A few weeks ago, The Hunter’s Wife  blogged about being on a radio game show hosted by Scott Linden, on Outdoor Life Radio.

“Ah-HA!” I thought. “This is something that I might actually be able to do, and have fun with!” I do hunt, after all, and have been reading about wildlife for my entire life. Fishing I’d have to just wing – my main interaction with fishing is gratefully accepting bags of filleted bass from my father-in-law.

So I went to his web page and contacted him, and they set me up with a date to be on national radio. Yipes. I get to stick my foot in my mouth in front of the whole country? Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, so this morning I swallowed my nerves when Scott and his producer called.

They had three questions for me, one each on hunting, wildlife, and fishing. I knew fishing would be hard, but I didn’t know he’d throw a trick question in there about hunting, in which I insisted that some sort of dog was actually an Italian ice cream. I don’t think spumoni is even an ice cream, is it? Some sort of pastry perhaps? Either way, it only sounded like spumoni, so with a little gentle guidance, I finally got the question right.

Wildlife would have been easier if I’d ever heard Coues deer pronounced out loud – I’ve only seen it written and had no idea that it sounded like an Angus or a Holstein. Certainly deer hunting would be more popular if there were great big, juicy deer with bells on them in the mountains.

Fishing doomed me, as I knew it would. He threw fly names at me, and surprisingly, they all sounded like nonsense! I guess that’s what fishing lure people do, so they can have a good giggle about a big burly man stepping up to the counter and orderering something like a “Pink Sparkly Whirlibob Humpty-Popper.”  I know our friend who makes his own worms is often absurdly proud of them, especially the smells they emanate. He’ll stick a ziploc bag full of what looks like rotten nightcrawlers up under your nose and say, “Look, they smell like rotten cheese and skunk musk!” I draw the line at tasting them. More than once, anyway.

Fortunately, the producer told me that the shows aren’t live, they’ll be aired later in the year. Maybe by March, I’ll have forgotten the sheer dread of hearing my recorded voice, and I’ll remind you all to go listen to the link. You’re forewarned!

Junior kept asking me if I wanted my Christmas gift early. I kept telling him no, Christmas would be fine. We’d already got his, and I thought he wanted to make it even.

Turns out, it was big and he didn’t want to wrap it. So when we stopped by his folks’  house, he made me cover my eyes and dragged it down the hall.  It was an electric smoker, the exact model I’d oogled at Bass Pro Shops a couple of weeks before. Good thing too, as he’d already bought it when we went there. I’ve wanted a smoker for a long time, one that’s easier to use than the vertical charcoal models. He has one of those, but we’ve had the damnedest time keeping the temperature steady in that one.

Besides the smoker, his dad had a gift for me of a bag of trout fillets that he’d caught for me. It was the perfect gift, really.  A bag of fish may not suit everyone, but it suits me just fine.

Last night, I marinated the fish and this morning, we seasoned the smoker. Just before lunchtime, I set the fish on the grates and Junior set the timer. I put the wood chips in and set a bowl of some more out there with it, although I never needed the extras.

Three hours later, it smelled delicious and the fish was smokey-brown. I pulled them out and sealed the extras up to freeze for later. Five bags of smoked trout are too much for one sitting.

Since Junior was gone to work, I had myself a light supper of smoked trout and cream cheese on crackers. Delicious!

Now I’m all jazzed up about smoking everything that will hold still for it. Ribs, brisket, jerky, tri tip. The dogs better keep out of the way too; if they hold still, they’d be delicious too.

My family’s never been big on insisting that Christmas be held on the actual day, which came in real handy when I got divorced and swapped which holidays I got every year. We figure it just spreads out the fun, and have been known to have it on the fourteenth just for convenience’s sake. Since the boys were going out of state with their father this year, I wanted to have it on the weekend before. Since Junior’s Grandma seemed to be getting tired of hosting Christmas and Thanskgiving herself every year, we combined the two and invited both families over this Saturday, so I only had to cook one feast.

And feast we did; I cooked to my heart’s content. The men went outside and deep-fried a turkey (which needs more practice, as it was really dry) while I worked the kitchen and tried not to get twitchy when people wanted to help. I’ve got a little family quirk, you see. We women don’t like to let other people in our kitchens. As big as it is, I was using all of it. So Junior’s mom brought her delicious ham and I did a prime rib in the rotisserie, and somehow we got everything to the table at more-or-less the same time. Except for the deviled eggs, but at least I did remember them mid-meal.

Their family traditions have been fairly consistent over the years. Grandma cooks, and I think usually the same things every year. I like to shake things up a little bit, and added in some of our family traditions too. They were polite and tried the Brussels Sprouts, but I don’t think most of them liked them. That’s OK, there were plenty of other vegetables to pick from.

It was a little weird having two tables, plus the kids’ table, but none of the rooms are big enough for eighteen people. It didn’t matter; it was just fun. Our families seem to like each other, and everyone hung out late enough for pie and coffee. My twitchy self managed to get out of the way when some of the women swooped in on the mess and did dishes – I’m usually the one in that role, but I could get used to it!

I think this is probably what we’ll do every year, which gives me a nice excuse to pick up a couple more serving dishes and maybe a tablecloth or two. Nobody noticed that the one I used was an old sheet. It was in a set of tablecloths that my Grandma had given me, and I assumed it was one too, until Seamus and I tried to spread it on the table and discovered that it may have actually been a homemade sleeping bag liner. Oh well, I shrugged and used it anyway, but next year, a real one is in order. I had a nice time using some of my treasured dishes, mixed with paper plates to make cleanup easier. I really do like to cook for lots of people, and this house has the room for it, so I’m happy to take the job, especially with a husband who fully pitches in.

My folks gave us a gift certificate to a fancy hotel in Monterey for a wedding gift. My job was too frantic when we got married, so we thought we’d put the trip off until winter. As the stress got worse and worse though, a trip away looked better and better.

So we took what would have probably been the last weekend of bear season, if bear season hadn’t closed the week before, and ran away from home together. The project was done enough, my website was back up, and we didn’t have the kids for the weekend. We turned off the cell phones and left the computers at home; this weekend was going to just be about us, not the rest of the world.

We pulled in to the hotel after getting only a little lost on Monterey’s streets, and my god, was it fancy! The underground garage was bricked, at least at the entrance, and we slowly squeezed the big Dodge into a spot. When we got to our room, we found a suite, not just a room. It had a fireplace, a little kitchenette, and a sitting area separate from the bed. Oh, and the bed was fluffy and soft, with a feather bed, down pillows and comforter; just right for sleeping in and lounging around.

Our one goal, besides relaxing, was to eat seafood, and we sure were in the place to do it. After we checked in, we walked down to the fisherman’s wharf to scope out our options. It was like a ghost town down there; the restaurants were so hungry for customers that they all had someone out front hawking clam chowder and handing out cards for free appetizers if you ate there. After four or five tastes, we couldn’t stand it any more, and went in to a nice place. We were almost the only people in there, and would have been way underdressed on a normal Friday night in our sweatshirts and flannel jackets.

We got a table right on the bay, and I didn’t even have to look at the menu. I had my choice in my head already; ciopinno, one of my favorite dishes. We thought we’d try something unusual for an appetizer, so I picked grilled sardines. that was a weird choice; they’re very bony and not a lot of meat for the work involved. I spent about the next 20 hours trying to cough a little bone out of my throat. Next time, something else.

Junior had never tried ciopinno before, and since I like it so much, he went for it too. He likes seafood a lot, but hasn’t tasted some of the weirder varieties, but he was game. He didn’t much care for the mussels, but he didn’t think the scallops or the squid were that bad. I have to say, the sight of my man chowing down on tentacles really touched off my funny bone. I don’t think it will be his favorite dish, but he gave it a good go.

I’d expected the wharf to be crowded, and Cannery Row the next day, but they were both dead. I don’t know if it’s the season, the cold weather, or the crappy economy, but it was pretty nice to get to walk around without fighting crowds. On Saturday, we walked down to Cannery Row in the morning and poked around in a shop or two. That’s not really our thing though, so after having a cookie and finding the Imax theater for the evening, we went back to the hotel and had a nice nap. I haven’t napped enough in months, it seems, and I really needed it.

For the evening’s entertainment, we went to see The Dark Knight at the Imax. I was hoping it would be 3-D, because that would have been really cool, but it wasn’t. Still, it was fun to watch it on the giant screen and with the big sound system. We could feel the sound effects, but it wasn’t so loud as to hurt my ears, which was nice. After the movie, we picked Bubba Gump’s instead of a fancypants restaurant, and found that to be much more our style. In fact, the peely shrimp appetizer there was the best part of ayn meal we had on the trip, and possibly the best shrimp I’ve ever had.

By Sunday morning, we were out of things to do. I might have liked to go up to a state beach, but it was cold and a storm was blowing in. We’d had all the wandering around we could stand, so we popped down to get the kids a little something and came on home.

I feel like I’ve been completely reset. Everything that I was stressed about has either been resolved or it just isn’t bugging me any more. I have no problem doing our Christmas this Saturday now; with the state I was in last week, I could easily have had a big meltdown about it. Now, I’m just going with the flow, doing side jobs here and wrapping presents there. No biggie.

So I had a temporary post up while my site was crashed; the short version is that I was hacked and my host shut down my website and instructed me to upgrade to the current version of WordPress. Well, that jacked my site all to holy hell, and I freaked. I followed all of the instructions that I am capable of (which isn’t nearly enough) and just couldn’t get it to work. Even simple things, like logging into FTP, weren’t working for me.

So as the host told me to do, I went to the WordPress boards. I did all the reading that I could comprehend, but was still lost. After some nice people explained things to me in a language that I simply don’t understand, I was in tears. I threw up some pleas for help, on this site and on my favorite board.

The extremely generous Heidi offered to look through the site and see if she could help. She helped me a lot until we came to a brick wall – apparently my FTP password wasn’t right. So we knocked it off until I could get that reset in the morning.

In the meantime, the also generous Otto from the WP boards offered to take a look at it too. He got in behind the scenes and figured out that it was well and truly jacked, not just misdirected. I don’t know what magic he did, but it worked, and I’m back up now. Thank you, both Heidi and Otto! I was really upset about losing five years’ worth of work here.

So, as it sometimes happens, everything’s settled down at once. My website’s back up, my project at work is winding down and the next phase isn’t for another month yet, the antibiotics seem to be working, and we’re leaving for a quick honeymoon in Monterey this afternoon. Plus, there was chocolate cake for the office birthdays today. That’ll settle anyone’s mood.

This project, the big one that’s consumed most of my Fall, has been getting worse and worse, but I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m working ridiculously long hours busting my butt to get everything done right. Of course, when things go wrong, it’s usually at the worst possible time. Earlier this week, I was chewed out in Mandarin because someone at the tenant’s location forgot to tell the cooks that the water would be going off. That was not my fault, and was rather funny. I knew exactly what that guy was getting at, even though he didn’t speak enough English to know that I wanted him to get someone who spoke English.

Then it got a little worse. A fitting we had to tie our meters in to one building did not fit after all, and it was the end of the day. No replacement fittings were to be had locally, and I had to leave both the customer and the fire department next door off overnight. Not only did I get yelled at by a fireman, he was also rather whiney. I got them porta-potties out asap, and had the water turned on just after noon the next day.

I was worried about this weekend’s jobs. We have a big tenant with two buildings, a call center. I wasn’t allowed to shut both down at the same time, so we arranged to pay the guys overtime to do one building on Saturday and one on Sunday. I was going to be the only one there to turn valves off and on, and of course, I don’t get paid any extra.

The Saturday one seemed to go well. I got a really good shutoff, and the guys got to work install the backflow preventers and meters. We’re required to have these in place at all of our sevice connections by 2010, so I wasn’t just picking on a few customers. It was tricky, in a tight space and really deep, and with some odd pipe sizes and materials, but we got it done. When we left, all was well.

On that note, I wasn’t so worried about the Sunday job. It was a simpler job anyway, so I got there before dawn to cut the water off so we could get to work. We cut into the line we were taking out and everything started to be very simple. Until one of the guys went over to yesterday’s hookup and noticed it was leaking, that is. Great. So we’ve got a leak on one building and the pipe cut clean in half at the other. I told the on-site guy what was going on and we finished the building we were working on so they could have water in one, at least.

After we got that one back up and running, we went over to the leaky one. The plan was to dig it out so we could see exactly where it was leaking, so we could get the right parts to fix it tomorrow. The ground was way too soupy to dig though, so we had to put it on hold until we could get a vacuum truck out there, and the right parts. Of course, none of the rental places and none of the big equipment parts houses are open on Sunday afternoon. We could get it fixed in the morning with a couple of hours of work, and since they didn’t have people in the place until 6:30 anyway, it shouldn’t have been that big a deal. It’s a call center, not a hospital.

At this point, it all went even more downhill. The maintenance manager called me to chew me a new one. She second-guessed every field decision I’d made and got all over me for, “not bothering to inform her when this happened,” never mind that I had immediately informed the maintenance guy she’d left there on call to be my contact. She then proceeded to condescend to and yell at me over every step of our job. She was having an absolute cow, and when she started demanding the names and phone numbers of our contractors, I turfed it to my boss. I do not have to listen to that kind of abuse, and I am sure not going to involve subcontractors in this. We as a water agency are required by state law to install backflow preventers, and by the county ordinance to have it done by 2010. We also have the right, written into the ordinance, to interrupt service to do so. In order to try to inconvenience this big customer less, we worked around their schedule to work on a weekend, which of course, meant that backup parts were not readily available. We did not have to do so.

So after several ass-chewing phone calls, some calls to my boss, and more parts-searching and contractor-coordinating, I am done with that woman. After the personally threatening voice mail insisting that I would be out there with a vac truck all night keeping mud out of the hole (we don’t have one), I have had enough. She can talk to my boss if she has a problem with it. I did not do anything wrong in this situation and went over and above to try to fix it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to pull a fitting out of my ass, no matter how much she insisted that it was “unacceptable” that her precious call-center drones couldn’t have their coffee in the morning. Not my problem man.

Unfortunately, she went way, way over my head and politics talks in this business. She convinced the director that the only time they could shut down was after 11 PM. These are by no means normal working hours, and it’s going to cost the county a boatload, especially at prevailing wages. So one contractor and I will be in at dawn with a vac truck to see exactly what we need. Then we’re coming back out in the middle of the fucking night with lights and people, all so they don’t have to shut down and walk to the other building or to the porta-potties for two hours in the morning.

So if I was feeling overwhelmed with the job overload before, I’m still shaking with it now. I am not able to let it go enough when I get home, and it gets to me too much. I think I’ve lost my ability to relax, and I’m quite sure that I’ve lost any funny that I once might have had. And I just sent in the project description for phase 2 of this bullshit.