Knit Sisters

In spite of the fact that the weather in the Boston area makes you feel like you’ve accidentally walked onto the set of Blade Runner, I am pleased to be back home.

I had a wonderful time in Vancouver, Berkeley, and Missouri, but it is nice to be back here Chez Mad Dog once again!

I even have a finished object to show for my time away:

Please simply ignore the hair-don’t I am sporting here. I obviously had a visit from the Hair Fairy earlier in the day. Actually, I also look a little simple in this photo, don’t I? Well, I assure you that I’m smarter than I look here. Which admittedly isn’t saying much.

In my absence, interesting developments had occurred Chez Mad Dog. For instance, my winter Interweave had arrived. Whoo hoo!:

Pictured here with a delightful ceramic doo-hickey that my father-in-law gave me while I was in California. I’m not sure what it is, but I like it very much. Thank you, Jeff!

And, in a completely unprecedented occurrence, Shelley and Zeno were being more or less filial in their comportment toward one another:

And the lion shall lie down with the lamb…

If you’d turn on the heat, fool, we wouldn’t have to sit this close together. Whaddya think this is, July?

Don’t imagine, however, that Zeno has changed one iota since I last saw him. No sirree.

When you die, I’m gonna gnaw off your ears.

He gave me a look when I got home on Sunday night, a look that said, “Oh, you’re back? I had been hoping that you had drowned.”

I’ll never understand why we habour this charmless creature.

We also have new upstairs neighbors, which comes as rather a shock since that apartment has been unoccupied for eighteen months. Why? Take a gander at the “before” pictures of our apartment, extrapolate, and you got yer answer.

I met the primary tenant, whose name is Anya, and she seems like a lovely person, a person furthermore intent upon improving the general appearance of the property. She has already insisted that she will strong-arm cajole Mr. Lee into getting rid of the derelict truck.

Many are the times that I myself have threatened to have the derelict truck towed away and dumped into the Charles River or to dismantle it piece by piece with my bare hands and put its parts out over a period of weeks for the garbage collectors, and yet I find the newly-probable prospect of its demise a strangely melancholy thought.

I’ve grown accustomed to its rusting, hulking presence outside my office window and the way that the cat will sit on its hood for hours meowing at me. I’ve come to admire the way that snow drifts into its cab through a broken window during the winter storms. The way the extra tires in the back are steadily decomposing as the weeks, months, and years pass. The way that upstanding, decent neighbors stop and shake their heads in horror and disbelief at this rotting vehicle that has been in the driveway for a decade.

It’s hard to imagine Chez Mad Dog without its characteristic derelict truck. So much of the romance will be taken from us! It is a derelict truck, yes, but it’s our derelict truck.

Perversely, I am unsettled by Anya’s take-charge attitude about getting rid of my busted-down truck. I mean, who does she think she is?

To just come in here and start talking big about getting rid of a perfectly useless truck that is an eyesore and probably a petrochemical hazard and that is furthermore sinking into the driveway slowly and inexorably?

I mean, really.

But seriously, I was sort of planning to use that truck for storing excess stash. You know, if it came to that. And it will come to that, dear friends. This you know as well as I. What, after all, is a LYS job for if not for mad, exuberant stashing?

Yet clearly, under this new regime, the derelict truck’s days are numbered. The truck we had to push will soon be no more. I will have to think of alternate stash annexes around the house. I will be forced to bid my defunct truck a tearful farewell and enter the sanitized world of people who do not harbour decomposing vehicles on their property.

Rest in peace, Derelict Truck. May we meet again in that great junkyard in the sky.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Designing woman, It's the process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.