Toe Zombies, Stranger Cooties and Other Hazards of Travel

Another highlight was following behind one of these trucks.
Underneath the appetizing pictures of fresh produce it had
a nice set of mudflaps with rats on them, their little jaws
gaping upwards in longing at the salad forever out of reach.
Mom's Meals: Better Wash That Lettuce!

So, I just returned from a business trip to East Texas. Various parts of the trip did not go as planned, due to reasons that will have to wait to be revealed in my post-retirement memoir, "How Being a Manager Caused Me To Despair of the Basic Common Sense of Humanity." But there were some highlights: off duty, I got to catch up with some friends. I got to relax at one of my favorite places (Lake o' the Pines).

Also, I got to see two billboards for Badders Law Firm, which was just awesome. I can only imagine the TV commercials: "Why hire a good attorney when you can get Badders?" or "Have you been bad? Get Badders!" Literally, this kept me occupied for the whole round trip between Lufkin and Nacogdoches, which is one possible explanation for how I got lost in both towns, which combined are a third the size of Round Rock, unless you want to attribute getting lost to Mercury being in retrograde. No, I did not use voice navigation, for reasons that may be summarized as, my phone stinks. Don't buy a Windows phone, even if it is only $40. Perhaps especially if it is only $40.

Bed at La Quinta of Lufkin,
both before and after sleeping.

I like East Texas. I like driving. I like looking at cows and barns and very tall trees. I like visiting friends. One thing I do not like, however, is sleeping in foreign beds. I have this weird hangup: if I have to sleep away from home, I rarely sleep under the covers. If I'm traveling with the kids and sharing a bed, I can make myself get under the covers, but it requires conscious effort, the same sort of effort and internal dialogue required to get me to voluntarily place phone calls ("C'mon, do it, do it, do it...DO IT!"). Otherwise, nope. If I'm too tired or lack the mental energy to make myself get under the covers, I'm spending the night on top of the bedspread.

Why? For one thing, Quora. If you don't subscribe, Quora is a place where people can ask random questions (such as travel hacks) and be answered by other random people who have some knowledge of the subject (such as former hotel employees). I've read numerous such posts describing how seldom cheap hotels change sheets, which makes sleeping in a hotel bed kind of like cuddling with a stranger you never see, which is pretty skeevy. I try to keep a healthy skepticism for things I've read on the Internet, but in this case my sense of skepticism has been pretty thoroughly bludgeoned by my sense of ewwwww.

It is a well known fact that, like the
draugr of Icelandic myth, there are
little zombies that live deep in the
dark, claustrophobic sheet caves
and come out at night to feast on the
feet of weary travelers.

Another contributing factor is The Toe Coffin: people who really make a bed properly (including hotel housekeepers and my mother) get the sheets and blankets so tight that I feel like my feet are confined, straightjacketed, imprisoned in a shroud of blankets. Sliding your toes down into that small, dark prison is an act of trust and commitment: there could be anything down there with them and I couldn't see it: bed bugs, a previous guest's toenail clippings, bloodstains, a stray revenant rising up from the toe coffin to eat my toes--anything! It just feels a bit risky.

Caprock Canyon: Because free-
roaming bison are AWESOME.

I can trace this weird phobia back to a single, triggering event. Several years back, I decided to spontaneously run away from my problems by taking a road trip to Caprock Canyon, one of my favorite state parks. My original intent had been to pitch a tent in the park, but it was cold and I also have a hangup about not being able to pitch a tent properly and being laughed at by real outdoorspeople (a hangup that, by the way, has caused real outdoorspeople to laugh at me while never having been actually tested by me even attempting to pitch a tent). Mainly, it was really cold. So I got a hotel. There are not many towns near Quitaque, and the few there are are not large enough to support a decent hotel, so I wound up at what might charitably be described as a dive, one so remote and dusty and dank that, had it been in a metropolitan area, it would have been what my friend Angie used to call a HO-tel. It is possible that the carpeting had once been lime green shag, but equally likely could have been a beige textured carpet that had been thrown up on by goats for decades, or a yellow carpet that had had an unfortunate encounter with radiation, perhaps through a botched arms deal. The bedspread was polyester, with a bold 70's print yellowed with age. For the first time in my life, I pulled down the covers on a bed, said nope, and pulled them right back up. I also didn't take my shoes off and checked out at dawn.

I heard these sheets being taken out of the
dryer, having been washed especially for me
and put on the bed warm...and I still couldn't
do it. Toe zombies do not care about such
niceties as cleanliness, warmth, or the
possibility of offending one's friends.
They are kind of mean that way.

Since that fateful night, all beds have become suspect, except my own. Even when visiting my mother (when she still lived in Houston) and sleeping in the same exact bed I had been sleeping in for a decade, I wound up on top of the bed more often than not and my mother is one of the cleanest people I know, with a rigid schedule of sheet washing and seasonal sheet rotation.

Sometimes, if it is cold or I have children with me, I can succeed in coaching myself under the covers, but it definitely requires effort, and I do not like it. In fact, I will usually pull the covers out so that I can cover my body with the blanket while leaving my feet zombie free on top of the covers. Every year, I consider bringing my own quilt on our family vacations, but then I remember the packing limitation and can't come up with a convincing reason why the kids wouldn't be able to bring pants.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty harmless and quirky hangup, so I generally indulge it. That means, though, if I'm ever a guest at your house, please be sure to leave an extra blanket on the guest bed and don't worry about changing the sheets: I won't be using them.

I may not be able to tell you the month (or sometimes year) when my sheets 
were last changed, but they are 100 toe zombie free and devoid of stranger 
cooties. They also come with cats, and Bob Cat only bites feet above the covers.
There's no place like home!

Salad Days of Spring

No, I actually use a real brush, but I would totally borrow
that cat if I could. Bob *has* climbed in the toilet a few
times, but he hasn't curled up for a nap or posed for a toilet
cleaning meme, and he's only bothered to flush once. Ingrate.

My mother and I co-habitate, which is pretty awesome for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it sets a very low bar for personal accomplishment. When you're 45 and you tell people you live with your mother, certain assumptions get made, and pretty much anything you say thereafter, from "I published a poem today" to "I cleaned the toilet" outperforms those assumptions handily. I like to under-promise and over-deliver.

One of the other minor things I enjoy about living with Mother is salad. I occasionally like a good salad with my dinner. Eleanor is meh on salad with dinner, since she takes them to school for lunch every day. Betty occasionally eats salad, a very particular kind of salad called Marinated Cucumber Salad in Tangy Vinegar Dressing (i.e., pickles). Sometimes, she will add tomatoes, carrots, or even non-marinated cucumbers to her salad, but that just dilutes the essence of the dish. Bruce finds most vegetables troubling and has a deep dislike of condiments. He considered trying salad last month, but once he saw the lettuce lying there on his plate, looking all green and fresh, he reneged and the matter has not been brought up again. So, before Mother joined our household, salad was pretty rare with dinner.

Now, however, I have another salad-eater in the house, and on the 50% of the days on which we have a formal dinner (i.e., when the kids are here), I have full license to get creative on my salads.

See? It says salad dressing right
there on the label! 

Creative salad making is not something I learned at home. I vividly remember my dad's idea of salad, because we ate it every time I visited him. It consisted, invariably and exclusively, of the following ingredients:
1. Tomatoes
2. Cucumbers
3. Onions
4. Raisins
5. Miracle Whip 

I also vividly remember my dad's idea of breakfast (1 tall glass: half milk, half orange juice, and 1 raw egg). The memories are vivid, in much the same way that my memories of that one gas station bathroom in West Texas in 2013 are vivid: oddly aromatic, gross, slimy, and lumpy, although Dad's cooking had, generally speaking, fewer flies.

Mother makes tasty salads, but she doesn't experiment much. From her salad making, I took a fondness for radishes and feta cheese. We disagree on Thousand Island Dressing, which, as best I can tell, is Miracle Whip and Ketchup mixed together and therefore suitable only for hamburgers, but her traditional base ingredients (romaine lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, onions, green olives, and feta cheese) have become the base ingredients of my salads as well.

Ironically, it was Dad and his raisins that opened the door to creativity. For a long time, I took Mother's base salad, added raisins and ranch dressing, and called it a day. Then raisins led to dried cranberries, probably because we were out of raisins, which led to a revolutionary thought: what if you put non-dried fruit in a salad? These days, I will generally toss in whatever's in the fruit bowl on top of the base salad: diced apple, cut up Cutie oranges, sliced strawberries, grapes...even the last couple of pieces of cantaloupe once. Nuts are another favorite. Currently, I am using some tequila lime flavored sunflower seeds, but we are big fans of roasted nuts, so I've been known to raid the nut jar (which looks suspiciously like a cookie jar because it is...we keep our cookies in Tupperware). I've also been experimenting with flavored olives.

Where is the artistry?
The pride in craftsmanship?
WHERE IS THE RADISH?

I enjoy the creativity of raiding the fridge (and the fruit bowl and the nut jar) and making something different every day. I've also found that I no longer enjoy eating salads at restaurants for the most part, because they just take the Dole Iceberg Mix, put a cherry tomato on it and douse it in ranch. If you're lucky, you get a stale crouton and a slice of slightly mushy cucumber that's starting to go off. One exception is the Strawberry Pecan Salad at Longhorn Steakhouse. 

Salad of the Gods.

The other exception is that, if there is a salad bar, I am irresistibly drawn to beets and pickled okra, even though, rationally, I know that they just took these things out of cans and dumped them in their little ceramic containers and that I could probably go to Wal-Mart and get both of these items for less than $5. I will freely admit that I don't mind taking the kids to Gattiland primarily because I know the salad bar contains pickled okra. One of the trainers left a jar of homemade pickled okra at the office around Christmas time. Theoretically, it may have been for sharing. We'll never know.

So, today I got a couple of poems published, cleaned the toilet AND made a fabulous salad for dinner! Expectations: SHATTERED.

Family and Other Natural Disasters

An 80% chance of rain?
Christmas came early!

If you live in Central Texas, you know we had an outbreak of severe weather last weekend. Normally, rain is such a rare occurrence that a late afternoon sprinkle that wouldn't be thought serious enough to cancel an outdoor wedding in other parts of the state brings the city (and traffic) to a halt and a Christmas morning-like glee to our local weather reporters, who would otherwise be stuck spending the afternoon buried in a thesaurus, trying to come up with new words for 'hot' and 'dry.'

However, on Sunday we had the third tornado warning I can recall in my years in the Austin area. The first was many years ago, and I remember shuffling down the stairs at work to the basement with several floors worth of coworkers at a rate of a stair a minute and then promptly turning around and shuffling up the stairs at the same rate because by then the storm had passed, like some sort of anxious and dispirited slug oozing through a tunnel.

"Look, either it skips over us and nobody
ever has to know, or it plows through
the building and we save a crap ton in
lapsed salary...either way, it's a win!"

The second also happened while I was at work. My boss at the time was also involved in buildings and disasters and such and he told me later that by the time the tornado warning moved through the bureaucracy, it was too late to do anything about it so they decided not to tell us. I remember people milling around in confusion because their phones were telling them we were in danger but the building alarms (which are very good about notifying us of Serious Disasters like overcooked popcorn) were strangely silent on the subject of tornadoes. Of course, that particular boss was more truth-ish than truth-ful, so perhaps it didn't go down quite like that.

So, Sunday morning, I was in the bedroom, making my grocery list. Mother was in the living room, on her tablet. The children were in their respective lairs, and the cats were sleeping (duh). Then the cell phone cacophony begins. Mother and I check our phones, go, "Huh. Weather," and go back to doing what we were doing before. The cats don't have cell phones because they would spend all their time texting poo emojis, blowing up my phone demanding early dinners, and ordering Kitty Crack on Amazon. Bob would probably exceed his data limit on ESPN, given his predilection for kicking things and Daisy would spend all of her time on Internet self-help forums.

Eleanor and Bruce, however, do have phones and, as young Austinites, have no memory of actual weather. They both came running into my room, somewhere between OMG! and WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! I explained that this was a warning for the whole county, and the odds that a tornado would actually carry us to Oz or even to the backyard were pretty slim, but that the National Weather Service issues a warning because tornadoes are so unpredictable. My son looked at me, then at the two windows, and said, "So, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?" And, in a rare moment of sibling unity usually reserved for the advisability of dessert, his sister agreed.

This Tornado Warning is brought to
you by "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

So Bruce called Betty and they invaded Eleanor's room, which, as the converted garage, has no windows and plenty of comfy seating. I summoned Mother, because, I figured that, if I had to succumb to cell phone-induced panic, I was taking her with me. She immediately retaliated by playing a record of my 1985 summer band camp performance, followed by Simon and Garfunkel's greatest hits. Daisy, our calico cat, ran into the room and hid under a chair--not, probably, because of some innate cat-sense of impending weather, but because Daisy's main life goals are (1) food, (2) affection, and (3) hiding, and Eleanor's room is the Holy Grail of Hiding because the door is usually closed. Bob, being completely lacking in survival skills, was still sleeping on his perch by the back window, and I had to go grab him at the insistence of the kids. And there we all remained, for half an hour, until the warning expired and Eleanor evicted us, which may not have happened in exactly that order.

So how did Mother and I become so nonchalant about Nature's Fury? Well, it all started in 1980. We lived on ten acres of land outside of Sinton, Texas, roughly 30 miles west of Corpus Christi. That September, Hurricane Allen came barreling towards Corpus Christi as a Category 5. For those who are not life-long Gulf Coast residents, here's a quick summary of hurricane categories:

• Category 1: A Good Rain ("We needed it!"--the mandatory Texas response to any rain, sort of like "Amen" for weather) + A Day Off Work/School
• Category 2: Put Away the Gnomes and Patio Furniture
• Category 3: You'll Probably Lose That Half-Rotten Tree, Your Patio Cover, and Some Fence Boards
• Category 4: Board Up the Windows and Stock Up on PB&J (Plywood, Bleach, and Jugs of Water)
• Category 5: RUN FOR YOUR LIVES--WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Patience (n)-- (1) A boat that survived a Category 5
hurricane anchored in the middle of a harbor. (2) a
quality Mom was completely lacking in by the time
Dad returned to Sinton after protecting said boat.

So, when Allen was a Category 5 and showing no signs of weakening, panic ensued, at least for normal people. I think we have previously established that my father was not normal. Although we technically had a half hour head start on Corpus Christi evacuees, we were delayed by Dad's pre-evacuation checklist. This consisted of: (1) securing his welding shop, and (2) securing his boat. I am assuming (3) was securing the safety of his loving family, but we'll never know because he never made it that far. (1) was easily managed, given that the shop was a large, metal building; however, (2) involved an elaborate (though successful) plot to protect his sailboat by sailing it into the middle of Corpus Christi harbor, dropping four anchors off the side, and rowing back to shore. If you're curious, three anchors broke but one held, and all the normal people who lashed their boats to the dock came back to find their boats (and the dock) smashed to toothpicks. So, from a boat protection standpoint, this was an awesome plan. From a get-your-family-to-safety standpoint, however, it was somewhat lacking.

By the time he got back to Sinton, the hurricane was already on shore, so there was no chance of us heading out of town. In fact, we barely had time to make it to the local Red Cross shelter, situated in the Sinton High School gymnasium. I don't remember much of the shelter, other than wall-to-wall people and clamoring noise from both inside and outside the building. In this situation, a normal family would have figured, "Oh well, the hurricane is upon us. Guess we'll make the best of it. Because only crazy people would leave a hurricane shelter in the middle of a freaking hurricane." I think you know where this is going.

Looks like a fabulous time to fire up the grill!

My father looked around at the mayhem of a packed shelter, uttered some profanity, and got in his truck and drove back to our house, in the middle of an actual squall. Mother, ever prudent, waited until the eye was overhead before driving us home in the car. My most vivid memory of living through a Category 5 hurricane was not the howling winds or booming thunder or even the otherworldly stillness of the eye passing overhead. It was pulling into the driveway to see my father at the barbecue pit, trying to grill a roast before the eye passed. In this particular endeavor, he failed, due to obvious problems with kindling, the random gusts of the wind stirring up during the eye, and the general thickness of roast. The attempt was spectacular and the failure epic.

*I.e., this little fish pond, the dirt from
which raised our house and provided a
convenient slope for all the water to roll
downhill and flood everyone else's house.

Ultimately, of course, we survived. The house withstood the storm without even a drop of water inside, for various reasons that subsequently became a source of contention with the neighbors.* Nevertheless, it is the sort of experience that alters your perception of 'bad weather' pretty much forever. After you've driven through a Category 4 hurricane and witnessed a man prioritize sailboat security and the salvaging of perishable meats above trivial things like personal and family safety, it is pretty hard to get worked up over a mere tornado warning, even with a half dozen cell phones and tablets squawking and screeching over the "Sounds of Silence."