Yes, February is quite the eventful month for us.

I’d planned on celebrating today with Mom and taking her and Dad out to dinner at Daniel. My brother and I had also arranged to fly him to NYC secretly to surprise her. Alas. These plans are all postponed.

But the birthday isn’t. I hope it is a happy one and that Dad doesn’t give you the flu as a present.

It’s been a while since I’ve managed to have all my submissions actually, you know, submitted at the same time. There are no stories waiting for me to write a cover letter at the moment. It feels good.

It also means that I need to finish a new story, like say, the 12,000 word monstrosity sitting in the works in progress stack.

The other day, Rob and I went to see part of the Silent City series at the Film Forum. The evening started off with NYC Treasures from the Library of Congress, which was a collection of short subject from 1898 to 1906. They had a live pianist providing accompaniment. Seeing the city bustling around in some ways made me feel as if only the fashions have changed. Granted, they’ve changed a lot, but watching these people in unguarded moments of laughter or frustration made me really aware of how little human nature changes. The fashions though…people definitely dressed better then. One put on a suit and tie to go to Coney Island.

After that collection, we watched Lonsome. Again, set at Coney Island, this film from 1929 is your standard boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl and they live happily ever after. The male lead, Glenn Tryon, was out of the same mold as Stefan Karl, quite delightfully so. One of the things that fascinated me was how modern the text cards appeared. I’m so used to faux silents with their old timey text, that I’d forgotten how recent these films actually were.

At one point, Our Hero followed the Girl to the beach. He tried to gain her approval by feats of acrobatics and then finally settled down next to her and said, “Hello.”

In sound.

I tell you, the entire audience gasped. It was as if we had never heard a talkie before in our life. This film, which I had thought was a standard silent film, had three minutes of dialogs in it. The moment when he opened his mouth and sound came out was electrifying. I can only imagine how much more it must have been for people who didn’t even know that such things were possible.

So, that thing I said about only the fashions changing isn’t completely true. Technology has given us a lot more possibilities. But it’s awfully nice to know that the sense of wonder can be regained in the right context.

Rob always gets on my case if I forget to unplug the gluegun when I’m finished with it. My defense has been that the state of “finished” fluctuates. I mean, finished for the moment versus finished for the day. It takes the gun awhile to heat up, so I don’t like to unplug it when I’m only finished for the moment. That seems reasonable, right? Even if I’m leaving the room to go, say, make bread or something. I’m coming back and then I’ll have to wait ten minutes while the gun heats.

Last night I unplugged it, because I was finished for the day, and this morning worked on my computer while I was waiting for it to heat up. I heard a sudden pop. And then a hissing crackle. On my workbench, smoke poured out of the gluegun.

I unplugged it.

In the eighteen years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a gluegun do anything like this. Still, all I can think about is: What would have happened if I hadn’t been in the room?

I picked up our set of bookshelves today. Compared to the kitchen cart, this was a piece of cake. It was only a three-story walkup and a eleven block stroll with the shelves on a hand truck. Every man I passed offered to help me. The shelves weren’t heavy, but they were very awkward. I was tempted to say, “Yes, if you will just push it a block to give me a breather,” but I knew I was going to need to save my karma for when I got back to our building.

There are three short steps up into the building. At the apartment where I picked up the shelves, they helped me get it down. Here, I was going to be on my own. I passed one of my neighbors as she was on her way to church. She turned around and followed me back to the building so she could hold the doors for me. Another neighbor, Manny, arrived at right that moment and helped me get it all the way up into the apartment.

Whew. Now. Note the gap between the shelf and the doorframe. Remember when I said that our floors sloped and that it was hard to make pictures look straight? This is why. I did level the shelf after taking the photo, but it took a one-inch block of wood under the left side to do it. Crazy.

All the books fit. I am happy.

I just dropped one of my mom’s punchbowl glass cups on a marble rolling pin and it didn’t break.

Am I offbase in being annoyed about this? When I dropped my computer off, the guy at the desk said it would be ready in a week. That was eight days ago, so I thought I could reasonably expect it to be finished today. I called to see when I could pick it up.

1) “Um… I’m having trouble finding it, can I call you back?”
I was silent for a moment and he said, “Don’t be scared when we say things like that. It usually means that it’s on a technician’s desk. I just need to spot it.”

Sure. That’s fine.

2) He calls back. “It should be ready later this week. We’re short-staffed because one of our technicians went on vacation to Spain.”

I said, “So when will it be ready? I was told that it would be five days when I called in and a week when I dropped it off.”

“I don’t know. I mean, if you could see what it’s like here. We’re really short-staffed.” He sounded nervous, like he was a geek totally out of his element. Which was probably true. “We’ve only got two techs on the floor. A third one comes in at three. Your computer is about ten down in the queue.”

“That’s good to know, but what does that mean in terms of when it will be ready?”

“I don’t know.” It sounds like he’s having to grip the phone harder to keep it from sliding out of his sweating palms. “I’m not a technician; I build systems.”

“Well, what I’m trying to decide is if I should come down and pull it out of the queue.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that. There’s no guarantee that you could find someone who would have it done faster than four days and then it would just be back at the end of our queue.”

“Four days?” I stuggled not to shout at him. “Look. This wasn’t an urgent repair, but it was my only window of time to have it done. This is my primary computer. I have a gig coming in on Thursday; I need it back.”

“If you could see what it was like at our end, you would understand why it’s not ready. One of our techs is in Spain and we’ve been working our regular hours.”

The effort to not shout became harder; I’ve run shops before. “I have been on your end. A vacation to Spain doesn’t spontaneously arise; that should have been part of the planning with your scheduling. I was told a week. I’m annoyed because I was given inaccurate information.”

“He was already in Spain when your computer came.”

I didn’t respond to that, because clearly, that did not improve his case at all. “I need the computer back by Thursday. So I’ll call at five o’clock on Wednesday to see if it is ready and if it isn’t then I’ll just come pick it up.”

“Oh that should be plenty of time. I know it’ll be ready in a couple of days.”

“Wednesday is tomorrow.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Today is Tuesday.”

“Oh. Man. Well, I’ll tell them you need it back. But we’re really backed up right now.”

At this point, I was finished with the conversation because I wasn’t going to get anything useful out of the boy. “Thank you for your time. I’ll check in tomorrow.”

So, my mental note from this is that computer geeks have no sense of time at all. I’m sure this will come in handy on a story sometime.

We recorded Chapter 9 and 10 today, so my part of the process is over for the moment. Rob will edit it together, and then we’ll see if I need to do any pick-up lines.

Our flight out was utterly uneventful. We both napped some. Rob read the NY Times. I wrote and got about 2000 words in.

And then we waited for our baggage to arrive. The staff seemed to be engaged in a slow motion Laurel and Hardy film, which anywhere else would have involved much running around trying to fix the multiple baggage carousels as they broke. But this is paradise, so they ambled from the first carousel to die. Then they ambled away. Sometime later, without an announcement the carousel next to us began revolving and lo! our flight number was now on the sign above it. En masse the passengers flocked to the new carousel. Four bags emerged.

It stopped.

The staff ambled back. They examined. Pondered. Then ambled away. We waited and then felt some relief when the buzzer over the carousel began to make its noise and flash. But as the minutes passed and nothing happened there was some question of whether they would move us to a different carousel.

The staff ambled back. One of them disappeared into the nether regions of the machinery, which would have given Hardy his cue to turn the belt back on, sending Laurel scrambling. In this case, we waited until he slowly emerged and ambled away. The buzzer began, slowly, and then built tempo like a diesel engine turning over on a cold day. It kept going for about a minute before the carousel started moving again this time with an added high squeal.

But no bags. The staff ambled back, stopped the machine and disappeared. Sometime later the buzzer began again, slowly revving up, and then it started to fail, doing half-buzzes or flickering. When the belt finally started moving again, bags came out packed tightly together, piled on top of one another. Rob’s bag tumbled down the ramp and slid toward us. And the carousel stopped again.

We waited for the staff to amble back. Once they arrived, they began manually extracting the bags from the conveyor. Mine was not far down the stack and so we were able to make our escape. I don’t know how much longer the other people had to wait.

Rob and I ambled outside to meet momk, who greeted us with leis.

Look at these shiny, shiny Rayguns.

The Rayguns: Dr. Grordborts Infallible Aether Oscillators, are a line of immensely dangerous yet simple to operate wave oscillation weapons.

Meticulously built to the exacting standards and plans of Dr. Grordbort, these weapons, bespangled in fine detail and with various (most likely quite dangerous) moving parts are the perfect addition to a gentleman’s study or a deterring centerpiece for a lady’s powder room or chiffonier.

Is anyone else having an intense session of coveting right now?

I woke up during the night with a toothache, which was Just Not Fair. At all. I tried sleeping anyway, I tried taking ibuprofen. Nada. In fact, it got worse, radiating through my ear and sending shafts of steel straight through my brain and out the top of my head. Visions of root canal opened in my head.

So, I got up around four and called my dentist’s office, leaving a fairly pathetic voicemail asking them to call me when they got in and make the pain go away.

At 8:05, five minutes after they opened, Angela called and sounded so sympathetic on the phone that I knew I was doomed. They got me in with an immediate appointment. Definitely doomed.

I walked in and apologized for being ill and the technician’s eyes lit up. “Sinuses?” she said.

I nodded, “And a cough. Sorry about that.”

“I have three kids, it’s not a problem.” She went to the computer screen. “So tell me what’s going on.”

“Well, about three days ago, I woke up and my jaw hurt. I thought ‘Jeez, have I been clenching my jaw.’ But then last night it got worse and woke me up.” I proceeded to describe those symptoms. “It hasn’t been as bad since I got up.”

“But the pain medication didn’t do anything?”

“It kept getting worse.”

“Let’s get an x-ray and see what’s going on there.”

She worked really fast, remembering that I have a hair-trigger gag reflex, and got the image up on their nifty computer screen. Then the doctor came in. She was quickly caught up on my symptoms and then looked at the x-ray.

“See that thin white line dipping down across the roots of your teeth?” When I nodded, she continued. “That’s your sinus cavity. It’s pressing down on your nerves. We’ll go ahead and test to make sure that it’s not a dental issue, but I think you’re looking at a sinus infection.”

She poked, prodded, stuck cold things on my teeth and everything was normal. Yay! No root canal. (By the way, thank you to Angela and Brandi at Laurelhurst Dentistry who sent me my xray.)

So then I trotted off to the doctor and repeated my symptoms. He shook his head, “I am exactly the right doctor for you to see because I am three weeks ahead of you with these symptoms. So I know that the first line antibiotic does nothing on this particular strain. Which means that you don’t have to spend five days wondering why you aren’t getting any better. What you have is the flu that’s going around plus a secondary infection.”

I somehow got to this point in my life without ever having had a sinus infection, ear ache or toothache. At the moment it feels like I have all of them.

I now have antibiotics. I’m armed with the knowledge that lying down will make the pain worse. That part of the symptoms with this is that it doesn’t respond to pain medicine, so I won’t bother trying. And, that the antibiotics will have no affect the flu portion of the illness, but in a couple of days my head won’t hurt.

The important thing is that I don’t have to have a root canal. On the whole, that alone makes it a good day.

Tonight we went into the studio to record Chapter Two of the secret project. At one point, the narration refers to one of the characters whistling. When we paused, Rob said, “Are you going to whistle?”

“No. I can’t whistle,” I replied.

A moment of silence passed with Rob’s mouth hanging slightly open. “Are you my wife?”

“Yes. But I can’t whistle.”

“Really? How did I not know that? Not at all?” He then whistled a scale. Bastard.

“Not reliably. I can make a sound, but not with any consistency. Inhaling. I can whistle on the inhale, but not blowing”

This seemed to fascinate Rob, while I felt a sort of delighted dread. Then I tried to show him what little whistling I could do, which tonight amounted to the sound of wind on the moor. Not a whistle, but not simply breath. I have no idea why whistling would have come up before, but Rob is apparently quite excited by the fact that I’m incapable of whistling. When we finished recording the chapter, he leapt up and came into the booth to ask more questions. This is the source of the delight and the dread. I have intrigued my husband by revealing a new aspect of myself, and new aspects are a precious commodity when you have known someone for seven years, but it’s something I’m bad at.

How about you? Is there something about you that your significant other learned after you’d been together long enough that it seemed as if the surprises were mostly over? Or, for that matter, what surprising thing are you bad at?