• goodbadi

    Heat 2: The Logger Boyfriend

    December 15, 2009

    Today I asked a colleague who grew up in the vicinity of The Logger if she knows him. It’s a small community, after all, and she seems to know everybody.

    We were walking to the cafeteria to pick up our students from lunch when I asked her, and all at once she was no longer walking beside me, but was instead perched on her high (and I mean high) heels and swaying a bit as if she would lose her balance, planted as she was there in the middle of the hall.

    “Yes,” she said, covering her mouth. “We dated for five years. We were young, 16-22.”

    I quickly assured her that it was just a question out of the blue, and explained the situation. She said that normally he would be true to his word, but she’s heard through the grapevine that he may have “fallen off the wagon. He’s such a redneck [not a derogatory term at my school], and he was always all about seeing how hard he could work, and earning a good name for himself, so I’m surprised at this. Maybe something’s wrong.”

    “If his dad knows about it, though, it’ll get done,” she said, and recited to me the man’s parents’ home number.

    And then she added, “He’s sort of stalkerish,” she said. “He knows when my husband leaves for work, and at our wedding I had a friend who’s a cop on the lookout in case he showed up. Now his brother’s dating the girl who lives across the street from me, so I think that’s how he keeps tabs.”

    So for now I might continue sitting back and waiting to see what will happen next. Might my colleague’s grapevine shiver with its exciting gossip–Has The Logger indeed fallen off the wagon?–and firewood show up at my house?

    I’m tempted to bet on it, even without calling his dad.

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  • goodbadi

    Heat

    December 13, 2009

    I’m pretty good at getting what I want (remember the washer/dryer fiasco?), so when the load of logs that was to become “4-4.5 cords” turned out to be only 2.46 cords (with generous measuring), I went straight to the phone to call the guy whom we’d overpaid $105.

    As soon as I explained to the logger about the amount of firewood I’d received, he said, “I’ll make it right to you. Would you like the money, or more logs?”

    I was a bit taken aback at his non-defensiveness. “Logs,” I said, and he said to expect a call and logs from him in the next two weeks.

    But when two weeks passed and I hadn’t heard a peep, I called him again.

    “I was sick,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it right to you.”

    Two weeks later, he said, “It’s been so wet, I haven’t even been able to get out to bring in logs.”

    Two or three weeks later, when I said I’d like the money back if he couldn’t get logs, he offered to bring me a cord of seasoned and split wood instead of the logs.

    “That’d be great,” I said.

    “I’ll call you the night before I come,” he said. “I’ll be there Thursday or Friday.”

    By Friday evening, I was a bit peeved. As I loaded our wheelbarrow to bring in wood from the stack left behind by the previous residents, I pondered and plotted: I could tell him I’d advertise myself on craigslist as a reference for him; I could ask him point blank if he was just saying he would bring wood, or will he, really? Or maybe I could call him and say something like, “Well, I don’t like being ripped off, and I’ll never buy firewood from you again, so there!”

    But then the truth of capital punishment–that when we kill murderers we become murderers ourselves–dawned on my furrowed brow, and I realized that I could just simply choose not to be a jerk even though he’s a crook.

    So maybe I have been ripped off. At least I still have my self respect.

    When I called Dad to ask him to bring along his chimney brush next weekend, he said that he had thought their water tank would be installed in July–and just this morning he wrote out the check paying for the completion of the project earlier this week.

    It’s possible; maybe the rest of what’s due will one day come my way. In the meantime, becoming a non-Scrooge sits higher on my bucket list than does holding a contentious grudge or acting nastily.

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  • goodbadi

    Environmental Philosophy Major

    October 21, 2009

    After making my legs burn on my second bike ride home this week (I completed my 483rd 2009-2010 commuting mile this evening), I decided for the second day in a row to heap physical insult on injury by splitting firewood.

    I nearly finished up the pile of easy-to-split pieces–I won’t think about that other pile right now; even though it’s not terribly big, it’ll be more work than all the rest busted apart, probably–and had but one large piece to finish up in order to feel accomplished, when I realized I had a problem on my hands: I know it won’t be the end of the world (for crying out loud, she could want to study art or English), but apparently N is planning to be an environmental philosophy major when she grows up and flits the coop.

    You simply can’t argue with a convinced tree hugger.

    I was tired and couldn’t think right off the top of my head how to creatively get her agreeably out of the way, so we went inside for her bath and then her snack, during which I helped with some of the yolks but none of the rest of the five (or was it six?) whole hard boiled eggs she put away.

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  • goodbadi

    Firewood: Satisfaction

    October 12, 2009

    Not only did my dad come as planned yesterday with his two chainsaws (and my mom), but not long after we’d buckled down to cutting up the pile of logs M and I had ordered for our winter heat, my brother-in-law and his son showed up to help out.

    Several hours later, it was all sawed and only a couple logs’ worth of the rest remained to be split and stacked.

    Doing this kind of work on our own place and for our own heat has been a long-time goal of mine–and having such dedicated and skilled help made it even more satisfying.

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  • goodbadi

    Impressions

    July 12, 2009

    The trailer across the road is impressively maintained. The four vehicles that sleep and leave there are quartered tidily at night, the lawn is mowed every few days, the outdoor swinging benches are appropriately parallel or perpendicular to the house, the trampoline and inflated pool are pristine.

    They had a party there, last night, with a little pavilion tent set up and a strange trumpet-like party favor that filtered into our own conversations with friends over homemade pizza, garden tea, cucumber salad, cole slaw, zucchini brownies and ice cream, and chocolate mousse.

    I made the slaw and pizza, the latter of which I was quite proud: two (with slightly burned bottoms) pepperoni pizzas with lots of sauce, cheese, and pepperoni; one a deep-dish cheese with squash-cubes-simmered-in-chicken-broth; and one a white pizza layered with sauteed onion and garlic, basil, mozzarella, Parmesan, and ground pepper.

    Before supper we took our visiting friends on a tour of our country life, milling about the garden talking corn and broccoli, admiring my newly organized trash heaps, noting the pre-gobbled blueberries, brainstorming about the cash crops we could grow in our front acre.

    My latest grandiose idea is to dig out a patio in the slope that is our back yard, but we currently have many other priorities. As I am able to work on the ones that require no money, I’ve finished moving the fence, finally, and restacked the naily lumber pulled from the downstairs wall in that hectic week before we moved in, and washed the windows, and this week I’ll maybe wash the baseboard heaters.

    They’re why I can do only free projects, those heaters. We bought a brand new oil-fired boiler for them. It’s a contraption that will keep us quite toasty, provided we use it, since we’re highly inclined to spend the money from selling the truck on firewood logs that I can saw and split right in our back yard and burn in our living room stove.

    The boiler–our insurance company required some sort of heat as a backup to the wood stove–was a bugger to put in, from what the installers said.

    “I’d like to shoot the man who ran these pipes,” said the grizzled man, not the one–this week, anyway–who smoked in our basement. “That newer bathroom? The pipes runs behind the tub. If they bust-es, that whole tub’ll have to be torn out.”

    One of my free projects is that I’ve been in charge of N and food the past few weeks, too, since M is teaching mornings and planning afternoons. (As I tell people, she’s getting more of a summer vacation than I am.) N helps me with outside jobs, requires me to stop for snacks, pulls book after book off the shelf for me to begin reading to her, and begs for rides in the wagon which is no longer functional because I broke yet another wheel by loading up too many fence posts.

    All this work has cultivated in me a stellar appetite, if I didn’t have one before. On Thursday I got the urge to make a rhubarb crisp, so M cut some stalks while I decided that the single recipe of crumbs looked piddly, doubled the 9×13″ recipe and laid the crumbs twice as thick.

    I’m glad our visiting friend last night informed us that a nutritionist friend of hers claims that butter is a good fat, because we ate the whole crisp–including the crumbs’ two sticks of the divine paste–in two sittings. Practically speaking, anyway. M didn’t want seconds in that second sitting, so I saved a small bit for her to finish yesterday.

    “You shouldn’t tell everyone that,” M said after I told our friends about the crisp. “It’s so embarrassing.”

    Embarrassingly delicious, at least.

    Embarrassed or not, we still had fun with our friends. With them we coined the phrase “chafing at the theological bit” to describe how we sometimes feel in church. I felt a bit of that sort of exasperation this morning as the pastor noted that the denominational delegates at national conference last week resolved to uphold the church’s current human sexuality statements, yet continue in dialogue with people who also want blessings for same-sex couples. What better way to say nothing?

    In my college newspaper editorials I sometimes wrote against the university’s controversial building plan, but as I lost my innocence–realized that what I thought really didn’t matter–I instead turned to more personal thoughts of irrelevance, like how I never kept my hands in my pockets when I climbed or descended stairs, in case I tripped. But somehow one of the friends who visited last night, someone I really didn’t know well at college, still remembers my speaking out against the new building ideas.

    I asked the only guest among us who attended a different college what he thinks he’s remembered for. “Boxy,” was his quick reply, and described his cardboard box and duct tape “backpack” that he used all four years.

    We asked his wife if she would have been seen with him.

    “Not in college,” she said.

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  • goodbadi

    Conspiracies

    July 8, 2009

    No truths, half truths, whole truths, you never know.

    The other day our neighbor farmer asked if he can truck through our pasture when he hauls cattle.

    “Sure,” I said, relieved that he at least asked permission and didn’t just assume that privilege.

    Yesterday, though, we noticed the not-trespassing tractor trailer unloading…not cattle, but hay.

    (Which is not a problem, really.)

    On Monday I finally called our tenant about her July rent.

    “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said when she returned the call. “I’m coming down to a town near yours tonight; can I stop by on my way home to drop off the check?”

    When she pulled in, the check was from her grandmother, who lives in that town near ours. “And the toilet’s not working,” she said. “I put in a $10 part, but I think that’s not the problem, and I know what to try next.”

    “I’ll see about coming up to check it,” I said. I looked at the check. “We should probably add on the late fee to this,” I said.

    “Oh.” She’s had to pay it twice before. “How much is that?”

    Totally not wanting to travel up the interstate again, I finally suggested that she take care of the rest of the toilet in lieu of paying the late fee. She jumped at the proposal; maybe that’s what she’d been getting at all along, which suits me fine, provided the toilet was actually broken.

    (“Just ask her for the old parts,” a friend later suggested to me.)

    Not that I’m above any of this truth-related telling:

    Today the oil-fired boiler installers were smoking in our basement. I thought about asking them to keep the cigarettes away from the house, as “my wife has a deadly reaction to them.”

    I didn’t work up the nerve, though.

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