PMS

I woke up feeling bloated and bitchy.  I had a new zit to go with my wrinkles.  Every article of clothing I tried on looked horrible.  Even my cat irritated me.  Nothing was right.

I had PMS. 

A good friend of mine dropped off the latest Victoria's Secret catalog.  She got it when she ordered a couple of bras online.  Much to her dismay, the black bra she thought she was ordering actually had a black-on-black leopard pattern on it, and was studded with rhinestones.  This upset her.  "Well," I said soothingly.  "At least, under a shirt you can't see either the pattern or the rhinestones."  She tends to get excited.  "Are you kidding me?"  she shrieked.  "It looks like a friggin' dryer ball."   Quite a picture, under a low-cut clingy tee shirt.

So, masochist that I am, I looked through the catalog.  I will never in my life be as long-legged and voluptuous  as any of the super models on those pages.  How is it that they need push-up bras, anyway?  Or is it just that if I buy one of those bras, I'll suddenly grow breasts?  And my bloat will disappear.  Miraculously, my wrinkles and zits will fade away, leaving me dewy-skinned and glossy lipped.  Such is the power of conspicuous consumerism.

There it was, in the middle of the catalog.  What I've been looking for, all these years.  A padded, push-up sports bra, with gold sparkles.

Damn.  I'll be the belle of the gym.

I told a friend of mine about getting a padded, push up sports bra, with sparkles, no less.  She shook her head,  "No," she said.  "I can't imagine working out without my boobs being smashed into oblivion."

This assumes that you have something to smash. Hmm.

My daughter called to tell me that she felt bloated, bitchy and was generally suffering from PMS.  Good, helpful mother that I am, I told her to eat some chocolate.  Or get a Pumpkin Spice Latte.  It's the only way to cope.  

Camping

"You're going to do what?"  my daughter asked incredulously.  "Camping," I replied.  "I'm going camping for the weekend."  She shook her head in disbelief.  "Does he know about you?  Does he know that your idea of camping is a two-star resort?"  I laughed at her. "I think you're underestimating me," I said.  "I've done it before."  She rolled her eyes and said,  "You were younger, then."  She also said that she hoped my relationship would survive, and made some snide comment about sheets and thread counts, but I completely disregarded her rudeness.

I was going camping with my boyfriend for the whole weekend.  Sleeping in a sleeping bag on the ground, in a tent, with bugs and no showers and no makeup.  I have done it before- I used to backpack, without a tent.  I've hiked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu and camped all around Easter Island.  Camping for a weekend- well, it should be no big deal.  That said, I am still trying to convince myself that hot flashes give you that dewy, glowing look.

We were going off to check out a piece of my boyfriend's past.  In his college days, he found this pristine canyon where he built a tepee as a weekend retreat.  It was a place, apparently, to take vast quantities of  psychotropic drugs and have sex with random women.  "After all," he said, "it was the seventies."

Well, of course.  That explains everything.   However, I was alive in the seventies;   I didn't have these kinds of adventures.  Maybe because he's so much older than me....

Sex and drugs aside, it was a place he went with his dog to escape the stress of college and the grind of work.  He rode his old motorcycle in, dog in his specially built box, walked down the hill, feeling the weight of his life drop off as he approached his retreat.  He told me of the hours he would spend in the quiet, sitting on a limestone ledge overlooking the steep walls of the canyon and the creek, listening to the birds, tuning into himself.  His love of nature stems from his time there.   The man he is today has a lot to do with the time he spent there.

He found out about the canyon originally from an old recluse who built a cabin in the canyon, not actually knowing to whom the land belonged.   The recluse cobbled out a simple life for himself there.  In the winter the creek turned into a raging river, and the recluse built a cable with a chair attached to it so you could be pulled across the wild water via pulley.  The tepee was across the creek from the cabin.  A couple of years after the cabin was built, the land was bought by a speculator who planned to develop it.  Apparently back in the seventies there were plans to dam the creek, which would have made the tepee and the cabin lakefront property. Those plans fell through.  Nevertheless, by the time my boyfriend gave it all up to join the world of job-marriage-children-mortgage, there was already tension in the pristine canyon.

Recently, there had been a huge fire in the area.  So, we were going to see what was left of of the halcyon days.

We were camping by a reservoir near the canyon.  It was pretty beautiful, and the weather was warm.  There were mosquitoes at dawn and dusk, and yellow jackets when food was out, but otherwise, it was great.  He set up the tent, and the sleeping pads, and did all the cooking.  He built a roaring fire, which shooed away the remaining pesky insects, and after dinner we made S'mores.

S'mores might be one of my favorite things.

We went to sleep pretty early, unlike the twenty-somethings camped near by, who partied late into the night.  Our slumber was interrupted by automatic weapons fire, echoing across the lake.  My boyfriend was convinced a mass murderer was going around the campground, shooting into every tent.  "Don't you think there'd be screaming?" I asked reasonably.  "You can't scream if you're dead," he said.  Meanwhile, the twenty-somethings partied on, which I pointed out.  No mass murderer was going to ruin their weekend.  Eventually my boyfriend relaxed,  the gunfire stopped, and we went to sleep.

The next day we went off to the canyon.

The terrain was rugged, and quite beautiful.  The scars from the recent fire were evident on the steep hillsides as we drove down into the canyon.  It was hot and still;  our dust and the sound of our truck were the only disturbances in that remote place.

After a few missteps, we found the locked gate, parked, and climbed through.  The land was posted now, with huge "No Trespassing" signs all over the place.  It was silent.  As we walked down the hill we started to see large appliances on the side of the rutted, dirt road.  Old stoves, dishwashers, a washing machine, in various stages of rust and decay.  A plywood house, with a metal lean-to full of more decrepit appliances.  A generator. Car parts.  A refrigerator leaning tiredly against a dryer, both missing their doors.  A window was open in the house, and a dirty white curtain hung out against the house, silent like everything else.  I felt like we were being watched, even though no one was around.

My boyfriend was uncertain.  He couldn't tell if he was in the right place or not.  "It could be," he said.  "But it's all so different."  He pointed at the house and said it belonged to the son of the speculator who bought the property.

Thirty years makes a huge difference.  Trees grown up, a dirt road put in, and every type of used appliance in the county draped about in some state of decrepitude. We continued down the steep, dusty dirt road.  We got to the bottom, and looked around.  The creek babbled, but there was no cabin.  The dirt road ran alongside the creek, going off into the distance. 

"Where's the cabin?" he said.  "This must be the wrong place."  Then he saw the cable attached to a tree, and underneath it, the remains of a broken, old, wooden chair, covered with weeds and trash.

This was it. 

We crossed the creek on a rickety bridge built in the eighties, according to a hand-lettered sign.  We looked around the meadow where the cabin had stood- nothing left.  What had happened to it?  We found a piece of charred wood with some nails sticking out of it- had the cabin burned?  Did the speculator bulldoze it?  There was no one to answer any of these questions.

We looked at the wall of limestone where my boyfriend used to sit and think, for hours on end.  We walked down the road that didn't exist thirty years ago to the place where the tepee had once stood.  The dirt track followed the creek around the corner out of sight.  In place of the tepee there were a couple of depressing one-room plywood shacks.  No one was around.

My boyfriend was really sad.

Here's the thing about your past, and your memories.  They belong to you.  Eventually, everything changes, including us;  it's inevitable. So the only thing I can say is to always enjoy the present moment.  And know that no one can ever take the memories of your past away from you.  This place, the way it was, would always be a part of him.

We left soon after that, walking up another dirt road that had once been a deer trail.  We drove back up through the canyon to the reservoir, where we swam in the lake, and had a picnic. Later that night, after dinner- more S'mores by the fire.  No guns interrupted our sleep. 

Our relationship survived camping.  In fact, we are planning to go again.  I know a two-star resort on the Yucatan Peninsula that is just perfect.

Quality People

I had dinner with an acquaintance of mine last week.  She's a surgical nurse, works long hours but really enjoys what she does.  We were discussing men.  She's married.  Not happily, though.  We spent the better part of dinner discussing her husband and his myriad of faults.  Apparently he snores, farts, ogles other women, leaves a mess in the kitchen and has never put the toilet seat down.  He also, according to her, doesn't respect her.   If she is to be believed, his only redeeming quality is that he pays her bills without questioning anything. That is enough for her to stay married, apparently.  But her editorial comments continue.

"Really," she said.  "Why is it so difficult to find a normal one?"

The answer to that question, of course, is the original reason I started this blog.  I know her husband, and he seems to be an okay guy.  She definitely has different taste in men than I do.  I know this because she once set me up on a doozy of a blind date.   This was before my fifteen-minute rule.

The man was a plastic surgeon.  She worked with him, said he was a great guy.  Ever the cynic, I questioned why a great guy who happened to be a plastic surgeon would need to be set up on a blind date.  She shrugged.  "People are busy.  You know how tough it is to meet quality guys.  He has the same problem meeting women.  You should just meet him.  I think you'll like each other."  She looked at my chest.  "Maybe he'll give you a deal on some implants.  You never know."
For some reason this reminded me of the time I went bra shopping at Victoria's Secret, and was immediately accosted by a helpful salesgirl, who insisted that I was a perfect candidate for their new water bra.  Oh, yeah?  What exactly are you saying here???
Chest comment aside, I could see her point, having had the same problem in meeting quality people, I agreed to a dinner date.  I said as much.  She laughed.  "Honey, " she said.  "He's quality.  You'll thank me."

The doctor and I agreed to meet at a local Thai restaurant.  All I knew about him was that he was taller than me, and had salt and pepper hair.  I was pleasantly surprised.  He wasn't bad looking, and only a few pounds overweight.  The only stretching of the truth was the salt and pepper hair- even though all three remaining strands were salt and pepper.  So it wasn't so far off the mark.  We had dinner, the food was good, but the conversation bored me to tears.  Chemistry, or lack of chemistry, appears pretty fast.   He asked me if I could pick him up the next day, after a little procedure he was having; for my trouble he'd buy me another dinner, he just couldn't drive his little car, and he really needed a ride.  I hesitated, because really at this point, I didn't care if I ever saw him again.   I thought it was a little unusual for him to ask a woman he had just met to pick him up, but I decided that he must really need the ride.  So I agreed.

Later that night, after the uninspiring dinner date was over and I was home, I grabbed my wallet for something and noticed something unusual:  my driver's license was in the wrong place.  As a survival skill against impending old age, I have to put everything back in the same place so I can find it again.  I would never have exchanged my driver's license for my debit card.  I racked my brains for when it could have happened.  I did go to the rest room during dinner, and left my purse on the seat, but surely he wouldn't have gone through my wallet- would he?  I looked through it a little more, and discovered that I was missing $20.  Since I often operate on cash, I usually know to the penny how much money I have with me.  Would a plastic surgeon really swipe a twenty from a me?  And pull out, look at, and mix up my cards?  Seemed improbable.  And- I was already on the hook for the next day.  I chalked it all up to another senior moment.

The next day I showed up at the hospital at the appointed time.

The nurse on duty looked down her nose through her glasses at me.   She had major attitude and she hadn't even opened her mouth yet.   "I see you are the next of kin," she said.  I wanted to give her a pair of tongs to help her pull the stick out of her a$$ but instead I gave her my patented stop-seventh-grade-boys-in-their-tracks-look.  "I barely know the man," I said.  "Are you Allyson Wonders?"  she asked in the clipped, officious tone that petty bureaucrats in charge of nothing often invoke. "Yes," I admitted, "I am, but..."  My voice trailed off.  She shrugged in an annoying manner- really, she was getting on my last nerve- and sniffed, "Well, for whatever reason Dr. Boring put you down as his next of kin.  He's almost finished.  Have a seat over there."   She gestured to a bank of chairs against the wall.

Dismissed, I went and sat down, feeling really strange.  The whole situation was too bizarre.  Next of kin for a man I hardly even knew?  Enough.  When Nurse Officious was busy being condescending to the next patient, I grabbed my bag and left.  I had just gotten back to the car when my cell phone began to ring.  I decided to ignore it- after all, one shouldn't drive and talk on a cell phone.
A couple of months later, I was home having dinner and watching a game when suddenly someone knocked on my kitchen window, which overlooks the driveway.  It was Dr. Boring.  How the hell did he know where I lived, anyway?  The driver's license, maybe?  Too creepy.  I wouldn't let him in, I just talked to him through the window, told him to get lost.  He wanted to know, why didn't I pick him up as promised?   I told him to take a hike.  He continued to harangue me.  Hearing the commotion, one of my neighbors came out- asked me if there was a problem.  I explained that Dr. Boring just wouldn't leave, and my nosy neighbor, who also happens to be a cop in the Tenderloin, flashed his badge and told Dr. Boring to go and never come back, etc.     So- off he went.  I ran into him at Safeway, not too long ago.  It was a little awkward but he didn't do much more than mutter hello and make a little jerk of his head in my direction.

Damn.   There go those implants.  Guess I'll just go get one of those water bras, instead.

.

Koyaanisqatsi

What the hell is going on?

Melky was using.  He's out for the rest of the season, taking with him the hopes of all the Giants fans out there.  Will the rest of the team step up?  I hope so, but the thing that rankles in my mind is the fact that management knew this was coming down the pike back in July.  I'm sure that's one of the reasons that they pursued Hunter Pence so aggressively.  And why, just last week, in an interview, Brian Sabean said they were putting further contract negotiations with Melky on hold.  At the time, I discussed it with my boyfriend.  I couldn't understand why they would hesitate to re-sign one of the National League's leading hitters.   Guess what- the boy's been juicing.  The only good thing I can see out of this whole mess is that Melky owned up to it, admitted he made a mistake.  Consider this:  he told the truth.

Nevertheless- I'm not sure what's going to happen to the rest of the Giants season.  They lost yesterday and the Dodgers won, so the Giants have fallen to second place, with a cloud over them.

I'm really sad about all of this.

Another headline caught my eye this morning:  One of the Nob Hill Twins has Alzheimer's, and is hospitalized.  The remaining twin is in financial hardship, but still goes everyday to visit her sister.
I loved those women, they brightened my day when I would see them in the City.

Everything is going up- gas, food, just plain living.

What do we possibly have to look forward to? 

"Softball," my boyfriend told me helpfully.  "My win/loss record.  The Coneheads in the playoffs.  The A's and the Cards in the World Series."

Well, there you have it.  Go, Coneheads.

It Looks Like a WHAT????

This morning in the pool I was talking with a friend as we kicked alongside each other.
"My boyfriend," I said, "grew a tomato with a penis."  She looked at me incredulously.  "Honestly," she replied.  "Anyone else would see a nose, and you see a penis." 

Maybe.  But I'm serious, here.

My boyfriend is a successful gardener.  He is also a fabulous cook, and he assured me, that from the bounty of his garden, we would feast royally all summer.  We were having a discussion in early Spring about how many tomato plants to buy.  I wanted half a dozen.  He decided on two.  "You have no idea how many tomatoes they will produce," he said.  He also got a bell pepper plant, some basil and oregano.  I was in heaven, already tasting the Caprese in my mind, smelling the simmering Bolongnese sauce.

So, he planted, and fussed, and watered, and weeded, and worried.  I waited, plate in hand.  It took months.  Finally- some tomatoes emerged.  Not nearly the bounty I had been expecting, however.  Just a few.  This bothered him;  why was it the tomatoes weren't growing as they should?  Why did we not have a bushel full?  I'm not going to say which one of us wanted to buy more plants.  I'll just say, it's the same person who would have killed even the two he planted.  Black-thumbed-food-sluts can't be choosers.  That in mind, I am grateful for the ones we got.  However, one of them had a little extra growth that grew along with it.

What you call it is a matter of semantics.

Ultimately, the tomato with a penis came to a bad end.  We ate him.  He was delicious.

Water

A shameful secret has come to light.

I admit it, I have two black thumbs, and my fingers and palms are pretty black as well.  Most of my plants are fakes.  I have two live plants, outside in pots.  One is a Christmas Cactus, the other is a Jade Plant.  They belonged to my mother, and I've had them both for twenty years, and they are still alive.  In fact, when I moved, I transplanted them into bigger pots, and not only did they survive, they thrived!  Considering you have to be a hardy plant to survive my talents, I feel I've done well, with no real effort.  This morning I discovered why they are thriving.

My neighbor waters them regularly.

I caught her in the act.  She is a lovely woman, and she twinkled at me as I thanked her.  "Oh,"
she said.  "Not a problem!  I know you're busy." 

Succulents and Cacti need water.  Who knew?

I crave water, myself- I love to swim, and I love to be out on the water.  Any kind- lake, ocean, pond, river, whatever I can get.

I had a date once who decided that I should learn to sail one of those one-man sailboats.  Off we went to a local lake.  The water was a bit chilly, so we put on wetsuits.

Really, is there anything less flattering than neoprene?  The thicker suits, the kind you wear for scuba, they at least hide everything, but the thinner ones, made for  swimming and surfing and kayaking, just accentuate every single bump, wrinkle and flesh-fold.  You feel like a sausage, squeezed into casing, all your fat squishing out above and below.  Not attractive.  Why is it that men, on the other hand, look okay in their wetsuits?  Another inequity between the sexes.

So, there I was, a blob in a shorty suit, fat squishing out above and below the line of the material on my thighs.  Just great.  (My thighs are one of the banes of my existence, anyway, but encased in neoprene.....  run.   Run for the hills.  Whatever you do, don't look back.)  And this damn boat seemed to have a life of it's own.  I could not make the thing listen to me.  It brought to mind a family vacation to Belize, in which my daughter and I went tubing down a river in the rain forest, got separated from the rest of our party, got stuck on some rocks in a swiftly moving current, and had to be rescued.  Our rescuer was the incredibly handsome guide, and we couldn't even enjoy him helping us because we were so embarrassed that we actually had to be rescued.   AND we ripped open one of the tubes.

My very helpful date, no doubt starstruck by my grace and beauty, kept barking out commands.
"Windward!  You're supposed to turn into the wind!  No!  Upwind!  The other way!"

Ever obedient, and gifted with a stellar sense of direction and knowing right from left,  I turned downwind.  That's Leeward.  I tipped that damn boat completely over.

It was quite cold.

At least I can swim well.  And laugh like no one's business.  My date, he didn't have a very good sense of humor about the whole thing.

That was the last date I ever had with that guy, but really, I know the truth.  It was the neoprene that ruined it all for me.

Labels and the Perfect Wedding

I am finally dating a man who calls me his girlfriend.

This is new territory for me.  I'm used to commitment-phobes.  I once dated a man who, after six months, referred to me as his "very, very, very very good friend." I dated another who said that one couldn't just call someone a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, that you had to come to some kind of consensus about it all, that it took time, and that we had only been seeing each other for a year.  And, I've had many bad dates that really went nowhere.  So putting a name on anything is a huge development for me.  And, here I am with a man who is secure enough and committed enough in our relationship to give me a label.  What a feeling!

A couple of weeks ago, we both attended one of the biggest labels of all- a wedding.

The wedding was at a beautiful winery in the wine country.  The bride is a good friend of mine; the bride's sister/maid of honor is a good friend of mine, and their Dad is a good friend of mine.   My boyfriend came along for the party.

The weather was perfect.  Sunny, warm but not sweltering, breezy at first but the wind eventually died down.  The setting was spectacular;  shuttle buses picked us up at the parking lot of the winery, and transported us up to the top of this magical hill, where everything was set up:  a place for the service, lots of comfy chairs and couches with a bar nearby, tables for dinner, a dance floor with a DJ.  Even the bathrooms were perfect, at least on the women's side, because inside was a huge case full of anything you might need- hairspray, bobby pins, safety pins, double tape, feminine protection, breath mints, Kleenex, hand creme, etc.  You name it, it was probably in there.   The view from the hilltop was amazing; 360 degrees of rolling hills and vineyards stretching away into the distance.

The ceremony was perfect.  Just long enough to be meaningful, but thankfully not a full-blown Catholic Mass,  which, when attached to a wedding can take several hours.  The bride was absolutely gorgeous, and when I saw the way she and the groom looked at each other I started to cry. 

The whole day was perfect.  The service, the wedding dress, the bridesmaid's gown, the wine, the food, the cake and gelato, the coffee. 

The groom got up and made a speech about how peaceful and beautiful our surroundings were, and how his bride made him feel like that at the end of every day, no matter how crazy it had been and how much his head was spinning.  And if we should find a person like that, we should hang on to them.

When the groom made his speech, there was a collective sigh from the entire assemblage.  The women all sighed, because it was quite possibly the most romantic thing any of us had ever heard.  The men all sighed because now they all had to live up to impossible standards; the ante had been upped.
My boyfriend turned to me and held my hand.

As the twilight descended, lanterns came on, and a roaring fire was started in the fire pit.  Lots of dancing.  The party went on until long after dark.  It was the best wedding I've ever been to- in fact, it was perfect.

I saw the father of the bride yesterday.  He asked after my boyfriend, remarked that he seemed like a really nice guy, wanted to know his intentions, and was I planning to move in with him soon?

Don't rush things, here.  I'm still getting used to calling him my boyfriend.