Lifestyles of the rich and powerless

Staying in our second vacation rental home for the summer, I am noticing yet again how different this home is from ours. Yes, it's a vacation home, in a different town, with owners who don't live here year-round. So there are bound to be some differences. Plus this time we are staying with my family and wanted a spacious place, but I don't think I realized just how big this place would be. I think the garage alone is about equal in square footage to my house. We brought Adelaide's scooter and she could sail around in there for a long time before needing to turn around. Everywhere we turn there is another bathroom, which will be good when there are lots of us here trying to get ready, but has been kind of laughable while only 3 of us are here. In fact, my brother pointed out, we have adjoining bathrooms upstairs. And all of the bathrooms have 2 or more sinks.

Of the three tables to choose from for our meals, we have only used two for eating. The third is in what I have dubbed "The Boardroom," and this morning we used it for our office. I was planning on posting but only got as far as getting photos off the camera before the CEO (pictured below) had other plans for me.The scale of everything is intense here, too. I suppose you need big furniture to fill up big rooms, but there is some seriously big stuff in here. The television is larger than my dining room table would be if I turned it on its side. I let Adelaide watch a video for a while today but was afraid her brain might get sucked out of her head if she looked at that screen so I used our portable DVD player for safety's sake. After navigating through 2 pages of instructions for the 3 remote controls I discovered that there are 9000 channels on the satellite dish, and nothing to watch. Despite the giant screen, the DVD we played last night didn't quite fit right in the frame so the subtitles for the portions which were in Spanish were cut off at the bottom. Good thing we understand French, so we could piece it together.

The whole family could all sit on the sectional couch at once without having to touch one another. Or we could sit in the other living room. Or the upstairs room with a couch. Or one of the decks or the sunroom. At least Uncle Dave is tall enough to make some of the furniture look a little more reasonable.
Also interesting are the little tidbits you find on your search for the vegetable peeler or colander (or, let's be honest, when you're just snooping around trying to glean something personal about the owners amidst the impersonal decor and items left behind by other renters). My favorite discovery thus far in this house was actually a warning label posted on the screen in the bathroom. Why there would be one is beyond me, but being a compulsive reader of box labels, signs and just about anything printed, I leaned in for a closer look.So you don't have to get your glasses, I'll repeat the text here. "Insect screens are intended to provide reasonable insect control and are not intended to provide security or provide for the retention of objects or persons from the interior."

So . . . are we really this stupid now? Or this litigious? I'm going to sue the maker of the screen because while I was trying to lock my kid in the bathroom without having to use bug spray, he brokered an escape by lobbing the towel rack and then himself through the screen?

One other odd coincidence between this vacation and our earlier trip this summer is that we had power outages while staying in both homes. Not super unusual in Minneapolis, where 2 big afternoon thunder storms took down a lot of trees and power lines, but a little weird this afternoon here when there was a bit of wind but nothing much in the way of a storm. The only reason it was worth noting in this post is that in both places, without power, the house was rendered very un-functional for many things. Electric stoves meant no cooking. Food in the freezer and frig was at risk. Newer phones meant no calling because the base needs to be plugged in (at home we keep an old non-cordless phone around for power outages). In Minneapolis, our neighbors couldn't get in to their house because all they had was the garage door opener. We couldn't get out with the car (at least I wasn't willing to try to figure out the manual override for the garage door) and could have been stranded. My laptop has a good battery but without the modem, no wi-fi so no email or internet. Tonight we had cereal and salad for dinner since anything else would have needed some way of cooking to prepare it.

Last time and this both really made me think about how much we take for granted and depend on for basic needs. I wonder how much power this place sucks up just sitting here on the days and weeks no one has rented it. And I think again of my not-so-large home, and what else I might do to unplug a little more. We do choose to pay more for our electric to support Green Power (our extra money goes to alternative energy for the electric), but we still probably waste a lot. I'm not thinking I'll go off the grid, but maybe I could reduce my footprint a little bit more. Because frankly, I'm a bit afraid of going from fully powered to not prepared without a little something in between.

A new venture

Coming home from swimming on Sunday Adelaide asked for a treat from the concession stand. She was told no, the same as the other 15 times she asked. We were headed home for a popsicle, so her ordeal of deprivation was not going to last long. She was quiet for a while, and then began this conversation:

A: Mom, can we have a popsicle stand and sell popsicles?

C: That sounds like a fun idea.

A: Because some people don't like to eat chemicals. And they are sad because they want a treat.

C: But the treats at the concession stand have chemicals in them, you're right.

A: Yeah, and so they are really sad.

C: But there are good treats they can have that don't have any chemicals, right? Like juice popsicles and apple pie?

A: Mom, can I have some apple pie?

And so on. So mostly it was about her being sad about the concession stand thing, I get that. But she knew there was a popsicle waiting at home for her. The part I thought was cool was the fact that she was concerned for the others out there, those without juice popsicles waiting in their freezers, those whose sadness would just go on and on until it left a hole in their treat-desiring hearts and stomachs that could never be filled.

So all week long we worked on the popsicle stand. When we got home on Sunday I set her up with a sign to color and embellish:
Next I made a list of the things we would need for the popsicle stand. (This was after tears and accusations that I would "forget," something I am being accused of more frequently these days. I think the truth of the matter is that I usually remember, but choose not to bring it up again if she forgets and I'm content to leave it at that.) So list was written and secured to frig door, and over the course of the week various items were procured to allow for popsicle production.

On Wednesday I made a prototype, flavor blueberry, and my boss approved. She helped make the inventory last night, and then we spent the morning setting up and waiting, waiting, waiting for customers.
Finally, after the marketing department (me) set up signs on the car and at the store across the street (thanks, PCC!), plus upped our walk-in business with the help of the Fisher-Price microphone and lots of smiles and waves, the customers started to trickle in. Close to lunchtime, we had quite a rush and then sold out. I encouraged the shareholders to re-invest in the company and so we took our profits to the store to buy more juice. My guess is that we will be open for business again later this afternoon and possibly tomorrow. I know I am pretty content to sit and watch people go by, and soak up some of this energy:

Magic

This morning I took a spade out to the potato patch to see what's happening. My planting guide tells me that baby potatoes are ready 2-3 weeks after the plants are finished flowering, which is our current timeframe for most of the plants. After selecting a plant that seemed to be the furthest along, I dug about 2 inches down at its base. In about 2 minutes, I had these:
I think this plant alone will yield 4 or 5 times this amount of potatoes, as I barely dug at all. There are 20 or 25 more plants. If they all do this well, we will have quite the feast! Some of the varieties I planted will store well, so we will be eating them all winter. The others we will enjoy as we harvest and we will pass them along to our friends.

Lightening her load

Every summer I have a list of things to accomplish, tasks that I put off during the school year since I have time off in the summer. Every summer I tell myself I will not do this next year, won't subject myself to dental cleanings, oil changes, frig cleanings and other things better done as the need arises rather than packed into the beautiful Seattle summer.

One of today's tasks was to brush the cat. This one I have actually done periodically this past year, so it doesn't technically qualify as a dreaded summer task, but I have been out of town for 10 days. 10 days of hot summer weather, before which there wasn't a cat brushing, during which there wasn't even much of a cat sighting, probably. Petting her today, my hand was lost in a sea of discarded fur. So I got out the brush, and spent about 10 minutes alternately pinning her down and pulling her off the comb.

I could have gotten much, much more off of her had I been willing to put up with some scratching and attitude, but I decided that when the ball of fur on the floor exceeds the circumference of the animal being groomed, you can officially call the job complete, regardless of the amount of loose fur remaining.

Guys and Dogs

This morning as I was riding my bike I had a couple of rubbernecking moments of which I am not overly proud. First there was the car in the process of parking, which had two adults in the front and and a large dog in the back. Or, make that a person . . . no, a dog . . . wait, is that a person? Yes, definitely human, but is it a man or a woman? Hm, long hair, can't see clothing too well . . . bingo, facial hair! Human male, for sure.

Hence, rubbernecking. Why did I care? There was nothing particularly interesting about this car or these people, but until I was certain about the figure in the back I couldn't let it rest. I think my brain (and maybe everyone's, or just some of us) has this built-in scientist who has to categorize, rate and sort everything it sees. I know mine does for fitness level (is that person fatter than me? Does my ass look like that in shorts like that?) because I have made a conscious effort to stop it. I really don't enjoy constant comparison and the self-criticism which can accompany it, and yet unless I am working on not doing it, there it is.

I have long thought that we have some innate tendencies towards making a quick analysis of everyone we see. Maybe it has something to do with mating, like we need to immediately determine if the person ahead of us in line is of the appropriate gender and build with which to spawn. Or maybe it's self-defense, a means of assessing whether the person doing step aerobics next to us could kick our ass if there were only one hunk of antelope left. Whatever the origins, it seems to me we are left with a need to form instant judgments about people we see in passing.

So when we take in something that we cannot process quickly, we look again, we stare, our minds race to place what we are seeing. When this happens for gender, my brother labels the mystery person "Chickerdude." I'll have to ask him what the label should be when the species is in question. Doggerdude doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Which brings me to my second rubbernecking moment this morning. Only a few blocks after the hairy backseat incident I saw a dog and its owner out for a walk. There was no question as to the gender of either (woman and male dog), but unfortunately, the dog was making its gender abundantly clear. As in, straining against its leash towards a tree that perhaps it mistook for a female dog in heat? As in, massive pulsing protuberance disproportionate to size of dog. Oh, to have not seen this in the first place, how that would have been so much easier. But having noticed, I could not tear my eyes from the sight until I was safely passed. Fortunately I was cruising by at a decent clip, but again, why? Why did I have to look?

The only solution I can see is to work towards observation without judgment. I doubt I can stop observing, and I would miss out on a lot of good observations if I did. But perhaps I can learn to let go of the next step a bit more, and look away instead of fixing my gaze. Or at least start carrying my camera a bit more regularly, so I can post pictures when I see something worth writing about!