how the turtle got its grump

Thursday, jul. 3, 2008   |   0 comments

At 2am, the ominous crunching of Daisy working a bone out in the livingroom penetrated my deep-sleep brain enough to stir me into semi-awake-itude. The hollow clunking of the dog worrying a marrow-stuffed bone wasn’t such an unusual sound in and of itself, but the timing was off. In my sleep-slowed head, I mused on the anomaly of it—in my years of knowing her, Daisy had never left our cozy bed in the dark, small hours of night to go chew on her bone. Stranger still, I didn’t recall either Marco or myself giving her a bone in recent days. Maybe she found some chicken bones in the trash? But chicken bones have more of a snapping sort of crunch to them. And the chicken we’d had that night was boneless. Huh.

After about five more minutes of pondering, the pull of the mystery overcame the pull of sleep, and I got up to discover just what she’d managed to get her mouth onto.

It was dark, so all I could figure was that her little chew project was rounder and darker than any bone I’d ever seen. I picked it up and brought it up to my face for a closer squint, as Daisy wagged cheerfully at my feet. And then in a whoosh I went from sleepily puzzled to freak-out scream-mode. “Daisy!” The dog wagged even harder, all proud and self-congratulatory. “This is NOT FOR YOU!” Because? It turned out? The thing I was holding was our turtle’s shell, denuded of its arms and legs and head and tail.

Marco came staggering in at the sound of my yells and I—scrambled and garbled—managed to break the news to him. And Marco, who has owned that turtle for 15 years and who was still basically asleep, did not react well. Tearfully he took the shell and cradled it, and then he asked me if I would do a perimeter check for turtle parts, because he just couldn’t face it. I turned on the light and carefully checked the carpet. Nothing.

We took the remains over to the light, and after closer examination we realized that the turtle’s legs and etc. weren’t so much missing as they were tucked impossibly far up inside him. Marco rushed him back into his turtle house, noting in a panicked, self-recriminating voice that the door was open and that Marco had probably forgotten to close it after changing the turtle’s water the night before. And how thrilled Daisy must have been to discover that oversight! Marco gently placed the turtle inside his water dish, which he likes to swim around in, but there was no movement. So sad! With waning hope, Marco set him beside the water dish, closed the door to the house, and scrambled over to ask the internet how long turtles can survive with their heads sucked inside out.

Marco searched on “dog” and “turtle” and “attack,” which conjured up a gruesome list of links to “hilarious” videos of dog attacking turtles. “That’s not funny,” Marco yelped. “Nothing about that is funny!”

As Marco continued to frantically ask the internet for answers, I went and lay down next to the turtle cage. “Marco? MARCO? I think I just saw his leg move!”

Marco rushed in and the turtle moved again, and we cheered a big cheer. And then we gave him some raspberries. But he wasn’t really in an eating mood, since that would require removing his head from its inverted triage mode, which he didn’t even consider doing until well into the next morning.

But slowly and surely, the turtle and his various extremities came out of their shell. And after a week of vet-prescribed medicated salving for his various scrapes and dents (poor thing!), including a weekend jaunt to Russian River—he needed his drops twice a day so we had to bring him with us when we went to visit Maggie, Bryan, and Co. Evany: “Does baby Hank know about not putting fingers near the mouth-end of angry, biting turtles?” Maggie: “He’ll learn!”—he now seems to be back to his same enraged self, if perhaps even a shade grumpier.

Meanwhile bad, bad Daisy is currently in the midst of a long lecture series about how the turtle is family and we never, ever chew on family, no matter how great it tastes.

And, just like in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when the Fudge ate Peter’s pet turtle and the parents made up for it by giving Peter a pet dog which he named Turtle, we all lived happily ever after.

Welcome back, turtle.

spare change thought

Sunday, jun. 29, 2008   |   0 comments

I’ve always said that I don’t like change, but I think maybe I’ve changed?

Now that I’m older, I’ve started to notice that some of my personality traits, traits that I’ve always thought of as fundamental to who I am, don’t necessarily apply anymore. Even so, I probably continued to tell people my “I hate change” mantra years and years after it ceased to be true, just out of habit. And my friends did the same, all “everyone knows how much Evany hates change!”

I think it takes a special kind of self-aware vigilance to first of all notice that things are no longer as they once were, and then second of all make the effort to update those personal taglines so that the world and your friends are aware of your latest revision.

Sometimes I worry that I’m the same exact person I was in high school, that the things I’ve done and seen and weathered in the years since then have taught me nothing. And how sad would that be? THIS SAD! So it’s a relief, and a comfort, to notice myself doing things I never used to do—transforming from night owl to early bird, making my bed with semi-regularity, embracing change—little signs that I’m capable of personal evolution after all.

welcoming you into the fold

Friday, jun. 27, 2008   |   0 comments

You and your respective HR departments will be glad to discover, as I recently did during an impromptu hallway meeting at my internet job, that all a person has to do to make the words “below the fold“ sound racy is to deliver them in a tart mid-Atlantic accent (with optional raised eyebrows).

If you think about it, like I have, non-stop, “above the fold” and “below the fold” are actually the perfect metaphors for the continuum of sexual progress. So much better than the confusing “bases” we had to work with when I was coming up! A “homerun” was always clear enough, especially when it was described as being slid into. “First base” meant…frenching? I think? “Second base” I’m pretty sure was shorthand for going up the girl’s shirt, which was always so lame because there wasn’t really a similarly titillating male equivalent, and what are you supposed to do if the person you’re making out with doesn’t have knockers, skip directly to third? Meanwhile third was a murky thing indeed, signaling acts that varied widely and awkwardly from school to school—for some it meant hot hands-to-parts action, others thought it referred to examinations of the oral persuasion, and there were even those who thought of third as nothing short of full-on pants off dance off…so confusing.

But the tidily binary “above the fold”/“below the fold” (or, even better, the newspaper equivalent: “under the crease”) is so elegant, so straightforward. I say, “How are things going with that ice cream salesperson you’ve been dating?” And you say, “Oh, we’re still strictly above the fold. But we’re going away to Big Sur this weekend, and I’ve already purchased a bottle of tequila, so I imagine we’ll be well below the fold come Saturday morning.” And I know exactly where you and your ice cream salesperson are coming from. Exactly!

Something else I discovered at work recently: “P2P” has almost nothing to do with prostitutes and the payment thereof?

thunder, lightning

Wednesday, jun. 25, 2008   |   0 comments

Driving up, moments before the sky tore open.

I drove far, far away up north this weekend to hang out with my great friend Kristin, who’s currently recovering from gnarly gut surgery. Which meant I had a totally reasonable excuse to lie around and watch retarded amounts of television all the live-long weekend—best birthday present ever. If only Kristin would get surgeried on more often!

The sun was just about slipping away when the air weirdly filled with that unmistakable electric smell of rain, and then suddenly…big drops on the windshield, then bonafide cracks of shazam-style lightning all across the sky, plus real loud thunder. In California! In June!

When I drove across country with Jill a few years back, we were in I think Ohio when suddenly all this water started falling on our car. Born-and-raised-Californian I just could not get my brain around what I was seeing—I actually asked Jill if maybe a fire hydrant had burst nearby? Midwestern-born Jill just laughed and laughed.

But I tell you, summer rain does not happen out here like that, no. But wild forest fires, with their poisonous, eye-searing reek (nothing at all like the cozy whiff of a fireplace wood fire, or fun Halloween-time leaf fires, despite the fact that forest is nothing but wood and leaves?), those we do just great.

The brown-filtered drive back down, after passing eleven firetrucks and also a freaky man lying on the side of the road with no shirt on and a smiling policeman at his side.

q.e.d.

Tuesday, jun. 24, 2008   |   0 comments

Evany: I think that’s actually one of my best qualities, my willingness to laugh at my shortcomings.
Liz: Well, first you get offended, and then we tease you, and then you see how funny it is.
Evany: [Momentarily offended, and then] laughs and laughs.