In the Bickyard

Tessa, 

The dog is on his back, attacking the sky.  Yesterday was 100 degrees and last night a storm ripped through with 50 mph gusts of wind, but today is bright and clear.  You are walking the length of the garden with your arms crossed, saying "Hmm" to the plants, the way a teacher walks the rows of a classroom.  I am sitting in an Adirondack, sipping tea and moving left every four minutes to stay in the shade.

I found this photo of the yard when we got here:

The dead grass is accented by the pile of I-don't-even-know-what.  Things look better this morning.

The Rug Really Ties the Yard Together

Some Kind of Lily

Magnus, Forever Thirsty

Here's the garden we just put in on the right side of that top shot.  Having a garden makes you feel productive, long, long after you've stopped production.  All you did was put plants in the ground; sun and soil took care of the rest.  But you get the notion that you're coaxing life of the earth, even if you're just sitting there, drinking tea and typing.

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Cabbage

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The heat is starting again.  6 months of winter makes you promise yourself that you'll never leave the  yard, just as soon as it thaws and we can all feel our fingers again.  Then the first 90 degree day makes a liar out of you.

Baby's First Lunch

Tessa, 

A picture is worth a thousand words.  In high school I always dreamed of turning in a paper with two pictures printed on it.  "David, what am I looking at?"

"You wanted 1,500 words on the Spanish-American War.  You're looking at a photo of the Battleship Maine, and another of William McKinley.  May they both rest in peace.  That's 2,000 words, granted, but I can crop one of those down if you think my paper's too long.

I got off topic.  Pictures is why we're all here.  Behold, the embodiment of adorable:

One for the books: sun, food, family, baby.  Like a Rockwell painting, or a Gwen Steffani album.  Magnus doesn't seem to fit in, but he was there, quietly awaiting scraps underneath the table.  Good dog.  Someday we'll look back in amazement that she was ever so small, so dependent.  She will walk up and ask for the car keys and Tom will fish them out of his pocket and say "Seat belts; I mean it." as he hands them to her.  She will walk away, and we'll bring up that time we sat outside and passed her around, taking pictures.  Seems impossible, but nothing, I suppose, stops the onward march of time.

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Tessa, 

You are gone.  You went to Chicago to see the baby, and left me and Magnus with a freezer full of microwaveable casseroles.  I thought I'd write to you, since I can't talk to you (and because the next thing on my To Do list is boring).

Started typing in "heytessa" and google is frantically trying to guess what I'm looking for.  H gets you hulu.com.  He gets you Hertze Rent-A-Car.  Hey gets you the lyrics to "Hey Soul Sister".  You get the idea.  Googling Heytessa brought up a blog titled HeyTessa.  But not this blog!  That's right, there's another heytessa blog!  I know, right?!

And she is the Anti-Tess.  It's like when Spider-Man meets himself from other dimensions, and they're all these alternate versions of himself.  Him, but not.  The other Tessa has pink hearts on everything, and inspirational quotes ripped from the inside of a middle-schooler's Trapper Keeper.  And background music from taken from a Mandy Moore movie.  It looks like all the Disney princesses got together to blog.

Moving on.  Ain't no sunshine when she gone.  Seriously.  There's clouds when she gone.  And severe weather warnings.  But no sunshine.  Four straight days of rain, but no sunshine.  I've been pretty productive in the garage, but the kitchen is suffering.  And to do more in the garage, I think I need to buy a belt sander.  Trying to use a palm sander in a huge, two-piece hutch is extra stupid.

LATER THAT DAY.

Okay, went to Home Depot and bought a belt sander (Now with a MicroFilter!  Cleaning the air for fewer inhaled carcinogens!).  I was right, the belt sander is the tool I needed.  I've also been looking into what I need to put together a kitchen table our of that wood from the farm up north.  (Incidently, I realized the table will be way cooler if we call it Reclaimed Native Black Ash instead of Wood From the Farm.)  I had figured on a longer table, something simple but stretching like 6 or 7 feet.  However, ain't no 7-foot table fitting in our current dinning room.  There are some nice ideas here, but the one I really dig is this one.  Yeah, I know, it's a chick blog by some silk-curtain debutante who wants tons of stuff and has her husband make it for her.  But the table is great.   I just need a pro to tell me how to do it.  All the stuff I've read so far has everyone assembling a simple table, and then freaking out over exactly how to treat the barnwood.  Oil stain or water based?  Poly?  Lacquer?   Tung oil?  SHOULD I USE TUNG OIL, AHHH!  Funny imagining carpenters, in plaid shirts, on the internet, freaking out about tung oil.  But there's pages of it, though I can't prove they're wearing plain.

Okay, off to the dog washing party.  He's been chewing a bone.  Outside. In the rain. For two hours.  The beast is disgusting, and if he ever wants to come inside again he must first agree to a bath.  Also, here's two sentences from an email I sent to John and Jon earlier today.  Its not important, but I liked it once I was done.

Coming down Friday, leaving Monday.  (Run-on Sentence Alert) That leaves us 3 nights and 2 days to find a time when we can all get together and party in such a way as to cause onlookers to turn deeply introspective, asking themselves just how well they are really using their time on this planet, and why, why is their own life a flickering candle at the foot of the Shrine to Boredom, whilst yonder revelers (us) drink deeply from the streams of epicurean blitheness (beer), shaking the tree of life and eating whatever falls from its heavy branches with the kind of hearty unrestraint usually reserved for children and looters.  

Hope to see you soon.  All my best to the Chicago contingency.  

Auntie Tessa, Unkie Dave

Tessa, 

It seemed worth noting that, on the morning of June 2nd, 2011, Evelyn April Nelson graced the world with her presence.  Behold:

Adorable.  She's got her mother's something and her father's other thing.  It's hard to tell from this angle which traits came from where, but she's definitely an Evelyn.  First female President of the United Sates, probably.  First human to walk on Mars.  Discoverer of a cure for cancer.  Inventor of a machine that shortens lines at the DMV.  Only good can come from this.

Oedipus Burgers

Tessa, 

Last night I was grilling, but the coals just wouldn't stay lit.  I slid the burgers over and doused the stubborn little carbon lumps with more lighter fluid.  No help, so I repeated the process until I ran out of fluid.

I waited.  Still no heat.  Fine, then, I'm going to the gas station to get some more lighter fluid and when I get back you briquettes are going to be reduced to burning rubble because the not-burning rubble you are right now is never gonna cook these burgers.

Hopped in the car, backed out of the driveway at a brisk, yet responsible, pace.  Down the street, turn the corner.  Flashing lights behind me.  I'm being pulled over.

The worst part of being pulled over is the waiting.  Usually you know exactly how fast you were going, the cop knows how fast you were going, but we're all going to sit in our cars and think about what we've done wrong.  So I sit.

Speeding?  No.  Seat belt; haven't you seen all the PSAs lately?  We made a special commercial to warn you, but in your infinite wisdom you used that commercial break to get more guacamole.  Idiot.  $105 spent, and I haven't even gotten to the gas station.  $4 more for the lighter fluid, back in the car, buckling up this time so The Man can't keep me down, drive back home.

Hop out of the car, run over to the grill, open it up.  Yup.  The coals warmed up without me, then they used their keen sense of irony turn the burgers into charcoal briquettes.  Like a Greek tragedy, my efforts to save dinner were the very thing that killed it.  Oedipus burgers.  If this square looks familiar, its because it's Square One, and we were here about 30 minutes ago.

Alien Archaeologist's Cheat Sheet

Tessa, 

I just wrote roughly 3 pages of stuff here and then erased it.  It was a list of things that people either love or hate; things that extricate applause or groans, but rarely silence.  Birthday cake, talk radio, Republicans.  Stuff like that.  1,300 words in I realized it was a) not really all that thought provoking, b) not really all that true, and c) kind of a stupid thing to spend 1,300 words on.

Not that this particular corner of the web is reserved for things most people consider worthwhile.  It's definitely not.  (A brief skimming of the "Shark Bites" entry will confirm as much.)  But we have to have standards, because someday all of this will be read by alien archeologists trying to figure out what the heck happened here.  

So my second list of the day will be "Things I Want to Say to the Alien Archeologists Currently Excavating the Remains of Our Long-Dead Planet."  

1. While it doubtlessly hastened our total destruction, MTV is not a fair sampling of the human condition.  Especially The Jersey Shore.  In fact -- except for Ken Burns documentaries and the Food Network -- cable television as a whole will likely be a waste of your time. It was certainly a waste of ours.
2. While we're all quite pleased with ourselves for creating the Internet, none of us are particularly proud of what you're going to find there.  If the Internet were an actual place, it would've been shut down long ago.  No city would keep a business open that made getting your mail easier, while simultaneously luring people into dens of gambling, pornography, and Justin Bieber videos.  
3. The best chefs were French, the best engineers were German, the best poets were English or Italian, and the best vodka is Polish.  The Russians will dispute all of this, and if the Irish hadn't invented whiskey this list may have been very different.
4. If you aliens possess the technology to go back in time and warn us about Celine Dion, please do it.  We had no idea.
5. You might think them geniuses, far ahead of their times.  However, the people who talked the most about aliens coming to Earth were considered by the rest of us humans to be dorks who lived in their parents' basements and never actually had girlfriends.  The fact that they were right about you guys is a total fluke.
6. A careful study of 21st Century architecture will give you the impression that we worshiped shopping and football.  100 years ago this would have been untrue; now it sort of depends on what you mean by "worship."

There.  That should point them in the right direction.  This wasn't a waste of my time at all.

Covenant Pococurante

Tessa, 

I'm writing a country song.  It's called, "I need to buy a home, my wife needs a contract, our dog only has one testicle, and the Twins have the worst record in baseball."  It's about the plight of the modern working man; very Woody Guthrie.  What's a man gotta do these days to get a home, and a job, and an extra puppy nugget, and a couple of Joe Mauer home runs?

We spent all weekend at Covenant Pines with a dozen junior high students.  That's actually going to be the title of my song.  That does a better job at striking at the heart of my malaise.  Wait, looking up "malaise".  No, that isn't right.  Pococurante.  That's what I'm feeling.  I'd like to thank Thesaurus.com for diagnosing today's affect.

Something about those kids last weekend just sucked the life out of me.  While I was being lanced by hay, riding in a trailer down a bumpy road, in the cold, in the dark, while listening to a 13-year-old complain for the trillionth time, I had this revelation.  An anti-revelation, really.  It was this moment of faux-clarity, when I saw -- very clearly -- Youth Ministry as nothing more than this elaborate scam.  It was a tapestry of lies, weaving religion and culture with camping and hayrides, all knit together to trick guys like me into watching other people's teenagers for the weekend.  Cynical, I know, but hard to ignore when you're in the middle of a cold, dark, complaint-riddled hayride.

It's not that I'm pretty sure I was ineffective as a speaker, or ignored as a teacher, or mocked as a leprechaun who is likely to ingest his own fecal matter.  That stuff is par for the Modern Teenager Course.  I think it's that there was so little silver lining.  The kids who did open up, share, learn, they opened up about big problems, tough issues.  There was no, "Oh, now I understand Jesus in a more real and personal way" moment.  The real and personal moments were about the deaths of loved ones, the drug use of a parent, the thoughts of suicide, the doubting of their faith in the face of a world that seems upside down.

And how do you respond to to that, when you're pretty sure that what they're describing isn't some rough patch, but actually a pretty apt representation of life on this planet?  How do you describe GOD to someone when you're pretty sure they know you have no way of describing such a thing?  That the faith of a child gets soured and stretched into the apathetic doubt of a teenager, from whence it grows and matures into the befuddled doctrine of a twenty-something?

It just feels like a lot.

I Heart You.