Herding Cats

While the saying is supposed to be descriptive of a ridiculous task, my husband and I were herding cats a week ago, the day the house went on the market. We thought that we could put all three cats in our hound dog's old crate which is quite large while people were looking at the house. That way we wouldn't have to worry about them bothering people or being let out or being closed up somewhere unknown. There is a sort of family joke that I always have a plan and my husband plays everything by ear. That turned out to be prophetic not comedic.

My husband caught all three cats individually and put them in the crate, but since we were supposed to be having three showings back to back, the cats would be locked up for approximately three hours. So my husband asked me if I could help him hold the cats in the crate while he put in their bedding and some food. I thought it was a pretty ridiculous order of events but since the cats were already in the crate I didn't have much choice. So my husband opened the door a crack which of course meant that cat number one came shooting out of their like a spit wad.

I bent down and stepped forward to grab the cat while simultaneously my husband stuck out his leg to prevent the cat from escaping. I tripped over his leg that I never saw, holding the cat in my arms, and crashed down on the cement floor of the basement. I broke two ribs, injured my elbow, hurt my knee, and let go of the cat. I am still in tremendous pain from the ribs but there isn't much that can be done for ribs. The only good outcome is that I haven't been able to help pack up our goods and even that probably isn't a good outcome since my husband's packing and labeling may take months if not longer to figure out.

An old family friend who spent his career as a gerontologist at Johns Hopkins has always said that the quickest way to true old age is to suffer a fall. 

Bigger Than Bigly

All the photos of the march against gun violence in DC show clearly that the march is bigger and better attended than Trump's inaugural parade. I sure hope someone points this out to him. Perhaps Sean Spicer should call him.

Reason For Caution

McMasters is gone and Bolton is in. Those may be the most frightening words about the current White House of any. It's bad enough that Trump wants all Fox analysts (note that analysts are opinion guys not news people), but Bolton is moronic and dangerous. He never met a country he didn't want to bomb and he thinks he is always right--a bad combination.

I am very sorry that other morons are causing issues near Carcassone. The walled city by itself is sort of cheesy recreation that isn't even authentic, but the area is delightful, including one of the best hotel-restaurants I have ever had the pleasure to enjoy. Hotel le Franc Putelat is lovely and the restaurant is outstanding.

Another Pair of Whackos

After the child psychologists moved out, we had some nice neighbors for a while, a young couple with a dog. But once they had a baby, they decided to move to a different neighborhood to have a bigger house and yard. When they sold their house, they actually apologized to us because they said they knew already from the husband's behavior during the house buying and selling phase that he was a jerk.

This assessment was proven true pretty quickly. The new neighbors had decided to remodel their kitchen to enlarge it. We didn't think much about that since it was their house, but when they took down part of the fence separating our two backyards, we asked them what was going on. They flat out told us that they didn't think we would mind since our yard was so big (.50 acre) and theirs was so small (.10 acre). We corrected their thinking and they replaced the fence but clearly did it grudgingly. Then over the next several months even more encroachments occurred. The husband climbed over the fence to screw a bird feeder into a tree in our yard. When I asked him what he was doing he said it gave him a better view of the birds from his front porch if it were in my tree. Then he hired a tree trimming company to cut the branches off my trees that overhung the fence. Now most of that is entirely legal at least to the property line but he still has to get permission to enter our yard to do the work. Being such a nice neighbor the way he got permission was to remind me that he was a lawyer and that he would sue me for all I had if I didn't give the permission. He tried to get away with leaving the cut limbs on my property but I fixed that right away.

The final straw for me was when he mowed down and dug up about six feet of the parking strip on my side of the property line because he didn't like the plants. Of course, the city is the actual owner of the parking strip, at least where we live, so there was very little recourse for me. Then he actually had the nerve to ask me why I didn't like him.

All of the above took place over six months so it felt like a constant assault. It was also happening while the other neighbor was being threatening and right before the financial meltdown. So I told my husband it was time to sell the white elephant and leave the neighborhood. That was one of the best decisions I ever made. 

My Other Neighbor

Perhaps I attract conflict. Certainly I know, and usually tell everyone, that I rub people the wrong way. Even my real estate agent, when he was trying to be funny, pointed to me to say that he could see me abusing my husband but my husband was a sweetheart. I found that curious because I certainly haven't done anything to harm the agent. In fact the last time he handled a sale I refused to let him use his own money to make up the difference between the asking price and the sale price which he wanted to do.

Since I have been detailing problems with one neighbor, I thought I would provide details of the problems with the other neighbor. We lived on a corner so our adjacent neighbors were to the west and to the north. The northern father was previously described. The first western neighbor was just as obnoxious but in a different way.

When we first moved in to the house, as I previously wrote, I was alone supervising the new kitchen. The house was pretty much a wreck but it did have electricity and water even though it did not have a kitchen. One afternoon, when I was down in the basement, I heard a very odd noise, a sharp crack, that didn't sound exactly like a gunshot but like something similar. Now this house was enormous, more than 10,000 square feet so wandering around empty rooms looking for what might have caused the noise was a job. But I found a newly broken window with a pellet or projectile from a small weapon in an upstairs bedroom. I looked at the hole in the window to see where it might have come from and the obvious culprit was in the house next door.

I went next door with the projectile in hand and knocked on the door. I asked the young woman who looked no older than 18 if she had any clue why someone from that house would have shot a hole in my window. She looked at me and replied immediately that it was definitely her younger brother using his mother's gun.  Okay--wtf--I asked her if either parent was home. She said they were having an "evil divorce" but that her father owned the house. I asked her if I could speak to him and she said  he wasn't there but he would come to my house as soon as he returned. He did show up the next day and asked me what I planned to do about the incident.

I had already called the Salt Lake City police department to report that someone had used a firearm to shoot out a window in a residential setting. The woman who came told me that I had destroyed any evidence because I had picked up the projectile and left without making a report. I did ask her if it was legal to shoot weapons in the city and she said that it wasn't but that there wasn't enough evidence to charge anyone.

So the father did pay to have the window replaced but when people asked me if I didn't prefer Utah to California I had to say that so far Utah was a much bigger danger to my health and welfare. In the short time I had been in the house I had been broken into, robbed, and shot at which hadn't happened at all in Sacramento

The more curious part of the window incident was that both parents in the acrimonious divorce were child psychologists. "Physician heal thyself." 

But that was not the end of problems with people living in that house. Stay tuned.

Fingers Crossed

If you have read the last two posts, you probably understand at least part of the reason my husband and I are ready to leave Utah. It's a weird place that makes people weird. Everyone is suspicious of their neighbors and everyone is ready to attack their neighbors.

Anyway, the house went on the market on Thursday, we got multiple offers including one that was above the asking price which we accepted. So unless there are weird results from either the home inspection or the credit report of the buyers (married couple, both doctors, student loans outstanding but good incomes), the house is sold and we are on track to leave Utah.

Utah is a strange place. The dominant culture doesn't abide dissent or questions. But here in Salt Lake City, there is a strong and vibrant gay community, interesting neighborhoods, many different immigrant communities some as refugees and some as converts to the dominant religion. But the dominant religion controls the city and the state. As the old apothegm describes, "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton had it right. Regardless of what one's neighborhood is like in Salt Lake City, and mine is liberal and tolerant, one's life will be controlled by the church. Decisions aren't made without the approval of the church.

Most people who are strong, faithful Mormons, live outside the city that they consider a citadel of sin. The state has been gerrymandered to prevent the liberal faction in Salt Lake City from having any voice at all except in city government and even that is closely watched by the church.

The reasons Wallace Stegner called Utah the only fascist state in the country before WWII still prevail.  

More Funny Memories

When I moved to our first house in Salt Lake City, I came alone. We had kids still in school in the middle of a school year, and my husband was integral to the move of the company he had joined. Our new next door neighbor's wife, among others, introduced herself, told me she and her husband owned the house just across the alley above the house that led to our garage. She seemed a little manic but since we had purchased a 10,000 square foot white elephant, I didn't have time to socialize.

Eventually, after supervising the reconstruction and installation of a kitchen in what had been a grand mansion, my husband and sons came to Utah and we were all invited for what the invitation said was snacks and drinks. The new neighbors had two very young children, one three and one about 18 months. The brief encounter was  almost the only face to face encounter I had with any of the four people for several years but not the only impact they had on my life.

Shortly after our friendly encounter, police cars came in the middle of the night to the house across the alley. They hauled off the husband and the next day we found out that the husband had been accused of spousal abuse by his wife who told me in a brief encounter that he had been drunk and belligerent and socked her. She moved herself and the children out of the house while he was in jail and soon he moved back in because she didn't press any charges.

So life went on and he didn't have his children but before anyone knew anything they were back. She liked them when they were kittens but she didn't like them much when they became cats so she returned the children to the man she had accused of abuse. After that point the kids bounced around between the two houses but as far as we could tell, no one had a plan or an idea about how to bring up two children.

When they were at their father's house the two were simply incorrigible. One day in early summer, the son and daughter aged approximately 6 and 8, threw bushels of ripe apricots at my house and garage leaving a sticky, pulpy mess. As their house was somewhat uphill of my own I saw them quite clearly and went out on my back porch to tell them they were idiots if they thought I couldn't see what they were doing. Then I went to their house to tell their father that I expected that the duo would come and clean up every single lump of apricot pulp on our property.

From that day it became almost an all out war and as the children grew older they grew more dangerous. The daughter chose to live with the mother more or less full time while the son came to live with his father. One house guest of ours caught the son doing a peeping tom act while she was in the shower. The son from the age of about 12 enjoyed smoking on his back porch and throwing the lit butts over the fence into our yard. I always picked up every single butt and put all of them outside their back shed. Then the son took to throwing black cat firecrackers at our dogs. Besides the cruelty of that scenario, the black cat firecrackers were illegal where we lived so that time I called the police. Although the boy went inside when he saw the police car, the odor of firecrackers was strong and the debris in the yard bolstered my testimony. But at the time I was flying my flag upside down and the police officers (the city sent six) told me I had asked for all the trouble. When the boy was in high school he encouraged his friends to throw trash and other refuse in our yard.

So when the father tried to get me arrested for "threatening" him and his son, even accusing me of spying on them with binoculars (which were in fact the magnifying lenses I use occasionally for threading needles and doing very close work on my quilts--completely useless for anything further away than three to five inches). I told the police officer that he needed to be very careful, that the father had been a college football player at Syracuse who had been arrested for spousal abuse and had his son taken at one point for child abuse charges. I told  him that it seemed unlikely to me that anyone would find the accusations credible since I am only 5'4" and at the time was quite thin and even the son was much taller and heavier than I will ever be. The officer went away without any further effort to charge me.

I saw both father and son quite recently at a grocery store. They looked more disheveled and clueless than ever. 

Funny Memories

We had dinner with some people we know on Sunday and talking to them brought back memories of odd, ridiculous or infuriating stuff that happened here in Utah. The ones I will share now have to do with the city zoning people.

Even though Utah is the second dryest state, no one here pays much attention or plans for the dry conditions. Everyone wants a lush green lawn and bountiful plants and flowers and that includes the city. When we first moved here there were prohibitions against xeriscaping the parking strip but some people started to complain about the waste of water so the city modified the rules to read that 30% of the parking strip had to be vegetation, not necessarily grass as it once was. The city relies on neighbors to inform on their neighbors if they don't like what your parking strip looks like and someone reported my son's strip to the inspectors. He asked me to be there when he met them after he got the notice that he wasn't in compliance. We had measured the strip for square footage, figured out what 30% would be given the plants' natural spread, and transplanted a variety of plants from my yard that I knew would do well with very little upkeep like daylilies and lavender.

The inspectors came out and right away they told us there wasn't enough vegetation. We showed them the statute which they claimed to know already, told them that we knew that we had planted 30% of the strip at which point the male of the crew said, "How do you know that?"

My son answered that it was elementary math and the guy got really huffy, and said, "Well, I don't like how it looks so you will have to change it". My son, the philosophy major, said that the language of the statute was pretty clear and needed to be objective rather than subjective. The city man said, "What's that mean?" When my son told him he said, "I didn't come here to be insulted." My son said his intent was not to insult but to ascertain just how the judgments were made. The guy got even redder and asked to see receipts for the plants that were in the ground. For what reason he wouldn't say and when we told him that we had done what all gardeners do by sharing our plants he told us that would never do--that we had to have receipts from a garden store or a statement from a garden store that we had purchased the plants. Of course I had nothing of the kind since my plants were multi-generations old, but I did have a decent relationship with some people down at the largest nursery in town. The pair of morons from the city said they would be back the next day and if I didn't have what was requested, they would begin levying fines against my son.

I went home and did two things. The first was I wrote an email to my city council person telling him pretty much what I laid out above and also telling him that if he didn't rein in his minions, I was going to send a letter to the editor. Then I went down to Western Gardens with a list of the plants I had transplanted to get some documentation. As I knew they would, they wrote a pretty complete rundown of how big the plants got at maturity, what their lateral spread was, how quickly they propagated, and finally attested to the fact that I had purchased the original plants there even though it was more than twenty years in the past.

The pair came by my son's house the next day still in very bad moods, sure that we were making fun of them in our copious free time, and took my documentation with far less than natural grace and good will. Then they told my son that they would drive by every year to make sure that the plants were growing as promised and that if not, the fines would be retroactive.

Now I am not saying that this could only happen in Salt Lake City, but it is the sort of stuff that goes on all the time here so it leaves a bad taste behind. 

Rewarding Bad Behavior

Donald Trump didn't even have the grace to fire Rex Tillerson in person. He sent out a tweet. This is not a surprise since tweeting is Trump's go to modus operandi but his cowardly streak is a mile wide and his manners are appalling. Then he moves Mike Pompeo to Secretary of State, a position for which he is probably even less qualified than Tillerson was, and nominates Gina Haspel to be director of CIA. Everyone is so excited that she will be the first woman director but the reason Trump likes her is that she likes to torture people. She ran the black ops detention center in Thailand where CIA tortured people early in the Bush years. To make that even more special, she was responsible for destroying the evidence when investigations about the torture started, and she did that with no qualms and without ever admitting her culpability or apologizing.

So when your kid steals from the store the thing to do is to pat her on the head and tell her how proud you are, maybe even raise her allowance. That's how to get ahead in this world.

And just in case you missed the addendum to the Tillerson firing--when Tillerson's top deputy was asked questions this morning, he told the truth about how it had transpired so Trump fired him too.

"Little by little, and imperceptibly..."

When my middle son was about 4 or 5, his favorite book was one called The Day Willie Wasn't. It was a strange story about a little boy who was chubby and whose cousin teased him unmercifully because of that. He decides to lose weight to get back at her and the title of this entry comes from that book.

That's sort of how I feel about working on the Baltimore Album quilt. I have finished approximately one-half of the appliqued borders. I have been working on this quilt for 15 months already, with some side trips to make baby quilts, and some real trips to SF, NYC, Scotland, Italy, etc. So I am definitely making progress but it does seem imperceptible at times.

 So the upper picture is the first half of the right side of the top with the blue vase as the midpoint. The design isn't symmetrical so the other half is not exactly the same but it is similar. The second picture is the first half of the left side.

This final picture is of the long ago completed first border with the corners as shown above. The top is pretty big so we have some problems getting everything in the picture at once but these show the general idea. Once the applique is complete, it still needs one final dogtooth border, then it needs to be embroidered and layered and quilted. That is obviously going to be in Pennsylvania, because we are just short timers here now. I knew this was going to be a long term project, but "little by little, and imperceptibly."