Operator? Operator!

The last of the tenants have gone home.  It was a financially bruising season.  I understand that Islanders on the Vineyard have to make all of their money during the summer months.  Gouging the summer folk is, if not a sport,  the norm.  They have reason to be bitter, the place shuts down after January first with few bars and nary a chichi store to be found.  Unemployment rises.  I have been there in February, walking the wind-whipped shores, and  I took to drink.
If I lived there year round, I would be right pissed about all these people in their Range Rovers trampling on my island.  So yes, there is justification.  But still....
A continually sparking pilot light prompted one tenant to call the gas company for an emergency visit.  I understand the tenant's concern.  The pilot light is electrically generated.  Unplug the stove for 30 seconds. Problem solved. We should have left a note to that effect. (There is nothing more inviting to a tenant than a house whose appliances are festooned with such notes.)  The gas company allegedly spent two and a half hours resolving the problem for $452.  (Last year a different company charged us $300 for travel time.) I called the gas company for an explanation.  The accountant couldn't find the work sheet.  She left a message the next day reducing the bill by $200 with no explanation of her generosity.   Then the phone bill arrived with a charge of $49 dollars for a 12 minute call to a 264 country  area code.  Namibia.  The tenants swore they did not call Africa.  No one else was in the house.  (Several years ago a member of cleaning crew had a lengthy chat to Brazil and billed me for the time as well.)
I called Verizon and waited 42 minutes to talk to a human.  When I explained the problem the operator said 'the call came from your house.'  Computers don't lie.  The best he could do was to call the number in Namibia and see if they could identify the caller. A long wait ended with the news that the call was to Cape Air in Hyannis, Massachusetts.  A stone throw from the Vineyard.  He didn't understand the mistake, Hyannis is a 508 area code but the computer listed it as 264-- Namibia.  (Perhaps with all the outsourcing the call was routed through Namibia.)  You would think I felt victorious, but I was just exhausted.
There are worse stories I could tell but my family won't let me.

Piggy Addendum

In my rush to appear 'prepared' and not 'piggy' in my last blog, I neglected to include  my most troublesome need for plenitude.  Future paintings. I need a back stock of three or four good ideas or I get prickly.  This happens to me rather more often than I would like. The last time, I wandered around  taking photos of detergent bottles, spiderwebs and truck wheels, anything really, hoping for a jump start.  (There is a folder on my computer labeled "Desperate Still Lifes".)

I am now officially prickly.  I have run out of gas in the middle of the ocean.  No land in sight.  

I am Not a Hoarder

 

Looking at my still lifes, one could be forgiven for believing I am a hoarder.  I am not a hoarder.  I am a plenitudian.  I know that is not a word (my autocorrect spelling tells me so). But it should be.  There must be others like me.  People who are only psychically happy when they have enough supplies to carry them through a prolonged emergency (with electricity intact, please).  The larder is stocked.  My freezer is packed, probably with inedible meat from 2002.  I have enough art supplies to stock a minor university.  I have never run out of gas.  I maintain a pile of books that I am eager to read.  Videos to watch and 14 days worth of songs on my ipod.   For the record, I am not piggy, I am prepared

Sam versus the Buddha

There is a scene in Eat, Pray, Love where the protagonist meditates at sundown in India.  Mosquitoes gorge on her flesh and yet she is able to maintain the perfect peace of her meditation.  I thought about that often this week.  Sam, my son's whirling dervish, was visiting for the week.  I usually meditate in the morning. The first day Sam slept beside me under the comforter. I was able to maintain my concentration even as he shimmied to the bottom of the comforter to escape.  It was the whining after he exited that ended my efforts.  The next day he wouldn't settle down, opting instead to chew and rip the down comforter.  Most of the week went like that.  If I put him outside the bedroom while I tried to meditate he butted the door. My husband erected barricades at the bottom of the stairs but that just made him angry.  Did I mention he excels at baying mournfully?

Sam is not a creature of  half measures.  He was outside stripping the tomatoes from the vine, I was inside reading.  When he decided he wanted in, he didn't bark or paw the door.  He didn't sit by the glass door and look longingly.  No, he hurled himself up in the air and planted four paws on the glass before thudding to the porch floor.

I love Sam. Really, I do.

Baby Blue

The above photo is of my brother's five and a-half month old bulldog Tucker in an oxygen cage.  Tucker, who couldn't be sweeter if he were made of gum drops,  developed aspirational pneumonia and nearly died several times last week. He is now through the worst of it, we hope.  I can only imagine the vet bills. Catastrophic in many ways.   It didn't use to be like this.  When my black lab had an ACL surgery in the mid 1990's the total bill, including anesthesia, medicine and two nights stay was $180.  When my yellow lab had the same operation ten years later the bill was over $2000. And that doesn't include treatment for the subsequent kidney failure that resulted from the pain medication.  It can't just be inflation.  America is pet crazy. And I say that as one of the deeply crazed.   Vets just happened to be the beneficiaries of our madness.  Anything is possible now, transplants, cloning, the sky's the limit.  Three years ago my vet was stunned by my refusal to put my 12 year old lab through chemotherapy. (In fairness, if Clio had been young at the time I might have been tempted.)  This pretty young vet told me, in all earnestness, "Old age is not a disease."  Ha!
Canine allergy tests start at $600.  My god-dog Sam went through a battery of them when the kangaroo and red lentil diet proved futile.
Sam is staying with us while my son and his wife enjoy Napa Valley.  While I was at work yesterday Sam discovered a wicked, horrid monster cleverly disguised as a 6-foot bath mat.  Sam to the rescue.  He dragged the 'monster' down the stairs and thrashed it soundly, whacked it against furniture and water bowls.   He seemed to expect some reward for his efforts.
Sam has developed a whiny quality that I thought only existed in pre-school children.  Whatever we are doing for him it is apparently, not enough.  The house is littered with his toys and bully sticks (for those happily unaware, a bully stick is a dried bull's penis) but he wants to munch on my collection of vintage windup toys.  He wants to chew the down comforter.  He wants the monster/bathmat released from the closet, where apparently it is issuing a siren song of taunts.  He just whined at my husband who  commented: "Oh for heaven's sake.  He has a bull's penis, what more does he want?"

Measure Up!

Sometimes when painting a piece, I can feel that it will sell.  One such piece sold off the easel.  Several that I know will sell are still waiting for their owners to claim them. Or to be born...   Then again, sometimes I know when a painting  will not sell.  The above, "Roman Love Triangles" is one of those.  It is from a photo I took in 2002.  I loved the dragon in the balusters staring at the the oblivious couple.  I doubt many people will share my amusement, but that's okay.  There's still room in my basement.
But I am baffled by consumers who buy, not because they love the painting, but because of its inches.  I was in the Torpedo Factory studio when a couple came in and pulled out a measuring tape.  They held it up against several of my partners' pieces and mine as well.  Then they left.  An hour later they came back, measured again.  I wondered if they would pull out fabric swatches to see if it matched the sofa.  They left again.  When they returned they settled on a piece that was 24 inches tall and was mostly red and yellow.
People should buy art that they love.  Repaint the room or buy a new couch, if necessary.  But love the art.

'Tis the season of their Discontent

The rental season is upon us.  We (I) wait with bated breath for the first complaint.  My brothers posted a note for the tenants: "If there is a problem, call Cindy."  Most magnanimous of them.  I'm also the one who goes to jail if there is anything hincky about our finances.
My acupuncturist thinks my qi would benefit if I would envision  a place where I am "most me" and at my happiest.  I should do this whenever I feel tense and also when I meditate.  I immediately thought of the porch at the Vineyard.  I recall of the angle of the sunlight, the smell of the sea and the bayberry, the drone of the mosquitoes.  Happy place!
 But it's a short jump from that porch to unhappy thoughts.  My mind is on the porch, feeling the breeze, and the next instant I'm thinking about the septic tank.  We have been stewards of the house for 27 years and I don't think we've ever had it pumped.  I remember vaguely that my parents had it done.  I believe it is under the yard in back.  No telling where the opening is.  Probably six feet into the brambles. My mother told me as a child not to play in a certain corner of the yard, but was that the septic tank or the underground root cellar?
If thinking makes it so, I expect a call soon from the tenants, to report that the back yard is bubbling and ripe with odour.
Happy, happy...