Here’s the thing, I can’t pick on him too much because he’s doing this out of love for ME.   Still, in the interest of keeping it real, I can’t let it pass.  I’ve got to call him on it.

My Captain and his best friend, Ty, are working on building a beach chair shed that My Captain designed for renters of Pop-Pop’s beach cottage to use.  So he’s spending a good portion of his vacation, well, working on it.  But that is the way My Captain rolls.  He’s got to be busy.  He’s got to be doing.  Making a difference. Sweating.  That’s just who I married.

Oh, sure, he says he’d like to just sit down with a beer and be a vegetable, but he never does it for more than a couple of hours before he finds stuff that ‘needs doing.’   And if he doesn’t find it, you can bet I will.

So here is the spot next to the garage the shed will eventually go.

And here are the guys at work building it.

But none of this is the point of this post.

The point of this post is that it is literally impossible for anyone to look cool wearing safety glasses.

Impossible.

Utterly impossible.

As in, NOT possible.

Despite sweaty muscles.

Despite the love-colored glasses through which I see him always.

Despite his cute butt, as reflected so beautifully in the old pink mirror.

There is just no way to turn safety glasses into something NOT dorky.

But My Captain doesn’t mind for several reasons. 1) He knows safety never takes a holiday, and a few hours of dorkiness easily off-sets wood chips through an eye.  2) He’s on a mission, and can’t be bothered with how he looks while carrying it out.  and 3) He knows and trusts his dearest friends and family to love him anyways.

And he is right, as always.

But he’s still a dork.

Summer has finally come!   Hooray!  Yippee!  Wahoo!!!!!  And Pop-Pop’s little cottage at the beach was waiting for us, along with Pop-pop’s roses, which still wave ‘Hello!’ to us in the ocean breeze.  Don’t tell ME that man is dead!  He blooms every summer in those flowers, as if to say, “What, you didn’t think I would actually leave you, did you?”

My Captain’s best friend, (since 3rd Grade!), Ty, and his wife Maggie and munchkin, Emily, joined us at the beach cottage for a few days, to jump start summer.   It’s always more fun with friends!     They’ve been here with us before, and therefore already knew the two immovable rules that have stood here since I was a little girl:  1) Everyone HAS to wear a shirt to the dinner table and 2) Everyone does their own thing, (except for rule number 1).   I don’t recall what original event happened that rule # 1 had to be created, but the law of everyone wearing a shirt to dinner is firmly entrenched in my mind, even after nearly five decades, so it must have been a doozy!

Fast forward to yesterday.  We’d spent all morning on the beach, in the sun and salt breeze.  We all came up to Pop-Pop’s air-conditioned cottage for lunch and a bit of a rest from the scorching sunshine.   I was looking forward to being with my beloved family, and my good friends! I was excited to hang with them, away from our usual work-week schedule and grind.  I couldn’t wait to start a game of cards or backgammon or something equally fun in fellowship during lunch.

But when I came out of the kitchen with my sandwich, I found that everyone was already adhering to rule #2.

They were all already doing their own thing, whether it be watching bad cartoons whilst consuming their body weight in unhealthy orange cheese balls…you know something is unhealthy when it is packaged in a barrel.

Or reading while sipping coffee.

(At least, it MIGHT have been coffee.)

Or working on learning Spanish, or designing a new shed for beach chairs and umbrellas.

(While drinking whiskey and beer.)

And while being ogled by the only one who hadn’t yet found an occupation for their lunchtime.

Other than, of course, taking pictures of everyone, and being a nuisance in general….at least until the warning-stink-eye came my way…..

Ah….togetherness!

But hey, at least everyone was obeying Pop-pop’s rules!

Happy Summer, Everyone!

Critter kills me.  He absolutely stinkin’ kills me.

We like to go for walks around the roads and country lanes near The Little Cottage, and this spring decided that we would pick up the trash (aka litter) that had accumulated so badly over the winter.

Garth and Amy Seely, of Landscape and Nature Discoveries, here in Montgomery County, Maryland, have been sponsoring trash pick up days for local school kids, and so we took a page out of their book and did the same out here on Peach Tree Road.

In the course of a few hours, Critter, Varmint, and I picked up over a dozen, 33-gallon trash bags worth of bottles and fast food bags.  It was truly disgusting.  Amy had wisely suggested we do this early in the spring, because in the summer and autumn, the habitat is, er, LESS friendly to having hands and arms picking through it.

It felt so good to be cleaning up our little corner of the world.   But as good as we felt for doing our part, we felt equally as strongly a horrible sense of disappointment in our fellow country folk who so voluminously scattered their trash.

Don’t get me wrong, Critter bitched and moaned the whole time.  He vacillated between being totally disgusted, and totally victimized.   Why should HE, after all, be the one to pick up after someone else?   I could only raise an eyebrow at that, for it wasn’t more than hours earlier that I had been picking up Jolly Rancher candy wrappers off the same couch his cute little pumpkin butt had just vacated.

“That’s different!” He wailed in righteous indignation. “I forget to pick them up!”

Huh.  We’re going to have to find a way to jog your memory, Candy Wrapper Boy.

Fast forward two months.  ONLY two months.  My Captain and I were walking the same road this evening and spied:

More beer cans and pop bottles.

Strewn all over both sides of the road.The SAME stretch of lonely road my munchkins and I had just cleaned two months earlier.

It was disheartening, I promise you.

And Amy Seeley of LAND had been totally correct….there was no way it would be easy to pluck that garbage out of the vegetation now….intermingled between the honeysuckle and Virginia creeper lay some heavy duty poison ivy, man.

“Oh yes,” I assured My Captain, “This new litter is just going to have to wait until next spring.”

“Or,” he winked, “you could just send Candy Wrapper Boy out here now to send the message, er, home.”

Nah.  I’m tough, but I’m not THAT tough.

That, and we’re out of Calamine.

I posted a picture on Facebook of a breakfast I concocted a while back, and a friend asked for the recipe.   And since I’m a very talented writer with an arsenal of thesauruses and dictionaries at my disposal, as well as a well-traveled and wizened vocabulary, I came up with the highly intelligent, image-provoking recipe title of ‘Breakfast Goo.’ 

I have no idea how I’m not on any best-seller lists yet.

Here tis:

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First, you wake up, go potty, feed the cats, scratch yourself, yawn largely, and make the coffee. Then you put on your second favorite apron, because your favorite moose apron is currently in the laundry having been covered in Rum Ball dough, and look in the fridge to see what you could make especially for your Beloved.

When you open the fridge, you see 4 dozen eggs, because you kept buying eggs, because you kept thinking you didn’t have any. Now you do. A lot of them. So you pull the eggs out. Then you open the freezer to see what you could put in the eggs. When you open the door, a pound of frozen, cooked shrimp fall out onto your bare feet because you’ve over-stuffed the freezer. Again.

THAT is when you decide to make a ‘Shrimp and Grits’ breakfast for your honey.

But since you don’t have any grits, and you have 4 dozen eggs, you figure you could use those and claim it’s ‘No-Carb-Sunday.’

THEN you remember to put the Sonos radio on, because everything you cook tastes better when you’re singing with Frank Sinatra.

Now this is the most important part. Go back to the fridge and extract: 1 lb. of bacon, 1 red pepper, 1 slightly moldy yellow pepper, heavy cream, butter, a chunk of sharp cheddar cheese, and white wine, which may, or may not have not been drunk straight from the bottle the night before. Go to your pantry and extract 1 onion that is starting to sprout, and 1 clove of garlic that is so old it is harder than a rock. Chop everything that looks choppable. Grate the cheese, leaving most of your thumb’s epidermis intact.

Then remember to run the shrimp under water in a colander so it is not frozen when you put it in the pan.

Violently throw the bacon into a large sauté pan. The largest you’ve got. Go big, or go home. Get it nice and medium cooked, and then violently throw in your chopped Portobello Mushrooms. You did pull those out earlier, right? I may not have mentioned it, but you, being you, would have remembered anyways.  And gosh, you are awfully darn violent.

As the Portobellos get nice and golden (don’t stir too soon or too often! Let ‘em get crispy on one side first.) grab your chopped mess and throw it all in there. When all of that deliciousness is tender, pour in a mess of wine and a mess of cream. Send up a prayer to our Lord and Savior, thanking him for these things, for they will surely make us see him sooner because of the quantities in which we consume them.

Did you remember to throw in a tablespoon or so of flour before you added your cream and wine, and give it a minute to cook in order to thicken your sauce? Good. I didn’t, so I added it now.

Now bring that wondrous, lovely stuff to a boil for a moment to thicken, and then add your shrimpies. Let ‘em get nice and hot, but don’t re-cook them. They’ll get nasty and tough if you do.

Sprinkle your cheddar cheese in, and stir ’til it melts. Then pour that thick wonderful goo into a big serving bowl that you’ve been warming in the oven. If you put that warm goo into a cold bowl, it will be bad, and all will not be right with the world. Do you want that on your conscience? Of course not. So for all that is good and right in this world, warm your daggum bowl.

Then break about 3 eggs per person into a bowl and beat the snot out of them. No one likes snotty eggs. And for heaven’s sake, get a fork and snag that nasty white stringy thing out of the eggs. Ew.  Just Ew.   Now, get those newly stringless eggs really nice and fluffy. Add some salt and pepper (but not too much salt…you’ve got bacon and cheese to contend with!) Be sure to beat them so well that some slops over the bowl onto your counter so you can now get raw egg on everything else you have out.   Send up a thanks that the government never inspects your kitchen.

Melt butter into the sauté pan you used earlier, and then rinsed out for this purpose, because you have only one super big pan and who the hell wants to make more dishes to wash later? No one, that’s who. So melt the butter in the used pan, pour the fluffy eggs in, and cook them gently while scraping the bottom ‘til they’re firm.

To serve this hot mess, put your cooked scrambled eggs into a different warmed serving bowl (you had one in the oven, right?) and let everyone at the table slop their own serving of eggs onto their plates, followed up with the creamy, wondrous, bacon, shrimp goo.

??????????????

It smells heavenly, your husband is drooling in his seat, and you feel like your purpose on this earth has suddenly risen greatly.   He will look over at you with a newfound love, and total forgiveness that you washed his favorite white t-shirt with your son’s orange Reese’s Pieces t-shirt.   This is a powerful breakfast, man!

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Now, eat in your apron, because you and I know that food is more likely to fall on your boobs when you are eating, than it is when you are cooking.

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And THAT, my friends, is how you make Breakfast Goo.

p.s.: I didn’t actually eat breakfast with the serving spoon.

Not this time, anyways.

Love,

Mama

I’ve always prided myself for being ‘Low Maintenance.’  Mostly because it gives other people low expectations of me, which makes me breathe a lot easier, I promise you!

But recently I’ve been told that maybe I am, in fact, NOT Low Maintenance.  I am, in fact, actually a demanding Pain in the Arse.

You see, when I bought this little cottage, it had a charming winding path of half-sunken paving stones.

No one ever used it.

They were often mud-covered, or if it rained, submerged in run-off, or in the winter, snow covered and not able to be shoveled.  We had issues, is what I’m saying.

So having already accomplished building a patio together,

I figured My Captain and I could pull off a charming little walkway made of brick pavers for The Little Cottage.  Easy Peasy, right?  All was going swimmingly until My Beloved asked me what I wanted it to look like.

Curved, of course!

And what design did I want?

Herringbone, of course!

Understand that what I was asking of My Captain meant a million little custom cuts would need to be worked out for the herringbone design to fit into my willy-nilly, no rhyme-or-reason, curvy, charming little cottage path.

But we’ve been together long enough that he just took one long sigh, pulled on his ripped-up-oh-my-god-they’re-sexy work jeans, and dug in.

Actually, he had ME dig in.  With the shovel.  Something I was never made for, as can readily be seen by my ridiculously inaccurate swath of cut sod.

Seriously, look at my horrendously non-specific lines.  Poor Beloved…God Bless Him.  This is a very mathematically thinking man, who, when faced with my willy-nilly-ness has to dig deep…DEEP…down into his soul to find tolerance.  So while I’m busy drawing asymmetric squiggles based on emotion, he’s right behind me calculating sine and co-sine to make it a reality.

I know, it’s all so clear now, isn’t it?  It’s so very clear why he works so much overtime.  I would too, if I were married to me.

Yes, he knew right out of the starting gate that he would have to make a million little custom brick cuts.  Just look at the curve here at the top.  That would have to be made from at least two bricks, and in at least four weird angled cuts.

Undaunted, he figured and calculated in his head, right along with what was most probably fantasies of having married a math professor instead of a goofball.

Right about here he was thinking that maybe her name might have been Diane, or Jennifer, or something wonderfully feminine, rather than my name, Pam, which, when barked in frustration, sounds ominously like a cuss-word.

And Diane/Jennifer would never do anything as inappropriate as taking a butt-crack-underwear-holey-sexy-work-jean shot and post it for all the world to see.

Make no mistake, his cuss-word-sounding-named wife worked side-by-side with him, even into the night.  Not just because she is as driven as he is, but also because we had learned that rain was imminent and unfinished pathways do not take kindly to water.    So it sounds good to say we were ‘driven’, but in reality, we were doing the ‘pee-pee’ dance so all of our sand grading wouldn’t be trashed by the rain.

I didn’t want my picture taken, so every time he tried to, I would look right at his phone with my hat light.  Tickled the heck out of my funny bone.  His, not so much.

Night or not, rain or not, this baby was taking shape!

And the next day, Varmint got called into service.  Turns out she was MUCH better at helping him piece together the million little funky-cut bricks.

Which included her using the lava stone to ‘sand’ them into exactly the right shape after he cut.  Varmint has the right disposition for that kind of work.   Me?   I am more apt to use the sledge hammer to get a brick to fit.  (Like this moment last year, while working on the patio.)

But back to this year’s project, while My Captain cut, and Varmint fit, I was relegated to brick schlepping.  I put on  my 3X unapologetically purple Schmidt work overalls from the Tractor Supply Company, was sure to wear my fire-engine red thermals under it, because THAT is the way I roll, and schlepped like the best cuss-word-sounding-named wife he ever had.

And then he had me begin the arduous process of back-filling the sand into the cracks.

Apparently other than schlepping, My Beloved feels I have talents in crack filling.

We all have to shine in our own ways, I guess.

But look at how it turned out! Ain’t it purty?!

Obviously I had to buy some creeping phlox to plant along the edges before we filled in the soil and grass seed.

Just take a second to appreciate all of the funky sized/shaped bricks he had to create for the weird curves.  Didn’t he nail it?!  What a rock star my man is!

He may be right, though.  It is possible, looking at this new path, that I am not Low Maintenance after all.

But I do rock a pair of purple work overalls, so I’ve got that going for me….

….which is nice.