This is week 99 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 686): Lying Under The Porch

I woke up thinking about all the things that needed to be done around the house. It’s not the best way to wake up on a Sunday morning, but it does set a tone for the day.

I made breakfast for #1GF!, as has become the tradition around here. We had nothing really planned, so we watched a home improvement show afterward. That show turned out to be nothing more than a pep rally for household chores. After the show, I cleaned out the tub drain and then raked the yard, neither of which turned out to be as exciting or fun as they sound.

I raked up all the dead grass and leaves from the yard until 2PM and then picked up glass that was sparkling through the grass nearly everywhere. I still can’t understand how much glass can be left in the yard considering the amount that we’ve already picked up. It’s unreal.

While I worked in the yard, #1GF! dusted and swept the house because she can’t sit idle while other people are working. I told her that making a baby is work, but she didn’t believe me. I tried to put it into terms that she could understand. I told her that if I had to shoot a baby out of my naughty parts, I would’ve quit my job on the second month and spent the remaining seven months in the fetal position on the mere premise of the horror that would ensue. She thought that I was cute, but still didn’t believe me.

I threw a pile of glass shards into the trash and went inside for a quick PBJ break. Minutes after the last bit of sandwich was making its way toward my belly, I dusted off, and we drove to my parents’ house to pick up any yard tools that I might have been storing there.

I was expecting to pick up a wheelbarrow and rake, and found, yet again, that my imagination was playing tricks on me. The wheelbarrow and rake did not exist. I did pick up my spreader, a shovel, and a couple of odd items, but I started to wonder if there was a mysterious force at work that was converting all my tools into glass shards and spreading them on my lawn. I mean how do you misplace a giant blue wheelbarrow? I know I had one.

On the way home, we picked up a rake and hose nozzle from a local home megastore (No, it wasn’t a douche nozzle. Douche is shower. Good luck not saying or thinking “douche nozzle” for the rest of the day though.). The wheelbarrow would have to wait because I didn’t think I really needed it.

When we got home, I was going to loosen some of the dirt in the back yard, when I noticed that the area under our porch was mounded with dirt. This is pretty normal for a porch, but the space under our porch was covered with poured concrete long ago to keep water from getting into our basement.

When the first contractor put the porch on, he simply shoveled the dirt from the footings over the concrete, and probably figured that it no one would know or care about it once it was out of sight. There was no telling how much water that dirt would retain, but I knew it was more than concrete would. With the amount of water issues that we’ve had, any project that will reduce the possibility of water in the basement gets immediate approval. My robot would continue to slumber by his window, because that dirt was coming out.

I shoveled out what I could from around the edges of the porch, but I couldn’t quite reach any dirt that was more than a foot underneath. I mean, I could reach the dirt, but I didn’t have enough leverage to pull it out more than a dusting at a time. I was at a crossroad: I could either go the clean, but difficult way of scraping out a handful of dirt at a time, or I could go the slut route (dirty and easy) and get under that porch with a shovel and push the dirt out by the shovel full.

It’s only a couple of feet of space under there, so I knew that there was the surety of getting “stay out of my car” filthy, and the distinct possibility of a lot of crawlies finding their ways into my ears and nose. I squatted down holding my shovel like I was the Tiger woods of Landscaping on an important putt.

I shrugged. “Fuck it,” I said under my breath to no one in particular.

I climbed under the porch through a small hole, and had to lie flat on the mound of dirt to avoid having any stray nails finding their way into my scalp. I was lying on six inches of dirt with my shovel out in front of me. Once my eyes acclimated to the dark, I started to push out the dirt with the back of the shovel like it was a tiny plow.

I didn’t have a lot of leverage lying under there and pushing with my shoulders, but it was better leverage than I had standing next to the porch. And nothing crawled into my nose or ears. Or nothing that I’m aware of. I pushed out as much dirt as could without closing off the exits, crawled out backward, and carried the dirt to other spots in the yard. The process was repeated a few times until I pushed the last batch out with the back of the shovel. The shovel was regularly scraping against the bare concrete with a loud, but welcome metallic clamor.

I lay under there for a minute thinking about all the time I spent hiding under peoples’ porches during games of hide and seek as a kid. The smell of dirt, and the darkness just beyond the bright sunshine of a sunny day carried me back to when my biggest worries about being under a porch involved imaginary beasts and not losing my glasses. I reached to my face, but the glasses have long been replaced by contact lenses. Not feeling them, snapped me back to the fact that I was a grown man lying under a porch.

As a grown man, you can’t lie under a porch for too long before people think that you’ve either had a heart attack or lost your mind, so it was time to get out. The last thing I wanted was for someone to cut time out of my yard work by calling 911. If it were acceptable, though, I could’ve dosed off under there. Then again, I’ve been known to doze in very odd places like MRI tubes and dentist chairs…

I crawled out into the light and dusted off an incredible amount of dirt. When I thought I was finished, I still looked like Pig Pen, were he ever to make the jump from a Charlie Brown cartoon into reality. I shoveled up the last pile of dirt, and grabbed my new rake to loosen the soil in our minuscule backyard. It was not as easy as I had anticipated, but it wasn’t all that bad.

Once the dirt was good and loose, I laid down some seed and fertilized. Only after I finished fertilizing did I read the that the fertilizer may keep new seed from germinating. Great. The seed package said to use it, but the fertilizer package says not to. That’s probably the best way a company can defend themselves when after a month, the customer is still staring at a mud pile where grass should be growing. I stopped caring about the yard around 5PM, and it was 5:10. I hosed down all the tools and put everything away.

I dusted off one last time, removed my boots, and tiptoed through the house so as to keep any cakes of mud from falling hitting the floor of the newly swept hall. I turned my clothes inside out to limit further damage, and jumped in the shower.

I’m either old, out of shape, or both, but my muscles hurt like I had gone to the gym in tiger striped pants. It was my third day working in the yard, and my hands were a mine field of holes. I scrubbed the dirt out of the pink and red craters, and noticed that after a few days of scrubbing out open cuts, they stop being a bother.

#1GF! cooked dinner, and even though I avoid turning on the computer on weekends, I turned it on to play a couple of games of Quake. I didn’t really even want to play, but it was too late for coffee, and I was hoping for some sort of adrenaline rush to wake me up a little. It did not work at all. When I shut down the PC twenty minutes later, I was still tired and my eyes were dry. I slumped on the couch and #1GF! eventually had to wake me up to go to bed.

Monday (Day 687): Baby, Lick Me Through The Phone

I got out of the house early in search of Seamer Mate to seal up some leaky spots in my gutters that #1GF! had pointed out the week before. The gutters look like they have been leaking for a number of years, which is nice.

I have never sealed a gutter, but Seamer Mate came recommended, so that’s what I wanted to get. The first store I went to didn’t have any, and it appeared neither did the second. I asked a lady in my section if they had any Seamer Mate. She said that she had no idea, but told me to check down in the lumber section for it. I could hear the call going out to different radios that a guy was looking for seam glue for gutters. The people replying sounded frustrated for so early in the day.

When I got to the lumber area, I walked up behind a guy who was staring at his radio.

The guy should be there by now. He’s looking for gutter sealer. squawked the radio.

“That’s me,” I said to the back of the guy’s head from three feet away. “I’m looking for Seamer Mate.”

The guy stopped looking frustrated and showed me where it was. I thanked him as he walked away. I could hear various radios asking if I was all set and where I was. “He’s all set. I got it,” said the guy into his radio and vanished behind a rack of orange shelves.

I grabbed the biggest tube of Seamer Mate that I could find because it’s better to have too much than not enough, and it seemed likely that I might have other gutter leaks in the near future. I grabbed a garden hose that might actually reach across the yard, and some bathroom caulk in case I ever got around to fixing some of the settling that had gone on in the bathroom.

As I was driving home, I had the choice of listening to Metallica’s “Fade to Black” or Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” on the radio. Easy choice, right? Yea, it was for me too. I put on Lady Gaga. Even though the song is mindless dance pop in its purest form, I found it more palatable because I at least knew what I was getting.

As much as I liked Metallica as a teenager, I don’t think that I can really listen to them anymore. I think I’ve finally hit that point where even their older stuff has lost its punch, and all of it gives me the vague impression of being laughed at. It’s like I bought into a pop scheme in metal’s clothing. Metallica is a pair of parachute pants (or a red leather Michael Jackson jacket, if that was your thing): You really thought they were awesome at one time, but now, you sort of look back on them as a ridiculous fad that you got suckered into.

Thanks to the pop that had emptied most of my deeper thoughts, by the time I got home, all I wanted to do was dance, get kissed over the phone, and seal a couple of joints in the gutter if I had time left over. It was supposed to rain the following day, and I figured that having the gutters sealed in the morning would give them ample time to dry before the rain set in.

I pulled out the instructions, and the seams had to be as clean and dry as possible before application. When I got up on the ladder, I found my seams to be muddy and under an inch of water. As always, the five minute project was about to turn into something larger.

I figured that there was a clog somewhere down the line, so I got the hose and sprayed down the gutter towards the opposite downspout. I had the spray attachment set to “stream”, which I figured had enough force to send any resistant dirt to the land of wind and ghosts.

When I stopped spraying, a tiny brown tidal wave of water would start flowing back towards the joint that I was trying to get clean and dry. So what did I do? I kept spraying the tidal wave back, and each time it returned, it had more water behind it. The gutter was filling up pretty fast, so I had to change strategy before a tiny, pissed Godzilla popped out of one of those tidal waves to attack the man who dared disturb his underwater rest.

I would move the ladder, climb up, spray, move the ladder, climb up, spray. Lather rinse, repeat. I ended up cleaning out the gutters and realized that the standing water wasn’t due to clogs as much as the gutters not being pitched right.

I managed to get only one joint (relatively) cleaned and sealed by making a dam of paper towels. The other joint was still under water (and possibly protected by a mini Godzilla), so I gave up on it. I wrapped everything up and was ready to start writing LOR Week 98 by noon. It was Monday after all. And for the last 98 or so weeks, Monday is a wall to wall writing day.

I went in and had a PBJ to, you know, give me the energy for the strenuous task of tic tacking on the keys. As I was wondering what inanimate object would get a personality this week, #1GF! called.

We were in the middle of our usual check in routine (how’s your day? How are you feeling? Did you set anything on fire?) when I got some peanut butter on the cordless phone. Before I could think about it, I simply stuck out my tongue and licked it off. I stopped for a second like someone who accidentally farts in the middle of a crowded room.

I realized the how quickly and automatically some issues are solved when you approach them like a five year old. I shook my head when I realized what I did, and suddenly remembered that it’s not considered proper to lick household items to clean them. That is why we have Windex and furniture polish.

“Oh geez,” I said while shaking my head.

“What?” asked #1GF!, pulling her side of the conversation to a halt mid sentence.

“Well, I got peanut butter on the phone, and I sort of licked it off like that was a normal thing to do.”

“I’M HAVING A BABY WITH YOU?!?!” #1GF! pined in a tone that implied that she may have miscalculated my maturity level before signing a nine month lease with one of my offspring.

“Yes you are. So, the next twenty some odd years should be pretty interesting to say the least.”

It’s times like those that I my funny uh-oh half seems to be overtaking the funny ha ha half, so I got off the phone and dove into writing. I wrote LOR until 8PM, played some Quake for an hour, and then checked my mail, comments, and stats until 10. LOR needed another round of edits with fresh eyes, so it would have to be published the following day.

Tuesday (Day 688): LOR Is Late

I wrote LOR in the morning, taking only one break to check on the new drainage system that I made last week. It was raining heavily, but the drain was working fairly well. I miscalculated the size of the rain drops that were falling, so when I returned to my desk ten minutes later, my sweatshirt was soaked.

I published LOR Week 98, and then wasted time getting in contact with some people I haven’t talked to in twenty years. I’m still not sold on the ability to look up and get in touch with people from the distant past. Sometimes, I think that the past is the past for a reason, and to turn it into the present might be a mistake.

I had a generally unproductive second half, and ended up knocking off at 4:30 to play a little Quake. I was at my desk for a full day, but I really felt like a bum for not having accomplished much more than editing a weekly post.

Wednesday (Day 689): Two Headed Juggler On A Motorcycle

I answered comments and e-mail until 10AM, wrapped a couple of presents, went food shopping, backed up my site, did some MySQL queries to extract the home pages of everyone who had commented since the start of this blog, and worked on an idea for another WordPress plugin. I spent the rest of the day compiling forty weeks of a timeline on what had been done (and not done) on our house in the last year.

At around 5PM, #1GF! picked me up, and we went to her mother’s house for a family party. We had pizza, cake, and iced cream, which seemed unusual for a Wednesday night.

Everything was normal until one of the kids had a total screaming meltdown when they were leaving. The parent handled it by the book, and I took some mental notes for when I was sure to face similar situations in the future. When the child was gone, I warned the other children.

“See what happens when you have too much fun? Next time, tone it down a little. Be a little boring, and maybe pinch each other for no reason. That way, when it’s time to go, everyone goes quietly. Got it?”

The kids looked at me like I had two heads, with one speaking Navajo and the other Creole, while riding a unicycle and juggling. They were grinning at me, but in that “this is so weird” way. I guess I’m crossing the line into weird. Or they’re crossing the line into the age where they can see it.

Thursday (Day 690): The Epic Battle Of The Beardites And Mustachios

The day started out fantastically, with me making up epic death metal songs about beards and mustaches while I showered. By the time I was down to my feet, there were two battling camps named the Mustachios and Beardites who had been secretly battling for control of the world for a thousand years or so. It was truly, and historically epic. As is the case with most of the best epics, by the time I shut the water off, most of it had been forgotten.

I spent the entire day combing through notes to gather data for a timeline of events on the house renovation. By the time #1GF! got home, I was beyond bored senseless and verging on catatonic.

Friday (Day 691): Fifteen Hours Of Web Development

I checked stats, answered mail, and approved comments until 9AM. In the process, I got an e-mail from the kitchen people asking about their site, so I thought that I should throw some effort into it and get it finished. I worked on getting the structure built for the next fifteen hours.

I got everything but a picture gallery laid out, and would have finished sooner if I didn’t blow the site up twice with a couple of errant tweaks. When you get tired, you make mistakes, and those mistakes end up being harder to track down and fix. Why? Because you’re tired. I know my stopping point, but I went past it to get the site as close to done as I could. I did get it close, but would’ve been just as close if I quit three hours earlier and tackled the rest another time.

I ate Ramen noodles for dinner (as cooked by the lovely and talented #1GF!) and talked to the screen in between bites. I managed to get everything put back together by midnight, and went to bed.

Saturday (Day 692):

I got up, had some cereal with strawberries in it, and sat down to continue reading Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job. Moore is one of those guys that can write funny characters without turning them into caricatures, so I sat on the couch reading for an hour or so.

I was dressed with no place to go by 10:30. It was 85 degrees out, so #1GF! and I decided to take a walk down to the beach. It felt like the thing to do on the first really hot day of the year.

The beach was absolutely packed. We walked along the sidewalk, frequently pulling over to let speed walkers and joggers by. In those pauses, we noted all the pink people who were going to pay later for refusing to use sunscreen, as well as all the tan meat heads and the ultra thin bikini clad young girls that they were trying to attract. It was the same circus, another year in a row.

After a mile or so, we sat down at a park bench on a wide portion of the cement boardwalk. It was empty, with the exception of two girls sitting on their beach chairs. Twenty years ago, this same area was wall to wall teenagers pitting their boomboxes against their closest neighbors in a battle for auditory supremacy. It was Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative”, Heavy D’s “We Got Our Own Thang”, and De La’s “Me Myself And I” mashed together in a cacophony of pop and hip hop.

It was a tangle of neon bathing suits and big hair that smelled like an alternating current of Coppertone and baby oil. And it was so difficult to walk through that they had to paint two white lines on the ground to make a path for people to be able to walk through. It was slightly more effective than if they put the same lines through a beach full of California sea lions.

It always seemed like more hassle than it was worth to find a spot there back then, but now it was no problem. The painted lines had become obsolete, and only people that lingered were dog people. They would stop, and the dogs would engage in a little butt sniffing.

Some would pull their dogs on, while others would ask what breed the other dog was. It was sort of like tax season: the only people who ask if you’re done with your taxes are the ones who are done themselves. The same goes for dog owners and breeding: Mutt owners don’t ever seem to bring up breeding first. The people who are proud of Mr. Bojangles fine pedigree do.

People had abandoned this area long ago, and after a bit of sitting, so did we. We had lunch at our local restaurant, passing up the summertime privilege of standing in line with wet people in sandals for a slice of pizza or a hot dog.

On the way back, we saw a little girl with big sunglasses driving one of those battery operated cars for kids. She drove a pink Barbie Mustang, and had the attitude to match it. She didn’t return a greeting to anyone, and spent most of her time gunning it and slamming on the brakes to skid across the pavement.

We watched her drive into the mass of long haired skateboarders, who were practicing their tricks on the blackened edge of the pavilion’s cement stage. She drove around posts, and wherever she wanted. Everyone around seemed to be laughing about the little pink diva and her little pink car. Even the skateboarders’ confusion broke through their cool facades in the forms of small smiles. For a minute, it seemed that underneath, people are pretty much the same, no matter what face they try to put on when they go out.

The girl drove off in her Mustang, and was replaced by groups of three or more teenage girls. I’m starting to think that teenage girls may develop the same accent when they’re together. And if I’m not mistaken, it seems to have developed in the San Fernando Valley in the 80’s and never left. It’s like the American infatuation with the word “like” like totally drilled into our, whatever, like language and like never, you know, got out. Like a leach or something. Hey, at least they don’t say “fer sher” and put their pony tails on one side of their heads anymore.

We walked home through the same crowds of people: the too tan old men sat talking to each other with arms folded over their beach ball bellies. The joggers ran like they had somewhere to go that was much more important than enjoying the day. The dog walkers walked, the new parents cooed, the teenagers hid their inconspicuous red plastic cups, and middle aged surfers had a beach side barbecue in the back of a truck. This was the summer, and even though it showed up early this year, it was here.

As we walked across one final parking lot on our way home, people followed us to try to snake a good spot. “What are they thinking,” I asked #1GF!. “It’s one o’ clock, bitches! This is the beach. All the good spots were gone by eight. You can’t come down here now.”

“Unless you live here…” chimed in #1GF!.

I smiled at her and resisted my urge to offer up a high five. “Unless you live here.”

We walked back to the house and then drove to a nursery to look at flowers. We have been tinkering with the idea of putting in more flowers around the house, so we thought we’d go to a nursery to see what they had. I don’t know if I expected some really awesome stuff, but everything looked pretty dull to me. There were no ninja flowers of death, or bleeding dragons of doom, or anything. #1GF! got aggravated with me because I was looking and not buying, but she didn’t seem all that interested either. I was still trying to figure out how much stuff was, and tried to calm her down.

We left the nursery empty handed, got some coffee, and drove around town looking at houses and landscaping. We would pull over like tourists and gawk at the new construction, looking at the different types of stone, or the curves of the classically styled windows. I’d dream of the day when I owned a house that had a 180 degree water view.

“You know, I think I love houses. Even though it’s an incredible pain in the ass, I love taking something big and rearranging it into something better. I’d love to do that a few more times to live up here.”

We looked out at the lighthouse on the rocks just off shore.

“The beach is too far from here,” said #1GF!, trying to sway me on the benefits of living on a hill with sweeping ocean views.

“It is.”

“And that lighthouse is probably really bright when you’re this close.”

“Well, yea. It probably is.”

“And our house is awesome.”

As long as she was there, I had to agree. “I guess it is.”

We drove home and sat side by side on our front stoop under an old tree that was providing a bit of shade despite its lack of leaves. I called my parents and #1GF! did her nails. The sun was shining, and we waved to various neighbors as they appeared and disappeared from view.

“Hey, you want to plan out the flower beds?” I asked #1GF!.

She gave me a look as if to say “Not really, but…” and hoisted herself off of the old brick stairs. “Ok,” she said and walked over to where I was trying to visualize mulch instead of grass.

We stared at the beds, and debated between my “subtle and safe” approach and #1GF!’s “GO BIG OR GO HOME” approach to flower beds. As we were looking, I started wondering why I hadn’t got a call back on the short film I had been working on. I figured that my acting must’ve been so bad that the editor couldn’t whittle a single good scene out of the footage.

Just then, I got a call from my friend over at Burning Snowman about the short film. We still have a couple of scenes left to shoot, but he put together the rough edit of the footage he had. He sounded slightly nervous, but wanted to know what I thought about it. He said that he sent it over via e-mail. I hung up the phone.

“The rough edit’s done,” I said to #1GF! as if she had a clue what I was talking about.

“Rough edit of what?” asked #1GF!

“The film.”

“The beard thing?”

“Yes.” I started getting antsy and animated like a kid after his first Pixy Stick. “I’m nervous. I never got to see any of the footage of what I did.” I turned the PC on. What if it completely sucks? You need to watch this with me.”

“You should watch it.”

“Come on, let’s watch it together. You get one earphone, I’ll get the other,” I said while leading #1GF! down the hall to the office.

“Okay,” said #1GF!.

We watched it, and whether my acting was good or not, the editing was awesome. I could pick out where different shots were combined and tweaked to make something better than I could’ve made on my own. Now, if I could just get out of the 90% complete rut that I’ve been saddled with since birth and get the final scenes prepped and filmed, we might be able to put it out there for the world to tear apart.

After we watched it together, each of us watched it solo. Well, we each thought we were watching it solo, but we both lingered in the hall listening to the reactions of the person watching.

I called my friend back and sort of gushed about how good I thought it was. Short of a couple of tweaks that could’ve been corrected with a better actor, it looked like something I would watch from one of those sites that makes short comedy videos.

At 7, #1GF! made some pasta salad, and we ate it while watching Body Of Lies. The movie was pretty good the whole way through, but neither of us was impressed with the ending.

What I Learned

• I may have a bigger, and more ridiculous grudge against Metallica than I thought.
• There is an unbelievable amount of glass still in my yard.
• I lost a wheelbarrow? How is that possible?
• Being under a porch evokes memories of childhood hide and seek.
• Some fertilizer will stop grass from germinating. How does that make any damned sense? It’s fertilizer.
• Seamer Mate is good for sealing gutter leaks.
• My gutters are incorrectly pitched.
• I used the WordPress Widget logic plugin, and thought it was a really simple, but incredibly useful plugin for the kitchen site.
• There is a really awesome editor over at Burning Snowman.

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