Home again, home again

Okay, I'll admit it: I've been off the net for a couple of days. That's largely because I don't sleep well on airplanes; on the entire trip from Rome to Houston, I maybe got in 30 minutes of catnapping. I tried several times, and I even thought a couple of times I'd actually go out, but no such luck.

Mostly, if I got settled into something that seemed like I might be able to relax enough to sleep, my eyeballs flew open and I'd snap out of the drowsy state that had gotten me there. Fortunately, I'd grabbed some light reading before I left and I still had a handful of crossword puzzles for backup, so the trip wasn't entirely a loss. Besides, it turns out netbooks really do have long battery life, so I played games and got some work done, too.

I figured out before I got home what the problem was: in spite of all the airlines' efforts to make their seats comfortable, the backs are too high for me, so they throw my head forward and make me uncomfortable. I know this because the seats on the little squirrel-powered plane that hops between Houston and College Station have somewhat lower backs—and I slept almost the whole way. For a 30-minute flight.

I had confused my travel plans enough before I left that Number One Son wasn't too sure what day I'd get back, but he had planned my favorite kind of surprise: he and Shrek, the current temporary roomer, would give the house a good once-over so I'd come home to clean digs. They were planning for me to get home Friday, but the only reason to think that was that my flight was due in about midnight, and I had fudged toward the Friday side of that.

When I texted from Newark to say I was stateside, the guys decided to get into gear and do what they could. Sure enough, when I walked into the dim entryway, the first thing I noticed was a bit of reflection off the sofa table that has sat there for years; the message there is that someone had dusted off a fairly thick layer of accumulated sand and beast hairs.

I didn't slide across the den floor, so I was pretty sure they also had swept: that floor usually reminds me of the old country dance halls where the owners intentionally put sand or sawdust down to facilitate slides; clearly they didn't understand how much simpler that would have been if they'd just killed the grass in the back yard and acquired a couple of dogs.

The kitchen had been attacked, too, at least enough to move dirty dishes into the drain side, presumably clean. NOS was disappointed, though, when my first words there were, "Hey, Tank, welcome home to you, too!"—especially since Tank was still in the den. NOS's face fell when he reached the kitchen door: half the floor was covered in kibble.

"Oh, no," NOS groaned. "He hasn't done that all week!"

Which means, of course, that this was by no means the first time. When Tank first started living with me, I tried keeping a dish of kibble in his kennel so he could eat if he got hungry while I was at the office; one afternoon I walked by the kennel to find him using his favorite stuffed tiger as a sweeper to brush all of the food out of his dish and out of his kennel. And I had thought the difference between humans and dogs had something to do with using tools. So much for that.

Soldier Son and I had discovered that keeping a bucketful of food in the kitchen floor seemed to make him much happier, and that worked for us for a couple of years. But a few weeks ago, I walked into the kitchen to find the bucket knocked over and food all over the floor.

I had caught a sale at WallyWorld where I bought a wider-based bucket more for its color theme than for its design, but it seemed like a less-tipsy alternative to the bucket we'd been using for years. Within a day or two, Tank had that on its side, too.

The next step up was to an old dishpan I have used intermittently for dish washing, plant potting, and kitty litter. I scrubbed and disinfected it and filled it with food. A couple of days later, it was on its side.

NOS said it had stayed upright the whole time I was gone, assisted partly by becoming wedged under the bottom step of a kitchen stool that made it harder to tip. Since the guys had cleaned up the dishes and swept the floor, they were pretty pleased with the kitchen effort—until Tank had stepped in.

Shrek beamed at the fact that I had noticed his effort to clean the table, and he urged me to logon to my laptop to see the work he had done to set up a website for me. I had asked him to do this weeks ago, since he's supposed to be a computer whiz and I thought it would be a good way to help him pay for his living space while he's out of work.

I wanted to check out the laptop, anyway; NOS had told me on the way home that one of Shrek's friends had gotten onto it while I was gone, initiated a rude conversation with a friend of mine who was looking for me on an instant messenger, and caused something of a hullabaloo among several of my online friends and some of my coworkers. He had also managed to rearrange the furniture in my usual seating area to plug the laptop in, although I have a convenient power strip right under my side table. I was not a happy camper.

I had sent Shrek a copy of my company letterhead to give him an idea of what I wanted on the website. The letterhead uses a standard Roman font and a common script to spell out my company name in kelly green on a white background; that model for my website follows the specifications I demand of my students for light backgrounds with dark text, a policy that makes sense physiologically for computer screens and presentations. (Those of us old enough to remember computers that ran on DOS with dark backgrounds and amber or green text also remember the plethora of headaches and other complaints by users whose eyes just weren't designed for that inverted combination.)

The site I saw was so bad I don't even remember if it included my business name. Instead of a light ground with dark text, it had a dark gray ground with orange highlights and white text. Shrek stood proudly by as I entered the URL, then deflated when I knee-jerked immediately, "That's horrible!" As a matter of fact, if he had been one of my students, he'd have gotten almost exactly the same reaction—and he'd have been sent back to the drawing board to do it over again. Aside from my green and white company logo, I was raised in the land of maroon and white; I have no interest at all in having an orange website. Fortunately, I have a friend at work who probably has the skills to fix it for me.

I didn't get to sleep until sometime around 2 Friday morning, and I woke up with sinus drainage bad enough that I just downed diphenhydramine and rolled back over. I woke up in the wee hours of Saturday morning and piddled around the house, sorting out the goods I brought back from Italy and catching up on email and reading.

When I dragged by the entryway on the way to the den, I realized that the dusting job hadn't so much been the treat I had thought it was; I'm pretty sure Shrek has never held a dust cloth before, because the only places that were "clean" were along the front edge of the table where he could reach without moving a thing.

NOS and I are contemplating gluing the dog food dish to the floor, and Shrek tells me family business may mean that he'll be moving out soon. I've stocked the larder, run the laundry, and played fetch with the puppies.

Rome was amazing, but it's good to be home.