times daily here at CK (still working on that), wrote almost 7,000 words for my NaNoWriMo novel, and dressed as Lucas from Empire Records for a Halloween party.

Oh, and occasionally ate, slept, and watched 30 Rock.

If you did more than that in your last ten days then I want to know what else you could have possibly fit in and kind of vitamins you are taking.

Please note: methamphetamines do not count as “vitamins.”

The Mopping Fool

by

I am not what you would call an active “cleaner.”

I’m a tidier. I’m an organizer. But, it takes a lot to move me into cleaning mode.

In my head I always look this adorable while I am cleaning. I may or may not also always wear that hat.

I have a certain fear of activating that particular urge, possibly because I come from a line of hard-core OCD scrubbers.  Much as Bruce Banner turns from nerd to Hulk, when my inner-cleaner is invoked I go from laid back dude to my grandmother. I become intent on vacuuming the floor every time someone leaves the room to get a drink – vacuuming it until it is safe to eat mashed potatoes right off that rug.

E has learned to let that particular sleeping OCD monster lie on most occasions, because getting me involved in day-to-day cleaning is the nuclear option. The one time I have been entrusted with cleaning a bathroom the result resembled a demolition project.

The one area where E is willing to deploy the nuclear strike that is my genetic heritage of clean-freak-ness is mopping. I like a floor to be so well-mopped, so gleaming with elbow-greased shine, that you dare not mar the surface with your shadow after the mopping is done. I don’t trust other people to mop for me, because they don’t employ the five key phases of mopping required for a truly gleaming floor.

To say that I was invested in our mop purchase for the new house would be an understatement. “Invested” implies a degree of detached evaluation. No, our mop purchase was a matter of life or death – life with gleaming floors, or the relative half-life of dull ones.

At one point I was reduced to near tears in the middle of an aisle in Home Depot, wracked with indecision and guilt. Couldn’t we buy a sampling of four or five mops to do our own comparative test across multiple surfaces?

The Rubbermaid Wavebrake® Dual-Water Combo with Sideward Pressure Wringer. Wavebreak? For real? It's a fucking mop cart, not a jet ski.

A test should not have been required. What I wanted was a rag mop with a solid wooden handle, and a bucket to wring it with and in. Rubbermaid G780-04 Pva Roller Mop was the ultimate mop because of its heavy metal handle, thick sponge, and heavy-duty wringer. Then I discovered that tiny screws hold said sponge onto the mop, and they get pretty rusty – to the tune of an hour or two to change the head. That was the end of that particular love affair.) –>

Home Depot has a wide, pleasing selection of wooden handled mops. What they had zero of were wringing buckets. They had one massive $100+ dollar custodian cart that came with its own “Caution: Wet Floors” sign in dual languages. I am a serious mopper, so the concept intrigued me, but I didn’t think the cart cornered well enough to get around the island in our kitchen.

Is it just me, or could this easily double as some sort of implement of torture?

Apparently wringing buckets are a rare item, which puzzles me seeing as non-wringing mops are pretty damned common. How do they get dry? Some Amazon shopping yielded the Behrens 412W Galvanized Mop Wringer Pail, but with shipping it totaled almost $40. Seriously? For a mop bucket?

As a result, I committed the cardinal sin of a committed mopper – I bought a plastic handled mop with a built-in wringer. I figured it could last me through three or four moppings – long enough to find a permanent solution.

This is the Quickie Home-Pro Twist Mop with Spot Scrubber. It is the devil.

I was wrong. Super wrong. I popped the wringer out of its plastic threading on my first wring. I began to wring six or seven times to get it dry during phases two and four, which caused the mop head to age six or seven times as fast, which resulted in a busted mop head on its second outing.

$20 dollars for two moppings. I know MY mopping skills are worth $10 a go (hello – I have FIVE PHASES), but I don’t know if the mop quality was equally as worthy.

This all came to a head on Sunday night. I had avoided mopping our kitchen since the mop gave up the ghost, but I caused a bottle of ginger salad dressing to explode across our entire kitchen. Spot-cleaning was not an option – this required mopping.

I dealt with the frustration of my devil mop for all of five minutes. So do you know what I did? Scrubbed the damn floor on my hands and knees. And dried it that way too.

I know I’m my grandmother’s child when I comes to clean floors, but is scrubbing by hand seriously my best recourse with all of the cleaning products in a Home Depot and across the internet at my disposal?

Should I really be having in-store panic attacks and 1000-word blog posts both on the topic of mops?

Am I missing some incredibly simple explanation about how mops get wrung? Do people wring with their bare hands (eewwwww)?

More importantly, what simple home cleaning or repair task drives you similarly up a wall? Please tell me I’m not alone in my insanity.