A Tale of Illicit Skin

Modesty is something that's important in my church and in my family. This makes buying clothes for a six foot teenage girl more interesting than it might otherwise be, and leads to interesting gymnastics in the changing room. Bend forward, sit down, stand up, do a little shimmy- if nothing comes apart it's good.

For the most part, modesty in not something I struggle with. I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that all tall girls are self-conscious, and when you're self-conscious it's easy to walk on the safe side of modesty.

But sometimes I like to sprawl on the floor to read or write or play video games or watch a movie. Not because the couch isn't big enough, but because there's something very freeing about lying on the floor.

And sometimes when I do this, my shirt and my pants part company.

The Teacher started a game to remedy this some time ago. It's called "Illicit skin ha ha ha ha!" Just like money on the floor belongs to Mom, illicit skin- that stripe of skin between my shirt and my pants- is a free tickle. And I'm ticklish (shh! don't tell!). Not as ticklish as I used to be thanks to a certain someone, but I am ticklish. So the result is that when I sprawl on the floor, the first thing I do before picking up my book, pencil, or controller, is yanking my shirt down. Just to be safe.

And if this was the end of the story, it wouldn't be very fair. (The Teacher doesn't believe in fair anyway.) But the beautiful thing about rules in this house is that they are never double standards. The Teacher would say this is because of her gracious nobleness blah blah. I say it's because I'm too old now for her to get away with it.

The point is that sometimes the Teacher likes to sprawl. And her shirts are normally shorter than mine anyway. And sometimes her clothing parts company. And sometimes a little bit of skin gleams like silver against the couch.

And then...!

In Which My True Love Abandons Me

I'm bookholic. I go into book-withdrawal if I go for a week without reading. (This is the extreme downside to girl's camp and EFY. No books.) I love the feel of a book in my hands. I love the sound the pages make when they turn. I love the smells of new vs old books. I love the way they line up on shelves, ready to be friends. I love the words on a page, in straight lines, with secrets and stories waiting to be read.

The side-effect of this is that I go to a lot of libraries. I love libraries.

This means a lot of library cards. We live in a rural area, so we have to drive fifteen minutes to an hour (depending on the direction and what your criteria for 'town' is) to find civilization. I can name eight off the top of my head without going to look, and one of those cards is for Austen and is for more than one library.

Normally Libraries and I experience a sunny relationship. Aside from the occasional late fee on my side, and not having a book I want on their side, we get along fairly well.

Right up until I turned seventeen. Austin has (had, but that's the end of the story) an annoying policy towards people who are out-of-county, which we are. Only check out so many books, can't renew online or over the phone, blah blah blah. Unless you're a child or a student, in which case you can do no wrong. When we moved here I was thirteen. I was a child. I got a child's library card. The Teacher and I shared this card so that we wouldn't have to drop everything and drive an hour in every time we had overdue books. We really only go into Austin once a month or so, sometimes twice.

But now I am seventeen. I am no longer a child. They won't let me use my library card. I have to get an adult library card. (This has a happy ending; the Teacher got a library card and found out that their policy had changed- of course they never told us this- and the books got checked out anyway.) But I am seriously annoyed.

I can't buy cigarettes. I can't buy beer or any other alcoholic beverage. I can't drive (yet- fear and tremble!). But I can't use my library card, because I'm seventeen.

Stupid library.

Not Carsick, But Sick of Cars

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather ride in an air-conditioned car than actually walk anywhere in three-digit weather. And cars these days are far more comfortable than, say, a covered wagon.

My aunt took me home today, along with her family of husband (1) and children (2). In one car. With everybodys luggage. And the box of cool stuff that she just 'forced' me to salvage from the get-rid-of pile. And I finished my one book within half an hour because I'm just not capable of planning that far ahead. And my cousins were watching cartoons in the back seat. (For the record, I could quite happily live without ever hearing the words 'Strong Bad' ever, ever again.) It was more than a little crowded.

And then there was the restaurant where we had lunch. I'll begin in the bathroom, since that's the first place I went. (I don't know what the men's room was like and I don't want to know.) The first thing was that the lighting was really bad. They had a heavy glass shade over the one light. Which meant that when you went in the stall and shut the door, it was dark. Very dark. I had to find the toilet paper by feel. I suspect that there was a secret conspiracy to keep the bathroom dark so it wouldn't have to be cleaned as often. The air freshener, wherever it was, was strong enough to make my head hurt in the five minutes I dared to stay in there. When I went to wash my hands, I turned on the supposedly hot tap (after I had already soaped my hands) nothing happened. Unless you think that an irritated grumbling from somewhere inside the plumbing is an acceptable something. I tried the other tap (my hands are already soapy at this point, remember). Fortunately, the cold water worked.

Sometimes I think the Greeks and the Romans were onto something when they believed in omens.

The wait was long. First we waited. Then my aunt got up and snitched the menus from another table. We deliberated on what to order for about twenty seconds before the waitress materialized and asked for our order. We ordered drinks and proceeded to memorize the menu while we waited for the waitress to come back. We ordered, and two of the orders were things (unmarked, by the way) that were not prepared until after five o'clock. I and whoever else it was who was unfortunate hastily (and somewhat randomly) chose something else. The waitress disappeared again. (In kindness to her, she was apologetic throughout all of this- whenever we saw her- and admitted to being new.) I began the next Great American Novel on some mostly intact straw wrappers. (Fun Fact: if you write small you can fit two lines of writing on each side of a flattened straw wrapper. Your punctuation is going to look weird, though.) I got maybe halfway through a small paragraph before I sloshed my drink on it. Still, that burned about forty minutes or so.

My cousins were bored to death. So was I, but I had a pen and am slightly more experienced in entertaining myself. My uncle finally fished out his palm pilot- or other electronic, nameless thing- and started a game of pictionary. (This is where the first person writes something, the next person draws a picture of that, the next describs the picture, until you've gone all the way around. This is somewhat like the telephone game, which I will not waste time explaining here. Then you repeat endlessly in the Resturant of Doom.)

On my turn- the next to last one to start a round- I wrote 'a very long wait'. I worried- after I had already passed it off to my seven-year-old cousin- that this might be a hard one to draw. Not so. It came out the other end as 'never get served food in this resturant'. (Mispellings withdrawn. You're welcome.)

Sometime during pictionary a plate of food- gasp- arrived at the table. But no silverware. Then two more plates. Then a third plate, which was the wrong order and disappeared again. Then my aunt went and snitched silverware from the same table she got the menus. I waited for my food. The palm pilot continued its rounds around the table. My food arrived. I had tacos.

We ate quickly. (At this point it was almost three. We walked in around one-thirty.) No one was either disgusted or impressed with the food, but everyone agreed that it was not worth the wait. I began to feel sick before I got up from the table. I felt sicker when I went to stand with my aunt at the cashier. (On a side note, she mentioned that she could have fed us all at On The Border for the same price. If you happen to not live in Texas, On The Border is one of the best chain Tex-Mex places available. And the service is better.) My aunt noticed and asked what was wrong. I admitted to certain up-and-down motions going on inside.

To cut the suspence off at the knees, I did not throw up. I almost wanted to, except that it would have prolonged the car trip. The Teacher met us at a turn off point so the others could go to Tourist Mecca and took me home. Having discussed (and cussed) the resturant at some length, it's been decided that the cheese was the processed plastic kind. I'm violently allergic to processed cheese; if it really was that, then I- and everyone else in the car- is lucky that I didn't throw up after all. I still don't feel to great, but I'm not about to die either, so I suppose that's an improvement.

In conclusion: if you are ever in Lampasas, do not eat at Medinas. Not worth it on any count.

I'm home and happy to be so. My kitties are still cute (I was really worried about that). I'll sleep in a bed instead of on a couch (although it was a very comfortable couch, it's not the same.) And I'm not carsick. I'm just sick of cars.

(Chocolate fish!)

The Power of Suggestion

It's finished. Every box has been unpacked, sorted, repacked, stored, or banished to the garage. The desk is clean again. (We've cleaned it maybe six times this week. It attracts mess like an industry-strength magnet.) The floor is pristine, even vacuumed.

And I'm clearly psychic. At the beginning of the week, I looked upon the office and made suggestions for the future. I suggested that since my aunt and uncle are both in scouts, besides homeschooling, they needed a shelf for non-book things. Like buckets of supplies or to hold bags or other scouting things. I suggested that all the books could be gathered into one side of the room so you wouldn't have to skip from one side of the room to the other looking for a particular book. All the bookshelves lined up together. I suggested that the Evil White Shelf was evil and deserved complete and total exile to the garage. I suggested that a tall cabinet/bookshelf really wasn't serving its purpose efficiently (the doors won't shut and since it was right in front of the closet that was more than slightly inconvenient) it could be repurposed to begin a new life as a garage-located pantry. I suggested that a smaller, more benign cousin of the Evil White Shelf could be rescued from the depths of the garage, cleaned off, and used to hold not-quite-scrapbooking-supplies. I suggested that the closet could become a craft/file storage closet instead of an inaccessible hole. I also suggested that the blankets currently taking up ten percent of the space in the closet could be relocated to the hall coat closet.

My aunt is not an entirely suggestible person. This is not completely surprising since I get my tendency to passive resistance from her side of the family. (The Teacher has said, more than once, that I'm a master of passive resistance. I'm sure, remembering context and tone, that she didn't mean it as praise.) Some of my suggestions were immediately embraced. (Like the blankets and a few others.) Others.... not so much.

So it is with a sense of half awe, half smug surprise, that I look around at the end of five days and realize that every suggestion I made (I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but anyway, all the ones that I actually meant) was, eventually, acted upon. The books are consolidated. The named furniture has departed. The Evil White Shelf is gone, gone, gone. The closet looks halfway friendly to the approaching supplicant. The non-book-shelf holds its unliterary burden with pride. The Evil White Shelf's cousin serves well and unobtrusively, which is the way furniture should be.

And now it's over, and tomorrow I go home to kittens and schoolwork and my own room which is a hypocritical mess. (On the other hand, it's only hypocritical if I pretended it was clean and happy and the way I wanted it to be.) But when I think about those suggestions that became prophecy, I am reminded of things I already knew.

Sometimes all you need is someone else to say what you're too afraid to think for yourself. Every time I wanted to get rid of a piece of major furniture, my aunt freaked out and went into stuff withdrawel. "I can't, can't, can't!" But in the end, (and many boxes later), it turned out she could.

The other thing is that I have a really awesome aunt. It takes courage to admit that you need help beating your stuff into submission. It takes something more than patience to let that help be your seventeen-year-old niece. Who may not be the most tactful or respectful of persons. ('Respect your elders' always seemed like a nice saying... for the elders. I don't believe in one way streets. If you want my respect... earn it. Inevitably, I don't seem to get along with some unnamed people very well.)

The moral of this long post is that sometimes all we need to change our life is a suggestion.

The Evil White Shelf

In my aunt's office (and it really is an office now, we're almost completely done- we contemplate not having much to do tomorrow, which will be an absolute hardship) there was a shelf. It was a tall shelf. It was wide. It was white. It creaked and groaned and fell apart when you didn't take things off of it with the right amount of tactfulness and courtesy. It's hard to be courteous when you're dead dog tired. And when you moved the shelf, which we did several times, it didn't matter how tactful we were, it fell apart in protest. Like a furniture tantrum.

It's the Evil White Shelf. (I just love my capital letters.) It looms, like some kind of albino vampire, waiting to fall on you. It doesn't matter if you stand just next to it or across the room. Even the other furniture is afraid of it. They shuffle away from the Evil White Shelf, fearing even its touch, in case the falling apart plague is catching. And the Evil White Shelf is wimpy. Load too much- and by too much I mean more than a box per shelf- and it screams in agony. The Evil White Shelf reminds me of a two-year old. It exists to whine and be wimpy.

I hate the Evil White Shelf.

My aunt is also not entirely fond of the Evil White Shelf, but she believed it to be necessary to the happiness and welfare of her office. Every time I said "I want to get rid of the Evil White Shelf," she said "Nooo! Not the Evil White Shelf! I can't survive without it!" (Editors Note: commentary here may vary from actual real conversation in some technical points, but be assured, loyal readers, that our diligent staff of purple giraffes in charge of all abridgment make sure actual meaning is not altered.)

But this afternoon, the final, fatal thing occurred. We unloaded the last things from the Evil White Shelf. We cleaned out the Closet of No End. (Seriously, it took forever to find the floor.) There was no longer a purpose to the Evil White Shelf's continued presence. Aha! I dragged it away to the garage, never to be seen by mortal man again! (I was careful to throw it into a deep dark deadly corner in case my aunt has a relapse and ever considers needing it again.) Of course the Evil White Shelf went out fighting, disintegrating many times on the way to its doom. I laughed and picked and hauled it on, refusing all pleas of half measures, where it might conceivably edge its way into good graces again.

I am absolutely merciless when it comes to bad furniture.

P.S- I offer no pictures of the Evil White Shelf, because it's already in the garage and anyway it doesn't deserve to be so honored. And you know what the Evil White Shelf looks like. You have one in your own home... waiting... watching... biding its time until it can hold something important and fall apart again...

The Excavation Underway

At this point in our archaeological venture only an expert (or extremely hopeful optimist) can detect the signs of an underlying office. This is the 'before-before' picture, taken before I arrived.


This is what we did Sunday evening when we were bored and didn't have much else to do. It consisted mostly of moving mess from one surface to another, but having a floor was very useful the next day.

Here the floor has begun to disappear again, but the office is emerging. At this point, we've removed three pieces of furniture and brought two in (one of them one of the ones we removed, brought it to hold things off the floor so we can walk around. Walking is nice. You can't see it in the picture, but if you could see it, I would advise you not to get attached because it's not staying.) The desk has been rotated to the window, one of the bookshelves was moved to a different wall with the other bookshelves, another bookshelf/cabinet was moved to the garage to start a new life as a pantry, and the microwave cart has mysteriously evaporated.

Here are the books as they look now. Be glad you didn't see how they started. The brown bookcase is the one we moved. The next item on the excavation checklist is to re-excavate the floor and get rid of enough stuff so that the floor is no longer a filing cabinet.

This has actually been a lot of fun. Hard work, but fun. And all the little trinkets from ancient times bestowed on the native worker don't hurt either. Two words: Chocolate. Fish. It weighs more than a pound. Life is good when you're an archaeologist and you don't have to register all these little finds with whoever archaeologists register. Treasure is everywhere.

I'm Back! Sort of

Well, I'm back from EFY- for a given value of back. I'm actually at my aunt's house. (Here I go pretending anyone who doesn't already know this actually reads my blog.)
She has found traces of an office in one of the rooms of her house, and has called me in to help excavate it. We'll begin by removing the top layer of dust from the fossil underneath. (The dust is composed, as far as I've seen, of wood fragments (papers, cards) and small gravel (everything else on the floor).) When the dust has been analyzed and disposed of, we'll get out the hammers and chisels and start knocking off the large pieces of extraneous stone. (Excess furniture that needs a new home.) Then we'll begin with the brushes, moving carefully so as not to damage the artifact underneath, but quickly, as some things, like newly excavated offices, can be damaged by overexposure to procrastination and needs to be removed to a safe place as soon as possible. This archaeological project will be hopefully completed (or at least majorly progressed) by Friday, when she'll throw me out of the house and take me back home to my kittens. I miss my kitties. But some sacrifices must be made in pursuit of knowledge, science, and bossing someone else around. (She did this for us a few months ago, and a year or so before that. What goes around comes around.)
And so now I boldly go where no man has gone before... tomorrow.