Moose in the Kitchen

Many, many thanks to everyone who commented with bits of your life story. And thank you to everyone who read and thought about commenting before getting distracted by something else and wandering off (that’s my usual commenting style, so it’s one I can appreciate). I’ve been sick the past few days, so it’s been great fun to wake up in a feverish haze, reach for my phone and find out that one of you reads from Finland (my dad worked for a Finnish company for years, so he was always in Finland – SEE, COMMON GROUND!), one of you adopts rescue sheep (I don’t have any sheep, sadly), and I really need to watch Battlestar Galactica already. Then I roll over and fall back asleep. Then I wake up and get to explain polyamory to my mother, because she’s checking the comments as religiously as I am. If that’s not the funniest conversation to have with your mother on Valentine’s Day, I don’t know what is.

On Sunday (also known as Day 2 of the Wasting Plague), I drove down to San Jose to tend to Her Royal Majesty while my mom reneged on her kitty butler duties to go to Point Reyes. She gave me the tutorial on HRM’s Fancy Feast (she likes lamb in the morning and venison in the evening) and then, since the fluffy feline got a dinner of venison and superiority, we felt we should have something better than frozen peas.

Here’s a tip for anyone who finds themselves in the suburbs on Valentine’s Day after completely forgetting about Valentine’s Day and so foolishly decided going out to dinner was a good plan: California Pizza Kitchen. It will save you from an ignominious journey to Safeway for chicken noodle soup. The wait was ten minutes, approximately an hour less than Applebee’s, Olive Garden, and Cheesecake Factory. (I told you we were in the suburbs. THESE ARE THE CHOICES.) And that’s after it takes two smart women (one who lived in San Jose for 18 years and one who’s lived in San Jose for 31 years) with GPS twenty minutes to find the Applebees that was four minutes away. Blaming my complete lack of directional capability on genetics is so reassuring. Descended from Magellan we are not. (Christopher Columbus, maybe. He did discover America while looking for India, after all. TOTALLY SOMETHING WE WOULD DO.)

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I should be frantically getting ready for my dinner guests right now (lest the floors remain unswept and UNSWEPT FLOORS ARE UNTHINKABLE) rather than blogging, but here I am. Because I have another question for you: What do you hide from company? I hide this. And all my magazines. (Hint: They’re in the closet.)

Another note on Company, The Having Of: As I was trying to nap (rather than get ready for company), my brain was churning tirelessly, as it likes to do, and it was in the Trying To Nap Away Nasty Plague But Can’t BECAUSE BRAIN IS NOISY moment that I discovered a cruel cosmic joke. My brain will not shut up, ever. It is stuffed with 17,000 thoughts at any given waking or supposed-to-be-napping moment. Except when I have company. Then, if the conversation slows for a minute or two, my brain goes completely blank. I suddenly become a Zen Creature of the Moment. I have no past, I have no future, there is only now, and I am screwed because I’m not doing my hostess-ly duty and people are starting to fidget. By this time, someone else has picked up the conversational slack, thank god. But still. That’s just mean.

My doorbell rang just as I finished that last paragraph. It’s now four hours later and I’m pleased to report that there were no pauses that couldn’t be solved with careful application of more banana bread.

Related posts:

1. Construction Paper Parable
2. Turkey with a Side of Emotional Stability