Happy Spring! I’m on day twenty-five of randomly cycling earworms. Want to know how to get from Jackson Browne’s “Tender is the Night” to Dua Lipa’s “Illusion”? I can probably draw you a map right through Jewel’s “Standing Still” (cathartic to sing while vacuuming up tumbleweeds of dog hair!) and Post Malone/Lainey Wilson’s “Nose Dive” (great for dealing with bathroom cleanup!) with random pit stops at the dark techno equivalent of George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You”.
That would be DeadMau5 and Stevie Appleton’s “Science”. The next time you have to scrub burnt meat drippings out of a beloved pan, get a chunk of chain mail, light a candle, and crank this up in your ear buds. Sing to the pan. It helps. Trust me.
I also sing when I’m driving. I’m not sure if it helps that, but it is safer than chewing gum while at the mercy of the Dark Powers that rule over I-66 and I-95 entertains my son when he’s playing DJ, especially when he finds something that makes me squawk “NO! NOPE! NEXT!”
The persistent earworm thing generally starts happening for me when there’s a lot going on and I’m trying to keep it all stuffed into a single sock. I’ve switched from stuffing a metaphorical sock to stuffing metaphorical frogs into a metaphorical pot on the metaphorical stove, and occasionally giving up on boiling them slow and throwing them pot and all into a microwave, beep beep beep beep BOOM.
A metaphorical microwave, of course. We still have the corpse of the last real one we killed in the house, awaiting its turn on the DealWithThis merry-go-round. Our acting cheap countertop microwave is still faithfully on the job, doing it better than the last two overpriced wall mounted units we had (and killed).
That said, I have chucked a number of domestic annoyances off the wait list onto the merry-go-round over the past twenty-five days. The missing roof flashing has been replaced, the car charger is fixed (as is a couple of circuit breakers we weren’t even aware were broken1), the top-of-every-hour-for-five-minutes septic alarm has been diagnosed and dealt with, the driveway has been patched and sealed, we were finally able to connect with the Pennsylvania farmer we buy our yearly cow side from and get the meat across two borders into Virginia2, and I survived taking the dog to the vet for his annual checkup without suffering damage that post-visit Advil couldn’t handle or winding up on one of our local Facebook groups.
Did I do the roofing and electrical work and septic inspection and asphalt laying work myself? Er, no. That involved getting other people involved. The work in that for me, as ridiculous as it is, is getting around the feeling that I should be able to deal with it myself without bothering anybody. My husband’s the same way, and we do both Know Better.
But, at least it’s spring. Maybe. Our beautiful young redbud tree, if it’s still alive, might disagree. The last cold snap killed all of its new leaves. I’ve put dealing with its potential corpse on the bottom of the wait list. Maybe it’ll surprise me and come back to life by the time I get to it. With luck, it’ll be alive-alive, and not another husk shouldered aside by an opportunistic swamp maple. Those are all thriving.
- We have a great electrician, who did his best to deliver the news about the circuit breakers in a way that didn’t make me freak out on the outside. Evidence suggested that the wires to those circuit breakers had been cut, either during initial install or when the electrical contractors came back on a warranty repair call to fix the wiring in the laundry room that killed the first dryer we had in this house. I am grateful the house didn’t catch fire, I am grateful the house didn’t catch fire, I am grateful lalalalala… ↩︎
- It makes me laugh when I think about how much meat and produce we’ve picked up in parking lots since we moved to this state. It seems wrong, like we’re getting away with something other than being fortunate enough to be closeish to small farms. ↩︎
Modus Dementi 