Life's a Bowl of Chairies

Quick update from the Taj before Tank and I head back to the coast tomorrow.

The Smell:  gone!  The Pest Dude's suggestion to run a box fan at the access door under the house worked like a charm.  So did the cheap box fan I bought years ago at Fred's and that we have severely abused.  The latest indignity was being run outside during a thunderstorm to get Possum Stank out from under the house. 

Projects:  none!  Well, that's not entirely true.  I did pick up a neat chair and repainted it.  My sister in law is the handiest human being in the world and she spotted this chair at a local junk store and texted me a picture.  When I said I liked it, she picked it up for me and this weekend, I finally got it from her and slapped some paint on it.  I thought it did pretty well:

Before

After

I also found this fun old phone at a Mayberry antique store.  At $50 it was a splurge, but a good bit cheaper than the ones I had found on ebay.  Shawn and I had thought it would be nice to have a phone around the same vintage as the house and put it on the built-in telephone table in the hallway.  This one STILL WORKS!  Tank had fun playing with the rotary dial...probably the only one he'll ever see!

"Pennsylvania 6500, please!"

It's pretty late now and Tank's been waking up early the last few days, so I am barely dragging around. 

Hopefully the next Taj trip will see a bit more progress than just a painted chair!

Give Up The Funk*

Oh, Lordy.  Where to start?

Since my last post, I've spent some time navel-gazing and coming to terms with the definitive end of my relationship with my father.  As long as we were both kicking around this old world, the possibility existed that one day we might come to some sort of cessation of hostilities.  With that option gone, there were some things I needed to work through.  So, I took a break from things for a while and dealt with all that stuff and now I'm feeling more like myself.  I'll leave you to decide whether that's a good thing or not.

Today was the annual training/meeting/get-together for the staff of the adoption agency where I work part-time.  The meeting was about 2.5 hours from Gilligan's Island and about 45 minutes from the Taj MaHell, so Tank and I drove up yesterday and spent the night.

But it wasn't quite as simple as that.  Oh, but no.

As soon as I got out of the car at the Taj, I smelled it.  That unmistakable smell of "somethin' dead."  Urgh.  The cloying scent of rotting animal flesh was everywhere.  Tank and I investigated and determined the general area of the crawlspace under the Taj where something had met its end.  I couldn't actually see anything and there was NO WAY I was going to crawl under there.  My unbelievably wonderful in-laws came over and helped try to locate the carcass, but we still couldn't see anything.  I went to bed last night in a stinky house and slept fitfully, waking up every hour or so to remember I once heard that your sense of smell is directly linked to your sense of taste...so that anything you smell has crossed your tastebuds for processing.  All night long, then, I was tasting something dead.  Yum.

This morning, I was up before the sun, getting ready to teach a couple of short sessions at our meeting ( and feeling really unprepared and anxious).  Just when I was about to wake Tank up to take him to Farm Maven's for the day, I realized I'd locked my keys in the Jeep.  OHMYFREAKINSTARS.

Frantic phone calls ensued:
To Shawn:  couldn't get him to answer
To the Farm Maven:  she sent Diamond Dave to come get Tank but didn't have a spare automobile for me to take to the training
To the City of Mayberry Police: whose non-emergency line was unmanned for another hour
To My Inlaws:  who brought me a car and who also discussed the issue with a local City of Mayberry police officer...and that officer later came to the house, unlocked the Jeep and stowed the keys away for me
To the Farm Maven: again and again, because I got lost on the way to the meeting and had to get her to Map Quest my sorry butt

By the end of the day, I'd managed to teach the sessions, had received several texts and photos from the Farm Maven documenting Tank's Excellent Farm Adventures, had an unlocked Jeep (at no charge!), and had returned Papa's car, with a full tank of gas and my undying devotion. 

In the meantime, Shawn had been working hard from Gilligan's Island.  He called a  Mayberry pest company who told him they did not do dead animal removals, but after hearing that I was here alone with a little one, the Very Nice Pest Dude came out, crawled under the extremely stinky house and emerged with one very large, very dead possum.  Well worth the $90 I had to pay him.

And now I'm just sitting in the den, with approximately 900 scented candles burning (now it smells like a flower pooped out a dead animal, but you take what you can get).  Tank is snoozing peacefully in his bed, worn out from a day of hard play with his cousins.  My Jeep key is safely in my pocket and I don't have to worry about power point presentations or flop sweat again for a while.

All in all, this day served as another reminder that life in Mayberry definitely has its advantages.

Yes, I have had some really bad times with some of the members of my original family.  But I am so lucky to have the family that I do have, and so grateful that my husband's family has been so welcoming, so kind and supportive...and so delightfully insane!

Wow.  What a rotten, smelly, wonderful day!


(*we don't call the Taj run-down and funky for nothing!)

Confession is Good for the Soul

A long time ago...a REALLY long time ago...I was a kid.  I grew up in a big old farmhouse out in the country, near a small town.  In the summer, it was Georgia-hot; my sister and I would turn our pillows to catch that blessed cool spot on the side we hadn't been lying on.  A hassock fan sat on the floor between our twin beds, doing little more than stirring the muggy air around and confusing the mosquitoes.  In the winter, the little electric and gas space heaters tried valiantly, but couldn't keep up with the drafty windows and high ceilings.  I remember running like the devil from one marginally heated room to another, my breath frosting in the air. 

It was wonderful.

My mother had the rare gift of being a phenomenal mother to little kids.  She was gentle and sweet and had this great, throaty chuckle when something struck her as funny.  She'd laugh and then say, "You won't do!"  Mama let my sister the Farm Maven and me trash the attic upstairs.  Our house was supposed to be a two-story, but the downstairs was so big that three generations of our family had not felt the need to finish the upper story, so it was one huge storage space.  In the attic, the Farm Maven and I acted out any fantasy that came to mind.  Sometimes, we ran an orphanage and lined our dolls' beds up in a quasi-institutional fashion.  Other days the same dolls were students in our school.  We were a huge family, she the mother, I the father and about 15 dolls our offspring.  We played church, Christmas, diner and headed west in a covered wagon.  Mama never made us clean up the attic, so we could play all day and then pick up where we left off the next morning.

I had room to roam on our large farm and animals to take the place of the neighborhood kids other children my age were playing with.  The Farm Maven read every book in the rather extensive family library, sitting in the cool living room in the summer, or enjoying a lazy swing on the front porch, one foot keeping the motion going while the bees hummed and the characters in her novel came alive.

I grew up (at least chronologically) and changes began creeping in.  My mother's hair, gray since she was a young woman, turned nearly white.  My sister went to college.  Our older brother married poorly, divorced and married poorly again.  Through all the ebbs and flows of our lives, my mother was the constant; I describe her as the sun that kept all our planets in their proper orbits.

Out of the three of us kids, I was the one who just couldn't stay put.  My sister joked that she had to stop writing my address in ink, since I had used up two pages in her last address book.  I once counted 22 moves in 15 years...a personal record.  I stayed within Georgia, but other than that, I liked to keep moving.  I kept my clothes, my CDs, favorite chairs and a bed with me, but my little treasures, things to save but not things you need every day, stayed at the old home place.  They were safe there, the old love letters and high school awards.  My first wedding dress, a plaster bust of Elvis that annoyed the crap out of Mama, a coin collection, letters from my decades-long pen pal in Australia...all of them were kept safe under the watchful eye of Mama.

And then she died.

She complained of pain, unusual for my normally stoic mother.  She went for tests that were negative, scans that didn't show anything.  More tests, more scans.  And then they told us that she had leukemia, an aggressive form.  The leukemia had no intention of letting her survive, but it had an ally in her:  Mama just quit.  Ten days after her diagnosis, she died.

To pick up again with the sun and planets analogy, we all spun out of our orbits.  Nothing made sense anymore.  Who were we, without her?  She was the rock, the safe place; she always knew the right hostess gift and the appropriate outfit for any occasion.

How do you navigate the world without a compass?

We tried, each in our own ways.  The Farm Maven and I took on much of Mama's work in the house and with Daddy.  We fed him, cleaned the now-unused rooms, washed his clothes and tried to cajole a smile from him.  I paid his bills, cut his grass and took his cars for oil changes and service.  My brother and sister in law for the most part laid low in their trailer behind the home place and lived their own lives.

Four and a half years later, my father had two heart surgeries.  We took turns sitting at the hospital in Atlanta, an hour and a half from the Farm Maven and my brother's homes and five hours from mine.  By this time, Tank was 3 months old; the Farm Maven was home-schooling a 15 year old, a 12 year old and a 4 year old.

He was in the hospital and two rehab facilities for five months.  Over that time, the veneer that we had known as our father stripped away.  He became a mean, selfish, nasty man who lashed out at everyone, except his new girlfriend (there had been one before, right after Mama's death, but she didn't last). 

He would glare at us, his children, and demand to know when his girlfriend would return.  "That's who I want to see!" he would growl.  For my part, I didn't want to be there any more than he wanted me there.  I had a baby that needed me and whose face lit up when I returned.  I had carefully planned my life so that I could stay home with my little one, only to find myself sitting in a hospital waiting room or listening to the insane rants of a sick and bitter old man.

It didn't help that his girlfriend was also his attorney.  It also didn't help that they had engaged in an affair when we were little kids.

I would sit, looking at my father's face, contorted in hatred for me and I would think, "Mother fucker...I ought to slap you out of that bed."  But I'd just sit, texting desperately to Shawn or anxiously awaiting the next photo of Tank that the Farm Maven would send while she babysat him.

When the scond rehab facility decided he could no longer stay there (purely coincidence that his insurance quit covering his stay), a decision had to be made.  Because he wouldn't eat, he had a feeding tube.  Because he refused physical therapy, he could still barely walk and couldn't manage basic self-care skills.  The Maven and I thought it was best for him to go to another rehab facility.  I believed that if he could improve at all, it would only happen if going home was the goal.  My brother advocated that he go directly home.  Knowing that we, with our children, Maven's home-schooling and my life 200 miles away, couldn't take care of him, we said he needed another rehab stint.  My brother said no and he and his wife stated that they would move in with him for one week and get him back on his feet. 

My father hated us all by that point, but he had always hated my brother and his wife most of all.  Both my brother, the redneck devil (Beelzebubba for short) and his wife, the Mighty Hermaphrodite were hoarders and had managed to completely trash their home, barn and numerous outbuildings.  My father did not want them in his family home and missed no opportunity to declare this, loudly.

So, I sighed and volunteered to move in with Daddy for two weeks.  To my surprise, he refused.  My brother's anti-rehab facility stance had made him a hero in Daddy's eyes and further vilified my sister and me.  So, in April 2009, Beelzebubba, the Mighty Hermaphrodite and Daddy limped into a big old house with no central heat and air, closed the door behind them and quickly pushed the Farm Maven and me out of their circle.

I sent photos and videos of Tank to my father.  I sent Christmas cards.  I received one envelope...it was a letter informing me I was no longer my father's power of attorney.

Last Wednesday, my father died.

He died at home, peacefully according to his hospice care coordinator, who called my sister a day later.  She said she had asked him if he wanted her to call us, so he could speak to us before he died.  He said no.

He died as he lived, angry and selfish. 

He missed the beautiful life he could have had, as a grandfather to four amazing children.  Four pure hearts stood ready to love him, but he wanted a 70-year-old, chain-smoking home wrecker instead.  He missed all the good things he could have enjoyed in his final years.

My Mama dated him for five years and they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary the week before she died.

She was not mentioned in his obituary.  The girlfriend was.

People don't know what to say to me.  "I'm sorry to hear about your father," they say.  Then there is an awkward pause.

I'm sorry, too.  I'm sorry he wasn't a good husband, a good father, a good man.  I'm sorry my mother was treated so poorly by a man who never--not even on his best day--deserved her.

I'm sorry that the things I inherited from him include his penchant for snide and cutting remarks.  Beelzebubba and Hermaphrodite will inherit everything else.  Including my wedding dress, my love letters and Elvis.

They say living well is the best revenge.  I plan to prove that.  Tonight, I tucked Tank into his bed and sang "Itsy Bitsy Spider" the requisite four hundred million times.  I told him for about the bazillionth time today that I love him.  I marveled at his innocent love for me, the chubby arms around my neck, the slobbery kisses and the "Wuv oo". 

How rich I truly am.


How staggeringly, embarrassingly wealthy.

Still Kickin...

So, it's been a while since I posted last.  The reason is, this blog is named the Taj MaHell because it's allegedly about the renovation process on the Taj.  And I haven't been to the Taj in nearly two months.  I KNOW!!  How did that happen?!?

Obviously, there've been no improvements made to the Taj since Christmas, although Shawn did pressure-wash the exterior on a quick trip we made.  So, every time I'd think about writing a post, I realized I had a big old nothin' to say.

Not that things have been quiet here.  Oh, by no means!  Once we got home to Gilligan's Island and rested a few days, Shawn and I both began squinting our eyes and tilting our heads to one side and thinking that the Gilligan house was beginning to look tired.  Time to whip out the paint brushes!

The office/third bedroom was the first project.  That's the only room we had never painted since moving in nearly 8 years ago.  And the funny thing is, we both HATED the paint in there--guess we just hated the idea of repainting more.  The room was a dark brown and in the summer, the combination of heat rising to the second story and sunlight coming in the windows and hitting that dark brown paint made it almost unbearable in there.  We just never could decide what color to paint it, so the project stayed on the back burner.  And then we took us a little trip to Lowe's and I found a color called Leaf Bud.  Actually, I found 3 colors and we got samples of each...Leaf Bud was the clear winner.  Side note: that was our first time using the little sample paints and we will be using them from now on!  I forgot we didn't have any photos of the office before (that's how bad I hated the paint!), but here's one of the primer going on:

We primed everything, since the trim was off-white and we were changing that to pure white.  Then, we painted on the samples and made our choice.  In the store, we both agreed on River Reed, the color on the right.  On the wall, we both disliked it intensely.  Leaf Bud is in the middle and the paint on the left is called  Limish.  All of them are Valspar colors.  So, Leaf Bud won and we got to painting.

Here is Shawn, finishing up the paint:

Not everybody's cuppa tea, but we love the way it turned out.  After the wall paint dried, I repainted the trim and changed the old off-white electrical outlets and switches to bright white.  We went with Decora switches, the wide toggle-type light switches and matching rectangular, flat-faced outets for an updated look.

  All in all, I think it turned out well!

And then we started squinting our eyes and turning our heads to one side when we looked at the powder room downstairs.  More on that later...

I sincerely apologize for this one.

There.  Now that we've gotten that out of the way.

A little tale from my checkered past has been getting re-told lately, due to a strange conversation I had with a friend, who then passed along my story and...well, word gets around.

I hadn't thought of this in years, since it happened a couple of careers ago and pre-Tank.  My memories from pre-Tank days are foggy at best.  I blame 3 1/2 years of sleep deprivation.

Anyway, the second worst job I ever had was working for the licensing entity of the state.  Professional licenses of all types were governed by this agency and there were a handful of police officers, including myself, who investigated alleged malfeasance, wrongdoing and general butt-headedness on the part of licensed peeps.

So.  I worked on one side of things and on the other side of the fence were other licenses, like hair salons and funeral homes.  I didn't work funeral homes because I DON'T *DO* DEAD PEOPLE. 

One day, I am happily toodling around and pretending to work when I get a call on the radio.  There is an emergency that needs to be dealt with right away aaaaand it's at a funeral home.  Oh, snap.

The gist of the complaint was this:  Dude dies.   Family (which lives out of state) pays funeral home for funeral service and cremation.  Funeral goes off without a hitch but family never receives ashes.  Family calls funeral home, but gets the runaround.  Two months go by and no ashes.  Family is rightfully p-o'ed.  Family wants ashes NOW.  The radio call goes on to say that the funeral home insists the deceased's ashes are at their facility, but "we can't take their word for that."

Okay, no problem.  All I have to do is go to the funeral home and tell them to get the ashes to the guy's family and quit messing around.  And then I hit the first snag.  Turns out the funeral home was having some financial difficulties and they wrote a bad check to the crematorium, which then refused to cremate any more of their stiffs.  Instead of just telling the family this, the funeral home dodged their calls.  "So the body was never cremated?" I ask.  No, it was not.  "Where is he now?"  "In the refrigerated room in back."  "Hang on a sec," I say, "I'll be right back."

And here's where I might start to offend people.  Dead Dude is African-American.  As I was waiting to talk to the funeral director, I noticed a board with recent and upcoming funerals on it.  By my count, there are FIVE African-American male bodies on the premises, not including the one I am looking for.  I zip out to the car and call in on the radio, explain the situation.  I end with, "So how will I know that the body they show me is really him?"  The response:  We'll just have to take their word for it.  To which I replied something about oh, we can't take their word that he's even HERE, but they can show me a random body and I can take their word it's HIM?!  I am told that this is, indeed, what I must do.  I must also advise the funeral director that the State is seizing control of the deceased's remains effective immediately and they are not to do anything further without our blessing.

So, I trudge back in to the funeral home.  The funeral director leads me back through this Byzantine crumbly old mansion that has seen better days.  Room after room we pass, some with bodies laid out, others dark, cockroaches darting off here and there.  We are heading to the refrigerated room to see Dude.

Did I mention I DON'T DO DEAD PEOPLE?!  Just checking.

We finally make it back to the room, which I was expecting to be like the city morgues on TV.  "Refrigerated room" in this case actually meant "enclosed former porch with a window A/C running full bore."  Did I mention it was July and the average high temperature in July is a hot and sticky 100?

Dude was lying on his back on a table in the "refrigerated room".  He was naked.  Apparently, you can rent a coffin AND an outfit for the funeral and then those are whisked away for the next guy. 

Luckily for me (or unluckily, depending how you look at it), the family had printed a funeral program with Dude's photo on the front.  Given a blurry, black and white and not very recent photo to work with, plus a handy toe tag, I was able to identify the body to my satisfaction. (No disrespect here, but I had already decided that if I saw a body that looked like Pamela Anderson, I was going to say it was him and get the hell out of Dodge.) 

After making the official ID of the body, I took a severe tone with the funeral director and informed him that the State was, effective immediately, seizing control of the remains of Dead Dude and that he was hereby proHIBited (that's how I said it) from interfering in any way with the return of the remains to the family.

And that's when Funeral Guy looked me dead in the eye and with a straight face said, "So, are you gonna take him with you now?"

Professionalism flew out the window and I sputtered, "WHAT?!  No...HAYUL no!  Mister, I am in a Chevy MALIBU.  What am I supposed to do, strap this poor nekkid man to the top like a surf board and ride through downtown?!"

In the end, I convinced him to keep the body and not bother it until a properly outfitted van could come and remove Dude for more ethical and sympathetic treatment of his earthly remains.

And a short while later, I quit that job.

Some things just ain't worth the money.

MIA No More

It's been a while since I've dropped in with news of the Taj.  I was kidnapped by a crazed toddler who now refuses to take an afternoon nap and is slowly driving me insane.  Okay, that's not entirely true. 

He's not doing it slowly.

Anyway, as I sob with devastation at the loss of the Sacred Afternoon Nap, I thought I'd check in.

We haven't been to the Taj since my last post.  We got back to Gilligan's Island and got wrapped up in work and little home repairs we'd ignored in the last big push to move in to the Taj for Christmas.  I hadn't realized how much I'd let slide as far as work goes, so I had a lot of catching up to do there.  And here at the Gilligan, we'd both brushed aside little annoyances like burnt out lightbulbs over the sink and a dryer vent that wasn't properly sealed.  Little stuff, but now that we've tackled some of the To Do list, we both are feeling slightly less slothful.  I mean, it's not like I wasn't busy, but trying to teach Tank to say, "Holy crap!" can only fill so many hours.

But back to the Taj...
I'll tell you one funny thing I've found learned, which is that the comparison between the Taj and the Gilligan houses has gone ass over teakettle lately.  When we first bought the Taj, we looked at it as a very cheap house that we could try to renovate inexpensively.  We love our sweet little Cape Cod on the Gilligan and couldn't imagine that hulking monster in Mayberry ever being worth more than a long weekend trip here and there.  But once we started working on it, we got sucked in.  Little by little, we started making choices based on what we REALLY wanted, instead of what we could find cheap or used.  And as the balance slowly tilted, another weird thing happened:  we started seeing a LOT of projects in the Gilligan house.  Now we're ready to repaint and reimagine THIS house, too.

Thanks for nothing, Taj MaHell.


So, anyway, I'm plotting a trip to Mayberry either this weekend or next.  Tank and I will definitely go, along with Marly the Geriatric Wiener Dog.  Shawn may or may not go, depending on his work schedule.  Who knows?  I might go buck wild and start another project while I'm there.  The den needs painting and we still need a fridge...

Holy crap.

...and then we all drowned in snot

Ah, the holidays.  Twinkling lights, festive foods, songs of cheer...

...and wads of germs.

We left the Taj on December 28th, loaded down with thoughtful gifts and at least a billion microscopic disease-bearing stowaways.  Shawn and Tank had runny noses over Christmas, but nothing serious and I had managed to avoid the whole mess, so we were feeling pretty lucky.  Luck ran out, though, and I got sick by the 29th.  Figuring we were in for a pretty crappy New Year's Eve anyway, we loaded the car and drove BACK to the Taj, arriving late Friday evening.

In the wee hours Friday night, Tank awoke us with pitiful cries and when I picked him up, he was BLAZING with fever.  Welcome, Croup!  Won't you come in and render our lives a living hell for a few days?!  Oh, and throw in a cold+sinus infection+ear infection for me, while you're at it.

Sigh.

Next year, let's just mail the gifts and stay home with hand sanitizer and bleach.  Please.

Well, anyway, Tank appears to be on the mend and I am hopeful that tomorrow I will finally feel human again.

But here let me make a heartfelt plea to all of you who feel compelled to show up at work with the flu, or sneeze all over the Kroger shopping cart handle, or drag feverish kids all over creation because BYGAWDYOUDON'TWANTTOMISSYOURGOODTIME....

Keep your sick ayce at the house.

Seriously.

We'll get together for the 4th of July, or some other non-cold-and-flu-season holiday.

Sincerely,
She of the Sherbet Colored Snot