This is week 111 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 770): Bad Radio and Yard Work

When I look through my wall of CDs these days, I rarely find anything that I want to listen to. I might stop at a few times and think that I’d like to hear a song from this CD or that one, but it’s rare that I want to listen to a CD the whole way through. Sometimes, I miss having a whole house audio system that shuffles through the songs in my library and plays them to any of the rooms.

That was one of the best features that I built into my first house. I have yet to build it into this one, and instead, lazily rely on the radio to shuffle songs for me. And radio is a poor shuffler with a library of old songs. Familiar songs. Songs that are like a worn out pair of shoes that you know you shouldn’t leave the house in, but put on because, even though they have no spark or zip, you’re comfortable with them.

I never bother changing the station because the dial on the radio is off just enough that the numbers are misaligned from the needle by at least a couple of points. It doesn’t matter much because I know that the other stations are just as bad as the one playing. It’s all the same ten to twenty year old songs that are safe, hummable, and boring.

Usually, just to get something unfamiliar, I’ll put on gummy teenage pop radio. I’ll listen to songs about riding disco sticks until I can’t take it anymore and favor silence.

I’ve had an MP3 collection since four gigabyte drives were $300, so not having a whole house jukebox is a bit silly these days, but it’s rare that I care about music as much as I used to. It’s no longer a way of life. Now, music is just something to keep my head from filling up when I’m trying to cook.

Today, while getting ready to make breakfast, I found a CD that I wanted to play. I threw Louis Prima on the portable radio and made breakfast for #1GF!. Prima adds a little fun to the mix, especially on a Sunday morning.

We opened the windows, and could hear that the neighbors were having a good time sitting out on their porch. In addition to a whole house audio system, I suddenly wanted a porch. I wanted a porch with a built in whole house audio system so that I could listen to my music in a buffer zone between the outside and the inside. The desire went away as soon as logistics and priorities settled in.

I cleaned up breakfast, and #1GF! went in to put away some of the baby clothes. When asked if she was nesting, she said that she was not.

I mowed the lawn, cut the bushes, went to the store for some mulch, and mulched a fragrant mystery bush that sits in the middle of the yard. When I finished, I was surprised that the yard didn’t look better than it did before I started. One day, it’s going to look good, I tell you. Like a grown out flat top haircut, the lawn is just in a transition phase.

I brought a bag of mortar from my mulch run down to the basement and thought about mortaring when I finished with the lawn. It was 3PM, my rule of thumb is that starting projects at 3PM inevitably require some additional item that will be discovered once the project progresses into the hours after the stores close. At that point, I’m usually hours past the point when I expected to be finished. Therefore, I shrugged off the 3PM mortaring and went in the house to shower.

I typically don’t turn on the PC on the weekend, but #1GF! took a nap at 5PM, so I took the time to read about agents, query letters, and getting published. I feel like I need to get as much of this book squared away before the baby shows up and chips away at my powers of concentration with around the clock feedings. Once #1GF! got up, I made her some dinner.

Monday (Day 771): The Fortress of Solitude At Knuckle Mountain

I wrote the Life of Riley 111 from 8AM until 4PM, which was a couple of hours short for a Life of Riley session these days. At around noon, I went out to the kitchen for lunch, and I was a little aggravated with my self-induced solitary condition. I opened the fridge and thought about the ham and cheese sandwich that I would have, like I have every day. “Fuck this,” I thought to myself. I’m having pudding for lunch.” A little voice in my head said, “You can’t eat pudding for lunch! Pudding is not lunch food!” to which I replied by eating a cereal bowl full of chocolate pudding in three or four bites.

It was the lamest rebellion that I had ever taken part in. Once the pudding was gone, that little voice started telling me that pudding wasn’t lunch again. I opened a cabinet and stared. So much for my life of half-assed rebellion.

Among the jars of pickles, chips, and pasta were a few packages of Ramen noodles. “If you’re going to be nutritionally rebellious, have a package of Ramen noodles, at least. You can’t just eat pudding. It’s just not healthy.”

“Fine,” I thought. “I’m supposed to have Ramen noodles for lunch? Then, I’ll have them.” I tore open a package and ate them without cooking them because that’s what rebels do: they break convention and eat pudding and dry noodles for lunch. Is solitude a problem for writers and the self-employed? I say no. When asked his opinion, my robot flashes an apple, whatever that means. You draw your own conclusions.

Because I had a couple of hours to spare before #1GF! got home, I worked on editing a few chapters of my manuscript. A lot of the time, I didn’t know if I was making the story better or worse, and would opt to go back to the original wording of some lines. I guess that’s how you know when a book is getting close to finished.

Once #1GF! got home, she sat on the couch and read instructions for me to put a baby swing together. When it was finished, it seemed as safe as the average carnival ride.

We were running out of space in the baby’s room, so #1GF! asked me to lug a few things up to the attic. On the way, I got my hand jammed between a box of baby stuff and the corner of a railing. Normally, a scrape would be nothing to even mention, but under the skin, it looked like a vein had been dammed off and was forming its own lake of blood between two of my knuckles. I still had feeling in my fingers, and wrote down “Lake of Blood” and “Knuckle Mountain” as possible future band names/book titles, so everything turned out okay.

Tuesday (Day 772): Corporate Misery Isn’t About Ties

I worked on book editing in morning, and then went out to get a haircut in the afternoon. I started to notice that my gelled dark hair and propensity for black T-shirts was making me look more and more like a vampire than I really want at this stage of the game. I went out for haircut at 11AM, and then drove over to the district where #1GF! works to see if she wanted to grab some lunch.

As I drove through the area, I saw a number of young people wearing ties and walking to get lunch. They walked in small, odd numbered groups with their heads down and without a smile among them. They all looked miserable, and I’m not sure how much it had to do with being forced to wear ties to work in the summer.

I then saw a bunch of older people without ties on, walking in smaller, even groups, generally with their hands in their pockets and without a smile. Even though they weren’t forced to wear ties, they looked even more miserable than the younger tie wearing group. It wasn’t difficult to figure out where each of the groups worked, and it made me question wanting to go back to a corporate job at all.

I pulled into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant and called #1GF!. Like a lot of working people, she was busy. I sat there in the car for twenty minutes, listening to the radio and waiting for her to call back. Once she did, I took her out to lunch at a local sandwich chain.

“So, do you have any good stories from the barber shop?” #1GF! asked.

“Not really, no.”

“None? You always have some sort of story.”

I shrugged. “Not this time, I guess. One guy came in who had recently had a pig’s valve put into his heart and said he was a member of the zipper club. He offered to buy me a cup of coffee, but I didn’t take him up on it (Seriously. People are always offering to go get a cup of coffee for strangers at my barber shop. It’s great). Another guy came in and tried to enumerate all the people he knew who had died in the past week, but kept forgetting in the middle and starting over. He tried four or five times before giving up and walking out. That was it. It was pretty uneventful.”

#1GF! seemed disappointed, but her disappointment was short lived. We talked for a while, and I eventually had to drive #1GF! back to work. On the way home, I picked up some fertilizer and did the grocery shopping. By the time I got home, it was late in the afternoon. I settled in for a few more hours of book editing before making a couple of quiches for dinner.

Wednesday (Day 773): Another Round of Editing

I edited all morning, cleaned the bathroom at noon, and edited all the way through to the end of my book by 5PM. There were still a couple of small spots that I wasn’t too happy with, but making it through that pass was good. I only added another 650 words in that round, putting the book at 56,600 words, or about 226 pages.

In the afternoon, the PC I built for #1GF!’s family showed up. It was a week early, so I brought it in the house and smiled at it for a while. I also got a pair of tiny, sparkly silver shoes in the mail from a sister who seems determined to impress her unique influence on my child as early as possible. Everyone should have at least one crazy aunt, and I don’t think anyone will ever deny that my child was ever deprived of her share of familial insanity.

By 6PM, I went out to put the fertilizer down and then watered the lawn, sort of. For a few minutes. By hand. Okay, so I got bored and gave the lawn just enough water to say that I had watered it. I spent more effort hoping for rain.

I don’t know why I bother with the lawn. Between the potholes and the desperate need of grading, the fertilizer is nothing but a stopgap waste of money. What the lawn really needs is a Bobcat and a host from DIY network.

When #1GF! came home, her feet were swollen like balloons. I put her on the couch and brought her some leftovers for dinner. I gave her an ice pack just in case that would help, but it only made dents on her feet. I stood next to her waiting to help, but couldn’t really do anything. I guess swelling is part of pregnancy.

Thursday (Day 774): I Was The Yeti

I checked my e-mail which has been in steady decline lately, and then looked up more information on query letters and agents. There are only so many times that you can read how to contact an agent.

I think the novel still needs a little bit of polish, but I feel like I’m under a time crunch. Am I making too many passes at editing? Will the novel ever be complete or will I edit forever? Am I simply editing to avoid sending out the letters? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I only have a few spots to sand down, but I’m sick of reading my book. I only watch shows once, read books once, and spend a single day writing and revising posts like this. Repeatedly reading and refining a book is necessary, but getting boring. Ninety percent of the work is done, but the last ten percent is threatening to eat an even larger percentage of time. I think this is one of the reasons that people smoke cigarettes. It’s a physically required distraction that pulls you away from things that you don’t want to do for seven minutes at a time.

I put the car seat base for the baby seat into ROCKET CAR! without incident in the morning. Now, it’s sort of ROCKET (BABY) CAR!. Maybe I can hang some baby toys off the giant wing to distract the baby from the stiff suspension. I need to get rid of that car for something normal. Something bland. Something that I won’t cringe at when puke and crackers are ground into the beige seats. Hopefully, some nice kid with a flat brimmed baseball hat perpetually tilted at ten degrees, or some old guy with a fresh divorce, or a woman who runs moonshine up and down the coast will get some use out of it.

A friend of mine came down from the North Shore and we had a lengthy lunch at a local restaurant. When we first sat down, the waitress asked if #1GF! had delivered yet. We talked about her for a couple of minutes, and I realized that I probably looked like a complete regular.

We had a long lunch, and then hung out at the house for a while. I didn’t realize that my friend had never been to the house, so I gave him a tour and explained some of the changes. We compared contractor stories for a while and came up with an idea for a website where you get to be enemies with people. We called it FoeBook. “Where do you hate Dan from? Work? School? click Dan is now your enemy.”

After my friend headed home, I got a whiff of something that smelled like a Yeti had rolled himself in spoiled hamburger and broken into my house. I sniffed various items in one of the rooms until I found the source of the stink. I sniffed down the sleeve of my shirt and my eyes rolled back in my head. I was the source. I was the Yeti. I somehow forgot to put on deodorant. How does something like that happen to an adult without any documented form of brain injury? I washed up and put on a fresh coat of deodorant so that #1GF! wouldn’t throw up once she got home. I hung the facecloth on the faucet temporarily to dry.

I went back to the bathroom a few minutes later, and the whole room smelled again. I had deodorant on, but I smelled down the sleeve of my freshly changed shirt just to make sure. Everything smelled normal. I picked up the armpit washing facecloth, and it smelled so bad that I recoiled and let out an involuntary, “Oh, jebus.” That little square of cloth had gained the power to stink up an entire room. I had to scrub it out with soap, right then and there, to get the room under control. Satisfied that it smelled normal, I wrung it out and left it in the sink to keep it from touching anything.

I was about to leave the bathroom and go back to editing, and noticed that the room still smelled bad enough that it wasn’t a leap for someone to think that I had hidden the hamburger Yeti behind the shower curtain. “What the hell?” I thought as I leaned down and smelled the faucet.

Somehow, the facecloth had transferred it’s powerful stink power onto the chrome faucet. How the hell can chrome smell? I splashed some water on it, because chrome isn’t porous and shouldn’t retain stink, right? Wrong. It didn’t help. I had to bust out some heavy duty, nuclear powered bathroom cleaner just to de-stink that faucet and the entire bathroom by proxy. When I was finished, I was glad not to be a medieval man, because any career that required stealth or the element of surprise would have been out of my reach in the days before deodorant.

Once everything was back to normal, I went back to editing my manuscript. I feel like I’m almost to the point where I won’t be able to read it anymore, but not quite. Until then, it couldn’t hurt to go through it one more time.

#1GF! came home with pizza, and I tried to make her and her balloon feet comfortable while we watched the second season of Mad Men. She didn’t ask about any Yetis, which was a good sign.

Friday (Day 775): Another Round Of Baby Name Vetoes

I edited my book all day, and made it halfway through the book with only minor additions and changes. When #1GF! got home, I had a batch of batter fried chicken waiting for her because I have become some sort of book writing house frau.

While she sat propped up on the couch, I ran off a list of names for the #1Baby!. #1GF! used her powers of veto to cast the names “Barbarella”, “Morgan Mindy”, “Lara Lor-Van” out of the running. I told her that my favorite baby name so far is “Moxie Crimefighter”, and she refused to entertain either name for use. I don’t know how many vetos #1GF! has available, but I’m running out of awesome names here.

Saturday (Day 776): PC Delivery Service

Our old contractor pulled up in front of the house while we were sitting around the kitchen table after breakfast, so we went outside to talk to him. We haven’t seen him since we moved in, and he had no idea that #1GF! was pregnant.

“So you going to put a ring on her finger?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s trying,” said #1GF!.

I looked back at her and smirked. Welcome to the modern age, folks.

The contractor left, and #1GF! and I drove over to her family’s house to drop off their new PC. I set it up and got it decrapified and went before we left. We stopped to look at patio furniture on the way home (even though we weren’t in the mood), and then went to dinner just to avoid cooking. When we got home, we heard large scale fireworks in the distance. It’s like there are constant fireworks around here in the summer. Welcome to life at the beach.

What I Learned

• You can eat pudding and raw Ramen noodles for lunch if you want to. There’s no real reason for that sort of thing, but it’s possible.
• My sense of rebellious behavior has severely atrophied.
• A lot of corporate workers look absolutely miserable irrespective of their work’s dress code.
• I have hit the point in life where I can forget to wear deodorant. there’s a good chance that pants are soon to follow.
• I know how to put a baby car base in a car.
• Ice just makes dents in swollen pregnancy feet.
• #1GF! has used a lot of baby name vetoes.
• New PC equipment still makes me smile.
• Editing a manuscript takes twice as long and is half as fun as writing it.

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