Oh, there you are!

CC mentioned to me on our way in to work the other day that I needed to put a post up explaining myself and my absence. As if somehow I were unaware that I haven’t posted on this blog, Facebook and Twitter for like three weeks now.

He said I needed to let the people who follow my blog know what’s going on. Apparently both of you are worried about me.

So here’s a story:

I go in to the city early one day to hit a yoga class before work. I drop my bags at my work area and go into the bathroom. Remember that I work in a theater.

The bathroom is in the basement and is, as my sister would call it, a one-butt bathroom. I d0 what I need to do, wash up and go to leave. I grab the doorknob, pop the lock and turn.

The doorknob spins in my hand. Loosely. Ineffectively. I would go so far as to call it impotent and flaccid, even though it’s a doorknob. The doorknob isn’t doing a goddamn thing. The door is still closed, and, somehow, still locked, even with a freely spinning doorknob.

Okay, I think, no biggie. I’ve been locked in far worse bathrooms than this. Plus, I’m a stagehand. Oh, wait. All my tools are at my work area. Not in here with me. As is my cell phone. Crap.

So I dig around the bathroom and find. . . a roll of paper towels. That’s it. No pipe wrench. No random screwdriver. Not even a goddamn plunger.

I start yelling and banging on the door to try to get someone’s attention, because people are actually in the building even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. The only thing is that I’m in the basement. They’re on stage, rehearsing. Far, far away.

I may as well be on the moon.

And suddenly I’m pissed, you know? I get dinner made early, I arrange a babysitter early, I pay extra for early parking all to come in early and take this goddamn yoga class and now I’m stuck in the frickin’ bathroom? Are you kidding me?

I’ll be damned if some doorknob is going to steal my peace.

So I start kicking the crap out of the doorknob. It takes a little while, but eventually the doorframe bends, the knob breaks off and I am free and I have exactly five minutes to haul ass down 8th avenue to get to my yoga class.

I drop the pieces of the doorknob off at the stage door on my way out and tell our doorman, Gus, what happened, apologizing as sincerely and as fast as I can.

I make my yoga class.

When I come back I have to endure a rash of crap from lots of people for breaking the bathroom door and leaving.

House Head Carpenter: I don’t get it. I don’t understand how you were locked in. The doorknob still works.

Me: But it came off! Completely! That’s how I got out.

House Head Carpenter: The door’s bent now where you kicked it, but nothing’s wrong with the doorknob. Even though it broke off.

Me: Dude. I don’t know what to tell you. I was locked the hell in. For like twenty minutes.

House Head Carpenter: I’ll replace it, I’m just saying it still works. Don’t kick me.

None of this has anything to do with my absence from all things social media. But it does explain these:

The old doorknob is still on the door and sometimes I forget and try to lock it instead of using the latch.

Don’t let anybody steal your peace.

Because I’m posting from work.

One night I was putting #5 to bed and, as always, he was talking.

#5: Hey guess what.

Me: What.

#5: I know why all those great inventors weren’t very nice people to work for.

Huh. Not what I was expecting him to say. The statement begged a thousand questions but I asked only one. Well, more of a prompt than a question.

Me: Oh?

#5: Yeah, because they were so busy inventing things that they never got enough sleep.

I looked at him for a minute.

Me: Are you saying that because Daddy and I get cranky when we don’t get enough sleep?

#5: Yes.

And there you have it. This conversation came back to me recently because I’m halfway through serious-badass-Nikola Tesla’s biography by Margaret Cheney Man Out Of Time, and among all the many other mindblowing things I read, there was a bit about the AC/DC (the current, not the band) wars.

So you have your Thomas Edison, by anyone’s standard, a great inventor. He’s a proponent of Direct Current and is actively working to make it our country’s electrical standard. Then you have Tesla, kind of a whippersnapper by Edison’s standard, but a brilliant inventor except no one remembers who he is today because he was a terrible businessman and also didn’t get around to patenting most of his inventions. He saw the flaws in the DC system and developed a better, stable Alternating Current system. The war was on. Edison began a smear campaign to malign AC. Tesla couldn’t be bothered. He just kept inventing stuff and making his AC sexy.

I live in New Jersey, as did Edison. Edison, as part of his smear campaign, was paying school boys to kidnap puppies basically in my neighborhood, and then he would electrocute them with alternating current, to prove how dangerous it is. Not in secret, publicly. Because we’re both New Jersians, I believe I am not out of line when I call him a douchebag. I mean, thanks for the light dude, but. . . yeah.

I have to conclude, based on this conversation with #5 who gets his information from perhaps the same genius realm as Tesla or else bacon-and-video-game-induced trances, that Edison was seriously sleep deprived.

Hey, so Christine at Quasiagitato took one of my posts and we did a Mad Lib with it. It totally cracked me up and you should go look at it. I refrained from using “boobies” for every plural noun, even though I wanted to. Click here for her post.

Happy Halloween

I may as well get it out there, because you guys are going to find out sooner or later.

The winter storm that hammered the east coast this weekend was all our fault. Perhaps the fault of my family as a whole, or it may be that the blame can be placed squarely on my shoulders.

#1 believes, and the idea is not without merit, that this was God’s way of telling us that we should have taken our Christmas lights down.

She bases this belief on the fact that the giant branch that landed five feet from her head and could have killed her instead took out the gutters, to which the lights were attached.

If you look at the vertical bar in the center of the picture, that’s the gutter. With the Christmas lights. As far as why those lights are still up, that’s another post entirely.

But it may have been me and what I wrote about Winter on Facebook.

crosses — Halloween decorations at the start of the snow

non-crosses — Halloween decorations, plus branches.

I’ll not be taunting Winter in print in the future.

I feel like we’re the luckiest people on the planet. It’s hard to show in the pictures, but we had two giant branches that just missed doing serious damage to the house, not to mention the one that didn’t land on #1.

Besides the gutters, we got our porch pierced:

And that’s it so far. That’s it!

So. Lucky.

The power’s still out. School is cancelled. I just hipped the little ones to the fact that power out days count as snow days. If we go over three snows days, they have to make it up at the end of the school year. Two down so far, and winter hasn’t even begun.

CC got a generator today, thanks to the shop that our shows rent their sound gear from. We now have heat. We got power to the freezer and the fridge before we lost anything. We have the internet back.

I Facebook-bitched about how the county hadn’t even started to clear our street yet- it’s completely blocked by one of the giant branches that didn’t land on my house- and they showed up within fifteen minutes. Never doubt the power of social media.

No school parties, no Halloween parade, and the neighborhood with the best candy and haunted houses behind us is pitch black and deadly with debris and laden branches that continue to fall. But #1 came home from an errand and said that everyone was out on main street, trick-or-treating where all the businesses have power. They went to main street and hit all the houses between here and there while it was still daylight. As soon as they finish hand washing the dinner dishes by candlelight, we’ll eat candy and make s’mores and continue telling spooky stories that may or may not involve the county’s wood chipper (whirring away in front of the house) and wayward children.

Here’s to Halloween miracles.