Molly Goatwax

SNAFUs

It's not just my computer, land phone and TV connections that have experienced difficulties recently. It seems as if the entire world has been tangled in glitches-the scanner at work, the wholesale websites to which I upload scanned files, my mobile telephone, the fax at home and my digital camera are kablooey, too. When I got to the office this morning the power was out. I remembered that the street lights on the way in didn't work, either. After a morning in the dark, word got out that the boss was buying us lunch at a fancy spot up the street. So I motored over to the restaurant to find the front door locked and the lights out. I didn't see the crew and couldn't call work to verify anything, so I drove back to the office. No one there knew anything. The lights were still off. The sun was shining and the day was warm so I decided to roll down the car top and peel out. As I found my car's sound system to be reliable still, a young co-worker asked me how I was down with the Stone Temple Pilots. I told him that I may be old but I'm not dead. Then I picked up the tot from school and took her the last drug store soda fountain in town. They don't need no stinkin digital to make award winning milk shakes.

Recipe on a tenement wall

 

Preston and Nursery Place. What a goofy town.
 

Fillmore

When I was accepted into the art school and moved to Baltimore, my mother bought an old row house converted into apartments for me to manage while I was housed, for a monthly profit. It was situated next to the building she bought for my sister while she attended the Johns Hopkins University. My duties as the teen-aged land lady included showing apartments, changing locks and collecting rents. If being called a "White Skunk Bitch"  by an insolvent Mr. Foote on the first floor was not challanging enough, there was the tenant in the basement, Fillmore. Fillmore had a beard and long blonde hair. I would have found him attractive but for his vacant stare and the rabbit fur slippers poking from the hems of his bell bottomed blue jeans. One day as I knocked on his door to collect the rent, I noticed smoke billowing from beneath the door. I banged and banged on it and was about to use my janitor keys when he opened up. As I pushed past him to determine how bad was the emergency he offered; "Sorry, man...I was busy frying marbles..." I have to explain that the fashion of the day was to heat glass marbles and then immerse them in cold water to make them crackle, but he had on his stove a skillet full of smoking butter and marbles as if ....never mind. I can't tell you what Fillmore was thinking. He wasn't. For years after we evicted him, I would see him shuffling along the streets in Charles Village and remember his fried marbles.

firing at 85%

All this month our house has had very limited access to most forms of modern communication. When the cable company cut us off, Hubby got an antenna to get a few channels and we sometimes got spotty reception on public wireless networks to check our e-mails. Because I want to keep my job, I haven't been using the internet connection there for recreational blogging or social networking. I've been out of touch. I have, though, made a piece for an invitational show and compiled two vignettes for a zine. Today is the dealine. I must deliver...

Sometimes you feel like a schmuck

What a day. I'm blue. After two months, the car gets fixed only to not be fixed when I try to drive it home from work. I had been looking forward to feeling the breezes of the season's last warm day in my hair after losing ground on half my files due to market forces and starting my morning with a less than glowing parent-teacher conference. But it the image of having the car towed from in front of the office in the morning after I was so happy to have it back that made me teary as I waited for the bus, and again as I write this. 

Cake stories

There is only one place left in town that makes a birthday cake acceptable for my husband's taste. So I ordered it ahead and took three buses in the rain to fetch it from Cross Street Market. The last driver said "That's a travelin' cake!" when I told her as I climbed off her bus. For the younger daughter's birthday I snuck a decorated cake and candles in a bag to the rib joint where she wanted dinner and handed it off to the waitress with a wink. It came with the whole restaraunt singing in the candle glow and our newly minted teen completely surprised, in a good way.

Examining the quality of life

My younger daughter asked me to stop complaining. She said that between me and her father and the other adults in her life complaining all the time, she found it very stressfull. I told her that I have a lot of things going on in my life and I was sorry if I was transferring my dissatisfaction. How do I stop complaining?

The Nobel Peace Prize

If not for wanting to end nuclear weapons proliferation and choosing diplomacy over chest beating, then for the Beer Summit. Of course. Even if he did drink Bud Light.

Beer Week

Tomorrow starts Baltimore Beer Week and it lasts ten days. Does it get better than that? I will, of course, be called apon as an expert to lend my opinion. Only in the casual way. Pass the tray of steins.

TCB

Today the Waxter Senior Center is offering free flu shots from 9 to1and I am going to stand in line with the rest of the old *arts for mine. No, you don't have to be a senior. I'm not sure if you need to be a city resident, they don't check ID. They are happy to innoculate all comers. It sure beats paying 25 dollars at the minute clinic and its hands down better than getting the flu and giving it all around, too. Get yours today!