Monthly Archives: November 2009

I got me a problem.

It’s not walking Tug and Cutter a couple of miles everyday where walking equals being at the ass end of a herky jerk tractor pull that, to date, has jacked up one knee, wrenched my back, pulled something or other in my other leg, yanked my bicep, and lengthened my right arm.

It’s not them sleeping in bed with us, even though I barely remember what Miss Carol feels like. Now, instead of cuddling with soft smoothness, I find myself draped in itchy, snoring dogs huffing and woofing hot dog breath in my face, chasing dream rabbits.

It’s not their incessantly manic barking at everybody and everything that moves.

It’s not having to share my apple and banana breakfast with them, even though they usually eat most of it and I go to work hungry.

It’s.

It’s that I’m getting wwaaaaaaay to attached to them. I’m lucky in that I get to come home for lunch everyday so I spend a LOT of time with Tug and Cutter and not much time with anybody else.

I work by myself so my interaction with other people is pretty limited. At the end of the day I go home to Cutter and Tug and then Miss Carol comes home and we have a cocktail and dinner and sleep and then it’s back to work again.

So this is my problem- the Friday after Thanksgiving we’re flying to Cozumel. Miss Carol’s youngest sister Julie is racing in an Ironman triathlon and we’re going to provide some kinda semi-drunken race support for her. Think beer and bikinis and the occasional shout out- GO JEWELS!

It should be and will be and promises to be a ton of fun.

And yet.

I can’t help but think that for five days I won’t be going home for lunch with the boys, won’t be sleeping and snoring in a big pile with with them, won’t be jerked and yanked, cursing, each morning and evening as we walk, won’t have them napping at my feet while I write this drivel, won’t have them barking for treats every time I get near the kitchen, won’t be seeing them impatiently waiting for me to do something.

I gots a problem.

So.

Aunt Ida finally left on Sunday. After 4 days of blowing, driving, horizontal rain, flooding and overall nastiness, she packed her bags and headed out of town.

I had been hoping to post each day so that ya’ll could feel with me the pain, the relentlessness that is one of these damn nor’easters, but that hope was squished on Wednesday when we lost Cox, which is phone, internet, and TV and then further smooshed on Thursday when we lost power, leaving us sitting in the dark listening to the howling wind and pounding rain til Saturday, taking cold showers and cooking on our little propane camp stove.

It’s fun camping in your house.

For a day tops.

Then it gets old.

Really fast.

But anyway, so Aunt Ida finally booked, leaving a little friend behind.

La Princessa is a 570 foot (that’s almost 2 football fields to you and me) container barge that was being towed from Puerto Rico to New Jersey when she and her tug parted company up off the Eastern Shore. Aunt Ida’s winds pushed her back southwards and up on our beach where she almost took out some condo’s and our fishing pier.

But she didn’t and now she sits hulking, wondering where Aunt Ida is.

Looks like the storm formally known as Hurricane Ida is coming for a visit. And like the annoying in-law whose visits you dread, it looks like she’s gonna stay awhile.

And that’s a problem.

Typically hurricanes are fast moving events. They ramp up and blow out in 24 hours or so.

This storm is supposed to be with us for almost FOUR DAYS. By tomorrow winds are forecast to be 35-45 knots with gusts to 55 and seas are supposed to be 13-16 feet. And stay that way, for DAYS.

Tonight when I walked Cutter and Tug it was raining horizontal and the wind was 25-35 with gusts to 40. You can lean into 40 knots and almost have it hold you up. Everything was swinging and swaying wildly, dancing in the wind and wet sand was already blowing and drifting across the beach road. The wind makes a weirdly eerie moaning sound blowing through the power lines that’s all but drowned out by the roar of the ocean.

It’s wildly beautiful, in its own way, but honestly? four days of this shit is going to rub raw and while I know living at the beach isn’t ALL bikini’s and beers, it’s like, c’mon, enough, already.

I don’t usually do book reviews or comment on books I read mostly because, really, who am I?

But The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an exception ’cause it’s, quite frankly, exceptional. And the fact that it won a Pulitzer doesn’t hurt my creds either.

It’s Junot Diaz’s first novel and I’m always drawn to first novels. I kinda remember reading reviews about it after it was released but then it was lost in the shifting muck of my memory. While out shopping last Christmas I ran across it at a bookstore and picked it up.

I’d like to say I hurried home and read it right away but I didn’t. Instead, it sat on a bookshelf for the better part of a year while I bought and read other books mostly best forgotten.

I finally got around to reading it last week and almost immediately wondered why I had waited so long, why I had kept pushing it to the bottom of the pile.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a high speed rollicking ride down the haunting tragicomedy highway of three generations of Oscar’s Santo Domingo (Dominguan?) family. Spanning the late thirties to the present it’s the story of his family’s inescapable familial fate.

While the story itself is kinda predictable the storytelling is anything but. Written with a raw energy and peppered with latino slang, Junot uses lengthy footnotes that are as entertaining as the story itself. The book is truly a literary event. (whoa, check me out, this is why I don’t review things- I start sounding like a turd)

Honestly though, it’s one of those books that you don’t want to ever end and even when it predictably winds down to it’s predictable ending it’s so well written that you’ll find yourself reading and re-reading the last couple of pages over and over and savoring the feelings they bring out.

It’s that damn good.