Nebulous Mooch

I like to think of myself as a relaxed, laid back kind of person. I can go with the flow, as they say. I’m great at chilaxing, as long as I have total control over what’s happening. I’m not a control freak or anything like that. I just like things done a certain way, at a certain time, preferably by me.

For example, my husband cooked breakfast this morning. While sitting in the living room, I could hear the oatmeal bubbling away in the pot. He didn’t seem to be stirring it at all, so I kept going into the kitchen to check on it. I didn’t want to interfere, so I didn’t touch the pot the oatmeal was in. Instead, I wandered into the kitchen and looked at him sitting at the bar checking emails for a while. When he didn’t get the telepathic message to go stir the oatmeal that I was trying to convey with my stare, I finally said, “That oatmeal sure is bubbling a lot.”

My husbanded nodded and continued his extremely important email checking.

“Maybe I should stir it,” I said.

“Nah, I got it,” he said, but still he didn’t move. “Go back to what you were doing. I’m making the oatmeal.”

I went back to the living room, but the sound of the oatmeal bubbling and possibly burning to the bottom of the pot nearly made me a crazy person. I know I’m already crazy, but this was making me straitjacket and padded cell crazy. When I returned to the kitchen to check on the oatmeal, he was still checking emails.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to make the oatmeal?” I asked.

“I’m just letting the extra water boil off,” he said.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I gave it a stir. It was just going to be a quick turn of the spoon, but once you start you can’t stop. I was stirring away like a mad woman when my husband kicked me out of the kitchen again. That didn’t matter much though because I had accomplished my mission. The oatmeal was well stirred and was fit for eating.

The craziest thing keeps happening to me every year. I keep getting older. I’ve been trying to figure out how to put an end to this, but outside of death I just can’t seem to come up with a solution. I was thinking that I might want to consider becoming a vampire, but I’m a bit squeamish around blood, and I don’t really like wearing black.

Last week I looked into building a time machine, because anyone who’s watched Doctor Who knows time travel is totally possible, but I can’t even seem to fix my sewing machine, how would I ever build a time machine. A time machine wouldn’t really be a solution anyway, because as I traveled backwards and forwards in time, I’d continue to age. I’d probably have to deal with some horrendous jet lag too. I’m pretty sure that every time you have jet lag you age a year.

After a lot of thought I decided that the best way to stop getting older was to just pretend it wasn’t happening. Denial solves everything, right? So I’ll tuck my gray hairs out of sight and when asked my age I’ll just tell people I’m twenty-nine. Someone once told me that I didn’t look a day over twenty-nine, but that was ten years ago.

Some people say that you should embrace your age. I don’t know what kind of drugs those people have been taking, but sane people like me will fight the advancing years like a zombie invasion.

Picture by Aih

When I was a kid I wanted to be an oceanographer, or a marine biologist, or the Bionic Woman. As an adult, I realized that becoming the Bionic Woman would be way too painful. A skydiving accident and a series of painful and costly surgeries wouldn’t really be worth bionic hearing or being able to run at 60 miles per hour.

The whole idea of being an oceanographer went out the window when someone told me that the job would require math. I struggle to figure out what my change should be when I buy something from the store. I failed Algebra II. I took a course in college called Math for Poets and nearly failed that. Math for Poets involved a lot of long division and adding, subtracting, and multiplying fractions. On my part, it also involved a lot of sweating during tests and a lot of meetings with the professor. What a nightmare of a class! Luckily, I passed and was officially declared a poet.

With all of my other childhood careers out of the running, the only thing left was marine biologist. Here is the thing about the ocean and marine life. On the surface it may seem all peaceful and nice, but the deeper you go the more freaky and frightening everything gets. Maybe you could say the same thing about life in general. Anyway, deep water sea life are the things that horror movies are made up of. Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a coward, so marine biologist had to be scratched off the list too.

Once I had to abandon all of these career choices I needed something else to fall back on, something stable that could make me piles of money. I settled on the only logical choice … writing.

Can you really trust your postal worker? I mean the one who is actually delivering your mail not the one that you buy stamps from at the post office. Today I was out in my front garden pulling weeds when the postman put some mail in my mailbox.

“How are you doing?” he said.

“Good. How are you?” I replied.

He smiled widely. “I’m great. I get to walk around in circles all day. It’s a great job.”

He seemed a bit too enthusiastic about delivering the mail to me. I wonder what he must be up to.

When I lived in Watford I read a story in the paper about a postal worker who was discovered going to the park every morning and opening people’s packages. What he liked he kept, and what he didn’t he threw away. I’m not accusing my postman of doing that, but I clearly remember handing him the envelope that contained the check to pay my internet bill. A few weeks later the internet company claims they never received my check. I wonder.

Now that I think about it, isn’t strange that I chose to pay my internet bill by putting a check in the mail? Who does that anymore?

I learned my lesson and paid my late bill online. I guess my postman was just trying to teach me that lesson as he dropped my envelope in the street while he was merrily walking in circles. I have no proof, but I’m trusting my gut on this one. From now on all my letters will go directly into the big blue box outside of the post office … expect for the water bill that I gave the postman this morning. Maybe I haven’t learned my lesson.

Now that we have a house, I’m looking forward to planting some food around it. No, I don’t mean I’m going to bury a cheeseburger in the backyard. A cheeseburger tree would be interesting and I’m sure it would make us the most popular house on the street, but I was thinking more along the lines of fruit and veggies.

We went to the garden festival the other day, where I nabbed a lychee tree. I just love lychees and they are quite expensive. If I can get a tree to produce some fruit that will be mighty exciting. The problem is that I have a bit of a brown thumb. I used to say that I walk into a room and the plants wither and die, but I’ve decided to change my thinking a bit. I mean, you are with you think, and if I think I have a green thumb, I’ll have a green thumb.

When I go to bed at night I imagine that my thumbs are a lovely shamrock shade of green, and that I just look at plants and they start growing, flowering, and producing fruit. My technique seems to be working with the Mona Lavender I have. It’s turning into a regular shrub. I should probably put it in a bigger pot or plant it outside.

All of my visualization and positive thinking has helped, but I think what helped the most is actually reading the instructions. If you look up how to care for a plant and simply follow the instructions, it’s actually quite easy. Who knew? All this time I thought plant people had mystical powers. Apparently, the only power they had was the ability to follow instructions. So I’ve set aside my old ways, the ways that made my kefir making go horribly wrong, and I’ve started following instructions … at least for this week.

There’s nothing like going for a nice walk on the beach at sunset. I just wish the sand wasn’t littered with so many razor sharp shells. Sometimes I feel like someone purposely came along and sprinkled them in my path. This person is really brilliant too, because somehow they managed to arrange the shells so that they would jab me just when I was in the midst of saying something particularly insightful.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about my purpose in life and these days I really think it’s …. awww. I hate shells,” I say doing a strange hopping chicken walk.

“You were talking about your purpose in life,” my husbands reminds me.

“Ouch … awwww …. jeez … These shells are ruining me.”

When we walk on the beach my husband likes to walk in the water. I’m not a big fan of getting my feet wet, so I walk right at the water’s edge. This seems to be the area where all of the sharpest shells gather. I keep telling myself that they’re toughening me up. It’s kind of like walking on hot coals except much more painful.

Every once in a while, a stray wave will wander up on the sand a little farther than the others getting the edge of my foot wet. I always respond by wailing and running away from it.

Other than the shells, water, and getting sand stuck between your toes, walking on the beach at sunset is wonderful. Maybe I should buy some water shoes.

Note: Aiming Low published an article I wrote about my wonderful packing and unpacking skill. Check it out here.

Our house hadn’t been lived in for a while before we bought it. That means that the light fixtures are all full of incandescent bulbs. When the closet light went out like a million years ago my husband suggested that we replace it with an LED light bulb. I was all like, “LED’s cost like $300 per bulb! No can do.”

My stepson wants to hang onto incandescent bulbs as long as possible because he has an unhealthy attachment to the past. He regularly tells us about how much he likes the incandescent bulbs. While my husband wants to tear through the house replacing all of the bulbs with new fancy expensive ones right away, I think it’s best to at least wait until bulbs burn out before we replace them.

We haven’t replaced the two bulbs in the house that have burned out already because of my difficulty committing LEDs. The last time we were in Home Depot, we spent at least twenty minutes looking at light bulbs. They are much more difficult to understand than it may seem.

You know how you buy an incandescent bulb and it says something like 60w on it as a measurement of brightness? Well the LED bulbs said things like 9W or 6W. That seems super dim to me. I like to read and if that’s as bright as these light bulbs get I might as well read by candle light. One bulb even had little plastic bars all around it like it was a prison for a tiny fairy. LEDs are probably so cheap to run because they don’t use electricity at all. Instead, they use fairy dust to create that pleasant glow.

Since today is Earth Day and I totally forgot to buy the Earth a gift, I’ve decided to reconsider the whole LED thing. I’ve been reading up on them so I know what I’m doing the next time I go light bulb shopping. Even though I’m used to spending a buck on a light bulb and LEDs cost $13, I’m going to buy a few and give them a try. They do use 75% less electricity and last 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs. After all, that will save me money and the precious time I’d normally spend changing light bulbs.

Note: I just made this joke up just now.
How many Bettisons does it take to change a light bulb?
None because we never get around to it.
Okay maybe that wasn’t funny, but it was funny in my head. This is why my stand-up career never went anywhere. That and my crippling stage fright.

Picture by anthonystoro.

We finally got around to cutting the grass. Yeah, that was last week really, but I’m only getting around to announcing this exciting news today.

We went to my favorite store, Home Depot, and stood in front of the lawn mowers for forever discussing which kind of mower to get. We were considering getting the cheapest gas one when my husband spied the manual push mowers. “Maybe we should get that,” he suggested.

I didn’t tell him this, but I was thinking the same thing. I actually researched these mowers online to find out if they really work. I research a lot of things online. Like yesterday I found out all about the angler fish, because this knowledge will really help me move ahead in life.

Frankly, we need all the exercise we can get. When you sit around writing on the interwebs all day, you need to get up off your squishy behind and push a lawn mower designed in the 1800s. So we got an old school push mower against the advice of the Home Depot employee who was hovering over us the entire time.

The best thing about having a manual lawn mower is watching those little blades spin. There’s something so satisfying about it. The worse thing is that it stops abruptly nearly impaling you through the chest with the handle every time even the smallest little stick gets stuck in it.

I’m sure my husband is loving the new purchase because anytime I notice that he is cutting the grass I get all jealous and have to do it too. He’s hardly doing any mowing at all. Yard work is fun, even in Florida heat.

Note: Here a joke courtesy of my father …
How do you say cut the grass in French?
Mow the lawn.

Note 2: That picture up there is an affiliate link in case you want to buy a manual mower of your own.

Did you know that I used to have a radio show? It was wonderful, of course. Isn’t everything I do just wonderful? Don’t answer that.

I was a college student with a plan. The plan was mainly to “borrow” CD’s from the radio station, copy them onto cassette tapes, and then return them. I’ll probably get arrested for admitting that, but I’m hoping the statute of limitations has run out. I mean I was in college like one thousand years ago. The only remaining evidence of my crime is this confession, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who did a lot worse in college. Are those enough justifications for you?

The show radio was called Juice Up with Lovelyn and Kate. I was Lovelyn and Kate was not Lovelyn. Every good radio show has to have a theme of some sort. Our theme was that we talked as little as possible on air. Do you want to know the name of the song we just played? Well, too bad because we’re going to play ten songs and maybe only mention one of them by name.

We also probably confused the audience because we played a variety of music. We weren’t an indie rock show, jazz show, or classic hip hop show. We were an everything we like show. Everyone from John Coltrane to Biz Markie to Liz Phair to Al Green were featured. No wonder Juice Up didn’t last long.

I mention all of this because the other day my husband told me that someone causally offered him a job as a radio DJ at one of his gigs. When I heard this I was incredibly jealous. “How come they didn’t offer me that job?” I asked, “I have experience. No one ever offers me radio jobs.”

“Maybe because you weren’t there,” my husband replied.

So all of this has got me thinking. Now that I have some space to record and a fancy USB microphone (here fancy means something cheap from Best Buy) maybe I’ll start a podcast.

You’re probably thinking that my podcast will eventually disappear into the ether just like the weekly Nebulous Mooch videos, but there was a reason for that. My laptop is too slow to edit videos … and my camera broke … and I didn’t really have any place to record them … and I started thinking that if I’m going to be putting my face online a lot I better start wearing makeup which I haven’t gotten around to purchasing because what do I really know about makeup (there should be some kind of punctuation there, but I’m not worrying about that. This is jazz, baby.) … and the dog that I don’t have yet ate my hard drive … and I’m full of excuses. Videos will be returning shortly though and they’ll maybe even be a podcast.

I witnessed a murder today. I’ve been keeping it to myself for the past five minutes because I was afraid for my own life. You know how it is. You go to the authorities to report a crime. The person who committed the crime finds out and next thing you know you wake up with a horse’s head in your bed and find out that someone’s boiled your bunny rabbit … or something like that.

It happened in the backyard. I went out to think because thinking is improved when you get some fresh air to your brain. That’s a very well known fact. Don’t question it. Anyway … I was trying really hard to think when a herd of birds came stampeding into the yard and landed in the tree. They promptly started yelling at each other which ruined any chance I had at getting some good thinking in. I don’t speak bird so I’m not sure what the argument was about, but I’m pretty sure they were just trying to distract me from the events that were about to unfold.

Here’s what I saw from my vantage point which was about two feet away from the scene of the crime. A Monarch butterfly floated gracefully into the yard and landed on a blade of grass. From what I could tell this butterfly was minding his own business. His only crime was flaunting a pair of very nice wings. A wasp, who as obviously jealous, promptly attacked him. I was horrified as the butterfly struggled to survive, but I did nothing. Yes, I just became one of those people. You know those people who witness a terrible crime, but don’t bother to call the police or do anything to intervene. In my defense, I wasn’t in the yard alone. There were those yelling birds and plenty of bees who went on gathering up nectar like nothing was happening.

When it was all over the dead butterfly lay in the grass and the wasp flew off to commit yet another crime. I took some pictures of the dead butterfly because isn’t the what you’re suppose to do? Later, I’ll make a chalk outline around the body for evidence before burying it next to the three baby squirrels I buried a few weeks ago.

Note: Every picture I took of that stinkin’ dead butterfly was out of focus. I think it’s because my hands were still shaking from the horror of what I had just witnessed.