Author: chobbsblog

Post Party

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Back in the day, Meta Cranky delighted in Bad Parties. Giving them, attending them, watching people fall in the pool at them. Scott Fitzgerald articulated the essence of the bad party in Tender Is the Night, and my undergraduate journalism pals aspired to host parties that met these standards:

I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it.
I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.


Truth be told, most Daily Texan parties I attended in the mid-eighties didn’t miss this mark by much. I have rosy memory of a full day spent inert on the sofa after a glorious multi-birthday soiree in my condo’s party room. Through slit eyes, I watched a dozen post-partiers shuffle through my condo collecting lost shoes and empty pony kegs. Some poor soul hobbled by on a foot that had been impaled by a woman’s stiletto. From my mostly horizontal position, I pointed toward missing articles of clothing and equipment, and listened to descriptions of epic, irresponsible binge drinking. I realized at day’s end that the Mexican fat dress I was wearing was inside out.

Time and space don’t much change the parameters of the Bad Party. We celebrated Grace Five Point Five recently, and I’m pleased to report that while it differed in specifics from the Daily Texan model, it still followed classic Bad Party form. Girls in outrageous outfits? Check. Girls jumping on sofas in the name of self-expression? Natch. Painfully loud music to fuel interpretive dance? You betcha. Then: “Caca de Vaca.” Now? “Barbie Girl.”

I began post-party cleanup by strategizing about the PlayDoh ground into the carpet. As I studied the wreckage, I begin to identify items left by members of Not My Tribe. Gigi’s camera. Helena’s sweater. Addie’s purse. Ellie’s jacket. KK’s jacket, plus her headband. And I smiled in recognition.
–MCG

Cranky Girl #1 Considers the Diesel Engine

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*photo credit to Glenda.

Cranky Girl #1 fulfilled a 7th grade English assignment by reflecting on her summertime rides in pickups. Here’s her product.

I Didn’t Go to Schlitterbahn on My Summer Vacation

When I’m asked the question, “What did you do over summer vacation,” I usually answer, “I rode around in a pickup truck.” People tend to say, “Oh, that’s, uh cool,” and then rush on to tell me about their trip to Schlitterbahn. All I’m asking is that you consider that my vacation could be as fascinating and exciting as yours. Then I will be happy to hear about Schlitterbahn.

If you say you live on a farm, people think you wear overalls and share your breakfast with Wilbur the pig. In my experience, farms aren’t inhabited by shy old men who raise adorable, spotless animals. Cow are just not that clean, and pigs don’t get buttermilk baths. Sure, I can tell you inspiring stories about calves being born, but honestly, calving is a big, bloody show with a wet, wobbly finale. Real farmers watch through the pickup window, while they thaw out their fingers from the February frost.

Some people’s summers have one big, memorable event. My summers are a lot of little good, funny, silly, serious events that I bundle up and call summer. For example, one night we got a flat tire on our Mazda Navaho. It was late, I was 6 and cranky, and Mom was in no mood to crawl under the car. Someone passed us and stopped to help. In making introductions my mom said, “You don’t know me but I’m Colleen Hobbs,” to which he replied, “O yeah, I know you. I went to school with your brother Sid.” How’s that for knowing your community?

For some people, the highlight of the summer is the most exciting thing that happened, like seeing a Broadway show or going to the Grand Canyon. The highlights of my summers, or at least the things I remember most clearly, are incidents like this: walking out across the field, inhaler in hand, to bring water to my uncle, who was disking a field. By the time I reach the tractor, the ice has melted. Another high point: being interrupted mid-pie one evening by an urgent call. We all dropped our forks, grabbed our shoes, jumped in a truck (I rode on the back) and went down three miles of red dirt road. The cows were out.

A visitor once asked me, “Aren’t you glad I saved you from that boring farm?” I couldn’t reply. Apparently my idea of a fun vacation isn’t the same as other seventh graders’. We may not have Wilbur, or Babe, but my family’s farm is a working farm where each day’s labor brings a chance to learn and grow. To me, riding in pickups is Schlitterbahn. The details of my summer add up to a larger lesson. You might learn about a person’s character, or how to test the strength of a flooding creek’s current. But every ordinary conversation or posthole can help you learn if you pay attention.


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Bounty

The shopping, cleaning, and cooking that go along with our national holiday might, perhaps, take the shine off the genuine feelings of gratitude that we cranky girls harbor in our flinty little hearts. But this artifact from a cousin makes me feel serious-as-a-heart attack thankful for all those post-war miracles: antibiotics, fluoridated water, free school lunches, GI Bill, the U.S. highway system, and the like. These are the O’Hern children at their mother Jane’s funeral in 1933. My grandmother Nora is the fourth from the left in the back row.
Jane O’Hern was married at 16 and died before she was 60. She had 13 children; Jeez, the hamster in Grace’s bedtime book only had 11.
Jane’s obituary described her as quiet and unassuming. If you live with someone as tightfisted as her husband, Pat O’Hern, and produce 13 children, you probably LOOK like you’re unassuming. But I think she must have been tough as a boot. Her 13 children all lived to adulthood; the only one missing from the funeral picture died at 18 in a farming accident. In other branches of my family, unattended children died from drinking kerosene or stepping on rusty nails. But not Jane’s. She didn’t leave any at the gas station, or let any drown in a creek. She must have been paying attention and not just phoning it in.
If Jane O’Hern, with no education, running water, or even a whiff of useful medical care can do all that, I think I can manage to unload the dishwasher one more time.
–mcg

Domestic Science

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A note to those of you who have graciously inquired whether we are back in our kitchen. The short answer is yes. Don’t ask me to find the spoons, lightbulbs, or can openers that I used back in May. But we have made reasonable substitutions. Homework has been done on the counter. The mixer has been unpacked, and it still produces cookies. The only difference is that the mixing bowl now goes in the dishwasher after being comprehensively licked.
Much of the old is still there, and old. This is the same fixture that has hung above the dining table since I first saw it in the mid-1980s. My suspicion is that it is original to the house.

OK, well now it’s red, instead of dirty beige. The globes came from the farm. I’ve seen them in a cabinet above the sink since about 1974. Recycle, reuse, etc.
When workers tore out the rotted kitchen cabinet, the name of the original owner was still clearly displayed. Mr. K. had the huevos to build a house in the last Depression. When our house gets turned into condos, or a University of Texas parking lot, or an expansion of Seton Hospital in the twenty-second century, maybe the subcontractors will smile at the Corvette-red light fixture that was installed in the Great Recession of Ought Nine.
–MCG

Tomstock

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Cousin Tom didn’t plan a fish fry just to observe our last night at the farm, but it worked out that way. His fish fries, held in his welding shop, are the stuff of local legend. You get the parking gridlock of Woodstock, but the food is much better. And instead of Jimi Hendrix, you get our Uncle Charlie. The guy in the red hat is about to turn 101.

Tomstock features an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the main draw is the fish. Tom and Cousin Jack are noodlers, which means they think it’s fun to catch fish with their hands. It works for them, and we get to eat it. Whatever. The buffet is filled out with the neighbors’ pot-luck offerings, which means lots of sinful desserts. Grace ate the icing off the red velvet cake, so I had to eat the rest. Darn. Also, UM pointed out a roaster filled with meat that looked like chicken, except that it wasn’t. I have a suspicion that I knew the guys in the roaster back when they could croak.

In addition to all its other fine qualities, Tomstock is a kid’s paradise. Tom has tricked out his place with all the usual grandkid-friendly gizmos. In addition, though, you get the playground equipment from the country school that was near his childhood home. So you get a terrific slide and jungle gym that no school would dare put in its playground for fear of litigation. The merry-go-round is particularly terrific. 
Poor Cranky Girl #2 got grief from Meta Cranky Girl for leaving her shoes at home. Attending Tomstock is a bit like exotic overseas travel in that you really want your tetanus shot up to date. Upon reflection, I find that the glory of Tomstock is that it requires you to improve your game, or else. Do you want to jump on that trampoline with five other kids and not break your cervical vertebrae when you’re bounced off? Great, then let’s see some agility and problem-solving skills. Do you really want to crawl to the top of Tom’s archway to see what’s there? That’s fine, but just don’t whine when it’s time to come down.
And you really do want to crawl to the top, because then you get to see the summer’s last sunset. 
–MCG

Dirt Work

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The Cranky Girls have returned to their Not Farm space to prepare for Kindergarten and Middle School. Meta Cranky is preparing to have someone else take her trash away each Friday. But on our way out of town, CGs managed to collect several adventures and a photo backlog that we will process urban tranquility. 

Here’s what we saw on our last day at the farm:

What we didn’t see was the road, our mailbox, and our house. Our vision was obstructed by our neighbor’s farm, which was vigorously blowing north. Here’s what it looked like from our house, moving in from the south:
Turns out that what you really want on a hot windy day is a luscious alfalfa field. Not just because your legumes are fixing nitrogen in your soil. No, it’s because those 15-foot roots are holding your dirt down. 
This has been a sorry summer for farmers. After the harvest, we got a drought and weeks of merciless heat. Last summer, we could plant field peas after harvest, a fine way to get a summer crop while scoring more of those nitrogen-fixing legumes. But without a rain, field peas were pretty much out of the picture. So we waited, and waited, to prep the field for a fall crop. Our field has been plowed once, with great trouble and expense, and more broken plow shears than we care to count.  
Look closely and you’ll see the light brown wheat stubble in our lumpy field. Turns out that lumpy and stubbly is terrific on a day like this.  The dust you see wafting above our field isn’t ours: our lumpy field stayed put while south wind picked up the smooth, twice-cultivated field nearby.
Make all the Dust Bowl comparisons you like, but a perfect storm of high wind and dry conditions can make any farmer look like an idiot. On our farm, we clearly remember when our sandy hill began to blow in the ’60s. The Cranky Family unrolled bale after bale of hay on the sandy spots to keep the dirt where it belonged. Now we’ve planted the hill (which is classified as “Highly Erodible Land” by Feds That Give Us Money) into permanent grasses, so we won’t have to go there again. 
Erosion on a this scale is tragic, of course. But can we take a moment to say that it’s also a big pain in the tush? The Crankies’ front porch has drifts that would be at home in Lawrence of Arabia. We left open a south basement window: the beds downstairs were covered with a layer of sand that brought to mind the snow drifts of Dr. Zhivago. Those aren’t the film references that we’re going for. Babe or Chicken Run  we can handle. But you can keep Ralph Fiennes, his swishy khakis, the Libyan desert, and The English Patient. 
–MCG

A Real Operator

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*photo credit to Lydia

Today, MGC became a real operator by signing paperwork at the U.S. Department of Agriculture office at the county seat. I signed on the line that clearly said Operator, so it must be true. You may be interested in knowing that your tax $$ will be going to make sure that MCG’s ’09 wheat crop is more lucrative than an uninsured, drought-stricken, and frost-bitten 20 bushel/acre crop otherwise would be.
Some federal offices are comforting and sustaining. Post offices, for example, smell familiar and have employees who seem genuinely interested in helping me process my mail. The Ag Department, however, makes me feel like I’ve walked into the wrong seminar room. Like my poor professor who walked in ready to talk about Middlemarch when the rest of us were primed for Mill on the Floss. 
Things I have learned from the Department of Agriculture: 
1)If you want $$ from a government program, buying local is counterproductive. Our lovegrass project was complicated by buying seed from a neighbor rather than from a dealer who would have all the handy paperwork. For the USDA, locavores kind of suck.
2)It’s really just easier to do it the way the the feds do it. Case in point: Our soil test indicated that our lovegrass needed 32 pounds of nitrogen/acre to meet the standards for a program that establishes grasses in erodible land. So, like a wierdo urban cranky girl who doesn’t put Sevin dust in my tomatoes, I asked about alternatives to commercial, petroleum-based fertilizer. The answer: it costs more to apply feedlot manure, and the feds are not going to cover it. Oh, and we used to have a program to fertilize with chicken poop from eastern Oklahoma. We know that all the crap from factory chicken farms is screwing up the watershed over there. But the program expired, so never mind.
MCG was doing her own translation from the original government-speak, so the nuances may have been lost on her. Also, she is distracted by the voice of her deceased step-mother-in-law, the opinionated organic gardener. From Organic Gardener Heaven, she is communicating that commercial fertilizer is a great deal for Monsanto, but not so good for her grandchildren’s health. Clearly, MCG is out of her league and should go back to picking tomato worms off her Jersey Girls.
–MCG

Bespoke Birthday Cake

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Grace ate cake at an early-summer birthday and declared, “She can make this cake for my birthday.” “She” was Wanda, and when Grace’s birthday rolled around, she did. It’s a glorious angel food confection, delivered on Aunt Minnie’s Fosteria cake plate. Talk about eye candy. Perhaps my favorite part was the Alma Cronin icing, a seven-minute creation that pre-dates marshmallow stuff from a jar. I like this icing on lots of levels, and not just because of the way it sticks to my fingers. In my apprentice cranky days, I spent a lot of time watching elderly women (crones over 40) making funeral dinners in the church basement, and Alma had an engaging prickliness that spoke to the cockles of my cranky little heart. 

The Alma icing makes me mentally review the recipes I refer to by a proper name. My mother’s recipe box is lousy with them: Berta’s Fan Fan rolls. Ruth Ann’s White Mountain Ice Cream. My system is less colorful, but mentally, I insert the name of the person who introduced me to something fabulous: (Mark’s) Hummus with Pomegranate Seeds on Top. (Laura’s) Carrot Soup. (Liz’s) Soup with Spinach that Small Children Eat. Recipes come with baggage, not to mention responsibility. Let’s just hope that I’m not remembered by posterity with (Toxic Mom’s) Scorched Broccoli.
–MCG

Evoking Closure

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At the farm, crankiness is a form of self expression, and this has not been a subdued summer. MCG has loudly uttered Mother-of-the-Year-type statements, such as If you two want to turn me into a drooling idiot, just keep it up. Some of us have proclaimed that the world will end if others of us touch particular CG property. MCG has declared she will not listen to any sentences beginning Sister said. Then came the day that cranky words were said over two boxes of mac and cheese. One exuberantly cranky outburst followed another, a door was slammed, and a window was sacrificed on the altar of crankiness.
At this point, MCG entered the category that Uncle Michael calls “Toxic Mom.” Crankies 1 and 2 have made reparations in the form of extra acts of housework. And after two tries, we finally received a tempered-glass window of the correct size. Lydia held the glass while UM nailed in the trim.
Apparently there’s a special tool called a nail set to help install finish nails with small heads. Do we have this tool? Take a big guess. But we do have a metal file. You put it over the nail and then whack. Extra points for adapting available tools to do the job.

We spent a month with this empty space between the laundry room and the kitchen, and it afforded us opportunities to perform clever tricks and Marx Brothers-type pantomimes. But now the window is replaced and the cranky incident that broke it has become Amusing Family Lore. MCG could get all literary and talk about literal and metaphorical closure, but she’s sure you appreciate her walking away from that temptation.

–MCG

Dog Update

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I was going to post a picture of this goofy bird dog and report that she was settling in nicely. Still chewing a bit, not so much jumping, putting on a few pounds. Everything on track to take her to Texas, where a new family is waiting to see whether she’s a good fit. 

And then, the dogs had a news flash this morning:

Apparently, there’s a porcupine in these parts. Both dogs ended up with lips full of quills.  Coco didn’t look so great, either.
A morning’s visit to the vet and all’s well again. Both dogs appear slightly chastened, but I’m sure that will pass. The vet assures me that if the porcupine is still there, the dogs will do it again.
–MCG