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dead animal to old feet Sunday, November 22 2009
I had the worst hangover in years, but somehow I managed to hang out and chat with the houseguests for a couple hours as they woke up this morning. I even mustered the energy to make coffee, which I made the mistake of drinking. This led to nausea, and I came very close to throwing up at several points. Sarah and Nancy outfitted themselves in orange and took the dogs for a walk, at which point I decided to go back to bed. Somehow I managed to sleep despite my headache, knotted guy, and psychological trauma (manifesting mostly as misplaced remorse).
Eventually everyone hit the road and headed back to south, leaving me alone in the house. So I took a took a nice hot bath.
Yesterday I'd replaced the nozzle on the boiler, and it had seemed to work okay afterwards, leading me to jump to the conclusion that I'd fixed whatever was causing it to require periodic resets. But then as I took my bath, I became aware that the heat demands coming from my hot water use had caused the boiler to lapse once more into a state where it required a reset. Drat! So after I came out of the bath, I tried swapping out the old fuel filter with a new one, though the old filter had only been in use for a single season. Unfortunately, the messiness of the fuel filter replacement procedure makes one feel as if one needs a bath. After my hands were soaked in it, I found it impossible to scrub out the smell of fuel oil.
Meanwhile, down in the brownhouse things have taken an unplesant turn. Yesterday I noticed a very slight dead animal smell creeping into the cabin. Today that smell had increased in intensity and transformed slightly, reminding me of smelly socks. This odor had to be coming from the fecal pile, which is supposed to be isolated from the cabin. Obviously, then, there must be some air leaks that I will have to plug. I found myself imagining a rubber gasket for the cover that folds down over the duplex toilet seats.
My hangovers always seem to peak the evening of the day after the night of indulgence, though this evening wasn't as bad as I'd expected. I was definitely handicapped, but I was in a perfect mood to watch movies on the Tivo. I ended up watching the Nanny Diaries, a peppy Sex-and-the-Cityesque tale of nanny misery at the hands of a Upper East Side mother, a sterotypical (and somewhat anachronistic) WASP. It had the chirpy, upbeat Sex-and-the-Cityesque soundtrack, and a Sex-and-the-Cityesque voiceover relating the shallow observations of someone with whom I would most definitely not want to have a beer. I found myself wondering if the National Dairy Council had provided funding, as the evil mother-employee was depicted as a vegetarian who insisted on soy substitutes for common animal food products. Beyond that, some of the assumptions about social status made by both the heroine and her villain employer seemed dated and absurd. Would, for example, a Harvard-educated douchebag (particularly one who turned out, despite his sweatshirt and baseball cap, not to be a douchebag) really be slumming by dating an attractive young nanny with a college degree? It was a dreadful mainstream middlebrow movie, but it was perfect for my state.
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