This is my last day here, and my ten-year anniversary at the site.

I’m so nervous about the whole change that I’m not sleeping well and my stomach is seriously revolting today.

My office is cleaned out and my truck is loaded up. As soon as the idiots who decided that they needed a last-minute site tour (after I’ve turned in my mileage expense report, of course, so they’re not going to get to see anything which requires my truck to get to), I’m going to run my boxes down to my new office and see if I can’t get a key. I like to start work at least an hour earlier than most of the office weenies do, and I can’t always go straight to the field.

I have very mixed emotions about this change. It’s huge and life-altering, but I know it’s a good thing overall. I’ve really enjoyed this job, but the people here have been such assholes lately that I’ve decided not to do that ongoing consulting work that they asked for. I do not need the money, and it’s so good to be able to say that. I just want to walk away from the rampant bureaucracy, although I know damn well that I’ll be walking right into another set. But hey, at least as a contractor, I won’t have to fight for budgets or deal with the Board. I can just do my job and submit my bills peacefully.

But still. Queasy tummy.

Thinking about the small things that are pleasing me lately might drive away some of the anguish about my impending life change (this week!) and even if writing them down doesn’t help kick me out of my creative block, well, it’s better than nothing, right?

My naughty black cat, who’s been driving me absolutely batshit with his naughtiness this week, turned out to be after something specific, as I discovered when I almost stepped on a very small, very cold, rather dead tree frog in front of my closet door. This sounds more like a bad thing, but I’m looking at the brighter side of it. Now that the prey is disposed of I can get some sleep without chucking the cat out from under the bed at 3 AM while having dark thoughts of adapting the dogs’ shock collar to his scrawny neck. And hey, at least he had a reason.

The house is rather clean, and I’ve been decluttering. I like the results, and must do more.

But while I’m decluttering, I’m also moving houseplants in from my office. When I started that job, my ficus tree was about three feet tall. Now it’s more than seven, and the roots had crawled out the drain hole and coiled around in the saucer, lifting the whole shebang up a good three inches. Yesterday, I got after that clay pot with a hammer (good thing it was terra cotta and not plastic) and liberated the roots and repotted him in a much bigger pot. Of course, ficus being the ornery things that they are, he’ll probably immediately shed all of his leaves all over my couch in a fit of pique from the indignity, but for now, he filters the light from the front window and gives me a nice pleasant place to read.

And what am I reading? I’m going back through the Harry Potter series, of course, and enjoying it very much. It’s fun to pick out the foreshadowing. This is probably my fourth or fifth reading of the first book, and it’s become an old friend. I’m very much into old friends in the summer, of the literary variety at least.

Of the personal variety, I’ve made several new friends lately. I went out with one last night to the county fair just north of us, where we hung with some other friends that I already knew and watched the eye candy walk by. It was a pleasant evening, and Thursday night is the rodeo, which also has potential. I may throw myself back in front of my ex or I may just watch the scenery again, but that rodeo holds a soft spot in my heart.

And one of the best parts of today is that I have no less than five varieties of mushrooms in the house tonight. I may make some spectacular pasta dish tomorrow (wasn’t hungry tonight) or I may just sautee them up and eat them. Well, the fresh ones anyway; the fifth is a staple of dried shiitakes. A wealth of fungus! And if a person has pleasing fungus, what else matters?

Even the job thing is a good thing, no matter if I get waves of sheer terror washing over me now and then. If I take it one piece at a time, I’ll be fine. I’ve been riding so easily for so long that it’s very good for me to get out and change. Nobody likes a slacker, especially not me.

A thread popped up on one of the boards that I frequent, about antique cookbooks and actually using them.

“Hey,” I thought, “I have several antique cookbooks, and this could be fun!”

So I went straight to the oldest one I have, published in 1908. It was probably my great-grandmother’s, and was handed down to me through my great-aunt’s line. It still has her juvenile-delinquent pencil drawings on the figures showing the cuts of meat, putting a saddle or a draft harness on each animal. She always was a rebel, my Aunt Muriel, and a kick in the pants.

That cookbook was called:

The White House Cook Book

A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home

containing

Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, etc.

I found surprisingly little that I could use in it. I wanted a dish that showed its age, but which we could still eat. A whole lot of it revolved around large families and dinner parties and situations for which I am simply not equipped. While I’d love to corn my own beef, I’ve looked into it before and learned that saltpeter is really hard to find these days. And I’d have to scale that back anyway, as I won’t be corning a whole side of beef at a time anyway.

I will also rarely need to call on this book to make terrapin soup, although I could see squirrel stew coming in handy once in a while considering my hobbies. I will not be making eyewash from eggs, nor Grandmother’s Universal Liniment from scratch. No, I can rely on the local Walgreen’s for my modern-day liniment needs.

There was a startling paucity of vegetable recipes, and of those that I could find, so many were so extremely overdone. An otherwise promising-looking recipe for Cucumber A La Creme called for boiling them until they were soft? Boiled cucumbers? I boggle.

But I did find the following likely dish:

Corn Pudding

This is a Virginia dish. Scrape the substance out of twelve ears of tender, green, uncooked corn (it is better scraped than grated, as you do not get those husky particles which you cannot avoid with a grater); add yolks and whites, beaten separately, of four eggs, a teaspoonful of sugar, the same of flour mixed in a tablespoonful of butter, a small quantity of salt and pepper, and one pint of milk. Bake about half or three-quarters of an hour.

So that’s more or less what I did. I cut it roughly in half, because there are only three of us, and of course, I couldn’t find green corn, but I figured yellow would do. I didn’t measure much, flying by the seat of my pants like people did then.

It started to look familiar by the time I had it mixed up and ready to pop in the oven.

And when it came out, it was clear. Yup, I’d reinvented creamed corn. It was slightly eggy, but still good, and perfectly normal.

The next one though, oh the next one. I don’t know what exactly I thought I was smoking, but I thought it would be fun to jump to the 70s, and pick something that totally showcased that poor, misbegotten decade. Yes folks, I made a jello mold.

And not just any jello mold.

No; I made jellied meat.

For this culinary masterpiece, I went to the 1972 Good Housekeeping One-Dish Dinners. There is not a doubt in my mind that I have this book through some sort of diabolical plan of my mother; maybe she slipped it into a box of perfectly normal, self-respecting books when we were cleaning out my grandparents things. Surely she couldn’t have made anything in it. Right?

This creation was actually titled Shimmering Chicken Mold. It contained chicken, ham, grapes, and watercress. Grapes. In chicken. Yes.

I cheated on this one a little too. I got me a canned ham (perfectly period, and not the cheating part), one of those roasted deli chickens, and spinach, since I couldn’t find watercress.

I dutifully halved my grapes, cubed my meat, and layered things into the closest I could come to a salad mold, a mediium-sized mixing bowl. There was a whole lot of sitting and waiting for gelatin to set with this recipe, which I bet was one of the appeals during this decade, or at least in this cookbook, which was perpetually bragging on how little time each recipe took.

Because I too have a significant evil streak, I didn’t tell the kids anything about my little social experiment. When they saw me unveil the thing, gasps of horror drowned out the television. John said, jokingly, “Is that Jello?” He was completely unnerved when I told him that yes, and it was meat jello no less.

We all talked a little, between snorting laughs about just how wrong the 70s were. He thought something like this had to come from the hippies, but no, I don’t think so. I think this came more from a generation of women brought up by full-time homemakers, but suddenly thrust into the working world, and trying to balance that with maintaining a 50s-ideal of a perfect household. Yeah, I might go off the deep and and make meat jello for my guests too, if that were dumped on me without notice.

They were sports, I have to give them that. We were all laughing too hard to eat at several points, but I really did want them to try it. And they did, and pronounced it disgusting. I ate more than they did; it wasn’t bad at first, if you could get your head away from the concept, but so salty, and so, so bland. Greens are simply not meant to be suspended in essense of chicken. Sweet bobble-headed Mary, was that shit bad. I gave the kids their leave to leave it, but they had to eat their corn before they fixed anything for themselves.

And I may have discovered the trick to getting the kids to eat their vegetables without complaint; make something truly horrifying, and the corn will seem positively mouth-watering in contrast.

And the worst part? I took all of the chickeny-hammy goodness out to the dogs. Who looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Well, maybe I had, but I was pretty damn funny.

I don’t get to nearly enough rodeos any more. I loved them even back when I was just a spectator, and while I’ve never been a contestant except in the fun family games like ribbon-roping, I loved them even more from behind the chutes. I spent quite a few years being the support staff for several cowboys, as I’ve documented here previously, and boy, do I miss that part. Sitting in the stands is fun enough, but climbing up on the fences or the rough-stock chutes to watch people you know and love work their hearts out is really where it’s at.

So yesterday was the local County Fair Rodeo, and I really like that one. It’s extremely small, even though it is on the State circuit at least, and there’s no problem with me driving right in, climbing up on the chutes, and taking pictures from a fantastic vantage point. Cowboy knew I was coming, told me when the slack started and when each of them were roping, and I met my buddy Dennis there too.

The calf roping is one of my favorite parts. The boy, man now, who I considered my step-son is a big calf roper. He’s roping on the PRCA circuit now, although he still does it at the State level, so he hits these little rodeos too. He was also in the big PRCA rodeo over on the coast this week, but drove back here to catch this one in the morning. Team roping’s fun too, and I’ve certainly been to more of these, but calf roping is kind of special to me.

I’ve photographed the hell out of the team roping, but not so much of the calf roping. Chris was doing it before I left, obviously, but he didn’t become a pro until after. It’s a little more fun and easier to photograph, since a lot of the action takes place in one spot. I thought I might show y’all how it’s done.

First, the cowboy and his horse back into the box. There’s a rope tied across the front to give the calf a head start. If the horse breaks the plane of that rope, which is on a quick-release attached to the calf, before the calf trips it, a ten-second time penalty is added to the score, which is almost always deadly. So they have to teach their horses to be very good about not busting out of there until they say, which is trickier than it sounds, as the horses get really excited about the sport too. That’s his string he’s got in his mouth, where he can get at it easily, and he comes out of the box at a gallop and already swinging. It’s all about the time, you know.

One or two swings is ideal; any more than that and they’ve chased the calf so far down the arena that they’re probably not going to get a great time no matter how fast they are on the ground.

As soon as he’s roped the calf around the neck, he’s got the horse stopped and is jumping off. He grabs the slack rope, pulls the calf around to face him without knocking it to the ground, and uses that momentum to help him get down there as quickly as possible.

And the ground part starts. That red rope paying out from his belt is attached to a pully on his saddle and back up to the horse’s bit to encourage him to stay stopped and to back up and keep that rope tight on the calf so he doens’t have to go chasing all over for it. The very well-trained horses don’t need that extra rope, but this was a new gelding, and his first time in a rodeo. He did just fine.

Down to the calf, as quickly as I can trip the camera shutter. He grabs the rope at the neck to control the animal, and grabs the calf’s flank. If he’d knocked the calf down either roping it or taking up his slack, he’d have to get it back up to its feet before he flanked it, which also adds time.

He picks the calf up by the neck and the flank, and flips it down to the ground on its side. This looks like a moderately big one.

He takes the string out of his mouth and sticks the loop on the calf’s top front foot, and uses his right leg to help scoop up the hind legs.

Now he crosses the hind legs with the front one, and takes either one or two wraps around all three to tie them together. One wrap is risky, because the calf can sometimes kick out of it, but if they’re really feeling the pressure of someone behind them, sometimes they’ll take that risk.

Now he flips a half-hitch, or a “hooey” over one of the legs to hold it, pulls it tight, and in the same motion gets up and cuts his arms across to signal that he’s done, stopping the clock.

But he’s not entirely done yet. The whole time he’s been on the ground, the horse has been working too, keeping tension on the rope so the calf doesn’t struggle.

He has to go back to his horse, mount up, and ride forward to release the tension. The calf has to stay tied for six seconds before his run is called good and his time accepted. That’s why “one wrap and a hooey” is risky – what’s the point of a second off of your time if the whole thing’s going to be invalidated? They do watch previous runs on the calves, if they can, to see which ones are likely to fight the tie.

And it was a good time; now to wait and see if anyone beats him. And in this rodeo, five of them did, leaving him in last-place money at sixth. Which is better than no money.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoy this sport, and now that I’m clearly on good terms with his father, I may take up photographing it again some more. My photos are still all over that house, and it’s such a fun subject. Totally worth the sunburn and I get to be around a whole bunch of people that I really like. Oh, and I’m sponsoring him professionally as soon as the money starts coming in from the business. He said he’d put my logo on his trailer, and I figure I’ll have a couple of shirts made for him, and he can be my advertising budget. How cool is that, to have enough money for once to give it to my own personal causes?

So. All has been quiet on the business front, except for boring niggling details here and there, and I decided not to wear y’all out with babbling about it endlessly.

But today was the real decision point. I signed the contract, but the County wouldn’t execute it until the Board of Supervisors formally approved the expense. I went and sat in on the meeting this morning so that I could know my fate as soon as possible.

It was approved with twenty other list items in about five seconds, after sitting through some presentation that went in one ear and out the other. How anticlimatic.

So I rushed back to my office and immediately quit my job. I yanked that net right out from under me, and I’m stepping out on the high wire on August 1st!

I’m all sorts of nervous, yes, but that’ll settle down. The details I have left to manage will calm me some, and then just getting down to doing the work will be fine. I do have to wonder though, what was I thinking, starting a physical, outdoor job in August? Clearly, I’m insane.

But I’m insane and my own boss.

I’ll let the photos speak for themselves, although it wasn’t my camera at the bar, so I only have pre-toasted pictures.

I didn’t get drunk myself, although I’d sort of planned to. I woke up with a headache and it never went away, so I just didn’t feel like it. That’s ok; I drove and we had a good time anyway.

But seriously, next time it’s my turn to get plastered.

I could use a good drunk.

I swear, I had no idea this business-starting thing sucked the life right out of a person. I’ve known business owners before, and they didn’t seem to be walking zombies, so maybe it’s just me.

All the time, I’m worrying things in my head. Three flavors of insurance, hiring backup, training backup, ohmygod I’m never going to get another day off.

I’m writing mental lists of things that need to be done and bought. I’m bleeding money, and it’s not like I have a lot to bleed.

Every time one thing clicks into place the hydra laughs at me and flings seven more my way. The water gods are pulling oddball stuff out of their asses just to mess with me now; the diesel generator’s gone bad? There’s no reason for that! What the hell?

I have no humor left in me, and so help me, I have a date Friday. That poor guy’s going to be completely underwhelmed and wonder if he somewhere picked up a mummy or possibly a med-school cadaver by accident.

I’m not writing, because all I have to write about is this crap, and even in my formaldehyded state, I can recognize that nobody really wants to hear all of this. If you happen to also be addled enough to try this, drop me an email and I’ll fill your box with horror.

I need to go out and have fun, and I don’t know if I can let it go. I don’t know if I’ll be able to let it go for much of the first year. When they say that a business owns you, not the other way around? Oh. This is what they meant. What in the hell am I doing?

But with all that, it’s still going well. I’m going to kick ass; I’m just not going to be very funny doing it.

I don’t believe that I’ve ever just taken time off to bum around the house. If I take a day, it’s because a kid is sick, or I’m sick, or I’ve got somewhere to go. Sometimes that involves bumming around a campsite, but there’s sure a lot of work involved to get there.

But with the upcoming quitting, I had a floating holiday that I had to use or lose. And since I had Wednesday off and was taking Thursday, was there really any sense in going in for a partial day on Friday? No, I thought not.

It’s been fantastic. I got Seamus Tuesday night after his last Summer League game. I kept him special because we were invited to a Fourth of July party at one of his favorite friends’ houses. I’d been getting friendly with the friend’s mom during the ball games, and she knew I would be at loose ends, so she invited me too, which was very nice of her. I really enjoyed getting to know some new people; makes me think I should get out more often.

The kids (there was a whole herd) had a ball, setting off fireworks in the court for at least three hours, until mothers started slyly sneaking the extras away to save for next year. Hey, we were tired, and the little ones had lost interest by 10:30. It was a great time for Seamus, especially since he was one of the big boys. He was one of four nine-year-olds, and for once there were no older brothers around to be bossy. These boys got to run the whole show, with Seamus doing a lot of picking the order of the explosions and his friend lighting a lot of them. Yes, lots of adult supervision was around, but we let them have their fun. All of the rest of the kids looked to be the seven-and-under set, and mostly girls, so the boys really enjoyed each other.

(I love the ghostly children in this long exposure shot. I was playing with sparklers, doing that on purpose.)

I turned Seamus back over to his father on Thursday, and went in to the big fancy mall with M to shop for reunion dresses. I was a little disappointed with the on-site offerings at Nordstroms, after all of the cool things they had online. I wanted to try on some of those that I’d been eyeing, but there wasn’t anything there worth the effort. Fortunately, Macy’s had better stuff, and I tried on a whole armload. M ended up taking one home that I’d picked out, of all things. Our tastes are wildly divergent, and it screamed her name when I picked it up, but I thought I’d try it on anyway. It looks better on her.

I was vaguely looking for two things; the reunion dress, which I wanted to take in a cocktail direction, and a nice light sundress. I should wear more sundresses, I think. Of course, what I ended up with was neither, but it works wonderfully with those red shoes I bought a couple of months ago, and I could wear it to the event if I don’t find anything better, or I could totally get away with wearing it on a date. If I had a date, of course. And no, I don’t have photos of it yet, because every time I settle down in the evening and consider it, my hair’s all funky from being in the pool and I have sweaty face. Maybe tonight. 

See, there, with sweaty, minimal makeup face:

Seamus and I spent yesterday and today farting around and doing errands. It was glorious to feel myself start to get stressed about having to get things done, and then realize that I still had a whole bunch of weekend left. It was all stupid stuff too; I went to the DMV and almost got my trailer relicensed. We went to the Farmer’s Market for tomatoes.

I contemplated making new window blinds for the kitchen after the cat wrecked the horrible shutters that were there, and Seamus looked through a couple of pattern books with me until we decided that that was all Kountry Kitsch Krap or inappropriately formal for a kitchen. So off we went to the land of the pre-made window coverings, where I still didn’t find anything kitcheny, although now I want curtains in my room and new ones in the living room. Finally, we ended up at Lowe’s, and in two trips got both a wide blind and a drill with which to install it.

It changes the look of the whole kitchen, and makes it feel cooler and less dirty already. Those shutters had lace insets, which were not removable for washing. Gross. And I suppose I needed the drill anyway, but I do wish I’d thought of that the first time we were down there.

And with all of that, I still have tomorrow in which to fight with getting Quickbooks installed and running, and possibly to alter a dress. All the time in the world! I should have done this years ago.

Since I was making a cheesecake to take to his friend’s party this evening, Seamus was right there in helping me. The boy’s really starting to take an interest in cooking, so as I go, I let him do a lot of it and explain why we do it that way while I go.

He’s helped me make cheesecake before, so he knows a little bit about it. Except for melting the butter, which I do because the microwave’s overhead and it’s not safe to be reaching that high for hot melty fat, he can just about do the crust by himself.

First, he pounds the cookies into crumbs. This is his favorite part, and if I don’t keep an eye on him, he pounds them into powder.

Then he mixes in the butter and puts the whole mess into the pan, which he put together too.

He’s getting over the whole ick-factor of using one’s hands to cook. We wash our hands an awful lot while we’re cooking. Seamus pats the crust down in there nicely.

He’s starting to get to use the stove a little too. I started the white chocolate melting, and he held the pan and stirred while I put the dulce de leche in. I’m glad to have him there; it’s a three-hand job.

But Seamus’ favorite kitchen tool happens to be my big mixer. Can’t blame him; it’s mine too. His job was to put everything in and run the bowl up and down while I ran the controls. I should have let him do the scraping down, now that I think of it.

And that’s it. He helped me fold this part into the whipped cream part and smooth it into the pan, and then we were done. Perhaps his next lesson should be doing the dishes?

I’ve started to shell out money for this enterprise, and let me tell you what, that’s a scary part!

I’ve commited to buying commercial liability insurance. Personal health and way-high vehicle insurance are on my to-do list for Friday. 

I spent most of yesterday browsing laptops, with the help of a very patient friend. The Dells were shiny and came in red and all, but in the end, I broke my three-computer Dell streak and bought a Toshiba. I even got it that day, as I went with the in-store pickup, so my night was filled with getting a new toy going.

The evening was less filled than it might have been though; adding an additional machine turns out to be much simpler than replacing one. There’s no major transfers to do, just move a few contacts and bookmarks on over, and I’m set. That one’s going to be dedicated to the business, but I can see that I’m going to want to use it otherwise too – the screen’s huge and bright, and it runs like the wind, even with the dreaded Vista on it. It doesn’t fit in my old laptop bag though, so John gets that back for his DVD player, and I have more shopping to do.

But the biggie of yesterday was completely unexpected. My manager called, and I assumed it was about the deliverable I gave him that morning. I’d have liked it to be about that, actually, as I’m not billing for it until he’s happy, in case I have to tack extra hours on to fix something.

But no, he wanted me to come sign my gigantic contract. Which I happily did, and even more happily since they had it right there and I didn’t have to go down to the main offices. Now I’ve officially obligated myself to six months of being my own boss. I just have to wait for the Board of Supervisors to look it over one last time (you can bet that I’m going to that meeting) and for the contracts people to execute it, and then I’ll give my notice at my day job. That’ll probably slip to a little less than two weeks, but I’ll warn my supervisor informally first. He knows I’m looking.

I took a look inside my office-to-be while I was there. It’s not bad; quite a bit smaller than this one, but nicer, and it does have a window. There isn’t as much room for my house plants, so some will have to come home with me, but I think the little fridge will fit just fine. There’s a fancy old desk in there, which happens when you move into the former Headquarters building. I’ll have to get my own internet service, which won’t be a problem, as I’m getting the office space for free. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense for them to charge me a lease when they’re the ones paying me.

So last night, it all sort of hit me, and I got the sick-feeling butterflies.

What have I done? Am I going to be able to do a good enough job at this?

I find it significant that my last day working for the Air Force is ten years to the day of my first one. I hope the next job runs as long and gives me as much growth.

It’s terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time. I’m nervous as hell, but I’m choosing to ignore that and just do the job anyway. And so it begins.