Rainy Weekend

Sick again yesterday. What a shock and surprise - although at least, to vary it a little, this was the stomach variety bug on top of the usual sinus cold variety. I've given up: apparently I'm just going to be an invalid forever. On the bright side, that means that nobody can expect me to wear anything but plaid flannel ever again, so, you know, things are not all bad.

On Thursday evening daughter A and I went to Lowes and Target. We went to Lowes because I need a new hot water heater. Isn't that nifty? Isn't that just faboo? Mine is leaking and, once I had wedged myself and a flashlight into the strange plywood closet where the water heater lurks and heats in darkness, I discovered that it has probably been leaking for some time, given that the mold on the bottom of the closet walls has progressed to the priest/king stage of civilization and is building ziggurats. So, off to Lowes where in my naivete I thought I could just buy a new one. This did not happen. Hot water heaters, it turns out, are expensive, holy fuck, far more expensive than I had thought and also, A (not A my daughter, A my friend who fixes everything in my house) is out of town and getting Lowes to install a hot water heater doubles the damn price of the thing. So I've packed the closet with towels, told the heater to keep on trying its best and asked the mold to perform a sacrifice for drought. When A gets back from Baltimore maybe he can make me a new hot water heater out of old gingerale cans and glue.

I spent a long time at Lowes looking at carpet samples since I've decided I need to carpet the basement. I'm not sure if you can just plunk carpet down on blue painted concrete, though, and again, we have that small problem called limited budget: I don't really want to pay for this carpet or anything. Since I don't particularly care what it looks like and in fact do not care if I end up with about 30 different bits of carpet all next to each other down there, I feel that my carpet should be either free or very cheap indeed. That doesn't seem to be how it works. I've never done carpet before - I'm a hippie; we tear carpet out and spend months pulling staples and then strapping waxy rags onto our children's feet to make the wood floors look better (I have actually done this; ask my kids) - and I'm just not up on all this carpet stuff, besides feeling vaguely that I am betraying my principles. Oh well. I ended up not buying much at all at Lowes; I was going to get some blind liners, since the attractive bamboo Roman shades I hung in the bedroom a couple weeks ago are basically only very slightly less transparent than glass, but as A pointed out, they were expensive; they didn't have exactly the right size; and by the time I was done fucking them up completely by trying to alter them I would have to buy more anyway. I have saved money, yes, but alas, there's still a puddle under the hot water heater; you can still see me walking around the bedroom looking confused and the basement floor is still bright blue concrete.

In other news, I totally saw coyotes on Thursday morning and I would like to stress that. Coyotes! In Asheville! Nobody else seems to understand how totally cool yet kind of scary that is but I swear to you, it is totally cool yet kind of scary. And, sort of vaguely as a result of this, it looks like Pebble's sister Okra might come to live with me. As you may or may not know, Pebble is the daughter of A's cat Izzy. Izzy managed to get herself knocked up in her first heat in a trailer park in Woodfin and yet produced perfectly Siamese looking kittens: go figure. Then, tragically, Izzy disappeared about two or three months ago. Given that A lives right up the street from where I suspect the coyotes live (in that wilderness power company no mans land beyond the dog park along the river) it is possible that Izzy was eaten. At any rate, A then decided that Okra would not be allowed to ever go outside again, which would all be well and good except that A's roommates do not much like cats; A is rarely home and Okra is bored being an only cat. So is Pebble and thus the plan is to move Okra in with me. I can hear young M laughing now: "A got you to take another of her animals!" and yes, it is true that A is very good at finding pets for other people and I'm not entirely sure how it is that I managed to agree to or possibly even suggest this solution to Okra & Pebbles' boredom problems but there you have it: soon I will have two cats and two dogs and even less sanity than I do now.