2001-06-13 - 9:54 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: The Beatles' "Something", which has been playing all day and won't go away.

So, the gardening trauma continues. I'm calm now, but I'm copying my shrieky rant to Poindexter when the latest thing happened. The cable company was digging multiple holes around the neighborhood looking for a broken connection or something, and one of them was in the sidewalk right in front of the south garden.

---

Evie: I HATE CONSTRUCTION WORKERS!
Evie: I HATE THEM ALL!
Poindexter: Poor thing.
Evie: I WANT TO TAKE SOME POSSESSION OF THEIRS THAT THEY LOVE AND STOMP ON IT!
Poindexter: What did the bad men do?
Evie: They're digging in front of the south patch.
Evie: They're piling the bricks from the sidewalk on the GARDEN side of their hole, of course
Evie: A few fell over into the garden.
Evie: The dahlia is covered with brick dust.
Poindexter: Did you yell?
Evie: I went over and looked pointedly at what they were doing.
Evie: They thought I was trying to get through.
Evie: I said, "Don't kill my flowers!" as nicely as I could muster.
Poindexter: lol
Evie: Anyway, I'm more or less resigned at this point to coming home to ruined flowers.
Evie: I will write a letter and make them give us a free month of cable. That will cover the cost of the flowers.
Poindexter: I have the name of the contact for those guys. If there's a problem, I'll call and yell.
Evie: But it's just SO INCREDIBLY ANNOYING that NOBODY CARES about people's STUFF anymore.
Evie: They just trample all over everything.
Poindexter: Yep.
Evie: Y'know, there is a gas can on the west side.
Evie: They have the WHOLE YARD to put that gas can down. Where did they put it? RIGHT NEXT TO MY HERBS.
Evie: I mean, almost IN the GARDEN.
Poindexter: lol
Evie: HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN PEOPLE BE!??!!?!?!?!?!
Poindexter: they probably don't know that they're herbs.
Evie: I DON'T CARE!
Evie: IT'S OBVIOUS THAT IT'S SOMEBODY'S FUCKING GARDEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

---

Fuckers. I will never understand why they felt it was necessary to step on my flowers to do their job. I'm especially irritated because the guy managing the job (their supervisor, I guess) came by the house to tell us they'd be digging in the area, and Poindexter said, "You can do whatever you want, but if you hurt anything in the garden my wife'll kill you."

Long story short, one of my bright red verbena plants got covered with brick dust, and the dahlias are trampled to death. There's one live stem left where there were bunches. They may come back next year, since the tubers are still in the ground, but I'm going to make them give me money to put a yellow annual in that blank spot.

As if real life weren't traumatizing enough, I had a dream last night that the cable people completely removed my west garden and replaced it with a kind of metal door into the ground where their cables were. I was beyond furious that they hadn't even TOLD me so that I could have saved a few of the plants.

Can't I just plant my flowers and be done with it, like normal people? Have 'em die because it's too hot or I forgot to water 'em or something, rather than being stomped on, eaten, or thrown away? This is turning into a Train Wreck Garden Journal, and I didn't really think such a thing was in the realm of possibility.

On the positive side, everything else looks happy, and I got a couple of rose blooms on the bush Alicia gave me:

So. What else?

Well, we're going down to Florida over the Fourth to visit Poindexter's folks. Looks like we'll be docking in Miami. Lots of reading, eating, and sleeping on my horizon, except I'll be doing it on a boat in Miami. I think I will like Miami. We shall see. We tried to do this last year, but a propeller broke on the boat outside Fort Lauderdale.

In preparation for this, I'm gonna do the w*xing (edited to discourage all those freaking Google hits) thing, which is extraordinarily annoying right now because I have to wear long pants for two more weeks (three weeks' growth, remember) while it's 90 degrees and muggy. And on Friday I'm getting my first perm in nearly ...

God, is it seven years? Wow. Holy shit. I'm SO OLD. How can SEVEN YEARS have passed since then?! I'm in shock. By the way, today is the seventh anniversary of my first day at my job, which is also a shock.

But back to the girly stuff. My hair is mostly straight, but it has a slight kink in it that means when it's layered like it is now, it just looks messy. Not sexy tousled messy (although Poindexter might disagree), but mousy geeky I-am-a-wife-who-has-completely-stopped-caring-what-other-men-think messy. As I said to my brother this past weekend, it's hard to give a shit about your hair when your husband is always attacking you and mauling you with kisses and squeezes no matter what you look like.

(Side note: Women are always getting upset when their husband doesn't notice a new haircut. They shouldn't. What this means is that your husband's love and attraction for you isn't affected by superficial changes to your appearance. It also means that you need only make superficial changes for yourself, not to make your husband happy.)

To make it look not messy, I must use the curling iron on it or do the fancy blow-drying thing like the hairdresser does, which hurts my arms so I never do it. And in the muggy summers here, my hair can't hold the curl from the curling iron, so it goes back to just looking messy.

Thing about a perm is, I can wash and go. And, as is nearly universal (you always like what you don't have), I like curls better than what I've got. I'm not looking for the Nicole Kidman look, but something in between that and straight-with-a-slight-kink would be good.

So, between the wash-and-go hair and the w*xing I should be quite low-maintenance while we're in Florida. It'll be great. While Poindexter's getting his hair cut (his favorite hairdresser ever is in Boca Raton) I'm considering having my lashes dyed too so I don't have to wash mascara off my eyes either. All this complicated grooming ahead of time so that I don't have to do any on my vacation.

Poindexter just walked into the room and said,

"Bridget Hummus"

I asked him to repeat. Lipreading sideways is not optimal.

"Bridget Hummus," it still looked like.

So I told him what I thought he said, and he choked on his soda and had to pull himself together before he could tell me what he really said.

"Mission accomplished"

He was referring to the little home project he had set for himself this evening, namely hooking up the turntable in the guest bedroom, which has become our guest-slash-multimedia room given that our multimedia room got a tad, uh, damp last week.

My brother is due for a visit this weekend, and I'm sure he'll enjoy having the projector in his room. Not to mention the turntable.

I was pleased to discover that my brother has about four Rage albums, so I can listen to them all without having to give money to crazy activists. My brother said, "They're Harvard educated" and I said, "That doesn't mean they have any common sense."

Also, I went to the dentist today. No cavities, no nagging other than a suggestion that I spend more time brushing on my front bottom teeth.

And he says I need to start thinking about having my wisdom teeth removed in the next six months to a year.

Shit.

I'm scared. Please reassure me. I did find out that I don't have to have general anesthesia (that just scares the shit out of me for non-life-threatening procedures), but on the other hand, can I put up with an hour of the dentist cutting my gums open and yanking teeth out?

I'll probably go meet with the oral surgeon, get my panoramic x-rays, and talk about it and obsess for a while. Megan says her husband got the same advice -- think about it -- and kept putting it off and one day they just came in and were fine. I don't think I have that kind of room in my mouth, though. Argh.

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