I know, I've been a Very Bad Blogger lately. My postings have been irregular, to say the least. Partly that's because I've been afraid of saying harsh things about the people who sold me this house, since as you know I have resolved to go back to the kinder, gentler me I was BB (Before Barry). Partly it's because...because...OK, let me tell you something that, before last weekend, only one other person on earth knew. I have OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).
I've joked about having a touch of OCD before, but the truth is that I've been a counter for as long as I can remember. I will see a flock of birds perched on a telephone line, or pencils in a cup, or people waiting for a bus, and I have to count them. Usually I can justify the counting to myself; if each person takes 10 seconds to deposit a token and move into the bus, how long will those of us in the bus have to wait before it moves on? If five people are in the line, though, I don't stop counting at five; especially if I'm stressed, my brain will count on to 50, or 150, or 500, or whenever I realize what it's doing and tell myself to stop. Sometimes even then it drones on in the background while I force myself to mentally go on to other things. Telephone poles, socks, semi-colons - given enough stress, I can count anything "to infinity and beyond."
One of the brightest moments in my life was when a New York co-worker told me that she was also a counter and we were able to talk freely about the problems it caused and how we coped with it. I lost touch with her a few years later when she changed jobs and always regretted it. Last week she found me again through Linked In, and I was so happy that I told my sister about it and about the counting. Sue was flabbergasted; she looked at me as though I'd confessed to an ax murder and said, "You've managed to hide it well."
Well, no. I wasn't really hiding anything; when I was a child I didn't realize that everyone's brain didn't work this way. I think I was in my late 30's before I read an article on counting as a symptom of OCD. I was shocked. Sure, I've always had anxiety dreams where I'm responsible for the fate of the world, pretty much every co-worker I've ever had has made fun of how neat my desk was, one co-worker used to call me "Adrian Monk" when she was in a bad mood, various friends have suggested I organize closets for a living, and my husband Tom used to do an imitation of me striding through the house and shouting, "Order! Ve must haf ORDER!!" - but OCD? ME???
The good news is that it doesn't control me. At an early age I developed a fierce focus that lets me keep on going even when I can't get the counting to stop. I can concentrate so completely on what I'm doing that I literally don't hear anything else, or when I do, I leap for the ceiling as if someone has set off firecrackers under my chair. Bosses love this because I usually get as much done for them as any two other employees in the same amount of time (although I have to watch myself to keep from redoing acceptable work in a fruitless attempt to make it perfect). Significant others hate it because they feel ignored. Hm. Maybe I was meant to live alone.
At any rate, now you all know. The main reason I haven't blogged much since July 22 (the day my house closed) is that I've been busy unpacking and obsessively arranging things. A few more days and I should be completely finished, if I can keep from rearranging things to make them just a little more perfect. And I have to say - the closet in the master bedroom is an organizational thing of beauty. The kitchen will be, too, by the time I'm done, if I can just keep myself from being derailed by counting silverware.
"I do not have OCD OCD OCD." ~Emilie Autumn
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Definitely One Cat
I mentioned recently that a friend of my sister's is trying to find a new home for her cat, now that her husband has developed an allergy to it, and I agreed to see if Rusty would tolerate a roomie.
Alas, the Kitty Meet and Greet took place today and a lot of bad language was passed on both sides, although no blood (human or feline) was shed. For a moment I thought Rusty was going to sink her teeth into me for opening our house to an interloper but fortunately the impulse passed. Jasmine is a beautiful cat and apparently well-behaved when not being hissed at, but she was also obviously very bonded with her current owner and I don't know whether I could win her affection in the middle of an armed (clawed?) camp, so I had to tell Deb I couldn't take her. Rusty sulked for a while after the Great Hissy Fit but eventually decided to treat the outcome as a personal victory and had a hearty snack to celebrate.
I hope Deb is able to find a good home for Jaz; the Humane Society is now so overloaded with cats that they're giving them away for whatever donations people are willing to pay. The last thing they need is another recycled kitty, and the last thing poor Jasmine needs is to be one.
"One is never sure, watching two cats washing each other, whether it's affection, the taste or a trial run for the jugular." ~ Helen Thomson
Alas, the Kitty Meet and Greet took place today and a lot of bad language was passed on both sides, although no blood (human or feline) was shed. For a moment I thought Rusty was going to sink her teeth into me for opening our house to an interloper but fortunately the impulse passed. Jasmine is a beautiful cat and apparently well-behaved when not being hissed at, but she was also obviously very bonded with her current owner and I don't know whether I could win her affection in the middle of an armed (clawed?) camp, so I had to tell Deb I couldn't take her. Rusty sulked for a while after the Great Hissy Fit but eventually decided to treat the outcome as a personal victory and had a hearty snack to celebrate.
I hope Deb is able to find a good home for Jaz; the Humane Society is now so overloaded with cats that they're giving them away for whatever donations people are willing to pay. The last thing they need is another recycled kitty, and the last thing poor Jasmine needs is to be one.
"One is never sure, watching two cats washing each other, whether it's affection, the taste or a trial run for the jugular." ~ Helen Thomson
Friday, August 5, 2011
A Less-Macho Hemingway
Over the past few days, during the breaks from unpacking, I've been re-reading A Moveable Feast, my favorite book by Ernest Hemingway. Written in fits and starts during the four years before his death in 1961 and published posthumously, A Moveable Feast looks back at Hemingway's life in 1920s Paris, when he lived there with his first wife Hadley and (later) their son "Bumby" (Jack).
As an undergraduate English major I struggled my way through Hemingway's more famous works, most of them dripping with machismo. I first read this "lesser" work a few years ago and was pleasantly surprised by its gentle treatment of Hadley and of F. Scott Fitzgerald; his friendship with the latter appears to have been rockier than one would expect, but Hemingway lays most of the turbulence at the feet of Fitzgerald's mentally unstable wife Zelda. Hemingway's incisive portraits of his fellow ex-pat writers are sometimes hilarious; I particularly liked his description of the poet Ernest Walsh as consciously "marked for death." (Apparently Walsh had tuberculosis and milked it for all it was worth.) Other descriptions - such as the cause of his break with Gertrude Stein - are quite disconcerting. These were the years when Hemingway was consciously paring back his writing style to develop the sinewy prose that eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 "for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration," and his discussions of how he did that and his struggles to find a market for this new type of prose are very interesting.
Between the personal and literary anecdotes Hemingway talks about the food, wine, art, cafes, and architecture that made Paris "the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is" in a way that makes me want to revisit Paris in a time machine. Of course, 30+ years after the events described Hemingway's memories of the discomforts of their often unheated cold-water flat have probably dimmed somewhat, and I'm still wondering how, during the lean periods when he often went without lunch to save money and wrote in cafes in avoid buying fuel, they could still apparently afford a cook; was Hadley really that hopeless in the kitchen? I may have to buy a copy of Hadley, the biography by Gioia Diliberto, to fill in the gaps.
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." ~Ernest Hemingway
As an undergraduate English major I struggled my way through Hemingway's more famous works, most of them dripping with machismo. I first read this "lesser" work a few years ago and was pleasantly surprised by its gentle treatment of Hadley and of F. Scott Fitzgerald; his friendship with the latter appears to have been rockier than one would expect, but Hemingway lays most of the turbulence at the feet of Fitzgerald's mentally unstable wife Zelda. Hemingway's incisive portraits of his fellow ex-pat writers are sometimes hilarious; I particularly liked his description of the poet Ernest Walsh as consciously "marked for death." (Apparently Walsh had tuberculosis and milked it for all it was worth.) Other descriptions - such as the cause of his break with Gertrude Stein - are quite disconcerting. These were the years when Hemingway was consciously paring back his writing style to develop the sinewy prose that eventually won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 "for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration," and his discussions of how he did that and his struggles to find a market for this new type of prose are very interesting.
Between the personal and literary anecdotes Hemingway talks about the food, wine, art, cafes, and architecture that made Paris "the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is" in a way that makes me want to revisit Paris in a time machine. Of course, 30+ years after the events described Hemingway's memories of the discomforts of their often unheated cold-water flat have probably dimmed somewhat, and I'm still wondering how, during the lean periods when he often went without lunch to save money and wrote in cafes in avoid buying fuel, they could still apparently afford a cook; was Hadley really that hopeless in the kitchen? I may have to buy a copy of Hadley, the biography by Gioia Diliberto, to fill in the gaps.
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." ~Ernest Hemingway
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Turning Up the Heat
This week I've been coming to grips with my new stove.
Over the years I've cooked on wood-burning, propane, gas, electric, and smooth-topped stoves plus campfires, charcoal grills, hibachis and Sterno. At Girl Scout camp I even learned to bake in a reflector oven. This stove, however, is going to take some getting used to. Don't get me wrong - it's a beautiful stove. It just isn't quite what I expected.
First of all, a couple of nights ago I opened the oven door to look for the broiler pan and it wasn't there. It wasn't any other logical place, either. Finally my sister, witness to my puzzlement, informed me that many stoves no longer automatically come with broiler pans; they must be special-ordered. This baffles me. Don't people broil any more? Surely not every consumer has switched to the George Foreman grill. What happens when the family wants steak and the snow is a foot deep on their Weber grill? I guess they do what I did that night - fry it instead. I need to look up the model on the manufacturer's website and see what I have to do to order a broiler pan.
The other issue I'm facing is the speed and calibration of the stovetop burners. My previous smooth-top range had instant-ignition halogen heating units that rivaled gas for speed, and the numbers on the knobs roughly corresponded to the heat levels I'd experienced with electric coil burners. The burners on my new stove tend to take a long time to heat up, but once they do, oh, baby. Level 3 for this stove seems to be equivalent to level 10 on the electric coil burner stove I just left behind. (This explains why the onions I intended to caramelize as part of dinner came out as onion crisps instead.) I believe I'll be doing a lot of cooking on Low.
Of course, the cooking situation hasn't been helped by the fact that so far I haven't unpacked much of my basic kitchen equipment. (The kitchen boxes seem to be buried under a huge heap of book boxes.) I'm getting pretty creative with the microwave, my omelet pan, and the one spatula I've located. Oh, well, nobody in his or her right mind wants to do anything too fancy in an Arizona kitchen at this time of the year - we're all wary of pushing our air conditioners past their limits.
Which means I'll probably have to wait another couple of months to explore the final frontier - does the oven actually work, and what's the temperature control like in there?
Over the years I've cooked on wood-burning, propane, gas, electric, and smooth-topped stoves plus campfires, charcoal grills, hibachis and Sterno. At Girl Scout camp I even learned to bake in a reflector oven. This stove, however, is going to take some getting used to. Don't get me wrong - it's a beautiful stove. It just isn't quite what I expected.
First of all, a couple of nights ago I opened the oven door to look for the broiler pan and it wasn't there. It wasn't any other logical place, either. Finally my sister, witness to my puzzlement, informed me that many stoves no longer automatically come with broiler pans; they must be special-ordered. This baffles me. Don't people broil any more? Surely not every consumer has switched to the George Foreman grill. What happens when the family wants steak and the snow is a foot deep on their Weber grill? I guess they do what I did that night - fry it instead. I need to look up the model on the manufacturer's website and see what I have to do to order a broiler pan.
The other issue I'm facing is the speed and calibration of the stovetop burners. My previous smooth-top range had instant-ignition halogen heating units that rivaled gas for speed, and the numbers on the knobs roughly corresponded to the heat levels I'd experienced with electric coil burners. The burners on my new stove tend to take a long time to heat up, but once they do, oh, baby. Level 3 for this stove seems to be equivalent to level 10 on the electric coil burner stove I just left behind. (This explains why the onions I intended to caramelize as part of dinner came out as onion crisps instead.) I believe I'll be doing a lot of cooking on Low.
Of course, the cooking situation hasn't been helped by the fact that so far I haven't unpacked much of my basic kitchen equipment. (The kitchen boxes seem to be buried under a huge heap of book boxes.) I'm getting pretty creative with the microwave, my omelet pan, and the one spatula I've located. Oh, well, nobody in his or her right mind wants to do anything too fancy in an Arizona kitchen at this time of the year - we're all wary of pushing our air conditioners past their limits.
Which means I'll probably have to wait another couple of months to explore the final frontier - does the oven actually work, and what's the temperature control like in there?
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Back to the Box
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably remember my rant about Barry's insistence that we buy a giant TV for our living room. You won't be surprised to hear that he retained custody of the leviathan and I kept our original TV plus the entertainment center we had built for it when we first moved into our house.
Before I bought my new home I carefully drew the floor plan on graph paper and pushed the little to-scale cutouts representing my furniture around to be sure everything would fit. And it did. Almost. I forgot one thing: the ceilings in this house are a foot lower than the ceilings in our previous place. The center section of the entertainment center wouldn't stand up in the living room here, or indeed in any of the rooms.
Enter Super Dad with his Skil saw. My father was able to remove the top 8 inches of the center section so it's now the same height as the side pieces and will (just barely) fit into the house. Of course, it's almost solid oak so it took the two of us plus my sister and a small wheeled furniture cart to get the thing into its final resting place, but it's there now and the living room looks less like I'm camping in it.
The next phase, of course, is to find and connect all the audio and video paraphernalia that go into the entertainment center along with the TV. If I can find my trusty wiring diagram, I should have everything up and running in a couple of days. If I can't find it, I may be cut off from PBS and TCM for weeks.
I guess that's not all bad, though. If I go back to spending my evenings in front of the box I will probably lose all my unpacking momentum. I could still be wondering where my favorite saucepan is at this time next year.
"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. " ~Orson Welles
Before I bought my new home I carefully drew the floor plan on graph paper and pushed the little to-scale cutouts representing my furniture around to be sure everything would fit. And it did. Almost. I forgot one thing: the ceilings in this house are a foot lower than the ceilings in our previous place. The center section of the entertainment center wouldn't stand up in the living room here, or indeed in any of the rooms.
Enter Super Dad with his Skil saw. My father was able to remove the top 8 inches of the center section so it's now the same height as the side pieces and will (just barely) fit into the house. Of course, it's almost solid oak so it took the two of us plus my sister and a small wheeled furniture cart to get the thing into its final resting place, but it's there now and the living room looks less like I'm camping in it.
The next phase, of course, is to find and connect all the audio and video paraphernalia that go into the entertainment center along with the TV. If I can find my trusty wiring diagram, I should have everything up and running in a couple of days. If I can't find it, I may be cut off from PBS and TCM for weeks.
I guess that's not all bad, though. If I go back to spending my evenings in front of the box I will probably lose all my unpacking momentum. I could still be wondering where my favorite saucepan is at this time next year.
"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. " ~Orson Welles
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