Painting

When I moved into my house in Year Of Our Lord XIIBV, one of the first things I noticed was that all the walls were beige, which I didn't love. 

"I'll paint them later," I optimistically promised myself. And then I moved all of the crap I've ever owned into the place.

Look. Let me give you some old man wisdom from this old man. Listen carefully. What I'm about to tell you is one of the most important things you'll ever hear in your life: if you buy a home and it is not the color you want it to be on the inside, do not move your sh&t into it. Leave your sh$t out of it. Paint the d@mn place first.

I bleeped out all of my swears for my mother.

The point is, painting an empty home? A pain. But a manageable pain. Painting a home full of your life's worth of hoarding? An unmanageable pain. 

Do not do that to yourself.

I give this advice knowing full well that I could have never followed it myself when I was young and dumb and so excited to sleep under my own roof and start saying things like "are we heating the neighborhood?!" whenever someone left the door open. I couldn't have forced myself to wait several days to get the painting done before moving in. 

The Great Flood

Skylar left at illegal o'clock this morning for affairs so he wasn't around when I discovered The Great Flood in our front yard. 

He's in pediatrics now, which is apparently different than the rotation he just completed, which was also in pediatrics. He had panicked before starting that last one because he decided against all possible evidence to the contrary that he wasn't "good with children." 

I had him watch that episode of Mr. Rogers where the kid goes to the doctor for a physical and Mr. Rogers goes with to show the viewers at home that it's not all that scary. I told Skylar he could maybe get some tips from how the physician in the episode interacted with the child. A few minutes later I found him intently watching the episode and furiously taking notes, which might be the cutest thing I've ever seen.

Apparently that did the trick because by the end of the rotation he had decided that he, in fact, liked working with children. So he was happy to start this new rotation in pediatrics that is somehow different than his last rotation in pediatrics. 

The point is, he wasn't around to deal with today's disaster.

Dead Rat

Our greatest neighborhood allies are the Perfects next door. When I bought this house in The Year of Our Lord Eleventy Hundred, I was too intimidated to talk to them because they were, well, perfect. So instead I just spent like three years doing a lot of embarrassing things in front of them without affording myself the opportunity to explain.

A big part of the reason I didn't cultivate much of a relationship with them is because I just assumed they wouldn't want me to bother them with my boring self. This is a thing I assume about everyone always. It's very healthy and for sure not in need of therapy.

Then Jon Skylar Westerdahl moved into my house. Skylar is the opposite of me. It doesn't even occur to him that someone wouldn't be interested in talking to him. And it's not like he's arrogant about it. He doesn't necessarily assume everyone will love him either. He just doesn't care. He barges into the lives of everyone he sees and decides that if they don't want him, it's their burden to get rid of him. 

Within days of him living in this house, he was in the Perfects's''ses' front yard arm-in-arm with all four of them and the dog, laughing and creating memories. Suddenly they were coming to parties at our house and helping us with our gardening. We became "can you water the flowers while we're out of town" neighbors for each other. They texted us immediately after the earthquake earlier this year to make sure we were ok. 

Gal Gadot

When I bought my house in 2014 the inspector guy showed up and kicked the tires and then told me the place was unlikely to collapse but that my A/C unit was from The Year of Our Lord 1776. It was actually used as the desk on which Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence. 

I didn't want to buy a new A/C at that time because I priced them out and found out that A/C units actually cost more than the International Space Station and since I had just spent eleventy billion dollars purchasing and furnishing a house, that wasn't going to happen.

Every summer I conduct a full seance in order to get the thing to kick on and start working for the year. I have literally made eternal promises to Satan I cannot possibly keep in order to get my house to cool down every July. I'm terrified of the day I have to explain that to him. It's seriously going to drive a wedge in our friendship. 

As it turns out, although 2020 so far has been a really phenomenal year with next to zero adversity or problems for anyone, I suddenly could not longer put off replacing this thing. I had noticed our power bill was exponentially increasing, the A/C was almost constantly running without ever actually cooling the house much, and whenever it kicked on all of the power in the house would flicker and an angel would die.

So I finally called a company I've previously liked and had them come out to replace it. A few days later two pimple-face teenagers showed up and spent a full day in my basement beating my furnace with weapons of war and loudly discussing which female celebrities were "hot enough" that they would deign to date them. They were on the fence with Gal Gadot. They had a hard time deciding if she could persuade them into a sexual relationship. 

Ghost Town Hunting

We were supposed to go on an adventure last weekend, but our plans were abruptly canceled when Skylar plugged in all eleventy hundred of his nuclear devices at once and blew out our power.

He disputes this characterization, but if he wants to revive his old Stranger fact-checking site, he can be my guest. Until then, I'll continue to unfairly and inaccurately tell the stories without any consequences.

The power outage happened on a Friday evening. "I'll handle this," I declared, in the tone of a homeowner who thinks he's a qualified electrician for no other reason than that he's pretty sure he knows where the breaker box is.

I marched to the basement and flicked each breaker at random for several minutes before finally accepting this problem fell outside my broad expertise. We called our electrician, Raul, who is 100% the best human being I've ever met on this planet. My friend Anna found Raul about 8 years ago and now several friends and I consider him a part of our families. I will for sure name a child after him if Skylar or I can ever figure out how to get pregnant.

Raul told us he could come the next day, which meant we needed to stay home and wait for him. He showed up at noon and climbed through every nook and cranny in the house until he found a wire that had straight up exploded (???).

Learning to Fail

You know what's not ok? THIS:

I think he's just doing it to spite me now. I started screaming last week when I saw it because I have abusively lectured my husband like 71 times about this and he refuses to learn.

"The cans say three feet apart, Skylar!" I've toxically yelled at him.

Our Mountain Vineyard

My husband has decided to turn our backyard into a vineyard.

I found out about this when I overheard him asking Matt if he could borrow several power tools, which he called by their proper names, like "that drill thingy and that saw thingy." He had called Matt and I heard the conversation from the next room over. The second they hung up Matt called me to let me know that Skylar had plans to destroy something. That's what good friends are for.

Skylar told me he was going to drill some holes into a wall at the back of our property (a wall that does not belong to us) so he could attach some wire contraption to some long screws and somehow wrap wire around this so he can grow his alcohol and sin like he thinks we live in Napa Valley NOT THAT WE KNOW WHAT NAPA VALLEY IS.

The saw thingy was apparently for an unrelated kitchen demolition project which has since been completed and I've tried not to ask too many questions because my new thing is letting disaster befall me without wasting energy on fruitless attempts to stop it. #2020 #apocalypse #INeverSpellApocalypseCorrectlyOnTheFirstTry #yolo

Does This Count As Pictures & Distractions Who's In Charge Here?

I was going to do Pictures & Distractions but then I got distracted (ha!) and started word vomiting. I guess the below does include some pictures and links, so maybe this counts? I don't know.

I was going to start this off by bragging to you about how I spent my weekend painting my garage door and patio in the backyard and I went to pull up a picture and somehow clicked on something on Instagram, which turned out to be a "live video."

As you know, I'm what the kids call "not tech savvy." I've seen people do these live videos before but I guess I just always assumed this was not a resource available to me for some reason. WELL. As it turns out, IT IS available to me, and if there's one thing I like more than watching TV it's BEING tv (hashtag attention seeker).

Being the international superstar that I am, upwards of SEVENTEEN PEOPLE tuned into this thing. Now I can't walk around my house without sunglasses on and TMZ hired a new person to just cover my life. That person followed me around for a week and then got fired when there was nothing sensational to report besides my skin-care regimen WHICH IS OUTRAGEOUS.

It was all very fun and very exciting and I think we should do a Quarantine Stranger Show where everyone gets their favorite not-that-I-know-what-that-is-Cathie beverage and joins us on Instagram one night for a story or something. Or is that lame? Is this a bad idea? I've been locked in my house so many days in a row now that I can't tell whether this is a bad idea. Someone reassure me here.

Let It Snow

We woke up to a snowstorm this morning, which is Skylar's actual vision of heaven.

Mine: I'm greeted by a woman making flour tortillas. We become best friends. We travel together and visit antique shops for all of eternity.

Skylar's: It's snowing but also somehow 110 degrees. He is handed mittens, a comically-large scarf, and is seated next to a fireplace with a stack of books. He is no longer affected by dairy or spicy food and can in fact consume an unlimited amount of each.

I don't think we can spend the afterlife together unless one of us is willing to experience hell, since that's how we view one another's paradises.

Our bedroom in our little hundred-year-old house is odd. The prior owners built an addition on the back of the home in the 50s, including two rooms, one which we use as our master bedroom and another that Skylar lovingly calls "Eli's room of forgotten hobbies."

The name isn't really accurate. In it I keep a piano, two guitars, a ukulele, a harmonica, some recording equipment, bike gear ok I hear it now BUT NOT ALL OF THOSE ARE FORGOTTEN.

Yard-Life Crisis

Skylar and I had a midlife crisis about our yard and in the last two weeks we have used all of your college funds to toil and labor our Earth.

I'm sorry. I know you wanted to be astronauts. But you're just going to have to settle to be asstronauts instead, which is a job waiting tables at a gay-themed restaurant over by the airport.

I don't remember exactly how it started, but I think it was something Skylar said. We've had an ongoing fight about our landscaping because we have completely competing visions and tastes for this sort of thing. I want it to look like if Walt Disney designed a garden for Joseph Stalin, with straight lines, perfect symmetry, not a thing out of place, and ongoing mysterious disappearances of my political enemies.

But if you ask Skylar what he wants, he's like "IT MUST LOOK LIKE NO HUMAN HAS EVER EXISTED." Skylar wants an organized mess. He wants the equivalent of sexy bed head for the yard.

Because we have a total inability to see eye-to-eye or compromise MARRIAGE IS GOING TO BE SO GREAT we have been at a stand-still all year, vetoing one another's ideas, and getting nothing done in the process.

Until two weeks ago. I had finally had it with this, and so had Skylar. So we had a conversation wherein we discovered that we both really just wished our yard looked like our neighbor Lynne's yard. Lynne has somehow captured both of our conflicting tastes at once. Her yard is like if Disney gave Stalin bed head. And then murdered his political acquaintances.

Farm House

I know this is the last thing I need in my life right now, but you guys.

On Sunday Bob and Cathie drove me and Skylar and my sister Krishelle to the great northern tundra that is southern Idaho to pay respects to deceased family members. My mom's parents both grew up around that area. I had never before been because we don't really have family up there anymore. At least none that we know.

My grandparents got married and moved out of the area, eventually settling down in a Southern California desert that is so hot you can see it from space. My grandma still has some cousins or nephews or friends she met at girls camp or what have you in the area, but my family is so huge that it's not really possible to keep track of anything beyond immediate family. I know I've told you people this before and you didn't believe me, but I have over 70 first cousins. FIRST cousins.

So, no. I don't know my second cousins or what they're up to or what Hogwarts house they belong to (Hufflepuff, all of them, I'm sure).

Nonetheneverthelesswithstanding, I've got ancestral homies buried all over that place and since I had never been my mom decided we ought to take a drive to lay flowers on their graves because we're respectful like that.

What I discovered as we entered what I am told was a town called "Mink Creek" is that this area--the area from which my grandparents availed and which they have kept from me for 35 years--is the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my life.

The Hole in my Front Yard

I told you a little while ago that my concrete steps leading up to the house look like Chernobyl. They have been crumbling apart for years. They are as old as the Titanic. I can still smell the paint.

So I called a concrete contractor who showed up and was like "I can fix those for you and it only costs twelve million dollars and half your virtue" and I was like "MY VIRTUE IS PROBABLY PRICELESS."

Speaking of virtue, Meg recently taught me a new phrase:

I’m putting this on Meg’s tombstone. https://t.co/Y9bqqZ1qmC

— Eli McCann (@EliMcCann) April 16, 2019

The point is, stuff be going on at Meg's Twitter and I don't always know how to feel about it.

Prison Steps

The steps leading up to my house are what we in the business call "a mess." I'm not sure what business we have or why we have it, but the point is: mess.

Look

There Will Be Some Kids

Halloween is a stressful day for me because I so want it to go well but it pretty much never goes well.

I want to live in that neighborhood from the movies where all of the kids are out in traditional Halloween costumes, marching up leaf-fallen pathways to Victorian brick houses, adorned with intricate pumpkin carvings and emitting smells of hot cider. That's all I want. Not much to ask for.

But that's not how it goes on my street.

The houses are dark, almost comically so. Windows are practically boarded. My first Halloween in my home I had about 4 trick-or-treaters.

It's gotten slightly better since then, probably only because I have aggressively shouted children down as I've seen them passing my street to move on to friendlier territory, convincing them to come over.

I never planned to be a man in his thirties screaming at kids to come to his house for candy, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Last year, thanks largely to my Halloween advocacy, I had nearly 30 trick-or-treaters. At least two of those were full-fledged adults, out without any children, but they were wearing costumes so I rewarded their commitment to sugar.

You Have Rats

"You have rats," The Perfects informed me, standing on my driveway as I fumbled with some grocery sacks from the back seat of my car.

The only one who was happy with this news was Duncan, who is brave only in the "hold me back" kind of way.

He turns into a vicious and rabid dog, while in the comfort of his own home, every time he sees a cat cross by the living room window. But when he saw one up close at Skylar's parents' house last Christmas, he quickly devolved into a nervous breakdown.

You wouldn't believe the therapy bills.

As soon as he discovered the rat or rats a day or two after The Perfects's's disclosure, he was in heaven, primarily because the rat had no interest in confrontation, so Duncan could look like a badass without ever having to fight the creature.

I knew that The Perfects didn't mean for the news to sound like an accusation, but I'm accustomed to translating everything that comes from their benevolent mouths into a certain tone and context.

Skylar Has Opinions

Be sure to check out this beautiful story from Shireen if you haven't already!

*****

Skylar has opinions about things and sometimes this is the worst.

I don't mean that his opinions are the worst. Sometimes they are. But that's not what I meant by the first sentence.

What I meant by the first sentence is that it is sometimes the worst that he has opinions in the first place.

Last week we got our by-mail ballots for the midterm elections. We sat around the kitchen table filling these out, quite thoughtfully, I would like to add. Probably more than any election, we studied the issues thoroughly, like we were preparing to take a test.

But then we got to one proposed constitutional amendment on our ballots and Skylar was not familiar with it so he asked me if I knew what it was all about.

"Just vote yes," I told him, without further explanation.

Mr. Pham's Patio Project

I told you a little while ago about how I hired Mr. Pham to do whatever the hell he wants with my yard. I had given Mr. Pham a vision of what I was looking for, and he didn't seem to hate that vision, although he did yell "NO" at me a few times as I was explaining some details of the vision. Then he took money from me, marched to his truck, and drove away.

Over the next couple of weeks I would come home from work to find Mr. Pham ripping giant bushes out of my yard and hauling away concrete that I didn't even realize I had back there. On two separate occasions The Perfects yelled over to me to ask what Mr. Pham was doing back there. I told them the truth: "whatever the hell he wants."

I had my own problems dealing with the dying grass situation in my front yard, one which Skylar is convinced is evidence of a hate crime. When I asked him what someone might hate about me he just said "EXACTLY" so I'm probably offended.

Finally, I left town for the Half Ironman, wondering when Mr. Pham might be done.

Mr. Pham

Please enjoy this week's Strangerville Live, and today's story:
 

My neighbor Lynne's landscaping could be in a magazine. Every flower and bush is perfectly manicured. I want to be buried in her backyard one day. Especially if I'm dead.

I was amazed that she had achieved everything she has by herself, especially considering that she's a flight attendant and is often gone for many days at a time. Then one day she told me about Mr. Pham.

I don't know Mr. Pham's first name and I'm not sure Lynne does either. He may not have one. She found him a few years ago and hired him to do some landscaping work on her property.

Mr. Pham is probably a genius. He is an exceptionally talented landscape artist. Lynne liked him instantly because of how proud he was of his work. He takes pictures of yards he's worked on and prints them out to put into a binder, and he likes to pull it out, a huge grin on his face, and show people that he meets. Lynne told me that only people who are really good at what they do care that much about it, so she trusted him and had him start helping her with her yard.

Grass Seed and Drug Cartels

My street is on a hill, which is a problem for three reasons:

1. Sliding past my driveway on icy days and having to circle the block multiple times to give it another try;

2. Losing balls that Duncan suddenly decides to set down on the ground mid-walk for reasons he refuses to explain to me;

3. The thing that happened on Saturday.

About three years ago I decided to base 100% of my self-esteem on my yard maintenance. This was a dangerous decision because a weed can send me to therapy now.

On the plus side, I can accidentally steal someone's car and get chased down by multiple employees of a car dealership and still think I'm a perfect human as long as my lawn is looking healthy that day.

Many Hands Make Light Work

Last week I wrote a post complaining about how cooking blogs make you scroll through 5,000 words of nonsense just to get to the one thing you were looking for in the first place. Then Meg told me that I basically do the same thing with Strangerville because people who listen to the podcast but don't read the blog have to sift through Stranger word vomit to get to the episode. And I was only incredibly offended.

So that's why I put the episode at the top. I'm not losing my mind. You were worried. You shouldn't be worried. About that, I mean. You should be worried about a lot of other things. Like e. coli, and how to spell e. coli.

In other news, I was graceful in front of my neighbors on Friday.

It all happened because it finally started snowing in Salt Lake City.