Tuesday, 20 January 2009
For those of you out there who don't know, I happen to live in one of the most remote, backwards, white-trash, hillbilly areas of California. That is, when I am not living in Scotland. Normally, when I tell people in the UK that I am from California, I get the typical not-from-California responses: The weather must be so nice! Everyone must be so tan! What's is like having Arnold Schwarzenegger for a Governor? And almost all their comments (apart from the last one) is location specific, as in anything SOUTH of San Luis Obispo. For those of us North of that pseudo-equator, its a different story. We have trees that have been around since the ice age, live half the year in fog, the other half in rain, and every once in a while get to enjoy weather in the mid 70s/80s Fahrenheit in the summer. Then there is the sliver of California that even Northern Californians blink twice upon hearing about its existance. It's dry as a desert, rattlesnake infested, and contains neither trees, beach, fog, rain, or any form of civilisation. It is so un-Californian that I think most people just call it Nevada, and in fact, Nevada county is just 40 minutes away, even though it's like 2 hours from Nevada state. I believe that this is because California secretly wants to let this part of CA cede from the state.
And that is where my family has ended up. Here's a list I've drawn up of what I've noticed so far.
-More women have mullets than men...and that is only because there is a larger female to male ratio
-Children under the age of 4 have Mohawks...when they turn 5 they get to graduate to mullets
-They list the day's hunting hours on the front page of the local paper
-You see people walking their llama up the driveway
-Your driveway is over a mile long
-The freshest milk available is at the gas station next to the highway, a 10 minute drive away
-You're the obvious outcast if you don't have at least one gun
-Your household only has 2 legal drivers, but your yard has at least 4 cars, 3 of which have dogs, goats, chickens, or cats living both on and inside of them
-You still use livestock as a form of currency (my mom had 10 guinea hens butchered and paid the butcher 5 hens for the task of killing and cleaning them)
-The roads don't have lines painted down their centres
-Everyone has a truck that has 4 wheel drive, covered in dirt, mud, and won't get washed until it rains
-The illiteracy rate is 20%
-Your mom waters the garden with a hose in one had and a rifle in the other...just in case there are rattlesnakes
-Dressy attire at a restaurant is dusting the dirt off your jeans and scraping the equine/bovine manure off your steel toed boots
-There are two sit-down restaurants, complete with menus and waiters/waitresses for ever 14 fast food ones. 1:8 = classy dining.
-The town consists of (1) post-office, (1) "mercantile" shop which sells jerky and chewing tobacco, (1) elementary school, and (1) bar.
-The bar opens at 9- this most likely leads to
-Headline in paper: Farther shoots son in car chase, injures friend.
-Also could lead to : Four assault rifles, about 40 pounds of frozen meat and piles of 20-year-old deer antlers all point to a case of poaching against a father and son
-Might also be the reason the deputies drive into canals
-It's not uncommon to eat rabbit, deer, and any animal you happen to find in your back yard
-You're not hard pressed to find a varriety of people selling produce out of their homes, trailers, cars or trucks every mile or so, most of which looks like it was previously purchased at the Grocery Outlet store beforehand.
I'm sure this list will grow, but I've only been visiting home for about a month now.
Holy hell, I miss Edinburgh SO much!
Sunday, 28 December 2008
I've been home now for about 3 weeks, and so far, the waters have been mostly calm. Most of that, I feel, is due to Scottie being here, causing everyone to act on their best behaviour and, more importantly, keeping me away from dealing with that thing known as Grandma.
I had to take care of my granny for 3 months before she and my family moved to Boonies Nowheresville (pop. rumoured to be just under 2,000- I went to high school with more people!) and life was almost hell. Seriously, I don't think I drank more in Scotland or University than I did in those 3 short months.
Anyway, Scottie is sadly leaving me on the 31st to get back in time to work while i have to bide my time here waiting for my Visa (hopefully) to arrive. And I have a feeling that once he's gone, Granny is going to get pawned off on me. Again.
Things she has done so far:
Granny's dentures no longer fit her shrunken head, and she has a penchant to talk whilst chewing her food, causing projectile missiles of half-masticated dinner and lord knows what kind of gunk that has been sitting for months or years in the crevices of her fake chompers to spray in the listeners' general direction. For the record, those bits can fly distances!
She is by far the snoopiest, nosey-est, curious busybody that ever existed! "What are doing?" "Where are you going?" "Why did you come back at 3 instead of 4?" "Why are you watching this programme?" I have been crocheting the same shawl for 3 weeks now, and every night i pick up my hook, I get the same "What are you working on now?"
Granny is shafted down to the bedroom at the very end of the house, which is nice for the rest of the family because she is annexed out where no one has to deal with her. She has her own large screen HD TV, Satellite, Radio, newspaper, cat, and glass door out to the garden so she can watch her birds. But she still insists on exercise, so every now and then she'll thump her way down the long hallway to the living room, cane knocking against the walls as she waddles along. I've noticed that she tends to do this along when we are all watching TV together, or if she wants a snack. If we're all watching TV, then she interrogates us about what we're watching and how it reminds her a book or an article she once read on the same subject, and if we hold on, she'll go get it, except that she read it a while ag0, and can't remember if she still has the book or article, or if she gave it away.......and on it goes until we get irritated enough and shoo heR away.
When she comes in for a snack, though, she is as quiet as can be, trying to ninja in and out without being seen. This is because granny has some bad habits. First of all, she wants to nibble everything, so there will always be half a slice of bread in the bread bag, half a cookie laying around, half a bit of cheese, half a bagel, bits of halves all over the place. Secondly, she has this thing with margarine. I noticed it a lot when I lived with her-she doesn't really use knives to get the margarine out of the tub, instead she dips her pointer, middle, and ring finger into the soft buttery spread and then uses her fingers to smear the margarine on her half piece of bread. You can tell by the three parallel ditches left in the tub as evidence.
The last thing I'll reveal before boring everyone is her strange bathroom habits. The other reason granny is annexed down to the end of the hall is because directly across from her room is a bathroom. Technically it's meant for her room and my room to share, but ever since granny moved in, it's been firmly hers. This is because granny has incredibly bad IBS and has the runs a lot. A LOT a lot. But sometimes I'll pop in there to use the mirror or brush my hair. And that's when I notice that there always seems to be quite a bit of dirty water in the toilet, but never any toilet paper. Then I realised that for the past few months, every since finding out that this half of CA is in drought, granny has been going potty, wiping her bum, and...throwing the dirty paper in the trash can instead of the toilet. Now, I remember back when we were having a drought and the rhyme "If it's yellow it's mellow, if it's brown, flush it down", but NOTHING about disposing your IBS soiled paper in the trash can for weeks before having it emptied...no wonder there are always so many flies buzzing around that end of granny's room!
