Because I love my own cooking and my shiny new macro lens, I spent a lot of time this evening getting up close and personal with my food.

You’d think the kids would have learned by now; that camera is an extension of my body. But no, I had to put up with completely unreasonable questions such as, “Mom, why are you taking pictures of food?”

Well, because it’s pretty, goofy kid!

We got up this morning and I had a vegetable jones, one that wouldn’t be satisfied with plain ol’ grocery store dreck. So off we went to the serious Farmer’s Market, the one without the jugglers and the food on a stick and the hordes of oddly dressed people. No, we went to the farmer’s version, which is just a little ol’ parking lot with some vendors set up, and a curious mismatch of yuppies, foodies, and poor people trying to eat on the cheap.

I spent most of my money at the same farmer whose stand I pass twice a day on my way to work, which is silly, but he wasn’t the only one.

No, I found good tomatoes and cucumbers, which was cheating a little, since I’m growing both of those. But they’re not ready yet and I’m not a patient woman.

I found a local olive oil producer who warned me that the one I’d selected was really strong. Good! The stronger, the better for some things, and this stuff is delicious.

And I found the sweetest, ripest little apricots I’ve had since we had a tree in our yard when I was growing up. Man, I should plant a tree here; apricots are by far my favorite fruit. Seamus liked them too.

I didn’t just cook local stuff tonight. I wanted to grill a tri-tip, and I like corn and artichokes with that, so that’s what I did.

I wrapped both the corn and the artichoke halves in foil with garlic butter, and threw it all on the grill as low as it would go and just left it.

Tri-tip’s got a good layer of fat on it and is notorious for flaming up and getting burned. The last time I cooked it, it was on someone else’s grill and I couldn’t get the meat far enough from the fire or the flame low enough, and it was a little too crunchy on the outside for my taste. But I know my own grill’s quirks, and it came out perfectly; maybe not quite as rare as I like it because I had to let it stand while I fixed John the noodles I’d forgotten, but it was still extremely juicy and yummy.

But the best part was the salad with those fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, a chunked-up avocado, and drizzled with that beautiful oil and salt and pepper. That couldn’t wait until dinner; it was half gone before anything was off the grill.

Now that’s what summer tastes like!

Did I mention a few weeks back, in the continuing saga of the County: Will They Hire Me or Won’t They, that the manager mentioned that the Board of Supervisors were getting itchy feet about creating a new position? Well, they did, and I broke out in a cold sweat, but the manager and his boss came up with a workaround.

They wanted me to bid on running the system full-time as a contractor. And they wanted me to be available 24/7/365, so it wasn’t going to be a small bid either. I think their goal was to show the Board just how much more it would cost to contract the work out than it would to hire.

I wrote up my bid on half a day’s notice, calculated costs for things like my benefits, extra taxes, and hiring someone to cover for me on my time off, and handed it in, expecting them to swallow their dentures. I made it healthy enough that I really wouldn’t have minded going to work for them at that rate at all, in case they did go for it, but that wasn’t the main goal of the bid.

Well.

The manager called me today as I was leaving work, and sounded very hesitant. Since I just gave him some documents that we’re working on together to review on another contract, my first thoughts were, “Oh crap, what’s he found wrong with them?”

But no. It seems that the Board has decided that they cannot hire someone right now. My heart sank. There went my job opportunities, and now I was going to have to scramble to keep food on the table when the day job runs out.

He went on. Instead, what they want to do is contract me to run the system, full time, same conditions as I bid on, only for a six-month trial period instead of a year. As a temporary contract, it doesn’t have to go out to bid, and they have six months to decide what they want to do for the long term. At the end of the term, they would either hire or put the whole thing out for bid. And did I still want to bid on it, and was half of that original (year-long) bid amount good, or did I want to recalculate numbers?

I didn’t even have to think about it. No, that bid is perfectly good. Yes, I will do that if they offer me the contract. They want it when? A decision by Friday? As in, two days from now? Holy cow.

Yes. My decision is yes. Took me all of four minutes.

So, if all goes well and the negotiations (I’m sure there will be some) come down in my favor, by July 17, you could be looking at a completely self-employed woman. I’ll either quit my day job or talk that down to minor part time, and go to work for myself full time.

It’s terrifying and completely exhilarating at the same time. This little business has never been more than pocket money to me, although it’s paid for my truck. We as women live in a world where we almost always have someone to fall back on; a father, a husband, an employer; something. To walk away from the last piece of security I had and stand absolutely on my own feet makes me feel so good.

And so afraid! There’s no one to take up the slack if I get sick or hurt, and it’s worse than the year-to-year contract I have now, as I’m going to have to re-compete for it myself each year. There will be a metric ass-load of stress, but I think it will all be worth it.

After all, my day job was going to run out in six months anyway, so what’s the harm in taking a better job for that time? If, at the end of it, they don’t like me or I hate being my own boss, then I’m no worse off than I am now. I’ll just have to start looking for another job, just like I would if this weren’t on the table. But ideally, I’ll have a bit of a cushion to fall back on, one that I made myself. And I’m really proud of that. Scared, but proud. I’m afraid, but I’m going to get up there and do it anyway, and deal with the details as they come. And I’m going to kick ass at it.

While I was at the baseball game last night, Marv was taking apart my trailer wheels to pack the bearings. One was wobbly, and they were all pretty dry, so he greased them back up. But in the process, he noticed that the brakes were toast, so I’m going to have to redo those too. Brake pads for trailers are just different enough from cars that the replacement parts aren’t easy to find, and are expensive when you do. This will probably bump me up over my budget. I’m not going to be able to pay for the registration and unsalvaging the title this month; it’s going to have to wait until July.

I don’t think this trailer restoration is a very good metaphor for life. After all, eventually the trailer’s going to get done, but my project of not being alone forever? That’s looking kind of bleak right now. I’ve had a long year already, and the longer I go without affection, the more unattractive and undesireable I feel. Which doesn’t exactly make me an ideal partner, and thus furthers the cycle.

I’ve just had a feeling lately that I will probably be one of those women who does spend the rest of their lives alone, and that I’d better just get down to getting used to the idea. I know plenty; I won’t be the only one, but somehow, I never quite thought that I’d join their ranks permanently. I’m sure they didn’t think that either.

I’ve already got some of the patterns; most of these women that I know are deeply involved in their hobbies and friends, and are otherwise quite fulfilled, except for the being alone part. You have to do something to keep your mind active, and if your heart atrophies from disuse, you might as well throw yourself into interesting things. I do that; I’ve got the hunting and the dogs and the photography and all sorts of other things. I have a good group of friends. I spend time with my kids.

What I don’t have is someone to share all of that with, and having had it once, I can see that everything I love to do is sort of hollow and echoey by myself. I like these things because the alternative is to scream inside my head, but I’d like them better with someone else to play too.

Maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Please forgive me if I stick to the superficial in the next few weeks; sometimes, it’s all I’ve got.

After a long couple of weekends, the trailer’s almost finished. Nothing but a few piddly details left – things that I’ll have to go get, like a light cover that I broke and a new propane hose, and those stores aren’t open today.

I didn’t exactly know what to expect when Marv talked me into buying the thing back. I knew it would be a shit-load of work, and also knew that I wasn’t qualified for most of it.

Once we got into it and started tearing things apart, it got even scarier. We had to reframe a whole side, and manufacture new parts for the front. But we did it. We took it from this:

To this:

In about three weeks.

It doesn’t look too impressive unless you see the interim steps, with the skin off and the bones all exposed, like here:

Sure, there are places that didn’t turn out quite right. The little corners where the siding met the new aluminum nosepiece at an angle gave us fits, so finally we went with expandable foam and liberal amounts of caulk. I do love me some expandable foam! It’s ugly in places and the siding doesn’t match, but that’s fine with me too. I leave it in the mountains for part of the year, and you don’t want to leave a shiny new trailer around; it attracts the human vermin.

Marv did three-quarters of the work, but I did my share. That new door there – Marv did the heavy lifting and knocked it in where it was sticking, but I did the rest. Small stuff and stupid stuff, I did. Things that required the heavier tools, Marv did, and his son did some welding on the tongue for us. Oh, and two small helpers; my son and Marv’s grandson, were in on the project too.

It’s still over there, as he’s going to work on the bearings tomorrow, but it’s done enough. It’s so nice to have it back, it’s like having my home back. I do live in the thing often enough during hunting season, and I’ve become very fond of it, and thought it was the end of it when I crunched it. Now, I just have to jump through the DMV’s hoops to get it reregistered as a salvage vehicle, and I’m free to go. With no more payments, and under budget. If I get another couple of years out of it, I’ll have more than got my money’s worth out of it, and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t keep it longer.

After all, I know how to fix almost anything that can go wrong with it by now.

Of course, there’s no one to give me a break except me, so this evening, that’s just what I did.

I stopped by Marv’s and admired the progress on the trailer, but it was over 100 degrees and too hot for me to work on it, so I didn’t.

I suppose I should have worked on my consulting job, but I’m still without a contract and I’m loathe to give them too many hours without one. They’re certainly not getting any documents delivered without one! So I didn’t do that either.

What I did instead was to throw together a quick dinner and leave the dishes in the sink.

I blew up a swim raft, and I went swimming with my kid.

The water’s great! Only two days after filling it, and it’s wonderfully warm, thanks to the dark cover. A couple more days like this, and we’ll have to leave the cover off, or else we’ll have a giant hot tub. No bubbles though, please!

He was delighted; we splashed and played around until Mama got wore out. Then I went inside and he bobbed around some more – he’s old enough and water-safe enough now to swim without constant hovering.

I think this is going to be a very nice summer.

What a busy day Seamus and I had yesterday! John’s at Boy Scout camp this week, so it was just the two of us, and we packed a whole weekend’s worth of stuff into one day.

First there was an early morning ball game, in which Seamus got a piece of it, and was batted in. That boy’s turning into a base-stealing fool, I tell you what!

After a quick trip home to change out of cleats, we went back out that way to work on the trailer for a while. Seamus is old enough to be a help now, so I set him to painting molding and he did a fine job of it. He also was my lovely assistant when it came to woodcutting, holding up the back end of the plywood just fine.

It was after lunch by the time we finally knocked off, and something had been kicking around in my head for a while, so I proposed it (after checking with Marv that he didn’t care if I destroyed a chunk of the lawn at my house.)

“How would you like a pool, son?”

Would he ever! I’d seen those big frame above-ground pools at Costco earlier in the week for a really good price, and why not? He’s finally old enough to trust around water without hovering right at the edge, and it’ll give the kids something to do which is not lazing around the house all summer.

So we went and got it. It was so heavy that I had to open the box in the bed of the truck and wheelbarrow some of the components back into the yard individually. He wanted to swim right now but was good about understanding that there’d be some work to do.

First, we had to pick the spot. We outlined it with the hose and spent some time dragging over buckets of dirt to fill in holes that various dogs have dug over the years. The site didn’t have to be perfectly flat, but a deep hole in the bottom would be a problem with the liner. He was a very good sport about that.

Then it was on to laying out the tarp and the pool liner. That was the heaviest piece; I could barely lift it, and once it was unfolded, it was extremely awkward. The gods of summer smiled down upon us though, and when we opened it up, the holes for the pump were exactly where they needed to be.

All of that was hot work, on a 95-degree afternoon. We took lots of breaks.

Then on to the assembly line work of installing the frame. Around and around we went, doing each step in its turn, except that one step which we forgot and had to go back to this morning. No biggie.

By then, I was pooped, and stinky and sweaty. We’d done physical hard work outside for eight straight hours, which is a lot to ask of a nine-year-old. We came in and showered, and ran off to see Pirates, mostly because I’d already bought the tickets online. It was a long day!

The next morning though, he was raring to go again. We got out there early and put the ladder and pump together, and started with the water. Hooray!

Of course, the water’s not running fast enough to satisfy the kid, but he’s out there playing in it right now anyway. I won’t worry about chlorinating it until I get it full. Surely I’m capable of chlorinating a pool, right? I do, after all, disinfect drinking water on a regular basis, and the parameters are much stricter for that.

The best part came at the end of the hard work yesterday. Seamus turned to me and said, “This was way funner than watching TV, Mom!”

I have to agree. It was, and will continue to be for the rest of the summer. Won’t his brother be surprised!

Things aren’t all doom; all the time, around here, contrary to my wallowing in it this morning.

I may have mentioned that my day job, she is running out. I’m frantically busy with some of the death throes right now, and really kicking ass at that, but at the end of the year, I’m out on the street. Possibly sooner, if they look up in July and notice that I’m out of work, a scenario which doesn’t amuse me.

Sure, I could stay with my company; they’d love to keep me, and I’d be OK with that. I’m finally vested, and get all sorts of really good benefits. But to stay means to move, and I’m not leaving the kids. I don’t have the resources to fight for them, if I wanted to bring them with me, and that’s sort of a horrible choice to present to a kid anyway. “Which parent do you want to live with? C’mon, pick, I don’t have all day here!”

Yeah, no. I’ll stay here, even if it means a drastic cut in pay.

Which it will. I tried to get on with the County in an environmental job in the fall, and was passed over. Theoretically, I could go to one of the neighboring counties or another position could open up here, but I’m not terribly enthusiastic about that.

I’m not sitting back waiting for the axe though. What I’ve been doing is using my business to get a foot in the door with the County department that’s actually four buildings down from me here. When Big Jeff went to Iraq, I suddenly became the only water operator for nine months, and they liked my work.

They liked my work enough that the guys on the ground here are finally listening to what Jeff and I have been saying for years; that in order to be in compliance with State laws, they need to have a full-time operator, not only part-time contract operators.

They’re working on making a permanent position, although that’s a fight, especially in the middle of the budget year. And they want me for the job. Jeff would do too, but they want to wrap the leftover on-site environmental stuff into the operator’s job, and I’m really the best man for that. That’s my job now, after all. Besides, Jeff’s getting out of the water business.

So today, I made a step forward on that. They’d asked me to contract with them for a certain number of hours to help write a document. Today, I signed a contract for that, making myself an official consultant in both of my jobs, although I’m much more proud of the one that has my name on the letterhead.

It’s a perfect situation too; I don’t actually have to produce the document, just assist the manager in producing it. I’ll get my 50 hours without having the stress of signing my name to it in front of the State. (Not that I won’t have stress enough; it’s due June 30.) And it’s not just this one product; I know damn well that it’s an audition for the real job, the one we’d all like me to have. And getting to keep my hand in writing the operations plan from which I’d have to work is sort of a gift.

The two hitches in my carefully laid out plans (do they ever go right?) are one: the pay rate stinks. Like, a 20% paycut from my day job’s rate, not to mention the loss of the business income from the County work that I already do, and two: one of the County Supervisors got cold feet about making the position.

The money thing is surmountable. It’ll be tight rations for a couple of years, but this job has the potential to move back up in the ranks; I’ve hit the top for this location in my current job. I’ll get back up to an acceptable rate sooner or later.

But the cold-feet thing, now that could be a problem. Last week, the manager came to me and told me what was going on, and asked me to write a bid on doing the whole thing as a contractor. And please to have it by the end of the day, which sent me into a little bit of a panic. After all, my business has only ever been a part-time one, and it’s a whole different ball game when you’re entirely supporting yourself independently. You have to think about things like self-employment taxes, and hiring backup, and health insurance and all of that. So I took a fairly standard equation of doubling one’s billing rate to cover all of that overhead, checked the numbers to see if I could do it and wasn’t fooling myself, and sent him up my bid. They wanted it to show the Supervisor how much more it would be to contract someone, but I tried to keep it realistic. After I looked at the numbers, I sort of hope they take it, even if it does put a metric ass-load of stress on me. The money would be good!

So, step one; sign small contract: done.

Step two coming up! (I hope.)

The trailer, that is.

We started working on it on Saturday, doing an excessive amount of demo work in a few short hours.

First stop was to pull off that stupid nose piece. It cracked when I hit the mountain, but man, was that thing a pain in the ass anyway. The cover never opened up all the way, so every time I wanted to change propane tanks, I’d end up hunched up under the thing, holding it up with my back while working at an impossible angle. Since I’m notorious for running out of propane for my grill in the middle of cooking dinner, it seemed like I was always running out front to snatch one of those to keep cooking, and then I’d have to get it back on there too. Besides, it’s not smart to have it covered like that, right adjacent to the living quarters. It’s a perfect place to trap leaky gases and accumulate them enough to be explosive, or to leak into my bedroom and asphyxiate me in the night. No, that had to go.

We pulled that off and cut off the brackets for the tanks and the batteries. We’re going to swap them out and put the tanks on the front of the tongue and the batteries in back, and just wall the front straight down. 

The it was on to removing siding so we could see what the structural damage was. It wasn’t quite as overwhelming as I’d thought; a little framing on the side, and all will be well. The front, however, had been leaking from above the window, and has some major dry rot problems. We’ll be reframing all of that.

I pulled off the compartment cover and the door. If I can find a used compartment, I’ll replace it, but I’m not shelling out extra money to have a new one custom made. I can always get into that storage through the inside of the trailer.

And that was about it, really. I was supposed to go back and work on it on Sunday, but I was nursing a slight hangover and a slightly more dented heart, and felt like crap warmed over, so I begged off. We’ll do a little more this week, taking out the front window and the cabinets on the inside, but it’s almost time to shop. Saturday will be a trip to the RV salvage yard in Sacramento; aren’t you excited?

Last night, I said some fairly harsh words to a friend of mine, and I feel so badly about that.

I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, and they desperately needed to hear it, but having to say it out loud was so unpleasant that I didn’t get much sleep and still feel queasy.

But if they’re going to treat me as their only counselor, and told me so, and blatantly refuse to go see a professional, then by god, I am going to do my damnedest.

They were counting on me not to be a yes-man, so I let down the walls and told them what I saw, from my outsider’s perspective. It wasn’t anything that they hadn’t seen themselves, but they hadn’t admitted that. Bringing it out in the open lets it be dealt with, and they very much need to deal with these things, if they want to keep their sanity.

That friend said that they weren’t mad at me for talking straight to them, but I’m sure some mad developed overnight.

You put me in that role, buddy, and I’m going to step up and do the best I can for you. Even if it costs me one of my friends.

I may have to walk away, for their own good. It will crack my heart, but I’ll do it, and just hope that in time, they recognized what I did for them, and think of me with a little warmth. I don’t know. I’ve done all I can; now it’s up to my friend to shit or get off the pot.