Musings on a Rainy Friday Afternoon
I took the afternoon off, because I’d reached my 40-something hours at 7 am this morning, and my company understandably looks a little squinty-eyed at overtime for no good reason other than I can’t seem to ignore my phone burping out email and text and Slack notifications. Anyway, I was really excited to have a rainy Friday afternoon at home, but so far, all I’ve managed to do is cut my toenails and unenthusiastically scrub at a couple of spots on the carpet.
Speaking of carpet, I signed a work order this morning to get my carpet replaced in the bedrooms. It’s been 19 years since I moved into the house, and after countless foster dogs with various peeing and vomiting proclivities (and old dogs of my own), it is destroyed, despite Mason the Carpet Guy’s best efforts over the years. I asked Home Depot to quote me a middle-of-the-road product with a squishy pad, and got back a quote that made my sphincter clench. When did replacing something that is out of style in the first place get so expensive? I’d have been almost as well off just installing hard flooring, but I am too lazy to sweep and mop another set of rooms.
“Get a robot,” my brother-in-law tells me. “It’ll change your life.”
“I don’t want my life changed by a glorified vacuum cleaner,” I think. “I am going to be stubborn about this and instead bitch about how much my carpet costs and how I hate sweeping and mopping.” I’ve always maintained that buying a vaccuum is the least fun money I’ll ever spend, and it’s a hill I’ll die on.
But the house is a wreck. Wolfie manages to bring all sorts of things in and out of the house, including chewies that he’s been working on for a week and have gotten all muddy and disgusting. Those make their way INTO the house, and this morning, while I was retrieving a couple of baseballs in the yard from the kids next door and heaving them over the fence, I found one of my good spoons OUTSIDE the house in the grass. This incident has Woflie written all over it. He’s still a rambunctious, energetic puppy. The other day his rescue called me to see how he was doing and if he and Winnie were getting along OK. I told them, “Winston is exasperated with Wolfie’s tail hitting him in the face all the time, but they are mostly indifferent to each other.”
My company celebrates their admins almost the whole month of April, but during this Administrative Professionals’ Week, they outdid themselves. Flowers, wine, balloons, candy, cards, massages, free lunches and accolades from my leaders and team abounded. It was an embarrassment of riches. Spot Awards were given out freely, which can then be converted into Amazon gift cards, but did I buy a robot? No, I did not. But I did get a new tent for camping this summer, which I’ll call Omar, at the suggestion of my friend Bonne, who I think — at the suggestion of her youngest daughter — might be calling her camper “Bonne’s Bitch Barn.” Much fun is to be had in July with this kind of hilarity already in play. Stay tuned for the July camping blog, a tradition around here on shastakalin.com.
Melina is doing well. We are both starting to turn the page on her stay here and winding down the frenzy of the year. She’s FINALLY excited to be going home and is in the midst of the drudgery of the last few weeks of school, although her grades are still high. She told me that the Junior-level math she’s been doing the past year is what she already learned in middle school in France and that this year has been a bit of a break for her, because she’s been able to sleep in until 7:30 every morning. In France, she has school six days a week until 6 pm every night except Saturdays. “So this has really been a gap year for you,” I marvelled to her. “Oui,” she says, because she knows I like it when she speaks French.
We have a few things planned during her last month here, though. In early May, we have a couple of Australian college students (or grads, I’m not sure) staying with us for a few days. Chez Shasta has been home to a wealth of cosomopolitan experiences in 2023-24, and I count myself lucky to be able to host such amazing people. It’s truly been a spectacular season.
It’s funny how life can turn on a dime with one impulsive decision, like deciding to host an international high-school exchange student. Of course, I can’t really take credit for it; I genuinely believe God put Melina in my path, and thank Him; for once, I said “yes” instead of biting my nails in indecision before the entire opportunity passed me by. It’s a cliche, this talk of “seasons of life,” but the last 2.5 years of ol’ Shazzy’s life has been One For the Ages. Granted, it feels like I paid for it with several years of job-related and self-inflicted misery before that. COVID didn’t help. But with this Year of Melina, I feel refreshed and ready to see what the next year has in store. She’s truly changed the trajectory of my life. Nothing but blue skies ahead!
