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Traveling Off-Island

November 08, 2010 - View Single Entry

Whether I named Travvy true or his name has rearranged my life I couldn't tell you. What I do know is that I've done more traveling since my Fellow Traveller came along, and most of it has been Travvy-related (most of the rest had to do with cataract surgery). Considerably more travel(l)ing, which is to say "going off-island." It started with that trek to Masasyu Alaskan Malamute Kennels in Canandaigua, New York, before we even met.

This is no vague impression: I've got data to prove it. Check out my credit card statements for the last 10 years. I've shelled out more money to the Steamship Authority (SSA -- if you live on Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket, SSA does not stand for Social Security Administration) since that trip to get Travvy (late April 2008) than I did in the preceding decade. Before the beginning of this month, I'd made seven round-trips accompanied by Trav. Two of them involved overnight stays.

The one time Travvy didn't come was in mid-March, when I went off on foot and came back with Malvina Forester. How Travvy-related was that? Here's where the karmic hypothesizing comes in. Trav destroyed Uhura Mazda's passenger-side upholstery and seat belt. About a year later, I wrecked Uhura's front axle en route to Rally obedience class. Malvina Forester is a far better MDV (that's Malamute Delivery Vehicle) than Uhura ever was. Uhura was good at hauling hay and shavings. Malvina transports malamute, gear, and driver-chaperone in comfort that is not only dry but (when necessary) air conditioned.

Yesterday we got up in the dark and were rolling down the driveway by 5:10 a.m. Daylight saving time ended several hours earlier, but even allowing for "fall back" it was still dark -- dark when we reached Vineyard Haven, and just beginning to get less dark when the 6 a.m. ferry left the slip, with us on it. The boat was barely half full -- no one takes the 6 a.m. ferry unless they have to, and at this time of year there's nearly always room on the 7 or 8:15, except maybe on peak weekends. I was going to a dog-training seminar that began at 9 a.m. The seminar was in Worcester, a solid two-hour drive from Woods Hole. The only alternative to the 6 o'clock boat was going off the day before and staying in a motel, which several of my friends did.

Travvy wasn't going to the seminar, but I didn't have anyone to look after him at home, and my Fellow Traveller travels well, so he came too. We made our customary stop at the gas station and convenience store near the Falmouth Ice Arena; it's adjacent to the "back 40" of the SSA's Palmer Ave. parking lot, which is a good place to give the dogs the potty break you didn't have time for before you rushed for the boat. This time Trav and I crossed the bike path and walked up the paved access road -- to discover that the backside of Falmouth Hospital was just over the top of the hill.

Before we hit the road in earnest, I decided to gas up. Gas is a lot cheaper off-island -- price differentials of 50 cents a gallon aren't unusual. The downside is that most off-island gas stations are self-serve, and I'm borderline phobic about self-serve gas. I didn't own a motor vehicle till I moved to Martha's Vineyard, and on Martha's Vineyard all the gas stations are full service. Since I don't travel much, you can figure out the rest: confronted with a self-serve pump, I do my best to decipher and follow the directions but usually make a fool of myself and have to ask the attendant for help.

Thanks to this year's traveling, however, I was beginning to get comfortable with serving myself. Confident, even. Maybe even cocky. I unscrewed the gas cap. Swiped my credit card, no problem. Lifted the handle, inserted nozzle into gas tank -- nozzle hit a metal wall. I was mystified. I poked it in a couple more times. No go. The metal wall gave easily to the pressure of my forefinger, but the nozzle wouldn't go in. By then the pump had given up and cancelled the sale. I was about to give up, but the nice attendant came out from the convenience store and pointed out that I was using the diesel pump. The nozzle on the regular gas pump went into Malvina's tank just fine.

Not all idiot-proofing is idiotic. I still think automatic daytime running lights are stupid, but I'm glad Malvina has a fool-proof gas tank. Travvy trusts me to get this stuff right, but he doesn't care how I do it.

Throwing Things Out

November 03, 2010 - View Single Entry

It's not that I don't like buying things; it's that I hate throwing things out. Things, not paper. I don't mind throwing paper out. Sometimes I love throwing paper out. I just reconciled four months' worth of bank statements and chucked the agglomeration of multiply-folded deposit and debit card slips that were making such a paunch in my checkbook. Finally I'm going through the small mountain of paper that has accumulated near my desk.

This stuff started out on top of Travvy's wire crate. The first time I dismantled the crate to take it on the road, the stuff -- reading material, newspapers to be clipped, receipts, bank statements, etc. -- got dumped in that little corner. When the crate came home, some of the stuff migrated back to its all-too-convenient top, and the rest of it stayed in the corner. Both accumulations grew, stealthily but steadily.

I hate filing. Filing is incredibly tedious and time-consuming and the only thing I have to show for it is a negative, as in "that ugly pile of junk in the corner is gone." Oh wow, how accomplished is that? Lately, though, I've had this nagging suspicion that the ugly pile of junk in the corner is a metaphor for my life being a heap of unsorted crap that's threatening to go out of control -- like I still haven't paid my third quarterly estimated tax to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because I got a memo from the state saying I'd underpaid last year's tax by a modest amount and I wanted to make that up with my third quarterly but I couldn't remember the amount or find the memo because it was in that pile somewhere.

As incentives go, not being hauled off for tax evasion is a better motivator than the satisfaction of seeing bare carpet with no junk piled on it (and coincidentally of being able to reach the bottom shelf on the little bookshelf that the pile is in front of). So I've been working on it, poco a poco. I found the memo (haven't made the quarterly payment yet, but I will, I will), got four months' worth of bank statements in order, and balanced my checkbook, which is to say that my paper checkbook is now in accord with my Quicken one. For good measure I entered the data from my credit card statements, which were backlogged to last February.

So in the process I've tossed a lot of paper, but as I started off saying, I don't mind throwing paper out. Throwing things out, on the other hand, makes me feel guilty, especially if those things have some use left in them. Case in point: the Rubbermaid dish pan in my sink. I got it when I moved into this apartment, which was more than three and a half years ago. It gets grungy for sure, but from time to time I scrub it and bleach it and it looks -- well, not quite as good as new, but at least like less of a health hazard. If I'm healthy, how much of a hazard could it be, and if no one else ever sees it, who cares how it looks?

Until this morning I managed to keep answering "not much" and "not me," respectively, but deep down the uneasiness was growing. Considered in isolation, the pile of junk in the corner might seem like no big deal, but considered in the context of a dish pan with ground-in dirt and green tinges rising up on all four sides, an impartial observer might conclude that the householder who tolerated these things might be in trouble.

The trouble was feeling guilty about throwing out a dish pan that was still usable. It was, I decided, time to get a new dish pan and throw the old one out. So I stopped by Shirley's Hardware and bought a new one for $6.99. And a new spatula for $2.99 -- the old one was like a fingernail that's half ripped off and keeps catching on things. Also windshield washer fluid for Malvina and a scrub brush to clean the window screens with when I take them off for the winter.

The old grungy dish pan went into the trash barrel. Briefly I considered recycling it into a planter, but I have all the planters I need so I recognized the impulse for the vestigial guilt that it was.

Also into the trash barrel went my old gray backpack. Last winter the last of its working zippers died, my wallet and checkbook fell out of it a couple of times, and I decided that after about 35 years of using backpacks almost exclusively I would try something else. My messenger bag was a big success; it's now my laptop carrier, and I'm toting a smaller, burnt-orange bag from Duluth Trading that has a satisfying number of compartments and is just the right size. Its one serious drawback is that it's hard to carry on a bicycle. For that I needed a backpack. The unzippable old one was still in my closet. I admitted to myself that I wasn't going to use it, and if not me, who? Into the trash it went. Its replacement is on its way from L.L. Bean, along with a new camp sleeping bag and (of course) a new pair of corduroys.

I've gotten rid of nearly all my horse stuff (except my saddle -- anyone want a comfy wide-tree Michael Stokes dressage saddle?), so yesterday I loaded the tack trunk I used to keep most of it in and took it down to the Dumptique, aka the recycling shed at the West Tisbury dump. Someone claimed it before I even took it out of the car.

November

November 01, 2010 - View Single Entry

When I woke up this morning, the sun wasn't up but the sky was lightening and the clock said 6:49. Under the covers it wasn't quite chilly, but it was getting close. Since about April, the Rinnai heater's been set on L, for Low, which means it only kicks on at 50 degrees. This morning the temperature was 56. I turned the heat up to 60.

I took my first indoor shower since whenever it was that David hung the panels on my outdoor one and turned the outside water on.

This weekend I pulled on my first turtleneck since May and did the big winter/summer switch. Those lovely sleeveless dresses and tank tops, shorts and shirts of featherweight fabric, they're all put away till spring.

For about eight years "storage" has been the big cardboard box that Allie's second saddle arrived in. The big cardboard box has been replaced by two proper containers, both of which used to hold horse stuff. This is a sign: most of the horse stuff has been sold. Last week a woman answered my most recent ad in the Bargain Box (free 20-word ad for stuff that costs $100 or less). She came to see the longeing surcingle and wound up buying the surcingle, the longe line, the four never-used polo wraps, and the rain sheet. What's left (apart from my saddle) now fits easily in the metal trash can (which used to hold grain). So now my summer clothes have a (slightly) more respectable winter home.

A couple of days ago I picked a dozen green cherry tomatoes and set them in a window to see if they'll ripen. Over the last couple of weeks the temps have veered from low 70s to high 30s. The tomatoes, it seems, don't take kindly to this. From late August to mid-October nearly every tomato was been perfect. Once the chill-and-warm days started,  many of them split and turned gooey while ripening, or they developed gray crusty streaks around their midsections. Parting isn't the sorrow I thought it would be.

October License Plate Report

October 31, 2010 - View Single Entry

Nuthin'.

Invitations

October 30, 2010 - View Single Entry

It's been an interesting week in Lake Wobegon, to paraphrase a contemporary sage.

Monday morning started off in the usual OK but not unusually interesting manner. The sun doesn't come up till after 7 these days, so by the time Trav and I go out for our long a.m. walk it's usually close to 7:30. When we got back, I woke up Morgana and Hekate (desktop and laptop, respectively), then put the kettle on for tea and the double-boiler sleeve for oatmeal.

By then Morgana and Hekate were wide awake. I can tell by the twinkly Microsoft tune that each one plays. (Morgana's speakers used to be turned off all the time. I don't really like to hear computers beeping and singing at me. YouTube and Pandora changed that. Now the default setting is On.) I sat down on my desk chair, rested Hekate's lap desk (the cheapest version from Levenger -- one of the handiest things I've bought in the last 10 years) on my lap, and downloaded e-mail. Amid the newspaper digests (which I barely glance at), New! Exciting! Act Now! offers from several online retailers, and a dozen or so posts to Copyediting-L was this subject line:

invitation to come to Oslo and work on K's book project

Well, I knew what that was about but that's a long way from saying I believed what I was reading. K is a Norwegian academic. I edited a English-language academic paper for her. This worked out well. She has a book due out soon in Norwegian; she wants to produce an English-language version that can be published in Britain or the U.S. Last winter we discussed this in "somewhere down the road" terms: L, USian by birth and Norwegian by marriage and long residence, will do the translation and I'll do the editing. (A couple of years ago I edited L's book, Writing for Scholars. We had a ball working on it and everyone was happy with the result.) I assumed we'd do K's book the way we did the earlier projects: by e-mail.

With invitation to come to Oslo and work on K's book project my assumptions went out the window. My first thought was, Sh*t, my passport expired in 1979. My second was, I haven't been out of the country since 1975, unless you count a trip to Toronto in 1992. My third was, How the fook does one go about getting a passport on Martha's Vineyard?

At this point I realized I was in problem-solving mode. In other words, I was going to accept the invitation.

By the end of the week I'd had passport pictures taken at Mosher's, the photo shop in Vineyard Haven; filled out the passport application on the State Department's website; and taken photos, application, and my birth certificate down to the West Tisbury library, where Colleen the librarian doubles as a passport agent.

With luck I'll have my passport before I'm due to leave. Current plan is for me to arrive in Oslo on 8 December. K, L, and I will work intensively on the book from the 9th to the 11th, then L will show me a little bit of Oslo before she has to get back to work and I have to come home, probably on the 13th or 14th. Trav will probably have to go to Animal Health Care, which is a kennel and grooming establishment as well as a veterinary practice. Rhodry never spent a night in a kennel, unless you count the two nights, one in his first year and the other in what turned out to be his last, that he spent in the pound. There was always someone who could look after him when I went away. At the moment I don't know anyone who has both the savvy and the facilities to look after Mr. T.

That's the downside, but mostly invitation to come to Oslo is a huge gift from the universe. For the last year or so, I've been pretty much sleepwalking through my life. Mud of the Place went nowhere, my essay in Trivia 10 went nowhere; I'm having a harder and harder time persuading myself that writing is worth doing or that any of the writing I've ever done was worth the effort I put into it. Pretty much the only interesting thing in my life these days is Travvy. Dog training is interesting and challenging, but even in my most self-delusional moments I can't convince myself that it's my reason for being on the planet.

invitation to come to Oslo didn't happen in isolation either. A couple of weeks ago I got another e-mail, asking me to be on the fantasy/science fiction jury for a literary award program. For many years I've had major reservations about this program in general, and its f/sf award in particular was a standing joke in the f/sf circles I frequented. The new award administrator, however, was someone whose name I knew and respected from the old days, so over the next few days I asked questions: How are nominees chosen? Can the jurors consider worthy books even if they haven't been nominated by their publishers or authors? Do the jurors get to discuss what they're reading, or is this a "read in isolation and then vote" thing?

The answers were all promising. I decided that I really should be reading something other than dog-training books. The more I don't read, the harder it is to convince myself that writing is worthwhile. So this week I said I'd do it.