I’ve been wanting to go fishing again, but we’ve been so stinking busy that we haven’t got to it. But Junior happened to have his kids on Saturday, so we four and his folks packed up to fish from the banks of one of the local lakes.

 We didn’t catch much, because I am a serious fishing jinx, but each kid got to reel in a trout before they went off to play on the nearby playground. We sat around in the sun and the shade, getting sunburned and slowly relaxing, which was just what I needed.

The whole weekend was pretty relaxing, come to think of it. We came back to my house on Saturday night, and slept in. I had a little work to do, so I dragged him out to turn valves and flush hydrants for a while before we made a tool-shopping expedition and had lunch out. Junior tilled me up some spots for tomatoes, which I will plant later in the week, and that was about it. There was some napping and a great deal of sitting around being unproductive, and it was absolutely what I needed.

Now, on to the chaos.

There are days when having this job that leaves me free to work outside, on my own schedule, is the most fabulous thing in the world.

And there are days when I wonder what in the hell I was thinking, to take a physical job fifteen years after my last one ended.

I think today has been both of them.

When it’s good, it’s really really good. I’ve been spending a lot of time outside in the last couple of weeks, developing a nice farmer’s tan, getting my old cowboy hat good and broke in for the year, and watching spring hit the valley. Today, I stopped at the well just to appreciate the smells. The boys had mowed the land around it last week, and it still smelled like fresh hay. I could catch a whiff of the dairy nearby, and not the chicken farm upwind. Flowers were blooming and a Great Blue Heron came in for a landing that paralleled the runway and looked like a small plane coming in. I said hello to my cabinet spider when I checked the chlorine. She doesn’t bother me and I don’t bother her, although the wasps will be a different story next month.

 

  

I spent the rest of the day running between a construction site (always a favorite), picking up samples and talking to tenants, and working by myself on valves and hydrants outside. It’s a wet job, blowing hydrants, but really satisfying when the water goes from dirty to clean in a minute or two. Sometimes the valves themselves are easy to turn; sometimes hard. Sometimes impossible, for me by myself, and I mark those to come back to with either my lovely assistant or a hydraulic assist. I like working as a team with the guys, but I also like doing it myself, at my own pace, as the last couple of weeks have been. I can think more about which way the water’s going and how best to get those pipes clean, and sometimes the phyisical work frees my mind to wander where it will.

 

  

But I get to working on these things and find that I can’t straighten my back easily. By the end of the week, I’m sort of a ball of hurt. I’m hoping I’ll condition myself out of that, and predict great big Ahnold arms by the time I’ve turned all of the valves. I’m not even on valve two hundred yet, and I have at least three hundred more to go. My noodley arms aren’t taking it very well, and I come home so tired. By the end of the week, I’d better have something easy prepared for dinner, because it’s all I can do to heat the kids up a frozen pizza, after those long days and then sitting through baseball practice for a couple of hours. At least that forces me to have a little downtime; if we were at home, my mind would be rolling with things that needed to be done at home, making me either more tired or just guilty.

I took the weekend off from the constant motion. I was on-call, and the kids had things to do, so I had to pass on Junior’s shoot, which I otherwise would have liked to go to. Not that I’d have chosen housework, but I sure am relieved that a big chunk of it is done. I can kind of veg in the evenings during the week, when I need it most. Well, that and I got to sneak in a nap. My poor body needed it.

It’s fun work, but somebody has to do it.

the way his lips curl up when he smiles

 the arch of his nose

shaving his neck between haircuts

when he brushes my hair

the way he makes me feel small, and warm, and loved when he wraps his arms around me

laughing until i can’t breathe

he teaches me to fish

and takes care of my guns and trucks

his denim-blue eyes, with one in a half-wink

the smell of him, even after he’s gone

sharing the mountains with him

the way he kisses his daughters on the tops of their heads

his relationship with his parents

when he quietly admits that he likes my hot rod truck too, even if it’s not a ford

how the cat loves him so, even when he torments him

scratching his back, and him scratching mine

how i don’t have to feel afraid to express my opinion, not any of them

that even though i’m the morning person, he’s the one willing to cook breakfast

his strong hands

silly text messages during the day

curling up together in our sleep

holding hands in public, like teenagers

piles of kids on him on the couch

he can build anything

road trips

 

that we have a future

and i know he loves me

and he knows i love him

 

This time of year means that the days of lazy weekends are over, and suddenly we start trying to cram as much as possible into one, in order to maximize our fun:work ratio. Of course, somehow, I missed the lazy winter weekends this year; this having a boyfriend thing takes up a nice chunk of time that would otherwise have been spent wandering bored around the house on a grey Saturday or two.

 

  

The main event this time was a trapshoot in Livermore, my home town. Junior wanted to make a weekend of it, so he got his trailer set up and we spent Friday and Saturday nights there. The shoot itself was on Saturday, but they had a nice RV lot with electrical hookups and everything. His trailer makes mine really look like the redneck adventure that it is. His trailer has more TVs than my house, and damn near as much counter space in the kitchen. It was much nicer than a motel, since it was like sleeping in our own bed, and way cheaper.

 

  

It was a beautiful day for a shoot, and exactly at the right time of year for the hills to be a brilliant green instead of their usual brown. The targets seemed to really stand out against the green, and the light was fantastic. I think I’ve gone past the point of taking 200 pictures of each shoot though; I only really need so many of his ass, and he just isn’t facing me while he’s shooting. Not that I’ll stop taking them, no, but fewer seems to be in order so I can also watch what’s going on.

 

  

Junior was really doing well too, and that added a little something to the watching. He went into the doubles having only missed three out of the previous 100 targets. He did so well in the handicap event, actually, that he made it to a shoot-off with five other guys that evening. In the handicap, they move the shooter farther back from the targets as they shoot consistently better and better, to a maximum of 27 yards. In this league, Junior is handicapped at 26 yards, so he was in the shoot-off lumped in with the other long distance guys. Two of them didn’t show up, so it was a race among four of them.

 

  

I knew he was good and I have faith in him each time, but it sure was fun to see those other guys squirm as one by one, they dropped out until it was just him and another guy shooting one round at a time for sudden death. They worked their way through a whole box of shells each while I held my breath at every shot. Finally, the other guy broke one and Junior missed, but I was very proud of him. He says that guy is one of the better ones out there, but I think he doesn’t see that he is too. He sure made him work for his win, and I really enjoyed watching it. And I betcha he’s bumped back to the 27 yard line at the next shoot.

 

 

We spent that night there too, alone in the parking lot. What we saved on hotel costs, we spent on dinners out, but we came home and watched a movie to relax. Had a leisurely breakfast out and made our way home, but some friends called and invited us to go four-wheeling that afternoon. Sounded fine and neither of us were quite ready for the weekend to be over, so we traded the trailer for a borrowed quad, since I’m not really up to running one with a clutch yet, and went up to the hills for a little dirt and sunburns.

I was so tired when we got home that I kind of stumbled my way through the things that had to be done before he put me to bed, but that’s a sure sign of a good weekend. You know it’s a fun one when you have to go to work to relax.

When I changed jobs and moved to this new office, I was happy to see that there were a few people that had potential for becoming friends socially. I have a good history of making long-term friends through work; look at Big Jeff and JJ, and Marv. But making new friends with women, especially, is something that I don’t just jump into gracefully. I start by being friendly at the office, and we share little pieces of our lives, and keep auditioning each other, just like dating, only slower and with way less sex involved.

It still can be as tricky as dating someone from work though. I was once quite good friends with a woman at work, Mary, until we blew up spectacularly and then couldn’t stand the sight of each other for quite some time. We still had to work together. In fact, I was senior to her by that time, although I hadn’t started out that way, and we barely managed to keep it coolly professional. It was every bit as awkward as running into that hypothetical guy that you had a drunken one-night stand with after the office Christmas party, and who now wants to get together at every lunch, when you just want to wipe that memory from your brain. At least, that’s what people always tell you will happen if you date at work. You’d think courting a friendship would be easier, but not always.

So I’d finally come to the point where I had a nice social event to share with work people, a fund-raiser crab feed for my son’s Little League division. It’s a great time; lots of good food and fun with a lot of local people. I’ve always gone with friends from work before, actually, but people that I’d known better to start with. Two of the secretaries that I like wanted to come this time, and one brought her daughter and her boyfriend too. My employee’s wife happens to run that show, so they saved us all room at their primo table so we could all sit together.

It started out fine. It was nice to talk to these people in a different setting, and nice to get to know their dates more. I’ve seen both of those men around work before; they both went to the demonstration of the robot car this fall with our office. I’ve never said more than a generic hello to either of them.

I was sitting across from B, the one who I’d really thought I’d hit it off with. And she started getting loopy. She’d been drinking red wine, but not an excessive quantity, I thought. She just wasn’t making any sense in the things she said, what I could hear, and I really didn’t know if I was being unusually dense, or what.  She hadn’t had much more to drink than I had, and I was perfectly clear-headed. He seemed drunk too, but I thought he’d probably had a head start on that. Besides, I don’t know him very well to tell if that was out of character for him or not. I really had a feeling that she was hitting on me, and that just wasn’t adding up to the B I know at work. Of course, it was quite obvious that he was hitting on me, but with the cleavage top I was wearing, that wasn’t quite as baffling. Fortunately, Junior is a very good sport.

She got further and further into incoherence until she looked at me, totally slack-faced, and turned from white to red in a heart beat. “Uh oh,” we all thought, and Junior and I backed up while I frantically looked for a container to hand her. She was obviously going to spew, right then and there, and spew she did. And then passed out with her face in a puddle of puke-drool right on the table. Now how do you talk around that, and at an event where that’s just not done? The hard drinkers hadn’t even started yet.

It was time to get her out of there. The Little League people were getting quite uncomfortable with what was going on. Her daughter and the boyfriend, who was their designated driver, had gone to sit somewhere else, presumably because they’ve had to deal with that before. The fiance was still mobile, so between the two of us, we got her shoes on and her standing amd more or less walking. I confiscated their truck keys, and walked them out to it so I could go back in and find their driver. Once we got out the door, I was regretting leaving Junior inside, because it turned out that neither of them were really capable of walking in a straight line, and while I was the biggest one there, I am not strong enough to manhandle two drunks at once. But I got them to the truck, hoisted her ass in, and went back in to find her kids. I happily handed the keys off to them, and it became not my problem.

Drunk people talk some shit, and from what she said during that ridiculous walk, it wasn’t my imagination that she was hitting on me. She was indeed. I told her that I’m hopelessly wired straight, at which point he took up the cause. Great. Two horny drunks. Her daughter had told me that they’d both had gastric bypass surgery, and they get drunk on very little alcohol. Well, that explained a lot, since they’d each had a bottle of wine, which is enough to give me a raging hangover.

B kept asking me to be her best friend, in an, “I love you man,” sort of way. I have enough experience with drunks to just nod and agree with whatever they’re on about, or else it gets all dramariffic. But man, I hope she doesn’t remember much of last night, because I do not need that kind of friend. I’ve been freeing myself of that kind of burden for a number of years; I don’t need to take on another babysitting role. Not that I would even if she remembers, but it would be much easier if she just doesn’t.

It’s funny, how different people’s public working personas can be from the rest of their lives. I would never have pegged her as someone with raging emotional issues, or to be someone who’d piss themselves in public. She’s such a sweet, bubbly little thing at work; I thought she was always like that. I’m pretty much the same person at work as at home, unless I’m keeping my personality under wraps to work with someone I don’t like. Sure, I talk more in a social situation; sometimes I just grump through the office because I get tired of chirping “hello” to the same four people fifteen times a day.

Fortunately, I’m not in so far as to make it difficult to remove myself. I just have to be busy all the time, and that’s not a stretch, as I am actually almost always tied up one way or another. And man, I know I say this all the time, but seeing other sides of people and relationships like this sure does make me appreciate more and more the one Junior and I have. We have our little dramas, of course, but we don’t blow things up to this bizarre proportion. I wouldn’t be with him if he was into that, and he wouldn’t be with me. Life’s so much simpler and nicer when it’s calm.