Mossy Cottage Knits

A Feeble Attempt at One-Upping in the Weird-Jobs Competition

Happy All Hallow's Eve, Dear Readers! I’m back, albeit minus half a tooth, thanks to something hard in a gyro sandwich (you know, the kind of thing you don’t want to investigate too closely lest the truth of what you're really eating is revealed to you in all of its awfulness).

My dentist is my hero. I split my tooth in half on Friday; he had me all patched up, emotionally and dentally, by 8am Saturday morning, even though he doesn't usually have Saturday hours. (And, for Cuzzin Tom all of you soulful romantics out there, when I got home, I surprised TMK trying to sneak out of my home after having left some pudding, a banana, a mango, and a Frappuccino—all the soft foods she knows I lerv—on my kitchen counter. Let me tell you how wonderful it was to go back to bed (the day sort of devolved into a mental health day), get up, grab a Frappuccino and a banana, and crawl back into bed again. Remember the day she carted me off to her house because I was too sick to know I was sick? Yeah, it was kind of like that. Thank you, sweetums.)

And now, before I say anything more about anything, I just have to get this out of my system: Goat Farting?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Who knew that TMK would unleash such a cloud of closely held “weird jobs I’ve had” secrets from the Readers. I am so impressed. Thank you, everyone, for your stories. I wish I could contribute, but my early jobs were for the most part of the administrative, front desk, secretarial type. Although, the summer right after I graduated from college, I did work as the weekend manager of a horse farm belonging to some snootie-patootie rich Princetonian folks. “Manager,” it turned out, was the fancy name for a stable boy girl. But I handled my responsibilities passably well with the exception of:

(a) Attaching a horse to a hot walker and then turning the hot walker on so it went in reverse. Fortunately, although the horse, Jeremiah, was huge (a good 18 hands, for those of you who speak the lingo), he was the gentlest of creatures (unlike the equally tall Noah who was the spawn of Satan*) and proceeded to walk backwards, as calm as you please, not questioning the change in standard operating procedures.

(b) Weed-whacking right through a huge pile of poison ivy, splashing the resulting liquid up and down and…er…between my legs. I was wearing shorts. Need I say the next few weeks were not fun? I found interesting ways to sit. And discreet ways to scratch. And, as my desperation grew, not so discreet.

On the Halloween front, Frankie has decided to go as an elephant this year:

You can imagine what it took to get this photo. Some other attempts:

And here, she reveals what her “trunk” really was, one of a pair of Dulaan Stashbusting Socks made of Lorna’s Laces worsted weight and a bit of red Cascade 220 thrown in to stretch my yardage.

The funniest thing about the "elephant" photo session? Right after we took the last photo, TMK and I got distracted by something and started jibber-jabbering away at each other about whatever it was...and five minutes later, looked down at Frankie, who was still sitting there, perfectly calmly, with the sock still on her nose. That dog.

No postings from me Wednesday or Friday, Dear Readers, although there is a rumor in the wind that the Guest Blogger may have a Guest Blogger. Curious....

*When I first typed this, I made a typo and wrote “spawn of Stan.” Poor Stan. He’s always getting Satan’s phone calls because their names are so close together in the phone book.

Posted by Ryan at October 31, 2005 12:34 PM